The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  The stone was pitted and multicoloured, here black with moulds, there frosted with white and turquoise lichens. What ornamentation that survived, though plain in comparison to Cil-Aujas, seemed exceedingly elaborate by human standards. Every surface had been worked in patterns, animal totems for the most part, beasts standing, their arms articulated in humanlike poses. As numerous as the reliefs were, Achamian found only one intact representation of Meori's ancient crest: seven wolves arrayed like daisy petals about a shield.

  His whole body hummed, at once scraped of all strength and steeped in giddy vigour. Qirri. Despite everything, Achamian found himself gazing and wandering as he had so many years ago, lost in thoughts of times long dead. He had always found sanctuary in ruins, freedom from the demands of his calling as well as connection with the ancient days that so tyrannized his nights. He had always felt whole in the presence of fragments.

  "Akka…" Mimara called, her voice so like her mother's that goosepimples climbed the old Wizard's spine. A plaintive echo.

  He turned, surprised by his smile. This was her first time, he realized, her first glimpse of the ancient Norsirai and their works.

  "Remarkable, isn't it? To think ruins like this are all that remain of…"

  He trailed, realizing that she looked at the others, not the ruined pockets climbing about them.

  She turned to him, her eyes pinned with indecision. "Skin-spy…" she said in Ainoni.

  "What?"

  She blinked in momentary indecision. "Skin-spy… Somandutta… He's a… a skin-spy."

  "What? What are you saying?" Achamian asked, struggling to collect his thoughts. She was a Princess-Imperial, which meant she had doubtless received extensive training regarding Consult skin-spies: who they were inclined to replace, how they were apt to reveal themselves.

  She probably knew more about the creatures than he did.

  "When the Sranc attacked," she continued under her breath, watching the Nilnameshi caste-noble where he stood with the others. "Earlier… The way he moved…" She turned to the Wizard, fixed him with a look of utter feminine certainty, as serious as famine or disease. "What he did was impossible, Akka."

  Achamian stood dumbstruck. A skin-spy?

  Half-remembered passions galloped through him. The heat and misery of the First Holy War. Images of old enemies. Old terrors…

  He turned to where the Nilnameshi stood. "Soma…" he called, his voice rising thin.

  "He saved my life," she murmured beside him, obviously every bit as bewildered as he was. "He revealed himself to save me…"

  "Soma!" Achamian called again.

  The man spared him a sideways glance before turning back to the mutter of those about him. Conger. Pokwas. Achamian blinked, suddenly feeling very feeble and very old. The Consult? Here?

  The entire time.

  "He revealed himself to save me…"

  The confusion did not so much lift as part about necessity, leaving only naked alarm and the focus that came with it.

  " Somandutta! I am speaking to you!"

  The affable brown face turned to him, smiling with…

  An Odaini Concussion Cant was the first thing to the old Wizard's lips.

  Without warning, Soma leapt over the milling scalpers, boggling eyes and snuffing voices. He twisted mid-air with an acrobat's grace, landed with the scuttling fury of a crab. He was two-thirds across the courtyard before Achamian had finished. He leapt, sailing over the ruined wall as the Cant smashed stone and scabbed mortar.

  The company stood pale and uncomprehending.

  "Let that be a warning!" Sarl cackled in abject glee. He turned to the Hags as if they were unkempt cousins requiring lessons in jnanic etiquette. "Steer clear the peach, lads!" He glanced at Achamian, his eyes possessing enough of the old canniness to unnerve the old Wizard.

  "What the Captain doesn't gut, the Schoolman blasts!"

  They slept in bare sunlight.

  As was proper, since nothing was as it should be. Battling men instead of Sranc. Taking refuge in a fallen fortress. Finding a skin-spy in their midst, then saying nothing of it.

  The Qirri had faded and, despite the longing looks, the Nonman kept his pouch hidden in his satchel. Of exhaustion's many modalities, perhaps none is so onerous as apathy, the loss of sense and desire, where you wish only to cease wishing, where mere breathing becomes a kind of thoughtless toil.

  Achamian's sleep was fitful, plagued by flies-the biting kind-and worries, too numerous and inchoate to resolve into anything comprehensible. Soma. The Sranc pursuing them. The Captain. Cleric. Mimara. The dead in Cil-Aujas. His lies. Her curse…

  And of course Kellhus… and Esmenet.

  Fire and their lack of numbers had convinced Lord Kosoter that the outer walls were indefensible, so they had retreated to the shattered citadel. At some point the structure had collapsed inward, leaving only the great blocks of the foundation intact. Centuries of vegetation had choked the inner ruin with uneven earth so that the remaining walls, which towered the height of three men along their outer faces, climbed only chest high for those standing within. The scalpers salvaged what they could find, those few trifles left behind by the retreating "Imperials," as they called them. Then they climbed into the citadel's earthen gut to await the inevitable.

  The subsequent vigil was as surreal as it was forlorn. While the rest dozed in what shade they could find, Cleric took a position on one of the great blocks, sitting cross-legged, gazing over the ruins below, across the field of felled trees, to the Mop's black verge. Achamian actually found comfort in the sight of him, a being who had survived who knew how many sieges and battles, back into the mists of history.

  The Nonman waited until late afternoon to begin his sermon, when the air had cooled enough and the shade had grown enough to provide the possibility of real sleep. He stood on the lip and turned to regard them below, his slim and powerful figure bathed in light. The sky reached blue and infinite beyond him. Achamian found himself watching and listening the way the others watched and listened.

  "Again, my brothers," he said in impossibly deep tones. "Again we find ourselves stranded, trapped in another of the World's hard places…"

  Stranded. A word like a breath across a dying coal.

  Stranded. Lost with none to grieve them. Trapped.

  "Me," the Nonman continued, letting his head sag. "I know only that I have stood here a thousand times over a thousand years-more! This… this is my place! My home…"

  When he looked up, his eyes glittered black for fury. A snarl hooked his colourless lips.

  "Wreaking destruction on these perversions… Atoning… Atoning!

  "

  This last word rang metallic across the stone, sent ever-dwindling echoes across the heights. Roused, several of the Skin Eaters mouthed their approval. The Stone Hags simply gaped.

  "And this is your place as well, even if you loathe numbering your sins."

  "Yes!" Sarl coughed out over the rising clamour. His eyes were slits for his grin. "Yes!"

  That was when the inhuman baying began, a few throats cascading into a hundred, a thousand, rising from the Mop below…

  Sranc.

  Achamian and the others leapt to their feet. They crowded the wall beneath Cleric, and to a man peered at the forest verge a half-mile or so to the south.

  And saw nothing save lengthening shadows and boundaries of scrub bathed in sunlight. The inhuman chorus dissolved into a cacophony of individual shrieks and cries. Birds bolted from the canopy.

  "A thousand times over a thousand years!" Cleric cried. He had turned to face the Mop, but otherwise stood as exposed as before. Achamian glimpsed his shadow falling long and slender across the ruins below.

  "You live your life squatting, shitting, sweating against your women. You live your life fearing, praying, begging your gods for mercy! Begging! " He was ranting now, swaying and gesticulating with a kind of arrhythmic precision. The setting sun painted him with lines of crimson.

  Un
seen throats howled and barked across the distance-a second congregation.

  "You think secrets dwell in these mean things, that truth lies in the toes you stub, the scabs you pick! Because you are small, you cry, 'Revelation! Revelation hides in the small! '"

  The black gaze fixed Achamian-lingered for a heartbeat or two.

  "It does not."

  The words pinched the old Wizard deep in the gut.

  "Revelation rides the back of history…" Cleric said, sweeping his eyes to the arc of the horizon, to the innumerable miles of wilderness. "The enormities! Race… War… Faith… The truths that move the future!"

  Incariol looked down across his fellow scalpers, his awestruck supplicants. Even Achamian, who had lived among the Cunuroi as Seswatha, found himself staring in dread and apprehension. Only the Captain, who simply watched the Mop with grim deliberation, seemed unmoved.

  "Revelation rides the back of history," the Nonman cried, bowing his head to the failing sun. The light etched the links and panels of his nimil so that he appeared garbed in trickles of glowering fire.

  "And it does not hide…"

  Incariol. He seemed something wondrous and precarious, Ishroi and refugee both. Ages had been poured into him, and poured, overflowing his edges, diluting what he had lived, who he had been, until only the sediment of pain and crazed profundity remained.

  The sun waxed against the distant peaks, hanging in reluctance-or so it seemed-sinking only when the watchers blinked. It rode the white-iron curve of a mountain for a moment, then slipped like a gold coin into high-stone pockets.

  The shadow of the world rose and descended across them. Dusk.

  All eyes turned to the ragged crescent of the tree-line, to the grunting hush that had fallen across the distance. They saw the first Sranc creep pale and white from the bowers, like insects feeling the air… A savage crescendo rifled the air, punctuated by the moan of urgent horns.

  Then the rush.

  – | They came as they always came, Sranc, no different from the first naked hordes that had surged across the fields of Pir-Pahal in an age that made Far Antiquity young. They came, over the slope of felled trees, sluicing between the trunks, racing across barked backs. They came, through the palisade gate, thronging across the ancient courtyards, braiding the wall's ruined circuit with gnashing teeth and crude weapons. They came and they came, until they seemed a liquid, streaming and breaking, spitting an endless spray of arrows.

  The blue and violet of the evening sky faded into oblivion, leaving only the starry dome of night. The Nail of Heaven glittered from raving eyes, gleamed from notched iron. The scalpers huddled behind what few shields they possessed, shouted curses, while Cleric and the Wizard stood upon the wall's disordered summit.

  All was screaming destruction below. Monochrome madness. The Men gagged on the porcine smoke. And they watched, knowing that they witnessed something older than nations or languages, a Gnostic sorcerer and a Quya Mage, singing in impossible voices, wielding looms of incandescence in wide-swinging arms. They saw hands glow about impossible dispensations. They saw light issue from empty air. They saw bodies pitched and prised, and burned, burned most of all, until the ground became croaking charcoal.

  Incariol had spoken true… It was a mighty thing, a sight worthy of the pyre.

  A revelation.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Istyuli Plains

  All ropes come up short if pulled long enough. All futures end in tragedy.

  — Ceneian Proverb

  And they forged counterfeits from our frame, creatures vile and obscene, who hungered only for violent congress. These beasts they loosed upon the land, where they multiplied, no matter how fierce the Ishroi who hunted them. And soon Men clamoured at our gates, begging sanctuary, for they could not contend with the creatures. "They wear your face," the penitents cried. "This calamity is your issue." But we were wroth, and turned them away, saying, "These are not our Sons. And you are not our Brothers."

  — Isuphiryas

  Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli

  The Company of Scions picked its way across the broad back of Earwa. The days passed without any visible sign of having travelled whatsoever. They had been charged with trolling the grasslands to the southwest with the hope of finding game they could drive back to the Army of the Middle-North. They did not see so much as a hoofprint. They could scarce feed themselves as the days passed, let alone an army.

  The Parching Wind continued to blow, kneading scalps and hair with warm fingers, hissing through the dead scrub that bristled the endless plate of the Istyuli. Even though they rode with purpose, it seemed they drifted, such was the expanse surrounding them. The land was devoid of track or direction and so vast that Sorweel often found himself hunching in his saddle-cringing in the dim way of bodily fears. He was bred to the plains, to open endless skies, and even still he felt shrunken, soft, and exposed. Men tend to forget the World's true proportion, to think the paltry measure of their ambition can plumb the horizon. It is a genius of theirs. But some lands, by dint of monumental heights or sheer, stark emptiness, contradict this conceit, remind them that they are never so big as the obstacles the World might raise against them.

  For watch after watch, Sorweel rode with the itch of this reminiscence floating within him. No distraction could scratch it away, not even Eskeles at his worst. To his chagrin, the rotund Schoolman insisted on practising language drills no matter who was in their vicinity-Zsoronga and Obotegwa more often than not. On one occasion, the entire company took up his chant, shouting Sheyic numerals across the plains while Sorweel gazed about in despair and disgust. Eskeles seemed to find the spectacle horribly amusing-as did Zsoronga, for that matter.

  The Mandate Schoolman proved as much a source of embarrassment as irritation. His mere presence rendered Sorweel a schoolboy, though the man insisted he had been sent as much to chaperone the entire company as to tutor the woefully ignorant King Sorweel of Sakarpus. "The Holy Aspect-Emperor takes his enemies seriously," the sorcerer said with a glib twinkle in his eye, "and his enemies take their children seriously." Sorweel found the comment at once laughable and troubling. Eskeles, with his foppish Three Seas beard and portly stature, not to mention his lack of armour or weaponry, seemed almost absurdly defenceless and ineffectual-another soft-pawed leuneraal. And yet Sorweel had no reason to doubt the truth of what he said, that he had been sent to safeguard their company-especially after witnessing the sorcerous destruction of Sakarpus.

  At night, Sorweel could almost pretend, when he kept his eyes hooked to the starry heavens, that none of what happened had happened, that the droning voices belonged to his father and his uncles, not the sons of exotic lands and distant kings. This was the time of the Lioning, when the Saglanders planted their crops, and when the male members of House Varalt and their boonsmen rode out into the mountains in search of puma. Since his twelfth summer he had accompanied his father and his uncles, and he adored every moment of it, even though his youth chained him to the hunting camp with his cousins. And he loved nothing more than lying with his eyes closed, listening to his father speak before the late-night fire, not as a king but as a man among others.

  The Lioning was how he learned his father was truly funny… and genuinely beloved by his men.

  So he would lie with these memories, curl about their warmth. But whenever it seemed he could believe, some dread would lurch out of the nethers and the pretense would blow away like smoke before gusting apprehensions. Zsoronga. The Aspect-Emperor. And the Mother — the Mother most of all.

  One question more than any other dominated the crowded commons of his soul. What? What does She want? And it would be the "She" who appalled him the most, who filled his bowel with nervous water. She. Yatwer. The Mother of Birth…

  He spent many sleepless watches simply hefting the vertiginous weight of this fact in his thoughts. He found it strange the way one could kneel, even pray with sobbing intensity, and yet ne
ver ponder, let alone comprehend, what lay behind the ancient names. Yatwer… What did that holy sound mean? The priests of the Hundred were dark and severe, every bit as harsh as the Tusk Prophets they took as their examples. They brandished the names of their Gods the way stern fathers raised whips: obedience was all they asked for, all they expected. The rest fell out of their hard readings of hard scriptures. For Sorweel, Yatwer had always been dark and nebulous, something too near the root of things, too aboriginal, not to be filled with the sense of peril belonging to sudden knives and fatal falls.

  All children come to temple with a fear of smallness, which the priests then work and knead like clay, shaping it into the strange reconciliation-to-horror that is religious devotion, the sense of loving something too terrible to countenance, too hoary to embrace. When he thought about the world beyond what his eyes could see, he saw souls in their innumerable thousands with only frayed threads to hold them, dangling over the gaping black of the Outside, and the shadows moving beneath, the Gods, ancient and capricious, reptilian with indifference, with designs so old and vast that there could only be madness in the small eyes of Men.

  And none were so old or so pitiless as the dread Mother of Birth.

  That was what her name was: childhood terror.

  To be pinched between such things! Yatwer and the Aspect-Emperor… Gods and Demons. Somehow he had been pulled into the world's threshing wheels, the grinding immensities-small wonder he had been so eager to escape the clamour of the Great Ordeal! Small wonder the travelling sway of his pony, Stubborn, carried the promise of deeper escape.

  He posed the question to Zsoronga and his impromptu court one night, careful to conceal the intensity of his interest. Fires were of course forbidden, so they sat side by side facing south, alternately staring into their hands and into the starry heavens: the Kings and Princes of lands cowed but not quite conquered by the New Empire, yearning for homes thrown far over the night horizon. Obotegwa sat dutifully behind them, translating when needed. If anything spurred Sorweel in his language lessons with Eskeles, it was the burden his stupidity had become for the wise old Obligate.