Perhaps this was when Achamian first sensed the madness about to happen.
"You would wager damnation for these things?" Galian asked.
"Damnation?"
A sly grin. "The Holy Bounty is Holy because it has been decreed by the Aspect-Emperor."
"The Aspect-Emperor, is it? Would you like to know what I think of our glorious tyrant?"
Achamian recognized the triumph in the Columnary's look. Galian used the same baiting manner with Soma, only with more mischief than malice in his eyes.
"Very much."
What was happening here?
The Tydonni thane grinned with alehouse cruelty. "I think his gold was born to burden my purse. I think he overlooks the likes of me... and of you! I think all those prayers, all those little wire circumfixes, are naught but wasted effort! Because in the end," he continued with a conspiratorial lean, "I think he's no different than you or me. A sinner. A dog. A demon when too deep in his cups! A fool. A fraud. A scalper of sou—!"
Lord Kosoter materialized at the man's side, his knife out... Achamian blinked in confusion. A stabbing motion. Hurm crushed his cheek against his shoulder, as if plagued by a mosquito in his ear.
Mimara cried out for shock. Achamian stood dumbfounded.
Gripping a nest of black hair, the Captain—impossibly—held the man upright while he hacked at the man's neck with his free hand. For an instant there was no blood. Then it seemed to gush from the jerking form.
"Blasphemer!" Sarl chortled, his teeth and gums shining, his eyes squeezed into creases. "No blasphemers on the slog!"
Galian had known this would happen, the old Wizard realized.
The Captain continued his savage work, grimacing in yellow-toothed disgust. He did not so much cut the head from the body as hack the body from under the head. The Hag's black-stained limbs flumped senseless between the grasses. His head yanked high like a freed kite.
"Anasûrimbor Kellhus!" the Captain raved at the survivors. "He is the God! And this"—he swung Hurm's head so that blood flew from the crimson lobes of its mouth—"is His work!"
Achamian could only watch with detached wonder, the kind that afflicts the survivors of sudden catastrophes. He saw well enough. He knew well enough. And yet none of it made the slightest sense.
He found himself wondering how long before Cleric called on them to dispense the Qirri. He needed it. To the point of wringing hands and clenched teeth, he needed it.
The Captain, it seemed, was a Believer.
Zaudunyani.
—|—
The pretense of thought twined through the fraud that was its soul...
It ran like a dog, bent, so that the grasses whipped in wet shags about its face and shoulders. The morning sun hung low, a pale orb in the mists that always greeted the dawn on the shore of a great sea. Gold limned any stonework bared to the sky. The acropolis rose from the ink of its own shadow, a silhouette without depth in the haze. There was beauty in the destruction, as well as thunderous proof of the Old Fathers and their power. Here, the will and might of Men had perished before the rapacious hunger of the Derived. Here, the glorious multitudes had coupled with the screaming, the broken and the dead.
These were holy facts—sacred. But the thing called Soma did not raise its head to contemplate or to consider. It did not dare. There was the tracker, Xonghis, whose almond eyes missed little. And there was the Nonman, whose senses almost rivalled its own in some respects.
There was the mission.
It paused over the headless corpse of the Stone Hag, listened to the music of carrion flies. It lingered for a moment, long enough to savour the thickness between its thighs, the arching bloat. Then it continued racing along the company's blundering trail.
On the heights of what had once been called the Heilor, it dashed through concentric shells of ruin, crept along debris-choked foundations. It ignored the vista: the city scattered like bones, the steaming marshes, the plate of the Cerish Sea. Instead it rooted through the remains of the scalper camp, sniffing the sweet where their anuses had pressed against the grasses. It found the spot where the female had made water, only to flee from the reek of her fetus.
It paused over the sour musk of the Nonman.
Something was happening... Something unanticipated by the Old Fathers.
It cringed, swatted its face in slouching fear. Had anyone happened upon it at that moment, they would have seen a crazed creature, limbed like a man but possessing a woman's beautiful face, greased with blood and filth, rocking from foot to foot like a bereaved ape.
It bent back its head until the base of its skull pressed against the crown of its spine, unsheathed its second voice...
And screamed.
"There's no need..." a small voice piped from above. "I have followed you since sunrise."
It whirled in feral alarm.
A series of ruined walls fenced the ground behind, each rising and falling like miniature mountain ranges. A bird perched on the summit of the nearest, its body glossy black, shot with strains of violet, its head white with marmoreal translucence—and human.
A Synthese... vessel of the Old Fathers. Flowering weeds trembled in the wind beside its clicking feet. A daylight moon, pale as a blind cat's eye, rose above its obsidian back.
The thing called Soma fell to its false face.
"You were to watch him," the bird said, a miniature scowl creasing its expression.
"Things have changed."
Eyes like blue beads closed then opened. "How so?"
The thing called Soma dared raise Mimara's face. "A sorcerer, a Gnostic sorcerer, hired the company several weeks ago... He hopes to find the Coffers."
A moment of palm-sized confusion.
"The Mandate? The Mandate has hired the Skin Eaters?"
"No... I'm not sure... He claims to be a Wizard, a sorcerer without a School. Even still, Chigra burns strong in him. Very strong."
The Synthese bent its tiny head down in momentary meditation. "So the old fool has found his way back to the benjuka plate... And he discovered you? Drusas Achamian?"
"No... There is a woman with him—one who has been taught how to recognize us. A pregnant woman..."
A sharp puppet nod. "The face you wear... I see." Shadows fluttered around the bird form, as if some greater eye blinked about the world. An intimation of rage and power. "Mimara."
The thing called Soma cringed and retreated. "Yes."
"She's pregnant. You are certain of this?"
"The stench is unmistakable."
Another moment of bird-hesitation, as if each thought had to be untangled... It was no small matter planting a soul so mighty into a skull the size of an eggshell.
"Then she cannot be harmed. All the prophecies must be respected, the false as much as the true."
"Yes, Old Father. I anticipated this, which is why I... refrained."
A sideways twitch of the head. "She leaves the safety of the others?"
"To piss and shit. I have spoken with her twice now. She will yield their secret in time."
"And the Schoolman has not intervened?"
"He does not know."
The small head flicked back. Laughter tinkled like glass. The Consult Synthese looked from the Heilor, its gaze ticking between points across the fields of papyrus out to the featureless reaches of the Cerish Sea. The wind combed its feathered tailings, blowing wide with the inaudible roar of absence and ruin.
The thing called Soma breathed deep the scent of ash become earth.
"Brave girl..." the Old Father cooed, still considering the crumbs of the age-long feast that was the Meorn Empire. "Continue tracking them, Tsuör. At the very least, they will take you home."
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Istyuli Plains
...and they scoff at heroes, saying that Fate serves disaster to many, and feasts to few. They claim that willing is but a form of blindness, the conceit of beggars who think they wrest alms from the jaws of lions. The Whore alone, they say, deci
des who is brave and who is rash, who will be hero and who will be fool. And so they dwell in a world of victims.
—QUALLAS, ON THE INVITIC SAGES
Ever do Men use secrets to sort and measure those they love, which is why they are less honest with their brothers and more guarded with their friends.
—CASIDAS, ANNALS OF CENEI
LATE SPRING, 20 NEW IMPERIAL YEAR (4132 YEAR-OF-THE-TUSK), THE HIGH ISTYULI
They had fled and they had gathered, like sawdust before the sweep of the carpenter's hand.
Sranc.
The clans that infested the Sakarpi Pale had fled long before the Great Ordeal trod their nourishing earth. They, unlike their wilder cousins to the north, had long, hard experience with the cunning ways of Men. They knew the folly of closing for battle absent overwhelming numbers, so they fled where other clans would have raced gibbering to their doom. They fled, bearing word of the dread Israzi'horul, the Shining Men, who marched with world-cracking strength behind them.
Their cousins to the north heeded them, as did their cousins in turn. Hundreds became thousands became tens of thousands. So the clans fell back, ever back, wincing from chance encounters with Mannish pickets, forming a rind that grew ever more raucous with numbers as it retreated across the empty leagues. And growing ever more hungry.
What began as the flight of a few scattered clans soon became a shrieking migration. The Parching Wind whipped high the dust of their discord, raised veils of arid filth to the arch of Heaven. The sun was blotted. The Sranc teemed as insects across the obscured flats and shallows, so many the land became desert waste in their wake, stamped and scratched into lifelessness.
And as their numbers swelled so did their fear of the Shining Men dwindle.
Shortly after the Breaking of the Ordeal, General Sibawul te Nurwul, intent to demonstrate the skill and daring of his Cepalorans, disobeyed the orders of Prince Kayûtas and rode far ahead of his fellow Kidruhil pickets. He would be the first among Men to lay eyes on the storm brewing in the Istyuli wastes. There was no question of giving battle, for the inhuman multitudes blackened the circuit of all that could be seen. A full third of his riders fell that day, for the fleetest among the Sranc were quicker than the slowest among the Cepaloran riders. Sibawul and his Cepalorans raced fleeing toward their fellow pickets, drawing thousands in pursuit, and a running battle, the first since the Fall of Sakarpus, was fought as the Kidruhil companies scrambled to fend them. Several hundred cavalrymen were lost before the day's end—a needless waste.
When Sibawul was brought before Kayûtas, the Prince-Imperial rebuked him in the harshest terms, saying that the Aspect-Emperor had known of the Hording all along, but realizing the ardour this knowledge would spark in the hearts of his men, he waited for the most opportune time to inform the Sacred Host.
"How do you, a master of men, punish those who disobey your commands?" Kayûtas asked.
"Flogging," Sibawul fearlessly replied.
So was the first Lord of the Ordeal whipped for a martial transgression.
And so did the Zaudunyani learn that beyond the northern horizon, their foe roiled in numbers that encompassed the horizon—numbers far greater than their own. About the campfires, those who had argued a bloodless march to Golgotterath were silenced.
None could deny that a grievous toll was about to be paid.
—|—
King Nersei Proyas had seen the way hosts accumulate infirmities more times than he cared to remember. Supplies dwindled, spirits flagged, diseases multiplied, and so on, until armies that once appeared invincible came to resemble doddering old men. There was the war against the Tydonni Orthodox, of course, and the disastrous campaign across the Secharib Plains, where he had almost succumbed to the Fevers. But more and more, he found himself thinking of the First Holy War, the way it had marched into Fanim lands the mightiest host the Three Seas had even seen, only to be starved into cannibalism in a matter of months.
The Great Ordeal, he had come to realize, was no different. The cracks had opened, and Fate had set the wedges as surely as shipbuilders striking boards from felled trees. What was cracked could be hammered asunder. The Army of the Middle-North, especially, seemed to be marching under a pall of imminent disaster.
And yet, time and again, at least once every week, his Lord-and-God called him to his spare, leather-panelled bed chamber in the Umbilicus to sit and discuss... madness.
"It troubles you often, that day in Shimeh."
That day in Shimeh, when Kellhus had been acclaimed Aspect-Emperor. Proyas found himself clearing his throat and looking away. Twenty years had passed, twenty years of toil and strife, and yet the image of his old tutor standing derelict before his Holy Aspect-Emperor plagued him as insistently as ever. A memory like a childhood burn, not quite stinging but too puckered not to probe with idle fingertips.
"I loved Achamian."
How could a boy, especially one as curious and precocious as he had been, not love his first true teacher? Children can smell the difference between duty, which is merely a form of self-regard, and the temper of genuine concern. Achamian taught not to serve, but to teach, to arm an errant boy against a capricious world. He taught young master Proyas, and not the Conriyan King's second son.
"But it troubles you..." Kellhus said, "that a soul so wise and gentle would so condemn me."
"He was a man spurned," Proyas replied on a heavy breath. "No cuckold possesses a wise and gentle soul." He remembered Achamian coming to him—coming back from the presumption of death—when the First Holy War lay besieged in Caraskand. He remembered his own cowardice, how he spared himself the heartbreak of watching the sorcerer absorb tidings of the impossible...
News that Esmenet, his wife, had abandoned hope and turned to the Warrior-Prophet's bed.
"Even still, it troubles you."
The Exalt-General gazed at his Lord-and-God, pursed his lips against the difficulty of admission.
"Yes."
"So much so that you read his Compendium."
Proyas smiled. For years he had wondered when Kellhus would call him out on this small secret. "I read a summary of its charges against you."
"Did you believe those charges?"
"Of course not!"
The Holy Aspect-Emperor frowned as if troubled by the vehemence of his denial. He lowered his gaze to the fire twirling in the arcane octagon of his hearth.
"But why would that be, when they are true?"
The small Seeing-Flame wheezed into the silence.
The Exalt-General stared at his Lord-and-God in breathless bewilderment. The simplicity of his garb. The scriptural profile of his face, long featured, profound for the archaic cut of his beard and hair, wise for the clarity of his gaze. The lingering glow about his hands, as if unseen clouds were forever breaking above them.
"What... What are you saying?"
"That Men are children to me, precisely as Achamian claims."
"As you are father to us!"
Anasûrimbor Kellhus regarded him with the utter absence of expression.
"What father murders so many of his sons?"
What was this melancholy? What was this doubt? After campaigning so long, surviving so much calamity, how could the man who gave meaning to it all ask such corrosive questions?
"A divine one," the Exalt-General declared.
—|—
The Sranc waxed ever more bold in measure with their hunger. Soon, not a day passed without word of some violent encounter. When they dared scout or patrol at all, the Kidruhil did so in force, stung by the loss of two entire companies, one of them captained by King Coithus Narnol's youngest son, Agabon. The Army of the Middle North began marching and camping on the ready. During the day they assembled into a vast, mile-long chevron, with the heavily armoured Thunyeri at the point, the Galeoth on the left flank, the Tydonni on the right, and all the baggage scattered behind and between. During the night, they arrayed their camps in tight, concentric circles, with a full quarter of thei
r numbers assigned to defend the perimeter in rotating shifts. Drills were scheduled at irregular intervals to ensure that each man knew his place. Habitual laggards were publicly whipped. The last companies to the line were assigned to the latrines.
Despite their growing exhaustion, the Men of the Ordeal took to singing as they marched, Zaudunyani hymns for the most part, but folk songs from faraway homes as well. Some were ribald and merry, others melancholy, but one song in particular, the "Beggar's Lament," became especially popular. In some cases groups more than a thousand strong would cry out, bemoaning everything from the boils on their rumps to the pox on their members, only to be answered by thousands more complaining of even more outrageous afflictions. One man in particular, a Galeoth Agmundrman named Shoss, became famous for the hilarity of his lyrics.
And so the Army of the Middle-North marched into the Horde's shadow laughing.
No such humour could be found in Kayûtas's evening councils. The Prince-Imperial always began by insisting he had no news of home, so preempting the inevitable parade of questions. His conferences with his Holy Father, he explained, were too rare and too brief to permit such questions—especially when the challenges they faced were so grievous.
The supply situation had become perilous, so much so that rationing had reduced the slaves who marched with the Ordeal to less than half the fare they needed to recoup their daily expenditures. Indeed, diseases of malnutrition were beginning to claim them in ever greater numbers; dozens were lost every day, either to death outright or to the straggling wastes behind them.
The presence of slaves, Kayûtas reminded his commanders, was but one of many concessions his Holy Father had made to appease the caste-nobility—them. Soon, he would demand they sacrifice in return. The Prince-Imperial bid them to recall the First Holy War and the infamous Slaughter of the Camp-followers.
"When the time comes, each will kill his own," he said. "Each. Those who fail to do so will be executed in their slave's stead. Remember, my brothers: cruelty is only injustice in the absence of Necessity. Compassion. Generosity. These are fast becoming gluttonous sins."
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