The White Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  Later that night he pulled the board from beneath his bed and resumed working on his model. Since his uncle’s treachery had loomed so large that day, he decided to work on the Temple Xothei, the monumental heart of the Cmiral temple complex. He began cutting and paring miniature columns, using the little knives that Mother had given him in lieu of a completed model. “What a man makes,” she had told him, “he prizes …” Unerringly, without the benefit of any measure, he carved them, not only one identical to another, but in perfect proportion to those structures he had already completed.

  He never showed his work to Mother. It would trouble her, he knew, his ability to see places just once, and from angles buried within them, yet to grasp them the way a bird might from far above.

  The way Father grasped the world.

  But even worse, if he showed his little city to her, it would complicate the day when he finally burned it. She did not like the way he burned things.

  Bugs, he thought. He needed to fill the streets of his little city with bugs. Nothing really burned, he decided, unless it moved.

  He thought of the ants in the garden.

  He thought of the Pillarian Guardsmen patrolling the Sacral Enclosure. He could even hear their voices on the evening breeze as they whiled away the watches with fatuous talk …

  He thought about the fun he could have, sneak-sneaking about them, more shadow than little boy.

  He thought about his previous murders and the mysterious person he saw trapped in the eyes of the dying. The one person he loved more than his mother—the one and only. Convulsing, bewildered, terrified, and beseeching … beseeching most of all.

  Please! Please don’t kill me!

  “The Worshipper,” he declared aloud.

  Yes, the secret voice whispered. That’s a good name.

  “A most strange person, don’t you think, Sammi?”

  Most strange.

  “The Worshipper …” Kelmomas said, testing the sound. “How can he travel like that from body to body?”

  Perhaps he’s locked in a room. Perhaps dying is that room’s only door …

  “Locked in a room!” the young Prince-Imperial cried laughing. “Yes! Clever-clever-cunning-clever!”

  And so he slipped into the gloom-gloomy hallways, dodging and ducking and scampering. Only the merest shiver in the shining lantern-flames marked his passing.

  Finally he arrived at the Door … the high bronze one with seven Kyranean Lions stamped into its greening panels, their manes bent into falcon wings. The one his mother had forbidden the slaves to polish until the day it could be safely opened.

  The door to his brother Inrilatas’s room.

  It stood partially ajar.

  Kelmomas had expected, even hoped to find it such. The slaves who attended to his brother generally did so whenever lulls in his tantrums permitted. During his brother’s calm seasons, however, they followed an exact schedule, cleansing and feeding Inrilatas the watch before noon and the watch before midnight.

  The boy mooned in the corridor for several moments, alternately staring at the stylized dragons stitched in crimson, black, and gold across the corridor’s carpet and stealing what glimpses the narrow slot provided of the cell’s bare floor interior. Eventually his curiosity mastered his fear—only Father terrified him more than Inrilatas—and he pressed his face to the opening, peering past the belt of brushed leather that had been tacked to the door’s outer rim to better seal in the sound and smell of his mad brother.

  He could see an Attendant to his left, a harried-looking Nilnameshi man soaping the walls and floor with a rake-mop. He saw his brother sitting hunched like a shaved ape to the right of the room, his edges illuminated in the light of a single brazier. Each of his limbs were shackled to a chain that ran like an elongated tongue from the mouth of a stone lion head, one of four set into the far wall, two with their manes pressed against the ceiling, two with their chins across the floor. A winch-room lay beyond that wall, Kelmomas knew, with wheels and locks for each of the chains, allowing the Attendants to pull his brother spread-eagled against the polished stone, if need be, or to grant him varying degrees of freedom otherwise.

  From the look of the links curled across the floor, they had afforded him two lengths or so of mobility—enough both to relieve and to embolden the boy. Inrilatas usually howled and raged without some modicum of slack.

  At first, Kelmomas thought him absolutely motionless, but he was not.

  He sat making faces … expressions.

  Not any faces, but those belonging to the slave who bent to and fro with his mop a mere toss away, scrubbing away urine and feces with a perfumed astringent. Periodically the deaf-mute would cast a terrified glance in his prisoner’s direction, only to see his face reflected back to him.

  “Most of them flee,” Inrilatas said. Kelmomas knew he addressed him even though he did not so much as glance at the boy. “Sooner or later, they choose the whip over my gaze.”

  “They are simple fools,” Kelmomas replied, too timid to press open the door, let alone cross the threshold.

  “They are exactly what they appear to be.”

  The shaggy mane turned. Inrilatas fixed the young Prince-Imperial with wild and laughing blue eyes. “Unlike you, little brother.”

  Save for his long face, Inrilatas looked utterly unlike the brother Kelmomas remembered from his infancy. His growth had come, gilding his naked form in a golden haze of hair. And years of warring against his iron restraints had strapped his frame in luxurious muscle. A beard stubbed his chin and the line of his jaw but had yet to climb his cheeks.

  His voice was deep and beguiling. Not unlike Father’s.

  “Come, little brother,” Inrilatas said with a comradely grin. He leapt toward the entrance so suddenly that the deaf-mute fumbled the handle of his mop and tripped backward. He landed at a point just shy of where the chains would bring him up short.

  Kelmomas watched his brother squat and defecate, then retreat to his previous position. Still smiling, Inrilatas waved his little brother forward. He possessed a man’s wrists now: the hands of a thick-fingered warrior.

  “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 Anasûrimbor 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 resemble …”

  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,” Anasûrimbor 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 …” Anasûrimbor 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 Zeüm, 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 Zeümi 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.