She climbed a small rise that had been chapped to gravel, spun in a pirouette that made a wheel of her white flashing hair. "I stand upon the axis of an ancient power," she declared to the two wondering men. "The hub of a wheel that once turned the World but now spins groundless in the smoky Outside." She closed her eyes, raised her nostrils, as if breathing deep the uncanniness of the place-as if the occult were simply a more subtle perfume.
"Two thousand years ago," she called, "from this very dais, the first Ordeal was declared against Golgotterath."
"Yes…" Moenghus replied scowling. "The one that failed."
The rain began shortly after, spilling from a bank of woollen clouds that caught them entirely unawares. The sun just slipped into the sky's pocket, and endless waters followed chill upon the gloom. The two men ran to the shelter of Serwa's sorcerous parasol, and together they hastened to the river.
They could not see the far shore.
Moenghus had said nothing the entirety of the trek, and now, sitting side by side upon the puddled stone, his manner became even darker. While Sorweel gazed out into fogged shadows, he glowered at nothing, as if staring down hatreds only he could fathom.
"Father says this river is holy," he finally said.
He stood and began stripping his clothes.
In disbelief, Sorweel watched him walk naked, following a shoal of sand and brush to where it dwindled to a finger prodding the water. He held his arms out for balance as he tiptoed to the very claw. He became shadowy as he passed through ever more veils of rain. He lingered for a moment, his powerful frame sculpted and gleaming. Then he leapt white and slicked out into waters. He vanished in a pale whoosh.
Sorweel and Serwa watched the rain fall, watched the white spitting across the iron-grey waters, threshing away the rings of his submersion, until they could no longer say just where the river had swallowed him.
He did not surface.
At some point, Sorweel could feel individual heartbeats within his breast, such was the horror rising within him. He peered across the descending roar, waiting…
"Something's happened!" he finally cried.
He flew to his feet, but Serwa restrained him with a firm clasp upon his right hand.
"He does that," she said in reply to his alarmed gaze. "Pretends to be dead."
"Why?"
Serwa frowned, once again far too canny and too wise for her youthful face.
"Surely Kayutas told you he was mad."
He gaped, and she laughed at his incomprehension, returned her gaze to the sparking waters.
Suddenly Moenghus burst from the Holy Aumris with an inhaling shout, his hair drawn like black paint about his face, neck, and corded shoulders.
"It tastes like dirt!" he laughed across the washing roar.
The Holy Aumris.
As the easternmost element of the Great Ordeal, the Army of the South was the last to pass from the endless plates of the High Istyuli into the more broken lands to the northwest. Ravines and defilades scored the once-simple distances. Monstrous stumps of stone breached the parch, formations that reared into saddle-backed summits. The Men of the Circumfix sighted ruins commanding bare rock heights, glimpsed the shadow of ancient and overgrown roads bisecting the horizon. Like their brethren to the west, they took heart in these signs, marvelled that places so far could have once been the centre of Mannish civilization. The sense of trespass fell from them, the aura of estrangement that makes wayfarers adopt the worried habits of the interloper. For the first time they understood that they were returning and not simply venturing-and their souls were fortified.
They would have thought themselves liberators… were it not for the curtains of dust drawn across the horizon about them.
They marched through the high heart of ancient Sheneor, the weakest and most ephemeral of the Three Kingdoms of Far Antique fame, the frontier sibling of stern Aorsi to the north and populous Kuniuri to the west. The Mandate Schoolmen, who every night dreamed of these lands in their nadir, looked upon the desolation and mourned. Where were the white-washed towers? The serpentine pennants of blue and gold? The companies of bronze-armoured Knights-Chieftain, cruel and proud? And they wondered that they had lived to see this earth with their waking eyes.
With the breaking of the land came the quickening of the rivers, and with this came the increasing complications of crossing them. Across the high plain, the drought had so reduced the flow as to make fording a mere trudge through mire. Now the Army crawled down into steeper valleys where they found denuded poplars, stripped to spears by the retreating Horde. The Men of the Circumfix took comfort in their campfires, the first in months, and feasted on what fish the Netters gleaned from the rivers. They sucked the grease from their fingers, spoke small prayers thanking War for their momentary reprieve. The Believer-Kings, meanwhile, argued logistics and debated the perils of crossing treacherous waters in the shadow of the Horde. The fords themselves were easy to find: the Sranc literally rewrote the landscape when funnelled into multiple crossings, such were their numbers. Banks worn into ramps, waters stamped into broad morasses. They imagined a writhing, shrieking world, the skies gauzed with dust, the worm-pale multitudes stamping and heaving, thousands flailing in the mudded waters, and they were troubled. The earth seemed to tingle with the memory of their raucous masses, like a sheet drawn from the body of a dead man. Everything reeked of pollution.
The fear was that the Horde would attack while the Army stood astride both banks-a fear that never materialized. At the first such river, Carindusu actually remained behind with some hundred of his white-and-violet-gowned Vokalati, thinking they could use the fords to rid themselves of the Sranc massing on their rear flank. They slew many to be sure, thousands, sending plumes of foul steam into the already obscure air, but the Sranc discovered other crossings, or perhaps they abandoned their armour and simply swam; either way, the Nilnameshi Schoolmen found themselves withdrawing across seething grounds.
King Umrapathur continued taking precautions. But he became ever more confident that the rivering of the land was far more a boon to his host than a liability. He could not foresee the danger to come.
The three camped in the ruins of a fortress halved by the collapse of the scarps that had once motivated its construction. Dagmersor, Serwa called it. The remains of the citadel hung jagged and hollow above them, a tattered silhouette across the clouding stars. Unseen wolves howled.
Sorweel drew the first watch. He picked a position above the moribund fortifications, where the land mobbed out from beneath his hanging feet. Nocturnal forests. Solitary trees climbed apart from their brothers, propped on swells of earth and rock, their crowns silver beneath the Nail of Heaven, their branches a veining black. Noise pitted the black with a million unseen places, a creaking, creeping chorus that rose from the dark face of all, fading into the ever-expanding silence that was the emptiness of Heaven.
And it scooped the breath from Sorweel's lungs.
There was a beauty to this journey across the ruined landscapes of lost Kuniuri, one due as much to these moments of solitude as to the whorled terrain that framed them.
His thoughts wandered, as they often did, across the myriad spectacles he had witnessed since his father's death. And he wondered that someone so frail as him could participate in such legendary events, let alone move them. The things he had seen. He imagined what it would be like returning to Sakarpus, excavating whatever scraps of his old life that remained, and trying to explain what had happened-what was happening — beyond the Pale. Would his countrymen marvel? Would they scoff? Would they accept the epic magnitude of what he described, or would they dismiss it as mere conceit?