“What do I do?” Sorweel murmured and gasped. “What do I do now?”
The man seemed to nod, though the yellow eyes remained fixed, immobile. Gradually, for reasons Sorweel could not fathom, his breathing slowed and the roaring in his ears fell away.
Porsparian led him to his quarters, taking too many turns for Sorweel to ever hope to remember. The tent was large enough for him to stand in, and furnished with nothing more than a cot for himself and a mat for his slave. For most of the afternoon, he laid in a bleary reverie, staring at the white fabric, watching it rise and fall like the shirt of a slumbering little brother. He paid no attention to the porters when they arrived with his meagre collection of things. He held his father’s torc for a time, an age-old relic of the Varalt Dynasty, stamped with the seal of his family: the tower and two-headed wolf. He pulled it to his breast, clutched it so tight he was sure the sapphires had cut him. But when he looked there was no blood, only a quick-fading impression.
King Proyas arrived as the tent panels became waxen in the failing light. He said a few jocular words in Sheyic, perhaps hoping to hearten with his tone. When Sorweel failed to respond, the Exalt-General stared at the young King with a kind of magisterial remorse, as though seeing in him some image from his own not-so-kindly past.
Porsparian knelt with his forehead to the ground for the entirety of visit.
After Proyas left, the two sat in utter silence, king and slave, pondering the way the rising dark made everything transparent to the encampment’s evening chorus. Singing warriors. Churlish horses. Then, when the darkness was almost complete, they heard someone, a Kidruhil trooper, relieving himself behind the tent’s far corner. Sorweel found himself smiling at the old Shigeki, who was little more than a silhouette sitting on the ground a length away. When the trooper farted, Porsparian abruptly cackled, rocked to and fro with his spindly legs caught in his arms. He laughed the way a child might, gurgling against the back of his throat. The effect was so absurd that Sorweel found himself howling with the mad old man.
Afterwards, Sorweel sat on the end of his cot while Porsparian busied himself lighting a lantern. Everything seemed bare in the light, exposed. Without explanation, the old Shigeki disappeared through the flap, into the dread world that murmured and rumbled beyond the greased canvas. Sorweel stared at the lantern, which was little more than a wick in a bronze bowl, until it seemed his sight must be marred forever. The point of light seemed so clear, so whispering pure, that he could almost convince himself that burning was the most blissful of death of all.
He looked away only when Porsparian returned bearing unleavened bread and a steaming bowl—some kind of stew. The scent of pepper and other exotic spices bloomed through the tent, but Sorweel, as gaunt as he was, had no appetite. After some urging, he finally convinced the slave to eat the entire meal instead of, as Sorweel surmised, waiting on whatever scraps he might leave.
He thought it strange the way Men did not need to share a language to speak about food.
He sat on the end of his cot as before, watching the diminutive Shigeki. Without a whisper of self-consciousness, the man pulled aside one of the rough-woven reed mats, revealing a patch of bruised turf. He parted the grasses, cooing in a strange voice as he combed his fingers through them, then he began praying over the line of bare earth he had uncovered. In a moment of almost embarrassing intensity, Porsparian pressed his cheek against the ground, hard, the way an adolescent might grind against a willing lover. He muttered something—a prayer, Sorweel supposed—in a language far more guttural than Sheyic. Holding his hand like a spatula, he pressed a slot into the black soil—a ritual mouth, Sorweel realized moments afterwards, when Porsparian placed a small portion of bread into it.
By some trick of the light, it actually seemed as if the earthen mouth closed.
Smacking his lips with satisfaction, the cryptic little man rolled onto his rump and began fingering the food into his own grey-and-yellow-toothed mouth.
Though Porsparian ate with crude honesty of a Saglander, Sorweel could not help but see a kind of sad poetry to his feasting. The inward pleasure of his eyes, the crook in his wrists as he raised each stew-soaked gob of bread, the slight, backward tilt of his head as he opened his darkbrown lips. The young King wondered how it could be that two men so dissimilar, a world apart in age, station, and origin, could share such a moment. Neither of them talked—what could they say, with their tongues wrapped around different sounds for similar meanings? But even if they could have spoken to each other, Sorweel was certain they would have said nothing. Everything, it seemed, was manifest.
Nothing needed to be spoken because all could be seen.
Sitting as he sat, watching as he watched, a kind of wild generosity seized him, that glad-hearted madness that emptied coffers and pockets. Without thinking, he reached under the cot and retrieved the writ of bondage that Kayûtas had given him that very morning. What did it matter, he thought, when he was already dead? For the first time he thought he understood the freedom that lay concealed in the cold bosom of loss.
Porsparian, suddenly wary, had set down his bowl to watch him. Sorweel stepped past him to squat over the lantern, strangely conscious of the way his shadow swallowed the rear quarters of the tent. He held the papyrus out, so the light glowed through the pulped lines of the reeds used to make the sheets. Then he touched it to the tear-drop flame …
Only to have the writ snatched away by a stamping and cursing Porsparian. Sorweel jumped upright, even raised his hands—for a bewildered moment he thought the old slave was about to strike him. But the man merely flapped the sheet until the flame went out. Its uppermost edges were curled and blackened, but it was otherwise intact. Breathing heavily, the two regarded each other for a crazed moment, the king slack and bewildered, the slave braced with old man defiance.
“We are a free people,” Sorweel said, warring against a renewed sense of dread and futility. “We don’t trade Men like cattle.”
The yellow-eyed Shigeki shook his head in a slow and deliberate manner. As though relinquishing a knife, he set the writ onto the mussed blankets of Sorweel’s cot.
Then he did something inexplicable.
Bending at the waist over the lantern, he drew his finger along the edges of the flame, oblivious to the heat. Straightening, he pulled aside his tunic, revealing an old man’s sunken chest—wild grey hairs across nut-brown skin. With the lamp-black on his fingertip, he traced what Sorweel immediately recognized as a sickle over his heart.
“Yatwer,” the man breathed, his eyes alight with a kind of embittered intensity. He reached out, gripped the young King by the arm. “Yatwer!”
“I-I don’t understand,” Sorweel stammered. “The Goddess?”
Porsparian let his hand slide down Sorweel’s arm—a strangely possessive gesture. He grasped the young King’s wrist, ran a thumb along his horsing bracelet before turning his hand palm outward. “Yatwer,” he whispered, his eyes brimming with tears. Drawing Sorweel’s palm between them, he leaned forward and kissed the soft-skinned basin.
Fire climbed the young King’s skin. He tried to yank his hand back, but the old man held him with the strength of newly cast stocks. He rolled his age-creased face above Sorweel’s palm, as if drowsing to some unheard melody. A single tear tapped the spot where his lips had touched …
It seemed to burn and cut all at once, like something molten falling through snow.
Then the slave uttered a single word in Sakarpic, so sudden and so clear that Sorweel nearly jumped.
“War …”
He was in awe of these people. Their devious refinement. Their labyrinthine ways. Their faith and their sorcery. Even their slaves, it seemed, possessed enigmatic power.
For watch after watch, Sorweel lay rigid in his cot, holding his own hand, pressing the impossible blister on his palm. Porsparian slept across the ground in the near darkness, his breathing broken by a periodic cough and wheeze. When he at last learned their language, Sorweel decid
ed, he would tease the man for snoring like an old woman.
The sounds of the Great Ordeal subsided, drew out and away until the young King could almost believe that only his tent remained, solitary on a trampled plain. There was, it seemed, a moment of absolute silence, a moment where every heartbeat hesitated, every breath paused, and the numb immobility of death fell upon all things.
He asked it to take him. It was as close as he had come to prayer since the day his father had died.
Then he heard something. It was almost too broad to be distinguished from the quiet at first, as if wings, spread too wide, simply became the sky. But slowly, contours resolved from the background, a kind of porous roar, something without a singular origin, but rather born of many. For the longest time, he could not place it, and for a panicked moment he even imagined that it came from the city, the combined screams and cries of his people, dying beneath the swords of their dark-skinned conquerors.
Then in a rush he realized …
The storks.
The storks called from across the nocturnal hills. They always did this, every spring. Legend said that each of them sang to a different star, naming their sons and daughters, beseeching, cajoling, guiding the gosling descent of innumerable stick-limbed souls …
Sorweel finally dozed, warm with thoughts of his mother and his first childhood visit to the Viturnal Nesting. He could remember her beauty, wane and pale. He could remember how cold her hand had seemed about his own—as though fate had begun prying loose her grasp on life even then. He could remember gazing in wonder at the storks, untold thousands of them, making white terraces of the hillsides.
“Do you know why they come here, Sorwa?”
“No, Mama …”
“Because our city is the Refuge, the hinge of the Worldly Wheel. They come here as our forefathers once came, Darling …”
Her smile. It had always seemed the world’s most obvious thing.
“They come so that their children might be safe.”
Later that night, he awoke in jerking horror, like a guard caught napping on the night of a great battle. Everything reeled in alarm and disorder. He sat up with a breath that was a cry, and at the foot of his cot he saw his father sitting, his back turned to him, weeping for his dead wife.
Sorweel’s mother.
“It’s okay, Da,” he rasped, swallowing against his own tears. “She watches … She watches over us still.”
At that, the apparition went rigid, in the way of proud men grievously insulted, or of broken men mocked for the loss that had overwhelmed them. Sorweel’s throat clenched, became hot and thin as a burning reed, to the point where he could not breathe …
The ghost of Harweel turned its burnt head, revealing a face devoid of hope and eyes. Beetles dropped from the joints of his blasted armour, clicked and scuttled in the dark.
The dead, it grated without sound, cannot see.
Dawn was no more than a band of grey in the east. Still the innumerable camps had been broken, the tents and pavilions felled, the guy-ropes coiled and stacked, the great baggage-trains loaded. Men caught steaming breath in their hands, stared across the frost-barren distances. Beasts of burden stamped and complained in the gloom.
Drawing a team of twenty oxen, the priests delivered the great wain to the highest point in the vicinity, a knoll stumped with ancient foundation stones. The bed of the vehicle had been constructed from timbers typically used in ship building, such was its size. Each of the eight iron-bound wheels stood as tall as olive trees. Slaves clambered across the frame, undoing the knots that fixed the circumfix-brocaded tarp. They rolled the crimson-and-gold covering back, revealing a horizontally suspended cylinder of iron as long as a skiff. Inscriptions adorned its every surface—verses from the Tusk rendered in the many tongues of the Three Seas—lending it an ancient and wrinkled look.
At the command of the High-Priest, a towering eunuch raised the Prayer Hammer … struck. The Interval sounded, a far-reaching, sonorous knell that somehow rose from the silence without breaking it, hung upon the ears before fading in imperceptible degrees.
The assembled Men of the Circumfix looked out to the horizon, waiting. For those across the higher slopes, their numbers scarce seemed possible, so far did the formations reach into the distance. The Nilnameshi phalanxes, with a file of iron-clad mastodons running like a spine through their midst. The Thunyeri with their long-edged axes. The Tydonni with their flaxen beards bound to their girdles. And on and on. High Ainon, Conriya, Nansur, Shigek, Eumarna, Galeoth, Girgash; the hosts of a dozen nations, arrayed about the gleaming standards of their kings, waiting …
Some were already on their knees.
Without warning, the Thunyeri began cursing and waving arms, spitting hatred at the North. Their broken shouts spread, resolved into a thundering chorus, one that soon boomed across the entirety of the Ordeal, even though many knew not the words they recited.
Hur rutwas matal skee!
Hur rutwas matal skee!
Men held out their arms as if they could, with their souls, reach out the thousands of miles to Golgotterath and wrestle it to ground with wrath and ardour alone. Each saw the coming tribulation in their soul’s eye, and in their heart, their triumph was more than assured, it was decreed …
Hur rutwas matal skee!
Hur rutwas matal skee!
The Interval tolled again, resonating through the thousand-throated clamour, and the roar faded into expectant silence. The ghus, the oceanic prayer horns, sounded just as the eastern light etched the horizon in brilliant gold, like a cup tipped to overflowing.
Gold paint gleamed. Circumfix banners hung listless in the chill air. A presentiment passed through the assembly, and the cries of defiance and adulation rose once again, the way wind might coax a second rain from sodden trees. Their Aspect-Emperor—they could feel him.
He walked across the vault of heaven, standing bright in a sun that had yet to reach the masses below. Orange and rose painted the eastern flanges of his white-silk robes. His golden hair and braided beard shone. Starlight flashed from his high-hanging eyes. The Men of the Three Seas howled and roared in adoration—a cacophony of tongues. They reached out, lifted fingertips to touch his remote image.
“HOLD MY LIGHT,” the hanging figure called in thunder.
The rim of the sun boiled over the horizon, and morning dawned over the Great Ordeal. Warmth kissed the cheeks of those watching.
“FOR TODAY WE WALK THE WAYS OF SHADOW …”
And they fell to their knees—warriors and scribes, kings and slaves, priests and sorcerers, more than two hundred and eighty thousand souls, the greatest gathering of human arms and glory the world had ever seen. So many that it seemed that the floor of the world had dropped with their kneeling. They raised their faces and cried out, for light had come to them …
And the sun had followed.
“AMONG ALL PEOPLES, ONLY YOU HAVE TAKEN UP THE YOKE OF APOCALYPSE. AMONG ALL PEOPLES, ONLY YOU …”
For the Sakarpi who watched from their broken battlements, it was a thing of wonder and horror. Many felt a kind of hanging consternation, similar to that which afflicts men who make overbearing declarations. Everyone had assumed the Second Apocalypse and the march to Golgotterath was simply a pretext, that the Great Ordeal was an army of conquest, and the assault on Sakarpus another chapter of the Unification Wars, about which they had heard so many atrocious rumours and tales. But now …
Did they not witness proof of the Aspect-Emperor’s word?
No one dared mock. Not a single jeer was raised against the ecstatic roar. They listened to their conqueror’s sky-spanning voice, and though the language defeated them, they thought they understood what was said. They knew the scene before them would be celebrated for a thousand years, that accounts of it would be recited in the manner of The Sagas or even The Chronicle of the Tusk.
The day the Great Ordeal marched beyond the frontiers of Men.
The proud and the embittered celebrated, th
inking that the Southron Kings marched to their doom. But that evening, long after the last of the long-snaking columns had vanished over the northern crests, thousands of Sakarpi went down into the streets to listen to sermons of the whiteand-green-clad Judges. They took the lengths of copper wire that were offered to them, to twist into the shape of Circumfixes.
Afterwards, they clutched their crude tokens the way children sometimes moon over baubles that have captured their imagination. The Circumfix. A living symbol of a living god. It seemed a wonder, all the stories, all the shining possibilities, the golden clamour of a deeper, more forgiving reality. They walked together in whispering clots, glared at those who upbraided them with as much pity as defensive hostility. Pride, the Judges had told them, was ever the sin of fools.
That night they knelt for what seemed the first time, gave voice to the great unanswered ache in their hearts. They held their Circumfixes hot between moist palms, and they prayed. And the chill that pimpled their skin seemed holy.
They knew what they had seen, what they had felt.
For who could be such a fool as to mistake Truth?
CHAPTER EIGHT
The River Rohil
The will to conceal and the will to deceive are one and the same. Verily, a secret is naught but a deception that goes unspoken. A lie that only the Gods can hear.
—MEREMPOMPAS, EPISTEMATA
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the headwaters of the River Rohil
The plan was to follow the tributaries of the River Rohil all the way into the Osthwai Mountains, then cross the Ochain Passes into the trackless Meörn Wilderness, where pretty much all the Scalpoi companies that frequented Marrow hunted their inhuman quarry. It was, Kiampas assured Achamian, an old and oft-travelled route. “As reliable as anything in this wicked trade,” he had said. Things wouldn’t get interesting, he guessed, until they had “slogged past the Fringe,” the Fringe being the fluid and ever-receding border of what Sarl called “skinny country”—land ranged by the Sranc.