The company descended the cliffs using what remained of a great switchback stair. Soon they found themselves on the loamy banks of an Aumris that once again flowed wide and ponderous and brown. Great willows, some even rivalling the mighty elms and oaks of the Mop, stepped and knotted the ground they trod, trailing sheaves of yellow and green across the waters. There was a strange peace in their passage, even a sense that the land was at last awakening, having slumbered ages waiting for their return.
Flies plagued them.
That night, as always, the old Wizard dreamed of the horror that was the Golden Room. The moaning procession. The eviscerating horn. The chain heaving him and the other wretches forward.
Closer. He was coming closer.
They reached the ruined gates of Sauglish two nights following. The towers had become knolls and the walls had crumbled into low, earthen ridges, like the wandering dikes so common to Shigek and Ainon.
But no one needed to be told. The very air, it seemed, smelled of conclusion.
Climbing the ridge, they could even see sun-bright trees waving across the westward slopes of the Troinim in the near distance: three low hills made one by the ruins strewn across their backs. Mottled walls, here hewn to their foundations, there rising blunted. Cratered brick faces. Witch-fingers of stone rising from the clamour of growth and tumble. The silence of things distant and dead.
The Holy Library.
It did not seem possible.
We all imagine what it will be like when we finally reach long-sought places. We all anticipate the wages of our toil and suffering-the momentary sum. Achamian had assumed he would feel either heartbreak or outrage, setting eyes upon the legendary Sohonc stronghold. Tears and inner turmoil.
But for some reason it seemed just another derelict place.
Give him Qirri. Give him sleep.
The dead could keep until morning.
They made camp at the mouth of the gate. There was no sermon that night, only the rush of wind through the treetops and the sound of Sarl's cackle, gurgling through the mucus that perpetually weighted his lungs, rising and falling in the manner of drunks given to reciting grievances at the edge of unconsciousness.
'The Cofferrrssss! Ha! Yes! Think on it, boys! Such a slog as there never was!'
'Kiampas! Kiampas! He-hee! What did I tell you…'
On and on, until it seemed an animal crouched in their shadowy midst, growling with low and bestial lust.
'The Cofferrrssss…'
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Gods are epochal beings, not quite alive. Since the Now eludes them, they are forever divided. Sometimes nothing blinds souls more profoundly than the apprehension of the Whole. Men need recall this when they pray.
Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli
Three days Sorweel waited after learning of the Nonman Embassy and the Niom.
Zsoronga refused to even countenance the possibility of his departure. Even though he had seen the Nonman Embassy first-hand, the Successor-Prince continued insisting the entire thing was some kind of Anasurimbor deceit. Sorweel was narindari, he insisted, chosen by the Gods to excise the cancer that was the Aspect-Emperor.
'Just wait,' Zsoronga said. 'The Goddess will intervene. Something auspicious will happen. Some twist will keep you here, where you can discharge your fate! Wait and see.'
'And what if they know?' Sorweel finally asked, voicing the one alternative they had passed over in silence: that the Anasurimbor had somehow guessed the Dread Mother's divine conspiracy.
'They don't know.'
'But wh-'
'They don't know.'
Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need — to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.
Faced with yet another sleepless night, he once again struck out through the encampment for the Swayali enclave, determined to confront Serwa with pointed questions. But the guardsmen denied him entry to the Granary, saying their Grandmistress conferred with her Holy Father over the horizon. When he refused to believe them, they called for the Nuns. 'Cap your gourd,' a spice-eyed witch teased. 'Soon the Grandmistress will be skipping you like a stone across water!'
Sorweel walked back to his tent in a stupor, at once dismayed at the capricious ways of Fate and thrilled — sometimes to the point of tingling breathlessness-at the prospect of spending so much time with his Enemy's daughter.
'Well?' Zsoronga cried when he returned.
'You are my brother, are you not?' Sorweel asked, pulling free the small purse that Porsparian-or the Goddess-had given him. It seemed dull and unremarkable in the sunlight, despite the golden crescents embroidered across it. 'I need you to keep this.'
As High Keeper of the Hoard, he knew enough about Chorae to know that it would wreck whatever sorcerous contrivance Serwa had prepared for them. Concealed or not.
'So you are leaving,' the Successor-Prince said, taking the pouch with a blank air of incomprehension.
'It's a family heirloom,' Sorweel offered by way of lame explanation. 'An old totem. It will bring you luck only so long as you don't know what it contains.'
This struck the young King as plausible enough, given that he had been forced to improvise. Many charms required some small sacrifice: beans that could not be eaten or wine that could not be quaffed.
But Zsoronga scarcely looked at the thing, let alone pondered it. In his eyes, Sorweel was the divine weapon.
'This cannot be!' he cried. 'You! You are the one! She has chosen you!'
Sorweel could do no more than shrug with weary resignation.
'Apparently He has chosen me as well.'
The following morning none other than Anasurimbor Moenghus himself came to fetch him before the Interval's toll. The Prince-Imperial was predictably menacing, not merely for his glare and feral physique. Like many of the Ordeal's outriders, he had taken to ornamenting his gear with fetishes cut from the Sranc. Most riders used shrivelled digits and blackened ears, but Moenghus, for some unfathomable reason, had their teeth braided across the hems of his nimil hauberk. Because of the way they were fused, the things seemed peculiarly inhuman: small, curved combs of enamel with three pairs of roots to a tooth.
The Prince-Imperial watched with bored amusement as Sorweel dressed and gathered his gear. Zsoronga, who sat watching Moenghus, could not keep his peace.
'Nil'giccas is a myth,' he said with open contempt. 'There is no Nonman King.'
Moenghus shrugged, picked a curl from his wild black mane to study. 'So says Zeum.'
'So says Zeum.'
