Rumbling commotion surrounded them as Sorweel took his seat between Zsoronga and Eskeles. “I have always wanted this,” the rotund sorcerer said. “We see such sights in our Dreams, things you could scarce imagine. But to witness such glory with living eyes, my King! I hope the day comes when you can fathom your fortune. Despite all the pain, all the wrenching loss, there is no greater glory than a complicated life.”

Sorweel feigned distraction, once again troubled by the way parts of his soul always rose in seditious agreement with the sorcerer’s words—the leuneraal’s words. He glanced at Zsoronga, searching for encouragement in his imperturbable pride, but the Zeümi Prince simply gazed out, his expression as empty and as guarded as Sorweel’s own. The look of a boy striving to pass unnoticed in the company of men.

Zsoronga could feel it as well, Sorweel realized. There was something in the air … something beyond the visible signs of warlike nobility, something that hung like a nimbus about outward observances. A kind of knowledge.

Sorweel twitched for the force of the realization when it came to him, as if some inner tendon had been plucked. Despite the differences in garb and armament, despite the differences in tongue, custom, and skin, something singular and implacable encompassed these men, defined them to their unguessed core.

Belief.

Here was belief, rendered sensuous for its intensity, made palpable in lilting voices and shining eyes.

Sorweel had known he marched in the company of fanatics, but until now he had never … touched it. The fever of jubilation. The lunacy of eyes that witnessed without seeing. The smell of commitment, absolute and encompassing. The Men of the Circumfix were capable of anything, he realized. They would weary, but they would not pause. They would fear, but they would not flee. Any atrocity, any sacrifice—nothing lay outside the compass of their possibility. They could burn cities, drown sons, slaughter innocents; they could even, as Zsoronga’s story about the suicides proved, cut their own throats. Through their faith they had outrun their every scruple, animal or otherwise, and they gloried in the stink of it—in the numbing smell of losing oneself in the mastery of another.

The Aspect-Emperor.

But how? How could any one man command such mad extremes in men? Zsoronga had said that it was a matter of intellect, that Men were little more than children in the presence of the Anasûrimbor—this was what Drusas Achamian, the Wizard-Exile, had claimed.

But who could be such a fool? And short of heaven how could such an intellect be? Eskeles had claimed that his soul was the God’s soul in small, that divinity was the cipher. If a man were to think the thoughts of a god, would not Men be as children before him?

What if the world really was about to end?