through invisible canyons.
And there it was… striking as straight as a geometer's line from the ground at the fat sorcerer's feet, dazzling the eyes, stilling the inhuman onlookers with salt-white astonishment…
Reaching high to illuminate the belly of the overcast night.
A Bar of Heaven.
General Kayutas was the first to glimpse it out across the tumult, the Northmen but rafts of discipline in a tossed sea of Sranc, the Swayali like columns of sunlight breaking through tempest clouds, burning the inexhaustible waters. He saw it, between pelting arcs of arrows, a needle of glittering white on the southern horizon…
Where nothing but dead earth should be.
He turned to his sister, who had followed his gaze out to the distant and inexplicable beacon. Others in his cortege noticed also, but their shouts of alarm were soundless in the thrumming roar.
Serwa need only glimpse her brother's lips to understand-they were children of the Dunyain.
She stepped into the sky, summoned the nearest of her sisters to rise with her.
– | The world smelled of burning snakes.
Sorweel saw clouds knotted into woollen plates, flickering in and out of edgeless illumination. His head lolled and he saw the earth reeling, pricked with infinite detail, a thousand thousand mortal struggles. Ironclad men hacking and hollering. Sranc and more Sranc-twitching and innumerable. He saw women hanging in the air with him, far-gowned Swayali, singing impossible, incandescent songs.
And he jerked his lurching gaze to the hook that had lifted him so high…
A Goddess held him, carried him like a child across the surfaces of Hell.
'Mother?' he gasped, thinking not of the woman who had borne him but of the divinity. Yatwer… the Mother of Wombs, who had cursed him with murdering the most deadly man to ever walk her parched earth.
'No,' the glorious lips replied. It seemed a miracle that she could hear him, such was the guttural clamour. A roar so knotted with violence, that the very air seemed to bleed. 'Worse.'
'You…' he gasped, recognizing the woman through the fiery veil of her beauty.
'Me,' Anasurimbor Serwa replied, smiling with the cruelty of the peerless. 'How many hundreds will die,' she asked, 'for saving you?'
'Drop me then,' he croaked.
She recoiled from the floating fury of his gaze, looked out across the threshing darkness, frowning as if finally understanding she bore a king in her arcane embrace. Through acrid veils of smoke, he breathed deep the scent of her: the myrrh of glory and privilege, the salt of exertion.
Let me fall.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.
Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Nansurium, Somewhere South of Momemn
In Gielgath, two thieves assailed him, and the White-Luck Warrior watched them scuffle, drunk and desperate, with the man who was their doom. They lurched out of alleyway shadows, their cries choked to murmurs for fear of being heard. They sprawled dead and dying across cobble and filth, the one inert, the other twitching. He wiped his Seleukaran blade clean across the dead one, even as he raised the sword to counter their manic rush. He stepped clear of the one who stumbled, raised his blade to parry the panicked swing of the other… the swing that would notch the scimitar's honed edge-as thin as an eyelid.
The notch that would shatter his sword, so allowing the broken blade to plunge into the Aspect-Emperor's heart. He could even feel the blood slick his thumb and fingers, as he followed himself into the gloomy peril of the alley.
Unholy blood. Wicked beyond compare.
No one noticed him in the subsequent hue and cry. He watched himself slip unnoticed through gathering crowds of onlookers-for even in these lawless times, the murder of two men was no small thing. He followed himself through an ancient and impoverished maze that was Gielgath. One of the priestess beggars called, 'You! You!' as he passed a fullery. He saw her sob for joy a million times.
The slave plantations were more severe in their discipline, more grand in extent, in the lands he subsequently crossed, following his following. He watched himself lean so that he might draw his bloody hands across the crowns of surging millet and wheat. Across the span of ages, the Goddess watched and was pleased, and it was Good.
He came across a cow calving, and he knelt into his kneeling so that he might witness his Mother made manifest. He watched himself draw his fingers through the afterbirth, then redden the lobes of his ears.
He found a fugitive child hiding in an overgrown ditch, watched himself give all that remained of his food. 'There is no greater Gift,' he overheard himself say to the wide brown eyes, 'than to give unto death.' And he caressed the dark-tanned cheek that was also a skull decaying between grass and milkweed.
He saw a stork riding invisible gusts across the sky.
He walked, forever trailing the man who walked before him and forever leading the one who walked behind. He watched his form, dark for the brilliance of the sun, sink over cultivated summits, even as he turned to see his form, dark within its own shadow, rising from the crest behind.
And so he stepped into his stepping, walked into his walking, travelled into his journey, a quest that had already ended in the death of the False Prophet.
Until at last he paused upon a hill and for the first time gazed across the walls and streets he had seen innumerable times.
Momemn. The Home City. Great Capital of the New Empire.
He saw all the lanes he had never travelled. He saw the Temple Xothei with its famed domes, heard the riotous cries that would shiver its stone. He saw the Imperial Precincts along the seaward walls, the campuses hazy and deserted. He saw the piling of structure and marble beauty that was the Andiamine Heights, his eyes roaming until they found the famed veranda behind the Aspect-Emperor's throne-room…
Where the Gift-of-Yatwer glimpsed himself peering back, the Holy Empress beside him.
– | Momemn
'Why should it trouble a mother to see her child love himself so?' Inrilatas said from his shadow. He exhaled a breath pent in hungry pleasure. 'Fondle himself?'
Sunlight streamed through the cell's one small window, drawing a fan of illuminated surfaces from the smoky gloom. A stretch of her son's hair, the outer lines of his left shoulder and arm. Thankfully, she could not so much see him masturbate as infer it.
She fixed him with a mother's flat gaze. Perhaps it was her old life as a whore, or perhaps he had simply exhausted her with his antics; either way she was unimpressed. There was very little Inrilatas could do that would shock or dismay her anymore.
A small carpet had been laid across the floor, with an oak chair, cushioned and elaborately carved, set upon it for her comfort. White-clad body-slaves stood ready to either side with wicker screens-shields, really-ready to shelter her if her son decided to begin pelting her with feces or any other fluid that caught his fancy. It had happened before. After they were done, she knew, the chains would be drawn to fix her son across the wall, and the Attendants would scour the floor looking for anything dropped or forgotten. The boy-young man, now-was
