that had lost their legs, one at the hips, the other high on the thigh, as if they had been felled side by side, reaved as if by a single scythe. Where those on the top had been mostly scorched to husks, those below remained primarily raw and wet. Their eyes glared out with an aimless, smoky curiosity. Not knowing what the man intended, Sorweel simply grabbed the carcasses adjacent to those his slave wrenched into sunlight. He cast hooded looks over his shoulders. He found himself troubled by the weight of the creatures, the way their scrawniness belied a brute density. The corpses became colder as the toil continued.
They found the earth sodden with filth-puddled. They gasped for their effort, gagged for the stench they had unleashed. Sorweel watched Porsparian fall to his knees in the heart of the muck oval they had cleared. A grave dug from the dead.
He watched him raise and kiss the polluted earth…
The wind tousled the King's lengthening hair, tumbled across all visible creation, troubling the emanations. The flies hummed undisturbed. Ravens punctuated the distance with random cries.
He watched his slave scallop muck clear, glimpsed a skull unearthed beneath the shadow of his hands. Peering, he willed himself to breathe through his horror. He watched the man gather putrid mud, then mould a face about the bone, all the while murmuring prayers in some harsh and exotic tongue. Then he watched as he skinned a Sranc face with terrifying economy, watched him pad the result across the earthen face he had prepared for it. The King experienced something outside horror or exaltation.
He watched his slave stroke and caress the slick surfaces: forehead, brow, lip, cheek. He watched and he listened, until the rasp that was the slave's prayer became a drifting smoke that obscured all other sound.
He watched life-impossible life-rise into the inhuman skin.
He watched Yatwer's eyes snap open.
He heard the groan of the earth.
– | The Goddess smiles…
The old man crouches over her, frozen like a man caught in the commission of some obscenity. Something shivers through the hideous earth. Scabrous arms burst from the soil to either side… Clotted bones. Knotted worms.
The slave stumbles back, staggers into the clutch of the horrified King.
They watch the Goddess exhume her own corpse. She trowels away muck and viscous slop, reveals the ivory comb of her ribs. She reaches into her muddy abdomen, excavates her cadaverous womb…
The very ground croaks and groans beneath them, the complaint of some cosmological hinge-existence pried too far from its essential frame.
She draws a pouch from the pit below her stomach, raises it pinched in fingers of filth and bone. She smiles. Tears of blood stream from her earthen eyes. The watching men gasp for the sorrow of a mother's endless Giving…
So many. So many children born…
So many taken.
The King trips to his knees. He crawls forward to receive her Gift, crawls with the shame of an inconstant son. He snatches the pouch as if from a leper. It lies stiff and cold in his fingers, like a dead man's tongue. He scarcely sees it for his Mother's dirt glare. He looks back to the slave, who sobs for joy and horror… He turns back to his Goddess…
But She is no more, nothing but a grotesque face, a monstrosity, moulded above an overturned grave.
'What just happened?' the King cries to the slave. 'What just happened?'
The slave says nothing. He climbs to his feet, hobbles from the macabre clearing back into the dead with an invalid's gait. He stumbles up a slope of pitched carcasses. He pauses before a spear that juts from the buzzing summit.
The King calls out to him, beseeching…
The slave places his chin upon the spear point, lifts his hands high in heavenly supplication.
'What the Mother gives…' he cries out to the King. 'You must take!'
He smiles fleetingly, as if regretting things both inevitable and criminal. Then Porsparian nesh Varalti drops. He never reaches his knees. He hangs, rather, from the inside crown of his skull, then slowly tips to his side. He seems to vanish among the strewn forms.
One more dead skinny.
The King of Sakarpus staggered back alone, trudging across mad ways of the dead. Zsoronga was waiting for him when he returned. Neither man had any words to speak, so they simply sat side by side in the dust, staring into their hands.
Zsoronga was first to break their fast of silence. He clasped his friend's shoulder and said, 'Things done are done.'
Sorweel did not reply. Each of them gazed in his own absent direction, like dogs leashed to the shade. They watched the endless to and fro of warlike men across and between the tents. The Army of the Middle-North. They watched the dust-devils spinning in and out of faint existence between the innumerable pennants and banners.
'Did he tell you?' Zsoronga asked. 'Your little priest… Did he tell you what… what She wants?'
Sorweel turned to regard his friend with a wide and wary glare. He knew he could trust the man-with his life if need be-and this comforted him in a way he had never known. Zsoronga was a true boonsman. But he also knew that he could not trust his face, that he could not risk saying anything for the shadows the Anasurimbor would glimpse within him.
'Yes,' he replied, looking back to the Men of the Ordeal. 'What is done is done.'
When the Successor-Prince finally departed, Sorweel retreated from the setting sun into the gloom of his tent. He pulled the pouch from his belt. The muck had dried to ash about its edges. He brushed it away with trembling fingers, noticing for the first time the dizzying patterns burned into the age-old leather. Crescents. Crescents within crescents.
Broken circles, he decided, glimpsing the gold-thread circumfixes embroidered along the hem of his own tunic.
Broken circumfixes.
He tugged free the clip of chapped bronze that held its mouth closed. He already knew what it contained, for as King of Sakarpus, he was also High Keeper of the Hoard. Nevertheless, he tipped the pouch so that he might hold it in his callused palm: a sphere of ancient iron…
A Chorae. A holy Tear of God.
The Swayali enclave formed an encampment all its own within the greater camp. When the host set stake across rolling or broken pasture, the witches' tents always tattooed the hazy vista, an oval of shining ochre among the jumbled phalanxes of canvas. The Scions had sat and pondered the sight more than a few evenings, like every other company in the Army. Charampa, in particular, was given to dreaming aloud. The 'Granary,' he called it. Here his little brother was starving, and yet the Granary remained closed. Several times he had leapt to his feet to display the hook lifting his skirts, crying out for food to feed his little brother. And though everyone about Zsoronga's hearth laughed with crazed merriment, they also became exceedingly reluctant to encourage the Cingulati Prince. Charampa was far too fond of his little brother.
He was also the reason why none of the witches strayed from their enclave-save Anasurimbor Serwa. As the days piled into months, as the memories of wives and lovers became more and more elusive, the famed Swayali witches, the Nuns, became a kind of narcotic. More than a few little brothers had been throttled for mere glimpse or rumour.
At first, Sorweel had no clue as to why he stalked the camp searching for the Granary. He had lain on his cot for watches, pinned by an exhaustion unlike any he had known, one that made slop of his centre, as if he were naught but a head and limbs sutured to a heap of entrails. He had stared at the canvas ceiling, glimpsing portents in water stains, feeling the prickle of Porsparian's continuous absence. And then he was up, answering to a restlessness he could not quite feel. And he was walking.
Initially he decided he sought out the Swayali because he needed to thank Anasurimbor Serwa for saving him. But this rationale, for all its convenience, did not long survive its insincerity. The unkind fact was that Sorweel felt no gratitude. Of the many Three Seas peculiarities that Zsoronga called out for disgust and ridicule, none
