Sorweel gripped the edge of his bench, sat as still as his quailing body would allow. The Aspect-Emperor had come—even still he could scarce believe it. An itch, a name, a principle, a foreboding, something so far across the horizon that it had to seem both childish and menacing, like the wights Sorweel’s nurse would invoke whenever he had vexed her. Something that could be dismissed until encircled by shadows.

Now, somewhere out in the darkness that surrounded their hearts and their walls, somewhere out there, he waited, a Hunger clothed in glorious manhood, propped by the arms of grovelling nations. A Demon, come to cut their throats, defile their women, enslave their children. A Ciphrang, come to lay waste to all they knew and loved.

“Have you not read The Sagas?” his father was asking the Emissary, his voice incredulous. “The bones of our fathers survived the might of the Great Ruiner—Mog-Pharau! I assure you, they haven’t grown too brittle to survive you!”

The Exalt-General smiled, or at least tried to. “Ah, yes … Virtue does not burn.”

“What do you mean?”

“A saying in my country. When a man dies, the pyre takes everything save what his children can use to adorn their ancestor scrolls. All men flatter themselves through their forebears.”

Harweel snorted not so much at the wisdom, it seemed, as the relevance. “And yet the North is waste and Sakarpus still stands!”

Proyas’s smile was pained, his look one of dull pity. “You forget,” he said with the air of disclosing a prickly truth, “my Lord has been here before. He broke bread with the men who raised these very halls, back when this was but a province of a greater empire, a backwater frontier. Fortune saved these walls, not fortitude. And Fortune, as you so well know, is a whore.”

Even though his father often paused to order his thoughts, something about the ensuing silence chilled Sorweel to the bowel. He knew his father, knew that the past weeks had taken their toll. His rallying words were the same, and his booming laugh was nothing if not more frequent. But something had changed nonetheless. A slouch in his shoulders. A shadow in his gaze.

“The Great Ordeal stands at your gate,” the Exalt-General pressed. “The Schools are assembled. The hosts of a hundred tribes and nations beat sword against shield. Doom encircles you, brother. You know you cannot prevail, even with the Chorae Hoard. I know this because your knuckles are as scarred as my own, because your eyes are as bruised by war’s horror.”

Another ashen silence. Sorweel found himself leaning forward, trying to peer around the Horn-and-Amber Throne. What was his father doing?

“Come …” the Exalt-General said, his voice one of genuine entreaty. “Harweel, I beg of you, take my hand. Men can no longer afford to shed the blood of Men.”