The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(42)

I war not with Men, it says, but with the God.

“Yet no one but Men die,” the Aspect-Emperor replies.

The fields must burn to drive Him forth from the Ground.

“But I tend the fields.”

The dark figure stands beneath the tree, begins walking toward him. It seems the climbing stars should hook and carry him in the void, but he is like the truth of iron—impervious and immovable.

It stands before him, regards him—as it has so many times—with his face and his eyes. No halo gilds his leonine mane.

Then who better to burn them?



For Sranc, the ground was meat, and so the desolation of the land was complete. The Nele?st had fallen unnaturally calm, lapping the grey beaches with swampish lassitude. It climbed into a distance bleak for want of feature, the line of the horizon smeared from existence, so that Creation coiled without demarcation into the greater scroll of the sky. Their left flank secure, the Men of the Circumfix crossed the southern marches of what had once been A?rsi, the most warlike of the great High Norsirai nations. Illawor, the province had been called, and in ancient times, it had been quilted with fields of sorghum and other hardy cereals. The Ordealmen spied the ruins of what they thought were small forts peppered across the despoiled landscape, but were in fact ancient byres. Every homestead had been a bastion in ancient A?rsi ere the First Apocalypse. Men slept with their swords, wives with their bows. Children were taught how to commit suicide. Sk?lsirai, they called themselves, the “Shield-People”.

Now the Great Ordeal chased the Horde across the waste that remained of their land, consuming those Sranc they butchered as they marched. New names were needed, given the revulsion and disgust milled into their existing epithets. To eat Sranc or skinnies or muckers was to eat excrement or vomit or even worse. The Ainoni began calling them “Catfish”, for the slicked skin, the pallor, and because they swore the beasts tasted like the black rivers roping the Secharib Plains. But the name soon fell into disfavour. Despite the advantage of euphemism, it seemed too flaccid a term to capture the madness of eating the creatures.

“Meat” soon became the term of choice, at once generic and visceral, a symbolic condensation of both the fact of their obscenity and the point. To eat was to dominate, to conquer as they needed to conquer. But it was horror as well, for their nightly feast could be nothing other than horror, the encampment dazzled with bonfires, greasy for shadow, adorned with innumerable dismemberments, butchered Sranc swinging on ropes, heaped into seeping piles, their innards coiled in oily puddles of violet and black.

None could say precisely when it happened, when feast had become bacchanal, when dining had become something more than chewing and swallowing—something darker. At first, only the most sensitive souls among them could discern the difference, how a growl seemed to perpetually hang from the back of their throat, and a savagery from the back of their soul—a furious inkling that others seemed more and more prone to act out. Only they could sense that the Meat was changing them and their brothers—and not for the better. What had been wary became ever more reckless. What was measured became garish by imperceptible degrees.

Perhaps no event demonstrated this creeping transformation more dramatically than the matter of Sibaw?l te Nurwul. With the reunification of the Great Ordeal, the Cepaloran Chieftain-Prince found himself ever more irked by the bombast of his rival, Halas Siroyon, General of the Famiri auxiliaries. The Famiri had accumulated a fearsome reputation over the previous weeks. Their disdain for armour easily rendered them the swiftest of the Ordeal’s horsemen, and with Siroyon riding the legendary Phiolos at their fore, they had proven themselves peerless suppliers of Meat. Lord Sibaw?l begrudged even this modest glory. On occasion he could be heard complaining that the very thing that made them such effective “cattlemen”—their lack of armour—was also what made them useless in actual battle.

Hearing word of these complaints, Siroyon confronted his Norsirai counterpart, wagered that he could lead his Famiri deeper into the shadow of the Horde than the blond Cepaloran would ever dare. Sibaw?l agreed to the wager, even though it was not his nature to hazard the lives of his men over such obvious points of honour. He accepted because he and his cousins had spied the beginning of an interval opening in the circuit of the Horde the day previous, and he saw a means of redeeming himself in Siroyon’s petulance. His back had since healed, but his flogging several weeks previous had all but crippled his pride.

And indeed, the Whore smiled on him. The following dawn revealed a great cleft in the Horde’s horizon-engulfing line, a point where the gaseous ochre-and-black had been smeared into vacancy. For those who daily ranged the raucous margins of the Horde, the break was as plain as the morning sun, but Sibaw?l and his Cepalorae had set out before sunrise. By the time Siroyon grasped what his rival was doing, Sibaw?l was already flying into the bower of the Shroud, a distant point leading a distant rake of thousands. Bellowing, the General led his Famiri in pursuit, riding so hard that dozens were killed for being thrown. The land was dishevelled, scalloped by streams and humped with knolls of bared stone, some with the remains of ancient cairns teetering on their summits. The Horde had stamped the scrub into never-ending carpets of dust and twigs. Siroyon only managed to spy Sibaw?l and his Cepalorae from a few rare heights—enough to know he had lost his rash wager. He should have relented, but pride drove him forth, the kind indistinguishable from terror of shame. Even if he conceded the glory to Sibaw?l, he could at least outshine the man with descriptions of what they had seen. Sibaw?l had never been one to expound on his glories. As a student of jnan, Siroyon suffered no such scruple.