"Hording…" Sorweel repeated, weighing the term on his tongue. "Does Harni know about this?"
"We shall know soon enough," the corpulent Schoolman said. Without further word, he spurred his overtaxed pony to overtake the Kidruhil Captain.
Sorweel allowed his gaze to range across the ground before the Company, saw strings of blood flung across the scree, welters of cracked bone, and skulls, some with the eyes sucked out, others with cheeks chewed away to the snout. No matter where he looked he saw another gory circle.
The largest Sranc clans the Horselords battled rarely numbered more than several hundred. Sometimes a particularly cruel and cunning Sranc chieftain would enslave his neighbours and open warfare would range across the Pale. And the legends were littered with stories of Sranc rising in nations and overcoming the Outermost Holds. Sakarpus itself had been besieged five times since the days of the Ruiner.
But this… slaughter.
Only some greater power could have accomplished this.
Meat sweated in open sunlight. Flies steamed about the scrub and grasses. Cartilage gleamed where not chapped with gore. The stink was raw unto gagging.
"The war is real," he said with dull wonder. "The Aspect-Emperor… His war is real."
"Perhaps…" Zsoronga said after listening to Obotegwa's translation. "But are his reasons?"
"Otherwise you are utterly lost…"
So Zsoronga had said.
Despite the clamour and triumph of the past days, these words continued to sink and to surface through the young King's turbulent soul. He had no reason to doubt them. For all his youth, Zsoronga possessed what the Sakarpi called thil, salt.
The fact was, Yatwer, the patroness of the weak and dispossessed, had chosen him, even though he had been trothed to her brother Gilgaol since his fifth summer, even though he possessed the blood of warriors-even though he was what the Yatwerians called weryild, a Taker, a thief by virtue of his bones. Railing against the absurdity, let alone the shame, of her choice did nothing but prove him worthy of the humiliation. He had been chosen. Now he only needed to know why.
Otherwise…
Porsparian was the obvious answer. It seemed clear now that the slave was a secret priest of some kind. Sorweel had always thought that only women attended to the worldly interests of the Ur-Mother, but he scarce knew anything of the low and mean peoples of his own nation, let alone the ways of those a world away. The more he considered it, the more he felt a fool for not realizing as much earlier. Porsparian had come to him bearing this terrible burden. He was the one to tell him what that burden was and whither it should be borne.
That was, if Sorweel could learn to wrap his tongue and ears around Sheyic.
That night, while the others slept, the young King of Sakarpus rolled to his side on his sleeping mat and, in the way anxious bodies choose small tasks of their own volition, started picking at the grasses before him. Porsparian-his cheeks rutted like withered apples, his eyes like wet chips of obsidian-floated beneath his soul's eye the entire time, spitting fire into his palm, rubbing mud into his cheeks…
Only when he had bared a small patch of earth did Sorweel realize what he was doing: moulding the dread Mother's face the way Porsparian had the day the Aspect-Emperor had declared him a Believer-King. It seemed a kind of crazed game, one of those acts that send the intellect laughing even as the stomach quails.
He could not pinch and mould the way the Shigeki slave had because the earth was so dry, so he raised the cheeks by cupping dust beneath his palms, sculpted the brow and nose with a trembling fingertip. He held his breath clutched and shallow, lest he mar his creation with an errant exhalation. He fussed over the work, even used the edge of his fingernail to render details. It was a numb and loving labour. When he was finished, he rested his head in the crook of his arm and gazed at the thing's shadowy profile, trying to blink away the deranged impossibility of it. For a mad moment, it seemed the whole of the World, all the obdurate miles he had travelled, multiplied on and on in every direction, was but the limbless body of the face before him.
King Harweel's face.
Sorweel hugged his shoulders with a wrestler's fury, grappled with the sobs that kicked through him. "Father?" he cried on a murmur.
"Son…" the earthen lips croaked in reply.
He felt himself bend back… as if he were a bow drawn by otherworldly hands.
"Water," the image coughed on a small cloud of dust, "climbs the prow…"
Eskeles's words?
Sorweel raised a crazed fist, dashed the face into the combed grasses.
– | He neither slept nor lay awake.
He waited in the in-between.
"So all this time?" he heard himself ask Eskeles.
"The clans have been driven before the Great Ordeal and its rumour, accumulating… Like water before the prow of a boat…"
"Hording…"
Sorweel had seen few boats in his life: fishing hulls, of course, and the famed river galley at Unterpa. He understood the significance of the sorcerer's description.
The problem was that the Scions tracked game to the southwest of the Great Ordeal.
So very far from the prow.
He bided his time in turmoil. His body had lost its instinct for breathing, so he drew air in its stead. Never did the sun seem so long in climbing.
"With all due respect, my King…" the sorcerer said with a waking sneer. "Kindly go fuck your elbows."
Eskeles was one of those men who never learned to bridle their temper simply because it was so rare. The sun had yet to breach the desolate line of the east, but the sky was brightening over the scattered sleepers. The sentries watched with frowning curiosity, as did several of the horses. Harnilas was awake as well, but Sorweel did not trust his Sheyic enough to go to him directly.
"The Sranc war-party we destroyed," Sorweel insisted. "It had no sentries posted."
"Please, boy," the corpulent man said. He rolled his bulk away from the young King. "Let me get back to my nightmares."
"It was alone, Eskeles. Don't you see?"
He raised his puffy face to blink at him over his shoulder. "What are you saying?"
"We lie to the southwest of the Great Ordeal… What kind of water piles behind a boat?"
The Schoolman stared at him for a blinking, beard-scratching moment, then with a groan rolled onto his rump. Sorweel helped haul him to his cursing feet and together they went to Harnilas, who was already ministering to his pony. Eskeles began by apologizing for Sorweel, something the young King had no patience for, especially when he could scarce understand what was being said.
"We're tracking an army!" he cried.
Both men looked to him in alarm. Harnilas glanced at Eskeles for a translation, which the Schoolman provided with scarce a glance in the Captain's direction. "What makes you say that?" he asked Sorweel on the same breath.
"These Sranc, the ones who cut down the elk, they are being driven."
"How could you know that?"
"We know this is no Hording," the young King replied, breathing deep to harness his thoughts, which had become tangled for a long night of horror and brooding. "The Sranc, as you said, are even now fleeing before the Great Ordeal, clan bumping into clan, gathering into a hor-"
"So?" Eskeles snapped.
"Think about it," he said. "If you were the Consult… You would know about the Hording, would you not?"
"More than any living," the Schoolman admitted, his voice taut with alarm. For Sorweel, the word Consult as yet possessed little meaning beyond the fear it sparked in the eyes of the Inrithi. But after the incident with the skin-spy in the Umbilicus, he had found it increasingly difficult to dismiss them as figments of the Aspect-Emperor's madness. As with so many other things.