'So even now, you're… manipulating me?'
The Exalt-General could scarce believe he had asked the question.
'There is no other way for me to be with you,' the Aspect-Emperor replied. ' I see what you do not. The origins of your thought and passion. The terminus of your fear and ambit. You experience but a fragment of the Nersei Proyas that I see. With every word, I speak to you in ways you cannot hear.'
Some kind of test-it had to be… Kellhus was sounding him, preparing him for some kind of trial.
'But…'
The Aspect-Emperor downed his bowl in a single draught. 'How could that be when you feel free, to say, to think, any way you please?'
'Yes! I never feel so free as I feel when I am with you! In all the world, wherever I go, Kellhus, I sense the jealousies and judgments of others. With you, I know I have no cause for wariness or concern. With you, I am my own judge!'
'But that is only the man you know, the Lesser Proyas. The man I know, the Greater Proyas, I hold in shackles of iron. I am Dunyain, my friend, exactly as Achamian claimed. To merely stand in my presence is to be enslaved.'
Perhaps this was the golden kernel, the whole point of these thought-bruising sessions. To understand how little he was himself…
There was no revelation without terror and overturning.
'But I am your willing slave. I choose a life of bondage!'
And he felt no shame in saying this. Ever since childhood he had understood the exaltation that was submission. To be a slave to truth is to be a master of men.
The Aspect-Emperor leaned back into the glow of his unearthly halo. As always the hearth's twirling light sketched smoky glimpses of doom across the canvas walls behind him. For a heartbeat, the Exalt-General could swear he saw children running…
'Choice,' his Lord-and-God said smiling. 'Willing…
'Your shackles are cast from this very iron.'
Sorweel and Zsoronga sat unceremoniously in the dust at the entrance of the tent they now shared, gnawing on their ration of amicut. Gone was the Successor-Prince's garish pavilion. Gone were the ritual wigs. Gone were the sumptuous cushions, the ornate decorations. Gone were the slaves who had borne all this pointless luxury.
Necessity, as Protathis famously wrote, makes jewels of lack and turns poverty into gold. For the Men of the Ordeal, wealth was now measured in the absence of burdens.
They sat side by side gazing with a kind of numb incredulity as the figure wobbled toward them through the haze of knee-high dust. They recognized him immediately, though it did not seem so at the time, so quick is the heart to deny what it cannot bear. Limbs like black ropes. Hair white as the sky. He staggered as much as he walked, a gait that spoke of endless miles, a thousand steps too many. Only his gaze remained steady, as if all that remained of him had been concentrated into his sense of sight. He did not blink once the entirety of his approach.
Swaying, he stood before them.
'You were supposed to be dead,' Zsoronga said, looking up with a peculiar terror, his voice wavering about some contest of dismay and gratitude.
'I am told…' Obotegwa rasped, his smile more a lipless grimace, 'my death… is your duty…'
Sorweel made to leave, but the Successor-Prince cried out for him to stay.
'I beg you…' he said. 'Please.'
So he helped the old man into the tent, shocked, nauseated even, by his kindling weight. He watched his friend chew his food, then offer up the resulting paste. He watched him raise Obotegwa's feet so that he might wash them, only to wash his shins instead because of the ulcerations that cankered his toes and heel. He listened to him whisper to the ailing servant in the warm, resonant tones of their native language. He understood none of it, and yet grasped all of it, for the tones of love and gratitude and remorse transcend all languages, even those from different ends of the world.
Sorweel watched Obotegwa blink two tears, as if they were all that remained, and somehow he just knew: the man had lived so long only to obtain permission to die. With fingers of trembling teak, the Obligate reached beneath his tunic and withdrew a small golden cylinder, which Zsoronga clasped with solemn disbelief.
He watched his friend take a knife to the old man's wrists.
He watched the lantern oil of his life leak into the earth, until the guttering flame that was Obotegwa shined no more. He stared at the inanimate body, wondered that it could seem as dry as the earth.
Zsoronga cried out as if freed of some long-suffering obligation to remain strong. He wept with outrage and shame and sorrow. Sorweel embraced him, felt the anguish kick through his powerful frame.
Afterward, when night had drawn its chill shroud over the world beyond their tent, Zsoronga told a story about how, in his eighth summer, he had come, for no reason he could fathom, to covet his older cousin's Battle- Sash-so much so he actually crept into his quarters and stole it. 'Things glitter in the eyes of a child,' he said, speaking with the blank manner of the bereaved. 'They shine, more than is seemly…'
Thinking himself clever, he had taken care to hide the thing in Obotegwa's annex to his room-in his matins satchel. Of course, giving the ceremonial importance of the Sash, a hue and cry was raised the instant it was discovered missing. By some stroke of disastrous fortune, it was found among Obotegwa's effects shortly after, and the Obligate was seized.
'Of course they knew I was the culprit,' Zsoronga explained, staring down at his thieving palms. 'This is an old trick among my people. A way to peel past the bark, as they say. Someone else is accused of your crime, and unless you confess, you're forced to witness their punishment…'
Seized by the terror and shame that so often makes puppets of children, Zsoronga had said nothing. Even as Obotegwa was whipped, he said nothing-and to his everlasting shame, the Obligate said nothing as well. 'Imagine… the whole of the Inner Court, watching him be whipped and knowing full well that I was the one!'
So he did what most children do when cornered by some fact of failure or weakness: he made believe. He told himself that Obotegwa had stolen the Sash, out of spite, out of fascination-who knew what moved lesser souls? 'I was a child!' Zsoronga cried, his voice pinched eight summers short.
One day passed. Two. Three. And still he said nothing. The whole world seemed bent to the warp of his fear. His father ceased speaking to him. His mother continually blinked tears. And so the farce continued. At some level, he knew that the world knew, but the stubbornness would not relent. Only Obotegwa treated him precisely as before. Only Obotegwa, the one bearing his welts, played along.
Then his father summoned him and Obotegwa to his apartments. The Satakhan was furious, to the point of kicking over braziers and spilling fiery coals across the floor. But Obotegwa, true to character, remained amiable and calm.
'He assured Father that I felt shame,' the Successor-Prince recalled with a vacant stare. 'He bid him recall my eyes and take heart in the pain he had seen there. Given this, he said, my silence should be cause for pride, for it is the curse of rulers to bear the burden of shameful secrets. 'Only weak rulers confess weakness,' he said. 'Only wise rulers bear the full burden of their crimes. Take heart knowing your son is both strong and wise…''
Zsoronga hung upon these words for a time. He glanced at the shadowy corpse at their feet, sat blinking at the impossibility. And Sorweel knew precisely what he felt, the way you lose so much more than simply another voice and gaze from an otherwise crowded life. He knew that many things in Zsoronga's life had some history peculiar to him and Obotegwa alone-that they had shared a world between them, a world that was gone.
'And what do you think?' Sorweel dared ask.
'That I was foolish and weak,' Zsoronga said.
They spoke of Obotegwa long into the night, and it seemed indistinguishable from speaking about life. They said things wise and foolish by turns, as young, intelligent men are prone. And at last, when weariness and grief overcame them, Zsoronga told the Sakarpi King how Obotegwa had insisted that he befriend Sorweel, how the old Obligate had always believed he would surprise them all. And then the Successor-Prince told him how, on the morn, he would add the name Harweel to his ancestor list.
'A brother!' the Successor-Prince whispered with startling violence. 'Sakarpus has a brother in Zeum!'
They slept with the beloved dead, as was the custom in High Holy Zeum. Their breathing pulled deep with
