Kellhus is cut down.
...Everywhere he looked, he saw men kneeling...
Yes... The Thousandfold Thought
And it seemed there was nothing, no dwarfing frame, that could restrict him to this place, to any place... He was all things, and all things were his...
He was one of the Conditioned. Dunyain.
He was the Warrior-Prophet.
The Padirajah sends a message to the Holy War, offering to give them lands if they yield and convert.
Twelve knights provide a reply, telling him 'the Warrior-Prophet shall come before you', and then cutting their own throats.
an act which is later replicated in Zeum
The Inrithi come out to fight. They have a new banner - the Circumfix of the Warrior-Prophet.
...They sang, the Men of the Tusk, overcome with strange passions: joy that knew no laughter, terror that knew no fear. They sang and they marched, walking with the grace of almost-broken men.
Somehow, Athjeari has got around the back of the Fanim lines and attacks them in the rear. It implies he is mounted, but I was under the impression that all the horses had be eaten.
As though driven by inevitability, the iron men marched forward. When the heathen charged, they grabbed at bridles and were trampled. They punched spears deep into the haunches of Fanim horses. They fended hacking swords, pulled heathen shrieking to the ground, where they knifed them in armpit, face, or groin. They shrugged off piercing arrows. When the heathen relented, some Men of the Tusk, the madness of battle upon them, hurled their helms at the feeling horseman. Time and again the Kianene charged, broke, then withdrew, while the iron men trudged on, through the olive trees, across the fallow fields. They would walk with the God - whether he favoured them or no,
The Padirajah takes the field himself.
...Men cast about for sign of the Cishaurim...
Clearly under orders from Mallahet, to keep out of it.
The Inrithi overwhelm the Fanim. Yalgrota kills a mastodon singlehanded. Kellhus kills the Padirajah. His children, led by Fanayal, escape.
Those Grandees that survive are hung from trees.
...And to anyone who listened, they would whisper a revelation... The secret of battle.
Indomitable conviction. Unconquerable belief.
Does this mean that faith is greater than reason? Emotion trumps intellect? This did appear to one of the key themes set up in Book 1.
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Meanwhile, in the North, the Werigda, including Aengelas, search for the missing wives and children. They enter ruined Myclai.
The Werigda are
...descendants of the Apocalypse. They dwelt among the unerathed bones of greater things.
They are tracking Sranc
... a different, more wicked clan - one never before encountered. Some of them were even horsed - something unheard of the the Sranc
They pass on into the plains.
They keep finding piles of children's bones.
The Sranc take them in the night. There are Nonmen there. They are brought to their loved ones.
The men without families and the families without men are all killed.
They are lined up opposite their wives and children.
Then he saw... it. An abomination walking through dawn twilight.
It was half-again taller than a man, with long, folded wings curved liked scythes over its powerful frame. Save where it was mottled by black, cancerous spots, its skin was translucent, and sheathed about a great flared skull shaped like an oyster set on edge. And within the gaping jaws of that skull was fused another, more manlike, so that an almost human face grinned from its water features
Inchoroi.
Aengelas' wife and child are successively raped to death, then it is his turn (and presumably the rest of the Werigda too). They are asked and asked a question that they cannot answer.
Who are the Dunyain?
