The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  There is a vastness to the wind on the nocturnal plain, a sense of heaven-spanning enormities, one drawn roughly across the other. All things are seized. All things are lifted and bent. And when the gusts are violent enough, all things kneel-or are broken.

  She has crept from the others into the night. Gusts scour the ground, galloping like the outriders of an infinite horde. She turns her face away from the prick of flying sand, gazes without surprise at herself wearing the tattered rags that had once belonged to Soma.

  It seems she had known she would find it here waiting-the Consult skin-spy. The company had continued marching past dusk, stopping only when they found the protection of a meagre depression. She set out the way she always set out, instinctively choosing the line of sight and wind most favourable to a stalking predator…

  And found one.

  "How?" she hisses. There is something frantic within her, something that would fly into pieces were it not for her skin. "How is the Nonman killing us?"

  The thing mimics her crouching posture. It seems at once harmless, nothing more than an image without depth, a mere reflection, and as deadly as a bolt cocked in a ballistae. Fear tickles her, but she feels it with a stranger's skin.

  "Tell me!"

  It smiles with the same condescension she has felt across her face innumerable times. One both beautiful and infuriating.

  "Your Chorae," it says with her voice. "Give it to me and I can save you."

  What? She clasps the pouch where it hangs between her breasts.

  "No! No more games! Tell me how!"

  Her vehemence surprises both of them. She watches her eyes click to the darkness of the camp behind her, her face imperceptibly bent to the needs of a sharper ear.

  Then she hears it herself. The mutter of sorcery, effortlessly stepping around the buffeting wind, climbing up out of the substance of dust and earth.

  "The Qirri…" the other her says. The other spy. "Ask him what it is!"

  Then the thing is gone, leaping high and deep into the darkness and running like no human can run. Yanking her head about, Mimara sees the old Wizard scaling the gusting heights, his eyes and mouth alight with brilliant meaning. His voice echoes deep across the angles and surfaces of a different plane. Lines of blinding light needle the dark, carving trails of white across plain. She glimpses fire and exploding earth, swathes of ground clawed into black by the shadow of grasses.

  She glimpses herself running with gazelle beauty, leaping with serpentine grace. Then the spewing dust sweeps up to obscure him and so secure his escape.

  Koll. The last of the Stone Hags.

  She stares at him while the Wizard rails at her.

  "What? What were you doing so far away?"

  The man sits hunched, the only one not watching her and her father. He was a large man, a powerful man, when they had rescued the surviving Stone Hags in the Mop. Now he is scarce more than a knob-jointed rack. He has long ceased caring about his war-knot, so his hair falls in mats about his face and shoulders. Whatever armour he possessed, he has lost to the trail-and were it not for the Captain, he would have cast away his broadsword as well, she imagines. His beard is matted with grime, making a sphincter of his mouth, which hangs perpetually open. His eyes stare down, always down, but even still they possess the glint of desperation.

  "It just came to me," she lies, for in truth, she came to it. "It had my face…"

  "You could have been killed! Why? Why would you wander so far?"

  Koll. Only Koll. Of all his brother Hags, only he has yet to succumb to the rigours of the trail. He is, she realizes, the last pure thing in their mad company.

  The measure, the cubit of their depravity. The only one who has not tasted Qirri.

  "It meant to replace you!"

  As she watches, the man's shaggy head jerks as if to a gnat's sting. The bleary eyes squint and struggle, as if trying to sort shadows from the darkness…

  He can't see, she realizes. Not because his eyes fail him, but because it is a moonless night and clouds obscure the Nail of Heaven. He can't see because his eyes remain human…

  Unlike theirs.

  "Fool! Fool of a girl! It would have strangled you. Stripped and replaced you!"

  At last she turns to look up at the Wizard. He stands with his back to the wind so the edges of him-rotted hide and tangled hair-seem to fly toward her.

  "What is it?" she asks in Ainoni.

  He blinks, and even though his fury continues to animate him, she somehow knows that a kernel of him simply does not care, that a hunger lies balled like a greased marble in his soul, waiting for the watches to pass and for the pouch to be drawn again.

  "What is what?" he cries. He is troubled, she knows, because she has spoken in Ainoni, the tongue of their conspiracy. "I'm talking to you, girl!"

  In her periphery she can see the hoary aspect of the Captain, his hair and caste-noble braid lashing the air above his right shoulder, his eyes as bright as Seleukaran steel. His knife slumbers in its scabbard, hanging high on his girdle, but she sees its curve glint above his bloodstained knuckles nonetheless.

  "Nothing," she says to the Wizard, knowing that he does not know.

  Qirri is Qirri…

  The desire that forever slips the leash of your knowing. The hunger that leaves no trace in your trammelled soul.

  "Water before food," Xonghis says to them.

  They walk an undeviating line now that their water-skins are empty. Nothing can be more simple, it seems, than walking straight across never-ending flatness. And yet all is turmoil and confusion, not the kind that quickens hearts or wrings hands, but the kind that simply hangs like a chrysalis in her soul, suspended, motionless. Everything, it seems-her voice, her scissoring step, her expression-is as assured as it has ever been, save that the world they confront has become a dream.

  Everything possesses a nagging lightness. The colours, the maroon swirls of different weeds drying and dying, the patches of sienna dust, the black of some recent grass fire. The swagger of the land piling without height, as if some god had poured mud atop mud just to watch the edges spread over the horizon. The drama of the sky, the clouds climbing in ranges, here tangled into luxuriant locks, there swept up and around in a snowy melange of wings. A kind of disbelief plagues everything she sees, as if existence were foam, and the world nothing more than a titanic bubble…

  What was happening?

  "You have the look," a voice gurgles from behind.

  She turns and sees teeth and gums, eyes pinched into besotted creases. Sarl, somehow shadowy though all the world is bright, looking like a filthy gnome.

  "You have the look… Aye!"

  She can hear phlegm snap in his cackle. The peril of speaking to madmen, she realizes, is that it permits them to speak to you.

  "Don't dispute me, girl, it's true. You have the look of a path long mudded. Am I wrong? Am I? Tell me, girl. How many men have marched 'cross your thighs?"

  She should hate him for saying this, but she lacks the inner wind. When has feeling become an effort?

  "Many fools. But men… Very few."

  "So you admit it!"

  She smiles out of some coquettish reflex, thinking she might use his carnal interest to learn more about Lord Kosoter.

  "What am I admitting?"

  The grin drops from his face, enough for her to glimpse a sliver of his bloodshot eyes. He leans close with a kind of wonder-too close. She fairly gags at his buzzing reek.

  "She burned a city for you-didn't she?"

  "Who?" she replies numbly.

  "Your mother. The Holy Empress."

  "No," she laughs in faux astonishment. "But I appreciate the compliment!"

  Sarl laughs and nods in turn, his eyes once again squeezed into invisibility. Laughs and nods, trailing ever farther behind her…

  What was happening?

  She is not who she is…

  She is already two women, each estranged from the other. There is the Mimara who knows, who wat
ches the old motives, the old bonds, gradually disintegrate. And there is the Mimara who has gathered all of the old concerns and set them in a circle about an unspeakable pit.

  She is already two women, but she needs only touch her bowing abdomen to become three.

  They laugh at her for all the food she eats. More and more, she is ravenous come evening. She chides the Wizard for loitering when he should be preparing the humble field Cants he uses to cook their spoiling game. She scolds Xonghis when he fails to secure them enough game.

  Whatever speech they possess leaks away as the sun draws down the horizon. They sit in the dust, their beards lacquered with grease, the entrails of their victims humming with flies. Vultures circle them. They sit and they wait for rising darkness… for the melodious toll of Cleric's first words.

  "I remember…"

  They gather before him. Some come crawling, while others shuffle, kicking up ghostly trails of dust that the wind whips into quick oblivion.

  "I remember coming down from high mountains, and treating with Mannish Kings…"

  He sits cross-legged, his forearms extended across his knees, his head hanging from his shoulders.

  "I remember seducing wives… healing infant princes…"

  Stars smoke the arch of Heaven paint the Nonman's slouching form in strokes of silver and white.

  "I remember laughing at the superstitions of your priests."

  He rolls his head from side to side, as if the shadow he cradles possesses hands that caress his cheeks.

  "I remember frightening the fools among you with my questions and astounding the wise with my answers. I remember cracking the shields of your warriors, shattering arms of bronze…"

  And it seems they hear distant horns, the thunder of hosts charging, clashing.

  "I remember the tribute you gave to me… The gold… the jewels… the babes that you laid at my sandalled feet."

  A hush.

  "I remember the love you bore me… The hatred and the envy."

  He raises his head, blinking as if yanked from a dream inhumanly cruel for its bliss. Veins of silver fork across his cheeks… Tears.

  "You die so easily!" he cries, howls, as if human frailty were the one true outrage.

  He sobs, bows his head once more. His voice rises as if from a pit.

  "And I never forget…"

  One of the scalpers moans in carnal frustration… Galian.

  "I never forget the dead."

  Then he is standing, drawn like a puppet by invisible strings. The Holy Dispensation is about to begin. Strange shouts crease and crumple the windy silence, like the yelping of leashed dogs. She can see hunger leaning in their avid eyes. She can see manly restraint give way to clutched arms and rocking gesticulations. And she does not know when this happened, how awaiting the pouch had become a carnival of fanatic declarations, or how licking a smudged fingertip had become carnal penetration.

  She sits rigid and estranged, watching Cleric, yes, but watching his pouch even more. As meagre as their rations are-scarce enough to blacken the crescent of a pared fingernail-she wonders how long they have before the purse fails them altogether. Finally he towers before her, his bare chest shining with hooks of light and shadow, his outstretched finger glistening about the nub of precious black.

  She cannot move.

  "Mimara?" the Ishroi asks, remembering her name.

  He calls to both of her selves, to the one who knows but does not care and to the one who cares but does not know.

  But for once it is the third incarnation that answers…

  "No," it says. "Get that poison away from me."

  Cleric gazes at her for a solemn moment, long enough for the others to set aside their singular hunger.

  There is horror in the Wizard's look.

  Lord Incariol gazes at her, his eyes watery white about coin-sized pupils. "Mimara…"

  She repeats herself, finding new wind in her unaccountable resolution. "No."

  Desire, she has come to understand, is not the only bottomless thing…

  There is motherhood.

  She dreams that an absence binds her, a hole that claws at her very substance. Something is missing, something more precious than jewels or celebrated works, more sustaining than drink or love or even breath. Something wonderful that she has betrayed…

  Then she is gasping, swallowing at sour consciousness, and blinking at the visage of Incariol leaning over her.

  She does not panic, for everything seems reasonable.

  "What are you doing?" she coughs.

  "Watching you."

  "Yes. But why?"

  Even as she asks this, she realizes that only sorcery, subtle sorcery, could have made this visitation possible. She thinks she can even sense it, or at the very least guess at its outlines, the warping of the Wizard's incipient Wards. It was as if he had simply bent the circumference of Achamian's conjuring, pressed into his arcane defences as if they were no more than a half-filled bladder.

  "You…" the flawless face said. "You remind me… of someone… I think…"

  There is something old about this reply. Not dead nation old, but doddering old… frail.

  "What is it?" she asks. She does not know where this question comes from, nor which traitor gives voice to it.

  "I no longer remember," he replies with a grave whisper.

  "No… The Qirri… Tell me what it is!"

  The Wizard murmurs and stirs beside her.

  Cleric stares at her with ancient, ancient eyes. The Nail of Heaven traces a perfect white sickle along the outer rim of his brow and skull. He has a smell she cannot identify, a deep smell, utterly unlike the human reek of the Wizard or the scalpers. The rot that softens stone.

  "Not all of my kind are buried… Some, the greatest, we burn like you."

  And she understands that she has been asking the wrong question-the wrong question all along. Not what, but who?

  "Who?" she gasps. Suddenly his hand is all that exists. Heavy with power, gentle with love. Her eyes track its flying path to his hip, to the rune-stitched pouch…

  "Taste…" he murmurs in tones of distant thunder. "Taste and see."

  She can feel the weight of him, the corded strength, hanging above her, and a part of her dreams she is naked and shivering.

  His finger lowers toward her, pointing to something that cannot be seen…

  She leans back her head, parts her lips. She closes her eyes. She can taste her breath, moist and hot, passing from her. The finger is hard and cold. She closes the pliant lobes of her mouth about it, warming and wetting its stubborn white skin. It comes alive, pressing down the centre of her tongue, tracing the line of her gums. It tastes of strength and dead fire.

  In the corner of her eye she glimpses the Captain through overlapping lattices of dead grass-a wraith watching.

  Above her, Cleric's face dissolves into a porcelain blur. Relief tunnels like lightning through her, swelling the slack hollows about her heart, flushing her extremities. Thin clouds race overhead, black trimmed in starlight, swept into the shapes of wings and scythes. They lend the illusion of surface across the infinite plummet of Heaven like froth drawn along a stream.

  He draws his finger back, and a reflex rises within her. She clamps her lips about his knuckle, takes the tip between her teeth, pad and nail. Her tongue soaks whatever residue remains.

  He places his hand across her face, thumb against her chin, fingers along her jaw and cheek. He withdraws the penetrating finger slowly, rolling down her lower lip. The Nail of Heaven gleams along its glazed edges. He stands in a single motion, at once swift and utterly soundless. She cannot tear her eyes from him, nor can she smother the longing that wells through her-so profound the ground itself seems to move.

  Her mouth tastes of ash and soot and glory…

  Glory everlasting.

  The old Wizard walked.

  Once, while travelling between Attrempus and Aoknyssus, he saw a child of no more than ten summers fall from the willo
w he had climbed in the hope of stealing honey from a great hive. The child broke his neck, died in his father's arms, mouthing inaudible words. Another time, while walking the endless paddies of the Secharib, he saw a woman accused of witchcraft stoned to death. They had bound her with rose wicks so that her struggles scored her skin. Then they cast stone after laughing stone, until she was little more than a crimson worm writhing through the mud her bleeding had conjured from the dust. And once on the road between Sumna and Momemn, he camped at the ruins of Batathent, and in the cool of morning, glimpsed the shadow of Fate cast across the First Holy War.

  Adversity lay in all directions, the Nilnameshi were fond of saying. A man need only walk.

  "I know what it is," Mimara said from his side. The sun spiked his eyes when he turned to her. Even when he squinted and raised his hand, it framed her with fiery white, blackened her with encircling brilliance. She is a shadow. A judging shadow.

  "The Qirri…" her silhouette continued. "I know what it is…"

  An angel-of-the-sun delivering tidings of woe.

  "What is it?" he asked. But not because he cared. He had outrun all caring.

  "Ashes…" she almost whispered. "Ashes from the pyre."

  Something in this stirred him, as if she had kicked a long-gutted fire and discovered coals-deep burning coals.

  "Ashes? Who?"

  He slowed, allowing her to outrun the sun's glare. He blinked at the immobility of her expression.

  "Cu'jara Cinmoi… I think…"

  A name drawn from the root of history.

  There was nothing to say, so he turned to the trackless world before them. Great flocks of tern rose like steam from the far-ranging folds of dust and grasses.

  The plains…

  They passed like a dream.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Istyuli Plains

  There is morality and there is cowardice. The two are not to be confused, even though in appearance and effect they are so often the same.

  — Ekyannus I, 44 Epistles

  If the Gods did not pretend to be human, Men would recoil from them as from spiders.