For despite the toll the Men of the Ordeal had exacted, the Horde had not been defeated. It had reeled back, diminished, grievously wounded, too quick and too amorphous to be run down. Twice he and Zsoronga were called on to deliver missives to the forward pickets—once to Anasûrimbor Moënghus himself. The two of them had galloped ahead with abandon, relieved to be free of the dust and cramp, and wary of the tawny haze that rimmed the horizon before them. Solitary, riding hard across the desolate plain, they felt a peculiar freedom, knowing that Sranc fenced the north in unseen multitudes. Zsoronga told him about a cousin of his who captained a war galley, how he said he loved—and hated—nothing more than sailing in the shadow of an ocean tempest. "Only sailors," the Successor-Prince explained, "know where they stand in their God's favour."
The Schools had been fully mobilized by this time, so as the Horde's dust steamed mountainous above them, they glimpsed sheets of light, not high among the slow swirling veils, but low, near the darkening base—flickers of brilliance through funereal shrouds. They would crane their heads, draw their gaze from the high piling summits, floating bright beneath the sun, to the false night of the foundations, and the dread scale would humble and mortify them. Schools. Nations. Races both foul and illumined. And they understood that even kings and princes counted for nothing when thrown upon the balance with such things.
They would ride dumbstruck, until the first of the pickets became visible, the companies marked by lighter tassels of dust beneath the sky-spanning mark of the Horde. Finding Moënghus—who by this time was notorious for the daring of his exploits—forced them to ride perilously deep, until the sun became little more than a pale smear, and the haunting call of the Horde swelled into a deafening roar.
"Tell me!" the wild-eyed Prince-Imperial cried above the howl, gesturing with his clotted sword to the sunless world about them. "What do infidel eyes see when they look upon my father's foe?"
"Hubris!" Zsoronga called before Sorweel could restrain him. "Mad misadventure!"
"Bah!" Moënghus shouted laughing. "This, my friends! This is where Hell concedes Earth to Heaven! Most Men grovel because their fathers grovelled. But you! Simply for seeing this, you will know why you pray!"
And beyond the Prince-Imperial, Sorweel saw them, the Nuns, striding above obscurities, wracking the earth beneath them. A necklace of shining, warring beads, cast thin across the trackless miles, scattering the Sranc before them.
Day in and day out, burning the earth to glass.
And then there was the greatest witch of all, Anasûrimbor Serwa, who had come to seem a miracle of beauty amid the sweat and Mannish squalor of the march. She rode a glossy brown, perched with one knee drawn high on a Nilnameshi side-saddle, her flaxen hair folded about the perfection of her face, her body slender, almost waifish beneath the simple gowns she wore when not freighted with her billows. She never spoke to Sorweel even though she spent much of her time at her brother's side. She did not so much as look at him, though he could never shake the impression that out of all the shadows that crowded her periphery, she had picked him out for special scrutiny. He was not the only one bewitched by her beauty. He sometimes spent more time watching the others steal glances in her direction than watching her himself. But he did not worship her the way the Zaudunyani did. He did not see her as the daughter of a god. Though he was loathe to admit as much, he feared the yearning—and at times, the raw lust—she inspired in him. And so, as is the wont of men, he often found himself resenting, even hating her.
The crazed fact was that he needed to hate her. If he were narindari, a kind of divine executioner chosen by the Hundred to deliver the world from the Aspect-Emperor, then what struck him as divine in his enemies had to be demonic—had to be, otherwise he would be the one dancing from a demon's strings. A Narindar proper—a servant of Ajokli, the evil Four-Horned Brother.
When he was a child, Good and Evil had always simplified a world that was unruly and disordered otherwise. Now it vexed him to the point of heartbreak, the treachery of sorting the diabolical and the divine. Some nights he would lie sleepless, trying to will Serwa evil, trying to rub pollution into the image of her beauty. But as always the memories of her carrying him across heaving fields of Sranc would rise into his soul's eye, and with it the reeling sense of security and numbing gratitude.
And he would think of the murderous intent he concealed behind his mudded cheeks and of the Chorae he bore hidden in the ancient pouch bound to his hip, and he would despair.
Sometimes, during the more sombre meals he and Zsoronga shared together, he dared voice his more troubling questions, and the two would set aside their bluster and honestly consider all they had seen.
"Golgotterath is not a myth," Sorweel ventured one night. "The Great Ordeal marches against a real foe, and that foe is evil. We have seen him with our own eyes!"
"But what does that mean?" Zsoronga replied. "Wickedness is forever warring against wickedness—you should read the annals of my people, Horse-King!"
"Yes, but only when they covet the same things... What could the Aspect-Emperor want with these wastes?"
"For hatred's sake, as well. For hatred's sake."
Sorweel wanted to ask what could inspire such hatred, but he conceded the argument, for he already knew what the Successor-Prince's would say, his argument of final resort, the one that typically doomed Sorweel to watches of cringing sleeplessness.
"But what about the Hundred? Why would the Goddess raise you as a knife?"
Unless the Aspect-Emperor were a demon.
It made him feel a worm sometimes, a thing soft and blind and helpless. He would raise his face to the sky, and it would seem he could actually feel the great gears of the Dread Mother's design, churning the perpetual dust on the horizon, clacking inscrutable through the voices of innumerable men. He would feel himself carried on the arc of her epic intent, and he would feel a worm...
Until he remembered his father.
"Father—Father! My bones are your bones!"
Sorweel had always flinched from thoughts of that final day before Sakarpus fell. For so long, recollecting those events had seemed like fumbling spines of glass with waterlogged fingers. But more and more he found himself returning to his memories, surprised to find all the cutting edges dulled. He wondered at the arrival of the stork in the moments before the Inrithi assault—at the way it had singled out his father. He wondered that his father had sent him away, and so saved his life, almost immediately after.
He wondered if the Goddess had chosen him even then.
But most of all he pondered their last moment alone together, before they had climbed to man the walls, when they had stood father and son warming themselves over glowering coals.
"There are many fools, Sorwa, men who conceive hearts in simple terms, absolute terms. They are insensible to the war within, so they scoff at it, they puff out their chests and they pretend. When fear and despair overcome them, as they must overcome us all, they have not the wind to think... and so they break."
King Harweel had known—even then. His father had known his city and his son were doomed, and he had wanted his son, at least, to understand that fear and cowardice were inevitabilities. Kayûtas had said it himself: sense was the plaything of passion. The night of the Ten-Yoke Legion, Zsoronga had fled when Sorweel called because stopping seemed the height of madness. He simply did what was sensible, and so found himself standing in the long shadow of his friend's bravery.
But Sorweel had stopped on that darkling plain. Against all instinct and reason, he had cast his life across the altar of necessity.
"...they have not the wind to think..."
All this time, he had mourned his manhood, had made a flag of his humiliation. All this time he had confused his lack of certainty with the lack of strength and honour. But he was strong—he knew that now. Knowing his ignorance simply made his strength that much more canny.
"...and so they break."
As ever, the world was a la
byrinth. And his was a complicated courage.
"Are you such a fool, Sorwa?"
No, Father.
—|—
The Men of the Ordeal marched, answering to the toll of the Interval day in and day out, until at long last they had chased the arid emptiness to its dregs. Despite its greatness the Istyuli was not inexhaustible.
For the first time they awoke to horizons different from those they had greeted the previous morn. The ground was just as gutted by the retreating Horde, and the distances were just as devoid of game or any other kind of forage, but the earth bent to a different sensibility. The rolls became deeper, the summits became more pinched, almost as if the hosts crossed the transitions wrought by age, from the smooth swales of youth to the creases of middle age. Bare rock scraped clear the turf with ever-greater regularity. And the tepid rivers, which had snaked brown and lazy, quickened into white, carving ever-deeper ravines.
The Army of the West, the host commanded by the mercurial King Coithus Saubon, came to the ruins of Suönirsi, a trading entrepot once famed as a link between the High Norsirai of Kûniüri and the White Norsirai of Akksersia. The Men of the Ordeal were astounded. After so many months of shambling waste, they walked the buried ways of a different, human age, struck by how time makes swamps of scabrous earth. They wondered at the contradiction of ruins, the way some structures are smashed to dust while others are granted the immortality of geological formations. For the first time they could connect the tales and rumours that stirred them to take up the Circumfix with the stumped earth beneath their feet, and they would stare in their weary, shuffling thousands, the tragedy of lost ages reflected in their eyes.
The land had lost its anonymity. Henceforth, they knew, the earth, for all its desolation, would carry the stamp of long-dead intentions. Where the High Istyuli had been barren, a land impervious to the generations who had once ranged across it, its northwestern frontiers were soaked in human history. Ruins teethed the heights, mounded the shallow valleys. The learned told tales of Sheneor, the least of the three nations divided between the sons of the first ancient Anasûrimbor King, Nanor-Ukkerja I. Names were debated by firelight. Names were invoked by the Judges in their sermons. Names were called out in curses and in prayers. Everywhere the Men of the Ordeal looked, they glimpsed ghosts of ancient meaning, the apparitions of ancestors, raising arms, leaning beneath burdens. If they could decode the land, it seemed, see it with ancient eyes, they could reclaim it in the name of Men.
It passed through them as a shiver, the coincidence of souls antique and new.
Though hunger had become a crisis, the numbers who succumbed to sickness declined. The rivers were simply too swift to hold the pollution of the retreating Horde, and in some cases, they fairly teemed with fish. Nets borne all the way from Cironj and Nron and Cingulat were cast across the narrows, and the issue was heaved onto the crowded shores: pike, bass, pickerel, and others. Men ate them raw, such was their hunger. But it was never enough. No matter how much they slowed their progress to throw their nets, they could do no more than prolong the host's starvation.
Meanwhile the Horde withdrew and congregated.
Day and night, the Schools assailed the gathering masses, striding into earthbound clouds of grey and ochre, burning and blasting the screeching shadows that fled beneath them. The Scarlet Spires strode alone through the shrouds with their Dragonheads, scourging the wasted earth beneath. The Vokalati worked with the cunning of wolves, driving swathes of the creatures into traps of golden flame. And the Mandati and the Swayali arrayed themselves in lines miles long, like threads beaded with stars, wracking the earth with combs of blinding Gnostic light.
The massacre was great, but never great enough. For all their feral simplicity, the Sranc possessed an instinctive cunning. They could hear the Schoolmen sing through the world-wringing roar, the unearthly rattle of sorcerous meaning, and so they scattered, ran with speed of fire-maddened horses, scooping up dust both to obscure their foe's vision and to blunt their incandescent dispensations.
The Culling, the Men riding the pickets came to call it. Every evening knights returned with stories of arcane violence glimpsed from afar, and the Men of the Ordeal wondered and rejoiced.
The Imperial Mathematicians tallied numbers, estimates of slain versus the inexorable accumulation of more and more clans, but they knew only that it was never enough, no matter how devious the tactics or how powerful the sorceries. The Horde grew and bloated, an assembly of shrieking mobs that encompassed more and more of the horizon—until all the North screamed.
The only tally they knew with certainty was the number of Schoolmen lost.
The first sorcerer to go missing, a Scarlet Schoolman named Irsalfus, had been dismissed as a fluke. The prevailing assumption was that the Sranc, even if they had somehow managed to keep Chorae through the wild tide of generations, would have no clue as to their purpose. After the fifth Schoolman was lost they realized they were mistaken. Either certain clans had managed to preserve the artefacts (along with some understanding of their use), or, what was more likely, the Consult had managed to infiltrate the Horde. Perhaps they had scattered contingents of Ursranc throughout the Sranc host. Or perhaps they had simply spread word of the Chorae and how they could be used.
The possibility occasioned no small amount of debate in the Aspect-Emperor's councils. Heramari Iyokus, the sightless Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, argued that the Schools should abandon the Culling, retire from the field. "Otherwise," he said, "we shall be halved before we reach the Gates of Golgotterath."
But Nurbanu Soter, the King-Regent of High Ainon, scoffed, saying the Great Ordeal would scarce survive to reach the Neleost Sea, let alone Golgotterath, unless the Schoolmen continued. "How many battles?" he cried to the Blind Grandmaster. "How many contests such as the last can we endure? Two? Four? Eight? For that is the real question." What made Culling so essential, the Holy Veteran argued, was the degree to which it slowed the Horde's cycle of retreat, starvation, and assault. To abandon it altogether would be to invite more skirmishes with disaster. "With each battle we toss the number-sticks," the old man said, his voice indomitable, his eyes as dark and cruel as they had been during the First Holy War. "Should we risk all for a few dozen wizard-skins?"
Tempers flared, a rarity in the presence of the Anasûrimbor, with the Schoolmen generally arguing against, and the caste-nobility generally arguing for, the Culling. In the end, the Aspect-Emperor declared the Culling would continue, but with the Schoolmen deployed in tandems to minimize losses. With their billows, he explained, the odds were good that any one Chorae strike could be survived, so long as someone uninjured could carry the one struck away from the Horde. "In all things we must conserve and we must sacrifice," he admonished. "We must be acrobats and rope-walkers, both in intellect and in heart. Far worse dilemmas confront us, my brothers. Far more dreadful decisions."
And so the Horde reeled back, shrank from the pricks of a thousand lights. And the Four Armies marched into the desolation that was its wake, across lands painted with the horror and glory of the Holy Sagas.
Into the gloom of the Ancient North.
—|—
King Nersei Proyas would much rather discuss arms, the dilemmas of the field, and the strategies to overcome them. Instead, his Lord-and-God turned to him and asked, "When you look into yourself, when you look into your soul, how much do you see?"
"I see... I see what I see."
The Exalt-General had spent many sleepless watches on his cot, pondering their discussions while listening to the camp and its dwindling murmur. Recollections from his long years of service and devotion would cycle through his soul's eye, a lifetime of war and ultimatum, and the worrisome sense that something had changed, that these talks were utterly unprecedented both in tenor and content, would grow ever more leaden with dread certainty. As much as he would marvel at the privilege—to sit and speak plain truth with a living prophet!—he would fear the implications more.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus waged more than one war, he had come to realize. One far beyond the meagre intellects of his followers. One fought across fields of maddening abstraction...
"But you do see. I mean, you do possess an inner eye."
"I suppose..."
The Aspect-Emperor smiled, rubbed his bearded chin like a carpenter assessing problematic wood. He wore the same plain white gown he always wore—the one Proyas imagined he slept in. The Ainoni silk was so fine as to be crushed into a thousand wrinkles at his every joint, creases that resembled the forking of twigs in the dim light of the octagonal hearth.
Proyas sat freighted as always in his Imperial armour, his golden cuirass biting his hips, his blue cloak wrapped about his waist in the ceremonial fashion.
"What if some people lacked that eye?" Kellhus asked. "What if some people could see nothing more than the outline of their passions, let alone the origins of those scribbles? What if most people were blind to themselves? Would they know as much?"
Proyas stared into the luminous gauze of the fire, rubbed his cheeks against the memory of its sorcerous bite. People insensible to their own souls... It seemed he had known many such men over the course of his life, when he considered it. Many such fools.
"No..." he said meditatively. "They would think they see everything there is to be seen."
Kellhus smiled in affirmation. "And why's that?"
"Because they know nothing different," Proyas replied, daring his sovereign's gaze. "You need to glimpse more to know that you see less."
Kellhus raised a wooden decanter to refill Proyas's dwindling bowl of anpoi. "Very good," he said as he poured. "So you understand the difference between you and me."
"I do?"
"Where you are blind," his Lord-and-God said, "I can see."
Proyas paused in hesitation, drank deep from his bowl. The tang of nectar, the bite of liquor. At a time when clear water had become a luxury, sipping anpoi seemed an almost obscene extravagance. But then everything had the taste of miracles in this room.
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