They had been discussing omens and portents, how more and more signs seemed to inveigh against the Aspect-Emperor—none more so than the persisting drought. Charampa, in particular, was convinced that the Anasûrimbor Dynasty's doom was imminent. "They overreach! Think of their gall! How could they not be punished? I ask you! I ask you!"
Tzing seemed inclined to agree, and as always, no one could fathom Tinurit's opinion—or whether his smile was in fact a sneer, for that matter. Zsoronga, however, remained skeptical.
"What happens," Sorweel finally ventured, "if we fail the Gods simply because we don't know what they demand?"
"Ka sircu alloman..." Obotegwa began droning from behind him.
"Damnation," Tzing replied. "The Gods care nothing for our excuses."
"No," Zsoronga snapped, loud enough to pre-empt Charampa's eager reply. "Only if we fail to properly honour our ancestors. The Heavens are like palaces, Horse-King. One does not need the King's permission to enter."
"Pfah!" Charampa cried, as much to avenge his interruption as otherwise, Sorweel suspected. "Here I thought the Zeümi were too sensible to believe that Inrithi nonsense!"
"No. It is not Inrithi nonsense. Honouring ancestors is far older than the Thousand Temples. You Cingi are as bad as the sausages..." Zsoronga turned to the young King of Sakarpus. "Family survives death. Don't let this fool tell you different."
"Yes..." Sorweel replied, listening far too keenly to what was said. This was what it meant to be a conquered people, a part of him realized: to turn to the foreign beliefs of foreign peoples. "But what if your... your family is damned?"
The Successor-Prince watched him appreciatively. "Trempe us mar—"
"Then you must do everything in your power to discover what the Gods do want. Everything."
Though Zsoronga was not overtly pious, Sorweel knew from previous discussions that the Zeümi had a far different way, not so much of conceiving life and death, as valuing them, a way that made them seem zealots on occasion. Even the peculiarities of Obotegwa's interpretations revealed as much: the Zeümi used two versions of the same word to speak of life and death, words that roughly translated into "small life" and "great life," with death being the latter.
"Otherwise?"
The Successor-Prince looked at Sorweel as if he were searching for something.
Grounds for trust?
"Otherwise you are lost."
—|—
The World seems greater in the morning, and Men smaller. The ground shrank beneath the rising sun, scalded into white blindness, so that it seemed they woke on the very edge of creation. Raised hands shielded eyes. Broke-back grasses cast shadows like black wire.
Sorweel had grown up in this country; its imprint lay deep in his soul, so deep that simply looking at it braced him, like legs and a wide stance for his soul. Even still, it dizzied him to think how far they had ridden beyond the Pale. He had been educated, of course, and so knew the Pale for what it was: the northern terminus of Sakarpic power, and not the point where waking reality tipped into nightmares. But the superstitions of the rabble had a way of steaming upward, of soaking the more worldly understanding of the nobility. Despite his tutors, the Pale remained a kind of moral boundary in his imagination, the line that marked the fading of the good and the gathering of what was evil. Enough to catch his breath when he thought of the miles between him and his holy city. For a company as small as theirs to ride the emptiness as they did, a nagging part of him insisted, was nothing short of madness.
If anything silenced these worries, it was his growing respect for Captain Harnilas. He had not thought much of Old Harni at first. Like many other Scions, he had tried to detest the man, if not for who he was, then for what he represented. Diminishing others is ever the way men raise themselves, and the might of the Aspect-Emperor was such, the glory and the competence of the Kidruhil so obvious, that petty targets like Harnilas seemed to be the only ones remaining.
But the Captain was nothing if not dogged in his warlike wisdom. Gruff. Bearded in manner, even though he shaved like so many of his Nansur countrymen. His scars picked up where his wrinkles left off so that his face seemed tattooed with different sigils depending on the angle and intensity of the light. He so obviously cared so little for what his wards thought of him that they could not but esteem him.
"In Zeüm," Zsoronga once said, "we call men like him nukbaru, masons... stone-hewers..." After Obotegwa finished translating, the Successor-Prince nodded toward the head of their small column. "Our Captain."
When Sorweel asked him why, Zsoronga smiled and said, "Because to hew stone you must be stronger than stone."
"Or smarter," Eskeles had added.
Riding as they did had a way of nursing and smothering conversations. Sometimes they chattered as loudly as wives filing from Temple. Sometimes they rode in desert silence, with only the arrhythmic gait of their ponies to punctuate the perpetual wind. Usually their talk would be momentary, sparking here, fading there, as though a single animate spirit drifted through them all, drawing thought into voice one by one.
The morning of their tenth day of ranging, they embarked in silence and continued riding that way.
They sighted the elk trail before noon, a mottled water-stain across the linen distances, as broad as a valley. They did not reach it until early afternoon, a thin file of cavalrymen picking their way across land battered by a thousand thousand hoofs, a trail as great as any of the World's enormities.
Sorweel cursed himself for a fool, such was his relief.
—|—
The following day began the same as any other. The elk trail continued its southern arc, resembling the imprint of a curved sword left overlong in the grass, only writ across the entire landscape. The Scions filed through its great trampled heart, silent save for the clank of gear and the warbling of one or two desultory conversations. Even Charampa seemed disinclined to speak. Sorweel rocked in his saddle like the others, listening to the sweep of wind and the low ghost noises it made when it caught his ears.
The first shouts came from the head of the column: a pair of vultures had been sighted to their left. The entire company rode perched in their saddles, fingers pointing, eyes scanning the wandering line of the eastern horizon. The plain seemed to curl and fold more and more as it diminished in the haze, like a mangy carpet kicked against a wall. The sky rose high and endless above.
"We've found our herd!" Obotegwa cried, translating Zsoronga's jubilant words.
Sorweel blinked and squinted, his face angled against the sun's glare. He found and tracked the two floating specks—even glimpsed the bar of wings riding faraway winds. Before he knew what he was doing, he spurred Stubborn into a gallop. The pony leapt into its stride with almost doglike exuberance. The Scions watched with curiosity and amusement as he pounded to the fore of the line. Captain Harnilas was already scowling at him when he reined Stubborn to a reluctant halt.
"Merus pah veuta je ghasam!" the old cavalryman shouted.
"Captain!" Sorweel cried in Sheyic. With a sweeping gesture he directed the man's grizzled attention toward the horizon. Then as emphatically as he could he spoke the one word that transcended all the languages of Men.
"Sranc."
He matched the officer's hard gaze, noticing, not for the first time, the scar on his left cheek, burn-puckered as though he had once shed a fiery tear. For the first time he saw the small soapstone figurines hanging about his neck: three children joined at the hands and feet, chipping across his cuirass. A strange sense of recognition welled through the young King, a realization that Harnilas, despite his exotic complexion and furious brown eyes, was not so different than his father's boonsmen, that he chambered his heart, as so many warlike men did, to keep his sense clear of his compassion. Harnilas loved, as all men loved, in the cracks and crevices of a warring world.
Eskeles finally trotted into earshot, gasping as though his pony had ridden him instead of otherwise. Sorweel turned to the Schoolman. "Tell him
to study those birds carefully. Tell him that they're storks—the most holy of birds. Tell him that storks only follow Sranc on the plain."
Eskeles frowned in his thoughtful way, then relayed the information to Captain Harnilas. Aside from a quick glance at the sorcerer he continued to watch Sorweel intently.
"Sranc," the Captain repeated. The leathery face turned to squint at the specks floating in the distant sky.
Sorweel pursed his lips and nodded.
"The bird is holy."
—|—
"Your tutor argues that the Sranc should be left to him," old Obotegwa explained, "so that no lives need be lost. Harnilas disagrees. He thinks the Scions need... practice, even at the cost of lives. Better to begin with an easy blooding, he says, than a hard one."
They had gradually closed on the high-circling storks over the course of the afternoon, taking care to remain upwind and to use the creases in the broken plain to keep their approach hidden. If Sorweel had entertained any fears regarding Harnilas, they had been allayed by the patient sensibility of his tactics and the thoughtless ease with which he exercised his command. After ascertaining the direction of their march, he angled their pursuit to better intercept their trail: they now knew they followed a warband of some three hundred—a number too small to suggest a migrating clan. They had almost been sighted twice now, crossing the crest of some knoll at the same time as their inhuman quarry, but they had managed to close within a mile of the warband. The sun had smouldered into evening, scorching the western horizon gold and crimson. Now the Company of Scions sheltered in a trough of cool shadow, watching Eskeles argue with their Captain.
The afternoon had been tense, certainly, but far more thrilling than anything else. With the possible exception of the Scylvendi, Tinurit, the Scions rode with grins whipped across their face. A kind of glee had possessed them, one that sparked low snorts of laughter whenever glances were exchanged, childlike in that sneaking way, murderous in its ultimate intent. For his own part, Sorweel felt none of the fear, not a whisper of the cowardice that he had thought would unman him. A limb-gripping eagerness filled him instead, a will to ride down and kill. Even his pony, Stubborn, seemed to sense the impending violence—and to welcome it.
Of course Eskeles was intent on ruining everything. Blasphemer, Sorweel found himself thinking.
Sorweel had no real idea how much influence his tutor wielded; Mandate Schoolmen were rumoured to be more powerful than Judges, but whether this extended to the field, or to Kidruhil Companies particularly, he did not know. He could only hope that their surly old Captain prevailed. Harnilas did not strike him as a particularly political man—which was probably why he had been given the Scions in the first place. Sorweel's father had told him several times that intriguing killed far more men on the field than otherwise.
The two middle-aged men waved hands and shouted for several moments more, then Eskeles apparently said something either too clever or too impertinent. Harnilas stood in his stirrups and began thundering at the sorcerer, who fairly wilted before the savage display. Sorweel found himself laughing with Zsoronga and Obotegwa.
"Fool!" Eskeles cried in corpulent exasperation as he rejoined them. "The man is a fool!"
"Practice-practice," Sorweel sang, mimicking the tone the Schoolman took whenever he groaned about language drills. "You're the one always saying the easy way is never the proper way."
Zsoronga chortled at Obotegwa's translation. The Schoolman glared at Sorweel for an angry moment, then collected himself with a harried smile. He looked up to the storks circling high above a crest that bowled the earth before them. Their white spans carried sunset gold. "I pray you prove me right, my King. I really do."
A chill seemed to creep into the shadow.
Once decided, their pursuit became determined. At Harnilas's gestured command they fell into wedge formation, rode the rising and falling knolls like a loose-jointed raft on ocean swells. They trotted to prevent winding their horses, a pace that allowed for more than a little excited chatter, though the anxiousness of cresting each rise knocked them into gazing silence.
"They don't move," Zsoronga said through Obotegwa. "Why? Have they seen us?"
"Could be," Sorweel replied, fighting against the breathlessness that pinched his voice. "Or they could be resting... Sranc prefer the night. Sun exhausts them."
"Then why not use the high ground, where they can keep watch?"
"The sun," he repeated, speaking through a pang of sudden apprehension. "They hate the sun."
"And we hate the night... which is why we double our watches."
The Sakarpi King nodded. "But no Man has walked this land for thousands of years, remember. Why should they keep watch for myths and legends?"
His earlier eagerness seemed to slip out of him, plummet through the soles of his boots. They climbed a slope, riding into their shadows at an angle to the dust that pealed away from them. Everywhere he looked he saw ground, and yet it seemed he rode the lip of a perilous chasm. Vertigo leaned out from him, threatened to pull him from his saddle. There was no certainty, he realized. Anything could happen on the field of war.
Anything.
A keening noise climbed into the earthen thunder of their advance, high and ragged, as though cutting the throats that were its crying origin. The storks seemed to hang in the air directly above them, lines of virgin white etched in the sun. The Scions swung through the shadow of the shallow basin, scraping through a haze of brush and dead grasses, then raced upward. The knoll's crown met their rush. The sun broke across their backs, crimson flashing from silver and crimson.
The shrieking chorus collapsed into squeals and yammering alarums.
The Sranc mobbed the spaces below them, a putrid congregation scattered across the gap between sunlit summits. Thin white arms yanked at weapons. Faces collapsed into squints of fury. Clan standards—human skulls haired with bison hide—jerked and wagged.
Sorweel did not need to look down the line of his fellows to know their faces. Disbelief is ever the door between young men and murder.
An impossible moment followed, one Sorweel had heard various Horselords mention from time to time. The line of lancers, their helms and mailed sleeves gleaming in the sunlight, stood motionless save for the most anxious of ponies. The Sranc band roiled with shriek and gesture but likewise did not move. The two parties simply regarded each other, not out of hesitation and certainly not for calculation's sake. It was more a warlike equipoise, as if the encounter were a coin spinning in the air, needing only the hard ground of murder to judge.
Sorweel lifted himself forward to whisper in Stubborn's ear: "One and one are one..."
And they were off, shouting the war-cries of a dozen heathen nations, a thundering, trampling line. A flying rake of lance-points. From the stories his father's boonsmen told him, he had expected each heartbeat to last an age, but in fact everything happened fast—far too fast to be terrifying, or exhilarating, or anything, for that matter. One heartbeat, the Sranc were a tangle of sprinting forms before him, skin white, armour black with filth, iron weapons wild in the air. The next heartbeat, he was crashing through them like something thrown. His lance glanced off the corner of a shield, skewered the throat of a wagging creature he had not even seen, let alone intended to kill. The heartbeat after, he was drawing his sword, reining Stubborn about, and hacking. Shrieks and cries and shouts pealed skyward. The dreadful clatter of war.
Seven, maybe eight, threshing heartbeats passed. He wondered at the ease with which sword points punctured faces—no different from practice melons. Otherwise, he was his blade, his horse, dancing between the jabber of pale shadows, raining ruin and destruction. Purple blood jetted, flew black across the dead scrub.
Then it was just the low dust, the clutch of the maimed and the dying, and the cacophony had moved beyond him—continued moving.
He spurred Stubborn in pursuit, glimpsed Zsoronga grinning from a passing saddle.
The surviving Sranc ran befor
e an uneven wave of horsemen, a kind of jerking scramble. Sorweel seized a lance jutting from the ground as he galloped past, leaned into Stubborn's exertions. He quickly overtook the laggards among the Scions, soon found himself in the pounding fore of the pursuit. A crazed grin seized his lips. He howled his people's ancient war-cry, the lung-cracking sound that had marked innumerable such pursuits through the ages.
The Sranc ran, bolting through dead scrub like wolverines, opening the interval between them and the slowest of the Scions—only the quickest of the quick overtook them.
There was joy in the race. His legs and hips had become mere extensions of Stubborn's leaping gallop The ground pouring away like water. His hand gripping his lance, loosely as he had been taught from childhood, floating, tingling as if he held a thunderbolt. He was a Son of Sakarpus, a Horselord, and this—this!—was his calling. He struck with a viciousness that seemed holy for its thoughtlessness. One in the neck, rolling limbs akimbo into caged bracken. Another in the heel, left limp-running, mewling like a knifed cat. Anything he overran he instantly forgot, knowing that the pounding wall behind him would eat them up.
They scattered and he followed—there was no hiding beneath the shining plains sun. They bent their white faces back to him as he closed, black eyes glittering, features pinched ancient with fear and fury. Their limbs little more than a flutter of shadows in the grass-thatched dust. They coughed. They screamed as they spun falling.
There was joy in the race. Ecstasy in the kill.
One and one were one.
—|—
Their victory was complete. Among the Scions, three were fallen, and some nine others were wounded, including Charampa, who took a spear in his thigh. Despite the dark looks thrown by Eskeles, Old Harni was obviously satisfied with his young wards, perhaps even proud of them. Sorweel had witnessed death enough during his city's fall. He knew what it meant to watch familiar faces spit their final breath. But for the first time he experienced the jarring of elation and regret that comes with triumph on the field. For the first time he understood the contradiction that blackens the heart of all martial glory.
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