With Nau-Cayûti at his side, Achamian crouched in the darkness, peering across the yawning fall before them. For days they had groped through the black, too terrified to dare any light. At times it seemed they climbed through blackened lungs, so choked and multitudinous were the tunnels. Their elbows bled from crawling on their bellies.
During the years of the Great Investiture, the Sranc had burrowed out from Golgotterath far beneath the armies camped across the surrounding plains. When the siege was broken, the Consult had forgotten the mines, thinking themselves invincible. And why would they not? The Ordeal, the holy war called by Anasûrimbor Celmomas against Golgotterath, had dissolved in acrimony and cannibal pride. And the unholy advent was near. So very near …
Who would dare what Seswatha and the High King’s youngest son now dared?
Please wake up.
“What is it?” Nau-Cayûti murmured. “A postern of some kind?”
Lying prone, they stared over the lip of an upturned ledge, across what could only be a mighty chasm. Entire mountains seemed to hang about them, cliff from towering cliff, plummet from plummet, dropping down into blackness, reaching up to pinch a great curved plane of gold. It loomed above them, impossibly immense, wrought with never-ending strings of text and panels, each as broad as a war galley’s sail, engraved with alien figures warring in relief. The lights from below cast a gleaming filigree across its expanse.
They looked upon the dread Ark itself, Seswatha knew, rammed deep into the sockets of the earth. They had reached the deepest pits of Golgotterath.
Below their vantage, across some hundred lengths of cavernous space, there was a door set perpendicular to the fall. Stonework had been raised beneath it, a platform with two immense braziers whose fires had blackened the Ark’s surface where it bowed above them. A network of landings and stairs twined into the black obscurity below. Partially screened by curtains of fire, several Sranc reclined and rutted on the gate’s threshold. Yammering squeals rang through the emptiness.
Akka …
“What should we do?” Seswatha whispered. The exercise of sorcery couldn’t be risked, not here, where the slightest bruise would be sure to draw the Mangaecca. His mere presence was fatal.
With characteristic decisiveness, Nau-Cayûti had already started stripping his bronze armour. Achamian watched the profile of his face, struck by the contrast between his pitch-blackened skin and the blond of his thickening beard. There was determination in his eyes, but it was born of desperation, not the zest and confidence that had made him such a miraculous leader of men.
Achamian turned away, unable to bear the falsehoods he had told him. “This is madness,” he murmured.
“But she’s here!” the warrior hissed. “You said yourself!”
Wearing only his hide kilt, Nau-Cayûti stood and ran his hands across the immediate stone faces. Then, clutching thin lips of rock, he hauled himself over the abyss. His heart in his throat, Seswatha watched him edge out across the gaping spaces, his back and calves shining with exertion and sweat.
Something—a shadow—above him.
Akka, you’re dreaming …
A spark of light, frail and glaring.
“Please …”
At first she seemed an apparition before him, a glowing mist suspended in void, but as he blinked, he saw her lines drawn off into darkness, the lantern illuminating her oval face.
“Esmi,” he croaked.
She knelt beside his bed, leaning over him. His thoughts reeled. What was the time? Why hadn’t his Wards awakened him? The horror of Golgotterath still tingled through his sweaty limbs. She had been crying, he could see that. He raised his hands, sheepish with slumber, but she pulled away from his instinctive embrace.
He remembered Kellhus.
“Esmi?” Then, softer, “What is it?”
“I…I just need you to know …ʺ
Suddenly his throat ached. He glimpsed her breasts, like smoke beneath the sheer fabric of her shift. “What?”
Her face crumpled, then recomposed. “That you are strong.”
She fled, and once again all was dark and absolute.
It flew at night, wary of the ground below. It beat its way higher, and higher, until the air became needles, and tears fractured the million-starred void. Then it coasted, wings wide and scooping.
Urgency did not come easily to such an ancient intellect.
It pondered in the manner of its race, though its thought balked at the limits of its Synthese frame. Millennia had passed since last it had warred across such a benjuka plate. The Mandate vindicated. Their children discovered, dragged into the light. The Holy War reborn as an instrument of unknown machinations …
That vermin could be so cunning! Mad the Scylvendi might be, but the testimony of events could not be denied. These Dûnyain …
The rushing air had grown warm, and the ground rose as though upon a swell. Trees and bracken sunned their backs beneath the cold moon. Slopes pitched and dropped. Streams roped along dark and stony courses. The Synthese wound over and through the shadowy landscape, unto the ends of Enathpaneah.
Golgotterath would not be pleased with this new disposition of pieces. But the rules had changed …
There were those who preferred clarity.
CHAPTER NINE
JOKTHA
In the skins of elk I pass over grasses. Rain falls, and I cleanse my face in the sky. I hear the Horse Prayers spoken, but my lips are far away. I slip down weed and still twig—into their palms I pool. Then I am called out and am among them. In sorrow, I rejoice.
Pale endless life. This, I call my own.
—ANONYMOUS, THE NONMAN CANTICLES
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Joktha
Somehow, he awoke more ancient.
Once, while raiding the South Bank in Shigek, Cnaiür and his men had rested their horses in the ruins of an ancient palace. Since kindling a fire was out of the question, they had unrolled their mats in the darkness beneath a ponderous section of wall. When Cnaiür awoke, the morning sun had bathed the limestone planes above him, and he found himself staring at figures in relief, their faces worn to serenity by the seasons, their poses at once stiff and indolent in the manner of age-old representations. And there, impossibly, at the head of a long file of captives, was a scarred-arm figure kissing the heel of an outland king.
A Scylvendi from another age.
“Do you know,” a voice was saying, “that I actually felt pity as the last of your people perished at Kiyuth?” It was a voice that liked its own sound—very much. “No … pity isn’t the right word. Regret. Regret. All the old myths collapsed at that moment. The world became weaker. I studied your people, deeply. Learned your secrets, your vulnerabilities. You see, even as a child I knew I would humble you one day. And there you were! Tiny figures in the distance, loping and howling like panicked monkeys. The People of War! And I thought, ‘There’s nothing strong in this world. Nothing I cannot conquer.’”
Cnaiür gasped, tried to blink away the tears of pain that clotted his eyes. He lay on the ground, his arms bound so tight he could scarce feel them. A shadow leaned over him, wiped his face with a cool, wet cloth. Who?
“But you,” the shadow continued. It shook its head as though at an endearing yet infuriating child. “You …”
His eyes clearing, Cnaiür absorbed his surroundings. He lay in some kind of field tent. Canvas panels bellied into an apex above him. A heap of blood-caked refuse lay in the far corner—his hauberk and accoutrements. A table with four camp chairs framed the man ministering to him, who had to be an officer of some kind given the splendour of his armour and weapons. The blue mantle meant he was a general, but the bruising about his face …
The man wrung rose-coloured water into a copper basin set near Cnaiür’s head. “The irony,” he was saying, “is that you mean nothing in this matter. It’s this Anasûrimbor, this False Prophet, who is the sole object of the Empire’s concern. Whatever significance you possess, you de
rive from him.” A snort. “I knew this, and still I let you provoke me.” The face momentarily darkened. “That was a mistake. I can see that now. What are the abuses of flesh compared with glory?”
Cnaiür glared at the stranger. Glory? There was no glory.
“So many dead,” the man said with rueful humour. “Was it you who devised that strategy? Knocking holes through walls. Forcing us to chase you and your rats into your burrows. Quite remarkable. I almost wish it had been you at Kiyuth. Then I would know, wouldn’t I?” He shrugged. “That’s how the Gods prove themselves, isn’t it? The overthrow of demons?”
Cnaiür stiffened. Something involuntary thrashed through him.
The man smiled. “I know you aren’t human. I know that we’re kin.”
Cnaiür tried to speak, but croaked instead. He ran his tongue across scabbed lips. Copper and salt. With a concerned frown the man raised a decanter, poured blessed water into his mouth.
“Are you,” Cnaiür rasped, “a god?”
The man stood, looked at him strangely. Points of lantern light rolled like liquid across the figures worked into his cuirass. His voice possessed a shrill edge. “I know you love me … Men often beat those they love. Words fail them, and they throw their fists into the breach … I’ve seen it happen many times.”
Cnaiür rolled his head back, closed his eyes for pain. How had he come to be here? Why was he bound?
“I know also,” the man continued, “that you hate him.”
Him. There could be no mistaking the word’s intensity. The Dûnyain. He spoke of the Dûnyain—and as though he were his enemy, no less. “You do not want,” Cnaiür said, “to raise arms against him …”
“And why would that be?”
Cnaiür turned to him, blinking. “He knows the hearts of men. He seizes their beginnings and so wields their ends.”
“So even you,” the nameless General spat, “even you have succumbed to the general madness. Religion …” He turned to the table, poured himself something Cnaiür couldn’t see from the ground. “You know, Scylvendi, I thought I’d found a peer in you.” His laugh was vicious. “I even toyed with the idea of making you my Exalt-General.”
Cnaiür scowled. Who was this man?
“Absurd, I know. Utterly impossible. The Army would mutiny. The mob would storm the Andiamine Heights! But I cannot help but think that, with someone such as you, I could eclipse even Triamis.”
Dawning horror.
“Did you know that? Did you know you stood in the Emperor’s presence?” He raised his wine bowl in salute, took a deep drink. “Ikurei Conphas I,” he gasped after swallowing. “With me the Empire is reborn, Scylvendi. I am Kyraneas. I am Cenei. Soon all the Three Seas will kiss my knee!”
Blood and grimaces. Roaring shouts. Fire. It all came back to him, the horror and rapture of Joktha. And then there he was … Conphas. A god with a beaten face.
Cnaiür laughed, deep and full-throated.
For a moment the man stood dumbstruck, as though suddenly forced to reckon the dimensions of an unguessed incapacity. “You play me,” he said with what seemed genuine bafflement. “Mock me.”
And Cnaiür understood that he’d been sincere, that Conphas had meant every word he said. Of course he was baffled. He had recognized his brother; how could his brother not recognize him in turn?
The Chieftain of the Utemot laughed harder. “Brother? Your heart is shrill and your soul is plain. Your claims are preposterous, uttered without any real understanding, like recitations of a mother’s daft pride.” Cnaiür spat pink. “Peer? Brother? You have not the iron to be my brother. You are a thing of sand. Soon you will be kicked to the wind.”
Without a word Conphas strode forward, brought a sandalled heel down on his head. The world flashed dark.
Cnaiür cackled even as the blood spilled hot across his teeth. With what seemed impossible clarity, he heard the Exalt-General retreat, the creak of leather about his stamped cuirass, the rasp of his scabbard across his leather skirts. The man swept aside the flap then strode into the greater camp, already shouting names. And Cnaiür could feel himself slipping between immensities—the earth that pressed so cruelly against his battered frame and the commotion of men and their fatal purposes.
At last, something deep laughed within him. At last it ends.
General Sompas entered moments after, his face grim, his knife drawn. Without hesitation he knelt at Cnaiür’s side and began sawing through his leather bonds.
“The others await,” he said in hushed tones. “Your Chorae is on the table.”
Cnaiür could only reply in a cracked whisper. “Where are you taking me?”
“To Serwë.”
The General had no problem leading the Scylvendi captive to the dark edge of the Nansur camp. They passed through a gallery of sentries and boisterous, celebratory camps. No one questioned the fact that the General wore a Captain’s uniform. They were the army of a brilliant and eccentric leader. Not once had his strange ways failed to deliver victory and vengeance. And Biaxi Sompas was his man.
“Is it always this easy?” Cnaiür asked the creature.
“Always,” it said.
In the blackness beneath a stand of carob trees, Serwë and another of her brothers awaited them, along with eight horses laden with supplies. Dawn had not yet broken when they heard the first of the horns, faint in the distance behind them.
A word dogged Emperor Ikurei Conphas, a word he had always regarded from the outside.
Terror.
He sat weary, leaning against the pommel of his saddle, watching the torches bob through the dark trees before him. Sompas waited quietly to his right, as did several others. Shouts echoed through the encampment behind them. The darkness teemed with searching lights.
“Scylvendi!” Conphas found himself crying out to the black. “Scylvendi!” He need not look to his officers to see their questioning expressions.
What was it about this man—this fiend? How had he affected him so? For all the hatred the Nansur bore toward the Scylvendi race, they were perversely enamoured of them as well. There was a mystique to them, and a virility that transcended the myriad rules that so constricted the intercourse of civilized men. Where the Nansur wheedled and negotiated, the Scylvendi simply took—seized. It was as though they had embraced violence whole, while the Nansur had shattered it into a thousand pieces to set as splinters across the multiform mosaic of their society.
It made them seem … more manly.
And this one Scylvendi, this Utemot Chieftain. Conphas had witnessed it, as much as any of the Columnaries who′d quailed before him in Joktha. In the firelight the barbarian’s eyes had been coals set in his skull. And the blood had painted him the colour of his true skin. The swatting arms, the roaring voice, the chest-pounding declarations. They had all seen the God. They had all seen dread Gilgaöl rearing about him, a great horned shadow …
And now, after wrestling him to the ground like some lunatic bull, after the wonder of capturing him—capturing War!—he had simply vanished.
Cememketri insisted no sorcery was involved, and for the first time Conphas appreciated his uncle’s manic suspicion of the Saik. Could they have done it? Or could it be, as Cememketri had nervously suggested, the Faceless Ones? Several of his soldiers maintained they had seen Sompas leading the Scylvendi through the camp—a rank impossibility, given that Conphas himself had gone to the man immediately after leaving the Scylvendi.
Faceless Ones … Skin-spies the Mandate Schoolman had called them. Since learning from Cememketri that Xerius had been murdered by one of these things posing as his grandmother, Conphas had found himself rehearsing the Mandate fool’s arguments from that day in Caraskand when they had debated the Prince of Atrithau’s fate. They were not Cishaurim, Conphas had conceded that much. It was even more clear now that Xerius was dead. Why would the Cishaurim murder the only man who might save them?
They weren’t Cishaurim, but did that make them Consult, as the Mandati
had insisted? Were these truly the opening hours of the Second Apocalypse?
Terror. How could he not be terrified?
All this time Conphas had assumed that he and his uncle had stood at the root of all that happened. No matter how the others plotted, they but thrashed in the nets of his hidden designs—or so he thought. Such errant conceit! All along, others had known, others had watched, and he hadn’t the slightest inkling of their intentions!
What was happening? Who ruled these events?
Not Emperor Ikurei Conphas I.
His aquiline face outlined by torchlight, Sompas looked at him expectantly, but he kept his counsel like the others. They could sense his humour, understood that it was more than merely “foul.” Conphas scanned the moon-blanched countryside, felt the despairing twinge all men felt when confronted by the dimensions of the world that had swallowed those they desired. Were he one, were he alone, it would be hopeless.
But he was not one. He was many. The ability to cede voice and limb to the will of another—herein lay the true genius of men. The ability to kneel. With such power, Conphas realized, he was no longer confined to the here and now. With such power, he could reach across the world’s very curve! He was Emperor.
How could he not cackle? Such a wondrous life he lived!
He need only make things simple. And he would start with this Scylvendi … He had no choice.
That he was Scylvendi could be no coincidence. Here Conphas stood on the cusp of restoring the Empire to all her past glory, only to discover that everything turned on killing a son of his ancestral enemy, the people who had overthrown the pretensions of his race time and again. He had said it himself, hadn’t He? He was Kyraneas. He was Cenei …
No wonder the savage had laughed!
The Gods were behind this—Conphas was certain of it. They begrudged their brother. Like children of a different father, they resented. There was a message to this—how could there not be? He had been served some kind of warning. He was Emperor now. A move had been made. The rules had been changed …
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