When he glimpsed them in fragments-a face nestled in the crook of an arm, a hand hanging from a raised wrist-they almost seemed human. When he gazed across them en masse, they seemed the issue of a drained sea. As bad as it had been in the camp, the reek welled palpable from the sweating tangle, to the point where coughing and gagging became one and the same, until smell became a taste that seemed to hang against the skin-an odour that could be licked. Ravens made summits of skulls, jumped from crown to crown spearing eye sockets. Vultures hunched and squabbled over individual spoils even though all was carrion. The whine of flies was multiplied until it became a singular hum.
Porsparian walked and he numbly followed, at times skidding across offal or wincing at the crack of ribbed hollows beneath his boots. He alternately found himself studying the Shigeki slave, his shoulders crooked about hard huffing breaths, and avoiding all sight of him. He knew now that he had deceived himself, that he had failed to press the enigmatic man for answers out of fear, and not because the intricacies of Sheyic defeated him. He had reacted, not as a man, but as a little boy, embracing the childish instinct to skulk and to avoid, to besiege fact with cowardly pretense. All this time, they could not speak and so were strangers, each perhaps as frightful to the other. And now, when he could finally ask, finally discover what madness the Dread Mother had prepared for him, he had to kill the little… priest, Zsoronga had called him.
His slave, Porsparian.
Sorweel paused, suddenly understanding Zsoronga's cryptic tone when he had asked him about Obotegwa. He had been thinking of the Aspect-Emperor's edict, the very edict behind the crime Sorweel was about to commit. If he himself balked at the prospect of murdering a terrifying stranger, what would it be like for Zsoronga to put down a beloved childhood companion-a surrogate father, even? Perhaps it was for the best that the Istyuli swallow the wise old man whole, that Obotegwa stumble into a small pile of human rubble-cloth and scattered bones- marking nothing.
Sorweel found himself blinking at the slave's form labouring through carrion ravines.
'Porsparian…' he called, coughing against the stench.
The old man ignored him. A clutch of ravens cried out in his stead, their caws like a small army of files scraping edges of tin.
'Porsparian, stop!'
'Not there yet!' the man hacked over his shoulder.
'Not where?' Sorweel cried, hastening after the agile slave. Bones popped in stiffening meat. Arrow shafts cracked. What was the man doing? Was this his manner of fleeing?
'Porsparian… Look. I'm not going kill you.'
'What happens to me is not important,' the Shigeki wheezed. Sorweel suffered dim memories of his grandfather in his final shameful days, how he had taken to wilful and insensible acts, if only to answer some prideful instinct to do…
'Porsparian…' he said, at last seizing the man's bony shoulder. He was going to tell the man that he could run, that he was free to risk the open plains, perhaps trust in the Goddess to deliver him, but instead he released the man, shocked by the immediacy of the bones beneath his tunic, by the sheer ease he had yanked him about, as if the man were naught but a doll, pig-skin wrapped about desert-dry wood.
When had he last eaten?
Cursing in some harsh tongue, the slave resumed his senseless trek, and Sorweel stood, absorbing the realization that Porsparian would not survive on the plains, that to set him free was simply to condemn him to a slower, far more miserable demise…
That anything short of execution would be an act of cowardice.
A moment of madness ensued, one which Sorweel would remember for the rest of his life. He choked on a scream that was a laugh that was a sob that was a father's soothing whisper. A kind of macabre intensity bubbled up out of his surroundings, an inversion of seeing, so that the jutting spears and the innumerable arrow shafts that stubbled the summits of dead pinned and staked his skin. The foggy glare of hundreds from limb-thatched burrows, the tongues like hanging snails, the entrails spilling from shells of armour, drying into papyrus…
She is positioning you…
How?
As mad as it sounds, I really have come to save Mankind…
What?
Fuh-Fuh-Father!
And then he saw it… standing with the grace and proportion of an Ainoni vase, regarding him, the knife of its long beak folded against its neck. A stork, perched upon purpling dead as though upon a promontory of high stone, its snowy edges framed by bleached sky.
And he was racing after the diminutive slave, tripping, skidding.
'What's going on?' he cried, seizing the man. 'You will tell me!'
The rutted face betrayed no surprise, no anger or fear whatsoever.
'Pollution has seized the hearts of Men,' the slave rasped. 'The Mother prepares our cleansing.'
The slave raised warm fingers to Sorweel's wrists, gently tugged his hands from his shoulders.
'And all thi-?'
'Is deception! Deception! '
Sorweel stumbled, so placid had Porsparian seemed, and such was the fury of his barked reply.
'So-so his war…' the Sakarpi King stammered.
'He is a demon who wears men the way we don clothes!'
'But his war…' He scraped his gaze across the tossed and tangled carcasses about them. 'It is real…'
Porsparian snorted.
'All is false. And all who follow him are damned!'
'But his war… Porsparian! Look around you! Look around you and tell me his war is not real!'
'What? Because he has sent his followers against the Sranc? The world is filled with Sranc!'
'And what of the Consult Legion… the Sranc who killed my comrades?'
'Lies! Lies!'
'How can you know?'
'I know nothing. I speak!'
And with that he resumed his bandy march into the dead.
The slave picked his way across a swale of blasted and blackened Sranc and into a region of sorcerous destruction. In his soul's eye, the young King could see the Swayali witch hanging a hard stone's throw above, a slender beauty aglow in the curlicue bloom of her billows, dispensing lines and sheets of cutting light. He shook his head at the vision…
'Porsparian!'
The little man ignored him, though he did slow his pace. He peered downward as he walked, looking this way and that, as if searching for a lost kellic.
'Tell me!' Sorweel called out, his wonder giving way to irritation. 'Tell me what She wants!'
'A mighty lord died here…' he heard the man mutter.
'Yatwer!' the Sakarpi King cried, throwing the name like a cold and heavy stone from his breast. 'What does She want of me?'
'Here…' The old man's voice was thick with a kind of unsavoury relish. 'Beneath the skinnies.'
Sorweel stood dumbfounded, watching the mad fool heave at the burnt Sranc thatched beneath his feet. 'The earth…' he grunted, tossing aside an arm and attached shoulder. 'Must… uncover…'
The Sakarpi King gazed witless. When they had set out, he could scarce look at Porsparian without flinching from the madness of what he had to do. But the Shigeki slave seemed to care not in the least, even though he had to know he was doomed. Not in the least! Sorweel had followed him out here into carrion to cut his throat, and the man acted as if this were but a trifling compared to what he…
Cold flushed through and about the young man. He found himself casting wild looks across the surrounding dead, as if he were a murderer suddenly unsure of the secrecy of his crime.
The Goddess.
The King bent his back and joined the slave in his grisly labour.
The forms were uniformly burned; many of them possessed cauterized slices-amputations. He cleared two
