Esmenet scowled. The Captain had a habit of spouting inane adages—from some popular scroll of aphorisms, no doubt. Usually she found it charming—she was not above forgiving handsome men their quirks, particularly when she was their motive—but not on a matter as grievous as this, and certainly not in the presence of rank carnage.
“I’m afraid I’ve nothing new to add, your Glory,” Phinersa said, his gaze ranging across the scenes of war and triumph along the walls. “We still think she’s somewhere in Shigek. Think. But with the Fanim raiding the length of the River Sempis …” His eyes circled back only to flinch the instant they met her own.
Esmenet acknowledged the dilemma with a grimace. After spending years simply running, Fanayal ab Kascamandri had suddenly become aggressive, extraordinarily aggressive, effectively cutting the overland routes to Eumarna and Nilnamesh and, according to the latest reports, storming fortified towns on the river itself—using Cishaurim no less! All Shigek was in an uproar—precisely the kind of confusion the Mother-Supreme needed.
Weakness, she realized. They smelled weakness, all the enemies of the New Empire, be they heathen or Orthodox.
“Unless you issue warrants for the arrest of the High-Priestesses,” Phinersa continued, “we simply will not find this Nannaferi.”
Of course by “arrest” he meant torture. Esmenet found herself looking to Maithanet. “I need to consider that … Perhaps if our Exalt-Inquisitor is disposed to blame Sharacinth’s murder on some kind of feud within the Cult, it might provide the pretext we need.”
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples pursed his lips. “We need to proceed cautiously. Perhaps, Empress, we should consult the Aspect-Emperor.”
Esmenet felt her look harden into a glare.
Why? she found herself thinking. Why doesn’t Kellhus trust you?
“Our immediate priority,” she declared, pretending he had not spoken, “is to prepare for the eventuality of riots. Phinersa, you must recruit infiltrators. Imhailas, you must assure that the Precincts are secured—I will not have this happen a second time! Tell Ngarau that we are to be provisioned for the possibility of a siege. And contact General Anthirul. Have him recall one of the Arcong Columns.”
For a moment all of them stood as motionless as the dead.
“Go! Both of you! Now!”
Startled into action, the two men hastened back the way they had come, the one tall and flashing in his ceremonial armour, the other dark and fluid in his black-silk robes. Esmenet found herself nagged by the certainty that Phinersa had momentarily glanced at Maithanet for confirmation ...
So many looks. So many qualms. It was always the complexities that overwhelmed us. It was always the maze of others that robbed us of our way.
My little boy is dead.
But she squelched her misgivings, stared at the Shriah of the Thousand Temples squarely. “Skin-spies,” she said. She suddenly found herself dizzy with exhaustion, like a water-bearer balancing one bowl too many. “You think skin-spies did this.”
Anasûrimbor Maithanet replied with uncharacteristic reluctance. “I find this turn … incalculable.”
A memory struck her then, not so much of an event as of a feeling, the murky sense of being harassed and hemmed in, the tightness of breath that belonged to the besieged. A memory of the First Holy War.
For an instant, she thought she could smell the septic reaches of Caraskand.
“Kellhus told me they would come,” Esmenet said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Condia
Damnation follows not from the bare utterance of sorcery, for nothing is bare in this world. No act is so wicked, no abomination is so obscene, as to lie beyond the salvation of my Name.
—ANASÛRIMBOR KELLHUS, NOVUM ARCANUM
Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Condia
In Sakarpus, leuneraal, or hunched ones (so-called for their habit of stooping over their scrolls), were so despised that it was customary for Horselords and their Boonsmen to bathe after their dealings with them. The Men of Sakarpus considered weakness a kind of disease, something to be fended with various rules of interaction and ritual cleansings. And no men were so weak as the leuneraal.
But Sorweel’s new tutor, Thanteus Eskeles, was more than a hunched man. Far more. Were he merely a scholar, then Sorweel would have had the luxury of these rules. But he was also a sorcerer—a Three Seas Schoolman!—and this made things … complicated.
Sorweel had never doubted the Tusk, never doubted that sorcerers were the walking damned. But try as he might, he could never square this belief with his fascination. Through all his innumerable daydreams of the Three Seas, nothing had captivated him quite so much as the Schools. What would it be like, he often wondered, to possess a voice that could shout down the World’s Holy Song? What kind of man would exchange his soul for that kind of diabolical power?
As a result, Eskeles was both an insult and a kind of illicit opportunity—a contradiction, like all things Three Seas.
The Mandate Schoolman would join him each morning, usually within a watch of the march getting underway, and they would while away the time with drill after laborious language drill. Though Eskeles encouraged him to believe otherwise, Sorweel’s tongue balked at the sound and structure of Sheyic. He often went cross-eyed listening to Eskeles drone. At times, he feared he might slump unconscious from his saddle, the lessons were so boring.
Once he enlisted Zsoronga to hide him in the middle of his retinue, he came to dread the sorceror’s appearance so. The Successor-Prince promptly betrayed him, but not before having his fill of laughing at the sight of the Schoolman riding on his burrow craning his neck this way and that. Old Obotegwa, he explained, was growing weary speaking for two men.
“Besides,” he said, “how can we be sure we’re talking to each other at all? Perhaps the old devil makes it all up so he can laugh himself to sleep.”
Obotegwa simply winked and grinned mischievously.
Eskeles was a strange man, obese by Sakarpi standards, but not so fat as many Sorweel had seen in the Ordeal. He never seemed to get cold, despite wearing only a red-silk tunic with his leggings, one cut to expose the black fur that crawled from his belly to his beard, which even oiled and plaited never quite seemed under control. He had an affable, even merry face, high cheeks beneath pig-friendly eyes. This, combined with a lively, even careless manner, made him exceedingly difficult to dislike, despite his sorcerous calling and the brownish tinge of his Ketyai skin.
At first Sorweel could scarcely understand a word he said, his accent was so thick. But he quickly learned how to listen through the often bizarre pronunciations. He discovered that the man had spent several years in Sakarpus as part of a secret Mandate mission posing as Three Seas traders.
“Dreadful, dreadful time for the likes of me,” he said.
“I suppose you missed your Southron luxuries,” Sorweel jeered.
The fat man laughed. “No-no. Heavens, no. If you knew what me and my kind dreamed each night, your Glory, you would understand our profound ability to appreciate the simplest of things. No. It was your Chorae Hoard … Quite extraordinary really, dwelling in the vicinity of so many Trinkets …”
“Trinkets?”
“Yes. That’s what we Schoolmen like to call them—Chorae, that is. For much the same reason you Sakarpi call Sranc—what is it? Oh, yes, grass-rats.”
Sorweel frowned. “Because that’s what they are?”
Despite his good humour, Eskeles had this sly way of appraising him sometimes, as if he were a map fetched from the fire. Something that had to be read around burns.
“No-no. Because that’s what you need them to be.”
Sorweel understood full well what the fat man meant—men often used glib words to shrink great and terrible things—but the true lesson, he realized, was quite different. He resolved never to forget that Eskeles was a spy. That he was an agent of the Aspect-Emperor.
Learning a language, Sorweel quickly real
ized, was unlike learning anything else. At first, he thought it would be a matter of simple substitution, of replacing one set of sounds with another. He knew nothing of what Eskeles called grammar, the notion that a kind of invisible mechanism bound everything he said into patterns. He scoffed at the sorcerer’s insistence that he first learn his own tongue before venturing to learn another. But the patterns were undeniable, and no matter how much he wanted to dispute the fat man and his glib I-told-you-so smile, he had to admit that he could not speak without using things such as subjects and predicates, nouns and verbs.
Though he affected an attitude of aloof contempt—he was in the presence of a leuneraal, after all—Sorweel found himself more than a little troubled by this. How could he know these things without knowing them? And if something as profound as grammar could escape his awareness—to the point where it had simply not existed—what else was lurking in the nethers of his soul?
So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.
None of which made the lessons any less boring. But thankfully even Eskeles’s passion for Sheyic would begin to wane by midafternoon, and his disciplined insistence on the drills would lapse. For a few watches, at least, he would let the young King indulge his curiosity about more sundry things. Sorweel spent much of this time avoiding the topics that really interested him—sorcery because he feared it sinful, and the Aspect-Emperor for reasons he could not fathom—and asking questions about the Three Seas and the Great Ordeal.
So he learned more details about the Middle-North and its peoples: the Galeoth, the Tydonni, and the Thunyeri. The Eastern Ketyai: the Cengemi, the Conriyans, and the Ainoni. And the Western Ketyai: primarily the Nansur, the Shigeki, the Kianene, and the Nilnameshi. Eskeles, who, Sorweel was beginning to realize, was one of those vain men who never seemed arrogant, discussed all these peoples with the confidence and wicked cynicism of someone who had spent his life travelling. Each nation had its strengths and weaknesses: the Ainoni, for instance, were devious plotters but too womanish in their affect and attire; the Thunyeri were savage in battle but about as sharp as rotten fruit—as Eskeles put it. Sorweel found all of it fascinating, even though the sorcerer was one of those men whose animate enthusiasm actually seemed to deaden rather than liven the subject matter.
Then, one afternoon several days into his instruction, Sorweel summoned enough courage to mention the Aspect-Emperor. He related—in a form abbreviated by embarrassment—the story Zsoronga had told him about the emissaries cutting their own throats before the Zeümi Satakhan. “I know he’s your master …” he ended awkwardly.
“What about him?” Eskeles replied after a thoughtful pause.
“Well … What is he?”
The sorcerer nodded in the manner of those confirmed in their worries. “Come,” he said cryptically, spurring his mule to a trot.
The Kidruhil typically rode near the forward heart of the Great Ordeal, where they could be sent in any direction given the unlikely event of an attack. But word of Sranc activity to the west had led to their redeployment on the extreme left flank. This meant the sorcerer and his ward need press neither hard nor far to ride clear of the slow roping columns. Looking absurd on his mule—his legs straight rather than bent, his girth almost equal to his mount’s—Eskeles pressed along the shoulders of a long low knoll. Sorweel followed, alternately smiling at the sight of the man and frowning at his intentions. Beyond the crest of the knoll, the farther plains sloped up into the horizon, bone-coloured for the most part but shot with whorls of grey and ash black. The green of the more lush lands to the south had become little more than a haze.
Staring off into the distance, the sorcerer reined to a halt at the summit, where Sorweel joined him. The air was crisp and chill.
“So dry,” Eskeles said without looking at him.
“It often is. Some years the grasses all die and blow away … Or so they say.”
“And that,” Eskeles continued, pointing toward the northwest. “What is that?”
There was a Kidruhil patrol in the distance, a line of tiny horses, but Sorweel knew that Eskeles pointed beyond them. The sky was a bowl of endless turquoise. Beneath it the land ascended a series of rumps, then spread bluing into a series of flats and folds, like a tent after its poles had been dropped. Reaching in and out of the horizon, an immense band cut across the plain, mottled black and grey near its centre and fading into the natural grain of the surrounding grasslands along its edges.
“The great herds,” Sorweel said, having seen such tracks many times. “Elk. Endless numbers of them.”
The sorcerer turned in his saddle, nodding back the way they had come. The breeze pulled a comb of hairs from his beard.
“And what would you say that is?”
Perplexed, Sorweel wheeled his horse about, followed Eskeles’s bemused gaze. Not since Sakarpus had he seen the Great Ordeal from its edge, and he found himself shocked at the difference of watching something that had encompassed him from afar. Where before the world had seemed to roll into the immobile masses, now the masses rolled over an immovable world. Thousands upon thousands of figures, scattered like grain, thrown like threads, knitted into slow heaving carpets, gradually creeping across the back of the earth. Arms twinkled to the horizon.
“The Great Ordeal,” he heard himself say.
“No.”
Sorweel searched his tutor’s smiling eyes.
“This,” Eskeles explained, “this … is the Aspect Emperor.”
Mystified, Sorweel could only turn back to the spectacle. Though he couldn’t be sure, he thought he saw the Aspect-Emperor’s own banner rising from faraway mobs: a white-silk standard the size of a sail, emblazoned with a simple blood-red Circumfix. Struck by unseen priests, the Interval hummed out across the arch of the sky, deep and resonant, fading as always in increments too fine to detect, so that he was never quite sure when it stopped sounding.
“I don’t understand …”
“There are many, many ways to carve the world, your Glory. Think of the way we identify different men with their bodies, with the position they occupy in place and time. Since we inherit this way of thinking, we assume that it is natural, that it is the only way. But what if we identify a man with his thoughts—what then? How would we draw his boundaries? Where would he begin, and where would he end?”
Sorweel simply gazed at the man. Damned leuneraal.
“I still don’t understand.”
The sorcerer frowned in silence for a time, then with a decisive grunt leaned back in his saddle to root through one of his packs. He huffed and cursed in some exotic tongue as he pawed through his belongings—the effort of twisting back and sideways obviously strained him. Without warning, he dismounted with a heavy “Oooof!” then began rifling the opposite pack in the same way. It wasn’t until he searched the rump pack—made of weather-beaten leather like the others—that he found what he was looking for: a small vase no bigger than a child’s forearm and just as white. With a triumphant expression, he held it shining to the sun: porcelain, another luxury of the Three Seas.
“Come-come,” he called to Sorweel, stamping his left boot in the grass to wipe mule shit from his heel.
Securing his pony’s reins to the pommel of the mule’s saddle, Sorweel hastened after the sorcerer, who walked kicking through winter-flattened grasses—to clean off more dung, the young King supposed, until, that is, Eskeles cried, “Aha!” at the sight of rounded stone rising from the turf.
“This is called a philauta,” the sorcerer said, raising the slight vase and shaking it. A clipped rattle issued from within. The sunlight revealed dozens of little tusks raised along its length. “It’s used for sacramental libation
s …”
He smashed it across the back of the stone. To his chagrin, Sorweel flinched.
“Now look,” Eskeles said, squatting over the wreckage so that his belly hung between his knees. A small replica of the vase—what had made the rattling sound, Sorweel realized—lay beneath the sorcerer’s bulk, no longer than a thumb. Otherwise, fragments lay scattered across the stone and between the twisted threads of last year’s grass, some as small as cat’s claws, others the size of teeth, and still others as big as coins. The sorcerer shooed away a spider with stubby fingers, then lifted one of the tinier pieces, little more than a splinter, to the glinting light.
“Souls have shapes, Sorweel. Think of how I differ from you”—he raised another splinter to illustrate the contrast—“or how you differ from Zsoronga,” he said, raising yet another. “Or”—he plucked a far larger fragment—“think of all the Hundred Gods, and how they differ from one another, Yatwer and Gilgaöl. Or Momas and Ajokli.” With each name he raised yet another coin-sized fragment.
“Our God … the God, is broken into innumerable pieces. And this is what gives us life, what makes you, me, even the lowliest slave, sacred.” He cupped several pieces in a meaty palm. “We’re not equal, most assuredly not, but we remain fragments of God nonetheless.”
He gingerly set each of the pieces across the top of the stone, then stared intently at Sorweel. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Sorweel did understand, so much that his skin had pimpled listening to the sorcerer speak. He understood more than he wanted. The Kiünnatic Priests had only rules and stories—nothing like this. They had no answers that made … sense of things.
“But …”
The young King trailed, defeated by the weakness of his own voice.
Eskeles nodded and smiled, so openly pleased with himself that he seemed anything but arrogant or haughty. “But what is the Aspect-Emperor?” he asked, completing Sorweel’s question.
Using his fingers, he combed the chipped replica of the vase from the grass below his left knee. He held it between thumb and forefinger, where it shone as smooth as glass, identical to the original philauta in every respect save for its size.
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