The Demon smiles.
It consumes the offering Eskeles has made, but it is displeased, the way it is always displeased, by the extremities of the man’s passion. It thanks him for the long starvation that has made him thin, counsels as well as blesses, recalls the virtues of intellect, the false power of the Logos.
Then Eskeles is stumbling into nonexistence, and the moment-once-called-Sorweel is kneeling directly before the Ciphrang, breathing deep the sweet scent of myrrh. The infernal Decapitants hang askew, each angled against the other, the Zeumi so low that its stump twirls upon the carpets. The long tails of the Ekkin? frame the Invader, gold braided about black bearing the endless descent of writhing text that no one save he and the Demon can read. The shadow of the Sickle draws over all.
“Blessed be Sakarpus,” the Unclean Spirit intones, its voice pitched so that the others might hear.
“Eternal Bastion of the Wild. Blessed be her Most Heroic King.”
The moment-once-called-Sorweel smiles in gratitude, but not for any word the Abomination has spoken. The pouch slips from the sleeve, falls to the fingertips. His head bows forward as his hands raise to grasp the infernal knee, gently, the way a warlike uncle might touch the cheeks of a weeping niece. The Lords of the Ordeal sing and make bellicose demonstration. The pouch is tipped. The lips rise to the kiss. The Chorae slips into the right palm.
The Demon is aware—an irrevocable heartbeat.
The right hand closes about the knee.
The World is light.
The moment-once-called-Sorweel is blown back into his astounded peers.
The Demon is salt.
The Mother shrieks, “Yatwer ku’angshir ciphrangi!”
The Lords of the Ordeal are screaming, and the daughter sees him, sees what the Blessed Mother hath wrought. Her gift to Men.
At last the sorcerous fire combs him free.
Anas?rimbor Kelmomas scowled for peering. The man stood at the milling root of the impromptu line that had formed to receive their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s blessing. Tall. Fine-featured. Blond hair once cropped for battle, but now grown into a greasy tangle. Beard and mustache thickening from juvenile haze. Eyes every bit as blue as Father’s, and more so than his own.
The boy turned to Father, searching for some reassurance, some sign that he too had seen, but he was preoccupied, muttering low words of encouragement to King Narnol, who had just kissed his knee. Kelmomas could see nothing of Serwa or Kay?tas, but through the singing he heard some old man cry “Proyas dies!” from the quarter where he had glimpsed Mother.
Even though Father did not so much as glance in the direction, the boy imagined He tracked it with a precision that eclipsed his own.
Kelmomas stood rigid, followed the Unbeliever’s progress with naked incredulity. The man was of an age with Inrilatas, even though he looked older for the onerous toll exacted by the trail. He wore the raggish remnants of a Kidruhil uniform emblazoned with the insignia of a Field-Captain, but he bore himself with the posture and bearing of a caste-noble. He sang with the others, acknowledged all their looks and pious asides, but in shabby token only, like a mummer who had come to despise his craft.
The little hand that does not doubt the great,
The sweaty brow that does not flinch for hate.
The Prince-Imperial began jumping, so desperate was he for some sign of his sister or brother.
A balm to my heart, a lamp to my feet,
Teach me, O’ Saviour, so that I might weep.
Father remained absorbed by the souls kneeling before him. Even still, the boy saw him glance across the train of petitioners on occasion … Surely he had set eyes upon the man numerous times. Surely, he had seen!
He knows, his brother whispered. He humours him to some end.
Perhaps …
It was the sheer audacity that most confounded the little Prince-Imperial, the way the traitor—for he could be nothing else—cared so little for the observation of his fellows. It was a contempt that would have made him seem daft, even imbecilic, were it not for the way everyone remained utterly oblivious—including those with the Strength!
But does everyone humour him?
His brother had no answer.
Something is wrong.
Mother gives.
Mother yields … strangles and suffocates.
The White-Luck Warrior need look ahead to see her.
“Sometimes, Sorwa,” she coos, “a hunger from the deep breaks free.”
He sits on her lap, his one leg folded, his other dangling. He is a little boy. The sun glares across the verandah, across tiles fired in ancient Shir. The air is so clear an eye can roam to the very Pale. His father still lives.
“A Ciphrang, Mama?”
A stork watches from the balustrade, white as pearl.
“Yes. And like a bubble in water, it rises …”
“Seeking us?”
She smiles at his fright, blinks in the slow, lazy way of dying invalids and drowsy lovers.
“Yes. They take us … take us to take, to feed their hunger.”
“And that’s why you struck me? Because it wasn’t … it wasn’t you?”
Welling tears.
“Yes. I was-wasn’t myself …”
She clutches him tight, and they sob as a single soul.
Weeping makes one.
He bawls, “Get-it-out-get-it-out-get-it-out!”
She presses him back, smiles against her grimace. “Oh, Sweetling! I wish I could!”
“Then I will do it!” he savagely declares.
Eskeles, the sorcerer who was once fat, kneels before him, revealing the moment.
“I will do it, Mama!”
The Demon smiles.
“Oh, Sorwa,” she cries smiling. “Oh my, darling little Prince!”
You already have.
“What ails you, Little Prince?”
Lord Sristai Croimas had lurched before Kelmomas as if from nowhere, so intent he had been on the dilemma of the Traitor. Croimas was Conriyan, one of those sycophantic souls who instinctively exploited all the possibilities of ingratiation, to the point of wooing slaves and children—the very inversion of his famed father, Sristai Ingiaban, by all accounts. Kelmomas found it amazing the man had survived the Great Ordeal’s transit, given the stories, yet here he was, skinnier beneath his hulking mail and plate hauberk, bearish for the lack of grooming and the surfeit of black hair, and no more the wiser for his tribulations.
His breath reeked of rancid meat.
“You have lost much, I know,” the man said, apparently referring to what had happened in Momemn. “But what you are about to witn—”
“Who is he?” Kelmomas interrupted. “That one. The young Norsirai behind the starved Schoolman … There … the Kidruhil Captain.”
No small part of him wanted the traitor to notice his pointing and thus his scrutiny, and so abandon whatever game he thought he was playing. But no.
“That is King Sorweel Harweelson,” Lord Croimas replied, turning back with a friendly scowl. “One of the most celebrated souls amo—”