The White Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  Finally, after days of tacking across the wastes, they had flanked and outdistanced the Ten-Yoke Legion—though they had been reduced to fifteen mounted souls doing so. Now with their last sip of strength, they raced toward the smear of flickering lights on the horizon, what they would have thought a thunderstorm were it not for the tin-distant clamour …

  They could hear it over the broken percussion of hooves tumbling across the dust, over the pinched complaints of their ponies. A sound, high and hollow, ringing as if the world were a cistern. It was a sound that grew and grew—impossibly, they realized, guessing the distance of its origin. Crooning like a thousand wolves, hacking like warring geese. An immeasurable sound, or at least one beyond Men and their mortal rule.

  The Horde.

  A sound so titanic that Harnilas, for all his ruthless determination to reach General Kayûtas, called the ragged company to a halt. The Scions sat rigid in their saddles, squinting at their shadowy companions, waiting for their dust to outrun them. Sorweel peered ahead, struggling to make sense of the flash and flicker that now extended across a good swathe of the horizon.

  He looked to Zsoronga, but the man hung his head, grimacing and thumbing his eyes.

  At the Captain’s bidding, Eskeles cast another of his sorcerous lenses. The light of his incantation seemed a jewel, so dark the world had become. Sorweel glimpsed the others, their faces drawn and gaunt, eyes bruised with the sorrow and fury that is manhood. Then soundless images crowded the air before the Schoolman …

  The Scions gasped and cried out, even those too exhausted to speak.

  A screeching world. Heaving, howling masses, pale and silvery like fish schooling through dark waters. Sranc, raving and thronging, so many as to seem singular, their rushing like the slow curl of scarves warring across the horizon. The Men of the Middle-North could be barely glimpsed, arrayed in bristling, segmented bars, defending barricades of stacked carcasses. Only the Swayali Witches could be clearly seen, hanging like slips of gold foil, drawing skirts of flashing Gnostic destruction … never enough.

  With twists of his fingers, Eskeles turned the lens on a shallow arc, revealing more and more of the madness that awaited them. For all its power and the glory, the Army of the Middle-North was but a shallow island in dark-heaving seas. No one need speak the obvious.

  The Northmen were doomed.

  Real, Sorweel once again found himself thinking in dumb wonder. His war is real …

  He turned from the spectacle to the Schoolman, saw the ribs of his ailing pony carved in light and shadow.

  “A sight from my Dreams …” Eskeles murmured. And Sorweel worried for the brittle cast of his eyes, the promise of panic.

  Without thinking, he reached out to squeeze the man’s round shoulder in reassurance—the way King Harweel might. “Remember,” he said, speaking words he suddenly wanted to believe. “This time the God marches with us.”

  “Yes …” the square-bearded sorcerer replied with a throat-clearing harrumph. “Of-of course …”

  And then they heard it, like an echo floating through howling winds, human voices, shouting out human sounds: hope, fury, and defiance, defiance most of all.

  “The ‘Beggar’s Lament’!” someone called from behind them. “The crazy bastards!”

  And with that, they all could hear it, word for hoarse word, a drinking song bellowed out to the heavens. Suddenly the throat-pricking frailty fell away from the distant Men, and what had seemed a vision of doom became legendary—glorious—more indomitable than overmatched. The gored Northmen, their lines unbroken, reaving …

  A massacre of the mad many by the holy few.

  That was when they heard another sound, another ear-scratching roar … one that came shivering through the dark and dust and grasses.

  More Sranc.

  Behind them.

  A miraculous slaughter, on a scale too demented to be celebrated.

  Kayûtas and his Believer-Kings knew their flanks would be quickly enveloped, but they also knew, thanks to the ancients, that their encircling would be the product of happenstance, a consequence of the Sranc and their mobbing desperation. Whipped by their lunatic hunger, each simply ran toward Men and their porcine smell, a course continually deflected by the mobbing of their brothers before them. In this way, the Horde spilled ever outward like water chasing gutters. But the process was such that those who reached the ends of the Galeoth flanks would be but trickles compared with the torrents above.

  “The Horde will strike the way Ainoni courtesans pile their hair,” Kayûtas had explained to his laughing commanders. “Locks will spill down our cheeks, make no mistake. But only a few curls will tickle our chin.”

  And so was the ignominious task of defending the camp and rear delegated to the Lords of the Great Ordeal. So-called “Cornice Phalanxes” occupied the ends of the common-line, formations of courageous souls trained to battle in all directions. Triunes of Swayali hung above, scourging the endless flurries of Sranc that sluiced around them. And with the Kidruhil, the assembled thanes and knights policed the darkling plains between.

  If the Prince-Imperial’s descriptions had led them to expectations of easy slaughter, they were quickly disabused. Many were lost to the mundane treachery of burrows and ant mounds. Earl Arcastor of Gesindal, a man renowned for his ferocity in battle, broke his neck before he and his Galeoth knights encountered a single Sranc. Otherwise all was darkness and racing madness, conditions that favoured the lust-maddened Sranc clans. Companies would ride down one cohort in effortless slaughter, only to be surprised by the shrieking assault of another. Company after company limped back to the precincts of the camp, their numbers decimated, their eyes vacant with vicious horrors. Lord Siklar of Agansanor, cousin of King Hogrim, would be felled by a stray arrow out of nowhere. Lord Hingeath of Gaenri would fall in pitched battle with his entire household, as would Lord Ganrikka, Veteran of the First Holy War—a name that would be mourned by many.

  And so death came swirling ever down.

  Despite the toll, not one of the obscenities lived to trod the alleys of the darkened camp.

  Fleeing into a world illumined by faraway sorcery.

  Riding as if chased by the world’s own crumbling edge.

  Gouged hollow, a stack of tin about a papyrus fire. Light enough to be blown by terror. Dull and heavy enough to die, to tumble dirt against dirt.

  The intellect overthrown. The eyes rolling, seeking nonexistent lines, as if trying to peer around the doom encircling them.

  Stubborn coursed beneath him, galloping like a dog across invisible earth, scoring the thirsty turf. Zsoronga glanced at him, sobs kicking through the monkey-terror of his grin. The others were less than shadows …

  The world flew in shreds beneath them. And the whole was delivered to Sranc.

  The Ten-Yoke Legion.

  A shriek, a sound heard only for its humanity, and the Scions were fourteen.

  “They would drive them the way we drive slaves in the Three Seas,” the Schoolman had said, “starve them until their hungers reached a fever pitch. Then, when they reached a position where the Sranc could smell Mannish blood on the wind, they would strike the chains, and let them run …”

  Sorweel tossed a panicked glance over his shoulder, toward the inscrutable black that gnashed and grunted behind them …

  Saw Eskeles yanked to earth on the back of his tumbling pony, slapped like a fish onto the gutting-table.

  And he was reining, crying out to Zsoronga, leaping to the turf, sprinting to the motionless Schoolman. The Scions were nothing but streamers of fading dust. He gasped shrieking air, skidded to a halt. He heaved the sorcerer onto his back, cried out something he could not hear. He looked up, felt more than saw the rush, raving and inhuman …

  And for a heartbeat he smiled. A King of the Horselords, dying for a leuneraal …

  One last humiliation.

  The beasts surfaced, as if looking back had become looking down. Faces of pale silk, crushed into ex
pressions both crazed and licentious. Slicked weapons. Glimpses piled upon glimpses, terror upon terror.

  Sorweel looked to them, smiling even as his body tensed against hacking iron. He watched the nearest leap …

  Only to crash into a film of incandescent blue—sorcery—wrapped into a hemisphere about them.

  The booming roar swept into them, over them, and Sorweel found himself in a mad bubble, a miraculous grotto where sweat could be wiped from sodden brows.

  Sand and dust shivered and danced between leather threads of grass. Beyond, howling faces, horned weapons, and knobbed fists crowded his every glimpse. He watched with a kind of disembowelled wonder: the white-rope limbs, the teeth like broken cochri shells, the covetous glitter of innumerable black eyes …

  Breathing required will.

  Eskeles thrashed his way back to blubbering consciousness. Moaning, he threw his gaze this way and that, flailed with his fists. Sorweel hugged his shoulders, tried to wrestle the panic from him. He thrust the portly man back, pinned him, crying, “Look at me! Look at me!”

  “Noooo!” the man howled from his dust-white beard. Urine blackened the man’s trousers.

  “Something!” Sorweel cried through the scratching, pounding racket. The heave of crazed wretches encompassed everything. The first luminous cracks scrawled across the Ward, wandering like the flight of flies. “You have to do something!”

  “It’s happening! Sweet Seju! Sweet-swe—!”

  Sorweel cuffed him full on the mouth.

  “Eskeles! You have to do something! Something with light!”

  The Mandate Schoolmen squinted in confusion.

  “The Ordeal, you fat fool! The Great Ordeal needs to be warned!”

  Somehow, somewhere in Sorweel’s cry, the sorcerer seemed to encounter himself, the stranger who had sacrificed all in the name of his Aspect-Emperor. The Zaudunyani. The Believer. His eyes found their focus. He reached out to squeeze the young King’s shoulder in assurance.

  “L-light,” he gasped. “Light—yes!”

  He pressed Sorweel to the side, tottered to his feet even as his incipient Ward began to crumble. The glow of his chanting gleamed across swatches of madness. Screeching faces, jerking, trembling like strings in the wind. Bleeding gums. Diseased skin, weeping slime and algae. Notched edges flying on arcs both cramped and vicious. Eyes of glittering black, hundreds of them fixing him, weeping and raging for hunger. Lips shining for slaver …

  Like a nightmare. Like a mad fresco depicting the living gut of Hell, bleached ever whiter for the brilliance of the Schoolman’s unholy song. Words too greased to be caught and subdued by the Legion’s vicious roar, echoing through invisible canyons.

  And there it was … striking as straight as a geometer’s line from the ground at the fat sorcerer’s feet, dazzling the eyes, stilling the inhuman onlookers with salt-white astonishment …

  Reaching high to illuminate the belly of the overcast night.

  A Bar of Heaven.

  General Kayûtas was the first to glimpse it out across the tumult, the Northmen but rafts of discipline in a tossed sea of Sranc, the Swayali like columns of sunlight breaking through tempest clouds, burning the inexhaustible waters. He saw it, between pelting arcs of arrows, a needle of glittering white on the southern horizon …

  Where nothing but dead earth should be.

  He turned to his sister, who had followed his gaze out to the distant and inexplicable beacon. Others in his cortege noticed also, but their shouts of alarm were soundless in the thrumming roar.

  Serwa need only glimpse her brother’s lips to understand—they were children of the Dûnyain.

  She stepped into the sky, summoned the nearest of her sisters to rise with her.

  The world smelled of burning snakes.

  Sorweel saw clouds knotted into woollen plates, flickering in and out of edgeless illumination. His head lolled and he saw the earth reeling, pricked with infinite detail, a thousand thousand mortal struggles. Ironclad men hacking and hollering. Sranc and more Sranc—twitching and innumerable. He saw women hanging in the air with him, far-gowned Swayali, singing impossible, incandescent songs.

  And he jerked his lurching gaze to the hook that had lifted him so high …

  A Goddess held him, carried him like a child across the surfaces of Hell.

  “Mother?” he gasped, thinking not of the woman who had borne him but of the divinity. Yatwer … the Mother of Wombs, who had cursed him with murdering the most deadly man to ever walk her parched earth.

  “No,” the glorious lips replied. It seemed a miracle that she could hear him, such was the guttural clamour. A roar so knotted with violence, that the very air seemed to bleed. “Worse.”

  “You …” he gasped, recognizing the woman through the fiery veil of her beauty.

  “Me,” Anasûrimbor Serwa replied, smiling with the cruelty of the peerless. “How many hundreds will die,” she asked, “for saving you?”

  “Drop me then,” he croaked.

  She recoiled from the floating fury of his gaze, looked out across the threshing darkness, frowning as if finally understanding she bore a king in her arcane embrace. Through acrid veils of smoke, he breathed deep the scent of her: the myrrh of glory and privilege, the salt of exertion.

  Let me fall.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  The Western Three Seas

  Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.

  —AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

  Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Nansurium, somewhere south of Momemn

  In Gielgath, two thieves assailed him, and the White-Luck Warrior watched them scuffle, drunk and desperate, with the man who was their doom. They lurched out of alleyway shadows, their cries choked to murmurs for fear of being heard. They sprawled dead and dying across cobble and filth, the one inert, the other twitching. He wiped his Seleukaran blade clean across the dead one, even as he raised the sword to counter their manic rush. He stepped clear of the one who stumbled, raised his blade to parry the panicked swing of the other … the swing that would notch the scimitar’s honed edge—as thin as an eyelid.

  The notch that would shatter his sword, so allowing the broken blade to plunge into the Aspect-Emperor’s heart. He could even feel the blood slick his thumb and fingers, as he followed himself into the gloomy peril of the alley.

  Unholy blood. Wicked beyond compare.

  No one noticed him in the subsequent hue and cry. He watched himself slip unnoticed through gathering crowds of onlookers—for even in these lawless times, the murder of two men was no small thing. He followed himself through an ancient and impoverished maze that was Gielgath. One of the priestess beggars called, “You! You!” as he passed a fullery. He saw her sob for joy a million times.

  The slave plantations were more severe in their discipline, more grand in extent, in the lands he subsequently crossed, following his following. He watched himself lean so that he might draw his bloody hands across the crowns of surging millet and wheat. Across the span of ages, the Goddess watched and was pleased, and it was Good.

  He came across a cow calving, and he knelt into his kneeling so that he might witness his Mother made manifest. He watched himself draw his fingers through the afterbirth, then redden the lobes of his ears.

  He found a fugitive child hiding in an overgrown ditch, watched himself give all that remained of his food. “There is no greater Gift,” he overheard himself say to the wide brown eyes, “than to give unto death.” And he caressed the dark-tanned cheek that was also a skull decaying between grass and milkweed.

  He saw a stork riding invisible gusts across the sky.

  He walked, forever trailing the man who walked before him and forever leading the one who walked behind. He watched his form, dark for the brilliance of the sun, sink over cultivated summits, even as he turned to see his form, dark within its
own shadow, rising from the crest behind.

  And so he stepped into his stepping, walked into his walking, travelled into his journey, a quest that had already ended in the death of the False Prophet.

  Until at last he paused upon a hill and for the first time gazed across the walls and streets he had seen innumerable times.

  Momemn. The Home City. Great Capital of the New Empire.

  He saw all the lanes he had never travelled. He saw the Temple Xothei with its famed domes, heard the riotous cries that would shiver its stone. He saw the Imperial Precincts along the seaward walls, the campuses hazy and deserted. He saw the piling of structure and marble beauty that was the Andiamine Heights, his eyes roaming until they found the famed veranda behind the Aspect-Emperor’s throne-room …

  Where the Gift-of-Yatwer glimpsed himself peering back, the Holy Empress beside him.

  Momemn

  “Why should it trouble a mother to see her child love himself so?” Inrilatas said from his shadow. He exhaled a breath pent in hungry pleasure. “Fondle himself?”

  Sunlight streamed through the cell’s one small window, drawing a fan of illuminated surfaces from the smoky gloom. A stretch of her son’s hair, the outer lines of his left shoulder and arm. Thankfully, she could not so much see him masturbate as infer it.

  She fixed him with a mother’s flat gaze. Perhaps it was her old life as a whore, or perhaps he had simply exhausted her with his antics; either way she was unimpressed. There was very little Inrilatas could do that would shock or dismay her anymore.

  A small carpet had been laid across the floor, with an oak chair, cushioned and elaborately carved, set upon it for her comfort. White-clad body-slaves stood ready to either side with wicker screens—shields, really—ready to shelter her if her son decided to begin pelting her with feces or any other fluid that caught his fancy. It had happened before. After they were done, she knew, the chains would be drawn to fix her son across the wall, and the Attendants would scour the floor looking for anything dropped or forgotten. The boy—young man, now—was simply too ingenious not to devise tools for some kind of mischief. Once he managed to make a shiv, which he used to kill one of his attendants, using only the fabric of his tunic and his seed.