The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(142)

Death comes. Death always comes. But it is meted in so many ways …

Few as glorious as this.

And his Company, the Company of the Raft, saw with him. The impossible light of their Lord-and-Prophet leapt from look to look, heart to heart. They laughed and cheered, even though all the World bristled and screamed—even as the first of their number slumped to his knees, an arrow in his eye …

“Praise! Praise to Him!”

The Sranc came scratching up, throwing themselves over the parapets.

“Hail Anas?rimbor Kellhus!”

Death came swirling down.

Saubon hacked against the onslaught, shattered wagging cleavers, cracked black helms. For a brief time, it seemed easy, hewing and chopping the snarling faces as they crested the battlements. They seemed invulnerable upon their bastion, casting Sranc like screaming cats from the heights. The rain of black arrows killed as many if not more the obscenities. Thirty-eight souls remained to the Company. They arrayed themselves about the Altar’s circuit according to necessity, a line that was drawn thinner as increasing numbers of Sranc shinnied various quarters of the tower. Kurwachal was soon engulfed in crawling skirts of Sranc, and it became little more than an octagonal shaft jutting from the seething assemblage. The creatures surmounted the parapets from all directions. The defenders were forced to close their line into a besieged circle, each man separated by paces from his gasping brother. Saubon continued crying out the name of his Lord-and-Prophet, but whether to rally or beseech he did not know. None could hear him, not in the rotted throat of the Horde. The name had become something empty, a reflex borne of outrage and horror and all the other darknesses that came before. There was his Company, little more than shadows that stood battling shadows that crawled or leapt. The World had imploded otherwise, become a bladder sucked tight about the points of life and murder. The tip of his nimil broadsword plunged and plummeted, slicing fish-belly skin, puncturing cheeks, shattering teeth. Arrows tinked from his helm, clattered from his ancient Cun?roi hauberk. He kicked the decayed masonry before him, sent a section tipping out, locked gazes with one of the clinging obscenities. Eyes like black marbles in sockets of oil, an expression like silk crushed in a fist, a sneering, spitting frenzy, leaning out and out, into the scabrous distances, then dropping on a sheer, slipping, vanishing … Fate begrudged him any respite or momentary exultation. More obscenities clambered over the lip—like human-faced lice they teemed. His blade swooped and struck, notching pitted iron, loosing strings and sheets of violet from maiden-pale skin. Kellhus! he bellowed. Kellhus! Kellhus! Kellhus! But his breath became more and more difficult, something he had to yank burning from the bottom of his lungs. Clutching agony seized his left arm. He faltered. Mepiro grovelled on his belly nearby, a javelin staking his back. Something resounded through his bones—a blow to the head. The ground swung vertical, slapped his cheek for his presumption …

Kellhus!

He pushed himself to his knees, despite the mountain across his shoulders.

He saw Bogyar, a red-skinned fury upon the parapet, one foot upon the battlements, his mouth watering blood, a javelin jutting from his mail-armoured shoulder. The Holca held his left arm extended to the heavens, a nude Sranc impaled through the jaw upon a broken sword, shaking over the abyss, erect even in its instant of death. His right arm carried his great battleaxe down, delivering gore and ruin to the pale beasts thronging about him. From nowhere, it seemed, a Sranc leapt onto his back, and hacking and shrieking carried the red-haired warrior over the plummet.

In the vacant place remaining, he saw a Sranc cresting the battlements, its face passive and porcelain, as beautiful as anything graven—until hatred crushed it into something inhuman.

A concussion sent him rolling. A crawling, encrusted World, thrown in sheets.

A sense of inner things leaking.

Kellhus …

Across a landscape of stamping legs and unshod, horned feet, he saw Mepiro’s face, blank beneath wild shadows, jerking to rhythmic thrusts.

No.

Something happened. Something …

Too loud to be sound. Too bright to be light …

So quick, so absolute as to circumvent perception.

Dagliash was gone—along with his breath, his heartbeat.

He suffered an absence of sensation that could only be called falling. Void was a spinning place, or so he learned, for he did not move, and it spun about him.

Then a mad, existential jarring, as if he had slipped from a precipice to be swatted motionless caught upon a ledge …

He opened eyes within already opened eyes … Cheek against the turf, shadows thrashing about and above, a scissoring forest of horse-legs … Men battling Men? Yes. Galeoth knights vying with golden-armoured Coyauri.

Mengedda?

By the God, his fury felt so empty, so frail against the earth …

He was already gazing across trampled turf. Motionless, he saw a young man fallen the same as he, heavily armoured in the old style, sandy-blond hair jutting from his mail hood. He watched him reach out in horror and confusion and grasp his own hand, squeeze the leathery fingers, the glass nails. He felt nothing …

A nightmarish moment of recognition, too surreal to be terrifying.

It was his face! His own hand had clasped him!

He tried to scream.

Nothing.

He tried to move, to twitch …

Absolute immobility encapsulated him. He felt only void across his exterior skin, but within … It seemed a door had swung or swollen open.