It seemed an important question, but then the legends seemed littered with the confusion of heroes and the Gods that favoured them. Perhaps his hand simply was her hand…
He recoiled from the thought.
"May I beg one boon?"
A flicker of mild surprise. "Of course."
"Zsoronga… I would have him accompany me if I could."
Kayutas scowled, and several onlookers exchanged not-so-discreet whispers. For perhaps the first time, the Sakarpi King understood his friend's importance to the Anasurimbor. Of all the world's remaining nations, only Zeum posed a credible threat to the New Empire.
"You know that he conspires against us?" the Prince-Imperial said, switching to effortless Sakarpic. Suddenly the two of them stood alone in a room walled with strangers.
"I have my fears…" Sorweel began, lying smoothly. "But…"
"But what?"
"He no longer doubts the truth of your father's war. No one does."
The implication was as clear as it was surprising, for in all his life Sorweel had never counted his among devious souls. The first son of Nganka'kull wavered. To bring him into the Prince-Imperial's retinue could be the very thing his conversion required…
And that, Sorweel suddenly realized, was the Aspect-Emperor's goal: to have a believer become Satakhan.
"Granted," Kayutas said, switching to the dismissive air of men who scarce had time for accommodations. He made a two-fingered gesture to one of his scribes, who began fingering through sheaves of vellum.
"But I fear you have one last duty to discharge," the General said in Sheyic just as Sorweel glanced about for some cue that the audience had ended. "A mortal one."
The omnipresent smell of rot seemed to take on a sinister tang.
"My arm is your arm, Lord General."
This reply occasioned a heartbeat of scrutiny.
"The Great Ordeal has all but exhausted its supplies. We starve, Sorweel. We have too many mouths and too little food. The time has come to put certain mouths to the knife…"
Sorweel swallowed against a sudden pang in his breast.
"What are you saying?"
"You must put down your slave, Porsparian, in accordance with my father's edict."
"I must what?" he asked blinking. So there was a joke after all.
"You must kill your slave before sunrise tomorrow, or your life will be forfeit," Kayutas said, speaking in a tone as much directed to the assembled caste-nobles as to the Believer-King standing before him. Even heroes, he was saying, must answer to our Holy Aspect-Emperor.
"Do you understand?"
"Yes," Sorweel replied, speaking with a determination utterly at odds with the tumult that was his soul.
He understood. He was alone, a captive in the host of his enemy.
He would do whatever… kill whomever…
"Chosen by the Gods…"
Anything to see the Aspect-Emperor dead and his father avenged.
Sorweel returned to his tent alone, his back still warm for all the slapping, his ears still hot with the chorus of overwrought acclaim. Porsparian stood before the entrance, forlorn and emaciated and as motionless as a sentinel. The sight fairly winded the young King.
"Follow me," he told the man, his gaze scratched with incredulity. The old Shigeki slave regarded him with a momentary squint, then without worry-or even curiosity-he struck out ahead of his master, leading him into the fields of rotting Sranc. Sorweel could only gape at the sight: a little nut-brown man, walking stooped, his limbs bowed as if bent to the bundle of his many years, picking his way across the packed dead.
So the slave led the King, and perhaps this was how it should have been, given the way Sorweel felt himself dwindle with every step. He could scarce believe what he was about to do… Execution. When he forced himself to confront the prospect, his body and soul rebelled the way he had once feared they would in the thick of battle. The lightness of the hands. The starlings battling in his gut, loosening his bowel. The wires that hooked his head and shoulders into a pose just shy of a cringe. The incessant murmur of dread…
Men often find themselves stranded in circumstance, stumbling toward goals not of their making, surrounded by absurdities they can scarce believe. They assume the little continuities that characterize their moments will carry them through their entire lives. They forget the volatility of the whole, the way tribes and nations trip like drunks through history. They forget that Fate is a whore.
Porsparian hobbled ahead, picking a path through the carapace of dead. Sorweel quickly lost sight of the camp behind the blood-slicked mounds. When he looked out, death and far-flung rot were all he could see. Sranc. When he glimpsed them in fragments-a face nestled in the crook of an arm, a hand hanging from a raised wrist-they almost seemed human. When he gazed across them en masse, they seemed the issue of a drained sea. As bad as it had been in the camp, the reek welled palpable from the sweating tangle, to the point where coughing and gagging became one and the same, until smell became a taste that seemed to hang against the skin-an odour that could be licked. Ravens made summits of skulls, jumped from crown to crown spearing eye sockets. Vultures hunched and squabbled over individual spoils even though all was carrion. The whine of flies was multiplied until it became a singular hum.
Porsparian walked and he numbly followed, at times skidding across offal or wincing at the crack of ribbed hollows beneath his boots. He alternately found himself studying the Shigeki slave, his shoulders crooked about hard huffing breaths, and avoiding all sight of him. He knew now that he had deceived himself, that he had failed to press the enigmatic man for answers out of fear, and not because the intricacies of Sheyic defeated him. He had reacted, not as a man, but as a little boy, embracing the childish instinct to skulk and to avoid, to besiege fact with cowardly pretense. All this time, they could not speak and so were strangers, each perhaps as frightful to the other. And now, when he could finally ask, finally discover what madness the Dread Mother had prepared for him, he had to kill the little… priest, Zsoronga had called him.
His slave, Porsparian.
Sorweel paused, suddenly understanding Zsoronga's cryptic tone when he had asked him about Obotegwa. He had been thinking of the Aspect-Emperor's edict, the very edict behind the crime Sorweel was about to commit. If he himself balked at the prospect of murdering a terrifying stranger, what would it be like for Zsoronga to put down a beloved childhood companion-a surrogate father, even? Perhaps it was for the best that the Istyuli swallow the wise old man whole, that Obotegwa stumble into a small pile of human rubble-cloth and scattered bones-marking nothing.
Sorweel found himself blinking at the slave's form labouring through carrion ravines.
"Porsparian…" he called, coughing against the stench.
The old man ignored him. A clutch of ravens cried out in his stead, their caws like a small army of files scraping edges of tin.
"Porsparian, stop!"
"Not there yet!" the man hacked over his shoulder.
"Not where?" Sorweel cried, hastening after the agile slave. Bones popped in stiffening meat. Arrow shafts cracked. What was the man doing? Was this his manner of fleeing?
"Porsparian… Look. I'm not going kill you."
"What happens to me is not important," the Shigeki wheezed. Sorweel suffered dim memories of his grandfather in his final shameful days, how he had taken to wilful and insensible acts, if only to answer some prideful instinct to do…
"Porsparian…" he said, at last seizing the man's bony shoulder. He was going to tell the man that he could run, that he was free to risk the open plains, perhaps trust in the Goddess to deliver him, but instead he released the man, shocked by the immediacy of the bones beneath his tunic, by the sheer ease he had yanked him about, as if the man were naught but a doll, pig-skin wrapped about desert-dry wood.
When had he last eaten?
Cursing in some harsh tongue, the slave resumed his senseless trek, and Sorweel stood, absorbing the realization that P
orsparian would not survive on the plains, that to set him free was simply to condemn him to a slower, far more miserable demise…
That anything short of execution would be an act of cowardice.
A moment of madness ensued, one which Sorweel would remember for the rest of his life. He choked on a scream that was a laugh that was a sob that was a father's soothing whisper. A kind of macabre intensity bubbled up out of his surroundings, an inversion of seeing, so that the jutting spears and the innumerable arrow shafts that stubbled the summits of dead pinned and staked his skin. The foggy glare of hundreds from limb-thatched burrows, the tongues like hanging snails, the entrails spilling from shells of armour, drying into papyrus…
She is positioning you…
How?
As mad as it sounds, I really have come to save Mankind…
What?
Fuh-Fuh-Father!
And then he saw it… standing with the grace and proportion of an Ainoni vase, regarding him, the knife of its long beak folded against its neck. A stork, perched upon purpling dead as though upon a promontory of high stone, its snowy edges framed by bleached sky.
And he was racing after the diminutive slave, tripping, skidding.
"What's going on?" he cried, seizing the man. "You will tell me!"
The rutted face betrayed no surprise, no anger or fear whatsoever.
"Pollution has seized the hearts of Men," the slave rasped. "The Mother prepares our cleansing."
The slave raised warm fingers to Sorweel's wrists, gently tugged his hands from his shoulders.
"And all thi-?"
"Is deception! Deception! "
Sorweel stumbled, so placid had Porsparian seemed, and such was the fury of his barked reply.
"So-so his war…" the Sakarpi King stammered.
"He is a demon who wears men the way we don clothes!"
"But his war…" He scraped his gaze across the tossed and tangled carcasses about them. "It is real…"
Porsparian snorted.
"All is false. And all who follow him are damned!"
"But his war… Porsparian! Look around you! Look around you and tell me his war is not real!"
"What? Because he has sent his followers against the Sranc? The world is filled with Sranc!"
"And what of the Consult Legion… the Sranc who killed my comrades?"
"Lies! Lies!"
"How can you know?"
"I know nothing. I speak!"
And with that he resumed his bandy march into the dead.
The slave picked his way across a swale of blasted and blackened Sranc and into a region of sorcerous destruction. In his soul's eye, the young King could see the Swayali witch hanging a hard stone's throw above, a slender beauty aglow in the curlicue bloom of her billows, dispensing lines and sheets of cutting light. He shook his head at the vision…
"Porsparian!"
The little man ignored him, though he did slow his pace. He peered downward as he walked, looking this way and that, as if searching for a lost kellic.
"Tell me!" Sorweel called out, his wonder giving way to irritation. "Tell me what She wants!"
"A mighty lord died here…" he heard the man mutter.
"Yatwer!" the Sakarpi King cried, throwing the name like a cold and heavy stone from his breast. "What does She want of me?"
"Here…" The old man's voice was thick with a kind of unsavoury relish. "Beneath the skinnies."
Sorweel stood dumbfounded, watching the mad fool heave at the burnt Sranc thatched beneath his feet. "The earth…" he grunted, tossing aside an arm and attached shoulder. "Must… uncover…"
The Sakarpi King gazed witless. When they had set out, he could scarce look at Porsparian without flinching from the madness of what he had to do. But the Shigeki slave seemed to care not in the least, even though he had to know he was doomed. Not in the least! Sorweel had followed him out here into carrion to cut his throat, and the man acted as if this were but a trifling compared to what he…
Cold flushed through and about the young man. He found himself casting wild looks across the surrounding dead, as if he were a murderer suddenly unsure of the secrecy of his crime.
The Goddess.
The King bent his back and joined the slave in his grisly labour.
The forms were uniformly burned; many of them possessed cauterized slices-amputations. He cleared two that had lost their legs, one at the hips, the other high on the thigh, as if they had been felled side by side, reaved as if by a single scythe. Where those on the top had been mostly scorched to husks, those below remained primarily raw and wet. Their eyes glared out with an aimless, smoky curiosity. Not knowing what the man intended, Sorweel simply grabbed the carcasses adjacent to those his slave wrenched into sunlight. He cast hooded looks over his shoulders. He found himself troubled by the weight of the creatures, the way their scrawniness belied a brute density. The corpses became colder as the toil continued.
They found the earth sodden with filth-puddled. They gasped for their effort, gagged for the stench they had unleashed. Sorweel watched Porsparian fall to his knees in the heart of the muck oval they had cleared. A grave dug from the dead.
He watched him raise and kiss the polluted earth…
The wind tousled the King's lengthening hair, tumbled across all visible creation, troubling the emanations. The flies hummed undisturbed. Ravens punctuated the distance with random cries.
He watched his slave scallop muck clear, glimpsed a skull unearthed beneath the shadow of his hands. Peering, he willed himself to breathe through his horror. He watched the man gather putrid mud, then mould a face about the bone, all the while murmuring prayers in some harsh and exotic tongue. Then he watched as he skinned a Sranc face with terrifying economy, watched him pad the result across the earthen face he had prepared for it. The King experienced something outside horror or exaltation.
He watched his slave stroke and caress the slick surfaces: forehead, brow, lip, cheek. He watched and he listened, until the rasp that was the slave's prayer became a drifting smoke that obscured all other sound.
He watched life-impossible life-rise into the inhuman skin.
He watched Yatwer's eyes snap open.
He heard the groan of the earth.
– | The Goddess smiles…
The old man crouches over her, frozen like a man caught in the commission of some obscenity. Something shivers through the hideous earth. Scabrous arms burst from the soil to either side… Clotted bones. Knotted worms.
The slave stumbles back, staggers into the clutch of the horrified King.
They watch the Goddess exhume her own corpse. She trowels away muck and viscous slop, reveals the ivory comb of her ribs. She reaches into her muddy abdomen, excavates her cadaverous womb…
The very ground croaks and groans beneath them, the complaint of some cosmological hinge-existence pried too far from its essential frame.
She draws a pouch from the pit below her stomach, raises it pinched in fingers of filth and bone. She smiles. Tears of blood stream from her earthen eyes. The watching men gasp for the sorrow of a mother's endless Giving…
So many. So many children born…
So many taken.
The King trips to his knees. He crawls forward to receive her Gift, crawls with the shame of an inconstant son. He snatches the pouch as if from a leper. It lies stiff and cold in his fingers, like a dead man's tongue. He scarcely sees it for his Mother's dirt glare. He looks back to the slave, who sobs for joy and horror… He turns back to his Goddess…
But She is no more, nothing but a grotesque face, a monstrosity, moulded above an overturned grave.
"What just happened?" the King cries to the slave. "What just happened?"
The slave says nothing. He climbs to his feet, hobbles from the macabre clearing back into the dead with an invalid's gait. He stumbles up a slope of pitched carcasses. He pauses before a spear that juts from the buzzing summit.
The King calls out to him, beseeching…
The slave places his chin upon the spear point, lifts his hands high in heavenly supplication.
"What the Mother gives…" he cries out to the King. "You must take!"
He smiles fleetingly, as if regretting things both inevitable and criminal. Then Porsparian nesh Varalti drops. He never reaches his knees. He hangs, rather, from the inside crown of his skull, then slowly tips to his side. He seems to vanish among the strewn forms.
One more dead skinny.
The King of Sakarpus staggered back alone, trudging across mad ways of the dead. Zsoronga was waiting for him when he returned. Neither man had any words to speak, so they simply sat side by side in the dust, staring into their hands.
Zsoronga was first to break their fast of silence. He clasped his friend's shoulder and said, "Things done are done."
Sorweel did not reply. Each of them gazed in his own absent direction, like dogs leashed to the shade. They watched the endless to and fro of warlike men across and between the tents. The Army of the Middle-North. They watched the dust-devils spinning in and out of faint existence between the innumerable pennants and banners.
"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 Anasurimbor 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…
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