Anas?rimbor Mo?nghus awoke to the bite of chains, the prickle of blood-starved extremities, and further pains too numerous to warrant complaint. He blinked against filtered light, saw greased hides rising on wooden ribs. He was naked … bound. His feet had been shackled at the ankles, and his hands at the wrists. A chain girdled his torso, crude iron links looped his white-skinned torso, pinning his elbows to his gullet, and leashing him to a birch that had been shorn of all its branches, hacked into a prisoner’s post.
The day was summer-hot with the bright and arid vacancy of autumn. The yaksh should have been stifling, but something, the dust in the leather and wooden crevices, perhaps, or the vent in the conical ceiling, lifted all breath and odour from the air. He felt … clean, he decided, the cleanest he had been since Ishterebinth. The claustrophobic shriek and clamour persisted, but buried in the blackness beneath his feet. The Scylvendi had him—the People of War!—and despite all the atrocities history had shovelled about their feet, he had no fear. What pain could they inflict upon one who had survived the Ghouls, endured Harapior? And what could they take when life hung like lead ingots from him? The Scylvendi had him, the Sons of his father’s race, and even if they refused to acknowledge his kinship, he had been born knowing theirs. No matter what fate they visited upon him, no matter what degradation, he would die knowing it had been clean and fair.
He was free! That was all that mattered … The madness of the Ghouls and the Anas?rimbor both were behind him. If his remaining span be brief, then let it be lucid—clean!
He held himself rigid, lest he rouse something, he could not say. A male and female voice warbled through the staccato chopping, and he lowered his head, pricked his ears. They spoke Scylvendi, a lilting version of the barking one heard in the camps. Mo?nghus understood nothing of what they said, but he somehow knew they were discussing him. He saw wedges of the man squatting outside the entrance flap, drawing two fingers through the earth then raising them to his lips. He glimpsed a scar-grilled forearm.
Then his captor was ducking through, standing upright in the dulcet gloom, a beautiful blond woman in tow. The man was old yet panther-lean, and almost entirely armoured in scars, plaque after plaque wrapped about his arms and neck, climbing his high cheeks. An animus coiled within him, a lethality that prodded hackles and tightened chests, warned of imminent mayhem. His very body was his provocation—his astonishing war-cry. Shoulders stooped to the saddle, arms the density of graven oak, inked in sinew, crossed about hands harder than horn. And swazond without number …
The ground momentarily tipped beneath the chained Prince-Imperial. His shackles chirped for saving his balance.
His captor regarded him, blinking turquoise eyes. He raised the blade of his hand and the woman scuttled to Mo?nghus’s side, brandishing a crude key to undo his shackles. Her proximity simply confirmed her unearthly beauty.
“Do you know me?” his captor barked in Sheyic.
Mo?nghus licked lips still broken for Ishterebinth. The woman had become a rattling shadow to his right.
“You …” he coughed, surprised by the pain of speaking. “You are Cnaiür urs Ski?tha.”
The most violent of all Men.
The glacial eyes regarded him. “And what did he tell you about me, the Anas?rimbor?”
Mo?nghus stammered for the enormity of the turn.
“Tha-that you … you were dead.”
“He knows you’re his sire,” the young woman called from Mo?nghus’s side. “He trembles for it.”
A murderous intensity crept into the man’s glare.
“Do you know who she is?”
“No …” Mo?nghus muttered, gazing into the girl’s face. “Should I?”
Cnaiür urs Ski?tha’s laugh was born of butchery, a deranged, sneering thing.
The woman leaned across the dry light to stroke Mo?nghus’s cheek, a divine handmaiden.
“You were just a baby,” she said, smiling regret.
The King-of-Tribes kept him hooded during the day, his arms bound behind his back, so he continually lurched in his saddle forever surprised by the ground crossed by his foul-smelling pony. The hood was removed only at day’s end, when he was returned to his yaksh. The shackles were removed only when the Norsirai concubine was present, the young woman, barely in her flower, who claimed to be his mother …
Serw? … A name had forever been a chill breath upon his heart.
Such a mad pantomime they played, night after night. The girl hanging upon the details of his day, showering him with chaste affections. The berserker King-of-Tribes not so much playing his father as watching while such games were played.
“I think you showed wisdom. Restraint. Your father is too quick to anger, to instill fear, so that Men who should confide in him whisper about him instead …”
Mo?nghus understood what happened. He had seen the sane pandering to the witless or insane enough, arranging beliefs like feathers then strutting according to their false plumage. He just never believed he could ever be party to it, that he would exchange dignity to allay a terrifying eye. And the ease of it dismayed him, answering her maternal curiosities, never condescending to confirm the pretense, but then never daring to contradict them either. How does a soul walk such a line, forever communicate what lies between fact and deception?
His accursed sister, he had no doubt, would ask how a soul could do anything else. But madness was madness because it carried a toll, one catastrophic in proportion to the heights it ascended. Madness in the fields or the agora generally ended with the hurling of stones to bludgeon or the stacking of wood to burn. But madness in the palace usually ended in the ruin of all.
“Cease this lunacy!” he roared the third night after crossing the Leash. “You are not my mother!”
The alluring waif clucked and smiled as if at his naiveté. Perhaps this was when he realized she wasn’t entirely human.
“Why?” he snarled at the shadowy spectre of his father standing arms crossed just inside the threshold. “Why do you play this mad game?”
Mo?nghus could almost believe that Cnaiür had loomed invisible above him in sooth, so suddenly was he struck. A yoke-hard forearm pressed his cheek to the lifeless dirt. And he could feel the heat of the legendary warrior, smell the bestial musk, the bull-snorting exhalations.
“You are Anas?rimbor!” the most-violent-of-men grated in his ear. “You have no right to complain of games!”
His spit made black glyphs of the dirt before the Prince-Imperial’s face.
A grunt occasioned each blow across his ear and cheek. It was the place of fathers, beating sons.
He could hear her laughing, his mother.
Cnaiür was watching him when Mo?nghus regained consciousness, sitting naked in the light showering through the yaksh entrance. The King-of-Tribes slouched forward, his arms hooked about an upright knee. His swazond appeared to scale him—such was the contrast between shadow and the white morning bright—rendering him something crocodilian.
“Scylvendi children,” the man said, eyes as bright as opals held to sky, “are taught to hate but a single thing.” He nodded as if admitting fault in a wisdom that had to be obeyed regardless. “Aye … weakness … Weakness is what sparks the father’s cane! Woe to the child that weeps!”