The White-Luck Warrior (6 page)

She has been a victim her whole life. So her instinct is the immediate one, to raise a concealing hand, to turn a shoulder in warding. Only a fool fails to hide what is precious.

Precious—and of course utterly incompatible with the one thing she desperately wants. Chorae and witches, as the Ainoni would say, rarely prosper beneath the same roof.

She finds a sour comfort in this—even a kind of warrant. Had it been pure and simple she would have shunned it out of jaded, melancholy reflex. But now it is something that demands to be understood—on
her
terms...

So of course the old Wizard refuses to tell her anything.

More comfort. Frustration and torment is the very shape of her life. The one thing she trusts.

That night she awakens to the sound of Sarl crooning in a low, lilting voice. A song like smoke, quickly drawn into soundlessness by the ridge's height. She listens, watching the Nail of Heaven as it peeks through the tattered garments of a cloud. The words to the song, if there are any, are incomprehensible.

After a time, the song trails into rasping murmur, then a moan.

Sarl is old, she realizes. He left more than his wits in the bowel of the mountain.

Sarl is dying.

A pang of terror bolts through her. She turns to look for the Wizard among the rocks, only to find him immediately behind her, bestial with hair. He had crept to her side after she had fallen asleep, she realizes.

She stares into the shadow of his rutted face and smiles, thinking,
At least he does not sing.
She crinkles her nose at his smell. She drifts back asleep to the fluttering image of him.

I understand, Mother... I finally see... I really do.

—|—

She dreams of her stepfather, wakes with the frowning confusion that always accompanies dreams too sticky with significance. With every blink she sees
him
: the Aspect-Emperor, not as he is but as he would be were
he
the shade that haunted the accursed deeps of Cil-Aujas...

Not a man but an emblem. A living Seal, rising on tides of hellish unreality.

"You are the eye that offends, Mimara..."

She wants to ask Achamian about the dream but finds the memory of their feud too sharp to speak around. She knows what everybody knows about dreams, that they are as likely to deceive as to illuminate. On the Andiamine Heights, the caste-noble wives would consult augurs, pay outrageous sums. The caste-menials and the slaves would pray, usually to Yatwer. The girls in the brothel used to drip wax on pillow-beetles to determine the truth of their dreams. If the wax trapped the insect, the dream was true. She has heard of dozens of other folk divinations besides. But she no longer knows what to believe...

It's the Wizard, she realizes. The damned fool is rubbing off on her.

"The eye that must be plucked."

They breakfast on the last of a juvenile buck. The sky is cloudless, and the morning sun is chill and sharp. An air of renewal surrounds the scalpers; they talk and prepare the way they used to, the animation of men reacquainting themselves with old and arduous tasks.

The Captain sits on a boulder overlooking the forested vista below, sharpening his blade. Cleric stands below him, shirtless beneath his nimil hauberk. He nods as though in prayer, listening as always to the grinding mutter of the Captain. Galian huddles in close conference with Pokwas and Xonghis, while Soma hovers over them. Sutadra has withdrawn up the trail to pray: he is always praying of late. Conger speaks to his countrymen in avid tones, and though Gallish defeats her, she knows that he attempts to rally them. Sarl mutters and cackles to himself as he shaves tiny slices no bigger than a fingernail from his breakfast cut, which he then chews and savours with absurd relish, as if dining on snails or some other delicacy.

Even Achamian seems to sense the difference, though he says nothing. The Skin Eaters have returned. Somehow, they have recovered their old ways and roles. Only the worried glances exchanged between jokes and declarations betray their fright.

The Mop, she realizes, the famed primeval forests of the Long Side. They fear it—apparently enough to forget Cil-Aujas for a time.

"Skinnies," Sarl cackles, his face flushed red. "Chop and bale them, boys... We have
skin
to eat!"

The cheer raised is so winded, so half-hearted, that the shadow of Lost Mansion seems to leap across them anew... There are so few left.

And Sarl is not one of them.

A tin clank alerts the company, tells them that their Captain has slung his battered shield over his back—what has become the signal for them to resume their march. The slopes are treacherous, and twice she infuriates the old Wizard by offering him a steadying hand. They wend their way down, descending lower and lower, picking and barging their way through massed ranks of scrub. It seems she can feel the mountains climbing into sky-high absurdity behind her.

The Mop grows beneath and before them, becoming larger and larger, until she can make out the vying of individual limbs across the tossed canopy. Despite the descriptions she has heard, she finds herself gawking in wonder. The trees are nothing short of monumental, such is their size. Through screens of leaves she glimpses soaring trunks and spanning limbs and the dark that is the world beneath the canopy.

The air fairly shivers with the sound of birds singing, screeching, hooting, creating a vast and shrill chorus that reaches, she knows, across the horizon to the shores of the Cerish Sea. They find themselves following a shelf that runs parallel to the forest edge about a length or so taller than the canopy. Her glimpses take her deeper now, though still far from the gloom-shrouded floor. She sees limbs reach like sinuous stone, bearing barn-sized shags of greenery and sheets of moss hanging like a mendicant's rags. She sees the piling on of shadows that makes blackness out of the forest depths.

It will swallow us,
she thinks, feeling the old panic buzzing through her bones. She has had her fill of lightless bellies. Small wonder the scalpers were anxious.

Tree
darkness, Sarl had said.

For the first time, it seems, she understands the sheer
enormity
of the task the Wizard has set for them. For the first time she understands that Cil-Aujas was but the beginning of their trial—the first in a parade of unguessed horrors.

The shallow cliff dips and collapses into a rugged slope, spilling gigantic stones into the forest verge. The expedition picks its way down and files into the Great Mop...

Into the green darkness.

CHAPTER TWO
The Istyuli Plains

We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one's own deception is to accuse others of deceit.

—
H
ATATIAN,
E
XHORTATIONS

It is not so much the wisdom of the wise that saves us from the foolishness of the fools as it is the latter's inability to agree.

—
A
JENCIS,
T
HE
T
HIRD
A
NALYTIC OF
M
EN

S
PRING, 20
N
EW
I
MPERIAL
Y
EAR (4132
Y
EAR-OF-THE-
T
USK),
T
HE
H
IGH
I
STYULI

The Sakarpi tell of a man who had two puppies in his belly, the one adoring, the other savage. When the loving one nuzzled his heart, he became joyous, like the father of a newborn boy. But when the other gored it with sharp puppy teeth, he became desperate with sorrow. Those rare times the dogs left him in peace, he would tell people he was doomed. Bliss can be sipped a thousand times, he would say, whereas shame need only cut your throat once.

The Sakarpi called him Kensooras, "Between Dogs," a name that had since come to mean the melancholy suffered by suicides.

Varalt Sorweel was most certainly between dogs.

His ancient city had been conquered, its famed Chorae Hoard plundered. His beloved father had been killed. And now that he found himself in the Aspect-Emperor's fearsome thrall, a
Goddess
accosted him, the Dread Mother of Birth, Yatwer, in the guise of his lowly slave.

Kensooras indeed.

The cavalry company that was his cage, the Scions, had been called to the hazard of war. The collection of young hostages who composed the Scions had long feared their company was naught but ornamental, that they would be cozened like children while the Men of the Ordeal fought and died around them. They pestered their Kidruhil Captain, Harnilas, endlessly. They even petitioned General Kayûtas—to no apparent avail. Even though they marched with their fathers' enemy, they were boys as much as men, and so their hearts were burdened with the violent longing to prove their mettle.

Sorweel was no different. When word of their deployment finally arrived, he grinned and whooped the same as the others—how could he not? The recriminations, as always, came crashing in afterward.

The Sranc had ever been the great foe of his people—that is, before the coming of the Aspect-Emperor. Sorweel had spent the better part of his childhood training and preparing for battle against the creatures. For a Son of Sakarpus, there could be no higher calling. Kill a Sranc, the saying went, birth a man. As a boy he had spent innumerable lazy afternoons mooning over imagined glories, chieftains brained, whole clans annihilated. And he had spent as many taut nights praying for his father whenever he rode out to meet the beasts.

Now, at long last, he was about to answer a lifelong yearning and to embark on a rite sacred to his people...

In the name of the man who had murdered his father and enslaved his nation.

More dogs.

He gathered with the others in Zsoronga's sumptuous pavilion the night before their departure, did his best to keep his counsel while the others crowed in anticipation. "Don't you see?" he finally cried. "We are
hostages
!"

Zsoronga watched with an air of frowning dismissal. He reclined more than the others so that the crimson silk of his basahlet gleamed across his cheek and jaw. Plaits of his jet medicine-wig curled across his shoulders.

The Zeümi Successor-Prince remained as generous as always, but there could be no denying the chill that had climbed between them since the Aspect-Emperor had declared Sorweel one of the Believer-Kings. The young King desperately wanted to explain things, to tell him about Porsparian and the incident with Yatwer's spit, to assure him that he still
hated
, but some inner leash always pulled him up short. Some silences, he was learning, were impossible not to keep.

To Sorweel's left sat Prince Charampa of Cingulat—the "
true
Cingulat," he would continually insist, to distinguish his land from the Imperial province of the same name. Though his skin was every bit as black and exotic as Zsoronga's, he possessed the narrow features of a Ketyai. He was one of those men who never ceased squabbling, even when everyone agreed with him. To his right sat the broad-faced Tzing of Jekkhia, a land whose mountain Princes paid grudging tribute to the Aspect-Emperor. He never spoke save through an enigmatic smile, as though he were privy to facts that made a farce out of all conversations. Opposite Sorweel, beside the Successor-Prince, sat Tinurit of the Akkunihor, a Scylvendi tribe whose lands lay no more than two weeks' ride from the New Empire's capital. He was an imperious, imposing character and the only one who knew less Sheyic than Sorweel.

"Why should we celebrate fighting our captor's war?"

No one understood a word, of course, but enough desperation had cracked through his tone to capture their attention. Obotegwa, Zsoronga's steadfast Obligate, quickly translated, and Sorweel was surprised to find himself understanding much of what the old man said. Obotegwa rarely had a chance to complete any of his translations of late—primarily because of Charampa, whose thoughts flew from soul to tongue without the least consideration.

"Because it is better than rotting in
our captor's
camp," Tzing replied through his perpetual smirk.

"Yes!" Charampa cried. "Think of it as a
hunting
expedition, Sorri!" He turned to the others, seeking confirmation of his wit. "You can even scar yourself like Tinurit here!"

Sorweel looked to Zsoronga, who merely glanced away as though in boredom. As fleeting as the wordless exchange had been, it stung as surely as a slap.

So says the Believer-King,
the Zeümi's green eyes seemed to say.

As far as Sorweel could tell, the single thing that distinguished their group from the other Scions was geography. Where the others hailed from recalcitrant tribes and nations
within
the New Empire, they represented the few lands that still exceeded its grasp—at least until recently. "Between us we have the Aspect-Emperor surrounded!" Zsoronga would sometimes cry in joking terms.

But it was no joke, Sorweel had come to realize. Zsoronga, who would one day be Satakhan of High Holy Zeüm, the only nation that could hope to rival the New Empire, was cultivating friendships according to the interests of his people. He avoided the others simply because the Aspect-Emperor was renowned for his devious subtlety. Because spies had almost certainly been planted among the Scions.