“Huh?” The Schoolman laughed. “Eh? Do you see? The soul of the Aspect-Emperor is not only greater than the souls of Men, it possesses the very shape of the Ur-Soul.”
“You mean … your God of Gods.”
“Our God of Gods?” the sorcerer repeated, shaking his head. “I keep forgetting that you’re a heathen! I suppose you think Inri Sejenus is some kind of demon as well!”
“I’m trying,” Sorweel replied, his face suddenly hot. “I’m trying to understand!”
“I-know-I-know,” the Schoolman said, this time smirking at his own stupidity. “We’ll discuss the Latter Prophet, er … later …” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “In the meantime, ponder this … If the Aspect-Emperor’s soul is cast in the very form of the God, then …” He trailed nodding. “Huh? Eh? If …”
“Then … He is the God in small …” A kind of supernatural terror accompanied these words.
The sorcerer beamed, his teeth surprisingly white and straight compared to the dark frazzle of his beard. “You wonder how it is so many would march to the ends of the earth for him? You wonder what could move men to cut their own throats in his name. Well then, there you have your answer …” He leaned forward, his pose rigid in the manner of men who think they possess world-judging truths. “Anasûrimbor Kellhus is the God of Gods, Sorweel, come to walk among us.”
Somehow Sorweel had fallen from a crouch to his knees. He remained breathless still, staring at Eskeles. To move his hands or even to blink his eyes, it seemed, would be to quake and to spill, to reveal himself a thing of sand.
“Before his coming, me and my kind were damned,” the sorcerer continued, though he seemed to be speaking more for his own benefit than Sorweel’s. “We Schoolmen traded a lifetime of power for an eternity of torment … But now?”
Damnation. Sorweel felt the cold of dead earth soak through his leggings. An ache climbed into his knees. His father had died in sorcerous fire—how many times had Sorweel tormented himself with that thought, imagining the shriek and scream, the thousand blistering knives? But what Eskeles was saying …
Did it mean he burned still?
The Mandate Schoolman gazed at him, his eyes wide and bright with a kind of uncompromising joy, like a man in the flush of infatuation, or a gambler delivered from slavery by an impossible throw of the number-sticks. When he spoke, more than admiration—or even worship—trilled through his voice.
“Now I am saved.”
Love. He spoke with love.
Rather than go to Zsoronga’s pavilion that evening, Sorweel shared a quiet repast with Porsparian in the white-washed air of his own tent. He sat on the end of his cot, his head bent to his steaming gruel, knowing yet not caring that the Shigeki slave stared at him wordlessly. A kind of incipient confusion filled him, one that had slipped the cup of his soul and spilled through his body, a leaden tingle. The sounds of the Great Ordeal fell through the fabric effortlessly, thrumming and booming from every direction.
Save the sky. The sky was silent.
And the earth.
“Anasûrimbor Kellhus is the God of Gods incarnate, Sorweel, come to walk among us …”
Men often make decisions in the wake of significant events, if only to pretend they had some control over their own transformations. Sorweel’s first decision was to ignore what had happened, to turn his back on what Eskeles had said, as though rudeness could drive his words away. His second decision was to laugh—laughter was ever the great ward against all things foolish. But he could not harness the breath to see it through.
Then he finally decided to think Eskeles’s thoughts, if only to pretend they had not already possessed him. What was the harm of thinking?
As a young boy he spent most of his solitary play in the ruined sections of his father’s palace, particularly in what was called the Overgrown Garden. Once, while searching for a lost arrow, he noticed a young poplar springing from some far-flung seed beneath a thicket of witch-mulberry. Wondering whether it would live or die, he checked on it from time to time, watched it slowly labour in the shadow. Several times he even crawled into the mossy interior of the thicket, wriggling in on his back, and bringing his cheek close to the newborn’s stem so that he could see it leaning, extending up and out to the promise of light shining through the fretting of witch-mulberry leaves. Over days and weeks it reached, thin with inanimate effort, straining for a band of golden warmth that descended like a hand from the sky. And then finally, it touched …
The last time he had looked, mere weeks before the city’s fall, the tree stood proud save for the memory of that first crook in its trunk, and the mulberry bush was long dead.
There was harm in thinking. He not only knew this—he could feel it.
What Eskeles had shown him had the power of … of sense. What Eskeles had shown him had explained, not only the Aspect-Emperor … but himself as well.
“… we remain fragments of the God, nonetheless.”
Was this why the Kiünnatic Priests had demanded that all Three Seas missionaries be burned? Was this why spittle had flecked their lips when they came to his father with their demands?
Had they been a bush, fearful of the tree in their midst?
“I keep forgetting that you’re a heathen!”
After darkness fell and Porsparian’s breathing dipped into a rasping snore, Sorweel lay awake, riven by thought after cascading thought—there was no thwarting them. When he curled beneath his blankets, it seemed he could see him as he was on that day of war and rain and thunder, the Aspect-Emperor, ringlets dripping about a long face, beard cut and plaited in the way of Southron Kings, eyes so blue they seemed a glimpse of another world. A glaring, golden figure, walking in the light of a different time, a brighter sun.
A friendly scowl, followed by a gentle laugh. “I’m rarely what my enemies expect, I know.”
And Sorweel told himself, commanded himself, mouthed about clamped teeth, I am my father’s son! A true son of Sakarpus!
But what if ...
Hands lifting him from his knees. “You are a King, are you not?”
What if he came to believe?
“I’m no conqueror ...”
He awoke, as had become his habit, several moments before the sounding of the Interval. For some reason, he felt a kind of long-drawn relief instead of the usual clutch of fear. The plains air, the breath of his people, sighed through his tent, made the bindings creak where Porsparian had tied them down. The silence was so complete he could almost believe that he was alone, that all the rolling pasture about his tent was empty to the horizon—abandoned to the Horse-King.
Then the Interval tolled. The first calls to prayer climbed into the skies.
He joined the Company of Scions where their Standard had been planted the previous evening, numbly followed Captain Harnilias’s barked instructions. Apparently his pony, which Sorweel called Stubborn, had done some soul searching the previous night as well, because for the first time he responded wonderfully to Sorweel’s demands. He’d known the beast was intelligent, perhaps uncommonly so, and only refused to learn his Sakarpic knee-and-spur combinations out of spite. Stubborn had become so agreeable, in fact, that Sorweel breezed through the early on-the-march drills. He even heard several of the Scions call out, “Ramt-anqual!”—the word Obotegwa always translated as “Horse-King.”
When chance afforded he leaned forward to whisper the Third Prayer to Husyelt into the pony’s twitching ear. “One and one are one,” he explained to the beast afterward. “You are learning, Stubborn. One horse and one man make one warrior.”
A bolt of shame passed through him at the thought of “one man,” for in fact he was not a man. He never would be, he realized, given that his Elking would likely never happen. A child forever, without the shades of the dead to assist him. This set him to gazing, once again, out over the marching masses that engulfed his surroundings. Shields and swords. Waddling packs. Innumerable souls behind innumerable faces, all toiling toward the dark
line of the north.
How could wonder make a heart so small?
When Sorweel finally settled next to Zsoronga and Obotegwa in the column, the Successor-Prince commented on his haggard expression.
Sorweel paid no attention, simply said, “The Ordeal. What do you think of it?”
Zsoronga’s expression went from bemusement to concentrated worry as he listened to Obotegwa’s frowning translation. “Ke yusu emeba—”
“I think it may be the end of us.”
“But do you think it’s real?”
The Prince paused, gazed out across a landscape dizzy with distances. He wore what he called his kemtush over his Kidruhil tunic, a white sash dense with black hand-painted characters that listed the “battles of his blood,” the wars fought by his ancestors.
“Well, I think they believe it’s real. I can only imagine what it must seem like to you, Horse-King. You and your stranded city. Me? I come from a great and ancient nation, mightier by far than any of the individual nations gathered beneath the Circumfix. And still, I have never seen the like. To concentrate so much glory, so much power, for a march to the ends of the Eärwa! This is something no Satakhan in history, not even Mbotetulu! could have brought about—let alone my poor father. Whatever this is, and whatever comes of it, you can rest assured that it will be recalled … Recalled to the end of all time.”
They rode in silence for some time, lost in the thoughts.
“And what do you think of them?” Sorweel eventually asked.
“Them?”
“Yes. The Anasûrimbor.”
The Successor-Prince shrugged, but not without, Sorweel noticed, a quick glance around him. “Everyone ponders them. They are like the mummers the Ketyai are so found of, standing before the amphitheatre of the world.”
“What does ‘everyone’ say?”
“That he is a Prophet, or even a God.”
“What do you say?”
“What the lines of my father’s treaty say: that he is a Benefactor of High Holy Zeüm, Guardian of the Son of Heaven’s Son.”
“No ... What do you say?”
For the first time, Sorweel saw anger score the young man’s handsome profile. Zsoronga momentarily glared at Obotegwa, as though holding him responsible for Sorweel’s relentless questioning, before turning back to the young King with mild and insincere eyes. “What do you think?”
“He’s so many things to so many people,” Sorweel found himself blurting. “I know not what to think. All I know is that those who spend any time with him, any time with him whatsoever, think him some kind of God.”
The Successor-Prince once again turned to his Senior Obligate, this time with questioning eyes. Though the drifting pace of their parallel horses meant that Sorweel could only glimpse Obotegwa’s face on an angle, he was certain he had seen the old translator nod.
While the two exchanged words in Zeümi, Sorweel struggled with the dismaying realization that Zsoronga had secrets, powerful secrets, and that compared to the intrigues that likely encircled him, his friendship with an outland king, with a sausage, could be little more than diversion. The Son of Nganka’kull was more than a hostage, he was a spy as well, a chit in a game greater than Sorweel could imagine. The fate of empires bound him.
When Zsoronga returned his gaze, the pinch of merriment that characterized so much of their discourse had utterly vanished, leaving a curious, questioning intensity in its place. It was almost as if his brown eyes were begging Sorweel, somehow …
Begging him to be someone High Holy Zeüm could trust.
“Petatu surub—”
“Have you heard the story of Shimeh, of the First Holy War?”
Sorweel shrugged. He felt at once honoured and gratified. A prince of a great nation confided in him. “Not much,” he admitted, careful to pitch his voice at the same low tenor as his friend.
“There is this book,” Zsoronga said, the squint in his eyes complementing the reluctance in his voice. “This forbidden book, written by a sorcerer … Drusas Achamian. Have you heard of him?”
“No.”
Zsoronga’s bottom lip pressed the line of his mouth into an upside-down crescent. He nodded, not so much in affirmation or approval, but as though to acknowledge his succinct honesty. “Bpo Mandatu mbal—”
“He was a Mandate Schoolman, like your own tutor.”
Sorweel found himself glancing about, fearing that Eskeles would arrive any moment. Men had a way of hearing their names, even when spoken across the arc of the world. “And?”
“Well, he was present when the Anasûrimbor joined the First Holy War. Apparently he was his first and dearest friend—his teacher, both before and after the Circumfixion.”
“So?”
“Well, for one, the Empress—you know, the woman on the silver kellics, the mother of our dear, beloved General Kayûtas—Achamian was her first husband. Apparently the Anasûrimbor stole her. So at the conclusion of the First Holy War, when the Shriah of their Thousand Temples crowns the Anasûrimbor Aspect-Emperor, this Achamian repudiates him before all those gathered, claims he is a fraud and deceiver.”
Something of the old Zsoronga had returned, as though he were warming to the gossip of the tale.
“Yes …” Sorweel said. “I’m sure I’ve heard this … or a version of it, anyway.”
“So he leaves the Holy War, goes into exile, becomes, they say, the only Wizard in the Three Seas. Only the love and shame of the Empress prevent his execution.”
“Wizard?”
Another grave turn in his ebony expression. “Yes. A sorcerer without a School.”
The Company of Scions was but a clot in a far larger column of Kidruhil companies, and a conspicuous one, given that its members had leave to wear native ornamentations over their crimson uniforms. They had followed the column over the crest of a scrub-choked rise, then leaned back against their cantles as they descended into a broad depression. The black track became viscous with water and muck. The susurrus of countless hooves stamping marshy ground rose about them—the wheeze of sinking grounds. What had looked like mist from the sloped heights became clouds of midges.
“And this is where he writes this book?” Sorweel asked, pitching his voice over the tramping clamour. “In exile?”
“Our spies brought my father a copy some six years ago, saying that it had become a kind of scripture for those who still resist the Anasûrimbor in the Three Seas. It’s titled A Compendium of the First Holy War.”
“So it’s a history?”
“Only apparently. There are … insinuations, scattered throughout, and descriptions of the Anasûrimbor as he was, before he gained the Gnosis and became almost all-powerful.”
“Are you saying this Mandate Schoolman knew … that he knew what the Aspect-Emperor was?”
Zsoronga paused before answering, looked at him as though rehearsing previous judgments. Among those who would contest the power of the Aspect-Emperor, Sorweel understood, no matters could be more essential.
“Yes,” Zsoronga finally replied.
“So. What does he say?”
“Everything you might expect a cuckold to say. That’s the problem …”
An ambient eagerness bloomed through Sorweel’s limbs. The knowledge he needed was here—he could sense it. The knowledge that would cleave certainty out of mangled circumstances—that would see his honour redeemed! He squeezed the reins tight enough to whiten his knuckles. “Does he call him a demon?” he asked almost with breath. “Does he?”
“No.”
A vertiginous, dumbfounded moment, as if he had leaned forward expecting an answer to brace him. “What then? Do not play me on such matters, Zsoronga! I come to you as a friend!”
The Successor-Prince somehow grinned and scowled all at once. “You must learn, Horse-King. Too many wolves prowl these columns. I appreciate your honesty, your overture, I truly do, but when you speak like this … I … I fear for you.”
Obotegwa had softened his sovereign’
s tone, of course. No matter how diligently the Obligate tried to recreate the tenor of his Prince’s discourse, his voice always bore the imprint of a long and oft-examined life.
Sorweel found himself looking down at the polished contours of his pommel, so different from the raw hook of iron on Sakarpi saddles. “What does this-this … Achamian say?”
“He says the Anasûrimbor is a man, neither diabolic nor divine. A man of unheard-of intellect. He bids us imagine the difference between ourselves and children …” The black man trailed into silence, his brows furrowed in concentration. He had this habit of staring down and to the left when pondering, as though judging points buried deep in the ground.
“And?”
“The important thing, he says, isn’t so much what the Anasûrimbor is, as what we are to him.”
Sorweel glared at him in exasperation. “You speak in riddles!”
“Yusum pyeb—!”
“Think to your childhood! Think of the hopes and fears. Think of the tales the nursemaids told you. Think of the way your face continually betrayed you. Think of all the ways you were mastered, all the ways you were moulded.”
“Yes! So?”
“That is what you are to the Aspect-Emperor. That is what we all are.”
“Children?”
Zsoronga dropped his reins, waved his arms out in grand gesture of indication. “All of this. This divinity. This apocalypse. This … religion he has created. They are the kinds of lies we tell children to assure they act in accord with our wishes. To make us love, to incite us to sacrifice … This is what Drusas Achamian seems to be saying.”
These words, spoken through the lense of wise and weary confidence that was Obotegwa, chilled Sorweel to the pith. Demons were so much easier! This … this …
How does a child war against a father? How does a child not … love?
Sorweel could feel the dismay on his face, the bewilderment, but his shame was muted by the realization that Zsoronga felt no different. “So what are his wishes, then? The Aspect-Emperor. If all this is … is a fraud, then what are his true ends?”