The Holy Aspect-Emperor frowned as if troubled by the vehemence of his denial. He lowered his gaze to the fire twirling in the arcane octagon of his hearth.
'But why would that be, when they are true?'
The small Seeing-Flame wheezed into the silence.
The Exalt-General stared at his Lord-and-God in breathless bewilderment. The simplicity of his garb. The scriptural profile of his face, long featured, profound for the archaic cut of his beard and hair, wise for the clarity of his gaze. The lingering glow about his hands, as if unseen clouds were forever breaking above them.
'What… What are you saying?'
'That Men are children to me, precisely as Achamian claims.'
'As you are father to us!'
Anasurimbor Kellhus regarded him with the utter absence of expression.
'What father murders so many of his sons?'
What was this melancholy? What was this doubt? After campaigning so long, surviving so much calamity, how could the man who gave meaning to it all ask such corrosive questions?
'A divine one,' the Exalt-General declared.
The Sranc waxed ever more bold in measure with their hunger. Soon, not a day passed without word of some violent encounter. When they dared scout or patrol at all, the Kidruhil did so in force, stung by the loss of two entire companies, one of them captained by King Coithus Narnol's youngest son, Agabon. The Army of the Middle North began marching and camping on the ready. During the day they assembled into a vast, mile-long chevron, with the heavily armoured Thunyeri at the point, the Galeoth on the left flank, the Tydonni on the right, and all the baggage scattered behind and between. During the night, they arrayed their camps in tight, concentric circles, with a full quarter of their numbers assigned to defend the perimeter in rotating shifts. Drills were scheduled at irregular intervals to ensure that each man knew his place. Habitual laggards were publicly whipped. The last companies to the line were assigned to the latrines.
Despite their growing exhaustion, the Men of the Ordeal took to singing as they marched, Zaudunyani hymns for the most part, but folk songs from faraway homes as well. Some were ribald and merry, others melancholy, but one song in particular, the 'Beggar's Lament,' became especially popular. In some cases groups more than a thousand strong would cry out, bemoaning everything from the boils on their rumps to the pox on their members, only to be answered by thousands more complaining of even more outrageous afflictions. One man in particular, a Galeoth Agmundrman named Shoss, became famous for the hilarity of his lyrics.
And so the Army of the Middle-North marched into the Horde's shadow laughing.
No such humour could be found in Kayutas's evening councils. The Prince-Imperial always began by insisting he had no news of home, so preempting the inevitable parade of questions. His conferences with his Holy Father, he explained, were too rare and too brief to permit such questions-especially when the challenges they faced were so grievous.
The supply situation had become perilous, so much so that rationing had reduced the slaves who marched with the Ordeal to less than half the fare they needed to recoup their daily expenditures. Indeed, diseases of malnutrition were beginning to claim them in ever greater numbers; dozens were lost every day, either to death outright or to the straggling wastes behind them.
The presence of slaves, Kayutas reminded his commanders, was but one of many concessions his Holy Father had made to appease the caste-nobility- them. Soon, he would demand they sacrifice in return. The Prince-Imperial bid them to recall the First Holy War and the infamous Slaughter of the Camp-followers.
'When the time comes, each will kill his own,' he said. ' Each. Those who fail to do so will be executed in their slave's stead. Remember, my brothers: cruelty is only injustice in the absence of Necessity. Compassion. Generosity. These are fast becoming gluttonous sins.'
He did not need to speak the obvious, that unless their foraging began providing game in far greater quantities, Necessity would be upon them in a matter of days. They did not even possess pasture enough for their ponies and beasts of burden, thanks to the drought and the scourging of the land.
As always, the discussion returned to the reason for their straits: the Horde. Kayutas polled his cavalry commanders, one by one, drawing martial wisdom from their observations: tactics to draw them out for easy slaughter, how the relative starvation of the creatures predicted their aggression, and the like.
There was no doubt, the Prince-Imperial informed his charges, that the Sranc were becoming more desperate and therefore more bold. He explained the way the snows accumulated in the high mountains, week after week, season after season, until the snow beneath could no longer hold the snow above.
'They will come crashing down upon us,' he said. 'And when they do, they will not be cowed so easily as they are now. They will come and they will come, until you cry out to the Gods for respite.'
'How many are they?' King Hogrim asked. There was no missing the Imperial Mathematicians, as pale as sorcerers beneath their parasols, riding out with Anasurimbor Moenghus on their daily forays.
'More than us, my friend. Far more.'
King Narnol, who still grieved the loss of his beloved son, chose this moment to voice a sentiment common among his peers: that the Breaking of the Great Ordeal had been ill advised. 'We should stand together!' he protested. 'Shoulder to shoulder with our brothers! Divided, they can engulf and overwhelm us one by one. But if the Great Ordeal confronts this Horde entire…'
'We cannot feed ourselves as it is,' the Prince-Imperial answered. 'We are gathering far more fare as four than we could as one, and still we hunger. To stand together is to starve together.'
Though his reasoning was sound, Kayutas could see that Narnol, in the course of framing his argument, had sparked real fear in the hearts of his commanders.
'Trust in my Father,' he pressed, 'who has foreseen and planned for all of these dilemmas. Think of how fifty of your knights can rout a mob of thousands! The Sranc battle in crazed masses, bereft of design or coordination. You need not fear for your flanks, only stand your ground! Hack and hew!' He turned to gesture to his sister, Anasurimbor Serwa, the Grandmistress of the Swayali, whose beauty was ever a lodestone for idle eyes. 'Most importantly, recall the Schools and the destruction they can rain down upon our foes! Have no fear, my brothers. We will cobble the horizon with their carcasses!'
And the Lords of the Ordeal filed from the council striking their chests and crying out in renewed resolution. So easy it was to kindle the lust for blood in the hearts of Men. Even those thrown more than a thousand miles from their home.
To look at skies bright and arid and to sense a darkness unseen.
The Men of the Ordeal marched, little more than shadows in the sheeted dust. Knowing what gathered in the distance, they gazed ever forward, pondering what they could not see. There is an exhaustion peculiar to hanging threats, a needing-to-confront that tires the soul the way overstuffed packs sap the limbs. They would look out across the blasted plate of the Istyuli, and they would wonder at the rumour of their enigmatic foe. The Horde. They would argue numbers, exchange speculations, discuss battles waged by long-dead men. It became a game for some, counting the hundreds of dust plumes that marked the Kidruhil and the various companies of knights that patrolled ahead of them. They would wager rations on which plume marked who, a practice that became so common that some companies found themselves returning to the shouts of uproarious thousands.
For the pickets themselves, it seemed they had come to the ends of the earth. The ground was all but gutted dust by this time, so the Horde always appeared as a peculiar dust storm that spanned the horizon, one tethered to the irregularities of the earth. Ochre clouds piled upon billowing foundations, a great curtain that climbed into a haze that stained the northern sky, obscuring the lower constellations at night. Streamers preceded it, tails of gauze hooked as though on nails, marking those clans that had fled the longest, starved the longest. On and on it extended, powder raised into sinuous mountains, beautiful for its slow-blooming complexities, wondrous for its mad scale. A sense of impunity had grown upon many of the riders, one of those thoughtless convictions that arise when something expected perpetually fails to arrive. They rode their trackless circuits, and the unseen hordes before them retreated, always retreated. This was simply the way.
Then some trick of the Gangan-naru would kick open a door across the distance, and the windy hush would suddenly tingle with sound of the Horde, a roar that was at once booming and thin. 'Like shrieking children,' one of the Kidruhil Captains would explain to General Kayutas. 'For the life of me, they sound like shrieking children.'
