'Not a pitched one,' Xonghis said, his almond eyes little more than slits as he peered northward. 'A running battle, I think… There're dead skinnies along the entire length of the trail.'
'The true contest was to the north,' Cleric said, peering.
Images from his dreams assailed the old Wizard. In the early days of the First Apocalypse, before the coming of Mog-Pharau, the ancient hosts of Kuniuri and Aorsi had left trails such as this whenever they marched through Sranc lands. 'A Hording,' he heard himself say. He turned to address the small crowd of curious looks. 'A mobbing like no other. This is what happens when you fight your way through an endless accumulation of Sranc.'
'Now we know where all the skinnies went,' Pokwas said, a great hand raised to the back of his neck.
'Aye,' Galian said nodding. 'Why chase scraps when a feast marches across your land.'
The company passed the first clutch of Sranc within a watch of its downward trek, at least a hundred of them, their skin withered to hide, their limbs jutting like sticks. Xonghis had difficulty estimating when they had been killed because of the drought. 'Dried to jerky,' he said, gazing across the blackened remains with a practised eye.
Soon they were in the midst of the battlefield, a thin file wandering across trammelled dust that was barely whiskered with grass-a barren as vast as the horizon. They saw vultures feuding, crows probing eye sockets, wolves and jackals loping in wary circles. They saw figures burned to charcoal, little more than stumps jutting from sand blasted to glass. They saw bodies hacked to the ground, tangled lines and arcs of them, and in his soul's eye the old Wizard saw the battle formations that had shaped them, the hard-armoured men fighting beneath banners drawn from across the Three Seas. They saw what looked like the remains of pyres, broad circles of gutted black. Mimara crouched to the dust, fetched a wire Circumfix from the sand. The old Wizard watched her tie the leather string, then loop the thing over her neck. By some perverse coincidence, the symbol fell directly across the Chorae that lay hidden against her breast.
Everywhere the old Wizard looked, he glimpsed the stain of sorceries, Gnostic rather than Anagogic. To the practised eye, the difference was plain, as if the world had been gored with razors instead of bludgeoned with hammers. Mimara once told him that Kellhus had largely honoured the ancient Mandate monopoly on the Gnosis, granting the secret knowledge only to the witches, the Swayali, as both a promise and a goad for other Schools. So wherever he glimpsed some Gnostic residue, he could not help but think of his erstwhile brothers and wonder why he no longer seemed to care.
'Skinnies!' Sarl cackled from somewhere behind him. 'A mobbing like no other! Think of the bales!'
The Captain said nothing. Cleric said nothing. Both walked as if the scene about them were interchangeable with any other landscape, as if mounds of dead surrounded them no matter where they walked. But the others craned their looks this way and that, pointing to various sights of grisly interest.
'He marches against Golgotterath,' Mimara murmured from the old Wizard's side. 'He slaughters Sranc…'
'What do you mean?'
'Kellhus… You still think him a fraud?'
He swept his gaze across the strewn carnage.
'That's for Ishual to answer.'
Ghosts moved in him, ghosts of who he had been. Once, before his exile, he would have celebrated fields such as this with hoots of exultation, tears of joy. An Aspect-Emperor marching against the Consult, bent on preventing the Second Apocalypse: the old him would have laughed in derision had anyone suggested he would live to see such a sight, laughed at the desperation of his longing.
But there was another ghost in him, a memory of who he had been mere months ago, the man who would have been aghast at the sight, not because he did not pray for Golgotterath's fall-he did with a fervour only a Mandate Schoolman could know-but because he had wagered the lives of innocents in a mad quest to prove the faith of millions wrong, and a lunatic barbarian-a Scylvendi, no less-right…
What had happened? Where had this man gone?
And if he was gone, what did that make of his quest?
He turned to scrutinize Mimara, gazed long enough to spark a curious frown.
She was right… He realized this as if for the first time.
The Qirri.
Flies had inherited the earth.
They crossed fields of detritus, threading the hillocks of dead, stepping over dried-out puddles skinned in cracked blood. Lines and blots of interlocking corpses reached out to knot the distances. Skin tight about grinning skulls. Innumerable hands with sunken palms, fingers drawn into claws. A thousand poses corresponding to a thousand deaths: thrown, struck spinning, flailing in fire. All of them lying inert and breathless in pools of inky shadow.
The reek was overpowering, a melange of rot and feces. The wind raised it, powdered them in it, yet they did not care.
The Captain called a halt. They prepared camp.
The sun scorched the western horizon. Nearby, hundreds of Sranc had been piled for some unknown reason, forming a heap that had dried into a kind of grisly deadfall. Stripped to his loincloth, Cleric climbed to the summit, his bare feet cracking ribcages like crusts of snow. The sight of him, a Nonman burnished in the bronze and copper of sunset standing upon the compressed remains of Sranc, struck the old Wizard with peculiar force. He sat gawking at Mimara's side, fumbling with things half-remembered.
Cleric stood with regal inhumanity, his skin gleaming as if greased. 'This war,' he began. 'This war is older than your tongues and nations…'
The old Wizard found himself wondering where the gruel of rotted memory would lead the Nonman this time. Would he speak of Far Antiquity? The First Apocalypse? Or would he speak of times when the Five Tribes of Men still wandered the wastes of Eanna?
Would he reveal his true identity?
Achamian lowered his gaze, stared blinking at his hands, at his scabbed knuckles, at the grime darkening the whorls of his skin. How long had it been since he last asked this question?
When had he forgotten to wonder?
'Men bled here,' Cleric said from his macabre summit. 'Men leaned shouting into their shields.'
How long had it been since he had last cared? Even now he could feel it welling within him, defeat and dissolution, a knee-cracking resignation. And a voice whispered within him, his voice, asking, What is there to care about?
'So frail, so mortal,' the ancient Ishroi continued, 'yet they cast themselves before the scythes of happenstance, yielded their souls to the perversities of Fate.'
All the world seemed a burned-out pyre. All the glory gone, roaring into the hiss of failing coals. All the hope twisting into smoky oblivion.
'Dogs scavenge,' the Nonman called. 'Wolves chase the foaling mother, the aged, and the weak. Even the lion shies from clawed prey. Only you and I know the madness that is war. Man and Nonman. Only we pursue what lions flee.'
And who was he, Drusas Achamian, to think he could grapple Fate, pin Her to the floor of his hateful aspiration?
'We die for what we know,' the Nonman boomed, 'and we know nothing! Generations heaped upon generations, tossing lives after self-serving guesses, murdering nations in the name of ignorance and delusion.'
Seswatha? Was that who he thought he was? The incarnation of an ancient hero?
'We call our greed justice! We call our soiled hands divine! We strike in the name of avarice and vanity, and the-!'
'Enough!' the Captain shouted at the high-shining figure. Aside from Cleric, he alone stood, wind whipped and insane. 'Some wars are holy,' he grated in blood-raw tones. 'Some wars… are holy.'
The Nonman regarded him from his summit, blinked once before turning from his furious aspect. He climbed from the heaped Sranc, making a stair of heads and torsos, then leapt to the dust with leonine grace. The shadows of the dead crowded his naked legs.
