eyes, regretting a heavy hand, celebrating a tickling laugh, and watching, always watching, to be sure his second heart beat warm and safe. And if he looked close, if he dared peer at those eyes the way he might gems, he knew he would see himself, not as he was, but mirrored across the shining curve of a father's pride, a father's hope that he might live with greater grace through the fact of a son.
Thunder shivered about them, cracking ancient mortar, loosing showers of grit from the low-vaulted ceilings. Narsheidel was shouting, something, something taut with more than fear. A warrior already mourning.
Then they were past the iron door, skidding on stones in the Gate's monumental shadow. Rearing horses. Warriors running through fog, their white shields across their backs. The foundations of buildings that vanished into grey. The void of ancient streets opening between them.
And a solitary figure in the midst of the confusion, crouched like a beggar, only clothed in too much shadow…
And with eyes that blinked light.
Crying out, Narsheidel hauled him down to the hard wet stone.
Diagrams of burning white, making smoke of the rain. The great bronze plates of the Herder's Gate flashed with sun-brilliance, then fell away, bent like woodchips, twirling like flotsam in a stream.
Shouting, always shouting, Narsheidel pulled him to his feet, yanked him to a run.
He saw the beggar become someone priestly and luminescent, then vanish in a twinkle. He saw his countrymen rally to stem the breach. He saw tall Droettal and his company of Gilgallic Priests roaring as the tide of dark-faced outlanders engulfed them. He saw the Eithmen, whipping their caparisoned chargers through panick- packed streets. He saw gutters rushing with pink and crimson waters. He saw one of the siege towers lurching above the crest of the walls, the ghosts of dragonheads rising from slots in its metallic hide. He saw ropes of men, Longshields and Horselords alike, vanish screaming in roiling light.
Again and again, he threw himself against Narsheidel's strength, sobbing, raving, but the High Boonsman was unconquerable, driving him ever forward, bellowing at the madness to make way. And through it all, he saw his father's summer-blue eyes, beseeching…
Please, Sorwa…
They ran down labyrinthine alleyways, through endless curtains of rain. Behind them, the shouts and screams multiplied into a senseless white roar, punctuated only by braying horns and the inside-out mutter of sorcery.
The winding streets were so deep they couldn't see the black-walled Citadel until they were almost upon it, hunched against the sky above them, its rounded towers no taller than the soaring walls. Weeds hung from the joints of its sloped and fluted base. Its northern quarters, where the ancient Sakarpi Kings had once resided, hung in ruin, windows like eye sockets revealing the gutted hollows within. They reeled toward it. The ramparts climbed to encompass a greater part of the sky. Sorweel glimpsed a star flaring high above the black-stone rim, as bright as the Nail of Heaven-only beneath the clouds. The light made diamonds of the falling rain.
Even Narsheidel stumbled in terror, face held up, pressing Sorweel before him. 'Quick, boy, quick!' Then they were through the vault doors, sheltered in deep sockets of black stone. Guards and ashen-faced attendants flocked to them. Sorweel found himself staggering in circles, fending away their fussing hands. 'The King?' an old retainer cried. 'What has become of the King?'
'There must be a way!' Narsheidel was shouting at some mail-armoured steward. 'This place must have secrets! Everything old has secrets!'
Then Sorweel was being hustled up tight-winding stairs, through hot, wood-panelled corridors, across low- ceilinged rooms, some too bright, others too dim. Turning-crossing-climbing. Everything, tapestries, batteries of candles, chapped walls, seemed to swim in his periphery.
What was happening?
'No!' Sorweel cried, shaking away ushering hands like a lunatic dog. 'Stop this! Stop!'
They stood in some kind of antechamber, with a hemispherical wall that found its apex in a bricked-in passageway. Narsheidel and two others-an aging Longshield and Baron Denthuel, the one-legged Horselord assigned to command the Citadel-stood back, their hands out, their faces wary or placating or worried or pleading or…
'Where's my father?' he cried.
Only Narsheidel, his soaked armour shining silver and black in the uncertain light, dared speak.
'King Harweel is dead, boy.'
The words winded him. Even still, Sorweel heard his own voice say, 'That means I am King. That I'm your master!'
The High Boonsman looked down to his palms, then out and upward, as though trying to divine the direction of the outer roar-for it had not stopped.
'Not so long as your father's words still ring in my ears.'
Sorweel looked into the older man's face, with its strong-jawed proportions and water-tangled frame of hair. Only then, it seemed, did he realize that Narshiedel too had loved ones, wives and children, sequestered somewhere in the city. That he was a true Boonsman, loyal unto death.
'King Harweel is-'
Explosion. Only afterwards, sputtering, scrambling across the floor, would the young Prince understand what happened. Bricks exploding outward, as though a tree-sized hammer had struck the round wall's far side, taking Lord Denthuel in the head and neck, swatting him broken to the ground.
Dust carried on the back of shiver-cold air. Pale out-of-doors light. Ears ringing, Sorweel turned to the gaping hole…
He might have called out, but he wouldn't remember.
He looked through the breach into the husk of the Citadel's ruined galleries. Something golden hung in the floorless hollows, something that boiled with impossible light. Against a backdrop of empty windows and long- gutted walls, it walked across open air. Walked. Rain plummeted in lines about it, as though down a well.
But no dampness touched him.
The Aspect-Emperor.
The shining demon crossed the threshold, framed by gloom and deluge.
The nameless Longshield simply turned and ran, disappearing into the halls. Raising his greatsword high, Narsheidel cried out, charged the luminescent figure…
Who simply stepped to the side, impossibly, like a dancer avoiding a drunk. Whipping his arms like rope, the figure brought his curved blade up over his scalp, then snapped it back in a perfect arc. Narsheidel's body and head continued careering forward, joined only by a flying thread of blood.
The demon's eyes had remained fixed on Sorweel the entire time. Only… they did not seem a demon's eyes.
Too human.
On his knees, Sorweel could do naught but stare.
The man seemed cut from a different place, one with a brighter sun, as though he stood both here amid the ruin that was Sakarpus and upon a mountain summit at the edge of dawn. He was tall, a full hand over Sorweel's father, draped in a priest's gold-panelled vestments, armoured in mail so fine it seemed silk-nimil, some absent part of Sorweel realized, Nonman steel. His hair fell in sodden ringlets about his long, full-lipped face. His flaxen beard was plaited and squared in the manner of the Southron Kings pictured on the most ancient of the Long Hall's reliefs. The severed heads of two demons, their skin blotched and aglow, hung from his girdle, making fishmouths about black-nail teeth.
Scabs of salt crusted his bare sword-hand.
'I am,' the vision said, 'Anasыrimbor Kellhus.'
It started with the shaking, the hot flush of urine. Then his bones became serpents, and Sorweel collapsed to the floor. On his belly… On his belly! He spat at the blood greasing his chin.
Fuh-Fuh-Father!
'Come,' the man said, crouching to place a hand on his shoulder. 'Come. Get up. Remember yourself…'
Remember?
'You are a King, are you not?'
Sorweel could only stare in horror and wonder.
'I–I d-d-don't understand…'
