As death is the sum of all harms, so is murder the sum of all sins.
The world has its own ways, sockets so deep that not even the Gods can dislodge them. No urn is so cracked as Fate.
Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Somewhere South of Gielgath…
That which comes after determines what comes before-in this World.
The Gift-of-Yatwer walked across ordained ground. His skin did not burn, thanks to the swarthiness he had purchased with his seed. His feet did not blister, thanks to the calluses he had purchased with his youth. But he grew weary as other men grew weary, for like them, he was a thing of flesh and blood. But he always tired when he should grow tired. And his every slumber delivered him to the perfect instant of waking. Once to the sound of lutes and to the generosity of travelling mummers. Another time to a fox that bolted, leaving the goose it had been laboriously dragging.
Indeed, his every breath was a Gift.
He crossed the exhausted plantations of Anserca, drawing stares from those slaves who saw him. Though he walked alone, he followed a file of thousands across the fields, for he was always the stranger he pursued, and the back before him was forever his own. He would look up, see himself walking beneath a solitary, windswept tree, vanishing stride by stride over the far side of a hill. And when he turned, he would see that same tree behind him, and the same man descending the same slope. A queue of millions connected him to himself, from the Gift who coupled with the Holy Crone to the Gift who watched the Aspect-Emperor dying in blood and expressionless disbelief.
He was the ripple across dark waters. The bow of force thrown across a length of a child's rope.
He saw the assassin gagging on his own blood. He saw the besieging armies, the hunger in the streets. He saw the Holy Shriah turn oblivious and bare his throat. He saw the Andiamine Heights crashing upon itself, the Empress's eyes flutter about her final breath…
And he walked alone, following a road of fields, stranded in the now of a mortal soul.
Day after day, across mile after mile of tilled earth-the very bosom of his dread Mother. He slept between the rising stalks, the nascent heads, listening to his Mother's soothing whisper, staring at stars that were silver lines.
He followed his footprints across the dust, witnessing more than plotting the murder of the dead.
The River Sempis
At least, Malowebi thought to himself as he swayed in his saddle, he could say he had seen a ziggurat before he died. What could that fool, Likaro, say? There was more to travel than bedding Nilnameshi slave boys, just as there was more to diplomacy than wearing an ambassador's wig.
Cohorts of horsemen fanned across the land, filing along irrigation dikes, filtering through groves and across millet fields. Hills like broken molars fenced the north, marking the arid frontier of Gedea. The River Sempis lay to the immediate south, black and green and placid, broad enough to shroud the South Bank in blue-grey haze. Five plumes of smoke rose from disparate points on the horizon before them.
One of those plumes, Malowebi knew, led the dusty army to Iothiah.
'It is a dangerous thing,' Fanayal ab Kascamandri said from his side, a sharp grin drawing wide his elaborate goatee, 'to parlay with the enemies of dangerous men. And in the whole wide world, my friend, no man is so dangerous as Kurcifra.'
Despite the Padirajah's smile, something shrewd and quite humourless glinted in his eyes.
Second Negotiant Malowebi, Emissary of High Holy Zeum, matched the man's gaze, careful to conceal his frown. 'Kurcifra…' he repeated. 'Ah… you mean the Aspect-Emperor.'
The Mbimayu sorcerer was old enough to remember the days when Kian ruled the Eastern Three Seas. Of all the outland peculiarities to leak into Zeum, few proved more vexing than the Fanim missionaries who trickled across the frontier, bearing their absurd message of fear and damnation. The God was Solitary. The Gods were in fact devils. And all their ancestors had been damned for worshipping them- all of them! You would think that claims so preposterous and repulsive would require no rebuttal, but the very opposite had been the case. Even the Zeumi, it turned out, were quick to embrace tales of their own iniquity, so universal is self-loathing among Men. Not a month passed, it sometimes seemed, without some public flaying.
Even still, when Fanayal's Padirajah father had sent an embassy to attend the coronation of Malowebi's cousin, Nganka'kull, the Kianene Grandees had caused a sensation among the kjineta. High Holy Zeum had always been an inward nation, too distant and too vain to concern itself with events or peoples beyond its sacred frontier. But the Kianene's pale skin, the stark luxury of their dress, their pious reserve-everything about them had hummed with exotic allure. Over night, it seemed, the Zeumi fondness for elaborate image and ornamentation had become dowdy and obsolete. Many caste-nobles even began cultivating goatees-until, that is, his cousin reinstated the ancient Grooming Laws.
Malowebi could scarce imagine these Kianene inspiring an upheaval in fashion. Where the Grandees of Kascamandri's embassy possessed the dress and bearing of heroes, Fanayal's men were little more than desert bandits. He had expected to ride with the likes of Skauras or Cinganjehoi, men terrible in war and gracious in peace, not a ragtag army of horse-thieves and rapists.
Fanayal alone reminded him of those ambassadors from long ago. He wore a helm of shining gold, five spikes rising from the peak, and perhaps the finest coat of mail Malowebi had ever seen-a mesh of inhuman manufacture, he eventually decided. His yellow-silk sleeves hung like pennants from his wrists. His curved sword was obviously a famed heirloom. The instant he had noticed it, Malowebi had known he would say, 'That glorious blade-was that your father's?' He even knew the solemn way he would pitch his voice. It was an old diplomat's trick, making a conversational inventory of the items his counterparts wore.
Relationships went much smoother, Malowebi had learned, in the absence of verbal holes.
'Kurcifra…' the Padirajah repeated with a curious smile, as if considering the way the name might sound to an outsider. 'The light that blinds.'
Fanayal ab Kascamandri was nothing if not impressive. Handsome, in the hard way of desert breeding. His falcon eyes set close about a hooked nose. Arrogant to the point of being impervious to insult and slight-and being quite agreeable as a result.
The Bandit Padirajah he might be, but he was no bandit, at least.
'You said no man is so dangerous,' Malowebi pressed, genuinely curious. 'Is this what you think? That the Anasurimbor is a man?'
Fanayal laughed. 'The Empress is a woman — I know that much. I once spared a Shrial Priest for claiming he had bedded her when she was a whore. The Aspect-Emperor? I know only that he can be killed.'
'And how do you know this?'
'Because I am the one doomed to kill him.'
Malowebi shook his head in wonder. How the World revolved about the Aspect-Emperor. How many times had he poured himself some unwatered wine just to drink and marvel at the simple fact of the man? A refugee wanders into the Nansurium from the wilderness-with a Scylvendi savage, no less! — and within twenty years, he not only commands the obedience of the entire Three Seas but its worship as well.
It was mad. Too mad for mere history, which was, as far as Malowebi could tell, every bit as mean and as stupid as the men who made it. There was nothing mean or stupid about Anasurimbor Kellhus.
'This is how Men reason in the Three Seas?' he asked. He repented the words even as he spoke them. Malowebi was Second Negotiant for no small reason. He was forever asking blunt questions, forever alienating instead of flattering. He had more teeth than tongue, as the menials would say.
But the Bandit Padirajah showed no outward sign of offence. 'Only those who have seen their doom,
