“They seek each other out,” Saccarees said to the dismayed Believer-Kings, “like schooling fish or flocking birds, so that the presence of few licenses the gathering of many.” Far from clearing the clans from their rear, he explained, they actually were pressing them farther afield and so opening ever-greater tracts for innumerable others to occupy. Their efforts to clear their flanks were leading to their encirclement.
“Could it be?” Carindûsû asked in derision. “Have the fabled Dreams of the First Apocalypse led the illustrious Saccarees astray?”
“Yes,” the Mandate Grandmaster replied, his honesty so genuine, his humility so reminiscent of their Lord-and-God, that Carindûsû found himself shamed before his peers a third time.
“What we face … The world has never seen the like.”
They sat, as always, side by side before the octagonal iron hearth. Master and disciple.
“Maithanet,” the Aspect-Emperor said. “My brother has seized control in Momemn.”
After so many years Proyas suffered only the most subtle urges to lie or save face. The merest hesitations were all that remained of his old instincts to write himself large in the eyes of others. This time it was the instinct to conceal his dismay. Before he had found Kellhus, he had made himself into Maithanet’s disciple. And over the years since the First Holy War, he had come to love Esmenet as a sister, as much as he revered her as the wife of his Lord-and-God. To think the one could usurp the other … It seemed impossible.
“What could have happened?” he asked.
The fire seemed to sputter for the tidings as much as Proyas’s heart laboured. If Maithanet, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, had revolted against his brother …
The Empire itself teetered.
“For some reason Esmi suspected Maitha of sedition,” Kellhus said without the least whisper of remorse or concern, “and so called him to account before Inrilatas. The interrogation went wrong, horribly wrong, and my brother ended up killing my son …” He looked down to his haloed palms, and Proyas found it curiously affecting, the contrast between his tone and his manner. “I know little more than this.”
The Exalt-General breathed deep and nodded. “What do you intend to do?”
“Gather as much knowledge as possible,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor replied, his head still bowed. “I yet have resources in Momemn.”
Since the beginning, Anasûrimbor Kellhus had possessed a peculiar density of presence, as if he were the lone iron ingot among shards of clay and stone, invulnerable to what would smash others to powder. But with each of these remarkable sessions, the more this density seemed to leak from him …
So much so the Exalt-General suffered the demented urge to prick him, just to see if he would bleed. Faith … he upbraided himself. Faith!
“Do you—?”
Proyas paused, recognizing the implications of what he was about to ask.
“Do I fear for Esmi?” Kellhus asked. He turned his friend smiling. “You wonder, as you have wondered your whole life, what passions bind me.” He closed his eyes in resignation. “And whether they are human.”
So here it was, the question of questions …
“Yes.”
“Love,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, “is for lesser souls.”
Young men are forever casting their meagre will and intellect against the tide of their passions, claiming they do not fear when they fear, insisting they do not love when they love. So the young King of Sakarpus told himself that he despised Anasûrimbor Serwa, cursed her as the self-important daughter of his Enemy, even as he mooned over the similarity of their names and the poetry of their conjunction: Serwa and Sorweel, Sorweel and Serwa. Even as he dreamed of their tender coupling.
Even as he began fearing more for her—a Gnostic sorceress—than for himself.
When he asked her whether she was worried about being a hostage, she simply shrugged and said, “The ghouls mean us no harm. Besides, we are children of Fate. What is there for us to worry?”
And indeed, the more time he spent with her, the more this seemed to characterize her: the absence of worry.
Equanimity, soothing for its constancy, arrogant for its extent.
“So, this Nonman King, Nil’giccas, what are you to offer him?”
“Nothing. We are the terms of the negotiation, Horse-King, not the framers.”
“So we are to be captives? Nothing more?”
He almost always found her smile dazzling, even when he knew she laughed at him and his barbaric ignorance. “Nothing more,” she said. “We will languish, safe and useless, while the Great Ordeal carries the burden of Apocalypse.”
And he could not but exult at the thought of languishing with Anasûrimbor Serwa. Perhaps, he found himself hoping, she might come to love him out of boredom.
Days had passed, and her demeanour remained every bit as wry and reflective as that day when he first met her in Kayûtas’s tent. She carried an aura of power, of course, as much for the miraculous way she whisked them from place to place as for the dizzying facts of her station and her blood. Grandmistress and Princess-Imperial. Archmage and Anasûrimbor.
Nevertheless, her youth and sex continually beguiled Sorweel into thinking she was a mere girl, someone weaker, simpler, and as much a victim of circumstances as he himself. And perhaps this was what he needed her to be, for no matter how many times her knowledge and intellect contradicted this image, it would reassert itself. Sometimes she astonished him, so subtle were her observations and so complete was her knowledge of the ancient lands they crossed. And yet, within a handful of heartbeats, she would inevitably lapse into the alluring waif, the one who would find such security in his arms, if only she would let him embrace her.
He would be long in appreciating the stamp of ancient profundity she carried in her soul.
“This Nil’giccas … Do you know much of him?”
“I was his friend once, ere the first end of the world …”
“And?”
Though they were of an age, sometimes her look made her seem a thousand years his senior.
“He was wise, powerful, and … unfathomable. The Nonmen resemble us too much not to continually fool us into thinking we comprehend them. But they always surprise, sooner or later.”
If Serwa embodied serenity, Moënghus was nothing short of mercurial. Sorweel had never forgotten Kayûtas’s warning to beware his brother’s madness. Even Serwa had mentioned Moënghus’s “foul humours,” as she called them. Sometimes days, as opposed to mere watches, would pass with the Prince-Imperial speaking nary a single word. Sorweel quickly learned to avoid him altogether during these periods, let alone refrain from speaking to him. The most innocuous question would spark a murderous glare, one all the more lunatic for the white-blue of his unblinking eyes and all the more frightening for the vigour of his frame. Then, over the course of a night or a day, whatever besieged him would lift, and he would resume his more sociable manner, wry and observant, quick to tease, and often outright considerate, especially when it came to his sister—to the point of risking his neck for eggs or wading through marsh muck for tubers, anything that might delight her when they took their evening repast.
“What makes you so worthy?” Sorweel once asked her while Moënghus crouched on the riverbank nearby, trolling the waters with a string and hook.
She drew her hair back to regard him, a gesture the Sakarpi King had fallen in love with. “Podi always says that aside from Mother, I’m the only Anasûrimbor he likes.”
“Podi,” Sorweel had learned, was the jnanic diminutive for “older brother,” a term of endearment and respect.
“My sister is sane,” Moënghus called from his perch over the flashing water.
Serwa scowled and smiled at once. “He thinks my family is crazy.”
“Your family?” Sorweel asked.
She nodded as if recognizing some previously discussed inevitability—truths they would have no choice but to share because of the intimacies of the t
rail. “He’s my brother, yes. But we share no blood. He is the son of my father’s first wife—my namesake, Serwë. The one whose corpse they bound with Father on the Circumfix—during the First Holy War. The one everybody is loathe to speak about.”
“So he’s your half-brother?”
“No. Have you heard of Cnaiür urs Skiötha?”
Even from a distance, Moënghus seemed to stiffen.
“No.”
She glanced at her brother with something resembling relish. “He was a Scylvendi barbarian, famed for his martial exploits in the First Holy War, and now venerated for his service to my father. I’m told,” she called out teasingly, “there’s even a cadre of fools who scar their arms like Scylvendi in the Ordeal …”
“Bah!” her brother cried.
“Why does he think your blood is crazy?” Sorweel pressed, eager to sidestep the topic of Moënghus’s paternity.
Serwa cast another laughing look at the dark-haired man.
“Because they think about thoughts,” Moënghus said, looking over his shoulder.
Sorweel frowned. He had always thought this the definition of wisdom. “And this is crazy?”
Moënghus shrugged. “Think about it.”
“Father,” Serwa explained, “says that we have an extra soul, one that lives, and another that watches us living. We are prone to be at war with ourselves, the Anasûrimbor.”
Her terms were simple enough, but Sorweel suspected she understood the matter with a philosopher’s subtlety.
“So your father thinks you crazy?”
Both siblings laughed at this, though Sorweel had no inkling as to the humour.
“My father is Dûnyain,” Serwa said. “More human than human. His seed is strong, apt to crack the vessels that bear it.”
“Tell him about our brother Inri …”
She crinkled her sunburned brow. “I would rather not.”
“What are Dûnyain?” Sorweel asked, speaking with the curiosity of those wishing to pass the time, nothing more, when in fact his breath ached for interest.
She looked to her brother once again, who shrugged and said, “No one knows.”
Serwa leaned her head low, almost sideways, so that her hair fell in a silk sheet. It was a girlish gesture, one that again reminded the Sakarpi King that for all her worldliness and self-possession, she was scarcely older than he.
“Mother once told me they dwelt some place in the northern wastes, that they have spent thousands of years breeding themselves the way Kianene breed horses or the Ainoni breed dogs. Breeding and training.”
Sorweel struggled to recall what it was Zsoronga had told him about the heretic, the Wizard named Achamian, and his claims against the Aspect-Emperor.
“Breeding and training for what?”
She looked at him with a wisp of a scowl, as if noting a regrettable sluggishness in his soul.
“To grasp the Absolute.”
“Absolute?” he asked, speaking the word, which he had never before heard, slowly so as to make it his own.
“Ho!” Moënghus called, yanking a small bass onto the riverbank. It thrashed silver and gold even as it blackened the bare stone with wetness.
“The God of Gods,” Serwa said, beaming at her brother.
The Men of the Circumfix were born to proud War. Most all of them had been tested on a dozen battlefields and had not so much developed a contempt for numbers as an appreciation for skill and training. They had seen single companies of hard-bitten knights rout whole armies of Orthodox rabble. Numbers often meant nothing on the field of war. But there were numbers, and then there were numbers. A mob, when it became great enough, became a living thing, vast and amorphous, shrinking when pricked, engulfing when roused, always too numerous to possess a singular will. The Horde, the Believer-Kings were beginning to realize, was unconquerable simply because it was too enormous to ever realize that it was conquered.
“Ours is the station of glory,” King Umrapathur declared, “for we have been given the yoke of victory. The fate of the Great Ordeal now turns upon us—the fate of the very World—and we shall not fail!”
“Ours is the station of death!” Carindûsû cried out in heretical contradiction.
And indeed, despite the lofty rhetoric of their lords, a presentiment of doom began shadowing the hearts of the common warriors. They were simple men, for the most part, hailing from Cironj, Girgash, Nilnamesh, and beyond. They thirsted and they starved. They had marched to the ends of the earth, into lands where cities were overgrown graves, surrounded by an enemy they could not close with, whose numbers curtained the very sky with dust. They had witnessed the might of the Schoolmen. They knew well the indomitable strength of their mounted lords. And now they knew that power, for all its miraculous glory, was naught but a nuisance to their inscrutable foe.
What difference could their hungry ranks make?
No one dared speak this question, not so much for fear of the Judges as for fear of the answers. But it began filing down the sharp edge of their resolve nevertheless. The songs they raised became ever more listless and half-hearted, until many of their caste-nobles forbade singing altogether. Soon the Army of the South trudged in exhausted silence, fields of dusty men, shambling without spark or purpose, their faces blank with long-hanging apprehension. In the evenings, they swapped rumours of doom while gnawing on their meagre repast.
The attempts to clear their flanks were abandoned—the losses among the cavalry, in particular, had become prohibitive. Other tactics were explored, especially with regards to the Culling, but an air of ritual futility began subverting their efforts, arcane or otherwise. Daily the Interval tolled and the pickets rode out, the Schoolmen walked the low sky above them, and together they pricked the elephantine Horde with mere needles.
The true fanatics among the Zaudunyani, those who repelled for the violence of their belief, began haranguing the more skeptical souls, for their thoughts were so disordered as to see redemption in the horror looming about them. Of those they exhorted, some took heart, but many others took exception. Fights began breaking out among nobles and menials alike, many of them lethal. The Judges found themselves condemning ever more men to the lash and gibbet.
Meanwhile, the Horde grew ever greater, until its unearthly howl could be heard at all times. At night men held their breath listening … and despaired.
To his father’s chagrin, Prince Charapatha told the council about the typhoon he once survived at sea. “Sunlight fell,” he said, his eyes vacant with unwelcome recollection. “You could drop a feather onto the deck, so calm was the wind. Yet thunderheads wreathed the whole world about us, a ring of dark that would span nations …” He looked across the assembled Lords of the Ordeal. “I fear we march in just such an eye of false peace.”
Afterward in the privacy of his pavilion, Umrapathur struck his famed son full across the mouth, such was his outrage. “Speak of glory, if you speak at all!” he roared. “Speak of will and iron and enemies gagging beneath your heel! Are you such a fool, Chara? Can you not see that fear is our foe? By feeding it you feed them—even as you rob us of the stomach to fight!”
And Charapatha wept, such was his shame. He repented, vowed never to speak save in the name of hope and courage.
“Belief, my son,” Umrapathur said, wondering that a famed hero such as his son could still act a little boy in paternal eyes. “Belief empowers men far more than knowledge.”
And so was their rift healed with respect and wisdom. What father does not correct his son? But several among their householders overheard their quarrel, and rumours of discord and indecision slipped from tongue to ear to tongue, until all the host feared their King-General desperate and weak. Umrapathur, it was said, had stopped his ears even to those he loved and would no longer countenance the Truth.
The three hostages-to-be had come to what seemed a great forested basin, so vast its outer rim rose into hazed oblivion but proved to be a valley. A river wound through it, roping across the fl
oodplains in meandering loops, broad enough to enclose slender islands. The Holy Aumris, Serwa declared, awed and excited despite the toll of their leap. The very nursery of Mannish civilization.
“This was how they found it … the first Men who set foot in this vale so many thousands of years ago.”
While she slept, Sorweel found a seat overlooking the vista between the roots of a towering oak that stood poised over a slope so steep as to seem half of a gorge. He sat dozing, watching as the iron dark of the river transformed with the climbing sun, becoming green and brown and blue and, along certain sections, a miraculous silver. The River Aumris … where the High Norsirai had raised the first great cities of stone, where Men had knelt like children at the knee of their Nonmen foes and learned the ways of art and commerce and sorcery.
Some time passed before he saw the ruins.
At first he noticed only their sum, like a ghostly pictogram glimpsed through the trees, lines writ for the Heavens to read. Then he found himself picking out individual works, some actually breaching the forest canopy: the arcs of dead towers, the lines of once-imposing fortifications. Where before he had gazed across mere wilderness, now he peered across a monumental cemetery, a place humming with loss and history. It seemed absurd, even impossible, that he had failed to see it. But there it was, as clear as a Galeoth tattoo, only laid across the reach of the earth …
The remains of some mighty city.
Serwa began crying out in her sleep so violently as to send both Sorweel and Moënghus sprinting to her. The Prince-Imperial shrugged Sorweel aside when he hesitated over her thrashing form, then pulled her in his powerful embrace. She awoke sobbing.
For some reason, the sight of her clutching her brother with weeping gratitude unnerved him as much as anything he had witnessed since Sakarpus’s fall. Everything but everything seemed to attest to the righteousness of the Aspect-Emperor’s war against the World’s second ending. The sheer might of the Great Ordeal. Eskeles and his unnerving lesson on the plain. The skin-spy so dramatically revealed in the Umbilicus. The terror of the Horde and the cunning of the Ten-Yoke Legion. Even the trust and charity the Anasûrimbor had extended to him, their enemy …
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