Sorweel thought the question so strange that he glared at the sorcerer, suspecting some kind of joke at his expense. But the fat man's friendly expression shouted otherwise. He was genuinely curious. The young King found this alarming in a vague way, like a spontaneous and inexplicable pain. 'Gulls,' he heard himself blurt. 'Gulls and fools!'
The Mandate Schoolman chuckled, shook his head like someone too familiar with the ways of conceit not to be amused.
The Interval's second sounding hung prickling in the avid air, soaking all other noise. Sorweel saw faces turn in curiosity across the tiers, at first to one another, then, as though bent to some singular will, to the pavilion floor…
He failed to see the prick of light at first, perhaps because his gaze shied from the eye-twisting planes of the arras. Some twenty Shrial Knights, resplendent in white and silver and gold, had taken up positions across the front of the dais, accompanied by three of the surviving Nascenti, the first of the Aspect-Emperor's disciples, clad entirely in silken black. It was the shadows thrown from the shoulders of these newcomers that drew his eyes to the glittering point behind them.
It twinkled at first, like a star watched with tired eyes. But it resolved, became more dense with blank incandescence. The Interval tolled again, deeper this time, like the boom of faraway thunder drawn into a string. The braziers wheezed into strings of smoke. Skirts of gloom fell from the tented heights.
A sloped landscape of faces-bearded, painted, clean-shaven-watched.
Seven heartbeats of soundless thunder.
Blinking brilliance… and there he was.
He sat cross-legged, but not upon any surface Sorweel could see, his forehead bowed to the spear-point of his hands, which had been pressed, elbows out, together in prayer. A halo shone about his crownless head, like a golden, ethereal plate, laying at an angle behind his scalp. The image of him seemed to scald unblinking eyes.
A murmuring wave passed through the Lords of the Ordeal: furtive exclamations of joy and wonder. Sorweel cursed himself for clasping his chest, for quick breaths drawn through a throat like a burning reed.
Demon! he cried to himself, trying to summon his father's face in his soul's eye. Ciphrang!
But the Aspect-Emperor was speaking, his voice so broad, so simple and obvious, that gratitude welled through the young King of Sakarpas. It was a beloved voice, almost but not quite forgotten, here at last to soothe the anxious watches, to heal the sundered heart. Sorweel understood none of the words, and Eskeles sat slack and dumbstruck, apparently too overawed to translate. But the voice-the voice! Somehow spoken to many, and yet intended only for one, for him, for Sorweel alone, out of all the hundreds, the thousands! You, it whispered. Only you… A mother's scolding cracked into laughter by love. A father's coaxing crimped into tears by pride.
And then, just when this music had wholly captured him, the assembled Lords of the Ordeal crashed into it with a booming chorus. And Sorweel found himself understanding the words, for they belonged to the first thing Eskeles had taught him in Sheyic, the Temple Prayer…
Sweet God of Gods,
Who walk among us,
Hallowed are your many names…
And somehow, through the entirety of the recitation, the Anasыrimbor's voice remained distinct, like a thread of milk in slow-curling waters. Sorweel pinched his lips into a line, steeled himself against the pitch of collective voices-against the tidal urge to pray with. At that moment, he understood what it meant to look out while others bowed their faces in worship. The groping of unanswered expectations, clammy and intangible. The fouled sense of defiance, like the sin of creeping awake through a house of sleepers. He exchanged a look with Zsoronga and saw in his eyes a more caustic version of his own bewildered dissent.
They were the fools here, not because they dared stand in the company of kneelers, but because being a fool consisted of no more than being thought so by others.
The chorus trailed into ringing silence.
His head bowed beneath a nimbus of gold, the Aspect-Emperor hung in a honey glow.
'Ishma tha serara!' one of the Nascenti, little more than a black silhouette before the image of his master, hollered to the darkest pockets of canvas. 'Ishma tha-'
'Raise your faces,' Eskeles hissed almost inaudibly, apparently recalling his interpretive duties. 'Raise your faces to the gaze of our Holy Aspect-Emperor.'
'What does he me-?' Sorweel began asking the sorcerer, but the flash of warning in the man's eyes silenced him. Scowling, Eskeles nodded toward the Aspect-Emperor. There… his expression said.
Look only there.
A breathless intensity slipped about the neck of the proceedings, a mingling of hope and anxiousness that Sorweel felt only as fear. Without exception, the assembly turned to the Anasыrimbor, so that all eyes reflected the white points of his otherworldly light. Only the twin demon heads, bound by their hair to the Anasыrimbor's girdle, stared off in contrary directions.
The Aspect-Emperor floated out over the Table of Potentates, his legs still crossed, his simple white cassock the one thing gleaming to a fixed light. He moved so slowly that at first Sorweel blinked at the unreality of it. The Lords of the Ordeal followed his passage, angling their faces with near perfection, so that no shadows marred their features. Soft light combed through their beards and moustaches, shimmered across their finery. Something, a sub-audible rumbling, accompanied his movement, a noise like slow-sailing thunderheads.
Sorweel almost coughed with relief when the impossible figure veered to the opposite side of the pavilion. Soon the Anasыrimbor hung luminous before the shadowy Men, no more than two lengths away, scrutinizing them as he followed the tier's line at a beetle's crawl. Sorweel saw faces squint as though expecting a sudden blow. But most stared back with lunatic poise-some rejoicing, others proclaiming, and still others confessing-confessing above all.
Tear-scored cheeks shimmered in the passing light. Grown men, warlike men, wept in the wake of their sovereign's divine passage…
The Aspect-Emperor paused.
The man beneath his gaze was an Ainoni, or so Sorweel guessed from the styling of his square-cut beard, ringlets about flattened braids. He sat on one of the lower tiers, and rather than descend, the Aspect-Emperor simply tilted in his floating posture to study him. The rings of light about his head and hands gilded the man's face and shoulders with a patina of gold. The caste-noble's dark eyes glittered with tears.
'Ezsiru,' the Aspect-Emperor began in a voice that seemed to coil about Sorweel's ears, 'ghusari histum mar-'
Leaning until his beard brushed Sorweel's shoulder, Eskeles whispered, 'Ezsiru, since your father, Chinjosa, kissed my knee during the First Holy War, ever has House Musammu been a bastion of the Zaudunyani. But the feud between you and your father has festered too long. You are too harsh. You do not understand the difference between the infirmities of youth and the infirmities of age. So you play father to your father, punish his weaknesses the way he once punished yours…'
One of the demon heads began opening and closing its white mouth like a fish. Horrified, Sorweel saw the glimmer of needle-teeth.
'Ezsiru, tell me, is it right that the father take the rod to the child?'
A throaty answer. 'Yes.'
'Is it right that the child take the rod to the father?'
A pause that tugged a pang from the back of Sorweel's throat. 'No,' Ezsiru said, his voice pitched high through phlegm and sobbing.
'Love him, Ezsiru. Honour him. And always remember that old age is rod enough.'
Onward the Aspect-Emperor moved, floating no more than a length before pausing before another Lord of the Ordeal, this one Nilnameshi. 'Avarartu… hetu kah turum pah-'
On and on it continued, each exchange at once momentary and interminable, as though the timelessness of the consequences had somehow soaked backward into the act. And in each case, nothing more than some human truth was summoned forth, as though the Anasыrimbor need only look into the face of one who stumbled to set every man in attendance upon sure footing. How the loss of a wife exempted you from the laws of manliness. How shame at being thought a fool made fools of us all in the end. How cruel natures corrupted piety into excuses to indulge their evil.
