The White-Luck Warrior (31 page)

And the Lords of the Ordeal filed from the council striking their chests and crying out in renewed resolution. So easy it was to kindle the lust for blood in the hearts of Men. Even those thrown more than a thousand miles from their home.

—|—

To look at skies bright and arid and to sense a darkness unseen.

The Men of the Ordeal marched, little more than shadows in the sheeted dust. Knowing what gathered in the distance, they gazed ever forward, pondering what they could not see. There is an exhaustion peculiar to hanging threats, a needing-to-confront that tires the soul the way overstuffed packs sap the limbs. They would look out across the blasted plate of the Istyuli, and they would wonder at the rumour of their enigmatic foe. The Horde. They would argue numbers, exchange speculations, discuss battles waged by long-dead men. It became a game for some, counting the hundreds of dust plumes that marked the Kidruhil and the various companies of knights that patrolled ahead of them. They would wager rations on which plume marked who, a practice that became so common that some companies found themselves returning to the shouts of uproarious thousands.

For the pickets themselves, it seemed they had come to the ends of the earth. The ground was all but gutted dust by this time, so the Horde always appeared as a peculiar dust storm that spanned the horizon, one tethered to the irregularities of the earth. Ochre clouds piled upon billowing foundations, a great curtain that climbed into a haze that stained the northern sky, obscuring the lower constellations at night. Streamers preceded it, tails of gauze hooked as though on nails, marking those clans that had fled the longest, starved the longest. On and on it extended, powder raised into sinuous mountains, beautiful for its slow-blooming complexities, wondrous for its mad scale. A sense of impunity had grown upon many of the riders, one of those thoughtless convictions that arise when something expected perpetually fails to arrive. They rode their trackless circuits, and the unseen hordes before them retreated, always retreated. This was simply the way.

Then some trick of the Gangan-naru would kick open a door across the distance, and the windy hush would suddenly tingle with
sound
of the Horde, a roar that was at once booming and thin. "Like shrieking children," one of the Kidruhil Captains would explain to General Kayûtas. "For the life of me, they sound like shrieking
children
."

Or, more rarely, given the sheer number of companies pacing the Horde, one of the retreating streamers would reverse direction and begin racing toward one of the slender fingers of dust that marked the pursuing cavalry companies. Then the choreographed race would begin, with the company pursued turning back to the main host, drawing the reckless clan ever farther from the Horde and so delivering it to the lances of those companies flanking. The battles would be so one-sided as to scarce be battles at all. Ghostly riders pounding out of the smoke of powder-dry earth, riding down the shadows of screeching Sranc, some so starved as to be little more than dolls of knotted rope. Men with chalked faces would congratulate one another, exchange petty news, then ride on with whatever trophies they so prized.

Originally, they tallied the dead, thinking this a means of measuring the Sranc's defeat. And squads would always be sent back for the gratification of the host, their lances heavy with severed heads. The counting was abandoned after they reached some ten thousand—for who bothers to count inexhaustible things? The practice was forsaken when the trudging infantrymen began jeering at the lancers' approach. The hearts of men are like buoys: the more water you give them, the higher their expectations swim. All that would survive of the custom was the use of
lance
as a term for twelve Sranc—the average number of heads that could be carried on a standard Kidruhil shaft.

And so did a kind of unspoken accord arise between the Men of the Ordeal and the Sranc of the Horde, a truce whose falseness lay in the meagreness of the former's rations—the footmen of most nations had been reduced to gnawing amicut. Every morning, the number of slaves abandoned to die climbed a handful of souls. Camp would be broken, and the Army would begin crawling toward the northern horizon, leaving several dozen forlorn and broken souls sitting amid the detritus, waiting to be claimed by whatever it was that ailed them. Many just vanished, and the vassals of different lords began trading rumours of midnight murder. Some tales, like the story of Baron Hunrilka demanding his thanes dip their beards in the blood of their slaves, transcended bounds of kin and vassalage and were traded through the Ordeal as a whole.

Fewer and fewer fires glittered at night, for the Sranc Horde had so raked the earth that the Judges forbade the binding of grasses—or anything else that could be used as fodder—for fuel. Here and there enterprising souls would raise fires of thistles and scrub, but for the most part men whiled away the watches in apprehension and gloom, uncounted thousands of them, sitting in small, shadowy bands, with only the Nail of Heaven to reveal the worry in the eyes around them. It was a soldier's nature to accumulate grievances over the course of a campaign. In civilized lands, where marches were brief and battles quick in coming, a commander could rely on either victory to cleanse the ledgers or defeat to render them moot. But this march was unlike any other, and the surrounding wastes offered nothing to ease the frustrations of a warlike heart.

They believed still, for they were Zaudunyani, and they feared the Judges enough to stay their tongues, but they were simple men and so thought the solution to their travails was simple.

Battle. They need only close with their inhuman foe and hack them to the ground.

—|—

Earlier, when the Horde had been more novelty than existential threat, the Lords of the Ordeal had hoped that one of the Istyuli's many rivers would catch the Sranc as though in a bottle, forcing them to close. But the severity of the drought had choked even the greatest of the Istyuli's rivers into muddy channels. The Horde fled across them as though they scarce existed, fouling the waters with their waste as they did so.

And so was the Great Ordeal thrown open to Disease, dread Akkeägni, who reached through the host seizing men in his pestilent hands. Sick Columns were formed, ever growing formations that trailed each of the Four Armies. They quickly became pageants of death and misery, men marching with heads slumped, many of them naked from the waist down, their backsides stained with blood and feces. Hemoplexy was far and away the most common ailment—as well as the most deadly, given the lack of clean water. Only in the madness that is war could men die of thirst through drinking. And so did many learn what the poets and historians left unspoken: that more warriors die in offal than in blood.

And still the Sranc continued to fall back, a mad seething that scarred the very curve of the world. More and more clans fell upon the companies of horsemen that shadowed them throughout the day, attacks that fooled several Captains into thinking the Horde
itself
descended on the Ordeal. Miles were lost to their false alarms.

Of the innumerable skirmishes, two in particular became famous. General Siroyon was already notorious because of the way he and his Famiri rode into battle bare-chested and because of the legendary beauty and speed of his mount, Phiolos. Since his Famiri could easily outdistance the Sranc, he began riding ever closer to the Horde, threading the dust streamers that marked the straggling clans, so close his men's necks were pained for gazing up at the mountainous skirts of dust that obscured their foe.

"It is like riding into canyons of smoke," he told King Proyas and his war-council, "a land where storm clouds war directly with the earth. The shrieks are too... too many to sound of shrieking... The world simply...
rings
. And then you see them, like a plague of insects clotting the ground, leaping, sprinting, massing without order or reason... Madness. Threshing madness! Only the outermost are visible, so they seem frail, at first, such is the proportion of the dust piling above them. But then you catch glimpses of the countless thousands swirling beyond... and you know, just know, that what you see is but the edge of screaming miles..."

The edge of screaming miles.
This phrase in particular would find itself passed from lip to lip, until fairly every soul in the Army of the East had heard it.

Knowing that he would arouse the creatures, the Famiri General took care to coordinate his expeditions with King-Regent Nurbanu Soter and his Ainoni. Arrayed some miles in advance of the Army, Soter's heavily armoured Palatines and their household knights would await Siroyon's howling return. They would wonder at the thin thread of half-naked Famiri flying across the waste and the mobs of leaping shadows that pursued them. They would open alleys for the men to flee between, then they would close ranks and begin thundering forward...

And so were the Sranc felled in the thousands.

When these tales reached Sibawul te Nurwul in the Army of the Middle-North, he commanded his Cepalorans to strip off their armour, reckoning this was what enabled Siroyon and his Famiri to outrun the creatures. Bent on redeeming his earlier failure, he passed informal word to several caste-nobles and Kidruhil Captains that he planned on repeating Siroyon's tactics, allowing them to destroy the creatures by the thousands. What he failed to realize was that the uneven accumulation of Sranc before the Army of the Middle-North meant his horses had far less fodder than General Siroyon's. The Cepalorans rode into the smoke canyons as the Famiri had, wheeled as they had wheeled when the Sranc began racing toward them. And fled as they fled, howling out with the same exhilaration.

But their ebullient mood quickly faltered. Once again, the Sranc
closed
upon the laggards among them. Sibawul commanded his hornsmen to signal for assistance, but the General had not discussed contingencies with any of the lords or captains who commanded the jaws of his trap. The inhuman masses gained on the rearmost horsemen, shrieked in obscene triumph as the first stragglers were pulled down. Men crouched in their saddles, whipped their ponies bloody, wept as the slavering masses engulfed them...

Some two thousand of Sibawul's kinsmen were lost to the gibbering pursuit. It would be the first true disaster suffered by the Great Ordeal. And so did the ill-fated General earn a second flogging, as well as everlasting shame in the scripture that would survive.

As the days passed, the shape of what had been an unthinkable fate had become clear to anyone who pondered the Ordeal's straits. They faced a more mobile enemy on open terrain—and this meant doom. They could not close with their foe, and as a result they could not secure the supplies they needed to survive. Tales of various historical battles, especially those involving the Scylvendi, the famed People of War, began filtering through the host, traded between shrugging men and pensive looks. More than one antique emperor, the Men of the Ordeal learned, had led the pride of his people to doom on distant plains.

"Fear not," Kayûtas assured his commanders. "They will attack, and soon."

"How?" King Narnol asked. Bent by the death of his son, he had grown ever more bold in his questioning, ever more insolent. "How could you know?"

"Because as much as we hunger, they
starve
."

"Ha!" the greybeard Galeoth cried. "So they will come to steal food we don't possess?"

Kayûtas said nothing, content to allow Narnol's own harsh intonations condemn him.

"We!" King Vûkyelt erupted. "
We
are the food, fool!"

At some point, each of the Marshals of the Four Armies petitioned the Aspect-Emperor, asking that he address their host and so silence the growing presentiment of doom. He rebuked each of them in turn, saying, "If your nations cannot endure trials so paltry without my intervention, then truly the Great Ordeal is doomed."

And so the Men of the Ordeal roused themselves at the Interval's morning toll. They tightened their belts and war-girdles, shouldered packs that always seemed one stone heavier than the day previous. And they trudged to their assembling formations, wondering at the dust that puffed from their steps. Some continued blinking long into the morning, whether from weariness or airborne grit, like men trapped in nightmares.

—|—

Sorweel had no brothers, a fact that had caused him no little shame in his childhood. He had no clue as to why he should feel responsible for his mother's failure to bear a second son, or for his father's refusal to take another wife after his mother died. From time to time he would hear his father arguing with some wizened adviser about the frailty of the dynastic line:
"But if the boy should die, Harweel!"
He would slink away numb and bewildered, oppressed by a curious sense of urgency, as if he should don his toy armour, do everything he could to safeguard his precious pulse. And he would think how much easier it would be if he had a younger brother,
someone to protect
—someone to share the future's terrible burdens.

And so he grew up searching for brothers, an asking-for-more that dogged his every friendship. He was the Prince. He was the one ordained to ascend the Horn-and-Amber Throne.
His
was the indispensable soul, and yet it always seemed otherwise. And now, when he needed a brother more than at any time in his life, he was not even sure he possessed a friend.

What Sorweel had feared had come to pass: the Scions had in fact stumbled across a Sranc host shadowing the Great Ordeal. They only glimpsed it a few times, from what rare heights the landscape provided: a column of vast squares marching in perfect formation. Twice Eskeles had cast an air-bending spell that allowed them to scry the host in greater detail. While others busied themselves counting heads, Sorweel watched with breathless wonder: the tiny figures become liquid and large, executing soundless errands utterly oblivious to the Scions and their sorcerous observation.