The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(141)

Ears whined for abrupt silence. Eyes rolled skyward. And then, over it all, a light appeared, like something dropped from an indescribable direction. White brilliance glaring from blue …

Becoming a man … the Holy Aspect-Emperor, hanging high and wind-blown beneath the blue vacancy of autumn, his edges smoking with otherworldly brilliance.

“Flee Dagliash!” his voice boomed. Across the Erengaw and the root of the Urokkas, the combatants looked up and wondered.

“Flee! Hide yourself from its sight!”

The Schoolmen turned immediately, striding the heights, abandoning all terrestrial plight. The Men of the Ordeal hesitated, wavered as more and more of their kinsmen abandoned the mobs behind them. The hard-hearted stood their ground, knowing that retreat meant doom. They fell into battling circles and squares as the formations about them dissolved in racing slaughter.

The Sranc hacked the earth, reconquered the sky with screeching ululation—and surged forward.



Kurwachal, the ancient A?rsi had called the squat tower, the “Altar”. With Ciworal destroyed, it was the mightiest bastion remaining—at least to the panicked eye. Saubon’s household had wasted the Horde’s silence bellowing at the Witches striding above the fortress, at first begging and then cursing their gold-ribboned passage. A handful looked askance as they fled, extending the gift of their pity perhaps, but no more. In an inkling, they were gone.

Saubon, meanwhile, concentrated on scaling the parapets to assess their straits. He hauled himself up wreckage heaped by Kellhus himself, stood upright upon a gantry wall enclosing the Ribbaral, surveyed the absurd proportions of their doom.

The Urokkas piled before him, bereft their diadems of ephemeral sorcerous light. The last of the Swayali blew as golden flakes across the raving multitudes. Even as he reeled for its preposterous extent, for the gnashing miles it encompassed, the Horde resumed its titanic wail, trammelled any hope of human sound. North. South. East. West. The land itself had been stippled in howling white faces.

He will come back, a fraction of him insisted.

You need only survive long enough.

He required no voice to direct his householders. The Knights of the Desert Lion had sought him out as soon as the last Nun had vanished over the walls. Even now they looked to him, grasped the doom reflected in his blue eyes. He pointed at Kurwachal. And so, from points scattered across the gutted heart of Dagliash, they mustered upon her last, truly mighty tower.

Hold on.

Saubon, who had to teeter picking his way along the interior wall, would be the last to gain the blunted summit. They set about securing the toothless parapets. Ingol heaved skyward to the east, as if the World were naught but a hide drawn over a mammoth tree stump. Oloreg was all but obscured, but Mantigol loomed in oceanic silhouette beyond, its flanks swagged with fire. The plate of the Nele?st extended southward, wind-scuffed and gleaming. To the north the Erengaw Plain flared out into the obscurity of the Shroud. Sranc smothered all the World between, from those screaming and raving directly below, to those clotting the distances, mutilated sheaves cast over bare stone and breathing earth. Maggot-teeming, worm-twisting …

He is coming.

They found themselves standing upon a different raft in far more perilous seas—one that was sinking. Riven with the others along the parapet, Saubon watched the leaping, scrabbling flood. His breath had become a rope of frayed hemp drawn to and fro, something that sawed at his heart. Swinging and bounding, the creatures swamped the outermost defences, bloomed in the baileys, gushed through the ruined inner gates. Saubon suffered the peculiar, dislocated sense of horror that comes with watching doom unfold at a distance—a cavernous knowledge … A recognition like a hole.

He will return!

They could see the Witches recede over the screeching tracts, like golden wildflowers for their billows. They could see Him sparking into existence upon the peaks, or at points above the sun-scaled coast. They could hear His dread exhortations …

Dagliash was engulfed in scribbling activity. Everywhere he looked he spied Sranc scaling the rotted mortices as quick and limber as adolescent boys. He watched the inhuman masses fan loping across the Ribbaral, saw Gwanw?’s salt effigy vanish into a fist of rutting fingers. He even glimpsed Bashrag lurching from the gutted pit where Ciworal had stood—the Well of Viri. The surge all but swallowed the unearthly golden glint of the receptacle.

The very ground was rotted, infested …

Please … How could I not believe you?

Saubon turned to see Bogyar leaning perilously out on the ledge, screaming inaudible outrage, hammering his chest—his face nearly as crimson as his beard. Spittle winked in the sunlight.

You knew my heart better than I.

Like an apple core tossed upon an ant nest, Dagliash crawled. Sranc filing, mobbing, thronging, closing upon Kurwachal from all squares of the compass. Black arrows already pelted them. Several of his men wrested blocks from the battlements to send clacking down upon those climbing the tower’s thighs …

The Holca made a show of rubbing a large stone against his mail-clad rump, then hurling it viciously at the skinnies flying atop the very wall Saubon had used to reach Kurwachal. Three were felled—and instantly, the whole company cheered as if at number-sticks. And the Exalt-General saw, with a profundity that fairly throttled him. Death. He understood. Death! He fathomed the enormity of the gift he had been given.

“Praise Him!” he cried laughing to Men who could not hear him—only believe. “Hail our Holy Aspect-Emperor!”