thumb.
'She's right, Sorweel,' he said, grinning as if entirely oblivious to the madness between them. 'People have a habit of dying around us…'
The Sakarpi King stood squinting against his turmoil. His heart pumped outrage instead of blood.
'As do nations!' he spat before turning on his heel.
'A son!' the Grandmistress of the Swayali called out after him, her voice mellow and bewitching. 'A son. A daughter. And an enemy!'
He fairly convulsed, so violent was the shaking that overcame him. It wracked him all the way back to their camp on the promontory. He found himself fearing the drops beyond the edges. Never had he been so shamed… so humiliated.
Never had he hated with such dark intensity.
Though the Great Ordeal survived, though their inhuman enemy had been thrown back to the rim of the horizon, the Second Battle of the Horde was nothing less than a disaster. The Holy Aspect-Emperor declared the Breaking of the Ordeal undone and commanded the Armies of the West and the East to converge upon the Army of the Middle-North. None of the Believer-Kings doubted his decision, even though this most recent defeat of the Horde had increased the opportunities for forage. King Sasal Umrapathur, one of their number, was dead, as were his kinsmen and vassals. They felt his ruin keenly, for he had breathed as they breathed, ruled as they ruled, and, most importantly, believed as they believed. If they did not understand as much before, they appreciated the grim truth now: their faith was no surety.
'The righteous,' King Proyas would remind his fellows, 'bleed no less than the wicked.'
The Armies gathered without fanfare or celebration, for the Men of the Circumfix were too hungry and astonished, and there were far too many absences among them. A pall had been drawn across the hosts, a shadow immune to the arid sun. Old friends were reunited in grief and lamentation. They traded stories of Irsulor between them, and the truth suffered little for the inevitable distortions. They had witnessed events so extreme as to outrun the possibility of exaggeration.
They had come to a land called Akirsual. In times of old it had been a frontier province of Kuniuri, sparsely populated, famed only for a hill called Swaranul, which rose solitary and inexplicable above broken flood plains. Swaranul was a place holy to the ancient High Norsirai, for it was here that the Gods had come to the chieftains of their many tribes and granted them tenure for all the lands within a thousand leagues.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor called on his Believer-Kings to assemble and to follow him. Climbing broken and overgrown steps, he brought them to the summit of Swaranul, into the pillared ruins of the Hiolis, and stood so they could see the Great Ordeal spread across the alluvial plains below. And though their losses had been grievous, the tents and pavilions of the combined host still embroidered the land to the horizon. Arms and armour winked in the sunlight, so that it seemed diamonds had been scattered across the whole earth. And they took no little heart in this vision of their glory.
Prince Charapatha was there, and many were the condolences extended to him. Saccarees, however, stood alone and brooding, shunned because of his rumoured fratricide.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor opened wide his haloed hands. The Lords of the Ordeal turned to him in reverence and sorrow.
'I have delivered you to the Waste,' he said, the resonances of his voice cupping heart and ear alike. 'And now even the stoutest hearts among you fear that I have brought you to your doom. For though I warned you of the Sranc, described for you the immensity of their number and the cunning of our Enemy's machinations, you find yourself dismayed.'
Several called out in contradiction, and a cacophony of warlike declarations reverberated through the temple ruins. The Aspect-Emperor silenced them with a glowing palm.
'They are the filings and we are the lodestone. Were we to concentrate, march ranks closed along the shores of the Neleost, they would come. Were we to scatter across the High Istyuli's desolate heart, they would come. It matters not what path we take. It matters not what we do. The Sranc will come and come, and we will be forced to destroy them.'
Like ethereal fingers, the intonations of his voice stretched wide then concentrated, to better seize the passions of his congregation, and to hold them…
'Irsulor…' he said, breathing horror into the name. 'Irsulor is the very proof of our greater peril. A dozen Ordeals could march as we have marched, slaughter as we have slaughtered, and still the Sranc would not be exhausted. Were the No-God to awaken, they would be seized by a single dark and malicious will, and for all its might and glory Mankind would be doomed. The very World,' he said, balancing existence upon an outstretched hand, 'would be given over to wretchedness and rutting darkness…'
Laments climbed into a ragged chorus.
'So what are we to do?' King Saubon called out. 'We thirst, and are sickened for drinking. And we hunger, until our shoulders are naught but hooks, and our axes and cudgels grow heavy with our frailty. We have stumbled with Irsulor. Now we stagger.'
These words provoked consternation among many of the Believer-Kings, for they thought such doubts an insult to Saubon's exalted station. 'Stay your impertinence!' the bellicose King Hogrim called out in reproach.
'No,' the Holy Aspect-Emperor said to the long-bearded King. 'We must speak plainly. Only honesty provides truth. Only truth delivers triumph.'
He stepped into their midst, placed his blessed hand first upon Hogrim's shoulder, then upon Saubon's forearm.
'As many of you have surmised,' he said, 'I have deceived you as to our stores, saying we had less when we had more. I have starved you so that our rations would carry us as far as possible.'
'So what are we to do?' King Saubon called out yet again.
More shouts climbed from the assembly, this time in discord, for as many called out in assent as against the Exalt-General's presumption.
The clamour wilted in the light of their Holy Prophet's sad smile.
'Scavenge what strength you will,' he said, striding from their midst to reclaim the ritual heights. 'Ponder your wives, your children-ponder your soul. Fear not the spectre of thirst, for soon the Neleost, the Misty Sea, will heave dark before us. And fear not starvation…'
He turned, taking two pillars as his frame and the enormity of the Great Ordeal as his beyond, the hundreds of thousands streaming and milling across all that could be seen. He burned as a beacon before it.
The breeze trilled through the plaited flax of his beard. The chutes of his gown swayed.
'To suffer is to bear evil,' he said, 'and we must suffer to see our World saved. No matter where it delivers us, what madness, what evil, we must follow the Shortest Path… '
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas walked, luminous among the doubtful and afraid. He acknowledged each of them with the simple, loving profundity of his gaze. He gave them heart even as he appalled them. For they understood what he was about to say, the truth they dared not whisper even in solitude.
'Henceforth, our very foe shall sustain us…'
The dread command had been given, at long last.
'Henceforth, we eat Sranc.'
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The truth of all polity lies in the ruins of previous ages, for there we see the ultimate sum of avarice and ambition. Seek ye to rule for but a day, because little more shall be afforded you. As the Siqu are fond of saying, Cu'jara Cinmoi is dead.
