a wooden rod. His hair was as wild as his eyes, and his parm, the traditional padded tunic of Sakarpi noblemen, hung stained, ragged, and beltless above bare knees.
The mere sight of him clutched the breath from Sorweel's throat, returned him to the rain-swept battlements, where he had last seen Tasweer-and his father. He could almost hear the crowing horns…
The young man did not recognize him, but rather stared with the unfixed intensity of those beaten back into the depths of themselves. To his shame, Sorweel looked away-to judge the weather across the horizon, he told himself. Yes, the weather. His horse felt reed-legged beneath him, like something wavering in the summer heat. The world smelled of mud cooking in the morning sun.
'Y-you?' a voice croaked from below.
The young King could not bear to look.
'Sorweel?'
Compelled to look down, he saw Tasweer gazing up at him, his once open face almost bewildered, almost horrified, even almost glad of heart, but in truth none of these things. The captive reeled to a halt, blinking.
'Sorweel,' he repeated.
His Conriyan escorts cursed, flicked his chains in warning.
'No!' the prisoner cried, leaning against the links. A stubborn and helpless noise. 'Nooo!' as they yanked him to his knees in the muck. 'Sorweel! S-s-sorweel! Fight them! Y-you have to! Cut their throats while they sleep! Sorweel! Sor-!'
One of the square-bearded knights struck him full in the mouth, knocked him into rolling half- consciousness.
As had happened so many times since the city's fall, Sorweel found himself divided, struck into two separate souls, one real, the other ethereal. In his soul's eye he slipped from his saddle, his boots slapping into wheezing mud, and shouldered his way past the Conriyans. He pulled Tasweer to his knees, held his head behind the ear. Blood pulsed from the captive's nostrils, clotted the coarse growth rising from his jaw. 'Did you see?' Sorweel cried to the broken face. 'Tasweer! Did you see what happened to my father?'
But the bodily Sorweel simply continued after his guide, his skin porcelain with chill.
'Noooo!' pealed hoarse into air behind him, followed by raucous laughter.
The young King of Sakarpus resumed his study of the nonexistent weather. The true horror of defeat, a kernel of him realized, lay not in the fact of capitulation, but in the way it kennelled in the heart, the way it loitered and bred and bred and bred.
The way it made fate out of falling.
Eventually they came to the northern perimeter of the encampment, to a broad field whose greening expanse was marred by broad swaths of hoof-mudded turf and ornamented by stretches of blooming yellow-cress. Small groups of horsemen rode patterns at various intervals, answering to the booming cries of their commanders. They were doing squad drills, Sorweel realized, riding a hearty breed not so different from those used by Sakarpi Horselords.
The slave led him along a row of white-canvas tents, most of them stocked with various kinds of stores. Where the two of them had passed largely unnoticed before, now they drew stares, largely from clots of loitering cavalrymen. Several even called out to them, but Sorweel affected not to notice. Even well-wishes became insults when shouted in an unfamiliar tongue.
Finally the slave reined to a halt and dismounted before an expansive white pavilion. A crimson standard had been hammered into the ground beside the entrance. It bore a black Circumfix over a golden horse: the sign of the Kidruhil, the heavy cavalry that had caused Harweel and his High Boonsmen so much grief in the skirmishes preceding the Great Ordeal's arrival. A guard armoured in a gold-stamped cuirass stood motionless beside it; he merely nodded at the slave as he led Sorweel across the threshold.
A strange aroma permeated the interior air, pleasant despite the bitter overtones. Like orange peels burning. He stood rigid, his eyes adjusting to the enclosed light. The recesses of the pavilion were largely unfurnished and unadorned: simple reed mats for flooring, various accouterments hanging from posts, a wicker-and-wood cot covered with empty scroll cases. The Circumfixes embroidered into the ceiling canvas cast vague shadows across the ground.
Anasыrimbor Kayыtas sat at the corner of a camp-table set against the centre post, alone save for a bald secretary who mechanically inked lines of script, apparently adding to the stacks of papyrus spread about him. The Prince-Imperial leaned back in his chair, his sandalled feet kicked out and crossed on the mats before him. Rather than acknowledge Sorweel, he gazed from one papyrus sheet to another, as though following the thread of some logistical concern.
Sorweel's wizened guide knelt, pressing his forehead to the stained mats, then withdrew the way he had come. Sorweel stood alone and breathless.
'You're wondering,' Kayыtas said, his eyes fixed on the vertical bars of script, 'whether it was a deliberate insult…' He set a final sheet down, following it with still-reading eyes as he did so. He looked to Sorweel, paused in appraisal. 'Having a slave bring you here like this.'
'An insult,' Sorweel heard himself reply, 'is an insult.'
A handsome smirk. 'I fear no court is so simple.'
The Prince-Imperial leaned back, raised a wooden bowl to his lips-water, Sorweel noted after he set it down.
It was no small thing, to stand before the son of a living god. Even with his hair trimmed so close and so curiously to the contours of his skull, Kayыtas closely resembled his father. He had the same long strong face, the same pearl-shining eyes. He even possessed the same unnerving manner. His every movement, it seemed, followed preordained lines, as though his soul had mapped all the shortest distances beforehand. And when he was still, he was utterly still. But for all that, Anasыrimbor Kayыtas still possessed a mortal aura. There could be no doubt that he faltered as other men faltered, that his skin, if pressed, would be thin and warm…
That he could bleed.
'Tell me,' the Prince-Imperial continued, 'what do your countrymen call it when men trade useless words?'
Sorweel tried to breath away his hackles. 'Measuring tongues.'
The Prince-Imperial laughed at the cleverness of this. 'Excellent. A name for jnan if there ever was one! Let us dispense with 'tongue measuring' then. Agreed?'
The secretary continued scratching characters across papyrus.
'Agreed,' Sorweel replied warily.
Kayыtas smiled with what seemed genuine relief. 'Let me speak to the matter then: My father needs more than your city, he needs the obedience of her people as well. I suppose you know full well what this means…'
Sorweel knew, though it had become more and more difficult to contemplate. 'He needs me.'
'Precisely. This is why you're here, to give your people a stake in our glorious undertaking. To make Sakarpus part of the Great Ordeal.'
Sorweel said nothing.
'But of course,' the Prince-Imperial continued, 'we remain the enemy, don't we? Which I suppose makes all this little more than a cunning ploy to win your loyalty… a way to dupe you into betraying your people.'
It was too late for that, Sorweel could not help but think. 'Perhaps.'
'Perhaps,' Kayыtas repeated with a snort. 'So much for not measuring tongues!'
A dull and resentful glare.
'Well, no matter,' the Prince-Imperial continued. 'I'll keep my end of our bargain at least.' He winked as though at a joke. 'I may not have the Gift of the Few, but I am my father's son, and I possess many of his strengths. I find languages effortless, as I suppose this conversation demonstrates. And I need only look at your face to see your soul, not so clearly as Father, certainly, but enough to sound the measure of you or anyone else before me. I can see the depth of your pain, Sorweel, and though I think your people have simply reaped the consequences of their own foolishness, I do understand. If I fail to commiserate, it's because I hold you to the same standards of manly conduct as would your father. Men weep to wives and pillows…
'Do you understand me?'
Sorweel blinked in sudden shame. Did they have spies watching him sleep as well?
