The man seemed cut from a different place, one with a brighter sun, as though he stood both here amid the ruin that was Sakarpus and upon a mountain summit at the edge of dawn. He was tall, a full hand over Sorweel's father, draped in a priest's gold-panelled vestments, armoured in mail so fine it seemed silk-nimil, some absent part of Sorweel realized, Nonman steel. His hair fell in sodden ringlets about his long, full-lipped face. His flaxen beard was plaited and squared in the manner of the Southron Kings pictured on the most ancient of the Long Hall's reliefs. The severed heads of two demons, their skin blotched and aglow, hung from his girdle, making fishmouths about black-nail teeth.
Scabs of salt crusted his bare sword-hand.
"I am," the vision said, "Anasыrimbor Kellhus."
It started with the shaking, the hot flush of urine. Then his bones became serpents, and Sorweel collapsed to the floor. On his belly… On his belly! He spat at the blood greasing his chin.
Fuh-Fuh-Father!
"Come," the man said, crouching to place a hand on his shoulder. "Come. Get up. Remember yourself…"
Remember?
"You are a King, are you not?"
Sorweel could only stare in horror and wonder.
"I–I d-d-don't understand…"
A friendly scowl, followed by a gentle laugh. "I'm rarely what my enemies expect, I know." Somehow, he was already helping him to his feet.
"Buh-buh-but…"
"All this, Sorweel, is a tragic mistake. You must believe that."
"Mistake?"
"I'm no conqueror." He paused as though to frown at the very notion. "As mad as it sounds, I really have come to save Mankind."
"Lies," the Prince murmured through his confusion. "Liar!"
The Aspect-Emperor nodded, closed his eyes in the manner of a long-suffering parent. His sigh was both honest and plain. "Mourn," he said. "Grieve as all Men must. But take heart in the fact of your forgiveness."
Sorweel gazed into the summer-blue eyes. What was happening?
"Forgiven? Who are you to forgive?"
The scowl of an innocent twice wronged.
"You misunderstand."
"Misunderstand what?" Sorweel spat. "That you think yourse-!"
"Your father loved you!" the man interrupted, his voice thick with a nigh irresistible paternal reprimand. "And that love, Sorwa, is forgiveness… His forgiveness, not mine."
The young King of Sakarpus stood dumbstruck, staring with a face as slack as rainwater. Then perfumed sleeves enclosed him, and he wept in the burning arms of his enemy, for his city, for his father, for a world that could wring redemption out of betrayal.
Years. Months. Days. For so long the Aspect-Emperor had been an uneasy rumour to the South, a name as heaped in atrocity as it was miracle…
No more.
CHAPTER TWO
Honoreal
We burn like over-fat candles, our centres gouged, our edges curling in, our wick forever outrunning our wax.
We resemble what we are: Men who never sleep.
— Anonymous Mandate Schoolman, The Heiromantic Primer
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Southwestern Galeoth
There would have been nightmares aplenty had Drusas Achamian been able to dream a life that was his own. Nightmares of a long, hard war across deserts and great river deltas. Nightmares of sublimity and savagery held in perfect equipoise, though the cacophony of the latter would make all seem like misery. Nightmares of dead men, feeding like cannibals on their once strong souls, raising the impossible on the back of atrocity.
Nightmares of a city so holy it had become wicked.
And of a man who could peer into souls.
But he could not dream of these things. No. Though he had renounced his School, cursed his own brothers, he still wore the great yoke that broke the backs of them all. He still bore within him a second, more ancient soul, Seswatha, the hero and survivor of the First Apocalypse. He still dreamed, as they dreamed, of the World's crashing end. And he still awoke gasping another man's breath…
The feast was a greasy, raucous affair-another celebration of the Hunt-Glorious. The High-King, Anasыrimbor Celmomas, reclined the way he always did when too far into his cups: legs askew, shoulders slumped into the left corner of the Urthrone, forehead planted against a slack fist. His Knight-Chieftains bickered and cavorted across the long trestle-table set before him, raising gobs of seared meat in shining fingers, drinking deep from golden cups stamped in the likeness of animal totems. Light danced from the bronze tripods set across the floor about them, making the table a place of shadows and silhouettes, and illuminating the curtain of freshly killed deer that rose behind the revellers to either side. Beyond, the mighty pillars of the Yodain, the King-Temple raised by Trysл's ancient rulers, rose higher still, into the obdurate blackness.
More toasts rang out. To Clan Anasыrimbor, to the Great Kin Lines represented at the table, to the Bardic Priest and his uproarious account of the day's escapade. Honey mead was poured and spilled into cups and smacking lips alike. But Achamian, alone at the very end of the booming table, lifted his vessel only to the water-bearer. He nodded at the warlike exclamations, laughed at the ribald jokes, grinned the sly grin of the learned in the company of fools, but he did not participate. Instead, with eyes that seemed more bored than cunning, he watched the High-King-the man he still called his best friend-drink himself into unconsciousness.
Then he slipped away, without care or notice. Who could fathom the ways of a sorcerer?
Seswatha passed through the shadowy, industrious network of servants that kept the feast in belching good humour, then left the King-Temple for the closeted maze of palace apartments.
The door was ajar-as promised.
Squat candles had been set on the floor along the passageway, spreading fans of illumination across the decorative mosaics above. Figures roped in and out of the gloom, the shadows of men warring against animals. Breathing deep, Achamian chipped shut the door, listened for the rasp of iron. The heavy stone of the Annexes had swallowed all sound save the spit of candle flames twirling in the wake of his passage. Resinous perfumes steeped the air.
When he found her-Suriala, glorious and wanton Suriala-he knelt in accordance with the very Laws he was about to break. He knelt before her beauty, before her hunger and her passion. She raised him to her embrace, and he glimpsed their entwined reflection in the contours of a decorative shield. They looked as bent and desperate as they should, he thought. Then he pressed her to the bed…
Made love to his High-King's wife-
A convulsive gasp.
Achamian bolted forward from his blankets. The darkness buzzed with exertion, moaned and panted with feminine lust-but only for a moment. Within heartbeats the chorus call of morning birdsong ruled his ears. Throwing aside his blankets, he leaned into his knees, rubbed at the ache across his jaw and cheek. He had taken to sleeping on wood as part of the discipline he had adopted since leaving the School of Mandate, and to quicken the transition between his nightmares and wakefulness. Mattresses, he had found, made waking a form of suffocation.
He sat for a while, trying to will his arousal away, to banish the memory of her nakedness sheering against his own. Had he still been a Mandate Schoolman, he would have run shouting to his brothers. But he was not, and he had dwelt with too many revelations for too long. Insights that would have once wired his body with horror or exultation now merely throbbed. Discovery, it seemed, had become but another ache.
Snuffling and coughing, he walked across the plank floor to the square corona of white outlining the shutters. "Shed some sun on this," he muttered to himself. "Yes-yes… Light is never a bad thing."
He closed his eyes against the explosive brilliance, breathed deep the many layers of morning: the bitter of budding leaves, the damp of forest loam. The cries of children rang up from below, claiming, daring-the singsong of careless souls. "I don't-don't believe you!" Banished from the lower floors by their
parents-Achamian's slaves-they always ran rampant about the tower's shadow in the morning, racing and twittering like combative starlings. For some reason, hearing them today seemed a profound miracle, so much so he almost wished he could stand such-here, now, eyes closed and all else open-for the remainder of his life.
It would be a good end, he thought.
Squinting against the brightness, he turned to his room, to its racks and rough-hewn tables, to the endless sheaves of scribbling stacked in precarious piles across random surfaces high and low. The broad curve of the stone walls embraced the morning gloom, its mortices lending the appearance of a Galeoth millery. A broad fireplace stood fallow opposite his plank bed. Immense ceiling timbers ran overhead, black with pitch, the spaces between insulated with layers of animal pelts-wolf, deer, even hare and marten.
He smiled a sad upside-down smile. Some small memory winced at the barbarity of the place, for he had spent a good portion of his life travelling the fleshpots of the South. But it had been home for far too long to seem anything other than safe. For nearly twenty years he had slept, studied, and supped in this room.
He walked different roads now. Deeper roads.
How long had he travelled?
All his life, it seemed, though he had been a Wizard for only twenty.
Breathing deep, drawing fingers from his balding scalp to his shaggy white beard, he walked to his main worktable, braced himself for the concentrated recital to come…
The meticulous labour of mapping Seswatha's labyrinthine life.
He had hoped to write a detailed account of everything he could remember. He had developed a talent, over the years, for recollecting what he dreamed. He had literally accumulated thousands of recitals, each the focus of innumerable critiques and speculations. Writing from memory was treacherous enough: Sometimes it seemed as though only the bones of things were actually remembered and that the flesh had to be invented anew with each resurrection. But when it came to the Dreams, everything carried the taint of contrivance, even when they tossed him whole into the heart and bowel of Seswatha's life. The key, he had learned, was to start writing immediately, before the afterimage found itself shouldered into obscurity by the brute insistence of the waking world.
But instead, all he could write was, NAU-CAYTI?
He found himself staring at this ink scribble throughout the morning, the name of Celmomas's famed son, whose theft of the Heron Spear would lead to the No-God's ultimate destruction. In the libraries of the Mandate, dozens if not hundreds of tomes were dedicated to his exploits, the predictable stuff mostly: the Slaying of Tanhafut the Red, his string of victories after the disaster at Shiarau, his death at the hands of his wife, Iлva, and of course the endless interpretations of the Theft. But a few scholars-at least two that Achamian could remember-had focused their attention on the sheer frequency of the Dreams involving Nau-Cayti, which seemed far out of proportion to his short-lived role in the Apocalypse.
But if Seswatha had bedded his mother…
The revelation of adultery was significant in its own right-and it stung the old Wizard for reasons he dare not ponder. But the possibility that Seswatha might be Nau-Cayti's father? Not all facts are equal. Some hang like leaves from the branching of more substantial truths. Others stand like trunks, shouldering the beliefs of entire nations. And a few-a desperate few-are seeds.
He was running through all the details that might allow him to date the dream-which Knight-Chieftains still had favour at the High-King's table, which rings Seswatha wore, the fertility tattoos on the Queen's inner thighs-when one of the children's voices piped through the drone of his failing concentration. "Yeah, but from how faaaaaar?" A girl's warbling, squeezed into a reed by the distance. Little Silhanna, he realized.
A woman replied, something tender and inaudible.
It was the accent more than the voice that sent him stumbling to the open window. He found himself blinking, gripping the cracked and pitted sill against the sudden vertigo. It was Sheyic, the common tongue of the New Empire, but lilting with southern nuances. Nansur? Ainoni?
He glanced out to the horizon, across what had once been the Galeoth province of Honoreal. The skies were iron grey with the chill-spring promise of summer blue. Climbing and falling canopies jostled across the near distance, a patchwork of tender greens so new that swales of ground could be seen through them. The morning sunlight was still barred from the ravines, so the landscape possessed an oceanic quality; the sunbathed summits and ridge lines resembled yellow islands in a shadowy sea. Even though he couldn't make out the white-backed tributaries of the Rohil, he could see their winding stamp on the disposition of the distant hills, like cables laid across love-tossed sheets.
Strange, the way distances grew in the chill.
The ground immediately below fell away in a series of stubbed terraces, so that looking directly down made it feel as though he were being tugged out the window. There were the outbuildings, little more than lean-tos actually, staking out their humble circle of habitation, and the nearer trees, elms and oaks, winding to heights that would have been eye level had the ground been even. And there were the bare stretches, whose bald stone carried premonitions of smashing melons and broken skulls. He could see nothing of the children, though he did spy a mule staring with daft concentration at nothing in particular.
The voices continued to chirp and gaggle somewhere to the left, on a blade of level earth that formed the foundation for several hoary old maples.
"Momma! Momma!" he heard young Yorsi cry. Then he spied him through the weave of branches, barrelling up the slope. His mother, Tisthanna, strolled down toward him, wiping her hands on her apron and quite-Achamian was relieved to note-unconcerned. "Look!" Yorsi cried, waving something small and golden.
Then he saw a petite woman climbing in Yorsi's wake, laughing at the four blond children who danced around her, their questions rising in chiming counterpoint. "What's your mule called?" "Can I chop your sword?" "Can I? Can I? Can I?" Her hair was Ketyai black and half-cropped, and she wore a leather cloak whose many-panelled manufacture shouted caste-noble even from such a distance. But given his high vantage and the way she looked down at her little interlocutors, Achamian could see nothing of her face.
He felt a tickle in his throat. How long had it been since their last visitor?
In the beginning, when it had just been him and Geraus, only the Sranc had come. He had lost count of how many times he had lit up the hillside with the Gnosis, sending the vile creatures howling back into the forest deeps. Every tree within bowshot carried some scar of those mad battles: A sorcerer poised on the edge of a half-ruined tower, raining brilliant destruction down on fields of what looked like raving, white-skinned apes. Geraus still suffered nightmares. Afterwards, with the end of the Unification Wars, it had been the Scalpoi, the innumerable Men-Galeoth, Conriyans, Tydonni, Ainoni, even Kianene-who had come to collect the Aspect-Emperor's bounty on Sranc scalps. For years it seemed some blood-mad camp of theirs lay within a day's distance of them. And on more than a few occasions, Achamian had to resort to the Gnosis to cut short their drunken depredations. But even they moved on after time, hunting their vicious prizes into the wilderness's truly primeval deeps. Periodically a troop of them would happen upon the tower, and if they were hungry or otherwise broken by the horrors of their trade, some kind of woe was certain to follow. But then even they ceased coming.
So what had it been? Five, maybe six years since the last visitor had climbed to the foot of their tower?
It had to be. That long at least. There had been those two starving Scalpoi who had come shortly after Geraus had taken Tisthanna for his wife, but after? Certainly not since the last of the children had been born.
No matter, the rule had been simple over the years: Visitors meant grief, the Gods and their laws of hospitality be damned.
Holding hands with one of the girls, the nameless woman came to a friendly stop before Tisthanna, bowed her head in greeting-precisely how
far Achamian couldn't tell because of an obscuring tree limb, though it seemed the inclination proper to caste-menials. He could see her boots through a brace of budding twigs, the toe of her left absently scuffing the winter-flat leaves; they were every bit as fine as her ermine-trimmed cloak.
Perhaps she was only equipped like a caste-noble.
Craning his head, he leaned out perilously far, to the point of breaking out in a cold sweat, but to no effect. He heard Tisthanna's whinnying laugh, and it relieved him-somewhat. Tisthanna was nothing if not sensible.
Then the two women were walking side by side into the clearing that encircled the tower's foundation, talking loudly enough to be overheard, but in that close, feminine tone that seemed to baffle masculine ears. Nodding at something, Tisthanna, her blonde hair stacked upon her apple-round face, looked up and gestured to him in the window. Achamian, who leaned stooped out like yard and tackle, tried to pull himself into a more dignified posture. His left foot slipped. The sill-stone beneath his left palm cracked free the rotten mortar-
He nearly followed it clacking down.
Tisthanna let loose an involuntary "Ooop!" then chortled as Achamian, his long white beard dragging along the stones, carefully palmed his way back to safety.
"Mast-Master Akka!" the children called out in a broken chorus.
The stranger looked up, her delicate face bemused and open and curious…
And something in Achamian suffered a greater fall.
There is a progression to all things. Madness, miracles, even dreams broken into their most feverish extremes follow some thread of association. The unexpected, the astonishing, are always the effect of ignorance, no matter how absolute they may seem. In this world, everything has its reasons.
"So," she said, her tone balanced between many things, hope and sarcasm among them, "the Great Wizard."
There was a strangeness to her, something like the stare of children with ill-mannered smiles.
The Judging eye ta-1 Page 5