The white-luck warrior ta-2

by R. Scott Bakker

  "And what about the Qirri?"

  Silence.

  Despite the air of hard deliberation, Lord Kosoter has bred an atmosphere of volatility between him and his men, cleaving to thresholds so vague and so brittle that it seems anything beyond abject obedience might warrant execution. Galian risks his life simply asking questions for all to hear. But mentioning Qirri…

  It seems nothing less than suicidal. The act of a fool.

  The Captain shakes his head slowly. "Only Cleric knows."

  "What if you were to demand he yield it?"

  Turning his head on a hinge of granite, Lord Kosoter finally regards the former Columnary.

  "The False Man is mad!" Pokwas calls out.

  The Captain lowers his face, pinches his lower lip in contemplation. "Yes," he says in grim admission. "But think. A year given. Our every greed slaked." He seeks each of his men with his gaze, as if knowing he must cow them one by one. "He's delivered us to these riches."

  Galian smiles like someone with arguments too devious to be refuted.

  "Then why suffer him any longer?"

  For the first time Mimara glimpses the fury sparking in the Captain's eyes.

  "Who will deliver us back, fool?"

  More silence.

  A nightmarish intensity engulfs the two men.

  Galian peers at the Ainoni caste-noble in mock reverence, his manner so feckless, so bold, that it raises an audible murmur from Mimara's lungs.

  "I want a fire," he says.

  "We march on the dark."

  Galian looks to the forested deeps about them, then back to his Captain. "Yes… Skinny country, is it?" There is nothing sly about his antagonism now. "Where are the skinnies then?"

  The Captain regards him for several heartbeats, his eye shadowed beneath heavy brows, his nose and cheeks like chipped flint above the brushed wire of his moustache and beard. There is something breathless, absolute about his composure. Grim deliberation glints from his eyes…

  The look of a man, a murderous man, finding the shadowy centre of his enemy's web.

  "Are you such a fool, Galian?" Mimara blurts aloud. The tension is too much.

  But the former Columnary has eyes only for his Captain.

  "You made your decision, just then," he says with a lolling smile. "Didn't you? You decided to kill me."

  Lord Kosoter glares, a hoary king leaning from his stone chair. A dark, tyrannical figure, passing judgment on the fool capering before him.

  "Before the slit called out," Galian presses. "That moment of silence… You thought to yourself, Kill the fool! "

  There is a sudden viciousness to his intonation, and enough mimicry of the Captain's growling voice to send Pokwas laughing. Even Xonghis, who is working on his bow, grins in his enigmatic Jekki manner.

  Horror bolts through her. She has just glimpsed the savage shape of what is about to happen. Conspiracy and conspirators both.

  "But then you thought it before, haven't you, Captain? Every time you glimpsed me leaning with the others, something cried, 'Kill him!' in that cramp you call a soul."

  The Captain remains utterly motionless, watching the Columnary's approach from his impromptu throne.

  "As it turns out," Galian continues with bright humour, "we were leaning together in sedition…"

  The Columnary comes to stop immediately before Lord Kosoter, easily within reach of his broadsword. A kind of boredom seems to glint in the Captain's eyes-as if mutiny were an old and tedious friend.

  "And you should know that every time I glimpsed you…" Galian throws out his arms and, as if daring him to strike, leans forward in vindictive contempt. "I also heard something whisper, 'Kill him!' "

  The arrow catches the Captain in the mouth. He jerks to his side as if slapped, staggers back two steps. He hangs there for a moment, spitting cracked teeth.

  A cloud occludes the sun.

  The Captain of the Skin Eaters, the man called Ironsoul, raises his face, not to the bowman, Xonghis, but to the bowman's maker, Galian. The shaft is visible. It skewers the lower half of his face, draws bearded skin tight. Blood spills from the ream of his bottom lip. His laughter sputters through it.

  A sardonic glee, malevolent for its intensity, shines like sorcery in his eyes.

  The second arrow thumps into his neck. He whirls to the side and around, as if a rope about his waist holds him staked in place. He hangs for an instant, like a thing made of wax. Then he slumps face first across the humus. A convulsive moment passes. He begins shaking, his limbs tossing with bonfire violence. A crazed, bestial scramble follows, as if an elemental wildness or disordered spirit has lain dormant within him, hidden, and only now could thrash free of human constraints.

  His expression loose with horror, Galian draws his sword.

  The Captain claws the leafy humus at the Columnary's feet, seizes a branch no thicker than two thumbs. His spine arches against his blooded hauberk. His head pulls back. He grimaces about his tented mouth, blows rage and spittle and blood. His eyes gleam like pearl. Snorting with effort and fury, he begins twisting and wrenching at the branch, as if it were the world's own spine-the one thing to be broken.

  He roars.

  Then his head is gone, bouncing about the tail of its caste-noble braid.

  Silence-this time of visible things.

  Mimara watches, breathless. Mortal, something cold whispers within her.

  Mortal after all.

  Strange, the way Qirri made hash of momentous things.

  Omens of the world's end. The death of races… Standing in bare sunlight, it all seemed little more than beautiful paint, a kind of ornamentation.

  The northern tower of the Muraw, the Library's forward gate, was scarce more than a mound. Wandering stretches of vertical blocks broke the slopes here and there, but otherwise it had ceased to exist. Inexplicably, the southern tower stood almost entirely intact, a cyclopean square that soared against the bald sky. Even the obsidian that had plated its base had survived. Turf and shrubs mounded its distant crown, and several tenacious trees hung rooted from its sides. Despite everything, a sudden, boyish urge to scale the tower struck the old Wizard, followed by a sense of exhausted longing.

  There had been a time when he had spent days loafing among ruins far less significant than these. A time when his worries had been small enough to ignore.

  Side by side, the old Wizard and the Nonman King strode into the Library's ruined precincts. The walls, or what remained of them, possessed the monumental feel of the Ziggurats in Shigek. In many cases trees, full grown yet bent and windswept, grew along their crests. Achamian could still recognize the Ursilaral, the central promenade where the One Thousand Gift-Shields had once hung, garish and beautiful, symbolizing the truce between the Sohonc and almost all the known tribes of White and High Norsirai. In Seswatha's day, the Library was often called the Citadel of Citadels because of its importance, certainly, but also because of its design: fortresses within fortresses, as if the outside were a kind of ocean, a flood to be fought chamber by grudging chamber. It possessed no fewer than nineteen courtyards, often call "pits" because of the height of the surrounding walls, with the Ursilaral, its length jawed by numerous gates, connecting most of them.

  The morning sun had climbed high enough only to bathe portions of their overgrown floors so that Achamian and Cleric found themselves walking through dry shadow. The growth was mostly restricted to thickets and clutches of shrubs, forcing Achamian to follow Cleric as he hacked his way forward with his sword. Plumes of fluff swirled in dry-wind eddies. Clouds drifted across the oblong squares of blue sky above them. Bees tracked spiral courses through the air, becoming white dots when they passed into sunlight. The Wizard even glimpsed a hare bolting through the grasses.

  The experience became increasingly surreal. At times the Wizard found himself staring at Cleric's labouring back, broad beneath its sheath of shining mail, wondering whether he should just attack the Nonman and be done with the suspense. At other times he
played a kind of game guessing what was the ruin of what. Mounds became fountains. Rectangular breaks in walls became windows onto barracks, apartments, and scriptoriums.

  And twice he caught himself squinting across the northeastern heights, looking for thunderheads massing black and terrible…

  For the Whirlwind.

  It was like walking through two worlds beyond the actual: the one the issue of his reading, the other the product of his Dreams. He was Achamian, exile and pariah, wearer of rotted pelts. And he was Seswatha, hero, Grandmaster of this place, both during the time when its fall was preposterous, laughable, and during the days of encroaching destruction.

  "I saw these towers burn," he said in an old voice. "I saw these walls tumble."

  The Nonman King paused, scanned his surroundings as if seeing the ruins about him for the very first time. Achamian wondered what it would be like, outliving great works of stone. When nations possessed the span of flowers, wouldn't everything seem but stages of ruin?

  "All Ishterebinth lamented when word arrived," Cleric eventually said. "We knew then the World was doomed."

  Achamian gazed at the Nonman King, pinned by an immovable melancholy.

  "Why?" he asked. "Why would you lament our death when it was Men, not the Inchoroi, who destroyed all your great mansions?"

  "Because we have always known we would not survive Men."

  The Wizard smiled in recollection.

  "Yes… Because our dooms are one."

  At last, walking bent through a gate almost buried by the rising ground, they came to the Turret, the mighty citadel raised by Noshainrau the White. It was naught but an enormous ring of stone, broad enough to encase any of the great amphitheatres of Invishi or Carythusal. Pitted with bird-holes, the sloped walls rose some thirty or so cubits before cresting, a line of ragged ruin against blue sky. The shining bronze sheets were gone-the Skutiri. In Seswatha's day they had ringed the Turret's base, nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them, each taller than a man, and each scored with innumerable lines of sorcerous script. The sun shone imperturbable, drawing shadows across hanging nubs of stone. Wind whisked through leaves and grasses. Never, it seemed to the old Wizard, had the world seemed so lonely.

  "The sorcery here is very old, very weak," the Nonman said.

  Did he remember Lord Kosoter's earlier charge? Could he?

  Was he accusing him of lying?

  "The Coffers lie beneath these ruins," Achamian replied. "The Wards protecting it are buried deep… and quite ageless, I assure you."

  Perhaps now was the time to strike.

  No. Not until he knew for sure he wouldn't need the Nonman's strength.

  The Turret's original gate was lost beneath ramped debris. They fought their way through a mass of scrub, then began climbing.

  Of all his memories of the Holy Library, the final days lived most fiercely in Achamian's memory. Always the No-God was there… like a nagging sense, a direction steeped in dread, as if one point on the compass had been honed sharp enough to draw a gasp from his lungs. He would walk the walls and verandas and feel it… there… sometimes stationary for days on end, but always moving sooner or later-always coming closer.

  And when the wind was right, he would hear the wailing of bereaved mothers from the city below.

  Stillborn… Every infant stillborn.

  The old Wizard stopped mid-ascent, leaned against pitted stone to recover his wind. Many years had passed since he last felt the horror that was Mog-Pharau while awake. The gaping sense of futility and loss, of things crashing, not here or there, but everywhere. The immobility of heart as much as limb or will. The horizon itself had become a revelation, taking you out of yourself and binding you to a world of dying things.

  It dogged the old Wizard as he continued climbing, a great shadow lurking in his periphery, a sky-staining malevolence that leapt into existence whenever he glanced away. And the conviction that all Mankind shared the very same premonition.

  Cleric stood atop the summit. The ruined walls reached to either side of him, thick enough to house pockets of grasses and shrub along their summit, climbing and dropping according to the logic of things wrecked for the passage of years.

  "Something is amiss," he called down to the huffing Wizard.

  He extended a hand in assistance as Achamian clambered near. There was a surprising reassurance in his grip, as if their bodies recognized a kinship too primitive not to be overlooked by their souls.

  Leaning against his knees to catch his breath, the old Wizard surveyed the Turret's vacant interior. He suffered the same knee-wobbling sense of vertigo he always suffered when he found himself standing high upon fallen works. Swallows battled about the curve of the inner walls. The ages had entirely gutted the citadel, leaving only what resembled an absurdly immense granary. But he had expected as much.

  What he had not expected was the great pit yawning below…

  Rubble heaped about the inner foundations, making a funnel of the ground. The cracked rim of floors broken, exposing wasp-nest hollows, each a level of the Turret's cellars. Then obdurate blackness at the bottom.

  "Do you smell that?" Achamian asked, frowning in disbelief.

  "Yes," the Nonman King replied. "Sulphur."

  She is not sure when she resumes breathing. The remaining Skin Eaters-the sane ones, anyway-immediately fall to arguing.

  Galian instructs Sarl to watch her, which he does with a kind of crazed reluctance. She and the mad Sergeant take turns gazing at the Captain in disbelief. At one point, Sarl grasps the very branch that Lord Kosoter had tried to snap in his final moment. Crouching a pace away, he uses it to poke at his dead Captain's face. He presses the tip against the waxen forehead, rolls the face skyward, then jumps when it slips and rocks back to face him.

  He turns to Mimara and cackles.

  "He's not dead," he says like a drunk keen to slur some fact that others thought obvious. "Not the Captain, no…"

  Shouts climb from the near distance. Pokwas is jabbing Galian's shoulder with a long finger.

  "He's too hard for Hell."

  It was like climbing down a monstrous rabbit hole.

  A strange anxiousness dogged the old Wizard as the brightness climbed in stages above him. The pit fell at an angle instead of dropping vertically, opening about a ramp of packed debris and earth, like a burrow that was at once a road into the underworld. The Turret's cellars formed a kind of pitched roof above them, three distinct levels of corridors halved and chambers cracked open like eggs.

  The depths opened before them, steeped in sulphurous mystery.

  "Look…" Cleric said, motioning toward the side of the tunnel.

  But Achamian had already glimpsed them in the grey light. Three gashes hooked like scythes: the centre one the longest, the innermost curving within its compass, while the outermost arced away at an angle.

  Achamian immediately recognized the mark: any Man in the Three Seas would have. The Three Sickles had been a common heraldic device since Far Antiquity-the symbol adopted by Triamis the Great.

  The scoring of long-curved claws…

  The spoor of Dragons.

  A profound ache climbs out from her back, roots itself in her knees and neck. But still she sits hugging her shins. She cannot move.

  Galian returns, leading the others. Sarl scampers from his path, his Captain's head clutched tight to his chest.

  "So what are you going to do?" she asks the Columnary.

  "We're going to wait for Cleric to return. Then we're going to relieve him of that pretty pouch."

  Xonghis has already yanked the two Chorae from beneath Lord Kosoter's hauberk.

  Galian smiles at her in the leering manner she knows all too well. "In the meantime," he says, "we are going to feast on the banquet the gods have delivered to us."

  Her look is so sour, it seems a miracle that he can grin.

  "Feast… On what?"

  The day is dry and bright-beautiful. Wind falls through the lazy t
ree-tops, shushing the bestiary that is the world. Blood clots across the leaves.

  "Peaches, my sweet. Peaches."

  Skidding on their rumps, the old Wizard and the Nonman King followed the burrow into airy darkness-the antechamber to the Coffers. The Upper Pausal had been reduced to balconies hanging amputated in the black. Debris choked the floors of the Pausal proper, heaped toward the sides by the passage of some monstrous bulk. Achamian shuddered, glimpsing what was left of the Nonman friezes that adorned its walls-memories of Cil-Aujas, he supposed. The Great Gate of Wheels had been obliterated; he could see its ensorcelled remains scattered through the ruin: the marmoreal white of broken incantation wheels, the chapped green of bronze cams and fittings.

  Raw blackness gaped before him.

  So, a dull and long-suffering portion of his soul murmured, the Coffers have been looted.

  He stood motionless, gazing in abject dismay.

  So much suffered… So many dead…

  For nothing.

  The great refrain of his miserable life.

  The madness, when he pondered it, was that he had believed it could be otherwise, that he would trek all this distance- survive this far — and actually find the Coffers intact, the map to Ishual waiting for him like a low-hanging plum. He almost laughed aloud for thinking it, the thought that Fate might be kind.

  This, he realized-this was what his fate had been all along. Snared in the machinations of his enemy, who had known his mission even before he had tripped across it. Confronted with the preposterous issue of his preposterous hopes. He had sought truth and had been delivered to madmen and a Dragon instead-a Dragon!

  A Wracu of old.

  He could almost hear the skies laugh.

  Sparing neither word nor glance, the old Wizard and the Nonman King stepped across the cracked threshold and at long last passed into the Coffers.

  The reek watered his eyes, mingled with his terror so that it seemed he wept for fear. Sulphur. The smoke of predatory life. And rot, profound and gangrenous. The putrefaction that ties a string to your stomach and pulls hard whenever breath is drawn too deep.