The young King of Sakarpus shrugged. "Ride hard for the Aspect-Emperor."
The old officer smiled and nodded, slapped him on the shoulder before bawling for camp to be broken.
"So it is possible?" Sorweel asked Eskeles, who remained beside him, watching with a strange, almost fatherly gleam in his eyes. "The Sranc could be doing what I think?"
The Schoolman crushed his beard into his barrel chest, nodding. "In ancient times, before the coming of the No-God, the Consult would harness the Sranc, chain them into great assemblies that the Ancient Norsirai called Yokes..." He paused, blinking as though to pinch away unwanted memories. "They would drive them the way we drive slaves in the Three Seas, starve them until their hungers reached a fever pitch. Then, when they reached a position where the Sranc could smell Mannish blood on the wind, they would strike the chains and let them run."
Something within the Sakarpi King, a binding of fear and hope, slumped in relief. He almost reeled for exhaustion, as if alarm alone had sustained him through all the sleepless watches.
The Schoolman steadied him with a hand on his shoulder.
"My King?"
Sorweel shook his head to dismiss the sorcerer's worry. He looked out across the morning plain: Sakarpus could be directly behind him instead of weeks away, for all the difference the horizon made.
"The Captain..." he said, returning the sorcerer's gaze. "What did he say to you just then?"
"That you possess the gifts of a great king," Eskeles replied, squeezing his shoulder the way his father had, whenever he took pride in his son's accomplishments.
Gifts? something within him wanted to cry. No...
Only things that the dirt had told him.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Western Three Seas
As death is the sum of all harms, so is murder the sum of all sins.
—CANTICLES 18:9, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
The world has its own ways, sockets so deep that not even the Gods can dislodge them. No urn is so cracked as Fate.
—ASANSIUS, THE LIMPING PILGRIM
LATE SPRING, 20 NEW IMPERIAL YEAR (4132 YEAR-OF-THE-TUSK), SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF GIELGATH...
That which comes after determines what comes before—in this World.
The Gift-of-Yatwer walked across ordained ground. His skin did not burn, thanks to the swarthiness he had purchased with his seed. His feet did not blister, thanks to the calluses he had purchased with his youth. But he grew weary as other men grew weary, for like them, he was a thing of flesh and blood. But he always tired when he should grow tired. And his every slumber delivered him to the perfect instant of waking. Once to the sound of lutes and to the generosity of travelling mummers. Another time to a fox that bolted, leaving the goose it had been laboriously dragging.
Indeed, his every breath was a Gift.
He crossed the exhausted plantations of Anserca, drawing stares from those slaves who saw him. Though he walked alone, he followed a file of thousands across the fields, for he was always the stranger he pursued, and the back before him was forever his own. He would look up, see himself walking beneath a solitary, windswept tree, vanishing stride by stride over the far side of a hill. And when he turned, he would see that same tree behind him, and the same man descending the same slope. A queue of millions connected him to himself, from the Gift who coupled with the Holy Crone to the Gift who watched the Aspect-Emperor dying in blood and expressionless disbelief.
He was the ripple across dark waters. The bow of force thrown across a length of a child's rope.
He saw the assassin gagging on his own blood. He saw the besieging armies, the hunger in the streets. He saw the Holy Shriah turn oblivious and bare his throat. He saw the Andiamine Heights crashing upon itself, the Empress's eyes flutter about her final breath...
And he walked alone, following a road of fields, stranded in the now of a mortal soul.
Day after day, across mile after mile of tilled earth—the very bosom of his dread Mother. He slept between the rising stalks, the nascent heads, listening to his Mother's soothing whisper, staring at stars that were silver lines.
He followed his footprints across the dust, witnessing more than plotting the murder of the dead.
—|—
THE RIVER SEMPIS
At least, Malowebi thought to himself as he swayed in his saddle, he could say he had seen a ziggurat before he died. What could that fool, Likaro, say? There was more to travel than bedding Nilnameshi slave boys, just as there was more to diplomacy than wearing an ambassador's wig.
Cohorts of horsemen fanned across the land, filing along irrigation dikes, filtering through groves and across millet fields. Hills like broken molars fenced the north, marking the arid frontier of Gedea. The River Sempis lay to the immediate south, black and green and placid, broad enough to shroud the South Bank in blue-grey haze. Five plumes of smoke rose from disparate points on the horizon before them.
One of those plumes, Malowebi knew, led the dusty army to Iothiah.
"It is a dangerous thing," Fanayal ab Kascamandri said from his side, a sharp grin drawing wide his elaborate goatee, "to parlay with the enemies of dangerous men. And in the whole wide world, my friend, no man is so dangerous as Kurcifra."
Despite the Padirajah's smile, something shrewd and quite humourless glinted in his eyes.
Second Negotiant Malowebi, Emissary of High Holy Zeüm, matched the man's gaze, careful to conceal his frown. "Kurcifra..." he repeated. "Ah... you mean the Aspect-Emperor."
The Mbimayu sorcerer was old enough to remember the days when Kian ruled the Eastern Three Seas. Of all the outland peculiarities to leak into Zeüm, few proved more vexing than the Fanim missionaries who trickled across the frontier, bearing their absurd message of fear and damnation. The God was Solitary. The Gods were in fact devils. And all their ancestors had been damned for worshipping them—all of them! You would think that claims so preposterous and repulsive would require no rebuttal, but the very opposite had been the case. Even the Zeümi, it turned out, were quick to embrace tales of their own iniquity, so universal is self-loathing among Men. Not a month passed, it sometimes seemed, without some public flaying.
Even still, when Fanayal's Padirajah father had sent an embassy to attend the coronation of Malowebi's cousin, Nganka'kull, the Kianene Grandees had caused a sensation among the kjineta. High Holy Zeüm had always been an inward nation, too distant and too vain to concern itself with events or peoples beyond its sacred frontier. But the Kianene's pale skin, the stark luxury of their dress, their pious reserve—everything about them had hummed with exotic allure. Over night, it seemed, the Zeümi fondness for elaborate image and ornamentation had become dowdy and obsolete. Many caste-nobles even began cultivating goatees—until, that is, his cousin reinstated the ancient Grooming Laws.
Malowebi could scarce imagine these Kianene inspiring an upheaval in fashion. Where the Grandees of Kascamandri's embassy possessed the dress and bearing of heroes, Fanayal's men were little more than desert bandits. He had expected to ride with the likes of Skauras or Cinganjehoi, men terrible in war and gracious in peace, not a ragtag army of horse-thieves and rapists.
Fanayal alone reminded him of those ambassadors from long ago. He wore a helm of shining gold, five spikes rising from the peak, and perhaps the finest coat of mail Malowebi had ever seen—a mesh of inhuman manufacture, he eventually decided. His yellow-silk sleeves hung like pennants from his wrists. His curved sword was obviously a famed heirloom. The instant he had noticed it, Malowebi had known he would say, "That glorious blade—was that your father's?" He even knew the solemn way he would pitch his voice. It was an old diplomat's trick, making a conversational inventory of the items his counterparts wore.
Relationships went much smoother, Malowebi had learned, in the absence of verbal holes.
"Kurcifra..." the Padirajah repeated with a curious smile, as if considering the way the name might sound to an outsider. "The light that blinds."
Fanayal ab
Kascamandri was nothing if not impressive. Handsome, in the hard way of desert breeding. His falcon eyes set close about a hooked nose. Arrogant to the point of being impervious to insult and slight—and being quite agreeable as a result.
The Bandit Padirajah he might be, but he was no bandit, at least.
"You said no man is so dangerous," Malowebi pressed, genuinely curious. "Is this what you think? That the Anasûrimbor is a man?"
Fanayal laughed. "The Empress is a woman—I know that much. I once spared a Shrial Priest for claiming he had bedded her when she was a whore. The Aspect-Emperor? I know only that he can be killed."
"And how do you know this?"
"Because I am the one doomed to kill him."
Malowebi shook his head in wonder. How the World revolved about the Aspect-Emperor. How many times had he poured himself some unwatered wine just to drink and marvel at the simple fact of the man? A refugee wanders into the Nansurium from the wilderness—with a Scylvendi savage, no less!—and within twenty years, he not only commands the obedience of the entire Three Seas but its worship as well.
It was mad. Too mad for mere history, which was, as far as Malowebi could tell, every bit as mean and as stupid as the men who made it. There was nothing mean or stupid about Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
"This is how Men reason in the Three Seas?" he asked. He repented the words even as he spoke them. Malowebi was Second Negotiant for no small reason. He was forever asking blunt questions, forever alienating instead of flattering. He had more teeth than tongue, as the menials would say.
But the Bandit Padirajah showed no outward sign of offence. "Only those who have seen their doom, Malowebi! Only those who have seen their doom!"
Fanayal, the Mbimayu sorcerer noted with no small relief, was a man who relished insolent questions.
"I notice you ride without bodyguards," he ventured.
"Why should that concern you?"
Though horsemen clotted the fields and berms about them, he and the Padirajah rode quite alone—aside from a cowled figure who trailed them by two lengths. Malowebi had assumed the man was a bodyguard of some description, but twice now he had glimpsed—or thought he had glimpsed—something resembling a black tongue within the cowl's dun shadows. Even still, it was remarkable, really, that someone like Fanayal would treat with anyone face to face, let alone an outland sorcerer. Just the previous week the Empress had offered another ten thousand gold kellics for the Bandit Padirajah's head.
Perhaps it spoke to the man's desperation...
"Because," the Mbimayu sorcerer said with a shrug, "your insurrection would not survive your loss... We would be fools to provoke the Aspect-Emperor on the promise of a martyr."
Fanayal managed to rescue his grin before it entirely faltered. He understood the power of belief, Malowebi realized, and the corresponding need to project confidence, both fatuous and unrelenting.
"You need not worry."
"Why?"
"Because I cannot die."
Malowebi was beginning to like the man but in a way that cemented, rather than softened, his skepticism of him. The Second Negotiant always had a weakness for vainglorious fools, even as a child. But unlike the First Negotiant, Likaro, he never let his sympathies make his decisions for him.
Commitments required trust, and trust required demonstrations. The Satakhan had sent him to assess Fanayal ab Kascamandri, not to parlay with him. For all his failings, Nganka'kull was no fool. With the Great Ordeal crawling into the northern wastes, the question was whether the New Empire could survive the absence of its Aspect-Emperor and his most fanatical followers. As the first real threat to the Zeümi people and nation since Near Antiquity, it needed to fail—and decisively.
But wishing ill and doing actual harm were far different beasts. Care had to be taken—extreme care. High Holy Zeüm could ill afford any long throws of the number-sticks, not after Nganka'kull had so foolishly yielded his own son as a hostage. Malowebi had always been fond of Zsoronga, had always seen in him the makings of a truly great Satakhan. He needed some real assurance that this desert outlaw and his army of thieves could succeed before recommending the monies and arms they so desperately needed. To take isolated fortresses was one thing. But to assail a garrisoned city—that was quite another.
Iothiah, the ancient capital of Old Dynasty Shigek. Iothiah would be an impressive demonstration. Most assuredly.
"Kurcifra was sent as punishment," Fanayal continued, "an unholy angel of retribution. We had grown fat. We had lost faith with the strict ways of our fathers. So the Solitary God burned the lard from our limbs, drove us back into the wastes where we were born..." He fixed the sorcerer with a gaze that was alarming for its intensity. "I am anointed, Outlander. I am the One."
"But Fate has many whims. How can you be sure?"
Fanayal's laughter revealed the perfect crescent of his teeth. "If I'm wrong, I always have Meppa." He turned to the enigmatic rider trailing them. "Eh, Meppa? Raise your mask."
Malowebi twisted in his saddle to better regard the man. Meppa raised bare hands, pulled back the deep cowl that had obscured his face. The mask Fanayal referred to was not so much a mask as a kind of blindfold: a band of silver as wide as a child's palm lay about his upper face, as if a too-large crown had slipped over his eyes. The sun flashed across its circuit, gleamed across the innumerable lines etched into it: water rushing sideways, around and around in an infinite cataract.
His cowl thrown back, Meppa raised the band from his head. His hair was as white as the peaks of the Atkondras, his skin nut brown. No eyes glinted from the shadow of his sockets...
Malowebi fairly gasped aloud. Suddenly, it seemed absurd that he had missed the hue of ochre in the man's dust-rimmed robes or that he had mistaken the serpent rising from the folds about the man's collar for a black tongue.
Cishaurim.
"Look about you, my friend," Fanayal continued, as if this revelation should settle the Second Negotiant's every misgiving. He gestured to the pillars of smoke bent across the sky before them. "This land simmers with rebellion. All I need do is ride fast. So long as I ride fast, I outnumber the idolaters everywhere!"
But the sorcerer could only think, Cishaurim!
Like every other School, the Mbimayu had assumed the Water-Bearers were extinct—and like every other School, they had been happy for it. The Tribe of Indara-Kishauri was too dangerous to be allowed to live.
Small wonder the Bandit Padirajah had such a talent for survival.
"Then what need do you have of Zeüm?" Malowebi asked quickly. He had hoped Fanayal would overlook his obvious fluster, but the sly glint in the man's eye confirmed what the Second Negotiant had already known: very little escaped the claws of Fanayal's acumen. Perhaps he was the first foe worthy of the Aspect-Emperor.
Perhaps...
"Because I am but one," the Padirajah said. "If a second strikes, then a third will join us, and a fourth..." He flung out his arms in an expansive gesture, setting alight the innumerable links of his nimil mail. "The New Empire—all of it, Malowebi!—will collapse into the blood and lies from which it was raised."
The Zeümi Emissary nodded as though acknowledging the logic, if not the attraction, of his argument. But all he really could think was, Cishaurim.
So... the accursed Water still flowed.
—|—
Discord is the way of imperial power. Triamis the Great once described empire as the perpetual absence of peace. "If your nation wars," he wrote, "not at the periodic whim of aggressors both internal and external, but always, then your people continually imposes its interests upon other peoples, and your nation is no longer a nation, but an empire." War and empire, for the legendary Near Antique ruler, were simply the same thing glimpsed from different summits, the only measure of power and the only surety of glory.
In the Hoshrut, the Carythusali agora famed for the continuous view it afforded of the Scarlet Spires, the Judges publicly lashed a slave they had apprehended for blasphemy. She was
lucky, they reasoned, since they could have charged her with sedition, a capital crime, in which case the dogs would already be lapping her blood from the flagstones. For some reason the unruly temper of the crowds that surrounded them escaped their notice. Perhaps because they were true believers. Or perhaps because the Hoshrut Pole, like the thousands of others scattered across the Three Seas, was so often used for matters of expedited justice. Either way, they were entirely unprepared for the mob's rush. Within a matter of moments they had been beaten, stripped, and hung from the hanging stone gutters of the Imperial Custom House. Within a watch, a greater part of the city rioted, slaves and caste-menials mostly, and the Imperial Garrison found itself engaged in pitched battles in the streets. Thousands died over the days following. Nearly an eighth of the city burned to the ground.
In Oswenta, Hampei Sompas, a high-ranking Imperial Apparati, was found in bed with his throat cut. He was but the first of many—very many—assassinations. As the days passed more and more Shrial and Imperial functionaries, from the lowest tax-farmers to highest judges and assessors, were murdered, either by their body-slaves or by the bands of armed menials that had taken to revenge killings in the streets.
There were more riots. Seleukara burned for seven days. Aöknyssus was only wracked for two, but tens of thousands were killed, so savage were the Imperial reprisals. The wife and children of King Nersei Proyas were removed to Attrempus for safety's sake.
Long-running insurrections flared into renewed violence, for there was no shortage of old and sequestered foes eager to take advantage of the general discord. In the southwest, the Fanim under Fanayal ab Kascamandri stormed and seized the fortress of Gara'gûl in the province of Mongilea, and in numbers so alarming that the Empress ordered four Columns rushed to defend Nenciphon, the former capital of the Kianene Empire. In the east, the wilder Famiri tribes from the steppes below the Araxes Mountains overthrew their Imperial administrators and massacred the Zaudunyani converts among them: sons of the families that had ruled them from time immemorial. And the Scylvendi raided the Nansur frontier with a daring and viciousness not seen for a generation.
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