The white-luck warrior

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

The Sakarpi tell of a man who had two puppies in his belly, the one adoring, the other savage. When the loving one nuzzled his heart, he became joyous, like the father of a newborn boy. But when the other gored it with sharp puppy teeth, he became desperate with sorrow. Those rare times the dogs left him in peace, he would tell people he was doomed. Bliss can be sipped a thousand times, he would say, whereas shame need only cut your throat once.

The Sakarpi called him Kensooras, "Between Dogs," a name that had since come to mean the melancholy suffered by suicides.

Varalt Sorweel was most certainly between dogs.

His ancient city had been conquered, its famed Chorae Hoard plundered. His beloved father had been killed. And now that he found himself in the Aspect-Emperor's fearsome thrall, a Goddess accosted him, the Dread Mother of Birth, Yatwer, in the guise of his lowly slave.

Kensooras indeed.

The cavalry company that was his cage, the Scions, had been called to the hazard of war. The collection of young hostages who composed the Scions had long feared their company was naught but ornamental, that they would be cozened like children while the Men of the Ordeal fought and died around them. They pestered their Kidruhil Captain, Harnilas, endlessly. They even petitioned General Kayutas-to no apparent avail. Even though they marched with their fathers' enemy, they were boys as much as men, and so their hearts were burdened with the violent longing to prove their mettle.

Sorweel was no different. When word of their deployment finally arrived, he grinned and whooped the same as the others-how could he not? The recriminations, as always, came crashing in afterward.

The Sranc had ever been the great foe of his people-that is, before the coming of the Aspect-Emperor. Sorweel had spent the better part of his childhood training and preparing for battle against the creatures. For a Son of Sakarpus, there could be no higher calling. Kill a Sranc, the saying went, birth a man. As a boy he had spent innumerable lazy afternoons mooning over imagined glories, chieftains brained, whole clans annihilated. And he had spent as many taut nights praying for his father whenever he rode out to meet the beasts.

Now, at long last, he was about to answer a lifelong yearning and to embark on a rite sacred to his people…

In the name of the man who had murdered his father and enslaved his nation.

More dogs.

He gathered with the others in Zsoronga's sumptuous pavilion the night before their departure, did his best to keep his counsel while the others crowed in anticipation. "Don't you see?" he finally cried. "We are hostages!"

Zsoronga watched with an air of frowning dismissal. He reclined more than the others so that the crimson silk of his basahlet gleamed across his cheek and jaw. Plaits of his jet medicine-wig curled across his shoulders.

The Zeumi Successor-Prince remained as generous as always, but there could be no denying the chill that had climbed between them since the Aspect-Emperor had declared Sorweel one of the Believer-Kings. The young King desperately wanted to explain things, to tell him about Porsparian and the incident with Yatwer's spit, to assure him that he still hated, but some inner leash always pulled him up short. Some silences, he was learning, were impossible not to keep.

To Sorweel's left sat Prince Charampa of Cingulat-the " true Cingulat," he would continually insist, to distinguish his land from the Imperial province of the same name. Though his skin was every bit as black and exotic as Zsoronga's, he possessed the narrow features of a Ketyai. He was one of those men who never ceased squabbling, even when everyone agreed with him. To his right sat the broad-faced Tzing of Jekkhia, a land whose mountain Princes paid grudging tribute to the Aspect-Emperor. He never spoke save through an enigmatic smile, as though he were privy to facts that made a farce out of all conversations. Opposite Sorweel, beside the Successor-Prince, sat Tinurit of the Akkunihor, a Scylvendi tribe whose lands lay no more than two weeks' ride from the New Empire's capital. He was an imperious, imposing character and the only one who knew less Sheyic than Sorweel.

"Why should we celebrate fighting our captor's war?"

No one understood a word, of course, but enough desperation had cracked through his tone to capture their attention. Obotegwa, Zsoronga's steadfast Obligate, quickly translated, and Sorweel was surprised to find himself understanding much of what the old man said. Obotegwa rarely had a chance to complete any of his translations of late-primarily because of Charampa, whose thoughts flew from soul to tongue without the least consideration.

"Because it is better than rotting in our captor's camp," Tzing replied through his perpetual smirk.

"Yes!" Charampa cried. "Think of it as a hunting expedition, Sorri!" He turned to the others, seeking confirmation of his wit. "You can even scar yourself like Tinurit here!"

Sorweel looked to Zsoronga, who merely glanced away as though in boredom. As fleeting as the wordless exchange had been, it stung as surely as a slap.

So says the Believer-King, the Zeumi's green eyes seemed to say.

As far as Sorweel could tell, the single thing that distinguished their group from the other Scions was geography. Where the others hailed from recalcitrant tribes and nations within the New Empire, they represented the few lands that still exceeded its grasp-at least until recently. "Between us we have the Aspect-Emperor surrounded!" Zsoronga would sometimes cry in joking terms.

But it was no joke, Sorweel had come to realize. Zsoronga, who would one day be Satakhan of High Holy Zeum, the only nation that could hope to rival the New Empire, was cultivating friendships according to the interests of his people. He avoided the others simply because the Aspect-Emperor was renowned for his devious subtlety. Because spies had almost certainly been planted among the Scions.

He had to know Sorweel was no spy. But why would he tolerate a Believer-King?

Perhaps he had yet to decide.

The young Sakarpi King found himself brooding more than contributing as the night wore on. Obotegwa continued translating the others for his benefit, but Sorweel could tell that the white-haired Obligate sensed his despondency. Eventually, he could do little more than gaze at their small flame, plagued by the sense that something stared back.

Was he going mad? Was that it? The earth speaking, spitting. And now flames watching…

He had been raised to believe in a living world, an inhabited world, and yet for the brief span of his life dirt had always been dirt, and fire had always been fire, dumb and senseless. Until now.

Charampa accompanied him on the walk back to his tent, speaking far too fast for Sorweel to follow. The Cingulat Prince was one of those oblivious souls who saw only excuses to chatter and nothing of what his listeners were thinking. "It's a poor hostage," Zsoronga had once joked, "whose father is relieved to see him captive." But in a sense, this made Charampa and Sorweel ideal companions, one from the New Empire's extreme southern frontier, the other from the extreme north. The one talking without care of comprehension, the other unable to comprehend.

The young King walked, scarcely pretending to listen. As always, he found himself awed by the scale of the Great Ordeal, that they could come to blank and barren plains and within a watch raise a veritable city. He groped for a memory of his father's face but could see only the Aspect-Emperor hanging in shrouded skies, raining destruction down upon Holy Sakarpus. So he thought of the morrow, of the Scions winding into the wastes, a frail thread of some eighty souls. The other Scions talked of battling Sranc, but the real purpose of their mission, Captain Harnilas had told them, was to find game to supply the host. Even still, they rode far beyond the Pale-who could say what they would encounter? The prospect of battle fluttered like a living thing in his breast. The thought of riding down Sranc screwed tight his teeth, hooked his lips into a broad grin. The thought of killing…

Mistaking his expression for agreement, Charampa grabbed his shoulders. "I knew it!" he cried, his Sheyic finally simple enough to understand. "I told them! I told them!"

Then he was off, leaving Sorweel dumbfounded behind him.

The Sakarpi King paused in momentary dread before entering his tent, but he found his slave, Porsparian, sleeping on his reed mat, curled like half-starved cat, his breath caught between a wheeze and a snore. He stood over the diminutive man, hanging in confusion and anxiousness. He need only blink to see Porsparian's knob-knuckled hands moulding Yatwer's face in the soil, the impossible vision of spit bubbling to her earthen lips. His cheeks burned at the memory of the slave's rough touch. His heart lurched at the thought of the Aspect-Emperor declaring him one of his Believer-Kings.

A slave-a slave had done this! More Southron madness, Sorweel found himself thinking. In the story and scripture of Sakarpus, the Gods only treated with the heroic and the highborn-those mortals who resembled them most. But in the Three Seas, he was learning, the Gods touched Men according to the extremity of their station. The abject were as apt to become their vessels as the grand…

Slaves and kings.

Sorweel crept into his cot as silently as he could manage, tossed in what he thought was the beginning of another sleepless night, only to dissolve into a profound slumber.

He awoke to the tolling of the Interval. With his first breath, he could taste the wind his people called the Gangan-naru-too warm for dawn, tinged with dust. The troubling glamour that Porsparian had possessed the previous night had evaporated. The slave scuttled about with nary a significant look, readied Sorweel's packs and saddle as he ate his meagre morning repast. The little man dragged the gear outside his tent, where he helped load the young King. The tablelands swirled with industry and purpose about them. Horns scored the brightening sky.

"You return…" Porsparian began, pausing to search for some word his owner might understand. "Hatusat…" he said, scowling with old-man concentration. "Exalted."

Sorweel frowned and snorted. "I will do my best."

But Porsparian was already shaking his head, saying, "She! She! "

The young King stepped back in terror, turned away, his thoughts buzzing. When the Shigeki slave clutched at his arm, he yanked himself free with more violence than he intended.

"She!" the old man cried. "Sheeee!"

Sorweel strode away, huffing beneath his gear. He could see the others, the Scions, a small eddy of activity in an ocean of seething detail-an army that extended into the colourless haze. Tents falling. Horses screaming, their caparisons flashing in the early dawn light. Officers bawling. The dip and wave of innumerable Circumfix banners.

The great host of the Aspect-Emperor… The other dog.

Yes, the young King of Sakarpus decided. He needed to kill something.

That or die.

Grassland roamed the horizon, every direction the eye could see, rising in chaotic tiers, panning into bowls, and tumbling into ravines. The greening of spring could be glimpsed in its contours, but it was little more than a haze beneath the sheets of dead scree. For the plainsmen who had taken up the Circumfix-Famiri and Cepalorans, who were used to seeing the detritus of winter swallowed in flowers and surging grasses-this was as ominous as could be. Where others were oblivious, they saw emaciated cattle, horizons burnt into long brown lines, horned skulls in summer dust.

The clouds that baffled the northwest never sailed toward them. Instead a breeze, preternatural for its constancy, swept in from the south, drawing the thousands of Circumfix banners into one rippling direction. The Sakarpi scouts called it the Gangan-naru, the "Parching Wind," a name they spoke with the flat look of men recalling disaster. The Gangan-naru, they said, came but once every ten years, culling the herds, forcing the Horselords to abandon the Pale, and all but transforming the Istyuli into a vast desert. The Kianene and Khirgwi among the host swore they could smell the dusty scent of their home, the faraway Carathay.

When the hour was late, and the Judges no longer walked the encampment, the grizzled Veterans of the First Holy War murmured stories of woe. "You think the path of the righteous is one of certainty and ease," they said to younger faces, "but it is trial that separates the weak from the holy." Only the most drunk spoke of the Trail of Skulls, the First Holy War's catastrophic march along the desert coasts of Khemema. And without exception their voices became murmurs, overcome by memories of the weak and the fallen.

Arrayed in great roping lines, the Men of the Circumfix trudged onward with dogged resolution, travelling ever northward. They formed a veritable sea, one churning with many-coloured currents-the black shields of the Thunyeri, the silvered helms of the Conriyans, the crimson surcoats of the Nansur-and yet the emptiness continued to open and open, vast enough to even make the Great Ordeal small. A cloud of horsemen encircled the host, companies of household knights riding beneath the banners of the Three Seas caste-nobility-Ainoni Palatines, Galeoth Earls, Kianene Grandees, and many more. They probed the distances, searching for an enemy who never appeared, save for the ever greater swathes of raked earth they galloped across.

At the Council of Potentates, the Believer-Kings finally petitioned their Holy Aspect-Emperor, asking whether he knew anything of their elusive foe. "You look about you," he said, stepping luminous among them, "see the greatest host of Men ever assembled, and you yearn to crush your enemies, thinking yourself invincible. Heed me, the Sranc will scratch that yearning from you. A time will come when you look back to these days and wish that your eagerness had gone unrequited."

He smiled, and they smiled, finding levity in his wry humour, wisdom in his sober heart. He sighed, and they shook their heads at their juvenile foolishness.

"Fret not about the absence of our foe," he admonished. "So long as the horizon remains empty, our way is secure."

Grassland roamed the horizon, drying beneath a succession of cool spring suns. The rivers dwindled, and the dust rose to shroud the farther pageants. The Priests and Judges organized mass prayers, fields of warlike men abasing themselves for want of rain. But the Gangan-naru continued to blow. At night, the plains twinkling with innumerable fires, the Men of the Three Seas began to murmur about thirst-and rumours of discord back home.

The horizon remained empty, and yet their way no longer seemed secure.

The Holy Aspect-Emperor declared a day of rest and consultation.

The quartermasters became ever more stingy. The Men of the Circumfix had exhausted the bulk of their supplies, and they had outrun the supply-trains that chased them from the south. The rivers they tramped across had become too slight to readily fill their skins with clean water. They had come as far as their beasts and their backs could take them, which meant they had indeed passed beyond the limits of civilization. From this point, they had to fend for themselves.

The time had come for the Great Ordeal to break into foraging columns.

Stark.

That was the only way to describe the Aspect-Emperor's bed chamber. A simple cot for sleeping, no different than those issued to low-ranking officers. A knee-high worktable, without so much as a single cushion to sit upon. Even the room's leather walls, which were swagged with decoration elsewhere throughout the Umbilicus, were bare. No gold could be seen. No ornament. The only symbols visible were those inscribed, column after meticulous column, about the octagonal circuit of the small iron hearth set in the room's heart.

King Nersei Proyas had known and served Anasurimbor Kellhus for more than twenty years, and still he found himself regularly perplexed by the man. As a youth he had often watched his tutor, Achamian, and his sword master, Xinemus, play benjuka-an ancient game, famed for the way the pieces determined the rules. Those had been sunny days, as the days of privileged youth often are. The two men would draw a table over to one of the seaside porticos and call out curses across the Meneanorean wind. Careful to be quiet, for tempers would flare more often than not, Proyas would watch them contest the plate, a winking partisan of whoever happened to be losing-Achamian usually. And he would wonder at decisions he could rarely understand.

This, he had come to learn, was what it meant to serve the Holy Aspect-Emperor: to be a witness to incomprehensible decisions. The difference was that Anasurimbor Kellhus took the World as his benjuka plate.

The World and the Heavens.

To act without understanding. This, this he had decided, was the essential kernel, the spark that made worship worship. In High Ainon, during the fevered height of the Unification Wars, he had overseen the Sack of Sarneveh, an act of brutality that still jarred him from sleep from time to time. Afterward, when the Mathematicians reported that more than five thousand children had been counted among the dead, Proyas began shaking, a flutter that began with his fingers and bowel but soon climbed through his every bone. He dismissed his staff and vomited, wept, only to find him standing in the gloom of his pavilion, watching. "You should grieve," the Aspect-Emperor said, his figure etched in a faint glow. "But do not think you have sinned. The World overmatches us, Proyas, so we make simple what we cannot otherwise comprehend. Nothing is more complicated than virtue and sin. All the atrocities you have committed in my name-all of them have their place. Do you understand this, Proyas? Do you understand why you will never understand?"

"You are our father," he had sobbed. "And we are your headstrong sons."

Zaudunyani.

The chamber was vacant. Even still, Proyas fell to his knees and lowered his face to the simple reed mats. He suffered a pang of shame, realizing that his own quarters possessed at least four times the baggage and so exacted four times the burden on the collective host. That would change, he resolved. And he would challenge all his officers to follow his parsimonious example.

"My Lord and Salvation?" he called to the empty air. The wheeze and pop of the hearth's fire filled the silence. Its light mottled the hanging walls with wavering patterns of light and dark. It almost seemed he could glimpse images in the dancing blur. Cities burning. Faces.

"Yes… Please, Proyas. Share my fire."

And there he was, sitting cross-legged before the octagonal hearth. Anasurimbor Kellhus. The Holy Aspect-Emperor.

He sat with the slack repose of someone who had not moved for some time. The outer edges of his plaited beard and shoulder-length hair gleamed in counterpoint to the fire. He wore a simple robe of grey silk embroidered only about the hems. Aside from the faint haze of illumination about his hands, only his eyes seemed extraordinary.

"Is everything-?" Proyas began, only to catch himself in embarrassment.

"Ours has always been a convoluted bond," Kellhus said smiling. "Clad in ritual armour one moment, naked the next. The time has come for us to recline side by side as simple friends."

He gestured for Proyas to sit beside him-on his right, the place of honour. "Truth be told," he said in his old, joking way. "I prefer you clothed."

"So all is well?" Proyas asked, crouching and crossing his legs.

"I remember when you laughed at my jokes," the Aspect-Emperor said.

"You were funnier back then."

"Back when?"

"Before you beat the World to the last laugh."

The Aspect-Emperor grinned and frowned at once. " That remains to be seen, my friend."

Proyas often was astonished by the way Kellhus could, utterly and entirely, just be what he needed to be given the demands of circumstance. At this moment, he was simply an old and beloved friend, nothing more or less. Usually Proyas found it difficult-given all the miracles of might and intellect he had witnessed-to think of Kellhus as a creature of flesh and blood, as a man. Not so now.

"So all is not well?"

"Well enough," Kellhus said, scratching his brow. "The God has allowed me glimpses of the future, the true future, and thus far everything unfolds in accordance with those glimpses. But there are many dark decisions I must make, Proyas. Decisions I would rather not make alone."

"I'm not sure I understand."

A twinge of shame accompanied this admission, not for the fact of his ignorance, but for the way he had hedged in confessing. Proyas most certainly did not understand. Even after twenty years of devotion, he still succumbed to the stubborn instinct to raise his pride upon little falsehoods and so manage the impressions of others.

How hard it was to be an absolutely faithful soul.

Kellhus had ceased correcting these petty lapses; he no longer needed to. To stand before him was to stand before yourself, to know the warp and woof of your own soul, and to see all the snags and tears that beggared you.

"You are a king and a general," Kellhus said. "I would think you know well the peril of guesses."

Proyas nodded and smiled. "No one likes playing number-sticks alone."

His Lord-and-God raised his eyebrows. "Not with stakes so mad as these."

By some trick of timing, the golden flames before them twirled, and again Proyas thought he glimpsed fiery doom flutter across the leather-panelled walls.

"I am yours, as always my Lor… Kellhus. What do you need of me?"

The leonine face nodded toward the fire. "Kneel before my hearth," the Aspect-Emperor said, the flint of command hardening his voice. "Bow your face into the flame."

Proyas surprised himself with his lack of hesitation. He came to his knees before the edge of the small iron hearth. The heat of the fire pricked him. He knew the famed story from the Tusk, where the God Husyelt asked Angeshrael to bow his face into his cooking fire. He knew, verbatim, the Sermon of the Ziggurat, where Kellhus had used this story to reveal his divinity to the First Holy War twenty years previous. He knew that "Bowing into the Fire" had since become a metaphor for Zaudunyani revelation.

And he knew that innumerable madmen wandered the Three Seas, blinded and scarred for taking the metaphor literally.

Even still, he was on his knees, and he was bowing, doing exactly as his Prophet and Emperor commanded. He even managed to keep his eyes open. And a part of him watched and wondered that a devotion, any devotion, could run so deep as to throw a face into the furnace…

Across the crazed bourne of opposites. Into the lapping glitter. Into the needling agony.

Into the light.

His beard and hair whooshed into tinder. He expected agony. He expected to scream. But something was tugged from him, sloughed like flesh from overboiled bone… something… essential.

And he was looking out from the fire, into a thousand faces-and a thousand more. Enough to wrench the eyes, dazzle and bewilder the soul. And yet somehow he focused, turned from the battering complexity and took refuge in a single clutch of men, four long-bearded Men of the Ordeal, one gazing directly at him with a child's thoughtless fixity, the others bickering in Thunyeri… Something about rations. Hunger.

Then he was out, on his rump in Kellhus's gloomy chamber, blinking and sputtering.

And his Lord-and-God held him, soothed his face with a damp cloth. "The absence of space," he said with a rueful smile. "Most souls find it difficult."

Proyas padded his cheeks and forehead with fumbling fingertips, expecting to feel blasted skin, but found himself intact. Embarrassed, he bolted upright, squinting away the last of the fiery brightness. He glanced about and for some unaccountable reason felt surprised that the iron hearth burned exactly as before.

"Does it trouble you that I can watch men from their fires?" Kellhus asked.

"If anything, it heartens me…" he replied. "I marched with you in the First Holy War, remember? I know full well the capricious humour of armies stranded far from home."

Afterward, he would realize that his Aspect-Emperor had already known this, that Anasurimbor Kellhus knew his heart better than he himself could ever hope to. Afterward, he would question the whole intent of this intimate meeting.

"Indeed you do."

"But why show me this? Do they speak of mutiny already?"

"No," Kellhus replied. "They speak of the thing that preoccupies all stranded men…"

The Aspect-Emperor resumed his position before the hearth, gestured for Proyas to do the same. A moment of silence passed as Kellhus poured him a bowl of wine from the wooden gourd at his side. Gratitude welled through the Exalt-General's breast. He drank from the bowl, watching Kellhus with questioning eyes.

"You mean home."

"Home," the Aspect-Emperor repeated in assent.

"And this is a problem?"

"Indeed. Even now our old enemies muster across the Three Seas. As the days pass they will grow ever more bold. I have always been the rod that held the New Empire together. I fear it will not survive my absence."

Proyas frowned. "And you think this will lead to desertion and mutiny?"

"I know it will.

"But these men are Zaudunyani… They would die for you! For the truth!"

The Aspect-Emperor lowered his face in the yes-but manner Proyas had seen countless times, though not for several years. They had been far closer, he realized, during the Unification Wars…

When they were killing people.

"The hold of abstractions over Men is slight at best," Kellhus said, turning to encompass him in his otherworldly scrutiny. "Only the rare, ardent soul-such as yours, Proyas-can throw itself upon the altar of thought. These men march not so much because they believe in me as they believe what I have told them."

"But they do believe! Mog-Pharau returns to murder the world. They believe this! Enough to follow you to the ends of the World!"

"Even so, would they choose me over their sons? How about you, Proyas? As profoundly as you believe, would you be willing to stake the lives of your son and daughter for my throw of the number-sticks?"

A kind of strange, tingling horror accompanied these words. According to scripture, only Ciphrang, demons, demanded such sacrifices. Proyas could only stare, blinking.

The Aspect-Emperor frowned. "Stow your fears, old friend. I don't ask this question out of vanity. I do not expect any man to choose me or my windy declarations over their own blood and bones."

"Then I don't understand the question."

"The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas-at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and their children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that their wives and daughters may perish for want of their shields, their swords, the Host of Hosts would melt about the edges, then collapse."

And in his soul's eye Proyas could see them, the Men of the Ordeal, sitting about their innumerable fires, trading rumours of disaster back home. He could see them prod and stoke one another's fears, for property, for loved ones, for title and prestige. He could hear the arguments, the long grinding to and fro of faith and incessant worry. And as much as it dismayed him, he knew that his Lord-and-God spoke true, that Men truly were so weak.

Even those who had conquered the known world. Even the Zaudunyani.

"So what are you proposing?" he asked, nodding in sour agreement.

"An embargo," the Aspect-Emperor replied on a pent breath. "I will forbid, on pain of death, all Cants of Far-calling. Henceforth, the Men of the Ordeal shall march with only memories to warm them."

Home. This, if anything, was the abstraction for the Exalt-General. There was a place, of course. Even for beggars, there was a place. But Proyas had spent so many years campaigning that home for him possessed a wane and fleeting character, the sense of things attested to by others. For him, home was his wife, Miramis, who still wept whenever he left her bed for the wide world, and his children, Xinemus and Thaila, who had to be reminded he was their father upon his rare returns.

And even they seemed strangers whenever melancholy steered his thoughts toward them.

No. This was his home. Dwelling in the light of Anasurimbor Kellhus.

Waging his endless war.

The Aspect-Emperor reached out, grasped his shoulder in unspoken acknowledgment. Never, in all their years together, had he promised any reprieve, any respite, from the toil that had so burdened his life. Never had he said, "After this, Proyas… After this…"

Warmth sparked through the Exalt-General, the tingle of grace.

"What will you tell them?" he asked roughly.

"That Golgotterath has the ability to scry our scrying."

"Do they?"

Kellhus arched his eyebrows. "Perhaps. Twenty centuries have they prepared-who could say? It would terrify you, Proyas, to know how little I know of our enemy."

A resigned smile. "I have not known terror since I have known you."

And yet he had known so many things just as difficult.

"Fear not," Kellhus said sadly. "You will be reacquainted before all this is through."

The Seeing-Flame fluttered and twirled before them, caught in some inexplicable draft. Even its warmth seemed to spin.

"So," Proyas said, speaking to ward against the chill falling through him, "the Great Ordeal at last sails beyond sight of shore. I see the wisdom-the necessity. But surely you will maintain contact with the Empire."

"No…" Kellhus replied with an uncharacteristic glance at his haloed hands. "I will not."

"But… but why?"

The Warrior-Prophet looked to the dark leather panels rising about them, gazed as if seeing shapes and portents in the wavering twine of light and shadow. "Because time is short and all I have are fragmentary visions…"

He turned to his Exalt-General. "I can no longer afford backward glances."

And Proyas understood that at long last the Great Ordeal had begun in earnest. The time had come to set aside burdens, to shed all complicating baggage.

Including home.

Only death, war, and triumph remained. Only the future.

Anasurimbor Kellhus, the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas, declared the Breaking of the Great Ordeal at the Eleventh Council of Potentates. The same concerns echoed through the ensuing debates, for such is the temper of many men that they must be convinced several times before they can be convinced at all. The Believer-Kings understood the need to disperse: without forage there was no way the Great Ordeal could reach its destination. But even so early in the year, the rivers were languishing, and the new growth of spring still slept beneath the detritus of the old. As the plainsmen among them knew, game followed the rain in times of drought. What use was dividing the host when all the game had fled in search of greener pasture?

But as the Aspect-Emperor and his planners explained, they had no choice but to pursue the route they had embarked upon. Any deviation from their course would force them to winter in the wilds, rather than Golgotterath, and so doom them. Tusullian, the senior Imperial Mathematician, explained how everything was knitted to everything, how forced marches meant more food, which in turn meant diminishing supplies, which in turn meant more foraging, which in turn meant slower progress.

"In all things," the Aspect-Emperor said, "I urge you to walk the Shortest Path. The road before us is no different, save that it is also the only path. We will be tried, my friends, and many of us will be found wanting. But we will prove worthy of salvation! We shall deliver the World from destruction!"

And so the lists were drawn, and the nations of the Believer-Kings were allotted to what would be called the Four Armies.

Prince Anasurimbor Kayutas, General of the Kidruhil, was given command of the Men of the Middle North, the Norsirai sons of the kings who had ruled these lands in Far Antiquity, ere all was lost in the First Apocalypse. They consisted of the fractious Galeoth under King Coithus Narnol, the elder brother of King Coithus Saubon; the black-armoured Thunyeri under King Hringa Vukyelt, the impetuous son of Hringa Skaiyelt, who had fallen in glory in the First Holy War; the long-bearded Tydonni under King Hoga Hogrim, the quick-tempered nephew of the sainted Earl Hoga Gothyelk and awarded the throne of Ce Tydonn for service in the Unification Wars; and the far-riding Cepalorans under Sibawul te Nurwul, a man noted only for his silence during councils.

With them would march the Swayal Sisterhood and their Grandmistress, Anasurimbor Serwa, the younger sister of General Kayutas, and widely thought to be the most powerful witch in the world.

Of the Four Armies, the Men of the Middle-North marched what was perhaps the most perilous path, since it skirted the westward marches of the plain, a route that would take his host near the vast forests that had overgrown ancient Kuniuri. "This is the land of your ancient forefathers," the Aspect-Emperor explained. "Hazard is your inheritance. Vengeance is your birthright!"

King Nersei Proyas, Exalt-General, Veteran of the First Holy War, was given command of the Ketyai of the East, the sons of ancient Shir. They consisted of the javelin-armed Cengemi under indomitable General Couras Nantilla, famed for championing the independence of his long-oppressed people; the silver-mailed Conriyans under Palatine Krijates Empharas, Marshal of the fortress of Attrempus; the bare-chested Famiri under the tempestuous General Halas Siroyon, whose mount, Phiolos, was rumoured to be the swiftest in the world; the Xiangol-eyed Jekki under Prince Nurbanu Ze, the adopted son of Lord Soter, and the first of his people to be called kjineta, or caste-noble; and the white-painted Ainoni under cold-hearted King-Regent Nurbanu Soter, Veteran of the First Holy War, renowned for his pious cruelty through the Unification Wars.

Two Major Schools were assigned to this column: the Scarlet Spires under Heramari Iyokus, the so-called Blind Necromancer, and another Veteran of the First Holy War. And the Mandate, the School of the Aspect-Emperor himself, under their famed Grandmaster, Apperens Saccarees, the first Schoolman to successfully recite one of the Metagnostic Cants.

King Coithus Saubon, Exalt-General, Veteran of the First Holy War, was charged with leading the Ketyai of the West, the sons of ancient Kyraneas and Old Dynasty Shigek. They consisted of the disciplined Nansur under the young General Biaxi Tarpellas, Patridomos of House Biaxi, a shrewd tactician; the spear-bearing Shigeki levies under the indomitable General Rash Soptet, hero of the interminable wars against the Fanim insurrectionists; the desert-born Khirgwi under the mad Chieftain-General Sadu'waralla ab Daza, whose epileptic visions confirmed the divinity of the Aspect-Emperor; the mail-draped Eumarnans under General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi, son of his famed father in both limb and spirit and an ardent convert to Zaudunyani Inrithism; and the celebrated Shrial Knights under Grandmaster Sampe Ussiliar.

Two Major Schools were also assigned to this column: the Imperial Saik, the School of the old Nansur Emperors, under the aged Grandmaster Temus Enhoru, and the rehabilitated Mysunsai under the irascible Obwe Guswuran, a Tydonni who behaved more like a Prophet of the Tusk than a sorcerer.

As the heart of the Great Ordeal, both these columns would march within one or two days of each other, utilizing the far greater gap between the outer columns to gather what forage the Istyuli offered. In this way, the Aspect-Emperor hoped to concentrate a greater part of the Believer-Kings' strength, should some calamity overtake either of the flanking columns.

King Sasal Umrapathur was made Marshal of the Ketyai of the South, the sons of Old Invishi, the Hinayati, and the southern Carathay. They consisted of the dusky-skinned Nilnameshi under the brilliant Prince Sasal Charapatha, the eldest son of Umrapathur, and called the Prince of One Hundred Songs in the streets of Invishi because of his exploits during the Unification Wars; the half-heathen Girgashi under the fierce King Urmakthi ab Makthi, a man giant in limb and heart, said to have felled a rampaging mastodon with a single blow of his hammer; the shield-bearing Cironji Marines under the eloquent King Eselos Mursidides, who during the Unification Wars stole his island nation from the Orthodox with a legendary campaign of bribery and assassination; and the regal Kianene under the sober-hearted King Massar ab Kascamandri, youngest brother of the Bandit Padirajah, Fanayal, and rumoured to be as devoted to the Aspect-Emperor as his eldest brother was devoted to his destruction.

With them marched the Vokalati, the feared Sun-wailers of Nilnamesh, under the Grandmaster known only as Carindusu, notorious for his insolence in the presence of the Aspect-Emperor and for his rumoured theft of the Mandate Gnosis.

Umrapathur was given the most uncertain route, in that he would march into the great vacant heart of the Istyuli, into a land so blank that it bore no witness to the ages but simply remained. If the Consult contrived to strike from the east, then he would bear the brunt of that fury.

The Men of the Circumfix spent the following day trudging to their new assignations, mobs cutting across mobs, columns tangling through columns. The chaos was good humoured for the most part, though it was inevitable that some tempers would be thrown out of joint. A dispute at one of the watering tributaries between Galeoth Agmundrmen and Ainoni Eshkalasi knights lead to bloodshed-some twenty-eight souls lost, another forty-two sent to the lazarets. But other than several isolated incidents between individuals, nothing untoward marred the day.

When the Interval tolled and camp was broken the following morning, the Breaking was complete, and four great tentacles, dark with concentrated motion, twinkling as though dusted with diamonds, reached out across the endless plate of the Istyuli. Songs in a hundred different tongues scored an indifferent sky.

Thus began the longest, most arduous, and most deadly stage of the Great Ordeal's bid to destroy Golgotterath and so prevent the Second Apocalypse.