"I saw you, Horse-King. I know you called to me... And yet I rode on." He glared like someone speaking against a mob of baser instincts. "I will be forever finding my way out from your shadow."

And that, Sorweel suddenly realized, was the Aspect-Emperor's goal: to have a believer become Satakhan.

"A mighty lord died here..." he heard the man mutter.

She draws a pouch from the pit below her stomach, raises it pinched in fingers of filth and bone. She smiles. Tears of blood stream from her earthen eyes. The watching men gasp for the sorrow of a mother's endless Giving...

He pulled the pouch from his belt. The muck had dried to ash about its edges. He brushed it away with trembling fingers, noticing for the first time the dizzying patterns burned into the age-old leather. Crescents. Crescents within crescents.
Broken circles, he decided, glimpsing the gold-thread circumfixes embroidered along the hem of his own tunic.
Broken circumfixes.
He tugged free the clip of chapped bronze that held its mouth closed. He already knew what it contained, for as King of Sakarpus, he was also High Keeper of the Hoard. Nevertheless, he tipped the pouch so that he might hold it in his callused palm: a sphere of ancient iron...
A Chorae. A holy Tear of God.

"That motif... the triple crescent..."
"What about it?" he asked, far too aware of the proximity of her gaze to his groin.
At last her eyes climbed to meet his own. Her look was cool, remote in the way of old and prideful widows.
"That is the Far Antique mark of my family... the Anasûrimbor of Trysë."

And he continually doubted...

A Narindar proper—a servant of Ajokli, the evil Four-Horned Brother.

The learned told tales of Sheneor, the least of the three nations divided between the sons of the first ancient Anasûrimbor King, Nanor-Ukkerja I.

The Aspect-Emperor leaned back into the glow of his unearthly halo. As always the hearth's twirling light sketched smoky glimpses of doom across the canvas walls behind him. For a heartbeat, the Exalt-General could swear he saw children running...
"Choice," his Lord-and-God said smiling. "Willing...
"Your shackles are cast from this very iron."

"A brother!" the Successor-Prince whispered with startling violence. "Sakarpus has a brother in Zeüm!"

"You are troubled, I know," Kellhus said, grinning at his Exalt-General. "For all your yearning, for all your faith, yours remains a pragmatic soul, Proyas." The slaves continued their silent labour, binding straps and laces. The Aspect-Emperor glanced down at his garb, rolled his eyes as if offering himself up as a poor example. "You have little patience for tools you cannot immediately use."

"I am Nin'sariccas," the Nonman announced in High Kûniüric, a language Proyas had spent years mastering so he could read The Sagas in their original tongue. "Dispossessed Son of Siol, Emissary of his Most Subtle Glory, Nil'giccas, King of Injor-Niyas..." His bow fell far short of what jnan demanded. "We have ridden long and hard to find you."

A serpentine blink. The preternatural eyes clicked to the Aspect-Emperor's right—to the sorcerous arras, Proyas realized.

Proyas was one of few who knew something about their acquisition, how Kellhus, during one of the longer truces that punctuated the Unification Wars, spent several weeks studying with Heramari Iyokus, the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, learning the darkest ways of Anagogic sorcery, the Daimos.

"Such thefts..." Nin'sariccas said with passionless tact. "Such substitutions. They have happened before."
"Why should you care," Kellhus said, "if your hatred is satisfied, your ancient foe at last destroyed? Ever have Men been ruled by tyrants. Why should you care what soul lies behind our cruelty?"
A single inhuman blink. "May I touch you?"
"Yes."

"Did you believe those charges?"
"Of course not!"
The Holy Aspect-Emperor frowned as if troubled by the vehemence of his denial. He lowered his gaze to the fire twirling in the arcane octagon of his hearth.
"But why would that be, when they are true?"

And so did the ill-fated General earn a second flogging, as well as everlasting shame in the scripture that would survive.

Far more numerous were what Eskeles called Ursranc, a species bred for obedience. "Like dogs to wolves," the Schoolman said. They seemed somewhat taller and broader than their wild cousins, but aside from their freedom, they were really only distinguished by the uniformity of their armour: hauberks of black iron scale. The Scions could only guess at their numbers, since they not only crawled throughout the column whipping and beating their more wolfish kin, but also patrolled the surrounding plains in loose companies of a hundred or so—the way Men would.

"I think," Zsoronga said, "and by that I mean think... that you are what they call narindari in the Three Seas..." His body seemed to sway about the stationary point of his gaze. "Chosen by the Gods to kill."
"Kill?" Sorweel cried. "Kill?"
"Yes," the Successor-Prince replied, his green eyes drawn down by the frightful weight of his ruminations. When he looked up, he gazed with a certain blankness, as if loathe to dishonour his friend with any outward sign of pity. "To avenge your father."

"What does the Mother expect? The Gods are children and we are their toys. Look at you sausages! They cherish us one day, break us the next." He held out his arms as if to mime Mankind's age-old exasperation. "We Zeümi pray to our ancestors for a reason."

For in truth, all the Men of the Ordeal in their countless, shining thousands were little more than a vehicle for the safe conveyance of the Schools.

That which comes after determines what comes before—in this World.

"The Gods are-are finite," Theliopa declared in a voice that contradicted the stark angularity of her frame. "They can only apprehend a finite por-portion of existence. They fathom the future-future, certainly, but from a vantage that limits them. The No-God dwells in their blind spots, follows a path-path they are utterly oblivious to..." She turned, looking from man to man with open curiosity. "Because he is oblivion."

Their Empress graced them all with a sour smile. "The Gods chafe, because like all souls, they call evil what they cannot comprehend."
More astounded silence. Kelmomas found himself squinting in hilarity. Why anyone should fear the Gods was quite beyond him, let alone fools as privileged and powerful as these.
Because they are old and dying, the secret voice whispered.

"So..." he said, looking to the others with a strategically blank face. "So it is true, then? The Gods..."—his gaze wandered—"the almighty Gods... are against us?"
Disaster. It fairly slapped the blood from Mother's painted face. Her lips retreated, the way they always did during such moments, into a thin line.
He offends me... the secret voice cooed. The fat one.

Dûnyain blood... the secret voice whispered. What raises us above the animals.
Like Mother.

He thought about his previous murders and the mysterious person he saw trapped in the eyes of the dying. The one person he loved more than his mother—the one and only. Convulsing, bewildered, terrified, and beseeching... beseeching most of all.
Please! Please don't kill me!
"The Worshipper," he declared aloud.
Yes, the secret voice whispered. That's a good name.
"A most strange person, don't you think, Sammi?"
Most strange.
"The Worshipper..." Kelmomas said, testing the sound. "How can he travel like that from body to body?"
Perhaps he's locked in a room. Perhaps dying is that room's only door...
"Locked in a room!" the young Prince-Imperial cried laughing. "Yes! Clever-clever-cunning-clever!"

And his brother's voice resonated, climbed as if communicating up out of his bones. "You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother—Little Knife! You think you murder in her name. But that love is simply cloth thrown over the invisible, what you use to reveal the shape of something so much greater..."
Memories tumbled into his soul's eye. Memories of his Whelming, how he had followed the beetle to the feet of the Grinning God, the Four-horned Brother, how they had laughed when he had maimed the bug—laughed together! Memories of the Yatwerian priestess, how she had shrieked blood while the Mother of Fertility stood helpless...
And the boy could feel it! An assumption of glory. A taking possession of a certainty that had possessed him all along—possessed him in ignorance... Yes!
Godhead.

And perhaps most interestingly, absolutely no Chorae...
Nganka—nay, Zeüm—needed to be informed. This night would be filled with far-calling dreams.

A scowl knits his brow. "The Judging Eye is the eye of the Unborn... The eye that watches from the God's own vantage."

A line of captives, wrist chained to wrist, ankle to ankle, wretched for abuse...
Standing encased in horror and ignorance, a file running the length of a shadowy tunnel...
His eyes rolled in equine panic. What now? What-what now?
He saw walls, which for an instant seemed golden but formed of mangled thatch, scrub and undergrowth, surging and twining to weave a black corridor about their miserable passage. He could even discern the terminus, over shoulders slouched in woe and capitulation, an opening of some kind, a clearing...
Bright with things he did not want to see.
His teeth were missing... Beaten?
Yes... Beaten from his skull.

At first he thought it had been carved—the product of some morbid scalper joke—but a second look told him otherwise. A skull. A human skull embedded in the coiled heartwood. Only a partial eye socket, a cheek, and several teeth—molars to canine—had been chiselled clear, but it was undeniably human.

Could the Mop be a topos, a place where trauma had worn away the hard rind of the world? Could the trackless leagues before them be soaked in Hell?

He would see them, whether high on a promontory or in a depression on the far side of a tree, Cleric sitting, but with his head bowed in such a manner that he seemed to be kneeling, while the Captain—who so rarely spoke otherwise—muttered over him, grinding out words that he could never quite hear.

Seswatha paused on the stair, warred with his stomach. He looked down and for some reason felt no surprise, no alarm, to see that the golden map-case had become an infant's inert form. Blue and grey. Mottled with black bruising, as if it had perished while lying on its face. Slicked with the sweat of the dead.

According to her, the Wight-in-the-Mountain had been driven away by her Chorae and that was that. When he reminded her that the Captain also carried a Chorae, one that apparently made no difference, she would simply shrug as if to say, "Well, I'm not the Captain, am I?"

He knew that some agencies could be summoned shorn of the Outside, plucked whole as it were, while others bore their realities with them, swamping the World with porous madness. The shade of Gin'yursis, Achamian knew, had been one of the latter.
Chorae only negated violations of the Real; they returned the world to its fundamental frame. But Gin'yursis had come as figure and frame—a symbol wedded to the very Hell that gave it meaning...
Mimara's Chorae should have been useless.

Something was open that should not have been open. She closed it...
Somehow.
...
A tear of the God, blazing in her palm. The God of Gods!

"The Wizard does not say," the Successor-Prince continued when he glanced back. "But I fear that you and I shall know before this madness is done with."

A mother wiping the face of her beloved son.

Look at you...

Somewhere on the plain, the priests sounded the Interval: a single note tolling pure and deep over landscapes of tented confusion. The sun was rising.

The ghost of Harweel turned its burnt head, revealing a face devoid of hope and eyes. Beetles dropped from the joints of his blasted armour, clicked and scuttled in the dark.

The dead, it grated without sound, cannot see.

That night they knelt for what seemed the first time, gave voice to the great unanswered ache in their hearts. They held their Circumfixes hot between moist palms, and they prayed. And the chill that pimpled their skin seemed holy.

They knew what they had seen, what they had felt.

For who could be such a fool as to mistake Truth?