The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(179)

For the D?nyain.

“But the World!” the old Wizard protests.

“The World—pfah! Let it burn! Let babes hang like leaves from trees! Let the screams of your cities crack the Heavens!”

“But how can you sa—?”

“My will shall be done!” the barbarian screams. “Anas?rimbor Kellhus will choke upon my knife! I shall cut out the bowel he calls his heart!”

“So that’s it?” Achamian cries. “Cnaiür urs Ski?tha, Breaker-of-horses-and-Men! Consult slave!”

The King-of-Tribes clubs as much as strikes the old Wizard to the shrouded ground.

“I would have let you live, sorcerer!” he thunders, hauling the hapless man from the dark. She glimpses Achamian’s face, gasping as if tossed between ocean rollers—drowning …

Panic, like a thousand little claws scratching a heart of plaster.

“I would have spared your bitch!” the Barbarian King rages. “Your unborn chi—!”

And she hears herself screech, “You!”

Wonder arrests the dark and grease-burning World.

“You are not of the People!”

She cannot feel her face, but she can feel them with excruciating clarity, the Chorae, Tears-of-God no more, hanging in the dark, like lead pellets dimpling the sodden tissue of existence. A dozen little rips.

Cnaiür urs Ski?tha has turned from the fallen Wizard and now faces her, a granitic shadow before white gossamer flame. He stands before her, his flesh leather strapped about conflagration. The whole night roars and marvels.

“Your entire life!” she cries. “Always thinking … thinking one thought too many!”

The furnace apparition looms …

“Your! Entire! Life!”

The Eye closes, and a terror overwhelms her. Her gaze is bent from the hulking shadow toward the macabre horse and rider hooked on poles … at Maurax sitting beneath the carrion display. She is transfixed …

“Yes,” the Scylvendi says on a bull murmur. “You do resemble her …”

Maurax, she realizes, is no more. A woman sits in his place. Flaxen hair, long and lustrous, molten with firelight, pallid with shadow.

“Esmenet … Yes. I remember …”

The name seizes her attention as surely as a slap, but Cnaiür is already peering beyond her.

“Look at me, boy.”

Shock. She had forgotten the boy.

The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes towers before the two of them, his shadow encompassing her whole. She can make out his savage mien, see the dim facts of his expression, the way he blinks, staring at the boy like an addict stepping from an opium pit.

“Cnaiür!” she hears Achamian cry. “Scylvendi!”

The Barbarian King extends a callous-horned hand to the boy’s cheek … The boy does not so much as flinch from the great thumb that dents his skin. Instead, he gazes up with a bland, slow-blinking curiosity that exposes everything.

“Ishu?l …” she hears Cnaiür exhale on a shudder.



The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes turns to confer with the thing that had been Maurax, but was now a beautiful Norsirai girl …

Serw?, Mimara realizes. Her stepfather’s other wife.

She has suffered untold absurdities since fleeing the Andiamine Heights. She has witnessed more rank impossibilities, more offenses to nature and scruple than she could hope to enumerate. She has huddled beneath raving abominations. But none of it bruised her quite so strangely as this … as Serw? …

In Momemn, Serw? was more than just a staple of dynastic legend, a ghost for being so intimately embroiled in the mad circus of the Anas?rimbor. She was also a weapon, and a shameful one. Mimara regularly used her in arguments with her mother—and how could she not, when it was a name that exposed the Empress for a fraud? The dead were always more chaste, more pure of past and intention. As the living wife, Anas?rimbor Esmenet could not but be the fallen wife …

“Did you exult, Mother, watching her rot upon the Circumfix? Did you celebrate for having survived?”

Such cruel things we say, when we make rods of our wounds.

Without a word of explanation, Cnaiür urs Ski?tha strides into the darkness beyond the depression, abandons them to Maurax-become-Serw?.

The World, the Zaudunyani poets called her. For as she died, so too had the innocence of Men. It seems a mockery unto sacrilege, that a skin-spy might wear her beauteous form.

The three of them watch in a stupor as the counterfeit woman begins barking commands into the night. The Scylvendi tongue is curious, at once as harsh as chipped flint and as slippery as flayed skin. Warriors, arms grilled in swazond, set out across the deformities of the little plateau. The Chorae Bowmen are dismissed—a fact Mimara would have celebrated were it not for the malign presence of Serw?—and the Trinket bound against her counterfeit navel.

With the boy in tow she draws Achamian into the firelight, does what she can to staunch the blood welling from his lower lip. Her head still spins for panic and confusion.

“He’s not through with us,” he murmurs. “Let me speak.”

“So you can get us killed?”

The amiable old face scowls.

“You don’t know him, Mimara.”

“The legendary Cnaiür urs Ski?tha …” she says on a gentle sneer. “I think I know him better than any …”