Fate pins them in place, delivers them to our fury, we fret and wring our hands?' With the Horde trapped and with Mandate and the Vokalati combined, the Grandmaster argued, the Culling would become outright butchery. He and his arcane brethren would lay carrion across the horizon.
The Believer-Kings turned to Apperens Saccarees, who gazed at his rival with wary appreciation.
'Perhaps the Grandmaster speaks true,' he said.
And so the council fell to devising a new strategy. As men are prone, they took heart in what they thought was evidence of their own ingenuity. Prince Charapatha alone harboured misgivings, for among the Lords of the South, only he reasoned that the Consult would also know of the Irshi-and so know it would catch the Horde. He was not named the Prince of One Hundred Songs for nothing: he understood the advantage conveyed by the ability to predict a foe's actions. But he had taken his father's earlier admonishment to heart and was loathe to raise questions that might undermine the ardour of his Zaudunyani brothers.
And as much as he distrusted Carindusu and his posturing pride, the Prince had come to regard Saccarees as a kindred intellect. The School of Mandate marched with them. How could they fail?
Sorweel dreamed of her bathing, trembled for the steam that rose from her gentle places. The waters were pure and translucent, sheathing and beading across her flushing skin. Wisps enveloped all. Then something crimson, something ragged and viscous, tentacled the waters, unlooped like spilled entrails, depositing scabrous filth across the clarity of her submerged form. But she knew it not, and so continued to cup offal in her hands, pour filth over her naked skin.
He called out…
Only to find himself splayed across forest turf, blinking at the midday sun broken through branches. He pawed an ant from his soft beard, saw Moenghus sitting nearby. The Prince-Imperial sat with his back against a tree, absently working his knife across his throat and chin, staring off toward the sound of his sister's singing, which rose with the noise of rushing water from behind tangled screens of foliage.
She bathed, Sorweel realized, blinking away memories of his dream.
She only sang when she bathed.
Moenghus turned to him for a moment, watched him with a preoccupied frown, then looked away when Sorweel hauled himself onto his rump.
'What you said earlier…' the young King said to the man, squinting against his grogginess. 'About the Hundred raising arms against your father…'
The Prince-Imperial regarded him with a long and canny look. There was a brutality to his face beyond the heaviness of his brow and jaw, one that made a snarl out of every glimpse of teeth.
'I was afraid you would ask me that,' he finally said. 'I wasn't supposed to mention it.'
'Why?'
A negligent shrug, as if he could trivialize catastrophic facts with mere manner. He was forever doing this, Sorweel realized, pitching his expression against the pious gravity of what he expressed.
'Some truths are too offensive.'
Sorweel instantly understood. The people, the common people, would be quick to turn against the Anasurimbor were they to know that the Hundred actually sought-in their paradoxical, unfathomable way-to destroy them.
'But does it mean the Gods can be… can be deceived?'
And it struck Sorweel that there was something vicious in this, asking the son questions that could murder his father… or save him. Something more than simply devious.
Serwa's voice floated across the moss-soft earth, hooking and curling to exotic cadences, lilting in yet another incomprehensible tongue.
'Entili matoi…
'Jesil irhaila mi…'
'Just believe, Horse-King,' the Prince-Imperial said, holding his face at a partial angle to his sister's singing. Did she sing to him?
'Just believe, eh?'
A hard look. 'My father wars against the end of the world. Stop thinking about your thoughts or you'll go as crazy as my sister.'
'But you said your sister was sane.'
Moenghus shook his mane in shaggy negation.
'That's what you say to crazy people.'
Kites filled the low, iron-grey sky.
The Schoolmen assembled before the Interval's toll-even those who had patrolled the perimeter through the night. Their cadres took to the air moments before the breaking of dawn so that they strode ablaze in morning gold above a dimmer world. Innumerable companies of knights and lancers and horse-archers galloped out beneath them, scoring the immediate north and west with streamers of dust. The number-sticks cast, the footmen marched into their wake, tens of thousands watching in apprehension as the ochre smear of the Horde climbed the circuit of the horizon and made a burial chamber of the sky.
Never had so many felt so small.
The Schoolmen and the accompanying knights receded out of view. King Sasal Umrapathur called the main host to a halt several watches after at the ruins of Irsulor, a city destroyed long before the First Apocalypse. Only mounds remained of the walls, a continuous series of embankments skirting the dead city's heights. Save for five decapitated pillars jutting from the summit-the Fingers, the men began calling them, for the way they resembled a hand thrusting from some enormous burial mound-no structure survived the tidal earth.
Staking his standard beneath the Fingers, Umrapathur watched the Army of the South assemble across the heaped remains of Irsulor below him. The spearmen of Pradu and Invishi with their great shields of wicker. The Girgashi hillmen, whose axes would flash in unison when they raised them in ritual brandishing. The levies of Nilnameshi bowmen, arrayed in twinkling bars across the slopes. The famed Cironji Marines assembled in reserve, looking more like beetles than men with their round-shields upon their backs. On and on, the dusky glory of the Southron Kings come to lands of pale-skinned legend. The buried bastions of Irsulor.
And it seemed a miracle, that out of all the indefensible lands they had crossed, they could find such a place-a strong place. How could he not think he had found more evidence of the Whore's favour?
He looked out across the desolate tracts to the shadow of the Horde, to the dust plumes rising high and tawny above ochre gloom. Others in his retinue swore they could see the distant flash of sorcery, but he saw nothing. He bided his time and waited for tidings. Periodically he craned his head back to study the chapped bulk of the Fingers looming about him, trying to guess at the figures worn into ambiguity across them. A man never knew where he might find portents and omens. He tried not to think of the souls who had raised the ancient pillars-or of their long-dead fate.
From the beginning the question had been what the Sranc would do when the Schoolmen cast their nets of light and destruction across them. Carindusu had argued that they would crash into themselves, fleeing mobs running into mobs, until they formed a crush from which none could escape. 'I wager more will suffocate and drown than fall to our fury,' the Grandmaster declared to the others. Of course, he admitted, some would survive the Schoolmen and their fires, but they would provide little more than sport for the companies of cavalrymen riding the land behind the Schoolmen.
This did not happen.
As Saccarees had argued weeks earlier, the Sranc were not beasts. For all the base savagery of their instincts, they were not so stupid as to flee into corners.
Leading a great echelon of Nilnameshi knights, Prince Charapatha watched the Schoolmen wade into the boiling horizon, a thin line of glittering points stretched wider than his eyes could follow, and somehow he simply knew that Carindusu had been beguiled by his arrogance-that they had raised a spiderweb about a dragon.
Seized by this premonition, he commanded, to the outrage and astonishment of his men, that everyone shed their iron-scaled hauberks. Many refused-an extraordinary mutiny, given the love and respect they bore their Prince. Scattered across rising and falling swales of gutted land, the companies milled in argument and indecision. Charapatha remained calm, simply repeated his order time and again. He understood the reluctance of his
