Then, one afternoon several days into his instruction, Sorweel summoned enough courage to mention the Aspect-Emperor. He related—in a form abbreviated by embarrassment—the story Zsoronga had told him about the emissaries cutting their own throats before the Zeümi Satakhan. “I know he’s your master …” he ended awkwardly.

“What about him?” Eskeles replied after a thoughtful pause.

“Well … What is he?”

The sorcerer nodded in the manner of those confirmed in their worries. “Come,” he said cryptically, spurring his mule to a trot.

The Kidruhil typically rode near the forward heart of the Great Ordeal, where they could be sent in any direction given the unlikely event of an attack. But word of Sranc activity to the west had led to their redeployment on the extreme left flank. This meant the sorcerer and his ward need press neither hard nor far to ride clear of the slow roping columns. Looking absurd on his mule—his legs straight rather than bent, his girth almost equal to his mount’s—Eskeles pressed along the shoulders of a long low knoll. Sorweel followed, alternately smiling at the sight of the man and frowning at his intentions. Beyond the crest of the knoll, the farther plains sloped up into the horizon, bone-coloured for the most part but shot with whorls of grey and ash black. The green of the more lush lands to the south had become little more than a haze.

Staring off into the distance, the sorcerer reined to a halt at the summit, where Sorweel joined him. The air was crisp and chill.

“So dry,” Eskeles said without looking at him.

“It often is. Some years the grasses all die and blow away … Or so they say.”

“And that,” Eskeles continued, pointing toward the northwest. “What is that?”

There was a Kidruhil patrol in the distance, a line of tiny horses, but Sorweel knew that Eskeles pointed beyond them. The sky was a bowl of endless turquoise. Beneath it the land ascended a series of rumps, then spread bluing into a series of flats and folds, like a tent after its poles had been dropped. Reaching in and out of the horizon, an immense band cut across the plain, mottled black and grey near its centre and fading into the natural grain of the surrounding grasslands along its edges.

“The great herds,” Sorweel said, having seen such tracks many times. “Elk. Endless numbers of them.”

The sorcerer turned in his saddle, nodding back the way they had come. The breeze pulled a comb of hairs from his beard.

“And what would you say that is?”