The white-luck warrior

Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli

Three days Sorweel waited after learning of the Nonman Embassy and the Niom.

Zsoronga refused to even countenance the possibility of his departure. Even though he had seen the Nonman Embassy first-hand, the Successor-Prince continued insisting the entire thing was some kind of Anasurimbor deceit. Sorweel was narindari, he insisted, chosen by the Gods to excise the cancer that was the Aspect-Emperor.

"Just wait," Zsoronga said. "The Goddess will intervene. Something auspicious will happen. Some twist will keep you here, where you can discharge your fate! Wait and see."

"And what if they know?" Sorweel finally asked, voicing the one alternative they had passed over in silence: that the Anasurimbor had somehow guessed the Dread Mother's divine conspiracy.

"They don't know."

"But wh-"

"They don't know."

Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need — to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.

Faced with yet another sleepless night, he once again struck out through the encampment for the Swayali enclave, determined to confront Serwa with pointed questions. But the guardsmen denied him entry to the Granary, saying their Grandmistress conferred with her Holy Father over the horizon. When he refused to believe them, they called for the Nuns. "Cap your gourd," a spice-eyed witch teased. "Soon the Grandmistress will be skipping you like a stone across water!"

Sorweel walked back to his tent in a stupor, at once dismayed at the capricious ways of Fate and thrilled — sometimes to the point of tingling breathlessness-at the prospect of spending so much time with his Enemy's daughter.

"Well?" Zsoronga cried when he returned.

"You are my brother, are you not?" Sorweel asked, pulling free the small purse that Porsparian-or the Goddess-had given him. It seemed dull and unremarkable in the sunlight, despite the golden crescents embroidered across it. "I need you to keep this."

As High Keeper of the Hoard, he knew enough about Chorae to know that it would wreck whatever sorcerous contrivance Serwa had prepared for them. Concealed or not.

"So you are leaving," the Successor-Prince said, taking the pouch with a blank air of incomprehension.

"It's a family heirloom," Sorweel offered by way of lame explanation. "An old totem. It will bring you luck only so long as you don't know what it contains."

This struck the young King as plausible enough, given that he had been forced to improvise. Many charms required some small sacrifice: beans that could not be eaten or wine that could not be quaffed.

But Zsoronga scarcely looked at the thing, let alone pondered it. In his eyes, Sorweel was the divine weapon.

"This cannot be!" he cried. "You! You are the one! She has chosen you!"

Sorweel could do no more than shrug with weary resignation.

"Apparently He has chosen me as well."

The following morning none other than Anasurimbor Moenghus himself came to fetch him before the Interval's toll. The Prince-Imperial was predictably menacing, not merely for his glare and feral physique. Like many of the Ordeal's outriders, he had taken to ornamenting his gear with fetishes cut from the Sranc. Most riders used shrivelled digits and blackened ears, but Moenghus, for some unfathomable reason, had their teeth braided across the hems of his nimil hauberk. Because of the way they were fused, the things seemed peculiarly inhuman: small, curved combs of enamel with three pairs of roots to a tooth.

The Prince-Imperial watched with bored amusement as Sorweel dressed and gathered his gear. Zsoronga, who sat watching Moenghus, could not keep his peace.

"Nil'giccas is a myth," he said with open contempt. "There is no Nonman King."

Moenghus shrugged, picked a curl from his wild black mane to study. "So says Zeum."

"So says Zeum."

Something about Zsoronga's assertion-its pious confidence perhaps-hooked the Prince-Imperial's attention. "Tell me, what has your father accomplished with all his Zeumi wisdom?"

"How to avoid marching into the wastes to die… among other things."

"Other things," Moenghus snorted. "Like surrendering his son as a hostage?"

Zsoronga glared at the man, speechless.

Moenghus's presence seemed too oppressive for any real verbal exchange, so, heavy with pack and shield, Sorweel simply clasped fingers with his friend. He smiled in the pretense of manliness, ignored the abject worry in Zsoronga's green gaze. Then, with the giddy sense of toppling from some ledge of happenstance, he turned to follow the Prince-Imperial toward the Granary.

The Interval had tolled by this time, so the encampment roiled with activity. Anasurimbor Moenghus paid no attention whatsoever to the warriors falling to their faces about them. He walked as though this simply were the way, the World abasing itself at his booted feet.

As though he truly were an Anasurimbor.

The Granary seemed another world, crowded as it was with women bustling in florid silk. Given the strict apportioning of duty and labour in Sakarpus, Sorweel could not but think of the kitchens and fulleries of his father's palace-the only places, in his narrow experience, where the voices of men did not predominate. He was not scandalized, though he suffered the vague sense that he should be.

Anasurimbor Serwa stood near the entrance of her pavilion, dispensing last-minute instructions to a small crowd of petitioners. She dismissed them the instant she glimpsed their approach, speaking some language Sorweel failed to recognize. The sun had climbed above the enclave's eastern rim, catching her flaxen hair in a brilliance that mimicked her father's haloed hands. A hush fell across the congregated witches, who, almost without exception, ceased their small labours to turn and watch their Grandmistress greet the newly arrived men.

Sorweel glanced from face to face, feeling more than a little conspicuous. More than a few of the Nuns, he realized, blinked tears. He suffered the sense, yet again, of blundering into dangers that only others could appreciate.

He turned to find Serwa standing nearby. Despite the craftsmanship, her leather jerkin and leggings seemed almost absurdly plain in comparison to the billows worn by her sisters. Both she and her brother shouldered packs that had been awaiting them in the dust.

"Come," she said, her arm lowered to receive his waist. "You must hold me tight."

Moenghus already stood hulking in her slip embrace. Sorweel glimpsed his eyes grinning at him over the flaxen arc of her head. "You get used to the reek," he said when the young King hesitated. Only several of the Nuns laughed, few enough to underscore the anxiousness of the others.

They loved her, Sorweel realized. The way King Harweel's men had loved him.

He stepped into the soft sphere of her touch and perfumed scent. Despite his mail hauberk, he started like an unbroken colt at her touch. She pulled him tight to her side, and he felt her spine arch to an inexplicable exertion. She leaned her head back, and he fairly cried out for the blue-white light shining from her mouth and eyes, so brilliant as to blacken her sunburned face.

Moenghus's laughter slipped through the chinks of her arcane call.

A fog rose about them, scored with glowing parabolic lines. The dawn-shadowed world dimmed. There was a binding, a sense of straps whipping about his body, immobilizing him, heaving him in a thousand simultaneous directions… and then the slip, as if he folded along occlusions in reality. Whipping light, then a lurching coming to be, as if he were a thing rotted yanked clear of his grave…

He was on his knees, retching.

He felt the fleeting press of Serwa's hand, as if she tested his bodily integrity. He spent several moments spitting into dust and balding turf. Then he staggered toward the Imperial siblings where they sat on the crest of a low berm. He had assumed they were watching him, but their gaze remained unbroken when he stepped beyond its angle. Craning his head back he saw regions of dust steaming across the horizon. The Army of the Middle-North, he realized, preparing to resume its long march to Golgotterath. Of the Men of the Circumfix, he could only glimpse the outermost assemblies, clouds of black specks, snaking beneath the dun plumes.

He turned back to Serwa and Moenghus.

"I am my father's daughter," she said, answering his questioning look. "But I am not my father…" Her eyelids fluttered against some unearthly drowsiness. "Metagnostic Cants are… trying for me."

He took an unceremonious seat at her side, found himself looking down, such was the lure of her gaze.

"Fate is indignity," he heard her say.

"What do you mean?"

"The King of Sakarpus, the city famed the world over for hoarding Chorae, now finds himself whisked across the sorcerous aether… and by a woman, no less."

"I hadn't considered it," he said with fuming wariness. "You lose track of the indignities after a while."

She smiled in what seemed genuine humour.

The Cant of Translocation, she went on to explain, could take them only the space of horizon, less if her vision were obscured. The Cant's difficulty was such that she could successfully hold its meaning only after at least two watches of sleep. She was lucky, she said, if she could complete two Translocations a day, unlike her divine father, who could cross endless leagues in that time, stepping from horizon to horizon.

"So you will vomit," she said, "and I will snooze, day in and day out, until we come to Ishterebinth."

"And while the Holy Princess snores and farts and mumbles," Moenghus said, leaning his shaggy-maned head low to see past his sister, "you and I will hunt."

"And the Sranc?" Sorweel asked, speaking with a confidence he did not feel.

"Will do everything they can to bugger our corpses," the Prince-Imperial replied, staring off.

Clenching his teeth against the tailings of his nausea, Sorweel turned back to regard their mighty fraction of the Great Ordeal. So many men, believing unto death…

The Horde retreated, scraping the horizon, and the Four Armies marched into its desolate wake.

Thus far the Army of the Middle-North under Anasurimbor Kayutas, charged with the extreme left flank, had confronted the greatest concentration of the abominations. For the Sranc sustained themselves on the fruits of the grave, worms and grubs, and so multiplied according to the richness of the earth. Though Kayutas did not so much as lay eyes on Lost Kuniuri, his Army lured innumerable clans from its forested frontiers. And so the Horde had accumulated in disproportion, mobbing to the west and thinning to the east, until, like gravel heaped upon a balance beam, it had tipped and come crashing…

Now it was the Army of the South under King Umrapathur of Nilnamesh that found itself most besieged. For as the Great Ordeal crawled ever northward, the Neleost, the famed Misty Sea, sheltered it to the west while the High Istyuli yawned ever more infinite to the northeast. Word of the Israzi'horul, the Shining Men, spread far among the high northern clans, and the Sranc came mobbing from over the horizon, a never-ending trickle of inhuman lust and wicked arms. They rutted and howled. They scoured the depleted earth. They battled over the carcasses of the dead, devoured their offspring. They blotted the earth with their multitudes.

For weeks the Great Ordeal had cleaved to a northern course, skirting the more broken lands to the west. But as they drew abreast the Neleost, the Four Armies had veered westward, forcing King Umrapathur to pivot with reference to his foe and so position the mad masses before him across his right flank. He understood the dangers, for as a long-time veteran of the Unification Wars he had fought many mortal campaigns. To drag your foe on your flank was to court disaster. Yet he put his faith in his Holy Aspect-Emperor, knowing that his Lord-and-God understood this risk far better than he did. But his men were not so sanguine. King Urmakthi of Girgash, especially, troubled him with dire pronouncements in council. As did the sinister Carindusu, the Grandmaster of the sorcerous Vokalati. For they spent their days in the shadow of the Sandstorm, fencing with the shrieking multitudes.

"When we drove them before us," Carindusu said, his oiled face held high and imperial, "fear was their contagion. Now that we drag them upon our boards, they answer more and more to their hunger."

Indeed, clans assailed them with increasing frequency, and not simply those driven by the extremis of starvation, the ones they cut down as easily as howling dogs. Soon not a day passed without tidings of some Grandee or Satrap dying on the dusty fields: Tikirgal, the Grandee of Macreb, who had always carried himself with the air of an immortal in council, and so shocked all the more with his passing; Mopuraul, the bellicose Satrap of Tendant'heras, whose overbearing manner few would miss.

And not a night passed without some pitched battle across the perimeter of the camp, crazed random affairs that often roused the whole of the Army and so contributed to its mounting exhaustion. The Vokalati never ceased walking the low skies to the immediate north, their lavish billows winding like nested snakes, their mouths and eyes aglow. Kites, the Men of the Circumfix began to call them. From dusk to dawn, they cast lights across the barren tracts, and without fail they found cohorts of Sranc-sometimes thousands strong-creeping toward the camp with reptilian cunning. Many of the swarthy Schoolmen bound themselves to their mules during the day so they might slumber. Fewer and fewer mustered for the daylight Culling.

And yet Umrapathur doggedly refused calling on their Holy Aspect-Emperor. When the Signallers asked what message they should flash across the horizon each evening, he would describe their straits, for he was not so arrogant as to pretend, but he would always conclude with "all is well with the Army of the South."

They exchanged horizon for horizon, winking from waste to wilderness to waste.

Since the Swayali Grandmistress had to see the places she delivered them to, the journey was one of stepping-if the madness of sorcery could be called such-from height to height. This made their passage a succession of breathtaking vistas, most of them densely forested after the first three days. Serwa's voice would speak from Sorweel's skin, bind the air about them with light, collapse his physical form into ash, then deliver them to an entirely novel vantage on the rim of the one previous. Usually, when she was not overcome by her arcane exertions, she would tell the two men something about the land beneath their blinking gaze.

"This was once the province of Unosiri, the ancient hunting grounds of the Umeritic God-Kings."

"There… See that line of shadow through the trees? That was the Soholn, the great road raised by King Nanor-Ukkerja I to speed the passage of his hosts to the frontier."

And each time, Sorweel would gaze out with a kind of perplexed wonder, trying to imagine what it would be like to possess memories of a distant age. Moenghus would typically scowl and cry, "Bah!"

Only the Neleost remained constant, a hazy band of dark across the north. And despite the clamour of birdsong, the land seemed hushed for the fact of losses endured so very long ago.

From height to height they leapt. A ridge-line crooked like an arthritic finger. A scarp overlooking forests whose trees dwarfed the greatest Sorweel had ever seen in the arid environs of Sakarpus. Once she conveyed them to the summit of a ruined tower, one that proved impossible to climb down from. The conjuring had proven to be particularly difficult, so much that Moenghus had to catch Serwa as she teetered on the brink. The two men found themselves stranded on the ruined summit for watches waiting for her to recover. Once she conveyed them to an island of stumped rock in a river, not realizing that miles of marshland lay just beyond. The three of them were pimpled in mosquito bites before they could escape.

They typically made their "leaps," as Moenghus called them, twice daily, though the Swayali Grandmistress often attempted-and sometimes succeeded-delivering them a third time. Early in the morning, not long after awaking, then again in the afternoon, or later depending on what success Serwa had snoozing in daylight. They struck no fire, relying instead on Serwa's witchcraft to cook the game that Moenghus felled with his gorgeous bow. They slept every night, taking turns keeping watch. Sorweel would never forget the moonlit worlds he gazed across during his shifts, his ears pricked to the chorus of nocturnal sounds. Not a night passed where he did not steal glimpses of Serwa sleeping. She would seem a thing of polished marble beneath loose cloth, something more dense than the surrounding world. And he would wonder that loneliness could be so beautiful.

Sometimes the Princess-Imperial did not so much sleep as swoon, such was her exhaustion following certain leaps. She often whimpered, or even cried out, while unconscious, prompting Sorweel to ask Moenghus what afflicted her.

"The past," he replied, glaring as if troubled by Sorweel's ignorance. "Same as all those who have touched the shrivelled turd that is Seswatha's heart. She dreams of these very lands dying in Sranc and fire. She dreams of Father's foe."

"The No-God," Sorweel said numbly.

Eskeles had told him about the First Apocalypse, of course, how the shadowy force the Sakarpi called the Great Ruiner was about to return to finish the destruction of the world. Eskeles also had moaned and whimpered in his sleep, but if anything he had complained of his Dreams too much, to the point where Sorweel had made a habit of dismissing them.

For whatever reason, the fact that Serwa dreamed these very same dreams troubled him more.

"What was it like," he asked her once, "the First Apocalypse?"

"Defeat," she replied with inward eyes. "Horror. Anguish…" She looked to him with a frowning smile. "And beauty too, in a strange way."

"Beauty?"

"The end of nations…" she said with uncharacteristic hesitancy. "Few things command the heart with such profundity."

"Nations," he repeated. "Like Sakarpus."

"Yes… Only exterminated instead of enslaved." She stood as though to put distance between herself and his thin-skinned questions. "And multiplied to the ends of the earth."

Twice they heard Sranc horns calling, similar, yet eerily different from those heard on the Sakarpi Pale. On both occasions the three of them halted whatever it was they were doing, crooked their heads in pensive listening, and it would seem-to Sorweel at least-that the end of the world was not so far.

The death toll climbed, enough to even provoke King Umrapathur's fearless son, Charapatha, the famed Prince of One Hundred Songs, to speak out in apprehension. Every morning he led the Knights of Invishi into the roiling horizon, and every evening he returned with reports of fomenting danger. "They no longer flee," he told his father. "They scatter only when they see Kites in the sky, and those have become all too rare… Soon they will not fear us at all, and they will fall upon us in numbers ten times greater than before-ten times or more!"

"What can we do but march?" King Umrapathur cried out in reply.

Even though the Believer-Kings understood their collective predicament, the fact that they had no choice but to continue advancing, their fear goaded them to question the manner of their march. Soon even King Mursidides of Cironj, who had been otherwise supportive, and Prince Massar of Chianadyni, who saw weakness in all complaints, began speaking out in council. At the very least, the Holy Aspect-Emperor had to be consulted.

"Why this stubbornness, King-Brother?" Mursidides chided. "Do you fear you will become less in His eyes? Your faith in Him should not hang on His faith in you."

There was no insolence in these words. All of them knew what it meant to dwell in the presence of their Holy Aspect-Emperor, to breathe air relieved of pride and shame, and they sought always to rekindle something of its tenor among themselves. They did not flinch from the prick of honesty, so long as it was well spoken.

So Umrapathur relented. He set aside his pride and commanded the Signallers to call on the Holy Aspect-Emperor with their coded pageants of light.

"The Horde waxes. Lord Most Holy, the Army of the South calls on your strength and wisdom."

Less than a watch passed before the Signallers, hanging in the sky above the camp's eastern perimeter, saw the reply glitter along the bald night horizon.

"Assemble the Believer-Kings."

Anasurimbor Kellhus arrived even as they organized themselves. He wore a common cloak, striding among them without ceremony, clutching shoulders in solemn reassurance.

First, he questioned them regarding forage and supplies. They starved as the other Armies starved, but since the rivers had quickened, their position high on the Neleost watershed assured them the most plentiful catches of fish. Indeed, many companies marched with flimsy mantlets spanning the heads of dozens, covered with fish to dry in the sunlight.

Then he questioned them about the Horde, heard their multitudinous misgivings.

"This is the balance of perils," he said, glaring down from his halo. "You are exposed for the sake of sustenance. To undo the one is to undo the other… I will send you Saccarees. I can do no more."

And with that, he winked out of existence.

To a man the Believer-Kings of the South rejoiced, for Apperens Saccarees was the Grandmaster of the Mandate, the Aspect-Emperor's own School. Only Carindusu, who could not set aside his scholastic rivalries even here, thousands of miles from his fastness in Invishi, scoffed. What could the Mandate do that the Vokalati could not do as well, if not better?

"Double your numbers," the ever-witty Mursidides declared to uproarious laughter.

The Grandmaster withdrew, embittered.

The Mandate Schoolmen arrived the following midday, bearing only what they could carry with them across the low sky. The great columns of infantrymen watched with wonder as the sorcerers filed across the flashing sun, their crimson-silk billows hanging like windless flags.

And so the number of Kites flown by the Army of the South was doubled. More than three hundred sorcerers of rank and some two hundred more understudies now strode through the sepulchral clouds above the Horde.

They crossed it as sparks from a grass fire-as a light leaping.

Kuniuri… The fabled land of his ancestors.

Not even two thousand years could undo the glory of its works. It seemed a great vessel clinging to the surface of an earthen sea, wrecked and derelict, too powerfully wrought to founder, too vast to entirely drown. Humped fortifications. Overgrown processionals. Mounded temples. It would linger for another two thousand years, Sorweel realized, even if only as featureless stones kissed by the sun. And this, he found himself thinking, was not such a bad thing, to find immortality in your bones.

"Do you ever ponder?" Serwa asked him once, watching him gaze across a field of vine-draped debris. Her voice startled him, since he had thought her asleep.

"Ponder?"

"The Apocalypse," she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "How your city survived when far greater bastions toppled."

The young King of Sakarpus shrugged. "Some live. Some die. My father always said it was a good thing that Men could only trust in the Whore when it comes battle. He believed Men should be wary of war."

She smiled in appreciation.

"But you do see it, don't you?"

"See what?"

" Evidence. Proof of my Holy Father."

Something balked within him, balked at the lies about to be told. Even in childhood, his had always been an honest, even earnest, soul. He gazed into her clear blue eyes, trusting in the mask the Dread Mother had given him.

"My friend, Zsoronga… He thinks your Consult is a myth, an-"

"And that Father is mad."

"Yes."

"But he saw the skin-spy Father unmasked in the Umbilicus."

"Months back? Yes."

Her scowl was quizzical enough to be alarming. "And?"

"He thought it a trick."

"Of course he did. The Zeumi are stubborn fools."

Now it was Sorweel's turn to scowl. He could feel the danger-the slippery tumble of word in passion, passion in word, that prefaced every argument-yet he erred against caution once again. "Better a fool than a slave," he snapped in reply.

Boldness, it seemed, was its own shelter.

Her expression hung in blank equipoise, as if deciding whether to be offended or amused. "You are not like the others. You do not speak as a Believer-King."

"I am not like the others."

Then she asked the dreaded question. "But you do believe, don't you? Or has your stubborn Zeumi friend robbed you of your conviction?"

The assumption was plain. Her father had declared him a Believer-King, therefore he simply had to be a believer-at least at some point. Once again, Sorweel found himself marvelling at the strange power the Goddess and her deception had afforded him. Knowledge-this was the great fortress the Anasurimbor had raised about themselves. And somehow he had found his way past the gates, into the very bosom of his adversary.

He was narindari, as Zsoronga had said. He, and he alone, was capable of murdering the Aspect-Emperor.

He need only summon the courage to die.

"Is doubt such a bad thing?" he asked, blinking to recover his concentration. "Would you rather I be a fanatic like the others?"

She glared at him, five heartbeats of scrutiny, unnerving for the glint of preternatural canniness in her Anasurimbor eyes.

"Yes," she finally said. "Most assuredly yes. I have battled Shauriatas in my Dreams. I have been tortured by Mekeritrig. Chased across Earwa by Aurax and Aurang. The Consult is as real as it is wicked and deadly, Sorweel. Short of my father, the world knows no powers more ferocious. Even absent the No-God and the Second Apocalypse, they warrant the bloodthirsty fanaticism of Men."

If anything, her voice had grown softer in speaking these words, yet the intensity of her look and intonation shocked the young King of Sakarpus. For all her allure and arcane potency, Anasurimbor Serwa had always seemed arrogant and flip like her brothers-another child too aware of her divine paternity. Now she reminded him of Eskeles, and the way the portly Schoolman had tucked his zealotry between the folds of his wit and compassion.

This was the true Serwa, he realized. The earnest one. And her beauty seemed to blaze all the brighter for it.

He found himself staring at her breathless. Leaf shadows bobbed across the perfect lines of her face.

"Don't be a fool, Sorweel."

She turned on her rump to kick her snoring brother.

No Schoolmen was as famed as Apperens Saccarees, who had long stood high among the Empire's Exalt-Ministers. His voice proved a tonic for the Army of the South's nightly war-councils, for it carried both the authority of their Aspect-Emperor and the promise of tactical acumen. Like all Mandate Schoolmen he dreamed the First Apocalypse through the eyes of Seswatha and so could speak of their straits with the wisdom of one who had suffered them before-many times.

"In Atyersus," he said, referring to the Mandate's famed citadel, "we have whole libraries dedicated to warring against the Sranc. Centuries have we dreamed the battles of old. Centuries have we pondered the debacles and the successes."

The Grandmaster of the Vokalati, however, was not impressed in the least. Such is the perversity of pride that it can drive a man to embrace contradiction, so long as some semblance of his privilege is preserved. Carindusu, who had been among the first to warn of their growing peril, now became the first to discount the ominous declarations made by others-and Saccarees especially.

"Why do you speak of them so?" the Invitic Grandmaster asked, his oiled features gleaming with derision. "They are naught but brutes, vicious beasts, to be herded with care, certainly, but to be herded nonetheless."

"Beasts to be herded?" Saccarees replied scowling. "They speak their own tongue. They forge their own weapons-when they cannot scavenge ours. The bliss we find in coupling, they find in the murder of innocents. They gather when we trod their earth, drawn from lands far from our stink on the wind. When overmatched they withdraw of their own nature, gouging all life from the earth before us, denying us the least sustenance. And when they come to dwarf our numbers, they assail us with suicidal ardour, throw themselves upon our spears simply to deny us our weapons!" The Grandmaster of the Mandate glanced from face to face to ensure that all present grasped the dire significance of his words. "Do you think this a mere coincidence, Carindusu?"

"They are beasts," the tall Vokalati Schoolman said.

"No. Carindusu, please, you must forgive my insistence. They are weapons. They were designed thus, hewn from the flesh of Nonmen by the Inchoroi to purge this world of souls-to exterminate Men! Beasts live to survive, my old friend. Sranc live to kill!"

And so was Carindusu shamed a second time.

The Culling was reorganized under Saccarees's direction. As the Army of the South veered westward, the Vokalati had simply spread themselves across the entirety of the Horde facing them. Since the clans accumulating along their right flank posed the greatest threat, Saccarees, with Carindusu's grudging assent, dedicated all the Mandate and Vokalati-some three hundred sorcerers of rank-to their extermination. For the long-suffering pickets, the vision of so many Kites sailing into the enormous bowers of dust was a thing of cheering joy and wonder. "Like watching angels drag skirts of fire," Prince Sasal Charapatha reported to his father.

Arrayed in cadres of three-triunes-the Schoolmen walked the high-hanging veils, their Wards turning aside flurries of arrows and javelins, their Cants scorching the shadows that raced shrieking beneath. The violence of the Horde's flight kicked ever more dust into the sky, so piling obscurity atop obscurity, until the Schoolmen could scarce see their own apparitional defences, let alone the ground seething beneath. Since nothing singular could be heard above the cavernous roar, they could not even rely on their ears to guide them. So, their mouths and eyes alight, they lashed out blindly, swept the ground with Cirroi Looms, Dragonheads, Gotaggan Scythes, and more, destroying the gibbering mobs they saw more in their soul's eye than in fact. They advanced in hellish echelon, using the glow of the triunes flanking to pace their progress into the ochre gloom. Shouting their voices to croaks, they chased the far flank of the Horde out into the droughted wastes…

Only to find it returned the following morning.

Since the Sranc cannibalized their dead, evidence of their efficacy was difficult to find. The cavalry pickets who crossed the sorcerers' wake counted the dead as they had been instructed. The Imperial Mathematicians argued estimates, and the Believer-Kings continually bent their darling ear, as the Nilnameshi put it, to the numbers that most flattered their hopes. But Saccarees was not fooled-no more than Carindusu.

"The number is irrelevant!" he finally cried to King Umrapathur. "The effect is all that matters."

This put an end to their numerical speculations, for everyone knew that despite the cunning and fury of their efforts, the Schoolmen had accomplished nothing that any man could discern. Their predicament, if anything, had become more perilous. Not only did the Horde seem to be swelling along their flank, it had grown mobbing tendrils that hooked about their rear. Sranc, uncounted thousands of them, now followed the Army.

Once again Umrapathur was forced to set aside his pride and call upon the Aspect-Emperor.

This time their Lord-and-God came to them chalked in dust, bearing the crackling aura of sorceries dispensed. In their soul's eye, the Believer-Kings could see him striding alone into the inhuman Horde, wracking the masses that thronged about him with cataclysmic light.

"Indeed," he said, favouring Sasal Umrapathur with a nod, "your peril is great. You were wise to call me, Umra."

Crisis, he told the assembled caste-nobles, was inevitable. The best they could hope to achieve was to weaken the Horde in tactically advantageous ways so they might survive its inevitable assault. "Henceforth, you must encircle yourselves with your might, camp curled as a caterpillar, armed against all directions."

The advance pickets were thinned to a handful of companies while the bulk of the Army's horsemen-the heavily armoured knights of Nilnamesh and the more fleet riders of Girgash and Chianadyni-concentrated on clearing the southeastern tracts of Sranc in concert with the Schoolmen. At the Aspect-Emperor's direction, they adopted the extravagant hunting tactics of the Far Antique Norsirai kings, who would use their hosts to encircle entire provinces and so drive all the beasts of the land to slaughter. The Schoolmen filed out into the depths of the plain, then arrayed themselves behind the Sranc so they could drive them into far-flung arcs of horsemen. It seemed they herded clouds with staffs of light. For the men marching in the main host, half the world was fenced in mountainous dust.

But it was like digging holes in loose sand: for every thousand they gouged clear, another thousand came collapsing in from the sides. And the losses, especially among the unarmoured ponies, rose to unsustainable levels. As ever, death came swirling down. Possu Hurminda, the even-handed Satrap of Sranayati, was lost, pulled down by a crazed Sranc chieftain. So too was Prince Hemrut, the eldest son of King Urmakthi, killed.

Despite these losses, despite the relentless heroism of their efforts, the numbers of Sranc trailing the Army of the South seemed to grow at an increasing rate, to the point where the cavalrymen found themselves mired in pitched battles rather than riding down panicked swarms. Then, on the sixth day of the Hunt, as it had come to be called, some five companies of Nilnameshi knights under Satrap Arsoghul were out-and-out overwhelmed, and the Cironji Marines, who were tasked with guarding the Army's rear, found themselves beset by several thousand Sranc.

"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?" Carindusu 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 Carindusu 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, Anasurimbor 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 Anasurimbor 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 Anasurimbor 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 Kayutas'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 Anasurimbor.

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, Moenghus was nothing short of mercurial. Sorweel had never forgotten Kayutas's warning to beware his brother's madness. Even Serwa had mentioned Moenghus'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 Moenghus 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 Anasurimbor he likes."

"Podi," Sorweel had learned, was the jnanic diminutive for "older brother," a term of endearment and respect.

"My sister is sane," Moenghus 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 trail. "He's my brother, yes. But we share no blood. He is the son of my father's first wife-my namesake, Serwe. 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 Cnaiur urs Skiotha?"

Even from a distance, Moenghus 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 Moenghus's paternity.

Serwa cast another laughing look at the dark-haired man.

"Because they think about thoughts," Moenghus said, looking over his shoulder.

Sorweel frowned. He had always thought this the definition of wisdom. "And this is crazy?"

Moenghus 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 Anasurimbor."

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 Dunyain," 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 Dunyain?" 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!" Moenghus 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!" Carindusu 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 floodplains 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 Moenghus 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 Anasurimbor had extended to him, their enemy…

Not to mention the shining presence of the Aspect-Emperor himself.

She had dreamed of the nameless city below them, Sorweel knew. She had relived the horror of its destruction even as he had pondered its overgrown imprint. And it struck him breathless, stationary in a way he had never known. The sight of her weeping somehow resurrected the circumstances that had so reduced her, a woman who seemed impervious to grief. He could almost hear the horns clawing the wind, glimpse the dread Whirlwind that Eskeles had always described in hand-wringing tones…

Nothing is quite so easy as dismissing the folly of the dead-so long as they remain dead.

She brought them to the ruins, though she could have leapt much farther, across the valley if need be. The Cant taxed her as profoundly as any, but she insisted on wandering with them, through the ruins of ancient Tryse, the Holy Mother of Cities.

The trees towered, formed high-hanging canopies that made gloom of the forest floor. The walls and bastions still loomed where not pulled down by the ages, their foundations buried, their torsos stained black, the blocks spangled with moss and lichens. In some places the rising tide of earth had inundated all, leaving only mossed debris scattered across the forest floor, fragments that would be taken for mere rocks and boulders in a deeper gloom. In other places, the loam and life had not so accumulated, leaving random stretches of nude ruin: heaped bricks, canted steps, walls finning the ground, the drums of toppled pillars.

Serwa led them across the destruction, her face flushed with excitement, her voice fluting in the manner Sorweel had heard so many times from girls her age, only about matters far more profound and tragic. The Sakarpi King thought he recognized some of the things she spoke of, either directly or through the slanted similarity of names. But far and away most of what she told them he had never heard before-nor had he imagined that Men period, let alone those who had fathered his ancestors, had battled and strived and conquered in days that were thought ancient by the ancients.

He had never heard of Cunwerishau, the first God-King to extend the might of his hand along the length of the River Aumris. And aside from Sauglish, he had never heard of any of the other cities that perpetually vied with Tryse for dominance: Etrithatta, Lokor, and Umerau, whose might would grow to exceed even that of Tryse, and whose language would remain the Sheyic of the Ancient North long after she was broken by a people called the Cond. " Your people, Horse-King," she said, her eyes alight with connections Sorweel could not fathom. "Or the cousins of your ancestors, to be exact, born to the lands just north of what you Sakarpi call the Pale. More than three thousand years ago, they cracked the walls of ancient Umerau and swept through this valley. Their ardour glutted, they spared all the great works they found and made slaves of those they would pillage."

She spoke as if he should celebrate these facts, take heart in the far-flung incarnations of his people's blood. But again Sorweel was afflicted with doubt and wonder. To know a man among the Sakarpi was to know his father. And here was this woman, telling him the truth of his fathers' fathers… The truth of himself!

What did it mean to be better known by outlanders than by oneself? What kind of fools were the Sakarpi, to find heart and honour-let alone self — in flattering fables spun across the ages?

How wrong had they been? Even proud Harweel.

They came to rockier ground, and she quickened her stride so much that Sorweel found himself breathless for trying to match her pace up the slope. A mysterious clearing opened between the trees, and for the first time they found themselves wandering among truly monumental works: blocks of hewn granite, as tall as a man and as long as a four-wheeled wain, some spilled, others assembled into cyclopean walls. She rushed forward without hesitation, wending through slots of stone and inciting any number of curses from her brother. They raced after her.

Panting, Sorweel paused before the sight of open sky, the blue so much deeper than the plains. He squinted against the sudden collusion of light and openness. A broad rectangle extended before him, heaped with stone ruin, yet miraculously devoid of overgrowth. The encroaching forest loomed about its perimeter as if leaning against some unseen barricade-or restrained by some unknown horror. He stood upon a far corner so that he could see the aisle of gargantuan pillars that braced the concourse in its entirety, as well as the lesser columns that lined its outer precincts. Most of them had tumbled-the smaller, outer columns especially-but enough remained standing to conjure the sense of the whole and to deliver the image of the long-lost ceilings to the soul's eye.

Sorweel watched a bee spiral from the gloom, then reel away to the edges of the clearing until it found a circumventing line. Even the birds he saw batting between the crowns of the surrounding elms and oaks seemed to avoid the open spaces, as if loathe to dare the scrutiny of the stage…

The Sakarpi King caught his breath, knowing he stood before an arena of lost glories-phantoms. A place that had lived too fiercely to ever truly die.

Oblivious, Serwa raced ahead, darted across the heaped stone and between the monstrous columns that remained. "Behold!" she cried with girlish disbelief. "Behold the King-Temple!"

Sorweel and Moenghus shared a hesitant glance.

"Bah!" the Prince-Imperial spat, running after her.

Sorweel trailed walking, trying hard to smile.

"How many times?" she called. It seemed she jostled with long-dead shades in his soul's eye.

"Stow your voice!" her brother commanded.

But she just frowned and continued, crying, "Here! Here! " looking about as though trying to orient her waking eyes with her sleeping. "On this very spot, Podi, I have supped and celebrated with the High-King, Celmomas-our little brother's namesake! — and his Knights-Chieftain."

"Serwa, please!" Moenghus cried. "Recall what Father told you! The skinnies are drawn to places like this!"

"Stow your worries!" she said, mocking his tone. "We leave no trail for them to follow. No trail, no mobbing. Even if we landed in the lap of an entire clan, they would be no match for me. I have reaped legions in the Culling, Podi! You know this…"

She climbed a small rise that had been chapped to gravel, spun in a pirouette that made a wheel of her white flashing hair. "I stand upon the axis of an ancient power," she declared to the two wondering men. "The hub of a wheel that once turned the World but now spins groundless in the smoky Outside." She closed her eyes, raised her nostrils, as if breathing deep the uncanniness of the place-as if the occult were simply a more subtle perfume.

"Two thousand years ago," she called, "from this very dais, the first Ordeal was declared against Golgotterath."

"Yes…" Moenghus replied scowling. "The one that failed."

The rain began shortly after, spilling from a bank of woollen clouds that caught them entirely unawares. The sun just slipped into the sky's pocket, and endless waters followed chill upon the gloom. The two men ran to the shelter of Serwa's sorcerous parasol, and together they hastened to the river.

They could not see the far shore.

Moenghus had said nothing the entirety of the trek, and now, sitting side by side upon the puddled stone, his manner became even darker. While Sorweel gazed out into fogged shadows, he glowered at nothing, as if staring down hatreds only he could fathom.

"Father says this river is holy," he finally said.

He stood and began stripping his clothes.

In disbelief, Sorweel watched him walk naked, following a shoal of sand and brush to where it dwindled to a finger prodding the water. He held his arms out for balance as he tiptoed to the very claw. He became shadowy as he passed through ever more veils of rain. He lingered for a moment, his powerful frame sculpted and gleaming. Then he leapt white and slicked out into waters. He vanished in a pale whoosh.

Sorweel and Serwa watched the rain fall, watched the white spitting across the iron-grey waters, threshing away the rings of his submersion, until they could no longer say just where the river had swallowed him.

He did not surface.

At some point, Sorweel could feel individual heartbeats within his breast, such was the horror rising within him. He peered across the descending roar, waiting…

"Something's happened!" he finally cried.

He flew to his feet, but Serwa restrained him with a firm clasp upon his right hand.

"He does that," she said in reply to his alarmed gaze. "Pretends to be dead."

"Why?"

Serwa frowned, once again far too canny and too wise for her youthful face.

"Surely Kayutas told you he was mad."

He gaped, and she laughed at his incomprehension, returned her gaze to the sparking waters.

Suddenly Moenghus burst from the Holy Aumris with an inhaling shout, his hair drawn like black paint about his face, neck, and corded shoulders.

"It tastes like dirt!" he laughed across the washing roar.

The Holy Aumris.

As the easternmost element of the Great Ordeal, the Army of the South was the last to pass from the endless plates of the High Istyuli into the more broken lands to the northwest. Ravines and defilades scored the once-simple distances. Monstrous stumps of stone breached the parch, formations that reared into saddle-backed summits. The Men of the Circumfix sighted ruins commanding bare rock heights, glimpsed the shadow of ancient and overgrown roads bisecting the horizon. Like their brethren to the west, they took heart in these signs, marvelled that places so far could have once been the centre of Mannish civilization. The sense of trespass fell from them, the aura of estrangement that makes wayfarers adopt the worried habits of the interloper. For the first time they understood that they were returning and not simply venturing-and their souls were fortified.

They would have thought themselves liberators… were it not for the curtains of dust drawn across the horizon about them.

They marched through the high heart of ancient Sheneor, the weakest and most ephemeral of the Three Kingdoms of Far Antique fame, the frontier sibling of stern Aorsi to the north and populous Kuniuri to the west. The Mandate Schoolmen, who every night dreamed of these lands in their nadir, looked upon the desolation and mourned. Where were the white-washed towers? The serpentine pennants of blue and gold? The companies of bronze-armoured Knights-Chieftain, cruel and proud? And they wondered that they had lived to see this earth with their waking eyes.

With the breaking of the land came the quickening of the rivers, and with this came the increasing complications of crossing them. Across the high plain, the drought had so reduced the flow as to make fording a mere trudge through mire. Now the Army crawled down into steeper valleys where they found denuded poplars, stripped to spears by the retreating Horde. The Men of the Circumfix took comfort in their campfires, the first in months, and feasted on what fish the Netters gleaned from the rivers. They sucked the grease from their fingers, spoke small prayers thanking War for their momentary reprieve. The Believer-Kings, meanwhile, argued logistics and debated the perils of crossing treacherous waters in the shadow of the Horde. The fords themselves were easy to find: the Sranc literally rewrote the landscape when funnelled into multiple crossings, such were their numbers. Banks worn into ramps, waters stamped into broad morasses. They imagined a writhing, shrieking world, the skies gauzed with dust, the worm-pale multitudes stamping and heaving, thousands flailing in the mudded waters, and they were troubled. The earth seemed to tingle with the memory of their raucous masses, like a sheet drawn from the body of a dead man. Everything reeked of pollution.

The fear was that the Horde would attack while the Army stood astride both banks-a fear that never materialized. At the first such river, Carindusu actually remained behind with some hundred of his white-and-violet-gowned Vokalati, thinking they could use the fords to rid themselves of the Sranc massing on their rear flank. They slew many to be sure, thousands, sending plumes of foul steam into the already obscure air, but the Sranc discovered other crossings, or perhaps they abandoned their armour and simply swam; either way, the Nilnameshi Schoolmen found themselves withdrawing across seething grounds.

King Umrapathur continued taking precautions. But he became ever more confident that the rivering of the land was far more a boon to his host than a liability. He could not foresee the danger to come.

The three camped in the ruins of a fortress halved by the collapse of the scarps that had once motivated its construction. Dagmersor, Serwa called it. The remains of the citadel hung jagged and hollow above them, a tattered silhouette across the clouding stars. Unseen wolves howled.

Sorweel drew the first watch. He picked a position above the moribund fortifications, where the land mobbed out from beneath his hanging feet. Nocturnal forests. Solitary trees climbed apart from their brothers, propped on swells of earth and rock, their crowns silver beneath the Nail of Heaven, their branches a veining black. Noise pitted the black with a million unseen places, a creaking, creeping chorus that rose from the dark face of all, fading into the ever-expanding silence that was the emptiness of Heaven.

And it scooped the breath from Sorweel's lungs.

There was a beauty to this journey across the ruined landscapes of lost Kuniuri, one due as much to these moments of solitude as to the whorled terrain that framed them.

His thoughts wandered, as they often did, across the myriad spectacles he had witnessed since his father's death. And he wondered that someone so frail as him could participate in such legendary events, let alone move them. The things he had seen. He imagined what it would be like returning to Sakarpus, excavating whatever scraps of his old life that remained, and trying to explain what had happened-what was happening — beyond the Pale. Would his countrymen marvel? Would they scoff? Would they accept the epic magnitude of what he described, or would they dismiss it as mere conceit?

The questions dismayed him. Until now, his return had been a thoughtless assumption: he was a Son of the Lonely City-of course he would return. But the more he considered it, the more improbable it began to seem. Were he to work the Goddess's divine will, murder the Aspect-Emperor… Surely that would mean his doom as well. And were he to deny the Goddess, become a Believer-King at the risk of his immortal soul… Would that not mean a different doom?

And if he were to return, how could he describe, let alone explain, the things he had witnessed?

How could he be Sakarpi?

Moenghus loomed out of the dark long before his turn to take watch and took a seat beside him, his manner as wordless and sombre as the Sakarpi King's own. Sorweel's alarm quickly subsided. Even after so many months of duplicity, he was not a man who could comfortably think treachery in the presence of those he intended to betray. In the siblings' company he invariably gave reign to a certain amenity in his nature-one easily confused for cowardice.

He could only plot in solitude.

They sat in silence, staring out over the sunless tracts, soaking in the aura of companionship that often rises between speechless men. Since Sorweel did not look at the man, he remained a brooding shadow in his periphery, one laden with intimations of physical force and errant passion.

"Your father…" the young King ventured to ask. "Do you think he has… grasped God?"

Sorweel would never know what motivated his honesty. A man, he was beginning to learn, could become as accustomed to contradiction and dilemma as to heartbreak.

"A strange question for a Believer — King," the Prince-Imperial snorted. "I could report you to the Judges!"

Sorweel merely scowled.

"Look about you," Moenghus continued, shrugging and rubbing his shaven chin the way he always did when yielding to serious considerations. " All the earth rises to wage war against Father, and yet he prevails. Even the Hundred raise arms against him!"

Sorweel blinked. These last words pricked like a fistful of broken glass.

"What are you saying?"

" Truth, Horse-King. Nothing offends Men or Gods more…"

Sorweel could only stare at him, witless. Was it possible for a god to be mistaken?

But then that had been Eskeles's lesson those months past-had it not? The Gods were but fragments of the God, mere shards of a greater whole-like Men. Yatwer, the Schoolman would most certainly say, was just such a fragment… Just as blind to the whole.

Could the Mother of Birth be deceived?

If the Prince-Imperial noticed his bewildered horror, he betrayed no sign whatsoever. Moenghus was one of those men who cared not at all for the petty rules that measured verbal exchanges. He simply stared out to the constellations twinkling low on the western horizon, talking as if no listening in the world could matter.

"Of course Father has grasped God."

The Army of the South had come to Hoilirsi, a province known in Far Antique days for the cultivation of flax. Hoilirsi found its northern boundary in a river called the Irshi, which ran fast and deep for some hundred miles before mellowing on its path to the Neleost Sea. Even in Far Antique times, the Irshi had been known for the rarity of its crossings, so much so that the ancient Bardic Priests often used it as a name for detour-and its crossing as a metaphor for death. Iri Irshi ganpirlal, they would say when speaking of fallen heroes, or of anyone who faltered in life: "Cruel Irshi pulls them under."

King Umrapathur and his planners knew of the Irshi, of course, but they had assumed, as was reasonable considering the hundred rivers they had crossed thus far, that it would also be droughted. They had even discussed the possibility of sending cohorts of Schoolmen out in advance of the Horde in the hope of catching it crossing fords. They did not realize they had come to the first of many rivers whose high sources threaded the peaks of the Great Yimaleti-that for vast stretches of its length, the Irshi had no fordable crossings.

The Horde found itself caught along its fanged banks. Multitudes were drowned, thrown into the gorges by the relentless press of their kin. Worm-white carcasses tumbled down the river's tempestuous lengths and formed macabre rafts along its idylls, stretches of bloat and filth that sheeted the Irshi from bank to bank. But as the clans retreated out of terror of the Shining Men, they soon began shrinking from the threshing waters as well. The raucous stormfront that was the Horde slowed, then halted altogether.

Prince Massar ab Kascamandri would be the first to bear the tidings to King Umrapathur: "The Horde… It no longer withdraws before our lances."

The council was thrown into an uproar. What were they to do? How could they assail such impossible numbers while masses more roiled about and behind their flanks?

Carindusu was the first to upbraid them. "Can't you see that this a boon?" he cried. "All this time fretting, wringing our hands because the skinnies outrun us, because we cannot kill them quickly enough, and now, when Fate pins them in place, delivers them to our fury, we fret and wring our hands?" With the Horde trapped and with Mandate and the Vokalati combined, the Grandmaster argued, the Culling would become outright butchery. He and his arcane brethren would lay carrion across the horizon.

The Believer-Kings turned to Apperens Saccarees, who gazed at his rival with wary appreciation.

"Perhaps the Grandmaster speaks true," he said.

And so the council fell to devising a new strategy. As men are prone, they took heart in what they thought was evidence of their own ingenuity. Prince Charapatha alone harboured misgivings, for among the Lords of the South, only he reasoned that the Consult would also know of the Irshi-and so know it would catch the Horde. He was not named the Prince of One Hundred Songs for nothing: he understood the advantage conveyed by the ability to predict a foe's actions. But he had taken his father's earlier admonishment to heart and was loathe to raise questions that might undermine the ardour of his Zaudunyani brothers.

And as much as he distrusted Carindusu and his posturing pride, the Prince had come to regard Saccarees as a kindred intellect. The School of Mandate marched with them. How could they fail?

Sorweel dreamed of her bathing, trembled for the steam that rose from her gentle places. The waters were pure and translucent, sheathing and beading across her flushing skin. Wisps enveloped all. Then something crimson, something ragged and viscous, tentacled the waters, unlooped like spilled entrails, depositing scabrous filth across the clarity of her submerged form. But she knew it not, and so continued to cup offal in her hands, pour filth over her naked skin.

He called out…

Only to find himself splayed across forest turf, blinking at the midday sun broken through branches. He pawed an ant from his soft beard, saw Moenghus sitting nearby. The Prince-Imperial sat with his back against a tree, absently working his knife across his throat and chin, staring off toward the sound of his sister's singing, which rose with the noise of rushing water from behind tangled screens of foliage.

She bathed, Sorweel realized, blinking away memories of his dream.

She only sang when she bathed.

Moenghus turned to him for a moment, watched him with a preoccupied frown, then looked away when Sorweel hauled himself onto his rump.

"What you said earlier…" the young King said to the man, squinting against his grogginess. "About the Hundred raising arms against your father…"

The Prince-Imperial regarded him with a long and canny look. There was a brutality to his face beyond the heaviness of his brow and jaw, one that made a snarl out of every glimpse of teeth.

"I was afraid you would ask me that," he finally said. "I wasn't supposed to mention it."

"Why?"

A negligent shrug, as if he could trivialize catastrophic facts with mere manner. He was forever doing this, Sorweel realized, pitching his expression against the pious gravity of what he expressed.

"Some truths are too offensive."

Sorweel instantly understood. The people, the common people, would be quick to turn against the Anasurimbor were they to know that the Hundred actually sought-in their paradoxical, unfathomable way-to destroy them.

"But does it mean the Gods can be… can be deceived?"

And it struck Sorweel that there was something vicious in this, asking the son questions that could murder his father… or save him. Something more than simply devious.

Serwa's voice floated across the moss-soft earth, hooking and curling to exotic cadences, lilting in yet another incomprehensible tongue.

"Entili matoi…

"Jesil irhaila mi…"

"Just believe, Horse-King," the Prince-Imperial said, holding his face at a partial angle to his sister's singing. Did she sing to him?

"Just believe, eh?"

A hard look. "My father wars against the end of the world. Stop thinking about your thoughts or you'll go as crazy as my sister."

"But you said your sister was sane."

Moenghus shook his mane in shaggy negation.

"That's what you say to crazy people."

Kites filled the low, iron-grey sky.

The Schoolmen assembled before the Interval's toll-even those who had patrolled the perimeter through the night. Their cadres took to the air moments before the breaking of dawn so that they strode ablaze in morning gold above a dimmer world. Innumerable companies of knights and lancers and horse-archers galloped out beneath them, scoring the immediate north and west with streamers of dust. The number-sticks cast, the footmen marched into their wake, tens of thousands watching in apprehension as the ochre smear of the Horde climbed the circuit of the horizon and made a burial chamber of the sky.

Never had so many felt so small.

The Schoolmen and the accompanying knights receded out of view. King Sasal Umrapathur called the main host to a halt several watches after at the ruins of Irsulor, a city destroyed long before the First Apocalypse. Only mounds remained of the walls, a continuous series of embankments skirting the dead city's heights. Save for five decapitated pillars jutting from the summit-the Fingers, the men began calling them, for the way they resembled a hand thrusting from some enormous burial mound-no structure survived the tidal earth.

Staking his standard beneath the Fingers, Umrapathur watched the Army of the South assemble across the heaped remains of Irsulor below him. The spearmen of Pradu and Invishi with their great shields of wicker. The Girgashi hillmen, whose axes would flash in unison when they raised them in ritual brandishing. The levies of Nilnameshi bowmen, arrayed in twinkling bars across the slopes. The famed Cironji Marines assembled in reserve, looking more like beetles than men with their round-shields upon their backs. On and on, the dusky glory of the Southron Kings come to lands of pale-skinned legend. The buried bastions of Irsulor.

And it seemed a miracle, that out of all the indefensible lands they had crossed, they could find such a place-a strong place. How could he not think he had found more evidence of the Whore's favour?

He looked out across the desolate tracts to the shadow of the Horde, to the dust plumes rising high and tawny above ochre gloom. Others in his retinue swore they could see the distant flash of sorcery, but he saw nothing. He bided his time and waited for tidings. Periodically he craned his head back to study the chapped bulk of the Fingers looming about him, trying to guess at the figures worn into ambiguity across them. A man never knew where he might find portents and omens. He tried not to think of the souls who had raised the ancient pillars-or of their long-dead fate.

From the beginning the question had been what the Sranc would do when the Schoolmen cast their nets of light and destruction across them. Carindusu had argued that they would crash into themselves, fleeing mobs running into mobs, until they formed a crush from which none could escape. "I wager more will suffocate and drown than fall to our fury," the Grandmaster declared to the others. Of course, he admitted, some would survive the Schoolmen and their fires, but they would provide little more than sport for the companies of cavalrymen riding the land behind the Schoolmen.

This did not happen.

As Saccarees had argued weeks earlier, the Sranc were not beasts. For all the base savagery of their instincts, they were not so stupid as to flee into corners.

Leading a great echelon of Nilnameshi knights, Prince Charapatha watched the Schoolmen wade into the boiling horizon, a thin line of glittering points stretched wider than his eyes could follow, and somehow he simply knew that Carindusu had been beguiled by his arrogance-that they had raised a spiderweb about a dragon.

Seized by this premonition, he commanded, to the outrage and astonishment of his men, that everyone shed their iron-scaled hauberks. Many refused-an extraordinary mutiny, given the love and respect they bore their Prince. Scattered across rising and falling swales of gutted land, the companies milled in argument and indecision. Charapatha remained calm, simply repeated his order time and again. He understood the reluctance of his men.

One after another, the glowing Schoolmen vanished into the pluming sheets of dust.

Lights flashed from the brown and black.

The howling, which had keened as loud as always so close to the Horde, warbled with unfamiliar resonances, then almost faded altogether. The Invitic Knights watched astonished. Men famed for their bravery in the Unification Wars cried out in amazement and horror. More and more scaled hauberks clanked across the earth.

The warring lights, if anything, increased in frequency and fury until it seemed lightning itself walked the long rim of the world. The howling faded, and for several heartbeats, they heard arcane shouts in the crotches of the breeze-the Schoolmen. Then they heard a different sound, grim and slow-building, chorus heaped atop inhuman chorus, louder and louder, until horses reared and men shook their heads like fly-plagued dogs. Until the air itself pricked their ears…

Screams. Inhuman screams.

The proud and headstrong Knights of Invishi gazed out and instantly knew that their King-General had erred, that his plan had gone catastrophically awry. For months they had shadowed the Horde, watching the stormfront of dust change colour in accordance with the soil beneath their feet and change shape in accordance with the strength and direction of the wind. Many times they had seen streamers break from the base and spill toward them like tumbling smoke, and always they had rejoiced at the prospect of running down isolate clans. But now they saw a hundred such streamers racing toward them-a thousand — ribbons of dust blooming into high-drawn clouds of filth.

Far from retreating into the crush of their fellows before the advancing sorcerers, the Sranc were running south…

"Ride!" Prince Charapatha bellowed through the cacophony. "Ride for your lives!"

For some reason Sorweel always took a deep breath beforehand, as if he were about to plunge into frigid waters. No matter how many leaps he suffered, a fraction of him always experienced it for the very first time. Her arm hooked fast about his armoured waist, her head a chalice brimming with singing light, and then the wrenching, at once violent enough to concuss the blood from his body, and as soft as wet tissue…

The step across the illusion of space… the Leap.

But something went wrong. Meanings grasped too numbly, utterances fumbled across a too weary tongue. Sorweel suffered the sense of not arriving all at once, as if his viscera trailed the shell of his body.

He fell to his knees on the crest that had been little more than a silhouette on the western horizon just moments before. He felt a sloshing barrel.

Both Moenghus and Serwa complained but did not seem quite so unsettled as him. At least he spared himself the humiliation of vomiting while they watched.

They all agreed to sleep.

And so began the Horde's second assault upon the Great Ordeal. As the whip communicates the strength of the arm from the grip to the nail, so too did the rush of those trapped against the River Irshi spread across the entirety of the Horde, from those hooked about Umrapathur's flanks to those massed near the Neleost coast. In the stark light of day they ran, numberless, maddened with hungers both vicious and foul, a shrieking plague.

From his vantage at Irsulor, Umrapathur was among the first to realize that something was amiss. For so long, the Horde's roar, wringed of its resonance by distance, had sounded like an endless death rattle. When the sound faltered, he and thousands of others had raised a ragged cheer, knowing that the Schoolmen had begun reaping their arcane harvest. But the sound that climbed into its place-more shrill, like the fluting of winter winds-did not stop climbing. Higher and higher it roared, until men began batting their ears. And Sasal Umrapathur III, the first Believer-King of Nilnamesh, looked out to the dust fencing the horizon and knew he had been deceived.

He cried out warnings and instructions. Horns brayed out against the building thunder.

Out on the broken plain, only the most foolhardy of the Grandees led their knights out against the Sranc as planned. Far and away most realized, like Charapatha, that something was amiss, but many tarried overlong in indecision and so were quickly overrun. The rest found themselves riding a great and desperate race.

Ensconced in their deep formations, the infantrymen watched with breathless horror as more than fifteen thousand riders, fleet skirmishers and ponderous knights, rode scattered across the waste, throwing shields and cutting loose saddle-packs, slapping blood from the rumps of their screaming ponies. Mountains of billowing dust roiled behind them-as if the world's very limits came crashing in pursuit.

They watched company after company, strung out in panicked flight, engulfed in raving doom. They glimpsed shadows through the low ribbons of dust, skinny and vicious and innumerable. The skirmishers, like King Urmakthi and his fleet Girgashi, reached the ruined city in good order. Others, the heavily armoured knights of Nilnamesh especially, were pulled under en masse. The more quick-witted commanders abandoned the flight and arrayed their men in defensive formations that lingered battling, pockets of frantic order engulfed in gibbering chaos, knights shouting and hacking, quilled in arrows, their positions dissolving like bright salt in putrid waters. Massar ab Kascamandri, the youngest brother of the outlaw Fanayal and famed for severing his earlobe to demonstrate his determination to join the Ordeal rather than remain as a figurehead in Nenciphon, was felled by an iron-tipped javelin less than a hundred paces from Irsulor's embankments. Prince Charapatha and his armourless knights, meanwhile, found themselves deflected westward time and again in his attempts to reach their besieged King. His Captains had to restrain the Prince, such was the violence of his grief.

King Umrapathur watched the world and sky vanish behind the Horde's veil. The air boomed with screeching until he could no longer hear his own plaintive commands.

The Horde closed upon Irsulor, and they were naught but an isle in a shrieking sea.

During this time, the Schoolmen continued walking the skies to the north, raking and scorching the obscured earth. To a man they knew Carindusu had erred, perhaps disastrously, but they had devised no means of communicating any alternative strategy-they could scarce see one another as it was. Eventually, the more decisive among them abandoned their northward course, and others followed, forming broken cohorts whose passage back was marked with fire and light. Some became lost in the dust and would never find their way to Irsulor. Some, a few fools, continued northward oblivious and did not turn back until they passed beyond the northern rim of the dust clouds.

None would return in time to counter the Consult.

Sheets of ochre were drawn across the sun, and shadow fell across the formations crowded upon the dead city. The Sranc threw themselves up the embankments and against the bristling ranks of Men, who stood locked, shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder, as they had during the first battle. The Horde caught about Irsulor as upon a jutting nail.

The Sons of Nilnamesh held the north and west, thrusting sword and spear between their cunning shields of wicker, nearly invulnerable in their gowns of plated iron. The vast bulk of them fought beneath the ancient standards of Eshdutta, Harataka, Midaru, Invoira, and Sombatti, the so-called Five Hosts of Nilnu, the tribal confederacies that had warred for the whole of Nilnamesh since time immemorial. Not since the days of Anzumarapata II had so many Sons of Nilnu marched beyond the paddied plains of their home. Gone were the antique rivalries, the mortal hatred that had so often set them against each other. Gone were the differences. And it seemed a thing of mad and tragic folly that Men might raise arms against Men, when creatures so vile so infested the world.

The Hetmen of Girgash held the east, fierce mountain warriors come from their high fastnesses in the Hinayati along with their softer cousins from Ajowai and the Vales. His horse abandoned, King Urmakthi stood at the fore of his countrymen, his Standard raised in lieu of his voice. The Grandees of Kian held the south, the desert-vicious men of Chianadyni, as well as their taller brothers from Nenciphon and Mongilea, all of them decked in the chained splendour of their fathers' fallen empire. Such was the clamour that they knew nothing of Prince Massar's fall-and so honoured him with their courage.

Crying out with soundless fury the Men of the South thrust and hacked at the gibbering masses. Even on the slopes the inhuman ferocity of the assault forced those deep in the ranks to brace their shields against the backs of those before them, transforming phalanxes into singular structures of flesh, ligament, and bone. Missiles blackened the already shrouded sky, shafts that rattled without harm across the armoured men, save those unfortunate few. The Ketyai archers answered with great volleys of their own, laying low whole swathes of their foe. But with every draw they exposed themselves to the endless black rain, and their losses were grievous.

Sorweel's eyes snapped open, the screeches of the Viturnal Nesting ringing in his ears. He actually swatted the empty air immediately before him, so vivid was the image of a sun-burnished stork standing upon his chest.

He sat up, blinking. They had leapt upon the treeless prow of a hill, so he could see immediately that he was alone. He could also see the surrounding sunlit miles, the creased terrain rendered as soft as ocean swells for the woollen canopies that clothed it. A land like an old woman.

He had fallen asleep on the shags of grass that edged the crude axe-blade of stone that capped the promontory. The shade had shifted while he slept so that he could feel the sun's burn upon his cheeks and hands. His hauberk, especially, radiated heat.

He peered into the adjacent gloom of the forest, blinking, searching for any sign of the Imperial siblings. A pang groped his breast when he realized their gear was missing as well.

Had they abandoned him?

He stood, shaking the fluff from his apparel and the grogginess from his limbs. Then he wandered into the wooded regions, following the uncertain line of the summit, hoping to find his keepers…

Hardened by the First Battle of the Horde, the Men of the South exacted a dreadful toll. When they looked out, they saw innumerable faces, white and cat-screaming, Sranc and more Sranc, wagging raucous arms, heaving across the basins below. When they looked back they saw the ranks of Men braced across the piled embankments, heights fenced in bright-painted shields and bristling with spears, standards torn ragged by javelins and freighted with snagged arrows. And they remembered the words of their Holy Prophet, that they would see sights awesome and horrific, that they would suffer unimaginable trials-that they would save the World.

And they believed.

The Sranc were speared and they were hammered. They were thrown from the bedlam slopes or pulled under by their howling kin. Soon the earth about the dead city was ramped with carcasses, to the point where many of the obscenities were simply trampled for want of footing, thrust stumbling and flailing into the spears and cudgels and swords above.

Their screeching resounded from the very ribs of Heaven.

High beneath the Fingers, King Umrapathur took heart, seeing that his host was too strongly situated to collapse, that it could only be ground to the nub. Soon, he reasoned, Saccarees and Carindusu would return, and with so many Sranc snagged upon Irsulor, mobbed to suffocation, the slaughter would be great.

Given his vantage, he was among the first to glimpse the great blemish on the Horde's seething skin, an almond of black, marching beneath umber skies, moving slowly through the ghoulish fields of Sranc, driving ever closer to the beleaguered Sons of Girgash. The height of the mass was the first detail he could discern: the creatures composing it towered over the Sranc. Then he realized the blackness of the thing was due to hair, great shaggy crowns upon heads like cauldrons. The fact of the creatures came to the King all at once, though his soul was long to comprehend their implication.

Bashrag.

Many saw their abominable approach, but like Umrapathur, all were powerless to communicate their horror and alarm. The Girgashi upon the embankment glimpsed them between frenzied assaults, hundreds of hideous frames rising above the Sranc tossing below, an iron-armoured formation, throwing and stamping the hordlings before them.

Bashrag. Three arms welded into one. Three ingrown chests. Three hands for fingers. They were an offence to the eyes, a sight that awed and sickened, such was their deformity. Idiot faces hanging from each grotesque cheek. Horse-tail moles springing from random skin.

Umrapathur saw the nature of the Consult trap instantly. Knowing the Horde would turn and strike at the Irshi, they needed only to wait in ambush and hope their foe would be so foolish as to send out their Schoolmen…

The Believer-King peered to the north, scanned the shrouded skies for sign of Saccarees or Carindusu.

The abominations lurched ever closer. The surviving Girgashi bowmen found their range. They pelted the fell legion with arrows. And for a moment, Umrapathur dared hope…

But the Bashrag advanced unscathed, quilled like porcupines. They climbed the slopes until they towered before the Men of Girgash.

King Urmakthi was among the first to be struck down, for he had stood at the fore of his kinsmen, his banner held high as a beacon to hearten his men. The Bashrag waded into their midst, sweeping their great axes and hammers. Shields were splintered. Arms were shattered. Heads were pulped. Whole bodies cartwheeled into the ranks behind. For all the courage of the Hetman and their tribal vassals, they were no match for the creatures clacking and bellowing above them. They crumpled as foil and were scattered.

Within a hundred heartbeats the Bashrag had seized the embankment's summit. Umrapathur's heart caught. Only the Cironji Marines and their burnished shields stood between the beasts and his army's doom.

Gilded in shining gold, King Eselos Mursidides led their rush, rammed his spear into the gullet of the foremost beast, only to be beaten to the quivered earth by the great hammer of another. But the famed Marines did not falter. They threw themselves at the monstrosities, and a battle was fought unlike any since the days of the Ancient North. Fearless, skilled, armed with the finest weapons of Seleukaran steel, the Cironji stemmed the lumbering rush. But for heartbeats only. For every Bashrag they felled, dozens of their brothers perished. They were thrown shattered, little more than sacks of human skin.

Men mobilized everywhere through the tight-packed encampment: priests, Judges, water-bearers, the sick and the wounded-it did not matter. All came rushing…

But the Bashrag swatted them dead. Men vanished beneath inhuman strokes. It was like witnessing a massacre of children.

What followed happened so fast that those beneath the Fingers could scarce believe.

Innumerable Sranc scrambled through the breach wrought by the Bashrag, and shrieking masses of them spilled into the narrow ways behind the Inrithi phalanxes. To a man, the Zaudunyani had been trained to fight encircled, to form shield-walls about them-and survive. And indeed, some did precisely this, but panic seized many others, and Men were felled in thousands. Umrapathur stood immobile, his gaze flinching from atrocity after atrocity. Men wailing in horror. Men pulled down, grimacing. The fallen convulsing beneath rutting shadows.

The pavilions and baggage trains vanished. Within heartbeats the entirety of the lower city was overrun, and those formations that did not fly apart or dissolve stood engulfed, dwindling lozenges of human form and colour in a threshing sea of monstrosities.

Death came swirling down.

The Nilnameshi Believer-King gaped and stumbled. A stray arrow caught his hand and pierced the gauntlet.

He raised his skewered palm in disbelief, saw the first of the Schoolmen come striding on sheets of murdering light. Some solitary. Some in ragged, impromptu formations. Motes pricked with brilliance, passing through clouds of missiles, dragging gowns of lightning-bright ruin across the Horde. First dozens, then hundreds, Schoolmen, hanging miraculous in the low sky, walking beneath mountainous scarps and troughs of dust.

The whole North, it seemed, flared with sorcerous destruction.

But is was too late.

Men moaned in the dust. The World shrieked in inhuman triumph.

Sorweel walked through what seemed a peculiar fog, one that whined in his ears and yanked short his breath. The forest floor wheezed beneath his boots. Oaks and maples climbed high and mocking about him, splicing the sunlight.

He heard them before he saw them. Nearby.

He stood breathless, listening through the creak and click of the surrounding woodland.

"Yessssss…"

A different kind of vigilance seized him, and he crept forward peering between screens of undergrowth. His ears stood poised between the sounds of his approach and the passion that gasped through the skein of leaves.

Like a thief, he crept…

– | Seeing the devastation, the returning Mandati and Vokalati withdrew to the skies above the Fingers, formed a ring of floating, battle-maddened brothers. Their faces blackened for dust and tears, they sang out their hatred and spite, the Mandate Schoolmen wielding abstract architectures of light, the Vokalati shining phantoms. And they burned those who clawed and clambered the slopes. And they burned those fornicating with corpses of the fallen. And they burned those thronging through the multitudes.

The slopes became fields of thrashing silhouettes.

Saccarees turned to Carindusu and feared for the vacancy he glimpsed in the man's eyes. He bid his former rival to stand by his side, mouthing, "Let me show you what it is you shall win!" For nothing other than the Gnosis was the prize the Aspect-Emperor had offered the Anagogic Schools.

But a monstrous wrath overcame the Grandmaster of the Vokalati, the lunacy of one who cannot dwell apart from his pride. His was the name that would be immortalized for infamy. His was the name his kin would strike from their ancestor lists. He called out sorceries with savage abandon, lashed the ground with cruel fire, killing Men and Sranc alike. The survivors below cried out, stunned and appalled.

Saccarees closed with the madman. To the horror of those watching, the two Grandmasters battled above the inhuman multitudes, an exchange of wicked lights, Abstractions against Analogies. Overmatched, Carindusu was struck from the skies, undone.

Not knowing what happened several Vokalati assailed Saccarees-then several more, until fairly half the Vokalati found themselves attacking for no reason save that their brothers had so turned in violence. And so did the Schools of Mandate and Vokalati consume each other in a final act of madness.

The surviving Men looked up from the looming Fingers. At first they could not credit their eyes. They gazed dismayed and incredulous, while all about them the Sranc surged up the smoking slopes. The frenzied creatures cast themselves upon the few hundred assembled against them, hacking and shrieking-a host that reached out to the obscured rim of the world.

And bloodied King Sasal Umrapathur saw that he was doomed. He fell to his knees and prayed that his Holy Prophet might prevail… that his beloved wife and many children might survive the horror to come.

He looked up and saw a sorcerer falling, his billows ablaze.

The Sranc seized him, raped him as he bled out his life remaining.

Sorweel could scarce breathe. His spit seemed gravel for swallowing.

Two pale forms against depths of grey and water-green, the one slight upon the one hard, locked in a clenching, quivering embrace.

Kissing as though the other possessed the sole breath.

Grinding, their groins famished, piercing and knowing.

Never had he witnessed such a thing, breath-stealing, filled with rage and horror and imperious lust. He was not who he was for seeing it. Not one of his concerns survived the trespass before him. Not his father. Not the Tear of God that would avenge him.

Nothing mattered save this…

The children of a god mating. The woman he loved betraying…

His little brother called out for him. He found him, grasped him, cold fingers opposite a burning palm.

And he coupled with the sinuous image writhing before him, arched in answer to the man's black-haired grunting, spilled his seed to the girl's high blonde cries.

The mounded heights of Irsulor smoked and crawled.

The Schoolmen hung in the air above, raining death upon their wicked foe. They wept even as they spoke hacking lights, for when they looked out, all creation whorled and seethed with foul Sranc. And of the tens of thousands who had been their brothers, all were dead and desecrated…

Shields trampled. Corpses pierced, clotted with rutting forms, like ants upon apple peels.

The Schoolmen scourged the embankments, pummelled the slopes, until Irsulor reared like a mountain burnt to the stub, sheeted in blasted, blackened dead. Man, Sranc, Bashrag…

And still the multitudes surged forward. The Horde reached out into obscurity, a cloak of twisting maggots thrown over the horizon, howling. Howling.

And the Schoolmen were so very alone.

His crimson billows black for filth and fire, Saccarees descended, set foot upon the charred summit in a heartbroken bid to recover Umrapathur's body. But he could scarce distinguish Sranc from Man, let alone man from man. He looked out, over the tiers of smoking carcasses, through the comb of brilliant sorceries, out across the tumult of the plains, and it seemed he gazed upon the future, what would become of the World should his Holy Prophet fail…

Raving. Vicious. Devoid of meaning or mercy.

The Schoolmen heard their Prophet before they saw him, shouting arcana in a voice like a thunderclap-the one voice that could shrug away the burden of the Horde's roar. He came from the west, the Aspect-Emperor, sparking a brilliant blue through miles of intervening filth. Where he walked the air, whole tracts of earth exploded beneath him, as though the God himself pummelled the powdered soil. Sranc were thrown in mangled thousands, flying hundreds of paces before raining across their inhuman brothers.

Anasurimbor Kellhus came to them and bid them follow him home.

She lowered her head to his chest in carnal exhaustion and lay there, her breasts kissing the barrel of his chest, her back bent to the arc of an oyster shell. Sorweel stared, held motionless by the shock of his dwindling ardour. Shame. Elation. Terror.

Knowledge that he could not move without alerting them robbed him of the ability to breathe. He stood stupefied as she turned to him and smiled.

He ducked in abject panic and shame.

"Who are we," she called out in a drowsy laugh, "for you to abuse yourself so?"

He fumbled to fasten his breeches, then stood, knowing that the shadow of his lust could still be plainly seen. But it was almost as if their shamelessness demanded he be brazen in return. She climbed from her slack-limbed brother, stood in the dappled sunlight, entirely naked, and at one with the wilderness for it.

How? How could she do this to me?

Tears burned in his eyes. Did he love her? Was that it? Was the son of Harweel such an errant fool?

She stood utterly exposed before him, her limbs lithe, her hips narrow, her pale skin flushed for the violence of her passion. Sunlight drew the shadow of her breasts across her white ribs, made golden filaments of her sex.

"Well?" she asked, smiling.

Indifferent, Moenghus began dressing at his leisure behind her.

"But-!" Sorweel heard himself cry like a fool.

Her look was at once demure and arrogant. Moenghus glanced darkly over a muscled shoulder.

"You're brother and sister!" he blurted. "What you… you did… is a… is a…"

He could only stand and stare at them incredulously.

"Who are you to judge us?" she cried laughing. "We are the fruit of a far, far taller tree, Horse-King."

For the first time he realized the derision and contempt they concealed in that name.

"And if you get pregnant?"

She frowned and smiled, and for the first time Sorweel realized that whatever warmth she had showed him was mere pantomime. That for all the human blood coursing through her veins, she was, and always would be, Dunyain.

"Then I fear my Holy Father would have you killed," she said.

"Me? But I have done nothing!"

"But you have witnessed, Sorweel-your thigh is sticky for it! And that is far from nothing."

His breeches fastened, Moenghus strode behind his sister, reached about her to place a scarred paw upon her womb. He kissed the hot of her neck, twiddled the fine blonde strands of her sex between finger and thumb.

"She's right, Sorweel," he said, grinning as if entirely oblivious to the madness between them. "People have a habit of dying around us…"

The Sakarpi King stood squinting against his turmoil. His heart pumped outrage instead of blood.

"As do nations!" he spat before turning on his heel.

"A son!" the Grandmistress of the Swayali called out after him, her voice mellow and bewitching. "A son. A daughter. And an enemy!"

He fairly convulsed, so violent was the shaking that overcame him. It wracked him all the way back to their camp on the promontory. He found himself fearing the drops beyond the edges. Never had he been so shamed… so humiliated.

Never had he hated with such dark intensity.

Though the Great Ordeal survived, though their inhuman enemy had been thrown back to the rim of the horizon, the Second Battle of the Horde was nothing less than a disaster. The Holy Aspect-Emperor declared the Breaking of the Ordeal undone and commanded the Armies of the West and the East to converge upon the Army of the Middle-North. None of the Believer-Kings doubted his decision, even though this most recent defeat of the Horde had increased the opportunities for forage. King Sasal Umrapathur, one of their number, was dead, as were his kinsmen and vassals. They felt his ruin keenly, for he had breathed as they breathed, ruled as they ruled, and, most importantly, believed as they believed. If they did not understand as much before, they appreciated the grim truth now: their faith was no surety.

"The righteous," King Proyas would remind his fellows, "bleed no less than the wicked."

The Armies gathered without fanfare or celebration, for the Men of the Circumfix were too hungry and astonished, and there were far too many absences among them. A pall had been drawn across the hosts, a shadow immune to the arid sun. Old friends were reunited in grief and lamentation. They traded stories of Irsulor between them, and the truth suffered little for the inevitable distortions. They had witnessed events so extreme as to outrun the possibility of exaggeration.

They had come to a land called Akirsual. In times of old it had been a frontier province of Kuniuri, sparsely populated, famed only for a hill called Swaranul, which rose solitary and inexplicable above broken flood plains. Swaranul was a place holy to the ancient High Norsirai, for it was here that the Gods had come to the chieftains of their many tribes and granted them tenure for all the lands within a thousand leagues.

The Holy Aspect-Emperor called on his Believer-Kings to assemble and to follow him. Climbing broken and overgrown steps, he brought them to the summit of Swaranul, into the pillared ruins of the Hiolis, and stood so they could see the Great Ordeal spread across the alluvial plains below. And though their losses had been grievous, the tents and pavilions of the combined host still embroidered the land to the horizon. Arms and armour winked in the sunlight, so that it seemed diamonds had been scattered across the whole earth. And they took no little heart in this vision of their glory.

Prince Charapatha was there, and many were the condolences extended to him. Saccarees, however, stood alone and brooding, shunned because of his rumoured fratricide.

The Holy Aspect-Emperor opened wide his haloed hands. The Lords of the Ordeal turned to him in reverence and sorrow.

"I have delivered you to the Waste," he said, the resonances of his voice cupping heart and ear alike. "And now even the stoutest hearts among you fear that I have brought you to your doom. For though I warned you of the Sranc, described for you the immensity of their number and the cunning of our Enemy's machinations, you find yourself dismayed."

Several called out in contradiction, and a cacophony of warlike declarations reverberated through the temple ruins. The Aspect-Emperor silenced them with a glowing palm.

"They are the filings and we are the lodestone. Were we to concentrate, march ranks closed along the shores of the Neleost, they would come. Were we to scatter across the High Istyuli's desolate heart, they would come. It matters not what path we take. It matters not what we do. The Sranc will come and come, and we will be forced to destroy them."

Like ethereal fingers, the intonations of his voice stretched wide then concentrated, to better seize the passions of his congregation, and to hold them…

"Irsulor…" he said, breathing horror into the name. "Irsulor is the very proof of our greater peril. A dozen Ordeals could march as we have marched, slaughter as we have slaughtered, and still the Sranc would not be exhausted. Were the No-God to awaken, they would be seized by a single dark and malicious will, and for all its might and glory Mankind would be doomed. The very World," he said, balancing existence upon an outstretched hand, "would be given over to wretchedness and rutting darkness…"

Laments climbed into a ragged chorus.

"So what are we to do?" King Saubon called out. "We thirst, and are sickened for drinking. And we hunger, until our shoulders are naught but hooks, and our axes and cudgels grow heavy with our frailty. We have stumbled with Irsulor. Now we stagger."

These words provoked consternation among many of the Believer-Kings, for they thought such doubts an insult to Saubon's exalted station. "Stay your impertinence!" the bellicose King Hogrim called out in reproach.

"No," the Holy Aspect-Emperor said to the long-bearded King. "We must speak plainly. Only honesty provides truth. Only truth delivers triumph."

He stepped into their midst, placed his blessed hand first upon Hogrim's shoulder, then upon Saubon's forearm.

"As many of you have surmised," he said, "I have deceived you as to our stores, saying we had less when we had more. I have starved you so that our rations would carry us as far as possible."

"So what are we to do?" King Saubon called out yet again.

More shouts climbed from the assembly, this time in discord, for as many called out in assent as against the Exalt-General's presumption.

The clamour wilted in the light of their Holy Prophet's sad smile.

"Scavenge what strength you will," he said, striding from their midst to reclaim the ritual heights. "Ponder your wives, your children-ponder your soul. Fear not the spectre of thirst, for soon the Neleost, the Misty Sea, will heave dark before us. And fear not starvation…"

He turned, taking two pillars as his frame and the enormity of the Great Ordeal as his beyond, the hundreds of thousands streaming and milling across all that could be seen. He burned as a beacon before it.

The breeze trilled through the plaited flax of his beard. The chutes of his gown swayed.

"To suffer is to bear evil," he said, "and we must suffer to see our World saved. No matter where it delivers us, what madness, what evil, we must follow the Shortest Path… "

The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas walked, luminous among the doubtful and afraid. He acknowledged each of them with the simple, loving profundity of his gaze. He gave them heart even as he appalled them. For they understood what he was about to say, the truth they dared not whisper even in solitude.

"Henceforth, our very foe shall sustain us…"

The dread command had been given, at long last.

"Henceforth, we eat Sranc."