The two regarded him for a torch-lit heartbeat. The taller one smiled, an expression rendered malicious for the play of shadow across his hard face. He stepped aside, saying, “She told us you might come.”
The guardsman led him into the Granary with the same uncanny focus—the same thoughtless discipline—that seemed to characterize so many Men of the Ordeal: no fatuous words, no posturing or bored bullying. A Sakarpi guard would have bickered until either cowed by threats or bribed.
The Granary’s courtyard was as dusty and trampled as any other ground in the camp, and with few exceptions, the surrounding tents were every bit as dark. Several censors had been set across the expanse, their smoky issue barely visible in the starlight. He breathed deep their odour: a pungent astringent of some kind, one specifically concocted to nullify the stench rising from the rotting miles surrounding them—or so he imagined.
The tall Nansur led him to a parasol tent on the far side of the oval courtyard, one identical to the others, save that it had been physically stitched to the tents adjoining. The entrance flap had been negligently drawn, revealing a golden sickle of interior light. Sorweel’s breath and ligaments tightened with every nearing step, as if he were a bow slowly drawn. The slit in the tent bobbed in his vision with erotic intensity, as though a candle had been lit beneath a courtesan’s skirts and he were about to glimpse the regions between her knees.
Perhaps he had come to feed his little brother after all.
“’Ware her, my King,” Eskeles had said that fateful day in the Umbilicus. “She walks with the Gods …”
The Swayali guardsman bid him pause with a polite gesture, then fell to his knees and called softly into the opening. Sorweel glimpsed ornate carpets and the odd leg of furnishing, nothing more.
If anyone replied, he did not hear it. The guardsmen simply stood and drew aside the ornately embroidered flap. “Kneel!” he hissed as Sorweel strode into the lane of light. Ignoring him, the Sakarpi King ducked into the interior and stood blinking in the light. Three bronze lanterns hung from a three-armed bracket set high on the centre pole, all of them dark. He had once asked Eskeles why he bothered with lanterns when he could spark brighter lights with mere words. “Because lanterns burn whether I remember them or not,” he had said. “Think of the way trivia weighs against your heart …” Anasûrimbor Serwa, apparently, did not mind the burden of sorcerous illumination: a point of blinding white hung in the corner, twinkling like a pilfered star. Its brilliance revealed faint patterns of russet in the felt walls—sigils or plant motifs—and rendered the room’s furnishings stark with shadow. Stacked chests. A cot, much the same as his own, save for the luxury of the blankets and pillows heaped across it. A worktable with canvas camp chairs. His boots felt an insult to the carpets beneath him: ranging landscapes wrought in black and silver, stylized according to exotic sensibilities. An unfamiliar perfume hung in the air.
The Grandmistress sat hunched over the worktable, wearing naught but a silken shift—her sleeping garb, Sorweel imagined. She hung her head to one side as she read, so that her hair fell in lazy blond wings across her right shoulder. She had hooked her bare feet about the forward legs of the chair—an undignified pose, and all the more erotic for it. Silk hung loose about her breasts, and pulled tight across her parted thighs. The hairlessness of her legs made her seem a little girl and so poisoned his desire with a peculiar shame.
Sin. Everything Three Seas, no matter how awe-inspiring or beautiful, had to be greased in sin.
“My brother finds you odd …” she said, apparently still absorbed by the inked lines before her.
“I find your brother odd.”
This occasioned a small smile—as well as her attention. She turned to regard him, careless enough with her knees to make him forget how to breathe. He struggled to remind himself that for all her wanton youth, she was the most powerful woman in all Eärwa, short of her Empress mother … who had been a whore.
“Have you come to thank me, or have you come to woo?”
The Sakarpi King scowled. “To thank you.”
Her eyes ranged across him with a boldness that would have seen a Sakarpi wife or daughter whipped.
“That pouch … hanging from your hip … Where did you find that?”
He swallowed, at last understanding the reason for this otherwise inexplicable visitation.
“It’s an heirloom. As ancient as my family.”
She nodded as if believing him.
“That motif … the triple crescent …”
“What about it?” he asked, far too aware of the proximity of her gaze to his groin.
At last her eyes climbed to meet his own. Her look was cool, remote in the way of old and prideful widows.
“That is the Far Antique mark of my family … the Anasûrimbor of Trysë.”
Sorweel struggled to speak around memories of the Goddess reaching into the muck of her womb.
“Would you like it back?”
A laugh like a sneezing cat.
“You seem more insolent than thankful.”
And in a heartbeat, Sorweel understood how the penetration of the Anasûrimbor, their godlike cunning, was as much their greatest weakness as their greatest strength. Men, Zsoronga had said, were like children to them.
Who fears children?
“I apologize,” he said. “The past weeks have been … difficult. This afternoon I … I murdered my slave in your father’s name.”
He saw Porsparian slump from the upright spear, hang twitching …
“You loved him,” she observed with something resembling pity.
He saw the light of watching fade from the slave’s yellow eyes.
“Here …” Sorweel said, grasping the pouch. “Take it as a gift.”
You are mad, a voice whispered in some corner of his soul.
“I would rather you keep it,” she replied with a frown almost identical to her brother’s. “I’m not sure I like you, Horse-King.”
Sorweel nodded as if in apology.
“Then I shall woo you …” he said, turning to step back out into the cool Istyuli night.
He had half-hoped she would call him back but was not surprised when she did not. He crossed the incense-fogged expanse of the Granary, his thoughts roiling in that strange fingerless way that prevents them from gripping your expression. He walked the way a man who had just gambled his freedom might walk: with the nimble gait of those preparing to run.
Anasûrimbor Serwa … She was one of the Few, among the greatest to practise the arcane arts, were the rumours to be believed.
“What the Mother gives …”
And he had carried a Chorae—concealed—within an arm’s span of her embrace.
“You must take.”
The following weeks did not so much pass like a dream as they seemed like one in hindsight.
Despite Anasûrimbor Kayûtas’s fine words the day following the Battle of the Horde, he did not so much as consult with Sorweel once when it came to the Sranc, let alone the mountain of trivial issues that confronted any great host on the march. Sorweel and Zsoronga spent most of their time mooning about the perimeter of the Prince-Imperial’s entourage, waiting to be called into whatever the ongoing debate.
They were accorded the honour of martial advisers, but in reality they were little more than messengers—runners. This fact seemed to weigh more heavily on Zsoronga than Sorweel, who would have been a runner for his father eventually, had the past months never happened. The Successor-Prince sometimes spent entire watches cursing their lot while they supped together: the Zeümi court, Sorweel had come to realize, was a kind of arena, a place where the nobility were inclined to count slights and nurture grudges, and where politicking through the dispensation of privileges had been raised to a lethal form of art. Zsoronga did not so much despise the actual work of bearing missives—Sorweel himself genuinely savoured the freedom of riding through and about seas of trudging men. What he could not abide, Sorweel decided, was the fut
ure, the fact that, when he finally found his way back to Domyot, he would be forced to describe things his countrymen could not but see as indignities. That in the sly calms between official discourse, they might murmur “Zsoronga the Runner” to one another and laugh.
More and more, Sorweel saw fractions of his former self in the Zeümi Prince—glimpses of Sorweel the Orphan, Sorweel the Mourner. Zsoronga had learned a dismaying truth about himself in fleeing when Sorweel had turned to save Eskeles. He had also lost his entire entourage—his Brace, as the Zeumi called their boonsmen—as well as his beloved Obotegwa. For all his worldly manner, the Successor-Prince had never experienced loss in his privileged life. Now he was stranded, as Sorweel had been stranded, in the host of his enemy. And now he was burdened, as Sorweel had been burdened, with questions of his own worth and honour.
They did not so much speak of these things as act around them, the way young men are prone to do, with only brotherly looks and warm-handed teasing for proof of understanding.
Zsoronga still asked him about the Goddess from time to time, his manner too eager for Sorweel’s comfort. The Sakarpi King would simply shrug and say something about waiting for signs, or make some weak joke about Zsoronga petitioning his dead relatives. The toll Zsoronga had paid in self-respect had turned the man’s wary hope into a kind of pressing need. Where before he had feared for his friend’s predicament, now he wanted Sorweel to be the instrument of the Goddess—even needed him to be. Each day seemed to add a granule of spite to the hatred he was slowly accumulating in his soul. He even began to take risks in Kayûtas’s distracted presence—insolent looks, snide remarks—trifles that seemed to embolden him as much as they alarmed Sorweel.
“Pray to Her!” Zsoronga began to urge. “Mould faces in the earth!”
Sorweel could only look at him in horror, insist that he was trying to no avail, fretting all the while about what traces of his own intent the Anasûrimbor might glimpse in the man’s face.
He had to be careful, exceedingly careful. He knew full well the power and cunning of the Aspect-Emperor, having lost his father, his city, and his dignity to him. He knew far better than Zsoronga.
This was why, when he finally mustered the courage to ask his friend about the narindari, those chosen by the Gods to kill, he did so in the guise of passing boredom.
“They are the most feared assassins in the World,” the Successor-Prince replied. “Men for whom murder is prayer. Fairly all the Cults have them—and they say Ajokli has no devotees save narindari …”
“But what use would the Gods have of assassins, when they need only deliver calumny and disaster?”
Zsoronga frowned as if at uncertain memories. “Why do the Gods require devotion? Sacrifice? Lives are easy to take. But souls—souls must be given.”
This was how Sorweel came to think of himself as a kind of divine thief.
“What the Mother gives … You must take.”
The problem was that in the passage of days he felt nothing of this divinity. He ached and he hungered. He scratched his buttocks and throttled his little brother. He squatted as other squatted, holding his breath against the reek of the latrines. And he continually doubted …
Primarily because what divinity he witnessed belonged to the Anasûrimbor. As before, Kayûtas remained a lodestone for his gaze, but where Sorweel had peered after his Horse and Circumfix standard across the massing of faraway columns, now he could watch him from a distance of several spans. He was, Sorweel came to realize, a consummate commander, orchestrating the activities of numberless thousands with mere words and manner. Requests and appraisals would arrive, and responses and reprimands would be dispatched. Failures would be scrutinized, alternatives considered. Successes would be ruthlessly exploited. Of course, none of these things carried the stamp of divinity, not in and of themselves or in their sum. No, it was the effortlessness of the Prince-Imperial’s orchestration that came to seem miraculous. The equanimity, the repose, and the ruthless efficacy of the man in the course of making a thousand mortal decisions. It was not, Sorweel eventually decided, quite human …
It was Dûnyain.
And there was the miracle of the Great Ordeal and its relentless northward crawl. Whatever heights the Istyuli afforded, no matter how meagre, he would find his gaze wandering across the Army of the Middle-North, the landslides of trudging men, columns drawing mountainous veils of dust. And if the vision seemed a thing of glory before, it fairly hummed with the gravitas of legend now, clothed as it was with crazed memories of what had been endured and with dire premonitions of what was to come.
For despite the toll the Men of the Ordeal had exacted, the Horde had not been defeated. It had reeled back, diminished, grievously wounded, too quick and too amorphous to be run down. Twice he and Zsoronga were called on to deliver missives to the forward pickets—once to Anasûrimbor Moënghus himself. The two of them had galloped ahead with abandon, relieved to be free of the dust and cramp, and wary of the tawny haze that rimmed the horizon before them. Solitary, riding hard across the desolate plain, they felt a peculiar freedom, knowing that Sranc fenced the north in unseen multitudes. Zsoronga told him about a cousin of his who captained a war galley, how he said he loved—and hated—nothing more than sailing in the shadow of an ocean tempest. “Only sailors,” the Successor-Prince explained, “know where they stand in their God’s favour.”
The Schools had been fully mobilized by this time, so as the Horde’s dust steamed mountainous above them, they glimpsed sheets of light, not high among the slow swirling veils, but low, near the darkening base—flickers of brilliance through funereal shrouds. They would crane their heads, draw their gaze from the high piling summits, floating bright beneath the sun, to the false night of the foundations, and the dread scale would humble and mortify them. Schools. Nations. Races both foul and illumined. And they understood that even kings and princes counted for nothing when thrown upon the balance with such things.
They would ride dumbstruck, until the first of the pickets became visible, the companies marked by lighter tassels of dust beneath the sky-spanning mark of the Horde. Finding Moënghus—who by this time was notorious for the daring of his exploits—forced them to ride perilously deep, until the sun became little more than a pale smear, and the haunting call of the Horde swelled into a deafening roar.
“Tell me!” the wild-eyed Prince-Imperial cried above the howl, gesturing with his clotted sword to the sunless world about them. “What do infidel eyes see when they look upon my father’s foe?”
“Hubris!” Zsoronga called before Sorweel could restrain him. “Mad misadventure!”
“Bah!” Moënghus shouted laughing. “This, my friends! This is where Hell concedes Earth to Heaven! Most Men grovel because their fathers grovelled. But you! Simply for seeing this, you will know why you pray!”
And beyond the Prince-Imperial, Sorweel saw them, the Nuns, striding above obscurities, wracking the earth beneath them. A necklace of shining, warring beads, cast thin across the trackless miles, scattering the Sranc before them.
Day in and day out, burning the earth to glass.
And then there was the greatest witch of all, Anasûrimbor Serwa, who had come to seem a miracle of beauty amid the sweat and Mannish squalor of the march. She rode a glossy brown, perched with one knee drawn high on a Nilnameshi side-saddle, her flaxen hair folded about the perfection of her face, her body slender, almost waifish beneath the simple gowns she wore when not freighted with her billows. She never spoke to Sorweel even though she spent much of her time at her brother’s side. She did not so much as look at him, though he could never shake the impression that out of all the shadows that crowded her periphery, she had picked him out for special scrutiny. He was not the only one bewitched by her beauty. He sometimes spent more time watching the others steal glances in her direction than watching her himself. But he did not worship her the way the Zaudunyani did. He did not see her as the daughter of a god. Though he was loathe to admit as much, he
feared the yearning—and at times, the raw lust—she inspired in him. And so, as is the wont of men, he often found himself resenting, even hating her.
The crazed fact was that he needed to hate her. If he were narindari, a kind of divine executioner chosen by the Hundred to deliver the world from the Aspect-Emperor, then what struck him as divine in his enemies had to be demonic—had to be, otherwise he would be the one dancing from a demon’s strings. A Narindar proper—a servant of Ajokli, the evil Four-Horned Brother.
When he was a child, Good and Evil had always simplified a world that was unruly and disordered otherwise. Now it vexed him to the point of heartbreak, the treachery of sorting the diabolical and the divine. Some nights he would lie sleepless, trying to will Serwa evil, trying to rub pollution into the image of her beauty. But as always the memories of her carrying him across heaving fields of Sranc would rise into his soul’s eye, and with it the reeling sense of security and numbing gratitude.
And he would think of the murderous intent he concealed behind his mudded cheeks and of the Chorae he bore hidden in the ancient pouch bound to his hip, and he would despair.
Sometimes, during the more sombre meals he and Zsoronga shared together, he dared voice his more troubling questions, and the two would set aside their bluster and honestly consider all they had seen.
“Golgotterath is not a myth,” Sorweel ventured one night. “The Great Ordeal marches against a real foe, and that foe is evil. We have seen him with our own eyes!”
“But what does that mean?” Zsoronga replied. “Wickedness is forever warring against wickedness—you should read the annals of my people, Horse-King!”
“Yes, but only when they covet the same things … What could the Aspect-Emperor want with these wastes?”
“For hatred’s sake, as well. For hatred’s sake.”
Sorweel wanted to ask what could inspire such hatred, but he conceded the argument, for he already knew what the Successor-Prince’s would say, his argument of final resort, the one that typically doomed Sorweel to watches of cringing sleeplessness.