scripture of Sakarpus, the Gods only treated with the heroic and the highborn-those mortals who resembled them most. But in the Three Seas, he was learning, the Gods touched Men according to the extremity of their station. The abject were as apt to become their vessels as the grand…
Slaves and kings.
Sorweel crept into his cot as silently as he could manage, tossed in what he thought was the beginning of another sleepless night, only to dissolve into a profound slumber.
He awoke to the tolling of the Interval. With his first breath, he could taste the wind his people called the Gangan-naru-too warm for dawn, tinged with dust. The troubling glamour that Porsparian had possessed the previous night had evaporated. The slave scuttled about with nary a significant look, readied Sorweel's packs and saddle as he ate his meagre morning repast. The little man dragged the gear outside his tent, where he helped load the young King. The tablelands swirled with industry and purpose about them. Horns scored the brightening sky.
'You return…' Porsparian began, pausing to search for some word his owner might understand. 'Hatusat…' he said, scowling with old-man concentration. 'Exalted.'
Sorweel frowned and snorted. 'I will do my best.'
But Porsparian was already shaking his head, saying, 'She! She! '
The young King stepped back in terror, turned away, his thoughts buzzing. When the Shigeki slave clutched at his arm, he yanked himself free with more violence than he intended.
'She!' the old man cried. 'Sheeee!'
Sorweel strode away, huffing beneath his gear. He could see the others, the Scions, a small eddy of activity in an ocean of seething detail-an army that extended into the colourless haze. Tents falling. Horses screaming, their caparisons flashing in the early dawn light. Officers bawling. The dip and wave of innumerable Circumfix banners.
The great host of the Aspect-Emperor… The other dog.
Yes, the young King of Sakarpus decided. He needed to kill something.
That or die.
Grassland roamed the horizon, every direction the eye could see, rising in chaotic tiers, panning into bowls, and tumbling into ravines. The greening of spring could be glimpsed in its contours, but it was little more than a haze beneath the sheets of dead scree. For the plainsmen who had taken up the Circumfix-Famiri and Cepalorans, who were used to seeing the detritus of winter swallowed in flowers and surging grasses-this was as ominous as could be. Where others were oblivious, they saw emaciated cattle, horizons burnt into long brown lines, horned skulls in summer dust.
The clouds that baffled the northwest never sailed toward them. Instead a breeze, preternatural for its constancy, swept in from the south, drawing the thousands of Circumfix banners into one rippling direction. The Sakarpi scouts called it the Gangan-naru, the 'Parching Wind,' a name they spoke with the flat look of men recalling disaster. The Gangan-naru, they said, came but once every ten years, culling the herds, forcing the Horselords to abandon the Pale, and all but transforming the Istyuli into a vast desert. The Kianene and Khirgwi among the host swore they could smell the dusty scent of their home, the faraway Carathay.
When the hour was late, and the Judges no longer walked the encampment, the grizzled Veterans of the First Holy War murmured stories of woe. 'You think the path of the righteous is one of certainty and ease,' they said to younger faces, 'but it is trial that separates the weak from the holy.' Only the most drunk spoke of the Trail of Skulls, the First Holy War's catastrophic march along the desert coasts of Khemema. And without exception their voices became murmurs, overcome by memories of the weak and the fallen.
Arrayed in great roping lines, the Men of the Circumfix trudged onward with dogged resolution, travelling ever northward. They formed a veritable sea, one churning with many-coloured currents-the black shields of the Thunyeri, the silvered helms of the Conriyans, the crimson surcoats of the Nansur-and yet the emptiness continued to open and open, vast enough to even make the Great Ordeal small. A cloud of horsemen encircled the host, companies of household knights riding beneath the banners of the Three Seas caste-nobility-Ainoni Palatines, Galeoth Earls, Kianene Grandees, and many more. They probed the distances, searching for an enemy who never appeared, save for the ever greater swathes of raked earth they galloped across.
At the Council of Potentates, the Believer-Kings finally petitioned their Holy Aspect-Emperor, asking whether he knew anything of their elusive foe. 'You look about you,' he said, stepping luminous among them, 'see the greatest host of Men ever assembled, and you yearn to crush your enemies, thinking yourself invincible. Heed me, the Sranc will scratch that yearning from you. A time will come when you look back to these days and wish that your eagerness had gone unrequited.'
He smiled, and they smiled, finding levity in his wry humour, wisdom in his sober heart. He sighed, and they shook their heads at their juvenile foolishness.
'Fret not about the absence of our foe,' he admonished. 'So long as the horizon remains empty, our way is secure.'
Grassland roamed the horizon, drying beneath a succession of cool spring suns. The rivers dwindled, and the dust rose to shroud the farther pageants. The Priests and Judges organized mass prayers, fields of warlike men abasing themselves for want of rain. But the Gangan-naru continued to blow. At night, the plains twinkling with innumerable fires, the Men of the Three Seas began to murmur about thirst-and rumours of discord back home.
The horizon remained empty, and yet their way no longer seemed secure.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor declared a day of rest and consultation.
The quartermasters became ever more stingy. The Men of the Circumfix had exhausted the bulk of their supplies, and they had outrun the supply-trains that chased them from the south. The rivers they tramped across had become too slight to readily fill their skins with clean water. They had come as far as their beasts and their backs could take them, which meant they had indeed passed beyond the limits of civilization. From this point, they had to fend for themselves.
The time had come for the Great Ordeal to break into foraging columns.
Stark.
That was the only way to describe the Aspect-Emperor's bed chamber. A simple cot for sleeping, no different than those issued to low-ranking officers. A knee-high worktable, without so much as a single cushion to sit upon. Even the room's leather walls, which were swagged with decoration elsewhere throughout the Umbilicus, were bare. No gold could be seen. No ornament. The only symbols visible were those inscribed, column after meticulous column, about the octagonal circuit of the small iron hearth set in the room's heart.
King Nersei Proyas had known and served Anasurimbor Kellhus for more than twenty years, and still he found himself regularly perplexed by the man. As a youth he had often watched his tutor, Achamian, and his sword master, Xinemus, play benjuka-an ancient game, famed for the way the pieces determined the rules. Those had been sunny days, as the days of privileged youth often are. The two men would draw a table over to one of the seaside porticos and call out curses across the Meneanorean wind. Careful to be quiet, for tempers would flare more often than not, Proyas would watch them contest the plate, a winking partisan of whoever happened to be losing-Achamian usually. And he would wonder at decisions he could rarely understand.
This, he had come to learn, was what it meant to serve the Holy Aspect-Emperor: to be a witness to incomprehensible decisions. The difference was that Anasurimbor Kellhus took the World as his benjuka plate.
The World and the Heavens.
To act without understanding. This, this he had decided, was the essential kernel, the spark that made worship worship. In High Ainon, during the fevered height of the Unification Wars, he had overseen the Sack of Sarneveh, an act of brutality that still jarred him from sleep from time to time. Afterward, when the Mathematicians reported that more than five thousand children had been counted among the dead, Proyas began shaking, a flutter that began with his fingers and bowel but soon climbed through his every bone. He dismissed his staff and vomited, wept, only to find him standing in the gloom of his pavilion, watching. 'You should grieve,' the Aspect-Emperor said, his figure etched in a faint glow. 'But do not think you have sinned. The World overmatches us, Proyas, so we make simple what we cannot otherwise comprehend. Nothing is more complicated than virtue and sin. All the atrocities you have committed in my name-all of them have their place. Do you understand this, Proyas? Do you understand
