Father remained absorbed by the souls kneeling before him. Even still, the boy saw him glance across the train of petitioners on occasion … Surely he had set eyes upon the man numerous times. Surely, he had seen!
He knows, his brother whispered. He humours him to some end.
Perhaps …
It was the sheer audacity that most confounded the little Prince-Imperial, the way the traitor—for he could be nothing else—cared so little for the observation of his fellows. It was a contempt that would have made him seem daft, even imbecilic, were it not for the way everyone remained utterly oblivious—including those with the Strength!
But does everyone humour him?
His brother had no answer.
Something is wrong.
Mother gives.
Mother yields … strangles and suffocates.
The White-Luck Warrior need look ahead to see her.
“Sometimes, Sorwa,” she coos, “a hunger from the deep breaks free.”
He sits on her lap, his one leg folded, his other dangling. He is a little boy. The sun glares across the verandah, across tiles fired in ancient Shir. The air is so clear an eye can roam to the very Pale. His father still lives.
“A Ciphrang, Mama?”
A stork watches from the balustrade, white as pearl.
“Yes. And like a bubble in water, it rises …”
“Seeking us?”
She smiles at his fright, blinks in the slow, lazy way of dying invalids and drowsy lovers.
“Yes. They take us … take us to take, to feed their hunger.”
“And that’s why you struck me? Because it wasn’t … it wasn’t you?”
Welling tears.
“Yes. I was-wasn’t myself …”
She clutches him tight, and they sob as a single soul.
Weeping makes one.
He bawls, “Get-it-out-get-it-out-get-it-out!”
She presses him back, smiles against her grimace. “Oh, Sweetling! I wish I could!”
“Then I will do it!” he savagely declares.
Eskeles, the sorcerer who was once fat, kneels before him, revealing the moment.
“I will do it, Mama!”
The Demon smiles.
“Oh, Sorwa,” she cries smiling. “Oh my, darling little Prince!”
You already have.
“What ails you, Little Prince?”
Lord Sristai Croimas had lurched before Kelmomas as if from nowhere, so intent he had been on the dilemma of the Traitor. Croimas was Conriyan, one of those sycophantic souls who instinctively exploited all the possibilities of ingratiation, to the point of wooing slaves and children—the very inversion of his famed father, Sristai Ingiaban, by all accounts. Kelmomas found it amazing the man had survived the Great Ordeal’s transit, given the stories, yet here he was, skinnier beneath his hulking mail and plate hauberk, bearish for the lack of grooming and the surfeit of black hair, and no more the wiser for his tribulations.
His breath reeked of rancid meat.
“You have lost much, I know,” the man said, apparently referring to what had happened in Momemn. “But what you are about to witn—”
“Who is he?” Kelmomas interrupted. “That one. The young Norsirai behind the starved Schoolman … There … the Kidruhil Captain.”
No small part of him wanted the traitor to notice his pointing and thus his scrutiny, and so abandon whatever game he thought he was playing. But no.
“That is King Sorweel Harweelson,” Lord Croimas replied, turning back with a friendly scowl. “One of the most celebrated souls amo—”
“Celebrated?” the boy snapped.
The friendliness dropped from the caste-noble’s scowl. Eastern oaf that he was, Croimas was not one to suffer youthful impudence. “He saved your sister’s life,” he said in a tone poised between flattery and reprimand. “And a whole fraction of the Ordeal aside!”
The Prince-Imperial persisted in peering around the fool.
“He alarms you?” the Palatine of Kethantei asked.
“Yes!” Kelmomas cried in exasperation. “Can none of you fools see?”
“What is there to see?”
Malice.
What’s happening?
I don’t know! I don’t know!
Lord Croimas stood upright with the paternal air of rescinding a gift given. “After your father blesses him, I will call him over.”
Kelmomas further insulted the fool by pressing him to the side, out of his line of sight. The Son of Harweel was now but two souls back from Father … Kelmomas swept the Conriyan Lord and everything else from the plate of his attention, aimed his every sense, his every fraction, at the Traitor … until he was all that could be heard, all that could be seen or pondered …
The Son of Harweel possessed nothing of the anxious excitement that so animated the Men about him. He did not sweat. His heart did not palpate. He did not breathe, as so many others did, from below his clavicles …
There was an air of … routine about him. In a queer way, it almost seemed as if the novelty of what happened, let alone the enormity, left him entirely untouched.
His eyes did not dart, but remained fixated on the image of his Holy Aspect-Emperor, gazing with ludicrous confidence—and with a naked hatred.
Young Anasûrimbor Kelmomas understood Sorweel Harweelson was no mere traitor …
He was an assassin.
I’m afraid, Kel …
Me too, Brother.
Me too.
The Sickle has fallen. The Demon is salt.
The Demon smiles in false greeting, saying, “Blessed be Sakarpus, Eternal Bastion of the Wild. Blessed be her Most Heroic King.”
The White-Luck Warrior looks up, sees himself kneel, lean forward to place his lips against the abomination’s floating knee.
The Demon is salt. The Lords of the Ordeal are screaming.
He glances over his shoulder, sees himself—as it happens—joyous and exultant, crying out, “Yatwer ku’angshir ciphrangi!”
He stands in queue, patiently awaiting what has always already transpired, knowing and knowing and knowing … Soon the Sickle will fall.
A thronging wall of Believer-Kings, Chieftains, Generals, Palatines and Earls, Grandmasters and their advisors all but surrounded them, leering and cadaverous. For several taut heartbeats, Kelmomas peered at Father in his periphery, his leonine profile imperious, at once proximal and remote. Judgment incarnate. The air thrummed for deep-throated song …
The light that does not shine but reveals,
The sun that leans gentle upon laden fields.
Would that Kelmomas could scream it away, strike all sound and motion from the brawling carnival before him. From his position, the great rent in the westward wall and ceiling of the Umbilicus framed the head and shoulders of the petitioners. He could see only the canted Horn, shining morose in the sunless distance. The assassin’s profile lingered beneath it for several heartbeats, obscuring sepulchral fortifications. It happened quickly, so quickly that none could have seen it save Kelmomas …
A stork, angular and pristine white, flitted across the opening … great wings wide.
What?
It was a glimpse so unexpected, so incongruous, that it could only refocus his attention on the immediate.
A balm to my heart, a lamp to my feet …
Kelmomas saw the starved Schoolman in front of the traitor stand and depart, drawing a crucial fragment of Father’s care with him.
Teach me, O’ Saviour, so I might finally weep.
The Son of Harweel stepped forward and fell to his knees in the man’s place, gazed up at his miraculous Lord-and-Prophet, his lip hooked in contempt, his eyes shining for lunatic hate.
Father hailed him—welcomed him as another Believer-King!
Anasûrimbor Kelmomas, the youngest son of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, glimpsed a hand clutch in concealment, saw a pouch branded with three sickles fall from a sleeve …
Mimara is done with talk. They h
ave been stranded at the congregation’s shadowy perimeter all along, arguing first with Kayûtas and now with Serwa, peering at the glowing heart of the assembly from where the light failed.
“Enough!” she cries over the chorus of singing Lords. She has never liked Serwa, not even when the girl was a wobbling toddler. Mother would ceaselessly chide her for treating a mere child as a rival, but Mimara always knew that some part of Mother understood (or at least feared) her daughter’s animus.
They were never quite human, her siblings. Always somehow more, somehow less.
And now here she is, Anasûrimbor Serwa, resplendent in her billows, a grown woman—a Grandmistress! The most powerful witch the World has ever known. And it irks—all the more for being petty. Irks that she’s taller, by a hand at least. Irks that she’s clean. Even the way her beauty cuts against the ferocity of her Mark irritates.
“We go where we will as we will!”
“No,” Serwa responds terse and remote. “You go where Father wills.”
“And Mother?” Mimara snaps. Mother was implacable when it was simply Kayûtas confronting them, but her resolve has wilted since the arrival of Serwa. “What of her will?”
“What of i—?”
“Father will receive you,” Kayûtas hastily intercedes. “You need only wait, Sister.”
How absurd he looks decked in their uncle’s insignia and mantle—how tragic and corrupt!
“Have you both taken leave of your senses?” she cries—with enough violence, apparently, to earn Mother’s wary hand on her forearm. “Proyas dies!” she shouts for a second time, her voice brimming with disgust for it. “Even as we speak!”
This silences them, but they remain stubbornly planted in their path nevertheless. When Mimara makes to barge around, Serwa seizes the crotch of her arm.
“No, Mim,” the witch says firmly.
“What?” Mimara cries, yanking her arm free. “Are we not Anasûrimbor, the same as you?”
“You never believed so.”
Mimara glares into her sister’s eyes, all her prior resentments twisting like sparks in the smoke of her fury. How could she not be jealous? The daughter raised in pampered splendour and the daughter sold to slavers. The daughter tended, enabled, and the daughter neglected … the daughter perpetually denied! She had been the prize of the brothel, the Empress! Allowed to pick and choose her abusers like suitors. That was the one thing Mother could never understand, the way she had been condemned by her rescue, a trampled weed replanted in the World’s most glorious garden, her blood thick with caste-menial mud, always outwitted, always outshone by her golden brothers and sisters. How could she not be ugly, incarcerated on the Andiamine Heights?
How could she not be so obviously … broken …
She glares up into Serwa’s face, struck yet again by the heinous profundity of the witch’s Mark—as deep as any sorcerer of rank despite her tender years. A peevish instinct clamours for the Eye to open so she might see her younger sister’s damnation … and she recoils in horror from the thought.
Was any family ever so deranged, so insanely convoluted, as the Anasûrimbor?
She glimpses the bones of the Whalemothers, vertebrae in the dust, ribs heaped like broken bows.
Mimara suddenly laughs, not in any shrill, defensive way, but in the manner of those stumbling across glaring absurdities hiding in plain site. Why bandy words with Dûnyain? She surprises her witch-sister, brushes past and throws herself into the warlike mob beyond. Perhaps it isn’t such a curse being the sole weed in the garden, the one soul broken. There is nothing they can do, no harm they could inflict, that she hasn’t already endured—short of killing her.
And that, she knows, the God will not allow.
She answers to a higher power.
Heedless, Mimara barges through a gallery of masculine shock, of towering, warlike Men, unwashed and armoured, making way agog. They yield, it seems, as much to her pregnancy as to her paternity or sex, astounded by the sight of something so bound to hearth and home, to the hidden world of bullied or cherished wives, arising here, in the fearsome shadow of Golgotterath.
Serwa cries out and curses close behind. She seizes Mimara’s shoulder just as she pushes clear the intervening caste-nobles, into the circuit of her step-father’s light. The Swayali Grandmistress tries to spin her about, but Mimara resists …
Together, they bear witness to a scene chiselled from Scripture. Lords and Schoolmen watch, some solemn and rapt, others cracking for passion, and still others singing, their heads back, their mouths merry pits in unruly beards. Her step-father floats cross-legged within their circle, illuminated from all angles, draping folds of the purest white, a plate of luminous gold shining behind his mane. A young Kidruhil officer, Norsirai, kneels before him, about to clutch and kiss the Imperial knee. And Kelmomas moves from his place beside his sire … so fast as to scarce be seen …
Gazes turn in singing faces. A knife is plucked from nowhere, agleam with reflected light. A leap … unnatural for any human child.
Kelmomas lands with his back to his handiwork, immediately before Mimara and Serwa, his stance impeccable, the blade now missing from his hand.
Mimara catches the boy’s gaze, even as the kneeling Norsirai jerks and sways behind him.
Murder … is Mimara’s singular thought. Serwa cries out with real horror, bolting past their littlest brother to the slumping Kidruhil officer. Shouts of alarm and dismay swallow the booming hymn. She glimpses the pommel jutting from the youth’s temple the instant before her sister obscures the mortal image. Kelmomas turns to follow the astonished line of her gaze.
She knows Serwa loves the man …
Then, impossibly, he is standing before her, the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas. Her Mother’s all-powerful husband, close enough to touch, and as always, taller than she remembered. He holds Kelmomas kicking and squirming beneath one arm. “He was an assassin!” the little boy is shrieking. “Father! Father!”
And in her soul she screams, Open! Open! You must open!
But the Eye refuses to listen. It is as stubborn as she.
And her step-father’s mortal blue eyes see … before waxing sudden, shining white.
Sorcerous muttering sets claws upon every surface, visible and invisible.
Lightning brilliance. And the Holy Aspect-Emperor is gone, leaving her blinking at the chaotic convergence of Men surging forward, the Lords of the Ordeal.
“Breathe!”
Her sister’s shout?
Mother clasps her shoulders, crying out, staring at her feet.
“Mimara? Mimara?”
She looks down, craning to see past her belly, sees her shins and calves glistening, the dust soaked black. Only then does she feel the flush of heat and wet across her thighs and feet.
The first of the pangs strike, the clench and cramp of things too deep to be her own. It was too early!
She grunts in shock, cries out.
Proyas is dead.
Her mother has her.
Her mother has her.
Sorweel topples. The earth bruises his cheek. Blood spills as if from his ear.
Life is famine. To draw breath is to starve for want of past and future … to suffocate.
He twitches prostrate across the rugs. The Lords of the Ordeal cry out astonished. He glimpses the Triple-Crescent Pouch through the trample of booted feet, sees it kicked into stamping obscurity, back into the nowhere from whence it came. He struggles to raise his cheek, but his head is an iron anvil.
To witness the rotting of instants and nothing else. To be the decay of presence, the forever failing light.
He has always burned as he burns now. The onlookers rush forward, a congregation of concerned shadows. Through fire, the beautiful witch watches him appalled. Serwa. She cradles his head upon her lap, coos reassurance, commands …
“Breathe.”
The Mother is bounty … birth …
“He is dead, Pri—”
“Bre
athe!”
The Mother is the bearer of all …
“Breathe, Horse-King!”
Warm arms. A cradle of sunlight. Fields whisk endless and nubile green. The earth aches for monstrous fertility.
“Sorweel!”
A feminine humming …
“You must breathe!”
Rising horrific from his bones.
Shush.
Shush, Sorwa, my Sweet.
Set aside the hammer of your heart … the kite of your breath …
Cease your work … your play …
I have you, Sweetling.
Doze in my holy arms.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
The Occlusion
To spy your enemy from afar is to spy the very thing he is blind to: his place in the greater scheme. To spy yourself from afar is to live in perpetual fear.
—DOMILLI, Rudiments
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4123, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Surfaces vast and gold soared and plunged about the Inchoroi, who appeared sepia for reflected light, like something carved from an apple. He hung out from one arm, clawed feet braced against the Horn’s impenetrable skin, so high his lungs ached for the emptiness of the air. Though he had been Grafted for this world, the frame of his body remembered its distant womb, or at least held fast some portion of it. His soul, however, recalled nothing of his origin, unless solace could be called recollection. He dreamed it on occasion, especially when novelty had commanded his day, as if all those ancient experiences, hidden as they were, remained essential to his understanding. But he could never remember these dreams. He knew only that contentment hummed deep within, hanging thus, stirring him to wonder at worlds with thinner air.
He was old, aye, so ancient as to be broken into multitudes by the Ages. Glorious Iskiak, Spear-Bearer to mighty Sil, the great King After-the-Fall. The legendary Sarpanur, celebrated King-Healer, the great Killer-of-Hells. The infamous Sin-Pharion, reviled Plague-Bearer, the Soul-Most-Hated …
Aurang, the accursed Horde-General.