Yesterday, he had been a Schoolman, begging and conniving, awakening to find himself strangled, his eyes clotted with two thousand years of grief. Yesterday, he had been the husband of a whore, loving against the pitch of circumstance and fanatical horror. To be a weak man, cursed with convictions that others could scarcely conceive, let alone consider. To be a laughingstock, a cuckold, counted treacherous among your brothers.
Yesterday, he had been a Wizard, measuring days with his resentments and ruminations, scrawling errant messages that not even fools would read. Yesterday, he had been a mad hermit, a prophet in the wilderness, lacking the heart to act on his own mad declarations. To have a question that was at once a hatred… To have a love that was at once a loss … and a cry for vengeance.
Yesterday, he had beheld Ishu?l.
The intruder’s shadow strode toward them, gathering substance and detail with every step.
Never had he felt so defeated … so old.
Too much …
The crab-handed boy lingered close enough to murder.
Too much …
His own wind rattled the cage of his lungs, bolted for escape.
The light seemed to seize the figure, hoist his terrifying visage from the gloom of the Thousand Thousand Halls. But he did not surface as he should according to swales of smooth skin and muscle. Illumination tripped across ridges of braided tissue, edged the crater of a missing cheek, gleamed across exposed gums and the remnants of teeth. Shadow inked innumerable hooks and gouges, the knotted scribble of children who had more time than papyrus.
The spoor of a thousand mortal battles, of a D?nyain in extremis, pursuing the intangible lines of survival and triumph through countless threshing swords, playing the margins of his own flesh, ignoring all but the most lethal incisions, so that he might kill and kill and overcome … Endure.
They are evil… So said the Eye.
The Survivor was a grotesquery. Even still Achamian could see through the skein of hideous scarring: the lineage, the bones and blood of antique Kings.
“You know my father,” the D?nyain said, his voice as deep and melodious as Truth. “Anas?rimbor Kellhus …”
Drusas Achamian retreated, his limbs moving without his volition. He stumbled, literally crashed onto his rump.
“Tell me …” the grotesquerie said.
Yesterday, the old Wizard had sought to deliver the World from destruction.
“Has he grasped the Absolute?”
CHAPTER SIX
Momemn
And there did a Narindar find him and kill him, pricking him with a poison needle behind the ear. Word passed throughout the Empire, and the multitudes were filled with wonder that an Aspect-Emperor could be sorted in his own garden. Within a fortnight, foul assassination had become manifest prophecy, and no action was taken against the Cult of the Four-Horned Brother. All the World wished the matter forgotten.
—The Annals of Cenei, CASIDAS
It is said of the Nansur that they fear their fathers, love their mothers, and trust their siblings, but only so far as they fear their fathers.
The Ten Thousand Day Dynasty, HOMIRRAS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
“Noooo …” the Padirajah howled.
Malowebi stood staring across the cluttered gloom of the grand pavilion, stranded three steps inside its threshold by protocol. Fanayal stood at his own bedside, staring down at the death throes of his Cishaurim, Meppa—or as his people knew him, Stonebreaker. The Padirajah, who had always seemed lean and youthful, now seemed fatted with his fifty-plus years. Psatma Nannaferi lounged upon a brocaded settee nearby, her dark eyes glittering like quicksilver on the gloom’s phantom verge. Her gaze never left the ailing Padirajah, who held his face turned from her—deliberately it seemed. She watched and watched, her expression one of genuine expectancy and sly contempt, as though she awaited an adored part of a well-rehearsed tale, one featuring the villain she most despised. It almost made her seem as youthful as she should seem.
Gleaming edges and surfaces cluttered the encircling shadows, glimpses of plunder, the Padirajah’s share of Iothiah. Fired pottery. Heaps of clothing. Brocaded furnishings. From where the Mbimayu Schoolman stood, the scene almost seemed cobbled from these fragments, debris bricked into Creation …
The stage where the fabled Fanayal ab Kascamandri reckoned his doom.
“Nooo!” he cried to the prostrate form. The Twin Scimitars of Fanimry, the gold-on-black banner of his nation and faith, had been kicked across the floor, and now lay neglected beneath his feet, one more looted carpet. The White Horse on Gold, the famed Coyauri flag that Fanayal used as his personal standard yet hung, but scorched and tattered for the very battle that had laid Meppa low …
Malowebi had already overheard Fanayal’s wild desert warriors murmuring and arguing amongst themselves. The Whore Empress had done this, they said. Kucifra’s woman had struck the Last Cishaurim down …
“What will they say?” the Yatwerian witch cooed, still watching him from her settee. “How far can you trust them?”
“Bridle your tongue,” Fanayal murmured. He leaned as if hung from hooks, peering at his fallen Cishaurim. The Padirajah had wagered everything on the man that lay dying on his silk sheets below—every favour his God had afforded him.