{T}he riders were beginning to appear far out on the
lake bed, a thin frieze of mounted archers that trembled and veered in the rising heat.
They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they
were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with
the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in
the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated
again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there
began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks
riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the
high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of
souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.