The White-Luck Warrior (56 page)

Zsoronga lay on his side as he always did, one arm thrown askew, his face the image of boyish bliss. Sorweel regarded him for a bleary moment, thinking as he often thought that the man's future wives would love him best like this, in the innocence of his mornings. The young King crept from his cot, fumbled with his gear in the dawning pallor, then slipped outside so as to not disturb his brother from Zeüm.

He savoured the chill of breathing open sky, rubbed his bearding chin as he gazed out across the encampment. He felt the clamour to come, the rousing of thousands about him, and the warring of doubts within. Another day marching with the Great Ordeal. The discomfort of long watches in the saddle. The ligatures of sweat. The ache of perpetual squinting. The anxiousness of the accumulating Horde. And for a fleeting moment, he knew the peace of those first to awaken—the gratitude that accompanies solitary lulls.

He sat on his rump to labour with his riding boots.

"Truth shines..."
a voice chimed.

"Truth shines," habit replied for him.

Anasûrimbor Serwa stood before him, her silken billows knotted tight about her slight form. She had appeared without the merest inkling. From his first glimpse, Sorweel knew he would crouch peering after her departure, looking for her footfalls across the trampled dust. She stood to his left, beneath the arch of the bluing sky. Crimson gilded the edges of the tents jumbled behind her.

She drew back a lick of flaxen hair from her cheek.

"The Charioteer you and my brother found... Father has met with them."

"The Embassy..." Sorweel said, squinting up at her. "Kayûtas said your father hopes to forge a treaty with Ishterebinth."

She smiled. "You know of Ishterebinth in Sakarpus?"

He scowled and shrugged. "From
The Sagas
... None thought it real."

"The mightiest among the Quya dwell there still."

He did not know what to say so he turned back to his boots. He never felt the Goddess so fiercely as when he found himself before Serwa or Kayûtas. His cheeks literally prickled. And yet at the same time, he never felt so unworthy of the Mother's dread design. To stand before the Anasûrimbor was to doubt... things old.

"The Nonmen have invoked Niom," she said. "An ancient ritual."

Something in her tone seized his attention. She had sounded almost embarrassed.

"I don't understand."

Her gaze had recovered its remote vantage. She considered him with a serenity that he yearned to muddy with his passion...

Evil. How could someone so beautiful be evil?

"The ancient Nonmen Kings found Men too mercurial," she explained, "too proud and headstrong to be trusted. So in all their dealings they demanded hostages as a guarantee: a son, a daughter, and a captive enemy. The two former as a surety against treachery. The latter as a surety against deception."

The sun broke behind her. Light unfurled in a burning fan about her silhouette.

"And I am to play the enemy," he said, holding a hand out against her glare.

What new twist was this?

"Yes," her shadow replied against the high drone of the Interval.

He had expected her to vanish, to wink out of existence the same way she had winked in. But she simply turned and began walking at an angle to the eastern sun. Her shadow floated across the trampled earth, drawn as long and slender as a felled sapling. With every step she became smaller, a mere wisp before the enormity of dawn...

Ever more lonely and afraid.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Momemn

This one thing every tyrant will tell you: nothing saves more lives than murder.

—
M
EROTOKAS,
T
HE
V
IRTUE OF
S
IN

No two prophets agree. So to spare our prophets their feelings, we call the future a whore.

—
Z
ARATHINIUS,
A
D
EFENCE OF THE
A
RCANE
A
RTS

E
ARLY
S
UMMER, 20
N
EW
I
MPERIAL
Y
EAR (4132
Y
EAR-OF-THE-
T
USK),
M
OMEMN

"I gutted a dove in the old way," the long-haired man said, "with a sharpened stone. And when I drew out the entrails, I saw you."

"Then you know."

The Narindar assassin nodded. "Yes... But do you?"

"I have no need of knowing."

The Gift-of-Yatwer leaned against the door he had already entered. The way was not barred.

The room was little more than a cellar, even though it hung some four storeys above the alleyway. The plaster had sloughed from the walls, leaving bare stretches of cracked brick. Near the slot that served as a window, he saw himself speaking with a man, his tunic grimed about the armpits. A cloak of road-beaten leather lay crumpled upon the spare bed. His hair was waist long, a peculiarity among the Ketyai. The only thing extraordinary about his dress was his war-girdle: a wide belt stamped with the images of bulls. A variety of knives and tools gleamed from holsters along the back.

"I gutted a dove in the old way," the long-haired man was saying, "with a sharpened stone. And when I drew out the entrails, I saw you."

"Then you know."

"Yes... But do you?"

"I have no need of knowing."

The Narindar frowned and smiled. "The Four-Horned Brother... Do you know why he is shunned by the others? Why my Cult and my Cult alone is condemned by the Tusk?"

The White-Luck Warrior saw himself shrug.

He glanced back, saw himself climbing stairs that had crumbled into a narrow slope.

He glanced back, saw himself pressing through packed streets, faces hanging like bulbs of garlic in shifting fields of cloth, soldiers watching from raised stoops, slave-girls balancing baskets and urns upon their heads, teamsters driving mules and oxen. He glanced back, saw the immensity of the gate climbing above him, engulfing sun and high blue sky.

He glanced back, one pilgrim among others braiding the roadway, watching Momemn's curtain walls wandering out to parse the hazy distances. A monumental fence.

He looked forward, saw himself rolling the long-haired man through his blood into the black slot beneath the bed rack. He paused to listen through the booming of the streets, heard tomorrow's prayer horns yaw deep across the Home City.

"The Four-Horned Brother..." the long-haired man was saying. "Do you know why he is shunned by the others? Why my Cult and my Cult alone is condemned in the Tusk?"

"Ajokli is the Fool," he heard himself reply.

The long-haired man smiled. "He only seems such because he sees what the others do not see... What
you
do not see."

"I have no need of seeing."

The Narindar lowered his face in resignation. "The blindness of the sighted," he murmured.

"Are you ready?" the Gift-of-Yatwer asked, not because he was curious, but because this was what he had heard himself say.

"I told you... I gutted a dove in the old way."

The White-Luck Warrior glanced back, saw himself standing upon a distant hill, looking forward.

The blood was as sticky as he remembered.

Like the oranges he would eat fifty-three days from now.

—|—

Esmenet felt a refugee, hunted, and yet somehow she also felt free.

Twenty years had passed since she had trod through the slots of a city as great as Momemn. When she married Kellhus, she had exchanged her feet for palanquins borne on the backs of slaves. Now that she walked again, alone save Imhailas, she felt as naked as a slave dragged out for auction. Here she was, easily the most powerful woman in the Three Seas, and she felt every bit as powerless and persecuted as she had as a common whore.

Once Biaxi Sankas had provided him with the time and location, Imhailas had plotted their course with the thoroughness of a military planner—even sending out soldiers, a different one for each leg of the journey, to count paces. She had dressed as the wife of a low Kianene functionary, cloaked in modest grey with a hanging half-veil that rested diagonally across her face, then she and Imhailas, who had disguised himself as a Galeoth caste-merchant, simply slipped out of the Imperial Precincts with the changing of the watches.

And she walked the streets—
her
streets—the way those she owned and ruled walked.

Sumna, where she had lived as prostitute, should have been a far different city, dominated as it was by the Hagerna, the city within the city that administered all the Thousand Temples. But power was power, whether clothed in the ecclesiastical finery of the Hagerna or the marshal regalia of the Imperial Precincts. Both Sumna and Momemn were ancient administrative centres, overrun with the panoply of peoples that served or seduced power. All that really distinguished them was the stone drawn from their respective quarries. Where Sumna was sandy and tan, as if one of the great Shigeki cities had been transplanted north, Momemn was largely grey and black—"the child of dark Osbeus," the poet Nel-Saripal had called it, referring to the famed basalt quarries that lay inland on the River Phayus.

She walked now the way she had walked then, her step brisk, her eyes shying from every passerby, her hands clutched before her. But where before she had passed through the fog of threat that surrounded every young and beautiful woman in low company, now she traversed the fog of threat that surrounded the powerful when they find themselves stranded among the powerless.

Imhailas had balked at the location Sankas had provided, but the Patridomos had assured him there was nothing to be done, that the kind of man they wanted to contract was as much priest as assassin, and so answered to his own unfathomable obligations. "You must understand, all of this is a kind of prayer for them," Sankas explained. "The penultimate... act... does not stand apart from the acts that feed into it. In their eyes, this very discussion is an integral component of the... the..."

"The assassination," Esmenet said.

For her part, she did not resent the prospect of sneaking across her city.
Something
had to be given, it seemed to her, for her mad design to have the least chance of succeeding. What was the risk and toil of walking mere streets compared with what she wanted—
needed
—to accomplish?

They walked side by side where the streets permitted, otherwise she followed Imhailas like a child—or a wife—taking heart in his high, broad shoulders. Even relatively affluent passersby stepped clear of his arm-swinging stature. They followed the Processional toward the Cmiral temple-complex, turned after crossing the Rat Canal. They skirted the River District, then crossed what was called the New Quarter, presumably because it had come to house itinerant communities from across her husband's far-flung empire. The clamour waxed and waned from street to street, corner to corner. Tutors crying out to their classes. Blue-skinned devotees of Jukan, chanting and crashing their cymbals. Beggars, cast-off galley or fuller slaves, calling out Yatwer's name. Violent drunks, raging against the jostle.

Even the smells ebbed and flowed, too pungent and deep, too acrid and sharp, and too many—an endless mélange of the noxious and the perfumed. The canals revolted her so much with their flotsam and stench that she resolved to legislate their cleaning when she returned to the palace. When she travelled as Empress, a company of slaves flanked her passage, each bearing blue-steaming censers. Absent them, she found herself alternately holding her breath and gagging. Ever attentive, Imhailas purchased an orange at the first opportunity. Cut in half and held about the mouth and nose, oranges and lemons provided a relatively effective remedy against urban reek.

She saw mule-drawn wains swaying with firewood heaped so high she and Imhailas quickened their step whenever they passed them. She tried hard not to glare at the Columnaries they passed playing number-sticks on the steps of the Custom House they were supposed to be guarding. They passed an endless variety of vendors, some walking the streets bent beneath their wares, others occupying the stalls that slotted the first floor of most buildings. She even saw prostitutes sitting on the sills of second-floor windows, hanging their legs so that passersby could chase glimpses along their inner thighs.

She could not but reflect on the miracle that had raised her from the warp and woof of the sordid lives surrounding her. Nor could she avoid the great wall that years, luxury, and innumerable intermediaries had thrown between her and them. She was one of them, and she was not one of them—the same as with the caste-nobility that showered her with flattery and insolence day in and day out.

She was something in-between—apart. In all the world the only person like her, she realized in a pique of melancholy, the only other member of her lonely, bewildered tribe, was her daughter, Mimara.

Even though she knew that countless thousands made journeys no different from the one she and Imhailas had undertaken, it seemed miraculous they should gain their destination without some kind of challenge. The streets became more narrow, less crowded, and odourless enough for her to finally discard her orange. For the span of a dozen heartbeats she even found herself alone with her Exalt-Captain, fending a sudden, unaccountable suspicion that he and Sankas conspired to kill her. The thought filled her with shame and dismay.