The White Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  At this, several Pillarians loosened their broadswords in their scabbard. Proyas was quick in raising his hand to restrain them, knowing the Nonman spoke from the vantage of ages, that for them, generations of Men were as fleeting as mice. They had no grave to swallow their ancient grudges.

  Kellhus betrayed no consciousness of the affront. He leaned forward in a familiar way, rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his haloed hands.

  “Is Ishterebinth with us?”

  A long, cold gaze. For the first time Proyas noticed how the two Nonmen accompanying Nin’sariccas held their eyes down as though in ritual shame.

  “Yes,” the Emissary said. “The Sacred Ishroi of Injor-Niyas will add voice and shield to your Ordeal … If you retake Dagliash. If you honour the Niom.”

  Proyas had never heard of the Niom. Dagliash, he knew, was the fortress the ancient High Norsirai had raised to guard against Golgotterath. It stood to reason that the ghouls would want some guarantee of success before casting their lot.

  “Have you seen the massacre we have wrought?” Kellhus cried in the semblance of a more impassioned ruler. “No Horde so great has been overcome. Not Pir-Pahal. Not Eleneot. No age of Man or Nonman has seen a host such as the one I have assembled!” He stood to peer into the Emissary’s inhuman face, and somehow the World seemed to lean with him, milky with the roar of intangible things.

  “The Great Ordeal will reach Golgotterath.”

  The Exalt-General had seen innumerable men—strong, proud men—shrivel beneath the Aspect-Emperor’s divine scrutiny, so many that it had come to seem a law of nature. But Nin’sariccas remained as remote as before.

  “If you retake Dagliash. If you honour the Niom.”

  Proyas took care not to look at his Lord-and-God directly, knowing that the sight of subordinates watching their rulers would be taken as a sign of weakness. But he found himself desperately curious as to the intricacies of Kellhus’s expression—the art. Proyas had witnessed many men deny the Aspect-Emperor through the years, either through him, as was the case with King Harweel of Sakarpus, or directly. But never in circumstances so extraordinary.

  Daring souls, and foolish, given that so few yet breathed.

  “Agreed,” the Aspect-Emperor said.

  A concession? Why did he need these inhuman ghouls?

  Once again, Nin’sariccas’s bow fell far short of what jnan demanded. He lifted his aquiline face. His glittering black gaze fell to Kellhus’s waist, to the abominations hanging from his hip.

  “We are curious …” the Nonman said. “The Ciphrang bound about your girdle. Is it true you have walked the Outside and returned?”

  Kellhus resumed his seat, leaned back with a single foot extended. “Yes.”

  An almost imperceptible nod. “And what did you find?”

  Kellhus propped his face with his right hand, two fingers pressed to his temple. “You worry that I never truly returned,” he said mildly. “That the soul of Anasûrimbor Kellhus writhes in some hell and a demon Ciphrang gazes upon you instead.”

  The Decapitants, as the demonic heads had come to be called, were something wilfully ignored by many among the Zaudunyani. A kind of indigestible proof. Proyas was one of few who knew something about their acquisition, how Kellhus, during one of the longer truces that punctuated the Unification Wars, spent several weeks studying with Heramari Iyokus, the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, learning the darkest ways of Anagogic sorcery, the Daimos. Proyas had been among the first to see them when he returned from Carythusal and perhaps the first to dare ask Kellhus what had happened. His reply loomed large among the many unforgettable things the man had told him over the years: “There are two species of revelation, my old friend. Those that seize, and those that are seized. The first are the province of the priest, the latter belong to the sorcerer…”

  Even after so many years, his skin still prickled in revulsion when he glimpsed the Decapitants. But unlike many of the faithful, Proyas never forgot that his prophet was also a mage, a Shaman, not unlike those so piously condemned by the Tusk. His was the New Covenant, the sweeping away of all the old measures. So many former sins had become new virtues. Women had claimed the privileges of men. Sorcerers had become priests.

  Obscenity should hang from the waist of Salvation, or so it had come to seem.

  “Such thefts …” Nin’sariccas said with passionless tact. “Such substitutions. They have happened before.”

  “Why should you care,” Kellhus said, “if your hatred is satisfied, your ancient foe at last destroyed? Ever have Men been ruled by tyrants. Why should you care what soul lies behind our cruelty?”

  A single inhuman blink. “May I touch you?”

  “Yes.”

  The Emissary instantly stepped forward, sparking cries and the baring of weapons throughout the gloom.

  “Leave him,” Kellhus said.

  Nin’sariccas had paused immediately above the Aspect-Emperor, the hem of his chain gown swaying. For the first time he betrayed something resembling indecision, and Proyas realized the creature was, in his own inhuman manner, terrified. The Exalt-General almost smiled, such was his gratification.

  The Emissary extended a sallow hand …

  Which the Aspect-Emperor clasped in a firm, human grip. For a heartbeat, it seemed that worlds, let alone the shadowy confines of the Eleven Pole Chamber, dangled from their grasp.

  Sun and moon. Man and Nonman.

  The clasp broke with the gliding of fingers.

  “What did you see?” Nin’sariccas asked with what seemed genuine curiosity. “What did you find?”

  “God … broken into a million warring splinters.”

  A grim nod. “We worship the spaces between the Gods.”

  “Which is why you are damned.”

  Another nod, this one strangely brittle. “As False Men.”

  The Aspect-Emperor nodded in stoic regret. “As False Men.”

  The Emissary retreated from the dais, resumed his place at the fore of his voiceless companions. “And why should the False Men lend their strength to the True?”

  “Because of Hanalinqu,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas declared. “Because of Cû’jara Cinmoi. Because four thousand years ago, all your wives and daughters were murdered … and you were cursed to go mad in the shadow of that memory, to live forever, dying their deaths.”

  Nin’sariccas bowed yet again, this time deeper, yet still far short of honouring jnan.

  “If you retake Dagliash,” he said. “If you honour the Niom.”

  As he had every morning since the Battle of the Horde, Sorweel awoke before the Interval’s toll. He lay aching in his cot, more pinched than warmed by his woollen blanket, blinking at the impossibility of his straits. Other than a residue of warmth that made cold dismay of his every waking, nothing sensible remained of his dreams. He knew only that he dreamed of better places. He could only dream of better places.

  Zsoronga lay on his side as he always did, one arm thrown askew, his face the image of boyish bliss. Sorweel regarded him for a bleary moment, thinking as he often thought that the man’s future wives would love him best like this, in the innocence of his mornings. The young King crept from his cot, fumbled with his gear in the dawning pallor, then slipped outside so as to not disturb his brother from Zeüm.

  He savoured the chill of breathing open sky, rubbed his bearding chin as he gazed out across the encampment. He felt the clamour to come, the rousing of thousands about him, and the warring of doubts within. Another day marching with the Great Ordeal. The discomfort of long watches in the saddle. The ligatures of sweat. The ache of perpetual squinting. The anxiousness of the accumulating Horde. And for a fleeting moment, he knew the peace of those first to awaken—the gratitude that accompanies solitary lulls.

  He sat on his rump to labour with his riding boots.

  “Truth shines …” a voice chimed.

  “Truth shines,” habit replied for him.

  Anasûrimbor Serwa sto
od before him, her silken billows knotted tight about her slight form. She had appeared without the merest inkling. From his first glimpse, Sorweel knew he would crouch peering after her departure, looking for her footfalls across the trampled dust. She stood to his left, beneath the arch of the bluing sky. Crimson gilded the edges of the tents jumbled behind her.

  She drew back a lick of flaxen hair from her cheek.

  “The Charioteer you and my brother found … Father has met with them.”

  “The Embassy …” Sorweel said, squinting up at her. “Kayûtas said your father hopes to forge a treaty with Ishterebinth.”

  She smiled. “You know of Ishterebinth in Sakarpus?”

  He scowled and shrugged. “From The Sagas … None thought it real.”

  “The mightiest among the Quya dwell there still.”

  He did not know what to say so he turned back to his boots. He never felt the Goddess so fiercely as when he found himself before Serwa or Kayûtas. His cheeks literally prickled. And yet at the same time, he never felt so unworthy of the Mother’s dread design. To stand before the Anasûrimbor was to doubt … things old.

  “The Nonmen have invoked Niom,” she said. “An ancient ritual.”

  Something in her tone seized his attention. She had sounded almost embarrassed.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Her gaze had recovered its remote vantage. She considered him with a serenity that he yearned to muddy with his passion …

  Evil. How could someone so beautiful be evil?

  “The ancient Nonmen Kings found Men too mercurial,” she explained, “too proud and headstrong to be trusted. So in all their dealings they demanded hostages as a guarantee: a son, a daughter, and a captive enemy. The two former as a surety against treachery. The latter as a surety against deception.”

  The sun broke behind her. Light unfurled in a burning fan about her silhouette.

  “And I am to play the enemy,” he said, holding a hand out against her glare.

  What new twist was this?

  “Yes,” her shadow replied against the high drone of the Interval.

  He had expected her to vanish, to wink out of existence the same way she had winked in. But she simply turned and began walking at an angle to the eastern sun. Her shadow floated across the trampled earth, drawn as long and slender as a felled sapling. With every step she became smaller, a mere wisp before the enormity of dawn …

  Ever more lonely and afraid.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Momemn

  This one thing every tyrant will tell you: nothing saves more lives than murder.

  —MEROTOKAS, THE VIRTUE OF SIN

  No two prophets agree. So to spare our prophets their feelings, we call the future a whore.

  —ZARATHINIUS, A DEFENCE OF THE ARCANE ARTS

  Early Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

  “I gutted a dove in the old way,” the long-haired man said, “with a sharpened stone. And when I drew out the entrails, I saw you.”

  “Then you know.”

  The Narindar assassin nodded. “Yes … But do you?”

  “I have no need of knowing.”

  The Gift-of-Yatwer leaned against the door he had already entered. The way was not barred.

  The room was little more than a cellar, even though it hung some four storeys above the alleyway. The plaster had sloughed from the walls, leaving bare stretches of cracked brick. Near the slot that served as a window, he saw himself speaking with a man, his tunic grimed about the armpits. A cloak of road-beaten leather lay crumpled upon the spare bed. His hair was waist long, a peculiarity among the Ketyai. The only thing extraordinary about his dress was his war-girdle: a wide belt stamped with the images of bulls. A variety of knives and tools gleamed from holsters along the back.

  “I gutted a dove in the old way,” the long-haired man was saying, “with a sharpened stone. And when I drew out the entrails, I saw you.”

  “Then you know.”

  “Yes … But do you?”

  “I have no need of knowing.”

  The Narindar frowned and smiled. “The Four-Horned Brother … Do you know why he is shunned by the others? Why my Cult and my Cult alone is condemned by the Tusk?”

  The White-Luck Warrior saw himself shrug.

  He glanced back, saw himself climbing stairs that had crumbled into a narrow slope.

  He glanced back, saw himself pressing through packed streets, faces hanging like bulbs of garlic in shifting fields of cloth, soldiers watching from raised stoops, slave-girls balancing baskets and urns upon their heads, teamsters driving mules and oxen. He glanced back, saw the immensity of the gate climbing above him, engulfing sun and high blue sky.

  He glanced back, one pilgrim among others braiding the roadway, watching Momemn’s curtain walls wandering out to parse the hazy distances. A monumental fence.

  He looked forward, saw himself rolling the long-haired man through his blood into the black slot beneath the bed rack. He paused to listen through the booming of the streets, heard tomorrow’s prayer horns yaw deep across the Home City.

  “The Four-Horned Brother …” the long-haired man was saying. “Do you know why he is shunned by the others? Why my Cult and my Cult alone is condemned in the Tusk?”

  “Ajokli is the Fool,” he heard himself reply.

  The long-haired man smiled. “He only seems such because he sees what the others do not see … What you do not see.”

  “I have no need of seeing.”

  The Narindar lowered his face in resignation. “The blindness of the sighted,” he murmured.

  “Are you ready?” the Gift-of-Yatwer asked, not because he was curious, but because this was what he had heard himself say.

  “I told you … I gutted a dove in the old way.”

  The White-Luck Warrior glanced back, saw himself standing upon a distant hill, looking forward.

  The blood was as sticky as he remembered.

  Like the oranges he would eat fifty-three days from now.

  Esmenet felt a refugee, hunted, and yet somehow she also felt free.

  Twenty years had passed since she had trod through the slots of a city as great as Momemn. When she married Kellhus, she had exchanged her feet for palanquins borne on the backs of slaves. Now that she walked again, alone save Imhailas, she felt as naked as a slave dragged out for auction. Here she was, easily the most powerful woman in the Three Seas, and she felt every bit as powerless and persecuted as she had as a common whore.

  Once Biaxi Sankas had provided him with the time and location, Imhailas had plotted their course with the thoroughness of a military planner—even sending out soldiers, a different one for each leg of the journey, to count paces. She had dressed as the wife of a low Kianene functionary, cloaked in modest grey with a hanging half-veil that rested diagonally across her face, then she and Imhailas, who had disguised himself as a Galeoth caste-merchant, simply slipped out of the Imperial Precincts with the changing of the watches.

  And she walked the streets—her streets—the way those she owned and ruled walked.

  Sumna, where she had lived as prostitute, should have been a far different city, dominated as it was by the Hagerna, the city within the city that administered all the Thousand Temples. But power was power, whether clothed in the ecclesiastical finery of the Hagerna or the marshal regalia of the Imperial Precincts. Both Sumna and Momemn were ancient administrative centres, overrun with the panoply of peoples that served or seduced power. All that really distinguished them was the stone drawn from their respective quarries. Where Sumna was sandy and tan, as if one of the great Shigeki cities had been transplanted north, Momemn was largely grey and black—“the child of dark Osbeus,” the poet Nel-Saripal had called it, referring to the famed basalt quarries that lay inland on the River Phayus.

  She walked now the way she had walked then, her step brisk, her eyes shying from every passerby, her hands clutched before her. But where before she
had passed through the fog of threat that surrounded every young and beautiful woman in low company, now she traversed the fog of threat that surrounded the powerful when they find themselves stranded among the powerless.

  Imhailas had balked at the location Sankas had provided, but the Patridomos had assured him there was nothing to be done, that the kind of man they wanted to contract was as much priest as assassin, and so answered to his own unfathomable obligations. “You must understand, all of this is a kind of prayer for them,” Sankas explained. “The penultimate … act … does not stand apart from the acts that feed into it. In their eyes, this very discussion is an integral component of the … the …”

  “The assassination,” Esmenet said.

  For her part, she did not resent the prospect of sneaking across her city. Something had to be given, it seemed to her, for her mad design to have the least chance of succeeding. What was the risk and toil of walking mere streets compared with what she wanted—needed—to accomplish?

  They walked side by side where the streets permitted, otherwise she followed Imhailas like a child—or a wife—taking heart in his high, broad shoulders. Even relatively affluent passersby stepped clear of his arm-swinging stature. They followed the Processional toward the Cmiral temple-complex, turned after crossing the Rat Canal. They skirted the River District, then crossed what was called the New Quarter, presumably because it had come to house itinerant communities from across her husband’s far-flung empire. The clamour waxed and waned from street to street, corner to corner. Tutors crying out to their classes. Blue-skinned devotees of Jukan, chanting and crashing their cymbals. Beggars, cast-off galley or fuller slaves, calling out Yatwer’s name. Violent drunks, raging against the jostle.

  Even the smells ebbed and flowed, too pungent and deep, too acrid and sharp, and too many—an endless mélange of the noxious and the perfumed. The canals revolted her so much with their flotsam and stench that she resolved to legislate their cleaning when she returned to the palace. When she travelled as Empress, a company of slaves flanked her passage, each bearing blue-steaming censers. Absent them, she found herself alternately holding her breath and gagging. Ever attentive, Imhailas purchased an orange at the first opportunity. Cut in half and held about the mouth and nose, oranges and lemons provided a relatively effective remedy against urban reek.