The Judging eye

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Condia

In Sakarpus, leuneraal, or hunched ones (so-called for their habit of stooping over their scrolls), were so despised that it was customary for Horselords and their Boonsmen to bathe after their dealings with them. The Men of Sakarpus considered weakness a kind of disease, something to be fended with various rules of interaction and ritual cleansings. And no men were so weak as the leuneraal.

But Sorweel's new tutor, Thanteus Eskeles, was more than a hunched man. Far more. Were he merely a scholar, then Sorweel would have had the luxury of these rules. But he was also a sorcerer-a Three Seas Schoolman! — and this made things… complicated.

Sorweel had never doubted the Tusk, never doubted that sorcerers were the walking damned. But try as he might, he could never square this belief with his fascination. Through all his innumerable daydreams of the Three Seas, nothing had captivated him quite so much as the Schools. What would it be like, he often wondered, to possess a voice that could shout down the World's Holy Song? What kind of man would exchange his soul for that kind of diabolical power?

As a result, Eskeles was both an insult and a kind of illicit opportunity-a contradiction, like all things Three Seas.

The Mandate Schoolman would join him each morning, usually within a watch of the march getting underway, and they would while away the time with drill after laborious language drill. Though Eskeles encouraged him to believe otherwise, Sorweel's tongue balked at the sound and structure of Sheyic. He often went cross-eyed listening to Eskeles drone. At times, he feared he might slump unconscious from his saddle, the lessons were so boring.

Once he enlisted Zsoronga to hide him in the middle of his retinue, he came to dread the sorceror's appearance so. The Successor-Prince promptly betrayed him, but not before having his fill of laughing at the sight of the Schoolman riding on his burrow craning his neck this way and that. Old Obotegwa, he explained, was growing weary speaking for two men.

"Besides," he said, "how can we be sure we're talking to each other at all? Perhaps the old devil makes it all up so he can laugh himself to sleep."

Obotegwa simply winked and grinned mischievously.

Eskeles was a strange man, obese by Sakarpi standards, but not so fat as many Sorweel had seen in the Ordeal. He never seemed to get cold, despite wearing only a red-silk tunic with his leggings, one cut to expose the black fur that crawled from his belly to his beard, which even oiled and plaited never quite seemed under control. He had an affable, even merry face, high cheeks beneath pig-friendly eyes. This, combined with a lively, even careless manner, made him exceedingly difficult to dislike, despite his sorcerous calling and the brownish tinge of his Ketyai skin.

At first Sorweel could scarcely understand a word he said, his accent was so thick. But he quickly learned how to listen through the often bizarre pronunciations. He discovered that the man had spent several years in Sakarpus as part of a secret Mandate mission posing as Three Seas traders.

"Dreadful, dreadful time for the likes of me," he said.

"I suppose you missed your Southron luxuries," Sorweel jeered.

The fat man laughed. "No-no. Heavens, no. If you knew what me and my kind dreamed each night, your Glory, you would understand our profound ability to appreciate the simplest of things. No. It was your Chorae Hoard… Quite extraordinary really, dwelling in the vicinity of so many Trinkets…"

"Trinkets?"

"Yes. That's what we Schoolmen like to call them-Chorae, that is. For much the same reason you Sakarpi call Sranc-what is it? Oh, yes, grass-rats."

Sorweel frowned. "Because that's what they are?"

Despite his good humour, Eskeles had this sly way of appraising him sometimes, as if he were a map fetched from the fire. Something that had to be read around burns.

"No-no. Because that's what you need them to be."

Sorweel understood full well what the fat man meant-men often used glib words to shrink great and terrible things-but the true lesson, he realized, was quite different. He resolved never to forget that Eskeles was a spy. That he was an agent of the Aspect-Emperor.

Learning a language, Sorweel quickly realized, was unlike learning anything else. At first, he thought it would be a matter of simple substitution, of replacing one set of sounds with another. He knew nothing of what Eskeles called grammar, the notion that a kind of invisible mechanism bound everything he said into patterns. He scoffed at the sorcerer's insistence that he first learn his own tongue before venturing to learn another. But the patterns were undeniable, and no matter how much he wanted to dispute the fat man and his glib I-told-you-so smile, he had to admit that he could not speak without using things such as subjects and predicates, nouns and verbs.

Though he affected an attitude of aloof contempt-he was in the presence of a leuneraal, after all-Sorweel found himself more than a little troubled by this. How could he know these things without knowing them? And if something as profound as grammar could escape his awareness-to the point where it had simply not existed-what else was lurking in the nethers of his soul?

So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.

None of which made the lessons any less boring. But thankfully even Eskeles's passion for Sheyic would begin to wane by midafternoon, and his disciplined insistence on the drills would lapse. For a few watches, at least, he would let the young King indulge his curiosity about more sundry things. Sorweel spent much of this time avoiding the topics that really interested him-sorcery because he feared it sinful, and the Aspect-Emperor for reasons he could not fathom-and asking questions about the Three Seas and the Great Ordeal.

So he learned more details about the Middle-North and its peoples: the Galeoth, the Tydonni, and the Thunyeri. The Eastern Ketyai: the Cengemi, the Conriyans, and the Ainoni. And the Western Ketyai: primarily the Nansur, the Shigeki, the Kianene, and the Nilnameshi. Eskeles, who, Sorweel was beginning to realize, was one of those vain men who never seemed arrogant, discussed all these peoples with the confidence and wicked cynicism of someone who had spent his life travelling. Each nation had its strengths and weaknesses: the Ainoni, for instance, were devious plotters but too womanish in their affect and attire; the Thunyeri were savage in battle but about as sharp as rotten fruit-as Eskeles put it. Sorweel found all of it fascinating, even though the sorcerer was one of those men whose animate enthusiasm actually seemed to deaden rather than liven the subject matter.

Then, one afternoon several days into his instruction, Sorweel summoned enough courage to mention the Aspect-Emperor. He related-in a form abbreviated by embarrassment-the story Zsoronga had told him about the emissaries cutting their own throats before the Zeьmi Satakhan. "I know he's your master…" he ended awkwardly.

"What about him?" Eskeles replied after a thoughtful pause.

"Well… What is he?"

The sorcerer nodded in the manner of those confirmed in their worries. "Come," he said cryptically, spurring his mule to a trot.

The Kidruhil typically rode near the forward heart of the Great Ordeal, where they could be sent in any direction given the unlikely event of an attack. But word of Sranc activity to the west had led to their redeployment on the extreme left flank. This meant the sorcerer and his ward need press neither hard nor far to ride clear of the slow roping columns. Looking absurd on his mule-his legs straight rather than bent, his girth almost equal to his mount's-Eskeles pressed along the shoulders of a long low knoll. Sorweel followed, alternately smiling at the sight of the man and frowning at his intentions. Beyond the crest of the knoll, the farther plains sloped up into the horizon, bone-coloured for the most part but shot with whorls of grey and ash black. The green of the more lush lands to the south had become little more than a haze.

Staring off into the distance, the sorcerer reined to a halt at the summit, where Sorweel joined him. The air was crisp and chill.

"So dry," Eskeles said without looking at him.

"It often is. Some years the grasses all die and blow away… Or so they say."

"And that," Eskeles continued, pointing toward the northwest. "What is that?"

There was a Kidruhil patrol in the distance, a line of tiny horses, but Sorweel knew that Eskeles pointed beyond them. The sky was a bowl of endless turquoise. Beneath it the land ascended a series of rumps, then spread bluing into a series of flats and folds, like a tent after its poles had been dropped. Reaching in and out of the horizon, an immense band cut across the plain, mottled black and grey near its centre and fading into the natural grain of the surrounding grasslands along its edges.

"The great herds," Sorweel said, having seen such tracks many times. "Elk. Endless numbers of them."

The sorcerer turned in his saddle, nodding back the way they had come. The breeze pulled a comb of hairs from his beard.

"And what would you say that is?"

Perplexed, Sorweel wheeled his horse about, followed Eskeles's bemused gaze. Not since Sakarpus had he seen the Great Ordeal from its edge, and he found himself shocked at the difference of watching something that had encompassed him from afar. Where before the world had seemed to roll into the immobile masses, now the masses rolled over an immovable world. Thousands upon thousands of figures, scattered like grain, thrown like threads, knitted into slow heaving carpets, gradually creeping across the back of the earth. Arms twinkled to the horizon.

"The Great Ordeal," he heard himself say.

"No."

Sorweel searched his tutor's smiling eyes.

"This," Eskeles explained, "this… is the Aspect Emperor."

Mystified, Sorweel could only turn back to the spectacle. Though he couldn't be sure, he thought he saw the Aspect-Emperor's own banner rising from faraway mobs: a white-silk standard the size of a sail, emblazoned with a simple blood-red Circumfix. Struck by unseen priests, the Interval hummed out across the arch of the sky, deep and resonant, fading as always in increments too fine to detect, so that he was never quite sure when it stopped sounding.

"I don't understand…"

"There are many, many ways to carve the world, your Glory. Think of the way we identify different men with their bodies, with the position they occupy in place and time. Since we inherit this way of thinking, we assume that it is natural, that it is the only way. But what if we identify a man with his thoughts-what then? How would we draw his boundaries? Where would he begin, and where would he end?"

Sorweel simply gazed at the man. Damned leuneraal.

"I still don't understand."

The sorcerer frowned in silence for a time, then with a decisive grunt leaned back in his saddle to root through one of his packs. He huffed and cursed in some exotic tongue as he pawed through his belongings-the effort of twisting back and sideways obviously strained him. Without warning, he dismounted with a heavy "Oooof!" then began rifling the opposite pack in the same way. It wasn't until he searched the rump pack-made of weather-beaten leather like the others-that he found what he was looking for: a small vase no bigger than a child's forearm and just as white. With a triumphant expression, he held it shining to the sun: porcelain, another luxury of the Three Seas.

"Come-come," he called to Sorweel, stamping his left boot in the grass to wipe mule shit from his heel.

Securing his pony's reins to the pommel of the mule's saddle, Sorweel hastened after the sorcerer, who walked kicking through winter-flattened grasses-to clean off more dung, the young King supposed, until, that is, Eskeles cried, "Aha!" at the sight of rounded stone rising from the turf.

"This is called a philauta," the sorcerer said, raising the slight vase and shaking it. A clipped rattle issued from within. The sunlight revealed dozens of little tusks raised along its length. "It's used for sacramental libations…"

He smashed it across the back of the stone. To his chagrin, Sorweel flinched.

"Now look," Eskeles said, squatting over the wreckage so that his belly hung between his knees. A small replica of the vase-what had made the rattling sound, Sorweel realized-lay beneath the sorcerer's bulk, no longer than a thumb. Otherwise, fragments lay scattered across the stone and between the twisted threads of last year's grass, some as small as cat's claws, others the size of teeth, and still others as big as coins. The sorcerer shooed away a spider with stubby fingers, then lifted one of the tinier pieces, little more than a splinter, to the glinting light.

"Souls have shapes, Sorweel. Think of how I differ from you"-he raised another splinter to illustrate the contrast-"or how you differ from Zsoronga," he said, raising yet another. "Or"-he plucked a far larger fragment-"think of all the Hundred Gods, and how they differ from one another, Yatwer and Gilgaцl. Or Momas and Ajokli." With each name he raised yet another coin-sized fragment.

"Our God… the God, is broken into innumerable pieces. And this is what gives us life, what makes you, me, even the lowliest slave, sacred." He cupped several pieces in a meaty palm. "We're not equal, most assuredly not, but we remain fragments of God nonetheless."

He gingerly set each of the pieces across the top of the stone, then stared intently at Sorweel. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Sorweel did understand, so much that his skin had pimpled listening to the sorcerer speak. He understood more than he wanted. The Kiьnnatic Priests had only rules and stories-nothing like this. They had no answers that made… sense of things.

"But…"

The young King trailed, defeated by the weakness of his own voice.

Eskeles nodded and smiled, so openly pleased with himself that he seemed anything but arrogant or haughty. "But what is the Aspect-Emperor?" he asked, completing Sorweel's question.

Using his fingers, he combed the chipped replica of the vase from the grass below his left knee. He held it between thumb and forefinger, where it shone as smooth as glass, identical to the original philauta in every respect save for its size.

"Huh?" The Schoolman laughed. "Eh? Do you see? The soul of the Aspect-Emperor is not only greater than the souls of Men, it possesses the very shape of the Ur-Soul."

"You mean… your God of Gods."

"Our God of Gods?" the sorcerer repeated, shaking his head. "I keep forgetting that you're a heathen! I suppose you think Inri Sejenus is some kind of demon as well!"

"I'm trying," Sorweel replied, his face suddenly hot. "I'm trying to understand!"

"I-know-I-know," the Schoolman said, this time smirking at his own stupidity. "We'll discuss the Latter Prophet, er… later…" He closed his eyes and shook his head. "In the meantime, ponder this… If the Aspect-Emperor's soul is cast in the very form of the God, then…" He trailed nodding. "Huh? Eh? If…"

"Then… He is the God in small…" A kind of supernatural terror accompanied these words.

The sorcerer beamed, his teeth surprisingly white and straight compared to the dark frazzle of his beard. "You wonder how it is so many would march to the ends of the earth for him? You wonder what could move men to cut their own throats in his name. Well then, there you have your answer…" He leaned forward, his pose rigid in the manner of men who think they possess world-judging truths. "Anasыrimbor Kellhus is the God of Gods, Sorweel, come to walk among us."

Somehow Sorweel had fallen from a crouch to his knees. He remained breathless still, staring at Eskeles. To move his hands or even to blink his eyes, it seemed, would be to quake and to spill, to reveal himself a thing of sand.

"Before his coming, me and my kind were damned," the sorcerer continued, though he seemed to be speaking more for his own benefit than Sorweel's. "We Schoolmen traded a lifetime of power for an eternity of torment… But now?"

Damnation. Sorweel felt the cold of dead earth soak through his leggings. An ache climbed into bis knees. His father had died in sorcerous fire-how many times had Sorweel tormented himself with that thought, imagining the shriek and scream, the thousand blistering knives? But what Eskeles was saying…

Did it mean he burned still?

The Mandate Schoolman gazed at him, his eyes wide and bright with a kind of uncompromising joy, like a man in the flush of infatuation, or a gambler delivered from slavery by an impossible throw of the number-sticks. When he spoke, more than admiration-or even worship-trilled through his voice.

"Now I am saved."

Love. He spoke with love.

Rather than go to Zsoronga's pavilion that evening, Sorweel shared a quiet repast with Porsparian in the white-washed air of his own tent. He sat on the end of his cot, his head bent to his steaming gruel, knowing yet not caring that the Shigeki slave stared at him wordlessly. A kind of incipient confusion filled him, one that had slipped the cup of his soul and spilled through his body, a leaden tingle. The sounds of the Great Ordeal fell through the fabric effortlessly, thrumming and booming from every direction.

Save the sky. The sky was silent.

And the earth.

"Anasыrimbor Kellhus is the God of Gods incarnate, Sorweel, come to walk among us…"

Men often make decisions in the wake of significant events, if only to pretend they had some control over their own transformations. Sorweel's first decision was to ignore what had happened, to turn his back on what Eskeles had said, as though rudeness could drive his words away. His second decision was to laugh-laughter was ever the great ward against all things foolish. But he could not harness the breath to see it through.

Then he finally decided to think Eskeles's thoughts, if only to pretend they had not already possessed him. What was the harm of thinking?

As a young boy he spent most of his solitary play in the ruined sections of his father's palace, particularly in what was called the Overgrown Garden. Once, while searching for a lost arrow, he noticed a young poplar springing from some far-flung seed beneath a thicket of witch-mulberry. Wondering whether it would live or die, he checked on it from time to time, watched it slowly labour in the shadow. Several times he even crawled into the mossy interior of the thicket, wriggling in on his back, and bringing his cheek close to the newborn's stem so that he could see it leaning, extending up and out to the promise of light shining through the fretting of witch-mulberry leaves. Over days and weeks it reached, thin with inanimate effort, straining for a band of golden warmth that descended like a hand from the sky. And then finally, it touched…

The last time he had looked, mere weeks before the city's fall, the tree stood proud save for the memory of that first crook in its trunk, and the mulberry bush was long dead.

There was harm in thinking. He not only knew this-he could feel it.

What Eskeles had shown him had the power of… of sense. What Eskeles had shown him had explained, not only the Aspect-Emperor… but himself as well.

"…we remain fragments of the God, nonetheless."

Was this why the Kiьnnatic Priests had demanded that all Three Seas missionaries be burned? Was this why spittle had flecked their lips when they came to his father with their demands?

Had they been a bush, fearful of the tree in their midst?

"I keep forgetting that you're a heathen!"

After darkness fell and Porsparian's breathing dipped into a rasping snore, Sorweel lay awake, riven by thought after cascading thought-there was no thwarting them. When he curled beneath his blankets, it seemed he could see him as he was on that day of war and rain and thunder, the Aspect-Emperor, ringlets dripping about a long face, beard cut and plaited in the way of Southron Kings, eyes so blue they seemed a glimpse of another world. A glaring, golden figure, walking in the light of a different time, a brighter sun.

A friendly scowl, followed by a gentle laugh. "I'm rarely what my enemies expect, I know."

And Sorweel told himself, commanded himself, mouthed about clamped teeth, I am my father's son! A true son of Sakarpus!

But what if…

Hands lifting him from his knees. "You are a King, are you not?"

What if he came to believe?

"I'm no conqueror…"

He awoke, as had become his habit, several moments before the sounding of the Interval. For some reason, he felt a kind of long-drawn relief instead of the usual clutch of fear. The plains air, the breath of his people, sighed through his tent, made the bindings creak where Porsparian had tied them down. The silence was so complete he could almost believe that he was alone, that all the rolling pasture about his tent was empty to the horizon-abandoned to the Horse-King.

Then the Interval tolled. The first calls to prayer climbed into the skies.

He joined the Company of Scions where their Standard had been planted the previous evening, numbly followed Captain Harnilias's barked instructions. Apparently his pony, which Sorweel called Stubborn, had done some soul searching the previous night as well, because for the first time he responded wonderfully to Sorweel's demands. He'd known the beast was intelligent, perhaps uncommonly so, and only refused to learn his Sakarpic knee-and-spur combinations out of spite. Stubborn had become so agreeable, in fact, that Sorweel breezed through the early on-the-march drills. He even heard several of the Scions call out, "Ramt-anqual!" — the word Obotegwa always translated as "Horse-King."

When chance afforded he leaned forward to whisper the Third Prayer to Husyelt into the pony's twitching ear. "One and one are one," he explained to the beast afterward. "You are learning, Stubborn. One horse and one man make one warrior."

A bolt of shame passed through him at the thought of "one man," for in fact he was not a man. He never would be, he realized, given that his Elking would likely never happen. A child forever, without the shades of the dead to assist him. This set him to gazing, once again, out over the marching masses that engulfed his surroundings. Shields and swords. Waddling packs. Innumerable souls behind innumerable faces, all toiling toward the dark line of the north.

How could wonder make a heart so small?

When Sorweel finally settled next to Zsoronga and Obotegwa in the column, the Successor-Prince commented on his haggard expression.

Sorweel paid no attention, simply said, "The Ordeal. What do you think of it?"

Zsoronga's expression went from bemusement to concentrated worry as he listened to Obotegwa's frowning translation. "Ke yusu emeba-"

"I think it may be the end of us."

"But do you think it's real?"

The Prince paused, gazed out across a landscape dizzy with distances. He wore what he called his kemtush over his Kidruhil tunic, a white sash dense with black hand-painted characters that listed the "battles of his blood," the wars fought by his ancestors.

"Well, I think they believe it's real. I can only imagine what it must seem like to you, Horse-King. You and your stranded city. Me? I come from a great and ancient nation, mightier by far than any of the individual nations gathered beneath the Circumfix. And still, I have never seen the like. To concentrate so much glory, so much power, for a march to the ends of the Eдrwa! This is something no Satakhan in history, not even Mbotetulu! could have brought about-let alone my poor father. Whatever this is, and whatever comes of it, you can rest assured that it will be recalled… Recalled to the end of all time."

They rode in silence for some time, lost in the thoughts.

"And what do you think of them?" Sorweel eventually asked.

"Them?"

"Yes. The Anasыrimbor."

The Successor-Prince shrugged, but not without, Sorweel noticed, a quick glance around him. "Everyone ponders them. They are like the mummers the Ketyai are so found of, standing before the amphitheatre of the world."

"What does 'everyone' say?"

"That he is a Prophet, or even a God."

"What do you say?"

"What the lines of my father's treaty say: that he is a Benefactor of High Holy Zeьm, Guardian of the Son of Heaven's Son."

"No… What do you say?"

For the first time, Sorweel saw anger score the young man's handsome profile. Zsoronga momentarily glared at Obotegwa, as though holding him responsible for Sorweel's relentless questioning, before turning back to the young King with mild and insincere eyes. "What do you think?"

"He's so many things to so many people," Sorweel found himself blurting. "I know not what to think. All I know is that those who spend any time with him, any time with him whatsoever, think him some kind of God."

The Successor-Prince once again turned to his Senior Obligate, this time with questioning eyes. Though the drifting pace of their parallel horses meant that Sorweel could only glimpse Obotegwa's face on an angle, he was certain he had seen the old translator nod.

While the two exchanged words in Zeьmi, Sorweel struggled with the dismaying realization that Zsoronga had secrets, powerful secrets, and that compared to the intrigues that likely encircled him, his friendship with an outland king, with a sausage, could be little more than diversion. The Son of Nganka'kull was more than a hostage, he was a spy as well, a chit in a game greater than Sorweel could imagine. The fate of empires bound him.

When Zsoronga returned his gaze, the pinch of merriment that characterized so much of their discourse had utterly vanished, leaving a curious, questioning intensity in its place. It was almost as if his brown eyes were begging Sorweel, somehow…

Begging him to be someone High Holy Zeьm could trust.

"Petatu surub-"

"Have you heard the story of Shimeh, of the First Holy War?"

Sorweel shrugged. He felt at once honoured and gratified. A prince of a great nation confided in him. "Not much," he admitted, careful to pitch his voice at the same low tenor as his friend.

"There is this book," Zsoronga said, the squint in his eyes complementing the reluctance in his voice. "This forbidden book, written by a sorcerer… Drusas Achamian. Have you heard of him?"

"No."

Zsoronga's bottom lip pressed the line of his mouth into an upside-down crescent. He nodded, not so much in affirmation or approval, but as though to acknowledge his succinct honesty. "Bpo Mandatu mbal-"

"He was a Mandate Schoolman, like your own tutor."

Sorweel found himself glancing about, fearing that Eskeles would arrive any moment. Men had a way of hearing their names, even when spoken across the arc of the world. "And?"

"Well, he was present when the Anasыrimbor joined the First Holy War. Apparently he was his first and dearest friend-his teacher, both before and after the Circumfixion."

"So?"

"Well, for one, the Empress-you know, the woman on the silver kellics, the mother of our dear, beloved General Kayыtas-Achamian was her first husband. Apparently the Anasыrimbor stole her. So at the conclusion of the First Holy War, when the Shriah of their Thousand Temples crowns the Anasыrimbor Aspect-Emperor, this Achamian repudiates him before all those gathered, claims he is a fraud and deceiver."

Something of the old Zsoronga had returned, as though he were warming to the gossip of the tale.

"Yes…" Sorweel said. "I'm sure I've heard this… or a version of it, anyway."

"So he leaves the Holy War, goes into exile, becomes, they say, the only Wizard in the Three Seas. Only the love and shame of the Empress prevent his execution."

"Wizard?"

Another grave turn in his ebony expression. "Yes. A sorcerer without a School."

The Company of Scions was but a clot in a far larger column of Kidruhil companies, and a conspicuous one, given that its members had leave to wear native ornamentations over their crimson uniforms. They had followed the column over the crest of a scrub-choked rise, then leaned back against their cantles as they descended into a broad depression. The black track became viscous with water and muck. The susurrus of countless hooves stamping marshy ground rose about them-the wheeze of sinking grounds. What had looked like mist from the sloped heights became clouds of midges.

"And this is where he writes this book?" Sorweel asked, pitching his voice over the tramping clamour. "In exile?"

"Our spies brought my father a copy some six years ago, saying that it had become a kind of scripture for those who still resist the Anasыrimbor in the Three Seas. It's titled A Compendium of the First Holy War."

"So it's a history?"

"Only apparently. There are… insinuations, scattered throughout, and descriptions of the Anasыrimbor as he was, before he gained the Gnosis and became almost all-powerful."

"Are you saying this Mandate Schoolman knew… that he knew what the Aspect-Emperor was?"

Zsoronga paused before answering, looked at him as though rehearsing previous judgments. Among those who would contest the power of the Aspect-Emperor, Sorweel understood, no matters could be more essential.

"Yes," Zsoronga finally replied.

"So. What does he say?"

"Everything you might expect a cuckold to say. That's the problem…"

An ambient eagerness bloomed through Sorweel's limbs. The knowledge he needed was here-he could sense it. The knowledge that would cleave certainty out of mangled circumstances-that would see his honour redeemed! He squeezed the reins tight enough to whiten his knuckles. "Does he call him a demon?" he asked almost with breath. "Does he?"

"No."

A vertiginous, dumbfounded moment, as if he had leaned forward expecting an answer to brace him. "What then? Do not play me on such matters, Zsoronga! I come to you as a friend!"

The Successor-Prince somehow grinned and scowled all at once. "You must learn, Horse-King. Too many wolves prowl these columns. I appreciate your honesty, your overture, I truly do, but when you speak like this… I… I fear for you."

Obotegwa had softened his sovereign's tone, of course. No matter how diligently the Obligate tried to recreate the tenor of his Prince's discourse, his voice always bore the imprint of a long and oft-examined life.

Sorweel found himself looking down at the polished contours of his pommel, so different from the raw hook of iron on Sakarpi saddles. "What does this-this… Achamian say?"

"He says the Anasыrimbor is a man, neither diabolic nor divine. A man of unheard-of intellect. He bids us imagine the difference between ourselves and children…" The black man trailed into silence, his brows furrowed in concentration. He had this habit of staring down and to the left when pondering, as though judging points buried deep in the ground.

"And?"

"The important thing, he says, isn't so much what the Anasыrimbor is, as what we are to him."

Sorweel glared at him in exasperation. "You speak in riddles!"

"Yusum pyeb-!"

"Think to your childhood! Think of the hopes and fears. Think of the tales the nursemaids told you. Think of the way your face continually betrayed you. Think of all the ways you were mastered, all the ways you were moulded."

"Yes! So?"

"That is what you are to the Aspect-Emperor. That is what we all are."

"Children?"

Zsoronga dropped his reins, waved his arms out in grand gesture of indication. "All of this. This divinity. This apocalypse. This… religion he has created. They are the kinds of lies we tell children to assure they act in accord with our wishes. To make us love, to incite us to sacrifice… This is what Drusas Achamian seems to be saying."

These words, spoken through the lense of wise and weary confidence that was Obotegwa, chilled Sorweel to the pith. Demons were so much easier! This… this…

How does a child war against a father? How does a child not… love?

Sorweel could feel the dismay on his face, the bewilderment, but his shame was muted by the realization that Zsoronga felt no different. "So what are his wishes, then? The Aspect-Emperor. If all this is… is a fraud, then what are his true ends?"

They had climbed out of the shallow marsh and now crested a low knoll. Zsoronga nodded past Sorweel's shoulder, to where, in the congestion of the near distance, the young King could see Eskeles's absurd form fairly bowing the back of his huffing donkey. More lessons…

"The Wizard does not say," the Successor-Prince continued when he glanced back. "But I fear that you and I shall know before this madness is done with."

That night he dreamed of Kings arguing across an ancient floor.

"There is the surrender that leads to slavery," the Exalt-General said. "And there is the surrender that sets one free. Soon, very soon, your people shall know that difference."

"So says the slave!" Harweel cried, standing in a flower of outward-hooking flames.

How bright his father burned. Lines of fire skittering up the veins wrapping his arms. His hair and beard a smoking blaze. His skin blistering like pitch, shining raw, trailing lines of fiery grease…

How beautiful was his damnation.

At first he battled the slave, crying out. Porsparian was little more than hands in the darkness, fending, pressing, and then as Sorweel eventually calmed, soothing.

"Ek birim sefnarati," the old slave murmured, though it sounded more like a mutter in his broken wood-pipe voice. "Ek birim sefnarati… Shhh… Shhh…" Over and over, little more than a shadow kneeling at the side of Sorweel's cot.

Illumination slowly tinted the greater dark beyond the canvas planes of his tent, a slow inhalation of light.

"I saw my father burn," he croaked to the uncomprehending slave.

For some reason, he did not begrudge the gnarled hand that rested on his shoulder. And it seemed a miracle the way the slave's cracked-leather features gained reality in the fading gloom. Sorweel's own grandfather had died on the Pale when he was very young, so he had never known the indulgent warmth of a father's father's adoration. He had never learned the way the years opened the hearts of the old to the miraculousness of the young. But he thought he could see it in Porsparian's strange yellow-smiling eyes, in the rattle of his voice, and he found himself trusting it completely.

"Does that mean he's damned?" he asked thickly. A grandfather, it seemed, would know. "Dreams of burning?"

The shadow of a stern memory crossed the old Shigeki's face, and he pressed himself to his feet. Sorweel sat up in his cot, absently scratched his scalp while watching his slave's shadowy labour. Porsparian stooped to pull the mat from the turf floor, then knelt in the manner of an old woman worshiping. As Sorweel had seen him do so many times, he plucked away the turf, then pressed the form of a face into the soil-a face that seemed unmistakably feminine despite the gloom.

Yatwer.

The slave brought dirt to his eyes, then began slowly rocking to a muttered prayer. Back and forth, without any discernible rhythm, like a man struggling against the ropes that bound him. On and on he muttered, while the dawning light pulled more and more details from obscurity: the crude black stitching of his tunic's hem, the tufts of wiry white hair that climbed his forearms, the cross-hatching of kicked and pressed grasses. A kind of violence crept into his movements, enough to draw Sorweel anxiously forward. The Shigeki jerked from side to side, as though yanked by some interior chain. The intervals between the spasms shrank, until it seemed he flinched from a cloud of bee stings. A series of convulsions…

Sorweel leapt to his feet, stepped forward, hands held out. "Porsparian!" he cried.

But something, some rule of religious witness perhaps, held him back. He remembered the incident with the tear, when Porsparian had burned his palm, and a hollowing anxiousness seized him. He felt like a thing of paper, creased and rolled and folded into the shape of a man. Any gust, it seemed, could make a kite of him, toss him to the arches of heaven. What new madness was this?

His soiled fingers still to his eyes, the old man writhed and bucked as though kicked and beaten from within. Breath whistled from flaring nostrils. His voice had sputtered into a ragged gurgle…

Then, like grass springing back to form in the wake of boots, he was upright and still. Porsparian drew aside his hands, looked to the earth with eyes like red gelatin…

Gazed at the earthen face.

Sorweel caught his breath, blinked as though to squint away the madness. Not only had the slave's eyes gone red (a trick, some kind of trick!), somehow the mouth pressed into the soil face had opened.

Opened?

Forming a plate with his palms, Porsparian lowered his fingers to the lower lip, received the waters pooling there. Old and bent and smiling, he then turned to his master and stood. His eyes had returned to normal, though the knowingness they possessed seemed anything but. He stepped forward, reached out. Muck trailed like blood from the pads of his fingers. Sorweel shrank backward, nearly toppled over his cot.

Standing across the morning-glowing canvas, Porsparian actually seemed a creature made of shadowy earth, like something moulded from the mud of an ancient river watching with the forever look of yellow eyes. "Spit," the old slave said, stunning him with the clarity of his Sakarpic pronunciation. "To keep… face… clean."

For several heartbeats Sorweel simply stared, dumbfounded. Where? Where had the water come from?

What kind of Three Seas trickery…

"You hide," the old slave gasped. "Hide in gaze!"

But a kernel of understanding anchored his panic, and something within him wept, shouted in anguish and relief. The Old Gods had not forgotten! Sorweel closed his eyes, knowing that this was all the permission required. He felt the fingers smear his cheek, press in the firm manner of old men who do all things at the limit of their strength, not for anger, but to overmatch the thoughtless vitality of the young. He felt her spit at once soil and cleanse.

A mother wiping the face of her beloved son.

Look at you…

Somewhere on the plain, the priests sounded the Interval: a single note tolling pure and deep over landscapes of tented confusion. The sun was rising.