Closer. He was coming closer.
They reached the ruined gates of Sauglish two nights following. The towers had become knolls and the walls had crumbled into low, earthen ridges, like the wandering dikes so common to Shigek and Ainon.
But no one needed to be told. The very air, it seemed, smelled of conclusion.
Climbing the ridge, they could even see sun-bright trees waving across the westward slopes of the Troinim in the near distance: three low hills made one by the ruins strewn across their backs. Mottled walls, here hewn to their foundations, there rising blunted. Cratered brick faces. Witch-fingers of stone rising from the clamour of growth and tumble. The silence of things distant and dead.
The Holy Library.
It did not seem possible.
We all imagine what it will be like when we finally reach long-sought places. We all anticipate the wages of our toil and suffering—the momentary sum. Achamian had assumed he would feel either heartbreak or outrage, setting eyes upon the legendary Sohonc stronghold. Tears and inner turmoil.
But for some reason it seemed just another derelict place.
Give him Qirri. Give him sleep.
The dead could keep until morning.
They made camp at the mouth of the gate. There was no sermon that night, only the rush of wind through the treetops and the sound of Sarl’s cackle, gurgling through the mucus that perpetually weighted his lungs, rising and falling in the manner of drunks given to reciting grievances at the edge of unconsciousness.
“The Cofferrrssss! Ha! Yes! Think on it, boys! Such a slog as there never was!”
“Kiampas! Kiampas! He-hee! What did I tell you …”
On and on, until it seemed an animal crouched in their shadowy midst, growling with low and bestial lust.
“The Cofferrrssss …”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
The Istyuli Plains
Gods are epochal beings, not quite alive. Since the Now eludes them, they are forever divided. Sometimes nothing blinds souls more profoundly than the apprehension of the Whole. Men need recall this when they pray.
—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN
Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli
Three days Sorweel waited after learning of the Nonman Embassy and the Niom.
Zsoronga refused to even countenance the possibility of his departure. Even though he had seen the Nonman Embassy first-hand, the Successor-Prince continued insisting the entire thing was some kind of Anasûrimbor deceit. Sorweel was narindari, he insisted, chosen by the Gods to excise the cancer that was the Aspect-Emperor.
“Just wait,” Zsoronga said. “The Goddess will intervene. Something auspicious will happen. Some twist will keep you here, where you can discharge your fate! Wait and see.”
“And what if they know?” Sorweel finally asked, voicing the one alternative they had passed over in silence: that the Anasûrimbor had somehow guessed the Dread Mother’s divine conspiracy.
“They don’t know.”
“But wh—”
“They don’t know.”
Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need—to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.
Faced with yet another sleepless night, he once again struck out through the encampment for the Swayali enclave, determined to confront Serwa with pointed questions. But the guardsmen denied him entry to the Granary, saying their Grandmistress conferred with her Holy Father over the horizon. When he refused to believe them, they called for the Nuns. “Cap your gourd,” a spice-eyed witch teased. “Soon the Grandmistress will be skipping you like a stone across water!”
Sorweel walked back to his tent in a stupor, at once dismayed at the capricious ways of Fate and thrilled—sometimes to the point of tingling breathlessness—at the prospect of spending so much time with his Enemy’s daughter.
“Well?” Zsoronga cried when he returned.
“You are my brother, are you not?” Sorweel asked, pulling free the small purse that Porsparian—or the Goddess—had given him. It seemed dull and unremarkable in the sunlight, despite the golden crescents embroidered across it. “I need you to keep this.”
As High Keeper of the Hoard, he knew enough about Chorae to know that it would wreck whatever sorcerous contrivance Serwa had prepared for them. Concealed or not.
“So you are leaving,” the Successor-Prince said, taking the pouch with a blank air of incomprehension.
“It’s a family heirloom,” Sorweel offered by way of lame explanation. “An old totem. It will bring you luck only so long as you don’t know what it contains.”
This struck the young King as plausible enough, given that he had been forced to improvise. Many charms required some small sacrifice: beans that could not be eaten or wine that could not be quaffed.
But Zsoronga scarcely looked at the thing, let alone pondered it. In his eyes, Sorweel was the divine weapon.
“This cannot be!” he cried. “You! You are the one! She has chosen you!”
Sorweel could do no more than shrug with weary resignation.
“Apparently He has chosen me as well.”
The following morning none other than Anasûrimbor Moënghus himself came to fetch him before the Interval’s toll. The Prince-Imperial was predictably menacing, not merely for his glare and feral physique. Like many of the Ordeal’s outriders, he had taken to ornamenting his gear with fetishes cut from the Sranc. Most riders used shrivelled digits and blackened ears, but Moënghus, for some unfathomable reason, had their teeth braided across the hems of his nimil hauberk. Because of the way they were fused, the things seemed peculiarly inhuman: small, curved combs of enamel with three pairs of roots to a tooth.
The Prince-Imperial watched with bored amusement as Sorweel dressed and gathered his gear. Zsoronga, who sat watching Moënghus, could not keep his peace.
“Nil’giccas is a myth,” he said with open contempt. “There is no Nonman King.”
Moënghus shrugged, picked a curl from his wild black mane to study. “So says Zeüm.”
“So says Zeüm.”
Something about Zsoronga’s assertion—its pious confidence perhaps—hooked the Prince-Imperial’s attention. “Tell me, what has your father accomplished with all his Zeümi wisdom?”
“How to avoid marching into the wastes to die … among other things.”
“Other things,” Moënghus snorted. “Like surrendering his son as a hostage?”
Zsoronga glared at the man, speechless.
Moënghus’s presence seemed too oppressive for any real verbal exchange, so, heavy with pack and shield, Sorweel simply clasped fingers with his friend. He smiled in the pretense of manliness, ignored the abject worry in Zsoronga’s green gaze. Then, with the giddy sense of toppling from some ledge of happenstance, he turned to follow the Prince-Imperial toward the Granary.
The Interval had tolled by this time, so the encampment roiled with activity. Anasûrimbor Moënghus paid no attention whatsoever to the warriors falling to their faces about them. He walked as though this simply were the way, the World abasing itself at his booted feet.
As though he truly were an Anasûrimbor.
The Granary seemed another world, crowded as it was with women bustling in florid silk. Given the strict apportioning of duty and labour in Sakarpus, Sorweel could not but think of the kitchens and fulleries of his father’s palace—the only places, in his narrow experience, where the voices of men did not predominate. He was not scandalized, though he suffered the vague sense that he should be.
Anasûrimbor Serwa stood near the entrance of her pavilion, dispensing last-minute instructions to a small crowd of petitioners. She dismissed them the instant she glimpsed their approach, speaking some language Sorweel failed to recognize. The sun had climbed above the enclave’s easter
n rim, catching her flaxen hair in a brilliance that mimicked her father’s haloed hands. A hush fell across the congregated witches, who, almost without exception, ceased their small labours to turn and watch their Grandmistress greet the newly arrived men.
Sorweel glanced from face to face, feeling more than a little conspicuous. More than a few of the Nuns, he realized, blinked tears. He suffered the sense, yet again, of blundering into dangers that only others could appreciate.
He turned to find Serwa standing nearby. Despite the craftsmanship, her leather jerkin and leggings seemed almost absurdly plain in comparison to the billows worn by her sisters. Both she and her brother shouldered packs that had been awaiting them in the dust.
“Come,” she said, her arm lowered to receive his waist. “You must hold me tight.”
Moënghus already stood hulking in her slip embrace. Sorweel glimpsed his eyes grinning at him over the flaxen arc of her head. “You get used to the reek,” he said when the young King hesitated. Only several of the Nuns laughed, few enough to underscore the anxiousness of the others.
They loved her, Sorweel realized. The way King Harweel’s men had loved him.
He stepped into the soft sphere of her touch and perfumed scent. Despite his mail hauberk, he started like an unbroken colt at her touch. She pulled him tight to her side, and he felt her spine arch to an inexplicable exertion. She leaned her head back, and he fairly cried out for the blue-white light shining from her mouth and eyes, so brilliant as to blacken her sunburned face.
Moënghus’s laughter slipped through the chinks of her arcane call.
A fog rose about them, scored with glowing parabolic lines. The dawn-shadowed world dimmed. There was a binding, a sense of straps whipping about his body, immobilizing him, heaving him in a thousand simultaneous directions … and then the slip, as if he folded along occlusions in reality. Whipping light, then a lurching coming to be, as if he were a thing rotted yanked clear of his grave …
He was on his knees, retching.
He felt the fleeting press of Serwa’s hand, as if she tested his bodily integrity. He spent several moments spitting into dust and balding turf. Then he staggered toward the Imperial siblings where they sat on the crest of a low berm. He had assumed they were watching him, but their gaze remained unbroken when he stepped beyond its angle. Craning his head back he saw regions of dust steaming across the horizon. The Army of the Middle-North, he realized, preparing to resume its long march to Golgotterath. Of the Men of the Circumfix, he could only glimpse the outermost assemblies, clouds of black specks, snaking beneath the dun plumes.
He turned back to Serwa and Moënghus.
“I am my father’s daughter,” she said, answering his questioning look. “But I am not my father …” Her eyelids fluttered against some unearthly drowsiness. “Metagnostic Cants are … trying for me.”
He took an unceremonious seat at her side, found himself looking down, such was the lure of her gaze.
“Fate is indignity,” he heard her say.
“What do you mean?”
“The King of Sakarpus, the city famed the world over for hoarding Chorae, now finds himself whisked across the sorcerous aether … and by a woman, no less”
“I hadn’t considered it,” he said with fuming wariness. “You lose track of the indignities after a while.”
She smiled in what seemed genuine humour.
The Cant of Translocation, she went on to explain, could take them only the space of horizon, less if her vision were obscured. The Cant’s difficulty was such that she could successfully hold its meaning only after at least two watches of sleep. She was lucky, she said, if she could complete two Translocations a day, unlike her divine father, who could cross endless leagues in that time, stepping from horizon to horizon.
“So you will vomit,” she said, “and I will snooze, day in and day out, until we come to Ishterebinth.”
“And while the Holy Princess snores and farts and mumbles,” Moënghus said, leaning his shaggy-maned head low to see past his sister, “you and I will hunt.”
“And the Sranc?” Sorweel asked, speaking with a confidence he did not feel.
“Will do everything they can to bugger our corpses,” the Prince-Imperial replied, staring off.
Clenching his teeth against the tailings of his nausea, Sorweel turned back to regard their mighty fraction of the Great Ordeal. So many men, believing unto death …
The Horde retreated, scraping the horizon, and the Four Armies marched into its desolate wake.
Thus far the Army of the Middle-North under Anasûrimbor Kayûtas, charged with the extreme left flank, had confronted the greatest concentration of the abominations. For the Sranc sustained themselves on the fruits of the grave, worms and grubs, and so multiplied according to the richness of the earth. Though Kayûtas did not so much as lay eyes on Lost Kûniüri, his Army lured innumerable clans from its forested frontiers. And so the Horde had accumulated in disproportion, mobbing to the west and thinning to the east, until, like gravel heaped upon a balance beam, it had tipped and come crashing …
Now it was the Army of the South under King Umrapathur of Nilnamesh that found itself most besieged. For as the Great Ordeal crawled ever northward, the Neleost, the famed Misty Sea, sheltered it to the west while the High Istyuli yawned ever more infinite to the north-east. Word of the Israzi’horul, the Shining Men, spread far among the high northern clans, and the Sranc came mobbing from over the horizon, a never-ending trickle of inhuman lust and wicked arms. They rutted and howled. They scoured the depleted earth. They battled over the carcasses of the dead, devoured their offspring. They blotted the earth with their multitudes.
For weeks the Great Ordeal had cleaved to a northern course, skirting the more broken lands to the west. But as they drew abreast the Neleost, the Four Armies had veered westward, forcing King Umrapathur to pivot with reference to his foe and so position the mad masses before him across his right flank. He understood the dangers, for as a long-time veteran of the Unification Wars he had fought many mortal campaigns. To drag your foe on your flank was to court disaster. Yet he put his faith in his Holy Aspect-Emperor, knowing that his Lord-and-God understood this risk far better than he did. But his men were not so sanguine. King Urmakthi of Girgash, especially, troubled him with dire pronouncements in council. As did the sinister Carindûsû, the Grandmaster of the sorcerous Vokalati. For they spent their days in the shadow of the Sandstorm, fencing with the shrieking multitudes.
“When we drove them before us,” Carindûsû said, his oiled face held high and imperial, “fear was their contagion. Now that we drag them upon our boards, they answer more and more to their hunger.”
Indeed, clans assailed them with increasing frequency, and not simply those driven by the extremis of starvation, the ones they cut down as easily as howling dogs. Soon not a day passed without tidings of some Grandee or Satrap dying on the dusty fields: Tikirgal, the Grandee of Macreb, who had always carried himself with the air of an immortal in council, and so shocked all the more with his passing; Mopuraul, the bellicose Satrap of Tendant’heras, whose overbearing manner few would miss.
And not a night passed without some pitched battle across the perimeter of the camp, crazed random affairs that often roused the whole of the Army and so contributed to its mounting exhaustion. The Vokalati never ceased walking the low skies to the immediate north, their lavish billows winding like nested snakes, their mouths and eyes aglow. Kites, the Men of the Circumfix began to call them. From dusk to dawn, they cast lights across the barren tracts, and without fail they found cohorts of Sranc—sometimes thousands strong—creeping toward the camp with reptilian cunning. Many of the swarthy Schoolmen bound themselves to their mules during the day so they might slumber. Fewer and fewer mustered for the daylight Culling.
And yet Umrapathur doggedly refused calling on their Holy Aspect-Emperor. When the Signallers asked what message they should flash across the horizon each evening, he would describe their s
traits, for he was not so arrogant as to pretend, but he would always conclude with “all is well with the Army of the South.”
They exchanged horizon for horizon, winking from waste to wilderness to waste.
Since the Swayali Grandmistress had to see the places she delivered them to, the journey was one of stepping—if the madness of sorcery could be called such—from height to height. This made their passage a succession of breathtaking vistas, most of them densely forested after the first three days. Serwa’s voice would speak from Sorweel’s skin, bind the air about them with light, collapse his physical form into ash, then deliver them to an entirely novel vantage on the rim of the one previous. Usually, when she was not overcome by her arcane exertions, she would tell the two men something about the land beneath their blinking gaze.
“This was once the province of Ûnosiri, the ancient hunting grounds of the Umeritic God-Kings.”
“There … See that line of shadow through the trees? That was the Soholn, the great road raised by King Nanor-Ukkerja I to speed the passage of his hosts to the frontier.”
And each time, Sorweel would gaze out with a kind of perplexed wonder, trying to imagine what it would be like to possess memories of a distant age. Moënghus would typically scowl and cry, “Bah!”
Only the Neleost remained constant, a hazy band of dark across the north. And despite the clamour of birdsong, the land seemed hushed for the fact of losses endured so very long ago.
From height to height they leapt. A ridge-line crooked like an arthritic finger. A scarp overlooking forests whose trees dwarfed the greatest Sorweel had ever seen in the arid environs of Sakarpus. Once she conveyed them to the summit of a ruined tower, one that proved impossible to climb down from. The conjuring had proven to be particularly difficult, so much that Moënghus had to catch Serwa as she teetered on the brink. The two men found themselves stranded on the ruined summit for watches waiting for her to recover. Once she conveyed them to an island of stumped rock in a river, not realizing that miles of marshland lay just beyond. The three of them were pimpled in mosquito bites before they could escape.