The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  "Come… I want to discuss the shit between us."

  With anyone else, Kelmomas would have thought this a mad joke of some kind. Not so with Inrilatas.

  The boy pressed the door inward, strode into the stench, pausing but two steps from the coiled feces. The slave glimpsed Kelmomas in his periphery, wheeled in sudden alarm. But the man was quick to resume his cleaning when he recognized him. Like so many palace slaves, terror kept him welded to the task before him.

  "You show no revulsion," Inrilatas said, nodding at the feces.

  Kelmomas did not know what to say, so he said nothing.

  "You are not like the others, are you, little brother? No… You … are like me."

  Remember your face, the secret voice warned. Only Father possesses the Strength in greater measure!

  "I am nothing like you," the little Prince-Imperial replied.

  It seemed strange, standing on the far side of the Door. And wrong

  … So very wrong.

  "But you are," Inrilatas chuckled. "All of us have inherited our Father's faculties in some mangled measure. Me… I possess his sensitivities, but I utterly lack his unity… his control. My natures blow through me-hungers, glorious hungers! — unfettered by the little armies of shame that hold the souls of others in absolute captivity. Father's reason mystifies me. Mother's compassion makes me howl with laughter. I am the World's only unbound soul…"

  He raised his shackled wrists as he said this, gestured to the polluted floor before him.

  "I shit when I shit."

  A ringing filled the boy's ears, such was the intensity of his older brother's gaze. He began to speak, but his voice caught as though about a hook in his throat.

  Inrilatas grinned. "What about you, little brother? Do you shit when you shit?"

  He sees me… the secret voice whispered. You have become reckless in Father's abse "Who?" Inrilatas laughed. "The shadow of hearing moves through you-as it so often does when no one is speaking. Who whispers to you, little brother?"

  "Mommy says you're mad."

  "Ignore the question," his older brother snapped. "State something insulting, something that will preoccupy, and thus evade a prickly question. Come closer, little brother… Come closer and tell me you do not shit when you shit."

  "I don't understand what you mean!"

  He knows you lie…

  "Of course you know… Come closer… Let me peer into your mouth. Let me listen to this whisper that is not your voice. Who? Who speaks inside of you?"

  Kelmomas fell backward a step. Inrilatas had managed to creep forward somehow, to steal slack from his chains without the boy noticing.

  "Uncle is coming to see you!"

  A heartbeat of appraising silence.

  "Again you ignore the question. But this time you state a truth, one that you know will intrigue me. You mean Uncle Holy, don't you? Uncle Holy is coming to visit me? I smell Mother in that."

  The boy found strength in her mere mention.

  "Y-yes. Mother wants you to read his face. She fears that he plots against Father-against us! She thinks only you can see."

  "Come closer."

  "But Uncle has learned how to fool you."

  Even as he spoke the words, Kelmomas cursed them for their clumsiness. This was an Anasurimbor crouched before him. Divinity! Divinity burned in Inrilatas's blood as surely as in his own.

  "Kin," Inrilatas crowed. "Blood of my blood. What love you possess for Mother! I see it burn! Burn! Until all else is char and ash. Is she the grudge you bear against Uncle?"

  But Kelmomas could think of nothing else to say or do. To answer any of his brother's questions, he knew, was to wander into labyrinths he could not hope to solve. He had to press forward…

  "He has learned to disguise his disgust as pity, Uncle Holy. His treachery as concern!"

  There was no other way through the monstrous intellect before him.

  This is a mistake…

  "The whisper warns you!" Inrilatas laughed, his eyes bright, not for the twin flames they reflected, but something more incendiary still: apprehension. "You do not like sharing… Such a peevish, devious little soul! Come closer, little brother."

  He sees me!

  "You cannot let him fool you!" the boy cried, trying to goad a pride that did not exist.

  "I see him — the one you hide, oh yes! The other one, the whisperer. I seeeeeeeee him," Inrilatas crooned. "What does he tell you? Is he the one who wants Uncle Holy dead?"

  "You will want to kill him, Brother, when he comes. I can help you!"

  More laughter, warm and avuncular, at once teasing and protective. "And now you offer the beast candy. Come closer, little brother. I want to stare into your mouth."

  "You will want to kill Uncle Holy," Kelmomas repeated, his thoughts giddy with sudden inspiration. "Think, brother… The sum of sins."

  And with that single phrase, the young Prince-Imperial's dogged persistence was rescued-or so he thought.

  Where his brother had fairly radiated predatory omniscience before, his manner suddenly collapsed inward. Even his nakedness, which had been that of the rapist-lewd, virile, bestial-lapsed into its chill and vulnerable contrary. He actually seemed to shrink in his chains.

  Suddenly Inrilatas seemed as pathetic as the human shit breathing on the floor between them.

  The young man's eyes flinched from the boy's gaze, sought melancholy reprieve in the shadowy corners of his cell's ceiling.

  "Do you ever wonder, Kel, why it is I do what I do?"

  "No," the boy answered honestly.

  Inrilatas glanced at his brother, then down to the floor. Breathing deep, he smiled the sad smile of someone lost in a game pursued too far for too long. Too long to abandon. Too long to continue.

  "I do it to heap damnation upon myself," he said as if making an absurd admission.

  "But why?" the boy asked, genuinely curious now.

  Be wary… the secret voice whispered.

  "Because I can think of no greater madness."

  And what greater madness could there be, exchanging a handful of glorious heartbeats for an eternity of anguish and torment? But the boy shied from this question.

  "I… I don't understand," he said. "You could leave this room… anytime you wished! Mother would release you-I know it. You just need to follow the rules."

  His brother paused, looked to him as if searching for evidence of kinship beyond the fact of their blood. "Tell me, little brother, what rules the rule?"

  Something is wrong… the voice warned.

  "The God," the boy said, shrugging.

  "And what rules the God?"

  "Nothing. No one."

  He breaths as you breathe, the secret voice whispered, blinks as you blink-even his heartbeat captures your own! He draws your unthinking soul into the rhythms of his making. He mesmerizes you!

  Inrilatas nodded in solemn affirmation. "So the God is… unconstrained."

  "Yes."

  Inrilatas stood with sudden grace, walked to the limit of chains. He seemed godlike in the gloom, his hair falling in flaxen sheets about his shoulders, his limbs bound in veined muscle, his phallus laying long and violet in a haze of golden down. He placed his foot upon his feces, and using his toes, smeared it in a foul arc across the floor below him.

  "So the God is like me."

  And just like that, the boy understood. The senseless sense of his brother's acts. The miraculous stakes of his mad exchange. Suddenly this little room, this shit-stained prison cell hidden from the light of shame, seemed a holy place, a temple to a different revelation, the nail of a darker heaven.

  "Yes…" the boy murmured, lost in the wisdom-the heartbreaking wisdom! — of his brother's constant gaze.

  And it seemed his brother's voice soaked into the surrounding walls, cupped everything that could be seen. "The God punishes us according to the degree we resemble him."

  Inrilatas towered before him.

  "And you resemble him, little brother. You res
emble…"

  What was this trap he had set for him? How could understanding, insight, capture?

  "No!" the boy cried. "I am not mad! I am not like you!"

  Laughter, warm and gentle. So like Mother when she is lazy and wishes only to tease and cuddle her beautiful little son. "Look," Anasurimbor Inrilatas commanded. "Look at this heap of screams you call the world, and tell me you would not add to them-pile them to the sky!"

  He has the Strength, the secret voice whispered.

  "I would…" Anasurimbor Kelmomas admitted. "I would." His limbs trembled. His heart hung as if plummeting through a void. What was this crashing within him? What was this release?

  The Truth!

  And his brother's voice resonated, climbed as if communicating up out of his bones. "You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother-Little Knife! You think you murder in her name. But that love is simply cloth thrown over the invisible, what you use to reveal the shape of something so much greater…"

  Memories tumbled into his soul's eye. Memories of his Whelming, how he had followed the beetle to the feet of the Grinning God, the Four-horned Brother, how they had laughed when he had maimed the bug-laughed together! Memories of the Yatwerian priestess, how she had shrieked blood while the Mother of Fertility stood helpless…

  And the boy could feel it! An assumption of glory. A taking possession of a certainty that had possessed him all along-possessed him in ignorance… Yes!

  Godhead.

  "Come closer," Inrilatas said in a whisper that seemed to boom across all creation. He nodded to the arc smeared across the floor between them. "Wander across the line others have etched for you…"

  The young Prince-Imperial watched his left foot, small and white and bare, step forward But a gnarled hand caught him, held him with gentle insistence. Somehow the deaf-mute Attendant had circled around without the boy noticing. The man wagged his face in alarm and horror.

  Inrilatas began laughing.

  "Flee, little brother," he said, passion fluting through his voice. "I can feel the…" He dandled his tongue on his lips as if savouring his own sweetness, even as his eyes widened in animal fury. A coital shudder passed through him. "I feel the rage!" he roared to the stone vaults. "The furies!" He seized the slack chains, wrenched them savagely enough to make the links screech for biting one another. Saliva swung from his mouth when he jerked his face back to Kelmomas. "I can feel it come… come upon me…" His phallus climbed into a grinning arc.

  "Diviniteeeeeee!"

  The boy stood astounded. At last he yielded to the Attendant and his shoulder-tugging hands, allowed the wretch to pull him from his brother's cell…

  He knew Inrilatas would find the little gift he had left for him, lying along the seam between floor-stones.

  The small file he had stolen from the palace tinker… not so long ago.

  | Iothiah

  Fire, fierce enough to sting the skin from paces away. Smoke, rolling in oily sheets, acrid enough to prick the eyes, needle the throat. Screams, violent enough to cramp the heart. Screams. Too many screams.

  Dizzy and nauseated, Malowebi rode close beside Fanayal ab Kascamandri as the Padirajah toured the streets, some raucous, others abandoned. The Second Negotiant had never witnessed the sacking of a village, let alone a city as vast and mighty as Iothiah. It reminded him that High Holy Zeum, for all its high holy bluster, knew very little about war. The Men of the Three Seas, he had come to realize, warred without mercy or honour. Where the dynastic skirmishes his Zeumi kinsmen called war were bound by ancient code and custom, Fanayal and his men recognized no constraints that he could see, save that of military expediency and exhaustion.

  They fought the way Sranc fought.

  The Mbimayu sorcerer saw entire streets carpeted in bodies. He saw several rapes, the victims either vacant or shrieking, and more summary executions than he cared to count. He saw a pale-skinned Columnary holding a squalling babe in one arm while trying to battle two laughing Kianene with the other. He saw an old man jumping from a rooftop, his clothing afire.

  Perhaps glimpsing something of his dismay, Fanayal was at pains to describe the atrocities suffered by his own people during the First Holy War and the subsequent Wars of Unification. A kind of madness warbled through his outrage as he spoke, condemnation spoken in the tones of divine revelation, as if nothing could be more right and true than the slaughter and rapine about them. The Bloodthirsty Excuse, the sage Memgowa had called it. Retribution.

  "But there is more to this than crude vengeance," Fanayal explained, as if suddenly recalling the learning of the man he addressed. The Padirajah was proud of his own youthful education, Malowebi knew, but found the posture difficult to recover after decades of brutality and fugitive insurrection. "You make an example of the first," the man continued, "then you show mercy to the second. First, you teach them to fear you, then you earn their trust. Nirsi shal'tatra, we call it. The Honey and the Goad."

  Malowebi could not but reflect on how easily the whip and the honey became confused. Everywhere they rode, the Kianene turned from their sordid labours and called out to their lord in exultation and gratitude-cheered as if famished guests at a sumptuous feast.

  Savages, Cousin. You have sent me out among savages.

  Something, Malowebi's silence, perhaps, convinced the Bandit Padirajah to cut their tour short. They reversed direction, rode for what seemed an entire watch plagued by the sound of a babe crying-Malowebi could almost believe someone followed them torturing a cat. Silence haunted the empty windows. Smoke sheeted the west in gauze rags, lending an eerie, watery timbre to the sunlight that slanted across the dying city. Finally they returned to the wrack and ruin of the city's northwestern walls-the section brought down by Meppa.

  Once again, Malowebi found himself gawking.

  "It frightens you, no?" Fanayal said, watching his profile. "The spilling of the Water."

  "What do you mean?"

  The Padirajah graced him with an upside-down smile. "I've been told that Schoolmen find the Cishaurim Psukhe troubling. You see a violation with your mundane eyes-the glare of sorcery-when your other eye, the one that itches, sees only mundane creation."

  Malowebi shrugged, thinking of the brief dual between Meppa and the lone Saik sorcerer-a decrepit and dishevelled old man-who had defended the hapless city. The rogue Cishaurim floating, impervious to the fire of the Schoolman's Anagogic dragonhead, disgorging cataracts of blue-twinkling light as pure as it was beautiful. As awesome as Meppa's power had been-there was no doubting he was a Primary-it had been the beauty that had most astounded, and mortified, the Second Negotiant.

  To be a sorcerer was to dwell among deformities.

  "It is extraordinary," Malowebi admitted, "to see the Work without the Mark." He smiled the wise and slippery smile of an old diplomat. "But we Schoolmen are accustomed to miracles."

  He said this last more in bitter jest than anything. What he witnessed had left many profound impressions. The power of Meppa, certainly. The martial acumen of the Padirajah. The cunning and the bravery of the Fanim, not to mention their barbarity…

  But nothing loomed so large as the weakness of the New Empire.

  The rumours were absolutely true: the Aspect-Emperor had boned his conquests to pursue his mad invasion of the northern wilds. Disaffected populations. Ill-equipped soldiers, poorly trained and even more poorly led. Infirm and doddering Schoolmen. And perhaps most interestingly, absolutely no Chorae…

  Nganka-nay, Zeum — needed to be informed. This night would be filled with far-calling dreams.

  "The people call him Stonebreaker," Fanayal said. "Meppa… They say he was sent to us by the Solitary God."

  Malowebi turned to him, blinking.

  "What do you say?"

  "I say he was sent to me!" the hawk-faced Padirajah cried laughing. " I am the Solitary God's gift to his people."

  "And what does he say?" the Second Negotiant asked, now genuinely curious.

  "Meppa?
He does not know who he is."

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Meorn Wilderness

  Everything is concealed always. Nothing is more trite than a mask.

  — Ajencis, The Third Analytic of Men

  If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.

  — Managoras, Ode to the Long-Lived Fool

  Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the "Long Side"

  It tracked their blundering flight through the Wilderness. It watched and it hungered and it hated…

  How it hated.

  It remained in the trees for the most part, running with glee along the dead limbs of the under-canopy. It fed on squirrels, eaten raw, and once upon a wildcat that had tried to feed on it. It supped on the mewling litter afterward, laughed at their miniature hisses and struggles. Their tiny skulls cracked like delicacies.

  Days. Weeks.

  Over gnarled miles, through rain falling in sheeted fury. It watched them trudge and it watched them sleep. It watched them feud and bicker. Three times it saw them battle the errant children of the Old Fathers, the Sranc, and it crouched, its eyes wide and wondering as tangles of sorcerous light and shadow fluttered through the forest's mangled depths.

  And sometimes it dared crawl close, like a serpent worming toward prey. Grinding its phallus against hoary bark, it would watch her, the girl who had saved them in the ancient-old deeps. And it would know lust, malice. It would gaze with a singularity unknown to Men.

  The thing called Soma.

  Each night it sought some tree greater than the others, a tower among lesser pillars, and it climbed, leaping and swinging through the canopies, from dead to living, following fork and branch to the wiry limit, until it breached the final leafy weave. There, gently creaking side to side in the breeze, it stared across an ocean of arboreal crowns.

  It would bend its neck back until its head pressed its spine, and it would scream.