The Judging eye

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Condia

The Istyuli Plains dominated the heart of Eдrwa, running from the northern back of the Hethantas to the southern spurs of the Yimaleti. It seemed hard to believe that this region had birthed dynasties and toppled empires before the First Apocalypse and the coming of the Sranc, consisting as it did of nothing more than endless sheaves of arid grassland.

In the days of Far Antiquity, a schism opened between the western Norsirai tribes, the High Norsirai, who under the tutelage of the Nonmen raised the first great literate civilization of Men along the banks of the River Aumris, and their eastern kin, the White Norsirai, who clung to the nomadic ways of their ancient fathers. For an entire age the Istyuli formed the barbaric hinterland of the High Norsirai nations that rose and fell about the great river cities of the west: Trysл, Sauglish, Umerau, and others. The tribes of White Norsirai who roamed and warred across the plains sometimes raided, sometimes bartered with, and continually despised their earth-tilling cousins to the west. The fewer the roads the harsher the codes, as the ancient Kыniьric proverb had it. And periodically, when united beneath the tyranny of some powerful tribe or personality, they invaded and conquered.

To the north of Sakarpus, the Istyuli Plains still bore the name of one of those conquering peoples, the Cond.

Nothing remained to mark their passing: The Cond, like most pastoral peoples, were primarily remembered for works destroyed rather than works raised. For the Men of the Ordeal, only the name connected the sloped terrain to the legends of their long-dead glory. They were accustomed to the rumour of lost peoples and nations, for their own lands had stacked them deep. But there was a melancholy attached to their thoughts of the Cond. Where the far antique peoples of the Three Seas had been replaced by other peoples, the end of the wild-haired horsemen of the Cond had been the end of Men on these plains. Proof of this lay in those signs of habitation the Inrithi did find: great heaps of bone sucked to the marrow, and swaths of turf overturned not by plows, but by claws hungry for grubs.

Signs of Sranc.

A kind of communal recognition dawned on the host, a realization that abandoned lands could be liberated. To demonstrate this fact, King Hoga Hogrim-the nephew of Hoga Gothyelk, the famed Martyr of Shimeh-commanded his Tydonni to draw stone from a nearby outcropping for a great ring, an immense Circumfix implanted for all time in Condian earth. The Longbeards laboured through the night, their numbers swelling as more and more of their encamped neighbours joined them. The break of dawn revealed not so much a ring as a circular fortress, as wide as five war-galleys set end to end and with walls of unshaped sandstone standing the height of three men.

Afterwards, the Aspect-Emperor himself walked among the exhausted men, remitting their sins and blessing their distant kith and kin. "Men make such marks," he said, "as their will affords them. Behold! Let the World see why the Tydonni are called the 'Sons of Iron.'"

And so the march wore on. According to conventional military wisdom, a host as vast as the Ordeal should break up and march in separate columns. Not only would this improve the ability of the soldiery to collect forage, be it wild game or the grasses their hardy ponies were bred to survive on, it would drastically increase their rate of advance. But as strange as it sounded, the sloth of the Great Ordeal was a necessity, at least at this stage in the long march to Golgotterath. The plan was to stretch the supply umbilicus between the host and Sakarpus as far as humanly possible, before taking what the Aspect-Emperor's generals grimly referred to as the Leap, marching beyond the point of meaningful contact with the New Empire.

Since the length of this umbilicus depended on the ability of the Imperial supply trains to overtake the Great Ordeal, dividing the host into quicker columns would simply increase the length of the Leap. This would prove disastrous, given the needs of the host and the scarcity of meaningful forage along the length of the Istyuli. Even if the Ordeal were to break into a hundred columns and spread across the width of the plain, it could not be trusted to provide enough game to make an appreciable difference. The host had to carry the supplies required to reach the more abundant lands of what had once been eastern Kыniьri, where, according to the Imperial Trackers, it could easily find enough forage once it scattered.

So it crept forward as all cumbersome armies must, scarcely travelling more than ten to fifteen miles a march. Aside from numbers, the rivers were the greatest source of delay. Again thanks to the Imperial Trackers, each waterway had been meticulously mapped years in advance. Not only did the Great Ordeal's planners need to know where the best crossing points were, they had to know the state of those fords at various times of the year and during various kinds of weather. A single swollen river could spell doom if it prevented the Great Ordeal from reaching Golgotterath before the onset of winter.

But even mapped, the fords still represented bottlenecks. In some cases, three, even four days were required simply for the host to cross banks no more than a stone's throw apart. These too were scheduled into the sacred host's ever-tightening margins.

In the highest councils of the Aspect-Emperor, the possibility that the Consult might find some way to poison these rivers was a matter of continual concern, if not outright dread. Only the possibility that they might exterminate game along their path troubled them more. As veterans of the First Holy War, both of the Ordeal's Exalt-Generals, King Saubon and King Proyas, were intimately acquainted with the catastrophic consequences of running out of water. Thirst, like hunger or disease, was a vulnerability that increased in proportion to an army's size, which was why it could unravel even the greatest host in a mere matter of days.

But among the rank and file, the absence of Sranc was the only concern voiced about the evening fires, not because they suspected anything devious-what trick could catch their Holy Aspect-Emperor unawares? — but because they longed to put their spears and swords and axes to work. Rumours were traded about the far-ranging exploits of Sibawul te Nurwal, whose Cepaloran lancers had apparently run down several fleeing Sranc clans. Similar tales were told about General Halas Siroyon and his Famiri, or General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi and his steel-clad Eumarnan knights. But the tales only seemed to whet their bloodlust and to draw out the trackless tedium of the march. They complained the way warriors complained, about the food, the lack of women, the pitch of the ground they slept across, but they never forgot their sacred mission. They marched to save the world, which for most meant saving their wives, their children, their parents, and their lands. They marched to prevent the Second Apocalypse.

And the God himself marched with them, speaking through the mouth, glaring through the eyes of Anasыrimbor Kellhus I.

They were plain men-warriors. They understood that doubt was hesitation, and that hesitation was death, not only on the field of war, but on the field of souls as well. Only believers persevered.

Only believers conquered.

What was Sakarpus compared to this? And who was he, but the son of another Beggar King?

These were the questions that Sorweel could not but ask whenever he looked to the shield line of the horizon. Men. Wherever he turned his gaze, he saw more and more armed and armoured Men.

The Great Ordeal.

For Sorweel, it existed in series of circles, each radiating outward, from his squad in the Company of Scions to the very limit of the world. In his immediate vicinity, all was the close tedium of riders on the march, defined more by sound and smell than sight: the must of fresh dung, the equine snorts and complaints, the swishing percussion of endless hooves through grass, the rattle of the small almost chariotlike carts that each of the doughty little horses pulled. A glimpse was all it took to surpass this mundane circle: Striding legs became scissoring forests, men rocking in their high-backed saddles became slow-filing fields of thousands. And beyond this, individuals vanished into many-coloured masses, their armour winking in the high-sky sun. The shouts and calls and laughter dissolved into a white ambient roar. Mobs congealed into ponderous columns strung with vast trains of mules and teetering ox-carts.

The host did not so much cross the greening pastures as they encompassed them, a slow flood of warlike humanity. Everything and everyone became a link in a far greater articulation. Only the high-jutting banners retained their singularity: the signs of tribes and nations, each married in some fashion to the Circumfix. And farther, moving beneath the silence that was the sky, even the banners became abstract, hooked threads on the carpet that had become a darker earth. The very ground seemed to move, out to the vanishing line of the plains.

The Great Ordeal. A thing so great that not even the horizon could contain it. And for a boy on the cusp of manhood, a thing that humiliated far more than it humbled.

What honour could dwell in a soul so small?

Officially, the Company of Scions was touted as one of the most elite units in the Kidruhil, but unofficially, it was known to be largely ceremonial. The power of the Aspect-Emperor or more importantly, the rumour of his power, was such that many rulers beyond his sway sent their own sons to him as means to guarantee their treaties with the New Empire. They were observers, perhaps even prisoners, but they certainly were not warriors-let alone Men of the Ordeal.

For Sorweel, this was a source of many contradictory passions. His blood ran hot at the prospect of battle-how long had he pestered his father for an opportunity to ride to war? But at the same time, the dishonour-if not the treachery-of riding beneath his enemy's banners alternately gouged his belly with horror and squeezed his heart with abject shame. He even caught himself taking pride in his uniform from time to time: the fine tooling of the leather-stripped skirts, the soft castor of the gloves, the interlocking motifs stamped into the cuirass, even the white cloak of his caste-nobility.

For as long as he could remember, Sorweel had always thought betrayal a kind of thing. And as a thing, he assumed, it was what it was, like anything else. Either a man kept faith with his blood and nation, or he didn't. But betrayal, he was learning, was far too complicated to be a mere thing. It was more like a disease… or a man.

It was too insidious not to have a soul.

It crept, for one thing, not like a snake or a spider, but like spilled wine, seeping into the fractures, soaking everything its own colour. Each betrayal, no matter how trivial, seemed to beget further betrayals. And it deceived as well, postured as nothing less than sense itself, as reason. "Play along," it told him. "Pretend to be one of their Kidruhil-yes, pretend." Wise counsel, or so it seemed. It failed to warn you of the peril, of how each day playing leached your soul of resolution. It said nothing of the slow collapse of pretending into being.

He tried to remain vigilant, and in the deep of night, he clung to his recriminations. But it was so hard, so hard to remember the taste of certainty.

The Scions were scarcely a hundred strong, far and away the smallest of the Kidruhil's three-hundred-odd companies. They rode with the strange sense of being a sliver in a great fist, an intrusion that inflamed and irritated. Kidruhil troopers were selected according to their skill and their ardour. If anything made the Scions anathema to their fellow Kidruhil, it was their lack of faith. Though the officers were always careful to observe the semblance of diplomatic decorum, their men understood, enough to allow a general contempt-and in some cases even outright hatred-to shine through.

But if the Scions were an outcast within the Kidruhil, then Sorweel was even more an outcast within the Scions. Of course everyone knew who he was. How could any Son of Sakarpus not be the talk of the Company, let alone the son of its slain king? Whether it was pity or derision, Sorweel saw in their looks the true measure of his shame. And at night, when he lay desolate in his tent listening to the fireside banter of the others, he was certain he could understand the questions that kept returning to their strange tongues. Who was this boy who rode for those who murdered his father? This Shit-herder, what kind of craven fool was he?

At the end of his sixth day, as he stood so that Porsparian could remove his gear, a black-skinned man with an ashen pallor pressed his face through the flap and begged permission to enter.

"Your Glory… I am Obotegwa, Senior Obligate of Zsoronga ut Nganka'kull, Successor-Prince of High Holy Zeьm." He fell to his knees as he said this, making three waving flourishes with each of his hands and lowering his chin to his chest. He was dressed in the finest silks, a padded yellow jacket stencilled with thin black floral motifs. His ebony skin, which was a shock to Sorweel-until the coming of the Great Ordeal, he had never seen any Satyothi-shone in the day's failing light. His receding white hair and high-climbing beard had been trimmed close to the apple-round contours of his skull. There seemed to be a sturdy honesty both to his bearing and his voice, which possessed a raspy earthiness despite its high tone.

As the son of an isolate nation, Sorweel had little grasp of etiquette between nations. Even his own father had seemed at a loss as to how to deal with the Aspect-Emperor's first fateful emissaries. Sorweel found himself flustered by the man's elaborate display, as well as bewildered by his command of the Sakarpic tongue. So he did what all young men did in such circumstances: he blurted.

"What do you want?"

The Obligate raised his face, displayed a grandfather's wise smile. "My Lord Master requests the pleasure of your company at his fire, your Glory."

The young King accepted the invitation, his cheeks burning.

All Sorweel knew of black men was that they hailed from Zeьm, an ancient and great nation in the distant west. And all he knew of Zeьm was that its people were black. He had noted Zsoronga earlier, both during assembly and exercises. The man was difficult to miss, even among the large retinue of black-skinned companions and servants that rode with him. Men born to authority, Sorweel had noticed, often stood apart from others, not merely in appearance, but in demeanour and comportment as well. Some positively swaggered with prominence-or self-importance as the case might be. Though Zsoronga communicated his station with a similar intensity, he did so without any overt gestures whatsoever. You simply looked at his party and knew that he was the first among them, as though consciousness of rank possessed a kind of visual odour.

Obotegwa waited outside while Porsparian finished ministering to the young King. The old Shigeki slave muttered under his breath the whole time, periodically fixed him with a yellow-eyed glare. Words or no words, Sorweel would have asked him what was amiss, but too many worries plagued his thoughts. What could this Zsoronga want? Amusement for his cohort? A lesson for his fellows, a living example of how base the blood of nobles could be?

He watched his enigmatic slave scowl over his uniform, swallowed against a sudden, almost maniacal urge to scream. Never. Never in his life had he suffered such consistent uncertainty. It plagued him, like some bone-deep fever of the soul. Everywhere he turned he found himself faced with the unfamiliar, whether it be wondrous, blasphemous, or merely novel. He knew not what was expected of him, by others, by honour, by his Gods…

And perhaps even more debilitating, he knew not what to expect of himself.

Certainly something better than this. How could he have been born with such a despicable heart, hesitating like an old man whose life had outrun his trust in his heart and frame? How could Harweel, strong Harweel, wise Harweel, have given birth to such a craven fool as he? To a boy who would weep in the arms of his murderer!

"I am no conqueror."

Worry piled upon recrimination. And then, miraculously, he found himself stepping through the canvas flaps into the bustle of the camp. He stood blinking at the streaming files of passers-by.

Obotegwa turned to him with a look of faint surprise. After leaning back to appraise the cut of his padded Sakarpic tunic, he beamed reassurance. "Sometimes it is not so easy," he said in his remarkable accent, "to be a son."

So many sights. So many kinds of Men.

The encampment was in a state of uproar as its countless denizens hastened to take advantage of the remaining daylight. The sun leaned low on Sorweel's left, spoked the sky with arid brilliance. The Great Ordeal thronged beneath it, a veritable ocean of tents, pavilions, and packed thoroughfares, sweeping out across the bowl of the valley. The smoke of countless cooking fires steamed the air. Zaudunyani prayer calls keened over the roar, high feminine voices, filled with sorrow and exaltation. The Standard of the Scions-a horse rearing through a tipped crown on Kidruhil red-lay dead in the motionless air, yet somehow the ubiquitous Circumfix banners seemed to wave as if in some higher breeze.

"Indeed," Obotegwa said from his side, "it is a thing of wonder, your Glory."

"But is it real?"

The old man laughed, a brief husky wheeze. "My master will like you, I am sure."

Sorweel continued stealing gazes across the encampment as he followed the Zeьmi Obligate's lead. He even stared at the southern horizon for several heartbeats, across miles of trampled earth, even though he knew Sakarpus had receded out of all vision. They had passed beyond the Pale into the Wilds where only Sranc roamed.

"My folk never dared ride this far from our city," he said to Obotegwa's back.

The old man paused to look apologetically into his face. "You must forgive my impertinence, your Glory, but it is forbidden for me to speak to you in any voice save my Master's."

"And yet you spoke earlier."

A gentle smile. "Because I know what it means to be thrown over the edge of the world."

Sorweel brooded over these words as they resumed walking, realizing they inadvertently explained what had pained his eyes when he looked southward. The Lonely City had become an edge. It had been more than conquered, its solitude had been consumed. Once an island in wicked seas, it was now a mere outpost, the terminus of something far greater, a civilization-just like the times of the Long Dead.

More than his father had been killed, he realized. His father's world had died with him.

He blinked at the heat in his eyes, saw the Aspect-Emperor leaning over him, blond and luminous, a sunlit man in the heart of night. "I am no conqueror…"

These proved long thoughts for the short walk to Prince Zsoronga's pavilion. He found himself within the small Zeьmi enclave before he was even aware of approaching it. The Prince's pavilion was an elaborate, high-poled affair, roofed and sided in weathered black-and-crimson leather, and chased with frayed tassels that may have once been golden but were now as pale as urine. A dozen or so smaller tents reached out to either side, completing the enclosure. Several Zeьmi milled about the three firepits, staring with a directness that was neither rude nor welcoming. Anxious, Sorweel found himself considering the tall wooden post raised in the enclosure's heart. Satyothi faces, stylized with broad noses and sensual lips, had been carved one atop another along its entire length, stacks of them staring off in various directions. This was their Pillar of Sires, he would later learn, the relic to which the Zeьmi prayed the same as Sakarpi prayed to idols.

Obotegwa led him directly into an antechamber at the fore of the pavilion, where he bid Sorweel to remove his boots. This proved to be the only ceremony.

They found Prince Zsoronga reclined across a settee in the airy depths of the central chamber. Light filtered down through a number of open slots in the ceiling, blue shafts that sharpened the contrast between the illumined centre of the chamber and the murky spaces beyond. Obotegwa bowed as he had earlier, uttering what Sorweel imagined was some kind of announcement. The handsome young man sat up smiling, set down a codex bound in gold wire. He gestured to a neighbouring settee with a long arm.

"Yus ghom," he began, "hurmbana thut omom…"

Obotegwa's voice rasped into the thread of his with practised ease, so much so it almost seemed Sorweel could understand the Prince directly.

"Appreciate these luxuries. The ancestors know how hard I had to fight for them! Our glorious host does not believe the rewards of rank have any place on the march."

Stammering his thanks, self-conscious of his pale white feet, Sorweel sat erect on the settee's edge.

The Successor-Prince frowned at his rigid posture, made a waving gesture with the back of his hand. "Uwal mebal! Uwal!" he urged, throwing himself back and wriggling into the soft cushions.

"Lean back," Obotegwa translated.

"Aaaaaaaah!" the Prince gasped in mock joy.

Smiling, Sorweel did as he was told, felt the cool fabric yield about his shoulders and neck.

"Aaaaaaaah!" Zsoronga repeated, his bright eyes laughing.

"Aaaaaaaah!" Sorweel gasped in turn, surprised at the relief that soaked through his body simply for saying it.

"Aaaaaaaah!"

"Aaaaaaaah!"

Wriggling, they both roared with laughter.

After serving them wine, Obotegwa hovered with the thoughtless discretion of a grandparent, effortlessly interpreting back and forth. Zsoronga wore a silk banyan, simple in cut yet lavish with black stencilled motifs: silhouetted birds whose plumage became branches for identical birds. He also wore a gold-fretted wig that made him positively leonine with silk-black hair-as Sorweel would discover, the kinds of wigs Zeьmi caste-nobles wore in leisure were strictly governed by rules of rank and accomplishment, to the point of almost forming a language.

Even though their shared laughter had set Sorweel at his ease, they knew so little about each other-and Sorweel knew so little, period-that they quickly ran short of idle pleasantries. The Successor-Prince spoke briefly about their horses, which he thought brutish to the extreme. He tried to gossip about some of their fellow Scions, but gossip required common acquaintances, and whenever he mentioned anyone, Sorweel could only shrug. So they came quickly to the one thing they did share in common: the reason two young men from such disparate worlds could share bowls of wine in the first place-the Aspect-Emperor.

"I was there," Zsoronga said, "when his first emissaries arrived in my father's court." He had the habit of making faces while he spoke, as though telling stories to a child. "I was only eight or nine at the time, I think, and I'm sure my eyes were as wide as oysters!" His eyes bulged as he said this, as if to demonstrate. "For years rumours had circulated… Rumours of him."

"It was much the same in our court," Sorweel replied.

"So you know, then." Pulling his knees up, the Prince nestled back into his cushions, balanced his wine between long fingers. "I grew up hearing tales of the First Holy War. For the longest time I thought the Unification Wars simply were the Three Seas! Then Invishi fell to the Zaudunyani and with it all Nilnamesh. That caused everyone to cluck and scratch like chickens, believe you me. Nilnamesh had always been our window on the Three Seas. And then, when news arrived that Auvangshei was being rebuilt-"

"Auvangshei?" Sorweel blurted, resisting the urge to look at the old Obligate, whom he had actually interrupted. He had witnessed enough interpreted exchanges in his father's court to know that the success of informal conversations of this kind required more than a little pretence on the interlocutors' part. A certain artificiality was inescapable.

"Sau. Rwassa muf molo kumbereti…"

"Yes. A fortress, a legendary fortress that guarded the frontier between Old Zeьm and the Ceniean Empire, centuries and centuries ago…"

All Sorweel knew about the Ceniean Empire was that it ruled all the Three Seas for a thousand years and that the Anasыrimbor's New Empire had been raised about its skeleton. As little as that was, it seemed knowledge enough. Just as his earlier laughter had been his first in weeks, he now felt the first true gleam of comprehension. The dimensions of what had upended his life had escaped him-he had floundered in his ignorance. The Great Ordeal. The New Empire. The Second Apocalypse. These were little more than empty signs to him, sounds that had somehow wrought the death of his father and the fall of his city. But here at last, in the talk of other places and other times, was a glimmer-as though understanding were naught but the piling on of empty names.

"Aside from skirmishing with Sranc," the Successor-Prince was saying, "Zeьm has had no external enemies since Near Antiquity… the days of the old Aspect-Emperors. In our land, we worship events more than gods. I know that must sound strange to you, but it's true. We do not, like you sausages, forget our fathers. At least the Ketyai keep lists! But you Norsirai…"

He shook his head and cast his eyes heavenward, a mock gesture meant to tell Sorweel that he simply teased. Expressions, it seemed, all spoke in the same language.

"In Zeьm," the Prince continued, "each of us has a book that is about us alone, a book that is never completed so long as our sons are strong, our samwassa, which details the deeds of our ancestors, and what they earned in the afterlife. Mighty events, such as battles, or even campaigns such as this, are what knot the strings of our descent together, what makes us one people. Since everything that is present hangs from these great decisions, we revere them more than you can know…"

There was wonder here, Sorweel realized, and room for strength. Different lands. Different customs. Different skins. And yet it was all somehow the same.

He was not alone. How could he be so foolish as to think he was alone?

"But then I'm forgetting, aren't I?" Zsoronga said. "They say your city has stood unconquered for almost three thousand years. The same is the case with Zeьm. The only real threats we have ever faced hearken back to the days of the Ceniean Aspect-Emperors and the armies they sent against us. The Three Axes we call them, Binyangwa, Amarah, and Hutamassa, the battles we regard as our most glorious moments, whose dead we implore to catch us when we at last fall from this life. So as you can imagine, that name, 'Aspect-Emperor,' is engraved in our souls. Engraved!"

The same, of course, had been true in Sakarpus. It seemed beyond belief that one man could incite such fear on opposite ends of the world, that he could pluck distant kings and princes like weeds, then replant them together…

That one man could be so powerful. One man!

And in a rush, Sorweel realized what it was he had to do-at last! He fairly shouted aloud, it struck with such sudden obviousness. He needed to understand the Aspect-Emperor. It wasn't his father's weakness or pride or foolishness that had seen the Lonely City fall…

It was his ignorance.

The Successor-Prince's eyes had drifted inward with his retelling, his face brightening with each turn and digression as though at some minor yet critical discovery. "So, when news arrived that Auvangshei had been rebuilt… Well, you can imagine. Sometimes it seemed the Three Seas and the New Empire was all anyone could speak about. Some were eager, tired of living in the shadow of greater fathers, while others were afraid, thinking that doom comes to all things, so why not High Holy Zeьm? I had always counted my father among the former, among the strong. The Aspect-Emperor's emissaries would change all that."

"What happened?" Sorweel asked, feeling an old timbre returning to his voice. Zsoronga was no different than him, he decided. Stronger perhaps, certainly more worldly, but every bit as baffled by the circumstances that had carried him here, to this conversation in this wild and desolate land.

"There were three of them in the embassy, two Ketyai and one sausage like you. One of them looked terrified, and we assumed he had simply been overwhelmed by the dread splendour of our Court. They strode beneath my father, who glared down at them from his throne-he was very good at glaring, my father.

"They said, 'The Aspect-Emperor bears you greetings, Great Satakhan, and asks that you send three emissaries to the Andiamine Heights to respond in kind.'"

Zsoronga had leaned forward in the course of reciting this, hooked his arms about his knees. "'In kind?' my father asked…"

The Prince held the moment with his breath, the way a bard might. In his soul's eye, Sorweel could see it, the feathered pomp and glory of the Great Satakhan's court, the sun sweating between great pillars, the galleries rapt with black faces.

"With that, the three men produced razors from their tongues and opened their own throats!" He made a tight, feline swiping motion with his left hand. "They killed themselves… right there before us! My father's surgeons tried to save them, to staunch the blood, but there was nothing to be done. The men died right there"-he looked and gestured to a spot several feet away, as though watching their ghosts-"moaning some kind of crazed hymn, to their last breath, singing…"

He hummed a strange singsong tune for several heartbeats, his eyes lost in memory, then he turned to the young King of Sakarpus with a kind of pained incredulity. "The Aspect-Emperor had sent us three suicides! That was his message to my father. 'Look! Look what I can do! Now tell me, Can you do the same?'"

"Could he?" Sorweel asked numbly.

Zoronga pulled a long hand across his face. "Ke amabo hetweru go…"

"I'm too hard on my father. I know I am. Only now can I appreciate the deranged bind that gesture put him in. No matter how my father responded, he would lose… Perhaps he could find three fanatics willing to return the message, but what kind of barbarity would that be? What unrest would that cause the kjineta? And what if they lost heart at the penultimate moment? Who would the people call to account for their shame? And if he refused to respond in kind, would that not be an admission of weakness? Tantamount to saying, 'I cannot rule as you rule…'"

Sorweel shrugged. "He could have marched to war."

"I think that's what the devil wanted! I think that was his trap. The provocation of rebuilding Auvangshei, followed by this mad diplomatic overture. Think of what would have happened, what a disaster it would have been, had we taken the field against his Zaudunyani hosts. Look at your city. Your ancient fathers weathered Mog-Pharau, turned aside the No-God! And the Aspect-Emperor broke you in the space of a morning."

These words hung between them like lead pellets on sodden cloth. There was no accusation in them, no implication of fault or weakness, just a statement of what should have been an impossible fact. And Sorweel realized that his question-his discovery-was the same question everyone was asking, and had been asking for years. Everyone who was not a believer.

Who was the Aspect-Emperor?

"So what did your father do?"

Zsoronga snorted in derision. "What he always does. Talk, talk, and bargain. My father believes in words, Horse-King. He lacks the courage your father showed."

Horse-King. This was the name they used for him, Sorweel realized. Zsoronga would not have spoken with such ease otherwise.

"And so what happened?"

"Deals were struck. Treaties were signed by flatulent old men. Whispers of weakness began circulating through the streets and halls of High Domyot. And here I am, a Successor-Prince, hostage to an outland devil, pretending that I ride to war, when all I really do is moan to sausages like you."

Sorweel nodded in understanding, smiled ruefully. "You would prefer the fate of my people?"

The question seemed to catch the Successor-Prince by surprise. "Sakarpus? No… Though sometimes, when my ardour overmatches my wisdom, I do… envy… the dead among you."

For some reason, the hooks of this reference to his overthrown world caught Sorweel where all the others had skipped past. The raw heart, the thick eyes, the leaden thought-all the staples of his plundered existence-came rushing back and with such violence he could not speak.

Prince Zsoronga watched him with an uncharacteristic absence of expression. "Ke nulam zo…"

"I suspect you feel the same."

The young King of Sakarpus looked to the red disc of wine in his bowl, realized that he had yet to take a single sip. Not one sip-all his pain seemed condensed in this idiotic fact. Mere weeks ago, simply holding wine would be cause for celebration, another pathetic token of the manhood he had so desperately craved. How he had yearned for his first Elking! But now…

It was madness, to move from a world so laughably small to one so tragically bloated… Madness.

"More than you could know," he said.

Sorweel found many things in Zsoronga's company, much more than he was willing to admit to himself, let alone anyone else. The friendship he could acknowledge, as this was a Gift prized by men and gods alike, particularly with someone as resolute and honourable as the Zeьmi Prince. His relief was something he had to admit, though it shamed him. For some perverse reason, all men found heart in learning that others shared not only their purpose, but their grief as well.

What he could not acknowledge was the relief he found in simply speaking. A true Horselord, a hero such as Niehirren Halfhand or Orsuleese the Faster, viewed speech with the high-handed distaste they reserved for bodily functions, as something men did only out of necessity. Sakarpus found its strength in its solitude, in its lack of intercourse with other babbling nations-it was not called the Lonely City for nothing-so its great men affected to do the same.

But Sorweel had found only desolation. Ever since joining the Scions, his voice had been stopped in the jar of his skull. His soul had turned inward, becoming ever more tangled in the hair of unruly thought. He had wandered about in a stupor, as if suffering the circling disease that sometimes afflicted horses, forcing them to walk around and around in senseless spirals until they collapsed. He too had been on the verge of collapse, pressed to the brink of madness by remorse and shame and self-pity-self-pity most of all.

Words had saved him, even if he could only speak around the fact of his pain. His single greatest fear leaving Zsoronga's pavilion that first night was that the Zeьmi Prince, despite all his displays and declarations to the contrary, found him as crude and as disagreeable as his name for Norsirai, "sausages," implied.

That he would be returned to the prison of his backward tongue.

As it turned out, Zsoronga invited him to ride with his retinue the following day, where thanks to Obotegwa's tireless voice, Sorweel found himself a part of the sometimes strange and often uproarious banter of Zsoronga's Brace, as the Zeьmi called their boonsmen. The day might have been his first good day in weeks, were it not for the sudden appearance of the Scion's commander-a campaign-grizzled Captain named Harnilias, or Old Harni as they called him. The silver-haired man simply rode into their midst, heavy with armour and airs of authority, searching and dismissing faces with a single sweeping glance. He addressed himself to Obotegwa without so much as a glance in Sorweel's direction. Even still, the young King was not at all surprised when the old Obligate turned to him and said, "The General wants to see you… Kayыtas himself."

Sorweel had seen the Prince-Imperial many times since his last summons, but only in glimpses through thickets of cavalrymen, his head bare and bright in the prairie sun, his blue cloak shimmering about its kinks and folds. Each time he caught himself craning his neck and peering like some Sagland churl, when he should have done no more than sneer and look away. Sorweel was always skirmishing over small points of dignity, always losing, but this was different. The sight of the General's battle-standard, which was well-nigh perpetual for some legs of the day-long march, drew his gaze like a lodestone. It was like some unnatural compulsion. He would ride and look, ride and look, and when the intervening masses parted…

There. A man who should be a man like any other.

Only that he wasn't. Anasыrimbor Kayыtas was more than powerful-more even than the son of the man who had killed King Harweel. It was as if Sorweel saw him against a greater frame, a background deeper than the endless emerald sweep of the Istyuli Plains.

As if Kayыtas were more an expression than an individual. A particle of fate.

Walking the short distance to the white-tented complex that formed the General's command, Sorweel struggled with a skin-tingling sense of exposure. A kind of anxious reluctance balled like a fist in his chest. He could hear the Prince-Imperial's declaration from their last meeting: "I need only look at your face to see your soul, not so clearly as Father, certainly, but enough to sound the measure of you or anyone else before me. I can see the depth of your pain, Sorweel…"

This was no mean claim, the kind men make when "measuring tongues," as the Sakarpi said, attempting to cow others with boasts and breast-beating. It was-and Sorweel knew this without reservation-a fact. Anasыrimbor Kayыtas could see through his arrogant posture, his feeble mask of pride-through him.

How? How did one war against such men?

A kind of panic welled through his thoughts as he approached the General's Horse-and-Circumfix standard. He did not want to be known…

Least of all now, and least of all by him.

A mixed cohort of soldiers crowded about the austere tent, some wearing the armour and crimson uniform of the General's Kidruhil guard and standing at attention, others garbed in silk-green beneath corselets of the finest chain and milling at ease-Pillarians, Sorweel would later learn, the personal bodyguard of the Imperial Family. A fair-haired Kidruhil officer barked senseless words at him as he approached, then nodded at his obvious incomprehension, as if there could be only one such fool.

Within heartbeats he found himself inside the command tent. As before, the interior was spare, almost devoid of ornament, and the furnishings severe. The setting sun flared across the westward panels, illuminating everything in white-filtered light. The contrast to Prince Zsoronga's pavilion with its gloomy corners and elaborate trappings could not be more complete. "Our glorious host," Sorweel remembered the Zeьmi Prince saying, "does not believe the rewards of rank have any place on the march."

Only what was needed. Only what was necessary.

Kayыtas sat as before at the same sheaf-covered table, only this time he stared at Sorweel with mild expectation instead of reading. A beautiful woman, her flaxen hair braided and bound about her head, sat to his immediate right, dressed in a gold-and-charcoal gown: Kayыtas's sister, Sorweel realized, glimpsing the familial resemblance in her face. Kayыtas's dark-maned brother, Moлnghus, hulked several paces away, fairly bristling with weaponry. There was a taut humidity in the air, the kind found in the wake of heated arguments.

The woman stared at him with the amused boldness of an aunt finally laying eyes on a sister's vaunted child. "Muirs kil tierana jen hыl," she said. Though her gaze never wavered, the way she tilted her head told Sorweel she had directed her words at Moлnghus behind her.

The dark Prince-Imperial said nothing, simply glared with eyes like chips of sky. His brother Kayыtas snorted in laughter.

Sorweel felt the blood rise to his face. They were scarcely older than him, he realized, and yet he was the boy here-unquestionably so. Was it the same with Zsoronga? Did they have this impact on everyone who came before them?

"How is Porsparian treating you?" the General asked in Sakarpic.

"As well as can be expected," Sorweel replied, though the words felt false on his lips. The Shigeki slave had tended to his modest needs with diligence-this much was true. But the old man's religious zealotry unsettled him: Porsparian was forever praying over the small mouths he moulded in the earth, continually feeding warm food to cold dirt, and forever… blessing the young King.

At least there had been no more episodes like that first night.

"Good," Kayыtas said nodding, though for the merest sliver of a heartbeat, a shadow crossed his face. "My father has at last chosen your tutor," he continued in a you-must-be-wondering tone, "a Mandate Schoolman named Thanteus Eskeles. A good man, I am told. He will accompany you throughout the remainder of the march, teach you Sheyic while you ride… I trust you will defer to his wisdom."

"Of course," Sorweel said, quite at a loss as to what to think. Moлnghus and the nameless woman continued staring at him, each with their own variety of contempt. Sorweel found himself looking to his feet, fuming. "Is there anything else?" he asked with more heat than he intended.

He was a king! A king! What would his father say, seeing him like this?

General Kayыtas laughed aloud, said something in the same language spoken by the woman moments earlier. "I'm afraid so," he continued in effortless Sakarpic. He spared a droll glance at his sister-whose name Sorweel suddenly recalled: Serwa. Anasыrimbor Serwa.

"As you might imagine," the fair-haired General continued, "the line between insolence and sacrilege is a rather hazy one in an endeavour such as this. But there are those who… watch such things. Those who keep count."

Something in his tone pried Sorweel's gaze upward. Kayыtas was leaning forward now, his elbows on his knees, so that the white silk of his robe hung in a series of luminous arcs below his throat. Behind him, his brother had turned away in apparent boredom, gnawed at what looked like a section of dried meat. But the woman continued watching as intently as before.

"You are a king, Sorweel, and when you return to Sakarpus you will rule as your father had ruled, with all of your privileges intact. But here, you are a soldier and a vassal. You will salute others in accordance to rank. In the presence of myself or my brother and sister, you will kneel and lower your face, so that when you look straight ahead, your eyes are focused on a spot one length before you. You may then look at us directly: This is your privilege as a king. When you encounter my father, no matter what the circumstance, you are to place your forehead to the ground. And never look at him unless invited. All men are slaves before my father. Do you understand?"

The tone was gentle, the words were nothing if not politic, and yet there could be no mistaking the cutting edge of reprimand. "Yes," Sorweel heard himself say.

"Then show me."

A breeze bellied the eastward canvas panels; ropes creaked and poles groaned. There was a burning tightness to the air, like the tinkle of old coals in an old fire, making breathing not only uncomfortable, but dangerous. It happened without him even willing it to happen: His knees simply bent, folded like stiff leather, then fell to the crude-woven mat that had been rolled across the floor. His chin dropped on the swivel of his neck, as though obeying an irresistible accumulation of weight. He found himself looking at the Prince-Imperial's sandalled feet, at white skin and pearl nails, at the yellow-orange calluses climbing the pads of his toes.

Forgive me…

"Excellent." A breathless pause. "I know that was difficult."

His every sinew, it seemed, tensed about his frame, cramped about his father's bones. Never had he been so utterly immobile-so utterly silent. And somehow, this became his accusation.

"Come, Sorweel. Please stand."

He did as he was instructed, though he continued staring at the General's feet. He looked up only when the silence became unbearable. Even in this, they were unconquerable.

"You've made a friend," Kayыtas said, gazing at him with the amiable air of an uncle fishing for some reluctant truth. "Who is it? Zsoronga? Yes. It only stands to reason. That interpreter of his… Obotegwa."

The young King's shock was such that he paid no heed to his expression. Spies! Of course they were watching him… Porsparian?

"I have no need of spies, Sorweel," the Prince-Imperial said, snatching the thought from his face. He leaned back and with a gentle laugh added, "My father is a god."