The Culling was reorganized under Saccarees's direction. As the Army of the South veered westward, the Vokalati had simply spread themselves across the entirety of the Horde facing them. Since the clans accumulating along their right flank posed the greatest threat, Saccarees, with Carindusu's grudging assent, dedicated all the Mandate and Vokalati-some three hundred sorcerers of rank-to their extermination. For the long-suffering pickets, the vision of so many Kites sailing into the enormous bowers of dust was a thing of cheering joy and wonder. 'Like watching angels drag skirts of fire,' Prince Sasal Charapatha reported to his father.
Arrayed in cadres of three-triunes-the Schoolmen walked the high-hanging veils, their Wards turning aside flurries of arrows and javelins, their Cants scorching the shadows that raced shrieking beneath. The violence of the Horde's flight kicked ever more dust into the sky, so piling obscurity atop obscurity, until the Schoolmen could scarce see their own apparitional defences, let alone the ground seething beneath. Since nothing singular could be heard above the cavernous roar, they could not even rely on their ears to guide them. So, their mouths and eyes alight, they lashed out blindly, swept the ground with Cirroi Looms, Dragonheads, Gotaggan Scythes, and more, destroying the gibbering mobs they saw more in their soul's eye than in fact. They advanced in hellish echelon, using the glow of the triunes flanking to pace their progress into the ochre gloom. Shouting their voices to croaks, they chased the far flank of the Horde out into the droughted wastes…
Only to find it returned the following morning.
Since the Sranc cannibalized their dead, evidence of their efficacy was difficult to find. The cavalry pickets who crossed the sorcerers' wake counted the dead as they had been instructed. The Imperial Mathematicians argued estimates, and the Believer-Kings continually bent their darling ear, as the Nilnameshi put it, to the numbers that most flattered their hopes. But Saccarees was not fooled-no more than Carindusu.
'The number is irrelevant!' he finally cried to King Umrapathur. 'The effect is all that matters.'
This put an end to their numerical speculations, for everyone knew that despite the cunning and fury of their efforts, the Schoolmen had accomplished nothing that any man could discern. Their predicament, if anything, had become more perilous. Not only did the Horde seem to be swelling along their flank, it had grown mobbing tendrils that hooked about their rear. Sranc, uncounted thousands of them, now followed the Army.
Once again Umrapathur was forced to set aside his pride and call upon the Aspect-Emperor.
This time their Lord-and-God came to them chalked in dust, bearing the crackling aura of sorceries dispensed. In their soul's eye, the Believer-Kings could see him striding alone into the inhuman Horde, wracking the masses that thronged about him with cataclysmic light.
'Indeed,' he said, favouring Sasal Umrapathur with a nod, 'your peril is great. You were wise to call me, Umra.'
Crisis, he told the assembled caste-nobles, was inevitable. The best they could hope to achieve was to weaken the Horde in tactically advantageous ways so they might survive its inevitable assault. 'Henceforth, you must encircle yourselves with your might, camp curled as a caterpillar, armed against all directions.'
The advance pickets were thinned to a handful of companies while the bulk of the Army's horsemen-the heavily armoured knights of Nilnamesh and the more fleet riders of Girgash and Chianadyni-concentrated on clearing the southeastern tracts of Sranc in concert with the Schoolmen. At the Aspect-Emperor's direction, they adopted the extravagant hunting tactics of the Far Antique Norsirai kings, who would use their hosts to encircle entire provinces and so drive all the beasts of the land to slaughter. The Schoolmen filed out into the depths of the plain, then arrayed themselves behind the Sranc so they could drive them into far-flung arcs of horsemen. It seemed they herded clouds with staffs of light. For the men marching in the main host, half the world was fenced in mountainous dust.
But it was like digging holes in loose sand: for every thousand they gouged clear, another thousand came collapsing in from the sides. And the losses, especially among the unarmoured ponies, rose to unsustainable levels. As ever, death came swirling down. Possu Hurminda, the even-handed Satrap of Sranayati, was lost, pulled down by a crazed Sranc chieftain. So too was Prince Hemrut, the eldest son of King Urmakthi, killed.
Despite these losses, despite the relentless heroism of their efforts, the numbers of Sranc trailing the Army of the South seemed to grow at an increasing rate, to the point where the cavalrymen found themselves mired in pitched battles rather than riding down panicked swarms. Then, on the sixth day of the Hunt, as it had come to be called, some five companies of Nilnameshi knights under Satrap Arsoghul were out-and-out overwhelmed, and the Cironji Marines, who were tasked with guarding the Army's rear, found themselves beset by several thousand Sranc.
'They seek each other out,' Saccarees said to the dismayed Believer-Kings, 'like schooling fish or flocking birds, so that the presence of few licenses the gathering of many.' Far from clearing the clans from their rear, he explained, they actually were pressing them farther afield and so opening ever-greater tracts for innumerable others to occupy. Their efforts to clear their flanks were leading to their encirclement.
'Could it be?' Carindusu asked in derision. 'Have the fabled Dreams of the First Apocalypse led the illustrious Saccarees astray?'
'Yes,' the Mandate Grandmaster replied, his honesty so genuine, his humility so reminiscent of their Lord- and-God, that Carindusu found himself shamed before his peers a third time.
'What we face… The world has never seen the like.'
They sat, as always, side by side before the octagonal iron hearth. Master and disciple.
'Maithanet,' the Aspect-Emperor said. 'My brother has seized control in Momemn.'
After so many years Proyas suffered only the most subtle urges to lie or save face. The merest hesitations were all that remained of his old instincts to write himself large in the eyes of others. This time it was the instinct to conceal his dismay. Before he had found Kellhus, he had made himself into Maithanet's disciple. And over the years since the First Holy War, he had come to love Esmenet as a sister, as much as he revered her as the wife of his Lord-and-God. To think the one could usurp the other… It seemed impossible.
'What could have happened?' he asked.
The fire seemed to sputter for the tidings as much as Proyas's heart laboured. If Maithanet, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, had revolted against his brother…
The Empire itself teetered.
'For some reason Esmi suspected Maitha of sedition,' Kellhus said without the least whisper of remorse or concern, 'and so called him to account before Inrilatas. The interrogation went wrong, horribly wrong, and my brother ended up killing my son…' He looked down to his haloed palms, and Proyas found it curiously affecting, the contrast between his tone and his manner. 'I know little more than this.'
The Exalt-General breathed deep and nodded. 'What do you intend to do?'
'Gather as much knowledge as possible,' the Holy Aspect-Emperor replied, his head still bowed. 'I yet have resources in Momemn.'
Since the beginning, Anasurimbor Kellhus had possessed a peculiar density of presence, as if he were the lone iron ingot among shards of clay and stone, invulnerable to what would smash others to powder. But with each of these remarkable sessions, the more this density seemed to leak from him…
So much so the Exalt-General suffered the demented urge to prick him, just to see if he would bleed. Faith… he upbraided himself. Faith!
'Do you-?'
Proyas paused, recognizing the implications of what he was about to ask.
'Do I fear for Esmi?' Kellhus asked. He turned his friend smiling. 'You wonder, as you have wondered your whole life, what passions bind me.' He closed his eyes in resignation. 'And whether they are human.'
So here it was, the question of questions…
'Yes.'
'Love,' the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, 'is for lesser souls.'
Young men are forever casting their meagre will and intellect against the tide of their passions, claiming they do not fear when they fear, insisting they do not love when they love. So the young King of Sakarpus told himself that he despised Anasurimbor Serwa, cursed her as the self-important daughter of his Enemy, even as he mooned over the similarity of their names and the poetry of their conjunction: Serwa and Sorweel, Sorweel and Serwa. Even as he dreamed of their tender coupling.
Even as he began fearing more for her — a Gnostic sorceress-than for himself.
