The White-Luck Warrior (84 page)

The bellow lungs continued to roar and croak in the deeps of Achamian's hearing. The sulphur pinched his own breath, quick and shallow and warm-blooded. Nausea rooted through his innards.

He turned to Cleric. Bleached in his own light, the Nonman King stood rapt, his left boot braced against a headless statue. The Surillic Point made polished marble of his skin, a diamond weave of his nimil hauberk. He looked more thoughtful than afraid or astounded.

"This..." Cleric murmured, his gaze fixed on the slumbering beast. "This is where I am meant to die."

"You and my loincloth," Achamian replied.

The Nonman turned to him, his face blank and wondering. A vagrant pain seemed to seize his expression. Then Nil'giccas, King of the Last Mansion,
laughed
. The sound boomed through the hollows, a cackle that rolled like thunder, deep and earthen and utterly—insanely—unafraid.

Achamian grimaced more than smiled.

"Ah... Seswatha," Cleric said, swallowing his mirth. "How I cherish your wi—"

"OLD," the very ground seemed to croak. "SO VERY OLD..."

Rasping through roped mucus, sheathed in a bottomless wheeze. The voice was more than loud, more than deep; it was
great
in the sense of absurd disproportions, words cast across faraway orders of strength and immensity. Achamian suddenly felt like a fly in the presence of a Sempis crocodile.

The scrape and scuff of shifting debris. The tinkle of little things falling. The Dragon stirred upon its heap, raised its armoured chest on limbs crooked and knotted like hoary old treetrunks. Riven with horror, Achamian watched the head wag across a lane of pale light, the crest battered and majestic...

The saurian skull long-jawed and wicked...

"WE HAVE FLOWN AND FLOWN, SEEKING YOUR CITIES... BUT
RUIN
WAS ALL WE COULD FIND. RUIN AND VERMIN SRANC..."

Dust rained from the crotches of every hanging seam, every granite joist. The ancient Wracu hoisted its head, exposed its segmented throat in absolute confidence of its invulnerability. In an absurd instant, Achamian grasped the reason why the ancient Kûniüri called them
Sûthaugi
...

"TELL ME... HAS THE WORLD ENDED?"

Worms.

"The world yet lives," Cleric called into the gloom. "In the South, where snow falls as rain."

Wisps of fire. Exhalations mighty enough to throw ships from their courses. The thing's head lowered in their direction, at last fully revealed in Cleric's light.

"THE WORLD LIVES..."

Achamian did not so much will himself to move as will himself to
will
. So much is forgotten in the flush of abject terror—from a man's bowel to his breathing.

"The beast is dead," Cleric murmured. "Dead and blind."

The old Wizard struggled to peer through his terror, to study the great head beyond the jaws, to see more than the predatory malevolence in its lines. It differed from the ancient Dragons of his Dreams—no surprise given the florid diversity characteristic of the species. Its head was more aquiline, as if built to root out prey hidden in burrows. And a mane of black iron tusks flared from its brows, bloomed into chattering skirts along the back of the beast's skull. But where smaller horns serrated the line of the beast's left brow, only stumps and savaged tissue adorned the right. The eye beneath, he could see, had rotted away long, long ago...

"What do you mean?" the old Wizard muttered in reply. "It
breathes
..."

But Men's eyes, once attuned to a possibility, scavenge evidence of their own volition: suddenly the old Wizard saw the bronze hide sagging like a hauberk, as if detached from the greased flesh beneath. The shrunken gums. The second eye socket, rotted as hollow as the first...

"I BREATHE..." the yawing, croaking voice boomed through the underworld spaces. "IT IS MY CURSE TO BREATHE, SO LONG AS THE WORLD LIVES."

The Dragon
was
dead—or almost so...

"TURN FROM THIS PLACE," the bronze-shelled corpse said. "FLEE TO YOUR HEARTHS, AND TELL THOSE WHO WOULD LISTEN HOW YOU SURVIVED FOR TELLING THE FIRST, THE
FATHER
, THE WORLD YET LIVED."

Madness. Madness and more madness.

But there was always more world than explanation. To come so far...
so close...
There was no turning from this place.

"May I beg but one dispensation?" Achamian cried.

A hissing pause. "GRASPING," the dead beast said, shadowy and mountainous. "MEN ARE FOREVER GRASPING."

"I search for a
map
," the old Wizard said.

Cleric regarded him.

"TURN FROM THIS PLACE, MORTAL. I WILL NOT PART WITH THE MEREST FRACTION OF MY HOARD."

"But what use could you have of trinkets and baubles?"

"TO LURE FOOLS SUCH AS YOU! TURN FROM THIS PLACE—
TURN!
COME TO ME WHEN THE WORLD HAS TRULY ENDED."

"I will not!" the old Wizard cried, casting his frail voice against the Dragon's booming echo. Thought and passion raced panicked through his soul. All at once, he found himself marvelling at his own stubborn courage, weighing the mad consequences of his baiting, and wondering—wondering most of all—that a Dragon could be dead, yet speak and breath still...

"I
cannot
!"

The Wracu laughed, a sound like a thousand hacking lungs.

"AVARICE AND NECESSITY ARE EVER CONFUSED IN THE SOULS OF MEN."

"No... No! Necessity alone drives me!"

"SO DOES FANCY BECOME SCRIPTURE..."

The old Wizard grappled with his anger, the urge to retort.
The Coffers!
he reminded himself, hearing Sarl's crazed voice as he did so.
The Coffers!

"SO DOES GREED BECOME GOD."

In a blink, it seemed, he saw through the fog of the intervening weeks and the lies that accumulated in his veins. In a heartbeat, the confusion that was Qirri vanished, leaving windswept fact in its wake. He had murdered men with his fictions, imperilled the woman he loved—he had marched across the desolate bosom of Eärwa—
for this moment
, this very encounter.

It happens...

He breathed deep, held the foul air against his hammering heart.

"A bargain then!" he cried in sudden inspiration. "I would strike a bargain with you!"

The grating of coiled limbs. The heaving of air through rotting windpipes.

"WHAT COULD YOU HAVE THAT I MIGHT DESIRE, MORTAL?"

The old Wizard clawed his scalp.

"Truth... Truth is all I have."

The Wracu raised its bulk from the heap's summit, wagged its enormous crown in the air.

"YESSSS... YOU REEK OF SUFFERING..."

As deep as graves, the eyeless sockets fixed on the old Wizard.

"I SMELL DEEDS LONG DEAD, AND FEARS—
IMMORTAL
FEARS. PERHAPS YOU POSSESS RICHES AFTER ALL..."

It creaked forward, loosing tiny landslides of debris and treasure.

"TRUTH IT IS, MANLING."

It descended its miserly summit, then more than two elephants tall at the shoulder stalked the blackness beyond the immediate pillars, dragging ruin in its wake.

"SHOW ME ONE TRUTH, AND YOU SHALL HAVE YOUR MEREST FRACTION."

Achamian retreated, fairly stumbled doing so. "I-I'm not sure how to begin."

He glimpsed its dead-grinning maw between columns.

"WHAT IS THIS MAP YOU SEEK?"

The will to lie leaned hard against the old Wizard's thought, but he resisted, understanding that the beast before him was as much spirit as flesh... Who can say what the dead hear, when their ears are pricked to the voices of the living?

So he began describing his Dreams, the way Anasûrimbor Celmomas had charged Seswatha with the map to Ishuäl, the final refuge of the ancient Kûniüric High-Kings. But he quickly became tangled in words. Every name he mentioned, required more names to be explained—names piled upon names, all begging explanation.

The eyeless creature yawned, revealing the furnace that smouldered within the dead hull of its frame. "
TRUTH
IS OUR BARGAIN," it rumbled, croaking out of the blackness. The head, cadaverous and crocodilian, leaned forward menacingly. "WHAT IS THIS MAP YOU SEEK?"

The old Wizard blinked at the monstrous spectre, chewed his bottom lip...

"Vengeance," he said.

"AND WHOM DO YOU SEEK TO MURDER?"

"Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the Aspect-Emperor."

"AND HIS CRIME? WHAT INDIGNITY DID HE INFLICT UPON YOU?"

Instead of glimpsing Esmenet, the old Wizard saw
Mimara
in his soul's eye, pregnant and derelict, a prisoner of the
Captain
. If he failed here... If he stumbled...

"Enough!" he cried. "You have your truth!"

"IS NOT TRUTH INFINITE?"

Mucus snapping like bowstrings.

"Yes, bu—"

"IS!"

The great bulk stamped forward one step, fissuring stone...

"NOT!"

The iron-horned chin dropped, as a wolf...

"TRUTH!"

Fire wicked from carcass nostrils...

"INFINITE?"

The pillared landscape hummed with reverberations. Sulphur and rot settled as a mist through the black. The old Wizard fairly cried out for sudden weight of Cleric's hand on his shoulder.

"He plays you," the Nonman said, his face white and serene. "There is no separating him from his hoard. He is too wicked, and he has slumbered here too long..."

The Last Nonman King turned back toward the scaled abomination.

"He?" Achamian asked witless.

"Wutteät."

Like some beast in nocturnal seas, the Wracu shrank into the darkness. Laughter like sloughing cliffsides crashed through the ancient hollows.

"He dies from the outside," Cleric said, "because Hell sustains him from within."

"CUNNING..." the Wracu groaned out from the black. "CUNNING-CUNNING ISHROI!"

"I have seen this before," Nil'giccas said, peering after the thing. He turned to the old Wizard and smiled. "I remember."

Achamian gazed at the Nonman, found himself wondering who was more hoary, more impossible: the ancient, undead Dragon or the ancient, inhuman King.

"So what do we do?"

Something resembling dark humour flashed in the Nonman's eyes. Without explanation, he began picking his way toward the wheezing blackness.

"Run," he called to the old Wizard behind him. "Save them while you still can."

"Them?"

A passing glance over his nimil-armoured shoulder.

"Your wife and child."

—|—

Like most dwellings in the slums of Carythusal, the Worm, the brothel Mimara had lived in was walled against everything surrounding and open only within. Two mercenaries—little more than thugs, really—manned the entrance, festooned with ornamental menace. Every mouth needs fangs. But once past them, all was carpeted invitation. Gold paint. Garish tapestries representing battles that may or may not have happened. Incense and obscure liquors. Sunlight showered the courtyard gardens. Patrons reclined on embroidered settees in the reception hall, talking and laughing in low, shameless voices...

Their eyes flicking to and fro, as if counting the bare-chested children.

The bedding cells lined the eastward wall, as demanded by luck and tradition. Despite her price she would be chosen. She was always chosen. Leading him by a single, callus-horned finger, she would hear grunts and whimpers and moans, and sometimes shrieks and sobs. A kind of numbness would own her, and she would flatten against her motions as if against a wall in a slice of shadow. And she would be
hidden
, even as she scampered nude before the lecherous eyes of many.

Very similar to Qirri, when she thought about it, watching Galian's hanging grin.

Perhaps this would be easy... dying.

—|—

The old Wizard did not flee. He found himself chasing the Nonman King instead, muttering Wards as he tripped across the floors. With every step the Nonman King dragged his Surillic Point with him, illuminating the wasted interior of the Coffers.

Rather than retreat, the great Wracu watched eyeless.

"Wutteät!"
Cleric bellowed.

Cold pricked the Wizard's skin, for Wutteät was a name drawn from the most ancient days of the War, when Men were little more than slaves or vermin. Wutteät the Terrible. The Black-and-Golden...

The Father of Dragons.

Revealed in all his decayed glory, the Wracu reared with chitinous grace, its neck hooking like a swan's, its mammoth head poised low. Blinding vomit cracked its lizard grin.

Fire.

Stone blasting. Gold melting. Unlike anything Achamian had ever dreamed. The world vanished, and all became white blindness, roaring, sparking. His outermost Wards simply blew away. His innermost buckled about cracks like incandescent veins.

"Cleric!" he cried, feeling a tongue of flame lap his arm and cheek.

There was no time. Blinking, he stepped into the air, into utter blackness—the Nonman's Surillic Point had winked into nonexistence.

Everyone was blind.

The wheezing grate of furnace bellows. Then a second geyser of fiery gold, this one roiling
beneath
his feet. Thunder and clacking stone. The light of it painted the ceiling and high pillars in pulsing tan and yellow. Crying out new Wards, Achamian climbed into the gap of a collapsed lintel, stepped through the grand chamber's false ceiling high into the dark.

"I am Quya!" the Nonman King cried from places unseen. "I am Ishroi! Five of your sons and daughters have I slain!"

"YOU ARE BUT A SNAIL!" the impossible beast roared. "A SNAIL TORN FROM ITS SHELL!"

"I am Nil'giccas—
I am Cleric!
And you will hear my sermon!"

Even high and hidden, Achamian could tell the Nonman ran as he called out, sprinted over ruin.

"FOOL. I AM THE
FIRST
. MY HIDE IS BRONZE. MY BONES ARE IRON!"

Above the ceiling, the old Wizard floated through a second, more barren world, one roofed with hanging precipices and floored with racks of masonry, ancient and enormous.

"You are blind!" Cleric shouted, the resonance of his voice thinned by the thunder that it followed. "You are a beggar, a scavenger, a prisoner of your own spite! Your flesh is rotted. The stone of your strength cracked long ago!"