Only what was needed. Only what was necessary.
Kayûtas sat as before at the same sheaf-covered table, only this time he stared at Sorweel with mild expectation instead of reading. A beautiful woman, her flaxen hair braided and bound about her head, sat to his immediate right, dressed in a gold-and-charcoal gown: Kayûtas’s sister, Sorweel realized, glimpsing the familial resemblance in her face. Kayûtas’s dark-maned brother, Moënghus, hulked several paces away, fairly bristling with weaponry. There was a taut humidity in the air, the kind found in the wake of heated arguments.
The woman stared at him with the amused boldness of an aunt finally laying eyes on a sister’s vaunted child. “Muirs kil tierana jen hûl,” she said. Though her gaze never wavered, the way she tilted her head told Sorweel she had directed her words at Moënghus behind her.
The dark Prince-Imperial said nothing, simply glared with eyes like chips of sky. His brother Kayûtas snorted in laughter.
Sorweel felt the blood rise to his face. They were scarcely older than him, he realized, and yet he was the boy here—unquestionably so. Was it the same with Zsoronga? Did they have this impact on everyone who came before them?
“How is Porsparian treating you?” the General asked in Sakarpic.
“As well as can be expected,” Sorweel replied, though the words felt false on his lips. The Shigeki slave had tended to his modest needs with diligence—this much was true. But the old man’s religious zealotry unsettled him: Porsparian was forever praying over the small mouths he moulded in the earth, continually feeding warm food to cold dirt, and forever … blessing the young King.
At least there had been no more episodes like that first night.
“Good,” Kayûtas said nodding, though for the merest sliver of a heartbeat, a shadow crossed his face. “My father has at last chosen your tutor,” he continued in a you-must-be-wondering tone, “a Mandate Schoolman named Thanteus Eskeles. A good man, I am told. He will accompany you throughout the remainder of the march, teach you Sheyic while you ride … I trust you will defer to his wisdom.”
“Of course,” Sorweel said, quite at a loss as to what to think. Moënghus and the nameless woman continued staring at him, each with their own variety of contempt. Sorweel found himself looking to his feet, fuming. “Is there anything else?” he asked with more heat than he intended.
He was a king! A king! What would his father say, seeing him like this?
General Kayûtas laughed aloud, said something in the same language spoken by the woman moments earlier. “I’m afraid so,” he continued in effortless Sakarpic. He spared a droll glance at his sister—whose name Sorweel suddenly recalled: Serwa. Anasûrimbor Serwa.
“As you might imagine,” the fair-haired General continued, “the line between insolence and sacrilege is a rather hazy one in an endeavour such as this. But there are those who … watch such things. Those who keep count.”
Something in his tone pried Sorweel’s gaze upward. Kayûtas was leaning forward now, his elbows on his knees, so that the white silk of his robe hung in a series of luminous arcs below his throat. Behind him, his brother had turned away in apparent boredom, gnawed at what looked like a section of dried meat. But the woman continued watching as intently as before.
“You are a king, Sorweel, and when you return to Sakarpus you will rule as your father had ruled, with all of your privileges intact. But here, you are a soldier and a vassal. You will salute others in accordance to rank. In the presence of myself or my brother and sister, you will kneel and lower your face, so that when you look straight ahead, your eyes are focused on a spot one length before you. You may then look at us directly: This is your privilege as a king. When you encounter my father, no matter what the circumstance, you are to place your forehead to the ground. And never look at him unless invited. All men are slaves before my father. Do you understand?”
The tone was gentle, the words were nothing if not politic, and yet there could be no mistaking the cutting edge of reprimand. “Yes,” Sorweel heard himself say.
“Then show me.”
A breeze bellied the eastward canvas panels; ropes creaked and poles groaned. There was a burning tightness to the air, like the tinkle of old coals in an old fire, making breathing not only uncomfortable, but dangerous. It happened without him even willing it to happen: His knees simply bent, folded like stiff leather, then fell to the crude-woven mat that had been rolled across the floor. His chin dropped on the swivel of his neck, as though obeying an irresistible accumulation of weight. He found himself looking at the Prince-Imperial’s sandalled feet, at white skin and pearl nails, at the yellow-orange calluses climbing the pads of his toes.
Forgive me …
“Excellent.” A breathless pause. “I know that was difficult.”
His every sinew, it seemed, tensed about his frame, cramped about his father’s bones. Never had he been so utterly immobile—so utterly silent. And somehow, this became his accusation.
“Come, Sorweel. Please stand.”
He did as he was instructed, though he continued staring at the General’s feet. He looked up only when the silence became unbearable. Even in this, they were unconquerable.
“You’ve made a friend,” Kayûtas said, gazing at him with the amiable air of an uncle fishing for some reluctant truth. “Who is it? Zsoronga? Yes. It only stands to reason. That interpreter of his … Obotegwa.”
The young King’s shock was such that he paid no heed to his expression. Spies! Of course they were watching him … Porsparian?
“I have no need of spies, Sorweel,” the Prince-Imperial said, snatching the thought from his face. He leaned back and with a gentle laugh added, “My father is a god.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Osthwai Mountains
Since all men count themselves righteous, and since no righteous man raises his hand against the innocent, a man need only strike another to make him evil.
—NULLA VOGNEAS, THE CYNICATA
Where two reasons may deliver truth, a thousand lead to certain delusion. The more steps you take, the more likely you will wander astray.
—AJENCIS, THEOPHYSICS
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the Osthwai Mountains
The Scalpoi called the mountain the Ziggurat, apparently because of its flat summit. None among the Skin Eaters knew its true name—perhaps even Cleric had forgotten. But Achamian had dreamt of it many, many times.
Aenaratiol.
When the Nonman had first mentioned the Black Halls, Achamian had thought only of the expedition, of reaching Sauglish by midsummer. By the time they made camp that evening, the relief had all but evaporated and the implications of what they were about to attempt—for want of a better word—stabbed at him. The world was old, strewn with ancient and forgotten hazards, and short of Golgotterath, few could match the peril that was Cil-Aujas.
The Skin Eaters had their own lore. Given that it flanked the southern approaches of the Ochain Passes, the Ziggurat and the derelict Nonman Mansion that plumbed its foundations had been the subject of countless fireside speculations. What shreds of fact they might have possessed had been burned long ago as fuel for brighter wonderings, and what remained was out-and-out fantastical. Pestilence. Exodus. Invasion. It seemed they had concocted every tale to explain the fate of the Black Halls save the actual one.
Refuge.
When Achamian began telling the true story, he found himself the focus of all attention, to the point where it almost seemed comedic: hard and warlike men hanging on his words like children, asking the same guileless questions, watching with the same timid impatience. Xonghis, in particular, would begin calling out what he thought would happen next, only to catch himself and trail mumbling. Achamian would have laughed, had he not understood what it meant to be stranded as these men were stranded, had he not known the power of words to parent the orphaned present.
The true name of the mountain, he told them, was Aenaratiol.
Sm
okehorn.
More and more Skin Eaters gathered about their fire as he spoke, including Sarl and Kiampas. Mimara sat with her head resting against Achamian’s shoulder, her eyes lifted high and searching each time he glanced at her. The flames tossed and twined in the mountain wind, and he basked in its heated glow. Sinking from the clouds, the sun leaned hot and crimson against the mountains, before slipping behind the uneven teeth of the mountains, trailing a shrinking patina of gold, violet, and blue. The land was tossed to the horizon, slopes and sheer drops, growing ever more black.
He told them about the Nonmen, the Cûnuroi, and the glory of their civilization in the First Age, when Men lived as savages and the Tusk had yet to be written. He told them about Cu’jara Cinmoi, the greatest of the Nonmen Kings, and the wars he fought against the Inchoroi, who had fallen in fire from the void, and how those wars left the survivors mateless and immortal, with no will to resist the Five Tribes of Men. And then he told them of the First Apocalypse.
“If you want to look at the true ruin,” he said, nodding to the barren knoll where the Captain sat alone with his inhuman lieutenant, “look no farther than your Cleric. Reduced. Dwindled. They were once to us as we are to Sranc. Indeed, for many among the Nonmen, we were little more.”
He described the Meori Empire, the great White Norsirai nation that once had ruled all the lands on the Long Side of the mountains, as the Scalpoi called it, the wilderness that was their hunting grounds. He described its destruction at the hands of the No-God, and how the great hero, Nostol, fled south with the remnants of his people, and found refuge in the lands of Gin’yursis, the Nonman King of Cil-Aujas. He described how the two of them, hero and king, defeated the No-God and his Consult at Kathol Pass, and so purchased a year’s respite for the entire world.
“But what does it mean,” he asked the faces about the fire, “when angels walk the very ground we trod? What does it mean to be mortally overshadowed, to toil in the dazzle of another race’s glory? Do you admire? Do you bend knee and acknowledge? Or do you envy and hate?
“Nostol and his Meöri kinsmen hated. Dispossessed, they coveted, and coveting, they maligned those they sought to rob. They did what all men do, you, me, throughout the entirety of our lives. They confounded need for justice, want for writ. They turned to the tangled strings of their scriptures and pulled out the threads that spoke to their fell ends.”
“Betrayal,” Mimara murmured from his side.
“Refuge,” Achamian said. He then narrated the three versions of the tale as he knew them. In the first, Nostol instructed his chieftains and thanes to woo the Emwama concubines, the slaves the Nonmen used as substitutes for their long-dead wives. Nostol, he explained, hoped to incite the Nonmen to some act of violence, something he could use as a pretext to rally his people behind his planned atrocities. Apparently the Meöri were zealous in the prosecution of his orders, impregnating no less than sixty-three different concubines.
“Talk about farting in the queen’s bedchamber!” Pokwas exclaimed.
“Indeed,” Achamian said, adding to the chorus of laughter with the mock gravity of his tone. “And there are no windows in the deeps of Cil-Aujas …”
In the second, Nostol himself seduced Weyukat, whom the Nonman King prized above all his other concubines, since she had twice carried his seed to pregnancy, if not to term—among few human women ever to do so. In this version, the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas had rejoiced, thinking that the resulting child, if female, could herald the resurrection of their dying race—only to discover that the infant boy was wholly human. The child, named Swanostol in the legends, was subsequently put to the sword, providing the outrage Nostol required to incite his Meöri kin.
In the third, Nostol commanded his chieftains and thanes to seduce not the Emwama, but the highest among the Nonmen nobility, the Ishroi, knowing that the resulting passions would be certain to create the friction he required. This, Achamian had always thought, was far and away the most likely tale, since most contemporary chroniclers placed the Fall of Cil-Aujas within a year of the Battle of Kathol Pass—scarcely enough time for plots involving seduction, pregnancy, and birth to unfold. And it seemed to accord with the scraps he could remember from Seswatha’s Dreams.
Nevertheless, each of the versions had its own poetic virtues, and they all came to the same: war between Men and Nonmen.
He described the glare of riot lighting the deeps. He told them about fury hunting grief, about bared blades raised to low ceilings and naked skin falling to chiselled floors. He spoke of corridors blocked by spears, of underworld houses soaked in flame. He described wild and desperate Men, Chorae bound against their throats, howling through the trackless deeps. He explained the blind stands of the Ishroi, their sorceries cracking through labyrinthine halls. He told them how Nostol, his beard all filth, his hair blood-matted, struck down the Nonman King as he wept and laughed upon his throne. How he murdered Gin’yursis, ancient and renowned.
“With courage and fell cunning,” Achamian said, his face hot in the firelight, “Men made themselves masters of Cil-Aujas. Some Nonmen hid, only to be found in the course of time, by hunger or iron, it mattered not. Others escaped through chutes no mortal man has ever known. Perhaps even now they wander like Cleric, derelict, cursed with the only memories that will not fade, doomed to relive the Fall of Cil-Aujas until the end of days.”
The mountain shadows had ascended to the arch of heaven, revealing a sky so deep with stars it tugged at the heart simply to glance at them. A chill crept through the old Wizard.
“I’ve heard this story,” Galian ventured as the windy silence grew leaden, his palms held out to the flames. “This is why the Galeoth are cursed with fractiousness, is it not? The fugitives you describe were their forefathers.”
Several of the Galeoth scalpers howled in complaint.
Achamian pursed his lips, shook his head in a way that made him feel campfire wise and mountain sad. “The King of Cil-Aujas was not so discriminate in his dying,” he said, staring into the pulsing coals. “According to the legends, all Men bears this curse.
“We are all Sons of Nostol. We all bear the stamp of his frailty.”
The following morning revealed cloudless skies, the clarity measured in the concave spine of the mountains fading to purple as they reached into the horizon, the cold measured in the white that capped their ragged heights. Sunlight glared nascent from hanging fields of snow, flashed gold and silver. It sharpened the breath, simply staring.
The company loaded their mules with little or no conversation, then set out toward the Ziggurat. What Lord Kosoter had called the Low Road seemed anything but. Not only was it little more than a track, it climbed far more than otherwise, following the course of various ridges, before dropping into some gullied interval to scale higher courses. But always, however circuitous its route, it stalked the great fissure that hoofed the Ziggurat’s knuckled base. No matter what earth-and-rock enormity the Low Road placed before them, the fissure inevitably climbed back into view, larger, darker, more sinister for the concentration of detail.
The mighty oaks and elms of previous days had yielded altogether, giving way to scrawny poplars and twisted screw pine where trees could be found at all. Most of the time the company scuffed and clopped across expanses of bare stone, surrounded by the wind-combed remains of the previous year’s bracken. Everything seemed to shiver. Everything that had once lived.
It was long past noon ere they descended into the delta of gorges at the base of the great fissure. The Ziggurat, by this time, occupied the whole of the sky before them, cowing them into consensual silence. They tramped onward in a kind of stupor. The Coffers were forgotten, as was the distraction of Mimara’s hips. Perhaps it was the humility of seeing fundamentals upended, the very ground wracked and beaten, hauled into scarps and slopes, heaved to heights that could defeat sun and clouds let alone the aspirations of mere men. Perhaps it was the weight of the inexpressible, the hard bone of the world rearing into horns that ho
oked the skirts of heaven. The titanic precipices, the pulverizing leaps, the distances ramping into the clouds. The Skin Eaters, each in their own way, seemed to understand that this was the prototype, what tyrants aped with their God-mocking works, mountains into monument, migrations into pageant and parade. This was the most primordial rule—the world itself—too vast, too elemental, to be called sacred or holy.
And it weakened the knees, as all true spectacle should.
The Ziggurat had become as much argument as mountain, posed not in claims or premises, but in immensities, in features that encompassed experience, saying, murmuring, You are small … So very small.
And they walked, willingly, between the cracks of its hoary fingers.
The sky was pinched into a shining slot. The air became dry and still, like the gap in a dead man’s mouth.
The Kianene, Sutadra, was the first to notice they walked the ruins of some ancient road. It almost seemed a trick of the eyes, for once they noticed the telltale signs, it seemed impossible they could have seen otherwise. Something, snowmelts perhaps, had sawed a long winding gully across and over its course, gutting the broad planes of what once must have been a grand processional avenue. There was little enthusiasm in the discovery. It seemed to trouble the Skin Eaters somehow, knowing they walked in the footsteps of gold-clad kings and shining armies, rather than those of wayfarers such as themselves. There was comfort in a simple track, Achamian supposed, an assurance that the world they walked did not laugh at them.
Several hours passed before they rounded the final bend and saw it before them. The fissured wall climbed high, straining the neck with its gouged dimensions. It loomed as only natural works could loom. The random line of fracture and millennial erosion, of rock sculpted in mystery and accident. Black outcroppings with mossed bellies. Long cracks dangling anemic weeds. And set in its heart, like some shrine to intellect and intention, the enormous Obsidian Gate, looming over the ruins of an ancient fortress.