For weeks the Great Ordeal had cleaved to a northern course, skirting the more broken lands to the west. But as they drew abreast the Neleost, the Four Armies had veered westward, forcing King Umrapathur to pivot with reference to his foe and so position the mad masses before him across his right flank. He understood the dangers, for as a long-time veteran of the Unification Wars he had fought many mortal campaigns. To drag your foe on your flank was to court disaster. Yet he put his faith in his Holy Aspect-Emperor, knowing that his Lord-and-God understood this risk far better than he did. But his men were not so sanguine. King Urmakthi of Girgash, especially, troubled him with dire pronouncements in council. As did the sinister Carindusu, the Grandmaster of the sorcerous Vokalati. For they spent their days in the shadow of the Sandstorm, fencing with the shrieking multitudes.
"When we drove them before us," Carindusu said, his oiled face held high and imperial, "fear was their contagion. Now that we drag them upon our boards, they answer more and more to their hunger."
Indeed, clans assailed them with increasing frequency, and not simply those driven by the extremis of starvation, the ones they cut down as easily as howling dogs. Soon not a day passed without tidings of some Grandee or Satrap dying on the dusty fields: Tikirgal, the Grandee of Macreb, who had always carried himself with the air of an immortal in council, and so shocked all the more with his passing; Mopuraul, the bellicose Satrap of Tendant'heras, whose overbearing manner few would miss.
And not a night passed without some pitched battle across the perimeter of the camp, crazed random affairs that often roused the whole of the Army and so contributed to its mounting exhaustion. The Vokalati never ceased walking the low skies to the immediate north, their lavish billows winding like nested snakes, their mouths and eyes aglow. Kites, the Men of the Circumfix began to call them. From dusk to dawn, they cast lights across the barren tracts, and without fail they found cohorts of Sranc-sometimes thousands strong-creeping toward the camp with reptilian cunning. Many of the swarthy Schoolmen bound themselves to their mules during the day so they might slumber. Fewer and fewer mustered for the daylight Culling.
And yet Umrapathur doggedly refused calling on their Holy Aspect-Emperor. When the Signallers asked what message they should flash across the horizon each evening, he would describe their straits, for he was not so arrogant as to pretend, but he would always conclude with "all is well with the Army of the South."
They exchanged horizon for horizon, winking from waste to wilderness to waste.
Since the Swayali Grandmistress had to see the places she delivered them to, the journey was one of stepping-if the madness of sorcery could be called such-from height to height. This made their passage a succession of breathtaking vistas, most of them densely forested after the first three days. Serwa's voice would speak from Sorweel's skin, bind the air about them with light, collapse his physical form into ash, then deliver them to an entirely novel vantage on the rim of the one previous. Usually, when she was not overcome by her arcane exertions, she would tell the two men something about the land beneath their blinking gaze.
"This was once the province of Unosiri, the ancient hunting grounds of the Umeritic God-Kings."
"There… See that line of shadow through the trees? That was the Soholn, the great road raised by King Nanor-Ukkerja I to speed the passage of his hosts to the frontier."
And each time, Sorweel would gaze out with a kind of perplexed wonder, trying to imagine what it would be like to possess memories of a distant age. Moenghus would typically scowl and cry, "Bah!"
Only the Neleost remained constant, a hazy band of dark across the north. And despite the clamour of birdsong, the land seemed hushed for the fact of losses endured so very long ago.
From height to height they leapt. A ridge-line crooked like an arthritic finger. A scarp overlooking forests whose trees dwarfed the greatest Sorweel had ever seen in the arid environs of Sakarpus. Once she conveyed them to the summit of a ruined tower, one that proved impossible to climb down from. The conjuring had proven to be particularly difficult, so much that Moenghus had to catch Serwa as she teetered on the brink. The two men found themselves stranded on the ruined summit for watches waiting for her to recover. Once she conveyed them to an island of stumped rock in a river, not realizing that miles of marshland lay just beyond. The three of them were pimpled in mosquito bites before they could escape.
They typically made their "leaps," as Moenghus called them, twice daily, though the Swayali Grandmistress often attempted-and sometimes succeeded-delivering them a third time. Early in the morning, not long after awaking, then again in the afternoon, or later depending on what success Serwa had snoozing in daylight. They struck no fire, relying instead on Serwa's witchcraft to cook the game that Moenghus felled with his gorgeous bow. They slept every night, taking turns keeping watch. Sorweel would never forget the moonlit worlds he gazed across during his shifts, his ears pricked to the chorus of nocturnal sounds. Not a night passed where he did not steal glimpses of Serwa sleeping. She would seem a thing of polished marble beneath loose cloth, something more dense than the surrounding world. And he would wonder that loneliness could be so beautiful.
Sometimes the Princess-Imperial did not so much sleep as swoon, such was her exhaustion following certain leaps. She often whimpered, or even cried out, while unconscious, prompting Sorweel to ask Moenghus what afflicted her.
"The past," he replied, glaring as if troubled by Sorweel's ignorance. "Same as all those who have touched the shrivelled turd that is Seswatha's heart. She dreams of these very lands dying in Sranc and fire. She dreams of Father's foe."
"The No-God," Sorweel said numbly.
Eskeles had told him about the First Apocalypse, of course, how the shadowy force the Sakarpi called the Great Ruiner was about to return to finish the destruction of the world. Eskeles also had moaned and whimpered in his sleep, but if anything he had complained of his Dreams too much, to the point where Sorweel had made a habit of dismissing them.
For whatever reason, the fact that Serwa dreamed these very same dreams troubled him more.
"What was it like," he asked her once, "the First Apocalypse?"
"Defeat," she replied with inward eyes. "Horror. Anguish…" She looked to him with a frowning smile. "And beauty too, in a strange way."
"Beauty?"
"The end of nations…" she said with uncharacteristic hesitancy. "Few things command the heart with such profundity."
"Nations," he repeated. "Like Sakarpus."
"Yes… Only exterminated instead of enslaved." She stood as though to put distance between herself and his thin-skinned questions. "And multiplied to the ends of the earth."
Twice they heard Sranc horns calling, similar, yet eerily different from those heard on the Sakarpi Pale. On both occasions the three of them halted whatever it was they were doing, crooked their heads in pensive listening, and it would seem-to Sorweel at least-that the end of the world was not so far.
The death toll climbed, enough to even provoke King Umrapathur's fearless son, Charapatha, the famed Prince of One Hundred Songs, to speak out in apprehension. Every morning he led the Knights of Invishi into the roiling horizon, and every evening he returned with reports of fomenting danger. "They no longer flee," he told his father. "They scatter only when they see Kites in the sky, and those have become all too rare… Soon they will not fear us at all, and they will fall upon us in numbers ten times greater than before-ten times or more!"