"So they would know not only that the Great Ordeal will be attacked, but when as well…"
"Very possibly," Eskeles said.
Sorweel thought of his father, of all the times he had heard him reason with his subjects, let alone his men. "To be a worthy King," Harweel had once told him, "is to lead, not to command." And he understood that all the bickering, all the discourse he had considered wasted breath, "tongue-measuring," was in fact central to kingship.
"Look," he said. "We all know this expedition is a farce, that Kayutas sent us to patrol a rear flank that would never have been patrolled otherwise simply because we are the Scions-the sons of his father's enemies. We cover territory that a host would otherwise be blind to, territory a cunning enemy could exploit. While patrolling this imaginary flank, we stumble across a war-party with no sentries posted, oblivious enough to find respite in the shade. In other words, we find proof that for this corner of the Istyuli, at least, the Great Ordeal does not exist…"
He trailed to let the Schoolmen complete his translation.
"Then we find the slaughtered elk, something you say Sranc only do when Hording-which we know cannot be the case…"
Sorweel hesitated, looked from man to man, the stern old veteran and the square-bearded sorcerer.
"You have our attention, my King," Eskeles said.
"All I have are guesses…"
"And we are dutifully astounded."
Sorweel looked out over the milling ponies to the vast elk trail, which was little more than the mottling of darker greys across the predawn landscape. Somewhere… Out there.
"My guess," he said, reluctantly turning back to the two men, "is that we've stumbled across some kind of Consult army, one that-" He paused to gulp air and swallow. "One that shadows the Great Ordeal using the elk both to feed itself and to conceal their trail. My guess is they plan to wait until the Great Ordeal comes against the Hording…" He swallowed and nodded as if suddenly recalling some adolescent insecurity. He flinched from an image of his father, speaking dust from the dirt. "Then… then attack the host from behind… But…"
"But what?" Eskeles asked.
"But I'm not sure how this could be possible. The Sranc, they…"
Eskeles and Harnilas exchanged a worried glance. The Captain looked up, gazed at the young King in the fixed manner officers use to humble subordinates. Without breaking eye contact, he said, "Aethum souti sal meretten," to the Mandate Schoolman beside him. Then he continued in Sheyic spoken slowly enough for Sorweel to follow. "So. What would you do?"
The young King of Sakarpus shrugged. "Ride hard for the Aspect-Emperor."
The old officer smiled and nodded, slapped him on the shoulder before bawling for camp to be broken.
"So it is possible?" Sorweel asked Eskeles, who remained beside him, watching with a strange, almost fatherly gleam in his eyes. "The Sranc could be doing what I think?"
The Schoolman crushed his beard into his barrel chest, nodding. "In ancient times, before the coming of the No-God, the Consult would harness the Sranc, chain them into great assemblies that the Ancient Norsirai called Yokes…" He paused, blinking as though to pinch away unwanted memories. "They would drive them the way we drive slaves in the Three Seas, starve them until their hungers reached a fever pitch. Then, when they reached a position where the Sranc could smell Mannish blood on the wind, they would strike the chains and let them run."
Something within the Sakarpi King, a binding of fear and hope, slumped in relief. He almost reeled for exhaustion, as if alarm alone had sustained him through all the sleepless watches.
The Schoolman steadied him with a hand on his shoulder.
"My King?"
Sorweel shook his head to dismiss the sorcerer's worry. He looked out across the morning plain: Sakarpus could be directly behind him instead of weeks away, for all the difference the horizon made.
"The Captain…" he said, returning the sorcerer's gaze. "What did he say to you just then?"
"That you possess the gifts of a great king," Eskeles replied, squeezing his shoulder the way his father had, whenever he took pride in his son's accomplishments.
Gifts? something within him wanted to cry. No…
Only things that the dirt had told him.
CHAPTER FIVE
As death is the sum of all harms, so is murder the sum of all sins.
The world has its own ways, sockets so deep that not even the Gods can dislodge them. No urn is so cracked as Fate.
Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Somewhere South of Gielgath…
That which comes after determines what comes before-in this World.
The Gift-of-Yatwer walked across ordained ground. His skin did not burn, thanks to the swarthiness he had purchased with his seed. His feet did not blister, thanks to the calluses he had purchased with his youth. But he grew weary as other men grew weary, for like them, he was a thing of flesh and blood. But he always tired when he should grow tired. And his every slumber delivered him to the perfect instant of waking. Once to the sound of lutes and to the generosity of travelling mummers. Another time to a fox that bolted, leaving the goose it had been laboriously dragging.
Indeed, his every breath was a Gift.
He crossed the exhausted plantations of Anserca, drawing stares from those slaves who saw him. Though he walked alone, he followed a file of thousands across the fields, for he was always the stranger he pursued, and the back before him was forever his own. He would look up, see himself walking beneath a solitary, windswept tree, vanishing stride by stride over the far side of a hill. And when he turned, he would see that same tree behind him, and the same man descending the same slope. A queue of millions connected him to himself, from the Gift who coupled with the Holy Crone to the Gift who watched the Aspect-Emperor dying in blood and expressionless disbelief.
He was the ripple across dark waters. The bow of force thrown across a length of a child's rope.
He saw the assassin gagging on his own blood. He saw the besieging armies, the hunger in the streets. He saw the Holy Shriah turn oblivious and bare his throat. He saw the Andiamine Heights crashing upon itself, the Empress's eyes flutter about her final breath…
And he walked alone, following a road of fields, stranded in the now of a mortal soul.
Day after day, across mile after mile of tilled earth-the very bosom of his dread Mother. He slept between the rising stalks, the nascent heads, listening to his Mother's soothing whisper, staring at stars that were silver lines.
He followed his footprints across the dust, witnessing more than plotting the murder of the dead.
The River Sempis
At least, Malowebi thought to himself as he swayed in his saddle, he could say he had seen a ziggurat before he died. What could that fool, Likaro, say? There was more to travel than bedding Nilnameshi slave boys, just as there was more to diplomacy than wearing an ambassador's wig.
Cohorts of horsemen fanned across the land, filing along irrigation dikes, filtering through groves and across millet fields. Hills like broken molars fenced the north, marking the arid frontier of Gedea. The River Sempis lay to the immediate south, black and green and placid, broad enough to shroud the South Bank in blue-grey haze. Five plumes of smoke rose from disparate points on the horizon before them.
One of those plumes, Malowebi knew, led the dusty army to Iothiah.
"It is a dangerous thing," Fanayal ab Kascamandri said from his side, a sharp grin drawing wide his elaborate goatee, "to parlay with the enemies of dangerous men. And in the whole wide world, my friend, no man is so dangerous as Kurcifra."