To leave Marrow was to pass out of history, out of memory … to enter a world as disordered as Incariol’s soul. Yes, Achamian thought, willing his old and bandy limbs step by puffing step. It was proper that he should climb.
All passages into dread should exact some chastising toll.
Mimara has learned much about the nature of patience and watching.
And even more about the nature of Men.
She realizes quite quickly that Marrow is no place for the likes of her. She understands her fine-boned beauty, knows in intimate detail the way it hooks, burrlike, the woollen gaze of men. She would, she knows, be endlessly accosted, until some clever pimp realized she had no protection.
She would be drugged, or set upon by numbers greater than she could handle. She would be raped and beaten. Someone would comment on her uncanny resemblance to the Holy Empress on an uncut silver kellic, and she would be trussed in cheap-dyed linens, foil, and candy jewels. For miles around, every scalper with a copper would walk away with some piece of her.
She knows this would happen … In her marrow, you might say.
Her slavery moves through her, not so much a crowd of flinching years as an overlapping of inner shadows. It is always there—always here. The whips and fists and violation, a clamour shot through with memories of love for her sisters, some weaker, some stronger, pity for the torment in the eyes of some, those who would weep, “Just a child …” They used her, all of them used her, but somehow the bottom of the jar never dried. Somehow a last sip remained, enough to moisten her lips, to dry her eyes.
This was how her mother’s agents found her years ago, dressed like their Holy Empress, emptied save for a single sip. Apparently thousands had died, such was Anasûrimbor Esmenet’s outrage. A whole swath of the Worm in Carythusal had been razed, the male population indiscriminately slaughtered.
But it was never clear just whom Mother was avenging.
Mimara knows what will happen. So rather than follow Achamian into the town, she circles around and climbs the escarpments instead. This time, she really does leave her mule, Foolhardy, to the wolves. She takes up a position well away from the eastward tracks—not a day passes, it seems, without some company trudging in from the horizon—and she watches the town the way an idle boy might study a termite-infested stump. It looks like a toy woven of rotted grass. The trees and bracken opening about a great lesion of open mud. The rows of swollen-wood structures ribbing the interior. The great white veils floating like some ghostly afterimage from the falls, encompassing the strings of fuzzing smoke …
From high above she watches the town and waits. Sometimes, when the wind blows just so, she can even smell the place’s fetid halo. She watches the coming and going, the ebb and flow of miniature men and their miniature affairs, and she understands that the infinite variety of Men and their transactions is simply a trick of an earthbound vantage, that from afar, they simply are the mites they appear to be, doing the same things over and over. Same pains, same grievances, same joys, made novel by crippled memory and stunted perspective.
Finitude and forgetfulness, these are what grace Men with the illusion of the new. It seems something she has always known, but could never see; a truth obscured by the succession of close leaning faces.
She dares no fire. She hugs herself warm. From lips of high-hanging stone, she watches and waits for him. She has no other place to go. She is, she decides, every bit as rootless as he. Every bit as mad.
Every bit as driven.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sakarpus
… conquered peoples live and die with the knowledge that survival does not suffer honour. They have chosen shame over the pyre, the slow flame for the quick.
—TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Sakarpus
It was a thing of wonder.
While the citadels and strong places of Sakarpus still smoked, innumerable storks began clotting the southern horizon, not the field-sized flocks that the Men of the Ordeal were accustomed to, but high-flying mountains of them, darkening the sky, settling like salt in water across the surrounding hills. Even for men familiar with momentous sights, it was remarkable to behold: the whooshing descent, the starved elegance, the twitch and turn of avian scrutiny, multiplied over and over across every sky. Since storks meant many different things to the many different nations of the Great Ordeal, few could agree what the bird’s arrival augured. The Aspect-Emperor said nothing, save issuing an edict to protect the birds from becoming either food or ornament. Apparently the Sakarpi held them holy: The men guarded them against foxes and wolves, while the womenfolk gathered their guano for a concoction called char soot, a long-burning fuel they used in lieu of wood.
The Judges were kept busy. Several hangings were required, and one Ainoni sergeant, who had been killing birds to make and sell pillows, was even publicly flayed. But eventually the Men of the Ordeal became accustomed to the squawking, white-backed hills, and ceased heckling the conquered men and women who tended to them. In the parlance of the camp, “eating stork” became synonymous with any reckless and self-indulgent act. Soon it seemed obvious—even to those, like the Kianene, who thought storks were vermin—that these birds with their thin-necked conceit were in fact holy, and that the hills were a kind of natural temple.
Meanwhile, preparations for the ensuing march continued. In the Council of Names, the kings and generals of the Great Ordeal debated points of supply and strategy beneath the all-seeing eyes of their Aspect-Emperor. Even though flushed with pious excitement—a great number of them had spent years waiting for this very day—they harboured few illusions about the trials and perils that awaited them. Sakarpus stood at the very edge of the mannish world, the point where, as King Saubon of Enathpaneah would say, “Men are more lamb than lion.” Sranc ruled the land beyond the northern horizon, scratching a vicious existence from the ruined cities of the long-dead High Norsirai. And that land, the Lords of the Ordeal knew, stretched for more than two thousand miles. Not since the wars of Far Antiquity had so many attempted such an arduous journey. “Between this march and the Consult,” their Aspect-Emperor told them, “the march will prove far deadlier.”
For more than a decade, a greater part of the New Empire’s resources had been bent toward the arduous trek to Golgotterath. Even before Sakarpus had fallen, the Imperial Engineers had begun building a second city below the ancient first: barracks, smithies, lazarets, and dozens of sodwalled storehouses. Still others staked the course of the broad stone road that would, in a matter of weeks, connect the ancient city to faraway Oswenta. Even now, an endless train of supplies wound in from the southern horizon, bearing arms, wares, rations, and more rations. Infantrymen, no matter their rank, were limited to strict portions of amicut, the campaign fare of the wild Scylvendi peoples to the southwest. The caste-nobility could count on somewhat heartier provisions but were reduced to riding shaggy-maned ponies that required no grain to preserve their strength. Vast herds of sheep and cattle, bred solely to accompany the march, were also beaten across the horizon, so many that some Men of the Ordeal began calling themselves ka Koumiroi, or the Herdsmen—a name that would later become holy.
But even with all these preparations, there was simply no way the Great Ordeal could bear the food required to reach Golgotterath. The ponderous herds, the great packs borne by the infantrymen, and the mile-long mule trains would only take them so far. At some point, the columns would have to fan out and fend for themselves. The Lords of the Ordeal knew they could depend on game for their men and wild fodder for their horses: thousands of the now legendary Imperial Trackers had given their lives mapping the lands ahead. But foraging armies moved far more slowly than supplied ones, and if winter struck before the Ordeal could overcome Golgotterath, the result would be catastrophic. A second problem, and the point that was endlessly argued in the Councils, was that no one knew how many of the countless Sranc clans the Enemy would be able
to rally. Despite the Imperial Bounty, despite collecting enough scalps to clothe entire nations, the number of Sranc remained beyond reckoning. But without the dread will of the No-God, the creatures were governed only by their terror, hatred, and hunger. Not even the Aspect-Emperor could say how many the Consult might recruit or enslave to oppose them. If the answer was many, then the day the Ordeal divided to begin foraging could very well be the day of its doom.
It was this that made Sakarpus so crucial, and not, as so many assumed, her famed Chorae Hoard. This was why Men of the Ordeal were killed so that birds might live. Where the hard rod of Imperial authority had been used to batter other nations into submission, only the soft hand of Imperial favour could be used here, where the people called themselves the Hoosverûl, or the Unconquered. The Lords of the Ordeal could ill-afford even a single week of riot and rebellion, let alone grinding months. Sakarpus was the nail from which their future would hang. After the public Councils, when the Aspect-Emperor retired to confer privately with his two Exalt-Generals, King Saubon of Enathpaneah and King Proyas of Conriya, Sakarpus and the temper of her people were often discussed.
This was how the fateful decision was made to place the young King of Sakarpus, Sorweel, in the care of the Aspect-Emperor’s two eldest sons, Moënghus and Kayûtas.
“When he becomes a brother to them,” his Arcane Holiness explained to his old friends, “he will be as a son to me.”
The knock came mere moments after Sorweel’s attendants had finished dressing him, a single rap, hard enough to rattle the hinges. The young King turned to see the door swing wide. Two men walked in without so much as an imploring look, the one fair and “royal boned,” as the Sakarpi said of tall gracile men, the other dark and powerfully built. Both were dressed in the martial finery of the New Imperium, with long white vests hanging over hauberks of nimil-chain. Cloth-of-gold tusks glimmered in the dull morning light.
“Tomorrow,” the fair one said in flawless Sakarpic, “you will report to me …” He strolled to the one open panel along the suite’s shuttered balcony, glanced out over the conquered city before turning on his heel. The dawning light caught his hair, transformed it into a luminous halo. “You ride with us … apparently.”
The other plucked a string of fat from the tray that bore the remains of Sorweel’s breakfast, dropped it into his mouth. He scrutinized Sorweel with murderous blue eyes as he chewed, absently wiped the pads of his fingers along his kilt.
Sorweel knew who they were—there was no mistaking the lethal strength of the one or the unblinking calm of the other. He probably could have guessed their names even before their father had sacked his city. But he resented their manner and tone and so replied with the cold outrage of a lord insulted by his lessers. “You don’t look like horses.”
Moënghus growled with what may have been laughter, then muttered something in Sheyic to his taller brother. Kayûtas snorted and grinned. They both watched Sorweel as though he were an exotic pet, a novelty from some absurd corner of the world.
Perhaps he was.
An uncomfortable silence followed, one that seemed to swell with every passing heartbeat.
“My elder brother,” Kayûtas said eventually, as though recovering from a momentary lapse in etiquette, “says that’s because we’re wearing our breeches.”
“What?” Sorweel asked, flushing in confusion and embarrassment.
“Why we don’t look like horses.”
Despite himself, Sorweel smiled—and so lost this first battle. He could feel it, humming through the two brothers’ laughter, a satisfaction scarcely concerned with humour.
They’re hunters, he told himself, sent to run down my heart.
He felt it most at night, when the ranging concerns of the day shrunk to the clutch of limbs beneath cold blankets and the mourning could seize his face without fear of discovery. Small. Alone. A stranger in his father’s home. I am a king of widows and orphans, he would think, as the faces of his father’s dead Boonsmen floated before his soul’s eye. It all came crowding back, the sights and sounds, the horror, the jerk and tumble of violent futility. Children weeping in the doorways, beloved buildings cupped in shining flame, the bodies of Horselords twisted in the streets.
I am a captive in my own land.
But as desolate as these sleepless watches were, Sorweel found a kind of reprieve in them. Here, huddled beneath the heavy weave, there was certainty, an assurance that his sorrow and hatred were not a kind of misplaced inevitability. Here, he could see his father clearly, he could hear his long low voice, as surely as he could those nights when he pretended to sleep, and his father had come to sit at the foot of his bed, to speak of his dead wife.
“I miss her, Sorwa. More than I dare let you know.”
But his days were … more confusing.
Sorweel did as he was told. He presided over the farce that was his court. He attended the ceremonies, spoke the holy words that would see his people “safe,” bore the witless accusation in the eyes of priest and petitioner alike. He walked and gestured with the listless grace of those who moved through a fog of betrayal.
He learned that he lacked the ability to do and to believe contradictory things. Where a nobler soul would have found consistency in his acts, he seemed to find it in his beliefs. He simply believed what he needed to believe in order to act as his conquerors wished him to act. While he muddled through the schedule his foreign secretaries arranged for him, while he sat in their perfumed presence, it really seemed that things were as the Aspect-Emperor claimed, that the world turned beneath the shadow of the Second Apocalypse, and that all Men must act of one accord to preserve the future, no matter how much it might offend their pride.
“All Kings answer to holy writ,” the godlike man had told him. “And so long as that writ is otherworldly, they willingly acknowledge as much. But when it comes to them as I come to them, wearing the flesh of their fellow man, they confuse the sanctity of obeying the Law with the shame of submitting to a rival.” A warm laugh, like a dear uncle admitting a harmless folly. “All men think themselves closer to the God than others. And so they rebel, raise arms against the very thing they claim to serve …
“Against me.”
The young King still lacked the words to describe what it was like, kneeling in the Aspect-Emperor’s presence. He could only think that knees were somehow not enough, that he should fall to his belly like the ancient supplicants engraved on the walls of Vogga Hall. And his voice! Melodious. By turns gentle, bemused, penetrating, and profound. The Anasûrimbor need only speak, and it would seem obvious that Sorweel’s father simply had succumbed to his conceit, that Harweel, like so many men before him, had confused his pride for his duty.
“This is all a tragic mistake …”
Only afterwards, as his handlers led him through the general clamour of the encampment, would his father’s words return to him. “He is a Ciphrang, a Hunger from the Outside, come in the guise of man …” And suddenly he believed the precise opposite of what he had believed a mere watch before. He would curse himself for being a kitten-headed fool, for breaking the only faith that remained to him. Despite the pain, despite the way it limned his face with the threat of sobs, he would recite his father’s final outburst: “He needs this city! He needs our people! That means he needs you, Sorwa!”
You.
And all would be confusion. For Sorweel understood that if his father had spoken true, then everyone about him—the Ainoni with their white cosmetics and plaited beards, the Schoolmen with their silk-print coats and airs of omniscience, the Galeoth with their long flaxen hair knotted above their right ear, all the thousands who sought redemption through the Great Ordeal—had gathered for naught, had conquered for naught, and now prepared to war against the Great Ruiner’s successors, all for naught. It seemed that delusion, like the span of arches, could only reach so far before collapsing into truth. It seemed impossible that so many could be so thoroughly deceived.
King Proya
s had told him the stories about the Aspect-Emperor, about the miracles he had witnessed with his own eyes, about the valour and sacrifice that had “cleansed” the Three Seas. How could Harweel’s claim gainsay such rampant devotion? How could his son not fear, in the bullying presence of such conquerors, that the matter only seemed undecided because he secretly held his finger on the scale?
During the day, every word, every look seemed to argue his father’s foolhardy conceit. Only at night, lying in the solitary dark, could Sorweel take refuge in the simpler movements of the heart. He could let his lips tremble, his eyes fill with tears like hot salted tea. He could even sit at the end of his bed as his father had sat, and pretend he spoke to someone sleeping.
“I dreamed of her again, Sorwa …”
At night, the young King could simply close his eyes and refuse. This was the secret comfort of orphans: the ability to believe according to want and not world—whatever it took to numb the ache of things lost.
I miss her too, Da …
Almost as much as I miss you.
They sent a slave for him the following morning, an old, dark-skinned man almost comically bundled against the spring chill. Sorweel saw the dismayed looks traded between his Householders—slaves were anathema in Sakarpus—but he affected no anger or outrage. Even though no porters could be found, the outlander insisted, in the exasperated hand-waving way of demands made across linguistic divides, that he come immediately. Sorweel consented without argument, secretly relieved he wouldn’t have to lead a procession out of the city—that he could pretend this was a mere outing rather than the abdication it seemed.