The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  And now she is here, on the frontier of her own becoming.

  That night they camp in the ruins of an ancient fort: battered foundations glimpsed between trees, the remains of a single bastion, massive blocks arrested in their downward tumble. After their passage across the Istyuli and the endless miles of human absence, the ruins almost seemed a landmark promising home.

  Game is plentiful, and thanks to Xonghis and his unerring aim they feast on a thrush and a doe. The Imperial Tracker skins and butchers the doe, which Cleric then cooks using a small and incomprehensible Cant. As his eyes dim to a dark glitter, the tip of his finger shines as bright as a candle flame, and Mimara cannot but think of the glorious soot, the Qirri, that will blacken it later in the evening. Cleric slowly draws the pad of his finger along the haunches, then the ribs, transforming crimson lobes into sizzling, smoking meat.

  The thrush they boil.

  Afterward, Mimara saunters along the edges of the Captain's distraction, then creeps back in a broad circle, ducking behind palms of leaning stone, slipping between throngs of undergrowth. A wall of sorts borders the inner courtyard where they have gathered, an arc of unmortared stone broken into toothlike sections. The Captain has deposited the Wizard at the far end, careful as always to keep him segregated from the others. She hurries even though she knows she risks Cleric's preternatural hearing. For a man who betrays almost no anxiety, Lord Kosoter is nothing if not a fastidious shepherd, always counting and remorselessly quick to catch strays with his crook.

  She slows as she nears the wall behind the old Wizard, following the tingle of his Mark more than any visual cue. She slinks between sumac, presses against the cold stone. She stretches out onto her belly, creeps with serpent patience until she can see the Wizard's maul of hair rising before her.

  "Akka..." she whispers.

  A warmth climbs through her as she speaks, an unaccountable assurance, as if out of all her crazed burdens, confession is the only real encumbrance. Secrecy mars the nature of every former slave, and she is no different. They hoard knowledge, not for the actual power it affords, but for the taste of that power. All this time, even before Achamian's captivity, she has been accumulating facts and suspicions. All this time she has fooled herself the way all men fool themselves, thinking that she alone possessed the highest vantage and that she alone commanded the field.

  All this time she has been a fool.

  She tells him what she has learned about the Captain and his mission. "He knows he's damned. We are his only hope of salvation—or so he believes. Kellhus has promised him paradise. So long as he needs us, we're secure... As soon as I discover just why he needs us, I promise I'll find some way to tell you!"

  She tells him how Cleric is more than Ishroi—so much more. "Nil'giccas!" she cries under her breath. "The last Nonman King! What could that mean?"

  She speaks of the terror she did not know she had. And there is something in her murmur, a despair perhaps, that bumps her from the ruts, carries her away from the tracks the previous weeks and months have worn into her thoughts. She recalls who she was.

  She tells him of the incense mornings on the Andiamine Heights, when she would laze in bed watching the sheers across her balcony rise and fall with twining grace, her breath deep and even, her eyes fluttering to protest the sun.

  "I dreamed of you... you, Akka."

  Because he wasn't real. Because a fictitious love was the only love she could bear.

  She always knew he would rebuff her, that he would deny his paternity, deny her the knowledge she so desperately sought. She always knew, in the queer way of damaged souls, that she loved him because he knew nothing about her, and so had no grounds for casual judgment—or even worse, the watchful pity she so despised in her mother's eyes.

  And it seems, somehow, impossibly, that she knew it would come to this, rooting across sodden earth, cringing against crumbling stone, whispering desperations...

  Clutching her belly and declaring love.

  Grace is more than immortal. The more the world besieges it, the greater its significance burns. And she can feel it, this very instant, a spark shining in the God's infinite palm.

  "The child is yours," she whispers sobbing. "Can't you see?

  "I bear my mother's child..."

  She reaches out with fingers that are steady even as shudders wrack her. She presses them through the matted nest of his hair, sobs aloud when she touches the hot skin of his scalp. For the first time she feels movement in her womb—an infant heel...

  "We're here, Akka... Kûniüri. At last we're here!"

  The Captain's voice, when it comes, seems to crack all hope asunder.

  "Lot of bones in this ground," he says from the far side of the stone. "I can feel it."

  Lord Kosoter stands from an unseen crouch, looms over her and the Wizard, testing his aging knees. Her intake of breath is so sharp it sounds like an inverted shriek. An unkind coincidence of angles places the Nail of Heaven just beyond his brow, illumines the rim of his hair, so that he seems more an unholy wraith than a man, a dark god come to punish for mere perversity's sake. He holds a rib in his hands, strips the last remaining rind with his teeth. Grease slicks his beard below his mouth.

  "Keep throwing the sticks like this, girl, and you will join them."

  He bends toward her with the leisurely cruelty of a butcher picking his slaughter. He grips the back of her neck, hauls her kicking to her feet. He throws her to the ground in the direction of the others. As she scrambles to find her footing, he kicks her to the ground once again. Weeds claw her cheeks.

  "This is my slog!" the Captain growls, unfastening one of his belts.

  Suddenly she is a little girl, one sold to foreign slavers by a starving mother. Suddenly she is flinching beneath violent shadows, cringing and cringing until she is scarce a human child at all, but a thing small, blind, and mewling, a thing to be cracked in mercantile jaws, a thing to be tasted...

  "Sarl!" the merciless voice bellows. "What's the Rule?"

  "Pleaaase!" she weeps, scuffing backward. "I'm-I'm sor—!"

  "No conniving!" the madman chortles. "No whispering on the slog!"

  She raises a frantic palm in warding. The belt makes small cooing sounds as it whips through the air. It reminds her of the lariats that musicians use performing in the alleyways of Carythusal's slums. And the breathless songs they composed, haunting, as if their instruments were children crying out from sleep.

  She looks past the shadows of those who laugh and catcall. She looks to him, the Nonman King. She calls out to the horror she sees in his great eyes. She spits blood and sobs his name, his real name.

  But he merely watches...

  She knows he will remember.

  —|—

  That night he comes to the little girl. He kneels beside her, offers his blackened fingertip.

  "Take him," he says. "Cherish him. He will make you strong."

  The little girl clutches his hand, halts its descent. She clasps his finger, then presses the stained tip across his own lips. She rises into his embrace, sucks the magic from his mouth. The strength of it races across her skin, then soaks through her, rinsing away a constellation of pains.

  "You could have stopped him..." the little girl wheezes between her sobs.

  "I could have stopped him," he says, dropping his solemn gaze.

  He withdraws into the dark.

  —|—

  The following morning it is her Judging Eye that opens.

  Lashed and bone-sore, she breakfasts with charcoal-scabbed demons. Even the old Wizard sits with his skin blistered, his edges haunted by the shadow of his soul's future thrashing. Galian glances at her and mutters to the others, and laughter jumps through them in small, peevish squalls. And it seems she can see it, the piling on of sin—wickedness in all its bestial diversity. Thievery and betrayal, deceit and gluttony, vanity and cruelty, and murder—murder most of all.

  "About your screams..." Galian says to her, his face grave w
ith mockery. "You really should cross the Captain more often. The boys and I were quite taken."

  Pokwas laughs outright. Xonghis grins while working his bow.

  She has wondered at Galian's transformation. He seemed a friend in the beginning, someone who could be trusted, if only because he was wry and sane. But as his beard grew and his clothing and accoutrements rotted, he became ever more remote, ever more difficult to trust. The burdens of the trail, she thought, recalling the way the brothel had embittered so many sweet souls.

  But now, seeing him revealed in the light of God, she realizes the months of hardship—or even the Qirri—have changed him very little. He is one of those men who is lovable or despicable depending on the peevish lines of camaraderie. Gracious and generous with those he deems his friends and caring not at all about others.

  "A crimson butterfly..." she murmurs, blinking at memories not her own.

  The man's grin falters. "A what?"

  "You raped a child," she tells the former Columnary. "You killed her trying to stifle her screams... You still dream of the crimson butterfly your bloody palm left on her face..."

  All three men go rigid. Pokwas looks to Galian for a laughing dismissal that does not come. A kind of pity wells through her, watching horror and arrogance dual in Galian's eyes.

  Henceforth, she knows, his jokes will be furtive and hidden. Fearful.

  Of all the Skin Eaters, none are more blasted than Cleric, whose sins run so deep she can scarce glance at him without her eyes rebelling. He is an impossible figure, a heaving motley of monstrosities, angelic beauty marred by sorcerous ugliness, blotted by ages of moral obscenity.

  But the Captain is perhaps the most horrifying. She can see the hallow brilliance of the two Chorae burning white through his rag tunic and between the splints of his hauberk—a contradiction that intensifies the hoary imprint of his transgressions. Murder barks his skin, victim chapped across victim. Cruelty smokes from his eyes.

  He gives the call to march, and then, inexplicably, the Eye closes. The sins vanish in a kind of inward folding, like wood unburning. The right and wrong of the world is hidden once again.

  She has been beaten many times. Beatings were simply the penultimate rite in the flurry of mean and petty ceremonies that composed life in the brothel. As a child she learned that some men could find bliss only in fury, climax in degradation. And as a child she learned to flee her body, to take refuge behind wide-open eyes. A final sip. Her body would weep, moan, even shriek, and yet she would always be there, hidden in plain sight, calmly waiting for the tempest to pass. One sip remaining.

  The outrage would come afterward, when she returned to find her body curled and sobbing.

  "You are a cunning little slit," Abbarsallas, her first owner, once told her. "The others fear the likes of you. They fear you because you are so difficult to see... Your kind lurks and lurks, waiting for opportunities... opportunities you do not even know! A knife forgotten. A shard of glass. A throat bared in a thoughtless moment. I've seen it with my own eyes—oh yes! You don't even know it's happening. You just strike, spit all your poison, and a freeman dies." He laughed as if at the particulars of some crazed memory. "That's why the others would keep you shackled, or drown you in the courtyard as a moral for the others. Spare themselves the worry. But me, oh, I see gold in you, my little darling. Hard men take no pleasure in breaking what is already broken. And your kind can be broken a thousand times—a thousand more!"

  Five years later they would find him dead, his body jammed into the sewer chute behind the scullery. Apparently Abbarsallas could only be broken once.

  Anasûrimbor Mimara has been beaten many times, so the coldness she feels as she walks, the numbness of a soul flinching from its own sharp edges, is a familiar one. As is the impulse that draws her to the fore of the slack-eyed company, into the glowering presence of the Captain.

  "I will tell him. He will damn you."

  A part of her even laughs, saying such to someone already damned—irrevocably.

  She has wondered what he was like in his youth. It seems absurd that he once reclined at heteshiras, the night-long bacchanals of eating and vomiting so popular among the Ainoni nobility, that he plotted with men too fat to walk, that he concealed his expressions with porcelain masks during negotiations, or painted his face white before riding out to war. High Ainon was a land of ringlets and perfume, where men ranked one another according to eloquence and jnanic wit. Where disputes over buttons could provoke duals to the death.

  And here stands Lord Kosoter, as savage as any Kutnarmi tribesman, as hard-bitten as mountain flint. More so than any of the other Skin Eaters, he seems bred to the cycle of deprivation and tribulation that rules a scalper's life. She can scarce imagine a man more at odds with the consumptive pantomime that was Carythusal. Silk, it seems, would tear for simply touching his skin.

  "You argue your own doom," he says without so much as glancing at her.

  "How is that?"

  He turns, seizes her with his gaze. "Killing you would be my only recourse, if what you say is true."

  Perhaps she is too exhausted to be frightened—or too disgusted. If her smile surprises him, he shows no sign of it. "You think he would not see such treachery within you?" she asks, using the tone her mother and the Wizard know so well. "You think he will not see these very words when you kneel before him?"

  "He'll see it. But you don't know him as I know him."

  "You know him better?"

  "There is a chasm, girl, an abyss between the hearth and the battlefield. Your stepfather and my prophet are two very different men, I assure you."

  "You sound certain of yourself, my Lord."

  There is a flatness to him, an aura of immovability. When she speaks to him like this, in low tones, walking side by side, she has this nagging sense of amputation, of a soul that either has legs for hatred and fury or has no legs at all.

  "We were seven days out from Attrempus," he says, sparing her his scrutiny, "marching on the Numaineiri Orthodox. We were naught but the jugglers—the greater parade lay with my kinsmen to the south. But still, he found time to inspect our bloody handiwork. The long-bearded fools only thought they believed. We showed them conviction—Zaudunyani conviction. But your stepfather, he decided we needed to show more, something all the blondies in Ce Tydonn could mull in their racks. So we herd up the converts, all those who had found salvation in the execution line, and we put out their eyes. Gropers, we called them—what they call them still."

  He does not turn to look at her, as she would expect from anyone who cared whether his words had effect. So much of what makes him unsettling, she realizes, are these violations of the innumerable small ways people anticipate one another. He is the most ruthlessly direct man she has ever known, and still he continually surprises her.

  "So you think my stepfather's cruelty is something that I should fear?"

  She even manages to laugh.

  He sweeps his gaze about and down, swallows her with a kind of compressed regard—a look that seems to throw her whole existence on the balance, as if weighing her life against half-hearted promises.

  "Besides," she says, pressing the remnants of her anger into her glare. "It's my mother you really need to consider." She looks away in feigned disinterest.

  "If she would burn down half a city to avenge me, what do you think she will do to you?"

  —|—

  Day after day, they walk through a dead land, a land where sons were slaughtered before they could father, where daughters were exterminated before their wombs could quicken. A land where birth itself had been murdered. And she mourns.

  She mourns her lost naiveté, the girl who would be a witch, not for knowledge's sake, but to better batter an offending world. To better injure a mother she cannot forgive.

  She mourns all those they have lost. Skin Eaters. Stone Hags. She whispers prayers to Yatwer, though she knows the Goddess despises warlike men as takers. She prays for Kiampas, for giant Oxw
ora. She even laments Soma, the unknown youth who was murdered not for gold or hate but for his face.

  She mourns her captivity and the suffering of the Wizard.

  She mourns her boots, which will very soon fail her feet.

  She mourns the tiny black sliver that is her ration of Qirri.

  She did not know what to expect coming to Kûniüri. Great journeys are often such, a matter of placing one foot before the other, again and again, for what seems a trudging eternity. Sometimes dusk and sleep are your only destination, and the trek's overarching end comes about as a kind of surprise.

  She wasn't journeying to places glimpsed in ancient dreams. She wasn't drawn the way the Wizard was drawn.

  She had been chased.

  She thinks of the Andiamine Heights, of her Empress mother. She thinks of her little brother, Kelmomas, and she worries—as far as the Qirri will allow her.

  At last they come to a river, every bit as great as the Sayut or the Sempis, broad-backed and slow moving, deep green with life and sediment, gleaming like a plate of silver where it catches the sun.

  The Captain turns to his captive. "Is this it?"

  Gagged, the old Wizard simply gazes at him in incredulity and disgust.

  The Captain yanks the gag from his mouth. "Is this it?"

  Achamian spits, works his lips and jaw for a moment. For the first time Mimara notices the sores caking the creases of his lips. After glaring at the Captain, the old Wizard turns to the others with mock grandiloquence. "Behold!" he cries through the sludge of a long-stopped voice. "Behold the Mighty Aumris! The nursery of Mannish civilization! The cradle of all!"

  The Captain slaps him to the ground for his insolence.

  She mourns the fact that cringing has become so easy.

  —|—

  The old Wizard was the first to realize how near they had come. He lay bound on his side as he had fairly every night of his captivity. But this time the Captain had thrust him across an incline, so that he could see the night sky through a broad gap in the canopy. A black plate of stars. At first, he gazed with a kind of senseless yearning, the attitude belonging to the defeated, one numbed to things beyond the immediate circuit of his fears. But then he glimpsed patterns... ancient constellations.