The White-Luck Warrior (72 page)

"Serwa, please!" Moënghus cried. "Recall what Father told you! The skinnies are drawn to places like this!"

"Stow your worries!" she said, mocking his tone. "We leave no trail for them to follow. No trail, no mobbing. Even if we landed in the lap of an entire clan, they would be no match for me. I have reaped legions in the Culling, Podi! You know this..."

She climbed a small rise that had been chapped to gravel, spun in a pirouette that made a wheel of her white flashing hair. "I stand upon the axis of an ancient power," she declared to the two wondering men. "The hub of a wheel that once turned the World but now spins groundless in the smoky Outside." She closed her eyes, raised her nostrils, as if breathing deep the uncanniness of the place—as if the occult were simply a more subtle perfume.

"Two thousand years ago," she called, "from this very dais, the
first
Ordeal was declared against Golgotterath."

"Yes..." Moënghus replied scowling. "The one that failed."

—|—

The rain began shortly after, spilling from a bank of woollen clouds that caught them entirely unawares. The sun just slipped into the sky's pocket, and endless waters followed chill upon the gloom. The two men ran to the shelter of Serwa's sorcerous parasol, and together they hastened to the river.

They could not see the far shore.

Moënghus had said nothing the entirety of the trek, and now, sitting side by side upon the puddled stone, his manner became even darker. While Sorweel gazed out into fogged shadows, he glowered at nothing, as if staring down hatreds only he could fathom.

"Father says this river is holy," he finally said.

He stood and began stripping his clothes.

In disbelief, Sorweel watched him walk naked, following a shoal of sand and brush to where it dwindled to a finger prodding the water. He held his arms out for balance as he tiptoed to the very claw. He became shadowy as he passed through ever more veils of rain. He lingered for a moment, his powerful frame sculpted and gleaming. Then he leapt white and slicked out into waters. He vanished in a pale whoosh.

Sorweel and Serwa watched the rain fall, watched the white spitting across the iron-grey waters, threshing away the rings of his submersion, until they could no longer say just where the river had swallowed him.

He did not surface.

At some point, Sorweel could feel individual heartbeats within his breast, such was the horror rising within him. He peered across the descending roar, waiting...

"Something's happened!" he finally cried.

He flew to his feet, but Serwa restrained him with a firm clasp upon his right hand.

"He does that," she said in reply to his alarmed gaze. "Pretends to be dead."

"Why?"

Serwa frowned, once again far too canny and too wise for her youthful face.

"Surely Kayûtas told you he was mad."

He gaped, and she laughed at his incomprehension, returned her gaze to the sparking waters.

Suddenly Moënghus burst from the Holy Aumris with an inhaling shout, his hair drawn like black paint about his face, neck, and corded shoulders.

"It tastes like dirt!" he laughed across the washing roar.

The Holy Aumris.

—|—

As the easternmost element of the Great Ordeal, the Army of the South was the last to pass from the endless plates of the High Istyuli into the more broken lands to the northwest. Ravines and defilades scored the once-simple distances. Monstrous stumps of stone breached the parch, formations that reared into saddle-backed summits. The Men of the Circumfix sighted ruins commanding bare rock heights, glimpsed the shadow of ancient and overgrown roads bisecting the horizon. Like their brethren to the west, they took heart in these signs, marvelled that places so far could have once been the centre of Mannish civilization. The sense of
trespass
fell from them, the aura of estrangement that makes wayfarers adopt the worried habits of the interloper. For the first time they understood that they were
returning
and not simply venturing—and their souls were fortified.

They would have thought themselves liberators... were it not for the curtains of dust drawn across the horizon about them.

They marched through the high heart of ancient Sheneor, the weakest and most ephemeral of the Three Kingdoms of Far Antique fame, the frontier sibling of stern Aörsi to the north and populous Kûniüri to the west. The Mandate Schoolmen, who every night dreamed of these lands in their nadir, looked upon the desolation and mourned. Where were the white-washed towers? The serpentine pennants of blue and gold? The companies of bronze-armoured Knights-Chieftain, cruel and proud? And they wondered that they had lived to see this earth with their waking eyes.

With the breaking of the land came the quickening of the rivers, and with this came the increasing complications of crossing them. Across the high plain, the drought had so reduced the flow as to make fording a mere trudge through mire. Now the Army crawled down into steeper valleys where they found denuded poplars, stripped to spears by the retreating Horde. The Men of the Circumfix took comfort in their campfires, the first in months, and feasted on what fish the Netters gleaned from the rivers. They sucked the grease from their fingers, spoke small prayers thanking War for their momentary reprieve. The Believer-Kings, meanwhile, argued logistics and debated the perils of crossing treacherous waters in the shadow of the Horde. The fords themselves were easy to find: the Sranc literally rewrote the landscape when funnelled into multiple crossings, such were their numbers. Banks worn into ramps, waters stamped into broad morasses. They imagined a writhing, shrieking world, the skies gauzed with dust, the worm-pale multitudes stamping and heaving, thousands flailing in the mudded waters, and they were troubled. The earth seemed to tingle with the memory of their raucous masses, like a sheet drawn from the body of a dead man. Everything reeked of pollution.

The fear was that the Horde would attack while the Army stood astride both banks—a fear that never materialized. At the first such river, Carindûsû actually remained behind with some hundred of his white-and-violet-gowned Vokalati, thinking they could use the fords to rid themselves of the Sranc massing on their rear flank. They slew many to be sure, thousands, sending plumes of foul steam into the already obscure air, but the Sranc discovered other crossings, or perhaps they abandoned their armour and simply swam; either way, the Nilnameshi Schoolmen found themselves withdrawing across seething grounds.

King Umrapathur continued taking precautions. But he became ever more confident that the rivering of the land was far more a boon to his host than a liability. He could not foresee the danger to come.

—|—

The three camped in the ruins of a fortress halved by the collapse of the scarps that had once motivated its construction. Dagmersor, Serwa called it. The remains of the citadel hung jagged and hollow above them, a tattered silhouette across the clouding stars. Unseen wolves howled.

Sorweel drew the first watch. He picked a position above the moribund fortifications, where the land mobbed out from beneath his hanging feet. Nocturnal forests. Solitary trees climbed apart from their brothers, propped on swells of earth and rock, their crowns silver beneath the Nail of Heaven, their branches a veining black. Noise pitted the black with a million unseen places, a creaking, creeping chorus that rose from the dark face of all, fading into the ever-expanding silence that was the emptiness of Heaven.

And it scooped the breath from Sorweel's lungs.

There was a beauty to this journey across the ruined landscapes of lost Kûniüri, one due as much to these moments of solitude as to the whorled terrain that framed them.

His thoughts wandered, as they often did, across the myriad spectacles he had witnessed since his father's death. And he wondered that someone so frail as him could participate in such legendary events, let alone
move
them. The things he had seen. He imagined what it would be like returning to Sakarpus, excavating whatever scraps of his old life that remained, and trying to explain what had happened—what was
happening
—beyond the Pale. Would his countrymen marvel? Would they scoff? Would they accept the epic magnitude of what he described, or would they dismiss it as mere conceit?

The questions dismayed him. Until now, his return had been a thoughtless assumption: he was a Son of the Lonely City—of course he would return. But the more he considered it, the more improbable it began to seem. Were he to work the Goddess's divine will, murder the
Aspect-Emperor
... Surely that would mean his doom as well. And were he to deny the Goddess, become a Believer-King at the risk of his immortal soul... Would that not mean a different doom?

And if he
were
to return, how could he describe, let alone explain, the things he had witnessed?

How could he
be Sakarpi
?

Moënghus loomed out of the dark long before his turn to take watch and took a seat beside him, his manner as wordless and sombre as the Sakarpi King's own. Sorweel's alarm quickly subsided. Even after so many months of duplicity, he was not a man who could comfortably think treachery in the presence of those he intended to betray. In the siblings' company he invariably gave reign to a certain amenity in his nature—one easily confused for cowardice.

He could only plot in solitude.

They sat in silence, staring out over the sunless tracts, soaking in the aura of companionship that often rises between speechless men. Since Sorweel did not look at the man, he remained a brooding shadow in his periphery, one laden with intimations of physical force and errant passion.

"Your father..." the young King ventured to ask. "Do
you
think he has... grasped God?"

Sorweel would never know what motivated his honesty. A man, he was beginning to learn, could become as accustomed to contradiction and dilemma as to heartbreak.

"A strange question for a
Believer
-King," the Prince-Imperial snorted. "I could report you to the Judges!"

Sorweel merely scowled.

"Look about you," Moënghus continued, shrugging and rubbing his shaven chin the way he always did when yielding to serious considerations. "
All the earth
rises to wage war against Father,
and yet he prevails.
Even the
Hundred
raise arms against him!"

Sorweel blinked. These last words pricked like a fistful of broken glass.

"What are you saying?"

"
Truth
, Horse-King. Nothing offends Men or
Gods
more..."

Sorweel could only stare at him, witless. Was it possible
for a god
to be mistaken?

But then that had been Eskeles's lesson those months past—had it not? The Gods were but
fragments
of the God, mere shards of a greater whole—like Men. Yatwer, the Schoolman would most certainly say, was just such a fragment... Just as blind to the whole.

Could the
Mother of Birth
be deceived?

If the Prince-Imperial noticed his bewildered horror, he betrayed no sign whatsoever. Moënghus was one of those men who cared not at all for the petty rules that measured verbal exchanges. He simply stared out to the constellations twinkling low on the western horizon, talking as if no listening in the world could matter.

"Of course Father has grasped God."

—|—

The Army of the South had come to Hoilirsi, a province known in Far Antique days for the cultivation of flax. Hoilirsi found its northern boundary in a river called the Irshi, which ran fast and deep for some hundred miles before mellowing on its path to the Neleost Sea. Even in Far Antique times, the Irshi had been known for the rarity of its crossings, so much so that the ancient Bardic Priests often used it as a name for detour—and its crossing as a metaphor for death.
Iri Irshi ganpirlal
, they would say when speaking of fallen heroes, or of anyone who faltered in life: "Cruel Irshi pulls them under."

King Umrapathur and his planners knew of the Irshi, of course, but they had assumed, as was reasonable considering the hundred rivers they had crossed thus far, that it would also be droughted. They had even discussed the possibility of sending cohorts of Schoolmen out in advance of the Horde in the hope of catching it crossing fords. They did not realize they had come to the first of many rivers whose high sources threaded the peaks of the Great Yimaleti—that for vast stretches of its length, the Irshi had no fordable crossings.

The Horde found itself caught along its fanged banks. Multitudes were drowned, thrown into the gorges by the relentless press of their kin. Worm-white carcasses tumbled down the river's tempestuous lengths and formed macabre rafts along its idylls, stretches of bloat and filth that sheeted the Irshi from bank to bank. But as the clans retreated out of terror of the Shining Men, they soon began shrinking from the threshing waters as well. The raucous stormfront that was the Horde slowed, then halted altogether.

Prince Massar ab Kascamandri would be the first to bear the tidings to King Umrapathur: "The Horde... It no longer withdraws before our lances."

The council was thrown into an uproar. What were they to do? How could they assail such impossible numbers while masses more roiled about and behind their flanks?

Carindûsû was the first to upbraid them. "Can't you see that this a
boon
?" he cried. "All this time fretting, wringing our hands because the skinnies outrun us, because we cannot kill them quickly enough, and now, when Fate pins them in place, delivers them to our fury, we fret and wring our hands?" With the Horde trapped and with Mandate and the Vokalati combined, the Grandmaster argued, the Culling would become outright butchery. He and his arcane brethren would lay carrion across the horizon.

The Believer-Kings turned to Apperens Saccarees, who gazed at his rival with wary appreciation.