The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(182)

“And the boy, here … You took him as your hostage?”

The old Wizard hesitates. She hears her voice leap into the silence—quite against her resolution.

“He is a refugee …”

The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes glares like someone slapped clear of delirium. His scowl is instant, the glove most worn by his face. The boy, she realizes, sensing the child’s immobile presence on her left—the boy has been the mad Scylvendi’s motivating concern since the episode beneath the bonfire … when he had glimpsed the child’s resemblance to his Holy Grandfather—Anas?rimbor Kellhus.

“Refugee …” For the first time the cruel eyes slacken. “You mean Ishu?l … has fallen?”

This time they both remain silent.

“N-no,” Achamian begins. “The boy merely sought asylum fro—”

“Silence!” Cnaiür urs Ski?tha screams at the old Wizard. “Ketyai scum!” he says, spitting. The flames hiss like a cat. “Always you seek advantage! Always conniving—worse than greedy wives!”

He draws a knife from his girdle—whips it with an outward arc. Mimara can scarcely blink, let alone raise warding arms …

But the knife zips past her cheek. She does not quite see, so quick is the shining passage, but she knows the boy has batted the blade to the side with his hale hand.

The barbarian now glares at the sorcerer, and for an instant, Mimara glimpses him, her terrible stepfather, Anas?rimbor Kellhus, sitting impervious in the interval between these disfigured souls. The spectre … the curse … that shackled them, these two most unlikely of Men.

She does not like the involuntary way Achamian’s jaw works. She likes the tendons finning the Scylvendi’s neck even less. “You know me!” the Barbarian King booms. “You know my cruelty knows no bounds! Tell me the truth, sorcerer! Tell me, lest I pluck your precious Eye!”

The thing-called-Serw? smiles at her from across the flames, glances toward the boy.

Achamian looks down to his hands, though out of cowardice or calculation she cannot tell.

“We found Ishu?l ruined.”

“Ruined?” The barbarian is shocked. “What? By him? By Kellhus?”

She glances at the boy, who for some prescient reason seems to be awaiting her look. She wants to cry out to him, tell him to run, for she knows, even though the thought has yet to occur to her. She knows that she and Achamian might pray to escape, but not the boy, not the orphaned seed of Anas?rimbor Kellhus.

“No…” Achamian says. “By the Consult.”

“More lies!”

“No! We-we found tunnels beneath the fortress. A labyrinth filled with the bones of Sranc!”

Run! she wanted to cry. Flee! But her voice is stilled. The golden blur in her periphery, the thing-called-Serw?, watches with bottomless black eyes, poised in soulless fixation.

“How long ago was it destroyed?” Cnaiür urs Ski?tha barks.

“I-I don’t know …”

“How long?” the barbarian repeats, his voice more hollow …

“Ye-years,” Achamian stammers. “Years ago.”

She sees Serw?’s impossible leap before she feels the air rushing to fill the boy’s absence. The abomination pirouettes beneath the radial felt ceiling, lands rolling into another explosive leap through the threshold. Mimara can scarcely snap her head about quickly enough.

She blinks tears of astonished joy, battles the urge to smile. Of course! she silently cries, clutching her belly. Of course he heard her!

He is D?nyain.



Alarums were raised, howls, clipped and guttural, leaping from breast to breast, igniting outward across the slumbering Scylvendi host.

And the boy sprinted—ran the way his dead father had shown him, the way he had been bred …

Alive.

He was young. He was fleet. He was neither weightless nor cumbersome, but that occult in-between, smoke when soaring, grass when twisting, stone when striking. He flew through a necklace of nocturnal grottos, Scylvendi warriors crawling to their feet, milling in confusion, gazing at random points of sky the way Men are prone when keen to distant calls. They could scarcely see, let alone seize him. They could scarcely comprehend …

He flitted through, over and between, beyond any hope of catching. Only their cries could outrun him. Shouts of coordination rang hoarse through the forest, different throats, different positions, pinpointing him in the racing black. He sensed mobs closing into ranks.

He need only turn, and the coalescing order dissolved into more confusion. Soft humus underfoot. Close arboreal air. The pinched musk of warriors long on the trail. And the freedom of the long run …

Torches wagged and glittered through ragged black screens. The Scylvendi host had morphed into a single beast, a far-flung composite, teeming like ants through detritus and dark. He would turn, and it would momentarily dissolve, then reassemble about ligaments of voice. He found his way blunted, though his feet scissored just as quick. He began as a spear thrown, but now he became a sparrow. He zig-zagged, continually tacking at intervals decreed by threat and happenstance. Glimpses of swazond girding arms in torchlight, blades bouncing moonlight, and horn bows raised. Choruses of shouts tracked him, forcing him into what pockets of obscurity the forest encampment possessed. Grim, outraged expressions. Tentacles of plainsmen twined across the tracts, curled about the most recent spate of hollering. He began doubling back, forcing the beast, vast and aggregate, to crash into itself. The sparrow became a gnat, a scribble. He took to the trees, leaping and swinging through arthritic lattices. Horses floating beneath. He heard shafts popping through foliage, ticking from bark, thudding into wood—sometimes about him, but almost always behind him. Savage faces squinting to peer. So long as he could astonish and shock the Scylvendi, so long as the darkness baffled their stunted sight, he could pass like smoke through their midst.