"Yes, but only when they covet the same things… What could the Aspect-Emperor want with these wastes?"
"For hatred's sake, as well. For hatred's sake."
Sorweel wanted to ask what could inspire such hatred, but he conceded the argument, for he already knew what the Successor-Prince's would say, his argument of final resort, the one that typically doomed Sorweel to watches of cringing sleeplessness.
"But what about the Hundred? Why would the Goddess raise you as a knife?"
Unless the Aspect-Emperor were a demon.
It made him feel a worm sometimes, a thing soft and blind and helpless. He would raise his face to the sky, and it would seem he could actually feel the great gears of the Dread Mother's design, churning the perpetual dust on the horizon, clacking inscrutable through the voices of innumerable men. He would feel himself carried on the arc of her epic intent, and he would feel a worm…
Until he remembered his father.
" Father — Father! My bones are your bones!"
Sorweel had always flinched from thoughts of that final day before Sakarpus fell. For so long, recollecting those events had seemed like fumbling spines of glass with waterlogged fingers. But more and more he found himself returning to his memories, surprised to find all the cutting edges dulled. He wondered at the arrival of the stork in the moments before the Inrithi assault-at the way it had singled out his father. He wondered that his father had sent him away, and so saved his life, almost immediately after.
He wondered if the Goddess had chosen him even then.
But most of all he pondered their last moment alone together, before they had climbed to man the walls, when they had stood father and son warming themselves over glowering coals.
"There are many fools, Sorwa, men who conceive hearts in simple terms, absolute terms. They are insensible to the war within, so they scoff at it, they puff out their chests and they pretend. When fear and despair overcome them, as they must overcome us all, they have not the wind to think… and so they break."
King Harweel had known-even then. His father had known his city and his son were doomed, and he had wanted his son, at least, to understand that fear and cowardice were inevitabilities. Kayutas had said it himself: sense was the plaything of passion. The night of the Ten-Yoke Legion, Zsoronga had fled when Sorweel called because stopping seemed the height of madness. He simply did what was sensible, and so found himself standing in the long shadow of his friend's bravery.
But Sorweel had stopped on that darkling plain. Against all instinct and reason, he had cast his life across the altar of necessity.
"…they have not the wind to think…"
All this time, he had mourned his manhood, had made a flag of his humiliation. All this time he had confused his lack of certainty with the lack of strength and honour. But he was strong-he knew that now. Knowing his ignorance simply made his strength that much more canny.
"…and so they break."
As ever, the world was a labyrinth. And his was a complicated courage.
"Are you such a fool, Sorwa?"
No, Father.
The Men of the Ordeal marched, answering to the toll of the Interval day in and day out, until at long last they had chased the arid emptiness to its dregs. Despite its greatness the Istyuli was not inexhaustible.
For the first time they awoke to horizons different from those they had greeted the previous morn. The ground was just as gutted by the retreating Horde, and the distances were just as devoid of game or any other kind of forage, but the earth bent to a different sensibility. The rolls became deeper, the summits became more pinched, almost as if the hosts crossed the transitions wrought by age, from the smooth swales of youth to the creases of middle age. Bare rock scraped clear the turf with ever-greater regularity. And the tepid rivers, which had snaked brown and lazy, quickened into white, carving ever-deeper ravines.
The Army of the West, the host commanded by the mercurial King Coithus Saubon, came to the ruins of Suonirsi, a trading entrepot once famed as a link between the High Norsirai of Kuniuri and the White Norsirai of Akksersia. The Men of the Ordeal were astounded. After so many months of shambling waste, they walked the buried ways of a different, human age, struck by how time makes swamps of scabrous earth. They wondered at the contradiction of ruins, the way some structures are smashed to dust while others are granted the immortality of geological formations. For the first time they could connect the tales and rumours that stirred them to take up the Circumfix with the stumped earth beneath their feet, and they would stare in their weary, shuffling thousands, the tragedy of lost ages reflected in their eyes.
The land had lost its anonymity. Henceforth, they knew, the earth, for all its desolation, would carry the stamp of long-dead intentions. Where the High Istyuli had been barren, a land impervious to the generations who had once ranged across it, its northwestern frontiers were soaked in human history. Ruins teethed the heights, mounded the shallow valleys. The learned told tales of Sheneor, the least of the three nations divided between the sons of the first ancient Anasurimbor King, Nanor-Ukkerja I. Names were debated by firelight. Names were invoked by the Judges in their sermons. Names were called out in curses and in prayers. Everywhere the Men of the Ordeal looked, they glimpsed ghosts of ancient meaning, the apparitions of ancestors, raising arms, leaning beneath burdens. If they could decode the land, it seemed, see it with ancient eyes, they could reclaim it in the name of Men.
It passed through them as a shiver, the coincidence of souls antique and new.
Though hunger had become a crisis, the numbers who succumbed to sickness declined. The rivers were simply too swift to hold the pollution of the retreating Horde, and in some cases, they fairly teemed with fish. Nets borne all the way from Cironj and Nron and Cingulat were cast across the narrows, and the issue was heaved onto the crowded shores: pike, bass, pickerel, and others. Men ate them raw, such was their hunger. But it was never enough. No matter how much they slowed their progress to throw their nets, they could do no more than prolong the host's starvation.
Meanwhile the Horde withdrew and congregated.
Day and night, the Schools assailed the gathering masses, striding into earthbound clouds of grey and ochre, burning and blasting the screeching shadows that fled beneath them. The Scarlet Spires strode alone through the shrouds with their Dragonheads, scourging the wasted earth beneath. The Vokalati worked with the cunning of wolves, driving swathes of the creatures into traps of golden flame. And the Mandati and the Swayali arrayed themselves in lines miles long, like threads beaded with stars, wracking the earth with combs of blinding Gnostic light.
The massacre was great, but never great enough. For all their feral simplicity, the Sranc possessed an instinctive cunning. They could hear the Schoolmen sing through the world-wringing roar, the unearthly rattle of sorcerous meaning, and so they scattered, ran with speed of fire-maddened horses, scooping up dust both to obscure their foe's vision and to blunt their incandescent dispensations.
The Culling, the Men riding the pickets came to call it. Every evening knights returned with stories of arcane violence glimpsed from afar, and the Men of the Ordeal wondered and rejoiced.
The Imperial Mathematicians tallied numbers, estimates of slain versus the inexorable accumulation of more and more clans, but they knew only that it was never enough, no matter how devious the tactics or how powerful the sorceries. The Horde grew and bloated, an assembly of shrieking mobs that encompassed more and more of the horizon-until all the North screamed.
The only tally they knew with certainty was the number of Schoolmen lost.
The first sorcerer to go missing, a Scarlet Schoolman named Irsalfus, had been dismissed as a fluke. The prevailing assumption was that the Sranc, even if they had somehow managed to keep Chorae through the wild tide of generations, would have no clue as to their purpose. After the fifth Schoolman was lost they realized they were mistaken. Either certain clans had managed to preserve the artefacts (along with some understanding of their use), or, what was more likely, the Consult had managed to infiltrate the Horde. Perhaps they had scattered contingents of Ursranc throughout the Sranc host. Or perhaps they had simply spread word of the Chorae and how they could be used.