The White-Luck Warrior (63 page)

He was at war, she realized.

"I've been a drunkard before," he muttered—but not to her, it seemed. "I've even hung from the hooks of the poppy..." Momentary clarity sparked in his eyes. "The burden that Mandate Schoolmen bear... Many of us are compelled to seek low pleasures."

At war with the earthly residue of Cû'jara Cinmoi.

Her fear is a novelty to her, so long have her passions slipped into oblivion at the merest distraction. She struggles to keep hold of it, but she is too weary. She drifts into unsettled sleep.

She dreams of Cil-Aujas, of white throngs scratching through the black. She dreams that she runs
with them
, the Sranc, chasing her own waifish figure ever deeper into the earth.

A cry awakens her, grunts and earth-scuffing struggle.

She blinks, sucks waking air. The sounds are near—very near.

Dawn rims a blackened world. Two figures crouch over the Wizard... The Captain and Cleric.

What?

The Wizard kicks and pedals.

"What are you doing?" she asks with bleary curiosity. No one acknowledges her. The Wizard gags, jerks, and struggles like a landed fish.

"What are you doing!"
she cries.

Heedless, she scrambles to her feet, throws herself across the Nonman's hunched back. He shrugs her away. "Hold her!" the Captain barks at shadows standing in the dark. Calloused hands clamp about her wrists: Galian, restraining her from behind. "There, pretty!" he grunts, dragging her back. He twists her arms against the small of her back, thrusts her to her knees. She hears herself howling in fury.
"No! Nooooo!"
All she can see of the Wizard is his legs kicking. Crude laughter slouches from the dark—Sarl. A hand closes about the back of her neck. Her face is slammed into the dust, the wiry remains of weeds. Other hands seize the waist of her breeches. She knows what comes next.

But the Captain has turned from the struggling Wizard, sees what has happened to her. He flies to his feet, savagely kicks one of her unseen assailants. Stabs another—she sees Wonard stumble kicking to the dust. The hands vanish and she finds herself on all fours.

"Touch her," Lord Kosoter grates to the unseen shadows behind her, "and your
soul
is forfeit!"

She glimpses Wonard convulsing, puking blood into his beard. She scrambles forward with an instinct borne of desperation. She seizes Squirrel from her meagre belongings, draws it retreating, trips over the beehive carcass of a Sranc.

Dawn is but a corona of slate and blue across the horizon. The night sky rises black and infinite, oblivion littered with countless stars. The scalpers are naught but hunched shadows, their heads and their shoulders stuck in pale starlight. They approach her, wary and weaponless.

Achamian screams.

"Nooo!" she shrieks. "Stop this! Stop!"

The Captain draws his blade. The rasp draws chills across her skin. He strides toward her as if she were nothing more than wood to kindle. Light soaks the horizon behind him, renders him black. She can see the murderous glint of his eyes beneath his hood of wild hair. They seem to glow for the black lines tattooed about them.

"What are you doing?" she cries. "What madness is this?" Her voice cuts the back of her throat, such is her terror. This is how it happens, she realizes. The brothel taught her as much, but she has forgotten in all the intervening years. Your doom always outruns you. You grow complacent, fat in the company of peace, then awaken to find all safety, all hope, overthrown.

The air is windless, chill. Lord Kosoter lunges at her. He hacks with a violence that notches her blade, wrenches her wrists. She retreats. She is quick enough, skilled enough to parry his strikes. She is trained. He sweeps and swings his broadsword, brings it clanking down. His caste-noble braid swings like sodden rope.

With a kind of wonder she realizes that he
isn't
trying to kill her. The future towers dark and shrieking in her soul's eye. Images of torment and violation, of brutalities only scalpers could commit.

Her cries become a wail. She throws herself at him, fighting the way her brothers have taught her, nimble and light, pitting craft against strength. He grunts in surprise, swatting at Squirrel. He relinquishes a single step, a hoary shadow thrown onto its heels.

Gold bursts across the horizon. He sidesteps, leans, angles his shadow to her side. Sunlight crashes into her squint. She blinks, hesitates. Her sword spins from fingertips she cannot feel. A fist of stone strikes her to the ground. It's happening, she thinks. After enduring so much, surviving so much, her death is happening.

"Akka..." she gasps, scrambling back. Sunlight splices her tears. Blood runs hot across her lips.

And nothing happens. No hand clamps about her throat. No knife pares away her rags.

Out of instinct she falls motionless, breathless.

The Judging Eye, which had remained sealed for so long, opens.

And she
sees
them standing in a ragged arc, demons on the plain. Their hides charred, the hair of their few redeeming deeds the only light threading them. And the darkest, the most fearsome by far, lies directly before her...
kneeling
. The Captain.

"Princess-Imperial," it croaks, glaring from eyes of fiery tar. "Save us from damnation."

—|—

"I am
Anasûrimbor Mimara
," she cries. "Princess-Imperial, daughter of the Holy-Empress, wife-daughter of the
Aspect-Emperor himself
! On pain of death and damnation I command you to release the Wizard!"

They have Achamian bound and gagged, trussed like a corpse about to be raised to the pyre.

"You are apostate," the Captain says. "A runaway."

They have her sword, poor Squirrel.

"No! No! I am on a... a..."

They have her Chorae... her Tear of God.

"Foolish girl. Did you think your disappearance went unnoticed?"

They have her.

"You presume? You presume to command me?"

"You are a
captive
. Thank your gods you are not more."

And she recalls as much as realizes that he is completely unlike her—that in soul and sentiment he is as alien as the Nonman, if not more. There is a
wholeness
to him, a singularity of act, aspect, and intention. She can see it in his look, in his face: the utter absence of warring pieces.

For some reason this calms her. There is relief to be found in futility. She knew this once.

"So what? You're going to bring me back to Mother then?"

His gaze has strayed from her to the dawn. Crimson light illuminates his face, paints the wilder strands of his beard in tones of blood.

"We march to the Coffers... Same as before."

"Why? What has my father commanded?"

He draws his knife, begins shaving the calluses about his fingernails.

"Why?" she cries. "I demand you tell me
why
."

He looks up from his trivial labour, gazes with a flat intensity that sets her thoughts quailing. He has always frightened her, Lord Kosoter. The threat of violence has always kindled his manner. For him, atrocity was simply one more thoughtless faculty—one more base instinct. Kindness, she knows, is mist to him, something not entirely real. The honed edge is one of only two boundaries he respects.

The other is
faith
... Faith in her mother's husband. Even after running so far, deep into the savagery beyond the New Empire's rim, she remains caught in the Aspect-Emperor's nets. And knowing this has made the Captain even more fearsome. The thought that he is
Zaudunyani
...

She does not ask again.

She rifles through the Wizard's satchel, finds only five sheaves of parchment, the writing across them illegible for some river soaking—evidence of the Qirri in that, she supposes. And a small razor, scabbed with rust, which she conceals beneath her belt.

She wants to weep as they resume their course. She wants to scream, to run, to scratch out the Captain's eyes. She slouches instead, stares at her feet for as long as boredom allows. She avoids looking at the scalpers, consigns them to her periphery, where they seem apiece with the desolate plains, little more than leering shadows.

She feels naked now that she is known.

They keep the old Wizard bound and gagged at all times. When they break for meals, either Galian or Pokwas remove the gag while the Captain dandles a Chorae—whether his own or the one he stole from her, she does not know—before the old Wizard's face. Achamian avoids any glimpse of the Trinket, invariably looks down to his right instead. He says absolutely nothing, even with his gag removed, presumably because Lord Kosoter has told him that any sound, arcane or mundane, would mean his instant death. Periodically, the thick fingers holding the Chorae stray too close, and the Wizard grimaces at the salting of his skin. After several days, a patchwork of scabs and pink skin web his face above his beard.

He reminds her of an ascetic she once saw burned alive in Carythusal when she was still young enough to feel terror for others. The Shrial Priests had marched the old man through the streets, decrying his heretical claims, and bidding onlookers to come witness his fiery cleansing. Where Achamian wears rancid furs, he wore putrid rags. But otherwise, they seem so alike that her gut flutters at the recollection. Knob-knuckled hands bound before them. Gags to stop the danger of their voice. Wild hair and beard, wiry and grey. And the distant look of men condemned long before the thugs had seized them.

The old Wizard stares at her, from time to time. A strange look, ragged, at once hopeless and reassuring. They have always shared an understanding, it seems, one as deep and cold as clay in earth. They have both been broken over the knee of Fate, and as different as their lives and catastrophes have been, their hearts have sheared along similar lines.

Be calm, girl,
his eyes seem to say.
No matter what happens to me, survive...

Without fail, his looks make her think of the razor hidden beneath her belts.

She only hears Achamian when he's gagged. On the afternoon of the first day, he begins roaring at the Captain through the spit-soaked cloth, shrieking with such guttural fury that the man pauses in his approach. Nostrils flaring. Eyes glaring with lunatic intensity. He screams about his own retching.

The Captain remains as imperturbable as always, simply gazes and waits until the Wizard's maniacal ire subsides. Then he cups his palm and cuffs the old man to the ground.

Mimara glimpses the smiling look exchanged between Galian and Pokwas.

Each night they force Qirri upon him.

She receives her measure willingly.

Koll hunches alone in the dusty grass, watches them with dead eyes. She cannot remember when she last heard his voice. Did he even speak Sheyic?

The Stone Hags no longer seem real.

She prays that Soma still follows them—that a
skin-spy
might save her!—but she has no way of knowing: the Captain now forces her to practise her daily indignities in plain view.

The other scalpers—Galian and Pokwas especially—regard her with forced indifference. They gambled on their lust, thinking the Wizard her only protection. Now, their intentions revealed, they behave like pious thieves, like men wronged for wronging others. They sit and eat without speaking. Aside from the rare hooded glance in her direction, it seems they look only to their hands or the horizon. The mutinous air that had festered ever since Cil-Aujas has become gangrenous. The expedition now seems more a collection of warring tribes than men bound to a singular purpose.

She finds herself stranded with the Captain and Cleric.

The first few nights she lies awake, plotting possibilities more than actions. Her body aches with sensation: the bruising ground, the prick of grasses, the tickle of fleas climbing her scalp. She can see Squirrel jutting from the beggar's bundle that is his pack. She can sense both her Chorae and the Captain's beneath his tunic, dark little twins suckling oblivion. She guesses at his slumber, only to be disabused time and again. He invariably lies on his side, his head cradled on a raised arm. But just when she thinks he has fallen into the arms of Orosis, he raises his head and lies rigid, as if probing the surrounding black with his ears. Once she even begins crawling toward him, her thoughts a mad tumble of terror and mayhem.
Grab your sword!
her thoughts cry through the tumult.
Grab your sword! Cut his throat!
But she glimpses his hand slide to his waist as she continues her feline creep, sees his fingers settle upon the grime-blackened pommel of his broadsword.

After that she decides he never sleeps. At least not the way humans sleep.

They rarely speak to each other, Cleric and the Captain. They almost never address her. For the entirety of their journey, a part of her has wondered at their relationship. The Captain's advantage seems plain enough: a scalper's kill is a scalper's profit, and she can scarce imagine a killer more formidable than Cleric. But what could induce a Nonman, an
Ishroi
no less, to submit to a mortal's will—even a will so preternatural as Lord Kosoter's? She fixates on this mystery, even becomes jealous of it, thinking that at the very least this one question will be answered. But as the days pass, as she watches them from their very midst, the relationship becomes more enigmatic if anything.

A week into the Wizard's captivity she is awakened by the sound she finds inexplicable at first until, blinking, she spies Cleric sitting cross-legged on the far side of the Captain's slumbering form. He weeps. She lies motionless across the hard ground, feeling the stamp of flattened weeds through her blanket. She battles a sudden terror of breathing. Cleric sits with his arms stretched across his knees, his head hanging so low that she can see the sinews roping the back of his neck, the humps of his spine. His breath is dog rapid, horse deep. He moans—a sound as bottomless as Cil-Aujas. He mumbles or murmurs—words she cannot decipher. Random tremors seem to fly through him, afflicting first this hand, then that shoulder, as if the ghost of some bird battles to escape him. A sense of heroic melancholy seems to emanate from him, as onerous and grand as the ages that have birthed it...