Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Condia
The Interval tolled long and low over the landscape of tents.
Blowing into his hands against the morning chill, Sorweel sat outside the entrance to his tent blearily watching Porsparian prepare their morning fire. The old man crouched like a beggar before a small, smoking pyramid of bound scrub and grasses, his feet bare despite the cold. He seemed more ancient somehow, more wise and penetrating for his leathery brown skin.
The Shigeki slave had been an embarrassment at first. But the man quickly had become an enigma, every bit as deep and as frightening as the Anasыrimbor. Something froze within Sorweel whenever the pink-and-yellow eyes fixed him. And though he smiled at his friendly frowns, his quizzical grins, the young King recoiled as well, as if expecting a blow from unseen quarters. Porsparian was neither meek nor innocent nor powerless. Shadows hung from him-terrifying shadows.
The old slave clucked in satisfaction as the first flames soaked his grasses. Sorweel pretended to grin. An involuntary hand drifted to his cheek, touched the memory of the soil the man had smeared across his face days earlier.
Somehow, simply thinking her name, Yatwer, had become a kind of premonition. And it shamed him. She was the Goddess of the weak, the enslaved, and now she was his.
Eskeles was the first to arrive, of course. The rotund Schoolman groaned and huffed as he lowered his bulk next to Sorweel on the mat. 'The Library of Sauglish,' he muttered as he tried to wrestle comfort from his posture. 'Yet again.' The sorcerer was forever complaining about his Dreams, enough for Sorweel to start losing interest in them.
Zsoronga arrived shortly afterwards, stiff in his basahlet, the traditional dress of the Zeьmi caste-nobility. His battle-sash seemed all the more crisp and white now that the Kidruhil tents surrounding them had become grey and mottled for travel.
With Obotegwa absent, Eskeles was forced to translate their conversation, something Sorweel found more and more irksome. Over the previous weeks, Obotegwa's mellow and throaty tones had simply become his friend's voice. Hearing the Successor-Prince speak through Eskeles only reminded Sorweel of the chasm of tongues between them. For his part, Zsoronga quite obviously distrusted the Mandate Schoolman, and so kept his remarks to a formal minimum. And Eskeles, of course, simply could not refrain from adding his own commentary, so that Sorweel was never quite certain where Zsoronga began and the sorcerer ended. It reminded him of when he had first joined the Great Ordeal, the dark days when all he could understand were the recriminations of his own voice.
After drinking the tea prepared by Porsparian, the three of them strolled down the avenues and the byways of the encampment, making their way to the Umbilicus, the palatial pavilion belonging to the Aspect-Emperor. The air of carnival permeated the Great Ordeal even during the most sober times. But today, when Sorweel had expected all to be riot and celebration, they found only camp after subdued camp. Some Men of the Circumfix clustered here and there sharing muted talk around smoking breakfast fires, while others simply laid in the sunlight snoozing.
'They have nothing to do,' Zsoronga remarked.
Sorweel found himself staring at a young Galeoth warrior laying between guy-ropes with his eyes closed, his head propped on the tear-shaped shield he had lain against his pack. He was stripped to his waist, and his skin shone as white as a child's teeth. A pang of envy struck the young King as deep as a stabbing. After weeks of fear and indecision, he now knew that he, Varalt Sorweel III, was simply an ordinary fool, no wiser, no stronger, than the next man. He had been born with the gifts of the mediocre, and yet here he was, stranded in the role of a captive king. He was cursed, cursed with the toil of pretending, endlessly pretending to be more.
Cursed to war, not across plains as heroes do, but within the wells of his soul-to war as cowards do.
Today was but one more example.
For reasons unknown, the Aspect-Emperor had declared a day of rest and consultation. Sorweel and Zsoronga, alone out of the Company of Scions, had been summoned to the Council of Potentates, a gathering of the Great Ordeal's senior planners and most powerful participants. Since Sorweel had yet to master the rudiments of Sheyic, Eskeles had been assigned his interpreter.
Something in his heart leapt at the thought of seeing him once more, even as the greater part of him quailed. It all seemed a gaggle of voices, nagging, warning, accusing, a chorus of contradictions. Porsparian and the Goddess. Zsoronga and his blasphemous book. His father. Kayыtas and his preternatural scrutiny. Eskeles and his fanatic enthusiasm. In the hearts of heroes, words cancelled out words, so that only truth and certainty remained. Not for him. In his heart, words simply accumulated, piled one on top of the other. He went through his daily motions well enough, discharged his paltry duties, but it all seemed an accident, like walking paths in the dead of night.
And he was about to face the Aspect-Emperor-Anasыrimbor Kellhus!
He was about to be discovered.
The Umbilicus loomed over the near horizon of tents, black, yet brocaded with patterns like the scales on a lizard's hide. With its many posts, it seemed a miniature mountain range, with curved conical faces warming in the pink morning sun. The Interval tolled again as they walked clear the last of the obscuring tents, near enough for its full resonance to press against their ears and chests, yet still somewhere unseen. The outer panels of the Umbilicus had been stitched with elaborate representations of the Circumfixion embroidered in gold across the great skirts of black: a nude man hanging upside down, his wrists and ankles bound to an iron ring. For the first time, Sorweel realized how innocuous and commonplace the symbol now seemed. It had fairly hummed with wickedness and revulsion before Sakarpus's fall…
Hundreds of shining figures populated the intervening pasture, crowds of them, threaded with slow-moving files that converged on an entrance in the southern quarter of the Umbilicus: the senior caste-nobility of the New Empire, filling the air with the sound of low laughter and concentrated discussion. Sorweel's instinct was to hesitate, to ponder and enumerate the strangers about to encompass them, but Eskeles forged ahead without a second glance. Within a dozen paces it seemed Sorweel had walked the Three Seas end to end. Glimpses became nations. A painted Nilnameshi Satrap comparing blades with a long-bearded Tydonni Earl. A doddering mage leaning hard on the shoulder of a boy-slave. Green-and-gold-clad Guards of the Hundred Pillars standing shoulder to shoulder in triangular threes. Two long-limbed Thunyeri staring off in the distance as they talked. A Conriyan Palatine in full martial regalia.
Sorweel found himself running nervous palms over the padded fabric of his royal parm, fearing that he looked as backward and as outlandish as he felt. He envied Zsoronga and the thoughtless confidence of his stride. The Successor-Prince walked as a man should, as though what set him apart also set him above. But it was more than his bearing: The glory of his Zeьmi heritage shouted from his garb and accoutrements, down to the jaguar-skin kilt he wore over his leggings. Sorweel's road-stained parm communicated far more humiliating facts: ignorance, poverty, crude manners, and foolish conceits.
The crowds bullied Sorweel with their shuffling proximity. He was accustomed to the company of physically powerful men: His father's Boonsmen had raised him as much as his father. But the strangeness of faraway lands and customs soaked the Lords of the Ordeal in menace. He saw knife strokes in the oddities of their affected manner, condemnation in the gold-threaded complexity of their dress. He heard insult and affront in their incomprehensible tongues.
He tried, as men so often do, to rally his pride with a kind of defensive contempt. Why, he told himself, should he fear these men when they could not even speak? They were no better than animals, the Galeoth harking like dogs, the Nansur thrumming like swallows, and the Nilnameshi cackling like geese.
But he knew these thoughts for what they were: the shallow posturings of a boy. He could feel it in the way his eyes flinched from the glare of others, in the empty bubbles that crept through his bones.
Stone-faced Pillarian Guards flanked the entrance, freighted with splinted mail and various arms. In the press, Sorweel almost stumbled into one of them. Powerful hands clamped his shoulders, a dark face sneered a thumb's length from his own, and a memory of Narsheidel dragging him through Sakarpas on the day of its fall shuddered through him. A jostling moment passed, and he found himself in the shadowy confines of the Umbilicus.
For a moment he simply stood gaping, his shoulders yanked this way and that as the Men of the Circumfix shoved past him. He heard several muttered curses, the Sheyic phrase for Shit-herder among them.
He was a plainsman, accustomed to camps on the Pale, and yet never had he stood in a tent so colossal. It was bigger than Vogga Hall, and far more luxurious, despite being a temporary structure of wood, hemp, and leather. The interior was cool, and the rumble of voices possessed an outdoor air. Shining silk banners ribboned the
