The Judging eye

CHAPTER ONE

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The Kathol Passes

The tracks between whim and brutality are many and inscrutable in Men, and though they often seem to cut across the impassable terrain of reason, in truth, it is reason that paves their way. Ever do Men argue from want to need and from need to fortuitous warrant. Ever do they think their cause the just cause. Like cats chasing sunlight thrown from a mirror, they never tire of their own delusions.

At the behest of their Holy Aspect-Emperor, the priests of the Thousand Temples harangued their congregations, and the Judges of the Ministrate scoured the land, seeking out and destroying all those who would either dispute the Truth or choose avarice over the mortal demands of the darkness to come. Everyone, whether caste-slave or caste-noble, was taught the Great Chain of Missions, how the words and works of each made possible the words and works of the other. They learned how Men, all Men, warred all the time, whether tilling fields or loving their kin. All lives, no matter how humble, were links that either fortified the Great Chain or impaired it, leading to the First Ring, the link from which the world itself hung: the Holy War against the apocalyptic designs of the Consult…

Or as it came to be called, the Great Ordeal.

Never, not even in the days of Far Antiquity, had the world seen the assembly of such a host. Ten years were devoted to its preparation. To prevent the resurrection of the No-God, they had to destroy his foul slaves, the Consult, and to destroy them, they had to march the length of Eдrwa, from the northern frontiers of the New Empire, across the Sranc-infested Wilds of the Ancient North, all the way to their stronghold, Golgotterath, which the Nonmen had called Min-Uroikas in days long dead, the Pit of Obscenities.

It was a mad endeavour. Only children and fools, who confused tales of war with war itself, could think the task simple. For them, war was battle, and they always squinted in surprise when veterans spoke of latrines and cannibalism and gangrenous feet and so on. Even the most illustrious knights required food, as did the horses they rode, as did the pack mules that carried the food, as did the slaves who served it. Food was required to transport food-the problem was as simple as this. Without some intensive system of supply-relays, depots, and the like-the amount consumed would quickly exceed the amount carried. This was why the most arduous battle waged by the Great Ordeal would not be against the Consult legions, but against Eдrwa's own wild heart. The host would have to survive the distance to Golgotterath before it could be tested on the field.

For years, the New Empire groaned beneath the demands of their holy sovereign's prophecy. Tithes of food were exacted from all the provinces. Vast granaries were constructed above the third cataract of the Vindauga River. Herds of sheep and cattle were driven northward, along coastal trails that soon became favourite topics for court minstrels. In the Home City, mathematicians scribbled indentures, summons, requisitions, and Kings and Judges seized what was needed in faraway lands. The records were stored in great mud-brick warehouses and cared for with the fastidiousness of religious ritual. Everything was numbered.

The call to arms did not come till the last.

Across the Three Seas the Zaudunyani took up the Circumfix, the holy symbol of their Aspect-Emperor: the knights of Conriya, masked and long-skirted, the disciplined columnaries of Nansur, the axmen of Thunyerus, wild-haired and ferocious, the peerless horsemen of Kian, and on and on. The sons of a dozen nations converged on Oswenta, the hoary old capital of Galeoth, bearing rough-painted or finely wrought representations of the Tusk and Circumfix. The sorcerous Schools sent their contingents as well: the haughty magi of the Scarlet Spires, borne in their silk-panelled litters, the dour witches of the Swayal Compact, the robed processions of the Imperial Saik, and, of course, the Gnostic sorcerers of the Mandate, who had been raised from fools to priests by the coming of the Warrior-Prophet.

The children of Oswenta marvelled. In streets choked with newcomers, they saw Nilnameshi princes in their palanquins, Ainoni Count-Palatines with their white-painted retinues, religious madmen of every description, and once, even a towering mastodon that sent horses bolting like dogs. They saw all the ornament, all the pomp and demonstration of ancient and faraway customs, thrown together and made a carnival. The bowl of each nation had spilled, and now their distinct and heady flavours swirled together, continually surprising the palette with some unheard-of combination. Long-bearded Tydonni throwing the number-sticks with wire-limbed Khirgwi. Kutnarmi monkeys climbing the gowns of Shigeki witches.

A summer and an autumn passed organizing the host. Though a generation had come and gone, the Aspect-Emperor and his advisers remembered well the lessons of the First Holy War. The Unification Wars, with their setbacks and victories and butchered cities, had produced a corps of shrewd and ruthless Zaudunyani officers, all of whom were made Judges and granted the power of life and death over the faithful. Trespasses were not forgiven-too much hung in the balance for the Shortest Path not to be taken. Mercy required a certain future, and for Men, there was none. Two Consult skin-spies were discovered, thanks to the divine insight of the Aspect-Emperor and his children. They were flayed before booming, riotous masses.

The Great Ordeal wintered at the headwaters of the Vindauga River, in the city of Harwash, which had been an entrepot for the Twelve-Pelt Road, the famed caravan route connecting Galeoth to the ancient and isolate cities of Sakarpus and Atrithau, but was now little more than a vast barracks and supply depot. The season was hard. Despite all the precautions, dread Akkeдgni, Disease, fondled the host with his Many Hands, and some twenty thousand souls were lost to a version of lung-plague common to the humid rice plains of Nilnamesh.

It was, the Aspect-Emperor explained, but the first of many tests.

The days began to thaw what the nights yet froze. Preparations intensified. The order to march was a fervent occasion of tears and joyous shouts. There is a taste to these things. The wills of men coalesce, become one, and the air knows. The God did not only create the created, He created the act of creation as well, the souls that dwell within men. Should it be any surprise that the world of things answered the world of intents? The Great Ordeal marched, and the very earth, rising from dreary winter slumber, bent knee and rejoiced. The Men of the Ordeal could feel it: an approving world, a judging world.

The host advanced in two stages. King Saubon of Caraskand, one of the Holy War's two Exalt-Generals, marched first, taking the quicker elements of the host-the Kianene, the Girgashi, the Khirgwi, and the Shrial Knights-and none of the slower, which included the sorcerous Schools. The Aspect-Emperor's second eldest son, Anasыrimbor Kayыtas, rode with him, leading the famed Kidruhil, the most celebrated heavy calvary cohort in the Three Seas. The Sakarpic host melted away before them, leaving only several companies of Long-Riders, their fleet and devious skirmishers, to harass their advance. The decisive engagement the Exalt-General hoped for never happened.

King Proyas of Conriya, the Ordeal's other Exalt-General, followed with the bulk of the host. Jubilant, the Men of the New Empire marched into the Kathol Passes, which formed the armature of two great mountains ranges, the Hethantas to the west and the Osthwai to the east. The column was too long for any real communication between its forward and rear elements-no rider could press through the masses quickly enough. The scarps climbed to either side, stacked to the timberline.

It snowed the fourth night, when the priests and judges led ceremonies commemorating the Battle of the Pass, where an ancient alliance of refugee Men and the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas had defeated the No-God in the First Apocalypse, so purchasing the World a year of precious respite. Nothing was said of the subsequent betrayal and the extermination of the Nonmen at the hands of those they had saved.

They sang of their devotion, the Men of the Ordeal, heartbreaking hymns composed by the Aspect-Emperor himself. They sang of their own might, of the doom they would deliver to the faraway gates of their enemy. They sang of their wives, their children, about the smaller pockets of the wider world they marched to save. In the evenings, the great bell they called the Interval tolled, and the Singers cried out the calls to prayer, their sweet voices rising across the far-flung fields of tents and pavillions. Hard men shed their gear and gathered beneath Circumfix banners. Noble knelt with slave or menial. The Shrial Priests gave their sermons and benedictions, and the Judges watched.

They spent several days filing through the final stages of the Pass, then descended the sill of the mountains. They crossed the thawing fields of Sagland, where the retreating Sakarpi had burned anything that could be of use to them. Overmatched, the King of Sakarpus had no recourse save the ancient and venerable weapon of hunger.

Few Three Seas Men had ever seen grassland steppes, let alone the vast and broad-backed Istyuli. Beneath grey skies, with tracts still scabbed with snow, it seemed a trackless and desolate place, a precursor to Agongorea, about which they had heard so much in endless recitations of The Sagas. Those raised on the coasts were reminded of the sea, of horizons as flat as a rule, with nothing but limits for the eye to fasten upon. Those bred along desert margins were reminded of home.

It was raining when the multitudes climbed into the broad scuffs of land that lifted the Lonely City above the plain. At last, the two Exalt-Generals clasped arms and set about planning the assault. They scowled and joked and shared reminiscences, from the legendary First Holy War to the final days of the Unification. So many cities. So many campaigns.

So many proud peoples broken.

The Emissary arrived in the pre-dawn cold, demanding to see Varalt Harweel II, the King of Sakarpus.

Unable to sleep for fear of the morrow, Sorweel was already awake when his menial came to rouse him. He regularly attended all important audiences-his father insisted on it as part of his princely education. But until recently, "important" had meant something quite different. Skirmishes with the Sranc. Insults and apologies from Atrithau. Threats from disgruntled nobles. Sorweel could not count the times he had sat at the stone bench in the shadow of his father's throne swinging his bare feet in what seemed mortal boredom.

Now, only a year shy of his first Elking, he planted his boots and stared at the man who would destroy them all: King Nersei Proyas of Conriya, Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal. Gone were the courtiers, the functionaries, the partisans of this or that petty interest. Vogga Hall stood vacant and dim, though for some reason, the cavernous aisles and galleries failed to make the outlander look small. From across the terra cotta reliefs that sheathed the walls and columns, Sorweel's ancestors seemed to watch with graven apprehension. The air smelled of cold tallow.

"Thremu dus kapkurum," the outlander began, "hedi mere'otas cha-" The translator, some mangy herdsman from the Saglands by the look of him, quickly rendered his words into Sakarpic.

"Our captives have told us what you say of him."

Him. The Aspect-Emperor. Sorweel silently cursed his skin for pimpling.

"Ah, yes," King Harweel replied, "our blasphemy…" Even though the ornate arms of the Horn-and-Amber Throne concealed his father's face, Sorweel knew well the wry expression that accompanied this tone.

"Blasphemy…" the Exalt-General said. "He would not say that."

"And what would he say?"

"That you fear, as all men fear, to lose your power and privilege."

Sorweel's father laughed in an offhand manner that made the boy proud. If only he could muster such careless courage.

"So," Harweel said merrily, "I have placed my people between your Aspect-Emperor and my throne, is that it? Not that I have placed my throne between your Aspect-Emperor and my people…"

The Exalt-General nodded with the same deliberate grace that accompanied his untranslated speech, but whether in affirmation or appreciation, Sorweel could not tell. His hair was silver, as was his plaited beard. His eyes were dark and quick. His finery and regalia made even his father's royal vestments seem like crude homespun. But it was his bearing and imperturbable gaze that made him so impressive. There was a melancholy to him, a sadness that lent him an unsettling gravity.

"No man," Proyas said, "can stand between a God and the people."

Sorweel suppressed a shudder. It was unnerving the way they all referred to him as such, Three Seas Men. And with such thoughtless conviction.

"My priests call him a demon."

"Hada mem porota-"

"They say what they need to keep their power safe," the translator said with obvious discomfort. "They are, truly, the only ones who stand to lose from the quarrel between us."

For Sorweel's entire life, it seemed, the Aspect-Emperor had been an uneasy rumour from the South. Some of his earliest memories were of his father dandling him on his knee while he questioned Nansur and Galeoth traders from the World-beyond-the-Plains. With looks at once ingratiating and guarded, they would always demur, protest they had ears only for trade and eyes only for profit, when what they really meant was that they had tongues only for gold. In many ways, Sorweel owed his understanding of the world to Twelve-Pelt caravaners and their struggle to render the South into Sakarpic. The Unification Wars. The Thousand Temples. All the innumerable nations of the Three Seas. And the coming of the False Prophet who preached the end of all things.

"He will come for us," his father would tell him.

"But how can you know, Da?"

"He is a Ciphrang, a Hunger from the Outside, come to this world in the guise of man."

"Then how can we hope to resist him?"

"With our swords and our shields," his father had boasted, using the mock voice he always used to make light of terrifying things. "And when those fail us, with spit and curses."

But the spit and the curses, Sorweel would learn, always came first, accompanied by bold gestures and grand demonstrations. War was an extension of argument, and swords were simply words honed to a blood-letting edge. Only the Sranc began with blood. For Men, it was always the conclusion.

Perhaps this explained the Emissary's melancholy and his father's frustration. Perhaps they already knew the outcome of this embassy. All doom required certain poses, the mouthing of certain words-so said the priests.

Sorweel gripped the edge of his bench, sat as still as his quailing body would allow. The Aspect-Emperor had come-even still he could scarce believe it. An itch, a name, a principle, a foreboding, something so far across the horizon that it had to seem both childish and menacing, like the wights Sorweel's nurse would invoke whenever he had vexed her. Something that could be dismissed until encircled by shadows.

Now, somewhere out in the darkness that surrounded their hearts and their walls, somewhere out there, he waited, a Hunger clothed in glorious manhood, propped by the arms of grovelling nations. A Demon, come to cut their throats, defile their women, enslave their children. A Ciphrang, come to lay waste to all they knew and loved.

"Have you not read The Sagas?" his father was asking the Emissary, his voice incredulous. "The bones of our fathers survived the might of the Great Ruiner-Mog-Pharau! I assure you, they haven't grown too brittle to survive you!"

The Exalt-General smiled, or at least tried to. "Ah, yes… Virtue does not burn."

"What do you mean?"

"A saying in my country. When a man dies, the pyre takes everything save what his children can use to adorn their ancestor scrolls. All men flatter themselves through their forebears."

Harweel snorted not so much at the wisdom, it seemed, as the relevance. "And yet the North is waste and Sakarpus still stands!"

Proyas's smile was pained, his look one of dull pity. "You forget," he said with the air of disclosing a prickly truth, "my Lord has been here before. He broke bread with the men who raised these very halls, back when this was but a province of a greater empire, a backwater frontier. Fortune saved these walls, not fortitude. And Fortune, as you so well know, is a whore."

Even though his father often paused to order his thoughts, something about the ensuing silence chilled Sorweel to the bowel. He knew his father, knew that the past weeks had taken their toll. His rallying words were the same, and his booming laugh was nothing if not more frequent. But something had changed nonetheless. A slouch in his shoulders. A shadow in his gaze.

"The Great Ordeal stands at your gate," the Exalt-General pressed. "The Schools are assembled. The hosts of a hundred tribes and nations beat sword against shield. Doom encircles you, brother. You know you cannot prevail, even with the Chorae Hoard. I know this because your knuckles are as scarred as my own, because your eyes are as bruised by war's horror."

Another ashen silence. Sorweel found himself leaning forward, trying to peer around the Horn-and-Amber Throne. What was his father doing?

"Come…" the Exalt-General said, his voice one of genuine entreaty. "Harweel, I beg of you, take my hand. Men can no longer afford to shed the blood of Men."

Sorweel stood, stared aghast at his father's blank visage. King Harweel was not an old man, but his face seemed slack and rutted about his hanging blond moustaches, his neck bent by the weight of his gold-andiron crown. Sorweel could feel the impulse, errant and unbidden, the overwhelming urge to cover for his father's shameful indecision, to lash out, to… to…

But Harweel had recovered both his wits and his voice.

"Then decamp," he said in dead tones. "March to your death in Golgotterath or return to your hot-blooded wives. Sakarpus will not yield."

As though deferring to some unknown rule of discourse, Proyas lowered his face. He glanced at the bewildered Prince before returning his gaze to the King of Sakarpus. "There is the surrender that leads to slavery," he said. "And there is the surrender that sets one free. Soon, very soon, your people shall know that difference."

"So says the slave!" Harweel cried.

The Emissary did not require the translator's sputtering interpretation-the tone transcended languages. Something in his look dismayed Sorweel even more than the forced bluster of his father's response. I am weary of blood, his eyes seemed to say. Too long have I haggled with the doomed.

He stood, nodding to his entourage to indicate that more than enough breath had been spent.

Sorweel had expected his father to draw him aside afterwards, to explain not only the situation, but the peculiarities of his demeanor. Though he knew well enough what had happened-the King and the Exalt-General had exchanged one final round of fatuous words to sanctify the inevitable conclusion-his sense of shame forced a kind of confusion upon him. Not only had his father been frightened, he had been openly so-and before the most dire enemy his people had ever faced. There had to be some kind of explanation. Harweel II wasn't simply King, he was also his father, the wisest, bravest man Sorweel had ever known. There was a reason his Boonsmen looked upon him with such reverence, why the Horselords were so loath to invite his displeasure. How could he of all Men be afraid? His father… His father! Was there something he wasn't telling him?

But no answer was forthcoming. Soldered to the bench, Sorweel could only stare at him, his dismay scarcely concealed, as Harweel barked orders to be relayed to his various officers-his tone brusque in the way of men trying to speak their way past tears. Not long afterwards, just as dawn broke behind impenetrable woollen clouds, Sorweel found himself tramping through mud and across cobble, hustled forward by his father's hard-eyed companions, his High Boonsmen. The narrow streets were swollen with supplies gathered from the surrounding country as well as refugees from the Saglands and elsewhere. He saw men butchering cattle, scraping viscera with honed shoulder blades. He saw mothers walking dumbfounded, their arms too short to herd their rag-bundled children. Feeling useless and depressed, Sorweel wondered about his own Boonsmen, though they would not be called such until his first Elking next spring. He had pleaded with his father the previous week that they be allowed to fight together, but to no avail.

The watches lurched one into the next. The rain, which had fallen lightly and sporadically enough to be taken for water blown from the trees, began in earnest, swallowing the distances in sheets of relentless grey. It slipped through his mail, soaking him first to the leathers, then to the felt. He began shivering uncontrollably-until his rage at the thought of others seeing him shake burned him to the quick. Though his iron helm kept his scalp dry, his face became more and more numb. His fingers seemed to ache and sting in equal measure. Just when he thought he couldn't be more miserable, his father finally called for him, leading him into an emptied barracks so they might warm their hands side by side before the last remnants of a hearth fire.

The barracks was one of the ancient ones, with the heavy lintels and low chapped ceilings, and the stables built in, so that the men could sleep with their horses-a relic of the days when Sakarpi warriors worshipped their steeds. The candles had guttered so that only the dying hearth provided illumination, the kind of orange light that seemed to pick out details at whim. The battered curve of an iron pot. The cracked back of a chair. The face of a troubled king. Sorweel did not know what to say, so he simply stood, gazing at the luminous detail of coals burning into snowy ash.

"Moments of weakness come upon all Men," Harweel said without looking at his son.

The young Prince stared harder into the glowing cracks.

"You must see this," his father continued, "so that when your time comes you will not despair."

Sorweel was speaking before he even realized he had opened his mouth. "But I do, Father! I do desp-!"

The tenderness in his father's eyes was enough to make him choke. It knocked his gaze down as surely as a slap.

"There are many fools, Sorwa, men who conceive hearts in simple terms, absolute terms. They are insensible to the war within, so they scoff at it, they puff out their chests and they pretend. When fear and despair overcome them, as they must overcome us all, they have not the wind to think… and so they break."

The heat enclosed the young Prince, thinning the moisture that slicked his skin. Already his palms and knuckles were dry. He dared look up at his father, whose bravery, he realized, burned not like a bonfire, but like a hearth, warming all who stood near its wisdom.

"Are you such a fool, Sorwa?"

The fact that the question was searching, genuine, and not meant as a reprimand cut Sorweel to the quick.

"No, Father."

There was so much he wanted to say, to confess. So much fear, so much doubt, and remorse above all. How could he have doubted his father? Instead of lending his shoulder, he had become one more burden-and on this day of days! He had recoiled, stricken by thoughts of bitter condemnation, when he should have reached out-when he should have said, "The Aspect-Emperor. He comes. Hold tight my hand, Father."

"Please…" he said, staring into that beloved face, but before he could utter another word the door flew open, and three of the greater Horselords called out.

Forgive me…

Even upon the walls, the famed and hallowed walls of Sakarpus, the heat of the barracks stayed with him, as though he had somehow carried away a coal in his heart.

Standing with his father's High Boonsmen upon the northern tower of the Herder's Gate, Sorweel stared out across the miserable distances. The rain continued to spiral down, falling from fog skies. Though the plains ringed the horizon with lines as flat as any sea, the land about the city was pitched and folded, like a cloak cast upon a vast floor, forming a great stone pedestal for Sakarpus and her wandering walls. Several times, Sorweel leaned forward to peer between the embrasures, only to push himself back, dizzied by the sheer drop: a plane of pocked brick that dropped to sloping foundations that hung over grass-and-thistle-choked cliffs. It seemed impossible that any might assail them. Who could overcome such towers? Such walls?

When he stared down their length, with the iron-horned crenelations and lines of bovine skulls set into the masonry, a mixture of pride and awe swelled through him. The Lords of the Plains, draped in the ancient armour of their fathers, crowded by the longshields of their clans. The batteries of archers hunched over their bows, struggling to keep the strings dry. Everywhere he looked, he saw his father's people-his people-manning the heights, their faces grim with determination and expectant fury.

And out there, across the grass slopes, only void, the grey of distances lost through sheet after sheet of gossamer rain. The Aspect-Emperor and his Great Ordeal.

Sorweel rehearsed the prayers his father had taught to him, the Demanding, meant to loosen the sword of Gilgaцl's favour, the Plea to Fate, meant to soften the hard look of the Whore. It seemed he could hear others among the High Boonsmen whispering prayers of their own, summoning the favour they would need to wrest their doom from the Aspect-Emperor's grasping hand.

He's a demon, Sorweel thought, drawing strength from the remembered tenor of his father's voice. A Hunger from the Outside. He will not prevail…

He cannot.

Just then, a single horn pealed from the rain-shrouded horizon, long drawn and low, of a tone with the call of bull mastodons. For several heartbeats, it seemed to hang suspended over the city, solitary, foreboding. It trailed into silence, one heartbeat, two, until it seemed its signification had ended. Then it was joined by a chorus of others, some shrill and piercing, some as deep as the previous night's thunder. Suddenly the whole world seemed to shiver, its innards awakened by the cold cacophony. Sorweel could see men trade apprehensive looks. Mumbled curses and prayers formed a kind of counterpoint, like bracken about a monument. Blare and rumble, a sound that made a ceiling of the sky-that made water sharp. Then the horns were gone, leaving only the hoarse cries of the lords and officers along the wall, shouting out encouragement to their men.

"Take heart," Sorweel heard an old voice mutter to someone unseen.

"Are you sure?" a panicked boy-voice whispered in reply. "How can you be sure?"

A laugh, so obviously forced that Sorweel could not but wince. "A fortnight ago, the Hunter's priests found a nest of warblers in the temple eaves. Crimson warblers-do you understand? The Gods are with us, my son. They watch over us!"

Peering after the voices, Sorweel recognized the Ostaroots, a family whom he had always thought hangers-on in his father's Royal Company. Sorweel had always shunned the son, Tasweer, not out of arrogance or spite, but in accordance with what seemed the general court attitude. He had never thought of it, not really, save to make gentle sport of the boy now and again with his friends. For some reason, it shamed Sorweel to hear him confessing his fears to his father. It seemed criminal that he, a prince born to the greatest of privileges, had so effortlessly judged Tasweer's family, that with the ease of an exhalation, he had assessed lives as deep and confusing as his own. And found them wanting.

But his remorse was short-lived. Shouts of warning drew his eyes back in the direction of the pelting rain, toward the first shadows of movement across the plain. The siege towers appeared first, each within toppling distance of the others, little more than blue columns at the misty limits of his vision, like the ghosts of ancient monoliths. There was no surprise at the number of them-fourteen-since Sorweel and countless others had watched their faraway assembly over the preceding days. The surprise, rather, was reserved for their scale, and for the fact that the Southerners had borne them disassembled across so many trackless leagues.

They moved in echelon, crawling as though perched on tortoises. Slowly, the finer details of their appearance resolved from the mist, as did the rhythmic shouts of the thousands that pressed them forward. They were sheathed in what appeared to be scales of tin, and almost absurdly tall, to the point of tottering, rising to a slender peak from bases as broad as any Sakarpic bastion-unlike any of the engines Sorweel had seen sketched in the Tomes of War. Each bore the Circumfix, the mark of the Aspect-Emperor and his sham divinity, painted in white and red across their middens: a circle containing the outstretched figure of an upside-down man-Anasыrimbor Kellhus himself, the rumours said. The sign tattooed into the flesh of the missionaries Sorweel's father had ordered burned.

There was a breathlessness to their approach, which Sorweel attributed to the fact that it was at last beginning, that all the worrying and bickering and preparing and skirmishing of the previous months was finally coming to a head. In the towers' wake, the immaculate ranks of the Great Ordeal resolved into gleaming solidity, row after marching row of them, reaching out across field and pasture, their far flanks lost in the rainy haze.

Once again the horns unnerved the sky.

Sorweel stood numb, one of ten thousand faces, concentrated with rancour, dread, disbelief, even ardour, watching as ten times that number-more! — marched through the dreary downpour, bearing the exotic arms of distant peoples, following the devices of a dozen different nations. Strangers come from sweaty shores, from lands unheard of, who knew not their language, cared nothing for their ways or their riches…

The Southron Kings, come to save the world.

How many times had Sorweel dreamed of them? How many times had he imagined them reclining half-nude in their grand marble galleries, listening bored to polyglot petitioners? Or riding divans through spice-dusted streets, heavy-lidded eyes scanning the mercantile bustle, searching for girls to add to their dark-skinned harems? How many times, his heart balled in child anger, had he told his father he was running away to the Three Seas?

To the land where Men yet warred against Men.

He had learned quickly to conceal his fascination, however. Among the officials of his father's court, the South was the object of contempt and derision-typically. It was a fallen place, where vigour had succumbed to complexity, to the turmoil of a thousand thousand vyings. It was a place where subtlety had become a disease and where luxury had washed away the bourne between what was womanish and what was manly.

But they were wrong-so heartbreakingly wrong. If the defeats of the previous weeks had not taught them such, then surely they understood now.

The South had come to teach them.

Sorweel cast about looking for his father. But like a miracle, King Harweel was already beside him, standing tall in his long skirts of mail. He gripped his son's shoulder, leaned reassuringly. When he grinned, jewels of water fell from his moustaches.

The tapping drone of rain. The peal of outland horns.

"Fear not," he said. "Neither he nor his Schoolmen will dare our Chorae. We will fight as Men fight." He looked to his High Boonsmen, who had all turned to watch their King give heart to his son.

"Do you hear me?" he cried out to them. "For two thousand years, our walls have stood unbroken. For two thousand years, the line of our fathers has reached unbroken! We are their culmination. We are the Men of Sakarpus, the Lonely City. We are survivors of the Worldfall, Keepers of the Chorae Hoard, a solitary light against the pitch of Sranc and endl-!"

The sound of swooping wings interrupted him. Eyes darted heavenward. Several men even cried out. Sorweel instinctively raised a hand to his mail-armoured stomach, pressed the sorcery-killing Chorae about his waist so that it pinched cold into his navel.

It was a stork, as white and as long as a tusk, flying when it should have sheltered from the rain. Men shrank in horror from the battlement it landed upon, crowded back into one another. It turned the knife of its head toward them, its long bill pressed low to its neck.

The King's hand fell from his son's shoulder.

The stork regarded them with porcelain patience. Its black eyes were sentient and unfathomable.

Raindrops tinkled across iron, pattered against leather.

"What does it want?" some voice cried.

King Harweel pushed himself to the fore of his men. Sorweel stood transfixed, blinked at the rain blowing into his eyes, tasted the cold spill across his lips. His father stood alone, his woollen mantle soaked, his hands slack below the shining lines of his vambraces. The stork stood nearly on top of him, legs like sticks, wings folded into the polished vase of its body, its sage face bent down to regard the King at its feet…

Then, hanging in the cloud-swollen distance to the right of the bird, a star appeared, a scintillating point of light. Sorweel could not but glance in its direction, as did all those crowded about him. When he looked back to his father, the stork was gone-gone!

Suddenly he found himself jostled forward by the High Boonsmen, pressed hard against the embrasures. Everybody seemed to be shouting, to his father, to one another, to the horn-filled sky. The siege towers had continued their inexorable approach, as had the Southron men, whose formations now made a dread tapestry of the surrounding plains. The point of light, which flared from deeper distances, suddenly flickered out…

Only to reappear above the Ordeal's forward ranks, hanging half again the height of the ponderous towers. Sorweel gasped, tried to step back. It seemed a fearful thing to look up when he already stood so high. The point was no longer a point, but a figure of the purest white striding through a nimbus of blue incandescence. A man or a god.

Sorweel found himself clutching the pitted stone of the battlements.

The Aspect-Emperor.

The rumour. The lifelong itch…

"Father!" Sorweel cried, unable to see past the shoulders and shields about him. Gusts tumbled down from the west, blowing the rain into veils of mist, which floated like mountainous apparitions over the walls and their sodden defenders. The cold was like knives. "Father!"

He heard the crack of firing ballistae, but with the wet, the Chorae-tipped bolts sank far short of the hanging spectre. Shouts and curses erupted all along the wall. Then he heard the words, words remembered but not understood, making haze of pools and puddles, stinging skin and making teeth ache.

Sorcery.

Silver lines appeared about the figure's outstretched hands, began scrolling into emptiness…

Incandescent geometries, a sun-bright filigree, scaling the rain to the dark-bellied clouds. And a hiss like no other, like the millennial pounding of the surf condensed into the span of heartbeats. Out and out the lines reached, making glory of the sky, a glittering canopy that reached over the walls and across the city. Ghoulish reflections rolled and glimmered across every sword and shield.

"He makes mist," Sorweel murmured to no one. "He blinds us!"

Southron voices, roaring thousands of them, unitary and ecstatic. Hymns-they were singing hymns! The towers continued their relentless approach, driven by trains of bent-back thousands. Someone had to do something! Why was no one doing anything?

Then his father was before him, grasping him by the arms. "Go to the Citadel," he said, his expression strange. The light of the Aspect-Emperor glittered in his eyes, rimmed the lines of his nose and cheek in blue. "It was a mistake bringing you to the walls."

"What do you mean? Father, how cou-"

"Go!"

Sorweel could feel the corners of his face waver and crumple.

"Father-Father! My bones are your bones!"

Harweel raised his hand to Sorweel's cheek. "Which is why you must go. Please, Sorwa. Sakarpus stands at the ends of the world. We are the last outpost of Men! He needs this city! He needs our people! That means he needs you, Sorwa! You!"

The Prince looked down, cowed by his father's fury and desperation. "No, Father," he mumbled, suddenly feeling twig-thin-far younger than his sixteen years. "I won't leave you…" When he looked up, cool rain flooded the hot of his tears. "I won't leave you!"

His voice hung raw and shrill, defiance yanked to the sinew. Then the song of the invaders swelled, the throats of the joyous thousands come to burn, to kill.

His father's blow took him in the jaw, sent him skidding into the men behind him, then to his hands and knees onto the wet stone. "Don't shame me with your impertinence, boy!" He turned to one of his High Boonsmen. "Narsheidel! Take him to the Citadel! See that no harm comes to him! He will be our final swordstroke! Our vengeance!"

Without a word Narsheidel hoisted him to his feet by the scruff of his mail harness, began dragging him through the assembled warriors. Pulled backward, Sorweel watched them close ranks in his wake, saw their looks of pity. "Nooo!" he howled, tasting clean cold water on his tongue. Across sodden shoulders and glistening shield-rims, he glimpsed his father staring back at him, his eyes as blue and crisp as the summer sky. For one inscrutable heartbeat, his father's look pierced him. Sorweel saw him turn just as the wall of fog encompassed the parapets.

"Nooooooo!"

The clamour of arms descended upon the world.

He tried to struggle, but Narsheidel was indomitable, an iron shadow that scarcely bent to his thrashing. Through the dark spiral of the tower stair, it seemed all he could see were his father's eyes, loving eyes, judging eyes, regretting a heavy hand, celebrating a tickling laugh, and watching, always watching, to be sure his second heart beat warm and safe. And if he looked close, if he dared peer at those eyes the way he might gems, he knew he would see himself, not as he was, but mirrored across the shining curve of a father's pride, a father's hope that he might live with greater grace through the fact of a son.

Thunder shivered about them, cracking ancient mortar, loosing showers of grit from the low-vaulted ceilings. Narsheidel was shouting, something, something taut with more than fear. A warrior already mourning.

Then they were past the iron door, skidding on stones in the Gate's monumental shadow. Rearing horses. Warriors running through fog, their white shields across their backs. The foundations of buildings that vanished into grey. The void of ancient streets opening between them.

And a solitary figure in the midst of the confusion, crouched like a beggar, only clothed in too much shadow…

And with eyes that blinked light.

Crying out, Narsheidel hauled him down to the hard wet stone.

Diagrams of burning white, making smoke of the rain. The great bronze plates of the Herder's Gate flashed with sun-brilliance, then fell away, bent like woodchips, twirling like flotsam in a stream.

Shouting, always shouting, Narsheidel pulled him to his feet, yanked him to a run.

He saw the beggar become someone priestly and luminescent, then vanish in a twinkle. He saw his countrymen rally to stem the breach. He saw tall Droettal and his company of Gilgallic Priests roaring as the tide of dark-faced outlanders engulfed them. He saw the Eithmen, whipping their caparisoned chargers through panick-packed streets. He saw gutters rushing with pink and crimson waters. He saw one of the siege towers lurching above the crest of the walls, the ghosts of dragonheads rising from slots in its metallic hide. He saw ropes of men, Longshields and Horselords alike, vanish screaming in roiling light.

Again and again, he threw himself against Narsheidel's strength, sobbing, raving, but the High Boonsman was unconquerable, driving him ever forward, bellowing at the madness to make way. And through it all, he saw his father's summer-blue eyes, beseeching…

Please, Sorwa…

They ran down labyrinthine alleyways, through endless curtains of rain. Behind them, the shouts and screams multiplied into a senseless white roar, punctuated only by braying horns and the inside-out mutter of sorcery.

The winding streets were so deep they couldn't see the black-walled Citadel until they were almost upon it, hunched against the sky above them, its rounded towers no taller than the soaring walls. Weeds hung from the joints of its sloped and fluted base. Its northern quarters, where the ancient Sakarpi Kings had once resided, hung in ruin, windows like eye sockets revealing the gutted hollows within. They reeled toward it. The ramparts climbed to encompass a greater part of the sky. Sorweel glimpsed a star flaring high above the black-stone rim, as bright as the Nail of Heaven-only beneath the clouds. The light made diamonds of the falling rain.

Even Narsheidel stumbled in terror, face held up, pressing Sorweel before him. "Quick, boy, quick!" Then they were through the vault doors, sheltered in deep sockets of black stone. Guards and ashen-faced attendants flocked to them. Sorweel found himself staggering in circles, fending away their fussing hands. "The King?" an old retainer cried. "What has become of the King?"

"There must be a way!" Narsheidel was shouting at some mail-armoured steward. "This place must have secrets! Everything old has secrets!"

Then Sorweel was being hustled up tight-winding stairs, through hot, wood-panelled corridors, across low-ceilinged rooms, some too bright, others too dim. Turning-crossing-climbing. Everything, tapestries, batteries of candles, chapped walls, seemed to swim in his periphery.

What was happening?

"No!" Sorweel cried, shaking away ushering hands like a lunatic dog. "Stop this! Stop!"

They stood in some kind of antechamber, with a hemispherical wall that found its apex in a bricked-in passageway. Narsheidel and two others-an aging Longshield and Baron Denthuel, the one-legged Horselord assigned to command the Citadel-stood back, their hands out, their faces wary or placating or worried or pleading or…

"Where's my father?" he cried.

Only Narsheidel, his soaked armour shining silver and black in the uncertain light, dared speak.

"King Harweel is dead, boy."

The words winded him. Even still, Sorweel heard his own voice say, "That means I am King. That I'm your master!"

The High Boonsman looked down to his palms, then out and upward, as though trying to divine the direction of the outer roar-for it had not stopped.

"Not so long as your father's words still ring in my ears."

Sorweel looked into the older man's face, with its strong-jawed proportions and water-tangled frame of hair. Only then, it seemed, did he realize that Narshiedel too had loved ones, wives and children, sequestered somewhere in the city. That he was a true Boonsman, loyal unto death.

"King Harweel is-"

Explosion. Only afterwards, sputtering, scrambling across the floor, would the young Prince understand what happened. Bricks exploding outward, as though a tree-sized hammer had struck the round wall's far side, taking Lord Denthuel in the head and neck, swatting him broken to the ground.

Dust carried on the back of shiver-cold air. Pale out-of-doors light. Ears ringing, Sorweel turned to the gaping hole…

He might have called out, but he wouldn't remember.

He looked through the breach into the husk of the Citadel's ruined galleries. Something golden hung in the floorless hollows, something that boiled with impossible light. Against a backdrop of empty windows and long-gutted walls, it walked across open air. Walked. Rain plummeted in lines about it, as though down a well.

But no dampness touched him.

The Aspect-Emperor.

The shining demon crossed the threshold, framed by gloom and deluge.

The nameless Longshield simply turned and ran, disappearing into the halls. Raising his greatsword high, Narsheidel cried out, charged the luminescent figure…

Who simply stepped to the side, impossibly, like a dancer avoiding a drunk. Whipping his arms like rope, the figure brought his curved blade up over his scalp, then snapped it back in a perfect arc. Narsheidel's body and head continued careering forward, joined only by a flying thread of blood.

The demon's eyes had remained fixed on Sorweel the entire time. Only… they did not seem a demon's eyes.

Too human.

On his knees, Sorweel could do naught but stare.

The man seemed cut from a different place, one with a brighter sun, as though he stood both here amid the ruin that was Sakarpus and upon a mountain summit at the edge of dawn. He was tall, a full hand over Sorweel's father, draped in a priest's gold-panelled vestments, armoured in mail so fine it seemed silk-nimil, some absent part of Sorweel realized, Nonman steel. His hair fell in sodden ringlets about his long, full-lipped face. His flaxen beard was plaited and squared in the manner of the Southron Kings pictured on the most ancient of the Long Hall's reliefs. The severed heads of two demons, their skin blotched and aglow, hung from his girdle, making fishmouths about black-nail teeth.

Scabs of salt crusted his bare sword-hand.

"I am," the vision said, "Anasыrimbor Kellhus."

It started with the shaking, the hot flush of urine. Then his bones became serpents, and Sorweel collapsed to the floor. On his belly… On his belly! He spat at the blood greasing his chin.

Fuh-Fuh-Father!

"Come," the man said, crouching to place a hand on his shoulder. "Come. Get up. Remember yourself…"

Remember?

"You are a King, are you not?"

Sorweel could only stare in horror and wonder.

"I–I d-d-don't understand…"

A friendly scowl, followed by a gentle laugh. "I'm rarely what my enemies expect, I know." Somehow, he was already helping him to his feet.

"Buh-buh-but…"

"All this, Sorweel, is a tragic mistake. You must believe that."

"Mistake?"

"I'm no conqueror." He paused as though to frown at the very notion. "As mad as it sounds, I really have come to save Mankind."

"Lies," the Prince murmured through his confusion. "Liar!"

The Aspect-Emperor nodded, closed his eyes in the manner of a long-suffering parent. His sigh was both honest and plain. "Mourn," he said. "Grieve as all Men must. But take heart in the fact of your forgiveness."

Sorweel gazed into the summer-blue eyes. What was happening?

"Forgiven? Who are you to forgive?"

The scowl of an innocent twice wronged.

"You misunderstand."

"Misunderstand what?" Sorweel spat. "That you think yourse-!"

"Your father loved you!" the man interrupted, his voice thick with a nigh irresistible paternal reprimand. "And that love, Sorwa, is forgiveness… His forgiveness, not mine."

The young King of Sakarpus stood dumbstruck, staring with a face as slack as rainwater. Then perfumed sleeves enclosed him, and he wept in the burning arms of his enemy, for his city, for his father, for a world that could wring redemption out of betrayal.

Years. Months. Days. For so long the Aspect-Emperor had been an uneasy rumour to the South, a name as heaped in atrocity as it was miracle…

No more.