R. Bakker - The Judging eye

Sorweel nodded in understanding, smiled ruefully. "You would prefer the fate of my people?"

The question seemed to catch the Successor-Prince by surprise. "Sakarpus? No… Though sometimes, when my ardour overmatches my wisdom, I do… envy… the dead among you."

For some reason, the hooks of this reference to his overthrown world caught Sorweel where all the others had skipped past. The raw heart, the thick eyes, the leaden thought-all the staples of his plundered existence-came rushing back and with such violence he could not speak.

Prince Zsoronga watched him with an uncharacteristic absence of expression. "Ke nulam zo…"

"I suspect you feel the same."

The young King of Sakarpus looked to the red disc of wine in his bowl, realized that he had yet to take a single sip. Not one sip-all his pain seemed condensed in this idiotic fact. Mere weeks ago, simply holding wine would be cause for celebration, another pathetic token of the manhood he had so desperately craved. How he had yearned for his first Elking! But now…

It was madness, to move from a world so laughably small to one so tragically bloated… Madness.

"More than you could know," he said.

Sorweel found many things in Zsoronga's company, much more than he was willing to admit to himself, let alone anyone else. The friendship he could acknowledge, as this was a Gift prized by men and gods alike, particularly with someone as resolute and honourable as the Zeьmi Prince. His relief was something he had to admit, though it shamed him. For some perverse reason, all men found heart in learning that others shared not only their purpose, but their grief as well.

What he could not acknowledge was the relief he found in simply speaking. A true Horselord, a hero such as Niehirren Halfhand or Orsuleese the Faster, viewed speech with the high-handed distaste they reserved for bodily functions, as something men did only out of necessity. Sakarpus found its strength in its solitude, in its lack of intercourse with other babbling nations-it was not called the Lonely City for nothing-so its great men affected to do the same.

But Sorweel had found only desolation. Ever since joining the Scions, his voice had been stopped in the jar of his skull. His soul had turned inward, becoming ever more tangled in the hair of unruly thought. He had wandered about in a stupor, as if suffering the circling disease that sometimes afflicted horses, forcing them to walk around and around in senseless spirals until they collapsed. He too had been on the verge of collapse, pressed to the brink of madness by remorse and shame and self-pity-self-pity most of all.

Words had saved him, even if he could only speak around the fact of his pain. His single greatest fear leaving Zsoronga's pavilion that first night was that the Zeьmi Prince, despite all his displays and declarations to the contrary, found him as crude and as disagreeable as his name for Norsirai, "sausages," implied.

That he would be returned to the prison of his backward tongue.

As it turned out, Zsoronga invited him to ride with his retinue the following day, where thanks to Obotegwa's tireless voice, Sorweel found himself a part of the sometimes strange and often uproarious banter of Zsoronga's Brace, as the Zeьmi called their boonsmen. The day might have been his first good day in weeks, were it not for the sudden appearance of the Scion's commander-a campaign-grizzled Captain named Harnilias, or Old Harni as they called him. The silver-haired man simply rode into their midst, heavy with armour and airs of authority, searching and dismissing faces with a single sweeping glance. He addressed himself to Obotegwa without so much as a glance in Sorweel's direction. Even still, the young King was not at all surprised when the old Obligate turned to him and said, "The General wants to see you… Kayыtas himself."

Sorweel had seen the Prince-Imperial many times since his last summons, but only in glimpses through thickets of cavalrymen, his head bare and bright in the prairie sun, his blue cloak shimmering about its kinks and folds. Each time he caught himself craning his neck and peering like some Sagland churl, when he should have done no more than sneer and look away. Sorweel was always skirmishing over small points of dignity, always losing, but this was different. The sight of the General's battle-standard, which was well-nigh perpetual for some legs of the day-long march, drew his gaze like a lodestone. It was like some unnatural compulsion. He would ride and look, ride and look, and when the intervening masses parted…

There. A man who should be a man like any other.

Only that he wasn't. Anasыrimbor Kayыtas was more than powerful-more even than the son of the man who had killed King Harweel. It was as if Sorweel saw him against a greater frame, a background deeper than the endless emerald sweep of the Istyuli Plains.

As if Kayыtas were more an expression than an individual. A particle of fate.

Walking the short distance to the white-tented complex that formed the General's command, Sorweel struggled with a skin-tingling sense of exposure. A kind of anxious reluctance balled like a fist in his chest. He could hear the Prince-Imperial's declaration from their last meeting: "I need only look at your face to see your soul, not so clearly as Father, certainly, but enough to sound the measure of you or anyone else before me. I can see the depth of your pain, Sorweel…"

This was no mean claim, the kind men make when "measuring tongues," as the Sakarpi said, attempting to cow others with boasts and breast-beating. It was-and Sorweel knew this without reservation-a fact. Anasыrimbor Kayыtas could see through his arrogant posture, his feeble mask of pride-through him.

How? How did one war against such men?

A kind of panic welled through his thoughts as he approached the General's Horse-and-Circumfix standard. He did not want to be known…

Least of all now, and least of all by him.

A mixed cohort of soldiers crowded about the austere tent, some wearing the armour and crimson uniform of the General's Kidruhil guard and standing at attention, others garbed in silk-green beneath corselets of the finest chain and milling at ease-Pillarians, Sorweel would later learn, the personal bodyguard of the Imperial Family. A fair-haired Kidruhil officer barked senseless words at him as he approached, then nodded at his obvious incomprehension, as if there could be only one such fool.

Within heartbeats he found himself inside the command tent. As before, the interior was spare, almost devoid of ornament, and the furnishings severe. The setting sun flared across the westward panels, illuminating everything in white-filtered light. The contrast to Prince Zsoronga's pavilion with its gloomy corners and elaborate trappings could not be more complete. "Our glorious host," Sorweel remembered the Zeьmi Prince saying, "does not believe the rewards of rank have any place on the march."

Only what was needed. Only what was necessary.

Kayыtas sat as before at the same sheaf-covered table, only this time he stared at Sorweel with mild expectation instead of reading. A beautiful woman, her flaxen hair braided and bound about her head, sat to his immediate right, dressed in a gold-and-charcoal gown: Kayыtas's sister, Sorweel realized, glimpsing the familial resemblance in her face. Kayыtas's dark-maned brother, Moлnghus, hulked several paces away, fairly bristling with weaponry. There was a taut humidity in the air, the kind found in the wake of heated arguments.

The woman stared at him with the amused boldness of an aunt finally laying eyes on a sister's vaunted child. "Muirs kil tierana jen hыl," she said. Though her gaze never wavered, the way she tilted her head told Sorweel she had directed her words at Moлnghus behind her.