The world flew in shreds beneath them. And the whole was delivered to Sranc.
The Ten-Yoke Legion.
A shriek, a sound heard only for its humanity, and the Scions were fourteen.
"They would drive them the way we drive slaves in the Three Seas," the Schoolman had said, "starve them until their hungers reached a fever pitch. Then, when they reached a position where the Sranc could smell Mannish blood on the wind, they would strike the chains, and let them run…"
Sorweel tossed a panicked glance over his shoulder, toward the inscrutable black that gnashed and grunted behind them…
Saw Eskeles yanked to earth on the back of his tumbling pony, slapped like a fish onto the gutting-table.
And he was reining, crying out to Zsoronga, leaping to the turf, sprinting to the motionless Schoolman. The Scions were nothing but streamers of fading dust. He gasped shrieking air, skidded to a halt. He heaved the sorcerer onto his back, cried out something he could not hear. He looked up, felt more than saw the rush, raving and inhuman…
And for a heartbeat he smiled. A King of the Horselords, dying for a leuneraal…
One last humiliation.
The beasts surfaced, as if looking back had become looking down. Faces of pale silk, crushed into expressions both crazed and licentious. Slicked weapons. Glimpses piled upon glimpses, terror upon terror.
Sorweel looked to them, smiling even as his body tensed against hacking iron. He watched the nearest leap…
Only to crash into a film of incandescent blue- sorcery — wrapped into a hemisphere about them.
The booming roar swept into them, over them, and Sorweel found himself in a mad bubble, a miraculous grotto where sweat could be wiped from sodden brows.
Sand and dust shivered and danced between leather threads of grass. Beyond, howling faces, horned weapons, and knobbed fists crowded his every glimpse. He watched with a kind of disembowelled wonder: the white-rope limbs, the teeth like broken cochri shells, the covetous glitter of innumerable black eyes…
Breathing required will.
Eskeles thrashed his way back to blubbering consciousness. Moaning, he threw his gaze this way and that, flailed with his fists. Sorweel hugged his shoulders, tried to wrestle the panic from him. He thrust the portly man back, pinned him, crying, "Look at me! Look at me!"
"Noooo!" the man howled from his dust-white beard. Urine blackened the man's trousers.
"Something!" Sorweel cried through the scratching, pounding racket. The heave of crazed wretches encompassed everything. The first luminous cracks scrawled across the Ward, wandering like the flight of flies. "You have to do something!"
"It's happening! Sweet Seju! Sweet-swe-!"
Sorweel cuffed him full on the mouth.
" Eskeles! You have to do something! Something with light!"
The Mandate Schoolmen squinted in confusion.
"The Ordeal, you fat fool! The Great Ordeal needs to be warned!"
Somehow, somewhere in Sorweel's cry, the sorcerer seemed to encounter himself, the stranger who had sacrificed all in the name of his Aspect-Emperor. The Zaudunyani. The Believer. His eyes found their focus. He reached out to squeeze the young King's shoulder in assurance.
"L-light," he gasped. "Light- yes! "
He pressed Sorweel to the side, tottered to his feet even as his incipient Ward began to crumble. The glow of his chanting gleamed across swatches of madness. Screeching faces, jerking, trembling like strings in the wind. Bleeding gums. Diseased skin, weeping slime and algae. Notched edges flying on arcs both cramped and vicious. Eyes of glittering black, hundreds of them fixing him, weeping and raging for hunger. Lips shining for slaver…
Like a nightmare. Like a mad fresco depicting the living gut of Hell, bleached ever whiter for the brilliance of the Schoolman's unholy song. Words too greased to be caught and subdued by the Legion's vicious roar, echoing through invisible canyons.
And there it was… striking as straight as a geometer's line from the ground at the fat sorcerer's feet, dazzling the eyes, stilling the inhuman onlookers with salt-white astonishment…
Reaching high to illuminate the belly of the overcast night.
A Bar of Heaven.
General Kayutas was the first to glimpse it out across the tumult, the Northmen but rafts of discipline in a tossed sea of Sranc, the Swayali like columns of sunlight breaking through tempest clouds, burning the inexhaustible waters. He saw it, between pelting arcs of arrows, a needle of glittering white on the southern horizon…
Where nothing but dead earth should be.
He turned to his sister, who had followed his gaze out to the distant and inexplicable beacon. Others in his cortege noticed also, but their shouts of alarm were soundless in the thrumming roar.
Serwa need only glimpse her brother's lips to understand-they were children of the Dunyain.
She stepped into the sky, summoned the nearest of her sisters to rise with her.
– | The world smelled of burning snakes.
Sorweel saw clouds knotted into woollen plates, flickering in and out of edgeless illumination. His head lolled and he saw the earth reeling, pricked with infinite detail, a thousand thousand mortal struggles. Ironclad men hacking and hollering. Sranc and more Sranc-twitching and innumerable. He saw women hanging in the air with him, far-gowned Swayali, singing impossible, incandescent songs.
And he jerked his lurching gaze to the hook that had lifted him so high…
A Goddess held him, carried him like a child across the surfaces of Hell.
"Mother?" he gasped, thinking not of the woman who had borne him but of the divinity. Yatwer… the Mother of Wombs, who had cursed him with murdering the most deadly man to ever walk her parched earth.
"No," the glorious lips replied. It seemed a miracle that she could hear him, such was the guttural clamour. A roar so knotted with violence, that the very air seemed to bleed. "Worse."
"You…" he gasped, recognizing the woman through the fiery veil of her beauty.
"Me," Anasurimbor Serwa replied, smiling with the cruelty of the peerless. "How many hundreds will die," she asked, "for saving you?"
"Drop me then," he croaked.
She recoiled from the floating fury of his gaze, looked out across the threshing darkness, frowning as if finally understanding she bore a king in her arcane embrace. Through acrid veils of smoke, he breathed deep the scent of her: the myrrh of glory and privilege, the salt of exertion.
Let me fall.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.
Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Nansurium, Somewhere South of Momemn
In Gielgath, two thieves assailed him, and the White-Luck Warrior watched them scuffle, drunk and desperate, with the man who was their doom. They lurched out of alleyway shadows, their cries choked to murmurs for fear of being heard. They sprawled dead and dying across cobble and filth, the one inert, the other twitching. He wiped his Seleukaran blade clean across the dead one, even as he raised the sword to counter their manic rush. He stepped clear of the one who stumbled, raised his blade to parry the panicked swing of the other… the swing that would notch the scimitar's honed edge-as thin as an eyelid.
The notch that would shatter his sword, so allowing the broken blade to plunge into the Aspect-Emperor's heart. He could even feel the blood slick his thumb and fingers, as he followed himself into the gloomy peril of the alley.