The White-Luck Warrior (49 page)

"Yes... Exactly. The saying means that the courage of one man is the
shame
of the other..." He pursed his fulsome lips. "And you, Horse-King... What you did..."

The night, the dark, the flurry of passion and dim detail came back to Sorweel. He remembered crying out to his friend the instant after Eskeles crashed to earth...

"Are you saying I
shamed
you?"

A dour grin. "In the eyes of my ancestors... most certainly."

Sorweel shook his head in disbelief. "I apologize... Maybe if you're lucky, they'll smuggle you in the slave entrance."

The Successor-Prince scowled. "It was a thing of
wonder
... what you did," he said with disconcerting intensity. "I saw you, Horse-King. I
know
you called to me...
And yet I rode on.
" He glared like someone speaking against a mob of baser instincts. "I will be forever finding my way out from your shadow."

Sorweel flinched from the look. His eyes settled on Porsparian where he sat humbled and huddled in the airy grey light...

"Time to seek the company of cowards," he offered weakly.

"The
longest
shadow, remember?" Zsoronga said, with an air of someone humiliated for his admission of humiliation. "The only way—the
only way
—to redeem myself is to stand at your side."

Sorweel nodded, did his best to shrug away the clamour of adolescent embarrassment, and to comport himself as a man—as a king of a proud people. Zsoronga ut Nganka'kull, the future Satakhan of High Holy Zeüm, was at once apologizing—which was remarkable in and of itself—and begging the most profound of favours: a means of recovering his honour and so securing the fate of his immortal soul.

The young King of Sakarpus offered up his hand, palm up, with his index finger alone extended. One boonsman to another.

Zsoronga frowned and smiled. "What is this... You want me to
smell
it?"

"N-no..." Sorweel stammered. "
No!
We call it the
virnorl
... 'finger-lock' you would say. It is a pledge of unity, a way to say that henceforth, all your battles will be my battles."

"You sausages," the Successor-Prince said, clasping his entire hand within the warm bowl of his own. "Come... Our mighty General wishes to see you."

—|—

Sorweel crouched next to his slave before following Zsoronga outside. "I can
speak
to you now," he said in Sheyic, hoping this might elicit some flicker of passion. But the old Shigeki merely regarded him with the same grieved lack of comprehension, as if he had forgotten Sheyic as promptly as Sorweel had learned it.

"More importantly," he added before stepping clear the cloistered heat, "I can
listen
."

Arid sunlight seemed to shower the whole of creation, so bright he stumbled for squinting. He stood at the tent threshold, blinking the liquid from the glare, until the world finally resolved into parched vistas. The camp, the crowded tents and grand pavilions, bleached of colour for brightness...

And the horror that encircled it.

Swales of blackening dead humped and pitted the distances. Sranc and more Sranc, teeth hanging spitless about gaping maws, eyes fogged, heaped into an endless array of macabre deadfalls. Limbs predominated in certain places, piled like the sticks Saglanders brought to market to sell as kindle. Heads and torsos prevailed in others, cobbled into mounds that resembled stacks of rotting fish. Great smears of black scored the far-flung mats, where the witches had burned their countless thousands. They reminded him of the charcoal grounds to the south of Sakarpus, only with bodies instead of trees charred to stumped anonymity. These marked the greatest concentrations of dead.

The reek struck too deep to be smelled. It could only be breathed.

The sight unsettled him, not for the grisly detail, but because of the preposterous scale. He wanted to rejoice, for it seemed that was what a true son of Sakarpus should do seeing their ancestral foe laid out to the horizon. But he could not. Breathing the carrion wind, glancing across the carcass heights, he found himself
mourning
, not for the Sranc, whose obscenity blocked all possibility of compassion, but for the innocence of a world that had never seen such sights.

For the boy he had been before awakening.

"Even if I survive," Zsoronga said from his side, "none will believe me when I return."

"We must make sure you die then," Sorweel replied.

The Successor-Prince smirked about a worried glance. They trekked on in awkward silence, sorting through industrious crowds of Inrithi, wending down tented alleys. Fairly every man Sorweel glimpsed bore some sign of the previous night's battle, whether it be bandages clotted about appalling wounds or the divided stares of those trying to stumble clear of memories of violence and fury. Many seemed to recognize him, and some even lowered their faces—in accordance, he imagined, with some precept of jnan, the arcane etiquette of the Three Seas.

The awkward transformation of his relationship with Zsoronga, he realized with no little dismay, was but the beginning of the changes his thoughtless courage had wrought.
Courage...
It seemed such a foolish word, naught but the scribble of a child compared to the lunacy of the previous night. When he dared glimpse his memories, he suffered only the crowding of dread and terror. He felt a
coward
, looking back, so laughably far from the hero Zsoronga was making of him.

A mob of caste-nobles and Kidruhil officers milled about the entrance to Kayûtas's command tent, and Sorweel simply assumed that he and Zsoronga would be forced to while away the watches in listless conversation. But faces turned to regard them as they approached, across the outer rind of warriors at first, then deeper as word of their arrival passed from lip to lip. The rumble of conversations evaporated. Sorweel and Zsoronga found themselves standing dumbfounded before their accumulated gazes.

"Huorstra hum de faul bewaren mirsa!"
a towering longbeard cried from the assembly's midst. The man shouldered his way through the others, his eyes bright with a kind of vicious joy.
"Sorweel Varaltshau!"
he bellowed, seizing him in a great, black-armoured embrace.
"Famforlic kus thassa!"

Suddenly everyone was cheering, and the young King found himself thrust into the crowd's congratulatory heart, shaking hands, returning embraces, nodding and thanking strangers with a kind of witless, breathless confusion. He acknowledged face after bruised face, even hugged a man blindfolded with bandages. In a matter of heartbeats he was delivered to the command tent, where he fairly tripped past the Pillarian Guards and into the washed light of the interior—so flustered that it seemed a minor miracle that he remembered to fall to his knees.

"She positions you..."

Anasûrimbor Kayûtas watched him from his chair, obviously amused by the spectacle of his arrival. Even in his Kidruhil cuirass and mail skirts, he sat with feline repose, his sandalled feet stretched across the mats before him, watching with the remote, lolling manner of an opium eater. Sorweel knew instantly that the man had not slept—and that he would not be the worse for it.

The air was stifling, as much for the sunlight that frosted the canvas ceiling as for all the exhaling mouths. Five scribes crowded the sheaf-laden table to his right, and numerous others stood milling in what little space remained: officers and caste-nobles for the most part. Sorweel saw Eskeles among them, decked in his crimson Mandate robes, his left eye swollen into a greasy purple crease. He also glimpsed Anasûrimbor Serwa standing as tall as many of the men, swanlike in gowns of embroidered white. A memory of her arcane embrace whispered through him.

Kayûtas allowed the uproar to subside before gesturing for him to stand. The Prince-Imperial was not long in waiting: something immaculate in his manner seemed to cut against all things unruly.

"Teüs Eskeles has told us everything," he declared. "You have saved us, Sorweel.
You...
"

A broken chorus of cheers and shouts rose from those gathered within the tent.

"I... I did nothing," the Sakarpi King replied, trying to avoid the Swayali Grandmistress's gaze.

"Nothing?" The Kidruhil General frowned, scratched the flaxen plaits of his beard. "You read the signs, like a true son of the plains. You
saw
the doom our foe had prepared for us. You counselled your commander to take the only action that could save us. And then, in the moment of utmost crisis, you lent your shoulder to Eskeles,
cast your life
on the longest of odds, so that he might alert us..." He glanced up toward his sister, then looked back, grinning like an uncle trying to teach his nephew how to gamble. "Nothing has ever been so impressive."

"I did only what I... what I thought sensible."

"Sense?" Kayûtas said with scowling good nature. "There are as many sensibilities as there are passions, Sorweel.
Terror
has a sense all its own: flee, shirk, abandon—whatever it takes to carry away one's skin. But
you
, you answered to the sense that transcends base desire. And we stand before you breathing,
victorious
, as a result."

The Sakarpi King glanced about wildly, convinced he was the butt of some cruel joke. But everyone assembled watched with a kind of indulgent expectation, as if understanding he was but a boy still, unused to the burden of communal accolades. Only Zsoronga's solitary black face betrayed worry.

"I... I-I know not what to say... You honour me."

The Prince-Imperial nodded with a wisdom that belied the adolescent tenderness of his beard. "That is my intent," he said. "I have even sent a party of crippled riders back to Sakarpus to bear word of your heroic role to your kinsmen..."

"You what?" Sorweel fairly coughed.

"It's a political gesture, I admit. But the glory is no less real."

In his soul's eye, Sorweel could see a wracked line of Kidruhil filing through the ruins of the Herders' Gate, outland conquerors, oppressors, crying out the treachery of Harweel's only son, how
he had saved
the very host that had laid Sakarpus low...

Nausea welled through him. Shame squirmed in his breast, clawing his ribs, scratching his heart.

"I... I don't know what to say..." he stammered.

"You need not say anything," Kayûtas said with an indulgent smile. "Your pride is clear for all to see."

"She is hiding you..."

And for the first time he felt it, the impunity of standing unseen. He had stood before Anasûrimbor Kayûtas before. He had suffered his raking gaze—he knew what it meant
to be known
by an enemy, to have his fears counted, his vengeful aspirations reckoned, and so transformed into levers that could be used against him. Now he felt as if he were peeking at the man through his mother's shielding fingers. And his cheeks stung for the memory of Porsparian rubbing Yatwer's spit into them.

"I've had you entered into the lists as the new Captain of the Scions," Kayûtas continued. "Disbanded they may be, but their honour will be yours. We were fortunate that Xarotas Harnilas possessed wisdom enough to recognize your sense—I will not trust fortune to so favour us a second time. Henceforth, you will attend me and my staff... And you will be accorded all the glory and privilege that belongs to a Believer-King."

She
had placed him here. The Dread Mother of Birth... Was the courage even his?

It seemed an important question, but then the legends seemed littered with the confusion of heroes and the Gods that favoured them. Perhaps his hand simply was her hand...

He recoiled from the thought.

"May I beg one boon?"

A flicker of mild surprise. "Of course."

"Zsoronga... I would have him accompany me if I could."

Kayûtas scowled, and several onlookers exchanged not-so-discreet whispers. For perhaps the first time, the Sakarpi King understood his friend's importance to the Anasûrimbor. Of all the world's remaining nations, only Zeüm posed a credible threat to the New Empire.

"You know that he conspires against us?" the Prince-Imperial said, switching to effortless Sakarpic. Suddenly the two of them stood alone in a room walled with strangers.

"I have my fears..." Sorweel began, lying smoothly. "But..."

"But what?"

"He no longer doubts the truth of your father's war. No one does."

The implication was as clear as it was surprising, for in all his life Sorweel had never counted his among devious souls. The first son of Nganka'kull
wavered
. To bring him into the Prince-Imperial's retinue could be the very thing his conversion required...

And that, Sorweel suddenly realized, was the Aspect-Emperor's goal: to have a
believer
become Satakhan.

"Granted," Kayûtas said, switching to the dismissive air of men who scarce had time for accommodations. He made a two-fingered gesture to one of his scribes, who began fingering through sheaves of vellum.

"But I fear you have one last duty to discharge," the General said in Sheyic just as Sorweel glanced about for some cue that the audience had ended. "A mortal one."

The omnipresent smell of rot seemed to take on a sinister tang.

"My arm is your arm, Lord General."

This reply occasioned a heartbeat of scrutiny.

"The Great Ordeal has all but exhausted its supplies. We
starve
, Sorweel. We have too many mouths and too little food. The time has come to put certain mouths to the knife..."

Sorweel swallowed against a sudden pang in his breast.

"What are you saying?"

"You must put down your slave, Porsparian, in accordance with my father's edict."

"I must what?" he asked blinking. So there was a joke after all.

"You must kill your slave before sunrise tomorrow, or
your life
will be forfeit," Kayûtas said, speaking in a tone as much directed to the assembled caste-nobles as to the Believer-King standing before him.
Even heroes,
he was saying,
must answer to our Holy Aspect-Emperor.