The White-Luck Warrior (74 page)

The Horde closed upon Irsûlor, and they were naught but an isle in a shrieking sea.

During this time, the Schoolmen continued walking the skies to the north, raking and scorching the obscured earth. To a man they knew Carindûsû had erred, perhaps disastrously, but they had devised no means of communicating any alternative strategy—they could scarce see one another as it was. Eventually, the more decisive among them abandoned their northward course, and others followed, forming broken cohorts whose passage back was marked with fire and light. Some became lost in the dust and would never find their way to Irsûlor. Some, a few fools, continued northward oblivious and did not turn back until they passed beyond the northern rim of the dust clouds.

None would return in time to counter the Consult.

Sheets of ochre were drawn across the sun, and shadow fell across the formations crowded upon the dead city. The Sranc threw themselves up the embankments and against the bristling ranks of Men, who stood locked, shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder, as they had during the first battle. The Horde caught about Irsûlor as upon a jutting nail.

The Sons of Nilnamesh held the north and west, thrusting sword and spear between their cunning shields of wicker, nearly invulnerable in their gowns of plated iron. The vast bulk of them fought beneath the ancient standards of Eshdutta, Harataka, Midaru, Invoira, and Sombatti, the so-called Five Hosts of Nilnu, the tribal confederacies that had warred for the whole of Nilnamesh since time immemorial. Not since the days of Anzumarapata II had so many Sons of Nilnu marched beyond the paddied plains of their home. Gone were the antique rivalries, the mortal hatred that had so often set them against each other. Gone were the differences. And it seemed a thing of mad and tragic folly that Men might raise arms against Men, when creatures so vile so infested the world.

The Hetmen of Girgash held the east, fierce mountain warriors come from their high fastnesses in the Hinayati along with their softer cousins from Ajowai and the Vales. His horse abandoned, King Urmakthi stood at the fore of his countrymen, his Standard raised in lieu of his voice. The Grandees of Kian held the south, the desert-vicious men of Chianadyni, as well as their taller brothers from Nenciphon and Mongilea, all of them decked in the chained splendour of their fathers' fallen empire. Such was the clamour that they knew nothing of Prince Massar's fall—and so honoured him with their courage.

Crying out with soundless fury the Men of the South thrust and hacked at the gibbering masses. Even on the slopes the inhuman ferocity of the assault forced those deep in the ranks to brace their shields against the backs of those before them, transforming phalanxes into singular structures of flesh, ligament, and bone. Missiles blackened the already shrouded sky, shafts that rattled without harm across the armoured men, save those unfortunate few. The Ketyai archers answered with great volleys of their own, laying low whole swathes of their foe. But with every draw they exposed themselves to the endless black rain, and their losses were grievous.

—|—

Sorweel's eyes snapped open, the screeches of the Viturnal Nesting ringing in his ears. He actually swatted the empty air immediately before him, so vivid was the image of a sun-burnished stork standing upon his chest.

He sat up, blinking. They had leapt upon the treeless prow of a hill, so he could see immediately that he was alone. He could also see the surrounding sunlit miles, the creased terrain rendered as soft as ocean swells for the woollen canopies that clothed it. A land like an old woman.

He had fallen asleep on the shags of grass that edged the crude axe-blade of stone that capped the promontory. The shade had shifted while he slept so that he could feel the sun's burn upon his cheeks and hands. His hauberk, especially, radiated heat.

He peered into the adjacent gloom of the forest, blinking, searching for any sign of the Imperial siblings. A pang groped his breast when he realized their
gear
was missing as well.

Had they abandoned him?

He stood, shaking the fluff from his apparel and the grogginess from his limbs. Then he wandered into the wooded regions, following the uncertain line of the summit, hoping to find his keepers...

—|—

Hardened by the First Battle of the Horde, the Men of the South exacted a dreadful toll. When they looked out, they saw innumerable faces, white and cat-screaming, Sranc and more Sranc, wagging raucous arms, heaving across the basins below. When they looked back they saw the ranks of Men braced across the piled embankments, heights fenced in bright-painted shields and bristling with spears, standards torn ragged by javelins and freighted with snagged arrows. And they remembered the words of their Holy Prophet, that they would see sights awesome and horrific, that they would suffer unimaginable trials—that they would save the World.

And they
believed
.

The Sranc were speared and they were hammered. They were thrown from the bedlam slopes or pulled under by their howling kin. Soon the earth about the dead city was ramped with carcasses, to the point where many of the obscenities were simply trampled for want of footing, thrust stumbling and flailing into the spears and cudgels and swords above.

Their screeching resounded from the very ribs of Heaven.

High beneath the Fingers, King Umrapathur took heart, seeing that his host was too strongly situated to collapse, that it could only be ground to the nub. Soon, he reasoned, Saccarees and Carindûsû would return, and with so many Sranc snagged upon Irsûlor, mobbed to suffocation, the slaughter would be great.

Given his vantage, he was among the first to glimpse the great blemish on the Horde's seething skin, an almond of black, marching beneath umber skies, moving slowly through the ghoulish fields of Sranc, driving ever closer to the beleaguered Sons of Girgash. The height of the mass was the first detail he could discern: the creatures composing it towered over the Sranc. Then he realized the blackness of the thing was due to hair, great shaggy crowns upon heads like cauldrons. The fact of the creatures came to the King all at once, though his soul was long to comprehend their implication.

Bashrag.

Many saw their abominable approach, but like Umrapathur, all were powerless to communicate their horror and alarm. The Girgashi upon the embankment glimpsed them between frenzied assaults, hundreds of hideous frames rising above the Sranc tossing below, an iron-armoured formation, throwing and stamping the hordlings before them.

Bashrag. Three arms welded into one. Three ingrown chests. Three hands for fingers. They were an offence to the eyes, a sight that awed and sickened, such was their deformity. Idiot faces hanging from each grotesque cheek. Horse-tail moles springing from random skin.

Umrapathur saw the nature of the Consult trap instantly. Knowing the Horde would turn and strike at the Irshi, they needed only to wait in ambush and hope their foe would be so foolish as to send out their Schoolmen...

The Believer-King peered to the north, scanned the shrouded skies for sign of Saccarees or Carindûsû.

The abominations lurched ever closer. The surviving Girgashi bowmen found their range. They pelted the fell legion with arrows. And for a moment, Umrapathur dared hope...

But the Bashrag advanced unscathed, quilled like porcupines. They climbed the slopes until they towered before the Men of Girgash.

King Urmakthi was among the first to be struck down, for he had stood at the fore of his kinsmen, his banner held high as a beacon to hearten his men. The Bashrag waded into their midst, sweeping their great axes and hammers. Shields were splintered. Arms were shattered. Heads were pulped. Whole bodies cartwheeled into the ranks behind. For all the courage of the Hetman and their tribal vassals, they were no match for the creatures clacking and bellowing above them. They crumpled as foil and were scattered.

Within a hundred heartbeats the Bashrag had seized the embankment's summit. Umrapathur's heart caught. Only the Cironji Marines and their burnished shields stood between the beasts and his army's doom.

Gilded in shining gold, King Eselos Mursidides led their rush, rammed his spear into the gullet of the foremost beast, only to be beaten to the quivered earth by the great hammer of another. But the famed Marines did not falter. They threw themselves at the monstrosities, and a battle was fought unlike any since the days of the Ancient North. Fearless, skilled, armed with the finest weapons of Seleukaran steel, the Cironji stemmed the lumbering rush. But for heartbeats only. For every Bashrag they felled, dozens of their brothers perished. They were thrown shattered, little more than sacks of human skin.

Men mobilized everywhere through the tight-packed encampment: priests, Judges, water-bearers, the sick and the wounded—it did not matter. All came rushing...

But the Bashrag swatted them dead. Men vanished beneath inhuman strokes. It was like witnessing a massacre of children.

What followed happened so fast that those beneath the Fingers could scarce believe.

Innumerable Sranc scrambled through the breach wrought by the Bashrag, and shrieking masses of them spilled into the narrow ways behind the Inrithi phalanxes. To a man, the Zaudunyani had been trained to fight encircled, to form shield-walls about them—and survive. And indeed, some did precisely this, but panic seized many others, and Men were felled in thousands. Umrapathur stood immobile, his gaze flinching from atrocity after atrocity. Men wailing in horror. Men pulled down, grimacing. The fallen convulsing beneath rutting shadows.

The pavilions and baggage trains vanished. Within heartbeats the entirety of the lower city was overrun, and those formations that did not fly apart or dissolve stood engulfed, dwindling lozenges of human form and colour in a threshing sea of monstrosities.

Death came swirling down.

The Nilnameshi Believer-King gaped and stumbled. A stray arrow caught his hand and pierced the gauntlet.

He raised his skewered palm in disbelief, saw the first of the Schoolmen come striding on sheets of murdering light. Some solitary. Some in ragged, impromptu formations. Motes pricked with brilliance, passing through clouds of missiles, dragging gowns of lightning-bright ruin across the Horde. First dozens, then hundreds, Schoolmen, hanging miraculous in the low sky, walking beneath mountainous scarps and troughs of dust.

The whole North, it seemed, flared with sorcerous destruction.

But is was too late.

Men moaned in the dust. The World shrieked in inhuman triumph.

—|—

Sorweel walked through what seemed a peculiar fog, one that whined in his ears and yanked short his breath. The forest floor wheezed beneath his boots. Oaks and maples climbed high and mocking about him, splicing the sunlight.

He heard them before he saw them. Nearby.

He stood breathless, listening through the creak and click of the surrounding woodland.

"Yessssss..."

A different kind of vigilance seized him, and he crept forward peering between screens of undergrowth. His ears stood poised between the sounds of his approach and the passion that gasped through the skein of leaves.

Like a thief, he crept...

—|—

Seeing the devastation, the returning Mandati and Vokalati withdrew to the skies above the Fingers, formed a ring of floating, battle-maddened brothers. Their faces blackened for dust and tears, they sang out their hatred and spite, the Mandate Schoolmen wielding abstract architectures of light, the Vokalati shining phantoms. And they burned those who clawed and clambered the slopes. And they burned those fornicating with corpses of the fallen. And they burned those thronging through the multitudes.

The slopes became fields of thrashing silhouettes.

Saccarees turned to Carindûsû and feared for the vacancy he glimpsed in the man's eyes. He bid his former rival to stand by his side, mouthing, "Let me show you what it is you shall win!" For nothing other than the Gnosis was the prize the Aspect-Emperor had offered the Anagogic Schools.

But a monstrous wrath overcame the Grandmaster of the Vokalati, the lunacy of one who cannot dwell apart from his pride. His was the name that would be immortalized for infamy. His was the name his kin would strike from their ancestor lists. He called out sorceries with savage abandon, lashed the ground with cruel fire, killing Men and Sranc alike. The survivors below cried out, stunned and appalled.

Saccarees closed with the madman. To the horror of those watching, the two Grandmasters battled above the inhuman multitudes, an exchange of wicked lights, Abstractions against Analogies. Overmatched, Carindûsû was struck from the skies, undone.

Not knowing what happened several Vokalati assailed Saccarees—then several more, until fairly half the Vokalati found themselves attacking for no reason save that their brothers had so turned in violence. And so did the Schools of Mandate and Vokalati consume each other in a final act of madness.

The surviving Men looked up from the looming Fingers. At first they could not credit their eyes. They gazed dismayed and incredulous, while all about them the Sranc surged up the smoking slopes. The frenzied creatures cast themselves upon the few hundred assembled against them, hacking and shrieking—a host that reached out to the obscured rim of the world.

And bloodied King Sasal Umrapathur saw that he was doomed. He fell to his knees and prayed that his Holy Prophet might prevail... that his beloved wife and many children might survive the horror to come.

He looked up and saw a sorcerer falling, his billows ablaze.

The Sranc seized him, raped him as he bled out his life remaining.

—|—

Sorweel could scarce breathe. His spit seemed gravel for swallowing.

Two pale forms against depths of grey and water-green, the one slight upon the one hard, locked in a clenching, quivering embrace.

Kissing as though the other possessed the sole breath.

Grinding, their groins famished, piercing and knowing.