The subsequent vigil was as surreal as it was forlorn. While the rest dozed in what shade they could find, Cleric took a position on one of the great blocks, sitting cross-legged, gazing over the ruins below, across the field of felled trees, to the Mop's black verge. Achamian actually found comfort in the sight of him, a being who had survived who knew how many sieges and battles, back into the mists of history.
The Nonman waited until late afternoon to begin his sermon, when the air had cooled enough and the shade had grown enough to provide the possibility of real sleep. He stood on the lip and turned to regard them below, his slim and powerful figure bathed in light. The sky reached blue and infinite beyond him. Achamian found himself watching and listening the way the others watched and listened.
"Again, my brothers," he said in impossibly deep tones. "Again we find ourselves stranded, trapped in another of the World's hard places…"
Stranded. A word like a breath across a dying coal.
Stranded. Lost with none to grieve them. Trapped.
"Me," the Nonman continued, letting his head sag. "I know only that I have stood here a thousand times over a thousand years-more! This… this is my place! My home…"
When he looked up, his eyes glittered black for fury. A snarl hooked his colourless lips.
"Wreaking destruction on these perversions… Atoning… Atoning!
"
This last word rang metallic across the stone, sent ever-dwindling echoes across the heights. Roused, several of the Skin Eaters mouthed their approval. The Stone Hags simply gaped.
"And this is your place as well, even if you loathe numbering your sins."
"Yes!" Sarl coughed out over the rising clamour. His eyes were slits for his grin. "Yes!"
That was when the inhuman baying began, a few throats cascading into a hundred, a thousand, rising from the Mop below…
Sranc.
Achamian and the others leapt to their feet. They crowded the wall beneath Cleric, and to a man peered at the forest verge a half-mile or so to the south.
And saw nothing save lengthening shadows and boundaries of scrub bathed in sunlight. The inhuman chorus dissolved into a cacophony of individual shrieks and cries. Birds bolted from the canopy.
"A thousand times over a thousand years!" Cleric cried. He had turned to face the Mop, but otherwise stood as exposed as before. Achamian glimpsed his shadow falling long and slender across the ruins below.
"You live your life squatting, shitting, sweating against your women. You live your life fearing, praying, begging your gods for mercy! Begging! " He was ranting now, swaying and gesticulating with a kind of arrhythmic precision. The setting sun painted him with lines of crimson.
Unseen throats howled and barked across the distance-a second congregation.
"You think secrets dwell in these mean things, that truth lies in the toes you stub, the scabs you pick! Because you are small, you cry, 'Revelation! Revelation hides in the small! '"
The black gaze fixed Achamian-lingered for a heartbeat or two.
"It does not."
The words pinched the old Wizard deep in the gut.
"Revelation rides the back of history…" Cleric said, sweeping his eyes to the arc of the horizon, to the innumerable miles of wilderness. "The enormities! Race… War… Faith… The truths that move the future!"
Incariol looked down across his fellow scalpers, his awestruck supplicants. Even Achamian, who had lived among the Cunuroi as Seswatha, found himself staring in dread and apprehension. Only the Captain, who simply watched the Mop with grim deliberation, seemed unmoved.
"Revelation rides the back of history," the Nonman cried, bowing his head to the failing sun. The light etched the links and panels of his nimil so that he appeared garbed in trickles of glowering fire.
"And it does not hide…"
Incariol. He seemed something wondrous and precarious, Ishroi and refugee both. Ages had been poured into him, and poured, overflowing his edges, diluting what he had lived, who he had been, until only the sediment of pain and crazed profundity remained.
The sun waxed against the distant peaks, hanging in reluctance-or so it seemed-sinking only when the watchers blinked. It rode the white-iron curve of a mountain for a moment, then slipped like a gold coin into high-stone pockets.
The shadow of the world rose and descended across them. Dusk.
All eyes turned to the ragged crescent of the tree-line, to the grunting hush that had fallen across the distance. They saw the first Sranc creep pale and white from the bowers, like insects feeling the air… A savage crescendo rifled the air, punctuated by the moan of urgent horns.
Then the rush.
– | They came as they always came, Sranc, no different from the first naked hordes that had surged across the fields of Pir-Pahal in an age that made Far Antiquity young. They came, over the slope of felled trees, sluicing between the trunks, racing across barked backs. They came, through the palisade gate, thronging across the ancient courtyards, braiding the wall's ruined circuit with gnashing teeth and crude weapons. They came and they came, until they seemed a liquid, streaming and breaking, spitting an endless spray of arrows.
The blue and violet of the evening sky faded into oblivion, leaving only the starry dome of night. The Nail of Heaven glittered from raving eyes, gleamed from notched iron. The scalpers huddled behind what few shields they possessed, shouted curses, while Cleric and the Wizard stood upon the wall's disordered summit.
All was screaming destruction below. Monochrome madness. The Men gagged on the porcine smoke. And they watched, knowing that they witnessed something older than nations or languages, a Gnostic sorcerer and a Quya Mage, singing in impossible voices, wielding looms of incandescence in wide-swinging arms. They saw hands glow about impossible dispensations. They saw light issue from empty air. They saw bodies pitched and prised, and burned, burned most of all, until the ground became croaking charcoal.
Incariol had spoken true… It was a mighty thing, a sight worthy of the pyre.
A revelation.
CHAPTER FOUR
All ropes come up short if pulled long enough. All futures end in tragedy.
And they forged counterfeits from our frame, creatures vile and obscene, who hungered only for violent congress. These beasts they loosed upon the land, where they multiplied, no matter how fierce the Ishroi who hunted them. And soon Men clamoured at our gates, begging sanctuary, for they could not contend with the creatures. "They wear your face," the penitents cried. "This calamity is your issue." But we were wroth, and turned them away, saying, "These are not our Sons. And you are not our Brothers."
Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli
The Company of Scions picked its way across the broad back of Earwa. The days passed without any visible sign of having travelled whatsoever. They had been charged with trolling the grasslands to the southwest with the hope of finding game they could drive back to the Army of the Middle-North. They did not see so much as a hoofprint. They could scarce feed themselves as the days passed, let alone an army.
The Parching Wind continued to blow, kneading scalps and hair with warm fingers, hissing through the dead scrub that bristled the endless plate of the Istyuli. Even though they rode with purpose, it seemed they drifted, such was the expanse surrounding them. The land was devoid of track or direction and so vast that Sorweel often found himself hunching in his saddle-cringing in the dim way of bodily fears. He was bred to the plains, to open endless skies, and even still he felt shrunken, soft, and exposed. Men tend to forget the World's true proportion, to think the paltry measure of their ambition can plumb the horizon. It is a genius of theirs. But some lands, by dint of monumental heights or sheer, stark emptiness, contradict this conceit, remind them that they are never so big as the obstacles the World might raise against them.