The White-Luck Warrior (86 page)

She loves him, and she despises. But she finds herself fearing
for
him most of all.

Often has she wondered how she could describe it, seeing the morality of things let alone lives. Sometimes it seems more a matter of memory than vision, like sighting a familiar treatise in the house of a friend. The object itself stews with significance, but all the passages—cherished and offending—are indistinct. Only the sum can be seen, inchoate and confounding. This is what she most often sees: the abbreviated mash that is judgment passed, the balance of a soul, good and evil, writ in a stick-figure scrawl.

But sometimes, if she concentrates, the tome of a lived life flutters open beneath the Eye, and the
crimes themselves
become visible, the way carnal images flicker about the glimpse of a long-absent lover.

And sometimes, more rarely still, she sees the particulars of their coming damnation.

The Columnary stares, his eyes wide with panicked fury. She clutches his wrist.

"Galian..." she hears herself gasp. "It's not too late. You
can
save yourself from... from..."

Something in her words or manner jars him from his intent—the trill of frantic sincerity, perhaps.

"Hell?" he laughs. "There's
too many
of them."

Such torment. Clenched and cringing, huddled in ways outside worldly dimensions. Prised and flayed, the innumerable petals of his soul peeled back in shrieks and sulphurous flame. Screams braided into screams, pains heaped upon agonies.

She sees it, his
future
, a gleam across his eyes, a fiery halo about his crown. His suffering disgorged like paint, smeared and stroked into obscene works of art. His soul passed from Ciphrang to feasting Ciphrang, dispensing anguish like milk through the endless ages.

She sees the truth of the Excruciata, the One Hundred-and-Eleven Hells depicted on the walls of the Junriüma in Sumna.

"Galian.
Galian.
You m-must listen. Please... You have no idea what awaits you!"

He tries to grin away his horror. He's strangling her as much as holding her now. "Witch!" he spits.
"Witch!"

"Shhhhh..." she manages to whisper. "It will b—"

He slams her to the raw earth. She cries out. He thrusts apart her knees, pins her while fumbling with his breeches. Belts pinch her inner thighs. Twigs bite at her shoulders, her buttocks. Dead leaves press cold against her back, like reptilian scales. His breathing is ragged, his look unfocused. He smells of shit and rotted teeth.

The world spins and roars about the fact of his damnation.

She cries into his ear, murmurs,
"I forgive you..."

Frees him of this final sin.

—|—

The beast had lain hidden, waiting for them to dig their way into the entrance antechamber, a dead end where they could not use the greater debris field to either flee or flank him. But it proved a treacherous trap. Had they not stood side by side, where the combined strength of their incipient defences purchased them the heartbeats they needed to reinforce their Wards, they would be dead.

Apparently Wutteät could not hear the distance between them...

Fire boiled over and around them, blinding them, ripping away the gossamer meanings they shouted against it. An inferno like no other, scorching some hard stone surfaces into liquid while exploding others.

Then the beast itself was on them, a crocodile falling upon sparrows. It clawed with feline savagery, tearing and rending, while the Gnostic sorcerer and the Quyan Mage sang in desperate tandem, slowing accumulating the glowing shells that preserved them.

The boom and crack of mountains breaking, and underneath, the rot of sorcery's unearthly murmur.

Roaring. Raging. Scales burnished, flashing as crimson as infant blood. Claws the size of wains swatting. The great saurian head ramming, snapping horns as thick as young trees.

Planes of spectral glass cracked and shattered, collapsed into aether. Rock rained down. Stone congealed like blood.

"It lives by its ears!" the old Wizard cried between thunders.

His eyes blazing, Nil'giccas nodded in immediate understanding.

The beast reared above them. Another incendiary eruption. The world beyond their defences became an amorphous glare. Wards cracked and burned...

But the Nonman King was attacking, howling in tongues as old as his race. Achamian could scarce see the light of his conjuring, just the faint blue of lines like parabolic wires, arcing into the heights...

The inferno lifted, streamed exploding across the scorched heaps to their right. The fire sputtered into a ground-strumming shriek, and they saw Wutteät, the dread Father of Dragons, flailing backward, smoke pluming from its eye socket.

"The
head
!" Achamian screamed.
"Attack the head!"

They assailed the beast, Man and Nonman, as in days of old. They threaded the air with arrays of wicked, dazzling illumination. And it screamed, squealed even, like a pig doused in burning oil.

They stepped into the cavernous air and pursued him. Wutteät's wings kicked the ground with gusts, swept up sheets of ash and dust. Yet they could see him.

Geometries of incandescence. Geometries of destruction.

Like a moth in a jar, Wutteät smashed its shoulders into the cragged ceiling, tried to bring stone down upon them. Deaf and blind, it spat fire across hanging cliffs...

The Gnostic sorcerer hung above one of the two remaining pillars, striking the thing with scissions and concussions. The Quyan Mage sailed an arc about the beast, uttering Cants that burned. They struck and struck until the iron of its bone glowed, until Wutteät's head was smashed ruin, a charred stump possessing jaws.

The beast dropped, and Achamian rushed to jubilation, thinking they had felled it. But it crashed into a lurch that became a run, its claws kicking up stone middens. It raised its blasted snout, snuffing against a piteous growl. Unerringly it charged toward the remnants of the entrance.

"No!" the Nonman King cried.

Coursing like a snake, it bolted through the punishing gauntlet of their sorcery, smashed through the entrance into the pale-glowing hollows beyond.

They pursued it into the breach, climbed as if up the throat of a toppled tower. But the dragon was too quick: they could already hear its shriek score the faraway sky. Climbing. Coughing. Breathless, they found themselves within the ring of the Turret, squinting up at the jagged circle of afternoon brilliance. His heart hammering with mortal violence, the old Wizard finally gained the summit.

Wutteät thrashed in the light of day, throwing up trees and gouts of dirt. It caromed against the Library walls, crashed like a thing thrown into the forest beyond. Trunks and limbs cracked. Over the wall's dusty halo, the crowns of a dozen trees convulsed and vanished. The beast spat wild gouts of fire, uttered shrieks that drove nails into their ears.

And then, suddenly, the dread beast was
flying
, white and black and golden, its ravaged wings buffeting the forest as though it were wheat. Scales shining, the Father of Dragons soared heavenward, spiralling and smoking like a bird afire. Astounded, the man and the Nonman watched, until finally, moth-small with distance, it vanished into the slow-tumbling flanks of a cloud.

Cleric stood atop the heights of a shattered inner wall, gazing high after the thing. Brush fires raged beyond him, throwing lines of orange across his jaw and cheek. His nimil chain glistened in the dry sunlight, and for the first time the old Wizard saw the faint lines of filigree worked across its innumerable links.

Herons. Herons and lions.

"Triumph!" Achamian cried out in relief and exaltation. "A victory worthy
The Sagas
!"

He hesitated in sudden realization. What did glory mean, when none could remember it?

And what was life, without glory to illuminate it?

The Nonman turned his profile to him, said nothing.

"You won't remember, will you?"

"Shadow," Nil'giccas replied, resuming his study of the distant sky. "I will remember the shadow it casts..." He turned to regard the Wizard. "Across the grief that follows."

The grief that follows.

The old Wizard matched the Nonman King's gaze for what seemed a hundred heartbeats. Finally, he nodded in slow resignation, scratched his chin beneath what remained of his beard.

"Yes," Achamian said. "Seswatha loved you as well."

—|—

Galian makes a noise, a grunt or a sob—she is not sure.

One moment he's an iron shadow grinding flaccid against her. Then he is gone.

She bolts upright, sees him arched across the forest floor, kicking his left foot, desperately clutching at his back. Koll stands above him, hunched and famine-frail, his hands clenching and unclenching. Galian flops onto his stomach, gags and screams. She sees a pommel jutting from below his left shoulder blade, a flower of crimson and black blooming through the links of his hauberk.

A breathless heartbeat passes. Xonghis rushes to assist Galian while Pokwas draws his great tulwar from his waist, sweeps it through the air before falling into his Sword-dancer stance.

"Fucking Stone Hag!" he cries. "I knew I should have cut your throat!"

Still clutching Lord Kosoter's head, Sarl sits rocking on the Captain's inert back, begins cackling. Light sparkles through the screens of foliage beyond him—from the direction of the Holy Library. A roaring whoosh follows...

Pokwas falls upon Koll in sweeping fury. His blade seems like silver ink, sketching sigils through open air. Koll effortlessly threads the gauntlet, ducking, leaping...

The Zeümi Sword-dancer pauses, eyes round in disbelief.

Koll dives to his right, cartwheels across the ground like a crab, toward Sarl and his Captain's draining corpse. The Sergeant scrambles backward.

Koll flits past him, rolls past the Captain's forgotten pack, then comes to his feet brandishing Squirrel. His stance low, his look darts from Pokwas to Xonghis, who has taken up a flanking position, his bow drawn.

More explosions rock the near distance. A titanic roar shivers the sky.

The starved Stone Hag begins laughing, a sound that begins human but ends like screaming wolves. Xonghis releases his shaft. Koll swats with Squirrel but misses. The arrow thuds into his neck.

Koll falls backward but somehow rolls back onto his feet. With his free hand he clutches the shaft. Pulls.

Screams.

The fingers of his face break apart, then fly open.

Mimara lurches to her feet, stumbles to Galian, who lies dying.

Crying out in Zeümi, Pokwas rushes the thing called Koll, his tulwar cutting poetry into the air. Steel rings against steel. Squirrel is nicked but does not shatter. Xonghis lets fly two more arrows. The thing lunges clear the first, but the second catches it high in the thigh. It barely survives the black giant's hollering assault.

Mimara stands breathless. Qirri pulses through her, makes a war-drum of her heart.

Xonghis whirls at the sound of her approach, releases. His arrow whistles past her left ear—a sound like a rip. She plunges Galian's sword into the Imperial Tracker's exposed armpit. She feels his death, the
inside of him
, communicated through blade and grip.

Beyond their clearing, the forest burns about the silhouette of stumped ruins. Sarl has resumed his phlegmatic howl, his expression crushed into a thousand laughing lines.

The whooshing tulwar catches the thing called Koll mid-leap. It careens through the air, tries to land on its remaining leg, tumbles backward. Closing for the kill, the Zeümi howls in triumph...

Fails to hear her naked approach.

—|—

Smoke piled over the derelict fortifications, drawn twisting into the high blue sky. Within the ruined Library, several smaller fires fanned bright in the gusting wind, sending showers of sparks and ash over the old Wizard and the Nonman King.

"You don't have to do this!" Achamian cried.

Still standing upon the wall he had climbed to peer after the dragon, Cleric tore his runed purse from its leather cord. He stared at it meditatively, hefted it in his palm. Achamian felt his heart clutch at his breast, seeing it dandled so near open flame. He realized he has worshipped this thing. The shrivelled folds pinched into creases about its drawstring. The faint impression of weight bulging within, as though it contained a mouse. It seemed absurd that such a low object could become the talisman, the fetish from which the whole expedition had come to hang. A pouch filled with soot.

"No!" Achamian cried.

But it was too late. Cleric bent his head sideways, as if to itch his ear against his shoulder, then swung the pouch upside down. The ashes of Cû'jara Cinmoi poured out in a dun stream. The wind fanned it into ghostly nothingness.

"You don't have to do this!" the old Wizard cried.

The dark eyes fixed him.

"I do..."

"Why? Why?"

"Because I remember no triumph..." He flinched, seemed to lose the thread of his voice. Sudden fury claimed the heights of his expression. "Only
betrayal
!" he roared. "Heartbreak and ruin!"

A kind of indignation welled through the Wizard, the outrage that overcomes Men whenever absurdities are stacked too high. "No!" he bellowed. "I
will
name you! I will be your book, and
you will
read me! You are
Nil'giccas
! The Last King of Mansions—the greatest of the Siqû!"

The fires seemed to wax at the sound of Cleric's warbling laughter.

"Seswatha!" the Nonman called. "Old dead friend... Will you hear my sermon?"

Achamian could only gaze in disgust and disbelief.

The Nonman muttered blasphemies that filled his eyes and mouth with light. He stepped from the summit and was aloft, climbing a floating arc that took him high above the fires surging through the courtyard.

"'Nil'giccas!' you call—
beseech!
as if trying to awaken some
truth
slumbering within me."