The White-Luck Warrior (67 page)

"You sound certain of yourself, my Lord."

There is a
flatness
to him, an aura of immovability. When she speaks to him like this, in low tones, walking side by side, she has this nagging sense of amputation, of a soul that either has legs for hatred and fury or has no legs at all.

"We were seven days out from Attrempus," he says, sparing her his scrutiny, "marching on the Numaineiri Orthodox. We were naught but the jugglers—the greater parade lay with my kinsmen to the south. But still,
he
found time to inspect our bloody handiwork. The long-bearded fools only thought they
believed
. We showed them conviction—
Zaudunyani
conviction. But your stepfather, he decided we needed to show
more
, something all the blondies in Ce Tydonn could mull in their racks. So we herd up the converts, all those who had found salvation in the execution line,
and we put out their eyes.
Gropers, we called them—what they call them still."

He does not turn to look at her, as she would expect from anyone who cared whether his words had effect. So much of what makes him unsettling, she realizes, are these violations of the innumerable small ways people anticipate one another. He is the most ruthlessly
direct
man she has ever known, and still he continually surprises her.

"So you think my stepfather's cruelty is something that
I
should fear?"

She even manages to laugh.

He sweeps his gaze about and down, swallows her with a kind of compressed regard—a look that seems to throw her whole existence on the balance, as if weighing her life against half-hearted promises.

"Besides," she says, pressing the remnants of her anger into her glare. "It's my
mother
you really need to consider." She looks away in feigned disinterest.

"If she would burn down half a city to avenge me, what do you think she will do to you?"

—|—

Day after day, they walk through a dead land, a land where sons were slaughtered before they could father, where daughters were exterminated before their wombs could quicken. A land where birth itself had been murdered. And she mourns.

She mourns her lost naiveté, the girl who would be a witch, not for knowledge's sake, but to better batter an offending world. To better injure a mother she cannot forgive.

She mourns all those they have lost. Skin Eaters. Stone Hags. She whispers prayers to Yatwer, though she knows the Goddess despises warlike men as takers. She prays for Kiampas, for giant Oxwora. She even laments Soma, the unknown youth who was murdered not for gold or hate but for his face.

She mourns her captivity and the suffering of the Wizard.

She mourns her boots, which will very soon fail her feet.

She mourns the tiny black sliver that is her ration of Qirri.

She did not know what to expect coming to Kûniüri. Great journeys are often such, a matter of placing one foot before the other, again and again, for what seems a trudging eternity. Sometimes dusk and sleep are your only destination, and the trek's overarching end comes about as a kind of surprise.

She wasn't journeying to places glimpsed in ancient dreams. She wasn't
drawn
the way the Wizard was drawn.

She had been chased.

She thinks of the Andiamine Heights, of her Empress mother. She thinks of her little brother, Kelmomas, and she worries—as far as the Qirri will allow her.

At last they come to a river, every bit as great as the Sayut or the Sempis, broad-backed and slow moving, deep green with life and sediment, gleaming like a plate of silver where it catches the sun.

The Captain turns to his captive. "Is this it?"

Gagged, the old Wizard simply gazes at him in incredulity and disgust.

The Captain yanks the gag from his mouth.
"Is this it?"

Achamian spits, works his lips and jaw for a moment. For the first time Mimara notices the sores caking the creases of his lips. After glaring at the Captain, the old Wizard turns to the others with mock grandiloquence. "Behold!" he cries through the sludge of a long-stopped voice. "Behold the Mighty Aumris! The nursery of Mannish civilization! The cradle of all!"

The Captain slaps him to the ground for his insolence.

She mourns the fact that cringing has become so easy.

—|—

The old Wizard was the first to realize how near they had come. He lay bound on his side as he had fairly every night of his captivity. But this time the Captain had thrust him across an incline, so that he could see the night sky through a broad gap in the canopy. A black plate of stars. At first, he gazed with a kind of senseless yearning, the attitude belonging to the defeated, one numbed to things beyond the immediate circuit of his fears. But then he glimpsed patterns...
ancient
constellations.

The Round of Horns, he realized. The Round of Horns as it appeared during the height of summer...

From Sauglish.

After that he bore the Captain's indignities with renewed resolution.

Stone heaved with greater regularity from the earth, until dirt became something found only in scallops of rock. Soon the Aumris became a booming white cataract, rushing through giant scarp-shelved canyons that were sometimes miles wide. They followed high lips of stone, laboriously descending and scaling the hanging gorges that fed the river. The Mirawsul, the Kûniüri had called these highlands—a name that meant "Cracked Shield" in ancient Umeri.

They found and followed what remained of the Hiril, the road that traversed the Mirawsul and where Seswatha had once shown a band of highwaymen the error of their ways. Three consecutive nights the Skin Eaters camped in the shells of ruined watchtowers—the famed Nûlrainwi, the "Sprinting-fires," beacons of war and peace that had linked the cities of Aumris since the days of Cûnwerishau.

At last they came to the Shield's end, and from high cliffs they gazed across forested alluvial plains that reached to the hazed horizon. For Achamian, the vista was like seeing a work of intricate art defaced with a child's crude strokes. Gone was the Kairil, the monumental stone road that tracked Aumris's winding course with ruler straight lines. Gone were the villages and the fields arrayed in great radial quilts. Gone were the innumerable plumes of smoke and the hearths and families that had kindled them.

The Wizard had expected a land like this, a wilderness overgrown with thronging life. But he had assumed that the Sranc would assail them time and again, an endless string of clans, and that he and Cleric would spend their nights crying out destruction. Knowing there could only be one explanation, Achamian found himself gazing into the east, wondering how many days their bent company would have to march to overtake them...

Kellhus and the onerous lodestone that was his Great Ordeal.

The old Wizard reflected on his days in arid Gedea, on the humble campfire he had shared with Esmenet and Kellhus more than twenty years ago. He could only marvel that Fate had brought them so far.

The company descended the cliffs using what remained of a great switchback stair. Soon they found themselves on the loamy banks of an Aumris that once again flowed wide and ponderous and brown. Great willows, some even rivalling the mighty elms and oaks of the Mop, stepped and knotted the ground they trod, trailing sheaves of yellow and green across the waters. There was a strange peace in their passage, even a sense that the land was at last awakening, having slumbered ages waiting for their return.

Flies plagued them.

That night, as always, the old Wizard dreamed of the horror that was the Golden Room. The moaning procession. The eviscerating horn. The chain heaving him and the other wretches forward.

Closer. He was coming closer.

—|—

They reached the ruined gates of Sauglish two nights following. The towers had become knolls and the walls had crumbled into low, earthen ridges, like the wandering dikes so common to Shigek and Ainon.

But no one needed to be told. The very air, it seemed, smelled of conclusion.

Climbing the ridge, they could even see sun-bright trees waving across the westward slopes of the Troinim in the near distance: three low hills made one by the ruins strewn across their backs. Mottled walls, here hewn to their foundations, there rising blunted. Cratered brick faces. Witch-fingers of stone rising from the clamour of growth and tumble. The silence of things distant and dead.

The Holy Library.

It did not seem possible.

We all imagine what it will be like when we finally reach long-sought places. We all anticipate the wages of our toil and suffering—the momentary sum. Achamian had assumed he would feel either heartbreak or outrage, setting eyes upon the legendary Sohonc stronghold. Tears and inner turmoil.

But for some reason it seemed just another derelict place.

Give him Qirri. Give him sleep.

The dead could keep until morning.

They made camp at the mouth of the gate. There was no sermon that night, only the rush of wind through the treetops and the sound of Sarl's cackle, gurgling through the mucus that perpetually weighted his lungs, rising and falling in the manner of drunks given to reciting grievances at the edge of unconsciousness.

"The Cofferrrssss! Ha! Yes! Think on it, boys! Such a slog as there never was!"

"Kiampas!
Kiampas!
He-hee! What did I tell you..."

On and on, until it seemed an animal crouched in their shadowy midst, growling with low and bestial lust.

"The Cofferrrssss..."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Istyuli Plains

Gods are epochal beings, not quite alive. Since the Now eludes them, they are forever divided. Sometimes nothing blinds souls more profoundly than the apprehension of the Whole. Men need recall this when they pray.

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

S
UMMER, 20
N
EW
I
MPERIAL
Y
EAR (4132
Y
EAR-OF-THE-
T
USK),
T
HE
H
IGH
I
STYULI

Three days Sorweel waited after learning of the Nonman Embassy and the Niom.

Zsoronga refused to even countenance the possibility of his departure. Even though he had seen the Nonman Embassy first-hand, the Successor-Prince continued insisting the entire thing was some kind of Anasûrimbor deceit. Sorweel was narindari, he insisted, chosen by the Gods to excise the cancer that was the Aspect-Emperor.

"Just wait," Zsoronga said. "The Goddess
will
intervene. Something auspicious will happen. Some twist will keep you here, where you can discharge your fate! Wait and see."

"And what if they know?" Sorweel finally asked, voicing the one alternative they had passed over in silence: that the Anasûrimbor had somehow guessed the Dread Mother's divine conspiracy.

"They don't know."

"But wh—"

"They
don't know
."

Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his
need
—to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing
him
to play the knot as a result.

Faced with yet another sleepless night, he once again struck out through the encampment for the Swayali enclave, determined to confront Serwa with pointed questions. But the guardsmen denied him entry to the Granary, saying their Grandmistress conferred with her Holy Father over the horizon. When he refused to believe them, they called for the Nuns. "Cap your gourd," a spice-eyed witch teased. "Soon the Grandmistress will be skipping you like a stone across water!"

Sorweel walked back to his tent in a stupor, at once dismayed at the capricious ways of Fate and
thrilled
—sometimes to the point of tingling breathlessness—at the prospect of spending so much time with his Enemy's daughter.

"Well?" Zsoronga cried when he returned.

"You are my brother, are you not?" Sorweel asked, pulling free the small purse that Porsparian—or the Goddess—had given him. It seemed dull and unremarkable in the sunlight, despite the golden crescents embroidered across it. "I need you to keep this."

As High Keeper of the Hoard, he knew enough about Chorae to know that it would wreck whatever sorcerous contrivance Serwa had prepared for them. Concealed or not.

"So you
are
leaving," the Successor-Prince said, taking the pouch with a blank air of incomprehension.

"It's a family heirloom," Sorweel offered by way of lame explanation. "An old totem. It will bring you luck only so long as you don't
know
what it contains."

This struck the young King as plausible enough, given that he had been forced to improvise. Many charms required some small sacrifice: beans that could not be eaten or wine that could not be quaffed.

But Zsoronga scarcely looked at the thing, let alone pondered it. In his eyes,
Sorweel
was the divine weapon.

"This cannot be!" he cried. "You! You
are the one
!
She
has chosen you!"

Sorweel could do no more than shrug with weary resignation.

"Apparently
He
has chosen me as well."