A negligent shrug, as if he could trivialize catastrophic facts with mere manner. He was forever doing this, Sorweel realized, pitching his expression against the pious gravity of what he expressed.
"Some truths are too offensive."
Sorweel instantly understood. The people, the common people, would be quick to turn against the Anasurimbor were they to know that the Hundred actually sought-in their paradoxical, unfathomable way-to destroy them.
"But does it mean the Gods can be… can be deceived?"
And it struck Sorweel that there was something vicious in this, asking the son questions that could murder his father… or save him. Something more than simply devious.
Serwa's voice floated across the moss-soft earth, hooking and curling to exotic cadences, lilting in yet another incomprehensible tongue.
"Entili matoi…
"Jesil irhaila mi…"
"Just believe, Horse-King," the Prince-Imperial said, holding his face at a partial angle to his sister's singing. Did she sing to him?
"Just believe, eh?"
A hard look. "My father wars against the end of the world. Stop thinking about your thoughts or you'll go as crazy as my sister."
"But you said your sister was sane."
Moenghus shook his mane in shaggy negation.
"That's what you say to crazy people."
Kites filled the low, iron-grey sky.
The Schoolmen assembled before the Interval's toll-even those who had patrolled the perimeter through the night. Their cadres took to the air moments before the breaking of dawn so that they strode ablaze in morning gold above a dimmer world. Innumerable companies of knights and lancers and horse-archers galloped out beneath them, scoring the immediate north and west with streamers of dust. The number-sticks cast, the footmen marched into their wake, tens of thousands watching in apprehension as the ochre smear of the Horde climbed the circuit of the horizon and made a burial chamber of the sky.
Never had so many felt so small.
The Schoolmen and the accompanying knights receded out of view. King Sasal Umrapathur called the main host to a halt several watches after at the ruins of Irsulor, a city destroyed long before the First Apocalypse. Only mounds remained of the walls, a continuous series of embankments skirting the dead city's heights. Save for five decapitated pillars jutting from the summit-the Fingers, the men began calling them, for the way they resembled a hand thrusting from some enormous burial mound-no structure survived the tidal earth.
Staking his standard beneath the Fingers, Umrapathur watched the Army of the South assemble across the heaped remains of Irsulor below him. The spearmen of Pradu and Invishi with their great shields of wicker. The Girgashi hillmen, whose axes would flash in unison when they raised them in ritual brandishing. The levies of Nilnameshi bowmen, arrayed in twinkling bars across the slopes. The famed Cironji Marines assembled in reserve, looking more like beetles than men with their round-shields upon their backs. On and on, the dusky glory of the Southron Kings come to lands of pale-skinned legend. The buried bastions of Irsulor.
And it seemed a miracle, that out of all the indefensible lands they had crossed, they could find such a place-a strong place. How could he not think he had found more evidence of the Whore's favour?
He looked out across the desolate tracts to the shadow of the Horde, to the dust plumes rising high and tawny above ochre gloom. Others in his retinue swore they could see the distant flash of sorcery, but he saw nothing. He bided his time and waited for tidings. Periodically he craned his head back to study the chapped bulk of the Fingers looming about him, trying to guess at the figures worn into ambiguity across them. A man never knew where he might find portents and omens. He tried not to think of the souls who had raised the ancient pillars-or of their long-dead fate.
From the beginning the question had been what the Sranc would do when the Schoolmen cast their nets of light and destruction across them. Carindusu had argued that they would crash into themselves, fleeing mobs running into mobs, until they formed a crush from which none could escape. "I wager more will suffocate and drown than fall to our fury," the Grandmaster declared to the others. Of course, he admitted, some would survive the Schoolmen and their fires, but they would provide little more than sport for the companies of cavalrymen riding the land behind the Schoolmen.
This did not happen.
As Saccarees had argued weeks earlier, the Sranc were not beasts. For all the base savagery of their instincts, they were not so stupid as to flee into corners.
Leading a great echelon of Nilnameshi knights, Prince Charapatha watched the Schoolmen wade into the boiling horizon, a thin line of glittering points stretched wider than his eyes could follow, and somehow he simply knew that Carindusu had been beguiled by his arrogance-that they had raised a spiderweb about a dragon.
Seized by this premonition, he commanded, to the outrage and astonishment of his men, that everyone shed their iron-scaled hauberks. Many refused-an extraordinary mutiny, given the love and respect they bore their Prince. Scattered across rising and falling swales of gutted land, the companies milled in argument and indecision. Charapatha remained calm, simply repeated his order time and again. He understood the reluctance of his men.
One after another, the glowing Schoolmen vanished into the pluming sheets of dust.
Lights flashed from the brown and black.
The howling, which had keened as loud as always so close to the Horde, warbled with unfamiliar resonances, then almost faded altogether. The Invitic Knights watched astonished. Men famed for their bravery in the Unification Wars cried out in amazement and horror. More and more scaled hauberks clanked across the earth.
The warring lights, if anything, increased in frequency and fury until it seemed lightning itself walked the long rim of the world. The howling faded, and for several heartbeats, they heard arcane shouts in the crotches of the breeze-the Schoolmen. Then they heard a different sound, grim and slow-building, chorus heaped atop inhuman chorus, louder and louder, until horses reared and men shook their heads like fly-plagued dogs. Until the air itself pricked their ears…
Screams. Inhuman screams.
The proud and headstrong Knights of Invishi gazed out and instantly knew that their King-General had erred, that his plan had gone catastrophically awry. For months they had shadowed the Horde, watching the stormfront of dust change colour in accordance with the soil beneath their feet and change shape in accordance with the strength and direction of the wind. Many times they had seen streamers break from the base and spill toward them like tumbling smoke, and always they had rejoiced at the prospect of running down isolate clans. But now they saw a hundred such streamers racing toward them-a thousand — ribbons of dust blooming into high-drawn clouds of filth.
Far from retreating into the crush of their fellows before the advancing sorcerers, the Sranc were running south…
"Ride!" Prince Charapatha bellowed through the cacophony. "Ride for your lives!"
For some reason Sorweel always took a deep breath beforehand, as if he were about to plunge into frigid waters. No matter how many leaps he suffered, a fraction of him always experienced it for the very first time. Her arm hooked fast about his armoured waist, her head a chalice brimming with singing light, and then the wrenching, at once violent enough to concuss the blood from his body, and as soft as wet tissue…
The step across the illusion of space… the Leap.
But something went wrong. Meanings grasped too numbly, utterances fumbled across a too weary tongue. Sorweel suffered the sense of not arriving all at once, as if his viscera trailed the shell of his body.
He fell to his knees on the crest that had been little more than a silhouette on the western horizon just moments before. He felt a sloshing barrel.