The edge of screaming miles. This phrase in particular would find itself passed from lip to lip, until fairly every soul in the Army of the East had heard it.
Knowing that he would arouse the creatures, the Famiri General took care to coordinate his expeditions with King-Regent Nurbanu Soter and his Ainoni. Arrayed some miles in advance of the Army, Soter’s heavily armoured Palatines and their household knights would await Siroyon’s howling return. They would wonder at the thin thread of half-naked Famiri flying across the waste and the mobs of leaping shadows that pursued them. They would open alleys for the men to flee between, then they would close ranks and begin thundering forward …
And so were the Sranc felled in the thousands.
When these tales reached Sibawul te Nurwul in the Army of the Middle-North, he commanded his Cepalorans to strip off their armour, reckoning this was what enabled Siroyon and his Famiri to outrun the creatures. Bent on redeeming his earlier failure, he passed informal word to several caste-nobles and Kidruhil Captains that he planned on repeating Siroyon’s tactics, allowing them to destroy the creatures by the thousands. What he failed to realize was that the uneven accumulation of Sranc before the Army of the Middle-North meant his horses had far less fodder than General Siroyon’s. The Cepalorans rode into the smoke canyons as the Famiri had, wheeled as they had wheeled when the Sranc began racing toward them. And fled as they fled, howling out with the same exhilaration.
But their ebullient mood quickly faltered. Once again, the Sranc closed upon the laggards among them. Sibawul commanded his hornsmen to signal for assistance, but the General had not discussed contingencies with any of the lords or captains who commanded the jaws of his trap. The inhuman masses gained on the rearmost horsemen, shrieked in obscene triumph as the first stragglers were pulled down. Men crouched in their saddles, whipped their ponies bloody, wept as the slavering masses engulfed them …
Some two thousand of Sibawul’s kinsmen were lost to the gibbering pursuit. It would be the first true disaster suffered by the Great Ordeal. And so did the ill-fated General earn a second flogging, as well as everlasting shame in the scripture that would survive.
As the days passed, the shape of what had been an unthinkable fate had become clear to anyone who pondered the Ordeal’s straits. They faced a more mobile enemy on open terrain—and this meant doom. They could not close with their foe, and as a result they could not secure the supplies they needed to survive. Tales of various historical battles, especially those involving the Scylvendi, the famed People of War, began filtering through the host, traded between shrugging men and pensive looks. More than one antique emperor, the Men of the Ordeal learned, had led the pride of his people to doom on distant plains.
“Fear not,” Kayûtas assured his commanders. “They will attack, and soon.”
“How?” King Narnol asked. Bent by the death of his son, he had grown ever more bold in his questioning, ever more insolent. “How could you know?”
“Because as much as we hunger, they starve.”
“Ha!” the greybeard Galeoth cried. “So they will come to steal food we don’t possess?”
Kayûtas said nothing, content to allow Narnol’s own harsh intonations condemn him.
“We!” King Vûkyelt erupted. “We are the food, fool!”
At some point, each of the Marshals of the Four Armies petitioned the Aspect-Emperor, asking that he address their host and so silence the growing presentiment of doom. He rebuked each of them in turn, saying, “If your nations cannot endure trials so paltry without my intervention, then truly the Great Ordeal is doomed.”
And so the Men of the Ordeal roused themselves at the Interval’s morning toll. They tightened their belts and war-girdles, shouldered packs that always seemed one stone heavier than the day previous. And they trudged to their assembling formations, wondering at the dust that puffed from their steps. Some continued blinking long into the morning, whether from weariness or airborne grit, like men trapped in nightmares.
Sorweel had no brothers, a fact that had caused him no little shame in his childhood. He had no clue as to why he should feel responsible for his mother’s failure to bear a second son, or for his father’s refusal to take another wife after his mother died. From time to time he would hear his father arguing with some wizened adviser about the frailty of the dynastic line: “But if the boy should die, Harweel!” He would slink away numb and bewildered, oppressed by a curious sense of urgency, as if he should don his toy armour, do everything he could to safeguard his precious pulse. And he would think how much easier it would be if he had a younger brother, someone to protect—someone to share the future’s terrible burdens.
And so he grew up searching for brothers, an asking-for-more that dogged his every friendship. He was the Prince. He was the one ordained to ascend the Horn-and-Amber Throne. His was the indispensable soul, and yet it always seemed otherwise. And now, when he needed a brother more than at any time in his life, he was not even sure he possessed a friend.
What Sorweel had feared had come to pass: the Scions had in fact stumbled across a Sranc host shadowing the Great Ordeal. They only glimpsed it a few times, from what rare heights the landscape provided: a column of vast squares marching in perfect formation. Twice Eskeles had cast an air-bending spell that allowed them to scry the host in greater detail. While others busied themselves counting heads, Sorweel watched with breathless wonder: the tiny figures become liquid and large, executing soundless errands utterly oblivious to the Scions and their sorcerous observation.
Nonmen, the first the young King had ever seen, policed the column’s flanks, riding black horses and wearing elaborate gowns of chainmail. Erratics, the Mandate Schoolman called them, Nonmen who had gone mad for immortality. Sorweel found the appearance of them disconcerting—their faces especially. Since time immemorial, his people had battled the Sranc. And so, for him, the Sranc were the rule and the Nonmen the perversions. He could not look at them without seeing the heads of Sranc stitched onto the bodies of statuesque Men.
Scarcely a hundred of them accompanied the host. Far more numerous were what Eskeles called Ursranc, a species bred for obedience. “Like dogs to wolves,” the Schoolman said. They seemed somewhat taller and broader than their wild cousins, but aside from their freedom, they were really only distinguished by the uniformity of their armour: hauberks of black iron scale. The Scions could only guess at their numbers, since they not only crawled throughout the column whipping and beating their more wolfish kin, but also patrolled the surrounding plains in loose companies of a hundred or so—the way Men would.
No matter what their numbers, they were but a pittance compared with their unruly relatives. At first Sorweel could scarce credit his eyes, gazing at the great square formations through the Schoolman’s lens of air. Sranc chained to Sranc chained to Sranc. On and on. Snapping. Soundlessly howling. Shambling through screens of dust. Eskeles counted one hundred heads a side, which meant that each square contained some ten thousand of the creatures. Arguing glimpses through the endless veils of dust, he and Captain Harnilas decided that no less than ten squares composed the column. Which meant that Sorweel witnessed something his people knew only from legend: a horde whipped and shackled into the form of a great army.
A Yoke Legion, Eskeles had said, speaking with a survivor’s dread. The Erratics and Ursranc, he explained, would drive their wretched captives until the scent of the Ordeal sang on the clear wind, then simply strike the chains that threaded their shackles. Hunger would do the rest. Hunger and diabolical lust …
The Consult was real. If the unmasking of the skin-spy in the Umbilicus had not entirely convinced Sorweel, this most certainly did. The Aspect-Emperor warred against a real enemy. And unless the Scions could find some way to warn Kayûtas, the Army of the Middle-North was doomed.
They had spent a crazed fortnight trying to catch the Army—without dying. They had struck eastward, slowly bending their course to the north, riding day and night in the hope
of skirting, then outdistancing, the Consult host. Within three days they found the great track the Army of the Middle-North had beaten into the dusty waste. But the urgency that spurred their flight was easily matched by the dread host. Day after day, no matter how hard they pushed their ponies, the smear of dun haze that marked the Ten-Yoke Legion on the horizon stubbornly refused to fall behind them.
After the first week, the miraculous endurance of their Jiünati ponies began to fail, and Harnilas had no choice but to leave more and more of their company hobbling on foot behind them. The rule he used was simple: those he deemed strong riders went on, while those he deemed weak were left behind, regardless of whose pony failed. Obotegwa was among the first to be so abandoned: Sorweel need only blink to see the old Satyothi smiling in philosophic resignation, trudging through the dust of their trotting departure. Charampa and other Scions who were not bred to horses were quick to follow. Eskeles was the sole exception—even though the others began calling him “Pony-killer.” Every other day, it seemed, his paunch broke another pony’s strength and so doomed another Scion to trudge alone on foot. He felt the shame keenly, so much so that he began refusing his rations. “I carry my pack on my waist,” he would say with a forced laugh.
The remaining Scions began watching him in exasperation—and, in some cases, outright hatred. The fifth pony he lamed, Harnilas chose a tempestuous Girgashi youth named Baribul to yield his mount. “What?” the young man cried to the Mandate Schoolman. “You cannot walk across the sky?”
“There are Quya on the horizon!” the sorcerer exclaimed. “We are all dead if I draw their eye!”
“Yield your shag!” Harnilas bellowed at the youth. “I will not ask again!”
Baribul wheeled about to face the commander. “There will be war for this!” he roared. “My father will sound the High Shi—”
Harnilas hefted his lance, skewered the young man’s throat with a blurred throw.
The Kidruhil veteran spurred his pony in a tight circle about the dying youth. “I care not for your fathers!” he called to the others, resolution like acid in his eyes. “I care not for your laws or your customs! And apart from my mission, I care not for you! Only one of us needs to reach the Holy General! One of us! and the Great Ordeal will be saved—as will your fathers and their fool customs!”
The huffing Schoolman clambered onto Baribul’s pony, his face dark with the rage that weak men use to overmatch their shame. The remaining Scions had already turned their backs to him, resumed their northward drift. Baribul was dead, and they were too tired to care. He had been insufferably arrogant, anyway.
Sorweel lingered behind, staring at the body in the dust. For the first time, he understood the mortal stakes of their endeavour—the mission his insight had delivered. The Scions could very well be doomed, and unless he set aside his cowardice and pride, he would die not only without brothers but without friends as well.
The Company rode in haphazard echelon across the plain, each pony hauling skirts of spectral dust. Zsoronga rode alone, relieved of his Brace by the steady loss of their mounts. He hung his head, his blinks so sticky as to become heartbeats of sleep. His mouth hung open. They had ridden past exhaustion, into mania and melancholy, into the long stupor of mile stacked upon endless mile.
“I’m next,” the Successor-Prince said with offhand disgust as Sorweel approached. “The fat man eyes my Mebbee even now. Eh, Mebbee?” He raked affectionate fingers through his pony’s plumed mane. “Imagine. The Satakhan of High Holy Zeüm, stumping alone through the dust …”
“I’m sure we’ll fi—”
“But this is good,” Zsoronga interrupted, raising a hand in a loose but-yes gesture. “Whenever my courtiers air their grievances, I can say, ‘Yes, I remember the time I was forced to hobble alone through Sranc-infested wastes …’” He laughed as if seeing their faces blanch in his soul’s eye. “Who could whine to such a Satakhan? Who would dare?”
He had turned to Sorweel as he said this, but he spoke in the inward manner of those who think their listeners cannot understand.
“I’m not one of the Believer-Kings!” Sorweel blurted.
Zsoronga blinked as though waking.
“You speak Sheyic now?”
“I’m not a Believer-King,” Sorweel pressed. “I know you think I am.”
The Successor-Prince snorted and turned away.
“Think? No, Horse-King. I know.”
“How? How could you know?”
Exhaustion has a way of parting the veils between men, not so much because the effort of censoring their words exceeds them, but because weariness is the foe of volatility. Oft times insults that would pierce the wakeful simply thud against the sleepless and fatigued.
Zsoronga grinned in what could only be called malice. “The Aspect-Emperor. He sees the hearts of Men, Horse-King. He saw yours quite clearly, I think.”
“No. I … I don’t know what happened at the-the …” He had assumed his tongue would fail him, that his Sheyic would be so rudimentary that it would only humiliate him, but the words were there, cemented by all those dreary watches he had spent cursing Eskeles. “I don’t know what happened at the council!”
Zsoronga looked away, sneering as though at a younger sister. “I thought it plain,” he said. “Two spies were revealed. Two false faces …”
Sorweel glared. Frustration welled through him and with it an overwhelming urge to simply close his eyes and slump from his saddle. His thoughts sagged, reeled into nonsensical convolutions. The ground looked cushion soft. He would sleep such a sleep! And his pony, Stubborn—Eskeles could have him. He was strong. Zsoronga could keep Mebbee, and so lose the moral high-ground to his whining courtiers …
The young King was quick in blinking away this foolishness.
“Zsoronga. Look at me … Please. I am the enemy of your enemy! He murdered my father!”
The Successor-Prince pawed his face as though trying to wipe away the exhaustion.
“Then why—?”
“To sow … thrauma … discord between us! To sow discord in my own heart! Or … or …”
A look of flat disgust. “Or?”
“Maybe he was … mistaken.”
“What?” Zsoronga crowed, laughing. “Because he found your soul too subtle? A barbarian? Spare me your lies, shit-herder!”
“No … No! Because …”
“Because … Because …” Zsoronga mocked.
For some reason this barb found its way through the numbness, stung enough to bring tears to his eyes. “You would think me mad if I told you,” the young King of Sakarpus said, his voice cracking.
Zsoronga gazed at him for a long, expressionless moment—a look of judgment and decision.
“I’ve seen you in battle,” he finally said, speaking with the semblance of cruelty that men sometimes use to make room for a friend’s momentary weakness. He smiled as best his heart could manage. “I already think you mad!”
A single teasing accusation, and the rift of suspicion between them was miraculously healed. Often men need only speak around things to come together and so remember what it means to speak through.
Too weary to feel gratified or relieved, Sorweel began telling the Successor-Prince everything that had transpired since the death of his father and the fall of his hallowed city. He told him of the stork who had alighted on the walls the instant before the Great Ordeal attacked his city. He told him how he had wept in the Aspect-Emperor’s arms. He confessed everything, no matter how shameful, how weak, knowing that for all the aloofness of Zsoronga’s gaze, the man no longer judged him with a simple rule.
And then he told him about the slave, Porsparian …
“He … he … made a face, her face, in the earth. And—I swear to you, Zsoronga!—he gathered … mud … spit, from her lips. He rubbed it across my chee—”
“Before the council?” Zsoronga asked, astonished eyes shining from a dubious scowl. “Before the Anasûrimbor named you one of the faithful?”
<
br /> “Yes! Yes! And ever since … Even Kayûtas congratulates me on my … my turning.”
“Conversion,” Zsoronga corrected, his head slung low in concentration. “Your conversion …”
So far the young King of Sakarpus had spoken through the weariness that hooks lead weights to each and every thought, making the effort of talking akin to that of lifting what would rather sink. Suddenly speaking felt more like trying to submerge air-filled bladders—holding down things that should be drowned.
“Tell me what you think!” Sorweel cried.
“This is bad rushru … The Mother of Birth … For us, she is the slave Goddess. Beneath our petitioni—”
“It does shame me!” Sorweel blurted. “I am one of the warlings! Born of blood both ancient and noble! Trothed to Gilgaöl since my fifth summer! She shames me!”
“But not beneath our respect,” Zsoronga continued with an air of superstitious concern. Dust had chalked his kinked hair, so that he resembled Obotegwa, older and wiser than his years. “She is among the eldest … the most powerful.”
“So what are you saying?”
The Successor-Prince absently stroked his pony’s neck rather than answer. Even when hesitating, Zsoronga possessed a directness, a paradoxical absence of hesitation. He was one of those rare men who always moved in accordance with themselves, as though his soul had been cut and stitched from a single cloth—so unlike the patched motley that was Sorweel’s soul. Even when the Successor-Prince doubted, his confidence was absolute.
“I think,” Zsoronga said, “and by that I mean think … that you are what they call narindari in the Three Seas …” His body seemed to sway about the stationary point of his gaze. “Chosen by the Gods to kill.”