The White-Luck Warrior (83 page)

The experience became increasingly surreal. At times the Wizard found himself staring at Cleric's labouring back, broad beneath its sheath of shining mail, wondering whether he should just attack the Nonman and be done with the suspense. At other times he played a kind of game guessing what was the ruin of what. Mounds became fountains. Rectangular breaks in walls became windows onto barracks, apartments, and scriptoriums.

And twice he caught himself squinting across the northeastern heights, looking for thunderheads massing black and terrible...

For the Whirlwind.

It was like walking through
two
worlds beyond the actual: the one the issue of his reading, the other the product of his Dreams. He was Achamian, exile and pariah, wearer of rotted pelts. And he was Seswatha, hero, Grandmaster of this place, both during the time when its fall was preposterous, laughable, and during the days of encroaching destruction.

"I saw these towers burn," he said in an old voice. "I saw these walls tumble."

The Nonman King paused, scanned his surroundings as if seeing the ruins about him for the very first time. Achamian wondered what it would be like, outliving great works of stone. When nations possessed the span of flowers, wouldn't everything seem but stages of ruin?

"All Ishterebinth lamented when word arrived," Cleric eventually said. "We knew then the World was doomed."

Achamian gazed at the Nonman King, pinned by an immovable melancholy.

"Why?" he asked. "Why would you lament our death when it was Men, not the Inchoroi, who destroyed all your great mansions?"

"Because we have always known we would not survive Men."

The Wizard smiled in recollection.

"Yes... Because our dooms are one."

—|—

At last, walking bent through a gate almost buried by the rising ground, they came to the Turret, the mighty citadel raised by Noshainrau the White. It was naught but an enormous ring of stone, broad enough to encase any of the great amphitheatres of Invishi or Carythusal. Pitted with bird-holes, the sloped walls rose some thirty or so cubits before cresting, a line of ragged ruin against blue sky. The shining bronze sheets were gone—the Skûtiri. In Seswatha's day they had ringed the Turret's base, nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them, each taller than a man, and each scored with innumerable lines of sorcerous script. The sun shone imperturbable, drawing shadows across hanging nubs of stone. Wind whisked through leaves and grasses. Never, it seemed to the old Wizard, had the world seemed so lonely.

"The sorcery here is very old, very weak," the Nonman said.

Did he remember Lord Kosoter's earlier charge? Could he?

Was he accusing him of lying?

"The Coffers lie beneath these ruins," Achamian replied. "The Wards protecting it are buried deep... and quite ageless, I assure you."

Perhaps now was the time to strike.

No. Not until he knew for sure he wouldn't need the Nonman's strength.

The Turret's original gate was lost beneath ramped debris. They fought their way through a mass of scrub, then began climbing.

Of all his memories of the Holy Library, the final days lived most fiercely in Achamian's memory. Always the No-God was there... like a nagging sense, a direction steeped in dread, as if one point on the compass had been honed sharp enough to draw a gasp from his lungs. He would walk the walls and verandas and feel it...
there...
sometimes stationary for days on end, but always moving sooner or later—always coming
closer
.

And when the wind was right, he would hear the wailing of bereaved mothers from the city below.

Stillborn... Every infant stillborn.

The old Wizard stopped mid-ascent, leaned against pitted stone to recover his wind. Many years had passed since he last felt the horror that was Mog-Pharau while awake. The gaping sense of futility and loss, of things crashing, not here or there, but
everywhere
. The immobility of heart as much as limb or will. The horizon itself had become a revelation, taking you out of yourself and binding you to a world of dying things.

It dogged the old Wizard as he continued climbing, a great shadow lurking in his periphery, a sky-staining malevolence that leapt into existence whenever he glanced away. And the conviction that
all Mankind
shared the very same premonition.

Cleric stood atop the summit. The ruined walls reached to either side of him, thick enough to house pockets of grasses and shrub along their summit, climbing and dropping according to the logic of things wrecked for the passage of years.

"Something is amiss," he called down to the huffing Wizard.

He extended a hand in assistance as Achamian clambered near. There was a surprising reassurance in his grip, as if their bodies recognized a kinship too primitive not to be overlooked by their souls.

Leaning against his knees to catch his breath, the old Wizard surveyed the Turret's vacant interior. He suffered the same knee-wobbling sense of vertigo he always suffered when he found himself standing high upon fallen works. Swallows battled about the curve of the inner walls. The ages had entirely gutted the citadel, leaving only what resembled an absurdly immense granary. But he had expected as much.

What he had not expected was the great
pit
yawning below...

Rubble heaped about the inner foundations, making a funnel of the ground. The cracked rim of floors broken, exposing wasp-nest hollows, each a level of the Turret's cellars. Then obdurate blackness at the bottom.

"Do you smell that?" Achamian asked, frowning in disbelief.

"Yes," the Nonman King replied. "Sulphur."

—|—

She is not sure when she resumes breathing. The remaining Skin Eaters—the sane ones, anyway—immediately fall to arguing.

Galian instructs Sarl to watch her, which he does with a kind of crazed reluctance. She and the mad Sergeant take turns gazing at the Captain in disbelief. At one point, Sarl grasps the very branch that Lord Kosoter had tried to snap in his final moment. Crouching a pace away, he uses it to poke at his dead Captain's face. He presses the tip against the waxen forehead, rolls the face skyward, then jumps when it slips and rocks back to face him.

He turns to Mimara and cackles.

"He's not dead," he says like a drunk keen to slur some fact that others thought obvious. "Not the Captain, no..."

Shouts climb from the near distance. Pokwas is jabbing Galian's shoulder with a long finger.

"He's too hard for Hell."

—|—

It was like climbing down a monstrous rabbit hole.

A strange anxiousness dogged the old Wizard as the brightness climbed in stages above him. The pit fell at an angle instead of dropping vertically, opening about a ramp of packed debris and earth, like a burrow that was at once a road into the underworld. The Turret's cellars formed a kind of pitched roof above them, three distinct levels of corridors halved and chambers cracked open like eggs.

The depths opened before them, steeped in sulphurous mystery.

"Look..." Cleric said, motioning toward the side of the tunnel.

But Achamian had already glimpsed them in the grey light. Three gashes hooked like scythes: the centre one the longest, the innermost curving within its compass, while the outermost arced away at an angle.

Achamian immediately recognized the mark: any Man in the Three Seas would have. The Three Sickles had been a common heraldic device since Far Antiquity—the symbol adopted by Triamis the Great.

The scoring of long-curved claws...

The spoor of Dragons.

—|—

A profound ache climbs out from her back, roots itself in her knees and neck. But still she sits hugging her shins. She cannot move.

Galian returns, leading the others. Sarl scampers from his path, his Captain's head clutched tight to his chest.

"So what are you going to do?" she asks the Columnary.

"We're going to wait for Cleric to return. Then we're going to relieve him of that pretty pouch."

Xonghis has already yanked the two Chorae from beneath Lord Kosoter's hauberk.

Galian smiles at her in the leering manner she knows all too well. "In the meantime," he says, "we are going to feast on the banquet the gods have delivered to us."

Her look is so sour, it seems a miracle that he can grin.

"Feast... On what?"

The day is dry and bright—beautiful. Wind falls through the lazy tree-tops, shushing the bestiary that is the world. Blood clots across the leaves.

"Peaches, my sweet. Peaches."

—|—

Skidding on their rumps, the old Wizard and the Nonman King followed the burrow into airy darkness—the antechamber to the Coffers. The Upper Pausal had been reduced to balconies hanging amputated in the black. Debris choked the floors of the Pausal proper, heaped toward the sides by the passage of some monstrous bulk. Achamian shuddered, glimpsing what was left of the Nonman friezes that adorned its walls—memories of Cil-Aujas, he supposed. The Great Gate of Wheels had been obliterated; he could see its ensorcelled remains scattered through the ruin: the marmoreal white of broken incantation wheels, the chapped green of bronze cams and fittings.

Raw blackness gaped before him.

So,
a dull and long-suffering portion of his soul murmured,
the Coffers have been looted.

He stood motionless, gazing in abject dismay.

So much suffered... So many dead...

For nothing.

The great refrain of his miserable life.

The madness, when he pondered it, was that he had
believed
it could be otherwise, that he would trek all this distance—
survive this far
—and actually find the Coffers intact, the map to Ishuäl waiting for him like a low-hanging plum. He almost laughed aloud for thinking it, the thought that
Fate might be kind
.

This,
he realized—this was what his fate had been all along. Snared in the machinations of his enemy, who had known his mission even before he had tripped across it. Confronted with the preposterous issue of his preposterous hopes. He had sought truth and had been delivered to madmen and a Dragon instead—a
Dragon!

A Wracu of old.

He could almost hear the skies laugh.

Sparing neither word nor glance, the old Wizard and the Nonman King stepped across the cracked threshold and at long last passed into the Coffers.

The reek watered his eyes, mingled with his terror so that it seemed he wept for fear. Sulphur. The smoke of predatory life. And rot, profound and gangrenous. The putrefaction that ties a string to your stomach and pulls hard whenever breath is drawn too deep.

Achamian could
feel
as much as hear the thing breathing in the blackness, the whoosh of enormous furnace bellows. He could scarce see the debris beneath his feet, yet the sound grew into a kind of vision, such is the mischief of imagination. Great lungs betokened great limbs. The deep reptilian creak conjured images of scaled hides, of lipless jaws and grinning teeth...

A mighty horror awaited them, and a portion of the old Wizard did not
want
to see. A portion of him preferred the hysterics of his soul's eye.

They came to a slope of heaped ruin, picked their way to the summit. The blackness yawned out about them, a motionless vacuum. Cleric uttered a sorcerous phrase; his eyes and mouth flared with meaning. The pale brilliance of a Surillic Point appeared above them, and the blackness fled to far places, leaving a globe of empty, illuminated air...

Dragon. Wracu.

According to legend, the first Sohonc discovered a vast cavern when laying the Library's foundations. They dredged the depths, squared the walls, pillared the open spaces, creating a secret, subterranean citadel. It was Noshainrau, whose sorcerous research had cast such long shadows across the future, who would make it his School's treasury, a vault for the world's greatest glories and darkest terrors.

The famed Coffers.

Perhaps the ancient architects had feared the ceiling the earth had provided them. Perhaps the chaotic weave of natural lines offended their sense of beauty and proportion. Either way, they constructed a roof with the post and lintel principles they used to raise their temples. This second ceiling had long since collapsed in its centre, littering the floor with the ruin of giant stone beams and the cracked drums of toppled pillars. Peering between the remaining columns, the old Wizard had the impression of a black lake hanging above all that could be seen, as if the very world had been turned on its head.

Gone were the ponderous lantern wheels. Gone were the narrow aisles. Gone were the racks and shelves that had organized a thousand years of sorcerous hoarding. Treasure and debris matted the floors, a ragged landscape of contradictions that piled higher toward the chamber's heart. Coins gravelling the wrack of shattered frescoes. A tripod capsized in a swell of mounded powder. A crown staved beneath a jutting beam of granite. A chest of cracked bronze, spilling rivulets of jewels between horns of broken stone.

Because of age-old accumulations of dust and tarnish, nothing glittered, nothing gleamed.

Apart from the Dragon.

The shadows cast by intervening columns were absolute, so only fragments of the beast could be seen. Horned ridges. Wings folded into scarred curtains. Scales like overlapping shields, pale with filth and bronze. A single nostril weeping smoke.

The beast was
old
, Achamian realized. Exceedingly old. Wracu never stopped growing, so it stood to reason that any dragon he encountered in his waking life would dwarf the ancient monstrosities from his Dreams...

But this.

Wings that could have tarped the Shilla Amphitheatre in faraway Aöknyssus. A torso broad enough to hull the largest Cironji carrack, yet long enough to coil about the small mountain of treasure and ruin. Were it to rear onto its hind legs, the beast would stand as tall as any of the Mop's unnatural trees.