The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(175)

Achamian eases himself to his rump, glaring, then, relying on his pelts for comfort, he rolls away from her. By some miracle, he manages to hold his tongue.

The sight of his back comforts her for some reason.

Do you see, little one? I bear you …

She lays back into her exhaustion, cooling, drifting.

And he bears me …



She sways and topples through something like a dream, a tempest flashing on some nocturnal horizon …

“What are you doing?”

Achamian’s voice, sharp enough to crack through the suffocating felt. She starts. Mere months ago she would have simply popped upright, but her belly forbids it, so she flails like an upturned beetle.

“Kirila meirwat dagru—” the boy is saying.

Night has claimed all the world as its spoil. She sees the old Wizard, but more as shape than substance. His ragged silhouette stands at a cautious distance, four paces or so from her feet. She whirls to the boy, who sits cross-legged on her immediate right. His eyes are luminous, searching. He holds “Chipmunk”—the bronze knife she plundered from the Library of Sauglish—flat across his left thigh. And in his crabbed hand he holds …

“It … makes … light,” the boy says in careful Sheyic.

As she watches, the boy scrapes the Chorae he holds in his right hand along the length of the sorcerous blade. Lightning whitens the hunched grotto of his fascination, engraving the grotesquerie of his maimed hand as vividly as the innocence of his face.

She strikes him out of some reflex, the way one might a child frolicking too near open flame. The boy catches her wrist without the least effort or worry. His look, as always, betrays nothing more than curiosity. She yanks her arm clear, fairly barges into his lap, scooping up Chipmunk and her Chorae both. She spares the boy a furious heartbeat, both glaring and grating.

“No,” she says, as if instructing a puppy. “No!”

“The knife,” Achamian says, still keeping his distance—because of the Chorae, she realizes. “Let me see it.”

She tosses it to him with a snort. She suddenly realizes the old Wizard has been right all along, that they should have continued fleeing into the night. Shivers crash across her, and she fumbles the exposed Chorae trying to slip it back into the pouch. She curses, squats, and begins pawing through the leaves scaling the ground.

“Emilidis …” the old Wizard says on a contemplative rasp.

“What?” she asks, retrieving and stowing the Trinket with its sibling. Her teeth are chattering. She bunches the back of her golden hauberk, draws the silken weight over her head. Qirri … a voice whispers.

Qirri will allow them to flee through the night. Yes.

“Your knife was locked in the Coffers for a reason …” the old Wizard says, still peering.

The boy, who has not moved, peers into the surrounding blackness. Perhaps he can feel shame. She begins slinging her pelts about her shoulders, winces for the reek.

“The greatest of the ancient Artificers made this,” Achamian explains.

“What?” she asks, tugging the knife from his grasp. “Chipmunk?”

The D?nyain boy pops effortlessly to his feet, his attention pricked to something in the dark. Both she and Akka follow his gaze into the wooded blackness, searching in vain.

“Travellers!” a voice booms across the clearing, one harsh with barbaric intonation.

She fairly swoons, so profound is her shock.

Voices, human voices, begin baying from the encircling blackness, tones of barbaric outrage and triumph, each as sharp and porcelain as teeth. Suddenly she can feel them, a necklace of needling absences identical to those against her breast, closing upon them from all angles. Chorae Bowmen. Scylvendi Chorae Bowmen.

“Three Seas scum!”

Bars of moonlight wink through the woolen sky, baring all in bloodless illumination.

She sees Achamian, a mad hermit sorcerer standing every bit as transfixed as she, only with his face held down as if in dread contemplation. She sees the figure addressing them, the blue-faced, bearded Scylvendi from before. The hard-faced tongue-walker …

“Attend me or die!” the barbarian shouts on a curious, lupine roll of his head.

The old Wizard raises his face. “Who—?”

“Maurax urs Cagn?ralka calls on you! The Childstrangler. The Great and Holy Throatcutter. Our mighty King-of-Tribes would scry your fate with his own cruel eyes!”



To think they had feared the Sranc.

Blue-face had bid Achamian to light their way. Now midges and mosquitoes form a scribbling halo about his Surillic Point. They follow it across bleached confusion, wading through sheaved scrub and weeds rising stark from absolute black. The surrounding trees are scabbed in white. A welter of glimpses surface from the gloom beyond them. Brutal profiles. Forearms roped in sinew and striped with scars. Figures floating on saddles. Pinpricks of oblivion swim in the greater black—she can feel them, hanging above the bottom, little fish wandering in loose schools. Sranc periodically screech and yelp from tracts unknown.

Blue-face had punched Achamian full in the mouth when he dared voice a question. So they spend watch after watch trudging in silence, a pocket of sorcerous light creeping through the tangled black, an avalanche of wild horsemen as their escort. Mimara holds her belly, squinting away the waves of dozing nausea. The unborn infant is restless, kicks continually. Twice the boy catches her stumbling. She knows it well, the slurry of dread and exhaustion, and the movements of her soul seem all the more mad for it. Solace in the Eye—the unfaltering fire of a conviction she had never known. Terror in the thought, the knowledge that these were Scylvendi. And so it seemed that she was assured—both of the miracle that would save them, and of the torment that would see them doomed.