The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  "I am Quya!" the Nonman King cried from places unseen. "I am Ishroi! Five of your sons and daughters have I slain!"

  "YOU ARE BUT A SNAIL!" the impossible beast roared. "A SNAIL TORN FROM ITS SHELL!"

  "I am Nil'giccas—I am Cleric! And you will hear my sermon!"

  Even high and hidden, Achamian could tell the Nonman ran as he called out, sprinted over ruin.

  "FOOL. I AM THE FIRST. MY HIDE IS BRONZE. MY BONES ARE IRON!"

  Above the ceiling, the old Wizard floated through a second, more barren world, one roofed with hanging precipices and floored with racks of masonry, ancient and enormous.

  "You are blind!" Cleric shouted, the resonance of his voice thinned by the thunder that it followed. "You are a beggar, a scavenger, a prisoner of your own spite! Your flesh is rotted. The stone of your strength cracked long ago!"

  "AS THE AGES HAVE ROTTED YOUR SOUL, CÛNUROI!"

  The beast spit another cataract of roaring fire, illuminating all the chinks and breaches in the ceiling. Achamian walked across emptiness, toward the central pit, which given the darkness of the cavernous attic, glowed like an afterlife of fire. Robbed of their supporting columns, the granite lintels had sheered according to the caprice of load and fracture. He alighted on the longest of these ribs, strode down the length of its powdered back. Fires small and large burned throughout the pillared spaces below. He saw Cleric—the briefest of glimpses—flit between distant pillars and vanish into far shadows. He was running circles...

  "If I perish a fool!" the Nonman cried, "then I perish my own fool! Not a slave like you, Wracu'jaroi!"

  Achamian paused at the hanging precipice, gazed down upon the heaving beast. Coiled like a bloated serpent, the Father of Dragons turned and turned to the sound of Cleric's voice, like a leashed dog about its stake, only retching fire instead of barking, maelstroms that engulfed the scorched aisles.

  "I EXCEED MY MAKERS," the scale-shining beast thundered. "NOT EVEN THE BLACK HEAVEN COMMANDS ME!"

  The old Wizard swayed on his perch, squinted against the smoke and sparks that buffeted his Wards. Cleric distracted the creature, he knew. Using taunts to goad its pride, the Nonman King provoked it precisely so that Achamian could do what he was doing...

  If only he knew what that was.

  "Spinning in circles," Cleric cried laughing, "twisting hide against hide! So it has always been, Wracu'jaroi! Think! Think of the desolate ages!"

  The blind beast stamped to and fro directly below. It swung its horn-crowned head in an attempt to anticipate the running Nonman, spewed torrents of braided fire. Achamian swayed, nearly retched for the reek of putrescence.

  "DESOLATION IS MY BIRTHRIGHT!"

  Think, old man! Think!

  "SUCH THINGS THAT I REMEMBER, CÛNUROI! TWISTING IN THE VOID FOR SAILING AGES! WATCHING MY MAKERS DESCEND AS LOCUSTS UPON WORLD AFTER WORLD, REDUCING EACH TO ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR THOUSAND—AND WAILING TO FIND THEMSELVES STILL DAMNED!"

  Dragons! Monstrosities literally bred to battle and destroy the ancient Quya. So much of the Gnostic armoury was devoted to sorcerous duals or the mass killing of mundane Men...

  What did Seswatha use?

  "Only to arrive here broken and exhausted!" Cleric cried.

  "YES—YES! AT LAST, THE PROMISED WORLD! I WAS THE FIRST—THE FIRST! WITH DREAD SIL UPON MY SHOULDERS, I WAS THE FIRST TO STEP FROM OUR HALLOWED ARK, TO SET EYES UPON THE LAND OF OUR REDEMPTION!"

  The Nonman's laughter rose clear as sunlight from the booming echoes.

  "And now look at you! Blind! Hidden in the dirt! Curled about the shit of dead ages!"

  A cry like the blast of many waters. "BECAUSE THIS WORLD YET LIVES!" the undead beast roared. "BECAUSE THIS WORLD REFUSES TO DIE!"

  Teetering above the monstrosity, Achamian shouted his Cant, a skinny old man hollering in a skinny old voice. The Noviratic Spike, a Gnostic War-Cant contrived to batter through great city gates.

  "MURDER! MURDER IS OUR SALVATION!"

  Light balled in Achamian's outstretched palms. The mighty Wracu lashed its head from side to panicked side, raised its smoking snout at the instant of the Cant's completion. Lines of light snapped in and out, deflecting and intersecting, forming a flying sheet of triangles, reproducing tip to tip, base to base, flashing down as swift as any bolt or arrow...

  A noise that struck blood from the skin.

  The Spike exploded against the creature's left shoulder, hammered it squealing down the side of its mound. Thrashing, Wutteät howled fire into the air. A brilliant geyser jetted up through the ceiling pit, a rooster's tail of brilliance washed across the cavern roof. Cascades of raw stone came crashing down.

  Achamian crouched low on the lintel, muttered Ward after Ward.

  A thunderclap from below.

  And he heard it through the dragon's mewling shriek: the sound of a Nonman Quya singing his world-breaking song. The sound of a famed Ishroi, a hero of dead ages, closing with his ancient foe.

  The old Wizard stood firm on his perch, cried out another Noviratic Cant. Below him, the Father of Dragons coiled in defence, spewed fire into looms of Quyan incandescence. Light flared from the Wizard's palms, made crimson glass of his hands...

  But the dragon had coiled to leap, not to shield. The Wizard's Spike gouged slopes of treasure and rubble. Mouldered and wretched, the dragon vaulted into the underworld attic, stretched forth its diseased wings. For a crazed heartbeat, Achamian found himself standing frail and astonished beneath the plated monstrosity. Light from the conflagration below illuminated its undersides, gleamed across horns and scaled flanges. Wings scooped dark air...

  It knew, Achamian realized. The beast drew back its battered skull, yanked open its maw in a feline hiss.

  It knew precisely where he stood.

  Fire.

  Wards dissolving like egg whites in a stream. Concussions. Blistering skin. The triggering of incipient Wards...

  The pier of stone collapsed beneath his feet.

  "YEARS UNCOUNTED!" it boomed from the cavern attic. "TEN THOUSAND SEASONS HAVE I LIVED WITHOUT EYES!"

  The old Wizard fell, cartwheeled down the beast's heap of treasure and debris. Blinking. Coughing. He tried to claw his way upright, too stunned to orchestrate the counterpoise of voices, inner and outer, required for sorcery. He beat at his burning hair and beard. He felt an arm draw him up, saw Cleric peering down at him, the porcelain lines of worry and relief. He heard the whoosh of conflagration, the clack and thunder of enormous collapses. Ancient pillars toppled. Sheets of masonry dropped. The world itself seemed to shrug, then crash upon them.

  Masses of stone pummelled the Nonman's Wards, a rain of godlike fists.

  The last shreds of light were pinched to utter black.

  Ringing ears. The taste of dust.

  "It has buried us," the Nonman King said in the clacking aftermath. "Shut us in."

  —|—

  She kicks off her boots.

  She unties the laces of her jacket, pulls it back from her bare shoulders, lets it slide of its own weight down her arms. She shakes it from her wrists. It slumps across the humus.

  She clasps her shift, winces at the reek of it as she draws it over her head. The swathes of down in her armpits tingle. Open air finds her breasts. Her nipples rise to the kissing breeze.

  She unlaces her leather breeches. Wriggling, she pushes them below her knees. She steps from them. Open air finds her thighs... her sex.

  She grabs the wire Circumfix—the one she found on the battlefield—hanging between her breasts. But she releases it, loathe to forsake the protection of symbols—even false ones.

  Motionless, the scalpers gaze. Sarl gropes his crotch with his free hand. The Captain's head continues to glare from the crook of his arm. Even Koll, wasted to the very lip of death, watches with licentious hunger. They are but five, yet countless others seem to crowd them, making pews of the forested ruins, all gazing with lidless eyes, some in outrage, others with pity and hope, and still more with lust an
d crass desire.

  She thought the Qirri would ease her passage, that it might have delivered her to the place where she had always hidden—for this was nothing new. But she was wrong. You have to be more than your motions to hide behind them, and she is not.

  The Qirri has whittled her down to the bone of what happens.

  She shudders with something deeper than shame, as if garments more profound than leather and fabric have been shed. The cloth of hope and flattery, perhaps—all the things she has called herself in the pursuit of her pain-numbing vanities. Sorceress. Princess. Warrior. All the lies she has conjured to hide the fact of her slavery.

  For the first time, it seems, she is wholly what scripture has made of her—and nothing more. The quiver on the hip of the bowman. The pillow beneath the head of the king. She is chattel. She is sustenance. She is pleasure and progeny...

  She is naked.

  —|—

  The two crouched for what seemed a hundred heartbeats after the clamour had settled, probing the cavernous black with pricked ears. They heard nothing, save the groan and clatter of settling debris.

  Wielding ethereal geometries, the old Wizard and the Nonman King began heaving aside masses of rock and masonry. Throughout history, kings and princes had sought to bend the Few to menial tasks, to works that only the sweat and misery of thousands could otherwise accomplish. Roads. Fortifications. Temples. Wars had been fought to resist them. For men who could manipulate the very frame of existence, sorcerers, demanding such mean labour was nothing less than an outrage, akin to asking lords to wash the feet of beggars. As Tsotekara, the Grandmaster of the extinct Surartu, famously declared to Triamis the Great: to do as slaves was to be as slaves.

  Even still, caprice demands all men, no matter how exalted their station, play the menial from time to time. Every sorcerer living knew some Cant adapted to the moving of earth.

  The darkness clacked and roared with their excavations. The devastation of the Coffers stretched out behind them, easily outrunning their paltry light, a twilight world the old Wizard was loathe to consider, lest he recall the hopeless task of finding a single golden map-case amid such wrack and ruin. Only two columns stood that they could see; the others lay heaped and toppled like a felled forest. Shelves of rock continued to fall from the inverted cliffs and valleys hanging above, sporadically showering the blasted landscape with debris.

  Huffing with effort, Achamian sank pinions into the mounded wreckage, raked it away with the flash of miracle lights. More debris would tumble into the gap he had cleared but never quite so much as he had removed. Braced on ever-uncertain footing—spilled gravel, canted lintels, or the curve of pillar drums—they thundered forward, dredging the entrance clear. When light at last rimmed the uppermost rocks before them, they paused to collect their breath and courage.

  "The beast awaits us," Cleric said.

  Achamian nodded. He could see fell Wutteät in his soul's eye, poised to flush the waiting passage with coiling fire. Ambush was a notorious tactic of the Wracu. For all their savage might, they were exceedingly intelligent and devious creatures—far more so than Sranc. They had no choice but to rush the burrow, somehow survive the sum of its power...

  "One of us must shield," he said, "while the other casts into the fire."

  The Nonman King began to nod, then whirled toward the darkness behind them.

  Frowning, Achamian followed his gaze into the high void, peered squinting. He raised a thumb to scratch away a fleck of grit...

  It breached the light—smoke that became a ghost that became shining, bestial reality—its claws outstretched, its wings hooked about emptiness, its horn-crowned head vanishing behind gaping jaws...

  The ancient dragon dropped out of the blackness. Achamian threw up futile arms.

  Conflagration.

  —|—

  The men stare at her, speechless.

  "What do you see?" she asks.

  Her voice seems to jar them. Galian's face darkens in unaccountable rage.

  "See?" he cries, his face twitching about a compulsive blink. "I see a world of plunder. You... The Coffers yonder... And when we return, every delicacy, every peach, and every silk pillow in the Three Seas! I see a tasty world, my little Whore-Imperial, and I intend to feast!"

  Whore. The word stirs something within her, a habit long forgotten. She knows this, knows how to bridle and ride the crazed passions of men...

  "And your soul?" she asks without passion. "What of your soul?"

  "Will be no worse for pillaging a witch, I assure you."

  "And pillaging," Pokwas laughs from his side. There is something lecherous and angular in the Zeümi Sword-dancer's bearing, as if he leans over legs already prised open. She can even see the curve of his phallus through his breeches. "And pillaging... and pillaging..."

  Galian strides toward her.

  She wracks her soul, searching for the hate that has always been the engine of her strength, but she can only summon moments of tenderness and love. She smiles, blinking tears. She draws the curve of her belly into warm palms. This is the first time, it seems, that she dares clutch, dares the making real that comes with grasping.

  Hello, little one...

  He grabs her throat, turns her head from side to side.

  "Sweet Sejenus..." he murmurs with an almost tender breath. "You are a true beauty... A pity about the maggot."

  "Maggot?" she gasps.

  "The grub you carry in your womb."

  Tears spill from her eyes. "What about it?" she asks about a sob.

  The Columnary leans close enough to lick her face. "I fear it will not survive me."

  "No! Plea—!"

  "No indeed!" he cries with renewed cruelty. "No worms in our peaches, eh, boys?"

  Once again Pokwas and Xonghis laugh, this time like nervous adolescents. They have been led and they have been drawn. They have stumbled across obsessed-over boundaries, only to find themselves thinking unthinkable things.

  Yatwer... Dear Goddess, please...

  Her head caught in the vise of his hands, she stares down the curve of her cheeks, and somehow her gaze finds his manic glare, latches...

  The Judging Eye opens.

  She finds herself peering into something... inexplicable.

  Contradictory passions roil through her, as if she were the scalper's lifelong mistress, the one most punished, the one who understood. For there is no sin without weakness, no transgression without want or suffering. She sees the cracks through which his infant nature bleeds. The father's cane, the brother's fists. The starving marches, and the need, to be admired, to be respected, to steal what he covets...

  She loves him, and she despises. But she finds herself fearing for him most of all.

  Often has she wondered how she could describe it, seeing the morality of things let alone lives. Sometimes it seems more a matter of memory than vision, like sighting a familiar treatise in the house of a friend. The object itself stews with significance, but all the passages—cherished and offending—are indistinct. Only the sum can be seen, inchoate and confounding. This is what she most often sees: the abbreviated mash that is judgment passed, the balance of a soul, good and evil, writ in a stick-figure scrawl.

  But sometimes, if she concentrates, the tome of a lived life flutters open beneath the Eye, and the crimes themselves become visible, the way carnal images flicker about the glimpse of a long-absent lover.

  And sometimes, more rarely still, she sees the particulars of their coming damnation.

  The Columnary stares, his eyes wide with panicked fury. She clutches his wrist.

  "Galian..." she hears herself gasp. "It's not too late. You can save yourself from... from..."

  Something in her words or manner jars him from his intent—the trill of frantic sincerity, perhaps.

  "Hell?" he laughs. "There's too many of them."

  Such torment. Clenched and cringing, huddled in ways outside worldly dimensions. Prised and flayed, the innumerable petals of
his soul peeled back in shrieks and sulphurous flame. Screams braided into screams, pains heaped upon agonies.

  She sees it, his future, a gleam across his eyes, a fiery halo about his crown. His suffering disgorged like paint, smeared and stroked into obscene works of art. His soul passed from Ciphrang to feasting Ciphrang, dispensing anguish like milk through the endless ages.

  She sees the truth of the Excruciata, the One Hundred-and-Eleven Hells depicted on the walls of the Junriüma in Sumna.

  "Galian. Galian. You m-must listen. Please... You have no idea what awaits you!"

  He tries to grin away his horror. He's strangling her as much as holding her now. "Witch!" he spits. "Witch!"

  "Shhhhh..." she manages to whisper. "It will b—"

  He slams her to the raw earth. She cries out. He thrusts apart her knees, pins her while fumbling with his breeches. Belts pinch her inner thighs. Twigs bite at her shoulders, her buttocks. Dead leaves press cold against her back, like reptilian scales. His breathing is ragged, his look unfocused. He smells of shit and rotted teeth.

  The world spins and roars about the fact of his damnation.

  She cries into his ear, murmurs, "I forgive you..."

  Frees him of this final sin.

  —|—

  The beast had lain hidden, waiting for them to dig their way into the entrance antechamber, a dead end where they could not use the greater debris field to either flee or flank him. But it proved a treacherous trap. Had they not stood side by side, where the combined strength of their incipient defences purchased them the heartbeats they needed to reinforce their Wards, they would be dead.

  Apparently Wutteät could not hear the distance between them...

  Fire boiled over and around them, blinding them, ripping away the gossamer meanings they shouted against it. An inferno like no other, scorching some hard stone surfaces into liquid while exploding others.

  Then the beast itself was on them, a crocodile falling upon sparrows. It clawed with feline savagery, tearing and rending, while the Gnostic sorcerer and the Quyan Mage sang in desperate tandem, slowing accumulating the glowing shells that preserved them.