The white-luck warrior

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli

The Company of Scions picked its way across the broad back of Earwa. The days passed without any visible sign of having travelled whatsoever. They had been charged with trolling the grasslands to the southwest with the hope of finding game they could drive back to the Army of the Middle-North. They did not see so much as a hoofprint. They could scarce feed themselves as the days passed, let alone an army.

The Parching Wind continued to blow, kneading scalps and hair with warm fingers, hissing through the dead scrub that bristled the endless plate of the Istyuli. Even though they rode with purpose, it seemed they drifted, such was the expanse surrounding them. The land was devoid of track or direction and so vast that Sorweel often found himself hunching in his saddle-cringing in the dim way of bodily fears. He was bred to the plains, to open endless skies, and even still he felt shrunken, soft, and exposed. Men tend to forget the World's true proportion, to think the paltry measure of their ambition can plumb the horizon. It is a genius of theirs. But some lands, by dint of monumental heights or sheer, stark emptiness, contradict this conceit, remind them that they are never so big as the obstacles the World might raise against them.

For watch after watch, Sorweel rode with the itch of this reminiscence floating within him. No distraction could scratch it away, not even Eskeles at his worst. To his chagrin, the rotund Schoolman insisted on practising language drills no matter who was in their vicinity-Zsoronga and Obotegwa more often than not. On one occasion, the entire company took up his chant, shouting Sheyic numerals across the plains while Sorweel gazed about in despair and disgust. Eskeles seemed to find the spectacle horribly amusing-as did Zsoronga, for that matter.

The Mandate Schoolman proved as much a source of embarrassment as irritation. His mere presence rendered Sorweel a schoolboy, though the man insisted he had been sent as much to chaperone the entire company as to tutor the woefully ignorant King Sorweel of Sakarpus. "The Holy Aspect-Emperor takes his enemies seriously," the sorcerer said with a glib twinkle in his eye, "and his enemies take their children seriously." Sorweel found the comment at once laughable and troubling. Eskeles, with his foppish Three Seas beard and portly stature, not to mention his lack of armour or weaponry, seemed almost absurdly defenceless and ineffectual-another soft-pawed leuneraal. And yet Sorweel had no reason to doubt the truth of what he said, that he had been sent to safeguard their company-especially after witnessing the sorcerous destruction of Sakarpus.

At night, Sorweel could almost pretend, when he kept his eyes hooked to the starry heavens, that none of what happened had happened, that the droning voices belonged to his father and his uncles, not the sons of exotic lands and distant kings. This was the time of the Lioning, when the Saglanders planted their crops, and when the male members of House Varalt and their boonsmen rode out into the mountains in search of puma. Since his twelfth summer he had accompanied his father and his uncles, and he adored every moment of it, even though his youth chained him to the hunting camp with his cousins. And he loved nothing more than lying with his eyes closed, listening to his father speak before the late-night fire, not as a king but as a man among others.

The Lioning was how he learned his father was truly funny… and genuinely beloved by his men.

So he would lie with these memories, curl about their warmth. But whenever it seemed he could believe, some dread would lurch out of the nethers and the pretense would blow away like smoke before gusting apprehensions. Zsoronga. The Aspect-Emperor. And the Mother — the Mother most of all.

One question more than any other dominated the crowded commons of his soul. What? What does She want? And it would be the "She" who appalled him the most, who filled his bowel with nervous water. She. Yatwer. The Mother of Birth…

He spent many sleepless watches simply hefting the vertiginous weight of this fact in his thoughts. He found it strange the way one could kneel, even pray with sobbing intensity, and yet never ponder, let alone comprehend, what lay behind the ancient names. Yatwer… What did that holy sound mean? The priests of the Hundred were dark and severe, every bit as harsh as the Tusk Prophets they took as their examples. They brandished the names of their Gods the way stern fathers raised whips: obedience was all they asked for, all they expected. The rest fell out of their hard readings of hard scriptures. For Sorweel, Yatwer had always been dark and nebulous, something too near the root of things, too aboriginal, not to be filled with the sense of peril belonging to sudden knives and fatal falls.

All children come to temple with a fear of smallness, which the priests then work and knead like clay, shaping it into the strange reconciliation-to-horror that is religious devotion, the sense of loving something too terrible to countenance, too hoary to embrace. When he thought about the world beyond what his eyes could see, he saw souls in their innumerable thousands with only frayed threads to hold them, dangling over the gaping black of the Outside, and the shadows moving beneath, the Gods, ancient and capricious, reptilian with indifference, with designs so old and vast that there could only be madness in the small eyes of Men.

And none were so old or so pitiless as the dread Mother of Birth.

That was what her name was: childhood terror.

To be pinched between such things! Yatwer and the Aspect-Emperor… Gods and Demons. Somehow he had been pulled into the world's threshing wheels, the grinding immensities-small wonder he had been so eager to escape the clamour of the Great Ordeal! Small wonder the travelling sway of his pony, Stubborn, carried the promise of deeper escape.

He posed the question to Zsoronga and his impromptu court one night, careful to conceal the intensity of his interest. Fires were of course forbidden, so they sat side by side facing south, alternately staring into their hands and into the starry heavens: the Kings and Princes of lands cowed but not quite conquered by the New Empire, yearning for homes thrown far over the night horizon. Obotegwa sat dutifully behind them, translating when needed. If anything spurred Sorweel in his language lessons with Eskeles, it was the burden his stupidity had become for the wise old Obligate.

They had been discussing omens and portents, how more and more signs seemed to inveigh against the Aspect-Emperor-none more so than the persisting drought. Charampa, in particular, was convinced that the Anasurimbor Dynasty's doom was imminent. "They overreach! Think of their gall! How could they not be punished? I ask you! I ask you!"

Tzing seemed inclined to agree, and as always, no one could fathom Tinurit's opinion-or whether his smile was in fact a sneer, for that matter. Zsoronga, however, remained skeptical.

"What happens," Sorweel finally ventured, "if we fail the Gods simply because we don't know what they demand?"

"Ka sircu alloman…" Obotegwa began droning from behind him.

"Damnation," Tzing replied. "The Gods care nothing for our excuses."

"No," Zsoronga snapped, loud enough to pre-empt Charampa's eager reply. "Only if we fail to properly honour our ancestors. The Heavens are like palaces, Horse-King. One does not need the King's permission to enter."

"Pfah!" Charampa cried, as much to avenge his interruption as otherwise, Sorweel suspected. "Here I thought the Zeumi were too sensible to believe that Inrithi nonsense!"

"No. It is not Inrithi nonsense. Honouring ancestors is far older than the Thousand Temples. You Cingi are as bad as the sausages…" Zsoronga turned to the young King of Sakarpus. "Family survives death. Don't let this fool tell you different."

"Yes…" Sorweel replied, listening far too keenly to what was said. This was what it meant to be a conquered people, a part of him realized: to turn to the foreign beliefs of foreign peoples. "But what if your… your family is damned?"

The Successor-Prince watched him appreciatively. "Trempe us mar-"

"Then you must do everything in your power to discover what the Gods do want. Everything. "

Though Zsoronga was not overtly pious, Sorweel knew from previous discussions that the Zeumi had a far different way, not so much of conceiving life and death, as valuing them, a way that made them seem zealots on occasion. Even the peculiarities of Obotegwa's interpretations revealed as much: the Zeumi used two versions of the same word to speak of life and death, words that roughly translated into "small life" and "great life," with death being the latter.

"Otherwise?"

The Successor-Prince looked at Sorweel as if he were searching for something.

Grounds for trust?

"Otherwise you are lost."

The World seems greater in the morning, and Men smaller. The ground shrank beneath the rising sun, scalded into white blindness, so that it seemed they woke on the very edge of creation. Raised hands shielded eyes. Broke-back grasses cast shadows like black wire.

Sorweel had grown up in this country; its imprint lay deep in his soul, so deep that simply looking at it braced him, like legs and a wide stance for his soul. Even still, it dizzied him to think how far they had ridden beyond the Pale. He had been educated, of course, and so knew the Pale for what it was: the northern terminus of Sakarpic power, and not the point where waking reality tipped into nightmares. But the superstitions of the rabble had a way of steaming upward, of soaking the more worldly understanding of the nobility. Despite his tutors, the Pale remained a kind of moral boundary in his imagination, the line that marked the fading of the good and the gathering of what was evil. Enough to catch his breath when he thought of the miles between him and his holy city. For a company as small as theirs to ride the emptiness as they did, a nagging part of him insisted, was nothing short of madness.

If anything silenced these worries, it was his growing respect for Captain Harnilas. He had not thought much of Old Harni at first. Like many other Scions, he had tried to detest the man, if not for who he was, then for what he represented. Diminishing others is ever the way men raise themselves, and the might of the Aspect-Emperor was such, the glory and the competence of the Kidruhil so obvious, that petty targets like Harnilas seemed to be the only ones remaining.

But the Captain was nothing if not dogged in his warlike wisdom. Gruff. Bearded in manner, even though he shaved like so many of his Nansur countrymen. His scars picked up where his wrinkles left off so that his face seemed tattooed with different sigils depending on the angle and intensity of the light. He so obviously cared so little for what his wards thought of him that they could not but esteem him.

"In Zeum," Zsoronga once said, "we call men like him nukbaru, masons… stone-hewers…" After Obotegwa finished translating, the Successor-Prince nodded toward the head of their small column. "Our Captain."

When Sorweel asked him why, Zsoronga smiled and said, "Because to hew stone you must be stronger than stone."

"Or smarter," Eskeles had added.

Riding as they did had a way of nursing and smothering conversations. Sometimes they chattered as loudly as wives filing from Temple. Sometimes they rode in desert silence, with only the arrhythmic gait of their ponies to punctuate the perpetual wind. Usually their talk would be momentary, sparking here, fading there, as though a single animate spirit drifted through them all, drawing thought into voice one by one.

The morning of their tenth day of ranging, they embarked in silence and continued riding that way.

They sighted the elk trail before noon, a mottled water-stain across the linen distances, as broad as a valley. They did not reach it until early afternoon, a thin file of cavalrymen picking their way across land battered by a thousand thousand hoofs, a trail as great as any of the World's enormities.

Sorweel cursed himself for a fool, such was his relief.

The following day began the same as any other. The elk trail continued its southern arc, resembling the imprint of a curved sword left overlong in the grass, only writ across the entire landscape. The Scions filed through its great trampled heart, silent save for the clank of gear and the warbling of one or two desultory conversations. Even Charampa seemed disinclined to speak. Sorweel rocked in his saddle like the others, listening to the sweep of wind and the low ghost noises it made when it caught his ears.

The first shouts came from the head of the column: a pair of vultures had been sighted to their left. The entire company rode perched in their saddles, fingers pointing, eyes scanning the wandering line of the eastern horizon. The plain seemed to curl and fold more and more as it diminished in the haze, like a mangy carpet kicked against a wall. The sky rose high and endless above.

"We've found our herd!" Obotegwa cried, translating Zsoronga's jubilant words.

Sorweel blinked and squinted, his face angled against the sun's glare. He found and tracked the two floating specks-even glimpsed the bar of wings riding faraway winds. Before he knew what he was doing, he spurred Stubborn into a gallop. The pony leapt into its stride with almost doglike exuberance. The Scions watched with curiosity and amusement as he pounded to the fore of the line. Captain Harnilas was already scowling at him when he reined Stubborn to a reluctant halt.

"Merus pah veuta je ghasam!" the old cavalryman shouted.

"Captain!" Sorweel cried in Sheyic. With a sweeping gesture he directed the man's grizzled attention toward the horizon. Then as emphatically as he could he spoke the one word that transcended all the languages of Men.

"Sranc."

He matched the officer's hard gaze, noticing, not for the first time, the scar on his left cheek, burn-puckered as though he had once shed a fiery tear. For the first time he saw the small soapstone figurines hanging about his neck: three children joined at the hands and feet, chipping across his cuirass. A strange sense of recognition welled through the young King, a realization that Harnilas, despite his exotic complexion and furious brown eyes, was not so different than his father's boonsmen, that he chambered his heart, as so many warlike men did, to keep his sense clear of his compassion. Harnilas loved, as all men loved, in the cracks and crevices of a warring world.

Eskeles finally trotted into earshot, gasping as though his pony had ridden him instead of otherwise. Sorweel turned to the Schoolman. "Tell him to study those birds carefully. Tell him that they're storks — the most holy of birds. Tell him that storks only follow Sranc on the plain."

Eskeles frowned in his thoughtful way, then relayed the information to Captain Harnilas. Aside from a quick glance at the sorcerer he continued to watch Sorweel intently.

"Sranc," the Captain repeated. The leathery face turned to squint at the specks floating in the distant sky.

Sorweel pursed his lips and nodded.

"The bird is holy."

"Your tutor argues that the Sranc should be left to him," old Obotegwa explained, "so that no lives need be lost. Harnilas disagrees. He thinks the Scions need… practice, even at the cost of lives. Better to begin with an easy blooding, he says, than a hard one."

They had gradually closed on the high-circling storks over the course of the afternoon, taking care to remain upwind and to use the creases in the broken plain to keep their approach hidden. If Sorweel had entertained any fears regarding Harnilas, they had been allayed by the patient sensibility of his tactics and the thoughtless ease with which he exercised his command. After ascertaining the direction of their march, he angled their pursuit to better intercept their trail: they now knew they followed a warband of some three hundred-a number too small to suggest a migrating clan. They had almost been sighted twice now, crossing the crest of some knoll at the same time as their inhuman quarry, but they had managed to close within a mile of the warband. The sun had smouldered into evening, scorching the western horizon gold and crimson. Now the Company of Scions sheltered in a trough of cool shadow, watching Eskeles argue with their Captain.

The afternoon had been tense, certainly, but far more thrilling than anything else. With the possible exception of the Scylvendi, Tinurit, the Scions rode with grins whipped across their face. A kind of glee had possessed them, one that sparked low snorts of laughter whenever glances were exchanged, childlike in that sneaking way, murderous in its ultimate intent. For his own part, Sorweel felt none of the fear, not a whisper of the cowardice that he had thought would unman him. A limb-gripping eagerness filled him instead, a will to ride down and kill. Even his pony, Stubborn, seemed to sense the impending violence-and to welcome it.

Of course Eskeles was intent on ruining everything. Blasphemer, Sorweel found himself thinking.

Sorweel had no real idea how much influence his tutor wielded; Mandate Schoolmen were rumoured to be more powerful than Judges, but whether this extended to the field, or to Kidruhil Companies particularly, he did not know. He could only hope that their surly old Captain prevailed. Harnilas did not strike him as a particularly political man-which was probably why he had been given the Scions in the first place. Sorweel's father had told him several times that intriguing killed far more men on the field than otherwise.

The two middle-aged men waved hands and shouted for several moments more, then Eskeles apparently said something either too clever or too impertinent. Harnilas stood in his stirrups and began thundering at the sorcerer, who fairly wilted before the savage display. Sorweel found himself laughing with Zsoronga and Obotegwa.

"Fool!" Eskeles cried in corpulent exasperation as he rejoined them. "The man is a fool!"

"Practice-practice," Sorweel sang, mimicking the tone the Schoolman took whenever he groaned about language drills. "You're the one always saying the easy way is never the proper way."

Zsoronga chortled at Obotegwa's translation. The Schoolman glared at Sorweel for an angry moment, then collected himself with a harried smile. He looked up to the storks circling high above a crest that bowled the earth before them. Their white spans carried sunset gold. "I pray you prove me right, my King. I really do."

A chill seemed to creep into the shadow.

Once decided, their pursuit became determined. At Harnilas's gestured command they fell into wedge formation, rode the rising and falling knolls like a loose-jointed raft on ocean swells. They trotted to prevent winding their horses, a pace that allowed for more than a little excited chatter, though the anxiousness of cresting each rise knocked them into gazing silence.

"They don't move," Zsoronga said through Obotegwa. "Why? Have they seen us?"

"Could be," Sorweel replied, fighting against the breathlessness that pinched his voice. "Or they could be resting… Sranc prefer the night. Sun exhausts them."

"Then why not use the high ground, where they can keep watch?"

"The sun," he repeated, speaking through a pang of sudden apprehension. "They hate the sun."

"And we hate the night… which is why we double our watches."

The Sakarpi King nodded. "But no Man has walked this land for thousands of years, remember. Why should they keep watch for myths and legends?"

His earlier eagerness seemed to slip out of him, plummet through the soles of his boots. They climbed a slope, riding into their shadows at an angle to the dust that pealed away from them. Everywhere he looked he saw ground, and yet it seemed he rode the lip of a perilous chasm. Vertigo leaned out from him, threatened to pull him from his saddle. There was no certainty, he realized. Anything could happen on the field of war.

Anything.

A keening noise climbed into the earthen thunder of their advance, high and ragged, as though cutting the throats that were its crying origin. The storks seemed to hang in the air directly above them, lines of virgin white etched in the sun. The Scions swung through the shadow of the shallow basin, scraping through a haze of brush and dead grasses, then raced upward. The knoll's crown met their rush. The sun broke across their backs, crimson flashing from silver and crimson.

The shrieking chorus collapsed into squeals and yammering alarums.

The Sranc mobbed the spaces below them, a putrid congregation scattered across the gap between sunlit summits. Thin white arms yanked at weapons. Faces collapsed into squints of fury. Clan standards-human skulls haired with bison hide-jerked and wagged.

Sorweel did not need to look down the line of his fellows to know their faces. Disbelief is ever the door between young men and murder.

An impossible moment followed, one Sorweel had heard various Horselords mention from time to time. The line of lancers, their helms and mailed sleeves gleaming in the sunlight, stood motionless save for the most anxious of ponies. The Sranc band roiled with shriek and gesture but likewise did not move. The two parties simply regarded each other, not out of hesitation and certainly not for calculation's sake. It was more a warlike equipoise, as if the encounter were a coin spinning in the air, needing only the hard ground of murder to judge.

Sorweel lifted himself forward to whisper in Stubborn's ear: "One and one are one…"

And they were off, shouting the war-cries of a dozen heathen nations, a thundering, trampling line. A flying rake of lance-points. From the stories his father's boonsmen told him, he had expected each heartbeat to last an age, but in fact everything happened fast-far too fast to be terrifying, or exhilarating, or anything, for that matter. One heartbeat, the Sranc were a tangle of sprinting forms before him, skin white, armour black with filth, iron weapons wild in the air. The next heartbeat, he was crashing through them like something thrown. His lance glanced off the corner of a shield, skewered the throat of a wagging creature he had not even seen, let alone intended to kill. The heartbeat after, he was drawing his sword, reining Stubborn about, and hacking. Shrieks and cries and shouts pealed skyward. The dreadful clatter of war.

Seven, maybe eight, threshing heartbeats passed. He wondered at the ease with which sword points punctured faces-no different from practice melons. Otherwise, he was his blade, his horse, dancing between the jabber of pale shadows, raining ruin and destruction. Purple blood jetted, flew black across the dead scrub.

Then it was just the low dust, the clutch of the maimed and the dying, and the cacophony had moved beyond him-continued moving.

He spurred Stubborn in pursuit, glimpsed Zsoronga grinning from a passing saddle.

The surviving Sranc ran before an uneven wave of horsemen, a kind of jerking scramble. Sorweel seized a lance jutting from the ground as he galloped past, leaned into Stubborn's exertions. He quickly overtook the laggards among the Scions, soon found himself in the pounding fore of the pursuit. A crazed grin seized his lips. He howled his people's ancient war-cry, the lung-cracking sound that had marked innumerable such pursuits through the ages.

The Sranc ran, bolting through dead scrub like wolverines, opening the interval between them and the slowest of the Scions-only the quickest of the quick overtook them.

There was joy in the race. His legs and hips had become mere extensions of Stubborn's leaping gallop The ground pouring away like water. His hand gripping his lance, loosely as he had been taught from childhood, floating, tingling as if he held a thunderbolt. He was a Son of Sakarpus, a Horselord, and this-this! — was his calling. He struck with a viciousness that seemed holy for its thoughtlessness. One in the neck, rolling limbs akimbo into caged bracken. Another in the heel, left limp-running, mewling like a knifed cat. Anything he overran he instantly forgot, knowing that the pounding wall behind him would eat them up.

They scattered and he followed-there was no hiding beneath the shining plains sun. They bent their white faces back to him as he closed, black eyes glittering, features pinched ancient with fear and fury. Their limbs little more than a flutter of shadows in the grass-thatched dust. They coughed. They screamed as they spun falling.

There was joy in the race. Ecstasy in the kill.

One and one were one.

Their victory was complete. Among the Scions, three were fallen, and some nine others were wounded, including Charampa, who took a spear in his thigh. Despite the dark looks thrown by Eskeles, Old Harni was obviously satisfied with his young wards, perhaps even proud of them. Sorweel had witnessed death enough during his city's fall. He knew what it meant to watch familiar faces spit their final breath. But for the first time he experienced the jarring of elation and regret that comes with triumph on the field. For the first time he understood the contradiction that blackens the heart of all martial glory.

His fellows cheered him, clapped his back and shoulders. Zsoronga even embraced him, a kind of madness cackling in his wide green eyes. Stunned, Sorweel climbed the hump of the nearest knoll, stared out across the plains. The sun lay on the horizon, burning crimson through a band of violet, dousing the innumerable crests and low summits in pale orange. He stood and breathed. He thought of his ancient fathers wandering as he did across these lands-killing those who did not belong. He thought of the way his boots rooted him to the earth.

The darkening sky was so broad that it seemed to spin with slow vertigo. The Nail of Heaven glittered.

And the World towered beneath.

That night Harnilas indulged them, knowing that they were boys drunk on the deeds of men. The last of the Ainoni rum was uncorked, and each of them was granted two burning swallows.

They took one of the surviving abominations and staked it to the turf. At first scruples held them back, for among the Scions were more than a few youths of gentle breeding. They would do no more than kick the shrieking creature. Disgusted, Sorweel finally knelt over the Sranc's white head and put out one of its eyes. Some among the Scions hooped and cheered, but more cried out in consternation, even outrage, saying that such torture was a crime against jnan-what they called their effeminate and obscure laws of conduct.

The young King of Sakarpus turned to his fellows in disbelief. The creature thrashed across the ground immediately behind him. Captain Harnilas strode to his side, and all fell silent in expectation.

"Tell them," he said to Sorweel, speaking slowly so that he might understand. "Explain their foolishness to them."

More than eighty faces watched, a moonlit congregation. Sorweel swallowed, glanced at Obotegwa, who simply nodded and stepped to his side…

"They-they come…" he began, only to falter at the sound of Eskeles translating in Obotegwa's stead. "They come in winter, mostly, especially when the ground freezes too hard for them to scrounge the grubs that are their staple. Sometimes in single clans. Sometimes in shrieking hordes. The Towers of the Pale are strong for this reason, and the Horselords have become reavers beyond compare. But every year at least one Tower is overcome. At least one. The Men are slaughtered, mostly. But the women-and the children particularly-are taken for sport. Sometimes we find their severed heads nailed to doors and walls. Little girls. Little boys… Infants. We never find them whole. And their blood is always… thrust from them. Instead of crimson the dead are smeared black… black"-and his voice broke upon this word-"with… seed…"

Sorweel stopped, his face flushed, his fingers trembling. In his fourteenth winter, his father had brought him north on a punitive expedition to see their ancient and implacable enemy first-hand. Hoping to find supplies and accommodation, they had come to a Tower called Grojehald, only to find it sacked. The horrors he had seen there haunted his dreams still.

"We could torment a thousand of these creatures for a thousand years," his father had told him that night, "and we would have repaid but a droplet of the anguish they have visited upon us."

He repeated these words now.

Sorweel was not accustomed to addressing men in numbers, and so he took the silence that followed as a kind of condemnation. When Eskeles continued speaking, he simply assumed the Schoolman tried to undo his foolishness. Then Obotegwa, translating the sorcerer, muttered, "King Sorweel speaks as eloquently as he speaks true." Sorweel was shocked to find he could follow much of what the Mandate Schoolman said.

"Shus shara kum…"

"These are beasts without souls. They are flesh without spirit, obscenities like no other. Each of them is a pit, a hole in the very fundament. Where we possess feelings, where we love and hate and weep, they are void! Cut them. Rend them. Burn and drown them. You can sooner wrong dirt than sin against these vile abominations!"

As strong as these words sounded, Sorweel noticed that most of the Scions continued to regard him rather than the Schoolman, and he realized that what he had thought was condemnation was in fact something entirely different.

Respect. Admiration, even.

Only Zsoronga seemed to watch him with troubled eyes.

The sport began in earnest after that. The Mannish laughter was as shrill as the inhuman screams were crazed.

What was left twitched and glistened in the blood-sodden grasses.

They broke camp discussing the strange absence of vultures, then rode out into the broad light of the plains. To a soul they discussed the previous day's battle, boasting of kills, comparing nicks, and laughing at gaffes. The Scions thought themselves veterans, but their talk remained that of boys. Easy victories, as a Horselord would say, grow no beards.

They recovered the elk trail without difficulty, followed it beneath an afternoon sun rendered small for the gaping horizon. They caught the reek on the wind before seeing anything. It was a wide smell, a rot that reached as far as the air. The vista rose into view in inexorable stages, the far corners, swathes of dun and black and bone, buttressing the line of the horizon, then the welter of nearer regions, too still, too silent. The Company of Scions assembled along the crest of a low ridge, eighty-seven of them abreast, the men slack-faced, the ponies nodding and stamping in equine anxiousness. Their Kidruhil standard, the Black Circumfix and Golden Horse, flapped and waved against endless blue. Aside from coughs and curses, none possessed the will to speak.

Carcasses. Fields of them, dead elk, soaking the dust black.

Vultures hunched like priests beneath cowls or raised wings in imperious accusation. In any given heartbeat, dozens could be seen dropping from the skies across points near and miles away. Their cries rose hoarse through a great buzzing hum: flies, so many they appeared as living smoke across the distances.

An elk carcass lay gutted not far from Sorweel, its gut strewn like rotted clothes. Several feet beyond lay a clutch of three more, ribs cracked out from articulated spines. Beyond that lay another, and yet another, ribs opened like gigantic traps, on and on and on, a thousand circles of gore across the wasted pasture.

Captain Harnilas called out, and the Company of Scions descended the slope in formation, opening only to skirt the carcasses. The nearest vultures screeched at their approach, a kind of reptilian outrage, then took to the wind. Sorweel watched them anxiously, knowing that others could use their ascent to track their progress from miles away.

"What kind of madness is this?" Zsoronga murmured from his side. Sorweel did not need Eskeles's translation to understand.

"Sranc," the Schoolman said, his voice curiously tight. "A Hording…"

Sorweel glimpsed the creatures in his soul's eye, hacking and tearing, stabbing the beasts still living, then coupling with shining wounds. A shrieking landscape of them.

"In ancient days," his Mandate tutor continued, "before the coming of the No-God, the Sranc would continually retreat before hosts too powerful for any one clan to assault. Back and back, clan heaped upon clan. Until their hunger forced them to take game, until their numbers blackened the very earth…"

"And then?" Sorweel asked.

"They attacked."

"So all this time…"

A grim nod. "The clans have been driven before the Great Ordeal and its rumour, accumulating… Like water before the prow of a boat…"

"Hording…" Sorweel repeated, weighing the term on his tongue. "Does Harni know about this?"

"We shall know soon enough," the corpulent Schoolman said. Without further word, he spurred his overtaxed pony to overtake the Kidruhil Captain.

Sorweel allowed his gaze to range across the ground before the Company, saw strings of blood flung across the scree, welters of cracked bone, and skulls, some with the eyes sucked out, others with cheeks chewed away to the snout. No matter where he looked he saw another gory circle.

The largest Sranc clans the Horselords battled rarely numbered more than several hundred. Sometimes a particularly cruel and cunning Sranc chieftain would enslave his neighbours and open warfare would range across the Pale. And the legends were littered with stories of Sranc rising in nations and overcoming the Outermost Holds. Sakarpus itself had been besieged five times since the days of the Ruiner.

But this… slaughter.

Only some greater power could have accomplished this.

Meat sweated in open sunlight. Flies steamed about the scrub and grasses. Cartilage gleamed where not chapped with gore. The stink was raw unto gagging.

"The war is real," he said with dull wonder. "The Aspect-Emperor… His war is real."

"Perhaps…" Zsoronga said after listening to Obotegwa's translation. "But are his reasons?"

"Otherwise you are utterly lost…"

So Zsoronga had said.

Despite the clamour and triumph of the past days, these words continued to sink and to surface through the young King's turbulent soul. He had no reason to doubt them. For all his youth, Zsoronga possessed what the Sakarpi called thil, salt.

The fact was, Yatwer, the patroness of the weak and dispossessed, had chosen him, even though he had been trothed to her brother Gilgaol since his fifth summer, even though he possessed the blood of warriors-even though he was what the Yatwerians called weryild, a Taker, a thief by virtue of his bones. Railing against the absurdity, let alone the shame, of her choice did nothing but prove him worthy of the humiliation. He had been chosen. Now he only needed to know why.

Otherwise…

Porsparian was the obvious answer. It seemed clear now that the slave was a secret priest of some kind. Sorweel had always thought that only women attended to the worldly interests of the Ur-Mother, but he scarce knew anything of the low and mean peoples of his own nation, let alone the ways of those a world away. The more he considered it, the more he felt a fool for not realizing as much earlier. Porsparian had come to him bearing this terrible burden. He was the one to tell him what that burden was and whither it should be borne.

That was, if Sorweel could learn to wrap his tongue and ears around Sheyic.

That night, while the others slept, the young King of Sakarpus rolled to his side on his sleeping mat and, in the way anxious bodies choose small tasks of their own volition, started picking at the grasses before him. Porsparian-his cheeks rutted like withered apples, his eyes like wet chips of obsidian-floated beneath his soul's eye the entire time, spitting fire into his palm, rubbing mud into his cheeks…

Only when he had bared a small patch of earth did Sorweel realize what he was doing: moulding the dread Mother's face the way Porsparian had the day the Aspect-Emperor had declared him a Believer-King. It seemed a kind of crazed game, one of those acts that send the intellect laughing even as the stomach quails.

He could not pinch and mould the way the Shigeki slave had because the earth was so dry, so he raised the cheeks by cupping dust beneath his palms, sculpted the brow and nose with a trembling fingertip. He held his breath clutched and shallow, lest he mar his creation with an errant exhalation. He fussed over the work, even used the edge of his fingernail to render details. It was a numb and loving labour. When he was finished, he rested his head in the crook of his arm and gazed at the thing's shadowy profile, trying to blink away the deranged impossibility of it. For a mad moment, it seemed the whole of the World, all the obdurate miles he had travelled, multiplied on and on in every direction, was but the limbless body of the face before him.

King Harweel's face.

Sorweel hugged his shoulders with a wrestler's fury, grappled with the sobs that kicked through him. "Father?" he cried on a murmur.

"Son…" the earthen lips croaked in reply.

He felt himself bend back… as if he were a bow drawn by otherworldly hands.

"Water," the image coughed on a small cloud of dust, "climbs the prow…"

Eskeles's words?

Sorweel raised a crazed fist, dashed the face into the combed grasses.

– | He neither slept nor lay awake.

He waited in the in-between.

"So all this time?" he heard himself ask Eskeles.

"The clans have been driven before the Great Ordeal and its rumour, accumulating… Like water before the prow of a boat…"

"Hording…"

Sorweel had seen few boats in his life: fishing hulls, of course, and the famed river galley at Unterpa. He understood the significance of the sorcerer's description.

The problem was that the Scions tracked game to the southwest of the Great Ordeal.

So very far from the prow.

He bided his time in turmoil. His body had lost its instinct for breathing, so he drew air in its stead. Never did the sun seem so long in climbing.

"With all due respect, my King…" the sorcerer said with a waking sneer. "Kindly go fuck your elbows."

Eskeles was one of those men who never learned to bridle their temper simply because it was so rare. The sun had yet to breach the desolate line of the east, but the sky was brightening over the scattered sleepers. The sentries watched with frowning curiosity, as did several of the horses. Harnilas was awake as well, but Sorweel did not trust his Sheyic enough to go to him directly.

"The Sranc war-party we destroyed," Sorweel insisted. "It had no sentries posted."

"Please, boy," the corpulent man said. He rolled his bulk away from the young King. "Let me get back to my nightmares."

"It was alone, Eskeles. Don't you see?"

He raised his puffy face to blink at him over his shoulder. "What are you saying?"

"We lie to the southwest of the Great Ordeal… What kind of water piles behind a boat?"

The Schoolman stared at him for a blinking, beard-scratching moment, then with a groan rolled onto his rump. Sorweel helped haul him to his cursing feet and together they went to Harnilas, who was already ministering to his pony. Eskeles began by apologizing for Sorweel, something the young King had no patience for, especially when he could scarce understand what was being said.

"We're tracking an army!" he cried.

Both men looked to him in alarm. Harnilas glanced at Eskeles for a translation, which the Schoolman provided with scarce a glance in the Captain's direction. "What makes you say that?" he asked Sorweel on the same breath.

"These Sranc, the ones who cut down the elk, they are being driven."

"How could you know that?"

"We know this is no Hording," the young King replied, breathing deep to harness his thoughts, which had become tangled for a long night of horror and brooding. "The Sranc, as you said, are even now fleeing before the Great Ordeal, clan bumping into clan, gathering into a hor-"

"So?" Eskeles snapped.

"Think about it," he said. "If you were the Consult… You would know about the Hording, would you not?"

"More than any living," the Schoolman admitted, his voice taut with alarm. For Sorweel, the word Consult as yet possessed little meaning beyond the fear it sparked in the eyes of the Inrithi. But after the incident with the skin-spy in the Umbilicus, he had found it increasingly difficult to dismiss them as figments of the Aspect-Emperor's madness. As with so many other things.

"So they would know not only that the Great Ordeal will be attacked, but when as well…"

"Very possibly," Eskeles said.

Sorweel thought of his father, of all the times he had heard him reason with his subjects, let alone his men. "To be a worthy King," Harweel had once told him, "is to lead, not to command." And he understood that all the bickering, all the discourse he had considered wasted breath, "tongue-measuring," was in fact central to kingship.

"Look," he said. "We all know this expedition is a farce, that Kayutas sent us to patrol a rear flank that would never have been patrolled otherwise simply because we are the Scions-the sons of his father's enemies. We cover territory that a host would otherwise be blind to, territory a cunning enemy could exploit. While patrolling this imaginary flank, we stumble across a war-party with no sentries posted, oblivious enough to find respite in the shade. In other words, we find proof that for this corner of the Istyuli, at least, the Great Ordeal does not exist…"

He trailed to let the Schoolmen complete his translation.

"Then we find the slaughtered elk, something you say Sranc only do when Hording-which we know cannot be the case…"

Sorweel hesitated, looked from man to man, the stern old veteran and the square-bearded sorcerer.

"You have our attention, my King," Eskeles said.

"All I have are guesses…"

"And we are dutifully astounded."

Sorweel looked out over the milling ponies to the vast elk trail, which was little more than the mottling of darker greys across the predawn landscape. Somewhere… Out there.

"My guess," he said, reluctantly turning back to the two men, "is that we've stumbled across some kind of Consult army, one that-" He paused to gulp air and swallow. "One that shadows the Great Ordeal using the elk both to feed itself and to conceal their trail. My guess is they plan to wait until the Great Ordeal comes against the Hording…" He swallowed and nodded as if suddenly recalling some adolescent insecurity. He flinched from an image of his father, speaking dust from the dirt. "Then… then attack the host from behind… But…"

"But what?" Eskeles asked.

"But I'm not sure how this could be possible. The Sranc, they…"

Eskeles and Harnilas exchanged a worried glance. The Captain looked up, gazed at the young King in the fixed manner officers use to humble subordinates. Without breaking eye contact, he said, "Aethum souti sal meretten," to the Mandate Schoolman beside him. Then he continued in Sheyic spoken slowly enough for Sorweel to follow. "So. What would you do?"

The young King of Sakarpus shrugged. "Ride hard for the Aspect-Emperor."

The old officer smiled and nodded, slapped him on the shoulder before bawling for camp to be broken.

"So it is possible?" Sorweel asked Eskeles, who remained beside him, watching with a strange, almost fatherly gleam in his eyes. "The Sranc could be doing what I think?"

The Schoolman crushed his beard into his barrel chest, nodding. "In ancient times, before the coming of the No-God, the Consult would harness the Sranc, chain them into great assemblies that the Ancient Norsirai called Yokes…" He paused, blinking as though to pinch away unwanted memories. "They would drive them the way we drive slaves in the Three Seas, starve them until their hungers reached a fever pitch. Then, when they reached a position where the Sranc could smell Mannish blood on the wind, they would strike the chains and let them run."

Something within the Sakarpi King, a binding of fear and hope, slumped in relief. He almost reeled for exhaustion, as if alarm alone had sustained him through all the sleepless watches.

The Schoolman steadied him with a hand on his shoulder.

"My King?"

Sorweel shook his head to dismiss the sorcerer's worry. He looked out across the morning plain: Sakarpus could be directly behind him instead of weeks away, for all the difference the horizon made.

"The Captain…" he said, returning the sorcerer's gaze. "What did he say to you just then?"

"That you possess the gifts of a great king," Eskeles replied, squeezing his shoulder the way his father had, whenever he took pride in his son's accomplishments.

Gifts? something within him wanted to cry. No…

Only things that the dirt had told him.