"I remember frightening the fools among you with my questions and astounding the wise with my answers. I remember cracking the shields of your warriors, shattering arms of bronze..."

And it seems they hear distant horns, the thunder of hosts charging, clashing.

"I remember the tribute you gave to me... The gold... the jewels... the babes that you laid at my sandalled feet."

A hush.

"I remember the love you bore me... The hatred and the envy."

He raises his head, blinking as if yanked from a dream inhumanly cruel for its bliss. Veins of silver fork across his cheeks... Tears.

"You die so easily!" he cries, howls, as if human frailty were the one true outrage.

He sobs, bows his head once more. His voice rises as if from a pit.

"And I never forget..."

One of the scalpers moans in carnal frustration... Galian.

"I never forget the dead."

Then he is standing, drawn like a puppet by invisible strings. The Holy Dispensation is about to begin. Strange shouts crease and crumple the windy silence, like the yelping of leashed dogs. She can see hunger leaning in their avid eyes. She can see manly restraint give way to clutched arms and rocking gesticulations. And she does not know when this happened, how awaiting the pouch had become a carnival of fanatic declarations, or how licking a smudged fingertip had become carnal penetration.

She sits rigid and estranged, watching Cleric, yes, but watching his pouch even more. As meagre as their rations are-scarce enough to blacken the crescent of a pared fingernail-she wonders how long they have before the purse fails them altogether. Finally he towers before her, his bare chest shining with hooks of light and shadow, his outstretched finger glistening about the nub of precious black.

She cannot move.

"Mimara?" the Ishroi asks, remembering her name.

He calls to both of her selves, to the one who knows but does not care and to the one who cares but does not know.

But for once it is the third incarnation that answers...

"No," it says. "Get that poison away from me."

Cleric gazes at her for a solemn moment, long enough for the others to set aside their singular hunger.

There is horror in the Wizard's look.

Lord Incariol gazes at her, his eyes watery white about coin-sized pupils. "Mimara..."

She repeats herself, finding new wind in her unaccountable resolution. "No."

Desire, she has come to understand, is not the only bottomless thing...

There is motherhood.

- - She dreams that an absence binds her, a hole that claws at her very substance. Something is missing, something more precious than jewels or celebrated works, more sustaining than drink or love or even breath. Something wonderful that she has betrayed...

Then she is gasping, swallowing at sour consciousness, and blinking at the visage of Incariol leaning over her.

She does not panic, for everything seems reasonable.

"What are you doing?" she coughs.

"Watching you."

"Yes. But why?"

Even as she asks this, she realizes that only sorcery, subtle sorcery, could have made this visitation possible. She thinks she can even sense it, or at the very least guess at its outlines, the warping of the Wizard's incipient Wards. It was as if he had simply bent the circumference of Achamian's conjuring, pressed into his arcane defences as if they were no more than a half-filled bladder.

"You..." the flawless face said. "You remind me... of someone... I think..."

There is something old about this reply. Not dead nation old, but doddering old... frail.

"What is it?" she asks. She does not know where this question comes from, nor which traitor gives voice to it.

"I no longer remember," he replies with a grave whisper.

"No... The Qirri... Tell me what it is!"

The Wizard murmurs and stirs beside her.

Cleric stares at her with ancient, ancient eyes. The Nail of Heaven traces a perfect white sickle along the outer rim of his brow and skull. He has a smell she cannot identify, a deep smell, utterly unlike the human reek of the Wizard or the scalpers. The rot that softens stone.

"Not all of my kind are buried... Some, the greatest, we burn like you."

And she understands that she has been asking the wrong question-the wrong question all along. Not what, but who?

"Who?" she gasps. Suddenly his hand is all that exists. Heavy with power, gentle with love. Her eyes track its flying path to his hip, to the rune-stitched pouch...

"Taste..." he murmurs in tones of distant thunder. "Taste and see."

She can feel the weight of him, the corded strength, hanging above her, and a part of her dreams she is naked and shivering.

His finger lowers toward her, pointing to something that cannot be seen...

She leans back her head, parts her lips. She closes her eyes. She can taste her breath, moist and hot, passing from her. The finger is hard and cold. She closes the pliant lobes of her mouth about it, warming and wetting its stubborn white skin. It comes alive, pressing down the centre of her tongue, tracing the line of her gums. It tastes of strength and dead fire.

In the corner of her eye she glimpses the Captain through overlapping lattices of dead grass-a wraith watching.

Above her, Cleric's face dissolves into a porcelain blur. Relief tunnels like lightning through her, swelling the slack hollows about her heart, flushing her extremities. Thin clouds race overhead, black trimmed in starlight, swept into the shapes of wings and scythes. They lend the illusion of surface across the infinite plummet of Heaven like froth drawn along a stream.

He draws his finger back, and a reflex rises within her. She clamps her lips about his knuckle, takes the tip between her teeth, pad and nail. Her tongue soaks whatever residue remains.

He places his hand across her face, thumb against her chin, fingers along her jaw and cheek. He withdraws the penetrating finger slowly, rolling down her lower lip. The Nail of Heaven gleams along its glazed edges. He stands in a single motion, at once swift and utterly soundless. She cannot tear her eyes from him, nor can she smother the longing that wells through her-so profound the ground itself seems to move.

Her mouth tastes of ash and soot and glory...

Glory everlasting.

- - The old Wizard walked.

Once, while travelling between Attrempus and Aoknyssus, he saw a child of no more than ten summers fall from the willow he had climbed in the hope of stealing honey from a great hive. The child broke his neck, died in his father's arms, mouthing inaudible words. Another time, while walking the endless paddies of the Secharib, he saw a woman accused of witchcraft stoned to death. They had bound her with rose wicks so that her struggles scored her skin. Then they cast stone after laughing stone, until she was little more than a crimson worm writhing through the mud her bleeding had conjured from the dust. And once on the road between Sumna and Momemn, he camped at the ruins of Batathent, and in the cool of morning, glimpsed the shadow of Fate cast across the First Holy War.

Adversity lay in all directions, the Nilnameshi were fond of saying. A man need only walk.

"I know what it is," Mimara said from his side. The sun spiked his eyes when he turned to her. Even when he squinted and raised his hand, it framed her with fiery white, blackened her with encircling brilliance. She is a shadow. A judging shadow.

"The Qirri..." her silhouette continued. "I know what it is..."

An angel-of-the-sun delivering tidings of woe.

"What is it?" he asked. But not because he cared. He had outrun all caring.

"Ashes..." she almost whispered. "Ashes from the pyre."

Something in this stirred him, as if she had kicked a long-gutted fire and discovered coals-deep burning coals.

"Ashes? Who?"

He slowed, allowing her to outrun the sun's glare. He blinked at the immobility of her expression.

"Cu'jara Cinmoi... I think..."

A name drawn from the root of history.

There was nothing to say, so he turned to the trackless world before them. Great flocks of tern rose like steam from the far-ranging folds of dust and grasses.

The plains...

They passed like a dream.

CHAPTER TEN.

The Istyuli Plains

There is morality and there is cowardice. The two are not to be confused, even though in appearance and effect they are so often the same.

-EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES If the Gods did not pretend to be human, Men would recoil from them as from spiders.

-ZARATHINIUS, A DEFENCE OF THE ARCANE ARTS LATE SPRING, 20 NEW IMPERIAL YEAR (4132 YEAR-OF-THE-TUSK), THE HIGH ISTYULI.

The shadows of missing things are always cold. And for Varalt Sorweel so very much was missing.

Like the way his mother would read to him in bed or how his father would pretend to lose finger-fights to him. Like laughter or hope.

Loss is at once memory-that is the kernel of its power. If you were to lose the memory with the person-the way Eskeles had said Nonmen lose-then loss would be complete, utter, and we could carry on oblivious. But no. The pain dwells in the balance of loss and retention, in losing and knowing what was lost. In being two incommensurate people, one with a father and mother, and one without. One with pride and honour...

And one without.

So the old him had continued to come up with jokes, questions, and observations to share with his father. Harweel had talked often with his son. While the new him, the orphan, would shiver, teeter, inner fingers groping for lost handholds. And that recognition, the crashing, all-encompassing cold, would strike him as if for the first time...

Your father is dead. Your people are slaves.

You are alone, a captive in the host of your enemy.

But the paradox, some would say tragedy, of human existence is that we so easily raise our lives about absence. We are bred for it. Men are forever counting their losses, hoarding them. There is meaning to be found in victimization, and no small justification. To be wronged is to be owed, to walk among debtors wherever you go.

But now even that embittered and self-righteous persona was missing... that boy.

Sorweel awoke tangled in fragmentary glimpses of the previous night. The last frantic moments with Eskeles, stranded in the very gut of Hell, the face of Serwa, hanging above a world painted in light and the shadows of spitting, gibbering violence...

Then Zsoronga's dark and handsome face, smiling in haggard joy.

"You took a knock on the head, Horse-King. Good thing you have more skull than brain!"

White-weathered canvas framed the Successor-Prince with dull brilliance. Sorweel raised a hand as if to block out the sight of him, tried to say something snide but choked on his own throat instead. His entire body buzzed with the deprivations of the previous weeks. He felt like a wineskin squeezed to its final pulpy dregs...

The alarm, when it came, wrenched him upright...

The Horde. The Ordeal. Eskeles.

"Ho!" Zsoronga cried, nearly toppling backward from his stool.

Sorweel glanced about the stifling confines of his tent, glaring with the urgent stupor of those worried they still dream. The canvas planes glowed with heat. The entrance flap wagged in the breeze, revealing a sliver of baked earth. Porsparian huddled in the corner next to the threshold, watching with a look that was at once wary and forlorn.

"Your slave..." Zsoronga said with a dark look at the Shigeki. "I fear I tried to beat the truth out of him."

Sorweel tried to focus on his friend, felt his eyes bulge for the effort. Something malodorous hung in the air, a smell he had breathed too long to identify. "And?" he managed to cough.

"The wretch fears powers greater than me."

The young King of Sakarpus rubbed his eyes and face, lowered his hands to consider the blood worn into the whorls of his palms. "The others?" he asked roughly. "What happened to the others?"