Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Far Wuor.
Daylight fell upon the dead land, warmed the clay and the canopy alike. The virtues once extolled by the Bardic Priests of yore thrummed with the grasshoppers that exploded from their feet, warbled with the birdsong that resounded above their heads. Resurgent earth. Air quick with flies and lazy with bees. From the Mountains all the way to the mighty River Aumris the land was thus, temperate, fertile. Wuor it had been called, a name that came to mean “plenty” to the Sons of ancient Ûmerau.
But then came the reoccupation of Min-Uroikas and with it the infiltration of Sranc across the narrows of the Leash. Despite the oaths made and the redoubts raised, the northwest became perilous to the point where only the forts remained, and the region was eventually abandoned. Wuor shrank, becoming a more limited province on the shoulder of the Aumris. The new frontier came to be called Anûnuarcû, a march that would be famed for the Knights-Chieftain it sired. The land conceded to the Foe, the land Achamian and Mimara now travelled, would come to be known as Far Wuor.
It had been long forsaken, a victim of Golgotterath centuries before the First Apocalypse had blighted the Sons of the Norsirai entirely. His chest ached for simply walking … for crossing Far Wuor as Seswatha had. Henceforth, the old Wizard realized, it would always be thus, always be a matter of travelling into ever more accursed land. They were drawing near—insanely near! Soon they would set eyes upon them, the shining horrors on the horizon, the golden tusks climbing to the height of mountain peaks, goring all that is true …
Just thinking about it winded him, set his limbs upon bubbles of terror.
“You’re muttering again …” Mimara piped from his side.
“What?” Achamian barked, affecting indignant surprise.
Given all they had endured, it was mad to think they could still be such cowards when it came to each other. But such was love, in the end, forever fearing the testimony of the other.
Mimara was the lesser coward, of course, always the first to discover her fortitude, and so always the first to plague and harry.
“Who’s Nautzera?” she pressed, her attention pointed and immovable.
He flinched, walked with a more hooded manner.
“Spare me your vinegar, woman. My cuts sting quite well unassisted …”
Achamian had suffered too much to possess a generous, or even an honest, soul. To be put upon is to rehearse grudges, to ruminate upon welts and switches, the marks left and the instruments responsible. Writing his banned history of the First Holy War amounted to writing the history of his degradation. Ink affords all souls the luxury of innocence. To write is to be quick where all else is still, to bully facts with words until they begin weeping. And so the old Wizard drew up lists of offenders and summaries of their crimes. Unlike other embittered souls, he knew the particulars of his victimization with a scholar’s self-serving precision, and he had long ago determined that Nautzera was the greatest of the criminals.
Even after all these years, he could still hear the wretch’s voice creaking through the gloom of Atyersus. “Ah yes … I forgot you numbered yourself among the skeptics …”
Were it not for Nautzera, he would not be here now, freighted by losses beyond numbering. Were it not for Nautzera, Inrau would still be alive.
“I guess, then, you would say a possibility, that we are witnessing the first days of the No-God’s return, is outweighed by an actuality, the life of a defector …”
Inrau!
“That rolling the dice of apocalypse is worth the pulse of a fool …”
“Nautzera is from the old days, isn’t he?” Mimara persisted. “The First Holy War.”
He ignored her, fuming in the disjoint way Men are prone when unaware of their fear or anger. Mumbling! When he had he started mumbling?
Together they followed what had been the bed of an ancient road across the many-cloven feet of the Demua. The stonework had been pulverized for the weight of emptiness and weather long ago, leaving only an overgrown dike that roped high and low, continuous save for the countless creeks and streams that had cracked its nethers asunder long, long ago. To their left, the world piled upward, conifers spearing dark from the climbing canopies. What might have been turrets flanged the nearest scarps, stone skinned in lichen where not otherwise flayed and pitted. The mountains reared massive and snow-capped beyond. But to their right, the world fell away, knitted the very horizon with arboreal crowns—birches, maples, larches and more—great and full and summer-weary.
And ahead of them … to the north … It was at once the direction he walked, and the direction he could not see.
“It terrifies you …” Mimara said from his side.
“I know what awaits us,” he replied, spooked for her penetration, speaking more from the ache in his chest than his throat.
He trailed to a stop at the summit of the rise, watched Mimara stroll ahead, hands pressed to the back of her hips, her abdomen making a bulb of her golden hauberk. The pregnant woman snapped a birch branch obscuring their view, left it hanging like a lamed bird wing. The Demua buckled the horizon beyond her, backed everything into indeterminate haze, one too cold to be called violet. And it seemed he could feel it out there, Golgotterath, like a bruise hidden for shame, like a stitch in the throat that could not be swallowed away. There was nothing to see save a vibrant land unfurling from cloud-wricking knuckles of stone, but he could feel it all the same …
Waiting?
“Nautzera is an old rival of mine in the Mandate,” he admitted. “The soul that set me upon the very path we trod now … The one I most blame, I suppose … aside from Kellhus.”
Mimara had unstopped her waterskin to take a swig. “Why so?”
The old Wizard waved away her offer to drink. “He’s the one who sent me to Sumna, to suborn a former student of mine to spy on your uncle, the Holy Shriah. He feared Maithanet might have something to do with the Consult—even though no one had uncovered any sign of them in centuries, at that point …”
“And what happened?”
“My student died.”
She peered at him. “Maithanet had him killed?”
“No … The Consult assassinated him.”
She frowned. “So the mission was a success.”
“Success?” the old Wizard cried. “I lost Inrau!”
“Yes, well … Lives must always be thrown with the sticks when you command. Surely your student knew as much. Nautzera as well.”
“No one knew anything back then!”
She graced him with an insouciant shrug—one of many little relics of jnan she had carried away from Carythusal.
“So you don’t think uncovering the Consult was worth one life?”
“Of course it was!”
“So then Nautzera merely demanded what had to be done …”
Achamian sputtered, tried to communicate his fury through his glare, knowing he betrayed something quite different.
“What? What are you saying?”
She gazed at him, devoid of expression for a long moment.
Every human act has its season, its effortless stage, even determinations of the heart. Nothing guarantees judgments made in one age will be applicable in the next, that piety and justice will remain pious and just come what may. We all understand this, somehow. We all possess the joints required to bend this way and that, to be what our circumstances sometimes gently, sometimes violently, demand. If hatred renders us inflexible it’s because, like love, it commits us to others. To hate is to sin against … What soul was so execrable as to wish evil on the innocent? Or worse yet, the heroic.
Nautzera had to be criminal, lest Achamian himself stand charged.
“Your student …” Mimara said, picking her words as if fearing what she saw in his mien. “Inrau … You do understand that he perished for a reason, Akka … that his life had more meaning than he could possibly fathom.”
“Of course!” he cried out, his ears buzzing.
It was happening! The Second Apocalypse was happening!
Which meant that Nautzera had been right all along …
The Wizard hung breathing, every pinch of his being a tingle, a sting.
Nautzera had been right all along. Inrau’s pulse had proven a bargain.
Achamian turned from her, the mother of his unborn child, lest she see him weep. He plunged down the spine of the ancient road, into the wilds of Far Wuor …
Some two thousand years after the light of Men had been extinguished in this corner of the World.
They had taken to snorting the Qirri the way the Survivor had before leaping to his death. Neither of them made mention of this, though both of them understood it with the clarity of monumental inscription. Instead, they told each other that the Scylvendi pursued them, that Cnaiür urs Skiötha peered into the horizon, seeking some glimpse of their furtive forms. More than wisdom or even hope, Qirri was necessity. After all, the People of War galloped in their wake …
So they raced through the night, trotting through wooded galleries, wading across rushing, roaring, moon-silvered streams. Mimara fell picking her way across one particularly evil tributary. She lost her footing on the mossed lip of a boulder, swung about in an attempt to recover, then simply vanished into the gushing blast. For a heartbeat, Achamian could scarcely breathe, let alone call out or leap into sorcerous action. By time he recovered his wits, she was already hauling herself onto the far shore some twenty lengths away, hacking water. He rushed to her side, fussed in the speechless way of one who ministers to disasters of their own making.
“What of the pouch?” he finally managed to ask.
She swatted through her sodden pelts, her eyes wide, but quickly found the rune-embroidered thing flattened against the purse she used to hold her two Chorae. They crouched upon a moonlit rock, hunched to inspect the contents, with their nostrils if not their eyes. She looked beautiful for the way the damp flattened her hair into jet—so very much like her mother. He could do no more than glance at her gold-scaled belly.
“Why?” the Scylvendi barbarian raved in his soul’s eye. “Why have you come, Drusas Achamian? Why have you dragged your bitch across a thousand screaming, rutting leagues? Tell me, what moves a man to cast number-sticks across his woman’s womb?”
Though Mimara was the one sodden, Achamian would be the one wracked with chills when they resumed.
So they crossed Far Wuor in fits and sprints. Mosquitos plagued them during certain watches, hung so thick as to form scribbling haloes around the moon and the Nail-of-Heaven, and left them almost entirely unmolested during others. Walking had ceased taxing them at some point, becoming something far nearer sleep—or at least something less wakeful, more automatic, more effortless. Achamian did not so much own or experience his strides as he floated on them, like an indolent Ketyai prince borne upon the litter of his own body. He found himself wandering at right angles to the world, both walking, negotiating pitched ground and rugged terrain, and dreaming in a peculiar, frenetic sense, hearing a voice that he recognized as his own voice, and suffering desires more obstinate than his own.
“No!” he heard himself cry. “What you say …”
He found himself walking into the Scylvendi’s apparition, the wraith of Cnaiür glaring into his eyes, grating in the voice of floods and landslides, the heat of him, the stink, promising at once murder and congress.
“Twenty winters have thawed, and now you find yourself in my tent, sorcerer, every bit as lost, as baffled and dismayed! Every bit as blind to the darkness that comes before!”
He wandered far from his walking.
The Qirri was there, of course, a prop for the canvas ceilings of his heart and soul. It alone cleared the spaces within and about him, made it possible for his body to march where his will could not hope to follow. It was always there, not so much lurking as mooning about, sulking for being bound within a sack, desiccate, inert. A nagging in the background. Free me! Give me life!
And for all the madness, nothing, it seemed, could be more proper. If they consumed Nil’giccas, then Nil’giccas imbibed them, the residue of one soul blown across the coals of another, flickering into a brighter flame. Consuming Qirri, the old Wizard realized, was a form of giving, not taking, a way to resurrect the Last Nonman King—Cleric!—to bear his being upon the back of their own living life.
He caught himself shouting aloud at one point, crying, “What choice? What choice?” The Qirri was the only reason they had found Sauglish, the only reason they had survived Ishuäl, the only reason they trod the skirts of Golgotterath. They had no choice. So why was he arguing? Because it was evil? Because it amounted to cannibalism, eating another sentient soul? Because it was slowly twisting their sensibilities in ways they could scarce conceive? Because it was beginning, ever so slowly, to own their thoughts, let alone their passions?
What did any of this matter to someone damned always already?
This was his death march, his long and anguished climb to the Golden Room. His Dreams even augured as much! This!—this was his death, his doom and damnation!
To die the death allotted to Seswatha.
“No,” Mimara was gasping, from somewhere—behind? The whole world was walking now, angular shadows massed into scissoring forests. “No, Akka, no!” Had he been speaking aloud? All that distinguished them was their direction, how they walked toward what all Creation fled.
“We march for life!” she cried, her tone as absolute as prophecy. “For hope!”
He would remember nothing else until dawn gilded the wild rim of the East, save laughing at her declaration.
The vista seemed colder than he had remembered—in his Dreams at least.
No matter how carefully wrought, maps always misled. So on surviving maps of the Ancient North in the Three Seas, the estuary Achamian and Mimara peered across was invariably called the “Straits of Aögus,” a title befitting the dignity of the names surrounding. But outside those schooled in the cartographic traditions of Sauglish, no High Norsirai of Seswatha’s day had called the waters thus. They called it, rather, Ogni, a Condic slang term for “Leash.”
The great estuary heaved chill and black before them, crashed into foam along the stunted shore. Gulls, terns, and a great many other birds seemed to have gone mad for the waters, some hanging upon unseen sheets of breeze, others buzzing the surface, descending in constellations, spooking in flurries. Scavenging cries harrowed the wind, pricked the autumnal emptiness ever deeper as Mimara and the old Wizard laboured near, becoming a shrill racket.
Scalloped for exhaustion, the companions wondered at the avian horde without any will to puzzle or resolve. Wind runnelled the grasses about them, flapped scrub and sumac like blankets.
Achamian was the first to cry out, for once his eye registered them, he saw them everywhere, congesting the straits. Sranc. Innumerable carcasses tangled the shallows, putrid rafts bending about swells, larding the waters with corruption. On and on the mass extended, out across the deeps, drawn into eddies the size of cities, monstrous wheels of sodden and blasted meat.
The old Wizard tripped back onto his rump, eyes fluttering. Mimara was slow to kneel at his side. Even hovering over him, her gaze lingered upon the spectacle. An errant cloud smothered the sun, and a sudden translucence revealed the tattered face of the drowning, as well as the rare Men bobbing among the fish-white masses, their limbs clothed, their jaws bearded.
Achamian gawked at the girl, stammering, “Kellhus … he … he found a way … a way to destroy the Horde.” He combed his scalp, his eyes darting. “At-at Dagliash … Yes-yes! Remember that black cloud we spied on the horizon leaving Ishual? That could have been Dagliash … the cause of this.”
She blinked, finally focussing. “I don’t understand.”
The old cogitations came to him quickly. “The River Sursa empties on the north shore of the Misty Sea … It would catch the Sranc as the Ordeal marched on Dagliash. Kellhus would have no choice but to grapple with the Horde in its entirety … to somehow overcome it!”
Mimara looked back to the carrion expanse. At some point she had started clicking the scales of her Sheära hauberk with her fingertips when rubbing her belly.
“So this is the Horde …”
“What else could it be?”
She regarded him more narrowly than he liked.
“So my stepfather already marches on Golgotterath.”
Teeth set, he nodded. They needed Qirri, he thought. Haste.
The World was ending.
“I can carry you across …” he said with the tentative air of broaching old and unresolved feuds. He could weep for the sight of her, gowned in rotted hides and cloth, her cropped hair matted, her eyes shining mad from the stained oval of her face …
Immense with child—his child!
“But you must relinquish your accursed Trinkets.”
The injury these words occasioned shocked him.
“They only appear such,” she said, “because you are accursed.”