The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(136)
Yes! The God was a spider!
But so too were Men—spiders unto themselves.
“Everything!” he would cry. “Everything eats!”
Ciworal, the famed Gauntleted Heart, stronghold of strongholds, crumbled skyward before his very eyes. It was like watching an edge devour the bastion, a plummet sideways to the real, blocks and fragments falling up and out before raining in a silent deluge across the baileys. He watched his Lord-and-Prophet eat, until even the monstrous foundation stones let go like rootless teeth, fell toppling into the Heavens—until great Ciworal was no more. Gwanw? seized his mailed forearm in her hands, but he could make no sense of her expression, let alone hear a word she said …
Looking back he could see it, a great circle sunk into the granite, the legendary Well of Viri. Ciworal, for all its cyclopean immensity, had been no more than a scab on a deeper wound—the same as Men, perhaps. The Holy Aspect-Emperor did not cease his labour; no seam marred his embalming song. The sideways plummet simply continued once it reached the ground, so that the ancient mouth seemed to spew the ruin that choked it, vomit a dark and mountainous geyser of wreckage into the sky. Exhilaration scooped the breath from Saubon’s chest, the sense of dangling above a torrential river flood.
Vertigo. The ground dipped beneath their feet in sensation, then shivered for clacking impacts in reality. And King Coithus Saubon found himself laughing in the teeth-baring manner of hyenas. It was the Meat, he knew, but it was the kind of careless knowing that belongs to drunks and disaster. Gwanw? still held one hand upon his forearm. A sudden longing to f*ck the witch loped to the fore of his scrambled passions. He preferred slips to strong women, but the colour of her hair was so rare …
Together they watched the great, broken bones of Nogaral tumble skyward, little more than shadows between streamers of dust and lesser debris. The Aspect-Emperor floated above in the morning sun. Conviction fairly pulsed through the Believer-King.
What God worth worshipping was weak?
Power. Power was the Mark of transcendence. What did it matter if it was diabolical or divine or even mortal?
So long as it was greater.
One tomb plundered to fashion another. Shivers through oceanic stone.
The slip of fractures as old as old. The spit of dust from the ceilings.
Some halls collapsed, be they humble or majestic, rooves clapping down, pounding wails and velvet dust through all the forking, subterranean hollows. And the beasts beat their cheeks for the stinging of slovenly eyes. The mulish barks of the dying set them baying in their thousands, strung and clotted through the veined deep. Anguish and outrage popping through sputum. The bellowing of elephantine lungs.
Where were the Old Fathers?
It sailed across the ochre glow, tracing circles over the violent pitch of the Erengaw.
A vision that crippled thought, exhaled numbness as smoke through gut and limbs …
Saccarees stood riven before his sorcerous Lens, incredulous despite all that he had seen and horrified for everything he had Dreamed. The image dipped and dwindled, swung around to slowly bloat into clarity once again, dark and ragged, claws slack and twitching, scabrous wings hooked about unseen winds …
A sight that made old scars itch and sting. An Inchoroi. The bone of the greater skull plain through intestinal skin, the lesser skull nested within its flared mandible …
Evil Aurang, the Horde-General of old.
It could be none other.
Like any vulture, he wallowed in the sky, kiting upon gusts. He was more than abhorrent; his mere appearance panicked, somehow, did not so much set skin as bones crawling. There was something—a corruption in its pallor, perhaps, or an uncanniness of movement, manner—something that sickened for witnessing, unnerved for eluding clean human sensibility. The monstrosity peered down upon the gruesome multitudes when gliding northward, appraising the inscrutable, but as he swung to the south, he turned to the ramparts of the Urokkas—to the corpses belching black smoke, to the wink of murderous lights, and to Saccarees high upon Mantigol.
The Inchoroi even mouthed words in derision.
The Exalt-Magus should have signalled his Lord-and-Prophet. He and the other Lords of the Ordeal had spent watches discussing this very contingency. The Great Ordeal’s gravest peril, they had decided, lay in the deployment of the Schools. Once scattered across the Urokkas, there they must remain, lest the Horde descend upon the Ordeal’s nude flank and drive it into the Sea. This meant the Consult, who could never hope to match the sorcerous might of the Schools otherwise, could ignore them outright, throw their cunning or their might at some other weakness. And as Saccarees himself had seen at Irs?lor, a single breach was all that utter ruin required.
“They will come,” Kellhus had warned. “They will not abandon such might as the Horde manifests to our design. The Unholy Consult will intervene. At long last, my brothers, you will vie with our foe in the flesh, grapple with the Cause that moves you.”
Words that had balled hearts as fists!
At least it had then. Now Saccarees needed only turn on his heel to see Dagliash, to see his Lord-and-Prophet shining white from an exhaust of black ruin. He could have informed him, or any of his peers for that matter, in multiple ways … but he did not.
For all his power and erudition, he was a Man of the Circumfix the same as any other. And like other Men he had the sense of regions, the passage of places and powers. Home had dwindled in his intellect, becoming little more than a muffled spark, ink spilled upon a page. For the longest time they had marched across the interval between, twilight regions that recognized no power save brutality. But now … Now they had passed into the bower of their ancient and implacable enemy. And here … Here the earth answered to a will more wicked, more monstrously horrific, than any the World had known. The Great Ordeal stood upon the very threshold of Golgotterath … the outermost gate.