"Granted," Kayutas said, switching to the dismissive air of men who scarce had time for accommodations. He made a two-fingered gesture to one of his scribes, who began fingering through sheaves of vellum.
"But I fear you have one last duty to discharge," the General said in Sheyic just as Sorweel glanced about for some cue that the audience had ended. "A mortal one."
The omnipresent smell of rot seemed to take on a sinister tang.
"My arm is your arm, Lord General."
This reply occasioned a heartbeat of scrutiny.
"The Great Ordeal has all but exhausted its supplies. We starve, Sorweel. We have too many mouths and too little food. The time has come to put certain mouths to the knife…"
Sorweel swallowed against a sudden pang in his breast.
"What are you saying?"
"You must put down your slave, Porsparian, in accordance with my father's edict."
"I must what?" he asked blinking. So there was a joke after all.
"You must kill your slave before sunrise tomorrow, or your life will be forfeit," Kayutas said, speaking in a tone as much directed to the assembled caste-nobles as to the Believer-King standing before him. Even heroes, he was saying, must answer to our Holy Aspect-Emperor.
"Do you understand?"
"Yes," Sorweel replied, speaking with a determination utterly at odds with the tumult that was his soul.
He understood. He was alone, a captive in the host of his enemy.
He would do whatever… kill whomever…
"Chosen by the Gods…"
Anything to see the Aspect-Emperor dead and his father avenged.
Sorweel returned to his tent alone, his back still warm for all the slapping, his ears still hot with the chorus of overwrought acclaim. Porsparian stood before the entrance, forlorn and emaciated and as motionless as a sentinel. The sight fairly winded the young King.
"Follow me," he told the man, his gaze scratched with incredulity. The old Shigeki slave regarded him with a momentary squint, then without worry-or even curiosity-he struck out ahead of his master, leading him into the fields of rotting Sranc. Sorweel could only gape at the sight: a little nut-brown man, walking stooped, his limbs bowed as if bent to the bundle of his many years, picking his way across the packed dead.
So the slave led the King, and perhaps this was how it should have been, given the way Sorweel felt himself dwindle with every step. He could scarce believe what he was about to do… Execution. When he forced himself to confront the prospect, his body and soul rebelled the way he had once feared they would in the thick of battle. The lightness of the hands. The starlings battling in his gut, loosening his bowel. The wires that hooked his head and shoulders into a pose just shy of a cringe. The incessant murmur of dread…
Men often find themselves stranded in circumstance, stumbling toward goals not of their making, surrounded by absurdities they can scarce believe. They assume the little continuities that characterize their moments will carry them through their entire lives. They forget the volatility of the whole, the way tribes and nations trip like drunks through history. They forget that Fate is a whore.
Porsparian hobbled ahead, picking a path through the carapace of dead. Sorweel quickly lost sight of the camp behind the blood-slicked mounds. When he looked out, death and far-flung rot were all he could see. Sranc. When he glimpsed them in fragments-a face nestled in the crook of an arm, a hand hanging from a raised wrist-they almost seemed human. When he gazed across them en masse, they seemed the issue of a drained sea. As bad as it had been in the camp, the reek welled palpable from the sweating tangle, to the point where coughing and gagging became one and the same, until smell became a taste that seemed to hang against the skin-an odour that could be licked. Ravens made summits of skulls, jumped from crown to crown spearing eye sockets. Vultures hunched and squabbled over individual spoils even though all was carrion. The whine of flies was multiplied until it became a singular hum.
Porsparian walked and he numbly followed, at times skidding across offal or wincing at the crack of ribbed hollows beneath his boots. He alternately found himself studying the Shigeki slave, his shoulders crooked about hard huffing breaths, and avoiding all sight of him. He knew now that he had deceived himself, that he had failed to press the enigmatic man for answers out of fear, and not because the intricacies of Sheyic defeated him. He had reacted, not as a man, but as a little boy, embracing the childish instinct to skulk and to avoid, to besiege fact with cowardly pretense. All this time, they could not speak and so were strangers, each perhaps as frightful to the other. And now, when he could finally ask, finally discover what madness the Dread Mother had prepared for him, he had to kill the little… priest, Zsoronga had called him.
His slave, Porsparian.
Sorweel paused, suddenly understanding Zsoronga's cryptic tone when he had asked him about Obotegwa. He had been thinking of the Aspect-Emperor's edict, the very edict behind the crime Sorweel was about to commit. If he himself balked at the prospect of murdering a terrifying stranger, what would it be like for Zsoronga to put down a beloved childhood companion-a surrogate father, even? Perhaps it was for the best that the Istyuli swallow the wise old man whole, that Obotegwa stumble into a small pile of human rubble-cloth and scattered bones-marking nothing.
Sorweel found himself blinking at the slave's form labouring through carrion ravines.
"Porsparian…" he called, coughing against the stench.
The old man ignored him. A clutch of ravens cried out in his stead, their caws like a small army of files scraping edges of tin.
"Porsparian, stop!"
"Not there yet!" the man hacked over his shoulder.
"Not where?" Sorweel cried, hastening after the agile slave. Bones popped in stiffening meat. Arrow shafts cracked. What was the man doing? Was this his manner of fleeing?
"Porsparian… Look. I'm not going kill you."
"What happens to me is not important," the Shigeki wheezed. Sorweel suffered dim memories of his grandfather in his final shameful days, how he had taken to wilful and insensible acts, if only to answer some prideful instinct to do…
"Porsparian…" he said, at last seizing the man's bony shoulder. He was going to tell the man that he could run, that he was free to risk the open plains, perhaps trust in the Goddess to deliver him, but instead he released the man, shocked by the immediacy of the bones beneath his tunic, by the sheer ease he had yanked him about, as if the man were naught but a doll, pig-skin wrapped about desert-dry wood.
When had he last eaten?
Cursing in some harsh tongue, the slave resumed his senseless trek, and Sorweel stood, absorbing the realization that Porsparian would not survive on the plains, that to set him free was simply to condemn him to a slower, far more miserable demise…
That anything short of execution would be an act of cowardice.
A moment of madness ensued, one which Sorweel would remember for the rest of his life. He choked on a scream that was a laugh that was a sob that was a father's soothing whisper. A kind of macabre intensity bubbled up out of his surroundings, an inversion of seeing, so that the jutting spears and the innumerable arrow shafts that stubbled the summits of dead pinned and staked his skin. The foggy glare of hundreds from limb-thatched burrows, the tongues like hanging snails, the entrails spilling from shells of armour, drying into papyrus…
She is positioning you…
How?
As mad as it sounds, I really have come to save Mankind…
What?
Fuh-Fuh-Father!
And then he saw it… standing with the grace and proportion of an Ainoni vase, regarding him, the knife of its long beak folded against its neck. A stork, perched upon purpling dead as though upon a promontory of high stone, its snowy edges framed by bleached sky.