More than walls had been overthrown with the coming of the Aspect-Emperor.
The slave said nothing as they rode through the city. Sorweel followed with his eyes fixed directly forward, more to avoid the questioning gazes of his countrymen than to study anything in particular—save maybe the blasted heights of the Herder’s Gate as they rose and fell out of view. He thought of the naive faith his people had put in their ancient fortifications—after all, who was the Aspect-Emperor compared to Mog-Pharau?
He thought of his father’s blood cooked into the stone.
The Inrithi encampment lay a short distance beyond the pocked and blackened walls, its tented precincts sprawling across miles of field and pasture. It seemed at once mundane and legendary: a migratory city of wood, twine, and cloth, where the stink of latrines hedged every breath, as well as a vast assemblage, a vehicle great enough to carry the dread weight of history. The Men of the Ordeal trudged to and fro, supped at firepits, rolled armour in barrels of gravel, tended to gear and horses, or simply sat about the entrances to their tents, deep in eyes-to-the-horizon conversation. They paid scant attention to Sorweel and his guide as they wended through the avenues and byways of the camp.
The old slave led without hesitation. He pressed through this or that commotion—a brawl, a wain buried to the axles in muck, two stalled mule-trains—with the calm assertiveness of a caste-noble, turning down lesser mud tracks only when marching companies blocked their passage entirely. Without a word, he led Sorweel deeper and deeper into the encampment. The grim stares of Thunyerus became the exotic canopies of Nilnamesh became the haggling bustle of Cironj. Every turn, it seemed, delivered them to another of the world’s far-flung corners.
Before meeting the Aspect-Emperor, Sorweel would have thought it impossible that one man could make an instrument of so many disparate souls. The Sakarpi were a sparse people. But even with their meagre numbers, not to mention common language and traditions, King Harweel had found it difficult to overcome their feuds and grudges. The more Sorweel pondered it, the more miraculous it seemed that all the Men of the Three Seas, with their contradictory tongues and ancient animosities, could find common purpose.
Everywhere he looked, he could see it, hanging slack in the windless morning: the Circumfix.
Wasn’t there proof in miracles? Isn’t that what the priests said?
Swaying to the canter of his horse, Sorweel found himself glancing at face after face, a stranger for every heartbeat, and finding bleak comfort in the careless way their looks skipped past him. There was a kind of safety, he realized, in the Great Ordeal’s clamour. In the press of so many, how could he not be forgotten? And it seemed that this was the only true desire that remained to him: to be forgotten.
Then, in the uncanny way that familiar faces rise out of the anonymity of strangers, he saw Tasweer, the son of Lord Ostaroot, one of his father’s High Boonsmen. Two Conriyan knights led him staggering, each holding chains welded to a collar about his skinned neck. His wrists were cruelly bound. His elbows had been wrenched back about a wooden rod. His hair was as wild as his eyes, and his parm, the traditional padded tunic of Sakarpi noblemen, hung stained, ragged, and beltless above bare knees.
The mere sight of him clutched the breath from Sorweel’s throat, returned him to the rain-swept battlements, where he had last seen Tasweer—and his father. He could almost hear the crowing horns …
The young man did not recognize him, but rather stared with the unfixed intensity of those beaten back into the depths of themselves. To his shame, Sorweel looked away—to judge the weather across the horizon, he told himself. Yes, the weather. His horse felt reed-legged beneath him, like something wavering in the summer heat. The world smelled of mud cooking in the morning sun.
“Y-you?” a voice croaked from below.
The young King could not bear to look.
“Sorweel?”
Compelled to look down, he saw Tasweer gazing up at him, his once open face almost bewildered, almost horrified, even almost glad of heart, but in truth none of these things. The captive reeled to a halt, blinking.
“Sorweel,” he repeated.
His Conriyan escorts cursed, flicked his chains in warning.
“No!” the prisoner cried, leaning against the links. A stubborn and helpless noise. “Nooo!” as they yanked him to his knees in the muck. “Sorweel! S-s-sorweel! Fight them! Y-you have to! Cut their throats while they sleep! Sorweel! Sor—!”
One of the square-bearded knights struck him full in the mouth, knocked him into rolling half-consciousness.
As had happened so many times since the city’s fall, Sorweel found himself divided, struck into two separate souls, one real, the other ethereal. In his soul’s eye he slipped from his saddle, his boots slapping into wheezing mud, and shouldered his way past the Conriyans. He pulled Tasweer to his knees, held his head behind the ear. Blood pulsed from the captive’s nostrils, clotted the coarse growth rising from his jaw. “Did you see?” Sorweel cried to the broken face. “Tasweer! Did you see what happened to my father?”
But the bodily Sorweel simply continued after his guide, his skin porcelain with chill.
“Noooo!” pealed hoarse into air behind him, followed by raucous laughter.
The young King of Sakarpus resumed his study of the nonexistent weather. The true horror of defeat, a kernel of him realized, lay not in the fact of capitulation, but in the way it kennelled in the heart, the way it loitered and bred and bred and bred.
The way it made fate out of falling.
Eventually they came to the northern perimeter of the encampment, to a broad field whose greening expanse was marred by broad swaths of hoofmudded turf and ornamented by stretches of blooming yellow-cress. Small groups of horsemen rode patterns at various intervals, answering to the booming cries of their commanders. They were doing squad drills, Sorweel realized, riding a hearty breed not so different from those used by Sakarpi Horselords.
The slave led him along a row of white-canvas tents, most of them stocked with various kinds of stores. Where the two of them had passed largely unnoticed before, now they drew stares, largely from clots of loitering cavalrymen. Several even called out to them, but Sorweel affected not to notice. Even well-wishes became insults when shouted in an unfamiliar tongue.
Finally the slave reined to a halt and dismounted before an expansive white pavilion. A crimson standard had been hammered into the ground beside the entrance. It bore a black Circumfix over a golden horse: the sign of the Kidruhil, the heavy cavalry that had caused Harweel and his High Boonsmen so much grief in the skirmishes preceding the Great Ordeal’s arrival. A guard armoured in a gold-stamped cuirass stood motionless beside it; he merely nodded at the slave as he led Sorweel across the threshold.
A strange aroma permeated the interior air, pleasant despite the bitter overtones. Like orange peels burning. He stood rigid, his eyes adjusting to the enclosed light. The recesses of the pavilion were largely unfurnished and unadorned: simple reed mats for flooring, various accouterments hanging from posts, a wicker-and-wood cot covered with empty scroll cases. The Circumfixes embroidered into the ceiling canvas cast vague shadows across the ground.
Anasûrimbor Kayûtas sat at the corner of a camp-table set against the centre post, alone save for a bald secretary who mechanically inked lines of script, apparently adding to the stacks of papyrus spread about him. The Prince-Imperial leaned back in his chair, his sandalled feet kicked out and crossed on the mats before him. Rather than acknowledge Sorweel, he gazed from one papyrus sheet to another, as though following the thread of some logistical concern.
Sorweel’s wizened guide knelt, pressing his forehead to the stained mats, then withdrew the way he had come. Sorweel stood alone and breathless.
“You’re wondering,” Kayûtas said, his eyes fixed on the vertical bars of script, “whether it was a deliberate insult …” He set a final sheet down, following it with still-reading eyes as he did so. He looked to Sorweel, paused in a
ppraisal. “Having a slave bring you here like this.”
“An insult,” Sorweel heard himself reply, “is an insult.”
A handsome smirk. “I fear no court is so simple.”
The Prince-Imperial leaned back, raised a wooden bowl to his lips—water, Sorweel noted after he set it down.
It was no small thing, to stand before the son of a living god. Even with his hair trimmed so close and so curiously to the contours of his skull, Kayûtas closely resembled his father. He had the same long strong face, the same pearl-shining eyes. He even possessed the same unnerving manner. His every movement, it seemed, followed preordained lines, as though his soul had mapped all the shortest distances beforehand. And when he was still, he was utterly still. But for all that, Anasûrimbor Kayûtas still possessed a mortal aura. There could be no doubt that he faltered as other men faltered, that his skin, if pressed, would be thin and warm …
That he could bleed.
“Tell me,” the Prince-Imperial continued, “what do your countrymen call it when men trade useless words?”
Sorweel tried to breath away his hackles. “Measuring tongues.”
The Prince-Imperial laughed at the cleverness of this. “Excellent. A name for jnan if there ever was one! Let us dispense with ‘tongue measuring’ then. Agreed?”
The secretary continued scratching characters across papyrus.
“Agreed,” Sorweel replied warily.
Kayûtas smiled with what seemed genuine relief. “Let me speak to the matter then: My father needs more than your city, he needs the obedience of her people as well. I suppose you know full well what this means …”
Sorweel knew, though it had become more and more difficult to contemplate. “He needs me.”
“Precisely. This is why you’re here, to give your people a stake in our glorious undertaking. To make Sakarpus part of the Great Ordeal.”
Sorweel said nothing.
“But of course,” the Prince-Imperial continued, “we remain the enemy, don’t we? Which I suppose makes all this little more than a cunning ploy to win your loyalty … a way to dupe you into betraying your people.”
It was too late for that, Sorweel could not help but think. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” Kayûtas repeated with a snort. “So much for not measuring tongues!”
A dull and resentful glare.
“Well, no matter,” the Prince-Imperial continued. “I’ll keep my end of our bargain at least.” He winked as though at a joke. “I may not have the Gift of the Few, but I am my father’s son, and I possess many of his strengths. I find languages effortless, as I suppose this conversation demonstrates. And I need only look at your face to see your soul, not so clearly as Father, certainly, but enough to sound the measure of you or anyone else before me. I can see the depth of your pain, Sorweel, and though I think your people have simply reaped the consequences of their own foolishness, I do understand . If I fail to commiserate, it’s because I hold you to the same standards of manly conduct as would your father. Men weep to wives and pillows …
“Do you understand me?”
Sorweel blinked in sudden shame. Did they have spies watching him sleep as well?
“Excellent,” Kayûtas said, like a field captain pleased by the vigour of his company’s response. “I should also tell you that I resent this charge of my father’s. I even resent this interview, not simply because I lack the time, but because I think it beneath me. I detest politics, and this relationship my father has forced upon us is nothing if not political. Even still, I recognize that these passions are a product of my own weakness. I will not, as other men might, hold you accountable for them. My father wants me to be as a brother to you … And since my father is more God than Man, I will do exactly as he wishes.”
He paused as though to leave room for Sorweel to reply, but the young King could scarce order his thoughts, let alone speak. Kayûtas had been every bit as direct as he had promised, and yet at the same time his discourse seemed bent to the point of deformity, charged with a too-penetrating intelligence, pleated with an almost obscene selfawareness …
Who were these people?
“I can see the embers of sedition in your eyes,” Kayûtas resumed, “a wild hunger to destroy yourself in the act of avenging your father.” His voice had somehow scaled the surrounding canvas panels, so that it seemed to fall from all directions. “At every turn you struggle, because you know not whether my father is a demon, as your priests claim, or the Saviour the Men of Three Seas know him to be. I do not begrudge you this, Sorweel. All I ask is that you inquire with an open heart. I fear proof of my father’s Holy Mission will come soon enough …”
He paused as though distracted by some unexpected thought. “Perhaps,” he continued, “if we’re fortunate enough to survive that proof, you and I can have a different conversation.”
Sorweel stood rigid, braced against the sense of futility that whelmed through him. How? was all he could think. How does one war against foes such as this?
“In the interim,” the Prince-Imperial said with an air of turning to more practical matters, “you need to learn Sheyic, of course. I will have an instructor arranged for you. And you need to show my Horse-masters that you’re a true son of Sakarpus. You are now a captain of the Imperial Kidruhil, Sorweel, a member of the illustrious Company of Scions ...” He lowered his chin in a curious smile. “And I am your general.”
Another long, appraising pause. The old secretary had paused to cut a new tip on his quill, which he held in fingers soaked black with ink. Sorweel caught him stealing a quick glance in his direction.
“Is this agreeable to you?” Kayûtas asked.
“What choice do I have?”
For the first time something resembling compassion crossed the Prince-Imperial’s face. He breathed as though gathering wind for crucial words. “You are the warlike son of a warlike people, Sorweel. Remain in Sakarpus, and you will be little more than a carefully managed captive. Even worse, you will never resolve the turmoil that even now chokes your heart. Ride with me and my brother, and you will see, one way or another, what kind of king you must be.”
He scarce understood what was happening, so how could he know what he should or shouldn’t do? But there was heart to be found in the sound of resolution. And besides, he was developing a talent for petulant remarks. “As I said,” Sorweel replied, “what choice.”
Anasûrimbor Kayûtas nodded, rather like a field surgeon regarding his handiwork, Sorweel thought.
It is enough that I obey …
“The slave who brought you here,” the Prince-Imperial continued in a by-the-way tone, “is named Porsparian. He’s from Shigek, an ancient land to the south of—”
“I know where it is.”
Had it come to this? Had it come to the point where interrupting his oppressors could count as vengeance?
“Of course you do,” Kayûtas replied with a partially suppressed grin. “Porsparian has a facility with tongues. Until I find you an instructor, you will practise your Sheyic with him …” Trailing, the man leaned across the table to lift a sheaf of papyrus between his fore and index fingers.
He held it out to Sorweel, saying, “Here.”
“What is it?”
“A writ of bondage. Porsparian is now yours.”
The young King blinked. He had stared at the slave’s back so long he could scarcely remember what he looked like. He took the sheet in his hands, stared at the incomprehensible characters.
“I know,” Kayûtas continued, “that you will treat him well.”
At that, the Prince-Imperial returned to his reading, acting for all the world as if their conversation had never happened. Numb save where the sheet burned his fingertips, Sorweel retreated. Just as he turned to cross the threshold, Kayûtas’s voice brought him up short.
“Oh, yes, and one final thing,” he said to the papyrus. “My elder brother, Moënghus … Beware him.”
The young King tried to reply but came
to a stammering halt. He grimaced, breathed past the hammering of his heart, then tried again. “Wh-why is that?”
“Because,” Kayûtas said, his eyes still ranging the inked characters, “he’s quite mad.”
Stepping from the Prince-Imperial’s pavilion, Sorweel told himself he blinked for the sharpness of the sun. But his burning cheeks and aching throat knew better, as did his sparrow-light hands.
What am I to do?
The shouts of the cavalrymen carried on the wind, followed by a cawcawing of a horn, high and shrill above the bone-deep din that was the Great Ordreal. The sound seemed to cut, to peel, expose him past the skin.
How many kings? How many grim-souled men?
What was Sakarpus compared to any nation of the Three Seas, let alone the might and majesty that was the New Empire? A god for an emperor. The sons of a god for generals. An entire world for a bastion. Sorweel had heard the reports of his father’s spies in the weeks preceding the Ordeal’s assault on the city. Shit-herders. This was what the Men of the Three Seas called him and his kinsmen …
Shit-herders.
A blank feeling reached through him, like forgetting to breathe, only more profound. What would his father say, seeing him unmanned time and again, not because of the wiles or the ruthlessness of their enemy, but because of … because of …
Loneliness?
The slave, Porsparian, watched him from the shadow of their horses. Not knowing what to do, Sorweel simply walked up and passed the writ of bondage to him.
“I …” he started, only to gag on welling tears. “I-I …”
The old man gawked in voiceless alarm. He grasped Sorweel’s forearms and gently pressed the writ against the padded fabric of his parm tunic. And Sorweel could only think, Wool, here stands the King dressed in woollen rags.
“I failed him!” he sobbed to the uncomprehending slave. “Don’t you see? I failed!”
The old Shigeki gripped him by the shoulders, stared long and hard into his anguished eyes. The man’s face, it seemed, was not so different from the writ Sorweel held against his breast: smooth save where scored with lines of unknown script, across the forehead, about the eyes and snout, as dark as any ink, as if the god who had carved him had struck too deep with the knife.