The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  "The boy… He could say anything. He is mad."

  All she needed were grounds.

  "He loves his mother."

  | Before, the young Prince-Imperial had run about the bones of the Andiamine Heights; now he ran through them.

  The more Kelmomas thought about it, the more it seemed he always knew that these tunnels existed, that all the subtle discrepancies between dimensions-shortened rooms and too-wide walls-had scratched and whispered at the edges of his notice. He did not like to think that ways had been hidden from him.

  He wandered through the dark. He held a small hand about his candle flame to protect against drafts where he could, but he was not so afraid of losing his way as missing something of interest were the light to flicker out. All eyes, he padded through narrow corridors, a bubble of light slipping through black pipes. Everything he saw bore the strict stamp of his father. Bare surfaces. Crude stonework. Simple iron. Here and there he came across walls adorned with chapped paint, and once, an entire hall that had been vaulted and corniced: sections of the old Ikurei palace, he realized, that Father had bent to his own design. He quickly realized the stairs and halls composed but a small fraction of the complex. For every stair there were at least five tubes set with iron rungs, some climbing, others plumbing depths he had yet dared to go. And for every hallway there were at least a dozen chutes, accessing, he imagined, the palace in its entirety.

  But there were too many locked doors and grates and hatches. He could almost see Mother or Father sending agents into these halls, using these portals to control how many bones could be explored.

  He resolved to teach himself how to pick their locks.

  Even though he knew he risked his mother's wrath, he decided to explore one of the few unbarred chutes-one leading through the Apparatory, he soon discovered. He passed innumerable voices, laughing and gossiping for the most part. He even glimpsed several shadows through tight marble and bronze fretting. He heard a couple making like dogs, and rooting around, he found a crease through which he could watch their sweaty backs heave.

  "This is the way you are to me," he whispered to the secret voice.

  This is how I am to you.

  "One bright."

  One dark.

  His eyes little more than slits, Kelmomas watched the plunging mystery for a time. The smell of it intrigued him, and it seemed he had caught some whiff of it on every man and woman he had met in his entire life. Including Mother. Finally, answering to a rising urgency, he began retracing his steps. He happily let his candle gutter out, knowing the route step for step, rung for rung. The musty darkness blew like a breeze through his hair and across his cheeks, so fleet was his passage back to the Empress's apartment.

  But Mother was waiting for him, her face as immobile as stone for fury.

  " Kel! What did I tell you?"

  He could duck her strike. He could catch her hand and break any one of her fingers. And while she winced for pain, he could snatch one of the pins fixing her hair and drive it deep into her eye. Death deep.

  He could do any of these things…

  But it was better to lean his cheek into her swatting palm, allow the blow to crack far harder than she intended, so that he could weep in false misery while she clutched him, and glory in her love and regret and horror.

  Psatma Nannaferi rose from him, skin peeling from skin. She stood, savoured the kiss of cool air across her breasts, felt his seed flush her inner thighs-for her womb would have none of it. His post-coital slumber was deep, so deep he did not stir when she spat her contempt upon him. She could strike him dead and he would never know. He would writhe in agony for all eternity, thinking he need only awaken to escape.

  Fanayal ab Kascamandri, blasted to charcoal, time and time again.

  She barked in laughter.

  She wandered the gloom of his pavilion, gazed upon the heirlooms of a destroyed empire. A fire-scorched standard, leaning negligently against a chair panelled in mother-of-pearl. Glittering coats of mail hanging from mahogany busts. The Padirajah's body-slave, a solemn Nilnameshi as old as she had once been, cowered in a slot between settees, watching her the way a child might watch a wolf.

  She paused before the pavilion's small but sumptuous shrine. "You are one of Her children," she said without looking at the man. "She loves you despite the wickedness your captors have forced upon you." She drew a finger along the spine of the book nestled in crimson crushed velvet upon the small altar: the kipfa'aifan, the Witness of Fane.

  The leather cracked and pimpled at her touch.

  "You give," she murmured, turning to fix the old man with her gaze. "He takes."

  Tears greased his cheeks.

  "She will reach for you when your flesh stumbles, and you are pitched into the Outside. But you must reach for Her in turn. Only then…"

  He shrank into his refuge as she stepped toward him.

  "Will you? Will you reach for Her?"

  He shook his head in affirmation, but she had already turned away, knowing his answer. She sauntered toward the draped entrance, glimpsed herself in the long oval of a standing silver mirror. The Mother-Supreme paused in the lantern gloom, allowed her eyes to roam and linger across the supple lines of her reborn body. She made a tongue of her image, savoured the honey of what she saw…

  To be returned, to experience the unfathomable loss, to shrink and wither-and then to bloom anew! Psatma Nannaferi had never suffered the vanities of her sisters. She did not hunger, as the others hungered, for the thieving touch of Men. Only in the execution of the rites would her flesh rise to the promise of congress. Even still, she exulted in this Gift as she had no other. There was glory in middle-youth, the tested limb and will of maturity, clothed in firm silk years away from the sackcloth it would become.

  Her temples looted and burned. So many of her sisters raped and put to the sword, and here she stood, drunk with joy.

  "Are you such a dog?" she asked the open air. "Eh, Snakehead?"

  She turned to where Meppa stood on the pavilion's threshold. The ornate flaps swayed into motionlessness behind him. Highland cool wafted through the interior.

  "You," he said with muttering intensity. His face remained directed forward, but the black finger of his salt asp had turned directly toward the cringing body-slave. The Mother-Supreme smiled, knowing the old man would not live to see dawn. He would die for her sake, she knew, and he would reach…

  "Always guarding his master's portal," she cackled.

  "Cover yourself, Concubine."

  "You do not like what you see?"

  "I see the withered old crone that is your soul."

  "So you are a man still, eh, Snakehead? You judge my beauty, my worth, according to the youth of my womb… My fertilit — "

  "Still your tongue!"

  " Bark, dog. Rouse your master. Let us see whose snout he will strike."

  The shining snake finally turned to regard her. The lips beneath the silver band tightened into a line.

  Psatma Nannaferi resumed her appraisal of her miraculous twin in the mirror. "You bear the Water within you," she said to the Last Cishaurim. She drew a palm across the plane of her abdomen. "Like an ocean! You can strike me down with your merest whim! And yet you stand here bandying threats and insults?"

  "I serve my Lord Padirajah."

  The Mother-Supreme laughed. This, she realized, was her new temple, a heathen army, flying through lands where even goatherds were loathe to go. And these heathen were her new priests-these Fanim. What did it matter what they believed, so long as they accomplished what needed to be done?

  "But you lie," she croaked in her old voice.

  "He has been anoin-"

  "He has been anointed!" she cackled. "But not by whom you think!"

  "Cease your blasphem-"

  "Fool! All of them. All these Men — all these Thieves! All of them think themselves the centre of their worlds. But not you. You have seen. You alone know how small we are… mere specks, motes in the gusting b
lack. And yet you place your faith in errant abstraction-the Solitary God! Pfah! You throw number-sticks for your salvation, when all you need do is kneel!"

  The Cishaurim said nothing in reply. The salt-asp, lantern light gleaming along the cross-hatching of its scales, hooked away from her toward a point over her shoulder.

  She turned to see Fanayal standing naked in a kind of stationary lurch behind her. He seemed insubstantial for the play of shadow and gloom.

  "Do you see now?" Meppa asked. "Her treachery. Her devilry! My Lord, please tell me that you see!"

  Fanayal ab Kascamandri wiped his face, breathed deep, his nostrils whistling. "Leave us, Meppa," he said roughly.

  A moment of equipoise followed, the mutual regard of three overbearing souls. Their breathing abraded the silent air. Then with the merest bow, the Cishaurim withdrew.

  The Padirajah loomed behind the diminutive woman.

  He flung her about, cried, "Witch!" He clamped callused hands about her neck, bent her back, crying, "Accursed witch!"

  Groaning, the Mother-Supreme clutched his hard muscled arms, hooked a naked calf about his waist.

  Thus he ravished her.

  Still huddled between the settees, the doomed body-slave wept for watching…

  Soft earth deeply ploughed.

  Scant ceremony greeted Uncle Holy's arrival at the Andiamine Heights' postern gate, only sombre words and unspoken suspicion. Slaves raised embroidered tarps against the rain, forming a tunnel with upraised arms, so Maithanet was spared the indignity of soaking in his own clothes. Kelmomas was careful to observe and mimic the attitude of his mother and her retinue. Children, no matter how oblivious otherwise, are ever keen to their parent's fear and quick to behave accordingly. Kelmomas was no different.

  Something truly momentous was about to happen-even his mother's fool ministers understood as much. Kelmomas actually glimpsed crooked old Vem-Mithriti shaking his head in disbelief.

  The Shriah of the Thousand Temples was about to be interrogated by their God's most gifted, destructive son.

  Uncle Holy paced the dripping gauntlet in the simulacrum of fury. He fairly shouldered aside Imhailas and Lord Sankas to stand before Mother, who even so diminutive seemed imposing for the strangeness of her shining white mask. For not the first time, Kelmomas found himself hating his uncle, not simply because of his stature, but because of the way he occupied it. No matter what the occasion, be it a blessing or a marriage or an exhortation or the Whelming of a child, Anasurimbor Maithanet cultivated an aura of neck-breaking strength.

  "Dispense with the frivolities," he snapped. "I would be done with this, Esmi."

  He wore a white robe with gold-embroidered hems-stark, even by his staid standards. Aside from the heavy Tusk-and-Circumfix that hung above his sternum, his only concessions to ornament were the golden vambraces that sheathed his forearms in antique Ceneian motifs.

  Rather than speak, the Empress lowered her head a degree short of what was demanded by jnan. Kelmomas felt her hand tighten about his shoulder as she did so.

  The young Prince-Imperial savoured the way they carried the scent of rain into the closeted halls of the palace. Moist creases of silk and felt. Feet squishing in sandals. Wet hair growing hot.

  Neither party spoke a word the entire trek, save Vem-Mithriti, who begged his mother's pardon as soon as they climbed beyond the Apparatory, asking whether he could continue on his own at a pace more suitable to ancient bones. They left the frail Saik Schoolman behind them, following a path of stairs and corridors cleared in advance and guarded at every turn by stone-faced Eothic Guardsmen. The wall sconces were idle despite the darkness of the day, so they passed through pockets of outright gloom. Despite his mother's fixed, forward glare, the young Prince-Imperial could not resist craning about, matching the ways he could see with the ways he could not-comparing the two palaces, visible and invisible.

  At long last they gained the Imperial Apartments and reached the Door.

  It seemed taller and broader than the boy remembered, perhaps because his mother had finally ordered it polished. Normally chalked in green, the Kyranean Lions now gleamed in florid majesty. He wanted to ask Mother whether this meant Inrilatas would be set free, but the secret voice warned him to remain silent.

  The Empress stood before them, her masked face lowered as if in prayer. All was silent, save for the creak of Imhailas's gear. Kelmomas reached about her silk-girdled waist to press his cheek into her side. She ran thoughtless fingers through his hair.

  Finally Maithanet asked, "Why is the boy here, Esmi?"

  No one could miss his tone, which twisted the question into, What is this morbid fixation?

  "I don't know," she replied. "Inrilatas refused to speak to you unless he was present."

  "So this is to be a public humiliation?"

  "No. Only you and my two sons," she replied, still gazing at the Door. "Your nephews."

  "Madness…" the Shriah muttered in feigned disgust.

  At last she turned her mask toward him. "Yes," she said. " Dunyain madness."

  She nodded to Imhailas, who grasped the latch and pushed the great door inward.

  The Shriah of the Thousand Temples looked down to Kelmomas, clasped his small white hand in the callused immensity of his own. "Do you fear me as well?" he asked.

  Rather than reply, the boy looked to his mother in the appearance of anxious yearning.

  "You are a Prince-Imperial," his mother said. "Go."

  He followed Uncle Holy into the gloom of his brother's cell.

  The cell's lone window was unshuttered, revealing a slot of dark sky and flooding the room with chill and moist air. Rain was all the boy could hear at first, roaring across complicated rooftops, gurgling and slurping down the course of zigzag gutters. A single brazier warmed the room, pitching an orange glow into the dark. An elaborately carved chair had been set facing the wall where Inrilatas's chains hung from the four stone lion heads. The brazier had been positioned, the boy noticed, to fully illuminate the chair's occupant and no one else.

  Inrilatas crouched naked some four paces from the chair, his arms about his knees. The dim light did not so much illuminate as polish him, it seemed. The young man watched them with a kind of blank serenity.

  We must discover what he wants us to do, the secret voice whispered.

  For certainly Inrilatas wanted something from him. Why demand his presence otherwise?

  His uncle released his hand the instant the Door creaked shut behind them. Without so much as looking at either brother, he reached into his left sleeve and extracted a wooden wedge from beneath the antique vambrace. He dropped it clattering to the floor, then kicked it beneath the base of the door…

  Locking them in.

  Inrilatas laughed, flexing arms as smooth and hard as barked branches. "Uncle Holy," he said, bending his head to press his left cheek against his knees. "Truth shines."

  "Truth shines," Maithanet replied, taking the seat provided for him.

  Kelmomas peered at the wooden butt jammed into the black seam between the floor and the portal. What was happening? It had never occurred to him that Uncle Holy might have plans of his own…

  Shout, the secret voice urged. Call for her!

  The boy shot a questioning look at his older brother-who simply grinned and winked.

  Raw for the rain, distant thunder reverberated through the cell window. But for the little boy, the crazed proportions of the circumstances that seized them rattled louder still. What was happening?

  "Do you intend to murder Mother?" Inrilatas asked, still staring at Kelmomas.

  "No," Maithanet replied.

  We have missed something! the voice exclaimed. Something has "Do you intend to murder Mother?" Inrilatas asked again, this time fixing his uncle in a cart-wheeling gaze.

  "No."

  "Uncle Holy. Do you intend to murder Mother?"

  "I said, no."

  The boy breathed against the iron rod of alarm that held him rigid. Every
thing was explicable, he decided. Inrilatas played as he always played, violating expectations for violation's sake. His uncle had stopped the door for contingency's sake… The little boy almost laughed aloud.

  They were all Dunyain here.

  "So many years," Inrilatas continued, "piling plots atop plots-could it be you have simply forgotten how to stop, Uncle?"

  "No."

  "So many years surrounded by half-witted peoples. How long have you toiled? How long have you suffered for these malformed children with their stunted intellects? How long have you suffered their ignorance-their absurd vanity? And then Father, that slovenly ingrate, raises one of them above you? Why might that be? Why would Father trust a whore over the pious Shriah of the Thousand Temples?"

  "I know not."

  "But you suspect."

  "I fear my brother does not fully trust me."

  "Because he knows, doesn't he? He knows the secret of our blood."

  "Perhaps."

  "He knows you, knows you better than you know yourself."

  "Perhaps."

  "And he has seen the flicker of sedition, the small flame that awaits the kindling of circumstance."

  "Perhaps."

  "And have the circumstances arrived?"

  "No."

  Laughter. "Oh, but Uncle Holy, they have arrived-most certainly!"

  "I do not understa-"

  "Liar!" the wild-haired figure screeched.

  The Shriah did not so much as blink. His face bathed in wavering orange light, Maithanet enveloped Inrilatas in Dunyain scrutiny, a gaze that seemed to tinkle like coals. It was a profile Kelmomas had seen thousands of times, stitched into banners if not in flesh. High of cheek, virile, the strength of his jaw obvious despite the thickness of his beard.

  He is our first true challenge, the voice whispered. We must take care.

  Inrilatas's eyes glittered in the gloom. He crouched the same as before, his chains hanging in arcs across the floor. If their uncle's scrutiny discomfited him, he betrayed no sign of it.

  "Tell me, Uncle Holy. How many children did grandfather sire?"

  "Six," the Shriah replied. There was a toneless brevity to the exchange now, as if they had shed the disguises they used when interacting with normal men.