their waking eyes.
With the breaking of the land came the quickening of the rivers, and with this came the increasing complications of crossing them. Across the high plain, the drought had so reduced the flow as to make fording a mere trudge through mire. Now the Army crawled down into steeper valleys where they found denuded poplars, stripped to spears by the retreating Horde. The Men of the Circumfix took comfort in their campfires, the first in months, and feasted on what fish the Netters gleaned from the rivers. They sucked the grease from their fingers, spoke small prayers thanking War for their momentary reprieve. The Believer-Kings, meanwhile, argued logistics and debated the perils of crossing treacherous waters in the shadow of the Horde. The fords themselves were easy to find: the Sranc literally rewrote the landscape when funnelled into multiple crossings, such were their numbers. Banks worn into ramps, waters stamped into broad morasses. They imagined a writhing, shrieking world, the skies gauzed with dust, the worm-pale multitudes stamping and heaving, thousands flailing in the mudded waters, and they were troubled. The earth seemed to tingle with the memory of their raucous masses, like a sheet drawn from the body of a dead man. Everything reeked of pollution.
The fear was that the Horde would attack while the Army stood astride both banks-a fear that never materialized. At the first such river, Carindusu actually remained behind with some hundred of his white-and- violet-gowned Vokalati, thinking they could use the fords to rid themselves of the Sranc massing on their rear flank. They slew many to be sure, thousands, sending plumes of foul steam into the already obscure air, but the Sranc discovered other crossings, or perhaps they abandoned their armour and simply swam; either way, the Nilnameshi Schoolmen found themselves withdrawing across seething grounds.
King Umrapathur continued taking precautions. But he became ever more confident that the rivering of the land was far more a boon to his host than a liability. He could not foresee the danger to come.
The three camped in the ruins of a fortress halved by the collapse of the scarps that had once motivated its construction. Dagmersor, Serwa called it. The remains of the citadel hung jagged and hollow above them, a tattered silhouette across the clouding stars. Unseen wolves howled.
Sorweel drew the first watch. He picked a position above the moribund fortifications, where the land mobbed out from beneath his hanging feet. Nocturnal forests. Solitary trees climbed apart from their brothers, propped on swells of earth and rock, their crowns silver beneath the Nail of Heaven, their branches a veining black. Noise pitted the black with a million unseen places, a creaking, creeping chorus that rose from the dark face of all, fading into the ever-expanding silence that was the emptiness of Heaven.
And it scooped the breath from Sorweel's lungs.
There was a beauty to this journey across the ruined landscapes of lost Kuniuri, one due as much to these moments of solitude as to the whorled terrain that framed them.
His thoughts wandered, as they often did, across the myriad spectacles he had witnessed since his father's death. And he wondered that someone so frail as him could participate in such legendary events, let alone move them. The things he had seen. He imagined what it would be like returning to Sakarpus, excavating whatever scraps of his old life that remained, and trying to explain what had happened-what was happening — beyond the Pale. Would his countrymen marvel? Would they scoff? Would they accept the epic magnitude of what he described, or would they dismiss it as mere conceit?
The questions dismayed him. Until now, his return had been a thoughtless assumption: he was a Son of the Lonely City-of course he would return. But the more he considered it, the more improbable it began to seem. Were he to work the Goddess's divine will, murder the Aspect-Emperor… Surely that would mean his doom as well. And were he to deny the Goddess, become a Believer-King at the risk of his immortal soul… Would that not mean a different doom?
And if he were to return, how could he describe, let alone explain, the things he had witnessed?
How could he be Sakarpi?
Moenghus loomed out of the dark long before his turn to take watch and took a seat beside him, his manner as wordless and sombre as the Sakarpi King's own. Sorweel's alarm quickly subsided. Even after so many months of duplicity, he was not a man who could comfortably think treachery in the presence of those he intended to betray. In the siblings' company he invariably gave reign to a certain amenity in his nature-one easily confused for cowardice.
He could only plot in solitude.
They sat in silence, staring out over the sunless tracts, soaking in the aura of companionship that often rises between speechless men. Since Sorweel did not look at the man, he remained a brooding shadow in his periphery, one laden with intimations of physical force and errant passion.
'Your father…' the young King ventured to ask. 'Do you think he has… grasped God?'
Sorweel would never know what motivated his honesty. A man, he was beginning to learn, could become as accustomed to contradiction and dilemma as to heartbreak.
'A strange question for a Believer — King,' the Prince-Imperial snorted. 'I could report you to the Judges!'
Sorweel merely scowled.
'Look about you,' Moenghus continued, shrugging and rubbing his shaven chin the way he always did when yielding to serious considerations. ' All the earth rises to wage war against Father, and yet he prevails. Even the Hundred raise arms against him!'
Sorweel blinked. These last words pricked like a fistful of broken glass.
'What are you saying?'
' Truth, Horse-King. Nothing offends Men or Gods more…'
Sorweel could only stare at him, witless. Was it possible for a god to be mistaken?
But then that had been Eskeles's lesson those months past-had it not? The Gods were but fragments of the God, mere shards of a greater whole-like Men. Yatwer, the Schoolman would most certainly say, was just such a fragment… Just as blind to the whole.
Could the Mother of Birth be deceived?
If the Prince-Imperial noticed his bewildered horror, he betrayed no sign whatsoever. Moenghus was one of those men who cared not at all for the petty rules that measured verbal exchanges. He simply stared out to the constellations twinkling low on the western horizon, talking as if no listening in the world could matter.
'Of course Father has grasped God.'
The Army of the South had come to Hoilirsi, a province known in Far Antique days for the cultivation of flax. Hoilirsi found its northern boundary in a river called the Irshi, which ran fast and deep for some hundred miles before mellowing on its path to the Neleost Sea. Even in Far Antique times, the Irshi had been known for the rarity of its crossings, so much so that the ancient Bardic Priests often used it as a name for detour-and its crossing as a metaphor for death. Iri Irshi ganpirlal, they would say when speaking of fallen heroes, or of anyone who faltered in life: 'Cruel Irshi pulls them under.'
King Umrapathur and his planners knew of the Irshi, of course, but they had assumed, as was reasonable considering the hundred rivers they had crossed thus far, that it would also be droughted. They had even discussed the possibility of sending cohorts of Schoolmen out in advance of the Horde in the hope of catching it crossing fords. They did not realize they had come to the first of many rivers whose high sources threaded the peaks of the Great Yimaleti-that for vast stretches of its length, the Irshi had no fordable crossings.
The Horde found itself caught along its fanged banks. Multitudes were drowned, thrown into the gorges by the relentless press of their kin. Worm-white carcasses tumbled down the river's tempestuous lengths and formed macabre rafts along its idylls, stretches of bloat and filth that sheeted the Irshi from bank to bank. But as the clans retreated out of terror of the Shining Men, they soon began shrinking from the threshing waters as well. The raucous stormfront that was the Horde slowed, then halted altogether.
Prince Massar ab Kascamandri would be the first to bear the tidings to King Umrapathur: 'The Horde… It no longer withdraws before our lances.'
The council was thrown into an uproar. What were they to do? How could they assail such impossible numbers while masses more roiled about and behind their flanks?
Carindusu was the first to upbraid them. 'Can't you see that this a boon?' he cried. 'All this time fretting, wringing our hands because the skinnies outrun us, because we cannot kill them quickly enough, and now, when
