The White-Luck Warrior (23 page)

There was no other way through the monstrous intellect before him.

This is a mistake...

"The whisper
warns
you!" Inrilatas laughed, his eyes bright, not for the twin flames they reflected, but something more incendiary still: apprehension. "You do not like sharing... Such a peevish, devious little soul! Come
closer
, little brother."

He sees me!

"You cannot let him fool you!" the boy cried, trying to goad a pride that did not exist.

"I see
him
—the one you hide, oh yes! The other one, the whisperer. I
seeeeeeeee
him," Inrilatas crooned. "What does he tell you? Is he the one who wants Uncle Holy dead?"

"You will want to kill him, Brother, when he comes. I can
help
you!"

More laughter, warm and avuncular, at once teasing and protective. "And now you offer the beast candy. Come closer, little brother. I want to stare into your mouth."

"You will want to
kill
Uncle Holy," Kelmomas repeated, his thoughts giddy with sudden inspiration. "Think, brother... The
sum of sins
."

And with that single phrase, the young Prince-Imperial's dogged persistence was rescued—or so he thought.

Where his brother had fairly radiated predatory omniscience before, his manner suddenly collapsed inward. Even his nakedness, which had been that of the rapist—lewd, virile, bestial—lapsed into its chill and vulnerable contrary. He actually seemed to shrink in his chains.

Suddenly Inrilatas seemed as pathetic as the human shit breathing on the floor between them.

The young man's eyes flinched from the boy's gaze, sought melancholy reprieve in the shadowy corners of his cell's ceiling.

"Do you ever wonder, Kel, why it is I do what I do?"

"No," the boy answered honestly.

Inrilatas glanced at his brother, then down to the floor. Breathing deep, he smiled the sad smile of someone lost in a game pursued too far for too long. Too long to abandon. Too long to continue.

"I do it to heap damnation upon myself," he said as if making an absurd admission.

"But why?" the boy asked, genuinely curious now.

Be wary...
the secret voice whispered.

"Because I can think of no greater madness."

And what greater madness could there be, exchanging a handful of glorious heartbeats for an eternity of anguish and torment? But the boy shied from this question.

"I... I don't understand," he said. "You could leave this room... anytime you wished! Mother would release you—I know it. You just need to follow the
rules
."

His brother paused, looked to him as if searching for evidence of kinship beyond the fact of their blood. "Tell me, little brother, what
rules
the rule?"

Something is wrong...
the voice warned.

"The God," the boy said, shrugging.

"And what rules the God?"

"Nothing. No one."

He breaths as you breathe,
the secret voice whispered,
blinks as you blink—even his heartbeat captures your own! He draws your unthinking soul into the rhythms of his making. He mesmerizes you!

Inrilatas nodded in solemn affirmation. "So the God is... unconstrained."

"Yes."

Inrilatas stood with sudden grace, walked to the limit of chains. He seemed godlike in the gloom, his hair falling in flaxen sheets about his shoulders, his limbs bound in veined muscle, his phallus laying long and violet in a haze of golden down. He placed his foot upon his feces, and using his toes, smeared it in a foul arc across the floor below him.

"So the God is like
me
."

And just like that, the boy
understood
. The senseless sense of his brother's acts. The miraculous stakes of his mad exchange. Suddenly this little room, this shit-stained prison cell hidden from the light of shame, seemed a
holy place
, a temple to a different revelation, the nail of a darker heaven.

"Yes..." the boy murmured, lost in the wisdom—the heartbreaking wisdom!—of his brother's constant gaze.

And it seemed his brother's voice soaked into the surrounding walls, cupped everything that could be seen. "The God punishes us according to the degree we resemble him."

Inrilatas towered before him.

"And you resemble him, little brother. You resemble..."

What was this trap he had set for him? How could understanding,
insight
, capture?

"No!" the boy cried. "I am not mad! I am not like you!"

Laughter, warm and gentle. So like Mother when she is lazy and wishes only to tease and cuddle her beautiful little son.
"Look,"
Anasûrimbor Inrilatas commanded. "Look at this heap of screams you call the world, and tell me you would not
add
to them—pile them to the sky!"

He has the Strength,
the secret voice whispered.

"I would..." Anasûrimbor Kelmomas admitted. "I would." His limbs trembled. His heart hung as if plummeting through a void. What was this crashing within him? What was this release?

The Truth!

And his brother's voice resonated, climbed as if communicating up out of his bones.
"You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother—Little Knife! You think you murder in her name. But that love is simply cloth thrown over the invisible, what you use to reveal the shape of something so much greater..."

Memories tumbled into his soul's eye. Memories of his Whelming, how he had followed the beetle to the feet of the Grinning God, the Four-horned Brother, how they had laughed when he had maimed the bug—laughed
together
! Memories of the Yatwerian priestess, how she had shrieked blood while the Mother of Fertility stood helpless...

And the boy could feel it! An assumption of glory. A taking possession of a certainty that had possessed him all along—possessed him in ignorance... Yes!

Godhead.

"Come closer,"
Inrilatas said in a whisper that seemed to boom across all creation. He nodded to the arc smeared across the floor between them.
"Wander across the line others have etched for you..."

The young Prince-Imperial watched his left foot, small and white and bare, step forward—

But a gnarled hand caught him, held him with gentle insistence. Somehow the deaf-mute Attendant had circled around without the boy noticing. The man wagged his face in alarm and horror.

Inrilatas began laughing.

"Flee, little brother," he said, passion fluting through his voice. "I can feel the..." He dandled his tongue on his lips as if savouring his own sweetness, even as his eyes widened in animal fury. A coital shudder passed through him. "I feel the
rage
!" he roared to the stone vaults.
"The furies!"
He seized the slack chains, wrenched them savagely enough to make the links screech for biting one another. Saliva swung from his mouth when he jerked his face back to Kelmomas. "I can feel it come... come upon me..." His phallus climbed into a grinning arc.

"Diviniteeeeeee!"

The boy stood astounded. At last he yielded to the Attendant and his shoulder-tugging hands, allowed the wretch to pull him from his brother's cell...

He knew Inrilatas would find the little gift he had left for him, lying along the seam between floor-stones.

The small file he had stolen from the palace tinker... not so long ago.

—|—

I
OTHIAH

Fire, fierce enough to sting the skin from paces away. Smoke, rolling in oily sheets, acrid enough to prick the eyes, needle the throat. Screams, violent enough to cramp the heart. Screams. Too many screams.

Dizzy and nauseated, Malowebi rode close beside Fanayal ab Kascamandri as the Padirajah toured the streets, some raucous, others abandoned. The Second Negotiant had never witnessed the sacking of a village, let alone a city as vast and mighty as Iothiah. It reminded him that High Holy Zeüm, for all its high holy bluster, knew very little about war. The Men of the Three Seas, he had come to realize, warred without mercy or honour. Where the dynastic skirmishes his Zeümi kinsmen called war were bound by ancient code and custom, Fanayal and his men recognized no constraints that he could see, save that of military expediency and exhaustion.

They fought the way Sranc fought.

The Mbimayu sorcerer saw entire streets carpeted in bodies. He saw several rapes, the victims either vacant or shrieking, and more summary executions than he cared to count. He saw a pale-skinned Columnary holding a squalling babe in one arm while trying to battle two laughing Kianene with the other. He saw an old man jumping from a rooftop, his clothing afire.

Perhaps glimpsing something of his dismay, Fanayal was at pains to describe the atrocities suffered by his own people during the First Holy War and the subsequent Wars of Unification. A kind of madness warbled through his outrage as he spoke, condemnation spoken in the tones of divine revelation, as if nothing could be more right and true than the slaughter and rapine about them. The Bloodthirsty Excuse, the sage Memgowa had called it. Retribution.

"But there is more to this than crude vengeance," Fanayal explained, as if suddenly recalling the learning of the man he addressed. The Padirajah was proud of his own youthful education, Malowebi knew, but found the posture difficult to recover after decades of brutality and fugitive insurrection. "You make an example of the first," the man continued, "then you show mercy to the second. First, you teach them to fear you, then you earn their trust.
Nirsi shal'tatra
, we call it. The Honey and the Goad."

Malowebi could not but reflect on how easily the whip and the honey became confused. Everywhere they rode, the Kianene turned from their sordid labours and called out to their lord in exultation and gratitude—cheered as if famished guests at a sumptuous feast.

Savages, Cousin. You have sent me out among savages.

Something, Malowebi's silence, perhaps, convinced the Bandit Padirajah to cut their tour short. They reversed direction, rode for what seemed an entire watch plagued by the sound of a babe crying—Malowebi could almost believe someone followed them torturing a cat. Silence haunted the empty windows. Smoke sheeted the west in gauze rags, lending an eerie, watery timbre to the sunlight that slanted across the dying city. Finally they returned to the wrack and ruin of the city's northwestern walls—the section brought down by Meppa.

Once again, Malowebi found himself gawking.

"It frightens you, no?" Fanayal said, watching his profile. "The spilling of the Water."

"What do you mean?"

The Padirajah graced him with an upside-down smile. "I've been told that Schoolmen find the Cishaurim Psûkhe troubling. You see a violation with your mundane eyes—the glare of sorcery—when your
other
eye, the one that itches, sees only mundane creation."

Malowebi shrugged, thinking of the brief dual between Meppa and the lone Saik sorcerer—a decrepit and dishevelled old man—who had defended the hapless city. The rogue Cishaurim floating, impervious to the fire of the Schoolman's Anagogic dragonhead, disgorging cataracts of blue-twinkling light as pure as it was beautiful. As awesome as Meppa's power had been—there was no doubting he was a Primary—it had been the
beauty
that had most astounded, and mortified, the Second Negotiant.

To be a sorcerer was to dwell among deformities.

"It is extraordinary," Malowebi admitted, "to see the Work without the Mark." He smiled the wise and slippery smile of an old diplomat. "But we Schoolmen are accustomed to miracles."

He said this last more in bitter jest than anything. What he witnessed had left many profound impressions. The power of Meppa, certainly. The martial acumen of the Padirajah. The cunning and the bravery of the Fanim, not to mention their barbarity...

But nothing loomed so large as the
weakness
of the New Empire.

The rumours were absolutely true: the Aspect-Emperor had boned his conquests to pursue his mad invasion of the northern wilds. Disaffected populations. Ill-equipped soldiers, poorly trained and even more poorly led. Infirm and doddering Schoolmen. And perhaps most interestingly,
absolutely no Chorae...

Nganka—nay,
Zeüm
—needed to be informed. This night would be filled with far-calling dreams.

"The people call him Stonebreaker," Fanayal said. "Meppa... They say he was sent to us by the Solitary God."

Malowebi turned to him, blinking.

"What do
you
say?"

"I say he was sent to
me
!" the hawk-faced Padirajah cried laughing. "
I am
the Solitary God's gift to his people."

"And what does
he
say?" the Second Negotiant asked, now genuinely curious.

"Meppa? He does not know who he is."

CHAPTER SIX
The Meorn Wilderness

Everything is concealed always. Nothing is more trite than a mask.

—
A
JENCIS,
T
HE
T
HIRD
A
NALYTIC OF
M
EN

If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.

—
M
ANAGORAS,
O
DE TO THE
L
ONG-
L
IVED
F
OOL

L
ATE
S
PRING, 20
N
EW
I
MPERIAL
Y
EAR (4132
Y
EAR-OF-THE-
T
USK), THE "
L
ONG
S
IDE"