The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  Not hers, and certainly not her daughter's.

  Was this not a kind of proof of Kellhus? Pain followed him, as did tumult and war. Every life that fell into his cycle suffered some kind of loss or deformation. Was this not an outward sign of his... his evil?

  Perhaps. Perhaps not. Suffering had ever been the wages of revelation. The greater the truth, the greater the pain. No one understood this quite so profoundly as he.

  Either way, it was proof of Mimara. Our words always paint two portraits when we describe our families to others. Outsiders cannot but see the small peeves and follies that wrinkle our relationships with our loved ones. The claims we make in defensive certainty—that we were the one wronged, that we were the one who wanted the best—cannot but fall on skeptical ears since everyone but everyone makes the same claims of virtue and innocence. We are always more than we want to be in the eyes of others simply because we are blind to the bulk of what we are.

  Kellhus had taught him that.

  Mimara had wanted him to see her as a victim, as a long-suffering penitent, more captive than daughter, and not as someone embittered and petulant, someone who often held others accountable for her inability to feel safe, to feel anything unpolluted by the perpetual pang of shame...

  And he loved her the more for it.

  Later, as the murk of evening steeped through the forest galleries, she slowed so that he could draw abreast, but she did not return his questioning gaze.

  "What I told you," she eventually said, "that was foolish of me."

  "What was foolish?"

  "What I said."

  This final exchange left him sorting through melancholy thoughts of his own family and the wretched Nroni fishing village where he had been born. They seemed strangers, now, not simply the people who inhabited his childhood memories, but the passions as well. The doting love of his sisters... Even the tyranny of his father—the maniacal shouts, the wordless beatings—seemed to belong to some soul other than his own.

  This, he realized... This was his true family: the mad children of the man who had robbed him of his wife. The New Anasûrimbor Dynasty. These were his brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. And this simply meant that he had no family... that he was alone.

  Save for the mad woman trekking beside him.

  His little girl...

  Back when he had been a tutor in Aöknyssus, he took up the antique Ceneian practice of considering problems while walking—peripatetics, the ancients had called it. He would trudge down from his apartment by the Premparian Barracks, through the wooded pathways of the Ke, and down to the port, where the masts made a winter forest of the piers. There was this defunct temple where he would always glimpse the same beggar through a breach in the walls. He was one of those unravelled men, unkempt and withered, slow-moving and speechless, as if dumbfounded at where the years had delivered him. And for some reason it always knocked Achamian from his stride seeing him. He would pass gazing, his walk slowing to a numb saunter, and the beggar would simple stare off, beyond caring who did or did not watch. Achamian would forget whatever problem he had set off to ponder and brood instead about the cruel alchemy of age and love and time. A fear would clutch him, knowing that this, this, was true solitude, to find yourself the feeble survivor, stranded at the end of your life, your loves and hopes reduced to remembered smoke, hungering, suffering...

  And waiting. Waiting most of all.

  His mother was dead, the old Wizard supposed.

  —|—

  Making water or mud has always been an irritating challenge for her. She cannot simply retreat behind a tree as the others might, not for the sake of modesty—a sentiment that had been pummelled from her in childhood—but out of a keen awareness of men and their lustful infirmities. She has to plunge deeper, beyond the possibility of craning looks. "A glimpse is a promise," the brothel masters used to say. "Show them what they would steal, and they will spend—spend!"

  She squats, her breeches crowded about her knees, stares up into the veined complexities of the canopy as she relieves herself. She follows the dark lines of silhouetted limbs scrawling across foliated stages, ragged screen set across ragged screen, each brighter than the next. She doesn't see the figure... not at first.

  But then its shape is unmistakable: human limbs clutched and hanging about arboreal. Unlike other forests, where trees branch and thicken according to their exposure to the sun, the trees of the Mop fork into the low nethers, as though begrudging all open space. The creature hangs from the lowermost skein, unnaturally still, intent with scrutiny and malice.

  The thing called Soma.

  Her fear falls short of reason. If it had wanted to kill her, she would already be dead. If it had wanted to steal her, she would already be missing.

  No. It wants something.

  She should cry out, she knows, send it fleeing into the sepulchral depths, chased by the crack and thunder of sorcerous lights. But she does not. It wants something, and she needs to know what. Slowly, deliberately, she stands and draws up her leggings, winces at her own humid reek.

  Its face hangs down just far enough to be discernable in the murk. Soma, as if glimpsed through a veil of black gauze. The canopy's high-hanging glow paints his edges with traceries of green.

  "He's killing you," it coos. "The Nonman."

  She stares up, breathless, immobile. She knows this thing, she reminds herself, knows it as surely as scalpers know Sranc. Assassins. Deceivers. Sowers of resentment and mistrust. Discord arouses them. Violence spills their cup. They are, as her mother once told her, the consummate union of viciousness and grace.

  "Then I shall kill him first," she says, shocked by the resolute tenor of her voice. Her whole life she has been surprised by her ability to appear strong.

  This is not the reply it was expecting. She's not sure how she knows this: its hesitation, perhaps, or the click of indecision that passes like smoke across its false expression. Regardless, she knows that it does not want the Nonman dead... at least not yet.

  "No..." it whispers. "Such a thing is beyond your power."

  "My fath—"

  "He too would certainly perish."

  She glares upward, peering, trying to discern the folding digits that compose its face. She cannot.

  "There is only one way to save yourself," it rasps.

  "And how is that?"

  "Kill the Captain."

  —|—

  She rejoins the company as if nothing has happened. She should tell Achamian. She knows this without wanting to know. Her reflex is to hide and to hoard—a product of the brothel, no doubt. Too much had been stolen.

  Soma came to me...

  She circles this thought, stalks it, returns to it the way she continually reaches for her Chorae where it hangs about her neck. As troubled as she is, as frightened as she is, a part of her soul exults—in the mystery of it, certainly, but also because it had chosen her before any of the others.

  Why had it saved her during the Stone Hag attack? At the cost of revealing itself, no less!

  Why was it following them in the first place?

  And why was it reaching out to her?

  After the nightmare of Maimor, Achamian spent long miles verbally pondering the skin-spy and its presence among the Skin Eaters. From the outset he made assumptions, forgivable assumptions: that the skin-spy had infiltrated the Skin Eaters immediately after he had contracted them. That he, the outcast inheritor of their ancient and implacable enemy, Seswatha, was the motive for the infiltration. That it was charged with killing him, lest he discover something too decisive... And so on.

  More than anything else, what prevents her from telling the old Wizard is the fear that he is wrong—utterly and catastrophically. The suspicion that the Consult has sent the skin-spy, not to assassinate Achamian or to sabotage the expedition, no. Her fear is that the Consult has sent it to assist them... to ensure they reach Sauglish and the Coffers.

  And why not, when Drusas Achamian is the enemy of
their enemy? According to her mother, the Consult waited months before finally attacking Kellhus during the First Holy War. "The only thing they found more terrifying than your stepfather," she said, "was the possibility there could be more like him."

  The possibility of Ishuäl.

  The origin of the Aspect-Emperor. As much as Achamian desires this knowledge to judge Anasûrimbor Kellhus, would not the Unholy Consult covet it even more?

  She has seen the Wizard with the Judging Eye—seen his damnation. At the time she simply assumed that sorcery was the cause, that contrary to her stepfather's claims, sorcery remained the unpardonable sin. And this seemed to lend credence to Achamian and his desperate case against the man who had stolen his wife. But what if this wasn't the case? What if this very quest was the ground of his damnation? There is poetry in the notion, as perverse as it is, and this more than anything else is what hones her fear to a cutting edge. To strike out in the name of love, only to inadvertently unleash the greatest terror the world has ever seen. When she mulls the possibility, it seems to smell of the Whore through and through... at least from what she has seen of Her.

  This is what makes telling the Wizard all but impossible. What was she supposed to say? That his life and the lives of all those his deceptions have killed have been in vain? That he is a tool of the very apocalypse he hopes to prevent?

  No. She will not speak what cannot be heard. Soma would have to remain her secret, at least for the immediate future. She needs to discover more before going to the Wizard...

  —|—

  Kill the Captain...

  She knows this creature. She can number the bones in its false face. She even knows the questions that will confuse it, hint at the absence that is its soul. It stands upon a different field of battle, vast and spectral and devious with a thousand years of patient calculation. And for some reason, it needs Lord Kosoter to be a casualty of that cryptic battle.

  Kill the Captain. Understand this command, she realizes, and she will understand Soma's design.

  She has watched the slow transformation of loyalties and rivalries within the company. She has seen the glint of sedition in Galian's eyes. She has noticed the way Achamian has come to accept, even prize, the Captain and his ruthless methods. Lord Kosoter will deliver them to the Library of Sauglish—despite all the perils and uncertainties. He is simply one of those men, possessed of a will so cruel, so domineering, that the world could not but yield.

  He was the Captain. The harsh shadow, bloodthirsty and pitiless, forever standing in her periphery.

  She has always watched, and her eyes are nothing if not critical, but she has never probed, never tested. According to Soma something was happening, something that would eventually imperil their lives. According to Soma things transpired that neither she nor the old Wizard could see.

  So she will squint against the glare of the obvious, peer into the gloom of implication. She will pretend to sleep while pondering possibilities and assembling questions. She will solve this one mystery...

  She will become a spy.

  So far the Mop has climbed and conquered every terrain they have encountered, scaffolding the sides of hills, braiding the heights above rivers, pillaring broad plains. She has peered through the green murk and trod across root-heaved earth for so long that sometimes she forgets the arid smell of open places, the flash of sunlight, and the kiss of unobstructed wind. All is humid and enclosed. She feels like a mole, forever racing beneath the thatch, always wary of flying shadows. When she thinks of the Stone Hags who have fallen in exhaustion, they are already buried in her soul's eye.

  Finally they come to a stone formation jutting like a great fractured bone from the earth. Scrub clings to its scarped shelves, but nothing else, and peering up they actually catch ragged glimpses of sky where its bulk breaches the canopy. Standing aloof from their curious peering, the Captain bids them to find a way to the summit. Though hours of daylight remain, they will camp.

  The sun glares. The air chills. The Mop tosses on and on, an endless ocean of swaying crowns. Whatever relief they hope to find in wind and sunlight is snuffed when they look to one another. Squinting. Eyes glittering from blackened faces. Ragged like beggars. In the gloom below, they seemed as true to their surroundings as the moss or the humus. Here on the heights, there is no overlooking either their straits or their desperation.

  They look like the damned. Achamian, in particular, given the Mark.

  They make camp on the formation's rump, where enough soil has accumulated to sustain a thin wig of foliage. They sit in scattered clots, watching the setting sun fall crimson into distant canopies. The Mop seems to mock and to beckon in turn, a susurrus unlike any she has heard, a horde of a million million leaves rattling in the dying breeze.

  Opposite their camp, the formation rears into a promontory, stone horned like a bent-back thumb. The Captain stands in the dying light, beckons Cleric to follow him. Mimara pretends not to watch them vanish about the treacherous ledges. She counts fifty heartbeats, then strikes out along the opposite face, where they have designated their latrine. She continues past the putrid smell, literally risks life and limb scaling a serrated pitch. Then she creeps forward in a crouch, moving toward the sound of muttered voices.

  The breeze or the play of echoes across chaotic stone fools her, for she almost blunders upon them. Only some instinct to freeze saves her from discovery. She breathlessly shrinks behind the cover of a tortoise-humped outcropping.

  "They remind you..."

  The Captain's voice. It shocks her as surely as a knife point pressed against the back of her neck.

  She creeps along the outer circuit of the tortoise stone, nearer, nearer... As shallow as it is, her breath burns against the tightness of her high chest. Her heart thumps.

  "What's happening?" the Nonman says. "I don't... I don't understand..."

  "You are truly a blasted idiot."

  She steps from behind the rising shell of rock, finds herself standing almost entirely exposed. Only the direction of their gazes prevents them from seeing her. Cleric sits in a pose of dejected glory, at once beautiful and grotesque for the blasted depths of his Mark. The Captain stands over him, a vision of archaic savagery, his Chorae so close to the Nonman that she can see a faint husk of salt rising across his scalp.

  "Tell me!" Incariol cries in hushed tones. "Tell me why I am here!"

  A moment of glaring impatience. "Because they remind you."

  "But who? They remind me of who?" Even as Cleric says this his glittering black eyes wander toward her.

  "Someone you once knew," the Captain grates. "They remind you of someone you once—"

  He whirls toward her. His hair swings in broken sheets of black and grey.

  "What are you doing?" he barks.

  "I-I..." she stammers. "I think I need more... more Qirri."

  A moment of murderous deliberation, then something like a grin hooks his eyes. He turns wordlessly to the Nonman, who remains seated as before.

  "No," Cleric says with a strange solemnity. "Not yet. I apologize... Mimara."

  This is the first time he has spoken her name. She retreats, flinching from the Captain's manic glare, her skin buzzing with the shame of her exposure. Afterward she remembers the Nonman's lips more than his voice, their fulsome curves, white tinged with too-long-in-the-water blue. She sees them moving to the rhythm of consonant and vowel.

  Mim... araa...

  Like a kiss, she thinks, her arms bundled against a curious sense of chill.

  Like a kiss.

  —|—

  She keeps to herself the following day. The Wizard seems only too happy to oblige her. The trail has its rhythms, its own ebb and flow. Sometimes everyone seems to be engaged in low conversation, while other times everyone appears sullen and wary or simply lost in their own labouring breaths, and naught can be heard above the whistling chorus of birdsong. Their descent back into the Mop has replaced their anxiousness with melancholy.

 
She is quite lost in thought when Cleric comes alongside her, senseless ruminations, more a collage of recriminations and pained memories than anything meaningful.

  She smiles at her shock. The unearthly beauty of his face and form unsettles her, almost as much as the horrid depth of his Mark. Something wrenches at the inner corners of her eyes whenever she allows her gaze to linger. He is contradiction incarnate.

  "Is it true," he inexplicably asks, "that being touched by another and touching oneself are quite distinct sensations for Men?"

  The question bewilders and embarrasses her, to the point of drawing even more heat to her flushed face. "Yes... I suppose..."

  He walks in silence for a time, eyes tracking the ground before his booted feet. There is something... overwhelming about his stature. The other men, with the possible exception of Sarl, exude the same aura of physical strength and martial brutality as had so many warlike men on the Andiamine Heights. But Cleric possesses a density beyond intimations of force and threat, one that reminds her of her stepfather and the way the world always seemed to bow about his passage.

  She thinks of all the skinnies he has killed, the legions incinerated in the existential thunder of his voice. And he seems hardened for the multitudes that flicker shrieking before her soul's eye—in Cil-Aujas, on Maimor, across the Mop—as if murder draws flesh to stone. She wonders what it would be like, dying beneath his black-glittering eyes.

  Beautiful, she decides.

  "I think I once knew this," he finally says. At first she cannot identify the passion twining through his voice. Achamian has told her much about the Nonmen, how their souls often move in ways counter to the tracks of human passion. She wants to say sorrow, but it seems more somehow...

  She wonders if tragedy could be a passion.

  "Now you know it again," she says, smiling at the frigid gaze.

  "No," he replies. "Never again."

  "Then why ask?"

  "There is... comfort... in rehearsing the dead motions of the past."

  She finds herself nodding—as if they were peers discussing common knowledge. "We are alike in this way."