The white-luck warrior

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

The shadows of missing things are always cold. And for Varalt Sorweel so very much was missing.

Like the way his mother would read to him in bed or how his father would pretend to lose finger-fights to him. Like laughter or hope.

Loss is at once memory-that is the kernel of its power. If you were to lose the memory with the person-the way Eskeles had said Nonmen lose-then loss would be complete, utter, and we could carry on oblivious. But no. The pain dwells in the balance of loss and retention, in losing and knowing what was lost. In being two incommensurate people, one with a father and mother, and one without. One with pride and honour…

And one without.

So the old him had continued to come up with jokes, questions, and observations to share with his father. Harweel had talked often with his son. While the new him, the orphan, would shiver, teeter, inner fingers groping for lost handholds. And that recognition, the crashing, all-encompassing cold, would strike him as if for the first time…

Your father is dead. Your people are slaves.

You are alone, a captive in the host of your enemy.

But the paradox, some would say tragedy, of human existence is that we so easily raise our lives about absence. We are bred for it. Men are forever counting their losses, hoarding them. There is meaning to be found in victimization, and no small justification. To be wronged is to be owed, to walk among debtors wherever you go.

But now even that embittered and self-righteous persona was missing… that boy.

Sorweel awoke tangled in fragmentary glimpses of the previous night. The last frantic moments with Eskeles, stranded in the very gut of Hell, the face of Serwa, hanging above a world painted in light and the shadows of spitting, gibbering violence…

Then Zsoronga's dark and handsome face, smiling in haggard joy.

"You took a knock on the head, Horse-King. Good thing you have more skull than brain!"

White-weathered canvas framed the Successor-Prince with dull brilliance. Sorweel raised a hand as if to block out the sight of him, tried to say something snide but choked on his own throat instead. His entire body buzzed with the deprivations of the previous weeks. He felt like a wineskin squeezed to its final pulpy dregs…

The alarm, when it came, wrenched him upright…

The Horde. The Ordeal. Eskeles.

"Ho!" Zsoronga cried, nearly toppling backward from his stool.

Sorweel glanced about the stifling confines of his tent, glaring with the urgent stupor of those worried they still dream. The canvas planes glowed with heat. The entrance flap wagged in the breeze, revealing a sliver of baked earth. Porsparian huddled in the corner next to the threshold, watching with a look that was at once wary and forlorn.

"Your slave…" Zsoronga said with a dark look at the Shigeki. "I fear I tried to beat the truth out of him."

Sorweel tried to focus on his friend, felt his eyes bulge for the effort. Something malodorous hung in the air, a smell he had breathed too long to identify. "And?" he managed to cough.

"The wretch fears powers greater than me."

The young King of Sakarpus rubbed his eyes and face, lowered his hands to consider the blood worn into the whorls of his palms. "The others?" he asked roughly. "What happened to the others?"

The question snuffed what remained of his friend's hilarity. Zsoronga explained how he and the others had continued riding hard for General Kayutas, how the treachery of the ground and fugitive exhaustion pulled them down one by one. Captain Harnilas was among the first to fall. A burst heart, Zsoronga assumed, given the way his pony had seized mid-stride. He never saw what became of Tzing. Only he, Tinurit, and four others managed to outdistance the Ten-Yoke Legion, only to be assailed by more Sranc-these from the Horde. "That was when the longbeards saved us…" he said, his voice limping about his disbelief. "Zaudunyani Knights. Agmundrmen, I think they were."

Sorweel regarded his friend in the silence that followed. Zsoronga no longer wore the crimson tunic and golden cuirass of a Kidruhil officer. He had donned, rather, the apparel and regalia of his native Zeum: a battle-sash cinching a jaguar-skin kilt and a wig consisting of innumerable oiled ringlets-symbolic of something, Sorweel imagined. The fabric and accoutrements seemed almost absurdly clean and unused, entirely at odds with the starved, battered, and unwashed form they clothed.

"What about those we left behind," Sorweel asked. "What about Obotegwa?"

"Nothing… But perhaps that's for the best."

The young King wanted to ask what he meant, but it seemed more important to ignore the man's tears.

"The Scions are no more, Sorweel. We are all dead."

They both paused to ruminate. The bindings of the tent complained in a mellow wind. The clamour of the camp seemed to wax and wane with its breezy pulses, as if the sky were a glass that alternately blurred and focused the world's sound.

"And Eskeles?" Sorweel asked, realizing he had only assumed his tutor's survival. "What about him?"

Zsoronga scowled. "He's a fat man in times of famine."

"What?"

"A Zeumi proverb… It means men like him never die."

Sorweel pursed a thoughtful lip, winced at a sudden pain lancing through his sinuses. "Even though they should."

Zsoronga dropped his gaze as if regretting glib words, then looked up with a helpless smile. "Zeumi proverbs tend to be harsh," he said. "We have always preferred the wisdom that cracks heads."

Sorweel snorted and grinned, only to find himself tangled in recriminations of his own. So many dead… Friends. Comrades. It seemed obscene that he should feel amusement, let alone relief and gratification. For weeks they had strived, warred against distance and frailty to accomplish a mortal mission. They had faltered and they had feared. But they had persevered. They had won — and despite the grievous proportions of the toll exacted, that fact cried out with its own demented jubilation.

The Scions had died in glory… undying glory. What was a life of bickering and whoring compared with such a death?

Zsoronga did not share his celebratory sentiment.

"Those who fell…" Sorweel said in the tentative way of friends hoping to balm guessed-at pains. "Few are so lucky, Zsoronga… Truly."

But even as he spoke, the young King understood he had guessed wrong. The Successor-Prince did not grieve those who had fallen, he grieved his own survival… or the manner of it.

"There is another… saying," Zsoronga said with uncharacteristic hesitancy. "Another proverb that you need to know."

"Yes?"

The Successor-Prince levelled his gaze. "Courage casts the longest shadow."

Sorweel nodded. "And what does that mean?"

Zsoronga flashed him the impatient look people give when called upon to elaborate embarrassing admissions. "We Zeumi are a people of deeds," he said on a heavy breath. "We live to honour our dead fathers with wisdom in the court, valour on the fiel-"

"The back door to the heavenly palace," Sorweel interrupted, recalling the man's explanation of Zeumi religion as a kind of spiritual influence-peddling. "I remember."

"Yes… Exactly. The saying means that the courage of one man is the shame of the other…" He pursed his fulsome lips. "And you, Horse-King… What you did…"

The night, the dark, the flurry of passion and dim detail came back to Sorweel. He remembered crying out to his friend the instant after Eskeles crashed to earth…

"Are you saying I shamed you?"

A dour grin. "In the eyes of my ancestors… most certainly."

Sorweel shook his head in disbelief. "I apologize… Maybe if you're lucky, they'll smuggle you in the slave entrance."

The Successor-Prince scowled. "It was a thing of wonder… what you did," he said with disconcerting intensity. "I saw you, Horse-King. I know you called to me… And yet I rode on. " He glared like someone speaking against a mob of baser instincts. "I will be forever finding my way out from your shadow."

Sorweel flinched from the look. His eyes settled on Porsparian where he sat humbled and huddled in the airy grey light…

"Time to seek the company of cowards," he offered weakly.

"The longest shadow, remember?" Zsoronga said, with an air of someone humiliated for his admission of humiliation. "The only way-the only way — to redeem myself is to stand at your side."

Sorweel nodded, did his best to shrug away the clamour of adolescent embarrassment, and to comport himself as a man-as a king of a proud people. Zsoronga ut Nganka'kull, the future Satakhan of High Holy Zeum, was at once apologizing-which was remarkable in and of itself-and begging the most profound of favours: a means of recovering his honour and so securing the fate of his immortal soul.

The young King of Sakarpus offered up his hand, palm up, with his index finger alone extended. One boonsman to another.

Zsoronga frowned and smiled. "What is this… You want me to smell it?"

"N-no…" Sorweel stammered. " No! We call it the virnorl… 'finger-lock' you would say. It is a pledge of unity, a way to say that henceforth, all your battles will be my battles."

"You sausages," the Successor-Prince said, clasping his entire hand within the warm bowl of his own. "Come… Our mighty General wishes to see you."

– | Sorweel crouched next to his slave before following Zsoronga outside. "I can speak to you now," he said in Sheyic, hoping this might elicit some flicker of passion. But the old Shigeki merely regarded him with the same grieved lack of comprehension, as if he had forgotten Sheyic as promptly as Sorweel had learned it.

"More importantly," he added before stepping clear the cloistered heat, "I can listen."

Arid sunlight seemed to shower the whole of creation, so bright he stumbled for squinting. He stood at the tent threshold, blinking the liquid from the glare, until the world finally resolved into parched vistas. The camp, the crowded tents and grand pavilions, bleached of colour for brightness…

And the horror that encircled it.

Swales of blackening dead humped and pitted the distances. Sranc and more Sranc, teeth hanging spitless about gaping maws, eyes fogged, heaped into an endless array of macabre deadfalls. Limbs predominated in certain places, piled like the sticks Saglanders brought to market to sell as kindle. Heads and torsos prevailed in others, cobbled into mounds that resembled stacks of rotting fish. Great smears of black scored the far-flung mats, where the witches had burned their countless thousands. They reminded him of the charcoal grounds to the south of Sakarpus, only with bodies instead of trees charred to stumped anonymity. These marked the greatest concentrations of dead.

The reek struck too deep to be smelled. It could only be breathed.

The sight unsettled him, not for the grisly detail, but because of the preposterous scale. He wanted to rejoice, for it seemed that was what a true son of Sakarpus should do seeing their ancestral foe laid out to the horizon. But he could not. Breathing the carrion wind, glancing across the carcass heights, he found himself mourning, not for the Sranc, whose obscenity blocked all possibility of compassion, but for the innocence of a world that had never seen such sights.

For the boy he had been before awakening.

"Even if I survive," Zsoronga said from his side, "none will believe me when I return."

"We must make sure you die then," Sorweel replied.

The Successor-Prince smirked about a worried glance. They trekked on in awkward silence, sorting through industrious crowds of Inrithi, wending down tented alleys. Fairly every man Sorweel glimpsed bore some sign of the previous night's battle, whether it be bandages clotted about appalling wounds or the divided stares of those trying to stumble clear of memories of violence and fury. Many seemed to recognize him, and some even lowered their faces-in accordance, he imagined, with some precept of jnan, the arcane etiquette of the Three Seas.

The awkward transformation of his relationship with Zsoronga, he realized with no little dismay, was but the beginning of the changes his thoughtless courage had wrought. Courage… It seemed such a foolish word, naught but the scribble of a child compared to the lunacy of the previous night. When he dared glimpse his memories, he suffered only the crowding of dread and terror. He felt a coward, looking back, so laughably far from the hero Zsoronga was making of him.

A mob of caste-nobles and Kidruhil officers milled about the entrance to Kayutas's command tent, and Sorweel simply assumed that he and Zsoronga would be forced to while away the watches in listless conversation. But faces turned to regard them as they approached, across the outer rind of warriors at first, then deeper as word of their arrival passed from lip to lip. The rumble of conversations evaporated. Sorweel and Zsoronga found themselves standing dumbfounded before their accumulated gazes.

"Huorstra hum de faul bewaren mirsa!" a towering longbeard cried from the assembly's midst. The man shouldered his way through the others, his eyes bright with a kind of vicious joy. "Sorweel Varaltshau!" he bellowed, seizing him in a great, black-armoured embrace. "Famforlic kus thassa!"

Suddenly everyone was cheering, and the young King found himself thrust into the crowd's congratulatory heart, shaking hands, returning embraces, nodding and thanking strangers with a kind of witless, breathless confusion. He acknowledged face after bruised face, even hugged a man blindfolded with bandages. In a matter of heartbeats he was delivered to the command tent, where he fairly tripped past the Pillarian Guards and into the washed light of the interior-so flustered that it seemed a minor miracle that he remembered to fall to his knees.

"She positions you…"

Anasurimbor Kayutas watched him from his chair, obviously amused by the spectacle of his arrival. Even in his Kidruhil cuirass and mail skirts, he sat with feline repose, his sandalled feet stretched across the mats before him, watching with the remote, lolling manner of an opium eater. Sorweel knew instantly that the man had not slept-and that he would not be the worse for it.

The air was stifling, as much for the sunlight that frosted the canvas ceiling as for all the exhaling mouths. Five scribes crowded the sheaf-laden table to his right, and numerous others stood milling in what little space remained: officers and caste-nobles for the most part. Sorweel saw Eskeles among them, decked in his crimson Mandate robes, his left eye swollen into a greasy purple crease. He also glimpsed Anasurimbor Serwa standing as tall as many of the men, swanlike in gowns of embroidered white. A memory of her arcane embrace whispered through him.

Kayutas allowed the uproar to subside before gesturing for him to stand. The Prince-Imperial was not long in waiting: something immaculate in his manner seemed to cut against all things unruly.

"Teus Eskeles has told us everything," he declared. "You have saved us, Sorweel. You… "

A broken chorus of cheers and shouts rose from those gathered within the tent.

"I… I did nothing," the Sakarpi King replied, trying to avoid the Swayali Grandmistress's gaze.

"Nothing?" The Kidruhil General frowned, scratched the flaxen plaits of his beard. "You read the signs, like a true son of the plains. You saw the doom our foe had prepared for us. You counselled your commander to take the only action that could save us. And then, in the moment of utmost crisis, you lent your shoulder to Eskeles, cast your life on the longest of odds, so that he might alert us…" He glanced up toward his sister, then looked back, grinning like an uncle trying to teach his nephew how to gamble. "Nothing has ever been so impressive."

"I did only what I… what I thought sensible."

"Sense?" Kayutas said with scowling good nature. "There are as many sensibilities as there are passions, Sorweel. Terror has a sense all its own: flee, shirk, abandon-whatever it takes to carry away one's skin. But you, you answered to the sense that transcends base desire. And we stand before you breathing, victorious, as a result."

The Sakarpi King glanced about wildly, convinced he was the butt of some cruel joke. But everyone assembled watched with a kind of indulgent expectation, as if understanding he was but a boy still, unused to the burden of communal accolades. Only Zsoronga's solitary black face betrayed worry.

"I… I–I know not what to say… You honour me."

The Prince-Imperial nodded with a wisdom that belied the adolescent tenderness of his beard. "That is my intent," he said. "I have even sent a party of crippled riders back to Sakarpus to bear word of your heroic role to your kinsmen…"

"You what?" Sorweel fairly coughed.

"It's a political gesture, I admit. But the glory is no less real."

In his soul's eye, Sorweel could see a wracked line of Kidruhil filing through the ruins of the Herders' Gate, outland conquerors, oppressors, crying out the treachery of Harweel's only son, how he had saved the very host that had laid Sakarpus low…

Nausea welled through him. Shame squirmed in his breast, clawing his ribs, scratching his heart.

"I… I don't know what to say…" he stammered.

"You need not say anything," Kayutas said with an indulgent smile. "Your pride is clear for all to see."

"She is hiding you…"

And for the first time he felt it, the impunity of standing unseen. He had stood before Anasurimbor Kayutas before. He had suffered his raking gaze-he knew what it meant to be known by an enemy, to have his fears counted, his vengeful aspirations reckoned, and so transformed into levers that could be used against him. Now he felt as if he were peeking at the man through his mother's shielding fingers. And his cheeks stung for the memory of Porsparian rubbing Yatwer's spit into them.

"I've had you entered into the lists as the new Captain of the Scions," Kayutas continued. "Disbanded they may be, but their honour will be yours. We were fortunate that Xarotas Harnilas possessed wisdom enough to recognize your sense-I will not trust fortune to so favour us a second time. Henceforth, you will attend me and my staff… And you will be accorded all the glory and privilege that belongs to a Believer-King."

She had placed him here. The Dread Mother of Birth… Was the courage even his?

It seemed an important question, but then the legends seemed littered with the confusion of heroes and the Gods that favoured them. Perhaps his hand simply was her hand…

He recoiled from the thought.

"May I beg one boon?"

A flicker of mild surprise. "Of course."

"Zsoronga… I would have him accompany me if I could."

Kayutas scowled, and several onlookers exchanged not-so-discreet whispers. For perhaps the first time, the Sakarpi King understood his friend's importance to the Anasurimbor. Of all the world's remaining nations, only Zeum posed a credible threat to the New Empire.

"You know that he conspires against us?" the Prince-Imperial said, switching to effortless Sakarpic. Suddenly the two of them stood alone in a room walled with strangers.

"I have my fears…" Sorweel began, lying smoothly. "But…"

"But what?"

"He no longer doubts the truth of your father's war. No one does."

The implication was as clear as it was surprising, for in all his life Sorweel had never counted his among devious souls. The first son of Nganka'kull wavered. To bring him into the Prince-Imperial's retinue could be the very thing his conversion required…

And that, Sorweel suddenly realized, was the Aspect-Emperor's goal: to have a believer become Satakhan.

"Granted," Kayutas said, switching to the dismissive air of men who scarce had time for accommodations. He made a two-fingered gesture to one of his scribes, who began fingering through sheaves of vellum.

"But I fear you have one last duty to discharge," the General said in Sheyic just as Sorweel glanced about for some cue that the audience had ended. "A mortal one."

The omnipresent smell of rot seemed to take on a sinister tang.

"My arm is your arm, Lord General."

This reply occasioned a heartbeat of scrutiny.

"The Great Ordeal has all but exhausted its supplies. We starve, Sorweel. We have too many mouths and too little food. The time has come to put certain mouths to the knife…"

Sorweel swallowed against a sudden pang in his breast.

"What are you saying?"

"You must put down your slave, Porsparian, in accordance with my father's edict."

"I must what?" he asked blinking. So there was a joke after all.

"You must kill your slave before sunrise tomorrow, or your life will be forfeit," Kayutas said, speaking in a tone as much directed to the assembled caste-nobles as to the Believer-King standing before him. Even heroes, he was saying, must answer to our Holy Aspect-Emperor.

"Do you understand?"

"Yes," Sorweel replied, speaking with a determination utterly at odds with the tumult that was his soul.

He understood. He was alone, a captive in the host of his enemy.

He would do whatever… kill whomever…

"Chosen by the Gods…"

Anything to see the Aspect-Emperor dead and his father avenged.

Sorweel returned to his tent alone, his back still warm for all the slapping, his ears still hot with the chorus of overwrought acclaim. Porsparian stood before the entrance, forlorn and emaciated and as motionless as a sentinel. The sight fairly winded the young King.

"Follow me," he told the man, his gaze scratched with incredulity. The old Shigeki slave regarded him with a momentary squint, then without worry-or even curiosity-he struck out ahead of his master, leading him into the fields of rotting Sranc. Sorweel could only gape at the sight: a little nut-brown man, walking stooped, his limbs bowed as if bent to the bundle of his many years, picking his way across the packed dead.

So the slave led the King, and perhaps this was how it should have been, given the way Sorweel felt himself dwindle with every step. He could scarce believe what he was about to do… Execution. When he forced himself to confront the prospect, his body and soul rebelled the way he had once feared they would in the thick of battle. The lightness of the hands. The starlings battling in his gut, loosening his bowel. The wires that hooked his head and shoulders into a pose just shy of a cringe. The incessant murmur of dread…

Men often find themselves stranded in circumstance, stumbling toward goals not of their making, surrounded by absurdities they can scarce believe. They assume the little continuities that characterize their moments will carry them through their entire lives. They forget the volatility of the whole, the way tribes and nations trip like drunks through history. They forget that Fate is a whore.

Porsparian hobbled ahead, picking a path through the carapace of dead. Sorweel quickly lost sight of the camp behind the blood-slicked mounds. When he looked out, death and far-flung rot were all he could see. Sranc. When he glimpsed them in fragments-a face nestled in the crook of an arm, a hand hanging from a raised wrist-they almost seemed human. When he gazed across them en masse, they seemed the issue of a drained sea. As bad as it had been in the camp, the reek welled palpable from the sweating tangle, to the point where coughing and gagging became one and the same, until smell became a taste that seemed to hang against the skin-an odour that could be licked. Ravens made summits of skulls, jumped from crown to crown spearing eye sockets. Vultures hunched and squabbled over individual spoils even though all was carrion. The whine of flies was multiplied until it became a singular hum.

Porsparian walked and he numbly followed, at times skidding across offal or wincing at the crack of ribbed hollows beneath his boots. He alternately found himself studying the Shigeki slave, his shoulders crooked about hard huffing breaths, and avoiding all sight of him. He knew now that he had deceived himself, that he had failed to press the enigmatic man for answers out of fear, and not because the intricacies of Sheyic defeated him. He had reacted, not as a man, but as a little boy, embracing the childish instinct to skulk and to avoid, to besiege fact with cowardly pretense. All this time, they could not speak and so were strangers, each perhaps as frightful to the other. And now, when he could finally ask, finally discover what madness the Dread Mother had prepared for him, he had to kill the little… priest, Zsoronga had called him.

His slave, Porsparian.

Sorweel paused, suddenly understanding Zsoronga's cryptic tone when he had asked him about Obotegwa. He had been thinking of the Aspect-Emperor's edict, the very edict behind the crime Sorweel was about to commit. If he himself balked at the prospect of murdering a terrifying stranger, what would it be like for Zsoronga to put down a beloved childhood companion-a surrogate father, even? Perhaps it was for the best that the Istyuli swallow the wise old man whole, that Obotegwa stumble into a small pile of human rubble-cloth and scattered bones-marking nothing.

Sorweel found himself blinking at the slave's form labouring through carrion ravines.

"Porsparian…" he called, coughing against the stench.

The old man ignored him. A clutch of ravens cried out in his stead, their caws like a small army of files scraping edges of tin.

"Porsparian, stop!"

"Not there yet!" the man hacked over his shoulder.

"Not where?" Sorweel cried, hastening after the agile slave. Bones popped in stiffening meat. Arrow shafts cracked. What was the man doing? Was this his manner of fleeing?

"Porsparian… Look. I'm not going kill you."

"What happens to me is not important," the Shigeki wheezed. Sorweel suffered dim memories of his grandfather in his final shameful days, how he had taken to wilful and insensible acts, if only to answer some prideful instinct to do…

"Porsparian…" he said, at last seizing the man's bony shoulder. He was going to tell the man that he could run, that he was free to risk the open plains, perhaps trust in the Goddess to deliver him, but instead he released the man, shocked by the immediacy of the bones beneath his tunic, by the sheer ease he had yanked him about, as if the man were naught but a doll, pig-skin wrapped about desert-dry wood.

When had he last eaten?

Cursing in some harsh tongue, the slave resumed his senseless trek, and Sorweel stood, absorbing the realization that Porsparian would not survive on the plains, that to set him free was simply to condemn him to a slower, far more miserable demise…

That anything short of execution would be an act of cowardice.

A moment of madness ensued, one which Sorweel would remember for the rest of his life. He choked on a scream that was a laugh that was a sob that was a father's soothing whisper. A kind of macabre intensity bubbled up out of his surroundings, an inversion of seeing, so that the jutting spears and the innumerable arrow shafts that stubbled the summits of dead pinned and staked his skin. The foggy glare of hundreds from limb-thatched burrows, the tongues like hanging snails, the entrails spilling from shells of armour, drying into papyrus…

She is positioning you…

How?

As mad as it sounds, I really have come to save Mankind…

What?

Fuh-Fuh-Father!

And then he saw it… standing with the grace and proportion of an Ainoni vase, regarding him, the knife of its long beak folded against its neck. A stork, perched upon purpling dead as though upon a promontory of high stone, its snowy edges framed by bleached sky.

And he was racing after the diminutive slave, tripping, skidding.

"What's going on?" he cried, seizing the man. "You will tell me!"

The rutted face betrayed no surprise, no anger or fear whatsoever.

"Pollution has seized the hearts of Men," the slave rasped. "The Mother prepares our cleansing."

The slave raised warm fingers to Sorweel's wrists, gently tugged his hands from his shoulders.

"And all thi-?"

"Is deception! Deception! "

Sorweel stumbled, so placid had Porsparian seemed, and such was the fury of his barked reply.

"So-so his war…" the Sakarpi King stammered.

"He is a demon who wears men the way we don clothes!"

"But his war…" He scraped his gaze across the tossed and tangled carcasses about them. "It is real…"

Porsparian snorted.

"All is false. And all who follow him are damned!"

"But his war… Porsparian! Look around you! Look around you and tell me his war is not real!"

"What? Because he has sent his followers against the Sranc? The world is filled with Sranc!"

"And what of the Consult Legion… the Sranc who killed my comrades?"

"Lies! Lies!"

"How can you know?"

"I know nothing. I speak!"

And with that he resumed his bandy march into the dead.

The slave picked his way across a swale of blasted and blackened Sranc and into a region of sorcerous destruction. In his soul's eye, the young King could see the Swayali witch hanging a hard stone's throw above, a slender beauty aglow in the curlicue bloom of her billows, dispensing lines and sheets of cutting light. He shook his head at the vision…

"Porsparian!"

The little man ignored him, though he did slow his pace. He peered downward as he walked, looking this way and that, as if searching for a lost kellic.

"Tell me!" Sorweel called out, his wonder giving way to irritation. "Tell me what She wants!"

"A mighty lord died here…" he heard the man mutter.

"Yatwer!" the Sakarpi King cried, throwing the name like a cold and heavy stone from his breast. "What does She want of me?"

"Here…" The old man's voice was thick with a kind of unsavoury relish. "Beneath the skinnies."

Sorweel stood dumbfounded, watching the mad fool heave at the burnt Sranc thatched beneath his feet. "The earth…" he grunted, tossing aside an arm and attached shoulder. "Must… uncover…"

The Sakarpi King gazed witless. When they had set out, he could scarce look at Porsparian without flinching from the madness of what he had to do. But the Shigeki slave seemed to care not in the least, even though he had to know he was doomed. Not in the least! Sorweel had followed him out here into carrion to cut his throat, and the man acted as if this were but a trifling compared to what he…

Cold flushed through and about the young man. He found himself casting wild looks across the surrounding dead, as if he were a murderer suddenly unsure of the secrecy of his crime.

The Goddess.

The King bent his back and joined the slave in his grisly labour.

The forms were uniformly burned; many of them possessed cauterized slices-amputations. He cleared two that had lost their legs, one at the hips, the other high on the thigh, as if they had been felled side by side, reaved as if by a single scythe. Where those on the top had been mostly scorched to husks, those below remained primarily raw and wet. Their eyes glared out with an aimless, smoky curiosity. Not knowing what the man intended, Sorweel simply grabbed the carcasses adjacent to those his slave wrenched into sunlight. He cast hooded looks over his shoulders. He found himself troubled by the weight of the creatures, the way their scrawniness belied a brute density. The corpses became colder as the toil continued.

They found the earth sodden with filth-puddled. They gasped for their effort, gagged for the stench they had unleashed. Sorweel watched Porsparian fall to his knees in the heart of the muck oval they had cleared. A grave dug from the dead.

He watched him raise and kiss the polluted earth…

The wind tousled the King's lengthening hair, tumbled across all visible creation, troubling the emanations. The flies hummed undisturbed. Ravens punctuated the distance with random cries.

He watched his slave scallop muck clear, glimpsed a skull unearthed beneath the shadow of his hands. Peering, he willed himself to breathe through his horror. He watched the man gather putrid mud, then mould a face about the bone, all the while murmuring prayers in some harsh and exotic tongue. Then he watched as he skinned a Sranc face with terrifying economy, watched him pad the result across the earthen face he had prepared for it. The King experienced something outside horror or exaltation.

He watched his slave stroke and caress the slick surfaces: forehead, brow, lip, cheek. He watched and he listened, until the rasp that was the slave's prayer became a drifting smoke that obscured all other sound.

He watched life-impossible life-rise into the inhuman skin.

He watched Yatwer's eyes snap open.

He heard the groan of the earth.

– | The Goddess smiles…

The old man crouches over her, frozen like a man caught in the commission of some obscenity. Something shivers through the hideous earth. Scabrous arms burst from the soil to either side… Clotted bones. Knotted worms.

The slave stumbles back, staggers into the clutch of the horrified King.

They watch the Goddess exhume her own corpse. She trowels away muck and viscous slop, reveals the ivory comb of her ribs. She reaches into her muddy abdomen, excavates her cadaverous womb…

The very ground croaks and groans beneath them, the complaint of some cosmological hinge-existence pried too far from its essential frame.

She draws a pouch from the pit below her stomach, raises it pinched in fingers of filth and bone. She smiles. Tears of blood stream from her earthen eyes. The watching men gasp for the sorrow of a mother's endless Giving…

So many. So many children born…

So many taken.

The King trips to his knees. He crawls forward to receive her Gift, crawls with the shame of an inconstant son. He snatches the pouch as if from a leper. It lies stiff and cold in his fingers, like a dead man's tongue. He scarcely sees it for his Mother's dirt glare. He looks back to the slave, who sobs for joy and horror… He turns back to his Goddess…

But She is no more, nothing but a grotesque face, a monstrosity, moulded above an overturned grave.

"What just happened?" the King cries to the slave. "What just happened?"

The slave says nothing. He climbs to his feet, hobbles from the macabre clearing back into the dead with an invalid's gait. He stumbles up a slope of pitched carcasses. He pauses before a spear that juts from the buzzing summit.

The King calls out to him, beseeching…

The slave places his chin upon the spear point, lifts his hands high in heavenly supplication.

"What the Mother gives…" he cries out to the King. "You must take!"

He smiles fleetingly, as if regretting things both inevitable and criminal. Then Porsparian nesh Varalti drops. He never reaches his knees. He hangs, rather, from the inside crown of his skull, then slowly tips to his side. He seems to vanish among the strewn forms.

One more dead skinny.

The King of Sakarpus staggered back alone, trudging across mad ways of the dead. Zsoronga was waiting for him when he returned. Neither man had any words to speak, so they simply sat side by side in the dust, staring into their hands.

Zsoronga was first to break their fast of silence. He clasped his friend's shoulder and said, "Things done are done."

Sorweel did not reply. Each of them gazed in his own absent direction, like dogs leashed to the shade. They watched the endless to and fro of warlike men across and between the tents. The Army of the Middle-North. They watched the dust-devils spinning in and out of faint existence between the innumerable pennants and banners.

"Did he tell you?" Zsoronga asked. "Your little priest… Did he tell you what… what She wants?"

Sorweel turned to regard his friend with a wide and wary glare. He knew he could trust the man-with his life if need be-and this comforted him in a way he had never known. Zsoronga was a true boonsman. But he also knew that he could not trust his face, that he could not risk saying anything for the shadows the Anasurimbor would glimpse within him.

"Yes," he replied, looking back to the Men of the Ordeal. "What is done is done."

When the Successor-Prince finally departed, Sorweel retreated from the setting sun into the gloom of his tent. He pulled the pouch from his belt. The muck had dried to ash about its edges. He brushed it away with trembling fingers, noticing for the first time the dizzying patterns burned into the age-old leather. Crescents. Crescents within crescents.

Broken circles, he decided, glimpsing the gold-thread circumfixes embroidered along the hem of his own tunic.

Broken circumfixes.

He tugged free the clip of chapped bronze that held its mouth closed. He already knew what it contained, for as King of Sakarpus, he was also High Keeper of the Hoard. Nevertheless, he tipped the pouch so that he might hold it in his callused palm: a sphere of ancient iron…

A Chorae. A holy Tear of God.

The Swayali enclave formed an encampment all its own within the greater camp. When the host set stake across rolling or broken pasture, the witches' tents always tattooed the hazy vista, an oval of shining ochre among the jumbled phalanxes of canvas. The Scions had sat and pondered the sight more than a few evenings, like every other company in the Army. Charampa, in particular, was given to dreaming aloud. The "Granary," he called it. Here his little brother was starving, and yet the Granary remained closed. Several times he had leapt to his feet to display the hook lifting his skirts, crying out for food to feed his little brother. And though everyone about Zsoronga's hearth laughed with crazed merriment, they also became exceedingly reluctant to encourage the Cingulati Prince. Charampa was far too fond of his little brother.

He was also the reason why none of the witches strayed from their enclave-save Anasurimbor Serwa. As the days piled into months, as the memories of wives and lovers became more and more elusive, the famed Swayali witches, the Nuns, became a kind of narcotic. More than a few little brothers had been throttled for mere glimpse or rumour.

At first, Sorweel had no clue as to why he stalked the camp searching for the Granary. He had lain on his cot for watches, pinned by an exhaustion unlike any he had known, one that made slop of his centre, as if he were naught but a head and limbs sutured to a heap of entrails. He had stared at the canvas ceiling, glimpsing portents in water stains, feeling the prickle of Porsparian's continuous absence. And then he was up, answering to a restlessness he could not quite feel. And he was walking.

Initially he decided he sought out the Swayali because he needed to thank Anasurimbor Serwa for saving him. But this rationale, for all its convenience, did not long survive its insincerity. The unkind fact was that Sorweel felt no gratitude. Of the many Three Seas peculiarities that Zsoronga called out for disgust and ridicule, none occasioned quite the same cutting vehemence as the witches. The Successor-Prince thought them worse than whores and certainly more accursed. "They make pits of their mouths," he said once, referring to the Tusk's ancient condemnation of prostitutes. But Sorweel's lack of gratitude had nothing to do with grudges against licentious women. Since the Sakarpi considered all sorcery anathema, the Swayali struck him as little more than a wicked anomaly. Yet one more Three Seas perversion.

No. He felt no gratitude because he no longer considered his life a gift.

Stars fogged the vault of Heaven in light. Clouds like wisps of tugged wool formed the illusion of a surface so that looking up seemed like gazing into waters of consummate clarity, an ocean of diamond emptiness. The ways of the camp were all but abandoned. Were it not for the odd voices and the moans of the ailing, he would have thought it emptied of Men. Maybe it was combination of quiet and cool air, or maybe it was the stench that soaked the edges of his every breath, but the place seemed ancient and haunted, and the shadows seemed to boil with unseen threats.

He found the Granary more by chance than by any unerring sense of direction. He slowed to a wary saunter when the sagging pyramids of its roofs rose into view. The tents were of the Ainoni parasol variety, with a single pole hoisting a square frame that formed the tasselled edges of the roof. They were pitched one against the other with their entrances turned inward so that their felt backs walled in the enclave. He had heard the tale of some Galeoth fool burning his fingers to stubs trying to slit a peephole through one of the greased panels. But who knew whether this rumour were true or something calculated precisely to prevent Galeoth fools from cutting peepholes. The Grandmistress of the Swayali was an Anasurimbor, after all.

He followed the enclave's outer circuit, his ears pricked to voices he could not hear, his arm hairs tingling with the anxious expectation of sorcery. In his soul's eye, he saw the witches hanging above the oceanic heave of the Horde. For his life, he could not think of what to do next. Twin torches on poles illuminated the entrance, drawing shags of ochre from the otherwise blue tent walls. Two heavily armoured men stood between them, speaking in voices as muted as the torchlight was dim. They fell silent the instant they spied him.

They were both clean-shaven, Nansur traditionalists, but the insignia stamped into the plates of their hauberks were unfamiliar to him-no surprise there. The question was whether they would recognize him.

"I have come to see Anasurimbor Serwa," he blurted in answer to their scowling gaze.

The two regarded him for a torch-lit heartbeat. The taller one smiled, an expression rendered malicious for the play of shadow across his hard face. He stepped aside, saying, "She told us you might come."

The guardsman led him into the Granary with the same uncanny focus-the same thoughtless discipline — that seemed to characterize so many Men of the Ordeal: no fatuous words, no posturing or bored bullying. A Sakarpi guard would have bickered until either cowed by threats or bribed.

The Granary's courtyard was as dusty and trampled as any other ground in the camp, and with few exceptions, the surrounding tents were every bit as dark. Several censors had been set across the expanse, their smoky issue barely visible in the starlight. He breathed deep their odour: a pungent astringent of some kind, one specifically concocted to nullify the stench rising from the rotting miles surrounding them-or so he imagined.

The tall Nansur led him to a parasol tent on the far side of the oval courtyard, one identical to the others, save that it had been physically stitched to the tents adjoining. The entrance flap had been negligently drawn, revealing a golden sickle of interior light. Sorweel's breath and ligaments tightened with every nearing step, as if he were a bow slowly drawn. The slit in the tent bobbed in his vision with erotic intensity, as though a candle had been lit beneath a courtesan's skirts and he were about to glimpse the regions between her knees.

Perhaps he had come to feed his little brother after all.

"'Ware her, my King," Eskeles had said that fateful day in the Umbilicus. "She walks with the Gods…"

The Swayali guardsman bid him pause with a polite gesture, then fell to his knees and called softly into the opening. Sorweel glimpsed ornate carpets and the odd leg of furnishing, nothing more.

If anyone replied, he did not hear it. The guardsmen simply stood and drew aside the ornately embroidered flap. "Kneel!" he hissed as Sorweel strode into the lane of light. Ignoring him, the Sakarpi King ducked into the interior and stood blinking in the light. Three bronze lanterns hung from a three-armed bracket set high on the centre pole, all of them dark. He had once asked Eskeles why he bothered with lanterns when he could spark brighter lights with mere words. "Because lanterns burn whether I remember them or not," he had said. "Think of the way trivia weighs against your heart…" Anasurimbor Serwa, apparently, did not mind the burden of sorcerous illumination: a point of blinding white hung in the corner, twinkling like a pilfered star. Its brilliance revealed faint patterns of russet in the felt walls-sigils or plant motifs-and rendered the room's furnishings stark with shadow. Stacked chests. A cot, much the same as his own, save for the luxury of the blankets and pillows heaped across it. A worktable with canvas camp chairs. His boots felt an insult to the carpets beneath him: ranging landscapes wrought in black and silver, stylized according to exotic sensibilities. An unfamiliar perfume hung in the air.

The Grandmistress sat hunched over the worktable, wearing naught but a silken shift-her sleeping garb, Sorweel imagined. She hung her head to one side as she read, so that her hair fell in lazy blond wings across her right shoulder. She had hooked her bare feet about the forward legs of the chair-an undignified pose, and all the more erotic for it. Silk hung loose about her breasts, and pulled tight across her parted thighs. The hairlessness of her legs made her seem a little girl and so poisoned his desire with a peculiar shame.

Sin. Everything Three Seas, no matter how awe-inspiring or beautiful, had to be greased in sin.

"My brother finds you odd…" she said, apparently still absorbed by the inked lines before her.

"I find your brother odd."

This occasioned a small smile-as well as her attention. She turned to regard him, careless enough with her knees to make him forget how to breathe. He struggled to remind himself that for all her wanton youth, she was the most powerful woman in all Earwa, short of her Empress mother… who had been a whore.

"Have you come to thank me, or have you come to woo?"

The Sakarpi King scowled. "To thank you."

Her eyes ranged across him with a boldness that would have seen a Sakarpi wife or daughter whipped.

"That pouch… hanging from your hip… Where did you find that?"

He swallowed, at last understanding the reason for this otherwise inexplicable visitation.

"It's an heirloom. As ancient as my family."

She nodded as if believing him.

"That motif… the triple crescent…"

"What about it?" he asked, far too aware of the proximity of her gaze to his groin.

At last her eyes climbed to meet his own. Her look was cool, remote in the way of old and prideful widows.

"That is the Far Antique mark of my family… the Anasurimbor of Tryse."

Sorweel struggled to speak around memories of the Goddess reaching into the muck of her womb.

"Would you like it back?"

A laugh like a sneezing cat.

"You seem more insolent than thankful."

And in a heartbeat, Sorweel understood how the penetration of the Anasurimbor, their godlike cunning, was as much their greatest weakness as their greatest strength. Men, Zsoronga had said, were like children to them.

Who fears children?

"I apologize," he said. "The past weeks have been… difficult. This afternoon I… I murdered my slave in your father's name."

He saw Porsparian slump from the upright spear, hang twitching…

"You loved him," she observed with something resembling pity.

He saw the light of watching fade from the slave's yellow eyes.

"Here…" Sorweel said, grasping the pouch. "Take it as a gift."

You are mad, a voice whispered in some corner of his soul.

"I would rather you keep it," she replied with a frown almost identical to her brother's. "I'm not sure I like you, Horse-King."

Sorweel nodded as if in apology.

"Then I shall woo you…" he said, turning to step back out into the cool Istyuli night.

He had half-hoped she would call him back but was not surprised when she did not. He crossed the incense-fogged expanse of the Granary, his thoughts roiling in that strange fingerless way that prevents them from gripping your expression. He walked the way a man who had just gambled his freedom might walk: with the nimble gait of those preparing to run.

Anasurimbor Serwa… She was one of the Few, among the greatest to practise the arcane arts, were the rumours to be believed.

"What the Mother gives…"

And he had carried a Chorae- concealed — within an arm's span of her embrace.

"You must take."

The following weeks did not so much pass like a dream as they seemed like one in hindsight.

Despite Anasurimbor Kayutas's fine words the day following the Battle of the Horde, he did not so much as consult with Sorweel once when it came to the Sranc, let alone the mountain of trivial issues that confronted any great host on the march. Sorweel and Zsoronga spent most of their time mooning about the perimeter of the Prince-Imperial's entourage, waiting to be called into whatever the ongoing debate.

They were accorded the honour of martial advisers, but in reality they were little more than messengers-runners. This fact seemed to weigh more heavily on Zsoronga than Sorweel, who would have been a runner for his father eventually, had the past months never happened. The Successor-Prince sometimes spent entire watches cursing their lot while they supped together: the Zeumi court, Sorweel had come to realize, was a kind of arena, a place where the nobility were inclined to count slights and nurture grudges, and where politicking through the dispensation of privileges had been raised to a lethal form of art. Zsoronga did not so much despise the actual work of bearing missives-Sorweel himself genuinely savoured the freedom of riding through and about seas of trudging men. What he could not abide, Sorweel decided, was the future, the fact that, when he finally found his way back to Domyot, he would be forced to describe things his countrymen could not but see as indignities. That in the sly calms between official discourse, they might murmur "Zsoronga the Runner" to one another and laugh.

More and more, Sorweel saw fractions of his former self in the Zeumi Prince-glimpses of Sorweel the Orphan, Sorweel the Mourner. Zsoronga had learned a dismaying truth about himself in fleeing when Sorweel had turned to save Eskeles. He had also lost his entire entourage-his Brace, as the Zeumi called their boonsmen-as well as his beloved Obotegwa. For all his worldly manner, the Successor-Prince had never experienced loss in his privileged life. Now he was stranded, as Sorweel had been stranded, in the host of his enemy. And now he was burdened, as Sorweel had been burdened, with questions of his own worth and honour.

They did not so much speak of these things as act around them, the way young men are prone to do, with only brotherly looks and warm-handed teasing for proof of understanding.

Zsoronga still asked him about the Goddess from time to time, his manner too eager for Sorweel's comfort. The Sakarpi King would simply shrug and say something about waiting for signs, or make some weak joke about Zsoronga petitioning his dead relatives. The toll Zsoronga had paid in self-respect had turned the man's wary hope into a kind of pressing need. Where before he had feared for his friend's predicament, now he wanted Sorweel to be the instrument of the Goddess-even needed him to be. Each day seemed to add a granule of spite to the hatred he was slowly accumulating in his soul. He even began to take risks in Kayutas's distracted presence-insolent looks, snide remarks-trifles that seemed to embolden him as much as they alarmed Sorweel.

" Pray to Her!" Zsoronga began to urge. "Mould faces in the earth!"

Sorweel could only look at him in horror, insist that he was trying to no avail, fretting all the while about what traces of his own intent the Anasurimbor might glimpse in the man's face.

He had to be careful, exceedingly careful. He knew full well the power and cunning of the Aspect-Emperor, having lost his father, his city, and his dignity to him. He knew far better than Zsoronga.

This was why, when he finally mustered the courage to ask his friend about the narindari, those chosen by the Gods to kill, he did so in the guise of passing boredom.

"They are the most feared assassins in the World," the Successor-Prince replied. "Men for whom murder is prayer. Fairly all the Cults have them-and they say Ajokli has no devotees save narindari…"

"But what use would the Gods have of assassins, when they need only deliver calumny and disaster?"

Zsoronga frowned as if at uncertain memories. "Why do the Gods require devotion? Sacrifice? Lives are easy to take. But souls-souls must be given."

This was how Sorweel came to think of himself as a kind of divine thief.

"What the Mother gives… You must take."

The problem was that in the passage of days he felt nothing of this divinity. He ached and he hungered. He scratched his buttocks and throttled his little brother. He squatted as others squatted, holding his breath against the reek of the latrines. And he continually doubted…

Primarily because what divinity he witnessed belonged to the Anasurimbor. As before, Kayutas remained a lodestone for his gaze, but where Sorweel had peered after his Horse and Circumfix standard across the massing of faraway columns, now he could watch him from a distance of several spans. He was, Sorweel came to realize, a consummate commander, orchestrating the activities of numberless thousands with mere words and manner. Requests and appraisals would arrive, and responses and reprimands would be dispatched. Failures would be scrutinized, alternatives considered. Successes would be ruthlessly exploited. Of course, none of these things carried the stamp of divinity, not in and of themselves or in their sum. No, it was the effortlessness of the Prince-Imperial's orchestration that came to seem miraculous. The equanimity, the repose, and the ruthless efficacy of the man in the course of making a thousand mortal decisions. It was not, Sorweel eventually decided, quite human…

It was Dunyain.

And there was the miracle of the Great Ordeal and its relentless northward crawl. Whatever heights the Istyuli afforded, no matter how meagre, he would find his gaze wandering across the Army of the Middle-North, the landslides of trudging men, columns drawing mountainous veils of dust. And if the vision seemed a thing of glory before, it fairly hummed with the gravitas of legend now, clothed as it was with crazed memories of what had been endured and with dire premonitions of what was to come.

For despite the toll the Men of the Ordeal had exacted, the Horde had not been defeated. It had reeled back, diminished, grievously wounded, too quick and too amorphous to be run down. Twice he and Zsoronga were called on to deliver missives to the forward pickets-once to Anasurimbor Moenghus himself. The two of them had galloped ahead with abandon, relieved to be free of the dust and cramp, and wary of the tawny haze that rimmed the horizon before them. Solitary, riding hard across the desolate plain, they felt a peculiar freedom, knowing that Sranc fenced the north in unseen multitudes. Zsoronga told him about a cousin of his who captained a war galley, how he said he loved-and hated-nothing more than sailing in the shadow of an ocean tempest. "Only sailors," the Successor-Prince explained, "know where they stand in their God's favour."

The Schools had been fully mobilized by this time, so as the Horde's dust steamed mountainous above them, they glimpsed sheets of light, not high among the slow swirling veils, but low, near the darkening base-flickers of brilliance through funereal shrouds. They would crane their heads, draw their gaze from the high piling summits, floating bright beneath the sun, to the false night of the foundations, and the dread scale would humble and mortify them. Schools. Nations. Races both foul and illumined. And they understood that even kings and princes counted for nothing when thrown upon the balance with such things.

They would ride dumbstruck, until the first of the pickets became visible, the companies marked by lighter tassels of dust beneath the sky-spanning mark of the Horde. Finding Moenghus-who by this time was notorious for the daring of his exploits-forced them to ride perilously deep, until the sun became little more than a pale smear, and the haunting call of the Horde swelled into a deafening roar.

"Tell me!" the wild-eyed Prince-Imperial cried above the howl, gesturing with his clotted sword to the sunless world about them. "What do infidel eyes see when they look upon my father's foe?"

"Hubris!" Zsoronga called before Sorweel could restrain him. "Mad misadventure!"

"Bah!" Moenghus shouted laughing. " This, my friends! This is where Hell concedes Earth to Heaven! Most Men grovel because their fathers grovelled. But you! Simply for seeing this, you will know why you pray!"

And beyond the Prince-Imperial, Sorweel saw them, the Nuns, striding above obscurities, wracking the earth beneath them. A necklace of shining, warring beads, cast thin across the trackless miles, scattering the Sranc before them.

Day in and day out, burning the earth to glass.

And then there was the greatest witch of all, Anasurimbor Serwa, who had come to seem a miracle of beauty amid the sweat and Mannish squalor of the march. She rode a glossy brown, perched with one knee drawn high on a Nilnameshi side-saddle, her flaxen hair folded about the perfection of her face, her body slender, almost waifish beneath the simple gowns she wore when not freighted with her billows. She never spoke to Sorweel even though she spent much of her time at her brother's side. She did not so much as look at him, though he could never shake the impression that out of all the shadows that crowded her periphery, she had picked him out for special scrutiny. He was not the only one bewitched by her beauty. He sometimes spent more time watching the others steal glances in her direction than watching her himself. But he did not worship her the way the Zaudunyani did. He did not see her as the daughter of a god. Though he was loathe to admit as much, he feared the yearning-and at times, the raw lust-she inspired in him. And so, as is the wont of men, he often found himself resenting, even hating her.

The crazed fact was that he needed to hate her. If he were narindari, a kind of divine executioner chosen by the Hundred to deliver the world from the Aspect-Emperor, then what struck him as divine in his enemies had to be demonic- had to be, otherwise he would be the one dancing from a demon's strings. A Narindar proper-a servant of Ajokli, the evil Four-Horned Brother.

When he was a child, Good and Evil had always simplified a world that was unruly and disordered otherwise. Now it vexed him to the point of heartbreak, the treachery of sorting the diabolical and the divine. Some nights he would lie sleepless, trying to will Serwa evil, trying to rub pollution into the image of her beauty. But as always the memories of her carrying him across heaving fields of Sranc would rise into his soul's eye, and with it the reeling sense of security and numbing gratitude.

And he would think of the murderous intent he concealed behind his mudded cheeks and of the Chorae he bore hidden in the ancient pouch bound to his hip, and he would despair.

Sometimes, during the more sombre meals he and Zsoronga shared together, he dared voice his more troubling questions, and the two would set aside their bluster and honestly consider all they had seen.

"Golgotterath is not a myth," Sorweel ventured one night. "The Great Ordeal marches against a real foe, and that foe is evil. We have seen him with our own eyes!"

"But what does that mean?" Zsoronga replied. "Wickedness is forever warring against wickedness-you should read the annals of my people, Horse-King!"

"Yes, but only when they covet the same things… What could the Aspect-Emperor want with these wastes?"

"For hatred's sake, as well. For hatred's sake."

Sorweel wanted to ask what could inspire such hatred, but he conceded the argument, for he already knew what the Successor-Prince's would say, his argument of final resort, the one that typically doomed Sorweel to watches of cringing sleeplessness.

"But what about the Hundred? Why would the Goddess raise you as a knife?"

Unless the Aspect-Emperor were a demon.

It made him feel a worm sometimes, a thing soft and blind and helpless. He would raise his face to the sky, and it would seem he could actually feel the great gears of the Dread Mother's design, churning the perpetual dust on the horizon, clacking inscrutable through the voices of innumerable men. He would feel himself carried on the arc of her epic intent, and he would feel a worm…

Until he remembered his father.

" Father — Father! My bones are your bones!"

Sorweel had always flinched from thoughts of that final day before Sakarpus fell. For so long, recollecting those events had seemed like fumbling spines of glass with waterlogged fingers. But more and more he found himself returning to his memories, surprised to find all the cutting edges dulled. He wondered at the arrival of the stork in the moments before the Inrithi assault-at the way it had singled out his father. He wondered that his father had sent him away, and so saved his life, almost immediately after.

He wondered if the Goddess had chosen him even then.

But most of all he pondered their last moment alone together, before they had climbed to man the walls, when they had stood father and son warming themselves over glowering coals.

"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."

King Harweel had known-even then. His father had known his city and his son were doomed, and he had wanted his son, at least, to understand that fear and cowardice were inevitabilities. Kayutas had said it himself: sense was the plaything of passion. The night of the Ten-Yoke Legion, Zsoronga had fled when Sorweel called because stopping seemed the height of madness. He simply did what was sensible, and so found himself standing in the long shadow of his friend's bravery.

But Sorweel had stopped on that darkling plain. Against all instinct and reason, he had cast his life across the altar of necessity.

"…they have not the wind to think…"

All this time, he had mourned his manhood, had made a flag of his humiliation. All this time he had confused his lack of certainty with the lack of strength and honour. But he was strong-he knew that now. Knowing his ignorance simply made his strength that much more canny.

"…and so they break."

As ever, the world was a labyrinth. And his was a complicated courage.

"Are you such a fool, Sorwa?"

No, Father.

The Men of the Ordeal marched, answering to the toll of the Interval day in and day out, until at long last they had chased the arid emptiness to its dregs. Despite its greatness the Istyuli was not inexhaustible.

For the first time they awoke to horizons different from those they had greeted the previous morn. The ground was just as gutted by the retreating Horde, and the distances were just as devoid of game or any other kind of forage, but the earth bent to a different sensibility. The rolls became deeper, the summits became more pinched, almost as if the hosts crossed the transitions wrought by age, from the smooth swales of youth to the creases of middle age. Bare rock scraped clear the turf with ever-greater regularity. And the tepid rivers, which had snaked brown and lazy, quickened into white, carving ever-deeper ravines.

The Army of the West, the host commanded by the mercurial King Coithus Saubon, came to the ruins of Suonirsi, a trading entrepot once famed as a link between the High Norsirai of Kuniuri and the White Norsirai of Akksersia. The Men of the Ordeal were astounded. After so many months of shambling waste, they walked the buried ways of a different, human age, struck by how time makes swamps of scabrous earth. They wondered at the contradiction of ruins, the way some structures are smashed to dust while others are granted the immortality of geological formations. For the first time they could connect the tales and rumours that stirred them to take up the Circumfix with the stumped earth beneath their feet, and they would stare in their weary, shuffling thousands, the tragedy of lost ages reflected in their eyes.

The land had lost its anonymity. Henceforth, they knew, the earth, for all its desolation, would carry the stamp of long-dead intentions. Where the High Istyuli had been barren, a land impervious to the generations who had once ranged across it, its northwestern frontiers were soaked in human history. Ruins teethed the heights, mounded the shallow valleys. The learned told tales of Sheneor, the least of the three nations divided between the sons of the first ancient Anasurimbor King, Nanor-Ukkerja I. Names were debated by firelight. Names were invoked by the Judges in their sermons. Names were called out in curses and in prayers. Everywhere the Men of the Ordeal looked, they glimpsed ghosts of ancient meaning, the apparitions of ancestors, raising arms, leaning beneath burdens. If they could decode the land, it seemed, see it with ancient eyes, they could reclaim it in the name of Men.

It passed through them as a shiver, the coincidence of souls antique and new.

Though hunger had become a crisis, the numbers who succumbed to sickness declined. The rivers were simply too swift to hold the pollution of the retreating Horde, and in some cases, they fairly teemed with fish. Nets borne all the way from Cironj and Nron and Cingulat were cast across the narrows, and the issue was heaved onto the crowded shores: pike, bass, pickerel, and others. Men ate them raw, such was their hunger. But it was never enough. No matter how much they slowed their progress to throw their nets, they could do no more than prolong the host's starvation.

Meanwhile the Horde withdrew and congregated.

Day and night, the Schools assailed the gathering masses, striding into earthbound clouds of grey and ochre, burning and blasting the screeching shadows that fled beneath them. The Scarlet Spires strode alone through the shrouds with their Dragonheads, scourging the wasted earth beneath. The Vokalati worked with the cunning of wolves, driving swathes of the creatures into traps of golden flame. And the Mandati and the Swayali arrayed themselves in lines miles long, like threads beaded with stars, wracking the earth with combs of blinding Gnostic light.

The massacre was great, but never great enough. For all their feral simplicity, the Sranc possessed an instinctive cunning. They could hear the Schoolmen sing through the world-wringing roar, the unearthly rattle of sorcerous meaning, and so they scattered, ran with speed of fire-maddened horses, scooping up dust both to obscure their foe's vision and to blunt their incandescent dispensations.

The Culling, the Men riding the pickets came to call it. Every evening knights returned with stories of arcane violence glimpsed from afar, and the Men of the Ordeal wondered and rejoiced.

The Imperial Mathematicians tallied numbers, estimates of slain versus the inexorable accumulation of more and more clans, but they knew only that it was never enough, no matter how devious the tactics or how powerful the sorceries. The Horde grew and bloated, an assembly of shrieking mobs that encompassed more and more of the horizon-until all the North screamed.

The only tally they knew with certainty was the number of Schoolmen lost.

The first sorcerer to go missing, a Scarlet Schoolman named Irsalfus, had been dismissed as a fluke. The prevailing assumption was that the Sranc, even if they had somehow managed to keep Chorae through the wild tide of generations, would have no clue as to their purpose. After the fifth Schoolman was lost they realized they were mistaken. Either certain clans had managed to preserve the artefacts (along with some understanding of their use), or, what was more likely, the Consult had managed to infiltrate the Horde. Perhaps they had scattered contingents of Ursranc throughout the Sranc host. Or perhaps they had simply spread word of the Chorae and how they could be used.

The possibility occasioned no small amount of debate in the Aspect-Emperor's councils. Heramari Iyokus, the sightless Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, argued that the Schools should abandon the Culling, retire from the field. "Otherwise," he said, "we shall be halved before we reach the Gates of Golgotterath."

But Nurbanu Soter, the King-Regent of High Ainon, scoffed, saying the Great Ordeal would scarce survive to reach the Neleost Sea, let alone Golgotterath, unless the Schoolmen continued. "How many battles?" he cried to the Blind Grandmaster. "How many contests such as the last can we endure? Two? Four? Eight? For that is the real question." What made Culling so essential, the Holy Veteran argued, was the degree to which it slowed the Horde's cycle of retreat, starvation, and assault. To abandon it altogether would be to invite more skirmishes with disaster. "With each battle we toss the number-sticks," the old man said, his voice indomitable, his eyes as dark and cruel as they had been during the First Holy War. "Should we risk all for a few dozen wizard-skins?"

Tempers flared, a rarity in the presence of the Anasurimbor, with the Schoolmen generally arguing against, and the caste-nobility generally arguing for, the Culling. In the end, the Aspect-Emperor declared the Culling would continue, but with the Schoolmen deployed in tandems to minimize losses. With their billows, he explained, the odds were good that any one Chorae strike could be survived, so long as someone uninjured could carry the one struck away from the Horde. "In all things we must conserve and we must sacrifice," he admonished. "We must be acrobats and rope-walkers, both in intellect and in heart. Far worse dilemmas confront us, my brothers. Far more dreadful decisions."

And so the Horde reeled back, shrank from the pricks of a thousand lights. And the Four Armies marched into the desolation that was its wake, across lands painted with the horror and glory of the Holy Sagas.

Into the gloom of the Ancient North.

King Nersei Proyas would much rather discuss arms, the dilemmas of the field, and the strategies to overcome them. Instead, his Lord-and-God turned to him and asked, "When you look into yourself, when you look into your soul, how much do you see?"

"I see… I see what I see."

The Exalt-General had spent many sleepless watches on his cot, pondering their discussions while listening to the camp and its dwindling murmur. Recollections from his long years of service and devotion would cycle through his soul's eye, a lifetime of war and ultimatum, and the worrisome sense that something had changed, that these talks were utterly unprecedented both in tenor and content, would grow ever more leaden with dread certainty. As much as he would marvel at the privilege-to sit and speak plain truth with a living prophet! — he would fear the implications more.

Anasurimbor Kellhus waged more than one war, he had come to realize. One far beyond the meagre intellects of his followers. One fought across fields of maddening abstraction…

"But you do see. I mean, you do possess an inner eye."

"I suppose…"

The Aspect-Emperor smiled, rubbed his bearded chin like a carpenter assessing problematic wood. He wore the same plain white gown he always wore-the one Proyas imagined he slept in. The Ainoni silk was so fine as to be crushed into a thousand wrinkles at his every joint, creases that resembled the forking of twigs in the dim light of the octagonal hearth.

Proyas sat freighted as always in his Imperial armour, his golden cuirass biting his hips, his blue cloak wrapped about his waist in the ceremonial fashion.

"What if some people lacked that eye?" Kellhus asked. "What if some people could see nothing more than the outline of their passions, let alone the origins of those scribbles? What if most people were blind to themselves? Would they know as much?"

Proyas stared into the luminous gauze of the fire, rubbed his cheeks against the memory of its sorcerous bite. People insensible to their own souls… It seemed he had known many such men over the course of his life, when he considered it. Many such fools.

"No…" he said meditatively. "They would think they see everything there is to be seen."

Kellhus smiled in affirmation. "And why's that?"

"Because they know nothing different," Proyas replied, daring his sovereign's gaze. "You need to glimpse more to know that you see less."

Kellhus raised a wooden decanter to refill Proyas's dwindling bowl of anpoi. "Very good," he said as he poured. "So you understand the difference between you and me."

"I do?"

"Where you are blind," his Lord-and-God said, "I can see."

Proyas paused in hesitation, drank deep from his bowl. The tang of nectar, the bite of liquor. At a time when clear water had become a luxury, sipping anpoi seemed an almost obscene extravagance. But then everything had the taste of miracles in this room.

"And this… this is why Achamian speaks true?"

Simply asking the question loosed a queasiness in his gut. As much as the topic of his old tutor and his heresy troubled Proyas, the fact that Kellhus knew the unruly thoughts the man occasioned disturbed him even more. Proyas had not so much buried Drusas Achamian as turned his back on him, the way men are want to do with matters too acidic to honestly consider. He had grown into manhood in the sorcerer's critical shadow, clinging to his convictions in a fog of nagging questions. He could not think of him without suffering some flutter of spiritual insecurity, without hearing his warm and amiable voice saying, "Yes, Prosha, but how do you know?"

And now, twenty years after Achamian's famed denunciation and subsequent exile, Kellhus had inexplicably raised the spectre of the man and his questions. Why?

Proyas had been there. He had clenched his teeth in shame, squinted through tears of heartbreak, watching the portly sorcerer condemn the first true prophet in a thousand years! Condemn the Holy Aspect-Emperor as false…

Only to be told now, on the very threshold of apocalypse, that he had spoken true?

"Yes," Kellhus said, watching him with unnerving concentration.

"So even now, you're… manipulating me?"

The Exalt-General could scarce believe he had asked the question.

"There is no other way for me to be with you," the Aspect-Emperor replied. " I see what you do not. The origins of your thought and passion. The terminus of your fear and ambit. You experience but a fragment of the Nersei Proyas that I see. With every word, I speak to you in ways you cannot hear."

Some kind of test-it had to be… Kellhus was sounding him, preparing him for some kind of trial.

"But…"

The Aspect-Emperor downed his bowl in a single draught. "How could that be when you feel free, to say, to think, any way you please?"

"Yes! I never feel so free as I feel when I am with you! In all the world, wherever I go, Kellhus, I sense the jealousies and judgments of others. With you, I know I have no cause for wariness or concern. With you, I am my own judge!"

"But that is only the man you know, the Lesser Proyas. The man I know, the Greater Proyas, I hold in shackles of iron. I am Dunyain, my friend, exactly as Achamian claimed. To merely stand in my presence is to be enslaved."

Perhaps this was the golden kernel, the whole point of these thought-bruising sessions. To understand how little he was himself…

There was no revelation without terror and overturning.

"But I am your willing slave. I choose a life of bondage!"

And he felt no shame in saying this. Ever since childhood he had understood the exaltation that was submission. To be a slave to truth is to be a master of men.

The Aspect-Emperor leaned back into the glow of his unearthly halo. As always the hearth's twirling light sketched smoky glimpses of doom across the canvas walls behind him. For a heartbeat, the Exalt-General could swear he saw children running…

"Choice," his Lord-and-God said smiling. "Willing…

"Your shackles are cast from this very iron."

Sorweel and Zsoronga sat unceremoniously in the dust at the entrance of the tent they now shared, gnawing on their ration of amicut. Gone was the Successor-Prince's garish pavilion. Gone were the ritual wigs. Gone were the sumptuous cushions, the ornate decorations. Gone were the slaves who had borne all this pointless luxury.

Necessity, as Protathis famously wrote, makes jewels of lack and turns poverty into gold. For the Men of the Ordeal, wealth was now measured in the absence of burdens.

They sat side by side gazing with a kind of numb incredulity as the figure wobbled toward them through the haze of knee-high dust. They recognized him immediately, though it did not seem so at the time, so quick is the heart to deny what it cannot bear. Limbs like black ropes. Hair white as the sky. He staggered as much as he walked, a gait that spoke of endless miles, a thousand steps too many. Only his gaze remained steady, as if all that remained of him had been concentrated into his sense of sight. He did not blink once the entirety of his approach.

Swaying, he stood before them.

"You were supposed to be dead," Zsoronga said, looking up with a peculiar terror, his voice wavering about some contest of dismay and gratitude.

"I am told…" Obotegwa rasped, his smile more a lipless grimace, "my death… is your duty…"

Sorweel made to leave, but the Successor-Prince cried out for him to stay.

"I beg you…" he said. "Please."

So he helped the old man into the tent, shocked, nauseated even, by his kindling weight. He watched his friend chew his food, then offer up the resulting paste. He watched him raise Obotegwa's feet so that he might wash them, only to wash his shins instead because of the ulcerations that cankered his toes and heel. He listened to him whisper to the ailing servant in the warm, resonant tones of their native language. He understood none of it, and yet grasped all of it, for the tones of love and gratitude and remorse transcend all languages, even those from different ends of the world.

Sorweel watched Obotegwa blink two tears, as if they were all that remained, and somehow he just knew: the man had lived so long only to obtain permission to die. With fingers of trembling teak, the Obligate reached beneath his tunic and withdrew a small golden cylinder, which Zsoronga clasped with solemn disbelief.

He watched his friend take a knife to the old man's wrists.

He watched the lantern oil of his life leak into the earth, until the guttering flame that was Obotegwa shined no more. He stared at the inanimate body, wondered that it could seem as dry as the earth.

Zsoronga cried out as if freed of some long-suffering obligation to remain strong. He wept with outrage and shame and sorrow. Sorweel embraced him, felt the anguish kick through his powerful frame.

Afterward, when night had drawn its chill shroud over the world beyond their tent, Zsoronga told a story about how, in his eighth summer, he had come, for no reason he could fathom, to covet his older cousin's Battle-Sash-so much so he actually crept into his quarters and stole it. "Things glitter in the eyes of a child," he said, speaking with the blank manner of the bereaved. "They shine, more than is seemly…"

Thinking himself clever, he had taken care to hide the thing in Obotegwa's annex to his room-in his matins satchel. Of course, giving the ceremonial importance of the Sash, a hue and cry was raised the instant it was discovered missing. By some stroke of disastrous fortune, it was found among Obotegwa's effects shortly after, and the Obligate was seized.

"Of course they knew I was the culprit," Zsoronga explained, staring down at his thieving palms. "This is an old trick among my people. A way to peel past the bark, as they say. Someone else is accused of your crime, and unless you confess, you're forced to witness their punishment…"

Seized by the terror and shame that so often makes puppets of children, Zsoronga had said nothing. Even as Obotegwa was whipped, he said nothing-and to his everlasting shame, the Obligate said nothing as well. "Imagine… the whole of the Inner Court, watching him be whipped and knowing full well that I was the one!"

So he did what most children do when cornered by some fact of failure or weakness: he made believe. He told himself that Obotegwa had stolen the Sash, out of spite, out of fascination-who knew what moved lesser souls? "I was a child!" Zsoronga cried, his voice pinched eight summers short.

One day passed. Two. Three. And still he said nothing. The whole world seemed bent to the warp of his fear. His father ceased speaking to him. His mother continually blinked tears. And so the farce continued. At some level, he knew that the world knew, but the stubbornness would not relent. Only Obotegwa treated him precisely as before. Only Obotegwa, the one bearing his welts, played along.

Then his father summoned him and Obotegwa to his apartments. The Satakhan was furious, to the point of kicking over braziers and spilling fiery coals across the floor. But Obotegwa, true to character, remained amiable and calm.

"He assured Father that I felt shame," the Successor-Prince recalled with a vacant stare. "He bid him recall my eyes and take heart in the pain he had seen there. Given this, he said, my silence should be cause for pride, for it is the curse of rulers to bear the burden of shameful secrets. 'Only weak rulers confess weakness,' he said. 'Only wise rulers bear the full burden of their crimes. Take heart knowing your son is both strong and wise…'"

Zsoronga hung upon these words for a time. He glanced at the shadowy corpse at their feet, sat blinking at the impossibility. And Sorweel knew precisely what he felt, the way you lose so much more than simply another voice and gaze from an otherwise crowded life. He knew that many things in Zsoronga's life had some history peculiar to him and Obotegwa alone-that they had shared a world between them, a world that was gone.

"And what do you think?" Sorweel dared ask.

"That I was foolish and weak," Zsoronga said.

They spoke of Obotegwa long into the night, and it seemed indistinguishable from speaking about life. They said things wise and foolish by turns, as young, intelligent men are prone. And at last, when weariness and grief overcame them, Zsoronga told the Sakarpi King how Obotegwa had insisted that he befriend Sorweel, how the old Obligate had always believed he would surprise them all. And then the Successor-Prince told him how, on the morn, he would add the name Harweel to his ancestor list.

"A brother!" the Successor-Prince whispered with startling violence. "Sakarpus has a brother in Zeum!"

They slept with the beloved dead, as was the custom in High Holy Zeum. Their breathing pulled deep with rhythmic life, a garland about the breathless.

They awoke before the Interval, buried Obotegwa without marker on the grey, desolate plain.

Sorweel and Zsoronga hung about the edges of the General's retinue, witless for the lack of sleep and the expenditure of passion. The sun had climbed past the precincts of noon, drawing the shadows of things to the east. The line of the land, which for so long reached out in a monotonous crescent before them, had been broken and multiplied. Low knolls rose against low ridges. Ravines rutted mounded distances. Gravel spilled from wandering defilades. The Army of the Middle-North mobbed the horizon immediately behind them, its innumerable pennants little more than shadows lolling through the steaming dust. They rode as they always did at this time of day, their brows angled away from the sun's glare, their thoughts wandering on the slack leash of midday boredom.

Sorweel was the first to glimpse the speck hanging low over the western horizon. He had fallen into the habit of reading the world as much as watching it, so he said nothing, convinced he witnessed some kind of sign. Was it another stork come to communicate the inexplicable?

He was quickly disabused of this conceit. The speck, whatever it was, hung in the faraway air more like a bumblebee than a bird, like something too cumbersome to fly…

He peered, squinted as much out of disbelief as against the high sun. He saw black horses — a team of four. He saw wheels…

A chariot, he realized. A flying chariot.

For a time he simply watched stupefied, rocking in rhythm to his mount's dogged trot.

A chorus of alarums cracked the air. The General's Pillarian escort leapt into formation about their flanks, their armour and tunics shining green and gold. The Nuns who accompanied Serwa cried out in arcane unison, let out their billows as they strode glimmering into the sky.

The sorcerous chariot rode a low arc over the churned landscape. Sunlight flashed across panels laden with graven images. Sorweel saw three pale faces swaying above the gilded rail-one of them shouting light.

Kayutas, for his part, betrayed no surprise or urgency whatsoever. "Silence!" he cried to those in his immediate circle. "Decorum!" Then, without a word of explanation, he tore off, galloping on a long plume of dust.

The witches hung motionless in the air, their billows winding and waving about them.

The retinue, which typically rode in a loose mass, flattened into a crescent as the officers and caste-nobles jostled for vantages. Sorweel and Zsoronga watched from the centre of the press. The sky-chariot banked toward the Prince-Imperial and swung to earth. The hooves of the blacks bit hard into the denuded turf, and wings of dust and gravel sprawled about their glossy flanks. Golden wheels gleamed about spokes spun into invisibility. The centre figure leaned back, pulling hard on the reins.

Standing in his stirrups, Kayutas raced out to meet them, hailed them with a raised arm.

The three strangers turned toward him in unison.

"They're not human," Zsoronga said. His tone was ragged, and not for exhaustion. He sounded like a man who had had his fill of miraculous things. Like a man straining to believe.

The Kidruhil General reined his pony to a dusty halt, exchanged what seemed cryptic greetings. Nothing could be heard on the arid wind. Then, with scarce a breath expended, he wheeled his mount about and began trotting back toward his astonished command. The sky-chariot lurched into motion behind him, trundling across the earth…

And for some reason, of all the awe-inspiring sights Sorweel had seen and would see, none would be so arresting as the sight of the gilded chariot wheeling back into open sky. He understood his friend's beseeching tone, for it had made a beehive of his own breast as well.

Nonmen.

So many miracles. All of them speaking for his enemy's cause.

For reasons he could scarce fathom, the Exalt-General found himself pondering the siege and fall of Shimeh-the final night of the First Holy War-as he walked the short distance from his pavilion to the black silhouette of the Umbilicus. Fleeing the streets of the Holy City, he had climbed onto the pediment of an ancient fullery, where he had watched his Holy Aspect-Emperor battle the last of the heathen Cishaurim. There had been five of them, Primaries, mightier, despite the crudity of their art, than the most accomplished Schoolmen. Five hellish figures floating high above the burning city, their eyes gouged so they might see the Water-that-was-Light-and Anasurimbor Kellhus had slain them all.

Such was the power of the man he had come to worship. Such was the might. So how had his soul let slip the ardour of his faith? Why had hope and inflexible determination become foreboding and gnawing worry?

The Men of the Ordeal hailed him as they always did when he walked the interior ways of the camp, but for once he did not return their salutations. He fairly knocked over Lord Couras Nantilla, the General of the Cengemi, at the entryway to the Umbilicus, such was the depth of his walking reverie. He squeezed the man's shoulder in lieu of an apology.

At long last the plains had yielded. At long last the Great Ordeal, the sum of his lifelong hope and toil, trod the fabled lands named in the Holy Sagas. At long last they marched into the shadow of foul Golgotterath- Golgotterath!

For all the perils facing them, for all the privations, this should be a time of jubilation. For who, in all the world, could withstand the might of Anasurimbor Kellhus?

No one.

Not even the dread Consult of Mog-Pharau.

So why did his heart pound air into his veins?

He resolved to make this his question. He resolved to set aside his pride, and to reveal the full extent of his misgivings…

To ask his Prophet how he could doubt his Prophet.

But for once the Aspect-Emperor was not alone in his chamber. He stood arms out while two body-slaves attended to him, cinching and fussing robes freighted with ceremonial splendour: the costume of a Ketyai warrior-king from Far Antiquity. He wore a full-length gown whose hems had been bound into his ankle-wraps. Golden vambraces encased his forearms and matching greaves his shins. Opposing Kyranean Lions gleamed across his breast-plate. With his stature and haloed mien, he seemed a vision from some ancient relief-save for the two severed demon heads hanging from his girdle…

"You are troubled, I know," Kellhus said, grinning at his Exalt-General. "For all your yearning, for all your faith, yours remains a pragmatic soul, Proyas." The slaves continued their silent labour, binding straps and laces. The Aspect-Emperor glanced down at his garb, rolled his eyes as if offering himself up as a poor example. "You have little patience for tools you cannot immediately use."

As a young child, one of Proyas's duties had been to bear his mother's train at public ceremonies. All he remembered of the toddling farce was stumbling after the long-dragging hems, clutching embroidery, losing it, then stumbling after the hems again, while all the Conriyan court roared in adoring laughter around him. In so many ways, Kellhus made him feel the same tender fool, always chasing, always stumbling…

"If I have fail-"

Kellhus interrupted him with a warm hand on his shoulder. "Please, Proyas. I'm just saying we grapple with earthly things tonight…"

"Earthly things?"

A broad smile cracked the flaxen curls of the Aspect-Emperor's moustache and beard.

"Yes. The Nonman King has finally answered our call."

Earthly, Proyas reflected, was not a term many would accord the ghouls.

"Even now his embassy waits here in the Umbilicus," his Lord-and-God continued. "We will receive them in the Eleven Pole Chamber…"

Within a matter of heartbeats, Proyas found himself immersed in the organizational carnival that perpetually characterized life behind the veils of power. Slaves took him in hand, washing his hands, brushing and perfuming his field armour, oiling and combing his hair and beard. A part of him always found it remarkable, the degree of coordination required for even the simplest and most impromptu of state occasions. An Imperial Eunuch festooned in insignia from across the Three Seas led him out into the airy chill of the Eleven Pole Chamber. Kellhus already stood on the low dais, dispensing trivial instructions to a small mob of functionaries. The Ekkinu, the sorcerous arras that framed the throne, writhed gold on black with the utter absence of motion. Glimpsing Proyas, Kellhus gestured for him to stand at his side.

His thoughts racing, the Exalt-General took his place next to the throne, convinced he could feel the sinuous, symbolic twine of the Ekkinu in the air behind him. He had never been able to fathom the significance of the Nonmen to the Ordeal-especially since whatever strength they could muster would be but a fraction of their former glory-and scarcely anything at all compared with the might of the Great Ordeal-at least in his humble, human opinion. But Kellhus had sent hundreds to their death, if not thousands, in his perpetual attempts to contact Nil'giccas: small fleets charged with leaving the Three Seas and running the coasts of Zeum, thence into the mists of the Ocean and the legendary shores of Injor-Niyas.

All in the name of striking an alliance with a ten-thousand-year-old king.

Another question to trouble their discussions.

Proyas gazed up into the gloom of the tented heights. Only three braziers had been lighted, so they seemed a small island of illumination surrounded by half-glimpsed Circumfix banners and walls and panels so dim as to be nothing more than the ghosts of structure.

The slaves and functionaries withdrew, taking the air of carnival bustle with them. Save for the shadowy guards posted about the chamber's perimeter, it was just the two of them.

"I have pulled aside the harem beads," Kellhus said. "And you find my wives ugly…"

The Exalt-General coughed aloud, such was his consternation. "What?"

"Your question," Kellhus said, chuckling. He spoke in the wry, warm tones of a friend who has always dwelt several paces closer to the peace that truth delivers. "You wonder how it is you can doubt after so many years of witness and miracle."

"I… I'm not sure I understand."

"There's a reason Men prefer their prophets dead, Proyas."

Kellhus stared askance at his Exalt-General, one eyebrow hooked in Do-you-see? curiosity.

And Proyas did see-he realized that he had understood all along. His question, he suddenly realized, was no question at all but instead a complaint. He did not doubt so much as yearn…

For the simplicity of simple belief.

"We begin believing when we are children," Kellhus continued. "And so we make childish expectations our rule, the measure for what the holy should be…" He gestured to the ornamentation about them, spare as it was compared with the fleshpots of the South. "Simplicity. Symmetry. Beauty. These are but the appearance of the holy-the gilding that deceives. What is holy is difficult, ugly beyond comprehension, in the eyes of all save the God."

Just then, the Pillarian Seneschal announced the visitors.

"Remember," Kellhus murmured as a mother might. "Forgive them their peculiarities…"

Three striding figures resolved from the gloom, hooded in black cloaks that shone as though slicked in rain.

"And beware their beauty."

The foremost figure paused immediately below them, threw back his cloak, which slipped into a pool of kneaded folds about the heels of his boots. His scalp gleamed with the pallor of cold mutton fat. His face was alarming, as much for its perfection as for its resemblance to the Sranc. He wore a hauberk that was at once a gown, one that baffled the eyes for the wrought delicacy of the chain: innumerable serpents no larger than the clippings of a child's nails.

"I am Nin'sariccas," the Nonman announced in High Kuniuric, a language Proyas had spent years mastering so he could read The Sagas in their original tongue. "Dispossessed Son of Siol, Emissary of his Most Subtle Glory, Nil'giccas, King of Injor-Niyas…" His bow fell far short of what jnan demanded. "We have ridden long and hard to find you."

Kellhus regarded him the way he regarded all penitents who found their way to his feet: as someone who had stumbled out of wintry desolation into the warm, sultry glow of summer.

"You are surprised," he said in a voice that easily matched the melodious resonance of the Nonman's. "You thought us doomed."

A serpentine blink. The preternatural eyes clicked to the Aspect-Emperor's right-to the sorcerous arras, Proyas realized. He understood what Kellhus had meant by peculiarities. Something about the ghoul's manner followed unexpected lines. For the first time he noticed that the Nonman stood nude beneath the gleam of his nimil hauberk.

"Nil'giccas sends his greetings," Nin'sariccas said. "Even in an age so dark, the light that is the Aspect-Emperor shines for all to see."

A leonine nod.

"Then Ishterebinth is with us?"

The Emissary's air of vague distraction lapsed into outright insolence. Rather than answer, Nin'sariccas peered across the Eleven Pole Chamber's airy interior, then, with the remote reserve of those careful to conceal their disgust, considered Proyas and the Pillarian Guards flanking him. Weathering the inhuman scrutiny, Proyas suffered a strange twinge of inadequacy, one he imagined caste-menials felt in the presence of nobles: a presentiment of bodily and spiritual inferiority.

Like the angels of a long-dead god, the Nonmen stood rigid with a pride that had out-lived their glory. Only the mien and manner of the Aspect-Emperor dwarfed them-a sun to their moon.

"The memory of your forefather's treachery…" the Emissary finally replied, his gaze lingering on Proyas, "burns bright with us. For some, Anasurimbor is the very name of Mannish arrogance and disorder."

At this, several Pillarians loosened their broadswords in their scabbard. Proyas was quick in raising his hand to restrain them, knowing the Nonman spoke from the vantage of ages, that for them, generations of Men were as fleeting as mice. They had no grave to swallow their ancient grudges.

Kellhus betrayed no consciousness of the affront. He leaned forward in a familiar way, rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his haloed hands.

"Is Ishterebinth with us?"

A long, cold gaze. For the first time Proyas noticed how the two Nonmen accompanying Nin'sariccas held their eyes down as though in ritual shame.

"Yes," the Emissary said. "The Sacred Ishroi of Injor-Niyas will add voice and shield to your Ordeal… If you retake Dagliash. If you honour the Niom."

Proyas had never heard of the Niom. Dagliash, he knew, was the fortress the ancient High Norsirai had raised to guard against Golgotterath. It stood to reason that the ghouls would want some guarantee of success before casting their lot.

"Have you seen the massacre we have wrought?" Kellhus cried in the semblance of a more impassioned ruler. "No Horde so great has been overcome. Not Pir-Pahal. Not Eleneot. No age of Man or Nonman has seen a host such as the one I have assembled!" He stood to peer into the Emissary's inhuman face, and somehow the World seemed to lean with him, milky with the roar of intangible things.

"The Great Ordeal will reach Golgotterath."

The Exalt-General had seen innumerable men-strong, proud men-shrivel beneath the Aspect-Emperor's divine scrutiny, so many that it had come to seem a law of nature. But Nin'sariccas remained as remote as before.

"If you retake Dagliash. If you honour the Niom."

Proyas took care not to look at his Lord-and-God directly, knowing that the sight of subordinates watching their rulers would be taken as a sign of weakness. But he found himself desperately curious as to the intricacies of Kellhus's expression-the art. Proyas had witnessed many men deny the Aspect-Emperor through the years, either through him, as was the case with King Harweel of Sakarpus, or directly. But never in circumstances so extraordinary.

Daring souls, and foolish, given that so few yet breathed.

"Agreed," the Aspect-Emperor said.

A concession? Why did he need these inhuman ghouls?

Once again, Nin'sariccas's bow fell far short of what jnan demanded. He lifted his aquiline face. His glittering black gaze fell to Kellhus's waist, to the abominations hanging from his hip.

"We are curious…" the Nonman said. "The Ciphrang bound about your girdle. Is it true you have walked the Outside and returned?"

Kellhus resumed his seat, leaned back with a single foot extended. "Yes."

An almost imperceptible nod. "And what did you find?"

Kellhus propped his face with his right hand, two fingers pressed to his temple. "You worry that I never truly returned," he said mildly. "That the soul of Anasurimbor Kellhus writhes in some hell and a demon Ciphrang gazes upon you instead."

The Decapitants, as the demonic heads had come to be called, were something wilfully ignored by many among the Zaudunyani. A kind of indigestible proof. Proyas was one of few who knew something about their acquisition, how Kellhus, during one of the longer truces that punctuated the Unification Wars, spent several weeks studying with Heramari Iyokus, the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, learning the darkest ways of Anagogic sorcery, the Daimos. Proyas had been among the first to see them when he returned from Carythusal and perhaps the first to dare ask Kellhus what had happened. His reply loomed large among the many unforgettable things the man had told him over the years: "There are two species of revelation, my old friend. Those that seize, and those that are seized. The first are the province of the priest, the latter belong to the sorcerer…"

Even after so many years, his skin still prickled in revulsion when he glimpsed the Decapitants. But unlike many of the faithful, Proyas never forgot that his prophet was also a mage, a Shaman, not unlike those so piously condemned by the Tusk. His was the New Covenant, the sweeping away of all the old measures. So many former sins had become new virtues. Women had claimed the privileges of men. Sorcerers had become priests.

Obscenity should hang from the waist of Salvation, or so it had come to seem.

"Such thefts…" Nin'sariccas said with passionless tact. "Such substitutions. They have happened before."

"Why should you care," Kellhus said, "if your hatred is satisfied, your ancient foe at last destroyed? Ever have Men been ruled by tyrants. Why should you care what soul lies behind our cruelty?"

A single inhuman blink. "May I touch you?"

"Yes."

The Emissary instantly stepped forward, sparking cries and the baring of weapons throughout the gloom.

"Leave him," Kellhus said.

Nin'sariccas had paused immediately above the Aspect-Emperor, the hem of his chain gown swaying. For the first time he betrayed something resembling indecision, and Proyas realized the creature was, in his own inhuman manner, terrified. The Exalt-General almost smiled, such was his gratification.

The Emissary extended a sallow hand…

Which the Aspect-Emperor clasped in a firm, human grip. For a heartbeat, it seemed that worlds, let alone the shadowy confines of the Eleven Pole Chamber, dangled from their grasp.

Sun and moon. Man and Nonman.

The clasp broke with the gliding of fingers.

"What did you see?" Nin'sariccas asked with what seemed genuine curiosity. "What did you find?"

"God… broken into a million warring splinters."

A grim nod. "We worship the spaces between the Gods."

"Which is why you are damned."

Another nod, this one strangely brittle. "As False Men."

The Aspect-Emperor nodded in stoic regret. "As False Men."

The Emissary retreated from the dais, resumed his place at the fore of his voiceless companions. "And why should the False Men lend their strength to the True?"

"Because of Hanalinqu," the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas declared. "Because of Cu'jara Cinmoi. Because four thousand years ago, all your wives and daughters were murdered… and you were cursed to go mad in the shadow of that memory, to live forever, dying their deaths."

Nin'sariccas bowed yet again, this time deeper, yet still far short of honouring jnan.

"If you retake Dagliash," he said. "If you honour the Niom."

As he had every morning since the Battle of the Horde, Sorweel awoke before the Interval's toll. He lay aching in his cot, more pinched than warmed by his woollen blanket, blinking at the impossibility of his straits. Other than a residue of warmth that made cold dismay of his every waking, nothing sensible remained of his dreams. He knew only that he dreamed of better places. He could only dream of better places.

Zsoronga lay on his side as he always did, one arm thrown askew, his face the image of boyish bliss. Sorweel regarded him for a bleary moment, thinking as he often thought that the man's future wives would love him best like this, in the innocence of his mornings. The young King crept from his cot, fumbled with his gear in the dawning pallor, then slipped outside so as to not disturb his brother from Zeum.

He savoured the chill of breathing open sky, rubbed his bearding chin as he gazed out across the encampment. He felt the clamour to come, the rousing of thousands about him, and the warring of doubts within. Another day marching with the Great Ordeal. The discomfort of long watches in the saddle. The ligatures of sweat. The ache of perpetual squinting. The anxiousness of the accumulating Horde. And for a fleeting moment, he knew the peace of those first to awaken-the gratitude that accompanies solitary lulls.

He sat on his rump to labour with his riding boots.

"Truth shines…" a voice chimed.

"Truth shines," habit replied for him.

Anasurimbor Serwa stood before him, her silken billows knotted tight about her slight form. She had appeared without the merest inkling. From his first glimpse, Sorweel knew he would crouch peering after her departure, looking for her footfalls across the trampled dust. She stood to his left, beneath the arch of the bluing sky. Crimson gilded the edges of the tents jumbled behind her.

She drew back a lick of flaxen hair from her cheek.

"The Charioteer you and my brother found… Father has met with them."

"The Embassy…" Sorweel said, squinting up at her. "Kayutas said your father hopes to forge a treaty with Ishterebinth."

She smiled. "You know of Ishterebinth in Sakarpus?"

He scowled and shrugged. "From The Sagas… None thought it real."

"The mightiest among the Quya dwell there still."

He did not know what to say so he turned back to his boots. He never felt the Goddess so fiercely as when he found himself before Serwa or Kayutas. His cheeks literally prickled. And yet at the same time, he never felt so unworthy of the Mother's dread design. To stand before the Anasurimbor was to doubt… things old.

"The Nonmen have invoked Niom," she said. "An ancient ritual."

Something in her tone seized his attention. She had sounded almost embarrassed.

"I don't understand."

Her gaze had recovered its remote vantage. She considered him with a serenity that he yearned to muddy with his passion…

Evil. How could someone so beautiful be evil?

"The ancient Nonmen Kings found Men too mercurial," she explained, "too proud and headstrong to be trusted. So in all their dealings they demanded hostages as a guarantee: a son, a daughter, and a captive enemy. The two former as a surety against treachery. The latter as a surety against deception."

The sun broke behind her. Light unfurled in a burning fan about her silhouette.

"And I am to play the enemy," he said, holding a hand out against her glare.

What new twist was this?

"Yes," her shadow replied against the high drone of the Interval.

He had expected her to vanish, to wink out of existence the same way she had winked in. But she simply turned and began walking at an angle to the eastern sun. Her shadow floated across the trampled earth, drawn as long and slender as a felled sapling. With every step she became smaller, a mere wisp before the enormity of dawn…

Ever more lonely and afraid.