“Kill?” Sorweel cried. “Kill?”
“Yes,” the Successor-Prince replied, his green eyes drawn down by the frightful weight of his ruminations. When he looked up, he gazed with a certain blankness, as if loathe to dishonour his friend with any outward sign of pity. “To avenge your father.”
Sorweel already knew this, but in the manner of men who have caged their fears. He knew this as profoundly as he knew anything, and yet somehow he had managed to convince himself it wasn’t true.
He had been chosen to kill the Aspect-Emperor.
“So what am I to do?” he cried, more honest to his panic than he intended. “What does She expect of me?”
Zsoronga snorted with the humour of the perpetually overmatched. “What does the Mother expect? The Gods are children and we are their toys. Look at you sausages! They cherish us one day, break us the next.” He held out his arms as if to mime Mankind’s age-old exasperation. “We Zeümi pray to our ancestors for a reason.”
Sorweel blinked against mutinous eyes. “Then what do you think I should do?”
“Stand in front of me as much as possible!” the handsome Successor-Prince chortled. A better part of Zsoronga’s strength, Sorweel had learned, lay in his ability to drag good humour out of any circumstance. It was a trait he would try to emulate.
“Look at these past days, Horse-King,” the black man continued when Sorweel’s lack of amusement became clear. “With every throw of the number-sticks you win! First, She disguised you. Now She exalts you with glory on the field, raises you in the eyes of men. Can’t you see? You were little more than a foundling when you first joined the Scions. Now old Harni can scarce sneeze without begging your advice …” Zsoronga appraised him with a kind of cocked wonder.
“She is positioning you, Sorweel.”
More truths he had already known yet refused to acknowledge. Suddenly, the young King of Sakarpus found himself regretting his confession, repenting what was in fact his first true conversation since the death of his father. Suddenly it seemed pathetic and absurd, searching for a brother in a Son of Zeüm, a nation the Sakarpi used to refer to things too distant or too strange to be credited.
“What if I don’t want to be disguised or positioned?”
Zsoronga shook his head with a kind of bemoaning wonder. You sausages … his eyes said.
“We Zeümi pray to our ancestors for a reason.”
Clouds climbed the horizon, and the Men of the Middle-North rejoiced, thinking the Gods had relented at long last. They sailed across the sky with the grace of whales, ever more crowded, ever more bruised about their bellies, but aside from brief showers of spittle, the rain did not come. A windless humidity rose in its stead, the kind that makes sodden cloth of limbs and lead of burdens. The day ended in weariness and indecision, the same as any other, save that the Zaudunyani’s exhaustion was total and their unslaked thirst extreme. The absence of dust was their only reprieve.
Night brought near absolute darkness.
The attack came during the first watch. A Sranc war-party some twenty lances strong simply leapt out of the blackness and fell upon the Galeoth flank. Men who muttered among themselves to while away the boredom cried out in sudden horror and were no more. The Sranc swept over the outermost sentries, raced caterwauling toward the ranks of the night defenders proper. Men locked shields against the blackness, lowered their pikes. Some cursed while others prayed. Then the obscenities were upon them, hacking and howling, their limbs wasted, their stomachs pinned to their spines. Heaving and hewing along the length of their shallow line, the Galeoth held their ground. Crying out hymns, they struck the maniacal creatures down.
Horns and alarums rang through the rest of the host. Men raced to their positions, some hopping to pull on their boots, others with their hauberks swinging. Agmundrmen with their war knots, Nangaels with their blue-tattooed cheeks, Numaineiri with their great hanging beards: ironclad men drawn from all the great tribes of Galeoth, Thunyerus, and Ce Tydonn, arrayed across a mile of flats and shallow ravines. They readied themselves with cursing bravado, and then, when every strap was buckled and every shield raised, they peered across the dark plain. Behind their gleaming ranks, the Kidruhil and caste-noble knights loitered in mounted clots, many standing in their stirrups to gaze as well.
No one saw anything, such was the darkness. During the following watch, news of the Sranc war-party’s easy defeat circulated through the ranks. The cynics among them predicted weeks of blaring horns and sleepless, pointless vigils.
General Kayûtas sent out several Kidruhil companies to reconnoitre the plain. The cavalrymen loathed few things more than riding pickets at night—for fear of ambush, certainly, but more for fear of being thrown. Since Sakarpus, some eighty souls had perished ranging the dark and hundreds more had been injured or crippled. After the Judges executed a Kidruhil captain for deliberately laming his ponies to feed his men, the companies were even denied the tradition of feasting on the crippled mounts.
The Northmen became complacent, and soon the host boomed with impatient chatter. Several pranksters broke ranks to dance and gesticulate before the pitch-black distances. The thanes could not silence them, no matter how hard they bawled. So when reports of cries heard on the plain reached General Kayûtas, he was not immediately inclined to believe them …
He summoned his sister, Serwa, only when the first of the scouting parties failed to return.
As with the other Schools, the Swayali Witches had remained largely cloistered within the host. Apart from chance encounters in the camp, the Zaudunyani saw them only during the Signalling, when one of the Swayali would climb the night sky to flash coded messages to their Saik counterparts in the Army of the East.
The reasons for this discretion were many-fold. The Swayali were witches, for one. Despite the Aspect-Emperor, many held their old prejudices fast—how could they not, when so many of their words for sorcery and its practitioners were also words for wickedness? They were women, for another. Several men had already been whipped, and one even executed, for acting out deranged infatuations. But most importantly, the Aspect-Emperor wished to deny the Consult any easy reckoning of the power he brought against them. For in truth, all the Men of the Ordeal in their countless, shining thousands were little more than a vehicle for the safe conveyance of the Schools.
Prince Anasûrimbor Kayûtas decided the time for discretion was at an end.
At her brother’s command, Serwa deployed her witches behind the common line, holding forty-three of the most senior and accomplished in reserve. A profound hush accompanied their appearance throughout the camp. The “Nuns,” the Men called them. With their yellow billows—the immense silken gowns they wore as protection against Chorae—wrapped and bound about them, the Swayali indeed resembled Jokian Nuns.
Sorcerous utterances cracked the gloom, and one by one the witches stepped into the air. They strode out over the deep ranks of the common line. Men in their thousands craned their necks to follow their soundless course. Some murmured, a few even called out, but most held their breath for wonder. Given the youth of the School, the women were young as well, with faces of smooth alabaster and teak, lips full about the lights that flashed from them. Free of the ground, they unbound their billows, spake the small Cant that animated them. The fabric dropped, unfurled in arcs that twined in the glow of the Nuns’ arcane voices. One by one the Swayali bloomed, opened like flowers of golden silk, and the Men of Ordeal were dumbstruck.
Swayali, the School of Witches.
They climbed out beyond the common line, a second chevron, like a mathematical apparition of the first, two hundred lights flung into the blackness of the plain. They stopped, hung like wickless candle lights. Arcane chanting, eerie and feminine, shrugged away the cavernous heights of the night and found ears in the form of intimate whispers.
Prompted by some inaudible signal, they lit the world in unison.
Bars of Heaven, lines of blinding white rising from the wasted ground to
the shrouded sky, some two hundred of them, like silver spokes across the near horizon.
Their faces slack above the rims of their shields, the Men of the Middle-North squinted across a lightning-illuminated world, one devoid of sound, bleached of colour. At first, many could not credit their eyes. Many stood blinking as if trying to awaken.
Instead of earth, Sranc. Instead of distance, Sranc.
Fields upon fields of them, creeping on their bellies like worms.
They had come as locusts, where the lust of the one sparks the lust of the other, until all is plague. They had come, answering a cunning as old as the age of their obscene manufacture. They had come to feast and they had come to couple, for they knew of no other possibility.
The Nuns’ chanting chorus crumbled into an arcane cacophony. One glowing figure sparked with furious light. Then another. Then all was glare and blinking hell.
The air whooshed and cracked, sounds so great that many flinched behind their shields—sounds that blew through the roar of burning Sranc. The Men of the Ordeal stood dazzled. Seven heartbeats Fate would grant them. Seven heartbeats to see their foe thrash in the fire of their burning. Seven heartbeats to wonder at the girls hanging alone in the sky, setting the earth alight with glowing song.
Seven heartbeats, for even though the beasts died in untold thousands before their eyes, all the world beyond the witches was Sranc. And far more creatures heaved and scrambled between the circuits of their sorcerous destruction than within. Arrows chipped at the Nuns’ Wards, a few that quickly became an obscuring rain, until the witches were naught but blue-glowing marbles beneath clattering black. Far more missed their mark than otherwise so that the creatures fell in great arcs below.
And the Horde howled, a noise so savage, raised in so many ulcerated throats, that many Men of the Ordeal dropped their weapons to clasp their ears. A cry that pinched the nape of even the bravest man’s neck …
And sent the very landscape rushing.
Not a man who had boasted failed to repent his words. The Swayali seemed to move for the fields of Sranc surging beneath them. Many men stumbled for vertigo. Shrieks warbled through the all-encompassing roar. No word that Men traded could be heard. No horn that sounded. No drum.
But the Believer-Kings had no need of communication; they had but one inviolable order …
Yield no ground.
Mouthing soundless shouts, the Men of the Middle-North watched the cyclopean charge. They saw the ground vanish beneath waves of howling faces. They glimpsed silhouettes against cauldrons of destroying light. Notched blades held high. Figures kicking in starved-dog fury.
They watched the Horde descend upon them …
No words, no training could prepare them for the fact of their enemy. Many glanced to the horizon, thinking they would see their Holy Aspect-Emperor striding across the back of a shrouded world—not realizing that the Horde had beset each of the Four Armies, that he battled faraway with Proyas and the Army of the East.
The fleetest among the Sranc struck first, a scattering of mad, individual assaults. They clawed and thrashed like cats thrown from rooftops. But the Men scarcely noticed them, such was the deluge that followed …
The scrambling herd of limbs. The flying line of blades and axes. The crazed white faces, those intent startling for their inhuman beauty, those that shrieked appalling for their infernal deformity. Glimpses rimmed in the light of Swayali destruction … Stick-limbed apparitions.
The Men of the Middle-North raised their shields and spears against them.
So did the Horde crash against the Army of the Middle-North. The dead could scarce fall, so packed, so violent was the melee. Men grimacing in thrusting panic. Nonman faces squealing and snapping. Sranc, crushed by the heave of their countless brothers. Sranc, their every bestial instinct bent to ferocity. Men cringed from their eye-blink speed, gasped against their gut-twisting stink: the rot of fish mongers clothed in fecal rags.
But the Shining Men stood their stubborn ground. Heavily armoured, stout of heart, and mighty of limb, they knew that flight would be their destruction. Torrents of arrows and javelins blackened the deranged vista, falling upon the ranks in a soundless clatter, but only those foolish enough to raise their faces were wounded or killed. Heeding the lessons of the ancients, they fought in deep phalanxes, arrayed so that those forward could brace their backs or shoulders against the shields of those behind, so that the entire formation must be clawed like a burr from world’s hair before moving. The Galeoth and Tydonni wielded their thrusting spears and nansuri, short-swords designed for close-quarters fighting, to great effect, stabbing at the abominations pinioned against their shields. The Thunyeri, who were weaned on the blood of Sranc, used the hatchets long favoured by their fathers.
The host’s bowmen maintained their positions immediately behind the common line, loosing shaft after shaft on shallow arcs over the heads of their countrymen. All of them, even the famed Agmundrmen, fired blind, knowing their arrows killed and yet despairing the insignificance of their toll.
For the knights and thanes stranded on their ponies behind the common line, it seemed a kind of mad performance, like those staged by the great troupes of dancers who frequented the courts of kings. For weeks they had skirmished with the Sranc, had grinned the pulse-pounding grin of the chase and kill. But now they could only watch in astonished frustration, for the Sranc had swallowed the very ground they would ride. Hundreds abandoned their mounts, hoping to shoulder their way to the fore of their men-at-arms, but the Judges stayed them with threats of doom and damnation, reminded them of the Aspect-Emperor and his Martial Prohibitions. For each phalanx was a kind of abacus, and each man a bead bound by strict rules of substitution.
Earl Hirengar of Canute spurned the Judges. He was one of those belligerent souls who could not abide watching while his lessers fought, let alone consider the consequences of his acts. When the Judges tried to seize him, he killed two and grievously injured a third. Then, because no signal could be heard above the clamour, he rode unopposed into the phalanx of his countrymen with his thanes in grim tow. His company managed to hack their way some thirty yards beyond the common line, great-bearded Tydonni, their mouths howling inaudible war-cries, their swords and axes swinging on wild arcs. But the Sranc engulfed them, climbed the backs of their brothers, leapt to tackle the hapless knights. Hirengar himself was dragged from his saddle by the beard. Death came swirling down.
Dismayed and disorganized, his kinsmen faltered. But even as panic leapt like wildfire among them, four Nuns floated above, their billows flaring golden, their sorcerous mutter fluting through the ringing deafness. Hanging as high as treetops, they decimated the Sranc with scythes of crackling light, and so provided the Canutishmen a desperate respite.
Wherever Men faltered, the Swayali witches were there above them, their silk billows cupping the light of their dread dispensations, glowing like jellyfish in the deep. Their mouths flashing lanterns. Their hands working looms of killing incandescence. After the initial shock, the Men of the Middle-North embraced their training, realizing with a kind of wonder that this was what they had prepared for all along. How to yield ten paces whenever the dead piled too high. How to draw their own wounded and dead through their line. Even how to fight the sky, for in their frenzy, the Sranc would claw across the backs and shoulders of their brothers and leap over the forward ranks.
Battle became a kind of dread harvest. Sranc died burning. Sranc died punctured and trampled. Sranc died scratching at shields. Yet they came and they came, surging beneath the witches and their comb of brilliant destruction, a shrieking chorus that wetted ears with blood. Men who faltered for exhaustion rotated with men from the rearward ranks. Soon gored figures could be seen stumbling behind the common lines, crying out for water, for bandages, or simply crashing to the dust. The Judges paced the line, their gilded Circumfixes held high, their mouths working about exhortations no one could hear. Hell itself seemed to churn but a keel away. And they wonde
red that mere Men could hold such wickedness at bay.
And then, slowly, inexorably, a different sound climbed into the deafening clamour, a more human intonation, tentative at first, but constant in its slow swelling … Singing.
The Shining Men crying out, rank upon rank, nation upon nation, until every soul bellowed in miraculous unison, a shout that climbed high upon the back of the Horde’s bedlam roar …
The “Beggar’s Lament.”
I have boils like little titties,
I have feet like stumps of beef,
And the Men of the Middle-North began laughing as they hacked and hewed, weeping for the joy of destruction.
Every coin that falls for me,
gets snatched by another thief!
The same lyric, hollered out over and over, like a sacred intonation. It became a banner, a scrap of purity hoisted high above a polluted world, and none would relinquish it. A call and a promise. A curse and a prayer. And the Shining Men matched the Sranc and their preternatural fury, roared singing as they stove skulls and spilled entrails. In one mad voice they fumbled for their faith, raised high the shield of their belief …
And became unconquerable.
The Scions fled across the black, the earth little more than liquid shadows sweeping beneath. Sorweel continually found himself sagging to his right, such was his exhaustion. His eyes would roll between pasty blinks, and his head would loll like a tipping weight. The dark world would tilt, and for a heartbeat he would float on the border of unconsciousness … before catching himself with a panicked jerk. At least his pony, Stubborn, remained true to his moniker and showed no sign of faltering.
Periodically he would shout mock encouragement to Zsoronga, who would always reply by wishing him ill. Neither paid attention to what was said: the saying was all that mattered, the reminder that other souls endured the same congealed misery and somehow persevered.