blankets and the mourning could seize his face without fear of discovery. Small. Alone. A stranger in his father's home. I am a king of widows and orphans, he would think, as the faces of his father's dead Boonsmen floated before his soul's eye. It all came crowding back, the sights and sounds, the horror, the jerk and tumble of violent futility. Children weeping in the doorways, beloved buildings cupped in shining flame, the bodies of Horselords twisted in the streets.
I am a captive in my own land.
But as desolate as these sleepless watches were, Sorweel found a kind of reprieve in them. Here, huddled beneath the heavy weave, there was certainty, an assurance that his sorrow and hatred were not a kind of misplaced inevitability. Here, he could see his father clearly, he could hear his long low voice, as surely as he could those nights when he pretended to sleep, and his father had come to sit at the foot of his bed, to speak of his dead wife.
'I miss her, Sorwa. More than I dare let you know.
But his days were… more confusing.
Sorweel did as he was told. He presided over the farce that was his court. He attended the ceremonies, spoke the holy words that would see his people 'safe,' bore the witless accusation in the eyes of priest and petitioner alike. He walked and gestured with the listless grace of those who moved through a fog of betrayal.
He learned that he lacked the ability to do and to believe contradictory things. Where a nobler soul would have found consistency in his acts, he seemed to find it in his beliefs. He simply believed what he needed to believe in order to act as his conquerors wished him to act. While he muddled through the schedule his foreign secretaries arranged for him, while he sat in their perfumed presence, it really seemed that things were as the Aspect-Emperor claimed, that the world turned beneath the shadow of the Second Apocalypse, and that all Men must act of one accord to preserve the future, no matter how much it might offend their pride.
'All Kings answer to holy writ,' the godlike man had told him. 'And so long as that writ is otherworldly, they willingly acknowledge as much. But when it comes to them as I come to them, wearing the flesh of their fellow man, they confuse the sanctity of obeying the Law with the shame of submitting to a rival.' A warm laugh, like a dear uncle admitting a harmless folly. 'All men think themselves closer to the God than others. And so they rebel, raise arms against the very thing they claim to serve…
'Against me.'
The young King still lacked the words to describe what it was like, kneeling in the Aspect-Emperor's presence. He could only think that knees were somehow not enough, that he should fall to his belly like the ancient supplicants engraved on the walls of Vogga Hall. And his voice! Melodious. By turns gentle, bemused, penetrating, and profound. The Anasыrimbor need only speak, and it would seem obvious that Sorweel's father simply had succumbed to his conceit, that Harweel, like so many men before him, had confused his pride for his duty.
'This is all a tragic mistake…'
Only afterwards, as his handlers led him through the general clamour of the encampment, would his father's words return to him. 'He is a Ciphrang, a Hunger from the Outside, come in the guise of man…' And suddenly he believed the precise opposite of what he had believed a mere watch before. He would curse himself for being a kitten-headed fool, for breaking the only faith that remained to him. Despite the pain, despite the way it limned his face with the threat of sobs, he would recite his father's final outburst: 'He needs this city! He needs our people! That means he needs you, Sorwa!'
You.
And all would be confusion. For Sorweel understood that if his father had spoken true, then everyone about him-the Ainoni with their white cosmetics and plaited beards, the Schoolmen with their silk-print coats and airs of omniscience, the Galeoth with their long flaxen hair knotted above their right ear, all the thousands who sought redemption through the Great Ordeal-had gathered for naught, had conquered for naught, and now prepared to war against the Great Ruiner's successors, all for naught. It seemed that delusion, like the span of arches, could only reach so far before collapsing into truth. It seemed impossible that so many could be so thoroughly deceived.
King Proyas had told him the stories about the Aspect-Emperor, about the miracles he had witnessed with his own eyes, about the valour and sacrifice that had 'cleansed' the Three Seas. How could Harweel's claim gainsay such rampant devotion? How could his son not fear, in the bullying presence of such conquerors, that the matter only seemed undecided because he secretly held his finger on the scale?
During the day, every word, every look seemed to argue his father's foolhardy conceit. Only at night, lying in the solitary dark, could Sorweel take refuge in the simpler movements of the heart. He could let his lips tremble, his eyes fill with tears like hot salted tea. He could even sit at the end of his bed as his father had sat, and pretend he spoke to someone sleeping.
'I dreamed of her again, Sorwa…'
At night, the young King could simply close his eyes and refuse. This was the secret comfort of orphans: the ability to believe according to want and not world-whatever it took to numb the ache of things lost.
I miss her too, Da…
Almost as much as I miss you.
They sent a slave for him the following morning, an old, dark-skinned man almost comically bundled against the spring chill. Sorweel saw the dismayed looks traded between his Householders-slaves were anathema in Sakarpus-but he affected no anger or outrage. Even though no porters could be found, the outlander insisted, in the exasperated hand-waving way of demands made across linguistic divides, that he come immediately. Sorweel consented without argument, secretly relieved he wouldn't have to lead a procession out of the city-that he could pretend this was a mere outing rather than the abdication it seemed.
More than walls had been overthrown with the coming of the Aspect-Emperor.
The slave said nothing as they rode through the city. Sorweel followed with his eyes fixed directly forward, more to avoid the questioning gazes of his countrymen than to study anything in particular-save maybe the blasted heights of the Herder's Gate as they rose and fell out of view. He thought of the naive faith his people had put in their ancient fortifications-after all, who was the Aspect-Emperor compared to Mog-Pharau?
He thought of his father's blood cooked into the stone.
The Inrithi encampment lay a short distance beyond the pocked and blackened walls, its tented precincts sprawling across miles of field and pasture. It seemed at once mundane and legendary: a migratory city of wood, twine, and cloth, where the stink of latrines hedged every breath, as well as a vast assemblage, a vehicle great enough to carry the dread weight of history. The Men of the Ordeal trudged to and fro, supped at firepits, rolled armour in barrels of gravel, tended to gear and horses, or simply sat about the entrances to their tents, deep in eyes-to-the-horizon conversation. They paid scant attention to Sorweel and his guide as they wended through the avenues and byways of the camp.
The old slave led without hesitation. He pressed through this or that commotion-a brawl, a wain buried to the axles in muck, two stalled mule-trains-with the calm assertiveness of a caste-noble, turning down lesser mud tracks only when marching companies blocked their passage entirely. Without a word, he led Sorweel deeper and deeper into the encampment. The grim stares of Thunyerus became the exotic canopies of Nilnamesh became the haggling bustle of Cironj. Every turn, it seemed, delivered them to another of the world's far-flung corners.
Before meeting the Aspect-Emperor, Sorweel would have thought it impossible that one man could make an instrument of so many disparate souls. The Sakarpi were a sparse people. But even with their meagre numbers, not to mention common language and traditions, King Harweel had found it difficult to overcome their feuds and grudges. The more Sorweel pondered it, the more miraculous it seemed that all the Men of the Three Seas, with their contradictory tongues and ancient animosities, could find common purpose.
Everywhere he looked, he could see it, hanging slack in the windless morning: the Circumfix.
Wasn't there proof in miracles? Isn't that what the priests said?
Swaying to the canter of his horse, Sorweel found himself glancing at face after face, a stranger for every heartbeat, and finding bleak comfort in the careless way their looks skipped past him. There was a kind of safety, he realized, in the Great Ordeal's clamour. In the press of so many, how could he not be forgotten? And it seemed that this was the only true desire that remained to him: to be forgotten.
Then, in the uncanny way that familiar faces rise out of the anonymity of strangers, he saw Tasweer, the son of Lord Ostaroot, one of his father's High Boonsmen. Two Conriyan knights led him staggering, each holding chains welded to a collar about his skinned neck. His wrists were cruelly bound. His elbows had been wrenched back about
