'I am no conqueror.'
Worry piled upon recrimination. And then, miraculously, he found himself stepping through the canvas flaps into the bustle of the camp. He stood blinking at the streaming files of passers-by.
Obotegwa turned to him with a look of faint surprise. After leaning back to appraise the cut of his padded Sakarpic tunic, he beamed reassurance. 'Sometimes it is not so easy,' he said in his remarkable accent, 'to be a son.'
So many sights. So many kinds of Men.
The encampment was in a state of uproar as its countless denizens hastened to take advantage of the remaining daylight. The sun leaned low on Sorweel's left, spoked the sky with arid brilliance. The Great Ordeal thronged beneath it, a veritable ocean of tents, pavilions, and packed thoroughfares, sweeping out across the bowl of the valley. The smoke of countless cooking fires steamed the air. Zaudunyani prayer calls keened over the roar, high feminine voices, filled with sorrow and exaltation. The Standard of the Scions-a horse rearing through a tipped crown on Kidruhil red-lay dead in the motionless air, yet somehow the ubiquitous Circumfix banners seemed to wave as if in some higher breeze.
'Indeed,' Obotegwa said from his side, 'it is a thing of wonder, your Glory.'
'But is it real?'
The old man laughed, a brief husky wheeze. 'My master will like you, I am sure.'
Sorweel continued stealing gazes across the encampment as he followed the Zeьmi Obligate's lead. He even stared at the southern horizon for several heartbeats, across miles of trampled earth, even though he knew Sakarpus had receded out of all vision. They had passed beyond the Pale into the Wilds where only Sranc roamed.
'My folk never dared ride this far from our city,' he said to Obotegwa's back.
The old man paused to look apologetically into his face. 'You must forgive my impertinence, your Glory, but it is forbidden for me to speak to you in any voice save my Master's.'
'And yet you spoke earlier.'
A gentle smile. 'Because I know what it means to be thrown over the edge of the world.'
Sorweel brooded over these words as they resumed walking, realizing they inadvertently explained what had pained his eyes when he looked southward. The Lonely City had become an edge. It had been more than conquered, its solitude had been consumed. Once an island in wicked seas, it was now a mere outpost, the terminus of something far greater, a civilization-just like the times of the Long Dead.
More than his father had been killed, he realized. His father's world had died with him.
He blinked at the heat in his eyes, saw the Aspect-Emperor leaning over him, blond and luminous, a sunlit man in the heart of night. 'I am no conqueror…'
These proved long thoughts for the short walk to Prince Zsoronga's pavilion. He found himself within the small Zeьmi enclave before he was even aware of approaching it. The Prince's pavilion was an elaborate, high-poled affair, roofed and sided in weathered black-and-crimson leather, and chased with frayed tassels that may have once been golden but were now as pale as urine. A dozen or so smaller tents reached out to either side, completing the enclosure. Several Zeьmi milled about the three firepits, staring with a directness that was neither rude nor welcoming. Anxious, Sorweel found himself considering the tall wooden post raised in the enclosure's heart. Satyothi faces, stylized with broad noses and sensual lips, had been carved one atop another along its entire length, stacks of them staring off in various directions. This was their Pillar of Sires, he would later learn, the relic to which the Zeьmi prayed the same as Sakarpi prayed to idols.
Obotegwa led him directly into an antechamber at the fore of the pavilion, where he bid Sorweel to remove his boots. This proved to be the only ceremony.
They found Prince Zsoronga reclined across a settee in the airy depths of the central chamber. Light filtered down through a number of open slots in the ceiling, blue shafts that sharpened the contrast between the illumined centre of the chamber and the murky spaces beyond. Obotegwa bowed as he had earlier, uttering what Sorweel imagined was some kind of announcement. The handsome young man sat up smiling, set down a codex bound in gold wire. He gestured to a neighbouring settee with a long arm.
'Yus ghom,' he began, 'hurmbana thut omom…'
Obotegwa's voice rasped into the thread of his with practised ease, so much so it almost seemed Sorweel could understand the Prince directly.
'Appreciate these luxuries. The ancestors know how hard I had to fight for them! Our glorious host does not believe the rewards of rank have any place on the march.'
Stammering his thanks, self-conscious of his pale white feet, Sorweel sat erect on the settee's edge.
The Successor-Prince frowned at his rigid posture, made a waving gesture with the back of his hand. 'Uwal mebal! Uwal!' he urged, throwing himself back and wriggling into the soft cushions.
'Lean back,' Obotegwa translated.
'Aaaaaaaah!' the Prince gasped in mock joy.
Smiling, Sorweel did as he was told, felt the cool fabric yield about his shoulders and neck.
'Aaaaaaaah!' Zsoronga repeated, his bright eyes laughing.
'Aaaaaaaah!' Sorweel gasped in turn, surprised at the relief that soaked through his body simply for saying it.
'Aaaaaaaah!'
'Aaaaaaaah!'
Wriggling, they both roared with laughter.
After serving them wine, Obotegwa hovered with the thoughtless discretion of a grandparent, effortlessly interpreting back and forth. Zsoronga wore a silk banyan, simple in cut yet lavish with black stencilled motifs: silhouetted birds whose plumage became branches for identical birds. He also wore a gold-fretted wig that made him positively leonine with silk-black hair-as Sorweel would discover, the kinds of wigs Zeьmi caste-nobles wore in leisure were strictly governed by rules of rank and accomplishment, to the point of almost forming a language.
Even though their shared laughter had set Sorweel at his ease, they knew so little about each other-and Sorweel knew so little, period-that they quickly ran short of idle pleasantries. The Successor-Prince spoke briefly about their horses, which he thought brutish to the extreme. He tried to gossip about some of their fellow Scions, but gossip required common acquaintances, and whenever he mentioned anyone, Sorweel could only shrug. So they came quickly to the one thing they did share in common: the reason two young men from such disparate worlds could share bowls of wine in the first place-the Aspect-Emperor.
'I was there,' Zsoronga said, 'when his first emissaries arrived in my father's court.' He had the habit of making faces while he spoke, as though telling stories to a child. 'I was only eight or nine at the time, I think, and I'm sure my eyes were as wide as oysters!' His eyes bulged as he said this, as if to demonstrate. 'For years rumours had circulated… Rumours of him.'
'It was much the same in our court,' Sorweel replied.
'So you know, then.' Pulling his knees up, the Prince nestled back into his cushions, balanced his wine between long fingers. 'I grew up hearing tales of the First Holy War. For the longest time I thought the Unification Wars simply were the Three Seas! Then Invishi fell to the Zaudunyani and with it all Nilnamesh. That caused everyone to cluck and scratch like chickens, believe you me. Nilnamesh had always been our window on the Three Seas. And then, when news arrived that Auvangshei was being rebuilt-'
'Auvangshei?' Sorweel blurted, resisting the urge to look at the old Obligate, whom he had actually interrupted. He had witnessed enough interpreted exchanges in his father's court to know that the success of informal conversations of this kind required more than a little pretence on the interlocutors' part. A certain artificiality was inescapable.
'Sau. Rwassa muf molo kumbereti…'
'Yes. A fortress, a legendary fortress that guarded the frontier between Old Zeьm and the Ceniean Empire, centuries and centuries ago…'
All Sorweel knew about the Ceniean Empire was that it ruled all the Three Seas for a thousand years and that the Anasыrimbor's New Empire had been raised about its skeleton. As little as that was, it seemed knowledge enough. Just as his earlier laughter had been his first in weeks, he now felt the first true gleam of comprehension.
