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their faces grim with determination and
expectant fury.
     
    And out there, across the grass
slopes, only void, the grey of distances lost through sheet after sheet of
gossamer rain. The Aspect-Emperor and his Great Ordeal.
     
    Sorweel rehearsed the prayers
his father had taught to him, the Demanding, meant to loosen the sword of
Gilgaöl's favour, the Plea to Fate, meant to soften the hard look of the Whore.
It seemed he could hear others among the High Boonsmen whispering prayers of
their own, summoning the favour they would need to wrest their doom from the
Aspect-Emperor's grasping hand.
     
    He's a demon, Sorweel
thought, drawing strength from the remembered tenor of his father's voice. A
Hunger from the Outside. He will not prevail...
     
    He cannot.
     
    Just then, a single horn pealed
from the rain-shrouded horizon, long drawn and low, of a tone with the call of
bull mastodons. For several heartbeats, it seemed to hang suspended over the
city, solitary, foreboding. It trailed into silence, one heartbeat, two, until
it seemed its signification had ended. Then it was joined by a chorus of
others, some shrill and piercing, some as deep as the previous night's thunder.
Suddenly the whole world seemed to shiver, its innards awakened by the cold
cacophony. Sorweel could see men trade apprehensive looks. Mumbled curses and
prayers formed a kind of counterpoint, like bracken about a monument. Blare and
rumble, a sound that made a ceiling of the sky—that made water sharp. Then the
horns were gone, leaving only the hoarse cries of the lords and officers along
the wall, shouting out encouragement to their men.
     
    "Take heart," Sorweel
heard an old voice mutter to someone unseen.
     
    "Are you sure?" a
panicked boy-voice whispered in reply. "How can you be sure?"
     
    A laugh, so obviously forced
that Sorweel could not but wince. "A fortnight ago, the Hunter's priests
found a nest of warblers in the temple eaves. Crimson warblers—do you
understand? The Gods are with us, my son. They watch over us!"
     
    Peering after the voices,
Sorweel recognized the Ostaroots, a family whom he had always thought
hangers-on in his father's Royal Company. Sorweel had always shunned the son,
Tasweer, not out of arrogance or spite, but in accordance with what seemed the
general court attitude. He had never thought of it, not really, save to make
gentle sport of the boy now and again with his friends. For some reason, it
shamed Sorweel to hear him confessing his fears to his father. It seemed
criminal that he, a prince born to the greatest of privileges, had so
effortlessly judged Tasweer's family, that with the ease of an exhalation, he
had assessed lives as deep and confusing as his own. And found them wanting.
     
    But his remorse was short-lived.
Shouts of warning drew his eyes back in the direction of the pelting rain,
toward the first shadows of movement across the plain. The siege towers
appeared first, each within toppling distance of the others, little more than
blue columns at the misty limits of his vision, like the ghosts of ancient
monoliths. There was no surprise at the number of them—fourteen—since Sorweel
and countless others had watched their faraway assembly over the preceding
days. The surprise, rather, was reserved for their scale, and for the fact that
the Southerners had borne them disassembled across so many trackless leagues.
     
    They moved in echelon, crawling
as though perched on tortoises. Slowly, the finer details of their appearance
resolved from the mist, as did the rhythmic shouts of the thousands that
pressed them forward. They were sheathed in what appeared to be scales of tin,
and almost absurdly tall, to the point of tottering, rising to a slender peak
from bases as broad as any Sakarpic bastion—unlike any of the engines Sorweel
had seen sketched in the Tomes of War . Each bore the Circumfix, the mark
of the Aspect-Emperor and his sham divinity, painted in white and red across
their middens: a circle