The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(43)
Lord Sibaw?l led his whooping Cepalorae into the very maw of the Horde, and it seemed a thing of madness to venture where hitherto only Schoolmen had dared tread. The howl deafened. The billowing heights of the Shroud encompassed them. The stampeded earth yielded to more and more desiccate grasses and scrub. Dead Sranc peppered the less-battered ground, limbs jutting about gaping mouths. This in itself was a shock, given that the creatures generally devoured their fallen. The horsemen almost instantly spied ruins draped ahead of them in the ochre gloom, structures like jaws snapped open across the earth, one inside another. They passed over the remnants of ancient walls, and a new dread claimed their hearts. The thanes rose their voices in futile query, even protest, understanding that the Horde had parted about a place that Sranc would sooner die than tread, a place famed in the Holy Sagas …
Wreoleth … the fabled Larder-of-Men.
But Lord Sibaw?l could not hear his champions, and rode ahead with the bearing of one who presumes the absolute loyalty of his beloved. So the horse-thanes of Cepalor followed their Lord-Chieftain into the accursed city, between the rotted black teeth of her walls, beneath the gutted skulls of her towers. Scrub webbed the ground, forcing their ponies to barge through bird-bone lattices. A kind black moss encrusted what stone and structure that survived, transforming the ruins into a sinister procession. The city seemed a pillaged necropolis, the many-chambered monument of a people who had not so much lived as dwelt.
The blond-braided horsemen filed through the ruin in columns, glancing about in numb incredulity. The Shroud climbed the neck-straining heights about them, plumes through mists, spilling like ink in water across the vault of heaven. Their lips tingled for the Horde’s yammering roar. Many held their cheeks to their horse’s neck, spitting or vomiting, so vile was the stench on the wind. A few hid their faces for weeping.
Without explanation, Sibaw?l veered southward and led his Cepalorans back to the molar line of the city’s southern fortifications. He led them to a section that had been swamped by some millennial tide of earth, and the horsemen formed a long line across the summit, the way they would mustering for a charge …
The riders gazed out over thronging, twisted miles, countless figures packed in orgiastic proximity, worm-pale and screeching. To the sweeping eye it shivered for lunatic motion and detail, a world of depraved maggots, at once larval and frantic, trowelled across the contours of a dead and blasted plain. To the eye that darted, it horrified for images of licentious fury, Sranc like hairless cats spitting and wailing, nude figures kicking across the ground, rutting, scratching and scratching at earth plowed into fecal desolation.
They felt iron-girt children, the hard Sons of Cepalor. They had all witnessed the onslaught of the Horde—witnessed and survived. They had all gazed across nightmare miles, screaming regions illumined in the glare of sorcerous lights. But never had they seen the Horde as it was. For months they had ridden like mites into the shadow of an unseen beast, thinking first they pursued, then hunted, what lay concealed behind the pluming cliffs. Now they fathomed the deranged vanity of their Lord, and the doom he had delivered them. This was why Sibaw?l te Nurwul, for all his celebrated restraint and cunning, had ridden to Wreoleth’s southern bourne. This was what he had wanted to brandish to his peers, to the Holy Aspect-Emperor …
Testimony of the Beast.
To a man they understood. They pursued no more than they hunted. They simply followed the way starving children follow perilously loaded wains, waiting for fortune to feed them. And even as they watched the Sranc spied them. They could see it, passing like a gust across distant fields of wheat, the awareness of Men, the temptation. The thunderous caterwaul, the screeching fore of it at least, waned and warbled, and was then redoubled as the innumerable creatures lunged toward the Cepalorae.
The horsemen battled with panicking mounts. Their mouths opened in cries that could not be heard. Alarums. Pleas. Some even cursed the callow arrogance of their illustrious Lord. But Sibaw?l, who could see if not hear their consternation, ignored them. He stared at the surging Horde, his face blank—the look of one testing the validity of dreams.
The Sranc seemed a singular thing, a millipede skin, celled with howling mouths, haired with crude arms, chapped and scaled with black armour. As one they charged, their numbers so vast as to make the twenty-three hundred Cepalorae seem a twig before the flood. They unmoored the very ground beneath the Ordealmen, so that Wreoleth, far from a rock awaiting the tide, seemed a raft floating toward doom. Sibaw?l watched without word or expression. Several horse-thanes screamed at him. Dozens of Vindaugamen—a shameful handful—fled. Others wheeled their balking ponies in preparation. The Nymbricani braced themselves against their cantles, lowered their lances. Even as they watched, the Sranc flying at the fore of the rush faltered, drawn up by some inexplicable terror. Many of the Cepalorae even glanced at the sky behind them, thinking that perhaps the Holy Aspect-Emperor had come. More and more of the creatures began screaming, scrambling backward, as if an invisible line had been scrawled about the circuit of the dead city. But all the world behind them was hunger in near infinite repetition, the obscene desire to savage and couple with their ancient foe. The horrified ones were shoved and trampled—some were even cut down, such was the frenzy. Sranc climbed their brothers, some to rush the horsemen on the mound, others to escape them, and countless abominations died in the crush. Abject madness consumed the frontal masses, forming a rind of cannibalistic fury. Only when it reached the very foot of the ancient fortifications did the surge stall …