The questions dismayed him. Until now, his return had been a thoughtless assumption: he was a Son of the Lonely City-of course he would return. But the more he considered it, the more improbable it began to seem. Were he to work the Goddess's divine will, murder the Aspect-Emperor… Surely that would mean his doom as well. And were he to deny the Goddess, become a Believer-King at the risk of his immortal soul… Would that not mean a different doom?
And if he were to return, how could he describe, let alone explain, the things he had witnessed?
How could he be Sakarpi?
Moenghus loomed out of the dark long before his turn to take watch and took a seat beside him, his manner as wordless and sombre as the Sakarpi King's own. Sorweel's alarm quickly subsided. Even after so many months of duplicity, he was not a man who could comfortably think treachery in the presence of those he intended to betray. In the siblings' company he invariably gave reign to a certain amenity in his nature-one easily confused for cowardice.
He could only plot in solitude.
They sat in silence, staring out over the sunless tracts, soaking in the aura of companionship that often rises between speechless men. Since Sorweel did not look at the man, he remained a brooding shadow in his periphery, one laden with intimations of physical force and errant passion.
"Your father…" the young King ventured to ask. "Do you think he has… grasped God?"
Sorweel would never know what motivated his honesty. A man, he was beginning to learn, could become as accustomed to contradiction and dilemma as to heartbreak.
"A strange question for a Believer — King," the Prince-Imperial snorted. "I could report you to the Judges!"
Sorweel merely scowled.
"Look about you," Moenghus continued, shrugging and rubbing his shaven chin the way he always did when yielding to serious considerations. " All the earth rises to wage war against Father, and yet he prevails. Even the Hundred raise arms against him!"
Sorweel blinked. These last words pricked like a fistful of broken glass.
"What are you saying?"
" Truth, Horse-King. Nothing offends Men or Gods more…"
Sorweel could only stare at him, witless. Was it possible for a god to be mistaken?
But then that had been Eskeles's lesson those months past-had it not? The Gods were but fragments of the God, mere shards of a greater whole-like Men. Yatwer, the Schoolman would most certainly say, was just such a fragment… Just as blind to the whole.
Could the Mother of Birth be deceived?
If the Prince-Imperial noticed his bewildered horror, he betrayed no sign whatsoever. Moenghus was one of those men who cared not at all for the petty rules that measured verbal exchanges. He simply stared out to the constellations twinkling low on the western horizon, talking as if no listening in the world could matter.
"Of course Father has grasped God."
The Army of the South had come to Hoilirsi, a province known in Far Antique days for the cultivation of flax. Hoilirsi found its northern boundary in a river called the Irshi, which ran fast and deep for some hundred miles before mellowing on its path to the Neleost Sea. Even in Far Antique times, the Irshi had been known for the rarity of its crossings, so much so that the ancient Bardic Priests often used it as a name for detour-and its crossing as a metaphor for death. Iri Irshi ganpirlal, they would say when speaking of fallen heroes, or of anyone who faltered in life: "Cruel Irshi pulls them under."
King Umrapathur and his planners knew of the Irshi, of course, but they had assumed, as was reasonable considering the hundred rivers they had crossed thus far, that it would also be droughted. They had even discussed the possibility of sending cohorts of Schoolmen out in advance of the Horde in the hope of catching it crossing fords. They did not realize they had come to the first of many rivers whose high sources threaded the peaks of the Great Yimaleti-that for vast stretches of its length, the Irshi had no fordable crossings.
The Horde found itself caught along its fanged banks. Multitudes were drowned, thrown into the gorges by the relentless press of their kin. Worm-white carcasses tumbled down the river's tempestuous lengths and formed macabre rafts along its idylls, stretches of bloat and filth that sheeted the Irshi from bank to bank. But as the clans retreated out of terror of the Shining Men, they soon began shrinking from the threshing waters as well. The raucous stormfront that was the Horde slowed, then halted altogether.
Prince Massar ab Kascamandri would be the first to bear the tidings to King Umrapathur: "The Horde… It no longer withdraws before our lances."
The council was thrown into an uproar. What were they to do? How could they assail such impossible numbers while masses more roiled about and behind their flanks?
Carindusu was the first to upbraid them. "Can't you see that this a boon?" he cried. "All this time fretting, wringing our hands because the skinnies outrun us, because we cannot kill them quickly enough, and now, when Fate pins them in place, delivers them to our fury, we fret and wring our hands?" With the Horde trapped and with Mandate and the Vokalati combined, the Grandmaster argued, the Culling would become outright butchery. He and his arcane brethren would lay carrion across the horizon.
The Believer-Kings turned to Apperens Saccarees, who gazed at his rival with wary appreciation.
"Perhaps the Grandmaster speaks true," he said.
And so the council fell to devising a new strategy. As men are prone, they took heart in what they thought was evidence of their own ingenuity. Prince Charapatha alone harboured misgivings, for among the Lords of the South, only he reasoned that the Consult would also know of the Irshi-and so know it would catch the Horde. He was not named the Prince of One Hundred Songs for nothing: he understood the advantage conveyed by the ability to predict a foe's actions. But he had taken his father's earlier admonishment to heart and was loathe to raise questions that might undermine the ardour of his Zaudunyani brothers.
And as much as he distrusted Carindusu and his posturing pride, the Prince had come to regard Saccarees as a kindred intellect. The School of Mandate marched with them. How could they fail?
Sorweel dreamed of her bathing, trembled for the steam that rose from her gentle places. The waters were pure and translucent, sheathing and beading across her flushing skin. Wisps enveloped all. Then something crimson, something ragged and viscous, tentacled the waters, unlooped like spilled entrails, depositing scabrous filth across the clarity of her submerged form. But she knew it not, and so continued to cup offal in her hands, pour filth over her naked skin.
He called out…
Only to find himself splayed across forest turf, blinking at the midday sun broken through branches. He pawed an ant from his soft beard, saw Moenghus sitting nearby. The Prince-Imperial sat with his back against a tree, absently working his knife across his throat and chin, staring off toward the sound of his sister's singing, which rose with the noise of rushing water from behind tangled screens of foliage.
She bathed, Sorweel realized, blinking away memories of his dream.
She only sang when she bathed.
Moenghus turned to him for a moment, watched him with a preoccupied frown, then looked away when Sorweel hauled himself onto his rump.
"What you said earlier…" the young King said to the man, squinting against his grogginess. "About the Hundred raising arms against your father…"
The Prince-Imperial regarded him with a long and canny look. There was a brutality to his face beyond the heaviness of his brow and jaw, one that made a snarl out of every glimpse of teeth.
"I was afraid you would ask me that," he finally said. "I wasn't supposed to mention it."
"Why?"