"Did he tell you?" Zsoronga asked. "Your little priest... Did he tell you what... what She wants?"
Sorweel turned to regard his friend with a wide and wary glare. He knew he could trust the man—with his life if need be—and this comforted him in a way he had never known. Zsoronga was a true boonsman. But he also knew that he could not trust his face, that he could not risk saying anything for the shadows the Anasûrimbor would glimpse within him.
"Yes," he replied, looking back to the Men of the Ordeal. "What is done is done."
When the Successor-Prince finally departed, Sorweel retreated from the setting sun into the gloom of his tent. He pulled the pouch from his belt. The muck had dried to ash about its edges. He brushed it away with trembling fingers, noticing for the first time the dizzying patterns burned into the age-old leather. Crescents. Crescents within crescents.
Broken circles, he decided, glimpsing the gold-thread circumfixes embroidered along the hem of his own tunic.
Broken circumfixes.
He tugged free the clip of chapped bronze that held its mouth closed. He already knew what it contained, for as King of Sakarpus, he was also High Keeper of the Hoard. Nevertheless, he tipped the pouch so that he might hold it in his callused palm: a sphere of ancient iron...
A Chorae. A holy Tear of God.
—|—
The Swayali enclave formed an encampment all its own within the greater camp. When the host set stake across rolling or broken pasture, the witches' tents always tattooed the hazy vista, an oval of shining ochre among the jumbled phalanxes of canvas. The Scions had sat and pondered the sight more than a few evenings, like every other company in the Army. Charampa, in particular, was given to dreaming aloud. The "Granary," he called it. Here his little brother was starving, and yet the Granary remained closed. Several times he had leapt to his feet to display the hook lifting his skirts, crying out for food to feed his little brother. And though everyone about Zsoronga's hearth laughed with crazed merriment, they also became exceedingly reluctant to encourage the Cingulati Prince. Charampa was far too fond of his little brother.
He was also the reason why none of the witches strayed from their enclave—save Anasûrimbor Serwa. As the days piled into months, as the memories of wives and lovers became more and more elusive, the famed Swayali witches, the Nuns, became a kind of narcotic. More than a few little brothers had been throttled for mere glimpse or rumour.
At first, Sorweel had no clue as to why he stalked the camp searching for the Granary. He had lain on his cot for watches, pinned by an exhaustion unlike any he had known, one that made slop of his centre, as if he were naught but a head and limbs sutured to a heap of entrails. He had stared at the canvas ceiling, glimpsing portents in water stains, feeling the prickle of Porsparian's continuous absence. And then he was up, answering to a restlessness he could not quite feel. And he was walking.
Initially he decided he sought out the Swayali because he needed to thank Anasûrimbor Serwa for saving him. But this rationale, for all its convenience, did not long survive its insincerity. The unkind fact was that Sorweel felt no gratitude. Of the many Three Seas peculiarities that Zsoronga called out for disgust and ridicule, none occasioned quite the same cutting vehemence as the witches. The Successor-Prince thought them worse than whores and certainly more accursed. "They make pits of their mouths," he said once, referring to the Tusk's ancient condemnation of prostitutes. But Sorweel's lack of gratitude had nothing to do with grudges against licentious women. Since the Sakarpi considered all sorcery anathema, the Swayali struck him as little more than a wicked anomaly. Yet one more Three Seas perversion.
No. He felt no gratitude because he no longer considered his life a gift.
Stars fogged the vault of Heaven in light. Clouds like wisps of tugged wool formed the illusion of a surface so that looking up seemed like gazing into waters of consummate clarity, an ocean of diamond emptiness. The ways of the camp were all but abandoned. Were it not for the odd voices and the moans of the ailing, he would have thought it emptied of Men. Maybe it was combination of quiet and cool air, or maybe it was the stench that soaked the edges of his every breath, but the place seemed ancient and haunted, and the shadows seemed to boil with unseen threats.
He found the Granary more by chance than by any unerring sense of direction. He slowed to a wary saunter when the sagging pyramids of its roofs rose into view. The tents were of the Ainoni parasol variety, with a single pole hoisting a square frame that formed the tasselled edges of the roof. They were pitched one against the other with their entrances turned inward so that their felt backs walled in the enclave. He had heard the tale of some Galeoth fool burning his fingers to stubs trying to slit a peephole through one of the greased panels. But who knew whether this rumour were true or something calculated precisely to prevent Galeoth fools from cutting peepholes. The Grandmistress of the Swayali was an Anasûrimbor, after all.
He followed the enclave's outer circuit, his ears pricked to voices he could not hear, his arm hairs tingling with the anxious expectation of sorcery. In his soul's eye, he saw the witches hanging above the oceanic heave of the Horde. For his life, he could not think of what to do next. Twin torches on poles illuminated the entrance, drawing shags of ochre from the otherwise blue tent walls. Two heavily armoured men stood between them, speaking in voices as muted as the torchlight was dim. They fell silent the instant they spied him.
They were both clean-shaven, Nansur traditionalists, but the insignia stamped into the plates of their hauberks were unfamiliar to him—no surprise there. The question was whether they would recognize him.
"I have come to see Anasûrimbor Serwa," he blurted in answer to their scowling gaze.
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 future, 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 Zeümi 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 fo
r 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 others 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.
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