The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  "I do not understa—"

  "Liar!" the wild-haired figure screeched.

  The Shriah did not so much as blink. His face bathed in wavering orange light, Maithanet enveloped Inrilatas in Dûnyain scrutiny, a gaze that seemed to tinkle like coals. It was a profile Kelmomas had seen thousands of times, stitched into banners if not in flesh. High of cheek, virile, the strength of his jaw obvious despite the thickness of his beard.

  He is our first true challenge, the voice whispered. We must take care.

  Inrilatas's eyes glittered in the gloom. He crouched the same as before, his chains hanging in arcs across the floor. If their uncle's scrutiny discomfited him, he betrayed no sign of it.

  "Tell me, Uncle Holy. How many children did grandfather sire?"

  "Six," the Shriah replied. There was a toneless brevity to the exchange now, as if they had shed the disguises they used when interacting with normal men.

  "Were any of them like me?"

  A fraction of a heartbeat.

  "I have no way of knowing. He drowned them at the first sign of peculiarities."

  "And you were the only one that expressed... balance?"

  "I was the only one."

  "So grandfather... He would have drowned me?"

  "Most certainly."

  The stark appraisal of a Dûnyain, directly to the point, careless of pride or injury. In an arena packed with the blind and the beggared, he and his family were the only sighted players. They played as the blind played—goading, commiserating, flattering—simply because these were the moves that moved the blind. Only when they vied one against another, the young Prince-Imperial realized, could they dispense with the empty posturing and play the game in its purest, most rarefied form.

  "So why," Inrilatas asked, "do you think Father has spared me?"

  The Shriah of the Thousand Temples shrugged. "Because the eye of the World is upon him."

  "Not because of Mother?"

  "She watches with the rest."

  "But you do not believe this."

  "Then enlighten me, Inrilatas. What do I think?"

  "You think Mother has compromised Father."

  Another fraction of hesitation. Maithanet's gaze drifted in and out of focus.

  Inrilatas seized the opportunity. "You think Mother has blunted Father's pursuit of the Shortest Path time and again, that he walks in arcs to appease her heart, when he should cleave to the ruthless lines of the Thousandfold Thought."

  Again the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples hesitated. Perhaps Inrilatas had found the thread. Perhaps Uncle could be unmasked...

  Perhaps Maithanet should be counted weak in their small tribe.

  "Who has told you these things?" his uncle demanded.

  Inrilatas ignored the distraction. "You think Father risks the very world for his Empress's sake—for the absurdity of love!"

  "Was it her? Did she tell you about the Thousandfold Thought?"

  "And you see me," the naked adolescent pressed, "the fact that I have been caged rather than drowned, as the most glaring example of your elder brother's folly."

  Again Kelmomas watched his uncle's eyes fall out of focus then return—an outward sign of the Probability Trance. It wasn't fair, he decided, that he should be born with all these gifts yet be denied the training required to forge true weapons out of them. What use was Father to him, so long as he let him flounder? How could the Aspect-Emperor be anything but his son's greatest threat, greatest foe, when he always saw more, more deeply?

  "I fear that you might be..." the Shriah said. "I admit as much. But if you can see this, Inrilatas, then your father has seen it also—and far more completely. If he sees no sedition in my fearing, why should you?"

  Once again his uncle tried to seize the initiative with questions of his own. Once again, Inrilatas simply ignored him and pressed on with his interrogation.

  "Tell me, Uncle, how will you have me killed when you seize power?"

  "These tricks, Inrilatas. These tactics... They only work when they are hidden. I see these things the same as you."

  "Strange, isn't it, Uncle? The way we Dûnyain, for all our gifts, can never speak?"

  "We are speaking now."

  Inrilatas laughed at this, lowered his beard-hazed cheek to his knees once again. "But how can that be when we mean nothing of what we say?"

  "You conf—"

  "What would they do, you think, if Men could see us? If they could fathom the way we don and doff them like clothes?"

  Maithanet shrugged. "What would any child do, if they could fathom their father?"

  Inrilatas smiled. "That depends upon the father... This is the answer you want me to speak."

  "No. That is the answer."

  More laughter, so like the Aspect-Emperor's that goose-pimples climbed across the boy's skin.

  "You really believe that we Dûnyain differ? That, like fathers, some can be good and some bad?"

  "I know so," Maithanet replied.

  There was something coiled about his brother, Kelmomas decided. The way he lolled his head, flexed his wrists, and rocked on his heels created an impression of awkward, effeminate youth—a false impression. The more harmless he seemed, the young Prince-Imperial understood, the more lethal he became.

  All of this, the secret voice warned, is simply for show.

  And that was the joke, Kelmomas realized: Inrilatas truly meant nothing of what he said.

  "Oh, we have our peculiarities, I grant you that," the adolescent said. "Our hash of strengths and weaknesses. But in the end we all suffer the same miraculous disease: reflection. Where they think, one thought following hard upon the other, tripping forward blindly, we reflect. Each thought grasps the thought before it—like a starving dog chasing an oh-so meaty tail! They stumble before us, reeling like drunks, insensible to their momentary origins, and we unravel them. Play them like instruments, plucking songs of love and adoration that they call their own!"

  Something was going to happen.

  Kelmomas found himself leaning forward, such was his hanker. When? When?

  "We all deceive, Uncle. All of us, all the time. That is the gift of reflection."

  "They make their choices," Maithanet said in a head-shaking tone.

  "Please, Uncle. You must speak before me the way you speak before Father. I see your lies, no matter how banal or cunning. No choices are made in our presence. Ever. You know this. The only freedom is freedom over."

  "Very well then," the Holy Shriah replied. "I tire of your philosophy, Inrilatas. I find you abhorrent, and I fear this entire exercise simply speaks to your mother's failing reason."

  "Mother?" his older brother exclaimed. "You think Mother arranged this?"

  A heartbeat of hesitation, the smallest crack in Maithanet's false demeanour.

  Something is wrong, the voice whispered.

  "If not her, then who?" the Shriah of the Thousand Temples asked.

  Inrilatas at once frowned and smiled, his expression drunk with exaggeration. His eyebrows hooked high, he glanced down at his little brother...

  "Kelmomas?" Maithanet asked, not with the incredulity appropriate to a human, but in the featureless voice belonging to the Dûnyain.

  Inrilatas gazed at the young Prince-Imperial as if he were a puppy about to be thrown into a river...

  Poor boy.

  "A thousand words and insinuations batter them day in and day out," the youth said. "But because they lack the memory to enumerate them, they forget, and find themselves stranded with hopes and suspicions not of their making. Mother has always loved you, Uncle, has always seen you as a more human version of Father—an illusion you have laboured long and hard to cultivate. Now, suddenly, when she most desperately needs your counsel, she fears and hates you."

  "And this is Kelmomas's work?"

  "He isn't what he seems, Uncle."

  Maithanet glanced at the boy, who stood as rigid as a shield next to him, then turned back to Inrilatas. Kelmomas did not know what he found
more terrifying: the unscalable surfaces of his uncle's face or his brother's sudden betrayal.

  "I have suspected as much," the Shriah said.

  Say something... the voice urged.

  Inrilatas nodded as if ruing some tragic fact. "As mad as all of us are, as much heartbreak we have heaped upon our mother, he is, I think, the worst of us."

  "Surely you—"

  "You know he was the one who killed Samarmas."

  Another crack in his uncle's once-impervious demeanour.

  It was all the young Prince-Imperial could do to simply stand and breathe. All his crimes, he had committed in the shadow of assumption. Were his Uncle to suspect him capable—of murdering Samarmas, Sharacinth—he would have quickly seen his guilt, such were his gifts. But for all their strength, the Dûnyain remained as blind to ignorance as the world-born—and as vulnerable.

  And now... Never in his short life had Kelmomas experienced the terror he now felt. The sense of flushing looseness, as if he were a pillar of water about to collapse in a thousand liquid directions. The sense of binding tension, as if an inner winch cranked at every thread of his being, throttled him vein by vein...

  And he found it curious, just as he found this curiosity curious.

  "Samarmas died playing a foolish prank," Maithanet said evenly. "I was there."

  "And my little brother. He was there also?"

  "Yes."

  "And Kelmomas, does he not share our gift for leading fools?"

  "He could... in time."

  "But what if he were like me, Uncle. What if he were born knowing how to use our gifts?"

  Kelmomas could hear all three of their hearts, his beating with rabbit quickness, his uncle's pounding as slow as a bull's—his brother's dancing through the erratic in-between.

  "You're saying he murdered his own brother?"

  Inrilatas nodded the way Mother nodded when affirming unfortunate truths. "And others..."

  "Others?"

  Kelmomas stood, immobilized by astonishment. How? How? How could everything turn so quickly?

  "Turn to him, Uncle. Use your portion. Gaze into his face and ask him if he is a fratricide."

  What was the mad fool doing? His uncle was the one! He was the one who needed to be humiliated—destroyed!

  The Shriah of the Thousand Temples turned to the boy, not as a human might, frowning, questioning, but with the glint of void in his eyes. As a Dûnyain.

  "The sum of sins," Inrilatas continued. "There is nothing more godly than murder. Nothing more absolute."

  And for the first time Kelmomas found himself trapped within the dread circuit of his Uncle's scrutiny.

  Hide! the secret voice cried. He glimpses... glimpses!

  "Come now, Kelmomas," his mad brother cackled. "Show Uncle Holy why you should be chained in my place."

  "Liar!" the boy finally shrieked in blubbering denial. "Lies!"

  "Kelmomas!" the Shriah shouted, his voice yanking on every string of authority, from parental to religious. "Turn to me! Look to me and tell me: Did you murd—"

  Two clicks, almost simultaneous. Two screeches—a noise as small as mice trampled underfoot. The whirr of flying iron. Links snapping. File-weakened links snapping. One chain whooshed over the boy's head, while the other hooked behind his uncle...

  They intersected, lashed in opposing directions about the post of Uncle Holy's neck. Wound like whips.

  Kelmomas had scarcely torn his eyes away from his uncle, when his brother heaved, throwing his arms out and back like wings, his spine arched like a bow. Maithanet flew headlong to his feet.

  Then Inrilatas had him, pulled him, for all his stature, like a child, against his chest. He roared in bestial exultation, wrenched at the chains again and again...

  And Kelmomas watched the Shriah of Thousand Temples strangle.

  Maithanet was on his knees, his face darkening, frantic hands grubbing at the chains. His silken sleeves had dropped down, revealing the fine-wrought beauty of his vambraces.

  Inrilatas screamed and twisted, his arms, chest, and shoulders grooved with exertion. Maithanet surrendered his breath, fought only to protect his carotid artery. Inrilatas wrenched once, twice, violently enough to lift Uncle from his knees. But in a heartbeat of dropping slack, Maithanet's left hand fluttered across the vambrace on the forearm opposite. A blade appeared, jutting a finger's length beyond his elbow. It gleamed as though wet.

  The first strike puffed the spark from Inrilatas's eyes. The second, low on his ribs, occasioned no more than a flinch. The chain slipped from the adolescent's grasp. Maithanet fell forward to his hands. He choked for air as would any mortal but recovered far more quickly. In mere heartbeats, it seemed, he had cast aside the chains and whirled to confront his dying nephew.

  Inrilatas had staggered back two steps, his mouth gaping, his hand pawing the blood welling from his side. No words needed to be exchanged. Muffled shouts and hammering could already be heard at the door. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples could not trust a madman's dying words. He raised his fist. His strike caught the adolescent utterly unprepared. His left brow and socket collapsed like bread crust.

  The Prince-Imperial fell back. The clink of iron accompanied the slap of his nude body across the floor. He jerked as if possessed by fire. Blood chased the creases between floor-stones.

  "Soft..." Maithanet said, as if noting a natural curiosity. He turned to the dumbstruck boy, his right sleeve crimson with blood. "And you?" he asked without a whisper of passion.

  "Do you have your mother's bones?"

  —|—

  The bronze door burst open. Both uncle and nephew whirled to the faces massed beyond the threshold. Angry and astounded eyes probed the gloom, sorted the living from the dead.

  "Mommy-mommy-mommy!" Kelmomas shrieked to the lone porcelain mask in the crowd's midst. "Uncle moves against you! He killed Inri to keep you from knowing!"

  But his mother had already caught sight of her prostrate son, had already jostled her way to the fore.

  "Esmi..." Maithanet began. "You have to und—"

  "I don't care how it happened," she interrupted, drifting more than walking toward the form of her son on the floor, his flushed nakedness becoming ever more grey. She teetered over him as if he were a fatal plummet.

  "Did you do this, Esmi?" the Shriah persisted, his voice imperious. "Did you plan this to—"

  "Did I do what?" she said in a voice so calm it could only be crazed. "Plan for you to murder my son?"

  "Esmi..." he began.

  But some sights commanded silence—even from a Dûnyain. For several giddy, horrifying moments, Kelmomas did not so much see his mother slump to her knees as he saw the Empress of the Three Seas collapse. A stranger. He told himself it was the mask, but when she pulled it from her face, the profile of cheek and brow did not seem familiar to him.

  Holding the thing in ginger fingers, she set it upon Inrilatas's shattered brow.

  Low thunder rumbled through the cell. Rain hissed and thrummed.

  "Before," she said, her head still down. "Before, I knew I could defeat you..."

  The Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples stood imperious and scowling. "How?"

  She shrugged like someone weary beyond all suffering. "A story Kellhus once told me about a wager between a god and a hero... a test of courage."

  Maithanet watched her with the absolute absence of expression.

  She looked up to him, her eyes red and welling. "I sometimes think he was warning me... Against him. Against my children... Against you."

  She turned back to her dead son.

  "He told me this story revealed the great vulnerability of the Dûnyain." She brushed a lock of hair from the mask upon Inrilatas's face. Blood had continued to drain, pooling, chasing the seams, soaking the nethers of her gown. "You need only be willing to sacrifice yourself..."

  "Esmi... You have been decei—"

  "I was so willing, Maitha. And I knew you would see... see this in me, realize that I wo
uld let all the Empire burn to war against you, and that you would capitulate the way all the others have capitulated to my sovereign will."

  "Esmenet... Sister, please... Relinquish this madn—"

  "But what... what you have done... here..." Her head dropped like a doll's, and her voice faded to a whisper. "Maitha... You have killed my boy... my... my son."

  She frowned, as if only now grasping the consequences, then glared at her Exalt-Captain.

  "Imhailas... Seize him."

  They crowded about the entrance, a small mob of astounded souls. Until now, the statuesque Norsirai officer had stood motionless, watching with a horrified pallor. Now Kelmomas almost giggled, so comic was his shock. "Your Glory?"

  "Esmi..." Maithanet said, something dark growling through his voice. "I will not be taken."

  He simply turned and began striding down the marmoreal halls.

  Silence, stunned and panting.

  "Seize him!" the Holy Empress screeched at Imhailas. She turned back to the corpse of her son, hung over him, murmuring, "No-no-no-no-no..." against the shudders that wracked her slender frame.

  Not another one, the secret voice whispered, laughing.

  —|—

  Her body-slaves had only attended to a handful of lanterns before she chased them from her apartments. Darkness ruled the clutch of interconnected rooms as a result, punctuated by pools of lonely illumination. In the boy's eyes, the world seemed soft and warm with secrets, all the edges rounded with shadow. The belly of an urn gleaming here, the combed planes of a tapestry hanging there—familiar things, made strange for the scarcity of light.

  Yes, he decided. A different world. Better.

  They lay together on the broad bed, she with her back partially propped on pillows, he within her sheltering curve. Neither of them spoke. For the longest time, the gauze sheers drawn across the balcony were all that moved, gently teasing the marble shadows.

  The Prince-Imperial had set an idle fraction of his soul the task of counting heartbeats so that he might know the measure of his bliss. Three thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven passed before Lord Sankas appeared from the darkened depths, his face drawn for worry.

  "He simply walked out of the palace."

  The Empress stiffened but did not move otherwise.