River Aumris. And aside from Sauglish, he had never heard of any of the other cities that perpetually vied with Tryse for dominance: Etrithatta, Lokor, and Umerau, whose might would grow to exceed even that of Tryse, and whose language would remain the Sheyic of the Ancient North long after she was broken by a people called the Cond. ' Your people, Horse-King,' she said, her eyes alight with connections Sorweel could not fathom. 'Or the cousins of your ancestors, to be exact, born to the lands just north of what you Sakarpi call the Pale. More than three thousand years ago, they cracked the walls of ancient Umerau and swept through this valley. Their ardour glutted, they spared all the great works they found and made slaves of those they would pillage.'
She spoke as if he should celebrate these facts, take heart in the far-flung incarnations of his people's blood. But again Sorweel was afflicted with doubt and wonder. To know a man among the Sakarpi was to know his father. And here was this woman, telling him the truth of his fathers' fathers… The truth of himself!
What did it mean to be better known by outlanders than by oneself? What kind of fools were the Sakarpi, to find heart and honour-let alone self — in flattering fables spun across the ages?
How wrong had they been? Even proud Harweel.
They came to rockier ground, and she quickened her stride so much that Sorweel found himself breathless for trying to match her pace up the slope. A mysterious clearing opened between the trees, and for the first time they found themselves wandering among truly monumental works: blocks of hewn granite, as tall as a man and as long as a four-wheeled wain, some spilled, others assembled into cyclopean walls. She rushed forward without hesitation, wending through slots of stone and inciting any number of curses from her brother. They raced after her.
Panting, Sorweel paused before the sight of open sky, the blue so much deeper than the plains. He squinted against the sudden collusion of light and openness. A broad rectangle extended before him, heaped with stone ruin, yet miraculously devoid of overgrowth. The encroaching forest loomed about its perimeter as if leaning against some unseen barricade-or restrained by some unknown horror. He stood upon a far corner so that he could see the aisle of gargantuan pillars that braced the concourse in its entirety, as well as the lesser columns that lined its outer precincts. Most of them had tumbled-the smaller, outer columns especially-but enough remained standing to conjure the sense of the whole and to deliver the image of the long-lost ceilings to the soul's eye.
Sorweel watched a bee spiral from the gloom, then reel away to the edges of the clearing until it found a circumventing line. Even the birds he saw batting between the crowns of the surrounding elms and oaks seemed to avoid the open spaces, as if loathe to dare the scrutiny of the stage…
The Sakarpi King caught his breath, knowing he stood before an arena of lost glories-phantoms. A place that had lived too fiercely to ever truly die.
Oblivious, Serwa raced ahead, darted across the heaped stone and between the monstrous columns that remained. 'Behold!' she cried with girlish disbelief. 'Behold the King-Temple!'
Sorweel and Moenghus shared a hesitant glance.
'Bah!' the Prince-Imperial spat, running after her.
Sorweel trailed walking, trying hard to smile.
'How many times?' she called. It seemed she jostled with long-dead shades in his soul's eye.
'Stow your voice!' her brother commanded.
But she just frowned and continued, crying, 'Here! Here! ' looking about as though trying to orient her waking eyes with her sleeping. 'On this very spot, Podi, I have supped and celebrated with the High-King, Celmomas-our little brother's namesake! — and his Knights-Chieftain.'
'Serwa, please!' Moenghus cried. 'Recall what Father told you! The skinnies are drawn to places like this!'
'Stow your worries!' she said, mocking his tone. 'We leave no trail for them to follow. No trail, no mobbing. Even if we landed in the lap of an entire clan, they would be no match for me. I have reaped legions in the Culling, Podi! You know this…'
She climbed a small rise that had been chapped to gravel, spun in a pirouette that made a wheel of her white flashing hair. 'I stand upon the axis of an ancient power,' she declared to the two wondering men. 'The hub of a wheel that once turned the World but now spins groundless in the smoky Outside.' She closed her eyes, raised her nostrils, as if breathing deep the uncanniness of the place-as if the occult were simply a more subtle perfume.
'Two thousand years ago,' she called, 'from this very dais, the first Ordeal was declared against Golgotterath.'
'Yes…' Moenghus replied scowling. 'The one that failed.'
The rain began shortly after, spilling from a bank of woollen clouds that caught them entirely unawares. The sun just slipped into the sky's pocket, and endless waters followed chill upon the gloom. The two men ran to the shelter of Serwa's sorcerous parasol, and together they hastened to the river.
They could not see the far shore.
Moenghus had said nothing the entirety of the trek, and now, sitting side by side upon the puddled stone, his manner became even darker. While Sorweel gazed out into fogged shadows, he glowered at nothing, as if staring down hatreds only he could fathom.
'Father says this river is holy,' he finally said.
He stood and began stripping his clothes.
In disbelief, Sorweel watched him walk naked, following a shoal of sand and brush to where it dwindled to a finger prodding the water. He held his arms out for balance as he tiptoed to the very claw. He became shadowy as he passed through ever more veils of rain. He lingered for a moment, his powerful frame sculpted and gleaming. Then he leapt white and slicked out into waters. He vanished in a pale whoosh.
Sorweel and Serwa watched the rain fall, watched the white spitting across the iron-grey waters, threshing away the rings of his submersion, until they could no longer say just where the river had swallowed him.
He did not surface.
At some point, Sorweel could feel individual heartbeats within his breast, such was the horror rising within him. He peered across the descending roar, waiting…
'Something's happened!' he finally cried.
He flew to his feet, but Serwa restrained him with a firm clasp upon his right hand.
'He does that,' she said in reply to his alarmed gaze. 'Pretends to be dead.'
'Why?'
Serwa frowned, once again far too canny and too wise for her youthful face.
'Surely Kayutas told you he was mad.'
He gaped, and she laughed at his incomprehension, returned her gaze to the sparking waters.
Suddenly Moenghus burst from the Holy Aumris with an inhaling shout, his hair drawn like black paint about his face, neck, and corded shoulders.
'It tastes like dirt!' he laughed across the washing roar.
The Holy Aumris.
As the easternmost element of the Great Ordeal, the Army of the South was the last to pass from the endless plates of the High Istyuli into the more broken lands to the northwest. Ravines and defilades scored the once-simple distances. Monstrous stumps of stone breached the parch, formations that reared into saddle-backed summits. The Men of the Circumfix sighted ruins commanding bare rock heights, glimpsed the shadow of ancient and overgrown roads bisecting the horizon. Like their brethren to the west, they took heart in these signs, marvelled that places so far could have once been the centre of Mannish civilization. The sense of trespass fell from them, the aura of estrangement that makes wayfarers adopt the worried habits of the interloper. For the first time they understood that they were returning and not simply venturing-and their souls were fortified.
They would have thought themselves liberators… were it not for the curtains of dust drawn across the horizon about them.
They marched through the high heart of ancient Sheneor, the weakest and most ephemeral of the Three Kingdoms of Far Antique fame, the frontier sibling of stern Aorsi to the north and populous Kuniuri to the west. The Mandate Schoolmen, who every night dreamed of these lands in their nadir, looked upon the desolation and mourned. Where were the white-washed towers? The serpentine pennants of blue and gold? The companies of bronze-armoured Knights-Chieftain, cruel and proud? And they wondered that they had lived to see this earth with
