A friendly scowl, followed by a gentle laugh. 'I'm rarely what my enemies expect, I know.' Somehow, he was already helping him to his feet.
'Buh-buh-but…'
'All this, Sorweel, is a tragic mistake. You must believe that.'
'Mistake?'
'I'm no conqueror.' He paused as though to frown at the very notion. 'As mad as it sounds, I really have come to save Mankind.'
'Lies,' the Prince murmured through his confusion. 'Liar!'
The Aspect-Emperor nodded, closed his eyes in the manner of a long-suffering parent. His sigh was both honest and plain. 'Mourn,' he said. 'Grieve as all Men must. But take heart in the fact of your forgiveness.'
Sorweel gazed into the summer-blue eyes. What was happening?
'Forgiven? Who are you to forgive?'
The scowl of an innocent twice wronged.
'You misunderstand.'
'Misunderstand what?' Sorweel spat. 'That you think yourse-!'
'Your father loved you!' the man interrupted, his voice thick with a nigh irresistible paternal reprimand. 'And that love, Sorwa, is forgiveness… His forgiveness, not mine.'
The young King of Sakarpus stood dumbstruck, staring with a face as slack as rainwater. Then perfumed sleeves enclosed him, and he wept in the burning arms of his enemy, for his city, for his father, for a world that could wring redemption out of betrayal.
Years. Months. Days. For so long the Aspect-Emperor had been an uneasy rumour to the South, a name as heaped in atrocity as it was miracle…
No more.
CHAPTER TWO
We burn like over-fat candles, our centres gouged, our edges curling in, our wick forever outrunning our wax.
We resemble what we are: Men who never sleep.
— Anonymous Mandate Schoolman, The Heiromantic Primer
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Southwestern Galeoth
There would have been nightmares aplenty had Drusas Achamian been able to dream a life that was his own. Nightmares of a long, hard war across deserts and great river deltas. Nightmares of sublimity and savagery held in perfect equipoise, though the cacophony of the latter would make all seem like misery. Nightmares of dead men, feeding like cannibals on their once strong souls, raising the impossible on the back of atrocity.
Nightmares of a city so holy it had become wicked.
And of a man who could peer into souls.
But he could not dream of these things. No. Though he had renounced his School, cursed his own brothers, he still wore the great yoke that broke the backs of them all. He still bore within him a second, more ancient soul, Seswatha, the hero and survivor of the First Apocalypse. He still dreamed, as they dreamed, of the World's crashing end. And he still awoke gasping another man's breath…
The feast was a greasy, raucous affair-another celebration of the Hunt-Glorious. The High-King, Anasыrimbor Celmomas, reclined the way he always did when too far into his cups: legs askew, shoulders slumped into the left corner of the Urthrone, forehead planted against a slack fist. His Knight-Chieftains bickered and cavorted across the long trestle-table set before him, raising gobs of seared meat in shining fingers, drinking deep from golden cups stamped in the likeness of animal totems. Light danced from the bronze tripods set across the floor about them, making the table a place of shadows and silhouettes, and illuminating the curtain of freshly killed deer that rose behind the revellers to either side. Beyond, the mighty pillars of the Yodain, the King-Temple raised by Trysл's ancient rulers, rose higher still, into the obdurate blackness.
More toasts rang out. To Clan Anasыrimbor, to the Great Kin Lines represented at the table, to the Bardic Priest and his uproarious account of the day's escapade. Honey mead was poured and spilled into cups and smacking lips alike. But Achamian, alone at the very end of the booming table, lifted his vessel only to the water- bearer. He nodded at the warlike exclamations, laughed at the ribald jokes, grinned the sly grin of the learned in the company of fools, but he did not participate. Instead, with eyes that seemed more bored than cunning, he watched the High-King-the man he still called his best friend-drink himself into unconsciousness.
Then he slipped away, without care or notice. Who could fathom the ways of a sorcerer?
Seswatha passed through the shadowy, industrious network of servants that kept the feast in belching good humour, then left the King-Temple for the closeted maze of palace apartments.
The door was ajar-as promised.
Squat candles had been set on the floor along the passageway, spreading fans of illumination across the decorative mosaics above. Figures roped in and out of the gloom, the shadows of men warring against animals. Breathing deep, Achamian chipped shut the door, listened for the rasp of iron. The heavy stone of the Annexes had swallowed all sound save the spit of candle flames twirling in the wake of his passage. Resinous perfumes steeped the air.
When he found her-Suriala, glorious and wanton Suriala-he knelt in accordance with the very Laws he was about to break. He knelt before her beauty, before her hunger and her passion. She raised him to her embrace, and he glimpsed their entwined reflection in the contours of a decorative shield. They looked as bent and desperate as they should, he thought. Then he pressed her to the bed…
Made love to his High-King's wife-
A convulsive gasp.
Achamian bolted forward from his blankets. The darkness buzzed with exertion, moaned and panted with feminine lust-but only for a moment. Within heartbeats the chorus call of morning birdsong ruled his ears. Throwing aside his blankets, he leaned into his knees, rubbed at the ache across his jaw and cheek. He had taken to sleeping on wood as part of the discipline he had adopted since leaving the School of Mandate, and to quicken the transition between his nightmares and wakefulness. Mattresses, he had found, made waking a form of suffocation.
He sat for a while, trying to will his arousal away, to banish the memory of her nakedness sheering against his own. Had he still been a Mandate Schoolman, he would have run shouting to his brothers. But he was not, and he had dwelt with too many revelations for too long. Insights that would have once wired his body with horror or exultation now merely throbbed. Discovery, it seemed, had become but another ache.
Snuffling and coughing, he walked across the plank floor to the square corona of white outlining the shutters. 'Shed some sun on this,' he muttered to himself. 'Yes-yes… Light is never a bad thing.'
He closed his eyes against the explosive brilliance, breathed deep the many layers of morning: the bitter of budding leaves, the damp of forest loam. The cries of children rang up from below, claiming, daring-the singsong of careless souls. 'I don't-don't believe you!' Banished from the lower floors by their parents-Achamian's slaves-they always ran rampant about the tower's shadow in the morning, racing and twittering like combative starlings. For some reason, hearing them today seemed a profound miracle, so much so he almost wished he could stand such- here, now, eyes closed and all else open-for the remainder of his life.
It would be a good end, he thought.
Squinting against the brightness, he turned to his room, to its racks and rough-hewn tables, to the endless sheaves of scribbling stacked in precarious piles across random surfaces high and low. The broad curve of the stone walls embraced the morning gloom, its mortices lending the appearance of a Galeoth millery. A broad fireplace
