1119, Year-of-the-Tusk, the North Shore of the Nele?st Sea.
Like many great and dangerous Men, Shae?nanra was despised for many things, his penchant for mongering spies not the least of them. The rules that bound the Norsirai were unforgiving in those days. Trys?, the Holy Mother of Cities, was little more than a village huddling behind ruined walls of stone. The God-Kings of Imperial ?merau stared blindly from overthrown stone, moss-covered and almost forgotten. The Cond ruled the cities of the River Aumris, an empire they called the Great All, and few people were so proud or so headstrong. They divided the Ground between the Feal and the Wirg—the weak and the glorious. They adhered to a simplicity that was at once a fanaticism. And they judged the way all Men were prone to judge in those Far Antique days, without patience or mercy.
Shae?nanra, for his part, celebrated the Cond hatred of spying. What did it matter if they declared him Feal, so long as he knew their secrets? He knew what stout the All-King drank, and what slave decanted it for him. He knew what was bellowed in counsel and whispered across pillows.
Most importantly, he knew what was plotted.
So he stood waiting before the gate of his cyclopean tower, Nogaral, staring southward across the heaving leagues of the Nele?st Sea, knowing that soon—very soon—a light would stride across the moonlit waters.
To the west lay the River Sursa, whose rusty waters bloomed far into the Sea during day. Beyond it, the wastes of Agongorea plaited the horizon, chapped and cracked like untanned leather. Low mountains knotted the north and east, domes of bald granite rising from forested slopes: the hunchbacked Urokkas.1
Nogaral stood upon the westernmost summit, Iros, a mountain that was a mass grave. Little more than a ramp of blunt granite, it climbed from the River toward the Sea, where it ended in scarped confusion. Ruins made gums and teeth of its heights, structures obliterated in an age that Men could not recollect for ignorance and savagery.2 Nogaral was both squat and rotund, resembling a monstrous byre more than a proper tower. Only the grand, central chamber could boast any architectural splendour. Otherwise, it was cramped and labyrinthine, the lower levels pillared as densely as a forest, the upper levels celled like a hive.
The construction of the tower had caused an uproar in Sauglish two centuries previous. The Sohonc, in particular, had objected, seeing in it the designs of their old rival, Cet’ingira. Even then they had suspected. But suspicions were not enough to sway an All-King who had grown to prize the Mangaecca and their disdain of scruple.
Nogaral, they named it, the “High Round.”
“They are called the Barricades,” the Nonman says. “The Artisan himself fashioned them.”
The Man gazes in wonder at the configurations of nimil and light. “So that none might enter …” he murmurs.
Cet’ingira lowers his porcelain face in assent. “So that none might enter.”
Shae?nanra almost stumbles, so dazzling is the sunlight across the immense curvatures of gold, so deep is the pitch of the surrounding fall. The Nonman steadies him with a firm hand.
“This was what my master sought? To tear down the Barricades?”
“And his masters before him,” the Nonman replies. “For more than two hundred years.”
He studies the mad Nonman. “And what lies within?”
The black eyes did not waver. “The truth my brothers could not bear.”
At last he glimpsed it, a point like a failing star.
Shae?nanra stood immobile. The Wind came from the north, answering the Sea’s long inhalation. It made lunacy of his hair and braids, slapped his robes with a snared thrush’s fury. The distant light blinked through it, a white glitter from across the black back of the Sea, vanishing and reappearing as faraway rollers plucked the nocturnal line of the horizon.
The Wind howled about the tower, made moaning flutes of the surrounding ruin. And it comforted Shae?nanra even as its violence forced him to lean against his toes: always at his back, always rushing south, across the Sea and over the Painted Cities, into the eyes of his witless enemies.
The distant spark became more constant, gathered both luminosity and portent as it crept above the blind line of the Neleost. Clouds like scrapes formed a skein across the starry vault. The star the Nonmen called Imburil3 cast his shadow over the cobble before him, and Shae?nanra considered the wildness of his windblown outline. The Wind and the Nail, Shae?nanra thought in elation. Both would be at his back.
This had been an old habit of his, identifying and assessing omens, born of days when he still walked paths that the Gods could reckon. Had he not known who was about to darken his threshold, he would have cursed himself for a fool for indulging it.
The light gathered brightness all out of proportion to its approach, and despite the Stain, Shae?nanra found himself wondering at its brilliance. Then finally he saw him … Little more than a region of blackness at first, a shadowy glimpse behind the luminous corona. Then more substantial … more human.
Titirga.
The Sohonc Archideme walked the low sky, holding high the Diurnal, the famed Day Lantern, a fan of mirrors that reflected the Sun even in the deepest night. The glare climbed as he neared, and Shae?nanra watched the great oblong of illumination—impossible daylight—slip across the stony expanses, reaching out toward Nogaral. It seemed miraculous, the weightlessness of light, the way whole fields of detail and swinging shadows could be dandled in the thin-fingered hands of a man. The Day Lantern scrolled over the rising slopes, then at last caught Nogaral’s western curve, where it paused as though fixed. And from night, Shae?nanra found himself staring into day—the pitch and scrawl of ruin, the black mortices sketching the stones of the tower’s ponderous wall, the knots of scrub and hanging weed. For the first time he saw how shadows were simply pieces of night.
And even though he knew as profoundly—as fanatically—as only a member of the Holy Consult could know, he found himself wondering how it had come to this …
Shae?nanra could not but marvel. The Sun! The Sun itself raised in the hands of a Man.
Squinting, he could see him, Titirga, his outline gilded in the manner of those peering into the bright outside from the recesses of a dark room. The great Hero-Mage come to deliver his ultimatum. The legendary Archidemu Sohoncu, the Glorious Pupil, perhaps the most powerful sorcerer the Ground had ever known.