The White Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  Once again Achamian apologized, but only so far as was seemly between master and slave. Strangely enough, he had come to prize the jnanic etiquette he so despised when travelling the fleshpots of the Three Seas. Afterward he stood there, watching the man he owned rinse his left eye time and again, feeling somehow guilty and wronged at the same time. After all, he had meant to assist the man …

  Geraus turned toward him, ruefully shook his head, and commended him for his supernatural aim. Achamian’s vague ire evaporated, as it always did in the face of the man’s relentless good nature. And then, impossibly, he caught the scent of the desert, as if somewhere just beyond the arboreal screens that fenced his tower, he would find the dunes of the mighty Carathay.

  And just like that, she was forgiven … Esmenet, the whore become Empress.

  Numb to his fingertips, Achamian returned the axe to its nook. “Better to heed the Gods,” Geraus had said in approval.

  Of course habits, like fleas, are not so easy to kill, especially habits of thought and passion. But she was forgiven, nonetheless. Even if he wasn’t finished accusing her, she was forgiven.

  And somehow, while walking with a band of killers through the empty heart of a dead civilization, he managed to explain this to Mimara.

  He told her about their very first meeting, about the bawdy way her mother had accosted him from her window.

  “Hey, Ainoni,” she had shouted down. It was the custom in Sumna to call all bearded foreigners Ainoni. “A man so swollen needs to take his ease, lest he bursts …”

  “I was quite fat in those days,” he said, answering Mimara’s dubious look.

  And he told her about herself—or at least the memory of her that continued to haunt her mother.

  “This was the summer after the famine. Sumna, the whole Nansur Empire had suffered grievously. In fact, the poor had sold so many of their children into slavery that the Emperor issued an edict voiding all such sales between Nansur citizens the previous summer. Like most caste-menials, your mother was too poor to afford citizenship, but Exceptions were being issued by various tax farmers throughout the city. Your mother would have never told me about you, I think, were it not for the law … the Sixteenth Edict of Manumission, it was called, I think. She needed the gold, you see. She was mad for gold—for anything she might use as a bribe.”

  “You gave it to her.”

  “Your mother never dreamed she could get you back. In fact, she never thought she would survive the famine. She literally believed she was sparing you her doom. You simply cannot imagine the straits she was in, the chains that shackled her. She sold you to Ainoni slavers, I think, because she thought the farther she could deliver you from the Nansurium the better.”

  “So the Emperor’s edict was useless.”

  “I tried to tell her, but she refused to listen … Really refused,” he added with a chuckle, drawing a finger to the small scar he still sported on his left temple. “Even still, she managed to secure the Exception … from a man, a monster, named Polpi Tharias—someone I still dream of killing. The first day the law went into effect she went down to the harbour. I don’t know about now, but back then the Ershi district—you know? the north part of the harbour, in the shadow of the Hagerna—was where the slavers held their markets. She refused to let me accompany her … It was something … something she needed to do on her own, I think.”

  It was a strange thing for a man to enter the world of a damaged woman. The apparent disproportion between event and evaluation. The endless sinkholes that punished verbal wandering. The crazed alchemy of compassion and condemnation. It was a place where none of the scales seemed balanced, where the compass bowl never settled and the needle never showed true north.

  “You know, girl, I think that was when I truly fell in love with her … that day, so very hot, as humid as any day in the Sayut Delta. I sat on the very sill she used to accost men on the street below, watched her slender form swallowed by the mobs …”

  For some reason, he could not conjure the image in his soul’s eye. Instead he glimpsed the eunuch-fat man she had vanished behind in the press: his smile hooking his jowls, empires of dark soaking his armpits.

  Such is the perversity of memory. Small wonder the Nonmen lapsed into madness.

  “She wasn’t the only one,” he continued. “Apparently thousands of Exceptions had been sold, almost all of them counterfeit. Not that it would have mattered, given that you were in Carythusal, far beyond the sway of the Emperor and his ill-considered law. The slavers had hired mercenaries in anticipation. There were riots. Hundreds were killed. One of the slaver’s ships was set alight. When I saw the smoke I went out into the city to try to find her.”

  He idly wondered whether anyone had seen as many smoking cities as he. Many, he decided, if the rumours he had heard regarding the Wars of Unification were true.

  Sarl and the Captain among them.

  “Men are fools at the best of times,” he continued, “but when they gather in mobs they lose whatever little reason they can claim when alone. Someone cries out, they all cry out. Someone bludgeons or burns, and they all bludgeon and burn. It’s remarkable really, and terrifying enough to send kings and emperors into hiding.

  “I was forced to resort to the Gnosis twice just to reach the harbour, and this in a city where Chorae were rife and sorcerers had their tongues scraped out with oyster shells. I actually remember little, just smoke, shadows running, bodies in the dust, and this … this cold that seemed to burn in the bottom of my gut.”

  Even after so many years, the phantasmagoric feel of that afternoon still tickled. It had been one of the first times his waking life had approximated the shrieking madness of his Dreams.

  “Did you find her?” Mimara asked. She had been walking with her head slouched, almost slung, from her shoulders. It was a unlikely posture, a peculiar combination of reflection and defeat.

  “No.”

  “No? What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean no. I remember thinking I found her. Along one of the Hagerna’s walls, lying face first in her own blood …” The moment came back to him unbidden. He had been nauseated for smoke and worry, leaning his then fat body against what seemed a laborious incline. The sight of her struck all thought and breath and motion from him. He just stood there, teetering, while the screams and shouts continued to pipe in the near distance behind him. At first, he had simply known it was her. The same girlish form and piling black hair. Even more, the same mauve cloak—though it struck him now that it might have only seemed the same cut and colour. Fear has a way of rewriting things to suit its purposes. She had fallen facing up-hill, pigeon-toed, one arm slack along her side, the other bent beneath her torso. The blood had streamed along her edges, outlining her in black and crimson. He remembered horns sounding across the harbour—the Shrial Knights signalling—and how in their blaring wake a hush had fallen, allowing him to hear the tap-tap of her blood directly into the heart of the earth: she had fallen across one of Sumna’s famed gutters.

  “But it wasn’t her?” Mimara was asking.

  Several young men had raced past without so much as seeing them. With nerveless fingers he had reached down, certain she would be as light as bundled rags. She was not, and it reminded him of pulling stones out of wet beach sand as a child. He heaved the woman onto her back, revealed her sodden face, and stumbled back against the wall, falling to his rump.

  Joy and relief … unlike anything he would experience until the First Holy War.

  “No,” he replied. “Just some other unfortunate. Your mother had found her way back with nary a scrape.” She had been sitting on her sill when he returned, staring down the slots between the opposing tenements, toward the harbour. The room was dark, so that she seemed to glow from where he stood in the doorway.

  “She never spoke of you again … Not to me or anyone.”

  Not until she succumbed to Kellhus.

  They both fell silent for a trudging time, as though struggling to a
bsorb the sideways significance of his tale. They stared at the sparse crowd of scalpers before them: Pokwas with a vole carcass slung across his great tulwar, which he wore holstered diagonally across his back. Galian bobbing at his side, his stride as quick and nimble as his tongue. Conger and Wonard shuffling like hurried ghosts, their Galeoth war-knots so haphazard that their hair fell in filthy rags to their shoulders. Koll lurching and limping, his shoulders as sharp as sticks.

  “Your mother is a survivor, girl,” Achamian finally hazarded. “Same as you.”

  He found himself thinking that perhaps she had died that day in the harbour—or a part of her. The Esmenet he had found was not the Esmenet who had left him, that much was certain. Her melancholy had lifted, if anything. He remembered thinking that she had actually healed in some way. Before that day, a kind of inward lethargy had always blunted the appetite of her curiosities, the wicked edge of her witticisms. Or so it seemed at the time.

  “Let the Outside sort her sins,” he added.

  He typically shied from this kind of talk. The World seemed too much a rind pulled across something horrific, and death loomed as the only terror. Someday his sins would be sorted as well, and he did not need Mimara and her Eye to know his ultimate fate.

  He walked, waiting for Mimara to pinch him with more questions and unflattering observations. But she kept her face turned to the distances before them, the wind-whisking openness, the endless lines. You would not know the world was crooked, he thought, living on the plains.

  Perhaps because they had been speaking Ainoni, he found himself recalling the time he had spent in Carythusal spying on the Scarlet Spires, and of this old drunk—Posodemas, he called himself—who would ply him with stories at a tavern called the Holy Leper. The man, who claimed to have survived seven naval battles and no less than five years as a captive of the Shirise pirates, would speak of nothing but his wives and mistresses. He would describe, in excruciating detail, how each had betrayed him in this or that humiliating respect. Achamian would sit listening to the cow-eyed wretch, alternately scanning the crowd and nodding in false encouragement, telling himself that few things were more precious to a man than his shame—the very sense endless drink stripped from him.

  And that, he realized with no small amount of dismay, was what seemed to be happening here, on the long road to Ishuäl.

  Endless intoxication. And with it, the slow strangulation of shame.

  What good was honesty when it carried no pain?

  Dust on the horizon. Human smells on the hot wind.

  Fleet, they sprinted across the grasses, running low so that the weeds clawed their shoulders, their numbers scattered wide so that the dust of their approach would not alert their prey. They howled insults at the hated sun. They were sleek creatures, tireless and unrelenting in the prosecution of their dread appetites. They took dirt for sustenance, violence for bliss. They wore the faces of their enemy, inhumanly beautiful when calm, twisted grotesqueries when aroused.

  Sranc … Weapons of an ancient war, ranging a dead world.

  They could smell them, the trespassers. They could see the lobes of flesh, the bloody pockets they would cut for their coupling, the eyes wide with unspeakable horror. Though generations had passed since their ancestors had last encountered Men, the fact of them had been stamped into their flesh. The aching splendour of their screams. The heat of their bleeding. The twitching glory of their struggles.

  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—th
e 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.