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 Carindusu 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, Carindusu 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.
Never had he witnessed such a thing, breath-stealing, filled with rage and horror and imperious lust. He was not who he was for seeing it. Not one of his concerns survived the trespass before him. Not his father. Not the Tear of God that would avenge him.
Nothing mattered save this…
The children of a god mating. The woman he loved betraying…
His little brother called out for him. He found him, grasped him, cold fingers opposite a burning palm.
And he coupled with the sinuous image writhing before him, arched in answer to the man's black-haired grunting, spilled his seed to the girl's high blonde cries.
The mounded heights of Irsulor smoked and crawled.
The Schoolmen hung in the air above, raining death upon their wicked foe. They wept even as they spoke hacking lights, for when they looked out, all creation whorled and seethed with foul Sranc. And of the tens of thousands who had been their brothers, all were dead and desecrated…
Shields trampled. Corpses pierced, clotted with rutting forms, like ants upon apple peels.
The Schoolmen scourged the embankments, pummelled the slopes, until Irsulor reared like a mountain burnt to the stub, sheeted in blasted, blackened dead. Man, Sranc, Bashrag…
And still the multitudes surged forward. The Horde reached out into obscurity, a cloak of twisting maggots thrown over the horizon, howling. Howling.
And the Schoolmen were so very alone.
His crimson billows black for filth and fire, Saccarees descended, set foot upon the charred summit in a heartbroken bid to recover Umrapathur's body. But he could scarce distinguish Sranc from Man, let alone man from man. He looked out, over the tiers of smoking carcasses, through the comb of brilliant sorceries, out across the tumult of the plains, and it seemed he gazed upon the future, what would become of the World should his Holy Prophet fail…
Raving. Vicious. Devoid of meaning or mercy.
The Schoolmen heard their Prophet before they saw him, shouting arcana in a voice like a thunderclap-the one voice that could shrug away the burden of the Horde's roar. He came from the west, the Aspect-Emperor, sparking a brilliant blue through miles of intervening filth. Where he walked the air, whole tracts of earth exploded beneath him, as though the God himself pummelled the powdered soil. Sranc were thrown in mangled thousands, flying hundreds of paces before raining across their inhuman brothers.
Anasurimbor Kellhus came to them and bid them follow him home.
She lowered her head to his chest in carnal exhaustion and lay there, her breasts kissing the barrel of his chest, her back bent to the arc of an oyster shell. Sorweel stared, held motionless by the shock of his dwindling ardour. Shame. Elation. Terror.
Knowledge that he could not move without alerting them robbed him of the ability to breathe. He stood stupefied as she turned to him and smiled.
He ducked in abject panic and shame.
'Who are we,' she called out in a drowsy laugh, 'for you to abuse yourself so?'
He fumbled to fasten his breeches, then stood, knowing that the shadow of his lust could still be plainly seen. But it was almost as if their shamelessness demanded he be brazen in return. She climbed from her slack-limbed brother, stood in the dappled sunlight, entirely naked, and at one with the wilderness for it.
How? How could she do this to me?
Tears burned in his eyes. Did he love her? Was that it? Was the son of Harweel such an errant fool?
She stood utterly exposed before him, her limbs lithe, her hips narrow, her pale skin flushed for the violence of her passion. Sunlight drew the shadow of her breasts across her white ribs, made golden filaments of her sex.
'Well?' she asked, smiling.
Indifferent, Moenghus began dressing at his leisure behind her.
'But-!' Sorweel heard himself cry like a fool.
Her look was at once demure and arrogant. Moenghus glanced darkly over a muscled shoulder.
'You're brother and sister!' he blurted. 'What you… you did… is a… is a…'
He could only stand and stare at them incredulously.
'Who are you to judge us?' she cried laughing. 'We are the fruit of a far, far taller tree, Horse-King.'
For the first time he realized the derision and contempt they concealed in that name.
'And if you get pregnant?'
She frowned and smiled, and for the first time Sorweel realized that whatever warmth she had showed him was mere pantomime. That for all the human blood coursing through her veins, she was, and always would be, Dunyain.
'Then I fear my Holy Father would have you killed,' she said.
'Me? But I have done nothing!'
'But you have witnessed, Sorweel-your thigh is sticky for it! And that is far from nothing.'
His breeches fastened, Moenghus strode behind his sister, reached about her to place a scarred paw upon her womb. He kissed the hot of her neck, twiddled the fine blonde strands of her sex between finger and
