The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(21)

He recognized Saubon before properly seeing him, so distinct was his leaning, broad-shouldered gait. Starlight dusted the summits of his hair and beard, moonlight complicated the chain-mail draped about his far shoulder. Torchlight painted the substance of him orange and brown.

Proyas made as though to call out, but his breath became as a stone, something too heavy to move. All he could do was watch, sitting like a child or dog in the dust.

The Believer-King of Caraskand walked with blank purpose, like a man reviewing some bland yet loathsome chore standing between him and his slumber. Proyas could feel himself shrink with the man’s every step—what kind of shameful madness was this? Cringing like a beggar, fearful of a thrashing when starvation threatened him more. What had delivered him to such a low place?

Who?

Saubon walked obliviously until the obtuse angle between them became square. Then, as though his senses were canine, he turned to Proyas.

“You waited all this time … here … for me?”

Proyas peered into his face, searching for some sign of his own wax-kneed uncertainty. He saw none.

“There’s discord between us,” Proyas called out, dismayed by the weakness of his voice. “We must speak.”

The Norsirai studied him. “There’s discord, yes … but not between you and I.” He took two steps and crouched before him, close enough to touch with outstretched fingers.

“What ails you, Brother?”

Proyas fought the anguish scaling his face. He ran a hand across his cheek and jaw, as if to catch any treacherous ticks. “Ails me?” He had the impression of profound misunderstanding, of running afoul assumptions so mistaken as to be comic.

Saubon regarded him with a kind of gloating pity.

“The things he tells you,” Proyas finally said, his voice conspiratorial. “Does it not … trouble … what you once believed?”

Saubon pursed his lower lip, nodded. A torch staked nearby flared in a spasm of wind. Curlicues of gold swam and flickered across the Believer-King of Caraskand.

“I am troubled, aye. But not so much as you.”

“So he has told you!” Proyas hissed, finally grasping the reason behind his mad vigil.

A grave nod. “Yes.”

“He told you about the God of Gods!”

King Coithus Saubon scowled; bird-footed shadows rutted his temples.

“He told me you would be waiting here … for me.”

Proyas blinked. “What? You mean he … he …”

The Norsirai Exalt-General reached out a bare hand, clenched him firmly on the shoulder.

“He told me to be kind.”





CHAPTER TWO


Injor-Niyas


One cannot console those who pretend to weep.

—Conriyan Proverb





Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4123, Year-of-the-Tusk), the northern Demua Mountains

“Come …” Serwa said, her brother already wind-whipped and towering at her side.

Sorweel hesitated as always. It seemed an insult clutching her, feeling the slim body that his heart had never ceased to ponder, even when fury made his jaw ache and his ears roar. For no matter how hard he hated, his lust refused to leave him.

It was always the same. No sooner would a realization come to him than the warring dogs of his soul would tear it into something bewildering. He had thought his path clear. He was Narindar, as Zsoronga had said, an assassin of the Hundred. The Mother of Birth herself had anointed him, hiding him from the unnatural scrutiny of the Anas?rimbor, provisioning him with the weapons he needed, even raising him to the exalted station he required. Accursed or no, his Fate had drawn relentlessly nearer. Then the Nonmen embassy had arrived bearing the terms of their alliance with the Great Ordeal, and the dogs set their grinning teeth to his heart once again. She had told him herself: he was to be a Hostage of Ishterebinth, held captive with Serwa and her eldest brother, Mo?nghus.

Sorweel found himself thrown—sorcerous leap after sorcerous leap—across the ruins of ancient K?niüri with the daughter of his father’s murderer, somehow more infatuated after every stone cast. And he had thought that he might love her, dared imagine a different future, one that assassinated him instead of her father …

Only to discover her shuddering in the arms of her brooding, warrior brother.

“Horse-King … It is time to go.”

Sorweel hesitated for his hatred, but he yielded for want of recourse as much as for want of her. So he slung his right-arm about her waist, felt the heat of her body as an iron drawn from the fire. Thoughts chattering, he listened as her voice made a pipe of the World. Lights spun as they always spun, glittered like glass wrack tossed into the white heights of the sun, and he unravelled as he always unravelled, from the pith outward, his very existence flashing like the light of a mirror between horizons.



They had crossed the Demua Mountains this way. Sorweel, the false Believer-King, and the insane children of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, leaping from slope to precipice, skin and nerves alive to the cold, lungs burning for some unfathomable sharpness in the air—peak to gasping peak, always perched on the edge of the void. The whole world seemed tossed, the ground hooked and hanging, barked of everything save rims and ravines of snow. He huddled with them, his numb fingers latched about his shoulders, hugging what heat his breast and gut could muster, pulling against the shivers that would shake him into more snow. And he found he could not distinguish between his terrors, the vertigo of the scarps soaring about and below them, and the plummet of his heart.