here, thousands of miles from his fastness in Invishi, scoffed. What could the Mandate do that the Vokalati could not do as well, if not better?
'Double your numbers,' the ever-witty Mursidides declared to uproarious laughter.
The Grandmaster withdrew, embittered.
The Mandate Schoolmen arrived the following midday, bearing only what they could carry with them across the low sky. The great columns of infantrymen watched with wonder as the sorcerers filed across the flashing sun, their crimson-silk billows hanging like windless flags.
And so the number of Kites flown by the Army of the South was doubled. More than three hundred sorcerers of rank and some two hundred more understudies now strode through the sepulchral clouds above the Horde.
They crossed it as sparks from a grass fire-as a light leaping.
Kuniuri… The fabled land of his ancestors.
Not even two thousand years could undo the glory of its works. It seemed a great vessel clinging to the surface of an earthen sea, wrecked and derelict, too powerfully wrought to founder, too vast to entirely drown. Humped fortifications. Overgrown processionals. Mounded temples. It would linger for another two thousand years, Sorweel realized, even if only as featureless stones kissed by the sun. And this, he found himself thinking, was not such a bad thing, to find immortality in your bones.
'Do you ever ponder?' Serwa asked him once, watching him gaze across a field of vine-draped debris. Her voice startled him, since he had thought her asleep.
'Ponder?'
'The Apocalypse,' she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. 'How your city survived when far greater bastions toppled.'
The young King of Sakarpus shrugged. 'Some live. Some die. My father always said it was a good thing that Men could only trust in the Whore when it comes battle. He believed Men should be wary of war.'
She smiled in appreciation.
'But you do see it, don't you?'
'See what?'
' Evidence. Proof of my Holy Father.'
Something balked within him, balked at the lies about to be told. Even in childhood, his had always been an honest, even earnest, soul. He gazed into her clear blue eyes, trusting in the mask the Dread Mother had given him.
'My friend, Zsoronga… He thinks your Consult is a myth, an-'
'And that Father is mad.'
'Yes.'
'But he saw the skin-spy Father unmasked in the Umbilicus.'
'Months back? Yes.'
Her scowl was quizzical enough to be alarming. 'And?'
'He thought it a trick.'
'Of course he did. The Zeumi are stubborn fools.'
Now it was Sorweel's turn to scowl. He could feel the danger-the slippery tumble of word in passion, passion in word, that prefaced every argument-yet he erred against caution once again. 'Better a fool than a slave,' he snapped in reply.
Boldness, it seemed, was its own shelter.
Her expression hung in blank equipoise, as if deciding whether to be offended or amused. 'You are not like the others. You do not speak as a Believer-King.'
'I am not like the others.'
Then she asked the dreaded question. 'But you do believe, don't you? Or has your stubborn Zeumi friend robbed you of your conviction?'
The assumption was plain. Her father had declared him a Believer-King, therefore he simply had to be a believer-at least at some point. Once again, Sorweel found himself marvelling at the strange power the Goddess and her deception had afforded him. Knowledge-this was the great fortress the Anasurimbor had raised about themselves. And somehow he had found his way past the gates, into the very bosom of his adversary.
He was narindari, as Zsoronga had said. He, and he alone, was capable of murdering the Aspect- Emperor.
He need only summon the courage to die.
'Is doubt such a bad thing?' he asked, blinking to recover his concentration. 'Would you rather I be a fanatic like the others?'
She glared at him, five heartbeats of scrutiny, unnerving for the glint of preternatural canniness in her Anasurimbor eyes.
'Yes,' she finally said. 'Most assuredly yes. I have battled Shauriatas in my Dreams. I have been tortured by Mekeritrig. Chased across Earwa by Aurax and Aurang. The Consult is as real as it is wicked and deadly, Sorweel. Short of my father, the world knows no powers more ferocious. Even absent the No-God and the Second Apocalypse, they warrant the bloodthirsty fanaticism of Men.'
If anything, her voice had grown softer in speaking these words, yet the intensity of her look and intonation shocked the young King of Sakarpus. For all her allure and arcane potency, Anasurimbor Serwa had always seemed arrogant and flip like her brothers-another child too aware of her divine paternity. Now she reminded him of Eskeles, and the way the portly Schoolman had tucked his zealotry between the folds of his wit and compassion.
This was the true Serwa, he realized. The earnest one. And her beauty seemed to blaze all the brighter for it.
He found himself staring at her breathless. Leaf shadows bobbed across the perfect lines of her face.
'Don't be a fool, Sorweel.'
She turned on her rump to kick her snoring brother.
No Schoolmen was as famed as Apperens Saccarees, who had long stood high among the Empire's Exalt- Ministers. His voice proved a tonic for the Army of the South's nightly war-councils, for it carried both the authority of their Aspect-Emperor and the promise of tactical acumen. Like all Mandate Schoolmen he dreamed the First Apocalypse through the eyes of Seswatha and so could speak of their straits with the wisdom of one who had suffered them before-many times.
'In Atyersus,' he said, referring to the Mandate's famed citadel, 'we have whole libraries dedicated to warring against the Sranc. Centuries have we dreamed the battles of old. Centuries have we pondered the debacles and the successes.'
The Grandmaster of the Vokalati, however, was not impressed in the least. Such is the perversity of pride that it can drive a man to embrace contradiction, so long as some semblance of his privilege is preserved. Carindusu, who had been among the first to warn of their growing peril, now became the first to discount the ominous declarations made by others-and Saccarees especially.
'Why do you speak of them so?' the Invitic Grandmaster asked, his oiled features gleaming with derision. 'They are naught but brutes, vicious beasts, to be herded with care, certainly, but to be herded nonetheless.'
'Beasts to be herded?' Saccarees replied scowling. 'They speak their own tongue. They forge their own weapons-when they cannot scavenge ours. The bliss we find in coupling, they find in the murder of innocents. They gather when we trod their earth, drawn from lands far from our stink on the wind. When overmatched they withdraw of their own nature, gouging all life from the earth before us, denying us the least sustenance. And when they come to dwarf our numbers, they assail us with suicidal ardour, throw themselves upon our spears simply to deny us our weapons!' The Grandmaster of the Mandate glanced from face to face to ensure that all present grasped the dire significance of his words. 'Do you think this a mere coincidence, Carindusu?'
'They are beasts,' the tall Vokalati Schoolman said.
'No. Carindusu, please, you must forgive my insistence. They are weapons. They were designed thus, hewn from the flesh of Nonmen by the Inchoroi to purge this world of souls-to exterminate Men! Beasts live to survive, my old friend. Sranc live to kill!'
And so was Carindusu shamed a second time.
