Sorweel regarded his friend in the silence that followed. Zsoronga no longer wore the crimson tunic and golden cuirass of a Kidruhil officer. He had donned, rather, the apparel and regalia of his native Zeum: a battle-sash cinching a jaguar-skin kilt and a wig consisting of innumerable oiled ringlets-symbolic of something, Sorweel imagined. The fabric and accoutrements seemed almost absurdly clean and unused, entirely at odds with the starved, battered, and unwashed form they clothed.
"What about those we left behind," Sorweel asked. "What about Obotegwa?"
"Nothing… But perhaps that's for the best."
The young King wanted to ask what he meant, but it seemed more important to ignore the man's tears.
"The Scions are no more, Sorweel. We are all dead."
They both paused to ruminate. The bindings of the tent complained in a mellow wind. The clamour of the camp seemed to wax and wane with its breezy pulses, as if the sky were a glass that alternately blurred and focused the world's sound.
"And Eskeles?" Sorweel asked, realizing he had only assumed his tutor's survival. "What about him?"
Zsoronga scowled. "He's a fat man in times of famine."
"What?"
"A Zeumi proverb… It means men like him never die."
Sorweel pursed a thoughtful lip, winced at a sudden pain lancing through his sinuses. "Even though they should."
Zsoronga dropped his gaze as if regretting glib words, then looked up with a helpless smile. "Zeumi proverbs tend to be harsh," he said. "We have always preferred the wisdom that cracks heads."
Sorweel snorted and grinned, only to find himself tangled in recriminations of his own. So many dead… Friends. Comrades. It seemed obscene that he should feel amusement, let alone relief and gratification. For weeks they had strived, warred against distance and frailty to accomplish a mortal mission. They had faltered and they had feared. But they had persevered. They had won — and despite the grievous proportions of the toll exacted, that fact cried out with its own demented jubilation.
The Scions had died in glory… undying glory. What was a life of bickering and whoring compared with such a death?
Zsoronga did not share his celebratory sentiment.
"Those who fell…" Sorweel said in the tentative way of friends hoping to balm guessed-at pains. "Few are so lucky, Zsoronga… Truly."
But even as he spoke, the young King understood he had guessed wrong. The Successor-Prince did not grieve those who had fallen, he grieved his own survival… or the manner of it.
"There is another… saying," Zsoronga said with uncharacteristic hesitancy. "Another proverb that you need to know."
"Yes?"
The Successor-Prince levelled his gaze. "Courage casts the longest shadow."
Sorweel nodded. "And what does that mean?"
Zsoronga flashed him the impatient look people give when called upon to elaborate embarrassing admissions. "We Zeumi are a people of deeds," he said on a heavy breath. "We live to honour our dead fathers with wisdom in the court, valour on the fiel-"
"The back door to the heavenly palace," Sorweel interrupted, recalling the man's explanation of Zeumi religion as a kind of spiritual influence-peddling. "I remember."
"Yes… Exactly. The saying means that the courage of one man is the shame of the other…" He pursed his fulsome lips. "And you, Horse-King… What you did…"
The night, the dark, the flurry of passion and dim detail came back to Sorweel. He remembered crying out to his friend the instant after Eskeles crashed to earth…
"Are you saying I shamed you?"
A dour grin. "In the eyes of my ancestors… most certainly."
Sorweel shook his head in disbelief. "I apologize… Maybe if you're lucky, they'll smuggle you in the slave entrance."
The Successor-Prince scowled. "It was a thing of wonder… what you did," he said with disconcerting intensity. "I saw you, Horse-King. I know you called to me… And yet I rode on. " He glared like someone speaking against a mob of baser instincts. "I will be forever finding my way out from your shadow."
Sorweel flinched from the look. His eyes settled on Porsparian where he sat humbled and huddled in the airy grey light…
"Time to seek the company of cowards," he offered weakly.
"The longest shadow, remember?" Zsoronga said, with an air of someone humiliated for his admission of humiliation. "The only way-the only way — to redeem myself is to stand at your side."
Sorweel nodded, did his best to shrug away the clamour of adolescent embarrassment, and to comport himself as a man-as a king of a proud people. Zsoronga ut Nganka'kull, the future Satakhan of High Holy Zeum, was at once apologizing-which was remarkable in and of itself-and begging the most profound of favours: a means of recovering his honour and so securing the fate of his immortal soul.
The young King of Sakarpus offered up his hand, palm up, with his index finger alone extended. One boonsman to another.
Zsoronga frowned and smiled. "What is this… You want me to smell it?"
"N-no…" Sorweel stammered. " No! We call it the virnorl… 'finger-lock' you would say. It is a pledge of unity, a way to say that henceforth, all your battles will be my battles."
"You sausages," the Successor-Prince said, clasping his entire hand within the warm bowl of his own. "Come… Our mighty General wishes to see you."
– | Sorweel crouched next to his slave before following Zsoronga outside. "I can speak to you now," he said in Sheyic, hoping this might elicit some flicker of passion. But the old Shigeki merely regarded him with the same grieved lack of comprehension, as if he had forgotten Sheyic as promptly as Sorweel had learned it.
"More importantly," he added before stepping clear the cloistered heat, "I can listen."
Arid sunlight seemed to shower the whole of creation, so bright he stumbled for squinting. He stood at the tent threshold, blinking the liquid from the glare, until the world finally resolved into parched vistas. The camp, the crowded tents and grand pavilions, bleached of colour for brightness…
And the horror that encircled it.
Swales of blackening dead humped and pitted the distances. Sranc and more Sranc, teeth hanging spitless about gaping maws, eyes fogged, heaped into an endless array of macabre deadfalls. Limbs predominated in certain places, piled like the sticks Saglanders brought to market to sell as kindle. Heads and torsos prevailed in others, cobbled into mounds that resembled stacks of rotting fish. Great smears of black scored the far-flung mats, where the witches had burned their countless thousands. They reminded him of the charcoal grounds to the south of Sakarpus, only with bodies instead of trees charred to stumped anonymity. These marked the greatest concentrations of dead.
The reek struck too deep to be smelled. It could only be breathed.
The sight unsettled him, not for the grisly detail, but because of the preposterous scale. He wanted to rejoice, for it seemed that was what a true son of Sakarpus should do seeing their ancestral foe laid out to the horizon. But he could not. Breathing the carrion wind, glancing across the carcass heights, he found himself mourning, not for the Sranc, whose obscenity blocked all possibility of compassion, but for the innocence of a world that had never seen such sights.
For the boy he had been before awakening.
"Even if I survive," Zsoronga said from his side, "none will believe me when I return."
"We must make sure you die then," Sorweel replied.
The Successor-Prince smirked about a worried glance. They trekked on in awkward silence, sorting through industrious crowds of Inrithi, wending down tented alleys. Fairly every man Sorweel glimpsed bore some sign of the previous night's battle, whether it be bandages clotted about appalling wounds or the divided stares of those trying to stumble clear of memories of violence and fury. Many seemed to recognize him, and some even lowered their faces-in accordance, he imagined, with some precept of jnan, the arcane etiquette of the Three Seas.