The most-violent-of-all-men cackled, a sound far too docile, given the grimace accompanying it.
“That’s the cunning of it, boy, for nothing is impervious. All power shits. All power sleeps. Strength must be aimed, and so are all things exposed, all things weak. To despise weakness is to loathe existence itself …”
And Anas?rimbor Mo?nghus understood what it seemed he had known all along. Cnaiür urs Ski?tha rode for Golgotterath, for the Unholy Consult, bent on settling the mortal grudge he bore Anas?rimbor Kellhus. Finding Mo?nghus en route, the very son his enemy had stolen, here, upon the very threshold of his vengeance … It would be too much for any man to credit, let alone one so rent by spite. How could he not presume some devious conspiracy to overthrow him?
“And so is the World made hateful, boy, transformed into yet another thing to be strangled and beaten.”
“I know hate,” Mo?nghus said warily.
The King-of-Tribes flinched, spat into the filtered morning glare.
“How could you?” he grated. “You had only mothers.”
“Bah!” the Prince-Imperial scoffed. “All Men ha—!”
The Scylvendi leapt to stand chiselled and rank before his son. “Thiiss!” he roared, swatting palms against his scarred chest, thighs, and abdomen. “This is hate!”
He struck Mo?nghus full on the mouth, throwing his head back on the arc of the chain, down hard to harder earth.
“You are lettered!” Cnaiür urs Ski?tha sneered. “Civilized! You abhor the harm that comes of cruel sport! You are sickened by those who whip horses, murder slaves or beat pretty wives! Something numb cramps within you, and you think it hate! But you do nothing! Nothing! You pule and you ponder, you worry loved ones, beat water and scream at skies! You! Do! Nothing!”
Mo?nghus could only gawk at the elemental figure before him, cower.
“This!” Cnaiür urs Ski?tha boomed on climbing veins. “Read it!” He raked clawed fingers from his abdomen to his chest.
“This! This is the history of Hate!”
It took four bowlegged warriors to pry his stake from the earth. He could not understand the least word of their banter, but he was certain they called him a woman for his unscarred skin. They secured his arms about an ash bough against his back, then he was bound to a train of yaksh-dragging ponies, left to stumble with the chattel and the supplies. They flogged him for sport that evening, tormented him until darkness. And it seemed a relief, compared to what he had suffered at the hands of the ghouls. His hacking laughter unnerved them, as did his sobbing grin. What began with whooping derision soured into silence and grave faces.
He saw no sign of his father or his consort during this time.
Finally they hauled him staggering through firelight toward the apparition of the White Yaksh, which wavered as a reflection in water. They wrestled him in, leaned knees upon his head while chaining him to a new stake. Then the reeking brutes were gone, and he lay alone, broken lips against the soothing earth. He cackled for reasons he would never know, and wept for reasons he could not unknow. A lone taper—plunder from some Nansur temple—illuminated the interior. He rubbed his jaw, saw what seemed a helter of baggage across the welter of soiled rugs in the gloom. He noticed furs twined and tangled into a nest no more than two steps from his feet. The taper sputtered, sent light and shadow fluttering across the cone of the weather-stained walls, then everything went black.
Even though it recalled the horror of the Thresholds in Ishterebinth, the darkness seemed to mend him, as if wounds unseen instantly healed. A body is naught but a clouded eye, a vision born into cataracts, pleasure and pain for bright, numbness for dark, everything shapeless and obscure. His skin had seen too much of late, and darkness was his only salve.
He drifted, his body pulsing, alive with aches and flares and winces. His breath pressed a cold spoon against his heart, and he awoke from his doze, realizing he, Anas?rimbor Mo?nghus, was chained to the foot of an uncouth barbarian’s bed. Like a dog.
This should have occasioned fury, but the limb required had been hacked from him, leaving the fact in the hands of melancholy wonder. He understood why he had fled Serwa. He understood why he had fled here, of all places. He even understood why his true father could do nothing but murder him, in the end. So why did his thoughts reel and stagger so? Why was he perpetually baffled, at a loss to answer some question he could not even ask? Was it simply because he was being beaten? Had his wits, like those of many old soldiers, been forever knocked from him?
The entrance flap snapped back, and Cnaiür urs Ski?tha pressed through, bearing a lantern hooked upon a staff. He raised the light high, transferred it to a hook wired to one of the yaksh poles. Muddy illumination swung about the interior, more than enough to awaken Mo?nghus’s weals.
The most violent of Men peered at the Prince-Imperial in the disconcerting way of those scrutinizing things near as if from afar. And for all his turbulent years, Cnaiür seemed far, far older still, like a barbarian scourge of old, the incarnation of Hori?tha, the Scylvendi King-of-Tribes who had sacked Cenei and brought a whole civilization crashing at his feet.
Serw? ducked through the entrance behind him, slunk around stooping beneath the hide walls.
Mo?nghus pulled himself to his knees, the very limit of the chain’s restraint.
“What do you want of me?” he cried hoarsely.
The barbarian placed his hands on his hips.
“What I always want. What I only want. Vengeance.”
His instinct was to avert his gaze, but there was something naked in his father’s blue-white glare, a famished intensity that demanded an answering stare—a matching exposure …
“So you beat what shreds of him you find in me? Is tha—?”
A concussion snapped his head around, sent his torso swinging about its chain.
“Yes.”
The Prince-Imperial pressed himself from the thatch, his eyes honey beneath fluttering lids.
“Because murdering your own son in fact, murders him in effigy? Becau—?”
A backhand exploded high across his left cheek, and the yaksh interior swung up and about. Links bit into his throat.
“Yes.”
Mo?nghus whirled back to the roaring figure.
“Fool! Mummer! Who spills their own blood to punish ano—?”
A strike high on his forehead sent him straight down.
The reply was grinding, demonic. “I do.”
Mo?nghus snorted fresh blood, saw the beautiful waif kneeling nearby, watching him, her back too arched, her eyes dozing for arousal.
Serw?.
He spat blood, bits of teeth, wondered that it had taken so long for him to realize. What was the power of knowledge such that even the chained and battered could be freed?
“Momma?” he called on a grisly laugh.
He wricked his body stiffly about, so that he could apprehend his deranged father.
“So you make like dogs with skin-spies,” he cackled at the shadow. “Is that it?”
Another concussion, this one chasing everything visible into the same tiny corner.
Yes.