The Empress calls, “Catch.”
See! the Prince-Imperial silently screeched at his twin. See!
The Game. It had been the Game all along!
Play was all that remained.
All that mattered.
He had sprinted up the Processional in his mother’s wake, staring into the surviving Grand Mirror, seeing nothing but an angelic boy smeared and daubed with blood—grinning in a manner some, perhaps, might find odd. Then he crept into the cavernous gloom of the Imperial Audience Hall, where he saw his mother standing bleached swan-white in the light of the Aperture, the missing wall. He crept soundlessly between the columns and through the shadows of the lesser aisle to the west. He spied the Grinning God quite quickly, standing beside a pillar on an angle inaccessible to where she stood. Heat flushed through him, such were the possibilities … the vulnerabilities.
Please … Samarmas sobbed from nowhere. Call to her …
Their mother stood upon the nethers of the audience floor, her arms held out, her face tilted to the chill emanation of light, as if awaiting …
Call to her!
It seemed such a dark and delicious moment.
No.
And then he sensed it, the stomach-dandling Mark … and he understood the true prize of this game they played.
Father!
Yes. The Four-Horned Brother hunted Father—the one most feared, most hated!
Kelmomas stood both horrified and astounded, then fairly whooped for the rush of savage vindication. He had been right all along! His impulses had possessed their own Unerring Grace—their own White-Luck! It seemed so clear now, both what had happened, and what was about to …
Mother crossed the expanse of kneeling tiles in a stupor, her gowns swishing as she approached the floor below the Mantle. The Prince-Imperial tracked her progress in the parallel gloom, making cramped faces of joy, malice, and fury. His soul pranced and capered while his body crept.
Of course! Today! Today was the day!
Battlehorns continued to peal in distant, metallic cascades. She paused upon the lowermost step of the dais. The sky painted the vacancy of her look white.
That was why Momemn had been cracked asunder! Why Anasûrimbor blood so flowed!
She saw Father, but chose not to recognize him as such. She awaited his approaching apparition as she would any vassal … then abruptly crumpled at his feet. Father caught her in his arms, knelt in a pose as intimate as the boy had ever seen between them. Her very image seemed warped for the foul proximity of his Mark.
This! This was why the Prince of Hate had come! To attend the coronation of a new and far more generous sovereign. One who could laugh as he shovelled souls into the furnaces of Hell! The boy crooned and cackled at the thought, and in his soul’s eye he could see it, the glory that was his future, the history of what had already happened! Kelmomas I, the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas!
Rimmed in plates of ethereal gold, Father held Mother swooning upon the dais, gazed into the broken cup of her soul …
Suddenly he released her, stood graven in white and shadow as she wailed abject at his feet.
What have you done?
A flicker of motion in his periphery. The boy’s eye caught Issiral turning from behind the fluted bulk of the pillar concealing Him … the Four-Horned Brother preparing …
He would help—Yes! He would distract Father. Yes! That was his role. That was how it had already happened. He could feel it, somehow, like an oracular density in his bones.
A certainty hard as flint, heavy as iron … He need only abide, be the happening of what happened.
“Mommaaaa!” he wailed from his concealment.
Both Father and Mother jerked their faces in his direction. Father took a single step …
The Prince-Imperial looked to his infernal co-conspirator, to the Narindar, expecting … something other than the near-naked man gawking at him … stupefied.
Certainly something more godlike.
The Narindar shook his head, stared down aghast at his hands. His ears wept blood.
And this seemed a calamity greater than any the Prince-Imperial had suffered, an overturning that cast the final contents of his World askew. He had miscalculated, the boy realized. The wrongness lay as a frozen knife held flat across the tender of his throat …
He glanced back to the dais, saw his father striding out toward the Circumfix Throne, peering at the now hapless assassin—and the ground exploded …
A second quake, as mighty as the first. The penultimate vault, the one framing the missing wall, the one bearing the prayer tower that had been raised upon it, simply dropped. It fell as a cudgel wreathed in streamers of dust, a hammer the size of a bastion, crashing upon the very spot where Father had stood. The ground spanked the boy from his feet. Creation clacked and roared, dropped as torrents about every glimpse. Columns spilled into stacked drums, ceilings plummeted as sodden rags. He saw the man he had mistook for Ajokli fall to his knees between tumbling immensities. He saw it then, the terror of ignorance that is the curse of mortality; he apprehended the man’s sickening humanity the instant stone clapped it into oblivion.
And he screamed, shrieked the terror and fury of a child bereft of all he had loved and known.
A child not quite human.
As a boy, Malowebi had been strangely affected upon hearing how those deemed guilty of capital offences aboard Satakhanic warships would be sewn into sacks and summarily cast into the Ocean. “Pursing”, the sailors had named the practice. It haunted him the way a premonition might, the thought of being immobilized without being bound, of possessing the ability to move without the ability to swim, of jerking and clawing and drowning in the infinite chill. Years later, on the galley that had transported him to his first Tenure as a young man, he had the misfortune of witnessing the punishment firsthand. A fight between rowers had led to one bleeding out during the night: the survivor was condemned as a murderer and sentenced to the Purse. The condemned man had begged the deck for mercies, knowing that none was to be had, while three marines manhandled him into a long burlap sack. The wretch had implored in whispers, Malowebi would remember, murmurs so low as to make loud the creaking timbers, the sloshing below the gunwales, the bone-rattle of knots in the rigging. The Captain spake a short verse to Momas Almighty, and then kicked the keening sack overboard. Malowebi had heard the muffled shriek, had watched the sack twist like a maggot into the greening depths, then had fled to vomit as inconspicuously as he could over the opposite side. He would be weeks shaking the last bubbles of anxiety from his limbs. And it would be years before he stopped hearing ghosts of that muffled cry.
The dream he suffered now was like this death sentence, something dark and drowning, something he could thrash and kick within, but never escape. A Pursing both more protracted and more profound.
Somehow, from a vantage he could not quite explain, he saw himself hanging before Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the World spinning ruin around them. The man’s sword scissored across the angle of the sun, and Malowebi screamed as his head tipped from his shoulders and dropped to the woven earth …
His head! Rolling like a cabbage.
Malowebi’s corpse twitched in the man’s irresistible grip, spouted blood, voided itself. Casting his blade into the carpeted earth, the Aspect-Emperor seized one of the Decapitants, wrenched the diabolical trophy from his girdle, then raised the horror to the welling stump of neck …
The unconquerable Anasûrimbor Kellhus spoke. His eyes ignited like blown-upon coals, flared with infernal meaning.
The union of desiccate tissue with warm, ebony flesh was instantaneous. Blood sluiced into and soaked the desert-rotted papyrus, transforming the Decapitant into something horrid and sodden, a bundle of pitch-soaked rags. The Aspect-Emperor released the thing, watched with utter indifference as it stumbled forward to its knees, swayed …
Malowebi screamed, kicked and clawed at the nightmarish fabric, choked on his own terror—drowned. T
his isn’t happening! This cannot be happening!
The abomination raised his hands, held them about the sorcerous turmoil of its face, the knitting of his blood to its blasted meat and skin. Malowebi screamed for watching Malowebi reborn in demonic replica.
The whirlwind roared about them both, a ruinous blur.
“Return to the Palace of Plumes,” the Aspect-Emperor called to the unholy slave. “End the line of Nganka’kull.”
Without lungs, void was his only wind. He howled until void was all that remained.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Demua Mountains
To stand tallest beneath the sun is the yearning of the child and the old man alike. For verily, age raises us up and strips us down. But where the child dreams as he should, the old man is naught but a miser. The curse of growing old is to watch one’s passion fall ever more out of season, to dwell ever more in the shadow of perversity.
—ASANSIUS, The Limping Pilgrim
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Demua Mountains
The boy flies up a nearby tree as quick as a monkey despite his crabbed hand. She and Achamian run across the forest floor, both huffing and lurching under their respective burdens, age and womb. The sun flashes through the shadowy dapple. Throngs of scrub, fern, and weed scrape and tug at their scissoring legs.
Fear not, little one …
A Sranc screams through the bowered gloom behind them, a skinned sound, glistening with anguish, yanked short by something unknown.
Your father is a Wizard!
“There!” Achamian cries on a hoarse exhalation. He makes a gesture, palsied by exertion, to an overgrown pit at the base of an oak that some storm or tumult had toppled at the roots. They slip through a curtain of nettle, curse the sting under their breath.
One without any sense of direction …
Another Sranc shrieks, this one to the west. She thinks of faraway dogs barking in the morning chill, the way they made a tin pot of the World. It smells dank and sweet in their trench, like sunless soil and rotting green.
“Another mobbing?” she asks under her breath.
“I don’t know,” Achamian peers through the fingers of their blind, searching the cavities between gnarled trunks and bands of sunlight. “Those cries. Something is different …”
Enough!
“The boy?” she asks.
“Has survived far worse than this, I’m sure.”
Nevertheless, she peers into the canopy, sorting between branches that elbow rather than wend. Ever since returning to Kûniüri she has noticed an oddness to the trees, an arthritic angularity, as if they would sooner raise fists than leaves to the sky. She can see nothing of the boy, though she was certain she knew which tree he had climbed.
A mucoid hiss draws her eyes back to the forest floor. She follows Achamian’s squint.
She cannot believe it at first. She observes without breath or thought.
A man on a horse. A man on a horse follows the Sranc …
Little more than a silhouette at a glance, leaning back against a high cantle, swaying to his mount’s tedious gait. Then a glimpse of wild black hair, a lancer’s shield across his horse’s rump. His arms are bare—this is how she knows what he is. It seems she sees the scars before the skin.
“Seju!” Achamian curses under his breath.
Neither of them speak. They track the Scylvendi horseman through the glare and gloom, watch him pass from obscurity into plain sight, then back into interleaving obscurity.
“Sweet Sejenus!” Achamian finally hisses.
“What should we do?” she asks.
The old Wizard slumps backward into the earthen recess, as if finally overrun by relentless ill-fortune.
“Should we run? Climb back into the Demua?”
He smears a palm across his forehead, thoughtless of the filth.
The angularity has seized her once again, that unerring need she has come to identify as motherhood.
“What, Akka?”
“Give me a blasted moment, girl!” he cries under his breath.
“We don’t have a—” she begins, but a sudden realization tosses the thought to oblivion.
Akka calls after her in alarm, far more loudly than he should. She silences him with a backward frown, then nimbly floats across the forest floor, ducking from tree to tree. She pauses twice, thinking that she hears thunder beneath her breath. In the surrounding obscurity another Sranc screeches at some insult. The sound is wet with nearness. She clenches her teeth about a hammering heart. At last she finds the tree the boy had climbed. She walks about it, alternately peering upward and casting glances over her shoulder. She sees him, as motionless as barked wood, watching her without expression. She calls him down with a violent wave of her hand. He gazes southward rather than reply, his head queerly bent. “Come!” she dares call.
The boy flies down the great elm like nothing human, legs and arms hooked about space. He thumps to a crouch on the humus. Before she can even acknowledge him, he has her arm in his crabbed hand. He yanks her back toward the old Wizard violently, his strength unlikely, his manner ruthless. The thunder is louder now. Panic pricks her from behind, sparks her stumbling gait. She sees the fallen tree, overthrown at the socket. She glimpses Achamian’s wild-bearded face watching through the blind of early-autumn weeds. The rumble climbs, a thrumming monotone, then breaks, as if a bladder overcome, becoming a cacophony of pounding hooves and equine complaints. She runs as if perpetually falling over her belly, always catching herself, always almost …
We are caught, a corner of her soul notes—one too weary not to be wry.
But the boy thinks otherwise. He yanks her, bruising iron in his claw grip, racing full bore. She crashes through the screen of weeds, into stinging gloom, a confusion of limbs, muck, and loam.
“Seju!” Achamian cries under his breath. “What were yo—”
The cacophony towers as if above them. Instinct brings her to her feet, leaning to peer at their pursuers—at the identity of their fate. But the boy has her again, pins her down, his odour sour for lack of bathing, yet sweet for youth. Paralysis. And they are in the belly of the thunder, the three huddled side by side, riven, dark save for a dragon’s claw of light across her belly. Rifling shadows. Pounding hooves. Huffing snorts and pinched indignations. Intimations are all they need.
Scylvendi. The dread People of War range the dead lands of Kûniüri.
Please.
Afterward she will wonder just when her every thought became a prayer.
Because of the toppled tree, the riders give their overgrown cavity a wide berth. What seems like a watch passes, lying curled and rigid. Only the boy is perfectly motionless.
Then the thunder climbs ahead of them, and the inability to discriminate wraps the whole once again.
They lie in its receding, rumbling wake, drawing breath in the earthen gloom.
“A patrol,” Achamian murmurs, pulling himself to his rump. He cautiously raises his eyes above the forest floor, renews his vigil.
She has to roll sideways onto her hands and knees, so onerous is her belly. She climbs to his side. The boy simply sits behind them, perfectly impassive, his knees caught in the circle of his arms.
“So you think there’s more?” she asks the old Wizard.
“Of course there is,” he says, peering. “They resemble your idiocy that way.”
Her apprehension is slapped from her. She is a heartbeat in understanding.
“What? I should have left him?”
“That boy has survived more than you or I can scarce dream.”
“And he is still a child! He’s—”
“Not so helpless as the one you carry in your womb!” the old Wizard cries, turning on her with sudden savagery. She shrinks from the display, understanding instantly and utterly that he speaks out of an outrage borne of terror … The terror belonging to fathers.
She makes to speak—just what, she does not know—but another scree
ch, strangely piteous, yowls among the bowers from places near and unknown. Another Sranc.
They both resume their anxious peering, and despite their straits, she cannot but think that this is the way with husbands and wives. A part of her even grins …
It is proper, she thinks, that they should be married in a grave.
“Those Sranc are called Exscursi,” Achamian says grimly. “Their scent fills their wild cousins with lunatic terror, clearing the land. The Consult uses them to secure safe passage for their human allies …” He glances at her, speaking this last, and something in her expression ignites a furious scowl.
“What are you smiling about?”
“You are a dear old fool,” she hears herself whisper.
“You don’t understand,” he cries. “Somewhere … out there …”—he points toward the south, to the throng and pillared deep of forest obscuring forest—“lies the People in War in sum … An entire host of Scylvendi!”
“I do understand,” she replies, staring into his eyes as if trying to lean into his irritable old soul … Reassure him. Even still, he refuses to trust what was happening.
“You do? Then you understand this means it’s really happening! The Second Apocalypse is really hap—”
The boy is upon them, hands whole and crabbed hard upon each of their shoulders, warning them to silence. Breathless they peer across the trampled humus and debris. The sound of a pony snorting jolts her—for some reason she had assumed the boy had heard one of the Sranc.
Peering through the chaotic thatch of their blind, the three of them watch as another Scylvendi horseman, apparently alone, rides into view, sinking into a depression then climbing the swale nearest to them … and stopping …
She cannot hear it yet, but all the south seems to shiver with teeming portent.
The People of War in sum …
The man almost seems to sniff the air. There is a brutality to him, the odour of an ignorant race, of souls too simple to countenance nuance or doubt. His arms are bared like the other’s, but nowhere near so many scars stripe their length. A looseness in the skin about the crotch of his armpit reveals his age, but little else. Blue paint adorns his face, as pale as his eyes. Fetishes dangle from his bridle and saddle, what look like desiccate mice strung by their tails. His pony paws at the leaves and loam. Like someone hunting something glimpsed, he rakes the surrounding forest depths with his glacial gaze. There is an alacrity to his eyes, something reminiscent of a weasel’s nose …