The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(155)

The relatively healthy set about clearing the innumerable Sranc dead: many of the sickest had simply crawled across the tangled masses, making cots of corpses. Sickened caste-nobles organized teams, while sickened Schoolmen hung sorcerous lights of their own. The blind and hale were paired with the sighted. Soon Sranc fairly rained down the scarps, crumpling and cartwheeling.

So they toiled as their brothers fled.

Hoga Hogrim, Believer-King of Ce Tydonn, assumed moral and temporal command of the impromptu host. It was as much a coup as anything else, with the fealty of potential competitors demanded at sword-point. More than a dozen dissenters were murdered (and thrown from the cliffs with the Sranc). Most, however, embraced his makeshift rule, thinking that all would be sorted with the imminent return of their Lord-and-Prophet. The survivors, sickened or otherwise, were already calling what had happened “the Great Scald” by this point. Knowing the way Men rally about a common identity, Hogrim bid his ailing householders to name the huddled and prone masses, and so dozens of longbeards trudged the groaning slopes and silent beaches, declaring that they were the Scalded.

So was a second Ordeal born that night, a host of those who could scarcely hope to survive the morrow, let alone save it. Black clouds piled in echelon across the northwestern horizon, and the sickest (those coughing and vomiting blood) lay staring in glazed wonder for the way the dark giants swallowed the constellations. The front soon formed a low, roiling ceiling above the mountainous stages of the Urokkas. The rain was not long in following.

The Men shivered and steamed. Some roared and rejoiced, while others bent their heads, too weary to care. Among the sickened on the shoreline, some wept for relief, thinking they might be cleansed, while those losing their skin began howling and shrieking in agony. Raindrops had become acid. Torrential sheets chased the slopes, flooding the ravines and gorges, rolling the dead down, draining black into the heaving sea. Muck and misery ruled the shores. The mouths of the dead were filled as cups.

An eerie quiet ruled the high and low places come the following morning. The Sea scarcely gurgled. Chill morning mists broke about the heights and drained from the ravines, revealing at every stage the crazed proportion of death and destruction. Dead burred the ridges, matted the slopes, their limbs hooked for rigour, their mouths grinning for spite of the living. Crows and gulls feasted, the black feather and the white, their ancient feud forgotten for the largesse. The passes of Oloreg lay empty, inked for the dark of morning shadow. The eyries abandoned, the summits lay barren beneath the sky.

Few among the Scalded were surprised. They had lived, as all civilized Men had lived, with pestilence their whole lives. The sick were always left behind. That was simply the way.

So they sat in solemn resignation, too aggrieved to be aggrieved by the thought of their plight. They sucked shallow breaths, perpetually braced against the sting. They passed their innards as vomit and offal. They gasped misery. Some bickered, some railed and accused, but most gazed out across the Sea, wondering at all the horizons that lay between them and their wives and children. Those blinded by the Scald smelled and listened, marvelled that air could take on the substance of water, that purity and pollution could be tasted, or that they could hear the scarps before them—hear the sound of falling—in the fluted pulse of the surf below. They raised their faces to the eastern warmth, wondered that they could see with their skin—that no man could be blind to the sun so long as he could feel.

Some wept.

And to a man they understood their toil was at an end.

Sibaw?l Vaka had sat motionless for the entirety of the night and the morning, his skin weeping, his flaxen hair tugged from his scalp strand by strand, drawn like spider webs out over the Sea. When Proyas and his entourage appeared on the shoulders of Oloreg, he turned his head and stared, watched the Exalt-General descend to meet King Hogrim, the self-proclaimed Lord of the Scalded. Without a word of explanation, Sibaw?l te Nurwul stood and began stalking the cliff-face, his eyes pinned upon some indeterminate point to the west. His surviving kinsmen joined him, and others joined them, souls clawing free from the torpor of doom. Soon pestilential masses were teetering to their feet, not out of curiosity or alarm or even less duty, but because their brothers so stood, so stumbled …

Because they too were Scalded.

Sibaw?l picked his way down to the carcass-littered beaches, apparently unaware of the growing thousands in his tow. Had the Sea possessed even a fraction of its native violence, his path would have been barred, but it remained miraculously calm, placid enough to see the bloom of cadaverous oils across its surface, a shimmering film of violet and yellow. He waded eastward, mapping oleaginous worlds across the water with his passage, aqueous coastlines curling into bewilderment and oblivion.

And all those able, some twenty-thousand anguished souls, laboured after him.

The tracts of floating dead rose and fell with the rhythm of deep-sleeping children. Water slurped and suckled the vertical stone. The Great Scald had shattered Antareg’s seaward faces, laying out piers of ruin. Sibaw?l waded between blasted enormities, dwarfed beneath incisors of rock as great as Momemn’s towers. Forever staring west, he traced the seaward limit of the mountain’s thighs to the mouth of the River Sursa.

All those able followed, a great wallowing column.

He stood motionless for a time at the river mouth, gazing across the slow-twisting rafts of Sranc dead, out to the line of the far shore, Agongorea … the Fields Appalling. More and more of the Scalded climbed the gravel shores behind him, black for scorching, sodden with water that dripped crimson, an assembly both spectral and appalling. Never had the World witnessed a multitude more wretched: souls with hanging skin, weeping burns and ulcerations, naked backsides clotted with excrement and blood. Their hair fell into the wind, creating a haze of black and gold filaments that was drawn out over the Sea.