He watched his friend take a knife to the old man’s wrists.
He watched the lantern oil of his life leak into the earth, until the guttering flame that was Obotegwa shined no more. He stared at the inanimate body, wondered that it could seem as dry as the earth.
Zsoronga cried out as if freed of some long-suffering obligation to remain strong. He wept with outrage and shame and sorrow. Sorweel embraced him, felt the anguish kick through his powerful frame.
Afterward, when night had drawn its chill shroud over the world beyond their tent, Zsoronga told a story about how, in his eighth summer, he had come, for no reason he could fathom, to covet his older cousin’s Battle-Sash—so much so he actually crept into his quarters and stole it. “Things glitter in the eyes of a child,” he said, speaking with the blank manner of the bereaved. “They shine, more than is seemly …”
Thinking himself clever, he had taken care to hide the thing in Obotegwa’s annex to his room—in his matins satchel. Of course, giving the ceremonial importance of the Sash, a hue and cry was raised the instant it was discovered missing. By some stroke of disastrous fortune, it was found among Obotegwa’s effects shortly after, and the Obligate was seized.
“Of course they knew I was the culprit,” Zsoronga explained, staring down at his thieving palms. “This is an old trick among my people. A way to peel past the bark, as they say. Someone else is accused of your crime, and unless you confess, you’re forced to witness their punishment …”
Seized by the terror and shame that so often makes puppets of children, Zsoronga had said nothing. Even as Obotegwa was whipped, he said nothing—and to his everlasting shame, the Obligate said nothing as well. “Imagine … the whole of the Inner Court, watching him be whipped and knowing full well that I was the one!”
So he did what most children do when cornered by some fact of failure or weakness: he made believe. He told himself that Obotegwa had stolen the Sash, out of spite, out of fascination—who knew what moved lesser souls? “I was a child!” Zsoronga cried, his voice pinched eight summers short.
One day passed. Two. Three. And still he said nothing. The whole world seemed bent to the warp of his fear. His father ceased speaking to him. His mother continually blinked tears. And so the farce continued. At some level, he knew that the world knew, but the stubbornness would not relent. Only Obotegwa treated him precisely as before. Only Obotegwa, the one bearing his welts, played along.
Then his father summoned him and Obotegwa to his apartments. The Satakhan was furious, to the point of kicking over braziers and spilling fiery coals across the floor. But Obotegwa, true to character, remained amiable and calm.
“He assured Father that I felt shame,” the Successor-Prince recalled with a vacant stare. “He bid him recall my eyes and take heart in the pain he had seen there. Given this, he said, my silence should be cause for pride, for it is the curse of rulers to bear the burden of shameful secrets. ‘Only weak rulers confess weakness,’ he said. ‘Only wise rulers bear the full burden of their crimes. Take heart knowing your son is both strong and wise …’”
Zsoronga hung upon these words for a time. He glanced at the shadowy corpse at their feet, sat blinking at the impossibility. And Sorweel knew precisely what he felt, the way you lose so much more than simply another voice and gaze from an otherwise crowded life. He knew that many things in Zsoronga’s life had some history peculiar to him and Obotegwa alone—that they had shared a world between them, a world that was gone.
“And what do you think?” Sorweel dared ask.
“That I was foolish and weak,” Zsoronga said.
They spoke of Obotegwa long into the night, and it seemed indistinguishable from speaking about life. They said things wise and foolish by turns, as young, intelligent men are prone. And at last, when weariness and grief overcame them, Zsoronga told the Sakarpi King how Obotegwa had insisted that he befriend Sorweel, how the old Obligate had always believed he would surprise them all. And then the Successor-Prince told him how, on the morn, he would add the name Harweel to his ancestor list.
“A brother!” the Successor-Prince whispered with startling violence. “Sakarpus has a brother in Zeüm!”
They slept with the beloved dead, as was the custom in High Holy Zeüm. Their breathing pulled deep with rhythmic life, a garland about the breathless.
They awoke before the Interval, buried Obotegwa without marker on the grey, desolate plain.
Sorweel and Zsoronga hung about the edges of the General’s retinue, witless for the lack of sleep and the expenditure of passion. The sun had climbed past the precincts of noon, drawing the shadows of things to the east. The line of the land, which for so long reached out in a monotonous crescent before them, had been broken and multiplied. Low knolls rose against low ridges. Ravines rutted mounded distances. Gravel spilled from wandering defilades. The Army of the Middle-North mobbed the horizon immediately behind them, its innumerable pennants little more than shadows lolling through the steaming dust. They rode as they always did at this time of day, their brows angled away from the sun’s glare, their thoughts wandering on the slack leash of midday boredom.
Sorweel was the first to glimpse the speck hanging low over the western horizon. He had fallen into the habit of reading the world as much as watching it, so he said nothing, convinced he witnessed some kind of sign. Was it another stork come to communicate the inexplicable?
He was quickly disabused of this conceit. The speck, whatever it was, hung in the faraway air more like a bumblebee than a bird, like something too cumbersome to fly …
He peered, squinted as much out of disbelief as against the high sun. He saw black horses—a team of four. He saw wheels …
A chariot, he realized. A flying chariot.
For a time he simply watched stupefied, rocking in rhythm to his mount’s dogged trot.
A chorus of alarums cracked the air. The General’s Pillarian escort leapt into formation about their flanks, their armour and tunics shining green and gold. The Nuns who accompanied Serwa cried out in arcane unison, let out their billows as they strode glimmering into the sky.
The sorcerous chariot rode a low arc over the churned landscape. Sunlight flashed across panels laden with graven images. Sorweel saw three pale faces swaying above the gilded rail—one of them shouting light.
Kayûtas, for his part, betrayed no surprise or urgency whatsoever. “Silence!” he cried to those in his immediate circle. “Decorum!” Then, without a word of explanation, he tore off, galloping on a long plume of dust.
The witches hung motionless in the air, their billows winding and waving about them.
The retinue, which typically rode in a loose mass, flattened into a crescent as the officers and caste-nobles jostled for vantages. Sorweel and Zsoronga watched from the centre of the press. The sky-chariot banked toward the Prince-Imperial and swung to earth. The hooves of the blacks bit hard into the denuded turf, and wings of dust and gravel sprawled about their glossy flanks. Golden wheels gleamed about spokes spun into invisibility. The centre figure leaned back, pulling hard on the reins.
Standing in his stirrups, Kayûtas raced out to meet them, hailed them with a raised arm.
The three strangers turned toward him in unison.
“They’re not human,” Zsoronga said. His tone was ragged, and not for exhaustion. He sounded like a man who had had his fill of miraculous things. Like a man straining to believe.
The Kidruhil General reined his pony to a dusty halt, exchanged what seemed cryptic greetings. Nothing could be heard on the arid wind. Then, with scarce a breath expended, he wheeled his mount about and began trotting back toward his astonished command. The sky-chariot lurched into motion behind him, trundling across the earth …
And for some reason, of all the awe-inspiring sights Sorweel had seen and would see, none would be so arresting as the sight of the gilded chariot wheeling back into open sky. He understood his friend’s beseeching tone, for it had made a beehive of his own breast as
well.
Nonmen.
So many miracles. All of them speaking for his enemy’s cause.
For reasons he could scarce fathom, the Exalt-General found himself pondering the siege and fall of Shimeh—the final night of the First Holy War—as he walked the short distance from his pavilion to the black silhouette of the Umbilicus. Fleeing the streets of the Holy City, he had climbed onto the pediment of an ancient fullery, where he had watched his Holy Aspect-Emperor battle the last of the heathen Cishaurim. There had been five of them, Primaries, mightier, despite the crudity of their art, than the most accomplished Schoolmen. Five hellish figures floating high above the burning city, their eyes gouged so they might see the Water-that-was-Light—and Anasûrimbor Kellhus had slain them all.
Such was the power of the man he had come to worship. Such was the might. So how had his soul let slip the ardour of his faith? Why had hope and inflexible determination become foreboding and gnawing worry?
The Men of the Ordeal hailed him as they always did when he walked the interior ways of the camp, but for once he did not return their salutations. He fairly knocked over Lord Couras Nantilla, the General of the Cengemi, at the entryway to the Umbilicus, such was the depth of his walking reverie. He squeezed the man’s shoulder in lieu of an apology.
At long last the plains had yielded. At long last the Great Ordeal, the sum of his lifelong hope and toil, trod the fabled lands named in the Holy Sagas. At long last they marched into the shadow of foul Golgotterath—Golgotterath!
For all the perils facing them, for all the privations, this should be a time of jubilation. For who, in all the world, could withstand the might of Anasûrimbor Kellhus?
No one.
Not even the dread Consult of Mog-Pharau.
So why did his heart pound air into his veins?
He resolved to make this his question. He resolved to set aside his pride, and to reveal the full extent of his misgivings …
To ask his Prophet how he could doubt his Prophet.
But for once the Aspect-Emperor was not alone in his chamber. He stood arms out while two body-slaves attended to him, cinching and fussing robes freighted with ceremonial splendour: the costume of a Ketyai warrior-king from Far Antiquity. He wore a full-length gown whose hems had been bound into his ankle-wraps. Golden vambraces encased his forearms and matching greaves his shins. Opposing Kyranean Lions gleamed across his breast-plate. With his stature and haloed mien, he seemed a vision from some ancient relief—save for the two severed demon heads hanging from his girdle …
“You are troubled, I know,” Kellhus said, grinning at his Exalt-General. “For all your yearning, for all your faith, yours remains a pragmatic soul, Proyas.” The slaves continued their silent labour, binding straps and laces. The Aspect-Emperor glanced down at his garb, rolled his eyes as if offering himself up as a poor example. “You have little patience for tools you cannot immediately use.”
As a young child, one of Proyas’s duties had been to bear his mother’s train at public ceremonies. All he remembered of the toddling farce was stumbling after the long-dragging hems, clutching embroidery, losing it, then stumbling after the hems again, while all the Conriyan court roared in adoring laughter around him. In so many ways, Kellhus made him feel the same tender fool, always chasing, always stumbling …
“If I have fail—”
Kellhus interrupted him with a warm hand on his shoulder. “Please, Proyas. I’m just saying we grapple with earthly things tonight …”
“Earthly things?”
A broad smile cracked the flaxen curls of the Aspect-Emperor’s moustache and beard.
“Yes. The Nonman King has finally answered our call.”
Earthly, Proyas reflected, was not a term many would accord the ghouls.
“Even now his embassy waits here in the Umbilicus,” his Lord-and-God continued. “We will receive them in the Eleven Pole Chamber …”
Within a matter of heartbeats, Proyas found himself immersed in the organizational carnival that perpetually characterized life behind the veils of power. Slaves took him in hand, washing his hands, brushing and perfuming his field armour, oiling and combing his hair and beard. A part of him always found it remarkable, the degree of coordination required for even the simplest and most impromptu of state occasions. An Imperial Eunuch festooned in insignia from across the Three Seas led him out into the airy chill of the Eleven Pole Chamber. Kellhus already stood on the low dais, dispensing trivial instructions to a small mob of functionaries. The Ekkinû, the sorcerous arras that framed the throne, writhed gold on black with the utter absence of motion. Glimpsing Proyas, Kellhus gestured for him to stand at his side.
His thoughts racing, the Exalt-General took his place next to the throne, convinced he could feel the sinuous, symbolic twine of the Ekkinû in the air behind him. He had never been able to fathom the significance of the Nonmen to the Ordeal—especially since whatever strength they could muster would be but a fraction of their former glory—and scarcely anything at all compared with the might of the Great Ordeal—at least in his humble, human opinion. But Kellhus had sent hundreds to their death, if not thousands, in his perpetual attempts to contact Nil’giccas: small fleets charged with leaving the Three Seas and running the coasts of Zeüm, thence into the mists of the Ocean and the legendary shores of Injor-Niyas.
All in the name of striking an alliance with a ten-thousand-year-old king.
Another question to trouble their discussions.
Proyas gazed up into the gloom of the tented heights. Only three braziers had been lighted, so they seemed a small island of illumination surrounded by half-glimpsed Circumfix banners and walls and panels so dim as to be nothing more than the ghosts of structure.
The slaves and functionaries withdrew, taking the air of carnival bustle with them. Save for the shadowy guards posted about the chamber’s perimeter, it was just the two of them.
“I have pulled aside the harem beads,” Kellhus said. “And you find my wives ugly …”
The Exalt-General coughed aloud, such was his consternation. “What?”
“Your question,” Kellhus said, chuckling. He spoke in the wry, warm tones of a friend who has always dwelt several paces closer to the peace that truth delivers. “You wonder how it is you can doubt after so many years of witness and miracle.”
“I … I’m not sure I understand.”
“There’s a reason Men prefer their prophets dead, Proyas.”
Kellhus stared askance at his Exalt-General, one eyebrow hooked in Do-you-see? curiosity.
And Proyas did see—he realized that he had understood all along. His question, he suddenly realized, was no question at all but instead a complaint. He did not doubt so much as yearn …
For the simplicity of simple belief.
“We begin believing when we are children,” Kellhus continued. “And so we make childish expectations our rule, the measure for what the holy should be …” He gestured to the ornamentation about them, spare as it was compared with the fleshpots of the South. “Simplicity. Symmetry. Beauty. These are but the appearance of the holy—the gilding that deceives. What is holy is difficult, ugly beyond comprehension, in the eyes of all save the God.”
Just then, the Pillarian Seneschal announced the visitors.
“Remember,” Kellhus murmured as a mother might. “Forgive them their peculiarities …”
Three striding figures resolved from the gloom, hooded in black cloaks that shone as though slicked in rain.
“And beware their beauty.”
The foremost figure paused immediately below them, threw back his cloak, which slipped into a pool of kneaded folds about the heels of his boots. His scalp gleamed with the pallor of cold mutton fat. His face was alarming, as much for its perfection as for its resemblance to the Sranc. He wore a hauberk that was at once a gown, one that baffled the eyes for the wrought delicacy of the chain: innumerable serpents no larger than the clippings of a child’s nails.
�
�I am Nin’sariccas,” the Nonman announced in High Kûniüric, a language Proyas had spent years mastering so he could read The Sagas in their original tongue. “Dispossessed Son of Siol, Emissary of his Most Subtle Glory, Nil’giccas, King of Injor-Niyas …” His bow fell far short of what jnan demanded. “We have ridden long and hard to find you.”
Kellhus regarded him the way he regarded all penitents who found their way to his feet: as someone who had stumbled out of wintry desolation into the warm, sultry glow of summer.
“You are surprised,” he said in a voice that easily matched the melodious resonance of the Nonman’s. “You thought us doomed.”
A serpentine blink. The preternatural eyes clicked to the Aspect-Emperor’s right—to the sorcerous arras, Proyas realized. He understood what Kellhus had meant by peculiarities. Something about the ghoul’s manner followed unexpected lines. For the first time he noticed that the Nonman stood nude beneath the gleam of his nimil hauberk.
“Nil’giccas sends his greetings,” Nin’sariccas said. “Even in an age so dark, the light that is the Aspect-Emperor shines for all to see.”
A leonine nod.
“Then Ishterebinth is with us?”
The Emissary’s air of vague distraction lapsed into outright insolence. Rather than answer, Nin’sariccas peered across the Eleven Pole Chamber’s airy interior, then, with the remote reserve of those careful to conceal their disgust, considered Proyas and the Pillarian Guards flanking him. Weathering the inhuman scrutiny, Proyas suffered a strange twinge of inadequacy, one he imagined caste-menials felt in the presence of nobles: a presentiment of bodily and spiritual inferiority.
Like the angels of a long-dead god, the Nonmen stood rigid with a pride that had out-lived their glory. Only the mien and manner of the Aspect-Emperor dwarfed them—a sun to their moon.
“The memory of your forefather’s treachery …” the Emissary finally replied, his gaze lingering on Proyas, “burns bright with us. For some, Anasûrimbor is the very name of Mannish arrogance and disorder.”
The White Luck Warrior Page 41
