"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.