“I’m trying,” Sorweel replied, his face suddenly hot. “I’m trying to understand!”

“I-know-I-know,” the Schoolman said, this time smirking at his own stupidity. “We’ll discuss the Latter Prophet, er … later …” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “In the meantime, ponder this … If the Aspect-Emperor’s soul is cast in the very form of the God, then …” He trailed nodding. “Huh? Eh? If …”

“Then … He is the God in small …” A kind of supernatural terror accompanied these words.

The sorcerer beamed, his teeth surprisingly white and straight compared to the dark frazzle of his beard. “You wonder how it is so many would march to the ends of the earth for him? You wonder what could move men to cut their own throats in his name. Well then, there you have your answer …” He leaned forward, his pose rigid in the manner of men who think they possess world-judging truths. “Anasûrimbor Kellhus is the God of Gods, Sorweel, come to walk among us.”

Somehow Sorweel had fallen from a crouch to his knees. He remained breathless still, staring at Eskeles. To move his hands or even to blink his eyes, it seemed, would be to quake and to spill, to reveal himself a thing of sand.

“Before his coming, me and my kind were damned,” the sorcerer continued, though he seemed to be speaking more for his own benefit than Sorweel’s. “We Schoolmen traded a lifetime of power for an eternity of torment … But now?”

Damnation. Sorweel felt the cold of dead earth soak through his leggings. An ache climbed into his knees. His father had died in sorcerous fire—how many times had Sorweel tormented himself with that thought, imagining the shriek and scream, the thousand blistering knives? But what Eskeles was saying …

Did it mean he burned still?

The Mandate Schoolman gazed at him, his eyes wide and bright with a kind of uncompromising joy, like a man in the flush of infatuation, or a gambler delivered from slavery by an impossible throw of the number-sticks. When he spoke, more than admiration—or even worship—trilled through his voice.

“Now I am saved.”

Love. He spoke with love.

Rather than go to Zsoronga’s pavilion that evening, Sorweel shared a quiet repast with Porsparian in the white-washed air of his own tent. He sat on the end of his cot, his head bent to his steaming gruel, knowing yet not caring that the Shigeki slave stared at him wordlessly. A kind of incipient confusion filled him, one that had slipped the cup of his soul and spilled through his body, a leaden tingle. The sounds of the Great Ordeal fell through the fabric effortlessly, thrumming and booming from every direction.

Save the sky. The sky was silent.

And the earth.

“Anasûrimbor Kellhus is the God of Gods incarnate, Sorweel, come to walk among us …”