The Judging eye

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Condia

The Interval tolled long and low over the landscape of tents.

Blowing into his hands against the morning chill, Sorweel sat outside the entrance to his tent blearily watching Porsparian prepare their morning fire. The old man crouched like a beggar before a small, smoking pyramid of bound scrub and grasses, his feet bare despite the cold. He seemed more ancient somehow, more wise and penetrating for his leathery brown skin.

The Shigeki slave had been an embarrassment at first. But the man quickly had become an enigma, every bit as deep and as frightening as the Anasыrimbor. Something froze within Sorweel whenever the pink-and-yellow eyes fixed him. And though he smiled at his friendly frowns, his quizzical grins, the young King recoiled as well, as if expecting a blow from unseen quarters. Porsparian was neither meek nor innocent nor powerless. Shadows hung from him-terrifying shadows.

The old slave clucked in satisfaction as the first flames soaked his grasses. Sorweel pretended to grin. An involuntary hand drifted to his cheek, touched the memory of the soil the man had smeared across his face days earlier.

Somehow, simply thinking her name, Yatwer, had become a kind of premonition. And it shamed him. She was the Goddess of the weak, the enslaved, and now she was his.

Eskeles was the first to arrive, of course. The rotund Schoolman groaned and huffed as he lowered his bulk next to Sorweel on the mat. "The Library of Sauglish," he muttered as he tried to wrestle comfort from his posture. "Yet again." The sorcerer was forever complaining about his Dreams, enough for Sorweel to start losing interest in them.

Zsoronga arrived shortly afterwards, stiff in his basahlet, the traditional dress of the Zeьmi caste-nobility. His battle-sash seemed all the more crisp and white now that the Kidruhil tents surrounding them had become grey and mottled for travel.

With Obotegwa absent, Eskeles was forced to translate their conversation, something Sorweel found more and more irksome. Over the previous weeks, Obotegwa's mellow and throaty tones had simply become his friend's voice. Hearing the Successor-Prince speak through Eskeles only reminded Sorweel of the chasm of tongues between them. For his part, Zsoronga quite obviously distrusted the Mandate Schoolman, and so kept his remarks to a formal minimum. And Eskeles, of course, simply could not refrain from adding his own commentary, so that Sorweel was never quite certain where Zsoronga began and the sorcerer ended. It reminded him of when he had first joined the Great Ordeal, the dark days when all he could understand were the recriminations of his own voice.

After drinking the tea prepared by Porsparian, the three of them strolled down the avenues and the byways of the encampment, making their way to the Umbilicus, the palatial pavilion belonging to the Aspect-Emperor. The air of carnival permeated the Great Ordeal even during the most sober times. But today, when Sorweel had expected all to be riot and celebration, they found only camp after subdued camp. Some Men of the Circumfix clustered here and there sharing muted talk around smoking breakfast fires, while others simply laid in the sunlight snoozing.

"They have nothing to do," Zsoronga remarked.

Sorweel found himself staring at a young Galeoth warrior laying between guy-ropes with his eyes closed, his head propped on the tear-shaped shield he had lain against his pack. He was stripped to his waist, and his skin shone as white as a child's teeth. A pang of envy struck the young King as deep as a stabbing. After weeks of fear and indecision, he now knew that he, Varalt Sorweel III, was simply an ordinary fool, no wiser, no stronger, than the next man. He had been born with the gifts of the mediocre, and yet here he was, stranded in the role of a captive king. He was cursed, cursed with the toil of pretending, endlessly pretending to be more.

Cursed to war, not across plains as heroes do, but within the wells of his soul-to war as cowards do.

Today was but one more example.

For reasons unknown, the Aspect-Emperor had declared a day of rest and consultation. Sorweel and Zsoronga, alone out of the Company of Scions, had been summoned to the Council of Potentates, a gathering of the Great Ordeal's senior planners and most powerful participants. Since Sorweel had yet to master the rudiments of Sheyic, Eskeles had been assigned his interpreter.

Something in his heart leapt at the thought of seeing him once more, even as the greater part of him quailed. It all seemed a gaggle of voices, nagging, warning, accusing, a chorus of contradictions. Porsparian and the Goddess. Zsoronga and his blasphemous book. His father. Kayыtas and his preternatural scrutiny. Eskeles and his fanatic enthusiasm. In the hearts of heroes, words cancelled out words, so that only truth and certainty remained. Not for him. In his heart, words simply accumulated, piled one on top of the other. He went through his daily motions well enough, discharged his paltry duties, but it all seemed an accident, like walking paths in the dead of night.

And he was about to face the Aspect-Emperor-Anasыrimbor Kellhus!

He was about to be discovered.

The Umbilicus loomed over the near horizon of tents, black, yet brocaded with patterns like the scales on a lizard's hide. With its many posts, it seemed a miniature mountain range, with curved conical faces warming in the pink morning sun. The Interval tolled again as they walked clear the last of the obscuring tents, near enough for its full resonance to press against their ears and chests, yet still somewhere unseen. The outer panels of the Umbilicus had been stitched with elaborate representations of the Circumfixion embroidered in gold across the great skirts of black: a nude man hanging upside down, his wrists and ankles bound to an iron ring. For the first time, Sorweel realized how innocuous and commonplace the symbol now seemed. It had fairly hummed with wickedness and revulsion before Sakarpus's fall…

Hundreds of shining figures populated the intervening pasture, crowds of them, threaded with slow-moving files that converged on an entrance in the southern quarter of the Umbilicus: the senior caste-nobility of the New Empire, filling the air with the sound of low laughter and concentrated discussion. Sorweel's instinct was to hesitate, to ponder and enumerate the strangers about to encompass them, but Eskeles forged ahead without a second glance. Within a dozen paces it seemed Sorweel had walked the Three Seas end to end. Glimpses became nations. A painted Nilnameshi Satrap comparing blades with a long-bearded Tydonni Earl. A doddering mage leaning hard on the shoulder of a boy-slave. Green-and-gold-clad Guards of the Hundred Pillars standing shoulder to shoulder in triangular threes. Two long-limbed Thunyeri staring off in the distance as they talked. A Conriyan Palatine in full martial regalia.

Sorweel found himself running nervous palms over the padded fabric of his royal parm, fearing that he looked as backward and as outlandish as he felt. He envied Zsoronga and the thoughtless confidence of his stride. The Successor-Prince walked as a man should, as though what set him apart also set him above. But it was more than his bearing: The glory of his Zeьmi heritage shouted from his garb and accoutrements, down to the jaguar-skin kilt he wore over his leggings. Sorweel's road-stained parm communicated far more humiliating facts: ignorance, poverty, crude manners, and foolish conceits.

The crowds bullied Sorweel with their shuffling proximity. He was accustomed to the company of physically powerful men: His father's Boonsmen had raised him as much as his father. But the strangeness of faraway lands and customs soaked the Lords of the Ordeal in menace. He saw knife strokes in the oddities of their affected manner, condemnation in the gold-threaded complexity of their dress. He heard insult and affront in their incomprehensible tongues.

He tried, as men so often do, to rally his pride with a kind of defensive contempt. Why, he told himself, should he fear these men when they could not even speak? They were no better than animals, the Galeoth harking like dogs, the Nansur thrumming like swallows, and the Nilnameshi cackling like geese.

But he knew these thoughts for what they were: the shallow posturings of a boy. He could feel it in the way his eyes flinched from the glare of others, in the empty bubbles that crept through his bones.

Stone-faced Pillarian Guards flanked the entrance, freighted with splinted mail and various arms. In the press, Sorweel almost stumbled into one of them. Powerful hands clamped his shoulders, a dark face sneered a thumb's length from his own, and a memory of Narsheidel dragging him through Sakarpas on the day of its fall shuddered through him. A jostling moment passed, and he found himself in the shadowy confines of the Umbilicus.

For a moment he simply stood gaping, his shoulders yanked this way and that as the Men of the Circumfix shoved past him. He heard several muttered curses, the Sheyic phrase for Shit-herder among them.

He was a plainsman, accustomed to camps on the Pale, and yet never had he stood in a tent so colossal. It was bigger than Vogga Hall, and far more luxurious, despite being a temporary structure of wood, hemp, and leather. The interior was cool, and the rumble of voices possessed an outdoor air. Shining silk banners ribboned the open spaces, swaying in unseen drafts, each incorporating the Tusk, the Circumfix, and the devices of innumerable nations and factions. A wooden amphitheatre had been raised about the outer walls, a horseshoe of rising tiers that were already teaming with various Lords of the Ordeal. A long table formed of many small camp tables occupied the broad space between, packed with obviously important personages, some with their chairs pulled close, others with their chairs pushed back or turned to follow some conversation. Two massive carpets covered the intervening expanses to either side, each with brocaded panels depicting various events: desert marches, walls assailed and defended, burning city heights. It was only when he saw the naked man bound to a Circumfix amid masses of starved warriors did Sorweel realize that the panels told the story of the First Holy War, the great Three Seas bloodletting that had made the New Empire and the Great Ordeal possible. Eskeles had already backtracked to fetch him by this time, so the young King was forced to scan the rest of the pictorial narrative while in the Schoolman's tow.

Rumbling commotion surrounded them as Sorweel took his seat between Zsoronga and Eskeles. "I have always wanted this," the rotund sorcerer said. "We see such sights in our Dreams, things you could scarce imagine. But to witness such glory with living eyes, my King! I hope the day comes when you can fathom your fortune. Despite all the pain, all the wrenching loss, there is no greater glory than a complicated life."

Sorweel feigned distraction, once again troubled by the way parts of his soul always rose in seditious agreement with the sorcerer's words-the leuneraal's words. He glanced at Zsoronga, searching for encouragement in his imperturbable pride, but the Zeьmi Prince simply gazed out, his expression as empty and as guarded as Sorweel's own. The look of a boy striving to pass unnoticed in the company of men.

Zsoronga could feel it as well, Sorweel realized. There was something in the air… something beyond the visible signs of warlike nobility, something that hung like a nimbus about outward observances. A kind of knowledge.

Sorweel twitched for the force of the realization when it came to him, as if some inner tendon had been plucked. Despite the differences in garb and armament, despite the differences in tongue, custom, and skin, something singular and implacable encompassed these men, defined them to their unguessed core.

Belief.

Here was belief, rendered sensuous for its intensity, made palpable in lilting voices and shining eyes.

Sorweel had known he marched in the company of fanatics, but until now he had never… touched it. The fever of jubilation. The lunacy of eyes that witnessed without seeing. The smell of commitment, absolute and encompassing. The Men of the Circumfix were capable of anything, he realized. They would weary, but they would not pause. They would fear, but they would not flee. Any atrocity, any sacrifice-nothing lay outside the compass of their possibility. They could burn cities, drown sons, slaughter innocents; they could even, as Zsoronga's story about the suicides proved, cut their own throats. Through their faith they had outrun their every scruple, animal or otherwise, and they gloried in the stink of it-in the numbing smell of losing oneself in the mastery of another.

The Aspect-Emperor.

But how? How could any one man command such mad extremes in men? Zsoronga had said that it was a matter of intellect, that Men were little more than children in the presence of the Anasыrimbor-this was what Drusas Achamian, the Wizard-Exile, had claimed.

But who could be such a fool? And short of heaven how could such an intellect be? Eskeles had claimed that his soul was the God's soul in small, that divinity was the cipher. If a man were to think the thoughts of a god, would not Men be as children before him?

What if the world really was about to end?

Through the course of his ruminations, Sorweel's gaze had waded across the pavilion's chaotic interior, insensible to the sights they chanced upon. He found himself staring at the grand black-and-gold tapestry that dominated the far wall, reaching to the pavilion's highest recesses. At first his eyes rebelled-something about the brocaded patterns defeated his ability to focus. Absent scrutiny, it had seemed to consist of abstract geometric designs, not so different from the Kianene rugs his father had hung in their chambers. But now, each shape he glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, found itself undone by the natural play of eyes discerning figures. At every turn, the lines, be they ruler straight or twined into curlicues, betrayed the representations they seemed to constitute. Everything was yanked short of sense, held in a kind of puzzling in-between. And when he averted his gaze, looked through the sideways lense of his periphery, the almost-figures appeared to resolve into patterned strings, as though they were unreadable sigils of some kind…

Sorcerous, he realized with a shudder of dread. The tapestry was sorcerous.

Raised on a low dais, the Great Ordeal's twin Exalt-Generals sat to either side of the towering arras, their seats turned so they faced both the long table and the rising crowd of caste-nobles. Of the two, King Proyas seemed the more refined, not for any nicety of his garb or ornament, but because of the austerity of his demeanour. Where he looked out over the bustling tiers with stern curiosity, nodding and smiling at those who caught his gaze, the King of Eumarna fairly glared. There was piety and confidence in King Saubon's look, to be sure, but there was a miserly, embittered air as well, as if he had won his stature at too great a cost and so continually found himself returning to the scales, seeking to weigh what he had lost.

Several Schoolmen sat at the table below them: an old bearded man wearing robes similar to Eskeles, only trimmed in gold; a Nilnameshi with ringed nostrils and tattooed cheeks; a stately silver-haired man dressed in voluminous black; and an ancient blind man, whose skin seemed as translucent as sausage rind. "The Grandmasters of the Major Schools," Eskeles explained, obviously watching his wandering gaze. Sorweel had guessed as much; what surprised him was the sight of Anasыrimbor Serwa in their midst, wearing a plain white gown that seemed all the more alluring for its high-necked modesty. Young-implausibly so. Flaxen hair drawn back in a braid that began in the small of her back. The incongruity of her presence would have looked absurd had she not so obviously carried the otherworldly stamp of her father's blood.

"Striking, no?" the Mandate Schoolman continued in a lowered voice. "The Aspect-Emperor's daughter, and Grandmistress of the Swayal Compact. Serwa, the Ladywitch herself."

"A witch…" Sorweel murmured. In Sakarpic, the word for witch was synonymous with many things, all of them wicked. That it could be applied to someone so exquisite in form and feature struck him as yet another Three Seas obscenity. Nevertheless, he found his gaze lingering for the wrong reasons. The word seemed to pry her open somehow, make her image wanton with tugging promise.

"Ware her, my King," Eskeles said with a soft laugh. "She walks with the Gods."

This was an old saying from the legend of Suberd, the legendary King who tried to seduce Aelswл, the mortal daughter of Gilgaцl, and so doomed his line forever. The fact that the Schoolman could quote the ancient Sakarpi tale simply reminded Sorweel that he had been a spy-and remained one still.

Serwa's older brothers, Kayыtas and Moлnghus, sat on the opposite side of the long table, with a dozen other Southron generals that Sorweel did not recognize. As before he was struck by the difference between the two brothers, the one slender and fair, the other broad and dark. Zsoronga had told him the rumour: that Moлnghus was not a true Anasыrimbor at all, but rather the child of the Aspect-Emperor's first wife-Serwa's namesake, the one who had been hung with the Anasыrimbor on the Circumfix-and a Scylvendi wayfarer.

At first this struck Sorweel as almost laughably obvious. When the seed was strong, women were but vessels; they bore only what men planted in them. If a boy-child was born white-skinned, then his or her father was white-skinned, and so on, down to all the particularities of form and pigment. The Anasыrimbor simply couldn't be Moлnghus's true father, and that was that. It had been a revelation of sorts to realize the Men of the Circumfix, without exception, overlooked this plain fact. Eskeles even referred to Moлnghus as a "True Son of the Anasыrimbor" forcefully, as though the wilful application of a word could undo what the world had wrought.

But another glimpse of the madness that had seized these men.

The Interval tolled, its resonant sound eerie because of the way it passed through the pavilion. The last of the stragglers filed in, three long-haired Galeoth, a lone Conriyan, and a contingent of goateed Khirgwi or Kianene-Sorweel still had difficulty telling them apart. Dozens of men still shuffled along the various tiers searching for gaps or friends, including two Nansur who shimmed past their knees with fierce yet apologetic smiles. The pavilion took on the open roar of men attempting to press in final comments and observations, a stacking of voices that was progressively doused into murmurs.

It would have reminded Sorweel of Temple-were it not for the skidding sense of doom.

"Tell me, your Glory," Eskeles muttered close in his ear. His breath smelled of sour milk. "When you look into these faces, what do you see?"

Sorweel thought the question so strange that he glared at the sorcerer, suspecting some kind of joke at his expense. But the fat man's friendly expression shouted otherwise. He was genuinely curious. The young King found this alarming in a vague way, like a spontaneous and inexplicable pain. "Gulls," he heard himself blurt. "Gulls and fools!"

The Mandate Schoolman chuckled, shook his head like someone too familiar with the ways of conceit not to be amused.

The Interval's second sounding hung prickling in the avid air, soaking all other noise. Sorweel saw faces turn in curiosity across the tiers, at first to one another, then, as though bent to some singular will, to the pavilion floor…

He failed to see the prick of light at first, perhaps because his gaze shied from the eye-twisting planes of the arras. Some twenty Shrial Knights, resplendent in white and silver and gold, had taken up positions across the front of the dais, accompanied by three of the surviving Nascenti, the first of the Aspect-Emperor's disciples, clad entirely in silken black. It was the shadows thrown from the shoulders of these newcomers that drew his eyes to the glittering point behind them.

It twinkled at first, like a star watched with tired eyes. But it resolved, became more dense with blank incandescence. The Interval tolled again, deeper this time, like the boom of faraway thunder drawn into a string. The braziers wheezed into strings of smoke. Skirts of gloom fell from the tented heights.

A sloped landscape of faces-bearded, painted, clean-shaven-watched.

Seven heartbeats of soundless thunder.

Blinking brilliance… and there he was.

He sat cross-legged, but not upon any surface Sorweel could see, his forehead bowed to the spear-point of his hands, which had been pressed, elbows out, together in prayer. A halo shone about his crownless head, like a golden, ethereal plate, laying at an angle behind his scalp. The image of him seemed to scald unblinking eyes.

A murmuring wave passed through the Lords of the Ordeal: furtive exclamations of joy and wonder. Sorweel cursed himself for clasping his chest, for quick breaths drawn through a throat like a burning reed.

Demon! he cried to himself, trying to summon his father's face in his soul's eye. Ciphrang!

But the Aspect-Emperor was speaking, his voice so broad, so simple and obvious, that gratitude welled through the young King of Sakarpas. It was a beloved voice, almost but not quite forgotten, here at last to soothe the anxious watches, to heal the sundered heart. Sorweel understood none of the words, and Eskeles sat slack and dumbstruck, apparently too overawed to translate. But the voice-the voice! Somehow spoken to many, and yet intended only for one, for him, for Sorweel alone, out of all the hundreds, the thousands! You, it whispered. Only you… A mother's scolding cracked into laughter by love. A father's coaxing crimped into tears by pride.

And then, just when this music had wholly captured him, the assembled Lords of the Ordeal crashed into it with a booming chorus. And Sorweel found himself understanding the words, for they belonged to the first thing Eskeles had taught him in Sheyic, the Temple Prayer…

Sweet God of Gods,

Who walk among us,

Hallowed are your many names…

And somehow, through the entirety of the recitation, the Anasыrimbor's voice remained distinct, like a thread of milk in slow-curling waters. Sorweel pinched his lips into a line, steeled himself against the pitch of collective voices-against the tidal urge to pray with. At that moment, he understood what it meant to look out while others bowed their faces in worship. The groping of unanswered expectations, clammy and intangible. The fouled sense of defiance, like the sin of creeping awake through a house of sleepers. He exchanged a look with Zsoronga and saw in his eyes a more caustic version of his own bewildered dissent.

They were the fools here, not because they dared stand in the company of kneelers, but because being a fool consisted of no more than being thought so by others.

The chorus trailed into ringing silence.

His head bowed beneath a nimbus of gold, the Aspect-Emperor hung in a honey glow.

"Ishma tha serara!" one of the Nascenti, little more than a black silhouette before the image of his master, hollered to the darkest pockets of canvas. "Ishma tha-"

"Raise your faces," Eskeles hissed almost inaudibly, apparently recalling his interpretive duties. "Raise your faces to the gaze of our Holy Aspect-Emperor."

"What does he me-?" Sorweel began asking the sorcerer, but the flash of warning in the man's eyes silenced him. Scowling, Eskeles nodded toward the Aspect-Emperor. There… his expression said.

Look only there.

A breathless intensity slipped about the neck of the proceedings, a mingling of hope and anxiousness that Sorweel felt only as fear. Without exception, the assembly turned to the Anasыrimbor, so that all eyes reflected the white points of his otherworldly light. Only the twin demon heads, bound by their hair to the Anasыrimbor's girdle, stared off in contrary directions.

The Aspect-Emperor floated out over the Table of Potentates, his legs still crossed, his simple white cassock the one thing gleaming to a fixed light. He moved so slowly that at first Sorweel blinked at the unreality of it. The Lords of the Ordeal followed his passage, angling their faces with near perfection, so that no shadows marred their features. Soft light combed through their beards and moustaches, shimmered across their finery. Something, a sub-audible rumbling, accompanied his movement, a noise like slow-sailing thunderheads.

Sorweel almost coughed with relief when the impossible figure veered to the opposite side of the pavilion. Soon the Anasыrimbor hung luminous before the shadowy Men, no more than two lengths away, scrutinizing them as he followed the tier's line at a beetle's crawl. Sorweel saw faces squint as though expecting a sudden blow. But most stared back with lunatic poise-some rejoicing, others proclaiming, and still others confessing-confessing above all.

Tear-scored cheeks shimmered in the passing light. Grown men, warlike men, wept in the wake of their sovereign's divine passage…

The Aspect-Emperor paused.

The man beneath his gaze was an Ainoni, or so Sorweel guessed from the styling of his square-cut beard, ringlets about flattened braids. He sat on one of the lower tiers, and rather than descend, the Aspect-Emperor simply tilted in his floating posture to study him. The rings of light about his head and hands gilded the man's face and shoulders with a patina of gold. The caste-noble's dark eyes glittered with tears.

"Ezsiru," the Aspect-Emperor began in a voice that seemed to coil about Sorweel's ears, "ghusari histum mar-"

Leaning until his beard brushed Sorweel's shoulder, Eskeles whispered, "Ezsiru, since your father, Chinjosa, kissed my knee during the First Holy War, ever has House Musammu been a bastion of the Zaudunyani. But the feud between you and your father has festered too long. You are too harsh. You do not understand the difference between the infirmities of youth and the infirmities of age. So you play father to your father, punish his weaknesses the way he once punished yours…"

One of the demon heads began opening and closing its white mouth like a fish. Horrified, Sorweel saw the glimmer of needle-teeth.

"Ezsiru, tell me, is it right that the father take the rod to the child?"

A throaty answer. "Yes."

"Is it right that the child take the rod to the father?"

A pause that tugged a pang from the back of Sorweel's throat. "No," Ezsiru said, his voice pitched high through phlegm and sobbing.

"Love him, Ezsiru. Honour him. And always remember that old age is rod enough."

Onward the Aspect-Emperor moved, floating no more than a length before pausing before another Lord of the Ordeal, this one Nilnameshi. "Avarartu… hetu kah turum pah-"

On and on it continued, each exchange at once momentary and interminable, as though the timelessness of the consequences had somehow soaked backward into the act. And in each case, nothing more than some human truth was summoned forth, as though the Anasыrimbor need only look into the face of one who stumbled to set every man in attendance upon sure footing. How the loss of a wife exempted you from the laws of manliness. How shame at being thought a fool made fools of us all in the end. How cruel natures corrupted piety into excuses to indulge their evil.

Truth. Nothing more than truth.

And the sheer clarity of it bewildered Sorweel, shook him as deeply as anything since the death of his father and the humiliation of his people. Truth! The Anasыrimbor spoke only truth. How? How could a demon do such a thing? What demon would?

And how? How could such a thing be…

Be miraculous?

Sorweel's heart began pacing the Aspect-Emperor's arcane transit once he reached the apex of the horseshoe and began moving toward them. Dread cinching his chest, he watched the expressions of those who believed, upturned and rapt, brightening as he soundlessly passed, then falling into shadow. The floating figure drew closer and closer, as inexorable as an equation, as bright as a prison window, until Sorweel's heart seemed to be beating against him. Finally, the Aspect-Emperor slowed, came to a hissing stop no more than two lengths away. He tilted back on an invisible axis to regard someone on the highest tier.

"Impalpotas, habaru-"

"Impalpotas," Eskeles said with a quaver, "tell me, how long has it been since you were dead?"

A collective intake of breath. The man called Impalpotas sat four people abreast of Sorweel-three of Eskeles-and two rows higher. The young King of Sakarpus found himself peering against the shining proximity of the Anasыrimbor: The Inrithi had the clean-shaven look of a Nansur but seemed different in dress and hair. A Shigeki, Sorweel guessed. Like Porsparian.

"Impalpotas…" the Aspect-Emperor repeated.

The man smiled like a rake caught wooing a friend's daughter-an expression so at odds with the circumstances that Sorweel's stomach reeled as if pitched from a cliff.

Impalpotas leapt-no, exploded-from the tiers, sword out and flashing in divine light. A crack of voice greeted him in the interval, a word shouted beneath the skins of all present. Bald and searing light flooded the pavilion to the seams. Sorweel blinked against the glare, saw the Shigeki hanging before the Anasыrimbor, pinned to nothing, encased in a calligraphy of blinding lines. Impalpotas's sword had dropped from nerveless fingers and now lay upright between the feet of a Conriyan on the bottom tier, its point buried into carpet and turf the depth of a palm.

The assembly broke out in roaring commotion. Like fire across desert scree, outrage leapt from face to face, a wrath too feral to be called manly. Beards opened about howls. Swords were brandished across the rows, like shaking teeth.

The Anasыrimbor's voice did not so much cut through the din as harvest it-the uproar collapsed like wheat about the scythe of his declaration. "Irishi hum makar," he said, continuing to scrutinize those seated before him. Save for his tongue and lips, he had not moved.

Eskele's stunned and stammering voice was several heartbeats in translating. "Be-behold our foe."

The Shigeki assassin had sailed out around the Aspect-Emperor and now floated behind his haloed head, a brighter beacon. The light that tattooed his skin and clothes flared, and his limbs were drawn out and away from his body. He hung, a different kind of proof, revolving like a coin in open space. He panted like an animal wrapped in wire, but his eyes betrayed no panic, nothing save glaring hate and laughter. Sorweel glimpsed the curve of his erect phallus through his silk breeches, looked away to his sigil-wrapped face, only to be more appalled…

For it flexed about invisible faults, then opened, drawn apart like interlocking fingers. Articulations were pried back and out, revealing eyes that neither laughed nor hated, that simply looked, above shining slopes of boneless meat.

"Rishra mei…" the Aspect-Emperor said in a voice that sounded like silk wrapped about a thunderclap. "I see…" Eskele's murmured in reedy tones, "I see mothers raise stillborn infants to blinded Gods. The death of birth-I see this! with eyes both ancient and foretold. I see the high towers burn, the innocents broken, the Sranc descend innumerable-innumerable! I see a world shut against Heaven!"

The assembly cried out, a cacophony of voices and hand-wringing gestures, piteous for the terror, frightening for the fury. With wild glances Sorweel saw them, the Men of the Ordeal, standing or clutching their knees, their faces cramped as though they listened to news of recent catastrophe. Wives dead. Clans scattered. No! their expressions shouted. No!

"Rishra mei-"

"I see kings with one eye gouged, naked save for the collars from which their severed hands swing. I see the holy Tusk sundered, fragments cast to the flames! Momemn, Meigeiri, Carythusal and Invishi, I see their streets gravelled in bones, their gutters black with old blood. I see the temples overgrown, the broken walls rot over empty, savage ages.

"I see the Whirlwind walk-Mog-Pharau! Tsurumah! I see the No-God…"

Spoken like a groan, like air struck from dead lungs.

"Behold!" the Aspect-Emperor bellowed in tones that ripped nerves from skin, yanked them to the farthest tingling corners. "See!"

The thing-the faceless thing-hung skinned in arcane light. One rotation passed in breathless witness. Another. Then, like smoke inhaled, the brilliant lattice imploded, against the beast, into the beast. The sound of scissions, multiple and immediate, whisked through the air. The sorcerous light winked out. What remained simply dropped, a curtain of slop raining to the ground.

Breathless silence. A return to the holy gloom. It had happened, and it had not happened.

"Rishra mei," the impossible visage said, sweeping his gaze across the astonished tiers. And the silence roared about him. Sorweel could only stare at the severed Ciphrang heads hanging like sacks from his hip, their white mouths laughing or howling.

His haloed palms spread wide, the Aspect-Emperor continued following the same unseen geometric curve. He was so close that Sorweel could see the winding Tusks embroidered white upon white into the hem of his cassock, the three pink lines wrinkling the outside corners of his eyes, the scuff of soil that marked the toe of his left white-felt slipper. He was so close that the image of him burned the surrounding spaces to black, so that the curving tier of forms and faces sunk into void.

The Anasыrimbor.

A scent preceded him, a draft that seemed to brush away the cloying perfumes worn by the more effete attendants. The smell of damp earth and cool rain. Weary truth.

The demons' puckered sockets seemed to watch him-recognize him.

Please! Sorweel found himself thinking, begging. Please let it be Zsoronga!

But the luminous form came to a stop directly before him, too vivid to possess depth, to be framed-to be truly seen. Sorweel's heart stomped against his breast. It seemed that animals thronged within him, that each of his fears had become gibbering terrors, creatures with their own limbs and volitions. What would he see?

How would he punish?

"Sorweel," a voice more melodious than music said in the tongue of his fathers. "Sad child. Proud King. There is nothing more deserving of compassion than an apologetic heart."

"Yes." A noise more kicked out of his lungs than spoken.

Never!

Though he had not moved, though he sat mild and meditative, the Aspect-Emperor somehow towered over every region of sight and sound. Summer-blue eyes, not seeing so much as sacking. Plaited golden beard. Lips shaped about a pit without bottom. The intensity of his presence boiled against the limits of the senses, seeped into the faults, steamed into the unseen recesses…

"Do you repent your father's folly?"

"Yes!" Sorweel lied, his voice cracking for fury.

Demon! Ciphrang! The Goddess names you! Names you!

An old friend's wry smile, as plain and as guileless as a joke about a girl, as sudden as a mother's slap.

"Welcome, young Sorweel. Welcome to the glory that is the God's Salvation. Welcome to the company of Believer-Kings."

Then the godlike figure was gone, floating to his left, searching for the face of another penitent, another troubled soul. Blinking, Sorweel saw the Lords of the Ordeal watching and smiling. The pavilion's embroidered interior seemed to become sky wide with sweet, breathable air.

"Gulls," he heard Eskeles murmur with sarcastic good-nature beside him. "Fools…"

The day wore on with speech, prayer, and debate. Afterwards, the fat Schoolman would cough back tears and hold him, hug him as a mother or a father might hug their son.

Against a desolate backdrop, Zsoronga simply watched, speaking not a word.

Sorweel insisted on walking back to his tent alone.

For a time he made his way in numb peace, simply enjoyed the sense of free calm that often follows tumultuous events. Sometimes the bare fact of time passing is enough to seal us from painful experience. Stripped of worry, warmed by the crimson sun and the wind that had raised so much consternation in the Council of Potentates, he found himself staring at the endless succession of makeshift camps with earnest curiosity. A bowl of tea steaming unaccompanied on the trampled grass. A lone Tydonni repairing a braid in his hair. A forgotten game of benjuka. Shields bracing shields in pairs and trios. Two Nansur muttering and smiling as they oiled the straps of their cuirass.

The awe was not long in coming. There were simply too many warriors from too many nations not to be astonished in some small way. And the field of wind-lashed banners was simply too great. Some of the Inrithi returned his gaze with hostility, some with indifference, others with open cheer, and it struck Sorweel that they were simply Men. They grunted upon their wives, fretted for their children, prayed against rumours of a hungry season. It was what they shared that made them seem remarkable, even inhuman: the omnipresent stamp of the Circumfix, be it in gold or black or crimson. A single purpose.

The Aspect-Emperor.

It was at once glorious and an abomination. That so many could be folded into the intent of a single man.

The calm slipped from his heart and limbs, and the mad rondo of questions began batting through his soul. What had happened at the Council? Did he see? Did he not see? Did he see and merely pretend not to see?

How could he, Sorweel, the broken son of a broken people, shout hate beneath the all-seeing eyes of the Aspect-Emperor, and not be… not be…

Corrected.

He quickened his pace, and the details of his surroundings retreated into half-glimpsed generalities. His left hand strayed to his cheek, to the warm memory of the muck Porsparian had smeared there. To the earthen spit of the Goddess…

Yatwer.

He found Porsparian busy preparing his evening repast. Their small camp bore all the signs of a laborious day. The sum of Sorweel's meagre wardrobe hung across the tent's guy-ropes. The contents of his saddle packs lay across a mat to the left of the tent entrance. The tent, which stood emptied of all its contents, had been washed, its sun-orange panels drying in the failing light. The old Shigeki had even set his small camp stool next to the swirling of their humble fire.

Sorweel paused at the invisible perimeter.

The High Court of the Sakarpic King.

Seeing him, Porsparian scurried to kneel at his feet, a bundle of old brown limbs.

"What did you do?" Sorweel heard himself bark.

The slave glanced up at him, his wrinkled look as resentful as alarmed. Sorweel had never addressed him as a servant, let alone as a slave.

He grabbed the old man's arm, yanked him to his feet with an ease that he found shocking. "What?" he cried. He paused, screwed his face in an expression of frustration and regret, tried to remember the Sheyic words Eskeles had taught him. Surely he could ask this-something as simple as this!

"What you do?" he cried.

A wild look of incomprehension.

Sorweel thrust him back, then maintaining his glare, made a pantomime of taking soil and rubbing it across his cheeks. "What? What you do?"

Like a flutter of wings, Porsparian's confusion flickered into a kind or perverse glee. He grinned, began nodding like a madman confirmed in his delusions. "Yemarte… Yemarte'sus!"

And Sorweel understood. For the first time, it seemed, he actually heard his slave's voice.

"Blessed… Blessed you."