The White Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  Zsoronga dropped his gaze as if regretting glib words, then looked up with a helpless smile. “Zeümi proverbs tend to be harsh,” he said. “We have always preferred the wisdom that cracks heads.”

  Sorweel snorted and grinned, only to find himself tangled in recriminations of his own. So many dead … Friends. Comrades. It seemed obscene that he should feel amusement, let alone relief and gratification. For weeks they had strived, warred against distance and frailty to accomplish a mortal mission. They had faltered and they had feared. But they had persevered. They had won—and despite the grievous proportions of the toll exacted, that fact cried out with its own demented jubilation.

  The Scions had died in glory … undying glory. What was a life of bickering and whoring compared with such a death?

  Zsoronga did not share his celebratory sentiment.

  “Those who fell …” Sorweel said in the tentative way of friends hoping to balm guessed-at pains. “Few are so lucky, Zsoronga … Truly.”

  But even as he spoke, the young King understood he had guessed wrong. The Successor-Prince did not grieve those who had fallen, he grieved his own survival … or the manner of it.

  “There is another … saying,” Zsoronga said with uncharacteristic hesitancy. “Another proverb that you need to know.”

  “Yes?”

  The Successor-Prince levelled his gaze. “Courage casts the longest shadow.”

  Sorweel nodded. “And what does that mean?”

  Zsoronga flashed him the impatient look people give when called upon to elaborate embarrassing admissions. “We Zeümi are a people of deeds,” he said on a heavy breath. “We live to honour our dead fathers with wisdom in the court, valour on the fiel—”

  “The back door to the heavenly palace,” Sorweel interrupted, recalling the man’s explanation of Zeümi religion as a kind of spiritual influence-peddling. “I remember.”

  “Yes … Exactly. The saying means that the courage of one man is the shame of the other …” He pursed his fulsome lips. “And you, Horse-King … What you did …”

  The night, the dark, the flurry of passion and dim detail came back to Sorweel. He remembered crying out to his friend the instant after Eskeles crashed to earth …

  “Are you saying I shamed you?”

  A dour grin. “In the eyes of my ancestors … most certainly.”

  Sorweel shook his head in disbelief. “I apologize … Maybe if you’re lucky, they’ll smuggle you in the slave entrance.”

  The Successor-Prince scowled. “It was a thing of wonder … what you did,” he said with disconcerting intensity. “I saw you, Horse-King. I know you called to me … And yet I rode on.” He glared like someone speaking against a mob of baser instincts. “I will be forever finding my way out from your shadow.”

  Sorweel flinched from the look. His eyes settled on Porsparian where he sat humbled and huddled in the airy grey light …

  “Time to seek the company of cowards,” he offered weakly.

  “The longest shadow, remember?” Zsoronga said, with an air of someone humiliated for his admission of humiliation. “The only way—the only way—to redeem myself is to stand at your side.”

  Sorweel nodded, did his best to shrug away the clamour of adolescent embarrassment, and to comport himself as a man—as a king of a proud people. Zsoronga ut Nganka’kull, the future Satakhan of High Holy Zeüm, was at once apologizing—which was remarkable in and of itself—and begging the most profound of favours: a means of recovering his honour and so securing the fate of his immortal soul.

  The young King of Sakarpus offered up his hand, palm up, with his index finger alone extended. One boonsman to another.

  Zsoronga frowned and smiled. “What is this … You want me to smell it?”

  “N-no …” Sorweel stammered. “No! We call it the virnorl …‘finger-lock’ you would say. It is a pledge of unity, a way to say that henceforth, all your battles will be my battles.”

  “You sausages,” the Successor-Prince said, clasping his entire hand within the warm bowl of his own. “Come … Our mighty General wishes to see you.”

  Sorweel crouched next to his slave before following Zsoronga outside. “I can speak to you now,” he said in Sheyic, hoping this might elicit some flicker of passion. But the old Shigeki merely regarded him with the same grieved lack of comprehension, as if he had forgotten Sheyic as promptly as Sorweel had learned it.

  “More importantly,” he added before stepping clear the cloistered heat, “I can listen.”

  Arid sunlight seemed to shower the whole of creation, so bright he stumbled for squinting. He stood at the tent threshold, blinking the liquid from the glare, until the world finally resolved into parched vistas. The camp, the crowded tents and grand pavilions, bleached of colour for brightness …

  And the horror that encircled it.

  Swales of blackening dead humped and pitted the distances. Sranc and more Sranc, teeth hanging spitless about gaping maws, eyes fogged, heaped into an endless array of macabre deadfalls. Limbs predominated in certain places, piled like the sticks Saglanders brought to market to sell as kindle. Heads and torsos prevailed in others, cobbled into mounds that resembled stacks of rotting fish. Great smears of black scored the far-flung mats, where the witches had burned their countless thousands. They reminded him of the charcoal grounds to the south of Sakarpus, only with bodies instead of trees charred to stumped anonymity. These marked the greatest concentrations of dead.

  The reek struck too deep to be smelled. It could only be breathed.

  The sight unsettled him, not for the grisly detail, but because of the preposterous scale. He wanted to rejoice, for it seemed that was what a true son of Sakarpus should do seeing their ancestral foe laid out to the horizon. But he could not. Breathing the carrion wind, glancing across the carcass heights, he found himself mourning, not for the Sranc, whose obscenity blocked all possibility of compassion, but for the innocence of a world that had never seen such sights.

  For the boy he had been before awakening.

  “Even if I survive,” Zsoronga said from his side, “none will believe me when I return.”

  “We must make sure you die then,” Sorweel replied.

  The Successor-Prince smirked about a worried glance. They trekked on in awkward silence, sorting through industrious crowds of Inrithi, wending down tented alleys. Fairly every man Sorweel glimpsed bore some sign of the previous night’s battle, whether it be bandages clotted about appalling wounds or the divided stares of those trying to stumble clear of memories of violence and fury. Many seemed to recognize him, and some even lowered their faces—in accordance, he imagined, with some precept of jnan, the arcane etiquette of the Three Seas.

  The awkward transformation of his relationship with Zsoronga, he realized with no little dismay, was but the beginning of the changes his thoughtless courage had wrought. Courage … It seemed such a foolish word, naught but the scribble of a child compared to the lunacy of the previous night. When he dared glimpse his memories, he suffered only the crowding of dread and terror. He felt a coward, looking back, so laughably far from the hero Zsoronga was making of him.

  A mob of caste-nobles and Kidruhil officers milled about the entrance to Kayûtas’s command tent, and Sorweel simply assumed that he and Zsoronga would be forced to while away the watches in listless conversation. But faces turned to regard them as they approached, across the outer rind of warriors at first, then deeper as word of their arrival passed from lip to lip. The rumble of conversations evaporated. Sorweel and Zsoronga found themselves standing dumbfounded before their accumulated gazes.

  “Huorstra kum de faul bewaren mirsa!” a towering longbeard cried from the assembly’s midst. The man shouldered his way through the others, his eyes bright with a kind of vicious joy. “Sorweel Varaltshau!” he bellowed, seizing him in a great, black-armoured embrace. “Famforlic kus thassa!”

  Suddenly everyone was cheering, and the young King found himself thrust into the crowd’s cong
ratulatory heart, shaking hands, returning embraces, nodding and thanking strangers with a kind of witless, breathless confusion. He acknowledged face after bruised face, even hugged a man blindfolded with bandages. In a matter of heartbeats he was delivered to the command tent, where he fairly tripped past the Pillarian Guards and into the washed light of the interior—so flustered that it seemed a minor miracle that he remembered to fall to his knees.

  “She positions you …”

  Anasûrimbor Kayûtas watched him from his chair, obviously amused by the spectacle of his arrival. Even in his Kidruhil cuirass and mail skirts, he sat with feline repose, his sandalled feet stretched across the mats before him, watching with the remote, lolling manner of an opium eater. Sorweel knew instantly that the man had not slept—and that he would not be the worse for it.

  The air was stifling, as much for the sunlight that frosted the canvas ceiling as for all the exhaling mouths. Five scribes crowded the sheaf-laden table to his right, and numerous others stood milling in what little space remained: officers and caste-nobles for the most part. Sorweel saw Eskeles among them, decked in his crimson Mandate robes, his left eye swollen into a greasy purple crease. He also glimpsed Anasûrimbor Serwa standing as tall as many of the men, swanlike in gowns of embroidered white. A memory of her arcane embrace whispered through him.

  Kayûtas allowed the uproar to subside before gesturing for him to stand. The Prince-Imperial was not long in waiting: something immaculate in his manner seemed to cut against all things unruly.

  “Teüs Eskeles has told us everything,” he declared. “You have saved us, Sorweel. You …”

  A broken chorus of cheers and shouts rose from those gathered within the tent.

  “I … I did nothing,” the Sakarpi King replied, trying to avoid the Swayali Grandmistress’s gaze.

  “Nothing?” The Kidruhil General frowned, scratched the flaxen plaits of his beard. “You read the signs, like a true son of the plains. You saw the doom our foe had prepared for us. You counselled your commander to take the only action that could save us. And then, in the moment of utmost crisis, you lent your shoulder to Eskeles, cast your life on the longest of odds, so that he might alert us …” He glanced up toward his sister, then looked back, grinning like an uncle trying to teach his nephew how to gamble. “Nothing has ever been so impressive.”

  “I did only what I … what I thought sensible.”

  “Sense?” Kayûtas said with scowling good nature. “There are as many sensibilities as there are passions, Sorweel. Terror has a sense all its own: flee, shirk, abandon—whatever it takes to carry away one’s skin. But you, you answered to the sense that transcends base desire. And we stand before you breathing, victorious, as a result.”

  The Sakarpi King glanced about wildly, convinced he was the butt of some cruel joke. But everyone assembled watched with a kind of indulgent expectation, as if understanding he was but a boy still, unused to the burden of communal accolades. Only Zsoronga’s solitary black face betrayed worry.

  “I … I-I know not what to say … You honour me.”

  The Prince-Imperial nodded with a wisdom that belied the adolescent tenderness of his beard. “That is my intent,” he said. “I have even sent a party of crippled riders back to Sakarpus to bear word of your heroic role to your kinsmen …”

  “You what?” Sorweel fairly coughed.

  “It’s a political gesture, I admit. But the glory is no less real.”

  In his soul’s eye, Sorweel could see a wracked line of Kidruhil filing through the ruins of the Herders’ Gate, outland conquerors, oppressors, crying out the treachery of Harweel’s only son, how he had saved the very host that had laid Sakarpus low …

  Nausea welled through him. Shame squirmed in his breast, clawing his ribs, scratching his heart.

  “I … I don’t know what to say …” he stammered.

  “You need not say anything,” Kayûtas said with an indulgent smile. “Your pride is clear for all to see.”

  “She is hiding you …”

  And for the first time he felt it, the impunity of standing unseen. He had stood before Anasûrimbor Kayûtas before. He had suffered his raking gaze—he knew what it meant to be known by an enemy, to have his fears counted, his vengeful aspirations reckoned, and so transformed into levers that could be used against him. Now he felt as if he were peeking at the man through his mother’s shielding fingers. And his cheeks stung for the memory of Porsparian rubbing Yatwer’s spit into them.

  “I’ve had you entered into the lists as the new Captain of the Scions,” Kayûtas continued. “Disbanded they may be, but their honour will be yours. We were fortunate that Xarotas Harnilas possessed wisdom enough to recognize your sense—I will not trust fortune to so favour us a second time. Henceforth, you will attend me and my staff … And you will be accorded all the glory and privilege that belongs to a Believer-King.”

  She had placed him here. The Dread Mother of Birth … Was the courage even his?

  It seemed an important question, but then the legends seemed littered with the confusion of heroes and the Gods that favoured them. Perhaps his hand simply was her hand …

  He recoiled from the thought.

  “May I beg one boon?”

  A flicker of mild surprise. “Of course.”

  “Zsoronga … I would have him accompany me if I could.”

  Kayûtas scowled, and several onlookers exchanged not-so-discreet whispers. For perhaps the first time, the Sakarpi King understood his friend’s importance to the Anasûrimbor. Of all the world’s remaining nations, only Zeüm posed a credible threat to the New Empire.

  “You know that he conspires against us?” the Prince-Imperial said, switching to effortless Sakarpic. Suddenly the two of them stood alone in a room walled with strangers.

  “I have my fears …” Sorweel began, lying smoothly. “But …”

  “But what?”

  “He no longer doubts the truth of your father’s war. No one does.”

  The implication was as clear as it was surprising, for in all his life Sorweel had never counted his among devious souls. The first son of Nganka’kull wavered. To bring him into the Prince-Imperial’s retinue could be the very thing his conversion required …

  And that, Sorweel suddenly realized, was the Aspect-Emperor’s goal: to have a believer become Satakhan.

  “Granted,” Kayûtas said, switching to the dismissive air of men who scarce had time for accommodations. He made a two-fingered gesture to one of his scribes, who began fingering through sheaves of vellum.

  “But I fear you have one last duty to discharge,” the General said in Sheyic just as Sorweel glanced about for some cue that the audience had ended. “A mortal one.”

  The omnipresent smell of rot seemed to take on a sinister tang.

  “My arm is your arm, Lord General.”

  This reply occasioned a heartbeat of scrutiny.

  “The Great Ordeal has all but exhausted its supplies. We starve, Sorweel. We have too many mouths and too little food. The time has come to put certain mouths to the knife …”

  Sorweel swallowed against a sudden pang in his breast.

  “What are you saying?”

  “You must put down your slave, Porsparian, in accordance with my father’s edict.”

  “I must what?” he asked blinking. So there was a joke after all.

  “You must kill your slave before sunrise tomorrow, or your life will be forfeit,” Kayûtas said, speaking in a tone as much directed to the assembled caste-nobles as to the Believer-King standing before him. Even heroes, he was saying, must answer to our Holy Aspect-Emperor.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Sorweel replied, speaking with a determination utterly at odds with the tumult that was his soul.

  He understood. He was alone, a captive in the host of his enemy.

  He would do whatever … kill whomever …

  “Chosen by the Gods …”

  Anything to see the Aspec
t-Emperor dead and his father avenged.

  Sorweel returned to his tent alone, his back still warm for all the slapping, his ears still hot with the chorus of overwrought acclaim. Porsparian stood before the entrance, forlorn and emaciated and as motionless as a sentinel. The sight fairly winded the young King.

  “Follow me,” he told the man, his gaze scratched with incredulity. The old Shigeki slave regarded him with a momentary squint, then without worry—or even curiosity—he struck out ahead of his master, leading him into the fields of rotting Sranc. Sorweel could only gape at the sight: a little nut-brown man, walking stooped, his limbs bowed as if bent to the bundle of his many years, picking his way across the packed dead.

  So the slave led the King, and perhaps this was how it should have been, given the way Sorweel felt himself dwindle with every step. He could scarce believe what he was about to do … Execution. When he forced himself to confront the prospect, his body and soul rebelled the way he had once feared they would in the thick of battle. The lightness of the hands. The starlings battling in his gut, loosening his bowel. The wires that hooked his head and shoulders into a pose just shy of a cringe. The incessant murmur of dread …

  Men often find themselves stranded in circumstance, stumbling toward goals not of their making, surrounded by absurdities they can scarce believe. They assume the little continuities that characterize their moments will carry them through their entire lives. They forget the volatility of the whole, the way tribes and nations trip like drunks through history. They forget that Fate is a whore.

  Porsparian hobbled ahead, picking a path through the carapace of dead. Sorweel quickly lost sight of the camp behind the blood-slicked mounds. When he looked out, death and far-flung rot were all he could see. Sranc. When he glimpsed them in fragments—a face nestled in the crook of an arm, a hand hanging from a raised wrist—they almost seemed human. When he gazed across them en masse, they seemed the issue of a drained sea. As bad as it had been in the camp, the reek welled palpable from the sweating tangle, to the point where coughing and gagging became one and the same, until smell became a taste that seemed to hang against the skin—an odour that could be licked. Ravens made summits of skulls, jumped from crown to crown spearing eye sockets. Vultures hunched and squabbled over individual spoils even though all was carrion. The whine of flies was multiplied until it became a singular hum.