Night fell steep on the Field Appalling.
Zsoronga no longer cast his pavilion whole, but rather lived within the space afforded by a single pole. What had been spacious, even sumptuous, had been folded into oblivion by hewn canvas. He had lost all that remained of his retinue. “They never returned from Dagliash,” the Successor-Prince of Zeum said without making eye contact. “The Scald took them. After you left, Kay?tas kept me as a runner, so …”
Sorweel stared at him like someone realizing they had been deafened. The Scald?
“Zsoronga … What happens here, brother?”
Hesitation. A look with a volatility wandering beneath.
“Such things … Such things I have seen, Sorwa …” The man dropped his head inexplicably. “Done.”
“What things?”
Zsoronga meditated upon his thumbs for several heartbeats.
“You look grown,” he said, affecting a mischievious glance. “Nukbaru. You have flint in your eye, now.”
Sorweel set his jaw.
“How do you fare, brother?”
A look of hunted perplexity, one that would have been comical absent knowledge of its history.
“Hungry like everyone …” he muttered. Something murderous flashed through his gaze. “Strong.”
Sorweel watched him carefully. “You hunger because you starve.”
“Tell that to your poor horse! I didn’t promise to save him, did I?”
Sorweel was undeterred. “I’m speaking of the Sranc.”
A queer grimace, followed by a croaking groan. “What do you think has fattened us so?”
“The skinnies nourish only the body … the appetite …”
The Sakarpi knew the perils of consuming Sranc. Life on the Pale was too hard. Scarce a winter passed without some debauched tale reaching Sogga Halls. But tales had been all that he had ever heard.
“The soul starves …” Sorweel continued, “perishes. Those who subsist on them too long become raving beasts.”
Zsoronga was watching him intently now. A hard moment passed between the two young men.
“They taste like fish,” Zsoronga said, drawing his chin from his clavicle to his shoulder. “And lamb … My mouth waters for merely mentioning it.”
“There is a cure,” Sorweel murmured.
“I am not sick,” Zsoronga said. “The sick ones went out … followed the Exalt-General to their damnation.”
Then, with an exaggerated air of recalling something momentous he popped to his feet and began rooting through the tent, seized upon his matins satchel.
Sorweel sat reeling, the pinprick of Zsoronga’s dismissal lost in the stab of a far more momentous realization. For the first time he understood the mad straits of the Great Ordeal, how these blasted lands meant they had nothing to eat …
Aside from their horses … their foes …
Themselves.
For several heartbeats it seemed he could not breathe, the dread logic was so clear.
The Shortest Path …
All of it, he realized, even these sins, as deranged and abyssal as they were, had a place. They were naught but sacrifices exacted by circumstance, lunatic in proportion to the dire ends they subserved …
Could it be? Could what he had witnessed—acts so loathsome as too strike vomit from righteous bellies—simply be … an unavoidable expenditure?
The greatest sacrifice …
His heartbeat counted out the span of his breathlessness.
Had the Aspect-Emperor known that their souls would have to be abandoned on the trail?
“Yes!” Zsoronga cried in savage jubilation. “Yes!”
And what did that say about his enemy? The Consult … and the boiling rumble of ancient half memories.
“Here it is!”
Could they be so wicked, so vile—could anything be? An evil so great as to warrant any crime, any atrocity contributing to its destruction …
“You can feel it … you who have worn the Amiolas …”
Sorweel stared numbly at the pouch Zsoronga had pressed into his palm, stiff as a dead man’s tongue, the pale pattern as intricate as he could remember it, crescents within crescents, like Circumfixes shattered and heaped into spilling piles. The Triple-Crescent, Serwa had called it. The ancient symbol of the Anas?rimbor.
His face scrunched about sudden tears, and he squeezed tight the Chorae within the ancient leather. He was High Keeper of the Hoard once again!
“Some say the Aspect-Emperor is dead,” Zsoronga fiercely murmured, his eyes wild and wondrous with violent imagining. “But I know he’ll return. I know it, because I know you are Narindar! That the Mother of Birth has chosen you! He will return because you have returned. And you have returned because he is not yet dead!”
Suddenly it seemed absurd, the weightlessness of the thing and the iron Chorae within it, like fluff …
He knew nothing in that moment, save that he wanted to weep.
What do I do?
Thick black fingers closed about his pale hand, then tightened, forcing him to grip the pouch.
A sluggish heat leapt into the air between them.
“This is how I know …” Zsoronga exhaled.
His body, long and sinuous, trembled, much as Sorweel’s own.
“Know what?” the youth murmured.
A wooer’s smile.
“That we dwell in a land without sin.”
Sorweel did not shrink in his shadow—and that was as much cause for terror as anything he had seen or thought this day. His gaze wandered across his friend’s scalding aspect, taking a numb inventory.
“What do you mean?”
A glimpse of something dead in his brown eyes.
Mu’miorn?
“I mean we have but one rule to constrain us, but one sacrifice to make! Kill the Aspect-Emperor!”
A long gaze, one urgent, the other pretending not to see.
I weep because I missed you.
“All else is holy …” Zsoronga gasped with thrilling fury. And it truly seemed that all things had been decided. The Zeumi Prince pinched the lantern light into oblivion.
Strong hands in the dark.
Naked in the tented gloom, sweating despite the chill.
Even when they finished, it was not done.
It was all a sham, living a life. Forever stumbling, lurching, chasing resolutions that you name as your own, forever coming after what you are. Difference spews from the oblivion of the same, and events forever tumble, delivering twists, turns, surprises that are in no way surprising, and there you are, suffocating in the aching heart of it, ducking across the numb perimeter, coming to be only in the lee of your questions, that ghost fools call reflection.
You awaken with a start, gasp about a missing heartbeat, and find yourself … doing … things.
You wonder if you ever had a father.
Zsoronga’s body seemed endless, vast and hot in the tangled dark, feverish with vigour, humming, pulsing. A greater hand enclosed his wrist, drew senseless fingers to the stubborn, granite arch of his phallus. The mere act of clutching made the World buzz and roar—even spin with languor and impossibility. Zsoronga tensed yet again, groaned and coughed through clenched teeth. He discharged his heat yet again, pulsing strings that looped through the black, pinning him, binding him, with nameless and unspeakable passions.