The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(153)
“Why he killed himself?” she asked, either preoccupied with her downward footing or pretending to be. She was genuinely great with child now, and even with the Qirri, she seemed to find steep descents labourious in particular.
The old Wizard grunted his affirmation.
“Because the God demanded it,” she offered after several huffing moments.
“No,” he said. “What were his reasons?”
Mimara graced him with a fleeting glance, shrugged. “Do they matter?”
“Where do we go?” the boy interrupted from above and behind them, his Sheyic inflected with Mimara’s Ainoni burr.
“That way,” the startled sorcerer replied, nodding to the north. What did a D?nyain child feel, he wondered, in the watches following his father’s death?
“The world ends that way, boy …”
He hung upon that final word, gawking …
Mimara followed his scowl to the horizon—the cerulean haze.
The three of them stood transfixed, gazed with numb incomprehension. The forests of K?niüri swept out from the crumpled gum-line of the Demua mountains, green daubed across ancient and trackless black. Several heartbeats passed before Achamian, cursing his failing eyes, conjured a sorcerous Lens. And so they saw it, an impossibility painted across an impossibility, a vast plume, spewing its fell innards outward and upward, far above the reach of mountain or even cloud …
Like the noxious shadow of a toadstool, bulging to the arch of Heaven, drawn across the curve of the very World.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The River Sursa
No bravery is possible in Hell, and in Heaven, none is needed. Only Heroes wholly belong to this World.
—KORACALES, Nine Songs Heroic
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Urokkas
The monstrous plume sailed into dissolution above the Sea.
It seemed Hell itself had taken Dagliash.
Saccarees greeted Proyas upon the summit of Mantigol, his manner blank with incredulity. The eyrie resembled a scene embroidered across some heroic tapestry: survivors milling in the aftermath of catastrophe, damaged souls who would have been illustrious, were it not for the toll exacted. This was what Men did in the wake of disaster, be it the loss of a battle, the death of a loved one, or anything that knocked their lives from the pins of workaday assumption: they communed, if not with words then with looks or simple breathing.
Turning from the mute Exalt-Magus, Proyas gazed out over what seemed perfect circles of obliteration, rings burnt into the very frame of the Urokkas, flung outward across the floodplains. The earth itself burned where Dagliash had stood. Pelts of viscous smoke streamed upward, as if an upside-down World dangled its innards in ashen skies. The ground about this boiling centre had been burnt to chalk and obsidian. The first of the visible dead began some distance away, fields of char, little more than stumped torsos that became recognizable as remains in the shelter of ravines or depressions, which were choked with dead like gutters with rotted leaves. Farther still, near the rutted foundations of Oloreg, he glimpsed survivors crawling or shambling across otherwise lifeless slopes …
Naked souls stumbling, hands out.
Agongorea burned beyond the far shore, smoking like sodden rags thrown over a fire. The River Sursa spilled black as ink into the Sea. Great clots of Sranc clotted its course, rafts of interlocked carcasses bumping and rolling like scum across the surface of a sewer. This, at least, relaxed one of the many fists clenched within Proyas’s breast. The Ordeal had suffered, certainly, but the Horde was no more.
Cataclysm.
Lights that scratch blind. Cracks that swat deaf. Concussions that slap hale bodies into pulp and mist …
Cataclysm shows Men the truth of their pitiful proportion, how their pulse hangs upon the sufferance of more monstrous things.
If Golgotterath had such weapons or allies, what did it matter, the zeal of Men?
Proyas turned to the blanched faces about him, his dismay plain.
No one seemed capable of asking the obvious.
“Has anyone seen Him?” he called, sorting between them with his gaze.
Not a soul answered.
“Anyone!” he cried, his voice cracking.
“I-I saw him …” a feminine voice stammered. “Mmoments be-be”—an eye-fluttering wince—“before it … it-it happened.” One of the Swayali regarded him, teetering, her gowns burnt to a fluted husk, her once luxurious hair scorched to a shag.
Somehow he knew she would not live out the night.
“He-he … was w-warning us! Telling us to—”
Coughs battered her, spilling blood as bright as poppies across her chin.
“And since?” Proyas snapped, looking from face to face. “Has anyone seen Him since … since …” He raised a slack hand to the mountainous plume behind him.
Not a soul among them possessed words for what they had witnessed.
Dread silence. Someone on the periphery of the small crowd began sobbing. A twist in the wind swept the summit with the reek of ash and copper filings.
No, a small voice whispered within him.
Proyas swayed, took a numb step to recover, then fairly swooned for vertigo. Far more than his balance seemed to swing off the hooks and fly. Hopes. Nations. Someone—Saccarees?—caught his elbow, and he could feel his own obstinate weight yank against the grip, as if willing some kind of plummet. But the hand that held him was too strong—impossibly and thoughtlessly strong, like the clasp of a father retrieving his son from peril.