The White-Luck Warrior (64 page)

A sorrow that would crack a human soul.

"Kosoter..." he rasps.

This is the first time she has heard Cleric refer to the Captain by name. It prickles her skin for some reason. The Captain draws himself to a seated position opposite the Nonman. She can only see the man's back, the play of starlight across the battered lines of his splint hauberk. Funnelled down the centre of his back, his hair hangs in a tangle about the rope of his caste-noble braid.

She already knows that Cleric's sanity is not a constant thing, that it ebbs and flows according to its own disordered rhythm. But she has only guessed at the role played by the Captain.

A shudder passes through the Nonman's frame. "I... I struggle."

"Good." There is an uncharacteristic softness to the Captain's voice, one borne more out of a greed for secrecy than any tenderness.

"Who... Who are these people?"

"Your children."

"What? What is this?"

"You are
preparing
."

The Nonman lowers his bald head back into shadow.

"Preparing? What is this tongue I speak? Where did I learn this tongue?"

"You are preparing."

"Preparing?"

"Yes. To remember."

Cleric raises his face to the grim figure sitting before him. Then without warning, his black gaze clicks over the Captain's shoulder, finds Mimara where she pretends to sleep.

"Yes..." the white lips say, full in the play of blackness and starlight. "They
remind
me..."

The Captain turns to follow his gaze, reveals his savage profile for no more than an instant before turning away. "Yes... They remind you of someone you once loved."

Lord Kosoter stands, shouldering the light of the stars, then draws Cleric into the windy dark.

This exchange alarms her, but more like news of growing famine overseas than any immediate threat. She recalls Achamian's description of Nonmen Erratics, how their memories of mundane life fade first, leaving only archipelagos of spectacle and intensity, the confusion of a soul hanging without foundation. And how their redemptive memories gradually follow, stranding them more and more with disconnected episodes of torment and pain, until their life becomes a nightmare lived through mist, until all love and joy sink into oblivion, become things guessed at through the shadows cast by their destruction.

This, she realizes. This is the prize the Captain has cast upon the balance of their transaction. Cleric yields up his power, and Lord Kosoter offers him
memory
. Men to love. Men to destroy...

Men to remember.

And yet Lord Kosoter is
Zaudunyani
—one of her stepfather's fanatics. Why else would he protect her from the bent lusts of the others? And if he is Zaudunyani, then he would never deliver his expedition into destruction unless... Unless his Aspect-Emperor has commanded it.

The deal he has struck with Incariol, she realizes, could be a false one. If so, the Captain plays a most deadly game.

Like all of the Few, she is accustomed to ignoring her arcane sight. But Cleric bears his mark so deeply, the residue of ages of sorcerous practice. Occult ugliness blasts him, the scars of his innumerable crimes against creation. Add to this the sheer beauty of his mundane form—the contradiction—and it sometimes seems as if the merest glance will pry her eyes from their sockets. Even if she had not seen him warring through the sewered depths of Cil-Aujas or beneath the clawed bowers of the Meorn Wilderness, she would have known he was a power—a great power.

If he were to choose to annihilate the Skin Eaters...

Only Achamian could possibly hope to stand against him—were he free to speak.

—|—

The company continues its lonely walk, dwarfed by the confluence of never-ending land and sky. What features the landscape possesses are slavish and melancholy, as if they were mountains beaten into ruddy heaps and long-wandering flanges. Wild clouds feather the sky, slow-sailing immensities that promise rain that is never delivered. She often gazes into them while she walks, probing the precipices and the plummets, wondering at the way they form floating plates that seem to wheel in competing directions, pinching deep glimpses of blue into white oblivion.

The Wizard stumbles along, bound and gagged, glaring hate at everyone save her.

Survive, Mimara! Forget me!

More days pass before she is able to piece things together. Sarl, especially, provides her with pivotal insights. He tells her how Lord Kosoter, famed for his cruelty and marshal zeal, had come to the Aspect-Emperor's attention during the Unification Wars. How he had been promised a special Shrial Remission by none other than her uncle, Maithanet, for founding a scalper company and remaining in the vicinity of Hûnoreal—where he could regularly check on the Wizard.

"He is born of Hell," the madmen tells her, his face squished into I-knew-all-along glee. "He is born of Hell, the Captain. And he knows it—oh ho! He knows it. He thinks your
gurwikka
, there, will pay his toll..." His squint pops open in mock alarm. "Deliver him to paradise!"

"But how?" she protests.

"Because of him!" the madman cackles. "
Him!
The Aspect-Emperor
knows all
..."

She herself had seen the yield of the Wizard's twenty years alone in the wilderness. After Achamian absconded for Marrow, she fought her way past his slaves and broke into his tower room. Part of her had expected to be blasted, to die screaming in sorcerous fire. She could sense the residue of something arcane. But there had been no incipient Wards protecting the room, nothing... Because of his slaves' children, she knew.

At first she could see little save the sunlight outlining the shuttered window where she had first seen him. The smell was rancid but curiously dry and inviting. Finally she saw the wolf-pelts warming the walls and ceiling. The crude-hewn bed. And then the issue of his decades-long labour.

Pages. Scattered. Stacked into teetering piles. Scrolls piled like bones, tumbling into shadow. Dream after dream, scratched in ink and numbered—everything numbered. Pattern after pattern. Theory after theory. Seswatha this. Seswatha that. A horde of details she could never hope to decode, let alone remember.

Out of all the scribbles she peered at, only one would live on in her memory, what seemed the old Wizard's final entry, the one that would spur her to pursue him.

She has returned. Of all people!
I am awake at last.

She,
he had written.
She...
Esmenet.

Mother.

If she could simply walk into the old Wizard's room, Mimara reasons, then so too could her stepfather. She can even see
him
in her soul's eye, the Aspect-Emperor stepping from a point of blue-white light. She can see his face, always so remote, always so terrifying, slowly scan the slovenly gloom. What would a god think, she wonders, looking upon the low belongings of his old teacher, the obsessive issue of his wife's first abiding love?

Nothing human, she is certain.

She laughs in the course of these ruminations, loud and hard enough to draw more than one questioning look from the others. Part of her blames the Qirri, which she adores even as she hates. It continues to leach her soul, to draw water from her previous concerns. Now and again she even catches herself thinking her captivity an honest and advantageous trade... so long as Cleric continues to plumb her mouth with his cool and bitter finger.

But the humour is real. From the very beginning she had dismissed the old Wizard's fears regarding her stepfather.
"This is the way he sends you,"
Achamian said.
"This is the way he rules—from the darkness in our own souls! If you were to
feel
it, know it, that would simply mean there was some deeper deception..."

She had discounted him with a smirk, with the grimace she reserved for fools. She, an Anasûrimbor by marriage, who had lived in his divine presence, who had sat riven, skinned in goose-pimples, as her stepfather merely crossed the room. Like so many she confused absence with impotence. The Andiamine Heights seemed so
distant
. Now she knows: the Aspect-Emperor transcends distance. Anasûrimbor Kellhus is everywhere.

Exactly as the old Wizard feared.

With this realization comes a new understanding of her power. She finds herself scrutinizing the Captain, guessing at the warring scales within him, the precarious balance of piety and bloodlust. She represents an infuriating complication, Mimara decides, the wrinkle marring the long silk of his ambition. He feels no worldly terror, she decides, because his fear of damnation eclipses all. Too warlike to find redemption in the Gods of Compassion. Too miserly and too cruel to secure the favour of War or the Hunter...

Only the Aspect-Emperor. Only he can make a virtue out of his bloodlust. Only
he
can deliver him to Paradise.

She is the variable, she thinks, remembering the algebra she learned at the knee of Yerajaman, her Nilnameshi tutor. She is the value he cannot calculate.

What Lord Kosoter does, she finally decides, depends on what he thinks his lord and master, his
god
, desires.

"I am with child," she tells him.

A flinch passes across the implacable face.

"Are you not curious?" she asks.

His glare does not waver. Never has a man so terrified her.

"You
know
..." she presses. "Don't you?"

She has spent her life, it seems, staring into the faces of bearded men, guessing at the line of their jaw, feeling their hair chafe the bare skin of her neck. She has childhood memories of bare-faced priests and caste-nobles in Sumna. Some of the older Nansur who populated the Imperial Court still clung to their womanish cheeks. But it seems that for as long as she can remember, men meant beards. And the more they adorned them, the higher their station.

Lord Kosoter looks like little more than a cutthroat to her—a beggar, even.
Think of him as that!
she cries wordlessly.
He is less than you! Less!

"Know what?" he grates.

"Who the father is..."

He says nothing.

"Tell me, Captain," she says, her voice pinched shrill. "Why do you think I fled the Andiamine Heights?"

Even his blink seems a thing graven, as if mere flesh were too soft to contain such a gaze.

"Why does any girl flee her stepfather's home?" she asks.

The lie is a foolish one: he need only guess at the length of her term to realize there is no way she could have been impregnated in Momemn. But then, what would a man such as him know of pregnancy, let alone one borne of a divine violation? Her mother had carried all her brothers and sisters far beyond the usual term.

"You understand, don't you? You
realize
what I bear..."

A god... I carry a god in my belly.
It seems she need only tell herself this for it to be true...

Another gift of the Qirri.

And she sees it sparking in his eyes. Wonder and horror both. She almost cries out in jubilation. She has cracked his face. At last she has cracked his face!

His lunge is so sudden, so swift, she scarcely knows what has happened until she slams across the turf. He pins her. His right hand clamps her mouth, so large it all but engulfs the lower half of her face. A kind of wild monkey rage shines from his glare. He leans close enough for her to smell rotting teeth.

"Never!"
he says in a roaring whisper.
"Never speak of this again!"

Then she is free, her head spinning, her lips and cheeks numb.

He turns away from her, back toward the watching Nonman. There is nothing to do, it seems, but to sit and weep.

Despair fills her after this last foolish gambit. These were
scalpers
. Implacable. These were the kind of men who never paused to reflect, who asked questions of women only so they might show them the proper answer. Even without the Qirri, they were forever trapped at the rushing edge of passion and thought, believing utterly what they needed to see their hungers appeased. Where some were set aflutter by the mere suspicion of slight, nothing but outright calamity could throw these men back into themselves. Only blood—
their
blood—could incite them to question.

What was, for these men,
was
. Lord Kosoter was a fanatical agent of the Aspect-Emperor. Drusas Achamian was his prisoner. They marched to plunder the Coffers.

If they were caught in the wheels of some greater machination, then so be it.

—|—

It is night and the scalpers argue. The voices of the others climb about the Captain's rare growl. They sit in a clutch several paces away, ragged shadows chalked in starlight. Sarl's laughter scratches the night. For some reason the substance of their feud does not concern her, even though she periodically hears the word
peach
carried on the wind. She has her razor to consider.

Achamian lies trussed beside her, his face pressed into the turf. He either sleeps or listens.

Cleric sits cross-legged nearby, his knees obscured by weedy shags. He stares at her without embarrassment. She can still feel the chill of his finger across her tongue.

She raises her waterskin high, slowly pours it over her head. She can feel the water warm as it snakes along her scalp. Her hair wet, her gaze fixed on the watching Nonman, she lifts the razor to her scalp.

She works quickly, even thoughtlessly. She has done this innumerable times: the custom of whores in Carythusal was to wear wigs. She had owned eleven by the time her mother's men had come with their swords and torches.

Galian's voice rises in disbelief.
"Slog?"
he cries.
"This is mor—"

Her hair drops in a tangle of ribbons across her lap. Rare dry strands ride the wind, float out behind her, where they snag grasses, hang quivering.