distant peoples, following the devices of a dozen different nations. Strangers come from sweaty shores, from lands unheard of, who knew not their language, cared nothing for their ways or their riches…
The Southron Kings, come to save the world.
How many times had Sorweel dreamed of them? How many times had he imagined them reclining half-nude in their grand marble galleries, listening bored to polyglot petitioners? Or riding divans through spice-dusted streets, heavy-lidded eyes scanning the mercantile bustle, searching for girls to add to their dark-skinned harems? How many times, his heart balled in child anger, had he told his father he was running away to the Three Seas?
To the land where Men yet warred against Men.
He had learned quickly to conceal his fascination, however. Among the officials of his father's court, the South was the object of contempt and derision-typically. It was a fallen place, where vigour had succumbed to complexity, to the turmoil of a thousand thousand vyings. It was a place where subtlety had become a disease and where luxury had washed away the bourne between what was womanish and what was manly.
But they were wrong-so heartbreakingly wrong. If the defeats of the previous weeks had not taught them such, then surely they understood now.
The South had come to teach them.
Sorweel cast about looking for his father. But like a miracle, King Harweel was already beside him, standing tall in his long skirts of mail. He gripped his son's shoulder, leaned reassuringly. When he grinned, jewels of water fell from his moustaches.
The tapping drone of rain. The peal of outland horns.
'Fear not,' he said. 'Neither he nor his Schoolmen will dare our Chorae. We will fight as Men fight.' He looked to his High Boonsmen, who had all turned to watch their King give heart to his son.
'Do you hear me?' he cried out to them. 'For two thousand years, our walls have stood unbroken. For two thousand years, the line of our fathers has reached unbroken! We are their culmination. We are the Men of Sakarpus, the Lonely City. We are survivors of the Worldfall, Keepers of the Chorae Hoard, a solitary light against the pitch of Sranc and endl-!'
The sound of swooping wings interrupted him. Eyes darted heavenward. Several men even cried out. Sorweel instinctively raised a hand to his mail-armoured stomach, pressed the sorcery-killing Chorae about his waist so that it pinched cold into his navel.
It was a stork, as white and as long as a tusk, flying when it should have sheltered from the rain. Men shrank in horror from the battlement it landed upon, crowded back into one another. It turned the knife of its head toward them, its long bill pressed low to its neck.
The King's hand fell from his son's shoulder.
The stork regarded them with porcelain patience. Its black eyes were sentient and unfathomable.
Raindrops tinkled across iron, pattered against leather.
'What does it want?' some voice cried.
King Harweel pushed himself to the fore of his men. Sorweel stood transfixed, blinked at the rain blowing into his eyes, tasted the cold spill across his lips. His father stood alone, his woollen mantle soaked, his hands slack below the shining lines of his vambraces. The stork stood nearly on top of him, legs like sticks, wings folded into the polished vase of its body, its sage face bent down to regard the King at its feet…
Then, hanging in the cloud-swollen distance to the right of the bird, a star appeared, a scintillating point of light. Sorweel could not but glance in its direction, as did all those crowded about him. When he looked back to his father, the stork was gone-gone!
Suddenly he found himself jostled forward by the High Boonsmen, pressed hard against the embrasures. Everybody seemed to be shouting, to his father, to one another, to the horn-filled sky. The siege towers had continued their inexorable approach, as had the Southron men, whose formations now made a dread tapestry of the surrounding plains. The point of light, which flared from deeper distances, suddenly flickered out…
Only to reappear above the Ordeal's forward ranks, hanging half again the height of the ponderous towers. Sorweel gasped, tried to step back. It seemed a fearful thing to look up when he already stood so high. The point was no longer a point, but a figure of the purest white striding through a nimbus of blue incandescence. A man or a god.
Sorweel found himself clutching the pitted stone of the battlements.
The Aspect-Emperor.
The rumour. The lifelong itch…
'Father!' Sorweel cried, unable to see past the shoulders and shields about him. Gusts tumbled down from the west, blowing the rain into veils of mist, which floated like mountainous apparitions over the walls and their sodden defenders. The cold was like knives. 'Father!'
He heard the crack of firing ballistae, but with the wet, the Chorae-tipped bolts sank far short of the hanging spectre. Shouts and curses erupted all along the wall. Then he heard the words, words remembered but not understood, making haze of pools and puddles, stinging skin and making teeth ache.
Sorcery.
Silver lines appeared about the figure's outstretched hands, began scrolling into emptiness…
Incandescent geometries, a sun-bright filigree, scaling the rain to the dark-bellied clouds. And a hiss like no other, like the millennial pounding of the surf condensed into the span of heartbeats. Out and out the lines reached, making glory of the sky, a glittering canopy that reached over the walls and across the city. Ghoulish reflections rolled and glimmered across every sword and shield.
'He makes mist,' Sorweel murmured to no one. 'He blinds us!'
Southron voices, roaring thousands of them, unitary and ecstatic. Hymns-they were singing hymns! The towers continued their relentless approach, driven by trains of bent-back thousands. Someone had to do something! Why was no one doing anything?
Then his father was before him, grasping him by the arms. 'Go to the Citadel,' he said, his expression strange. The light of the Aspect-Emperor glittered in his eyes, rimmed the lines of his nose and cheek in blue. 'It was a mistake bringing you to the walls.'
'What do you mean? Father, how cou-'
'Go!'
Sorweel could feel the corners of his face waver and crumple.
'Father-Father! My bones are your bones!'
Harweel raised his hand to Sorweel's cheek. 'Which is why you must go. Please, Sorwa. Sakarpus stands at the ends of the world. We are the last outpost of Men! He needs this city! He needs our people! That means he needs you, Sorwa! You!'
The Prince looked down, cowed by his father's fury and desperation. 'No, Father,' he mumbled, suddenly feeling twig-thin-far younger than his sixteen years. 'I won't leave you…' When he looked up, cool rain flooded the hot of his tears. 'I won't leave you!'
His voice hung raw and shrill, defiance yanked to the sinew. Then the song of the invaders swelled, the throats of the joyous thousands come to burn, to kill.
His father's blow took him in the jaw, sent him skidding into the men behind him, then to his hands and knees onto the wet stone. 'Don't shame me with your impertinence, boy!' He turned to one of his High Boonsmen. 'Narsheidel! Take him to the Citadel! See that no harm comes to him! He will be our final swordstroke! Our vengeance!'
Without a word Narsheidel hoisted him to his feet by the scruff of his mail harness, began dragging him through the assembled warriors. Pulled backward, Sorweel watched them close ranks in his wake, saw their looks of pity. 'Nooo!' he howled, tasting clean cold water on his tongue. Across sodden shoulders and glistening shield- rims, he glimpsed his father staring back at him, his eyes as blue and crisp as the summer sky. For one inscrutable heartbeat, his father's look pierced him. Sorweel saw him turn just as the wall of fog encompassed the parapets.
'Nooooooo!'
The clamour of arms descended upon the world.
He tried to struggle, but Narsheidel was indomitable, an iron shadow that scarcely bent to his thrashing. Through the dark spiral of the tower stair, it seemed all he could see were his father's eyes, loving eyes, judging
