And he was racing after the diminutive slave, tripping, skidding.
"What's going on?" he cried, seizing the man. "You will tell me!"
The rutted face betrayed no surprise, no anger or fear whatsoever.
"Pollution has seized the hearts of Men," the slave rasped. "The Mother prepares our cleansing."
The slave raised warm fingers to Sorweel's wrists, gently tugged his hands from his shoulders.
"And all thi-?"
"Is deception! Deception! "
Sorweel stumbled, so placid had Porsparian seemed, and such was the fury of his barked reply.
"So-so his war…" the Sakarpi King stammered.
"He is a demon who wears men the way we don clothes!"
"But his war…" He scraped his gaze across the tossed and tangled carcasses about them. "It is real…"
Porsparian snorted.
"All is false. And all who follow him are damned!"
"But his war… Porsparian! Look around you! Look around you and tell me his war is not real!"
"What? Because he has sent his followers against the Sranc? The world is filled with Sranc!"
"And what of the Consult Legion… the Sranc who killed my comrades?"
"Lies! Lies!"
"How can you know?"
"I know nothing. I speak!"
And with that he resumed his bandy march into the dead.
The slave picked his way across a swale of blasted and blackened Sranc and into a region of sorcerous destruction. In his soul's eye, the young King could see the Swayali witch hanging a hard stone's throw above, a slender beauty aglow in the curlicue bloom of her billows, dispensing lines and sheets of cutting light. He shook his head at the vision…
"Porsparian!"
The little man ignored him, though he did slow his pace. He peered downward as he walked, looking this way and that, as if searching for a lost kellic.
"Tell me!" Sorweel called out, his wonder giving way to irritation. "Tell me what She wants!"
"A mighty lord died here…" he heard the man mutter.
"Yatwer!" the Sakarpi King cried, throwing the name like a cold and heavy stone from his breast. "What does She want of me?"
"Here…" The old man's voice was thick with a kind of unsavoury relish. "Beneath the skinnies."
Sorweel stood dumbfounded, watching the mad fool heave at the burnt Sranc thatched beneath his feet. "The earth…" he grunted, tossing aside an arm and attached shoulder. "Must… uncover…"
The Sakarpi King gazed witless. When they had set out, he could scarce look at Porsparian without flinching from the madness of what he had to do. But the Shigeki slave seemed to care not in the least, even though he had to know he was doomed. Not in the least! Sorweel had followed him out here into carrion to cut his throat, and the man acted as if this were but a trifling compared to what he…
Cold flushed through and about the young man. He found himself casting wild looks across the surrounding dead, as if he were a murderer suddenly unsure of the secrecy of his crime.
The Goddess.
The King bent his back and joined the slave in his grisly labour.
The forms were uniformly burned; many of them possessed cauterized slices-amputations. He cleared two that had lost their legs, one at the hips, the other high on the thigh, as if they had been felled side by side, reaved as if by a single scythe. Where those on the top had been mostly scorched to husks, those below remained primarily raw and wet. Their eyes glared out with an aimless, smoky curiosity. Not knowing what the man intended, Sorweel simply grabbed the carcasses adjacent to those his slave wrenched into sunlight. He cast hooded looks over his shoulders. He found himself troubled by the weight of the creatures, the way their scrawniness belied a brute density. The corpses became colder as the toil continued.
They found the earth sodden with filth-puddled. They gasped for their effort, gagged for the stench they had unleashed. Sorweel watched Porsparian fall to his knees in the heart of the muck oval they had cleared. A grave dug from the dead.
He watched him raise and kiss the polluted earth…
The wind tousled the King's lengthening hair, tumbled across all visible creation, troubling the emanations. The flies hummed undisturbed. Ravens punctuated the distance with random cries.
He watched his slave scallop muck clear, glimpsed a skull unearthed beneath the shadow of his hands. Peering, he willed himself to breathe through his horror. He watched the man gather putrid mud, then mould a face about the bone, all the while murmuring prayers in some harsh and exotic tongue. Then he watched as he skinned a Sranc face with terrifying economy, watched him pad the result across the earthen face he had prepared for it. The King experienced something outside horror or exaltation.
He watched his slave stroke and caress the slick surfaces: forehead, brow, lip, cheek. He watched and he listened, until the rasp that was the slave's prayer became a drifting smoke that obscured all other sound.
He watched life-impossible life-rise into the inhuman skin.
He watched Yatwer's eyes snap open.
He heard the groan of the earth.
– | The Goddess smiles…
The old man crouches over her, frozen like a man caught in the commission of some obscenity. Something shivers through the hideous earth. Scabrous arms burst from the soil to either side… Clotted bones. Knotted worms.
The slave stumbles back, staggers into the clutch of the horrified King.
They watch the Goddess exhume her own corpse. She trowels away muck and viscous slop, reveals the ivory comb of her ribs. She reaches into her muddy abdomen, excavates her cadaverous womb…
The very ground croaks and groans beneath them, the complaint of some cosmological hinge-existence pried too far from its essential frame.
She draws a pouch from the pit below her stomach, raises it pinched in fingers of filth and bone. She smiles. Tears of blood stream from her earthen eyes. The watching men gasp for the sorrow of a mother's endless Giving…
So many. So many children born…
So many taken.
The King trips to his knees. He crawls forward to receive her Gift, crawls with the shame of an inconstant son. He snatches the pouch as if from a leper. It lies stiff and cold in his fingers, like a dead man's tongue. He scarcely sees it for his Mother's dirt glare. He looks back to the slave, who sobs for joy and horror… He turns back to his Goddess…
But She is no more, nothing but a grotesque face, a monstrosity, moulded above an overturned grave.
"What just happened?" the King cries to the slave. "What just happened?"
The slave says nothing. He climbs to his feet, hobbles from the macabre clearing back into the dead with an invalid's gait. He stumbles up a slope of pitched carcasses. He pauses before a spear that juts from the buzzing summit.
The King calls out to him, beseeching…
The slave places his chin upon the spear point, lifts his hands high in heavenly supplication.
"What the Mother gives…" he cries out to the King. "You must take!"
He smiles fleetingly, as if regretting things both inevitable and criminal. Then Porsparian nesh Varalti drops. He never reaches his knees. He hangs, rather, from the inside crown of his skull, then slowly tips to his side. He seems to vanish among the strewn forms.
One more dead skinny.
The King of Sakarpus staggered back alone, trudging across mad ways of the dead. Zsoronga was waiting for him when he returned. Neither man had any words to speak, so they simply sat side by side in the dust, staring into their hands.
Zsoronga was first to break their fast of silence. He clasped his friend's shoulder and said, "Things done are done."
Sorweel did not reply. Each of them gazed in his own absent direction, like dogs leashed to the shade. They watched the endless to and fro of warlike men across and between the tents. The Army of the Middle-North. They watched the dust-devils spinning in and out of faint existence between the innumerable pennants and banners.