The White-Luck Warrior (87 page)

Flames roiled about the silhouettes of trees. Smoke wreathed him. Heat rippled across his hanging form. And the Wizard realized that he was actually
going to attack
.

A Quya Master of old, a hero of wars older than the Tusk, made ready his murder.

"You think Nil'giccas is something
I
have lost!" the Nonman King called down. "And therefore something that I can
recover
!"

Achamian was weary. He was bruised and he was burned—even well rested and whole, he would not dare a contest such as this. At least he was practised, thanks to the dragon. He could feel the Cants and Wards within him, tingling weaves of arcane meaning, hanging like possibilities...

Yet he did not strike.

"You forget," Cleric shouted, "that before the Nonman King's passing,
I did not exist
!"

The figure continued floating on a rising arc, one that took Achamian as its compass point. Sheets of stone toppled into the inferno below, kicking constellations of sparks in the wind.

"I can no more recover him than you can recover your mother's virgin womb."

Achamian stood rooted and frail before the rising conflagration.
Strike!
something howled within him.
Strike now!

"I am Incariol!" the Nonman screamed. "
Cleric!
And you shall not survive my lesson!"

But instead of attacking, the old Wizard arrayed himself with Wards, cloaked himself with shining panes of light. He had flattered himself after the underworld debacle of Cil-Aujas, told himself that perhaps Cleric was not so mighty, that the rot that had devoured so much of his soul had blunted his meanings as well...

Now he was not so sure.

Strike, you fool!

"You think
me
the cripple!" Nil'giccas cried. "You think Cleric the
ruin
of someone whole! But you are wrong, Seswatha! I am the
Truth
!"

The Nonman King had climbed a half-spiral above burning bark and foliage, over headless towers and blunted walls. Now he hung motionless before the monumental frame of the Turret.

"We
are
Many!" the Erratic roared. "
We are legion!
What you call your soul is nothing but a confusion, an inability! A plurality that cannot count the moments that divide it and so calls itself One."

His eyes flared white. Words boomed out, words that made a crimson globe of his head and face. The sound of vacant space ripping, a growl in the deepest pocket of the ear. Abstractions lashed the open air between them, wracked Achamian's Wards. The old Wizard raised arms against the glittering violence.

"Only when memory is stripped away!" Cleric cried out, the glow fading from his eyes. "Only then is Being revealed as pure Becoming! Only
when the past dies
can we shrug aside the burden that is our Soul!"

Fractal lights tangled the figure's outstretched arms. More arcane words, reverberating across ethereal surfaces. More flashing Abstractions, cracking and hissing across the glowing shells that shielded the Wizard. Fire consumed the thronging scrub and trees. Fire garnished the truncated walls. About them, the famed courtyards of the Holy Library had become burning pits.

"Only then does the Darkness sing untrammelled!" Cleric cried. "Only then!"

"And yet you seek memories!" the Wizard cried, at last delivered to tears.

"To
be
! Being is not a choice!"

"But you claim Being is deception!"

"Yes!"

"But that is nonsense! Madness!"

Again the Nonman King laughed.

"That is Becoming."

—|—

The forests are burning.

Pokwas jerks around so quickly that the pommel is torn from her hands.
You!
his glaring eyes shout. Blood spills from his strange smile.

"The Slog of Slogs!" the mad Sergeant howls in their periphery. "I told
you
, boys! I told you we would stack them!"

She retreats before the Sword-dancer's groping lurch. He skids to his knees, sways over sheeted leaves. His eyes find Galian, then Xonghis. He looks to her with childlike curiosity. Blood bubbles to his lips.

"I em-embrace..." he gasps. "I-I..."

He slumps to his side, flops across the ground.

She steps around him, stumbles to stand over the thing called Koll.

"Why?" she cries, and a cold part of her is surprised by the salt and heat of her tears. "Why would you save me?
Sacrifice
yourself! I am the daughter of your enemy! Your enemy!"

"Kill... me..."
it coughs.

"Tell me! Soma!"

"Mim... Mim..."

"Who? Who is your handler?"

Something hooks her stomach. The madness of what just happened, the debasement, the transcendence, has blinded her to the obscenity. This thing before her has been cut from the meat of the World. Were it sorcerous, it would have possessed the numb glaze of unreality. It is raw and abhorrent instead. Suddenly she cannot look away from the mastications of its mouth, the way the lipless gums climb unbroken to the lidless eyes, to the air-clawing digits, which are furred and skinned and ridged with apparently random fragments of face.

Revulsion does not so much course as slam through her.

"I beg..."
it gasps.
"Beg you..."

Bile rises to the back of her throat. She draws away from the thing, lurches backward, falls to her rump, catches herself on a single thrown arm...

Smoke twines through the air between them, a translucent veil. Through it, she watches spasms rock the skin-spy.

Sarl rushes from nowhere, bent and bandied. He lands on the creature, drives his sword square through its chest. The thing clutches at him, but the mad Sergeant wrenches his blade with vicious strength, back and forth, as if testing a hated wagon's brake.

"Yeeesss!" he screams up to the broken canopy.
"Yeeessss!"

The mad Sergeant turns to her with canines bared. His eyes are crimson slits. Blood sops his beard.

"A real
chopper
!"

The thrashing weakens beneath him. The facial digits fall slack at the same instant. Sarl lowers his cheek against the fist he holds atop his pommel. Gasping, he wipes a filthy cuff across his face, manages only to smear the blood. He releases his sword, then with a chuckle like a dog's growl, he draws his knife. He crawls over the creature, sways above it with a knee on either of its shoulders.

She watches dumbstruck.

"Spider-face,"
he grunts, hacking and sawing with his knife. A manic grin squeezes his eyes into two more creases. "A
thousand
gold Kellics at least!"

Madness,
is all she can think.

She runs, heedless of her bearings or her nakedness.

Away. She must get away from all the madness.

The whole World burns.

—|—

And so they battled, the Gnostic Wizard uttering no Cants, the Quyan Mage speaking no Wards. Broken walls encircled them, surrounded in turn by the oily tumble of smoke and trees wrapped in shining flame.

Hanging high before the Turret, the inhuman Mage blazed with arcane meaning, unleashed a logic raised to killing light.

His feet braced against the earth, the human Wizard sang his unholy counterargument, wrapping himself in glowing spheres, long-winded pyramidal forms, planes arrayed to deflect dread energies outward.

The First Quyan Fold. The Ribs of Gotagga.

Burning cables. Sparks so brilliant they blinded. Concussions so immense they blew sheets of debris from the crests of the surrounding walls. Blisters of warding light cracked, slumped before sheering into nothingness.

And the dread voices droned on, unravelling into echoes too cavernous to be called sound, ringing from Heaven's vault as if it loomed as low as a cellar ceiling.

Achamian shouted between gasps of fiery air. He raised Ward after Ward, only to see them smashed, swept away.

The Third Concentric. The ever-risky Cross of Arches.

But the Quya Master was like a sun above him, glaring with destruction, cracking his defences with wicked and relentless incandescence. Beating. Hammering. Scissoring. A rain of cataclysms. Until Achamian was breathless and stammering, able to cough out only the lowest and quickest Wards.

For the briefest of instants, the underworld angel above him paused.

"Madness!" the Wizard cried out in sobbing frustration. "This is not you!"

Fire crackled and hissed, filling the heartbeat of silence between them.

"Can't you see!" the Nonman King cried. "Your appeals
only incite me
! You will die and I will remember! Because all you do is reach for the love I bear you!"

"No! I will not strike you!"

The face of Nil'giccas resolved from the dwindling glare. The setting sun rimmed his scalp with sickles of gold. "I remember... I remember your name..."

Light filled his howling mouth—blasphemous meaning...

At long last the Wizard struck.

An Odaini Concussion Cant. Simple and low, meant only to stun—to knock back into reason perhaps. But Nil'giccas had floated above sharp ruin...

He plummeted from on high, broke about a low spine of stone. The ground fires caught and consumed him.

The old Wizard puffed out the flames with a sorcerous cry. He hobbled around blocks and between flanged foundations, swallowing at the sobs that wracked him. Streamers of smoke twisted and dissolved about his passage.

He found the Nonman King prostrate across a shoulder-high segment of wall, bent as though he had half fallen from bed. Black scored his milk-white skin. Blisters puckered his cheek and scalp. Blood sopped the heron and lion links of his nimil harness. He seemed that much more broken, given the perfection of his form.

"What just happened?" Nil'giccas gasped, hacking gouts of blood with the words. His lips worked about the glistening arc of his fused teeth. "Wh-what just..."

"You found glory," the old Wizard croaked. He coughed as if at some fact too acrid to be breathed. He reached out to clutch the Nonman's cheek, saw Death swirl up in the eyes of his ancient friend. He watched the spark of sight dull into sightlessness. Cleric's body heaved, then settled, as if finally coming to peace with its own anguished corporeality.

Blood pooled in the mortises.

Burned, battered, the old Wizard looked about, from the wreckage of the Library out to the blazing forests of Sauglish. This was how it would end, he realized... The was how all of it would end.

Heartbreak and fire.

—|—

She runs.

Twigs and branches pinch and cut her feet, but it seems proper that she should suffer. The breeze brushes like silk across her body, but it seems proper that she should find succour for her grievances. Leaves lash her arms and outer thighs.

Horror animates her. Horror that runs with her legs. Horror that tingles throughout her body, heat rimmed with cold, as if she bleeds from a thousand internal wounds.

She clutches her belly. She assumed she would feel it hang from her as she ran, the life she carried. But it is at one with her, the centring counterweight, the ligament that binds her to future and fate.

She climbs a low rise, a place away from the eye-stabbing smoke. She turns, glimpses the flicker of sorcery. She climbs higher, searching for a break in the canopy. She sees it once again, luminescent white lines twisting like language from the Library. She sees a form hanging, a dark figure silvered about the waist and shoulders, suspended over the walled depths adjacent to a destroyed citadel—what looks like a broken amphorae jutting from the ground.

Cleric,
she thinks.
Ishroi...

She turns, and begins walking back the way she came.

—|—

The Skin Eaters lay strewn like castaway clothes. The Wizard stumbled to his knees at the sight of the carnage.

"Where is she?" he cried at the last man living—Sarl, looking like something out of a child's nightmare.

"The Coffers!" the mad scalper croaked. He raised his hands in crazed gesticulation. Something bloody flapped in the right. "Make ready, boys! Plunder them like a whore! Shake them like your purple pommel!"

"What happened here?" Achamian cried. He looked from dead man to dead man. Galian. Pokwas. Xonghis.

The Captain...

The very World pitched beneath his feet.

Suddenly the thing swinging in Sarl's hand became clear, the digits knuckled with fragments of expression...

A skin-spy's face.

"Speak up, fool!
What happened?
"

"Ahhh," Sarl crooned to him. "The World will be our wicked little peach! We'll be princes!
Princes!
"

The old Wizard seized him about the shoulders. "Where's Mimara... Where's
my daughter
?"

The madman nodded and gazed the way he had that second night in the Cocked Leg's common room, after smashing his wine bowl. A
knowing
gaze, the Wizard suddenly realized, one brimming with the intuition of the insane...

That Fate is madder still.

Achamian turned to the demand of some instinct, peered... glimpsed something slight passing through screens of smoke. He fairly doubled over for relief when she stepped naked from a fire-curtained world.

She ran to him, clutched his shoulders as he grinned and keened.

"You live!" he cried like a fool.

"As do you."

"You're naked!"

Her look of reproach made him want to cry out for joy.

"And they're dead," she said. "
All
of them," she added, with a glance at Sarl. "Come... We must flee this fire."

They moved with the quickness of looters racing dawn. She retrieved Squirrel, then paused at Xonghis to relieve him of the stolen Chorae, the one loose, the other affixed to a fletched shaft. Achamian gathered her clothing, threw a rotted cloak about her shoulders. Then together they stumbled and ran through the smoking galleries.