It would have reminded Sorweel of Temple—were it not for the skidding sense of doom.
“Tell me, your Glory,” Eskeles muttered close in his ear. His breath smelled of sour milk. “When you look into these faces, what do you see?”
Sorweel thought the question so strange that he glared at the sorcerer, suspecting some kind of joke at his expense. But the fat man’s friendly expression shouted otherwise. He was genuinely curious. The young King found this alarming in a vague way, like a spontaneous and inexplicable pain. “Gulls,” he heard himself blurt. “Gulls and fools!”
The Mandate Schoolman chuckled, shook his head like someone too familiar with the ways of conceit not to be amused.
The Interval’s second sounding hung prickling in the avid air, soaking all other noise. Sorweel saw faces turn in curiosity across the tiers, at first to one another, then, as though bent to some singular will, to the pavilion floor …
He failed to see the prick of light at first, perhaps because his gaze shied from the eye-twisting planes of the arras. Some twenty Shrial Knights, resplendent in white and silver and gold, had taken up positions across the front of the dais, accompanied by three of the surviving Nascenti, the first of the Aspect-Emperor’s disciples, clad entirely in silken black. It was the shadows thrown from the shoulders of these newcomers that drew his eyes to the glittering point behind them.
It twinkled at first, like a star watched with tired eyes. But it resolved, became more dense with blank incandescence. The Interval tolled again, deeper this time, like the boom of faraway thunder drawn into a string. The braziers wheezed into strings of smoke. Skirts of gloom fell from the tented heights.
A sloped landscape of faces—bearded, painted, clean-shaven—watched.
Seven heartbeats of soundless thunder.
Blinking brilliance … and there he was.
He sat cross-legged, but not upon any surface Sorweel could see, his forehead bowed to the spear-point of his hands, which had been pressed, elbows out, together in prayer. A halo shone about his crownless head, like a golden, ethereal plate, laying at an angle behind his scalp. The image of him seemed to scald unblinking eyes.
A murmuring wave passed through the Lords of the Ordeal: furtive exclamations of joy and wonder. Sorweel cursed himself for clasping his chest, for quick breaths drawn through a throat like a burning reed.
Demon! he cried to himself, trying to summon his father’s face in his soul’s eye. Ciphrang!
But the Aspect-Emperor was speaking, his voice so broad, so simple and obvious, that gratitude welled through the young King of Sakarpas. It was a beloved voice, almost but not quite forgotten, here at last to soothe the anxious watches, to heal the sundered heart. Sorweel understood none of the words, and Eskeles sat slack and dumbstruck, apparently too overawed to translate. But the voice—the voice! Somehow spoken to many, and yet intended only for one, for him, for Sorweel alone, out of all the hundreds, the thousands! You, it whispered. Only you … A mother’s scolding cracked into laughter by love. A father’s coaxing crimped into tears by pride.
And then, just when this music had wholly captured him, the assembled Lords of the Ordeal crashed into it with a booming chorus. And Sorweel found himself understanding the words, for they belonged to the first thing Eskeles had taught him in Sheyic, the Temple Prayer …
Sweet God of Gods,
Who walk among us,
Hallowed are your many names …
And somehow, through the entirety of the recitation, the Anasûrimbor’s voice remained distinct, like a thread of milk in slow-curling waters. Sorweel pinched his lips into a line, steeled himself against the pitch of collective voices—against the tidal urge to pray with. At that moment, he understood what it meant to look out while others bowed their faces in worship. The groping of unanswered expectations, clammy and intangible. The fouled sense of defiance, like the sin of creeping awake through a house of sleepers. He exchanged a look with Zsoronga and saw in his eyes a more caustic version of his own bewildered dissent.
They were the fools here, not because they dared stand in the company of kneelers, but because being a fool consisted of no more than being thought so by others.
The chorus trailed into ringing silence.
His head bowed beneath a nimbus of gold, the Aspect-Emperor hung in a honey glow.
“Ishma tha serara!” one of the Nascenti, little more than a black silhouette before the image of his master, hollered to the darkest pockets of canvas. “Ishma tha—”
“Raise your faces,” Eskeles hissed almost inaudibly, apparently recalling his interpretive duties. “Raise your faces to the gaze of our Holy Aspect-Emperor.”
“What does he me—?” Sorweel began asking the sorcerer, but the flash of warning in the man’s eyes silenced him. Scowling, Eskeles nodded toward the Aspect-Emperor. There … his expression said.
Look only there.
A breathless intensity slipped about the neck of the proceedings, a mingling of hope and anxiousness that Sorweel felt only as fear. Without exception, the assembly turned to the Anasûrimbor, so that all eyes reflected the white points of his otherworldly light. Only the twin demon heads, bound by their hair to the Anasûrimbor’s girdle, stared off in contrary directions.
The Aspect-Emperor floated out over the Table of Potentates, his legs still crossed, his simple white cassock the one thing gleaming to a fixed light. He moved so slowly that at first Sorweel blinked at the unreality of it. The Lords of the Ordeal followed his passage, angling their faces with near perfection, so that no shadows marred their features. Soft light combed through their beards and moustaches, shimmered across their finery. Something, a sub-audible rumbling, accompanied his movement, a noise like slow-sailing thunderheads.
Sorweel almost coughed with relief when the impossible figure veered to the opposite side of the pavilion. Soon the Anasûrimbor hung luminous before the shadowy Men, no more than two lengths away, scrutinizing them as he followed the tier’s line at a beetle’s crawl. Sorweel saw faces squint as though expecting a sudden blow. But most stared back with lunatic poise—some rejoicing, others proclaiming, and still others confessing—confessing above all.
Tear-scored cheeks shimmered in the passing light. Grown men, warlike men, wept in the wake of their sovereign’s divine passage …
The Aspect-Emperor paused.
The man beneath his gaze was an Ainoni, or so Sorweel guessed from the styling of his square-cut beard, ringlets about flattened braids. He sat on one of the lower tiers, and rather than descend, the Aspect-Emperor simply tilted in his floating posture to study him. The rings of light about his head and hands gilded the man’s face and shoulders with a patina of gold. The caste-noble’s dark eyes glittered with tears.
“Ezsiru,” the Aspect-Emperor began in a voice that seemed to coil about Sorweel’s ears, “ghusari histum mar—”
Leaning until his beard brushed Sorweel’s shoulder, Eskeles whispered, “Ezsiru, since your father, Chinjosa, kissed my knee during the First Holy War, ever has House Musammu been a bastion of the Zaudunyani. But the feud between you and your father has festered too long. You are too harsh. You do not understand the difference between the infirmities of youth and the infirmities of age. So you play father to your father, punish his weaknesses the way he once punished yours …”
One of the demon heads began opening and closing its white mouth like a fish. Horrified, Sorweel saw the glimmer of needle-teeth.
“Ezsiru, tell me, is it right that the father take the rod to the child?”
A throaty answer. “Yes.”
“Is it right that the child take the rod to the father?”
A pause that tugged a pang from the back of Sorweel’s throat. “No,” Ezsiru said, his voice pitched high through phlegm and sobbing.
“Love him, Ezsiru. Honour him. And always remember that old age is rod enough.”
Onward the Aspect-Emperor moved, floating no more than a length before pausing before another Lord of
the Ordeal, this one Nilnameshi. “Avarartu … hetu kah turum pah—”
On and on it continued, each exchange at once momentary and interminable, as though the timelessness of the consequences had somehow soaked backward into the act. And in each case, nothing more than some human truth was summoned forth, as though the Anasûrimbor need only look into the face of one who stumbled to set every man in attendance upon sure footing. How the loss of a wife exempted you from the laws of manliness. How shame at being thought a fool made fools of us all in the end. How cruel natures corrupted piety into excuses to indulge their evil.
Truth. Nothing more than truth.
And the sheer clarity of it bewildered Sorweel, shook him as deeply as anything since the death of his father and the humiliation of his people. Truth! The Anasûrimbor spoke only truth. How? How could a demon do such a thing? What demon would?
And how? How could such a thing be …
Be miraculous?
Sorweel’s heart began pacing the Aspect-Emperor’s arcane transit once he reached the apex of the horseshoe and began moving toward them. Dread cinching his chest, he watched the expressions of those who believed, upturned and rapt, brightening as he soundlessly passed, then falling into shadow. The floating figure drew closer and closer, as inexorable as an equation, as bright as a prison window, until Sorweel’s heart seemed to be beating against him. Finally, the Aspect-Emperor slowed, came to a hissing stop no more than two lengths away. He tilted back on an invisible axis to regard someone on the highest tier.
“Impalpotas, habaru—”
“Impalpotas,” Eskeles said with a quaver, “tell me, how long has it been since you were dead?”
A collective intake of breath. The man called Impalpotas sat four people abreast of Sorweel—three of Eskeles—and two rows higher. The young King of Sakarpus found himself peering against the shining proximity of the Anasûrimbor: The Inrithi had the clean-shaven look of a Nansur but seemed different in dress and hair. A Shigeki, Sorweel guessed. Like Porsparian.
“Impalpotas …” the Aspect-Emperor repeated.
The man smiled like a rake caught wooing a friend’s daughter—an expression so at odds with the circumstances that Sorweel’s stomach reeled as if pitched from a cliff.
Impalpotas leapt—no, exploded—from the tiers, sword out and flashing in divine light. A crack of voice greeted him in the interval, a word shouted beneath the skins of all present. Bald and searing light flooded the pavilion to the seams. Sorweel blinked against the glare, saw the Shigeki hanging before the Anasûrimbor, pinned to nothing, encased in a calligraphy of blinding lines. Impalpotas’s sword had dropped from nerveless fingers and now lay upright between the feet of a Conriyan on the bottom tier, its point buried into carpet and turf the depth of a palm.
The assembly broke out in roaring commotion. Like fire across desert scree, outrage leapt from face to face, a wrath too feral to be called manly. Beards opened about howls. Swords were brandished across the rows, like shaking teeth.
The Anasûrimbor’s voice did not so much cut through the din as harvest it—the uproar collapsed like wheat about the scythe of his declaration. “Irishi hum makar,” he said, continuing to scrutinize those seated before him. Save for his tongue and lips, he had not moved.
Eskele’s stunned and stammering voice was several heartbeats in translating. “Be-behold our foe.”
The Shigeki assassin had sailed out around the Aspect-Emperor and now floated behind his haloed head, a brighter beacon. The light that tattooed his skin and clothes flared, and his limbs were drawn out and away from his body. He hung, a different kind of proof, revolving like a coin in open space. He panted like an animal wrapped in wire, but his eyes betrayed no panic, nothing save glaring hate and laughter. Sorweel glimpsed the curve of his erect phallus through his silk breeches, looked away to his sigil-wrapped face, only to be more appalled …
For it flexed about invisible faults, then opened, drawn apart like interlocking fingers. Articulations were pried back and out, revealing eyes that neither laughed nor hated, that simply looked, above shining slopes of boneless meat.
“Rishra mei …” the Aspect-Emperor said in a voice that sounded like silk wrapped about a thunderclap. “I see …” Eskele’s murmured in reedy tones, “I see mothers raise stillborn infants to blinded Gods. The death of birth—I see this! with eyes both ancient and foretold. I see the high towers burn, the innocents broken, the Sranc descend innumerable—innumerable! I see a world shut against Heaven!”
The assembly cried out, a cacophony of voices and hand-wringing gestures, piteous for the terror, frightening for the fury. With wild glances Sorweel saw them, the Men of the Ordeal, standing or clutching their knees, their faces cramped as though they listened to news of recent catastrophe. Wives dead. Clans scattered. No! their expressions shouted. No!
“Rishra mei—”
“I see kings with one eye gouged, naked save for the collars from which their severed hands swing. I see the holy Tusk sundered, fragments cast to the flames! Momemn, Meigeiri, Carythusal and Invishi, I see their streets gravelled in bones, their gutters black with old blood. I see the temples overgrown, the broken walls rot over empty, savage ages.
“I see the Whirlwind walk—Mog-Pharau! Tsurumah! I see the No-God …”
Spoken like a groan, like air struck from dead lungs.
“Behold!” the Aspect-Emperor bellowed in tones that ripped nerves from skin, yanked them to the farthest tingling corners. “See!”
The thing—the faceless thing—hung skinned in arcane light. One rotation passed in breathless witness. Another. Then, like smoke inhaled, the brilliant lattice imploded, against the beast, into the beast. The sound of scissions, multiple and immediate, whisked through the air. The sorcerous light winked out. What remained simply dropped, a curtain of slop raining to the ground.
Breathless silence. A return to the holy gloom. It had happened, and it had not happened.
“Rishra mei,” the impossible visage said, sweeping his gaze across the astonished tiers. And the silence roared about him. Sorweel could only stare at the severed Ciphrang heads hanging like sacks from his hip, their white mouths laughing or howling.
His haloed palms spread wide, the Aspect-Emperor continued following the same unseen geometric curve. He was so close that Sorweel could see the winding Tusks embroidered white upon white into the hem of his cassock, the three pink lines wrinkling the outside corners of his eyes, the scuff of soil that marked the toe of his left white-felt slipper. He was so close that the image of him burned the surrounding spaces to black, so that the curving tier of forms and faces sunk into void.
The Anasûrimbor.
A scent preceded him, a draft that seemed to brush away the cloying perfumes worn by the more effete attendants. The smell of damp earth and cool rain. Weary truth.
The demons’ puckered sockets seemed to watch him—recognize him.
Please! Sorweel found himself thinking, begging. Please let it be Zsoronga!
But the luminous form came to a stop directly before him, too vivid to possess depth, to be framed—to be truly seen. Sorweel’s heart stomped against his breast. It seemed that animals thronged within him, that each of his fears had become gibbering terrors, creatures with their own limbs and volitions. What would he see?
How would he punish?
“Sorweel,” a voice more melodious than music said in the tongue of his fathers. “Sad child. Proud King. There is nothing more deserving of compassion than an apologetic heart.”
“Yes.” A noise more kicked out of his lungs than spoken.
Never!
Though he had not moved, though he sat mild and meditative, the Aspect-Emperor somehow towered over every region of sight and sound. Summer-blue eyes, not seeing so much as sacking. Plaited golden beard. Lips shaped about a pit without bottom. The intensity of his presence boiled against the limits of the senses, seeped into the faults, steamed into the unseen recesses …
“Do you repe
nt your father’s folly?”
“Yes!” Sorweel lied, his voice cracking for fury.
Demon! Ciphrang! The Goddess names you! Names you!
An old friend’s wry smile, as plain and as guileless as a joke about a girl, as sudden as a mother’s slap.
“Welcome, young Sorweel. Welcome to the glory that is the God’s Salvation. Welcome to the company of Believer-Kings.”
Then the godlike figure was gone, floating to his left, searching for the face of another penitent, another troubled soul. Blinking, Sorweel saw the Lords of the Ordeal watching and smiling. The pavilion’s embroidered interior seemed to become sky wide with sweet, breathable air.
“Gulls,” he heard Eskeles murmur with sarcastic good-nature beside him. “Fools …”
The day wore on with speech, prayer, and debate. Afterwards, the fat Schoolman would cough back tears and hold him, hug him as a mother or a father might hug their son.
Against a desolate backdrop, Zsoronga simply watched, speaking not a word.
Sorweel insisted on walking back to his tent alone.
For a time he made his way in numb peace, simply enjoyed the sense of free calm that often follows tumultuous events. Sometimes the bare fact of time passing is enough to seal us from painful experience. Stripped of worry, warmed by the crimson sun and the wind that had raised so much consternation in the Council of Potentates, he found himself staring at the endless succession of makeshift camps with earnest curiosity. A bowl of tea steaming unaccompanied on the trampled grass. A lone Tydonni repairing a braid in his hair. A forgotten game of benjuka. Shields bracing shields in pairs and trios. Two Nansur muttering and smiling as they oiled the straps of their cuirass.
The awe was not long in coming. There were simply too many warriors from too many nations not to be astonished in some small way. And the field of wind-lashed banners was simply too great. Some of the Inrithi returned his gaze with hostility, some with indifference, others with open cheer, and it struck Sorweel that they were simply Men. They grunted upon their wives, fretted for their children, prayed against rumours of a hungry season. It was what they shared that made them seem remarkable, even inhuman: the omnipresent stamp of the Circumfix, be it in gold or black or crimson. A single purpose.