Night brought near absolute darkness.
The attack came during the first watch. A Sranc war-party some twenty lances strong simply leapt out of the blackness and fell upon the Galeoth flank. Men who muttered among themselves to while away the boredom cried out in sudden horror and were no more. The Sranc swept over the outermost sentries, raced caterwauling toward the ranks of the night defenders proper. Men locked shields against the blackness, lowered their pikes. Some cursed while others prayed. Then the obscenities were upon them, hacking and howling, their limbs wasted, their stomachs pinned to their spines. Heaving and hewing along the length of their shallow line, the Galeoth held their ground. Crying out hymns, they struck the maniacal creatures down.
Horns and alarums rang through the rest of the host. Men raced to their positions, some hopping to pull on their boots, others with their hauberks swinging. Agmundrmen with their war knots, Nangaels with their blue- tattooed cheeks, Numaineiri with their great hanging beards: ironclad men drawn from all the great tribes of Galeoth, Thunyerus, and Ce Tydonn, arrayed across a mile of flats and shallow ravines. They readied themselves with cursing bravado, and then, when every strap was buckled and every shield raised, they peered across the dark plain. Behind their gleaming ranks, the Kidruhil and caste-noble knights loitered in mounted clots, many standing in their stirrups to gaze as well.
No one saw anything, such was the darkness. During the following watch, news of the Sranc war-party's easy defeat circulated through the ranks. The cynics among them predicted weeks of blaring horns and sleepless, pointless vigils.
General Kayutas sent out several Kidruhil companies to reconnoitre the plain. The cavalrymen loathed few things more than riding pickets at night-for fear of ambush, certainly, but more for fear of being thrown. Since Sakarpus, some eighty souls had perished ranging the dark and hundreds more had been injured or crippled. After the Judges executed a Kidruhil captain for deliberately laming his ponies to feed his men, the companies were even denied the tradition of feasting on the crippled mounts.
The Northmen became complacent, and soon the host boomed with impatient chatter. Several pranksters broke ranks to dance and gesticulate before the pitch-black distances. The thanes could not silence them, no matter how hard they bawled. So when reports of cries heard on the plain reached General Kayutas, he was not immediately inclined to believe them…
He summoned his sister, Serwa, only when the first of the scouting parties failed to return.
As with the other Schools, the Swayali Witches had remained largely cloistered within the host. Apart from chance encounters in the camp, the Zaudunyani saw them only during the Signalling, when one of the Swayali would climb the night sky to flash coded messages to their Saik counterparts in the Army of the East.
The reasons for this discretion were many-fold. The Swayali were witches, for one. Despite the Aspect- Emperor, many held their old prejudices fast-how could they not, when so many of their words for sorcery and its practitioners were also words for wickedness? They were women, for another. Several men had already been whipped, and one even executed, for acting out deranged infatuations. But most importantly, the Aspect-Emperor wished to deny the Consult any easy reckoning of the power he brought against them. For in truth, all the Men of the Ordeal in their countless, shining thousands were little more than a vehicle for the safe conveyance of the Schools.
Prince Anasurimbor Kayutas decided the time for discretion was at an end.
At her brother's command, Serwa deployed her witches behind the common line, holding forty-three of the most senior and accomplished in reserve. A profound hush accompanied their appearance throughout the camp. The 'Nuns,' the Men called them. With their yellow billows-the immense silken gowns they wore as protection against Chorae-wrapped and bound about them, the Swayali indeed resembled Jokian Nuns.
Sorcerous utterances cracked the gloom, and one by one the witches stepped into the air. They strode out over the deep ranks of the common line. Men in their thousands craned their necks to follow their soundless course. Some murmured, a few even called out, but most held their breath for wonder. Given the youth of the School, the women were young as well, with faces of smooth alabaster and teak, lips full about the lights that flashed from them. Free of the ground, they unbound their billows, spake the small Cant that animated them. The fabric dropped, unfurled in arcs that twined in the glow of the Nuns' arcane voices. One by one the Swayali bloomed, opened like flowers of golden silk, and the Men of Ordeal were dumbstruck.
Swayali, the School of Witches.
They climbed out beyond the common line, a second chevron, like a mathematical apparition of the first, two hundred lights flung into the blackness of the plain. They stopped, hung like wickless candle lights. Arcane chanting, eerie and feminine, shrugged away the cavernous heights of the night and found ears in the form of intimate whispers.
Prompted by some inaudible signal, they lit the world in unison.
Bars of Heaven, lines of blinding white rising from the wasted ground to the shrouded sky, some two hundred of them, like silver spokes across the near horizon.
Their faces slack above the rims of their shields, the Men of the Middle-North squinted across a lightning- illuminated world, one devoid of sound, bleached of colour. At first, many could not credit their eyes. Many stood blinking as if trying to awaken.
Instead of earth, Sranc. Instead of distance, Sranc.
Fields upon fields of them, creeping on their bellies like worms.
They had come as locusts, where the lust of the one sparks the lust of the other, until all is plague. They had come, answering a cunning as old as the age of their obscene manufacture. They had come to feast and they had come to couple, for they knew of no other possibility.
The Nuns' chanting chorus crumbled into an arcane cacophony. One glowing figure sparked with furious light. Then another. Then all was glare and blinking hell.
The air whooshed and cracked, sounds so great that many flinched behind their shields-sounds that blew through the roar of burning Sranc. The Men of the Ordeal stood dazzled. Seven heartbeats Fate would grant them. Seven heartbeats to see their foe thrash in the fire of their burning. Seven heartbeats to wonder at the girls hanging alone in the sky, setting the earth alight with glowing song.
Seven heartbeats, for even though the beasts died in untold thousands before their eyes, all the world beyond the witches was Sranc. And far more creatures heaved and scrambled between the circuits of their sorcerous destruction than within. Arrows chipped at the Nuns' Wards, a few that quickly became an obscuring rain, until the witches were naught but blue-glowing marbles beneath clattering black. Far more missed their mark than otherwise so that the creatures fell in great arcs below.
And the Horde howled, a noise so savage, raised in so many ulcerated throats, that many Men of the Ordeal dropped their weapons to clasp their ears. A cry that pinched the nape of even the bravest man's neck…
And sent the very landscape rushing.
Not a man who had boasted failed to repent his words. The Swayali seemed to move for the fields of Sranc surging beneath them. Many men stumbled for vertigo. Shrieks warbled through the all-encompassing roar. No word that Men traded could be heard. No horn that sounded. No drum.
But the Believer-Kings had no need of communication; they had but one inviolable order…
Yield no ground.
Mouthing soundless shouts, the Men of the Middle-North watched the cyclopean charge. They saw the ground vanish beneath waves of howling faces. They glimpsed silhouettes against cauldrons of destroying light. Notched blades held high. Figures kicking in starved-dog fury.
They watched the Horde descend upon them…
No words, no training could prepare them for the fact of their enemy. Many glanced to the horizon, thinking they would see their Holy Aspect-Emperor striding across the back of a shrouded world-not realizing that the Horde had beset each of the Four Armies, that he battled faraway with Proyas and the Army of the East.
The fleetest among the Sranc struck first, a scattering of mad, individual assaults. They clawed and thrashed like cats thrown from rooftops. But the Men scarcely noticed them, such was the deluge that followed…
The scrambling herd of limbs. The flying line of blades and axes. The crazed white faces, those intent startling for their inhuman beauty, those that shrieked appalling for their infernal deformity. Glimpses rimmed in the light of Swayali destruction… Stick-limbed apparitions.
The Men of the Middle-North raised their shields and spears against them.
So did the Horde crash against the Army of the Middle-North. The dead could scarce fall, so packed, so
