The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  King Umrapathur and his planners knew of the Irshi, of course, but they had assumed, as was reasonable considering the hundred rivers they had crossed thus far, that it would also be droughted. They had even discussed the possibility of sending cohorts of Schoolmen out in advance of the Horde in the hope of catching it crossing fords. They did not realize they had come to the first of many rivers whose high sources threaded the peaks of the Great Yimaleti-that for vast stretches of its length, the Irshi had no fordable crossings.

  The Horde found itself caught along its fanged banks. Multitudes were drowned, thrown into the gorges by the relentless press of their kin. Worm-white carcasses tumbled down the river's tempestuous lengths and formed macabre rafts along its idylls, stretches of bloat and filth that sheeted the Irshi from bank to bank. But as the clans retreated out of terror of the Shining Men, they soon began shrinking from the threshing waters as well. The raucous stormfront that was the Horde slowed, then halted altogether.

  Prince Massar ab Kascamandri would be the first to bear the tidings to King Umrapathur: "The Horde… It no longer withdraws before our lances."

  The council was thrown into an uproar. What were they to do? How could they assail such impossible numbers while masses more roiled about and behind their flanks?

  Carindusu was the first to upbraid them. "Can't you see that this a boon?" he cried. "All this time fretting, wringing our hands because the skinnies outrun us, because we cannot kill them quickly enough, and now, when Fate pins them in place, delivers them to our fury, we fret and wring our hands?" With the Horde trapped and with Mandate and the Vokalati combined, the Grandmaster argued, the Culling would become outright butchery. He and his arcane brethren would lay carrion across the horizon.

  The Believer-Kings turned to Apperens Saccarees, who gazed at his rival with wary appreciation.

  "Perhaps the Grandmaster speaks true," he said.

  And so the council fell to devising a new strategy. As men are prone, they took heart in what they thought was evidence of their own ingenuity. Prince Charapatha alone harboured misgivings, for among the Lords of the South, only he reasoned that the Consult would also know of the Irshi-and so know it would catch the Horde. He was not named the Prince of One Hundred Songs for nothing: he understood the advantage conveyed by the ability to predict a foe's actions. But he had taken his father's earlier admonishment to heart and was loathe to raise questions that might undermine the ardour of his Zaudunyani brothers.

  And as much as he distrusted Carindusu and his posturing pride, the Prince had come to regard Saccarees as a kindred intellect. The School of Mandate marched with them. How could they fail?

  Sorweel dreamed of her bathing, trembled for the steam that rose from her gentle places. The waters were pure and translucent, sheathing and beading across her flushing skin. Wisps enveloped all. Then something crimson, something ragged and viscous, tentacled the waters, unlooped like spilled entrails, depositing scabrous filth across the clarity of her submerged form. But she knew it not, and so continued to cup offal in her hands, pour filth over her naked skin.

  He called out…

  Only to find himself splayed across forest turf, blinking at the midday sun broken through branches. He pawed an ant from his soft beard, saw Moenghus sitting nearby. The Prince-Imperial sat with his back against a tree, absently working his knife across his throat and chin, staring off toward the sound of his sister's singing, which rose with the noise of rushing water from behind tangled screens of foliage.

  She bathed, Sorweel realized, blinking away memories of his dream.

  She only sang when she bathed.

  Moenghus turned to him for a moment, watched him with a preoccupied frown, then looked away when Sorweel hauled himself onto his rump.

  "What you said earlier…" the young King said to the man, squinting against his grogginess. "About the Hundred raising arms against your father…"

  The Prince-Imperial regarded him with a long and canny look. There was a brutality to his face beyond the heaviness of his brow and jaw, one that made a snarl out of every glimpse of teeth.

  "I was afraid you would ask me that," he finally said. "I wasn't supposed to mention it."

  "Why?"

  A negligent shrug, as if he could trivialize catastrophic facts with mere manner. He was forever doing this, Sorweel realized, pitching his expression against the pious gravity of what he expressed.

  "Some truths are too offensive."

  Sorweel instantly understood. The people, the common people, would be quick to turn against the Anasurimbor were they to know that the Hundred actually sought-in their paradoxical, unfathomable way-to destroy them.

  "But does it mean the Gods can be… can be deceived?"

  And it struck Sorweel that there was something vicious in this, asking the son questions that could murder his father… or save him. Something more than simply devious.

  Serwa's voice floated across the moss-soft earth, hooking and curling to exotic cadences, lilting in yet another incomprehensible tongue.

  "Entili matoi…

  "Jesil irhaila mi…"

  "Just believe, Horse-King," the Prince-Imperial said, holding his face at a partial angle to his sister's singing. Did she sing to him?

  "Just believe, eh?"

  A hard look. "My father wars against the end of the world. Stop thinking about your thoughts or you'll go as crazy as my sister."

  "But you said your sister was sane."

  Moenghus shook his mane in shaggy negation.

  "That's what you say to crazy people."

  Kites filled the low, iron-grey sky.

  The Schoolmen assembled before the Interval's toll-even those who had patrolled the perimeter through the night. Their cadres took to the air moments before the breaking of dawn so that they strode ablaze in morning gold above a dimmer world. Innumerable companies of knights and lancers and horse-archers galloped out beneath them, scoring the immediate north and west with streamers of dust. The number-sticks cast, the footmen marched into their wake, tens of thousands watching in apprehension as the ochre smear of the Horde climbed the circuit of the horizon and made a burial chamber of the sky.

  Never had so many felt so small.

  The Schoolmen and the accompanying knights receded out of view. King Sasal Umrapathur called the main host to a halt several watches after at the ruins of Irsulor, a city destroyed long before the First Apocalypse. Only mounds remained of the walls, a continuous series of embankments skirting the dead city's heights. Save for five decapitated pillars jutting from the summit-the Fingers, the men began calling them, for the way they resembled a hand thrusting from some enormous burial mound-no structure survived the tidal earth.

  Staking his standard beneath the Fingers, Umrapathur watched the Army of the South assemble across the heaped remains of Irsulor below him. The spearmen of Pradu and Invishi with their great shields of wicker. The Girgashi hillmen, whose axes would flash in unison when they raised them in ritual brandishing. The levies of Nilnameshi bowmen, arrayed in twinkling bars across the slopes. The famed Cironji Marines assembled in reserve, looking more like beetles than men with their round-shields upon their backs. On and on, the dusky glory of the Southron Kings come to lands of pale-skinned legend. The buried bastions of Irsulor.

  And it seemed a miracle, that out of all the indefensible lands they had crossed, they could find such a place-a strong place. How could he not think he had found more evidence of the Whore's favour?

  He looked out across the desolate tracts to the shadow of the Horde, to the dust plumes rising high and tawny above ochre gloom. Others in his retinue swore they could see the distant flash of sorcery, but he saw nothing. He bided his time and waited for tidings. Periodically he craned his head back to study the chapped bulk of the Fingers looming about him, trying to guess at the figures worn into ambiguity across them. A man never knew where he might find portents and omens. He tried not to think of the souls who had raised the ancient pillars-or of the
ir long-dead fate.

  From the beginning the question had been what the Sranc would do when the Schoolmen cast their nets of light and destruction across them. Carindusu had argued that they would crash into themselves, fleeing mobs running into mobs, until they formed a crush from which none could escape. "I wager more will suffocate and drown than fall to our fury," the Grandmaster declared to the others. Of course, he admitted, some would survive the Schoolmen and their fires, but they would provide little more than sport for the companies of cavalrymen riding the land behind the Schoolmen.

  This did not happen.

  As Saccarees had argued weeks earlier, the Sranc were not beasts. For all the base savagery of their instincts, they were not so stupid as to flee into corners.

  Leading a great echelon of Nilnameshi knights, Prince Charapatha watched the Schoolmen wade into the boiling horizon, a thin line of glittering points stretched wider than his eyes could follow, and somehow he simply knew that Carindusu had been beguiled by his arrogance-that they had raised a spiderweb about a dragon.

  Seized by this premonition, he commanded, to the outrage and astonishment of his men, that everyone shed their iron-scaled hauberks. Many refused-an extraordinary mutiny, given the love and respect they bore their Prince. Scattered across rising and falling swales of gutted land, the companies milled in argument and indecision. Charapatha remained calm, simply repeated his order time and again. He understood the reluctance of his men.

  One after another, the glowing Schoolmen vanished into the pluming sheets of dust.

  Lights flashed from the brown and black.

  The howling, which had keened as loud as always so close to the Horde, warbled with unfamiliar resonances, then almost faded altogether. The Invitic Knights watched astonished. Men famed for their bravery in the Unification Wars cried out in amazement and horror. More and more scaled hauberks clanked across the earth.

  The warring lights, if anything, increased in frequency and fury until it seemed lightning itself walked the long rim of the world. The howling faded, and for several heartbeats, they heard arcane shouts in the crotches of the breeze-the Schoolmen. Then they heard a different sound, grim and slow-building, chorus heaped atop inhuman chorus, louder and louder, until horses reared and men shook their heads like fly-plagued dogs. Until the air itself pricked their ears…

  Screams. Inhuman screams.

  The proud and headstrong Knights of Invishi gazed out and instantly knew that their King-General had erred, that his plan had gone catastrophically awry. For months they had shadowed the Horde, watching the stormfront of dust change colour in accordance with the soil beneath their feet and change shape in accordance with the strength and direction of the wind. Many times they had seen streamers break from the base and spill toward them like tumbling smoke, and always they had rejoiced at the prospect of running down isolate clans. But now they saw a hundred such streamers racing toward them-a thousand — ribbons of dust blooming into high-drawn clouds of filth.

  Far from retreating into the crush of their fellows before the advancing sorcerers, the Sranc were running south…

  "Ride!" Prince Charapatha bellowed through the cacophony. "Ride for your lives!"

  For some reason Sorweel always took a deep breath beforehand, as if he were about to plunge into frigid waters. No matter how many leaps he suffered, a fraction of him always experienced it for the very first time. Her arm hooked fast about his armoured waist, her head a chalice brimming with singing light, and then the wrenching, at once violent enough to concuss the blood from his body, and as soft as wet tissue…

  The step across the illusion of space… the Leap.

  But something went wrong. Meanings grasped too numbly, utterances fumbled across a too weary tongue. Sorweel suffered the sense of not arriving all at once, as if his viscera trailed the shell of his body.

  He fell to his knees on the crest that had been little more than a silhouette on the western horizon just moments before. He felt a sloshing barrel.

  Both Moenghus and Serwa complained but did not seem quite so unsettled as him. At least he spared himself the humiliation of vomiting while they watched.

  They all agreed to sleep.

  And so began the Horde's second assault upon the Great Ordeal. As the whip communicates the strength of the arm from the grip to the nail, so too did the rush of those trapped against the River Irshi spread across the entirety of the Horde, from those hooked about Umrapathur's flanks to those massed near the Neleost coast. In the stark light of day they ran, numberless, maddened with hungers both vicious and foul, a shrieking plague.

  From his vantage at Irsulor, Umrapathur was among the first to realize that something was amiss. For so long, the Horde's roar, wringed of its resonance by distance, had sounded like an endless death rattle. When the sound faltered, he and thousands of others had raised a ragged cheer, knowing that the Schoolmen had begun reaping their arcane harvest. But the sound that climbed into its place-more shrill, like the fluting of winter winds-did not stop climbing. Higher and higher it roared, until men began batting their ears. And Sasal Umrapathur III, the first Believer-King of Nilnamesh, looked out to the dust fencing the horizon and knew he had been deceived.

  He cried out warnings and instructions. Horns brayed out against the building thunder.

  Out on the broken plain, only the most foolhardy of the Grandees led their knights out against the Sranc as planned. Far and away most realized, like Charapatha, that something was amiss, but many tarried overlong in indecision and so were quickly overrun. The rest found themselves riding a great and desperate race.

  Ensconced in their deep formations, the infantrymen watched with breathless horror as more than fifteen thousand riders, fleet skirmishers and ponderous knights, rode scattered across the waste, throwing shields and cutting loose saddle-packs, slapping blood from the rumps of their screaming ponies. Mountains of billowing dust roiled behind them-as if the world's very limits came crashing in pursuit.

  They watched company after company, strung out in panicked flight, engulfed in raving doom. They glimpsed shadows through the low ribbons of dust, skinny and vicious and innumerable. The skirmishers, like King Urmakthi and his fleet Girgashi, reached the ruined city in good order. Others, the heavily armoured knights of Nilnamesh especially, were pulled under en masse. The more quick-witted commanders abandoned the flight and arrayed their men in defensive formations that lingered battling, pockets of frantic order engulfed in gibbering chaos, knights shouting and hacking, quilled in arrows, their positions dissolving like bright salt in putrid waters. Massar ab Kascamandri, the youngest brother of the outlaw Fanayal and famed for severing his earlobe to demonstrate his determination to join the Ordeal rather than remain as a figurehead in Nenciphon, was felled by an iron-tipped javelin less than a hundred paces from Irsulor's embankments. Prince Charapatha and his armourless knights, meanwhile, found themselves deflected westward time and again in his attempts to reach their besieged King. His Captains had to restrain the Prince, such was the violence of his grief.

  King Umrapathur watched the world and sky vanish behind the Horde's veil. The air boomed with screeching until he could no longer hear his own plaintive commands.

  The Horde closed upon Irsulor, and they were naught but an isle in a shrieking sea.

  During this time, the Schoolmen continued walking the skies to the north, raking and scorching the obscured earth. To a man they knew Carindusu had erred, perhaps disastrously, but they had devised no means of communicating any alternative strategy-they could scarce see one another as it was. Eventually, the more decisive among them abandoned their northward course, and others followed, forming broken cohorts whose passage back was marked with fire and light. Some became lost in the dust and would never find their way to Irsulor. Some, a few fools, continued northward oblivious and did not turn back until they passed beyond the northern rim of the dust clouds.

  None would return in time to counter the Consult.

  Sheet
s of ochre were drawn across the sun, and shadow fell across the formations crowded upon the dead city. The Sranc threw themselves up the embankments and against the bristling ranks of Men, who stood locked, shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder, as they had during the first battle. The Horde caught about Irsulor as upon a jutting nail.

  The Sons of Nilnamesh held the north and west, thrusting sword and spear between their cunning shields of wicker, nearly invulnerable in their gowns of plated iron. The vast bulk of them fought beneath the ancient standards of Eshdutta, Harataka, Midaru, Invoira, and Sombatti, the so-called Five Hosts of Nilnu, the tribal confederacies that had warred for the whole of Nilnamesh since time immemorial. Not since the days of Anzumarapata II had so many Sons of Nilnu marched beyond the paddied plains of their home. Gone were the antique rivalries, the mortal hatred that had so often set them against each other. Gone were the differences. And it seemed a thing of mad and tragic folly that Men might raise arms against Men, when creatures so vile so infested the world.

  The Hetmen of Girgash held the east, fierce mountain warriors come from their high fastnesses in the Hinayati along with their softer cousins from Ajowai and the Vales. His horse abandoned, King Urmakthi stood at the fore of his countrymen, his Standard raised in lieu of his voice. The Grandees of Kian held the south, the desert-vicious men of Chianadyni, as well as their taller brothers from Nenciphon and Mongilea, all of them decked in the chained splendour of their fathers' fallen empire. Such was the clamour that they knew nothing of Prince Massar's fall-and so honoured him with their courage.

  Crying out with soundless fury the Men of the South thrust and hacked at the gibbering masses. Even on the slopes the inhuman ferocity of the assault forced those deep in the ranks to brace their shields against the backs of those before them, transforming phalanxes into singular structures of flesh, ligament, and bone. Missiles blackened the already shrouded sky, shafts that rattled without harm across the armoured men, save those unfortunate few. The Ketyai archers answered with great volleys of their own, laying low whole swathes of their foe. But with every draw they exposed themselves to the endless black rain, and their losses were grievous.