The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  —|—

  The three hostages-to-be had come to what seemed a great forested basin, so vast its outer rim rose into hazed oblivion but proved to be a valley. A river wound through it, roping across the floodplains in meandering loops, broad enough to enclose slender islands. The Holy Aumris, Serwa declared, awed and excited despite the toll of their leap. The very nursery of Mannish civilization.

  "This was how they found it... the first Men who set foot in this vale so many thousands of years ago."

  While she slept, Sorweel found a seat overlooking the vista between the roots of a towering oak that stood poised over a slope so steep as to seem half of a gorge. He sat dozing, watching as the iron dark of the river transformed with the climbing sun, becoming green and brown and blue and, along certain sections, a miraculous silver. The River Aumris... where the High Norsirai had raised the first great cities of stone, where Men had knelt like children at the knee of their Nonmen foes and learned the ways of art and commerce and sorcery.

  Some time passed before he saw the ruins.

  At first he noticed only their sum, like a ghostly pictogram glimpsed through the trees, lines writ for the Heavens to read. Then he found himself picking out individual works, some actually breaching the forest canopy: the arcs of dead towers, the lines of once-imposing fortifications. Where before he had gazed across mere wilderness, now he peered across a monumental cemetery, a place humming with loss and history. It seemed absurd, even impossible, that he had failed to see it. But there it was, as clear as a Galeoth tattoo, only laid across the reach of the earth...

  The remains of some mighty city.

  Serwa began crying out in her sleep so violently as to send both Sorweel and Moënghus sprinting to her. The Prince-Imperial shrugged Sorweel aside when he hesitated over her thrashing form, then pulled her in his powerful embrace. She awoke sobbing.

  For some reason, the sight of her clutching her brother with weeping gratitude unnerved him as much as anything he had witnessed since Sakarpus's fall. Everything but everything seemed to attest to the righteousness of the Aspect-Emperor's war against the World's second ending. The sheer might of the Great Ordeal. Eskeles and his unnerving lesson on the plain. The skin-spy so dramatically revealed in the Umbilicus. The terror of the Horde and the cunning of the Ten-Yoke Legion. Even the trust and charity the Anasûrimbor had extended to him, their enemy...

  Not to mention the shining presence of the Aspect-Emperor himself.

  She had dreamed of the nameless city below them, Sorweel knew. She had relived the horror of its destruction even as he had pondered its overgrown imprint. And it struck him breathless, stationary in a way he had never known. The sight of her weeping somehow resurrected the circumstances that had so reduced her, a woman who seemed impervious to grief. He could almost hear the horns clawing the wind, glimpse the dread Whirlwind that Eskeles had always described in hand-wringing tones...

  Nothing is quite so easy as dismissing the folly of the dead—so long as they remain dead.

  —|—

  She brought them to the ruins, though she could have leapt much farther, across the valley if need be. The Cant taxed her as profoundly as any, but she insisted on wandering with them, through the ruins of ancient Trysë, the Holy Mother of Cities.

  The trees towered, formed high-hanging canopies that made gloom of the forest floor. The walls and bastions still loomed where not pulled down by the ages, their foundations buried, their torsos stained black, the blocks spangled with moss and lichens. In some places the rising tide of earth had inundated all, leaving only mossed debris scattered across the forest floor, fragments that would be taken for mere rocks and boulders in a deeper gloom. In other places, the loam and life had not so accumulated, leaving random stretches of nude ruin: heaped bricks, canted steps, walls finning the ground, the drums of toppled pillars.

  Serwa led them across the destruction, her face flushed with excitement, her voice fluting in the manner Sorweel had heard so many times from girls her age, only about matters far more profound and tragic. The Sakarpi King thought he recognized some of the things she spoke of, either directly or through the slanted similarity of names. But far and away most of what she told them he had never heard before—nor had he imagined that Men period, let alone those who had fathered his ancestors, had battled and strived and conquered in days that were thought ancient by the ancients.

  He had never heard of Cûnwerishau, the first God-King to extend the might of his hand along the length of the River Aumris. And aside from Sauglish, he had never heard of any of the other cities that perpetually vied with Trysë for dominance: Etrithatta, Lokor, and Ûmerau, whose might would grow to exceed even that of Trysë, and whose language would remain the Sheyic of the Ancient North long after she was broken by a people called the Cond. "Your people, Horse-King," she said, her eyes alight with connections Sorweel could not fathom. "Or the cousins of your ancestors, to be exact, born to the lands just north of what you Sakarpi call the Pale. More than three thousand years ago, they cracked the walls of ancient Ûmerau and swept through this valley. Their ardour glutted, they spared all the great works they found and made slaves of those they would pillage."

  She spoke as if he should celebrate these facts, take heart in the far-flung incarnations of his people's blood. But again Sorweel was afflicted with doubt and wonder. To know a man among the Sakarpi was to know his father. And here was this woman, telling him the truth of his fathers' fathers... The truth of himself!

  What did it mean to be better known by outlanders than by oneself? What kind of fools were the Sakarpi, to find heart and honour—let alone self—in flattering fables spun across the ages?

  How wrong had they been? Even proud Harweel.

  They came to rockier ground, and she quickened her stride so much that Sorweel found himself breathless for trying to match her pace up the slope. A mysterious clearing opened between the trees, and for the first time they found themselves wandering among truly monumental works: blocks of hewn granite, as tall as a man and as long as a four-wheeled wain, some spilled, others assembled into cyclopean walls. She rushed forward without hesitation, wending through slots of stone and inciting any number of curses from her brother. They raced after her.

  Panting, Sorweel paused before the sight of open sky, the blue so much deeper than the plains. He squinted against the sudden collusion of light and openness. A broad rectangle extended before him, heaped with stone ruin, yet miraculously devoid of overgrowth. The encroaching forest loomed about its perimeter as if leaning against some unseen barricade—or restrained by some unknown horror. He stood upon a far corner so that he could see the aisle of gargantuan pillars that braced the concourse in its entirety, as well as the lesser columns that lined its outer precincts. Most of them had tumbled—the smaller, outer columns especially—but enough remained standing to conjure the sense of the whole and to deliver the image of the long-lost ceilings to the soul's eye.

  Sorweel watched a bee spiral from the gloom, then reel away to the edges of the clearing until it found a circumventing line. Even the birds he saw batting between the crowns of the surrounding elms and oaks seemed to avoid the open spaces, as if loathe to dare the scrutiny of the stage...

  The Sakarpi King caught his breath, knowing he stood before an arena of lost glories—phantoms. A place that had lived too fiercely to ever truly die.

  Oblivious, Serwa raced ahead, darted across the heaped stone and between the monstrous columns that remained. "Behold!" she cried with girlish disbelief. "Behold the King-Temple!"

  Sorweel and Moënghus shared a hesitant glance.

  "Bah!" the Prince-Imperial spat, running after her.

  Sorweel trailed walking, trying hard to smile.

  "How many times?" she called. It seemed she jostled with long-dead shades in his soul's eye.

  "Stow your voice!" her brother commanded.

  But she just frowned and continued, crying, "Here! Here!" looking about as though trying to orient
her waking eyes with her sleeping. "On this very spot, Podi, I have supped and celebrated with the High-King, Celmomas—our little brother's namesake!—and his Knights-Chieftain."

  "Serwa, please!" Moënghus cried. "Recall what Father told you! The skinnies are drawn to places like this!"

  "Stow your worries!" she said, mocking his tone. "We leave no trail for them to follow. No trail, no mobbing. Even if we landed in the lap of an entire clan, they would be no match for me. I have reaped legions in the Culling, Podi! You know this..."

  She climbed a small rise that had been chapped to gravel, spun in a pirouette that made a wheel of her white flashing hair. "I stand upon the axis of an ancient power," she declared to the two wondering men. "The hub of a wheel that once turned the World but now spins groundless in the smoky Outside." She closed her eyes, raised her nostrils, as if breathing deep the uncanniness of the place—as if the occult were simply a more subtle perfume.

  "Two thousand years ago," she called, "from this very dais, the first Ordeal was declared against Golgotterath."

  "Yes..." Moënghus replied scowling. "The one that failed."

  —|—

  The rain began shortly after, spilling from a bank of woollen clouds that caught them entirely unawares. The sun just slipped into the sky's pocket, and endless waters followed chill upon the gloom. The two men ran to the shelter of Serwa's sorcerous parasol, and together they hastened to the river.

  They could not see the far shore.

  Moënghus had said nothing the entirety of the trek, and now, sitting side by side upon the puddled stone, his manner became even darker. While Sorweel gazed out into fogged shadows, he glowered at nothing, as if staring down hatreds only he could fathom.

  "Father says this river is holy," he finally said.

  He stood and began stripping his clothes.

  In disbelief, Sorweel watched him walk naked, following a shoal of sand and brush to where it dwindled to a finger prodding the water. He held his arms out for balance as he tiptoed to the very claw. He became shadowy as he passed through ever more veils of rain. He lingered for a moment, his powerful frame sculpted and gleaming. Then he leapt white and slicked out into waters. He vanished in a pale whoosh.

  Sorweel and Serwa watched the rain fall, watched the white spitting across the iron-grey waters, threshing away the rings of his submersion, until they could no longer say just where the river had swallowed him.

  He did not surface.

  At some point, Sorweel could feel individual heartbeats within his breast, such was the horror rising within him. He peered across the descending roar, waiting...

  "Something's happened!" he finally cried.

  He flew to his feet, but Serwa restrained him with a firm clasp upon his right hand.

  "He does that," she said in reply to his alarmed gaze. "Pretends to be dead."

  "Why?"

  Serwa frowned, once again far too canny and too wise for her youthful face.

  "Surely Kayûtas told you he was mad."

  He gaped, and she laughed at his incomprehension, returned her gaze to the sparking waters.

  Suddenly Moënghus burst from the Holy Aumris with an inhaling shout, his hair drawn like black paint about his face, neck, and corded shoulders.

  "It tastes like dirt!" he laughed across the washing roar.

  The Holy Aumris.

  —|—

  As the easternmost element of the Great Ordeal, the Army of the South was the last to pass from the endless plates of the High Istyuli into the more broken lands to the northwest. Ravines and defilades scored the once-simple distances. Monstrous stumps of stone breached the parch, formations that reared into saddle-backed summits. The Men of the Circumfix sighted ruins commanding bare rock heights, glimpsed the shadow of ancient and overgrown roads bisecting the horizon. Like their brethren to the west, they took heart in these signs, marvelled that places so far could have once been the centre of Mannish civilization. The sense of trespass fell from them, the aura of estrangement that makes wayfarers adopt the worried habits of the interloper. For the first time they understood that they were returning and not simply venturing—and their souls were fortified.

  They would have thought themselves liberators... were it not for the curtains of dust drawn across the horizon about them.

  They marched through the high heart of ancient Sheneor, the weakest and most ephemeral of the Three Kingdoms of Far Antique fame, the frontier sibling of stern Aörsi to the north and populous Kûniüri to the west. The Mandate Schoolmen, who every night dreamed of these lands in their nadir, looked upon the desolation and mourned. Where were the white-washed towers? The serpentine pennants of blue and gold? The companies of bronze-armoured Knights-Chieftain, cruel and proud? And they wondered that they had lived to see this earth with their waking eyes.

  With the breaking of the land came the quickening of the rivers, and with this came the increasing complications of crossing them. Across the high plain, the drought had so reduced the flow as to make fording a mere trudge through mire. Now the Army crawled down into steeper valleys where they found denuded poplars, stripped to spears by the retreating Horde. The Men of the Circumfix took comfort in their campfires, the first in months, and feasted on what fish the Netters gleaned from the rivers. They sucked the grease from their fingers, spoke small prayers thanking War for their momentary reprieve. The Believer-Kings, meanwhile, argued logistics and debated the perils of crossing treacherous waters in the shadow of the Horde. The fords themselves were easy to find: the Sranc literally rewrote the landscape when funnelled into multiple crossings, such were their numbers. Banks worn into ramps, waters stamped into broad morasses. They imagined a writhing, shrieking world, the skies gauzed with dust, the worm-pale multitudes stamping and heaving, thousands flailing in the mudded waters, and they were troubled. The earth seemed to tingle with the memory of their raucous masses, like a sheet drawn from the body of a dead man. Everything reeked of pollution.

  The fear was that the Horde would attack while the Army stood astride both banks—a fear that never materialized. At the first such river, Carindûsû actually remained behind with some hundred of his white-and-violet-gowned Vokalati, thinking they could use the fords to rid themselves of the Sranc massing on their rear flank. They slew many to be sure, thousands, sending plumes of foul steam into the already obscure air, but the Sranc discovered other crossings, or perhaps they abandoned their armour and simply swam; either way, the Nilnameshi Schoolmen found themselves withdrawing across seething grounds.

  King Umrapathur continued taking precautions. But he became ever more confident that the rivering of the land was far more a boon to his host than a liability. He could not foresee the danger to come.

  —|—

  The three camped in the ruins of a fortress halved by the collapse of the scarps that had once motivated its construction. Dagmersor, Serwa called it. The remains of the citadel hung jagged and hollow above them, a tattered silhouette across the clouding stars. Unseen wolves howled.

  Sorweel drew the first watch. He picked a position above the moribund fortifications, where the land mobbed out from beneath his hanging feet. Nocturnal forests. Solitary trees climbed apart from their brothers, propped on swells of earth and rock, their crowns silver beneath the Nail of Heaven, their branches a veining black. Noise pitted the black with a million unseen places, a creaking, creeping chorus that rose from the dark face of all, fading into the ever-expanding silence that was the emptiness of Heaven.

  And it scooped the breath from Sorweel's lungs.

  There was a beauty to this journey across the ruined landscapes of lost Kûniüri, one due as much to these moments of solitude as to the whorled terrain that framed them.

  His thoughts wandered, as they often did, across the myriad spectacles he had witnessed since his father's death. And he wondered that someone so frail as him could participate in such legendary events, let alone move them. The things he had seen. He imagined what it would be like re
turning to Sakarpus, excavating whatever scraps of his old life that remained, and trying to explain what had happened—what was happening—beyond the Pale. Would his countrymen marvel? Would they scoff? Would they accept the epic magnitude of what he described, or would they dismiss it as mere conceit?

  The questions dismayed him. Until now, his return had been a thoughtless assumption: he was a Son of the Lonely City—of course he would return. But the more he considered it, the more improbable it began to seem. Were he to work the Goddess's divine will, murder the Aspect-Emperor... Surely that would mean his doom as well. And were he to deny the Goddess, become a Believer-King at the risk of his immortal soul... Would that not mean a different doom?

  And if he were to return, how could he describe, let alone explain, the things he had witnessed?

  How could he be Sakarpi?

  Moënghus loomed out of the dark long before his turn to take watch and took a seat beside him, his manner as wordless and sombre as the Sakarpi King's own. Sorweel's alarm quickly subsided. Even after so many months of duplicity, he was not a man who could comfortably think treachery in the presence of those he intended to betray. In the siblings' company he invariably gave reign to a certain amenity in his nature—one easily confused for cowardice.

  He could only plot in solitude.

  They sat in silence, staring out over the sunless tracts, soaking in the aura of companionship that often rises between speechless men. Since Sorweel did not look at the man, he remained a brooding shadow in his periphery, one laden with intimations of physical force and errant passion.

  "Your father..." the young King ventured to ask. "Do you think he has... grasped God?"

  Sorweel would never know what motivated his honesty. A man, he was beginning to learn, could become as accustomed to contradiction and dilemma as to heartbreak.

  "A strange question for a Believer-King," the Prince-Imperial snorted. "I could report you to the Judges!"