The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  This, he thought as he always thought. This was where he would live forever!

  He assumed she would seize him in a hug and spin in a pirouette. A mother finding strength in the need to be strong for a beautiful son. A mother finding respite in the love of a beautiful son. She always held him when she was frightened, and she literally reeked with fear. But instead she wheeled him about by the arm and slapped him hard across the cheek.

  "You are never to say such things!"

  A tide of murderous hurt and outrage swamped him. Mummy! Mummy had struck him! And for what? The truth? Scenes flickered beneath his soul's eye, strangling her with her own sheets, seizing the Gold Mastodon set upon the mantle and—

  "But I do!" he bawled. "I do hate him!"

  Maithanet. Uncle Holy.

  She was already holding him in a desperate embrace, shushing and kissing, pressing her tear-slicked cheek against his own.

  Mommeee!

  "You shouldn't," she said, a thumb's breadth from his ear. "He's your uncle. Even more, he's the Shriah. It's a sin to speak against the Shriah—don't you know that?"

  He fought her until she pressed him back.

  "But he's against you! Against Father! Isn't that a si—?"

  "Enough. Enough. The important thing, Kel, is that you never say these things. You are a Prince-Imperial. An Anasûrimbor. Your blood is the very blood that flows in your uncle's veins..."

  Dûnyain blood... the secret voice whispered. What raises us above the animals.

  Like Mother.

  "Do you understand what I'm telling you?" the Blessed Empress continued. "Do you realize what others think when they hear you disputing your own blood?"

  "No."

  "They hear dissension... discord and weakness! You embolden our enemies with this talk—do you understand me, Kel?"

  "Yes."

  "We have come upon fearful times, Kel. Dangerous times. You must always use your wits. You must always be wary..."

  "Because of Fanayal, Mommy?"

  She held him tight to her breast, then pressed him back. "Because of many things..." Her gaze became suddenly absent. "Look," she continued. "There's something I need to show you." She stood and with a rustle of silk moved across the bed chamber, paused before the frieze on the far wall, belts of mythic narrative piled one atop the other.

  "Your father raised two palaces when he rebuilt the Andiamine Heights," she said, gesturing to the sun slanting through the unshuttered balcony. "A palace of light..." She turned, leaning forward on her toes to peer at the top panel of the marble frieze. She pressed the bottommost star of a constellation Kelmomas had never seen before. Something clicked elsewhere in the room. The Prince-Imperial literally swayed with vertigo, so surprised were his senses. The marble-gilded wall simply dropped away and swooped out, rotating on a perfect central hinge.

  Light only filtered several feet into the black passage beyond.

  "And a palace of shadow."

  —|—

  "Your uncle," Mother said. "I don't trust him."

  They sat where they always sat when the Empress took her "morning sun," as she termed it: on divans set near the heart of the Sacral Enclosure between two of the taller sycamore trees. A thin procession of clouds rode high in the blue sky above. The Imperial Apartments surrounded them on all sides, colonnaded walkways along the ground, verandas on the upper floors, some with their canopies unfurled, all forming the broad, marmoreal octagon that gave the Enclosure its famous shape.

  Theliopa sat immediately next to Mother, a distance that suggested mother-daughter intimacy but was really an artefact of the girl's blindness to the rules that governed proximity. Her face, as always, was pale and sunken—skin stretched across the tent-poles of her bones. She wore what looked like several luxurious gowns sown into a florid motley, as well as dozens of jewelled broaches set end to end along the sleeve of either arm. Tree shadows waved across her, so that she seemed continually ablaze with reflected sunlight.

  Wearing only a morning robe, Mother looked plain and dark in comparison—and all the more beautiful for it. Kelmomas played in the adjacent garden. With blackened fingers, he had started forming walls and bastions, a small complex of dirt structures he could strike down, but had quickly stopped when he discovered a stream of ants crawling from the earth to the blue-tiled walkway, hundreds of them. He began executing them, one by one, using his thumbnail to chip off their heads.

  "Wha-what do you suspect?" his sister asked, her voice as dry as the air.

  A long breath. A hand drawn to the back of her weary neck. "That he is somehow behind this crisis with the Yatwerians," his mother replied. "That he intends to use it as a pretext to seize the Empire."

  Of all the games he played, this was the one the young Prince-Imperial relished the most: the game of securing his mother's constant attention while at the same time slipping beneath her notice. On the one hand, he was such a sad little boy, desolate, scarred for the tragic loss of his twin. But he was also just a little boy, too young to understand, too lost in his play to really listen. There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have sent him away for conversations such as this...

  The real ones.

  "I see," Theliopa said.

  "Are you not surprised?"

  "I'm not sure surprise-surprise is a passion I can feel, Mother."

  Even watching from his periphery, Kelmomas could see his mother's expression dull. It troubled her, the little boy knew, filling in what was missing in her children. Perhaps this was why he didn't despise Theliopa the way he had that bitch, Mimara. Mother's feelings for Thelli would always be stymied by the girl's inability to reciprocate her love. But Mimara...

  Some day soon... the secret voice whispered. She will love you as much... More!

  "Have you conferred with Father-Father?" Theliopa asked.

  His sister was a face reader. She had to see Mother's bewildered heartbreak as easily as he could. Did Thelli lack the heart to grieve this as well? Kelmomas had never been able to read much of anything in his sister. She was like Uncle Maithanet that way—only harmless.

  If Mother were to ever look at him with those eyes...

  "The Far-callers..." Mother said with the reluctant air of admission. "They've heard nothing for two weeks now."

  The merest flicker of horror slackened Theliopa's pale face. Perhaps she could feel surprise after all—as crippled as her heart was. "What?"

  "Do not fear," Mother said. "Your father lives. The Great Ordeal continues its march. I am certain of that much at least."

  "Then-then what has happened?"

  "Your father has declared an Interdiction. He has forbidden every Schoolmen in the Great Ordeal, on pain of execution, from contacting any soul in the Three Seas."

  Kelmomas recalled his lessons on Cants of Far-Calling well enough. The primary condition of contacting someone in their dreams was to know, precisely, where they were sleeping. This meant the Great Ordeal had to contact them, since it travelled day by day.

  "He suspects spies among the Schools?" Theliopa asked. "Is this some kind of ruse to draw them out?"

  "Perhaps."

  His sister was generally averse to eye contact, but those rare times she deigned to match someone's gaze, she did so with a peculiar intensity—like a bird spying worms. "You mean Father hasn't told you anything?"

  "No."

  "He abides by his own embargo? Mother... has Father deserted us?"

  The young Prince-Imperial abandoned the pretense of his garden play. He even held his breath, so profound was his hope. For as long he could remember, Kelmomas had feared and hated his divine father. The Warrior-Prophet. The Aspect-Emperor. The one true Dûnyain. All the native abilities possessed by his children, only concentrated and refined through a lifetime of training. Were it not for the demands of his station, were he more than just a constantly arriving and departing shadow, Father would have certainly seen the secret Kelmomas had held tight since his infancy. The secret that made him stron
g.

  As things stood, it was only a matter of time. He would grow as his brothers and sisters had grown, and he would drift, as his brothers and sisters had drifted, from Mother's loving tutelage to Father's harsh discipline. And one day Father would peer deep into his eye and see what no one else had seen. And that day, Kelmomas knew, would be his doom...

  But what if Father had abandoned them? Even better, what if he were dead?

  He has the Strength, the voice whispered. So long as he lives, we are not safe...

  Mother raised a finger to scoop tears from either eye. This, the young Prince-Imperial realized. This was why she had struck him the previous day! This was why the fat fool, Pansulla, had so easily goaded her, and why the tidings from Shigek had so dismayed her...

  If Father is gone... the secret voice dared whisper.

  "It would appear so," she said, speaking about a crack in her voice. "I fear it has something to do with your uncle."

  Then we are finally safe.

  "Maithanet," Thelli said.

  The Empress mastered her feelings with a deep breath. "Maybe this is a... a test of some kind. Like the fable of Gam..."

  Kelmomas recalled this from his lessons as well. Gam was the mythical king who faked his own death to test the honour of his four sons. The boy wanted to shout this out, to bask a moment in Mother's pride, but he bit his tongue. For the briefest of instants, he thought he saw his sister glance at him.

  "It need not have anything to do with Uncle," Theliopa said. "Maybe the Consult has discovered some way of eavesdropping on our communications..."

  "No. It has something to do with Maithanet. I can feel it."

  "I can rarely fathom Father," Theliopa admitted.

  "You?" the Empress cried with pained hilarity. "Think about your poor mother!"

  Kelmomas laughed precisely the way she wanted.

  "Ponder it, Thelli. Your father assuredly knows about the strife growing between us, his wife and his brother, so then why would he choose this moment to strand us each with the other?"

  "That much is simple-simple, at least," Thelli replied. "Because he believes the best solution will be the one you find on your-your own."

  "Exactly," Mother said. "Somehow he thinks my ignorance will serve me in this..." Her voice trailed into pensive thought. For several moments she let her gaze wander across points near and far within the Sacral Enclosure, then shook her head in sudden outrage and disgust.

  "Damn your father and his machinations!" she cried, her voice loud enough to draw looks from the nearby Pillarian Guardsmen. She glanced skyward, her eyes rolling with something like panic. "Damn him!"

  "Mother?" Theliopa asked.

  The Empress lowered her head and sighed. "I am quite all right, Thelli." She spared her daughter a rueful look. "I don't give a damn what you think you see in my face..." She trailed, her mouth hanging on these words. Kelmomas held his breath, so attuned had he become to the wheel of his mother's passion.

  "Thelli..." She began, only to hesitate for several heartbeats. "Could... Could you read his face?"

  "Uncle's? Only Father has that-that ability. Father and..."

  "And who?"

  Theliopa paused as if weighing the wisdom of honest answers. "Inrilatas. He could see... Remember Father trained-trained him for a time..."

  "Father trained who?" Kelmomas cried, the way a jealous little brother might.

  "Kel—please."

  "Who?"

  Esmenet raised two fingers to Theliopa, turned to Kelmomas, her manner cross and adoring. "Your older brother," she explained. "Your father hoped teaching him to read passions in others would enable him to master his own." She turned back to her daughter. "Treachery?" she asked. "Could Inrilatas see treachery in a soul so subtle as Maithanet's?"

  "Perhaps, Mother," the pale girl replied. "But the real-real question, I think, is not so much can he, as will he."

  The Holy Empress of all the Three Seas shrugged, her expression betraying the fears that continually mobbed her heart.

  "I need to know. What do we have to lose?"

  —|—

  Since Mother had to attend special sessions with her generals, the young Prince-Imperial dined alone that evening—or as alone as possible for a soul such as his. He was outraged even though he understood her reasons, and as always he tormented the slaves who waited on him, blaming his mother for each and every hurt he inflicted.

  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.