enough. No matter how much they slowed their progress to throw their nets, they could do no more than prolong the host's starvation.
Meanwhile the Horde withdrew and congregated.
Day and night, the Schools assailed the gathering masses, striding into earthbound clouds of grey and ochre, burning and blasting the screeching shadows that fled beneath them. The Scarlet Spires strode alone through the shrouds with their Dragonheads, scourging the wasted earth beneath. The Vokalati worked with the cunning of wolves, driving swathes of the creatures into traps of golden flame. And the Mandati and the Swayali arrayed themselves in lines miles long, like threads beaded with stars, wracking the earth with combs of blinding Gnostic light.
The massacre was great, but never great enough. For all their feral simplicity, the Sranc possessed an instinctive cunning. They could hear the Schoolmen sing through the world-wringing roar, the unearthly rattle of sorcerous meaning, and so they scattered, ran with speed of fire-maddened horses, scooping up dust both to obscure their foe's vision and to blunt their incandescent dispensations.
The Culling, the Men riding the pickets came to call it. Every evening knights returned with stories of arcane violence glimpsed from afar, and the Men of the Ordeal wondered and rejoiced.
The Imperial Mathematicians tallied numbers, estimates of slain versus the inexorable accumulation of more and more clans, but they knew only that it was never enough, no matter how devious the tactics or how powerful the sorceries. The Horde grew and bloated, an assembly of shrieking mobs that encompassed more and more of the horizon-until all the North screamed.
The only tally they knew with certainty was the number of Schoolmen lost.
The first sorcerer to go missing, a Scarlet Schoolman named Irsalfus, had been dismissed as a fluke. The prevailing assumption was that the Sranc, even if they had somehow managed to keep Chorae through the wild tide of generations, would have no clue as to their purpose. After the fifth Schoolman was lost they realized they were mistaken. Either certain clans had managed to preserve the artefacts (along with some understanding of their use), or, what was more likely, the Consult had managed to infiltrate the Horde. Perhaps they had scattered contingents of Ursranc throughout the Sranc host. Or perhaps they had simply spread word of the Chorae and how they could be used.
The possibility occasioned no small amount of debate in the Aspect-Emperor's councils. Heramari Iyokus, the sightless Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, argued that the Schools should abandon the Culling, retire from the field. 'Otherwise,' he said, 'we shall be halved before we reach the Gates of Golgotterath.'
But Nurbanu Soter, the King-Regent of High Ainon, scoffed, saying the Great Ordeal would scarce survive to reach the Neleost Sea, let alone Golgotterath, unless the Schoolmen continued. 'How many battles?' he cried to the Blind Grandmaster. 'How many contests such as the last can we endure? Two? Four? Eight? For that is the real question.' What made Culling so essential, the Holy Veteran argued, was the degree to which it slowed the Horde's cycle of retreat, starvation, and assault. To abandon it altogether would be to invite more skirmishes with disaster. 'With each battle we toss the number-sticks,' the old man said, his voice indomitable, his eyes as dark and cruel as they had been during the First Holy War. 'Should we risk all for a few dozen wizard-skins?'
Tempers flared, a rarity in the presence of the Anasurimbor, with the Schoolmen generally arguing against, and the caste-nobility generally arguing for, the Culling. In the end, the Aspect-Emperor declared the Culling would continue, but with the Schoolmen deployed in tandems to minimize losses. With their billows, he explained, the odds were good that any one Chorae strike could be survived, so long as someone uninjured could carry the one struck away from the Horde. 'In all things we must conserve and we must sacrifice,' he admonished. 'We must be acrobats and rope-walkers, both in intellect and in heart. Far worse dilemmas confront us, my brothers. Far more dreadful decisions.'
And so the Horde reeled back, shrank from the pricks of a thousand lights. And the Four Armies marched into the desolation that was its wake, across lands painted with the horror and glory of the Holy Sagas.
Into the gloom of the Ancient North.
King Nersei Proyas would much rather discuss arms, the dilemmas of the field, and the strategies to overcome them. Instead, his Lord-and-God turned to him and asked, 'When you look into yourself, when you look into your soul, how much do you see?'
'I see… I see what I see.'
The Exalt-General had spent many sleepless watches on his cot, pondering their discussions while listening to the camp and its dwindling murmur. Recollections from his long years of service and devotion would cycle through his soul's eye, a lifetime of war and ultimatum, and the worrisome sense that something had changed, that these talks were utterly unprecedented both in tenor and content, would grow ever more leaden with dread certainty. As much as he would marvel at the privilege-to sit and speak plain truth with a living prophet! — he would fear the implications more.
Anasurimbor Kellhus waged more than one war, he had come to realize. One far beyond the meagre intellects of his followers. One fought across fields of maddening abstraction…
'But you do see. I mean, you do possess an inner eye.'
'I suppose…'
The Aspect-Emperor smiled, rubbed his bearded chin like a carpenter assessing problematic wood. He wore the same plain white gown he always wore-the one Proyas imagined he slept in. The Ainoni silk was so fine as to be crushed into a thousand wrinkles at his every joint, creases that resembled the forking of twigs in the dim light of the octagonal hearth.
Proyas sat freighted as always in his Imperial armour, his golden cuirass biting his hips, his blue cloak wrapped about his waist in the ceremonial fashion.
'What if some people lacked that eye?' Kellhus asked. 'What if some people could see nothing more than the outline of their passions, let alone the origins of those scribbles? What if most people were blind to themselves? Would they know as much?'
Proyas stared into the luminous gauze of the fire, rubbed his cheeks against the memory of its sorcerous bite. People insensible to their own souls… It seemed he had known many such men over the course of his life, when he considered it. Many such fools.
'No…' he said meditatively. 'They would think they see everything there is to be seen.'
Kellhus smiled in affirmation. 'And why's that?'
'Because they know nothing different,' Proyas replied, daring his sovereign's gaze. 'You need to glimpse more to know that you see less.'
Kellhus raised a wooden decanter to refill Proyas's dwindling bowl of anpoi. 'Very good,' he said as he poured. 'So you understand the difference between you and me.'
'I do?'
'Where you are blind,' his Lord-and-God said, 'I can see.'
Proyas paused in hesitation, drank deep from his bowl. The tang of nectar, the bite of liquor. At a time when clear water had become a luxury, sipping anpoi seemed an almost obscene extravagance. But then everything had the taste of miracles in this room.
'And this… this is why Achamian speaks true?'
Simply asking the question loosed a queasiness in his gut. As much as the topic of his old tutor and his heresy troubled Proyas, the fact that Kellhus knew the unruly thoughts the man occasioned disturbed him even more. Proyas had not so much buried Drusas Achamian as turned his back on him, the way men are want to do with matters too acidic to honestly consider. He had grown into manhood in the sorcerer's critical shadow, clinging to his convictions in a fog of nagging questions. He could not think of him without suffering some flutter of spiritual insecurity, without hearing his warm and amiable voice saying, 'Yes, Prosha, but how do you know?'
And now, twenty years after Achamian's famed denunciation and subsequent exile, Kellhus had inexplicably raised the spectre of the man and his questions. Why?
Proyas had been there. He had clenched his teeth in shame, squinted through tears of heartbreak, watching the portly sorcerer condemn the first true prophet in a thousand years! Condemn the Holy Aspect-Emperor as false…
Only to be told now, on the very threshold of apocalypse, that he had spoken true?
'Yes,' Kellhus said, watching him with unnerving concentration.
