Her brother’s aggrieved humour forced them to segregate, and so the young Believer-King found himself, impossibly, alone with the Aspect-Emperor’s daughter upon the flank of Shaugiriol, or “Eaglehorn” as she called it, the northernmost peak of the Demua. Finding some place to comfortably sleep was no easy task on a mountainside. Mo?nghus claimed the first, meagre horizontal shelf they encountered, forcing him and Serwa to scale a diagonal cleft to a lolling tongue of granite some twenty cubits above. Sorweel’s hands seemed to float and his boots seemed leaden. He dared not look up, lest some opportune glimpse of her nethers strike him numb. He feared for his life as it was, such was his vertigo, the sense of sideways gravity drawing him outward. But he clung and he climbed, the stone close enough to his face to smell. His breath a shallow pang, he followed her out to the edge of the outcropping, joined her sitting, gazing. He silently thanked the Hunter for the preternatural absence of wind.
The Nail of Heaven flared high and white directly to the north, frosting the nocturnal tracts below, and he listened as she explained the vast stage before them—the Leash, and Agongorea, and the soaring Yimaleti—enthralled not so much by her knowledge as by her proximity, her heat in such high, clean air, and he wondered how it could possibly be, wooing the daughter of an incarnate God with weapons provided by one without time or place.
“And Golgotterath,” she said, “lies in that direction.”
If she had said “Min-Uroikas,” his bones would have bolted in their flesh. Instead he turned, heart thrumming, to kiss her bare shoulder. She clasped him by his soft-furred cheeks, drank deeply from his lips. He lay back, drawing her down upon him. Taking the stars as her mantle, she straddled him, whispered, “I am not what you think I am,” as she lowered her fire upon his.
“Nor am I,” he replied.
“I can see through you …”
“Nooo,” he groaned. “You cannot.”
And so they made love, perched high on the Eaglehorn, the mountain from which so many ancient invasions had been spied. They moved slowly, gasped rather than cried, and yet the violence of their coupling, the desperation, would leave them sapped of all difference, wrapped one about the other, slicked in the same sweat, breathing as a single human being.
He awoke for a need to urinate. Eaglehorn’s stone was harder than it had seemed in the fog of carnal undertaking: the ground gnawed with grit and cold. Serwa lay nestled against him, buttocks to thighs; he rolled away, lest his rising lust disturb her. Far more than he or Mo?nghus, she required sleep. So he lay breathless and throbbing, his manhood aching in open air.
He gazed northward, searching for distraction. Golgotterath lay out there … somewhere. He looked for some glimpse of its fabled glimmer, but found himself peering after a flicker of movement instead, something hanging high in the great gulf between mountains. He squinted, even raised a hand to shield the Nail’s glare.
Horror climbed as a foam through him, crawling from his innards to his extremities …
A stork strung the dark void, buoyant upon the gusts, edges bleating.
The whole mountain seemed to turn on a wheel moving too slowly to see but still quickly enough to dizzy.
The Dread Mother was watching.
She had not forgotten her apostate assassin.
She knew.
His thoughts roiled. How did the Old Gods punish his brand of treachery? Damnation?
Would he burn for loving Anas?rimbor Serwa?
For seeing what Holy Yatwer could not?
He lay motionless, his body pressed against the space between him and the woman that had so bewitched him. A sob cracked the chill air, and he started a second time, afflicted by the mad certainty that he had authored the noise. But it was Mo?nghus, he realized, weeping upon his shelf below. Bull-chested gasps punctuated high-hooking moans, so obviously the issue of someone mighty, but belonging to a child all the same, the little black-haired boy who had been raised among the D?nyain.
And so the Believer-King drifted back to sleep believing sleep would be denied him.
Mu’miorn held him pinned to the pillows, grunting in time with his thrusts. Unpared nails left threads of pink and violet across milk white skin.
And then Serwa was crying out to him, and he found himself shivering upon the lip of oblivion. “We are in peril, Son of Harweel! Up! Up!”
He blinked against the dawn glare, the impossible bright, rolled to his fours groaning, immediately realized that what he had thought soil upon their roost was in fact the aggregate of bird droppings. He pressed himself to his feet, only to be felled by the yawing spaces, the plummet of what seemed all things …
Serwa was crouched at the edge, staring down. “Do you see them, Brother?” she was calling. “Approaching from the east!”
Sorweel steadied himself upon one knee, squinted at the Grandmistress, dumbfounded as much for her beauty as for the dregs of unwanted dreams. His breath bubbled about the fact that they had lain as man and wife—man and wife! And now …
The Dread Mother?
“Sranc?” he asked on croak.
Just then an arrow rifled the air just to the right of his face, struck the scarps behind and above. He ducked low, nerves aflame.
“No,” she said, her tone clipped. “Men.” She leaned forward to call down once again. “Do you see them, Brother?”
Sorweel pawed at his eyes, stared blearily eastward, saw nothing. “Men?” he asked, crawling to a better vantage. “Ordealmen?”
“No …” An arrow zipped high over the tumbling slopes, chipped from an invisible plane about the exposed Grandmistress, then fell away, clattering. “Scylvendi …”
Scylvendi?
Another arrow threaded a different path, this one passing through the sorcerous Ward that had deflected the previous bolt. But Serwa was already leaning back, reaching out … It seemed natural watching it happen, and stupendous, even miraculous, afterward, how the neck of the shaft simply appeared in her hand. She held the bulb of the Chorae away, salt sparking like frost across her knuckles and forearm, then cast the thing out over the abyss.
“Podi!” she cried.
Peering with greater caution, Sorweel began picking their assailants out, one by one, a thin cloud of helmed heads and armoured shoulders ascending the ramped stages almost immediately below. Two more shafts whistled into Serwa’s defenses.
“So what … forty-five of them?”
“Sixty-eight,” she said.
“Skirmishers …” Mo?nghus called on a grunt, hoisting himself through the cleft they had climbed the night previous. Even still he made a point of only looking at Sorweel. “They likely saw our arrival last night.”
“Come,” Serwa said, gesturing for the two of them to join her.
Sorweel retreated from the edge, and keeping low, withdrew to her side. The vista leapt about him, dizzying for the endless miles of depth.
Mo?nghus grinned, scowling, standing hunched in a manner the ledge did not require, as if his ligaments were being wound and released unevenly. A shaft cracked the stone above and behind his head. He did not flinch.
“Come,” his sister implored on an outstretched hand. “I can see deep into Agongorea from here.”
Something wild bucked through her brother’s glare. Another shaft skittered from her Ward, bruising the air with a blue glow flattened like paper.
Already clasped in her left arm, Sorweel followed the Prince-Imperial’s gaze to her abdomen, saw the dimpled residue of his seed across the Injori silk.
“Brother!”