The awkward transformation of his relationship with Zsoronga, he realized with no little dismay, was but the beginning of the changes his thoughtless courage had wrought. Courage… It seemed such a foolish word, naught but the scribble of a child compared to the lunacy of the previous night. When he dared glimpse his memories, he suffered only the crowding of dread and terror. He felt a coward, looking back, so laughably far from the hero Zsoronga was making of him.
A mob of caste-nobles and Kidruhil officers milled about the entrance to Kayutas's command tent, and Sorweel simply assumed that he and Zsoronga would be forced to while away the watches in listless conversation. But faces turned to regard them as they approached, across the outer rind of warriors at first, then deeper as word of their arrival passed from lip to lip. The rumble of conversations evaporated. Sorweel and Zsoronga found themselves standing dumbfounded before their accumulated gazes.
"Huorstra hum de faul bewaren mirsa!" a towering longbeard cried from the assembly's midst. The man shouldered his way through the others, his eyes bright with a kind of vicious joy. "Sorweel Varaltshau!" he bellowed, seizing him in a great, black-armoured embrace. "Famforlic kus thassa!"
Suddenly everyone was cheering, and the young King found himself thrust into the crowd's congratulatory heart, shaking hands, returning embraces, nodding and thanking strangers with a kind of witless, breathless confusion. He acknowledged face after bruised face, even hugged a man blindfolded with bandages. In a matter of heartbeats he was delivered to the command tent, where he fairly tripped past the Pillarian Guards and into the washed light of the interior-so flustered that it seemed a minor miracle that he remembered to fall to his knees.
"She positions you…"
Anasurimbor Kayutas watched him from his chair, obviously amused by the spectacle of his arrival. Even in his Kidruhil cuirass and mail skirts, he sat with feline repose, his sandalled feet stretched across the mats before him, watching with the remote, lolling manner of an opium eater. Sorweel knew instantly that the man had not slept-and that he would not be the worse for it.
The air was stifling, as much for the sunlight that frosted the canvas ceiling as for all the exhaling mouths. Five scribes crowded the sheaf-laden table to his right, and numerous others stood milling in what little space remained: officers and caste-nobles for the most part. Sorweel saw Eskeles among them, decked in his crimson Mandate robes, his left eye swollen into a greasy purple crease. He also glimpsed Anasurimbor Serwa standing as tall as many of the men, swanlike in gowns of embroidered white. A memory of her arcane embrace whispered through him.
Kayutas allowed the uproar to subside before gesturing for him to stand. The Prince-Imperial was not long in waiting: something immaculate in his manner seemed to cut against all things unruly.
"Teus Eskeles has told us everything," he declared. "You have saved us, Sorweel. You… "
A broken chorus of cheers and shouts rose from those gathered within the tent.
"I… I did nothing," the Sakarpi King replied, trying to avoid the Swayali Grandmistress's gaze.
"Nothing?" The Kidruhil General frowned, scratched the flaxen plaits of his beard. "You read the signs, like a true son of the plains. You saw the doom our foe had prepared for us. You counselled your commander to take the only action that could save us. And then, in the moment of utmost crisis, you lent your shoulder to Eskeles, cast your life on the longest of odds, so that he might alert us…" He glanced up toward his sister, then looked back, grinning like an uncle trying to teach his nephew how to gamble. "Nothing has ever been so impressive."
"I did only what I… what I thought sensible."
"Sense?" Kayutas said with scowling good nature. "There are as many sensibilities as there are passions, Sorweel. Terror has a sense all its own: flee, shirk, abandon-whatever it takes to carry away one's skin. But you, you answered to the sense that transcends base desire. And we stand before you breathing, victorious, as a result."
The Sakarpi King glanced about wildly, convinced he was the butt of some cruel joke. But everyone assembled watched with a kind of indulgent expectation, as if understanding he was but a boy still, unused to the burden of communal accolades. Only Zsoronga's solitary black face betrayed worry.
"I… I–I know not what to say… You honour me."
The Prince-Imperial nodded with a wisdom that belied the adolescent tenderness of his beard. "That is my intent," he said. "I have even sent a party of crippled riders back to Sakarpus to bear word of your heroic role to your kinsmen…"
"You what?" Sorweel fairly coughed.
"It's a political gesture, I admit. But the glory is no less real."
In his soul's eye, Sorweel could see a wracked line of Kidruhil filing through the ruins of the Herders' Gate, outland conquerors, oppressors, crying out the treachery of Harweel's only son, how he had saved the very host that had laid Sakarpus low…
Nausea welled through him. Shame squirmed in his breast, clawing his ribs, scratching his heart.
"I… I don't know what to say…" he stammered.
"You need not say anything," Kayutas said with an indulgent smile. "Your pride is clear for all to see."
"She is hiding you…"
And for the first time he felt it, the impunity of standing unseen. He had stood before Anasurimbor Kayutas before. He had suffered his raking gaze-he knew what it meant to be known by an enemy, to have his fears counted, his vengeful aspirations reckoned, and so transformed into levers that could be used against him. Now he felt as if he were peeking at the man through his mother's shielding fingers. And his cheeks stung for the memory of Porsparian rubbing Yatwer's spit into them.
"I've had you entered into the lists as the new Captain of the Scions," Kayutas continued. "Disbanded they may be, but their honour will be yours. We were fortunate that Xarotas Harnilas possessed wisdom enough to recognize your sense-I will not trust fortune to so favour us a second time. Henceforth, you will attend me and my staff… And you will be accorded all the glory and privilege that belongs to a Believer-King."
She had placed him here. The Dread Mother of Birth… Was the courage even his?
It seemed an important question, but then the legends seemed littered with the confusion of heroes and the Gods that favoured them. Perhaps his hand simply was her hand…
He recoiled from the thought.
"May I beg one boon?"
A flicker of mild surprise. "Of course."
"Zsoronga… I would have him accompany me if I could."
Kayutas scowled, and several onlookers exchanged not-so-discreet whispers. For perhaps the first time, the Sakarpi King understood his friend's importance to the Anasurimbor. Of all the world's remaining nations, only Zeum posed a credible threat to the New Empire.
"You know that he conspires against us?" the Prince-Imperial said, switching to effortless Sakarpic. Suddenly the two of them stood alone in a room walled with strangers.
"I have my fears…" Sorweel began, lying smoothly. "But…"
"But what?"
"He no longer doubts the truth of your father's war. No one does."
The implication was as clear as it was surprising, for in all his life Sorweel had never counted his among devious souls. The first son of Nganka'kull wavered. To bring him into the Prince-Imperial's retinue could be the very thing his conversion required…
And that, Sorweel suddenly realized, was the Aspect-Emperor's goaclass="underline" to have a believer become Satakhan.