5 Founded by Gin’yursis, Holy Siqu, in the time of Nincama-Telesser (574-668).
6 This was a tumultuous time in the history of the Cond Empire, when Scintya depredations forced the All-King, the much maligned Aulyanau Cawa-Imvullar (c. 1091-1124), to levy punitive taxes upon the All.
7 Derived from the Ancient Umeri term for “sorcerer,” derived in turn from ancient shamanistic Hulwa Ilruga, “the Bottomless Inward.”
8 A kind of whiskey smoked in peat.
9 Untrue, insofar as Aulyanau Cawa-Imvullar (c. 1091-1124) was forced to pay the White Norsirai tribes of the Scintya tribute, the amount of which was never disclosed, but was apparently substantial enough to cripple Cond ?merau over time.
10 The Sohonc, which was by far the largest of the Tutelage Schools, could boast only some fifty sorcerers of rank (at this time). The Mangaecca, it could be assumed, possessed no more than thirty.
11 Treasurer.
12 An indirect reference to the fact that Viri was destroyed by the falling of the Ark, which is to say, by the Inchoroi.
13 “So death denies you your lesson.”
APPENDIX
THREE
Four Revelations
You drink of the River and it is clear. You drink of the River and it is foul. You breathe of the Sky and it never empties. You weep, and the Sea stings your lips. Rejoice, and mourn, for you belong to this World.
Heaven does not know you.
—NIN’HILARJAL, Psalms to Oblivion
The World is a glare when you are helpless.
The Men had bound him, pierced his flesh with nails, but their terror so overmatched their hatred, they were gentle, and so left no memory of their indignity. They shout and laugh. Papa … A walnut tree stands upon the rising pasture beyond them, great with age and solitude, dark with interior shadow. Please, Papa …
Aisralu!
A woman who has outlived her teeth scourges him with thistles. Her arms are frantic with hatred and heartbreak, her knobbed knuckles shake, but her eyes remain slack with incredulity … eyes that were once daring and mercurial, grown stagnant at the bottom of crinkled pockets. For the first time he realizes he has never understood Men, the way they toil against the yoke of dwindling years. The way they do not so much fail as are betrayed.
The Horns rear golden, so high as to hook the woolen sky. The Host of the Nine Mansions groans.
They raise him upon a pole, pile sheaves of bracken about his feet. He has wondered whether death would be beautiful. He has wondered how the end of memory would appear at memory’s end. He has wondered what it means to so outrun glory as to become blind to disgrace. It seems proper that these screeching animals show him.
He watches them tip the amphorae, sees the oil pulse white in the sun. They are all there: Tinnirin, Rama, Par’sigiccas, sheeted in the blood of obscenities, their warcries cracked into gasps of effort, grunts of desperation. As the Men stand milling in the sunlight, filthy, bestial for hair, their brows dark so their eyes seem fires in angry caves. Rama’s head tips back like a bust on an unbalanced pedestal, painting witless shoulders in blood, as a plummeting shadow blots him, an Inchoroi monstrosity, decked in the corpse of some luckier brother. And he sorts them with his gaze, his frail captors, glimpsing dog-teeth, gloating for all the faces he will remember, for shame if not for torment. As Quya Chariots soar like polished stones cast against the sky. Rama! Rama! And a torch is brought forth, little more than a smoking blur in the open sunlight; a wave of exclamation peaks in a raw little cheer. As Ciogli makes a bastion of the Father of Dragons, his shouts ringing from his cauldron helm, Bashrag slumping from the arc of his hammer. A sobbing boy-child takes the torch. He and his brothers cry, Lord Mountain! Bullied forward, he turns to him, sobbing, the torch held like a poisonous snake. The Horns rise as golden haze through pitched skies, distant Quya drifting like sparks from the evening fire, dragons like twirling soot, making deep a World crabbed with violence. So like his dead sister in the dove-breasted beauty of his cheek (though she had hated fear more) Great Ciogli teeters, and the hacking floor drops into watery insignificance ….
“Papa hates that he is my image,” she says, laughing, squinting as if about to sneeze at the sunlight.
How could … How could …
Great Ciogli teeters, his head turning as if to catch some uncommon sound from a drowse, and they see it: the lone arrow pricking from the slot of his helm. The boy is thrust forward, a push like a blow, so that his stride is caught on a thrown shoulder, and he stumbles, flinches from kissing the unseen flame. “No.” A flicker hooks his gaze, and out of the thousand pockets of tumult, he is cursed with seeing … seeing … The same mouth slung about indecision, the same tipping look (though she hated fear more). Nin’janjin leaps crisp from the tumult, his spear poised high, his shield a burnished coin. The boy grimaces, cries out to the rag-garbed women—
What is your name?