prow of a boat…'
'Hording…'
Sorweel had seen few boats in his life: fishing hulls, of course, and the famed river galley at Unterpa. He understood the significance of the sorcerer's description.
The problem was that the Scions tracked game to the southwest of the Great Ordeal.
So very far from the prow.
He bided his time in turmoil. His body had lost its instinct for breathing, so he drew air in its stead. Never did the sun seem so long in climbing.
'With all due respect, my King…' the sorcerer said with a waking sneer. 'Kindly go fuck your elbows.'
Eskeles was one of those men who never learned to bridle their temper simply because it was so rare. The sun had yet to breach the desolate line of the east, but the sky was brightening over the scattered sleepers. The sentries watched with frowning curiosity, as did several of the horses. Harnilas was awake as well, but Sorweel did not trust his Sheyic enough to go to him directly.
'The Sranc war-party we destroyed,' Sorweel insisted. 'It had no sentries posted.'
'Please, boy,' the corpulent man said. He rolled his bulk away from the young King. 'Let me get back to my nightmares.'
'It was alone, Eskeles. Don't you see?'
He raised his puffy face to blink at him over his shoulder. 'What are you saying?'
'We lie to the southwest of the Great Ordeal… What kind of water piles behind a boat?'
The Schoolman stared at him for a blinking, beard-scratching moment, then with a groan rolled onto his rump. Sorweel helped haul him to his cursing feet and together they went to Harnilas, who was already ministering to his pony. Eskeles began by apologizing for Sorweel, something the young King had no patience for, especially when he could scarce understand what was being said.
'We're tracking an army!' he cried.
Both men looked to him in alarm. Harnilas glanced at Eskeles for a translation, which the Schoolman provided with scarce a glance in the Captain's direction. 'What makes you say that?' he asked Sorweel on the same breath.
'These Sranc, the ones who cut down the elk, they are being driven.'
'How could you know that?'
'We know this is no Hording,' the young King replied, breathing deep to harness his thoughts, which had become tangled for a long night of horror and brooding. 'The Sranc, as you said, are even now fleeing before the Great Ordeal, clan bumping into clan, gathering into a hor-'
'So?' Eskeles snapped.
'Think about it,' he said. 'If you were the Consult… You would know about the Hording, would you not?'
'More than any living,' the Schoolman admitted, his voice taut with alarm. For Sorweel, the word Consult as yet possessed little meaning beyond the fear it sparked in the eyes of the Inrithi. But after the incident with the skin-spy in the Umbilicus, he had found it increasingly difficult to dismiss them as figments of the Aspect-Emperor's madness. As with so many other things.
'So they would know not only that the Great Ordeal will be attacked, but when as well…'
'Very possibly,' Eskeles said.
Sorweel thought of his father, of all the times he had heard him reason with his subjects, let alone his men. 'To be a worthy King,' Harweel had once told him, 'is to lead, not to command.' And he understood that all the bickering, all the discourse he had considered wasted breath, 'tongue-measuring,' was in fact central to kingship.
'Look,' he said. 'We all know this expedition is a farce, that Kayutas sent us to patrol a rear flank that would never have been patrolled otherwise simply because we are the Scions-the sons of his father's enemies. We cover territory that a host would otherwise be blind to, territory a cunning enemy could exploit. While patrolling this imaginary flank, we stumble across a war-party with no sentries posted, oblivious enough to find respite in the shade. In other words, we find proof that for this corner of the Istyuli, at least, the Great Ordeal does not exist…'
He trailed to let the Schoolmen complete his translation.
'Then we find the slaughtered elk, something you say Sranc only do when Hording-which we know cannot be the case…'
Sorweel hesitated, looked from man to man, the stern old veteran and the square-bearded sorcerer.
'You have our attention, my King,' Eskeles said.
'All I have are guesses…'
'And we are dutifully astounded.'
Sorweel looked out over the milling ponies to the vast elk trail, which was little more than the mottling of darker greys across the predawn landscape. Somewhere… Out there.
'My guess,' he said, reluctantly turning back to the two men, 'is that we've stumbled across some kind of Consult army, one that-' He paused to gulp air and swallow. 'One that shadows the Great Ordeal using the elk both to feed itself and to conceal their trail. My guess is they plan to wait until the Great Ordeal comes against the Hording…' He swallowed and nodded as if suddenly recalling some adolescent insecurity. He flinched from an image of his father, speaking dust from the dirt. 'Then… then attack the host from behind… But…'
'But what?' Eskeles asked.
'But I'm not sure how this could be possible. The Sranc, they…'
Eskeles and Harnilas exchanged a worried glance. The Captain looked up, gazed at the young King in the fixed manner officers use to humble subordinates. Without breaking eye contact, he said, 'Aethum souti sal meretten,' to the Mandate Schoolman beside him. Then he continued in Sheyic spoken slowly enough for Sorweel to follow. 'So. What would you do?'
The young King of Sakarpus shrugged. 'Ride hard for the Aspect-Emperor.'
The old officer smiled and nodded, slapped him on the shoulder before bawling for camp to be broken.
'So it is possible?' Sorweel asked Eskeles, who remained beside him, watching with a strange, almost fatherly gleam in his eyes. 'The Sranc could be doing what I think?'
The Schoolman crushed his beard into his barrel chest, nodding. 'In ancient times, before the coming of the No-God, the Consult would harness the Sranc, chain them into great assemblies that the Ancient Norsirai called Yokes…' He paused, blinking as though to pinch away unwanted memories. 'They would drive them the way we drive slaves in the Three Seas, starve them until their hungers reached a fever pitch. Then, when they reached a position where the Sranc could smell Mannish blood on the wind, they would strike the chains and let them run.'
Something within the Sakarpi King, a binding of fear and hope, slumped in relief. He almost reeled for exhaustion, as if alarm alone had sustained him through all the sleepless watches.
The Schoolman steadied him with a hand on his shoulder.
'My King?'
Sorweel shook his head to dismiss the sorcerer's worry. He looked out across the morning plain: Sakarpus could be directly behind him instead of weeks away, for all the difference the horizon made.
'The Captain…' he said, returning the sorcerer's gaze. 'What did he say to you just then?'
'That you possess the gifts of a great king,' Eskeles replied, squeezing his shoulder the way his father had, whenever he took pride in his son's accomplishments.
Gifts? something within him wanted to cry. No…
Only things that the dirt had told him.
CHAPTER FIVE