The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(177)

No one moves, other than two warriors tossing another carcass upon the fire. The Nail of Heaven squints and glowers above them, marking the direction of Golgotterath.

Her eyes adjust. Achamian, she can see, alternately clenches and releases the nimil hauberk he drew from the ashes of Nil’giccas …

Fat hisses in flame.

“Be done with it!” the old Wizard finally cries.

The barbaric scrutiny continues.

“Kill us and be done with it!” Achamian cries, his disgust so profound it verges on hilarity.

“The woman,” Maurax says in a deep, scarcely-accented voice. “She is yours?”

The fact that he had not so much as glanced at her makes the question all the more terrifying.

Achamian glares in horror.

“Wha-what?” he stammers, then stops on a swallow, licks his lips, breathes deep. A kind of resignation seems to calm him. “What do you want?”

The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes leans forward, elbows out, hands on knees. He has the air of a man dispensing advice to a half-wit.

“Migagurit says you wear your stain deep, Three Seas … That you are a sorcerer-of-rank.”

Achamian glances at Blue-face. The bonfire makes a wiry halo of his beard and hair as he does so. “Yes.”

An appraising look, one both possessing the lettered arrogance of kings and the ignorant conceit of barbarians.

“And what brings a sorcerer-of-rank and his pregnant woman to the High Wild?”

An incredulous smirk creases the old Wizard’s face. He raises a hand to the back of his neck, shakes his lowered face in disbelief. He is done with madness, Mimara can tell. He would quit his ancient contest with the Whore, even at the cost of his life. Were he alone, she knows, this would all end in salt and incineration.

But he is not alone. He glances at her, and even though the bonfire’s white glare obscures his expression, she knows he begs forgiveness as much as permission.

“Searching …” he says with exhausted boldness. “Searching for Ishu?l, the hidden refuge of the D?nyain …”

Maurax does not so much as blink. “You risk much,” he says through gravel, his eyes clicking to and from Mimara. “What does Ishu?l possess that warrants such a throw?”

Achamian stands motionless. “The truth of the Holy Aspect-Empe—”

“LIES!” one of the Nine booms.



The man’s shadow erupts from the depression’s rim. The first of the Nine towers over the old Wizard, the details of his face and figure burned into blackness for the blistering white of the bonfire. But she does not need to see to know that he is the true power here, the true King-of-Tribes. But it is the menace of his frame, at once lean and thick, and the grating malice of his voice that name him …

“You …” the old Wizard croaks.

The shadow spits. She thinks she must smell his famished grin, because she cannot see it.

Slicked in firelight, Achamian’s face has been struck of all defences, stripped to the wonder. “Th-they said you were dead,” he stammers.

“Aye. Dead …” the figure grates.

The fire of white burning Sranc blackens him. She feels more than sees his gaze slide across her face and belly … and then, as if on some mad whim, glide to the stars.

“Dead, I walked across the desert.” His voice sounds of cracking timbers, crashing stone. “Dead, I drank deep the blood of vultures. Dead, I returned to the People …”

She can actually feel his invisible gaze seize the old Wizard anew.

“And dead, I conquered …”

The other Scylvendi warriors have averted their gaze—even Blue-face peers at his boots. Only Maurax, it seems, dares look upon him directly.

“I have not the skin,” the great shadow continues, “to bear the number I have taken. I have not the bones to carry the wickedness I have wrought. The sky gags for the bodies burned. The Hells grow fat on the back of my wrath—my judgment!”

Posturing. Pious declarations of prowess, ferocity and might. Were this the Andiamine Heights, she would have sneered, even tittered aloud—to needle Mother if nothing else. But not here—not with this man, whose every word stabbed as a knife.

“And you, sorcerer? Is Drusas Achamian dead as well?”

Achamian peers at the silhouette, glances down as if cowed by some unseen fury. “And alive,” he says with a meekness that makes her cringe.

And with that, the Eye opens …

And she finds herself in the captivity of the damned.

“What does this mean,” the King-of-Tribes asks. “Eh, sorcerer? What does our meeting portend?”

All is illumined before the Eye. It knows no shadow—the same as It knows no past, no future. She sees him, Cnaiür urs Ski?tha, the legend, and she cannot look away. She sees him for the soul he is.

“I am a fool in this,” the old Wizard retorts. “No different than you.”

The Scylvendi demon grins. It is like staring into a furnace, watching him. Heat pinches her cheeks. She squints against the blowing of unseen sparks. The sins of the Wizard—grievous though they may be—are but trifles compared to the atrocities wrought by this one man.

A bark of laughter. “So our ends are one! You too have come to collect from our common debtor.”

And she sees it, a flicker bound to the back of flickers, a myriad of criminal glimpses. Babes caught on sword-point. Mothers raped and strangled.