The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  They loped like wolves, scuttled like spiders. They ran for truths they did not know, for verities written in their blood. They ran for the promise of violation…

  Only to be astonished by a human figure rising from wicks of scrub and grass.

  A woman.

  Baffled, they tripped to a walk, closed about her in a broad arc. The wind flowed over her limbs, rifled through her hair, her rags, drawing with it the sediment that was her scent.

  Man, rot, feces, and… and something else…

  Something at once alarming and alluring.

  They formed fences about her, swaying and screeching, brandishing crude weapons, or mewling in confused apprehension. Their Chieftain approached, his arms thrown down and back to drag knives through the powdery turf. He stood before her, nearly as tall, flies buzzing about the rotted leathers that clothed him.

  "What are you?" he barked.

  "A child of the same father," she said.

  The Chieftain began stomping. He bared his teeth, gnashed them for the woman to see. "Father… father! We have no fathers save the earth!"

  She smiled a mother's smile. "But you do. And they deny you this path."

  "Kill! Kill you! Kill-murder-fuck the others!"

  "Yet you have no hunger for me…"

  "No hunger…"

  "Because we are children of the same fathers."

  "Kill!" the Chieftain shrieked. "Kill-murder-fuck!" He shook his jaws like a wolf disputing a bone, raised his pitted knives to the featureless sky.

  The thing called Mimara leapt high over the Chieftain's wagging head. Sunlight sparked from bared steel. It somersaulted with preternatural languor, landed in a warrior stance. Behind its back the Chieftain jerked, shrieked, clawed the air, as if trying to snatch at the violet blood spouting from his neck. The beast spun into the dust, little more than a twitching shadow behind screens of chalk.

  "We are children of the same fathers," the woman said to the others. "Do you smell the truth-power of this?"

  A raucous swell of howls…

  "The Black Heaven will call you very soon."

  She smiled at the grovelling obscenities.

  "He will call you very soon."

  "What was it like?" she asks. "Meeting Kellhus for the first time, I mean."

  The old Wizard's reply is typically long-winded.

  Ajencis, he tells her, was fond of chiding his students for confusing assent with intellect. Apparently this confusion was what made obviously profound souls so troubling-and so rare. "You, my girl, are the ground of your assumptions. No matter how bent your cubit may be, it is the very definition of straight for you. So when another comes to you with their carpenter's string… Well, let's just say they will necessarily come up short the degree to which their assumptions deviate from yours-and it will strike you as obviously so. No matter how wrong, how foolish you are, you will think you know it 'in your stomach,' as the Galeoth say."

  "So true wisdom is invisible? You're saying we can't see it when we encounter it."

  "No. Only that we have great difficulty recognizing it."

  "Then what made my stepfather different?"

  The old Wizard walked in silence for what seemed a long while, pondering the kick of his boots through the leathery grasses. "I've spent many hours mulling this. Now, you see, he possesses the authority… He is the mighty, all-knowing Aspect-Emperor. His listeners come to him with their yardsticks in hand, actually seeking his correction. But back then… Well, he was little more than a beggar and a fugitive."

  His tone is halting, pensive. He has the manner of a man surprised by things so familiar they have become thoughtless.

  "He had a gift for showing you the implications of things…" he says, then trails into the silence of second thoughts. His brow furrows. His lips purse within the shaggy profile of his beard. "Ajencis was forever saying that ignorance is invisible," he begins again, "and that this is what fools us into thinking we know the truth of anything, let alone complicated matters. He thought certainty was a symptom of stupidity-the most destructive one. But at the risk of offending the Great Teacher-or his ancient shade, anyway-I would say that not all ignorances are… are equal. I think there are truths, profound truths, that we somehow know without knowing…"

  Mimara glances around the way she often does when they have conversations like this. Pokwas is the nearest, his harness sagging, his black skin chalked by dust. Galian trudges nearby-the two have become inseparable. Cleric strides more than walks several paces ahead, his scalp gleaming white in the wide-sky sun. Sarl lags with Koll, his face pulled into a perpetual grimace. The Skin Eaters. They look more like a scattered mob of refugees than a warlike company on a quest.

  "This…" Achamian says, still gazing into his reminiscences, "this was Kellhus's noschi, his genius. He could look into your eyes and pluck these… half-known truths from you… and so, within heartbeats of speaking with him, you would begin doubting your own cubit, and begin looking more and more toward his measure…"

  She feels her eyes arch wide in comprehension. "A deceiver could ask for no greater gift."

  The Wizard's look is so sharp that at first she fears she has offended him. But he has that appreciative gleam in his eyes, the one she has come to prize.

  "In all my years," he continues, "I have never quite understood worship, what happens to souls when they prostrate themselves before another-I've been a sorcerer for too long. And yet I did worship him… for a time. So much so I even forgave him the theft of your mother…"

  He shakes his head as if trying to ward away bees, looks away to the stationary line of the horizon. A cough kicks through him.

  "Whatever worship is," he says, "I think it involves surrendering your cubit… opening yourself to the perpetual correction of another…"

  "Having faith in ignorance," she adds with a wry grin.

  His laughter is so sudden, so mad with hilarity, that fairly all the scalpers turn toward them.

  "The grief you must have caused your mother!" he cries.

  Even though she smiles at the joke, a part of her stumbles in errant worry. When has she become so clever?

  The Qirri, she realizes. It quickens more than the step.

  Wary of the sudden attention, they stay their tongues. The silence of endless exertion climbs over them once again. She stares out toward the northern horizon, at the long divide between sky and earth. She thinks of Kellhus and her mother making love in a distant desert. Her hand drifts to her belly, but her thoughts dare not follow… Not yet.

  She has the sense of things bending.

  The World is old and miraculous and is filled with a deep despair that none truly know. The Nonman, Mimara has come to understand, is proof of this.

  "There was a time," he says, "when the world shook to the stamping chorus of our march…"

  Dusk rolls the plain's farther reaches into darkness and gloom. The wind buffets, hard enough to prickle with grit. Thunderheads scrawl across the sky, dark and glowing with internal discharges, but rainless save for the odd warm spit.

  The Nonman stands before them, naked to the waist, one held in the eyes of ten. His hairless form is perfect in cast and proportion, the very image of manly grace and strength, a statue in a land without sculptors.

  "There was such a time…"

  Thunder rolls across the mocking skies, and the scalpers crane their gazes this way and that. It alarms the soul, thunder on the plain. The eyes turn to shelter when the heavens crack, and plains are naught but the absence of shelter, exposure drawn on and on across the edge of the horizon. The plains offer no place to hide-only directions to run.

  "A time when we," Cleric says, "when we! — were many, and when these depravities-these skinnies — were few. There was a time when your forefathers wept at the merest rumour of our displeasure, when you offered up your sons and daughters to turn aside our capricious fury!"

  She cannot yank her gaze from him-Incariol. He is a mystery, a secret that she must know, if sh
e and Achamian were to be saved. His aspect has become a compulsion for her, like a totem or even an idol: something that rewards the ardour of its observation.

  "The most foolish among us," Cleric continues, "has forgotten more than your wisest will ever know. Even your Wizard is but a child stumbling in his father's boots. You are but twig-thin candles, burning fast and bright, revealing far more than your span allows you to fathom."

  He bends back his head until the line of his jaw forms a triangle above the banded muscle of his neck. He shouts heavenward, mouthing words that pool blue and brilliant white… Then, miraculously, he steps into the sky, arms out, rising until the clouds become a kind of mantle about his shoulders, a windblown cloak of smoke and warring, interior lights.

  "But now look at us," he booms down to their astonished shadows. "Diminished. Perpetually foundering. Lost without memories. Persecuted as false. Hunted by the very depths we warred to uncover, the very darkness we sought to illuminate."

  He hangs above them. He lowers his radiant gaze. His tears burn silver with refracted light. Thunder crashes, a thousand hammers against a thousand shields.

  "This is the paradox-is it not? The longer you live, the smaller you become. The past always dwarfs the present, even for races as fleeting as yours. One morning you awaken to find now… this very moment… little more than a spark in a cavern. One morning you awaken to find yourself so much… less…"

  Incariol, she thinks. Ishroi…

  "Less than what you wanted. Less than what you once were."

  She is in love, she realizes. Not with him, but with the power and wonder of what he was.

  "One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will ask where the glory has gone. Failing strength. Failing nerve. You will find yourself faltering at every turn, and your arrogance will grow brittle, defensive. Perhaps you will turn to your sons and their overshadowed ardour. Perhaps you will seal yourself in your mansion, as we did, proclaiming contempt for the world rather than face its cruel measure…"

  She is more in his presence, she decides. She will always be more, whether he flees or dies or utterly loses himself in the disorder that is his soul. For knowing him… Cleric.

  "One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will peer through the maze of your depleted life, and see that you are lost…"

  He abandons his mantle of clouds, sinking as though on a wire. He sets foot upon powder-dry earth.

  Mimara leans forward with the Wizard and the other scalpers. Their mouths hang slack with drool.

  "Lost like us," he murmurs, reaching for the wonder that hides in his pouch.

  The thunderheads continue their march into the obscurity of night.

  The rain, as always, refuses to fall.

  – | Cil-Aujas, she decides. Something broke in Cil-Aujas. Something between them, something within. And now sanity is abandoning them, drip by lucid drip.

  There's a new Rule of the Slog, and even though it has never been spoken, Mimara knows with utter certainty that violators will be punished as lethally as all the others. A rule that ensures no mention shall be made of the madness slowly possessing them.

  No questions. No doubters on the slog.

  The extraordinary thing about insanity, she has come to realize, is the way it seems so normal. When she thinks of the way the droning days simply drop into their crazed, evening bacchanals, nothing strikes her as strange-nothing visceral, anyway. Things that should make her shudder, like the nip of Cleric's nail as his finger roams the inside of her cheek, are naught but part of a greater elation, as unremarkable as any other foundation stone.

  It is only when she steps back and reflects that the madness stares her plain in the eye.

  "He's killing you…" the thing called Soma had said. "The Nonman."

  She finds herself drifting to the rear of their scattered mob and approaching Sarl, thinking that someone wholly broken might know something about the cracks now riddling their souls. According to the old Wizard, the Sergeant has known Lord Kosoter since the Unification Wars-a long time, as far as life is measured by scalpers. Perhaps he can decipher the skin-spy's riddle.

  "The Slog of Slogs," she says lamely, not knowing where to begin with a madman. "Eh, Sarl?"

  The others have long since abandoned him to his crazed musings. No one dares glance at him, for fear of sparking some kind of rambling tirade. For weeks she has expected, and a couple of times even hoped, that the Captain would silence him. But no matter how long his harsh voice rattles on into the night, nothing is done, nothing is said.

  Sarl, it seems, is the lone exception to the Rules.

  "She talks to me," he says, staring off to her right as if she were a phantasm that had plagued his ruminations too long to be directly addressed. "The second most beautiful thing…"

  He was easily one of the most wrinkled men she had ever seen when she first saw him. Now his skin is as creased as knotted linen. His tunic has rotted to rags, his hauberk swings unfastened from his knobbed shoulders, and his kilt has somehow lost its backside, baring withered buttocks to open daylight.

  "Tell me, Sergeant. How long have you known the Captain?"

  "The Captain?" The hoary old man wags a finger, shaking his head in cackling reproach. "The Captain, is it? He-heeee! There's no explanation for the likes of him. He's not of this world!"

  She flinches at the volume of his voice, reflexively lowers her own tone to compensate.

  "How so?"

  He shudders with silent laughter. "Sometimes souls get mixed up. Sometimes the dead bounce! Sometimes old men awaken behind the eyes of babes! Sometimes wolves…"

  "What are you saying?"

  "Don't cross him," he rasps with something like conspiratorial glee. "He-he! Oh, no, girl. Never cross him!"

  "But he's such a friendly fellow!" Mimara cries.

  He catches her joke but seems to entirely miss the humour. So much of his laughter possesses the dull hollow of reflex. More and more he seems to make the sound of laughter without laughing at all…

  And suddenly she can feel it, the lie that has been burrowing through all of them, like a grub that devours meaning and leaves only motions. Laughter without humour. Breath without taste. Words said in certain sequences to silence words unsaid-words that must never be said.

  Her whole life she has lived some kind of lie. Her whole life she has charted her course about some contradiction, knowing yet not knowing, and erring time and again.

  But this lie is different. This lie somehow eludes the pain of those other lies. This lie carves the world along more beautiful joints.

  This lie is bliss.

  She needs only look to the others to see they know this with the same deathless certainty. Even Sarl, who had long since fled the world's teeth, content to trade fancy for mad fancy, seems to understand that something… false… is happening.

  "And Cleric… How did you fall in with him?"

  There's something about the Sergeant's presence that winds her. His gait is at once vigorous and wide, his arms swinging out like a skinny man pretending to be fat.

  "Found him," he says.

  "Found him? How? Where?"

  Mischief twinkles in his gaze.

  "Found him like a coin in the dirt!"

  "But where? How?"

  "After we took Carythusal, when they disbanded the Eastern Zaudunyani… they sent us north to Hunoreal, he-he!"

  "Sent you? Who sent you?"

  "The Ministrate. The Holies. Stack skinnies, they said. Haul the bales and keep the gold-they don't care about gold, the Holies. Just stay on the southeastern marches of Galeoth, they said. Nowhere else? No. No. Just there…"

  This confuses her. She has always thought that scalpers were volunteers.

  "But what about Cleric?" she presses. "Incariol…"

  "Found him!" he explodes with a phlegmatic roar. "Like a coin in the dirt!"

  More eyes have turned to them, and she suddenly feels conspicuous-even guilty in a strange way. Aside from
other madmen, only thieves trade jokes with madmen-as a way of playing them. Even the old Wizard watches her with a quizzical squint.

  Simply talking to the man has compromised her, she realizes. The others now know that she's seeking something… The Captain knows.

  "The Slog of Slogs," she says lamely. "They'll sing songs across the Three Seas, Sergeant-think on it! The Psalm of the Skin Eaters."

  The old man begins weeping, as though overwhelmed by the charity of her self-serving words.

  "Seju bless you, girl," he coughs, staring at her with bleary, blinking eyes. For some reason he has started limping, as if his body has broken with his heart.

  Suddenly he smiles in his furrow-faced way, his eyes becoming little more than deeper perforations in his red-creased face. "It's been lonely," he croaks through rotted teeth.

  They see the plume of dust shortly after breaking camp. It rises chalk-white and vertical before being drawn into a mountainous, spectral wing by the wind. The plains pile to the north in desiccated sheets, some crumpled, others bent into stumps and low horns. The plumb line of the horizon has been raised and buckled, meaning some time will pass before the authors of the plume become visible. So they continue travelling with a wary eye to the north. Mimara hears Galian and Pokwas muttering about Sranc. The company has yet to encounter any since crossing into the Istyuli, so it stands to reason.

  The plume waxes and wanes according to unseen terrain but grows ever nearer. The Captain barks no instructions, even when the first of the specks appear crawling across the back of a distant knoll.

  Hands held against the spiking sun, they peer into the distance.

  Riders. Some forty or fifty of them-just enough to defend themselves against a single clan of skinnies. A motley assemblage of caste-menials, wearing crude hauberks of splint over stained tunics of blue and gold. Their beards hang to their waists, sway to the canter of their ponies. They ride beneath a standard she has never seen before, though she recognizes the checkered black shields of Nangaelsa.