Anything.
A keening noise climbed into the earthen thunder of their advance, high and ragged, as though cutting the throats that were its crying origin. The storks seemed to hang in the air directly above them, lines of virgin white etched in the sun. The Scions swung through the shadow of the shallow basin, scraping through a haze of brush and dead grasses, then raced upward. The knoll’s crown met their rush. The sun broke across their backs, crimson flashing from silver and crimson.
The shrieking chorus collapsed into squeals and yammering alarums.
The Sranc mobbed the spaces below them, a putrid congregation scattered across the gap between sunlit summits. Thin white arms yanked at weapons. Faces collapsed into squints of fury. Clan standards—human skulls haired with bison hide—jerked and wagged.
Sorweel did not need to look down the line of his fellows to know their faces. Disbelief is ever the door between young men and murder.
An impossible moment followed, one Sorweel had heard various Horselords mention from time to time. The line of lancers, their helms and mailed sleeves gleaming in the sunlight, stood motionless save for the most anxious of ponies. The Sranc band roiled with shriek and gesture but likewise did not move. The two parties simply regarded each other, not out of hesitation and certainly not for calculation’s sake. It was more a warlike equipoise, as if the encounter were a coin spinning in the air, needing only the hard ground of murder to judge.
Sorweel lifted himself forward to whisper in Stubborn’s ear: “One and one are one …”
And they were off, shouting the war-cries of a dozen heathen nations, a thundering, trampling line. A flying rake of lance-points. From the stories his father’s boonsmen told him, he had expected each heartbeat to last an age, but in fact everything happened fast—far too fast to be terrifying, or exhilarating, or anything, for that matter. One heartbeat, the Sranc were a tangle of sprinting forms before him, skin white, armour black with filth, iron weapons wild in the air. The next heartbeat, he was crashing through them like something thrown. His lance glanced off the corner of a shield, skewered the throat of a wagging creature he had not even seen, let alone intended to kill. The heartbeat after, he was drawing his sword, reining Stubborn about, and hacking. Shrieks and cries and shouts pealed skyward. The dreadful clatter of war.
Seven, maybe eight, threshing heartbeats passed. He wondered at the ease with which sword points punctured faces—no different from practice melons. Otherwise, he was his blade, his horse, dancing between the jabber of pale shadows, raining ruin and destruction. Purple blood jetted, flew black across the dead scrub.
Then it was just the low dust, the clutch of the maimed and the dying, and the cacophony had moved beyond him—continued moving.
He spurred Stubborn in pursuit, glimpsed Zsoronga grinning from a passing saddle.
The surviving Sranc ran before an uneven wave of horsemen, a kind of jerking scramble. Sorweel seized a lance jutting from the ground as he galloped past, leaned into Stubborn’s exertions. He quickly overtook the laggards among the Scions, soon found himself in the pounding fore of the pursuit. A crazed grin seized his lips. He howled his people’s ancient war-cry, the lung-cracking sound that had marked innumerable such pursuits through the ages.
The Sranc ran, bolting through dead scrub like wolverines, opening the interval between them and the slowest of the Scions—only the quickest of the quick overtook them.
There was joy in the race. His legs and hips had become mere extensions of Stubborn’s leaping gallop The ground pouring away like water. His hand gripping his lance, loosely as he had been taught from childhood, floating, tingling as if he held a thunderbolt. He was a Son of Sakarpus, a Horselord, and this—this!—was his calling. He struck with a viciousness that seemed holy for its thoughtlessness. One in the neck, rolling limbs akimbo into caged bracken. Another in the heel, left limp-running, mewling like a knifed cat. Anything he overran he instantly forgot, knowing that the pounding wall behind him would eat them up.
They scattered and he followed—there was no hiding beneath the shining plains sun. They bent their white faces back to him as he closed, black eyes glittering, features pinched ancient with fear and fury. Their limbs little more than a flutter of shadows in the grass-thatched dust. They coughed. They screamed as they spun falling.
There was joy in the race. Ecstasy in the kill.
One and one were one.
Their victory was complete. Among the Scions, three were fallen, and some nine others were wounded, including Charampa, who took a spear in his thigh. Despite the dark looks thrown by Eskeles, Old Harni was obviously satisfied with his young wards, perhaps even proud of them. Sorweel had witnessed death enough during his city’s fall. He knew what it meant to watch familiar faces spit their final breath. But for the first time he experienced the jarring of elation and regret that comes with triumph on the field. For the first time he understood the contradiction that blackens the heart of all martial glory.
His fellows cheered him, clapped his back and shoulders. Zsoronga even embraced him, a kind of madness cackling in his wide green eyes. Stunned, Sorweel climbed the hump of the nearest knoll, stared out across the plains. The sun lay on the horizon, burning crimson through a band of violet, dousing the innumerable crests and low summits in pale orange. He stood and breathed. He thought of his ancient fathers wandering as he did across these lands—killing those who did not belong. He thought of the way his boots rooted him to the earth.
The darkening sky was so broad that it seemed to spin with slow vertigo. The Nail of Heaven glittered.
And the World towered beneath.
That night Harnilas indulged them, knowing that they were boys drunk on the deeds of men. The last of the Ainoni rum was uncorked, and each of them was granted two burning swallows.
They took one of the surviving abominations and staked it to the turf. At first scruples held them back, for among the Scions were more than a few youths of gentle breeding. They would do no more than kick the shrieking creature. Disgusted, Sorweel finally knelt over the Sranc’s white head and put out one of its eyes. Some among the Scions hooped and cheered, but more cried out in consternation, even outrage, saying that such torture was a crime against jnan—what they called their effeminate and obscure laws of conduct.
The young King of Sakarpus turned to his fellows in disbelief. The creature thrashed across the ground immediately behind him. Captain Harnilas strode to his side, and all fell silent in expectation.
“Tell them,” he said to Sorweel, speaking slowly so that he might understand. “Explain their foolishness to them.”
More than eighty faces watched, a moonlit congregation. Sorweel swallowed, glanced at Obotegwa, who simply nodded and stepped to his side …
“They-they come …” he began, only to falter at the sound of Eskeles translating in Obotegwa’s stead. “They come in winter, mostly, especially when the ground freezes too hard for them to scrounge the grubs that are their staple. Sometimes in single clans. Sometimes in shrieking hordes. The Towers of the Pale are strong for this reason, and the Horselords have become reavers beyond compare. But every year at least one Tower is overcome. At least one. The Men are slaughtered, mostly. But the women—and the children particularly—are taken for sport. Sometimes we find their severed heads nailed to doors and walls. Little girls. Little boys … Infants. We never find them whole. And their blood is always … thrust from them. Instead of crimson the dead are smeared black … black”—and his voice broke upon this word—“with … seed …”
Sorweel stopped, his face flushed, his fingers trembling. In his fourteenth winter, his father had brought him north on a punitive expedition to see their ancient and implacable enemy first-hand. Hoping to find supplies and accommodation, they had come to a Tower called Grojehald, only to find it sacked. The horrors he had seen there haunted his dreams still.
“We could torment a thousand of these creatures for a thousand years,” his father had told him that ni
ght, “and we would have repaid but a droplet of the anguish they have visited upon us.”
He repeated these words now.
Sorweel was not accustomed to addressing men in numbers, and so he took the silence that followed as a kind of condemnation. When Eskeles continued speaking, he simply assumed the Schoolman tried to undo his foolishness. Then Obotegwa, translating the sorcerer, muttered, “King Sorweel speaks as eloquently as he speaks true.” Sorweel was shocked to find he could follow much of what the Mandate Schoolman said.
“Shus shara kum …”
“These are beasts without souls. They are flesh without spirit, obscenities like no other. Each of them is a pit, a hole in the very fundament. Where we possess feelings, where we love and hate and weep, they are void! Cut them. Rend them. Burn and drown them. You can sooner wrong dirt than sin against these vile abominations!”
As strong as these words sounded, Sorweel noticed that most of the Scions continued to regard him rather than the Schoolman, and he realized that what he had thought was condemnation was in fact something entirely different.
Respect. Admiration, even.
Only Zsoronga seemed to watch him with troubled eyes.
The sport began in earnest after that. The Mannish laughter was as shrill as the inhuman screams were crazed.
What was left twitched and glistened in the blood-sodden grasses.
They broke camp discussing the strange absence of vultures, then rode out into the broad light of the plains. To a soul they discussed the previous day’s battle, boasting of kills, comparing nicks, and laughing at gaffes. The Scions thought themselves veterans, but their talk remained that of boys. Easy victories, as a Horselord would say, grow no beards.
They recovered the elk trail without difficulty, followed it beneath an afternoon sun rendered small for the gaping horizon. They caught the reek on the wind before seeing anything. It was a wide smell, a rot that reached as far as the air. The vista rose into view in inexorable stages, the far corners, swathes of dun and black and bone, buttressing the line of the horizon, then the welter of nearer regions, too still, too silent. The Company of Scions assembled along the crest of a low ridge, eighty-seven of them abreast, the men slack-faced, the ponies nodding and stamping in equine anxiousness. Their Kidruhil standard, the Black Circumfix and Golden Horse, flapped and waved against endless blue. Aside from coughs and curses, none possessed the will to speak.
Carcasses. Fields of them, dead elk, soaking the dust black.
Vultures hunched like priests beneath cowls or raised wings in imperious accusation. In any given heartbeat, dozens could be seen dropping from the skies across points near and miles away. Their cries rose hoarse through a great buzzing hum: flies, so many they appeared as living smoke across the distances.
An elk carcass lay gutted not far from Sorweel, its gut strewn like rotted clothes. Several feet beyond lay a clutch of three more, ribs cracked out from articulated spines. Beyond that lay another, and yet another, ribs opened like gigantic traps, on and on and on, a thousand circles of gore across the wasted pasture.
Captain Harnilas called out, and the Company of Scions descended the slope in formation, opening only to skirt the carcasses. The nearest vultures screeched at their approach, a kind of reptilian outrage, then took to the wind. Sorweel watched them anxiously, knowing that others could use their ascent to track their progress from miles away.
“What kind of madness is this?” Zsoronga murmured from his side. Sorweel did not need Eskeles’s translation to understand.
“Sranc,” the Schoolman said, his voice curiously tight. “A Hording …”
Sorweel glimpsed the creatures in his soul’s eye, hacking and tearing, stabbing the beasts still living, then coupling with shining wounds. A shrieking landscape of them.
“In ancient days,” his Mandate tutor continued, “before the coming of the No-God, the Sranc would continually retreat before hosts too powerful for any one clan to assault. Back and back, clan heaped upon clan. Until their hunger forced them to take game, until their numbers blackened the very earth …”
“And then?” Sorweel asked.
“They attacked.”
“So all this time …”
A grim nod. “The clans have been driven before the Great Ordeal and its rumour, accumulating … Like water before the prow of a boat …”
“Hording …” Sorweel repeated, weighing the term on his tongue. “Does Harni know about this?”
“We shall know soon enough,” the corpulent Schoolman said. Without further word, he spurred his overtaxed pony to overtake the Kidruhil Captain.
Sorweel allowed his gaze to range across the ground before the Company, saw strings of blood flung across the scree, welters of cracked bone, and skulls, some with the eyes sucked out, others with cheeks chewed away to the snout. No matter where he looked he saw another gory circle.
The largest Sranc clans the Horselords battled rarely numbered more than several hundred. Sometimes a particularly cruel and cunning Sranc chieftain would enslave his neighbours and open warfare would range across the Pale. And the legends were littered with stories of Sranc rising in nations and overcoming the Outermost Holds. Sakarpus itself had been besieged five times since the days of the Ruiner.
But this … slaughter.
Only some greater power could have accomplished this.
Meat sweated in open sunlight. Flies steamed about the scrub and grasses. Cartilage gleamed where not chapped with gore. The stink was raw unto gagging.
“The war is real,” he said with dull wonder. “The Aspect-Emperor … His war is real.”
“Perhaps …” Zsoronga said after listening to Obotegwa’s translation. “But are his reasons?”
“Otherwise you are utterly lost …”
So Zsoronga had said.
Despite the clamour and triumph of the past days, these words continued to sink and to surface through the young King’s turbulent soul. He had no reason to doubt them. For all his youth, Zsoronga possessed what the Sakarpi called thil, salt.
The fact was, Yatwer, the patroness of the weak and dispossessed, had chosen him, even though he had been trothed to her brother Gilgaöl since his fifth summer, even though he possessed the blood of warriors—even though he was what the Yatwerians called weryild, a Taker, a thief by virtue of his bones. Railing against the absurdity, let alone the shame, of her choice did nothing but prove him worthy of the humiliation. He had been chosen. Now he only needed to know why.
Otherwise …
Porsparian was the obvious answer. It seemed clear now that the slave was a secret priest of some kind. Sorweel had always thought that only women attended to the worldly interests of the Ur-Mother, but he scarce knew anything of the low and mean peoples of his own nation, let alone the ways of those a world away. The more he considered it, the more he felt a fool for not realizing as much earlier. Porsparian had come to him bearing this terrible burden. He was the one to tell him what that burden was and whither it should be borne.
That was, if Sorweel could learn to wrap his tongue and ears around Sheyic.
That night, while the others slept, the young King of Sakarpus rolled to his side on his sleeping mat and, in the way anxious bodies choose small tasks of their own volition, started picking at the grasses before him. Porsparian—his cheeks rutted like withered apples, his eyes like wet chips of obsidian—floated beneath his soul’s eye the entire time, spitting fire into his palm, rubbing mud into his cheeks …
Only when he had bared a small patch of earth did Sorweel realize what he was doing: moulding the dread Mother’s face the way Porsparian had the day the Aspect-Emperor had declared him a Believer-King. It seemed a kind of crazed game, one of those acts that send the intellect laughing even as the stomach quails.
He could not pinch and mould the way the Shigeki slave had because the earth was so dry, so he raised the cheeks by cupping dust beneath his palms, sculpted the brow and nose with a trembling fingertip. He held his bre
ath clutched and shallow, lest he mar his creation with an errant exhalation. He fussed over the work, even used the edge of his fingernail to render details. It was a numb and loving labour. When he was finished, he rested his head in the crook of his arm and gazed at the thing’s shadowy profile, trying to blink away the deranged impossibility of it. For a mad moment, it seemed the whole of the World, all the obdurate miles he had travelled, multiplied on and on in every direction, was but the limbless body of the face before him.
King Harweel’s face.
Sorweel hugged his shoulders with a wrestler’s fury, grappled with the sobs that kicked through him. “Father?” he cried on a murmur.
“Son …” the earthen lips croaked in reply.
He felt himself bend back … as if he were a bow drawn by otherworldly hands.
“Water,” the image coughed on a small cloud of dust, “climbs the prow …”
Eskeles’s words?
Sorweel raised a crazed fist, dashed the face into the combed grasses.
He neither slept nor lay awake.
He waited in the in-between.
“So all this time?” he heard himself ask Eskeles.
“The clans have been driven before the Great Ordeal and its rumour, accumulating … Like water before the prow of a boat …”
“Hording …”
Sorweel had seen few boats in his life: fishing hulls, of course, and the famed river galley at Unterpa. He understood the significance of the sorcerer’s description.
The problem was that the Scions tracked game to the southwest of the Great Ordeal.
So very far from the prow.
He bided his time in turmoil. His body had lost its instinct for breathing, so he drew air in its stead. Never did the sun seem so long in climbing.