Perplexed, Sorweel wheeled his horse about, followed Eskeles’s bemused gaze. Not since Sakarpus had he seen the Great Ordeal from its edge, and he found himself shocked at the difference of watching something that had encompassed him from afar. Where before the world had seemed to roll into the immobile masses, now the masses rolled over an immovable world. Thousands upon thousands of figures, scattered like grain, thrown like threads, knitted into slow heaving carpets, gradually creeping across the back of the earth. Arms twinkled to the horizon.

“The Great Ordeal,” he heard himself say.

“No.”

Sorweel searched his tutor’s smiling eyes.

“This,” Eskeles explained, “this … is the Aspect Emperor.”

Mystified, Sorweel could only turn back to the spectacle. Though he couldn’t be sure, he thought he saw the Aspect-Emperor’s own banner rising from faraway mobs: a white-silk standard the size of a sail, emblazoned with a simple blood-red Circumfix. Struck by unseen priests, the Interval hummed out across the arch of the sky, deep and resonant, fading as always in increments too fine to detect, so that he was never quite sure when it stopped sounding.

“I don’t understand …”

“There are many, many ways to carve the world, your Glory. Think of the way we identify different men with their bodies, with the position they occupy in place and time. Since we inherit this way of thinking, we assume that it is natural, that it is the only way. But what if we identify a man with his thoughts—what then? How would we draw his boundaries? Where would he begin, and where would he end?”

Sorweel simply gazed at the man. Damned leuneraal.

“I still don’t understand.”

The sorcerer frowned in silence for a time, then with a decisive grunt leaned back in his saddle to root through one of his packs. He huffed and cursed in some exotic tongue as he pawed through his belongings—the effort of twisting back and sideways obviously strained him. Without warning, he dismounted with a heavy “Oooof!” then began rifling the opposite pack in the same way. It wasn’t until he searched the rump pack—made of weather-beaten leather like the others—that he found what he was looking for: a small vase no bigger than a child’s forearm and just as white. With a triumphant expression, he held it shining to the sun: porcelain, another luxury of the Three Seas.

“Come-come,” he called to Sorweel, stamping his left boot in the grass to wipe mule shit from his heel.

Securing his pony’s reins to the pommel of the mule’s saddle, Sorweel hastened after the sorcerer, who walked kicking through winter-flattened grasses—to clean off more dung, the young King supposed, until, that is, Eskeles cried, “Aha!” at the sight of rounded stone rising from the turf.