As a boy, Malowebi had been strangely affected upon hearing how those deemed guilty of capital offences aboard Satakhanic warships would be sewn into sacks and summarily cast into the Ocean. “Pursing”, the sailors had named the practice. It haunted him the way a premonition might, the thought of being immobilized without being bound, of possessing the ability to move without the ability to swim, of jerking and clawing and drowning in the infinite chill. Years later, on the galley that had transported him to his first Tenure as a young man, he had the misfortune of witnessing the punishment firsthand. A fight between rowers had led to one bleeding out during the night: the survivor was condemned as a murderer and sentenced to the Purse. The condemned man had begged the deck for mercies, knowing that none was to be had, while three marines manhandled him into a long burlap sack. The wretch had implored in whispers, Malowebi would remember, murmurs so low as to make loud the creaking timbers, the sloshing below the gunwales, the bone-rattle of knots in the rigging. The Captain spake a short verse to Momas Almighty, and then kicked the keening sack overboard. Malowebi had heard the muffled shriek, had watched the sack twist like a maggot into the greening depths, then had fled to vomit as inconspicuously as he could over the opposite side. He would be weeks shaking the last bubbles of anxiety from his limbs. And it would be years before he stopped hearing ghosts of that muffled cry.
The dream he suffered now was like this death sentence, something dark and drowning, something he could thrash and kick within, but never escape. A Pursing both more protracted and more profound.
Somehow, from a vantage he could not quite explain, he saw himself hanging before Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the World spinning ruin around them. The man’s sword scissored across the angle of the sun, and Malowebi screamed as his head tipped from his shoulders and dropped to the woven earth …
His head! Rolling like a cabbage.
Malowebi’s corpse twitched in the man’s irresistible grip, spouted blood, voided itself. Casting his blade into the carpeted earth, the Aspect-Emperor seized one of the Decapitants, wrenched the diabolical trophy from his girdle, then raised the horror to the welling stump of neck …
The unconquerable Anas?rimbor Kellhus spoke. His eyes ignited like blown-upon coals, flared with infernal meaning.
The union of desiccate tissue with warm, ebony flesh was instantaneous. Blood sluiced into and soaked the desert-rotted papyrus, transforming the Decapitant into something horrid and sodden, a bundle of pitch-soaked rags. The Aspect-Emperor released the thing, watched with utter indifference as it stumbled forward to its knees, swayed …
Malowebi screamed, kicked and clawed at the nightmarish fabric, choked on his own terror—drowned. This isn’t happening! This cannot be happening!
The abomination raised his hands, held them about the sorcerous turmoil of its face, the knitting of his blood to its blasted meat and skin. Malowebi screamed for watching Malowebi reborn in demonic replica.
The whirlwind roared about them both, a ruinous blur.
“Return to the Palace of Plumes,” the Aspect-Emperor called to the unholy slave. “End the line of Nganka’kull.”
Without lungs, void was his only wind. He howled until void was all that remained.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Demua Mountains
To stand tallest beneath the sun is the yearning of the child and the old man alike. For verily, age raises us up and strips us down. But where the child dreams as he should, the old man is naught but a miser. The curse of growing old is to watch one’s passion fall ever more out of season, to dwell ever more in the shadow of perversity.
—ASANSIUS, The Limping Pilgrim
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Demua Mountains
The boy flies up a nearby tree as quick as a monkey despite his crabbed hand. She and Achamian run across the forest floor, both huffing and lurching under their respective burdens, age and womb. The sun flashes through the shadowy dapple. Throngs of scrub, fern, and weed scrape and tug at their scissoring legs.
Fear not, little one …
A Sranc screams through the bowered gloom behind them, a skinned sound, glistening with anguish, yanked short by something unknown.
Your father is a Wizard!
“There!” Achamian cries on a hoarse exhalation. He makes a gesture, palsied by exertion, to an overgrown pit at the base of an oak that some storm or tumult had toppled at the roots. They slip through a curtain of nettle, curse the sting under their breath.
One without any sense of direction …
Another Sranc shrieks, this one to the west. She thinks of faraway dogs barking in the morning chill, the way they made a tin pot of the World. It smells dank and sweet in their trench, like sunless soil and rotting green.