The same lyric, hollered out over and over, like a sacred intonation. It became a banner, a scrap of purity hoisted high above a polluted world, and none would relinquish it. A call and a promise. A curse and a prayer. And the Shining Men matched the Sranc and their preternatural fury, roared singing as they stove skulls and spilled entrails. In one mad voice they fumbled for their faith, raised high the shield of their belief…
And became unconquerable.
The Scions fled across the black, the earth little more than liquid shadows sweeping beneath. Sorweel continually found himself sagging to his right, such was his exhaustion. His eyes would roll between pasty blinks, and his head would loll like a tipping weight. The dark world would tilt, and for a heartbeat he would float on the border of unconsciousness… before catching himself with a panicked jerk. At least his pony, Stubborn, remained true to his moniker and showed no sign of faltering.
Periodically he would shout mock encouragement to Zsoronga, who would always reply by wishing him ill. Neither paid attention to what was said: the saying was all that mattered, the reminder that other souls endured the same congealed misery and somehow persevered.
Finally, after days of tacking across the wastes, they had flanked and outdistanced the Ten-Yoke Legion-though they had been reduced to fifteen mounted souls doing so. Now with their last sip of strength, they raced toward the smear of flickering lights on the horizon, what they would have thought a thunderstorm were it not for the tin-distant clamour…
They could hear it over the broken percussion of hooves tumbling across the dust, over the pinched complaints of their ponies. A sound, high and hollow, ringing as if the world were a cistern. It was a sound that grew and grew-impossibly, they realized, guessing the distance of its origin. Crooning like a thousand wolves, hacking like warring geese. An immeasurable sound, or at least one beyond Men and their mortal rule.
The Horde.
A sound so titanic that Harnilas, for all his ruthless determination to reach General Kayutas, called the ragged company to a halt. The Scions sat rigid in their saddles, squinting at their shadowy companions, waiting for their dust to outrun them. Sorweel peered ahead, struggling to make sense of the flash and flicker that now extended across a good swathe of the horizon.
He looked to Zsoronga, but the man hung his head, grimacing and thumbing his eyes.
At the Captain's bidding, Eskeles cast another of his sorcerous lenses. The light of his incantation seemed a jewel, so dark the world had become. Sorweel glimpsed the others, their faces drawn and gaunt, eyes bruised with the sorrow and fury that is manhood. Then soundless images crowded the air before the Schoolman…
The Scions gasped and cried out, even those too exhausted to speak.
A screeching world. Heaving, howling masses, pale and silvery like fish schooling through dark waters. Sranc, raving and thronging, so many as to seem singular, their rushing like the slow curl of scarves warring across the horizon. The Men of the Middle-North could be barely glimpsed, arrayed in bristling, segmented bars, defending barricades of stacked carcasses. Only the Swayali Witches could be clearly seen, hanging like slips of gold foil, drawing skirts of flashing Gnostic destruction… never enough.
With twists of his fingers, Eskeles turned the lens on a shallow arc, revealing more and more of the madness that awaited them. For all its power and the glory, the Army of the Middle-North was but a shallow island in dark-heaving seas. No one need speak the obvious.
The Northmen were doomed.
Real, Sorweel once again found himself thinking in dumb wonder. His war is real…
He turned from the spectacle to the Schoolman, saw the ribs of his ailing pony carved in light and shadow.
"A sight from my Dreams…" Eskeles murmured. And Sorweel worried for the brittle cast of his eyes, the promise of panic.
Without thinking, he reached out to squeeze the man's round shoulder in reassurance-the way King Harweel might. "Remember," he said, speaking words he suddenly wanted to believe. "This time the God marches with us."
"Yes…" the square-bearded sorcerer replied with a throat-clearing harrumph. "Of-of course…"
And then they heard it, like an echo floating through howling winds, human voices, shouting out human sounds: hope, fury, and defiance, defiance most of all.
"The 'Beggar's Lament'!" someone called from behind them. "The crazy bastards!"
And with that, they all could hear it, word for hoarse word, a drinking song bellowed out to the heavens. Suddenly the throat-pricking frailty fell away from the distant Men, and what had seemed a vision of doom became legendary- glorious — more indomitable than overmatched. The gored Northmen, their lines unbroken, reaving…
A massacre of the mad many by the holy few.
That was when they heard another sound, another ear-scratching roar… one that came shivering through the dark and dust and grasses.
More Sranc.
Behind them.
A miraculous slaughter, on a scale too demented to be celebrated.
Kayutas and his Believer-Kings knew their flanks would be quickly enveloped, but they also knew, thanks to the ancients, that their encircling would be the product of happenstance, a consequence of the Sranc and their mobbing desperation. Whipped by their lunatic hunger, each simply ran toward Men and their porcine smell, a course continually deflected by the mobbing of their brothers before them. In this way, the Horde spilled ever outward like water chasing gutters. But the process was such that those who reached the ends of the Galeoth flanks would be but trickles compared with the torrents above.
"The Horde will strike the way Ainoni courtesans pile their hair," Kayutas had explained to his laughing commanders. "Locks will spill down our cheeks, make no mistake. But only a few curls will tickle our chin."
And so was the ignominious task of defending the camp and rear delegated to the Lords of the Great Ordeal. So-called "Cornice Phalanxes" occupied the ends of the common-line, formations of courageous souls trained to battle in all directions. Triunes of Swayali hung above, scourging the endless flurries of Sranc that sluiced around them. And with the Kidruhil, the assembled thanes and knights policed the darkling plains between.
If the Prince-Imperial's descriptions had led them to expectations of easy slaughter, they were quickly disabused. Many were lost to the mundane treachery of burrows and ant mounds. Earl Arcastor of Gesindal, a man renowned for his ferocity in battle, broke his neck before he and his Galeoth knights encountered a single Sranc. Otherwise all was darkness and racing madness, conditions that favoured the lust-maddened Sranc clans. Companies would ride down one cohort in effortless slaughter, only to be surprised by the shrieking assault of another. Company after company limped back to the precincts of the camp, their numbers decimated, their eyes vacant with vicious horrors. Lord Siklar of Agansanor, cousin of King Hogrim, would be felled by a stray arrow out of nowhere. Lord Hingeath of Gaenri would fall in pitched battle with his entire household, as would Lord Ganrikka, Veteran of the First Holy War-a name that would be mourned by many.
And so death came swirling ever down.
Despite the toll, not one of the obscenities lived to trod the alleys of the darkened camp.
Fleeing into a world illumined by faraway sorcery.
Riding as if chased by the world's own crumbling edge.
Gouged hollow, a stack of tin about a papyrus fire. Light enough to be blown by terror. Dull and heavy enough to die, to tumble dirt against dirt.
The intellect overthrown. The eyes rolling, seeking nonexistent lines, as if trying to peer around the doom encircling them.
Stubborn coursed beneath him, galloping like a dog across invisible earth, scoring the thirsty turf. Zsoronga glanced at him, sobs kicking through the monkey-terror of his grin. The others were less than shadows…