The White Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

  The thing grinned—sheets of mucus pinned to its lesser skull.

  Laughter like pain blown through broken flutes.

  “None,” the Inchoroi gasped through leprous throats. “None escape Golgottera—”

  Shouting. Someone was shouting.

  The Wizard bolted from the forest floor, blinking and peering in the stupefied manner of those just awoken. He coughed, convulsed as his throat warred against the gag. The world was predawn grey, the eastern sky a golding slate through skeins of branches.

  The Captain. The Captain ranted at them to awaken.

  “The Coffers, boys!” he cried in a macabre parody of Sarl’s exclamation. The mad Sergeant chortled in delight, cried, “The Slog of Slogs!” in answer, before a realization of some kind yanked his breath short. Afterward, he watched with the wariness of a dog long-beaten.

  “Today is the day we turn around!”

  Achamian glimpsed Mimara rising slight and slender from a depression in the ground, her lips hanging open as she beat at the leafy detritus pasted across her arm and shoulder. Suddenly Lord Kosoter was looming over him, the twin voids tingling as always beneath his splint hauberk. He grabbed the Wizard by the shoulders, heaved him to his feet as though he were a child.

  “Galian!” he shouted to the former Columnary. “Make ready.”

  The Captain seized the rope about the Wizard’s wrists and, accompanied by Cleric, led him like a votive lamb away from the others. He had a practised hand, shoving and catching so that it seemed the Wizard continually tripped forward. Eventually, he let him fall onto his face.

  The Wizard writhed like a fish, kicked himself onto his back only to crush and scrape his fingers against a branch. Lord Kosoter towered over him, more shadow than man with the brightening east behind him. His two Chorae glowered with nothingness, like the empty sockets of a skull hanging about his heart. The Wizard watched him reach beneath his hauberk and tug one free.

  “Our expedition has come to a head,” Lord Kosoter said, dandling the thing before him.

  The old Wizard’s thoughts raced. There was a path through this. There was a path through everything …

  Yet one more lesson learned at Kellhus’s punishing hand.

  The Captain knelt beside him, leaned so low his beard brushed Achamian’s own. His rough fingers worked the leather straps that held the gag in place. The Chorae was a coal that scorched the air with absence—burning oblivion …

  “The time has come, Wizard. Xonghis says the solstice is several days away.”

  The old Wizard shrank from the Trinket, writhed as if searching for a hatch through the forest floor. The Captain pulled the gag free.

  “Speak with care.”

  His tongue was cankered and swollen. Talking was onerous. “Wha—?” He trailed in a coughing fit. “Sol-solstice?”

  The Captain’s face betrayed no passion. His eyes gleamed dead within their rim of tattooed black. The ferocity of his suspicion lay compressed in the pause he took before replying.

  “You claimed the Coffers were protected by powerful Wards,” he fairly growled. “Curses that could only be unlocked during the solstice …”

  Achamian glared, blinking. It seemed a lifetime had passed since he had said as much. Lies. Where facts were like embroidery, each one stitched across the whole cloth of others, lies were like chips of ice in water, always slipping one past the other, always melting …

  “Our expedition has come to a head …”

  And it came upon the Wizard as a kind of falling horror, the profundity of his ignorance.

  Were the Coffers still sealed after all this time? Were they buried? Were they gutted, long emptied of their riches?

  For all he knew, the Map to Ishuäl might lie in Golgotterath …

  Even still, he heard his voice rasp, spill even more ice into the water of expediency—and with more than enough hate to sound convincing. “Th-the Wards … They yoke the movement of the planets—that is the source of their never-ending power. F-four sorcerous keys were given, one for each transition of the seasons. Summer to autumn is the only key I know.”

  The Captain regarded him for a flint-hearted moment.

  “You lie.”

  “Yes,” Achamian replied in a cold voice. “I lie.”

  Lord Kosoter turned to Cleric, who stood looming behind. His Chorae drifted a fraction nearer as he did so, blistering the Wizard’s cheek with salt. Seeing the Nonman, Achamian suddenly realized what it was he needed to do. He needed to convince Kosoter to send him alone with the Nonman King—with Seswatha’s ancient friend and ally.

  He needed to reach what remained of Nil’giccas … Or, failing that, kill him.

  But how to convince him, a being gone mad for forgetfulness?

  The Captain scooped the Chorae tight into his fist. Achamian watched, trying to squint the hope from his eyes, while the man drew his knife and began sawing at his restraints.

  “I smell treachery,” Lord Kosoter said to his inhuman ward. “You take him. Confirm his story or kill him.”

  Cleric nodded. A band of dawn orange slipped across his cheek.

  The old Wizard fairly shouted aloud for relief. How long had it been since the Whore had last favoured him? Seju knew he would need more of her capricious favours before this insanity was through.

  His extremities prickled and stabbed at the sudden return of circulation. Groaning, he drew himself up, rubbing his hands and fingers against his forearms.

  “You die no matter what,” the Captain spat, speaking as if the future were as irrevocable as the past. “It’s the girl who tips upon the balance.”

  And suddenly Achamian understood why Kosoter had elected to remain behind. Logic—scalper logic. Who knew what sorcerous traps lay buried in a legendary place like the Library? Better to hang back, to direct events from safety, with a knife held to his hostage’s throat.

  “And the child within her.”

  The Great Library of Sauglish. Even beaten to its foundations, portions of the holy fortress reared above the trees. The merest rise or gap in the screening branches afforded him glimpses. His dreaded destination.

  Even still, the old Wizard found an unexpected serenity walking with the Nonman through the wooded ruins. Ragged patches of sunshine waved across the forest floor. Birdsong chirped and chattered through the canopy, light and inexhaustible. Here and there sections of wall rose from mounds like teeth from earthen gums. Layers of stonework ribbed the ravines they crossed. Blocks and fragments of every description stumped the ground. They passed a free-standing triumphal, the first thing Achamian clearly recognized from his Dreams: the Murussar, the symbolic bastion that marked the entrance to Sauglish’s outlander quarter. Stripped of its inscriptions and engravings, it towered into the canopy, stone blackened, chapped with white lichens, shelved with moss. He need only blink to see the crowds bustling about its marble base: their garb ancient, their arms and armour bronze—men culled from all nations, from wild Aörsi to distant Kyraneas.

  Prior to the First Apocalypse, the Holy Library had been famed throughout Eärwa, the destination of poets, sorcerers, and princely embassies. Entire literary traditions had grown about the long pilgrimage to the City of Robes, the famed Caravaneeri, of which only fragments now survived. Bards and prophets haunted the niches and alcoves of every street, crying out diversion and threatening damnation. Vendors lined the ways, hawking wares from as faraway as ancient Shir.

  Sauglish had been infamous for its racket, the markets booming with commerce during the days, the streets clattering with teamsters during the night. There was something both tragic and beautiful, Achamian decided, in the contrast between that ancient clamour and the peaceful din he heard now—as if there were something proper in the passing of Men.

  The Ganiural, the processional avenue that led to the Library, was still clearly visible beneath the mounding of centuries: a broad trough in the forest floor that followed a compass-straight bearing. The old Wizard had said nothing to Cleric in
all this time: despite the wonder he felt, his outrage at his captivity remained too raw a thing to broach. But as they climbed toward the ruined Library, the scale of ages seemed to leach into his bones—generations stacked upon generations, innumerable lives snuffed after a mere handful of scratching years. The fact that the figure walking beside him had outlived all of it, long enough to break beneath the burden, loomed so large that his grudge began to seem preposterous.

  “Incariol,” Achamian finally said, wincing at the way speaking pained his gag-cankered tongue. “Why that name?”

  The Nonman’s stride did not falter. “Because I wander.”

  The Wizard breathed deep, knowing the time had come to plunge back into the fray. He squinted up at the figure. “And Cleric?”

  The Nonman’s pace slowed a fraction. A scowl furrowed his hairless brow.

  “It is a tradition … I think … A tradition among the Siqû to take a Mannish name.”

  Siqû was the name given to Nonmen who walked among Men.

  “But Incariol is not your name …”

  The Nonman continued walking.

  “You are Nil’giccas,” the Wizard pressed. “The Last King of Mansions.”

  Cleric abruptly halted and with an alien air slowly turned to face him. Because they had walked shoulder to shoulder or rather, shoulder to elbow, the Nonman loomed over him, broad and hale beneath his nimil armour.

  The Wizard saw turmoil in his dark eyes.

  “No,” the marmoreal lips said. “He is dead.”

  A sudden consciousness of what Seswatha had felt in the presence of the being before him descended upon Achamian. A sense of age-spanning majesty, grievous nobility, and power, angelic and unfathomable.

  “No,” the old Wizard said. “He is quite alive, gazing upon me.”

  The King of Ishterebinth stood before him, storied and immortal. The legendary hero, whose triumphs and disasters had been stamped into the very foundation of history.

  Drusas Achamian fell to his knees, bent with fingers interlocked behind his neck, the way the Grandmaster of the Sohonc had bowed so many times so very many years ago, even in this, the celebrated city he once called his own …

  He knelt to accord honour to the great King before him.

  She watches Cleric and the Wizard vanish over the burial rim that once was Sauglish’s walls, swallows against the cry climbing her throat. The sight reeks of execution.

  They have reached the Coffers. The Skin Eaters, she knows, will not suffer them long.

  Mimara has never been a timid or fearful woman. Nor has she ever been like her mother, who continually swaddled her heart in doubt and misgivings. Their quest has doled out terrors aplenty, but almost always as calls to desperate action. There were always eyes she could claw. Always.

  But the fear she feels now forbids all action. It gags her, as certainly as the Wizard had been gagged. Even her wailing is caught in the fist of her breast. It empties her limbs of blood.

  The fear that taught prayer to Men.

  She can feel Achamian walking alone, out there, a point of panic swamped in torpor. She can feel his doom close hoary about him.

  The Captain and the others busy themselves with trivial labours. Pokwas whets his great blade. Koll seems to sleep. Xonghis fashions snares. Mimara simply sits hugging her knees, rapt, at times praying for Achamian, at times fending the images of disaster flashing through her soul’s eye. She spends the early morning watches grappling with doom and futility.

  But the focus of her anxiety is not long in changing.

  Great Sauglish, the ancient City of Robes, extended about them, little more than a host of ruined grottos scattered through the forest. He would succeed in this, the old Wizard thought on his knees beneath the towering Nonman. He would wrest Cleric away from the Captain. He would recover Anasûrimbor Celmomas’s ancient map from the Coffers. He would find Ishuäl and the truth of the man who had stolen his wife.

  “You are confused, mortal,” Cleric said. “Rise.”

  And with these simple words, the old Wizard’s sudden hope collapsed back into the morass of worry and embittered fear. Feeling foolish, Achamian climbed back to his feet. He gazed angrily up at the Nonman, then looked down in embarrassment and fury.

  “Lord Kosoter …” he ventured as they resumed their climb. “He’s your elju? Your book?”

  Cleric was reluctant to speak. The old Wizard knew he had to tread carefully. Famed King of Ishterebinth or not, the Nonman walking beside him was also an Erratic, one of the Wayward.

  “Yes.”

  “What if he lies? What if he manipulates you?”

  Cleric turned to regard him, then looked to the glimpses of ruined walls in the distance before them. “What if he’s treacherous?” he asked.

  “Yes!” the Wizard pressed. “Surely you can see how … diseased his heart has become. Surely you can see his madness!”

  “And you … you would be my book in his stead?”

  Achamian paused to better choose his words.

  “Seswatha,” he began with an imploring look, “your old friend of yore—he dwells within me, my Lord. I cannot betray him. He cannot betray you. Let me bear the burden of your memory!”

  Cleric continued in silence for several strides, his expression inscrutable.

  “Seswatha …” he finally repeated. “That name … I remember. When the world burned … When Mog-Pharau shouldered the clouds … He … Seswatha fought at my side … for a time.”

  “Yes!” Achamian exclaimed. “Please, my Lord. Take me as your book! Leave this scalper madness behind! Regain your honour! Reclaim your glory!”

  Cleric lowered his face, clutched his chin and cheek. His shoulders hitched in what Achamian took for a sob …

  But was in fact a laugh.

  “So …” the Nonman King said, raising eyes savage for their mirth. “You offer me oblivion?”

  Too late, the old Wizard recognized his mistake.

  “No … I—”

  The Nonman whirled, grasped him with a strength that made the Wizard feel bone thin, bone frail. “I will not die a husk!” he cried. He rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder in his curious, mad and explosive way. He flung out his hands to clutch the air.

  “No! I will ruin and I will break!”

  Few things unsettle more than the violation of hidden assumptions—or make us more wary. The old Wizard had appealed to his own logic—his own vanity—forgetting that the absence of common ends was the very thing that made the mad mad. He had offered himself as a tool, not realizing that he and Mimara were the object of the bargain struck: the shade of an ancient friend and the echo of long-lost love. They were the loves to be betrayed.

  They were the souls to be remembered …

  “Honour?” the Nonman cried, his sneer transforming him into a gigantic Sranc. “Love? What are these but dross before oblivion? No! I will seize the world and I will shake from it what misery, what anguish, I can. I will remember!”

  The old Wizard resumed walking, this time with a bearing more suited to a death march. Let the victim lead the executioner, he thought. Nil’giccas, the Last King of Mansions, was going to kill him in the Library of Sauglish.

  Scenarios both disastrous and absurdly hopeful raced through Achamian’s thoughts. He would ambush the Nonman with a Cant powerful enough to smash his incipient Wards—kill him before he himself was killed. He would plead and cajole, find the incantation of reason and passion that would throw Cleric from the mad track he followed. He would battle with howling fury, tear down what was left of the Sacred Library, only to be beaten down by the Quya Mage’s greater might …

  The impulse to survive is not easily denied, no matter how severe the calamities a man has suffered or how relentless the misfortunes.

  “I mourn what Fate has made of me …” the Nonman said without warning.

  The old Wizard watched his booted feet kick through forest debris.

  “So what of Ishterebinth?” he asked. “Has it
fallen?”

  The hulking Nonman made a gesture that possessed the character of a shrug. “Fallen? No. Turned. In the absence of recollection my brothers have turned to tyranny … To Min-Uroikas.”

  Min-Uroikas. That he spoke this with ease attested to the severity of his condition. Among the Intact, it was a name not so much mentioned as spat or cursed. Min-Uroikas. The Pit of Obscenities. The dread stronghold that had murdered all their wives and daughters, and so doomed their entire race.

  “Golgotterath,” the Wizard managed to say without breath.

  A heavy nod. Sickles of reflected sunlight bobbed across his scalp.

  “I had forgotten that name.”

  “And you?” the Wizard asked. “Why have you not joined them?”

  Long silence. Long enough to bring them to the base of the broken Library.

  “Pride,” the Nonman finally said. “I would bring about my own heartbreak. So I set out in search of those I might love …”

  Achamian searched the dark glitter of his eyes. “And destroy.”

  A solemn nod, carrying thousands of years of inevitability. “And destroy.”

  Mimara does not know what alerts her to the sudden change in the air among the scalpers. Her mother once told her the bulk of discourse consisted of hidden exchanges, that most men blathered in utter ignorance of their meaning and intent. Mimara scoffed at the idea, not because it rang false, but because her mother argued it.

  “Most find it difficult to stomach,” the Empress said with maternal exhaustion. “They believe in a thousand things they cannot see, yet tell them the greater part of their own soul lies hidden, and they balk …”

  This proved to be one of those rare comments that would flank Mimara’s anger and leave her simply troubled. She could not shake the sense that the object of the exchange, the hidden object, had been her stepfather, Kellhus. The nagging suspicion that her mother had been warning her.

  A part of her awakened that day. It was one thing to realize that the men who wooed her spoke through their teeth, as the Ainoni would say. But it was quite another to think that motives could hide themselves, leaving the men they moved utterly convinced of their honourable intentions.