“And to you, you most of all, have I been unjust. Can you forgive an old man? Can you forgive a foolish old man?”
Seswatha lowered his forehead to his royal rings, kissed his numb fingertips.
“There’s nothing to forgive, Celmomas. You’ve lost much, suffered much.”
Tears spliced an illuminated world.
“My son … Do you think he’ll be there, Seswatha? Do you think he’ll greet me as his father?”
“Yes …” Seswatha replied roughly. “As his father, and as his king.”
And there was such comfort in this lie, a swooning relief, a swell of ferocious, paternal pride. “Did I ever tell you,” Achamian said, “that my son once stole into the deepest pits of Golgotterath?”
“Yes,” the Sohonc Grandmaster replied blinking. “Many times, old friend.”
“How I miss him, Seswatha!” Achamian cried, his eyes hooking back, rolling. “How I yearn to stand at his side once again.”
A silhouette resolved from the high-hanging brilliance … a figure, riding in majesty and divine glory.
“I see him so clearly,” the High-King gasped. “He’s taken the sun as his charger, and he rides among us. I see him! Galloping through the hearts of my people, stirring them to wonder and fury!”
Gilga?l, War, come to claim him … Come to save, despite everything.
“Shush … Conserve your strength, my King. The surgeons are coming.”
The vision’s eyes were fury, his hair the tangle of warring nations, and his teeth were as whetted blades. A crown gleamed above his brow, four golden horns, clutched in the arms of four nubile virgins—the Spoils. Bones and bodies clotted the ravines of his grim expression. And his cloak smoked with the burning of fields.
Gilga?l, the Dread Father of Death, the All-Taker.
Brave, broken King …
He did not so much fly toward the High King as grow, bigger and bigger, bloating until he blotted the Whirlwind, crowded the very sky. Fire sheathed and pulsed across his four horns, streams that plummeted in skyward oblivion. He opened his hands, and lo! Another stood within the curved palms, another man, bright as a ceremonial knife. A Norsirai, though his beard was squared and plaited in the fashion of Shir and Kyraneas. His dress was strange, and his arms and armour bore the glint of Nonmen metals. Two decapitated heads swung from his girdle …
Behold the son of a hundred fathers …
Behold the end of the World …
“He says … says such sweet things to give me comfort. He says that one of my seed will return, Seswatha—an Anas?rimbor will return …”
A cough that was a convulsion wracked the High-King and the old Wizard could feel clotted things float loose within. Blood foamed against the back of his throat. He pulled his next breath as through a burning reed. Then the darkness at last came out of hiding, spilled from all quarters into his life and vision.
“At the end of th—”
Drusas Achamian awoke screaming.
Drusas Achamian is tender. As much as Mimara loves him for this, she recoils whenever he awakes crying out. Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to the pinch of fire and coals, insensible to burning things.
“I saw so—” he begins, only to be throttled by waking phlegm. He gazes at her with idiot need.
She looks away, expressionless. She knows the cruelty of his Dreams—as well as anyone who’s not a Mandate Schoolman, she knows. Even still she cannot bring herself to ask after the matter, let alone comfort him.
A part of her has forgotten how. The judging portion.
So she gazes across the mountain slopes as he collects himself, staring with sham curiosity at the high-climbing flanges of stone. The D?nyain watch from perches in the nearby ruin, two faces in her periphery, unnerving for their blank vigilance.
She finally believes what Achamian has always insisted. She knows they see the souls behind human expression the way architects see behind the facades of great buildings. She knows that they see her hatred, her murderous intent—she knows that every word she speaks brings them infinitesimally closer to mastering her …
She does not care, let alone worry. What was cunning was wicked also: they could do naught but bare their souls to the Judging Eye. And even if the Eye failed, she had swooned for the evil visited upon the Whale Mothers. There could be no undoing the foul umbrage stamped into her heart. If she could not see, she would hate.
The question was Achamian. What would that blank vigilance make of him? Had his heart been likewise hardened?
Or had the long toll finally emptied his purses?
Am I too harsh with him, little one?