"There is this book," Zsoronga said, the squint in his eyes complementing the reluctance in his voice. "This forbidden book, written by a sorcerer… Drusas Achamian. Have you heard of him?"
"No."
Zsoronga's bottom lip pressed the line of his mouth into an upside-down crescent. He nodded, not so much in affirmation or approval, but as though to acknowledge his succinct honesty. "Bpo Mandatu mbal-"
"He was a Mandate Schoolman, like your own tutor."
Sorweel found himself glancing about, fearing that Eskeles would arrive any moment. Men had a way of hearing their names, even when spoken across the arc of the world. "And?"
"Well, he was present when the Anasыrimbor joined the First Holy War. Apparently he was his first and dearest friend-his teacher, both before and after the Circumfixion."
"So?"
"Well, for one, the Empress-you know, the woman on the silver kellics, the mother of our dear, beloved General Kayыtas-Achamian was her first husband. Apparently the Anasыrimbor stole her. So at the conclusion of the First Holy War, when the Shriah of their Thousand Temples crowns the Anasыrimbor Aspect-Emperor, this Achamian repudiates him before all those gathered, claims he is a fraud and deceiver."
Something of the old Zsoronga had returned, as though he were warming to the gossip of the tale.
"Yes…" Sorweel said. "I'm sure I've heard this… or a version of it, anyway."
"So he leaves the Holy War, goes into exile, becomes, they say, the only Wizard in the Three Seas. Only the love and shame of the Empress prevent his execution."
"Wizard?"
Another grave turn in his ebony expression. "Yes. A sorcerer without a School."
The Company of Scions was but a clot in a far larger column of Kidruhil companies, and a conspicuous one, given that its members had leave to wear native ornamentations over their crimson uniforms. They had followed the column over the crest of a scrub-choked rise, then leaned back against their cantles as they descended into a broad depression. The black track became viscous with water and muck. The susurrus of countless hooves stamping marshy ground rose about them-the wheeze of sinking grounds. What had looked like mist from the sloped heights became clouds of midges.
"And this is where he writes this book?" Sorweel asked, pitching his voice over the tramping clamour. "In exile?"
"Our spies brought my father a copy some six years ago, saying that it had become a kind of scripture for those who still resist the Anasыrimbor in the Three Seas. It's titled A Compendium of the First Holy War."
"So it's a history?"
"Only apparently. There are… insinuations, scattered throughout, and descriptions of the Anasыrimbor as he was, before he gained the Gnosis and became almost all-powerful."
"Are you saying this Mandate Schoolman knew… that he knew what the Aspect-Emperor was?"
Zsoronga paused before answering, looked at him as though rehearsing previous judgments. Among those who would contest the power of the Aspect-Emperor, Sorweel understood, no matters could be more essential.
"Yes," Zsoronga finally replied.
"So. What does he say?"
"Everything you might expect a cuckold to say. That's the problem…"
An ambient eagerness bloomed through Sorweel's limbs. The knowledge he needed was here-he could sense it. The knowledge that would cleave certainty out of mangled circumstances-that would see his honour redeemed! He squeezed the reins tight enough to whiten his knuckles. "Does he call him a demon?" he asked almost with breath. "Does he?"
"No."
A vertiginous, dumbfounded moment, as if he had leaned forward expecting an answer to brace him. "What then? Do not play me on such matters, Zsoronga! I come to you as a friend!"
The Successor-Prince somehow grinned and scowled all at once. "You must learn, Horse-King. Too many wolves prowl these columns. I appreciate your honesty, your overture, I truly do, but when you speak like this… I… I fear for you."
Obotegwa had softened his sovereign's tone, of course. No matter how diligently the Obligate tried to recreate the tenor of his Prince's discourse, his voice always bore the imprint of a long and oft-examined life.
Sorweel found himself looking down at the polished contours of his pommel, so different from the raw hook of iron on Sakarpi saddles. "What does this-this… Achamian say?"
"He says the Anasыrimbor is a man, neither diabolic nor divine. A man of unheard-of intellect. He bids us imagine the difference between ourselves and children…" The black man trailed into silence, his brows furrowed in concentration. He had this habit of staring down and to the left when pondering, as though judging points buried deep in the ground.
"And?"
"The important thing, he says, isn't so much what the Anasыrimbor is, as what we are to him."
Sorweel glared at him in exasperation. "You speak in riddles!"
"Yusum pyeb-!"
"Think to your childhood! Think of the hopes and fears. Think of the tales the nursemaids told you. Think of the way your face continually betrayed you. Think of all the ways you were mastered, all the ways you were moulded."
"Yes! So?"
"That is what you are to the Aspect-Emperor. That is what we all are."
"Children?"
Zsoronga dropped his reins, waved his arms out in grand gesture of indication. "All of this. This divinity. This apocalypse. This… religion he has created. They are the kinds of lies we tell children to assure they act in accord with our wishes. To make us love, to incite us to sacrifice… This is what Drusas Achamian seems to be saying."
These words, spoken through the lense of wise and weary confidence that was Obotegwa, chilled Sorweel to the pith. Demons were so much easier! This… this…
How does a child war against a father? How does a child not… love?
Sorweel could feel the dismay on his face, the bewilderment, but his shame was muted by the realization that Zsoronga felt no different. "So what are his wishes, then? The Aspect-Emperor. If all this is… is a fraud, then what are his true ends?"
They had climbed out of the shallow marsh and now crested a low knoll. Zsoronga nodded past Sorweel's shoulder, to where, in the congestion of the near distance, the young King could see Eskeles's absurd form fairly bowing the back of his huffing donkey. More lessons…
"The Wizard does not say," the Successor-Prince continued when he glanced back. "But I fear that you and I shall know before this madness is done with."
That night he dreamed of Kings arguing across an ancient floor.
"There is the surrender that leads to slavery," the Exalt-General said. "And there is the surrender that sets one free. Soon, very soon, your people shall know that difference."
"So says the slave!" Harweel cried, standing in a flower of outward-hooking flames.
How bright his father burned. Lines of fire skittering up the veins wrapping his arms. His hair and beard a smoking blaze. His skin blistering like pitch, shining raw, trailing lines of fiery grease…
How beautiful was his damnation.
At first he battled the slave, crying out. Porsparian was little more than hands in the darkness, fending, pressing, and then as Sorweel eventually calmed, soothing.
"Ek birim sefnarati," the old slave murmured, though it sounded more like a mutter in his broken wood-pipe voice. "Ek birim sefnarati… Shhh… Shhh…" Over and over, little more than a shadow kneeling at the side of Sorweel's cot.
Illumination slowly tinted the greater dark beyond the canvas planes of his tent, a slow inhalation of light.
"I saw my father burn," he croaked to the uncomprehending slave.
For some reason, he did not begrudge the gnarled hand that rested on his shoulder. And it seemed a miracle the way the slave's cracked-leather features gained reality in the fading gloom. Sorweel's own grandfather had died on the Pale when he was very young, so he had never known the indulgent warmth of a father's father's adoration. He had never learned the way the years opened the hearts of the old to the mirac
ulousness of the young. But he thought he could see it in Porsparian's strange yellow-smiling eyes, in the rattle of his voice, and he found himself trusting it completely.
"Does that mean he's damned?" he asked thickly. A grandfather, it seemed, would know. "Dreams of burning?"
The shadow of a stern memory crossed the old Shigeki's face, and he pressed himself to his feet. Sorweel sat up in his cot, absently scratched his scalp while watching his slave's shadowy labour. Porsparian stooped to pull the mat from the turf floor, then knelt in the manner of an old woman worshiping. As Sorweel had seen him do so many times, he plucked away the turf, then pressed the form of a face into the soil-a face that seemed unmistakably feminine despite the gloom.
Yatwer.
The slave brought dirt to his eyes, then began slowly rocking to a muttered prayer. Back and forth, without any discernible rhythm, like a man struggling against the ropes that bound him. On and on he muttered, while the dawning light pulled more and more details from obscurity: the crude black stitching of his tunic's hem, the tufts of wiry white hair that climbed his forearms, the cross-hatching of kicked and pressed grasses. A kind of violence crept into his movements, enough to draw Sorweel anxiously forward. The Shigeki jerked from side to side, as though yanked by some interior chain. The intervals between the spasms shrank, until it seemed he flinched from a cloud of bee stings. A series of convulsions…
Sorweel leapt to his feet, stepped forward, hands held out. "Porsparian!" he cried.
But something, some rule of religious witness perhaps, held him back. He remembered the incident with the tear, when Porsparian had burned his palm, and a hollowing anxiousness seized him. He felt like a thing of paper, creased and rolled and folded into the shape of a man. Any gust, it seemed, could make a kite of him, toss him to the arches of heaven. What new madness was this?
His soiled fingers still to his eyes, the old man writhed and bucked as though kicked and beaten from within. Breath whistled from flaring nostrils. His voice had sputtered into a ragged gurgle…
Then, like grass springing back to form in the wake of boots, he was upright and still. Porsparian drew aside his hands, looked to the earth with eyes like red gelatin…
Gazed at the earthen face.
Sorweel caught his breath, blinked as though to squint away the madness. Not only had the slave's eyes gone red (a trick, some kind of trick!), somehow the mouth pressed into the soil face had opened.
Opened?
Forming a plate with his palms, Porsparian lowered his fingers to the lower lip, received the waters pooling there. Old and bent and smiling, he then turned to his master and stood. His eyes had returned to normal, though the knowingness they possessed seemed anything but. He stepped forward, reached out. Muck trailed like blood from the pads of his fingers. Sorweel shrank backward, nearly toppled over his cot.
Standing across the morning-glowing canvas, Porsparian actually seemed a creature made of shadowy earth, like something moulded from the mud of an ancient river watching with the forever look of yellow eyes. "Spit," the old slave said, stunning him with the clarity of his Sakarpic pronunciation. "To keep… face… clean."
For several heartbeats Sorweel simply stared, dumbfounded. Where? Where had the water come from?
What kind of Three Seas trickery…
"You hide," the old slave gasped. "Hide in gaze!"
But a kernel of understanding anchored his panic, and something within him wept, shouted in anguish and relief. The Old Gods had not forgotten! Sorweel closed his eyes, knowing that this was all the permission required. He felt the fingers smear his cheek, press in the firm manner of old men who do all things at the limit of their strength, not for anger, but to overmatch the thoughtless vitality of the young. He felt her spit at once soil and cleanse.
A mother wiping the face of her beloved son.
Look at you…
Somewhere on the plain, the priests sounded the Interval: a single note tolling pure and deep over landscapes of tented confusion. The sun was rising.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cil-Aujas
The world is only as deep as we can see.
This is why fools think themselves profound.
This is why terror is the passion of revelation.
— Ajencis, The Third Analytic of Men
Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), South of Mount Aenaratiol
Age. Age and darkness.
For the peoples of the Three Seas, The Chronicle of the Tusk was the ultimate measure of the ages. Nothing was more ancient. Nothing could be. Yet the Skin Eaters found themselves walking halls older than even the language of the Tusk, let alone the ivory into which it had been cut. No one had to tell them this, though they sometimes glanced at Achamian as if pleading to be told otherwise. They could see it scrawling through the light about them. They could smell it hanging in the dust. They could feel it creeping through meek bones and chastened hearts.
Here was a glory that no human, tribe or nation, could hope to match, and their hearts balked at the admission. Achamian saw it floating in their faces: lips drawn into lines, teeth set in slack jaws, eyes roaming without focus, the vacant look of blowhards confronting their tolly. Even these men, so quick to celebrate sin and debauchery, had thought the blood of Gods coursed through their veins.
Cil-Aujas, for all its silence, boomed otherwise.
What Achamian had thought a vast entrance gallery turned out to be a subterranean road. The line of walkers quickly coalesced into two bands, one following Cleric and his hanging point of sorcerous light in the lead, the other crowding Achamian and his Surrillic Cant of Illumination. For a time they seemed to shuffle more than stride, a gawking band staring up and around, painfully aware of their trespass. Everyone cringed at the sound of voices. Fragments of what might have been bone gravelled their steps. Dust fogged their ankles.
Images. Images planked every surface, virginal as exhumed graves, soaked in the gloom of unwitnessed ages. The style mirrored that of the Obsidian Gate: the walls banded with layered pictorial reliefs, the outer set like impossibly elaborate grillwork over the inner, vaulting some forty feet. The sedimentary grain, whorls of charcoal black veined with grey, made it obvious that it had been hewn from living rock. Whole sections shone like brown and black glass. Pinned between their passing points of light, the walls literally seethed with counterfeit motion.
It was the absence of weathering that distinguished the hall from the Gate. The detail baffled the eye, from the mail of the Nonmen warriors to the hair of the human slaves. Scars striping knuckles. Tears lining supplicants' cheeks. Everything had been rendered with maniacal intricacy. The effect was too lifelike, Achamian decided, the concentration too obsessive. The scenes did not so much celebrate or portray, it seemed, as reveal, to the point where it hurt to watch the passing sweep of images, parade stacked upon parade, entire hosts carved man for man, victim for victim, warring without breath or clamour.
Pir-Pahal, Achamian realized. The entire hall was dedicated to it, a great and ancient battle fought between the Nonmen and the Inchoroi. He could even recognize the principals: the traitor, Nin'janjin, and his sovereign, Cu'jara Cinmoi, the Nonman Emperor. The mighty hero, Gin'gыrima, with arms like a man's thighs. And the Inchoroi King, Sil, armoured in corpses, flanked by his inhuman kinsmen, winged monstrosities with wicked limbs, pendulous phalli, and skulls grafted into skulls.
Achamian nearly stumbled when he saw the Heron Spear raised high in Sil's articulated arms.
"Those things…" Mimara whispered from his side.
"Inchoroi," Achamian muttered. With a kind of wonder, he thought of Kellhus and his Great Ordeal, of their mad march across the wasted North to Golgotterath. The war depicted on these walls, he realized, had never ended, not truly.
Ten thousand years of woe.
"These are their memories," Achamian found himself saying aloud. "The Nonmen cut their past into the walls… as a way to make it as immortal as their bodies."
The faces of several scalpers turned toward him, some in expectation, others in annoyance. Speaking seemed a kind of sacrilege, like ill-willed gossip in the light of a funeral pyre.
On and on they walked, deeper into the bowels of the mountain. Miles passed without a terminus or a fork, just warring walls, stamped as deep as outstretched arms. The way before them resolved out of obscurity. Behind, the light of the entrance dwindled into a star, solitary in a field of absolute black.
Then with horrifying suddenness, a second gate welled out of the darkness. Several gasps echoed through the stale air. The company stumbled to a halt.
Two wolves towered before them, standing like men to either side of an unbarred portal, eyes bulging, tongues lolling. The contrast was dramatic. Gone was the intricacy of the underworld road, replaced by a more ancient, more totemic sensibility. Each wolf was three wolves, or the same wolf at three different times, the graven heads warped into three distinct postures, their stylized expressions ranging from sorrow to savagery, as if the ancient artisans had rendered an entire animal existence in a single moment of stone. Writing ringed the casings of each, densely packed in vertical columns, pictograms like numeric slashes, at once elegant and primitive. Auja-Gilcыnni, Achamian realized, the so-called First Tongue, so old that even the Nonmen had forgotten how to read or speak it-which meant this gate had to be as ancient to Nonmen as the Tusk was to Men. Everything about it spoke of rude souls awakening to the subtleties of artistic wonder…
But the fascination wilted as quickly as it had sparked. Achamian found himself swaying on his feet, light-headed, as if he had leapt too quickly from a slumber. Mimara also stumbled, brought both hands to her forehead, held them like a tent over her brows. Several mules spooked, stamped and jerked against their ropes. There was more than the ache of ages in the air. There was… something else, a lack of some kind, running perpendicular to the geometry of the real, bowing its lines with its cavernous suck. Something that whispered from the blackness between the graven beasts.
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