The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  And not a night passed without some pitched battle across the perimeter of the camp, crazed random affairs that often roused the whole of the Army and so contributed to its mounting exhaustion. The Vokalati never ceased walking the low skies to the immediate north, their lavish billows winding like nested snakes, their mouths and eyes aglow. Kites, the Men of the Circumfix began to call them. From dusk to dawn, they cast lights across the barren tracts, and without fail they found cohorts of Sranc—sometimes thousands strong—creeping toward the camp with reptilian cunning. Many of the swarthy Schoolmen bound themselves to their mules during the day so they might slumber. Fewer and fewer mustered for the daylight Culling.

  And yet Umrapathur doggedly refused calling on their Holy Aspect-Emperor. When the Signallers asked what message they should flash across the horizon each evening, he would describe their straits, for he was not so arrogant as to pretend, but he would always conclude with "all is well with the Army of the South."

  —|—

  They exchanged horizon for horizon, winking from waste to wilderness to waste.

  Since the Swayali Grandmistress had to see the places she delivered them to, the journey was one of stepping—if the madness of sorcery could be called such—from height to height. This made their passage a succession of breathtaking vistas, most of them densely forested after the first three days. Serwa's voice would speak from Sorweel's skin, bind the air about them with light, collapse his physical form into ash, then deliver them to an entirely novel vantage on the rim of the one previous. Usually, when she was not overcome by her arcane exertions, she would tell the two men something about the land beneath their blinking gaze.

  "This was once the province of Ûnosiri, the ancient hunting grounds of the Umeritic God-Kings."

  "There... See that line of shadow through the trees? That was the Soholn, the great road raised by King Nanor-Ukkerja I to speed the passage of his hosts to the frontier."

  And each time, Sorweel would gaze out with a kind of perplexed wonder, trying to imagine what it would be like to possess memories of a distant age. Moënghus would typically scowl and cry, "Bah!"

  Only the Neleost remained constant, a hazy band of dark across the north. And despite the clamour of birdsong, the land seemed hushed for the fact of losses endured so very long ago.

  From height to height they leapt. A ridge-line crooked like an arthritic finger. A scarp overlooking forests whose trees dwarfed the greatest Sorweel had ever seen in the arid environs of Sakarpus. Once she conveyed them to the summit of a ruined tower, one that proved impossible to climb down from. The conjuring had proven to be particularly difficult, so much that Moënghus had to catch Serwa as she teetered on the brink. The two men found themselves stranded on the ruined summit for watches waiting for her to recover. Once she conveyed them to an island of stumped rock in a river, not realizing that miles of marshland lay just beyond. The three of them were pimpled in mosquito bites before they could escape.

  They typically made their "leaps," as Moënghus called them, twice daily, though the Swayali Grandmistress often attempted—and sometimes succeeded—delivering them a third time. Early in the morning, not long after awaking, then again in the afternoon, or later depending on what success Serwa had snoozing in daylight. They struck no fire, relying instead on Serwa's witchcraft to cook the game that Moënghus felled with his gorgeous bow. They slept every night, taking turns keeping watch. Sorweel would never forget the moonlit worlds he gazed across during his shifts, his ears pricked to the chorus of nocturnal sounds. Not a night passed where he did not steal glimpses of Serwa sleeping. She would seem a thing of polished marble beneath loose cloth, something more dense than the surrounding world. And he would wonder that loneliness could be so beautiful.

  Sometimes the Princess-Imperial did not so much sleep as swoon, such was her exhaustion following certain leaps. She often whimpered, or even cried out, while unconscious, prompting Sorweel to ask Moënghus what afflicted her.

  "The past," he replied, glaring as if troubled by Sorweel's ignorance. "Same as all those who have touched the shrivelled turd that is Seswatha's heart. She dreams of these very lands dying in Sranc and fire. She dreams of Father's foe."

  "The No-God," Sorweel said numbly.

  Eskeles had told him about the First Apocalypse, of course, how the shadowy force the Sakarpi called the Great Ruiner was about to return to finish the destruction of the world. Eskeles also had moaned and whimpered in his sleep, but if anything he had complained of his Dreams too much, to the point where Sorweel had made a habit of dismissing them.

  For whatever reason, the fact that Serwa dreamed these very same dreams troubled him more.

  "What was it like," he asked her once, "the First Apocalypse?"

  "Defeat," she replied with inward eyes. "Horror. Anguish..." She looked to him with a frowning smile. "And beauty too, in a strange way."

  "Beauty?"

  "The end of nations..." she said with uncharacteristic hesitancy. "Few things command the heart with such profundity."

  "Nations," he repeated. "Like Sakarpus."

  "Yes... Only exterminated instead of enslaved." She stood as though to put distance between herself and his thin-skinned questions. "And multiplied to the ends of the earth."

  Twice they heard Sranc horns calling, similar, yet eerily different from those heard on the Sakarpi Pale. On both occasions the three of them halted whatever it was they were doing, crooked their heads in pensive listening, and it would seem—to Sorweel at least—that the end of the world was not so far.

  —|—

  The death toll climbed, enough to even provoke King Umrapathur's fearless son, Charapatha, the famed Prince of One Hundred Songs, to speak out in apprehension. Every morning he led the Knights of Invishi into the roiling horizon, and every evening he returned with reports of fomenting danger. "They no longer flee," he told his father. "They scatter only when they see Kites in the sky, and those have become all too rare... Soon they will not fear us at all, and they will fall upon us in numbers ten times greater than before—ten times or more!"

  "What can we do but march?" King Umrapathur cried out in reply.

  Even though the Believer-Kings understood their collective predicament, the fact that they had no choice but to continue advancing, their fear goaded them to question the manner of their march. Soon even King Mursidides of Cironj, who had been otherwise supportive, and Prince Massar of Chianadyni, who saw weakness in all complaints, began speaking out in council. At the very least, the Holy Aspect-Emperor had to be consulted.

  "Why this stubbornness, King-Brother?" Mursidides chided. "Do you fear you will become less in His eyes? Your faith in Him should not hang on His faith in you."

  There was no insolence in these words. All of them knew what it meant to dwell in the presence of their Holy Aspect-Emperor, to breathe air relieved of pride and shame, and they sought always to rekindle something of its tenor among themselves. They did not flinch from the prick of honesty, so long as it was well spoken.

  So Umrapathur relented. He set aside his pride and commanded the Signallers to call on the Holy Aspect-Emperor with their coded pageants of light.

  "The Horde waxes. Lord Most Holy, the Army of the South calls on your strength and wisdom."

  Less than a watch passed before the Signallers, hanging in the sky above the camp's eastern perimeter, saw the reply glitter along the bald night horizon.

  "Assemble the Believer-Kings."

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus arrived even as they organized themselves. He wore a common cloak, striding among them without ceremony, clutching shoulders in solemn reassurance.

  First, he questioned them regarding forage and supplies. They starved as the other Armies starved, but since the rivers had quickened, their position high on the Neleost watershed assured them the most plentiful catches of fish. Indeed, many companies marched with flimsy mantlets spanning the heads of dozens, covered with fish to dry in the sunlight.

  Then he question
ed them about the Horde, heard their multitudinous misgivings.

  "This is the balance of perils," he said, glaring down from his halo. "You are exposed for the sake of sustenance. To undo the one is to undo the other... I will send you Saccarees. I can do no more."

  And with that, he winked out of existence.

  To a man the Believer-Kings of the South rejoiced, for Apperens Saccarees was the Grandmaster of the Mandate, the Aspect-Emperor's own School. Only Carindûsû, who could not set aside his scholastic rivalries even here, thousands of miles from his fastness in Invishi, scoffed. What could the Mandate do that the Vokalati could not do as well, if not better?

  "Double your numbers," the ever-witty Mursidides declared to uproarious laughter.

  The Grandmaster withdrew, embittered.

  The Mandate Schoolmen arrived the following midday, bearing only what they could carry with them across the low sky. The great columns of infantrymen watched with wonder as the sorcerers filed across the flashing sun, their crimson-silk billows hanging like windless flags.

  And so the number of Kites flown by the Army of the South was doubled. More than three hundred sorcerers of rank and some two hundred more understudies now strode through the sepulchral clouds above the Horde.

  —|—

  They crossed it as sparks from a grass fire—as a light leaping.

  Kûniüri... The fabled land of his ancestors.

  Not even two thousand years could undo the glory of its works. It seemed a great vessel clinging to the surface of an earthen sea, wrecked and derelict, too powerfully wrought to founder, too vast to entirely drown. Humped fortifications. Overgrown processionals. Mounded temples. It would linger for another two thousand years, Sorweel realized, even if only as featureless stones kissed by the sun. And this, he found himself thinking, was not such a bad thing, to find immortality in your bones.

  "Do you ever ponder?" Serwa asked him once, watching him gaze across a field of vine-draped debris. Her voice startled him, since he had thought her asleep.

  "Ponder?"

  "The Apocalypse," she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "How your city survived when far greater bastions toppled."

  The young King of Sakarpus shrugged. "Some live. Some die. My father always said it was a good thing that Men could only trust in the Whore when it comes battle. He believed Men should be wary of war."

  She smiled in appreciation.

  "But you do see it, don't you?"

  "See what?"

  "Evidence. Proof of my Holy Father."

  Something balked within him, balked at the lies about to be told. Even in childhood, his had always been an honest, even earnest, soul. He gazed into her clear blue eyes, trusting in the mask the Dread Mother had given him.

  "My friend, Zsoronga... He thinks your Consult is a myth, an—"

  "And that Father is mad."

  "Yes."

  "But he saw the skin-spy Father unmasked in the Umbilicus."

  "Months back? Yes."

  Her scowl was quizzical enough to be alarming. "And?"

  "He thought it a trick."

  "Of course he did. The Zeümi are stubborn fools."

  Now it was Sorweel's turn to scowl. He could feel the danger—the slippery tumble of word in passion, passion in word, that prefaced every argument—yet he erred against caution once again. "Better a fool than a slave," he snapped in reply.

  Boldness, it seemed, was its own shelter.

  Her expression hung in blank equipoise, as if deciding whether to be offended or amused. "You are not like the others. You do not speak as a Believer-King."

  "I am not like the others."

  Then she asked the dreaded question. "But you do believe, don't you? Or has your stubborn Zeümi friend robbed you of your conviction?"

  The assumption was plain. Her father had declared him a Believer-King, therefore he simply had to be a believer—at least at some point. Once again, Sorweel found himself marvelling at the strange power the Goddess and her deception had afforded him. Knowledge—this was the great fortress the Anasûrimbor had raised about themselves. And somehow he had found his way past the gates, into the very bosom of his adversary.

  He was narindari, as Zsoronga had said. He, and he alone, was capable of murdering the Aspect-Emperor.

  He need only summon the courage to die.

  "Is doubt such a bad thing?" he asked, blinking to recover his concentration. "Would you rather I be a fanatic like the others?"

  She glared at him, five heartbeats of scrutiny, unnerving for the glint of preternatural canniness in her Anasûrimbor eyes.

  "Yes," she finally said. "Most assuredly yes. I have battled Shauriatas in my Dreams. I have been tortured by Mekeritrig. Chased across Eärwa by Aurax and Aurang. The Consult is as real as it is wicked and deadly, Sorweel. Short of my father, the world knows no powers more ferocious. Even absent the No-God and the Second Apocalypse, they warrant the bloodthirsty fanaticism of Men."

  If anything, her voice had grown softer in speaking these words, yet the intensity of her look and intonation shocked the young King of Sakarpus. For all her allure and arcane potency, Anasûrimbor Serwa had always seemed arrogant and flip like her brothers—another child too aware of her divine paternity. Now she reminded him of Eskeles, and the way the portly Schoolman had tucked his zealotry between the folds of his wit and compassion.

  This was the true Serwa, he realized. The earnest one. And her beauty seemed to blaze all the brighter for it.

  He found himself staring at her breathless. Leaf shadows bobbed across the perfect lines of her face.

  "Don't be a fool, Sorweel."

  She turned on her rump to kick her snoring brother.

  —|—

  No Schoolmen was as famed as Apperens Saccarees, who had long stood high among the Empire's Exalt-Ministers. His voice proved a tonic for the Army of the South's nightly war-councils, for it carried both the authority of their Aspect-Emperor and the promise of tactical acumen. Like all Mandate Schoolmen he dreamed the First Apocalypse through the eyes of Seswatha and so could speak of their straits with the wisdom of one who had suffered them before—many times.

  "In Atyersus," he said, referring to the Mandate's famed citadel, "we have whole libraries dedicated to warring against the Sranc. Centuries have we dreamed the battles of old. Centuries have we pondered the debacles and the successes."

  The Grandmaster of the Vokalati, however, was not impressed in the least. Such is the perversity of pride that it can drive a man to embrace contradiction, so long as some semblance of his privilege is preserved. Carindûsû, who had been among the first to warn of their growing peril, now became the first to discount the ominous declarations made by others—and Saccarees especially.

  "Why do you speak of them so?" the Invitic Grandmaster asked, his oiled features gleaming with derision. "They are naught but brutes, vicious beasts, to be herded with care, certainly, but to be herded nonetheless."

  "Beasts to be herded?" Saccarees replied scowling. "They speak their own tongue. They forge their own weapons—when they cannot scavenge ours. The bliss we find in coupling, they find in the murder of innocents. They gather when we trod their earth, drawn from lands far from our stink on the wind. When overmatched they withdraw of their own nature, gouging all life from the earth before us, denying us the least sustenance. And when they come to dwarf our numbers, they assail us with suicidal ardour, throw themselves upon our spears simply to deny us our weapons!" The Grandmaster of the Mandate glanced from face to face to ensure that all present grasped the dire significance of his words. "Do you think this a mere coincidence, Carindûsû?"

  "They are beasts," the tall Vokalati Schoolman said.

  "No. Carindûsû, please, you must forgive my insistence. They are weapons. They were designed thus, hewn from the flesh of Nonmen by the Inchoroi to purge this world of souls—to exterminate Men! Beasts live to survive, my old friend. Sranc live to kill!"

  And so was Carindûsû shamed a second ti
me.

  The Culling was reorganized under Saccarees's direction. As the Army of the South veered westward, the Vokalati had simply spread themselves across the entirety of the Horde facing them. Since the clans accumulating along their right flank posed the greatest threat, Saccarees, with Carindûsû's grudging assent, dedicated all the Mandate and Vokalati—some three hundred sorcerers of rank—to their extermination. For the long-suffering pickets, the vision of so many Kites sailing into the enormous bowers of dust was a thing of cheering joy and wonder. "Like watching angels drag skirts of fire," Prince Sasal Charapatha reported to his father.

  Arrayed in cadres of three—triunes—the Schoolmen walked the high-hanging veils, their Wards turning aside flurries of arrows and javelins, their Cants scorching the shadows that raced shrieking beneath. The violence of the Horde's flight kicked ever more dust into the sky, so piling obscurity atop obscurity, until the Schoolmen could scarce see their own apparitional defences, let alone the ground seething beneath. Since nothing singular could be heard above the cavernous roar, they could not even rely on their ears to guide them. So, their mouths and eyes alight, they lashed out blindly, swept the ground with Cirroi Looms, Dragonheads, Gotaggan Scythes, and more, destroying the gibbering mobs they saw more in their soul's eye than in fact. They advanced in hellish echelon, using the glow of the triunes flanking to pace their progress into the ochre gloom. Shouting their voices to croaks, they chased the far flank of the Horde out into the droughted wastes...

  Only to find it returned the following morning.

  Since the Sranc cannibalized their dead, evidence of their efficacy was difficult to find. The cavalry pickets who crossed the sorcerers' wake counted the dead as they had been instructed. The Imperial Mathematicians argued estimates, and the Believer-Kings continually bent their darling ear, as the Nilnameshi put it, to the numbers that most flattered their hopes. But Saccarees was not fooled—no more than Carindûsû.

  "The number is irrelevant!" he finally cried to King Umrapathur. "The effect is all that matters."

  This put an end to their numerical speculations, for everyone knew that despite the cunning and fury of their efforts, the Schoolmen had accomplished nothing that any man could discern. Their predicament, if anything, had become more perilous. Not only did the Horde seem to be swelling along their flank, it had grown mobbing tendrils that hooked about their rear. Sranc, uncounted thousands of them, now followed the Army.