'Teus Eskeles has told us everything,' he declared. 'You have saved us, Sorweel. You… '
A broken chorus of cheers and shouts rose from those gathered within the tent.
'I… I did nothing,' the Sakarpi King replied, trying to avoid the Swayali Grandmistress's gaze.
'Nothing?' The Kidruhil General frowned, scratched the flaxen plaits of his beard. 'You read the signs, like a true son of the plains. You saw the doom our foe had prepared for us. You counselled your commander to take the only action that could save us. And then, in the moment of utmost crisis, you lent your shoulder to Eskeles, cast your life on the longest of odds, so that he might alert us…' He glanced up toward his sister, then looked back, grinning like an uncle trying to teach his nephew how to gamble. 'Nothing has ever been so impressive.'
'I did only what I… what I thought sensible.'
'Sense?' Kayutas said with scowling good nature. 'There are as many sensibilities as there are passions, Sorweel. Terror has a sense all its own: flee, shirk, abandon-whatever it takes to carry away one's skin. But you, you answered to the sense that transcends base desire. And we stand before you breathing, victorious, as a result.'
The Sakarpi King glanced about wildly, convinced he was the butt of some cruel joke. But everyone assembled watched with a kind of indulgent expectation, as if understanding he was but a boy still, unused to the burden of communal accolades. Only Zsoronga's solitary black face betrayed worry.
'I… I–I know not what to say… You honour me.'
The Prince-Imperial nodded with a wisdom that belied the adolescent tenderness of his beard. 'That is my intent,' he said. 'I have even sent a party of crippled riders back to Sakarpus to bear word of your heroic role to your kinsmen…'
'You what?' Sorweel fairly coughed.
'It's a political gesture, I admit. But the glory is no less real.'
In his soul's eye, Sorweel could see a wracked line of Kidruhil filing through the ruins of the Herders' Gate, outland conquerors, oppressors, crying out the treachery of Harweel's only son, how he had saved the very host that had laid Sakarpus low…
Nausea welled through him. Shame squirmed in his breast, clawing his ribs, scratching his heart.
'I… I don't know what to say…' he stammered.
'You need not say anything,' Kayutas said with an indulgent smile. 'Your pride is clear for all to see.'
'She is hiding you…'
And for the first time he felt it, the impunity of standing unseen. He had stood before Anasurimbor Kayutas before. He had suffered his raking gaze-he knew what it meant to be known by an enemy, to have his fears counted, his vengeful aspirations reckoned, and so transformed into levers that could be used against him. Now he felt as if he were peeking at the man through his mother's shielding fingers. And his cheeks stung for the memory of Porsparian rubbing Yatwer's spit into them.
'I've had you entered into the lists as the new Captain of the Scions,' Kayutas continued. 'Disbanded they may be, but their honour will be yours. We were fortunate that Xarotas Harnilas possessed wisdom enough to recognize your sense-I will not trust fortune to so favour us a second time. Henceforth, you will attend me and my staff… And you will be accorded all the glory and privilege that belongs to a Believer-King.'
She had placed him here. The Dread Mother of Birth… Was the courage even his?
It seemed an important question, but then the legends seemed littered with the confusion of heroes and the Gods that favoured them. Perhaps his hand simply was her hand…
He recoiled from the thought.
'May I beg one boon?'
A flicker of mild surprise. 'Of course.'
'Zsoronga… I would have him accompany me if I could.'
Kayutas scowled, and several onlookers exchanged not-so-discreet whispers. For perhaps the first time, the Sakarpi King understood his friend's importance to the Anasurimbor. Of all the world's remaining nations, only Zeum posed a credible threat to the New Empire.
'You know that he conspires against us?' the Prince-Imperial said, switching to effortless Sakarpic. Suddenly the two of them stood alone in a room walled with strangers.
'I have my fears…' Sorweel began, lying smoothly. 'But…'
'But what?'
'He no longer doubts the truth of your father's war. No one does.'
The implication was as clear as it was surprising, for in all his life Sorweel had never counted his among devious souls. The first son of Nganka'kull wavered. To bring him into the Prince-Imperial's retinue could be the very thing his conversion required…
And that, Sorweel suddenly realized, was the Aspect-Emperor's goal: to have a believer become Satakhan.
'Granted,' Kayutas said, switching to the dismissive air of men who scarce had time for accommodations. He made a two-fingered gesture to one of his scribes, who began fingering through sheaves of vellum.
'But I fear you have one last duty to discharge,' the General said in Sheyic just as Sorweel glanced about for some cue that the audience had ended. 'A mortal one.'
The omnipresent smell of rot seemed to take on a sinister tang.
'My arm is your arm, Lord General.'
This reply occasioned a heartbeat of scrutiny.
'The Great Ordeal has all but exhausted its supplies. We starve, Sorweel. We have too many mouths and too little food. The time has come to put certain mouths to the knife…'
Sorweel swallowed against a sudden pang in his breast.
'What are you saying?'
'You must put down your slave, Porsparian, in accordance with my father's edict.'
'I must what?' he asked blinking. So there was a joke after all.
'You must kill your slave before sunrise tomorrow, or your life will be forfeit,' Kayutas said, speaking in a tone as much directed to the assembled caste-nobles as to the Believer-King standing before him. Even heroes, he was saying, must answer to our Holy Aspect-Emperor.
'Do you understand?'
'Yes,' Sorweel replied, speaking with a determination utterly at odds with the tumult that was his soul.
He understood. He was alone, a captive in the host of his enemy.
He would do whatever… kill whomever…
'Chosen by the Gods…'
Anything to see the Aspect-Emperor dead and his father avenged.
Sorweel returned to his tent alone, his back still warm for all the slapping, his ears still hot with the chorus of overwrought acclaim. Porsparian stood before the entrance, forlorn and emaciated and as motionless as a sentinel. The sight fairly winded the young King.
'Follow me,' he told the man, his gaze scratched with incredulity. The old Shigeki slave regarded him with a momentary squint, then without worry-or even curiosity-he struck out ahead of his master, leading him into the fields of rotting Sranc. Sorweel could only gape at the sight: a little nut-brown man, walking stooped, his limbs bowed as if bent to the bundle of his many years, picking his way across the packed dead.
So the slave led the King, and perhaps this was how it should have been, given the way Sorweel felt himself dwindle with every step. He could scarce believe what he was about to do… Execution. When he forced himself to confront the prospect, his body and soul rebelled the way he had once feared they would in the thick of battle. The lightness of the hands. The starlings battling in his gut, loosening his bowel. The wires that hooked his head and shoulders into a pose just shy of a cringe. The incessant murmur of dread…
Men often find themselves stranded in circumstance, stumbling toward goals not of their making, surrounded by absurdities they can scarce believe. They assume the little continuities that characterize their moments will carry them through their entire lives. They forget the volatility of the whole, the way tribes and nations trip like drunks through history. They forget that Fate is a whore.
Porsparian hobbled ahead, picking a path through the carapace of dead. Sorweel quickly lost sight of the camp behind the blood-slicked mounds. When he looked out, death and far-flung rot were all he could see. Sranc.
