CHAPTER TEN

SUMNA

How should one describe the terrible majesty of the Holy War? Even then, still unblooded, it was both frightening and wondrous to behold, a great beast whose limbs were composed of entire nations—Galeoth, Thunyerus, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, High Ainon, and the Nansurium—and with the Scarlet Spires as the dragon’s maw, no less. Not since the days of the Ceneian Empire or the Ancient North has the world witnessed such an assembly. Even diseased by politics, it was a thing of awe.

—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Midwinter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Sumna

Even after night fell, Esmenet continued walking, intoxicated by the sheer impossibility of it. Several times she even raced into the dark fields, her feet whisking through frosted grass, her arms outstretched as she twirled beneath the Nail of Heaven.

The cold was iron hard, the spaces endless. The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter’s razor. So different from the humid murk of Sumna, where inky sensations stained everything. Here, in the cold and dark, the parchment of the world was blank. Here, it seemed, was where it all started.

She at once savoured and shuddered at the thought. The Consult, Achamian had once told her, believed much the same thing.

Eventually, as the night waxed, she sobered. She reminded herself of the arduous days ahead, of the dread purpose that drove her.

Achamian was being watched.

She could not think this without remembering that night with the stranger. Sometimes she felt nauseated, glimpsing the pitch that was his seed everytime she blinked. Other times she grew very cold, reviewing and assessing every spoken word, every stinging climax with the dispassion of a tax-farmer. She found it difficult to believe she had been that whorish woman, treacherous, adulterate . . .

But she had been.

It was not her betrayal that shamed her. Achamian, she knew, would not fault her. No, what shamed her was what she had felt, not what she had done.

Some prostitutes so despised what they did they sought pain and punishment whenever they coupled. Esmenet, however, counted herself among those who could laugh, from time to time, about being paid for being pleasured. Her pleasure was her own, no matter who fondled her.

But not that night. The pleasure had been more intense than any she’d ever experienced. She had felt it. Gasped it. Shuddered it. But she had not owned it. Her body had been notched that night. And it shamed her to fury.

She often grew wet at the thought of his abdomen against her belly. Sometimes she flushed and tensed at the memory of her climaxes. Whoever he was, whatever he was, he had taken her body captive, had seized what was hers and remade it not in his own image, but in the image of what he needed her to be. Infinitely receptive. Infinitely docile. Infinitely gratified.

But where her body groped, her intellect grasped. She quickly realized that if the stranger knew about her, he knew about Inrau. And if he knew about Inrau, there was simply no way his death could have been a suicide. This was why she had to find Achamian. The possibility that Inrau had committed suicide had almost broken him.

“What if it’s true, Esmi? What if he did kill himself?”

“He didn’t. Enough, Akka. Please.”

“He did! . . . Oh, sweet Gods, I can feel it! I forced him into a position where all he could do was betray. Me or Maithanet. Don’t you see, Esmi? I forced him to pit love against love!”

“You’re drunk, Akka. Your fears always get the best of you when you’re drunk.”

“Sweet Gods . . . I killed him.”

How empty her reassurances had been: wooden recitations born of flagging patience born of the unaccountable suspicion that he punished himself simply to secure her pity. Why had she been so cold? So selfish? At one point, she had even caught herself resenting Inrau, blaming him for Achamian’s departure. How could she think such things?

But that was going to change. Many things were going to change.

Somehow, impossibly, she had a part in whatever it was that was happening. She would be its equal.

You did not kill him, my love. I know this!

And she also knew who the killer was. The stranger, she supposed, could have hailed from any of the Schools, but somehow she knew he did not. What she had suffered was beyond the Three Seas.

The Consult. They had murdered Inrau, and they had ravished her.

The Consult.

As terrifying as this intuition was, it was also exhilarating. No one, not even Achamian, had seen the Consult in centuries. And yet she . . . But she did not ponder this overmuch, because when she did, she began to feel . . . fortunate. That she could not bear.

So she told herself she travelled for Achamian. And in unguarded moments, she styled herself a character from The Sagas, like Ginsil or Ysilka, a wife mortally ensnared in her husband’s machinations. The road before her, it seemed, would sing with a furtive glamour, as though hidden witnesses to her heroism watched her every step.

She shivered in her cloak. Her breath piled before her. She walked, pondering the sense of chill expectancy that accompanied so many winter mornings. Dawn’s light was slow in coming.

By mid-morning, she came across a roadside hostel, where she loitered in hopes of joining the small group of wayfarers who assembled in its yards. Two old men, their backs stooped beneath great bushels of dried fruits, waited with her. From their scowls Esmenet supposed they had glimpsed the tattoo on the back of her left hand. Everyone, it seemed, knew that Sumna branded her whores.

When the group at last took to the road, she followed it as unobtrusively as possible. A small cadre of blue-skinned priests, devotees of Jukan, led them, singing soft hymns and clinking finger cymbals. A handful of the others joined them in singing, but most kept to themselves, trudging, muttering in low voices. Esmenet saw one of the old men speaking to the driver of a wain. The teamster turned and looked at her in the blank way she had seen so often: the look of one who yearns for what must be loathed. He glanced away when she smiled. Sooner or later, she knew, he would manufacture some accidental way to speak to her.

Then she would have to make a decision.

But then a band on her left sandal snapped. She was able to knot the ends back into usable shape, but they pinched and chafed the skin beneath her woollen socks. Blisters broke, and soon she was limping. She cursed the teamster for not hurrying. She heartily cursed the canon that made it illegal for women to wear boots in the Nansurium. Then the knot gave way, and try as she might, she could not repair it.

The group dwindled farther and farther down the road.

She thrust the sandal into her satchel and began walking without it. Her foot went almost immediately numb. After twenty steps, the first hole opened in her sock. A short time after, her sock was little more than a ragged skirt about her ankle. She hopped as much as she walked, frequently pausing to rub warmth into the sole of her foot. She could see no sign of the others. Behind her, she glimpsed a distant band of men. They seemed to be walking pack animals . . . or warhorses.

She prayed it was the former.

The road she followed was the Karian Way—a relic of the Ceneian Empire, though kept in good repair by the Emperor. It ran straight through the province of Massentia, which in summer people called the Golden because of its endless fields of grain. The problem with the Karian Way was that it struck deep into the Kyranae Plains rather than heading directly toward Momemn. More than a thousand years before, it had linked Holy Sumna to ancient Cenei. Now it was maintained only so far as it serviced Massentia; it trailed into pasture, Esmenet had been told, after intersecting the far more important Pon Way, which did lead to Momemn.

Despite this detour through the interior, Esmenet had chosen the Karian Way after much careful deliberation. Even though she could neither afford nor read maps, and even though she had never before set foot outside of Sumna, she possessed intimate knowledge of this and many other roads.

All prostitutes ranked their custom according to their tastes. Some liked large men, others small. Some favoured priests with their hesitant, uncallused hands, while others favoured soldiers and their rough confidence. But Esmenet had always prized experience. Those who had suffered, who had overcome, who had seen far-away or astounding things—these were the men she prized.

When she was younger, she had coupled with such men and thought: Now I’m part of what they’ve seen. Now I’m more than what I was. When she pestered them with questions afterward, she did so as much to learn the details of her enrichment as out of curiosity. They left lightened of both silver and seed, but she had convinced herself that they took some part of her with them, that she had expanded somehow, that she, Esmenet, haunted eyes that watched and warred with the world.

Several people had cured her of this belief. There was the old whore, Pirasha, who would have starved had it not been for Esmenet’s generosity. “No, sweetling,” she once told her. “When women dip their cups in men, they draw only what’s been stolen.” Then there was the dashing Kidruhil cavalryman, the one she had thought she loved, who came to her a second time without any recollection of the first. “You must be mistaken,” he had exclaimed. “I’d remember a beauty such as you!”

Then she had given birth to her daughter.

She could remember thinking, not long after her daughter was born, that childbirth had signalled the end of her delusions. She knew now, however, that it had simply marked the transition from one set of self-deceptions to another. The death of a child: that marked the end of delusions. Gathering little clothing into a bundle, giving it to the expectant mother the floor below, saying kind words to ease her—her!—of her embarrassment . . .

Much foolishness had died with her daughter, and much bitterness had been born. But Esmenet was not, like some, inclined to spite. Even though she knew it belittled her, she continued to indulge her hunger for stories of the world, and she continued to prize the best storytellers. She wrapped her legs around them—gladly. She pretended to rise to their ardour, and sometimes, given the curious way pretence so often blurred into actuality, she did rise. Afterward, as their interests receded into the dark world they had come from, they became impenetrable. Even her kinder patrons seemed dangerous. So many men, she’d found, harboured a void of some kind, a place accountable only to other men.

Then the real seduction would begin. “Tell me,” she sometimes purred, “what have you seen that makes you more . . . more than other men?” Most found the question amusing. Others were perplexed, annoyed, indifferent, or even outraged. A rare handful, Achamian among them, found it fascinating. But every one of them answered. Men needed to be more. This was why, she had decided, so many of them gambled: they sought coin, certainly, but they also yearned for a demonstration, a sign that the world, the Gods, the future—someone—had somehow set them apart.

So they told her stories—thousands of them over the years. They smiled at their accounts, thinking they thrilled her, as they had when she was young, with knowledge of just who had bedded her. And with one exception, none of them guessed that she cared nothing for what their stories said about them, and everything for what their stories said about the world.

Achamian had understood.

“You do this with all your custom?” he once asked without warning.

She wasn’t shocked. Others had asked as much. “It comforts me to know my men are more than cocks.”

A half-truth. But true to form, Achamian was sceptical. He frowned, saying, “It’s a pity.”

This had stung, even though she had no idea what he meant. “What’s a pity?”

“That you’re not a man,” he replied. “If you were a man, you wouldn’t need to make teachers of everyone who used you.”

She had wept in his arms that night.

But she had continued her studies, ranging far through the eyes of others.

This was why she knew that Massentia was safe, that despite the longer distance, the Karian and Pon Ways were a far better route for a lone woman to take than the more direct routes along the coast. And this was also why she knew enough to walk with other travellers, so those passing by would simply assume she belonged.

And this was why her broken sandal frightened her so. Before, intoxicated by openness and sheer daring, she had felt unburdened by her solitude. Now it weighed against her. She felt exposed, as though archers lay hidden behind every clutch of trees, waiting for a glimpse of her tattooed hand, for a whispered word, or for some other inevitable cue.

The road climbed, and she hobbled on as best she could. A welling sense of despair only made her bare foot seem more painful. How could she walk all the way to Momemn like this? How many times had she been told that safe travel was always a matter of preparation? Each painful step seemed a rebuke.

The Karian Way gradually dropped before her, levelling over a shallow floodplain, then crossing what looked to be a minor river before spearing into the dark hills that ringed the horizon. Jutting from thickets of leafless trees, a ruined Ceneian aqueduct parsed the near distances, crumbling into small fields of debris where the locals had pillaged its stone. Mud tracks wound into the farther heights, skirting fallow fields, disappearing into climbing tracts of forest. But what held Esmenet’s hope and attention were the rustic buildings clustered about the bridge: a village of some kind, trailing thin lines of smoke into the grey sky.

She had some money. More than enough to repair her sandal.

She chided herself for her misgivings as she neared the village. One of the things that characterized Massentia, she had heard, was the fact that it possessed few of the great plantations that dominated so much of the Empire. Massentia was a land of free yeomen and craftsmen. Forthright. Honest. Proud. Or so she had heard.

But then she remembered the way such men scowled when they saw her hanging from her window in Sumna. “Men who own their drudgery,” old Pirasha had once told her, “think they own the Truth as well.” And the Truth was not kind to whores.

Esmenet cursed herself for worrying. Everyone said Massentia was safe.

She hobbled onto the packed earth of what passed for a humble market square, searching the surrounding shanties and facades for a cobbler. When she found none, she smelled the air for some sign of the fish oil that tanners hammered into their hides. A strip of leather was all she really needed. She passed thawing heaps of clay, then four interconnected potters’ sheds. In one, an old man worked his wheel despite the cold, coaxing curves from the clay with his thumbs. The mouth of an oven glowed behind him. His cough, which sounded like gurgling mud, startled her.

She idly wondered if the village was poxed.

A group of five boys mooned about the entrance to a stable, staring. The oldest, or at least the tallest, watched her with frank admiration. He would have been handsome had his eyes been even. She remembered one of her patrons telling her it was rare to find beautiful children in villages such as these, because they were so often sold to wealthy travellers. Esmenet found herself wondering whether a bid had ever been made on this boy.

She smiled as he sauntered toward her. Perhaps he—

“Are you a whore?” he asked baldly.

Esmenet could only stare in shock and fury.

“She is! She is!” another boy cried. “From Sumna! That’s why she hides her hand!”

A number of soldier’s curses came to her. “Go finger your chimney,” she snapped, “you little fucking pissant.”

The boy grinned, and Esmenet immediately realized he was one of them: men who think more of a dog’s bark than a woman’s words.

“Let me see your hand.”

Something in his voice unsettled her.

“Don’t you have stalls to muck?” Slave, her tone sneered.

The casual viciousness of his look hardened into something else. When he grabbed for her hand, she struck him on the cheek. He stumbled back, shocked.

Recovering himself, he stooped to the ground. “She’s a whore,” he told his compatriots, his tone grim, as though unfortunate truths entailed unfortunate consequences. He stood, rolling a dirty stone between his fingers. “An adulterate whore.”

A nervous moment passed. The four hesitated. They stood on a threshold of some kind, and they knew it, even if they understood nothing of its significance. Rather than rallying them with words, the handsome one whipped his stone.

Esmenet ducked, dodged it. But the others were crouching, gathering missiles of their own.

They began pelting her. She cursed, drawing up her arms. The thick wool of her cloak saved her from any real harm.

“Bastards!” she cried. They paused, at once cowed and amused by her ferocity. One of the boys, the fat one, guffawed when she bent to scoop up her own stones. She hit him first, just above his left eyebrow, splitting skin and sending him wailing to his knees. The others simply stared, dumbstruck. Blood had been drawn.

She raised another stone in her right hand, hoping they would duck and run. As a child, before her body bid her to other vocations, she had worked the wharves, earning bread or quarter-coppers by throwing stones at scavenging gulls. She had been very good.

But the tall one struck first, throwing a fistful of dirt at her face. Most of it missed—the fool threw as though his arm were made of rope—but some grit momentarily blinded her. She frantically rubbed at her eyes. Then an explosion in her ear sent her staggering. Another stone bruised off her fingers . . .

What was happening?

“Enough! Enough!” a hoarse voice boomed. “What are you boys doing?”

The fat boy still wailed. Esmenet blinked at the sting, saw an old man wearing stained Shrial vestments in the boys’ midst, brandishing a fist like the knob of a leg bone.

“Stoning her!” the half-handsome instigator called out. “She’s a whore!” The others eagerly seconded him.

The old priest scowled at them for a moment, then turned to her. She could see him clearly now, the liver spots, the miserly hunch of someone who had screeched in innumerable faces. His lips were purple in the chill.

“Is this true?”

He snatched her hand in his own, which was shockingly strong, and studied the tattoo. He peered into her face.

“Are you a priestess?” he barked. “A servant of Gierra?”

She could tell that he knew the answer, that he asked only out of some perverse urge to humiliate and instruct. Staring into his bleary eyes, she suddenly understood her peril.

Sweet Sejenus . . .

“Y-yes,” she stammered.

“Liar! This is a whore’s mark,” he cried, twisting her hand to her face as though trying to shove food into her mouth. “A whore’s mark!”

“I’m a whore no more,” she protested.

“Liar! Liar!”

A sudden coldness descended on Esmenet. She graced him with a false smile, then wrested back possession of her hand. The sputtering old fool stumbled backward. She looked briefly at the crowd that had gathered, glanced scathingly at the boys, then turned back to the road.

“Do not walk away from me!” the old priest howled. “Do not walk away from me!”

She continued walking with what dignity she could muster.

“Suffer not a whore to live,” the old priest recited, “for she maketh a pit of her womb!”

Esmenet halted.

“Suffer not a whore to breathe,” the priest continued, his tone now gleeful, “for she mocks the seed of the righteous! Stone her so that thy hand shall not be tempt—”

Esmenet whirled. “Enough!” she exploded.

Stunned silence.

“I am damned!” she cried. “Don’t you see? I’m already dead! Isn’t that enough?”

Too many eyes watched her. She turned away, continued limping toward the Karian Way.

“Whore!” someone shouted.

Something cracked against the back of her skull. She fell to her knees. Another stone bruised off her shoulder. She raised warding hands, stumbled to her feet, tried walking quickly forward. But the youths were capering around her again, bombarding her with small, river-round stones. Then she glimpsed the tall one in her periphery, hefting something as big as his hand. She cringed. The concussion snapped her teeth together, sent her teetering, toppling. She rolled in cold muck, pulled herself to all fours, raised one knee from the ground. A small stone slapped into her cheek, brought stinging tears to her left eye, then she was up, walking as best as she could manage.

This entire time everything had seemed nightmarishly practical. She needed to leave as quickly as she could. The stones were no more than gusts of rain and wind, impersonal obstacles.

Now she was weeping uncontrollably. “Stop!” she shrieked. “Leave me alone!”

“Whore!” the priest roared.

A much larger crowd had gathered about her now, jeering, reaching to the gravelly mud at their feet.

A numbing thump near her spine. Shoulders jerking backward. An involuntary hand reaching. An explosion in her temple. Then the ground again. Spitting grit.

Stop! Pleassse!

Was that her voice?

Small, sharp, against her forehead. Arms up. Curling like a dog.

Please. Someone.

The sound of thunder. Then a great shadow blotting the sky. Through tears and fingers, she looked up, saw the veined belly of a horse and above, a rider peering down at her. Handsome, full-lipped face. Large brown eyes at once furious and concerned.

A Shrial Knight.

The stones had stopped. Esmenet wailed into her muddy hands.

“Who started this?” a voice boomed.

“See here!” the priest roared. “These matt—”

The Shrial Knight leaned forward and struck him with a mailed fist.

“Pick him up!” he commanded the others. “Now.”

Three men scrambled to pull the priest to his feet. Spit and blood trailed from his trembling lips. He loosed a single, coughing sob, looked about in dazed horror.

“Y-you haven’t the authority!” he cried.

“Authority?” he laughed. “You would like to debate authority?”

While the Shrial Knight bullied the priest, Esmenet struggled to her feet. She wiped the blood and tears from her face, then brushed at the mud caked to her woollen robe. Her heart hammered in her ears, and twice she feared she would swoon for lack of breath. The urge to scream almost overcame her, not in terror or in pain, but in disbelief and naked outrage. How had this happened? What had happened?

She glimpsed the Shrial Knight striking the priest again, and cursed herself for flinching. Why should she pity that obscene ingrate? She breathed deeply. Wiped at more burning tears. Calmed.

Her hands cupped before her, she turned to the youth who had started it all. She glared at him with all the hate she could muster, then slipped her pinky finger from the others so that it wagged like a tiny phallus. She glanced down, to be sure he noticed, then smiled at him wickedly. The boy paled.

He looked to the Shrial Knight, all fright and apprehension, then to his friends, who had also noticed Esmenet’s derisive attention. Two of them grinned despite themselves, and one, possessed of that uncanny and unsettling ability of the young to conspire with those they had tormented only moments earlier, cried out, “It’s true!”

“Come,” the Shrial Knight said to her, holding down a hand. “I’ve had my fill of these provincial fools.”

“Who are you?” she croaked, once again overwhelmed by tears.

“Cutias Sarcellus,” the man said warmly, “First Knight-Commander of the Shrial Knights.”

She reached up, and he took her tattooed hand.

Men of the Tusk hastened throughout the darkness—tall figures, mostly in shadow save for the rare glimmer of iron. Leading his mule, Achamian hurried among them. Their bright eyes afforded him only passing interest. They had, Achamian supposed, grown accustomed to strangers.

The journey troubled Achamian. Never before had he threaded his way through such an encampment. Each firelight he skirted seemed a world filled with its own amusement or desperation. He heard drifting fragments of conversation, glimpsed combative faces over fire. He moved between these pockets, part of a shadowy procession. Twice, he climbed hills that rose high enough to reveal the River Phayus and its congested alluvial plains. Each time he was stilled by awe. Shining fires peppered the distance—those near pocking the darkness with glimpses of canvas and warlike men, those far forming constellations that glittered across the slopes. Years ago he’d watched an Ainoni drama held in an amphitheatre near Carythusal, and he’d been struck by the contrast of the dark onlookers and the illuminated performers on the floor. Here, it seemed, were a thousand such dramas. So many men, so far from home. Here, he could sound the true measure of Maithanet’s strength.

Such numbers. How can we fail?

He pondered this thought, “we,” for some time.

To the west, he could discern the winding circuit of Momemn’s walls, her monstrous towers capped by the glow of torches. He veered toward them, the ground becoming more bald and packed the closer they loomed. Daring the light of several Conriyan fires, he asked where he might find the contingent from Attrempus. He crossed a creaking footbridge over the stagnant waters of a canal. Finally he found the camp of his old friend Krijates Xinemus, the Marshal of Attrempus.

Though Achamian immediately recognized Xinemus, he paused in the darkness beyond the firelight, watching him. Proyas had once told him that he and Xinemus looked remarkably similar, like, as he put it, “strong and weak brothers.” Of course it had never occurred to Proyas that this comparison might offend his old teacher. Like many arrogant men, Proyas thought his insults an extension of his honesty.

Cradling a bowl of wine, Xinemus sat before a small fire, discussing something in low tones with three of his senior officers. Even in the ruddy firelight, he looked tired, as though he spoke of some issue far beyond their ability to redress. He scratched absently at the dead skin that, Achamian knew, perpetually bedevilled his ears, then unaccountably turned and peered into the darkness—at Achamian.

The Marshal of Attrempus scowled. “Show yourself, friend,” he called.

For some reason, Achamian found himself speechless.

Now the others were staring at him also. He heard one of them, Dinchases, mutter something about wraiths. The man to his right, Zenkappa, made the sign of the Tusk.

“That’s no wraith,” Xinemus said, coming to his feet. He ducked his head as though peering through fog. “Achamian?”

“If you weren’t here,” the third officer, Iryssas, said to Xinemus, “I’d swear it was you . . .”

Glancing at Iryssas, Xinemus suddenly strode out toward Achamian, his expression one of baffled joy. “Drusas Achamian? Akka?”

Breath finally came to Achamian’s lips. “Hello, Zin.”

“Akka!” the Marshal cried, catching him like a sack in his arms.

“Lord Marshal.”

“You smell like an ass’s ass, my friend,” Xinemus laughed, pushing him back. “Like the stink of stink!”

“The days have been hard,” the sorcerer said.

“Fear not. They’ll grow harder still.”

Claiming he’d sent his slaves to bed, Xinemus assisted him with his baggage, saw to the care of his mule, then helped him pitch his battered tent. Years had passed since Achamian had last seen the Marshal of Attrempus, and though he’d thought their friendship immune to the passage of time, their talk was awkward at first. By and large they discussed trivialities: the weather, the temperament of his mule. Whenever one of them mentioned something more substantial, an inexplicable shyness forced the other to give a noncommittal reply.

“So how have you been?” Xinemus eventually asked.

“As well as one could expect.”

For Achamian, everything seemed horribly unreal, so much so that he half-expected Xinemus to call him Seswatha. His friendship with Xinemus was one born of the far-away Conriyan court. To meet the man here while on mission embarrassed him in the manner of someone caught, not in a lie, but in circumstances that, given enough time, were certain to make a liar of him. Achamian found himself racking his soul, wondering what he’d told Xinemus of his previous missions. Had he been honest? Or had he succumbed to the juvenile urge to appear to be more than he was?

Did I tell him I was a broken-down fool?

“Ah, with you Akka, one never knows what to expect.”

“So the others are with you?” he asked, even though he knew the answer. “Zenkappa? Dinchases?”

Another fear had assailed him. Xinemus was a pious man, among the most pious Achamian had ever known. In Conriya, Achamian had been a tutor who also happened to be a Schoolman. But here he was a Schoolman through and through. There would be no overlooking his sacrilege here—in the midst of the Holy War, no less! How much would Xinemus tolerate? Perhaps, Achamian thought, this was a mistake. Perhaps he should camp elsewhere—alone.

“Not for long,” Xinemus replied. “I’ll send them off.”

“There’s no need . . .”

Xinemus held a knot up to the dim firelight. “And the Dreams?”

“What of them?”

“You told me once that they waxed and waned, that sometimes details in them changed, and that you’d decided to record them in the hope of deciphering them.”

The fact that Xinemus remembered this unsettled him.

“Tell me,” he said in a clumsy attempt to switch topics, “where are the Scarlet Spires?”

Xinemus grinned. “I was wondering when you were going to ask . . . Somewhere south of here, at one of the Emperor’s villas—or so I’ve been told.” He hammered at a wooden stake, cursed when he smashed his thumb. “Are you worried about them?”

“I’d be a fool not to be.”

“They covet your learning that much?”

“Yes. The Gnosis is iron to their bronze . . . Though I doubt they’d try anything in the midst of the Holy War.” For a School of blasphemers to be part of the Holy War already beggared the understanding of the Inrithi. For them to actually speak their blasphemy in pursuit of their own arcane ends would be beyond all toleration.

“Is that why . . . they sent you?”

Xinemus rarely referred to the Mandate by name. They were always “they.”

“To watch the Scarlet Spires? In part, I suppose. But of course there’s”—an image of Inrau flashed across his soul’s eye—“more . . . There’s always more.”

Who killed you?

Somehow Xinemus had secured his gaze in the darkness. “What’s wrong, Akka? What’s happened?”

Achamian looked to his hands. He wanted to tell Xinemus, to recount his absurd suspicions regarding the Shriah, to explain the deranged circumstances surrounding Inrau’s death. He certainly trusted the man as he trusted no other, inside or outside of the Mandate. But the story just seemed too long, too tortuous, and too polluted by his own failings and frailties to be shared. Esmenet he could tell, but then she was a whore. Shameless.

“Well enough, I suppose,” Achamian said breezily, tugging on the ropes. “It’ll keep the rain off me at least.”

Xinemus studied him for a wordless moment. Thankfully, he did not press the issue.

They joined the other three men about Xinemus’s fire. Two were captains of the Attrempus garrison, leather-faced contemporaries of their Marshal. The senior officer, Dinchases—or Bloody Dench, as he was called—had been with Xinemus for as long as Achamian had known the Marshal. The junior, Zenkappa, was a Nilnameshi slave Xinemus had inherited from his father and later freed for valour on the field. Both, as far as Achamian could tell, were good men. The third man, Iryssas, was the youngest son of Xinemus’s only surviving uncle and, if Achamian remembered correctly, Majordomo of House Krijates.

But none of the men acknowledged their arrival. They were either too drunk or too engrossed in discussion. Dinchases, it seemed, was telling a story.

“. . . then the big one, the Thunyeri—”

“Do you blasted idiots even remember Achamian?” Xinemus cried. “Drusas Achamian?”

Wiping eyes and stifling laughs, the three men turned to appraise him. Zenkappa smiled and raised his bowl. Dinchases, however, regarded him narrowly, and Iryssas with outright hostility.

Dinchases glanced at Xinemus’s scowl, then reluctantly raised his bowl as well. Both he and Zenkappa inclined their heads, then poured a libation. “Well met, Achamian,” Zenkappa said with genuine warmth. As a freed slave, Achamian imagined, he perhaps had less difficulty with pariahs. Dinchases and Iryssas, on the other hand, were caste nobles—Iryssas one of true rank.

“I see you pitched your tent,” Iryssas remarked casually. He possessed the guarded, probing look of a dangerous drunk.

Achamian said nothing.

“So I suppose I should resign myself to your presence then, eh, Achamian?”

Achamian met his gaze directly, cursed himself for swallowing. “I suppose you should.”

Xinemus glared at his young cousin. “The Scarlet Spires are actually part of this Holy War, Iryssas. You should welcome Achamian’s presence. I know I do.”

Achamian had witnessed countless exchanges such as these. The faithful trying to rationalize their fraternization with sorcerers. The rationale was always the same: They are useful . . .

“Perhaps you’re right, Cousin. Enemies of our enemies, eh?” Conriyans were jealous of their hatreds. After centuries of skirmishing with High Ainon and the Scarlet Spires, they had come, however grudgingly, to appreciate the Mandate. Overmuch, the priests would say. But of all the Schools only the Mandate, steeped in the Gnosis of the Ancient North, was a match for the Scarlet Spires.

Iryssas raised his cup, then emptied it across the dust at his feet. “May the gods drink deep, Drusas Achamian. May they celebrate one who is damned—”

Cursing, Xinemus kicked the fire. A cloud of sparks and ash engulfed Iryssas. He fell backward, crying out, instinctively beating at his hair and beard. Xinemus leapt after him, roaring: “What did you say? What did you say?”

Though of slighter build than Iryssas, Xinemus pulled him to his knees as if he were a child, berating him with curses and open-handed cuffs. Dinchases looked to Achamian apologetically. “We’re not with him,” he said slyly. “We’re just piss drunk.” Zenkappa found this too hilarious to remain seated. He rolled on the ground in the shadows beyond his log, howling with laughter.

Even Iryssas was laughing, though in the hounded way of a henpecked spouse. “Enough!” he cried to Xinemus. “I’ll apologize! I’ll apologize!”

Shocked both by Iryssas’s insolence and by the violence of Xinemus’s response, Achamian watched, his mouth agape. Then he realized he’d never really seen Xinemus in the company of his soldiers before.

Iryssas scrambled back to his seat, his hair askew and his black beard streaked with ash. At once smiling and frowning, he leaned forward on his camp stool toward Achamian. He was bowing, Achamian realized, but was too lazy to lift his ass from his seat. “I do apologize,” he said, looking to Achamian with bemused sincerity. “And I do like you, Achamian, even though you are”—he shot a ducking look at his lord and cousin—“a damned sorcerer.”

Zenkappa began howling anew. Despite himself, Achamian smiled and bowed in return. Iryssas, he realized, was one of those men whose hatreds were far too whimsical to become the fixed point of an obsession. He could despise and embrace by guileless turns. Such men, Achamian had learned, inevitably mirrored the integrity or depravity of their lords.

“Besotted fool!” Xinemus cried at Iryssas. “Look at your eyes! More squint than a monkey’s asshole!”

Further paroxysms of laughter followed. This time Achamian found their hilarity irresistible.

But he laughed far longer than the others, wailing as though possessed by some demon. Tears of relief creased his cheeks. How long had it been?

The others grew quiet, watched as he struggled with his composure.

“It’s been too long,” Achamian at last managed. His breath shuddered as he exhaled. His tears suddenly stung.

“Far too long, Akka,” Xinemus said, placing a friendly hand on his shoulder. “But you’re back and for a time free from the wiles of conniving men. Tonight, you can drink in peace.”

He slept fitfully that night. For whatever reason, heavy drinking at once intensified and deadened the Dreams. The way they slurred into one another made them seem less immediate, more dreamlike, but the passions that accompanied them . . . They were unbearable at the best of times. With drink they became lunatic with misery.

He already lay awake by time Paäta, one of Xinemus’s body-slaves, arrived with a basin of fresh water. While he washed, Xinemus pressed his grinning face through the flaps and challenged him to a game of benjuka.

Soon afterward, Achamian found himself sitting cross-legged on a thatched mat opposite Xinemus, studying the gilded benjuka plate between them. A sagging canopy sheltered them from the sun, which burned so bright that the surrounding encampment seemed a desert bazaar despite the chill. All that was missing, Achamian mused, were camels. Though most of the passersby were Conriyans from Xinemus’s own household, he saw all manner of Inrithi: Galeoth, stripped to the waist and painted for some festival that apparently confused winter for summer; Thunyeri, sporting the black-iron hauberks they never seemed to shed; and even an Ainoni nobleman, whose elaborate gowns looked positively ludicrous amid the welter of larded canvas, wains, and haphazard stalls.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Xinemus said, apparently referring to the sheer numbers of Inrithi.

Achamian shrugged. “Yes and no . . . I was at the Hagerna when Maithanet declared the Holy War. Sometimes I wonder whether Maithanet called the Three Seas or the Three Seas called Maithanet.”

“You were at the Hagerna?” Xinemus asked. His expression had darkened.

“Yes.” I even met your Shriah . . .

Xinemus snorted in the bullish way he often used to express disapproval. “Your move, Akka.”

Achamian searched Xinemus’s face, but the Marshal seemed thoroughly absorbed by the geometries of piece and possibility across the plate. Achamian had agreed to the game knowing it would drive the others away, and so allow him to tell Xinemus about what had happened in Sumna. But he’d forgotten how benjuka tended to bring out the worst in them. Every time they played benjuka, they bickered like harem eunuchs.

Benjuka was a relic, a survivor of the end of the world. It had been played in the courts of Trysë, Atrithau, and Mehtsonc before the Apocalypse, much as it was studied in the gardens of Carythusal, Nenciphon, and Momemn now. But what distinguished benjuka was not its age. In general, there was a troubling affinity between games and life, and nowhere was this affinity more striking, or more disturbing, than in benjuka.

Like life, games were governed by rules. But unlike life, games were utterly defined by those rules. The rules were the game, and if one played by different rules, then one simply played a different game. Since a fixed framework of rules determined the meaning of every move as a move, games possessed a clarity that made life seem a drunken brawl by comparison. The proprieties were indubitable, the permutations secure; only the outcome was shrouded.

The cunning of benjuka lay in the absence of this fixed framework. Rather than providing an immutable ground, the rules of benjuka were yet another move within the game, yet another piece to be played. And this made benjuka the very image of life, a game of baffling complexities and near poetic subtleties. Other games could be chronicled as shifting patterns of pieces and number-stick results, but benjuka gave rise to histories, and whatever possessed history possessed the very structure of the world. Some, it was said, had bent themselves to the benjuka plate and lifted their heads as prophets.

Achamian was not among them.

He pondered the plate, rubbing his hands together for warmth. Xinemus taunted him with a nasty chuckle.

“Always so dour when you play benjuka.”

“It’s a wretched game.”

“You say that only because you try too hard.”

“No. I say that because I lose.”

But Xinemus was right. The Abenjukala, a classic text on benjuka from Ceneian times, began, “Where games measure the limits of intellect, benjuka measures the limits of soul.” The complexities of benjuka were such that a player could never intellectually master the plate and so force another to yield. Benjuka, as the anonymous author put it, was like love. One could never force another to love. The more one grasped for it, the more elusive it became. Benjuka likewise punished a grasping heart. Where other games required industrious cunning, benjuka demanded something more. Wisdom, perhaps.

With an air of chagrin, Achamian moved the only stone among his silver pieces—a replacement for a piece stolen, or so Xinemus claimed, by one of his slaves. Another aggravation. Though pieces were nothing more than how they were used, the stone impoverished his play somehow, broke the miserly spell of a complete set.

Why do I get the stone?

“If you were drunk,” Xinemus said, answering his move decisively, “I might understand why you did that.”

How could he make jokes? Achamian stared at the patterns across the plate, realizing that the rules had shifted yet again—this time disastrously. He searched for options but saw none.

Xinemus smiled winningly and began paring his nails with a knife. “Proyas will feel the same way,” he said, “when he finally arrives.” Something in his tone made Achamian look up.

“Why’s that?”

“You’ve heard of the recent disaster.”

“What disaster?”

“The Vulgar Holy War has been destroyed.”

“What?” Achamian had heard talk of the Vulgar Holy War before leaving Sumna. Weeks ago, before the arrival of the bulk of the Holy War, a number of great lords from Galeoth, Conriya, and High Ainon had decided to march against the heathen on their own. The moniker “vulgar” had been given to them because of the hosts of lordless rabble that followed. It had never occurred to Achamian to ask how it fared. It’s started. The bloodshed has started.

“On the Plains of Mengedda,” Xinemus continued. “The heathen Sapatishah, Skaurus, sent the tarred heads of Tharschilka, Kumrezzer, and Calmemunis to the Emperor as a warning.”

“Calmemunis? You mean Proyas’s cousin?”

“Arrogant, headstrong fool! I begged him not to march, Akka. I reasoned, I shouted, I even grovelled—abased myself like a fool!—but the dog wouldn’t listen.”

Achamian had met Calmemunis once, in the court of Proyas’s father. Outrageous conceit coupled with stupidity—enough to make Achamian wince. “Aside from thinking the God Himself stirred him, why do you think he marched?”

“Because he knew once Proyas arrived, he’d be little more than a fawning lapdog. He’s never forgiven Proyas for the incident at Paremti.”

“The Battle of Paremti? What happened?”

“You don’t know? I’ve forgotten how long it’s been, old friend. I’ve much gossip to share.”

“Later,” Achamian said. “Tell me what happened at Paremti.”

“Proyas had Calmemunis whipped.”

“Whipped?” This concerned Achamian deeply. Had his old student changed so much? “For cowardice?”

As though he shared Achamian’s concern, Xinemus’s face darkened. “No. For impiety.”

“You jest. Proyas had a peer whipped for impiety? How far has his fanaticism gone, Zin?”

“Too far,” Xinemus said quickly, as though ashamed for his lord. “But for a brief time only. I was sorely disappointed in him, Akka. Heartbroken that the godlike child you and I had taught had grown to be a man of such . . . extremes.”

Proyas had been a godlike child. Over the four years he had spent as court tutor in the Conriyan capital of Aöknyssus, Achamian had fallen in love with the boy—even more than with his legendary mother. Sweet memories. Strolling through sunlit foyers and along murky garden paths, discussing history, logic, and mathematics, and answering a never-ending cataract of questions . . .

“Master Achamian? Where have all the dragons gone?”

“The dragons are within us, young Proyas. Within you.”

The knitted brow. The hands clenched in frustration. Yet another indirect answer from his tutor.

“So there are no more dragons in the world, Master Achamian?”

“You’re in the world, Proyas, are you not?”

Xinemus had been Proyas’s sword trainer at the same time, and it was through their periodic squabbles over the boy that they had come to respect each other. As much as Achamian loved the Prince, Xinemus—who nurtured the devotion he would need to serve the child as king—loved Proyas more. So much so that when Xinemus glimpsed the strength of the teacher in the pupil, he invited Achamian to his villa on the Meneanor Sea.

“You’ve made a child wise,” Xinemus had said, attempting to explain the extraordinary offer. Very rarely did caste nobles host sorcerers.

“And you’ve made him dangerous,” Achamian had replied.

They had found their friendship somewhere in the laughter that had followed.

“Fanatic for a time?” Achamian now asked. “Does that mean he’s regained his senses?”

Xinemus grimaced, absently scratched the side of his nose. “Somewhat. The Holy War and his acquaintance with Maithanet have rekindled his zeal, but he’s wiser now. More patient. More tolerant of weakness.”

“Your lessons, I imagine. What did you do?”

“I beat him until he was bloody.”

Achamian laughed.

“I’m quite serious, Akka. After Paremti I left the court in disgust. Wintered in Attrempus. He came to me, alone—”

“To beg forgiveness?”

Xinemus grimaced. “One would hope so, but no. He travelled all that way to upbraid me.” The Marshal shook his head and smiled. Achamian knew why: even as a child Proyas had been given to endearing excesses. Travelling alone two hundred miles simply to deliver a rebuke was something only Proyas would do.

“He accused me of abandoning him in his hour of need. Calmemunis and his crew had brought charges against him, both to the ecclesiastical courts and to the King, and for a while things went sour, though he was never in any real danger.”

“Of course you know he was only seeking your approval, Zin,” Achamian said, suppressing a twinge of envy. “He’s always worshipped you, you know—in his way . . . So what did you do?”

“I listened to him rant with what patience I could muster. Then I led him into the postern bailey and threw him a training sword. ‘You wish to punish me,’ I said, ‘so punish me.’” Xinemus smiled as Achamian roared with laughter.

“He was tenacious as a whelp, Akka, but he’s absolutely relentless now. He refused to yield. I’d knock him senseless, and he’d drag himself back up, soaked by blood and snow. Each time I’d say: ‘I’ve trained you as best as I know how, my Prince. Yet still you lose.’ Then he’d rush me again, yelling like a madman.

“The following morning he said nothing, avoided me like pestilence. But come afternoon he sought me out, his face bruised like apples. ‘I understand,’ he said. I asked him, ‘Understand what?’ ‘Your lesson,’ he replied. ‘I understand your lesson.’ I said, ‘Oh, and what lesson was that?’ And he said: ‘That I’ve forgotten how to learn. That life is the God’s lesson, and that even if we undertake to teach impious men, we must be ready to learn from them as well.’”

Achamian stared at his friend with candid awe. “Is that what you’d intended to teach him?”

Xinemus frowned and shook his head. “No. I just wanted to pound the arrogant piss out of him. But it sounded good to me, so I simply said, ‘Indeed, my Lord Prince, indeed,’ then nodded the sage way you do when you agree with someone you think isn’t as clever as you.”

Achamian smiled and nodded sagely.

Xinemus growled with laughter. “Either way, Proyas has refrained from repeating Paremti ever since. And when he returned to Aöknyssus, he offered to compensate Calmemunis lash for lash, in his father’s court.”

“And Calmemunis actually accepted? Surely the man’s not that foolish.”

“Oh, the oaf accepted, whipped Nersei Proyas before the eyes of King and court. And that’s the real reason why Calmemunis never forgave Proyas. He lashed away his last shreds of honour. When he realized this, he claimed that Proyas had tricked him.”

“So you think that’s why Calmemunis insisted on leading the Vulgar Holy War?”

Xinemus nodded sadly. “That’s why he, and a hundred thousand others, are dead.”

Great catastrophes were often wrought by such small things. The intolerance of a prince and the stupidity of an arrogant lord. But where were these facts? Did they lie somewhere across those distant fields of dead?

One hundred thousand dead . . .

Achamian glanced down at the benjuka plate. For some reason he saw it instantly—his move. As though surprised that Achamian still wanted to play, Xinemus watched as he repositioned an apparently irrelevant piece.

One hundred thousand dead—was this also a move of some kind?

“Cunning devil,” Xinemus hissed, studying the plate. After a moment’s hesitation, he made his countermove.

A mistake, Achamian realized. In one thoughtless instant, Xinemus had utterly undone his earlier advantage. Why do I see it so clearly now?

Benjuka. Two men. Two different ends. One outcome. Who determined that outcome? The victor? But true victories were so rare—as rare across the benjuka plate as they were in life. More often the result would be uneasy compromise. But a compromise shaped by whom? By no one?

Soon enough, Achamian realized, the Holy War proper would march from Momemn, cross the fertile province of Anserca, and then pass into hostile lands. All this time the prospect of the campaign had seemed an abstraction, a mere move that could not, as yet, be countered. But this isn’t a game. The Holy War will march, and no matter what, thousands upon thousands will die.

So many men. So many competing ends. And only one outcome. What would that outcome be? And who would shape it?

No one?

The thought terrified Achamian. The Holy War suddenly seemed a mad wager, a casting of number-sticks against an utterly black future. The lives of innumerable thousands—including Achamian—for distant Shimeh. How could any prize be worth such a wager?

“A hundred thousand dead,” Xinemus continued, apparently unaware of the seriousness of his position on the plate. “A handful of them men I knew. And to make matters worse, the Emperor has been quick to exploit our dismay. He bids us to learn from the Vulgar Holy War’s mistake.”

“Which was?” Achamian asked, still distracted by the plate.

“The folly of marching without Ikurei Conphas.”

Achamian looked up. “But I thought the Emperor provisioned Calmemunis and the others, made it possible for them to march in the first place.”

“Indeed. But then he’s promised to provision any who sign his accursed Indenture.”

“So Calmemunis and the others did sign . . .” There had been uncertainty about this in Sumna.

“Why not? Men like him care nothing for their word. Why not promise to return all conquered lands to the Empire when your promise means nothing?”

“But certainly,” Achamian pressed, “Calmemunis and the others must have seen the Emperor’s plan. Ikurei Xerius knows full well that the Great Names will yield nothing to him. The Indenture is simply a pretext, something to prevent Shrial Censure when he orders Conphas to retake the Holy War’s conquests.”

“Ah, but you forget why Calmemunis marched in the first place, Akka. He didn’t march for Shrial Remission or for the glory of the Latter Prophet—or even to carve out a kingdom of his own, for that matter. No. Calmemunis possessed the heart of a thief. He marched to deny Proyas any glory.”

Arrested by a sudden thought, Achamian paused to study his friend. “But you, Zin . . . You do march for the Latter Prophet. How do all these vendettas and agendas make you feel?”

For a moment, Xinemus seemed taken aback. “You’re right, of course,” he said slowly. “I should be outraged. But I guess I expected this to happen. To be honest, I worry more about what Proyas will think.”

“And why’s that?”

“Certainly the news of the disaster will appall him. But all this score-settling and politicking . . .” Xinemus hesitated, as though silently rehearsing something long thought but never spoken. “I was among the first to arrive here, Akka, sent by Proyas to coordinate all those Conriyans who followed. I’ve been part of the Holy War since the first of the pavilions were pitched beneath Momemn’s walls. I know that the bulk of those who rumble around us are pious men. Good men—no matter what nation they hail from. And all of them have heard of Nersei Proyas and the respect Maithanet bears him. All of them, even other Great Names such as Gothyelk or Saubon, are prepared to follow his lead. So much of what happens in this game with the Emperor will depend on how Proyas responds . . .”

“And Proyas is often impractical,” Achamian concluded. “You fear that this game with the Emperor will provoke Proyas the Judge, rather than Proyas the Tactician.”

“Precisely. As it stands the Emperor holds the Holy War hostage. He refuses to provision us beyond our daily needs unless we condescend to sign his Indenture. Of course, Maithanet can command him to provision the Holy War on pain of Shrial Censure, but now it seems that even he hesitates. The destruction of the Vulgar Holy War has convinced him that we’re doomed unless we march with Ikurei Conphas. The Kianene have bared their teeth, and faith alone, it seems, won’t be enough to overcome them. Who better to pilot us through those shoals than the great Exalt-General who has crushed the Scylvendi? But not even a Shriah as powerful as Maithanet can force an Emperor to send his only heir against the heathen. And of course, once again, the Emperor will not send Conphas unless the Great Names sign his Indenture.”

“Remind me,” Achamian said wryly, “never to cross paths with the Emperor.”

“He’s a fiend,” Xinemus spat. “A cunning fiend. And unless Proyas is able to outmanoeuvre him, all of us will be spilling blood for Ikurei Xerius III rather than Inri Sejenus.”

For some reason, the Latter Prophet’s name reminded Achamian of the chill. He stared numbly at the silver-and-onyx geometries of the benjuka plate. He leaned forward, clutched the small sea-rounded stone he’d used to replace the missing piece, then tossed it across the glaring dust beyond their canopy. The game suddenly seemed childish.

“So you concede?” Xinemus asked. He sounded disappointed; he still thought he would win.

“I’ve no hope,” Achamian replied, thinking not of benjuka but of Proyas. The Prince would arrive a man besieged, and Achamian had to further harass him, tell him even his gilded Shriah played some dark game.

Despite the winter gloom, it was warm in the pavilion. Esmenet sat up, hugging her knees in her arms. Who would have thought riding could make legs so sore?

“You think of someone else,” Sarcellus said.

His voice was so different, she thought. So confident.

“Yes,” she said.

“The Mandate Schoolman, I suppose.”

Shock. But then she remembered telling him . . .

“What of it?” she asked.

He smiled, and as always she found herself at once thrilled and unsettled. Something about his teeth maybe? Or his lips?

“Exactly,” he said. “Mandate Schoolmen are fools. Everyone in the Three Seas knows this . . . Do you know what the Nilnameshi say of women who love fools?”

She turned her face to him, fixed him with a languid look. “No. What do the Nilnameshi say?”

“That when they sleep, they do not dream.”

He pressed her gently to his pillow.