The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  The booming roar swept into them, over them, and Sorweel found himself in a mad bubble, a miraculous grotto where sweat could be wiped from sodden brows.

  Sand and dust shivered and danced between leather threads of grass. Beyond, howling faces, horned weapons, and knobbed fists crowded his every glimpse. He watched with a kind of disembowelled wonder: the white-rope limbs, the teeth like broken cochri shells, the covetous glitter of innumerable black eyes...

  Breathing required will.

  Eskeles thrashed his way back to blubbering consciousness. Moaning, he threw his gaze this way and that, flailed with his fists. Sorweel hugged his shoulders, tried to wrestle the panic from him. He thrust the portly man back, pinned him, crying, "Look at me! Look at me!"

  "Noooo!" the man howled from his dust-white beard. Urine blackened the man's trousers.

  "Something!" Sorweel cried through the scratching, pounding racket. The heave of crazed wretches encompassed everything. The first luminous cracks scrawled across the Ward, wandering like the flight of flies. "You have to do something!"

  "It's happening! Sweet Seju! Sweet-swe—!"

  Sorweel cuffed him full on the mouth.

  "Eskeles! You have to do something! Something with light!"

  The Mandate Schoolmen squinted in confusion.

  "The Ordeal, you fat fool! The Great Ordeal needs to be warned!"

  Somehow, somewhere in Sorweel's cry, the sorcerer seemed to encounter himself, the stranger who had sacrificed all in the name of his Aspect-Emperor. The Zaudunyani. The Believer. His eyes found their focus. He reached out to squeeze the young King's shoulder in assurance.

  "L-light," he gasped. "Light—yes!"

  He pressed Sorweel to the side, tottered to his feet even as his incipient Ward began to crumble. The glow of his chanting gleamed across swatches of madness. Screeching faces, jerking, trembling like strings in the wind. Bleeding gums. Diseased skin, weeping slime and algae. Notched edges flying on arcs both cramped and vicious. Eyes of glittering black, hundreds of them fixing him, weeping and raging for hunger. Lips shining for slaver...

  Like a nightmare. Like a mad fresco depicting the living gut of Hell, bleached ever whiter for the brilliance of the Schoolman's unholy song. Words too greased to be caught and subdued by the Legion's vicious roar, echoing through invisible canyons.

  And there it was... striking as straight as a geometer's line from the ground at the fat sorcerer's feet, dazzling the eyes, stilling the inhuman onlookers with salt-white astonishment...

  Reaching high to illuminate the belly of the overcast night.

  A Bar of Heaven.

  —|—

  General Kayûtas was the first to glimpse it out across the tumult, the Northmen but rafts of discipline in a tossed sea of Sranc, the Swayali like columns of sunlight breaking through tempest clouds, burning the inexhaustible waters. He saw it, between pelting arcs of arrows, a needle of glittering white on the southern horizon...

  Where nothing but dead earth should be.

  He turned to his sister, who had followed his gaze out to the distant and inexplicable beacon. Others in his cortege noticed also, but their shouts of alarm were soundless in the thrumming roar.

  Serwa need only glimpse her brother's lips to understand—they were children of the Dûnyain.

  She stepped into the sky, summoned the nearest of her sisters to rise with her.

  —|—

  The world smelled of burning snakes.

  Sorweel saw clouds knotted into woollen plates, flickering in and out of edgeless illumination. His head lolled and he saw the earth reeling, pricked with infinite detail, a thousand thousand mortal struggles. Ironclad men hacking and hollering. Sranc and more Sranc—twitching and innumerable. He saw women hanging in the air with him, far-gowned Swayali, singing impossible, incandescent songs.

  And he jerked his lurching gaze to the hook that had lifted him so high...

  A Goddess held him, carried him like a child across the surfaces of Hell.

  "Mother?" he gasped, thinking not of the woman who had borne him but of the divinity. Yatwer... the Mother of Wombs, who had cursed him with murdering the most deadly man to ever walk her parched earth.

  "No," the glorious lips replied. It seemed a miracle that she could hear him, such was the guttural clamour. A roar so knotted with violence, that the very air seemed to bleed. "Worse."

  "You..." he gasped, recognizing the woman through the fiery veil of her beauty.

  "Me," Anasûrimbor Serwa replied, smiling with the cruelty of the peerless. "How many hundreds will die," she asked, "for saving you?"

  "Drop me then," he croaked.

  She recoiled from the floating fury of his gaze, looked out across the threshing darkness, frowning as if finally understanding she bore a king in her arcane embrace. Through acrid veils of smoke, he breathed deep the scent of her: the myrrh of glory and privilege, the salt of exertion.

  Let me fall.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Western Three Seas

  Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.

  —AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

  LATE SPRING, 20 NEW IMPERIAL YEAR (4132 YEAR-OF-THE-TUSK), NANSURIUM, SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF MOMEMN

  In Gielgath, two thieves assailed him, and the White-Luck Warrior watched them scuffle, drunk and desperate, with the man who was their doom. They lurched out of alleyway shadows, their cries choked to murmurs for fear of being heard. They sprawled dead and dying across cobble and filth, the one inert, the other twitching. He wiped his Seleukaran blade clean across the dead one, even as he raised the sword to counter their manic rush. He stepped clear of the one who stumbled, raised his blade to parry the panicked swing of the other... the swing that would notch the scimitar's honed edge—as thin as an eyelid.

  The notch that would shatter his sword, so allowing the broken blade to plunge into the Aspect-Emperor's heart. He could even feel the blood slick his thumb and fingers, as he followed himself into the gloomy peril of the alley.

  Unholy blood. Wicked beyond compare.

  No one noticed him in the subsequent hue and cry. He watched himself slip unnoticed through gathering crowds of onlookers—for even in these lawless times, the murder of two men was no small thing. He followed himself through an ancient and impoverished maze that was Gielgath. One of the priestess beggars called, "You! You!" as he passed a fullery. He saw her sob for joy a million times.

  The slave plantations were more severe in their discipline, more grand in extent, in the lands he subsequently crossed, following his following. He watched himself lean so that he might draw his bloody hands across the crowns of surging millet and wheat. Across the span of ages, the Goddess watched and was pleased, and it was Good.

  He came across a cow calving, and he knelt into his kneeling so that he might witness his Mother made manifest. He watched himself draw his fingers through the afterbirth, then redden the lobes of his ears.

  He found a fugitive child hiding in an overgrown ditch, watched himself give all that remained of his food. "There is no greater Gift," he overheard himself say to the wide brown eyes, "than to give unto death." And he caressed the dark-tanned cheek that was also a skull decaying between grass and milkweed.

  He saw a stork riding invisible gusts across the sky.

  He walked, forever trailing the man who walked before him and forever leading the one who walked behind. He watched his form, dark for the brilliance of the sun, sink over cultivated summits, even as he turned to see his form, dark within its own shadow, rising from the crest behind.

  And so he stepped into his stepping, walked into his walking, travelled into his journey, a quest that had already ended in the death of the False Prophet.

  Until at last he paused upon a hill and for the first time gazed across the walls and streets he had seen innumerable times.

  Momemn. The Home City. Great Capital of the
New Empire.

  He saw all the lanes he had never travelled. He saw the Temple Xothei with its famed domes, heard the riotous cries that would shiver its stone. He saw the Imperial Precincts along the seaward walls, the campuses hazy and deserted. He saw the piling of structure and marble beauty that was the Andiamine Heights, his eyes roaming until they found the famed veranda behind the Aspect-Emperor's throne-room...

  Where the Gift-of-Yatwer glimpsed himself peering back, the Holy Empress beside him.

  —|—

  MOMEMN

  "Why should it trouble a mother to see her child love himself so?" Inrilatas said from his shadow. He exhaled a breath pent in hungry pleasure. "Fondle himself?"

  Sunlight streamed through the cell's one small window, drawing a fan of illuminated surfaces from the smoky gloom. A stretch of her son's hair, the outer lines of his left shoulder and arm. Thankfully, she could not so much see him masturbate as infer it.

  She fixed him with a mother's flat gaze. Perhaps it was her old life as a whore, or perhaps he had simply exhausted her with his antics; either way she was unimpressed. There was very little Inrilatas could do that would shock or dismay her anymore.

  A small carpet had been laid across the floor, with an oak chair, cushioned and elaborately carved, set upon it for her comfort. White-clad body-slaves stood ready to either side with wicker screens—shields, really—ready to shelter her if her son decided to begin pelting her with feces or any other fluid that caught his fancy. It had happened before. After they were done, she knew, the chains would be drawn to fix her son across the wall, and the Attendants would scour the floor looking for anything dropped or forgotten. The boy—young man, now—was simply too ingenious not to devise tools for some kind of mischief. Once he managed to make a shiv, which he used to kill one of his attendants, using only the fabric of his tunic and his seed.

  "I want Maithanet brought here... to you."

  She could feel him peering into her face, the strange tickle of being known. She experienced some sense of exposure with almost all her children by Kellhus, but it differed with each one. With Kayûtas, it simply seemed to render her irrelevant, a problem easily dismissed or solved. With Serwa, it raised her ire because she knew the girl could see the pain she had caused her mother and yet chose to ignore it. With Theliopa, it was simply a fact of the time they spent together, and a convenience as well, since it allowed the girl to more completely subordinate herself to her mother's wishes.

  But with Inrilatas it always seemed more profound, more intrusive, somehow...

  Like the way she felt in her husband's eyes, only without the sense of... resignation.

  "Uncle Holy," he said.

  "Ye—"

  "They smell it on you, you know," he interrupted. "Fear."

  "Yes," she replied on a long breath. "I know."

  Kellhus once told her that Inrilatas's soul had been almost perfectly divided between the two of them, his intellect and her heart. "The Dûnyain have not so much mastered passion," he had explained, "as snuffed it out. My intellect is simply not robust enough to leash your heart. Imagine bridling a lion with string."

  "You are blackened by Father's light," the adolescent said, his voice straying across resonances only her husband used. "Rendered pathetic and absurd. How could a mere whore presume to rule Men, let alone the Three Seas?"

  "Yes... I know, Inrilatas."

  What was the power that a mother wielded over her son? She had watched Inrilatas reduce her flint-hearted generals to tears and fury, yet for all the cutting things he had said to her, for all the truths, he managed only to increase her pity for him. And this, it seemed to her, kindled a desperation in him while rendering her a kind of challenge, a summit he must conquer. For all the labyrinthine twists of his madness, he was just an anguished little boy in the end.

  It was hard to play God in the eyes of a heartbroken mother.

  Inrilatas grunted and huffed air. She tried to ignore the strings of semen that looped across the oblong of sunlit floor several paces from her feet.

  He was always doing this, marking the spaces about him with his excretions. Always staining. Always defacing. Always desecrating. Always expressing bodily what he sought to do with his mastery of word and expression. All men gloried in transgression, Kellhus had told her, because all men gloried in power, and no power was more basic than the violation of another's body or desire. "Innumerable rules bind the intercourse of Men, rules they can scarce see, even if they devote their lives to the study of jnan. Our son lives in a world far different than yours, Esmi—a visible world. One knotted and stifled and choked with the thoughtless customs we use to pass judgment one upon another."

  "Aren't you curious?" she asked.

  Her son raised a finger to his mouth. "You think Father left the Empire to you because he feared the ambition of his brother. So you suspect Uncle Holy of treachery. You want me to interrogate him. Read his face."

  "Yes," she said.

  "No... This is simply the rationale you use. The truth is, Mother, you know you will fail. Even now, you can feel the New Empire slip from your grasp, topple over the edge. And because you know you fail, you know Maithanet will be forced to wrest the Empire from you, not for his own gratification, but for the sake of his brother..."

  And so the game began in earnest. "You must be forever wary in his presence," Kellhus had warned her. "For truth will be his sharpest goad. He will answer questions that you have never asked yet lay aching in your heart nonetheless. He will use enlightenment to enslave you, Esmi. Every insight you have, every revelation you think you have discovered, will be his."

  Thus had her husband, in the course of arming her against their mad son, also warned her against himself. As well as confirmed what Achamian had said so very long ago.

  She leaned forward, braced her elbows against her knees to watch him the way she had when he was but a babe. "I will not fail, Inrilatas. If Maithanet assumes my eventual failure, then he's mistaken. If he acts on this assumption, then he has broken the Aspect-Emperor's divine law."

  Inrilatas's chuckle was soft, forgiving, and so very sane.

  "But you will fail," he asserted with a slaver's nonchalance. "So why should I do this for you, Mother? Perhaps I should side with Uncle, for in truth, only he can save Father's Empire."

  How could she trust him? Inrilatas, her and her husband's monstrous prodigy...

  "Because my heart beats in your breast," she said out of rash maternal reflex. "Because half of your madness is mine..." But she trailed, troubled by the way Inrilatas could, merely by listening, reveal the falsehood of sentiments that seemed so simple and true otherwise.

  A jerk and rattle of iron chains. "Things heave in me, Mother. Be. Quick."

  "Because I know that you want the Empire to fail."

  His laughter was curious, as though crazed forces sheered the humour underpinning it.

  "And you will trust... what I tell you?" he said, his voice cracked by inexplicable exertions. "The words... of a madman?"

  "Yes. If only because I know that Truth is your madness."

  A kind of jubilation accompanied these words—one that she immediately repented, knowing her son had already seen it, and fearing he would deny her for simple perversity's sake. Even as a young child, he had always sought to quash whatever was bright within her.

  "Inspired words, Mother." His tone was thin and blank, almost as if he mocked his older sister, Theliopa. "The very kind Father has warned you not to trust. You cannot see the darkness that precedes your thoughts, but unlike most souls you know it exists. You appreciate how rarely you are the author of what you say and do..." He raised his shackled hands for a clap that never came. "I'm impressed, Mother. You understand this trick the world calls a soul."

  "A trick that can be saved... or damned."

  "What if redemption were simply another form of damnation? What if the only true salvation lay in seeing through the trick and embracing oblivion?"

  "And what
if," Esmenet replied with more than a little annoyance, "these questions could be debated endlessly without hope of resolution?"

  In a wink, Theliopa's manner vanished, replaced by a hunched ape, leering and laughing. "Father has been rubbing off on you!"

  Perhaps she should have been amused. Perhaps she would have been, despite the utter absence of trust. But her heart had been bludgeoned, her hope battered beyond the possibility of amusement.

  "I tire of your games, Inrilatas," she said, speaking a fury that seemed to gather strength in the sound of her voice. "I understand that you can see my thoughts through my voice and face. I understand your abilities as well as anyone without Dûnyain blood can. I even understand the predicaments I face in merely speaking to you!"

  More laughter. "No, Mother. You most certainly do not understand. If you did, you would have drowned me years ago."

  She fairly leapt to her feet, such was the sudden violence of her anger. But she caught herself. "Remember, Esmi," Kellhus had warned her, "never let your passions rule you. Passions make you simple, easy to master. Only by twisting, reflecting upon your reflections, will you be able to slip his grasp..."

  Inrilatas had leaned forward from his hunch, his face avid with a shifting mélange of contradictory passions, a face like a pick, sorting through tumblers of her soul.

  "You lean heavily on Father's advice..." he said, his voice reaching for intonations that almost matched Kellhus's. "But you should know that I am your husband as he really is. Even Uncle, when he speaks, parses and pitches his words to mimic the way others sound—to conceal the inhumanity I so love to flaunt. We Dûnyain... we are not human, Mother. And you... You are children to us. Ridiculous and adorable. And so insufferably stupid."

  The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas could only stare in horror.

  "But you know this..." Inrilatas continued, his gaze fixed upon her. "Someone else has told you this... And in almost precisely the same words! Who? The Wizard? The legendary Drusas Achamian—yes! He told you this in a final effort to rescue your heart, didn't he? Ah... Mother! I see you so much more clearly now! All the years of regret and recrimination, torn between terror and love, stranded with children—such wicked, gifted children!—ones you can never hope to fathom, never hope to love."