The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  After the first week, the miraculous endurance of their Jiunati ponies began to fail, and Harnilas had no choice but to leave more and more of their company hobbling on foot behind them. The rule he used was simple: those he deemed strong riders went on, while those he deemed weak were left behind, regardless of whose pony failed. Obotegwa was among the first to be so abandoned: Sorweel need only blink to see the old Satyothi smiling in philosophic resignation, trudging through the dust of their trotting departure. Charampa and other Scions who were not bred to horses were quick to follow. Eskeles was the sole exception-even though the others began calling him "Pony-killer." Every other day, it seemed, his paunch broke another pony's strength and so doomed another Scion to trudge alone on foot. He felt the shame keenly, so much so that he began refusing his rations. "I carry my pack on my waist," he would say with a forced laugh.

  The remaining Scions began watching him in exasperation-and, in some cases, outright hatred. The fifth pony he lamed, Harnilas chose a tempestuous Girgashi youth named Baribul to yield his mount. "What?" the young man cried to the Mandate Schoolman. "You cannot walk across the sky?"

  "There are Quya on the horizon!" the sorcerer exclaimed. "We are all dead if I draw their eye!"

  "Yield your shag!" Harnilas bellowed at the youth. "I will not ask again!"

  Baribul wheeled about to face the commander. "There will be war for this!" he roared. "My father will sound the High Shi-"

  Harnilas hefted his lance, skewered the young man's throat with a blurred throw.

  The Kidruhil veteran spurred his pony in a tight circle about the dying youth. "I care not for your fathers!" he called to the others, resolution like acid in his eyes. "I care not for your laws or your customs! And apart from my mission, I care not for you! Only one of us needs to reach the Holy General! One of us! and the Great Ordeal will be saved-as will your fathers and their fool customs!"

  The huffing Schoolman clambered onto Baribul's pony, his face dark with the rage that weak men use to overmatch their shame. The remaining Scions had already turned their backs to him, resumed their northward drift. Baribul was dead, and they were too tired to care. He had been insufferably arrogant, anyway.

  Sorweel lingered behind, staring at the body in the dust. For the first time, he understood the mortal stakes of their endeavour-the mission his insight had delivered. The Scions could very well be doomed, and unless he set aside his cowardice and pride, he would die not only without brothers but without friends as well.

  The Company rode in haphazard echelon across the plain, each pony hauling skirts of spectral dust. Zsoronga rode alone, relieved of his Brace by the steady loss of their mounts. He hung his head, his blinks so sticky as to become heartbeats of sleep. His mouth hung open. They had ridden past exhaustion, into mania and melancholy, into the long stupor of mile stacked upon endless mile.

  "I'm next," the Successor-Prince said with offhand disgust as Sorweel approached. "The fat man eyes my Mebbee even now. Eh, Mebbee?" He raked affectionate fingers through his pony's plumed mane. "Imagine. The Satakhan of High Holy Zeum, stumping alone through the dust…"

  "I'm sure we'll fi-"

  "But this is good," Zsoronga interrupted, raising a hand in a loose but-yes gesture. "Whenever my courtiers air their grievances, I can say, 'Yes, I remember the time I was forced to hobble alone through Sranc-infested wastes…'" He laughed as if seeing their faces blanch in his soul's eye. "Who could whine to such a Satakhan? Who would dare?"

  He had turned to Sorweel as he said this, but he spoke in the inward manner of those who think their listeners cannot understand.

  "I'm not one of the Believer-Kings!" Sorweel blurted.

  Zsoronga blinked as though waking.

  "You speak Sheyic now?"

  "I'm not a Believer-King," Sorweel pressed. "I know you think I am."

  The Successor-Prince snorted and turned away.

  "Think? No, Horse-King. I know. "

  "How? How could you know?"

  Exhaustion has a way of parting the veils between men, not so much because the effort of censoring their words exceeds them, but because weariness is the foe of volatility. Oft times insults that would pierce the wakeful simply thud against the sleepless and fatigued.

  Zsoronga grinned in what could only be called malice. "The Aspect-Emperor. He sees the hearts of Men, Horse-King. He saw yours quite clearly, I think."

  " No. I… I don't know what happened at the-the…" He had assumed his tongue would fail him, that his Sheyic would be so rudimentary that it would only humiliate him, but the words were there, cemented by all those dreary watches he had spent cursing Eskeles. "I don't know what happened at the council!"

  Zsoronga looked away, sneering as though at a younger sister. " I thought it plain," he said. " Two spies were revealed. Two false faces…"

  Sorweel glared. Frustration welled through him and with it an overwhelming urge to simply close his eyes and slump from his saddle. His thoughts sagged, reeled into nonsensical convolutions. The ground looked cushion soft. He would sleep such a sleep! And his pony, Stubborn-Eskeles could have him. He was strong. Zsoronga could keep Mebbee, and so lose the moral high-ground to his whining courtiers…

  The young King was quick in blinking away this foolishness.

  "Zsoronga. Look at me… Please. I am the enemy of your enemy! He murdered my father! "

  The Successor-Prince pawed his face as though trying to wipe away the exhaustion.

  "Then why-?"

  "To sow… thrauma… discord between us! To sow discord in my own heart! Or… or…"

  A look of flat disgust. "Or?"

  "Maybe he was… mistaken."

  "What?" Zsoronga crowed, laughing. "Because he found your soul too subtle? A barbarian? Spare me your lies, shit-herder!"

  "No… No! Because…"

  "Because… Because…" Zsoronga mocked.

  For some reason this barb found its way through the numbness, stung enough to bring tears to his eyes. "You would think me mad if I told you," the young King of Sakarpus said, his voice cracking.

  Zsoronga gazed at him for a long, expressionless moment-a look of judgment and decision.

  "I've seen you in battle," he finally said, speaking with the semblance of cruelty that men sometimes use to make room for a friend's momentary weakness. He smiled as best his heart could manage. "I already think you mad!"

  A single teasing accusation, and the rift of suspicion between them was miraculously healed. Often men need only speak around things to come together and so remember what it means to speak through.

  Too weary to feel gratified or relieved, Sorweel began telling the Successor-Prince everything that had transpired since the death of his father and the fall of his hallowed city. He told him of the stork who had alighted on the walls the instant before the Great Ordeal attacked his city. He told him how he had wept in the Aspect-Emperor's arms. He confessed everything, no matter how shameful, how weak, knowing that for all the aloofness of Zsoronga's gaze, the man no longer judged him with a simple rule.

  And then he told him about the slave, Porsparian…

  "He… he… made a face, her face, in the earth. And-I swear to you, Zsoronga! — he gathered… mud… spit, from her lips. He rubbed it across my chee-"

  " Before the council?" Zsoronga asked, astonished eyes shining from a dubious scowl. "Before the Anasurimbor named you one of the faithful?"

  "Yes! Yes! And ever since… Even Kayutas congratulates me on my… my turning."

  "Conversion," Zsoronga corrected, his head slung low in concentration. "Your conversion…"

  So far the young King of Sakarpus had spoken through the weariness that hooks lead weights to each and every thought, making the effort of talking akin to that of lifting what would rather sink. Suddenly speaking felt more like trying to submerge air-filled bladders-holding down things that should be drowned.

  "Tell me what you think!" Sorweel cried.

  "This is bad rushru… The Mother of Birth…
For us, she is the slave Goddess. Beneath our petitioni-"

  "It does shame me!" Sorweel blurted. "I am one of the warlings! Born of blood both ancient and noble! Trothed to Gilgaol since my fifth summer! She shames me!"

  "But not beneath our respect," Zsoronga continued with an air of superstitious concern. Dust had chalked his kinked hair, so that he resembled Obotegwa, older and wiser than his years. "She is among the eldest… the most powerful."

  "So what are you saying?"

  The Successor-Prince absently stroked his pony's neck rather than answer. Even when hesitating, Zsoronga possessed a directness, a paradoxical absence of hesitation. He was one of those rare men who always moved in accordance with themselves, as though his soul had been cut and stitched from a single cloth-so unlike the patched motley that was Sorweel's soul. Even when the Successor-Prince doubted, his confidence was absolute.

  "I think," Zsoronga said, "and by that I mean think… that you are what they call narindari in the Three Seas…" His body seemed to sway about the stationary point of his gaze. "Chosen by the Gods to kill."

  "Kill?" Sorweel cried. "Kill?"

  "Yes," the Successor-Prince replied, his green eyes drawn down by the frightful weight of his ruminations. When he looked up, he gazed with a certain blankness, as if loathe to dishonour his friend with any outward sign of pity. "To avenge your father."

  Sorweel already knew this, but in the manner of men who have caged their fears. He knew this as profoundly as he knew anything, and yet somehow he had managed to convince himself it wasn't true.

  He had been chosen to kill the Aspect-Emperor.

  "So what am I to do?" he cried, more honest to his panic than he intended. "What does She expect of me?"

  Zsoronga snorted with the humour of the perpetually overmatched. "What does the Mother expect? The Gods are children and we are their toys. Look at you sausages! They cherish us one day, break us the next." He held out his arms as if to mime Mankind's age-old exasperation. "We Zeumi pray to our ancestors for a reason."

  Sorweel blinked against mutinous eyes. "Then what do you think I should do?"

  "Stand in front of me as much as possible!" the handsome Successor-Prince chortled. A better part of Zsoronga's strength, Sorweel had learned, lay in his ability to drag good humour out of any circumstance. It was a trait he would try to emulate.

  "Look at these past days, Horse-King," the black man continued when Sorweel's lack of amusement became clear. "With every throw of the number-sticks you win! First, She disguised you. Now She exalts you with glory on the field, raises you in the eyes of men. Can't you see? You were little more than a foundling when you first joined the Scions. Now old Harni can scarce sneeze without begging your advice…" Zsoronga appraised him with a kind of cocked wonder.

  "She is positioning you, Sorweel."

  More truths he had already known yet refused to acknowledge. Suddenly, the young King of Sakarpus found himself regretting his confession, repenting what was in fact his first true conversation since the death of his father. Suddenly it seemed pathetic and absurd, searching for a brother in a Son of Zeum, a nation the Sakarpi used to refer to things too distant or too strange to be credited.

  "What if I don't want to be disguised or positioned?"

  Zsoronga shook his head with a kind of bemoaning wonder. You sausages… his eyes said.

  "We Zeumi pray to our ancestors for a reason."

  Clouds climbed the horizon, and the Men of the Middle-North rejoiced, thinking the Gods had relented at long last. They sailed across the sky with the grace of whales, ever more crowded, ever more bruised about their bellies, but aside from brief showers of spittle, the rain did not come. A windless humidity rose in its stead, the kind that makes sodden cloth of limbs and lead of burdens. The day ended in weariness and indecision, the same as any other, save that the Zaudunyani's exhaustion was total and their unslaked thirst extreme. The absence of dust was their only reprieve.

  Night brought near absolute darkness.

  The attack came during the first watch. A Sranc war-party some twenty lances strong simply leapt out of the blackness and fell upon the Galeoth flank. Men who muttered among themselves to while away the boredom cried out in sudden horror and were no more. The Sranc swept over the outermost sentries, raced caterwauling toward the ranks of the night defenders proper. Men locked shields against the blackness, lowered their pikes. Some cursed while others prayed. Then the obscenities were upon them, hacking and howling, their limbs wasted, their stomachs pinned to their spines. Heaving and hewing along the length of their shallow line, the Galeoth held their ground. Crying out hymns, they struck the maniacal creatures down.

  Horns and alarums rang through the rest of the host. Men raced to their positions, some hopping to pull on their boots, others with their hauberks swinging. Agmundrmen with their war knots, Nangaels with their blue-tattooed cheeks, Numaineiri with their great hanging beards: ironclad men drawn from all the great tribes of Galeoth, Thunyerus, and Ce Tydonn, arrayed across a mile of flats and shallow ravines. They readied themselves with cursing bravado, and then, when every strap was buckled and every shield raised, they peered across the dark plain. Behind their gleaming ranks, the Kidruhil and caste-noble knights loitered in mounted clots, many standing in their stirrups to gaze as well.

  No one saw anything, such was the darkness. During the following watch, news of the Sranc war-party's easy defeat circulated through the ranks. The cynics among them predicted weeks of blaring horns and sleepless, pointless vigils.

  General Kayutas sent out several Kidruhil companies to reconnoitre the plain. The cavalrymen loathed few things more than riding pickets at night-for fear of ambush, certainly, but more for fear of being thrown. Since Sakarpus, some eighty souls had perished ranging the dark and hundreds more had been injured or crippled. After the Judges executed a Kidruhil captain for deliberately laming his ponies to feed his men, the companies were even denied the tradition of feasting on the crippled mounts.

  The Northmen became complacent, and soon the host boomed with impatient chatter. Several pranksters broke ranks to dance and gesticulate before the pitch-black distances. The thanes could not silence them, no matter how hard they bawled. So when reports of cries heard on the plain reached General Kayutas, he was not immediately inclined to believe them…

  He summoned his sister, Serwa, only when the first of the scouting parties failed to return.

  As with the other Schools, the Swayali Witches had remained largely cloistered within the host. Apart from chance encounters in the camp, the Zaudunyani saw them only during the Signalling, when one of the Swayali would climb the night sky to flash coded messages to their Saik counterparts in the Army of the East.

  The reasons for this discretion were many-fold. The Swayali were witches, for one. Despite the Aspect-Emperor, many held their old prejudices fast-how could they not, when so many of their words for sorcery and its practitioners were also words for wickedness? They were women, for another. Several men had already been whipped, and one even executed, for acting out deranged infatuations. But most importantly, the Aspect-Emperor wished to deny the Consult any easy reckoning of the power he brought against them. For in truth, all the Men of the Ordeal in their countless, shining thousands were little more than a vehicle for the safe conveyance of the Schools.

  Prince Anasurimbor Kayutas decided the time for discretion was at an end.

  At her brother's command, Serwa deployed her witches behind the common line, holding forty-three of the most senior and accomplished in reserve. A profound hush accompanied their appearance throughout the camp. The "Nuns," the Men called them. With their yellow billows-the immense silken gowns they wore as protection against Chorae-wrapped and bound about them, the Swayali indeed resembled Jokian Nuns.

  Sorcerous utterances cracked the gloom, and one by one the witches stepped into the air. They strode out over the deep ranks of the common line. Men in their thousands craned their necks to follow their soundless cours
e. Some murmured, a few even called out, but most held their breath for wonder. Given the youth of the School, the women were young as well, with faces of smooth alabaster and teak, lips full about the lights that flashed from them. Free of the ground, they unbound their billows, spake the small Cant that animated them. The fabric dropped, unfurled in arcs that twined in the glow of the Nuns' arcane voices. One by one the Swayali bloomed, opened like flowers of golden silk, and the Men of Ordeal were dumbstruck.

  Swayali, the School of Witches.

  They climbed out beyond the common line, a second chevron, like a mathematical apparition of the first, two hundred lights flung into the blackness of the plain. They stopped, hung like wickless candle lights. Arcane chanting, eerie and feminine, shrugged away the cavernous heights of the night and found ears in the form of intimate whispers.

  Prompted by some inaudible signal, they lit the world in unison.

  Bars of Heaven, lines of blinding white rising from the wasted ground to the shrouded sky, some two hundred of them, like silver spokes across the near horizon.

  Their faces slack above the rims of their shields, the Men of the Middle-North squinted across a lightning-illuminated world, one devoid of sound, bleached of colour. At first, many could not credit their eyes. Many stood blinking as if trying to awaken.

  Instead of earth, Sranc. Instead of distance, Sranc.

  Fields upon fields of them, creeping on their bellies like worms.

  They had come as locusts, where the lust of the one sparks the lust of the other, until all is plague. They had come, answering a cunning as old as the age of their obscene manufacture. They had come to feast and they had come to couple, for they knew of no other possibility.