The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  Esmenet, he understood, had tried to undo her crime with the commission of another. She had mistook vengeance for reparation.

  "So you understand," Mimara continued, swallowing. "My first years on the Andiamine Heights were hateful… shameful, even. You understand why I did everything I could to punish Mother."

  Achamian studied her for a moment before nodding. The company had crested a gradual slope and now descended, using webs of bared roots as steps. A rare glimpse of the sun flashed above, making silhouettes of shagged leaves.

  "I understand," he said as they picked their way down, feeling the raw weight of his own story, his own grievances, press through the tone of his reply. They were both victims of Esmenet.

  They walked in silence, their strides as thoughtless as they were quick.

  "Thank you," Mimara said after a time, fixing him with a curious gaze.

  "For what?"

  "For not asking what all the others ask."

  "Which is?"

  "How I could have stayed all those years. How I could have allowed myself to be used as I was used. Apparently everyone would have run away, slit their master's throat, committed suicide…"

  "Nothing makes fools of people quite like a luxurious life," Achamian said, shaking his head and nodding. "Ajencis says they confuse decisions made atop pillows for those compelled by stones. When they hear of other people being deceived, they're certain they would know better. When they hear of other people being oppressed, they're certain they would do anything but beg and cringe when the club is raised…"

  "And so they judge," Mimara said sourly.

  "They certainly picked the wrong woman in your case!"

  This coaxed another smile-another small triumph.

  She began talking about her younger siblings, haltingly at first, then with more confidence and detail. She seemed surprised by her own reminiscences, and troubled. She had foresworn her family-he knew that much. But watching and listening to her describe the embittered object of her anger, he came to suspect she had gone so far as to deny her family, to tell herself that she was in fact alone, without the guy ropes of kith and kin to prop her.

  Small wonder she had been so reluctant to tell him anything. People are generally loathe to describe what they need to forget, especially the small things, the loving things that contradict their precious sense of injustice.

  She started with Kayutas, the child Esmenet had carried in her womb the day Achamian had repudiated her before the assembled Lords of the Holy War. He would have seemed a kind of god to her, she said, had her stepfather not been Kellhus-a real God. "He is the very image of his father," she said, nodding as if agreeing with her own description. "Not so remote, certainly… More…"

  "Human," the old Wizard said, scowling.

  She then turned to Moenghus, whom she described as the most normal and difficult of her younger siblings. Apparently he was quite the terror as a youth, given to episodes of inconsolable anger and continually brooding, if not sulking. Esmenet regularly left the boys in her care-with the hope of fostering some tenderness for her younger siblings, Mimara presumed. She despised the swimming expeditions most of all.

  Apparently Moenghus enjoyed diving under the water and not reappearing for the longest time. The first incident was the worst-she even called on their bodyguards to help her, only to watch Moenghus's head break the flashing water several spans away. He ignored her commands and curses, and repeated the stunt again and again. Each time she would tell herself he was simply playing, but her heart would continue counting beats, and the panic would well higher and higher-until she was fairly beside herself with fear and fury. Then his head would magically pop into sight, his black hair glazed in white sunlight, and he would glare at her shouting antics before descending again. Finally she turned on his brother, demanding an explanation.

  "Because," Kayutas said with a detachment that clammed her skin, "he wants people to think him dead."

  The old Wizard responded with a nodding snort. When he asked her whether anyone knew about his true parentage, she merely frowned and said, "Questioning our holy parentage is sacrilege."

  Lies, Achamian mused. Deceit heaped atop deceit. In the early days of his exile, he would sometimes lie awake at night, convinced that sooner or later someone would see through Kellhus and his glamour, that the truth would win out, and all the madness would come crashing down…

  That he could come home and reclaim his wife.

  But as the years passed he came to see this for the rank foolishness that it was. He-a student of Ajencis, no less! Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies-words-and so sank or floated with equal ease. But since truths were carved by the World, they rarely appeased Men and their innumerable vanities. Men had no taste for facts that did not ornament or enrich, and so they wilfully-if not knowingly-panelled their lives with shining and intricate falsehoods.

  Mimara's eldest sister, Theliopa, would be the only one of her siblings to occasion a true smile. According to Mimara, the girl was almost incapable of expressing passion of any sort and was oblivious-sometimes comically so-to all but the most obvious social graces. She was also dreadfully thin, famine thin, and had to be continually cajoled and bullied to eat. But her intellect was nothing short of a miracle. Everything she read, she remembered, and she read voraciously, often to the point of forgetting to sleep. Her gifts were so prodigious that Kellhus made her an Imperial Adviser at the tender age of twelve, after which she became a continual presence in her mother's entourage: pale, emaciated, decked in absurd gowns of her own design and manufacture.

  "It's hard not to pity her," Mimara said, her gaze flat with memories, "even as you marvel…"

  "What do people say?"

  "Say?"

  "About her… peculiarities. What do they think caused them?" Few things inspired more malicious speculation than deformities. Conriya even had a law-back before the New Empire, anyway-rendering misshapened children the property of the King. Apparently the court diviners thought a careful reading of their deformations could reveal much about the future.

  "They say my stepfather's seed is too heavy for mortal women to bear," Mimara said. "He took other wives, 'Zikas' they call them, after the small bowls they pass out for libations on the Day of Ascension. But of those who became pregnant, none carried to term-either that or they died… Only Mother."

  Achamian could only nod, his thoughts roiling. Kellhus had to have known this, he realized. From the very beginning he had known Esmenet possessed the strength to survive him and his progeny. And so he had set out to conquer her womb as one more tool-one more weapon — in his unceasing war of word, insight, and passion.

  You needed her, so you took…

  Regarding her sister Serwa, Mimara said very little, save that she was cold and arrogant.

  "She's the Grandmistress of the Swayali, now. Grandmistress! I don't think Mother ever forgave Kellhus for sending her away… I saw very little of her, and when I did my teeth fairly cracked for envy. Studying with the Sisters! Attaining the only thing I truly desired!"

  Inrilatas, on the other hand, she discussed for quite some time, partly because Esmenet had sought to involve her in the boy's upbringing. According to Mimara, none of her siblings possessed more of their father's gifts-or more of their mother's all too human weaknesses. Speaking long before any infant should. Never forgetting. And seeing deeper, far deeper, than any human could… or should.

  His subsequent madness, she said, was inevitable. He was perpetually at a loss, perpetually overwhelmed by the presence of others. Unlike his father, he could only see the brute truths, the facts and lies that compelled the course of lives, but these were quite enough.

  "He would look into my eyes and say impossible things… hateful things…"

  "How do you mean?"

  "He told me once that I punished mother not to avenge my slavery, but because… because…"

  "Because what?"

  "Because I was broken inside," she sai
d, her lips set in a grim and brittle line. "Because I had suffered so much so long that kindness had become the only cruelty I could not endure-kindness! — and so suffering would be all I… all I would ever know…"

  She trailed, turned her face away to swat at the tears clotting her eyes.

  "So I told him," she continued, avoiding Achamian's gaze. "I told him that I had never known kindness because everything-everything! — I had been given had been just another way to take-to steal! 'You cannot stroke a beaten dog,' he replied, 'because it sees only the raised hand…' A beaten dog! Can you believe it? What kind of little boy calls his grown sister a beaten dog?"

  A Dunyain, the old Wizard thought in unspoken reply.

  She must have glimpsed something of his sorrow in his eyes: the outrage in her expression, which had been helpless in the face of memory, turned in sudden fury upon him.

  "You pity me?" she cried, as if her pain were something with its own outrage and volition. "Pity?"

  "Don't, Mimara. Don't do this…"

  "Do what? What? "

  "Make Inrilatas true."

  This smacked the fury from her expression. She stared at him speechless, her body jerking as her legs carried her thoughtlessly forward, her eyes wide with a kind of desolate horror.

  "What about the others?" the old Wizard asked, snipping all memory of her outburst from his tone. The best way to retrieve a conversation from disaster, he often found, was to speak as if the disaster had never happened. "I know there's more-the twins. Tell me about them."

  She marched in silence for a time, collecting herself, Achamian supposed. The footing had become even more treacherous: a stream had gullied the forest floor, cutting away the loam beneath the feet of several massive elms so that roots hung in tentacled sheets to their right. Achamian could see the rest of the party below, picking their way under a toppled giant with the same haste that was taking such a toll on the Hags. He glimpsed Cleric behind the Captain, white and bald and obviously not human. Even from a distance, his Mark blotted out his inhuman physical beauty, stained him with gut-wrenching ugliness.

  The stream glittered, a ribbon of liquid obsidian in the gloom. The air smelled of clay and cold rot.

  "They were the only ones, really…" she finally said. "The twins. I was there, you know… there from the beginning with them. I saw them drawn squalling from Mother's womb…" She paused to watch her booted feet pick steps across the ground. "I think that was the only moment I truly… truly loved her."

  "You've never stopped loving her," Achamian said. "You wouldn't care to hate her otherwise."

  Anger shrouded her eyes once again, but to her credit she managed to purge it from her voice. She was trying, the old Wizard realized. She wanted to trust him. Even more, she wanted to understand what he saw when he looked upon her-perhaps too desperately. "What do you mean?"

  "No love is simple, Mimara." Something hooked his voice while saying this, something like weak eyes and a burning throat. "At least no love worth the name."

  "But…"

  "But nothing," he said. "Far too many of us confuse complexity for impurity-or even pollution. Far too many of us mourn what we should celebrate as a result. Life is unruly, Mimara. Only tyrants and fools think otherwise."

  She frowned in a mock here-we-go-again manner. "Ajencis?" she asked, her eyes bright and teasing.

  "No… Just wisdom. Not everything I say is borrowed, you know!"

  She walked in silence for a time, her smile fading into a look of puzzled concentration. Achamian paced her in silence.

  She resumed her account, describing the Imperial twins, Kelmomas and Samarmas. The latter was indeed an idiot, as Achamian had heard. But according to Mimara, the Imperial Physicians had feared both children were idiots in the beginning. Apparently the two infants would simply stare into each other's eyes, day after day, month after month, then year after year. If separated, they ceased to eat, as if they shared but one appetite between the two of them. It was only after Esmenet contracted a celebrated physician from Conriya that their two souls were finally pried apart and the idiocy of Samarmas was revealed.

  "It was a wonder," Mimara exclaimed, as if reliving the memories of their cure in a rush. "To be so… so strange, and then to waken as, well, beautiful little boys, normal in all respects."

  "You were fond of them."

  "How could I not be? They were innocents born into a labyrinth-a place devious beyond compare. The others could never see it, no matter how much they complained and clucked, they could never see the Andiamine Heights for what it was."

  "And what was that?"

  "A prison. A carnival. And a temple, a temple most of all. One where sins were counted according to harms endured rather than inflicted. It was no place for children! I told Mother as much, told her to take the twins to one of the Refuge Estates, some place where they could grow in the light of the sun, where things were… were…"

  They had stooped to make their way beneath the fallen tree he'd seen earlier, so he supposed she had trailed to better concentrate. The limbs of the giant had folded and snapped, either bending back or prying deep into the earth. Dead leaves hung in rasping sheets. Finding passage was no easy task.

  "Where things were what?" he asked when it became apparent she did not care to continue.

  "Simple," she said dully.

  Achamian smiled in his wise old teacher way. The thought occurred to him that she had sought to protect the memory of her own childhood as much as the innocence of her two little brothers. But he said nothing. People rarely appreciate alternative, self-serving interpretations of their conduct-especially when suffering ruled the balance of their lives.

  "Let me guess," he ventured. "Your mother refused, said that they would need to learn the perils and complexities of statecraft to survive as Princes-Imperial."

  "Something like that," she replied.

  "So you trusted him. Kelmomas, I mean."

  "Trusted?" she cried with open incredulity. "He was a child! He adored me-to the point of annoyance!" She fixed him with a vexed look, as if to say, Enough, old man… "He was the reason I ran away to find you, in fact."

  Something troubled the old Wizard about this, but as so often happens in the course of heated conversations, his worries yielded to the point he hoped to press home. "Yes… But he was a child of Kellhus, an Anasurimbor by blood."

  "So?"

  "So, that means he possesses Dunyain blood. Like Inrilatas."

  They had sloshed across the stream and were now climbing the far side of the gully. They could see the rest of the company above them, a string of frail forms labouring beneath the monumental trunks.

  "Ah, I keep forgetting," she said, huffing. "I suppose he simply must be manipulative and amoral…" She regarded him the way he imagined she had regarded countless others on the Andiamine Heights: as something ridiculous. "You've been cooped in the wilds too long, Wizard. Sometimes a child is just a child."

  "That's all they know, Mimara. The Dunyain. They're bred for it."

  She dismissed him with a flutter of eyelids. She had no inkling, he realized-like everyone else in the Three Seas. For her, Kellhus was simply what he appeared to be.

  In the first years of his exile, the hardest years, Achamian had spent endless hours revisiting the events of the First Holy War-his memories of Kellhus and Esmenet most of all. The more he pondered the man, the more obvious the Scylvendi's revelatory words came to seem, until it became difficult to remember what it was like living within the circuit of his glamour. To think he had still loved the man after he had lured Esmenet to his bed! That he had spent sleepless hours wrestling with excuses-excuses! — for him.

  But even still, after so many years, the appearances continued to argue for the man. Everything Mimara had described regarding the preparations for the Great Ordeal-even the scalpers accompanying him! — attested to what Kellhus had claimed so many years previous: that he had been sent to prevent the Second Apocalypse. Achamian had suffered that
old sense several times now while feuding with Mimara, the one that had plagued him as a Mandate Schoolman travelling the courts of the Three Seas arguing the very things Kellhus had made religion (and there was an irony that plucked, if there ever was one). The anxious urge to throw words atop words, as if speaking could plaster over the cracked expressions that greeted his claims. The plaintive, wheedling sense of being disbelieved.

  Maybe you need it, old man… Need to be disbelieved.

  He had seen it before: men who had borne perceived injustices so long they could never relinquish them and so continually revisited them in various guises. The world was filled with self-made martyrs. Fear goads fear, the old Nansur proverb went, and sorrow, sorrow.

  Perhaps he was mad. Perhaps everything-the suffering, the miles, the lives lost and taken-was naught but a fool's errand. As wrenching as this possibility was, and as powerful as the Scylvendi's words had been, Achamian would have been entirely prepared to accept his folly. He was a true student of Ajencis in this respect…

  Were it not for his Dreams. And the coincidence of the Coffers.

  The old Wizard continued on in silence, mulling the details of Mimara's tale. The picture she had drawn was as fascinating as it was troubling. Kellhus perpetually distracted, perpetually absent. His children possessing a jumble of human and Dunyain attributes-and half-mad for it, apparently. Games heaped upon games, and sorrow and resentment most of all. Esmenet had fetched her broken daughter from the brothel only to deliver her to the arena that was the Andiamine Heights-a place where no soul could mend.

  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.