The White-Luck Warrior (82 page)

"Yes!" Achamian exclaimed. "
Please
, my Lord. Take me as your book! Leave this scalper madness behind! Regain your honour! Reclaim your glory!"

Cleric lowered his face, clutched his chin and cheek. His shoulders hitched in what Achamian took for a sob...

But was in fact a laugh.

"So..." the Nonman King said, raising eyes savage for their mirth. "You offer me oblivion?"

Too late, the old Wizard recognized his mistake.

"No... I—"

The Nonman whirled, grasped him with a strength that made the Wizard feel bone thin, bone frail. "I will not die a husk!" he cried. He rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder in his curious, mad and explosive way. He flung out his hands to clutch the air.

"No! I will ruin and I will break!"

Few things unsettle more than the violation of hidden assumptions—or make us more wary. The old Wizard had appealed to his
own
logic—his own vanity—forgetting that the absence of common ends was the very thing that made the mad
mad
. He had offered himself as a
tool
, not realizing that he and Mimara were the
object
of the bargain struck: the shade of an ancient friend and the echo of long-lost love.
They
were the loves to be betrayed.

They
were the souls to be remembered...

"Honour?" the Nonman cried, his sneer transforming him into a gigantic Sranc. "Love? What are these but dross before oblivion? No! I will seize the world and I will shake from it what misery, what anguish, I can. I will
remember
!"

—|—

The old Wizard resumed walking, this time with a bearing more suited to a death march.
Let the victim lead the executioner,
he thought. Nil'giccas, the Last King of Mansions, was going to kill him in the Library of Sauglish.

Scenarios both disastrous and absurdly hopeful raced through Achamian's thoughts. He would ambush the Nonman with a Cant powerful enough to smash his incipient Wards—kill him before he himself was killed. He would plead and cajole, find the incantation of reason and passion that would throw Cleric from the mad track he followed. He would battle with howling fury, tear down what was left of the Sacred Library, only to be beaten down by the Quya Mage's greater might...

The impulse to survive is not easily denied, no matter how severe the calamities a man has suffered or how relentless the misfortunes.

"I mourn what Fate has made of me..." the Nonman said without warning.

The old Wizard watched his booted feet kick through forest debris.

"So what of Ishterebinth?" he asked. "Has it fallen?"

The hulking Nonman made a gesture that possessed the character of a shrug. "Fallen? No. Turned. In the absence of recollection my brothers have turned to tyranny... To Min-Uroikas."

Min-Uroikas. That he spoke this with ease attested to the severity of his condition. Among the Intact, it was a name not so much mentioned as spat or cursed. Min-Uroikas. The Pit of Obscenities. The dread stronghold that had murdered all their wives and daughters, and so doomed their entire race.

"Golgotterath," the Wizard managed to say without breath.

A heavy nod. Sickles of reflected sunlight bobbed across his scalp.

"I had forgotten that name."

"And you?" the Wizard asked. "Why have you not joined them?"

Long silence. Long enough to bring them to the base of the broken Library.

"Pride," the Nonman finally said. "I would bring about my own heartbreak. So I set out in search of those I might love..."

Achamian searched the dark glitter of his eyes. "And destroy."

A solemn nod, carrying thousands of years of inevitability. "And destroy."

—|—

Mimara does not know what alerts her to the sudden change in the air among the scalpers. Her mother once told her the bulk of discourse consisted of
hidden
exchanges, that most men blathered in utter ignorance of their meaning and intent. Mimara scoffed at the idea, not because it rang false, but because her
mother
argued it.

"Most find it difficult to stomach,"
the Empress said with maternal exhaustion.
"They believe in a thousand things they cannot see, yet tell them the greater part of their
own
soul lies hidden, and they balk..."

This proved to be one of those rare comments that would flank Mimara's anger and leave her simply troubled. She could not shake the sense that the object of the exchange, the
hidden
object, had been her stepfather, Kellhus. The nagging suspicion that her mother had been
warning
her.

A part of her awakened that day. It was one thing to realize that the men who wooed her spoke through their teeth, as the Ainoni would say. But it was quite another to think that motives
could hide themselves
, leaving the men they moved utterly convinced of their honourable intentions.

Now she can feel it. Something
hidden
has happened, here, among these idle men, on the ruined outskirts of Sauglish. Something as ethereal and small as a soul committing to some resolution, yet as momentous as anything that has happened in her life.

She becomes quiet, watchful, knowing the only question is whether
they
realize as much...

The scalpers.

The Captain squats upon a toe of mossed stone that smacks of masonry, even though it looks natural. He stares out into random forest pockets with a kind of stationary hatred, like a man who never tires of counting his grievances. Galian and Pokwas recline against a hump in the matted humus, talking and joking in low tones. Koll sits like a cross-legged corpse, his hollow eyes sorting nothing. Sarl sits and stands, sits and stands, grinning his eyes into lines and gurgling about slogs and riches.

Xonghis alone remains both industrious and vigilant.

After a time, Galian bolts upright. With the air of settling some inaudible dispute between him and Pokwas, he asks, "What will our shares be?"

A heartbeat of astonished silence follows, such is the general terror of addressing the Captain.

"As much as you can bear and still survive," Lord Kosoter finally says. Absolutely nothing about his gaze or demeanour changes as he says this. He literally speaks as if not speaking.

"And what about the Qirri?"

Silence.

Despite the air of hard deliberation, Lord Kosoter has bred an atmosphere of volatility between him and his men, cleaving to thresholds so vague and so brittle that it seems anything beyond abject obedience might warrant execution. Galian risks his life simply asking questions for all to hear. But mentioning
Qirri
...

It seems nothing less than suicidal. The act of a fool.

The Captain shakes his head slowly. "Only Cleric knows."

"What if you were to
demand
he yield it?"

Turning his head on a hinge of granite, Lord Kosoter finally regards the former Columnary.

"The False Man is mad!" Pokwas calls out.

The Captain lowers his face, pinches his lower lip in contemplation. "Yes," he says in grim admission. "But think. A year given. Our every greed slaked." He seeks each of his men with his gaze, as if knowing he must cow them one by one. "He's delivered us to these riches."

Galian smiles like someone with arguments too devious to be refuted.

"Then why suffer him any longer?"

For the first time Mimara glimpses the fury sparking in the Captain's eyes.

"Who will deliver us back, fool?"

More silence.

A nightmarish intensity engulfs the two men.

Galian peers at the Ainoni caste-noble in mock reverence, his manner so feckless, so bold, that it raises an audible murmur from Mimara's lungs.

"I want a fire," he says.

"We march on the dark."

Galian looks to the forested deeps about them, then back to his Captain. "Yes... Skinny country, is it?" There is nothing sly about his antagonism now. "Where
are
the skinnies then?"

The Captain regards him for several heartbeats, his eye shadowed beneath heavy brows, his nose and cheeks like chipped flint above the brushed wire of his moustache and beard. There is something breathless, absolute about his composure. Grim deliberation glints from his eyes...

The look of a man, a murderous man, finding the shadowy centre of his enemy's web.

"Are you such a fool, Galian?" Mimara blurts aloud. The tension is too much.

But the former Columnary has eyes only for his Captain.

"You made your decision,
just then
," he says with a lolling smile. "Didn't you? You decided
to kill me
."

Lord Kosoter glares, a hoary king leaning from his stone chair. A dark, tyrannical figure, passing judgment on the fool capering before him.

"Before the slit called out," Galian presses. "That moment of silence... You thought to yourself,
Kill the fool!
"

There is a sudden viciousness to his intonation, and enough mimicry of the Captain's growling voice to send Pokwas laughing. Even Xonghis, who is working on his bow, grins in his enigmatic Jekki manner.

Horror bolts through her. She has just glimpsed the savage shape of what is about to happen. Conspiracy and conspirators both.

"But then you thought it
before
, haven't you, Captain? Every time you glimpsed me leaning with the others, something cried,
'Kill him!'
in that cramp you call a soul."

The Captain remains utterly motionless, watching the Columnary's approach from his impromptu throne.

"As it turns out," Galian continues with bright humour, "we
were
leaning together in sedition..."

The Columnary comes to stop immediately before Lord Kosoter, easily within reach of his broadsword. A kind of boredom seems to glint in the Captain's eyes—as if mutiny were an old and tedious friend.

"And you should know that every time
I glimpsed you
..." Galian throws out his arms and, as if daring him to strike, leans forward in vindictive contempt. "I also heard something whisper,
'Kill him!'
"

The arrow catches the Captain in the mouth. He jerks to his side as if slapped, staggers back two steps. He hangs there for a moment, spitting cracked teeth.

A cloud occludes the sun.

The Captain of the Skin Eaters, the man called Ironsoul, raises his face, not to the bowman, Xonghis, but to the bowman's maker, Galian. The shaft is visible. It skewers the lower half of his face, draws bearded skin tight. Blood spills from the ream of his bottom lip. His laughter sputters through it.

A sardonic glee, malevolent for its intensity, shines like sorcery in his eyes.

The second arrow thumps into his neck. He whirls to the side and around, as if a rope about his waist holds him staked in place. He hangs for an instant, like a thing made of wax. Then he slumps face first across the humus. A convulsive moment passes. He begins shaking, his limbs tossing with bonfire violence. A crazed, bestial scramble follows, as if an elemental wildness or disordered spirit has lain dormant within him, hidden, and only now could thrash free of human constraints.

His expression loose with horror, Galian draws his sword.

The Captain claws the leafy humus at the Columnary's feet, seizes a branch no thicker than two thumbs. His spine arches against his blooded hauberk. His head pulls back. He grimaces about his tented mouth, blows rage and spittle and blood. His eyes gleam like pearl. Snorting with effort and fury, he begins twisting and wrenching at the branch, as if it were the world's own spine—the one thing to be broken.

He roars.

Then his head is gone, bouncing about the tail of its caste-noble braid.

Silence—this time of visible things.

Mimara watches, breathless.
Mortal,
something cold whispers within her.

Mortal after all.

—|—

Strange, the way Qirri made hash of momentous things.

Omens of the world's end. The death of races... Standing in bare sunlight, it all seemed little more than beautiful paint, a kind of ornamentation.

The northern tower of the Muraw, the Library's forward gate, was scarce more than a mound. Wandering stretches of vertical blocks broke the slopes here and there, but otherwise it had ceased to exist. Inexplicably, the southern tower stood almost entirely intact, a cyclopean square that soared against the bald sky. Even the obsidian that had plated its base had survived. Turf and shrubs mounded its distant crown, and several tenacious trees hung rooted from its sides. Despite everything, a sudden, boyish urge to scale the tower struck the old Wizard, followed by a sense of exhausted longing.

There had been a time when he had spent days loafing among ruins far less significant than these. A time when his worries had been small enough to ignore.

Side by side, the old Wizard and the Nonman King strode into the Library's ruined precincts. The walls, or what remained of them, possessed the monumental feel of the Ziggurats in Shigek. In many cases trees, full grown yet bent and windswept, grew along their crests. Achamian could still recognize the Ursilaral, the central promenade where the One Thousand Gift-Shields had once hung, garish and beautiful, symbolizing the truce between the Sohonc and almost all the known tribes of White and High Norsirai. In Seswatha's day, the Library was often called the Citadel of Citadels because of its importance, certainly, but also because of its design: fortresses within fortresses, as if the outside were a kind of ocean, a flood to be fought chamber by grudging chamber. It possessed no fewer than nineteen courtyards, often call "pits" because of the height of the surrounding walls, with the Ursilaral, its length jawed by numerous gates, connecting most of them.

The morning sun had climbed high enough only to bathe portions of their overgrown floors so that Achamian and Cleric found themselves walking through dry shadow. The growth was mostly restricted to thickets and clutches of shrubs, forcing Achamian to follow Cleric as he hacked his way forward with his sword. Plumes of fluff swirled in dry-wind eddies. Clouds drifted across the oblong squares of blue sky above them. Bees tracked spiral courses through the air, becoming white dots when they passed into sunlight. The Wizard even glimpsed a hare bolting through the grasses.