“Does Achamian scare you, Serchaa?” Esmenet asked. Something wicked and mischievous glinted in her eyes.
Serwë thought about that night at the ruined shrine, when he’d sent light to the stars. She shook her head. “No,” she replied. He was too sad to frighten.
“He will after this,” Esmenet said.
“He leaves for proof,” Xinemus jeered, “and he returns with a toy!”
“This is no ‘toy,’” Achamian muttered, annoyed.
“He’s right,” Kellhus said seriously. “It is some kind of sorcerous artifact. I can see the Mark.”
Achamian looked at Kellhus sharply, but said nothing. The fire crackled and hissed. He finished adjusting the doll, took two steps back. Suddenly, framed by the darkness and the shining fires of the greater encampment, he seemed less a weary scholar and more a Mandate Schoolman. Serwë shivered.
“This is called a ‘Wathi Doll,’” he explained, “something I … I purchased from a Sansori witch a couple of years ago … There’s a soul trapped in this doll.”
Xinemus coughed wine through his nose. “Akka,” he rasped, “I won’t tolerate—”
“Humour me, Zin! Please … Kellhus says he’s one of the Few. This is the one way for him to prove it without damning himself—or you, Zin. Apparently for me, it’s already too late.”
“What should I do?” Kellhus asked.
Achamian knelt and fetched a twig from the ground at his feet. “I’ll simply scratch two words into the earth, and you’ll speak them, aloud. You won’t be uttering a Cant, so you won’t be marked by the blood-of-the-onta. No one will look at you and know you for a sorcerer. And you’ll still be pure enough to handle Trinkets without discomfort. You’ll just be uttering the artifact’s cipher … The doll will awaken only if you truly are one of the Few.”
“Why’s it bad that anyone recognize Kellhus as a sorcerer?” Bloody Dinch asked.
“Because he’d be damned!” Xinemus nearly shouted.
“That,” Achamian acknowledged, “and he’d quickly be dead. He’d be a sorcerer without a school, a wizard, and the Schools don’t brook wizards.”
Achamian turned to Esmenet; they exchanged a quick, worried look. Then he walked over to Kellhus. Serwë could tell that a large part of him already regretted this spectacle.
With the twig, Achamian deftly scratched a line of signs in the earth before Kellhus’s sandalled feet. Serwë assumed that they were two words, but she couldn’t read. “I’ve written them in Kûniüric,” he said, “to spare the others any indignity.” He stepped back, nodded slowly. Despite the brown of innumerable days spent in the sun, he looked grey. “Speak them,” he instructed.
Kellhus, his bearded face solemn, studied the words for a moment, then in a clear voice said, “Skuni ari’sitwa …”
All eyes scrutinized the doll lying slack against the stone in the firelight. Serwë held her breath. She’d expected that perhaps the limbs might twitch and then drawl into drunken life, as though the doll were a puppet, something that might prance on the end of invisible strings. But that didn’t happen. The first thing to move, rather, was the stained, silk head—but it didn’t loll with lazy life, or even slowly nod; instead, something moved from within. Serwë gasped in horror, realizing that a tiny face—nose, lips, brow, and eye sockets—now strained against the fabric …
It was as though a narcotic haze had settled upon them, the torpor of bearing witness to the impossible. Serwë’s heart hammered. Her thoughts wheeled …
But she couldn’t look away. A human face, small enough to palm, pressed against the silk. She could see tiny lips part in a soundless howl.
And then the limbs moved—suddenly, deftly, with none of the swaying stagger of a puppet. Whatever moved those limbs moved them from within, with the compact elegance of a body assured of its extremities. And with half-panicked thoughts, Serwë understood that it was a soul, a self-moving soul … In a single, languorous motion, it leaned forward, braced its arms against the earth, bent its knees, then came to its feet, casting a slender shadow across the earth, the shadow of man with a sack bound about his head.
“By all that’s holy …” Bloody Dinch hissed in a breathless voice.
The wooden man turned its eyeless face from side to side, studied the dumbstruck giants.
It raised the small, rusty blade it possessed in lieu of a right hand. The fire popped, and it jumped and whirled. A smoking coal bounced to a stop at its feet. Looking down, it knelt with the blade, flicked the coal back into the fire.
Achamian muttered something unspeakable, and it collapsed in a jumble of splayed limbs. He looked blankly at Kellhus, and in a voice as ashen as his expression, said, “So you’re one of the Few …”
Horror, Serwë thought. He was horrified. But why? Couldn’t he see?
Without warning, Xinemus leapt to his feet. Before Achamian could even glance at him, the Marshal had seized his arm, yanked him violently about.
“Why do you do this?” Xinemus cried, his face both pained and enraged. “You know that it’s difficult enough for me to … to … You know! And now displays such as this? Blasphemy?”
Stunned, Achamian looked at his friend aghast. “But Zin,” he cried. “This is what I am.”
“Perhaps Proyas was right,” he snapped. With a growl he thrust Achamian away, then paced off into the darkness. Esmenet leapt from her place by Serwë and grasped one of Achamian’s slack hands. But the sorcerer stared off into the blackness that had encompassed the Marshal of Attrempus. Serwë could hear Esmenet’s insistent whisper: “It’s okay, Akka! Kellhus will speak to him. Show him his folly …” But Achamian, his face turned from those watching about the fire, pushed at her feebly.
Still bewildered, her skin still tingling in dread, Serwë looked to Kellhus beseechingly: Please … you must make this better! Xinemus must forgive Achamian this. They must all learn to forgive!
Serwë didn’t know when she’d begun speaking to him with her face, but she did it so often now that many times she couldn’t sort what she’d told him from what she’d shown him. This was part of the infinite peace between them. Nothing was hidden.
And for some reason, his look reminded her of something he’d once said: “I must reveal myself to them slowly Serwë, slowly. Otherwise they’ll turn against me …”
Late that night, Serwë was awakened by voices—angry voices, just outside their tent. Reflexively she grasped for her belly. Her innards churned with fright. Dear Gods … Mercy! Please, mercy!
The Scylvendi had returned.
As she knew he would. Nothing could kill Cnaiür urs Skiötha, not so long as Serwë remained alive.
Not again … please-please …
She could see nothing, but the menace of his presence already clutched at her, as though he were a wraith, something feral and malevolent bent upon consuming her, scraping out her heart the way Cepaloran women scrape pelts clean with sharpened oyster shells. She began to cry, softly, secretly, so he wouldn’t hear … Any moment, she knew, he would thrash into the tent, fill it with the stink of a man who’d just shed his hauberk, grip her about the throat and …
Pleaasse! I know I’m supposed to be a good girl—I’ll be a good girl! Please!
She heard his harsh voice, low so as not to be overheard, but fierce nonetheless.
“I tire of this, Dûnyain.”
“Nuta’tharo hirmuta,” Kellhus replied with an impassiveness that unnerved her—until she realized: He’s cold because he hates him … Hates him as I do!
“I will not!” the Scylvendi spat.
“Sta puth yura’gring?”
“Because you ask me too! I tire hearing you defile my tongue. I tire of being mocked. I tire of these fools you ply. I tire of watching you defile my prize! My prize!”
A moment of silence. Buzzing ears.
“Both of us,” Kellhus said in taut Sheyic, “have secured places of honour. Both of us have gained the ears of the great. What more could you want?”
“And together, we walk the shortest path to—”
Kellhus abruptly halted. A hard moment passed between them.
“You intend to leave,” Kellhus said.
Laughter, like a wolf ’s growl broken into fragments.
“There is no need to share the same yaksh.”
Serwë gasped for air. The scar on her arm, the swazond the plainsman had given beneath the Hethanta Mountains, flared in sudden pain.
No-no-no-no-no …
“Proyas …” Kellhus said, his voice still blank. “You intend to camp with Proyas.”
Please God noooo!
“I have come for my things,” Cnaiür said. “I have come for my prize.”
Never in all her violent life had Serwë felt herself pitched upon such a precipice. The breath was choked from her mid-sob, and she became very still. The silence shrieked. Three heartbeats it took Kellhus to answer, and for three heartbeats her very life hung as though from a gibbet between the voices of men. She would die for him, she knew, and she would die without him. It seemed she’d always known this, from the first clumsy days of her childhood. She almost gagged for fear.
And then Kellhus said: “No. Serwë stays with me.”
Numb relief. Warm tears. The hard earth beneath her had become as fluid as the sea. Serwë very nearly swooned. And a voice that wasn’t hers spoke through her anguish and her rapture and said: Mercy … At last mercy …
She heard nothing of their ensuing argument; succour and joy possessed their own thunder. But they didn’t speak long, not with her weeping aloud. When Kellhus returned to his place beside her, she threw herself upon him, showered him with desperate kisses and held his strong body so tight she could scarcely breathe. And at last, when the great weariness of the unburdened overwhelmed her and she lay spinning on the threshold of sweet, childlike sleep, she could feel callused yet gentle fingers slowly caressing her cheek.
A God touched her. Watched over her with divine love.
Its back to canvas, the thing called Sarcellus crouched, as still as stone. The musk of the Scylvendi’s fury permeated the night air, sweet and sharp, heady with the promise of blood. The sound of the woman weeping tugged at its groin. She might have been worth its fancy, were it not for the smell of her fetus, which sickened …
What passed for thought bolted through what passed for its soul.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SHIGEK
If all human events possess purpose, then all human deeds possess purpose. And yet when men vie with men, the purpose of no man comes to fruition: the result always falls somewhere in between. The purpose of deeds, then, cannot derive from the purposes of men, because all men vie with all men. This means the deeds of men must be willed by something other than men. From this it follows that we are all slaves. Who then is our Master?
—MEMGOWA, THE BOOK OF DIVINE ACTS
What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next?
—TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES
Late Summer, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, southern Gedea
Gedea didn’t so much end as vanish. After dozens of skirmishes and petty sieges, Coithus Athjeäri and his knights raced south across the vast sandstone plateau of the Gedean interior. They followed ravines and ridge lines, always climbing. By day they hunted antelope for food and jackals for sport. At night they could smell the Great Desert on the wind. The grasses faltered, gave way to dust, gravel, and pungent-smelling scrub. After riding three full days without seeing so much as a goatherd, they finally sighted smoke on the southern horizon. They hastened up the slopes, only to rein their caparisoned mounts to a sudden and panicked halt. The ground plummeted a thousand feet or more. To either side great escarpments ramped into the hazy distances. Before them the long waters of the River Sempis snaked across a plain of verdant green, its back flashing opposite the sun.
Shigek.
The ancient Kyraneans had called her “Chemerat,” the “Red Land,” because of the copper-coloured silt the seasonal floods deposited across the plains. In far antiquity, she ruled an empire that extended from Sumna to Shimeh, and her God-Kings produced works unrivalled to this day, including the legendary Ziggurats. In near antiquity she was famed for the subtlety of her priests, the elegance of her perfumes, and the effectiveness of her poisons. For the Men of the Tusk, she was a land of curses, crypts, and uneasy ruins.
A place where the past became dread, it ran so deep.
Athjeäri and his knights descended the escarpments and wondered that sterile desert could so quickly become lush fields and heavy trees. Wary of ambush, they followed the ancient dikes, rode through one abandoned village then another. Finally they found one old man without fear, and with some difficulty determined that Skauras and all the Kianene had abandoned the North Bank. Hence the smoke they had seen from the escarpment. The Sapatishah was burning every boat he could find.
The young Earl of Gaenri sent word to the Great Names.
Two weeks later the first columns of the Holy War marched unopposed into the Sempis Valley. Bands of Inrithi spread across the floodplain, securing stores, occupying the villas and strongholds abandoned by the Kianene. There was little bloodshed—at first.
Along the river, the Men of the Tusk saw sacred ibis and heron wading among the reeds and great flocks of egret wheeling over the black waters. Some even glimpsed crocodiles and hippopotamuses, beasts which, they would learn, the Shigeki revered as holy. Away from the river, where small stands of various trees—eucalyptus and sycamore, date palm and fan palm—perpetually screened the distances, they were often surprised by ruined foundations, by pillars and walls bearing engravings of nameless kings and their forgotten conquests. Some of the ruins were truly colossal, the remains of palace or temple complexes once as great, it seemed to them, as the Andiamine Heights in Momemn or the Junriüma in Holy Sumna. Many of them wandered for a time, pondering things that may or may not have happened.
When they passed villages, walking along earthen banks meant to capture floodwaters for the fields, the inhabitants gathered to watch them, shushing children and holding tight barking dogs. In the centuries following the Kianene conquest the Shigeki had become devout Fanim, but they were an old race, tenants who had always outlived their landlords. They could no longer recognize themselves in the warlike images that glared from the broken walls. So beer, wine, and water were given to slake the invader’s thirst. Onions, dates, and fresh-baked breads were furnished to sate his hunger. And, sometimes, daughters were offered to comfort his lust. Incredulous, the Men of the Tusk shook their heads and exclaimed that this was a land of marvels. And some were reminded of their first youthful visit to their father’s ancestral home, of that strange sense of returning to a place where they had never been.
Shigek was oft named in The Tractate, the rumour of a distant tyrant, already ancient in those ancient days. As a result, some among the Inrithi found themselves troubled because the words seemed to overshoot the place. They urinated in the river, defecated in the trees, and slapped at the mosquitoes. The ground was old, melancholy, more fertile perhaps, but it was ground like any other ground. Most, however, found themselves struck by awe. No matter how sacred the text, the words merely dangled when the lands remained unseen. Each in their own way, they realized that pilgrimage was the work of stitching the world to scripture. They had taken their first true step.
And Holy Shimeh seemed so close.
Then Cerjulla, the Tydonni Earl of Warnute, encountered the walled town of Chiama. Fearing starvation because of a blight the previous year, the town elders demanded guarantees before throwing open their gates. Rather than negotiate, Cerjulla simply ordered his men to storm the walls, which were easily overcome. Once within, the Warnutishmen butchered everyone.
Two days afterward, there was another massacre at Jirux, the great river fortress opposite the South Bank city of Ammegnotis. Apparently the Shigeki garrison left there by Skauras had mutinied and murd
ered all their Kianene officers. When Uranyanka, the famed Ainoni Palatine of Moserothu, arrived with his knights, the mutineers threw open the gates only to be herded together and executed en masse. Heathens, Uranyanka would later tell Chepheramunni, he could tolerate, but treacherous heathens he could not forbear.
The following morning, Gaidekki, the tempestuous Palatine of Anplei, ordered the assault of a town called Huterat, not too far from the Old Dynasty city of Iothiah, presumably because his interpreter, a notorious drunkard, had mistranslated the town’s terms of surrender. Once the gates were taken, his Conriyans ran amok through the streets, raping and murdering without discrimination.
Then, as though murder possessed its own unholy momentum, the Holy War’s occupation of the North Bank degenerated into wanton carnage, though for what reason, no one knew. Perhaps it was the rumours of poisoned dates and pomegranates. Perhaps bloodshed simply begat bloodshed. Perhaps faith’s certainty was as terrifying as it was beautiful. What could be more true than destroying the false?
Word of the Inrithi atrocities spread among the Shigeki. Before the altar and in the streets the Priests of Fane claimed that the Solitary God punished them for welcoming the idolaters. The Shigeki began barricading themselves in their great, domed tabernacles. With their wives and children they gathered wailing on the soft carpets, crying out their sins, begging for forgiveness. The thunder of rams at the doors would be their only answer. Then the rush of iron-eyed swordsmen.
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