The White Luck Warrior

  “With all due respect, my King …” the sorcerer said with a waking sneer. “Kindly go fuck your elbows.”

  Eskeles was one of those men who never learned to bridle their temper simply because it was so rare. The sun had yet to breach the desolate line of the east, but the sky was brightening over the scattered sleepers. The sentries watched with frowning curiosity, as did several of the horses. Harnilas was awake as well, but Sorweel did not trust his Sheyic enough to go to him directly.

  “The Sranc war-party we destroyed,” Sorweel insisted. “It had no sentries posted.”

  “Please, boy,” the corpulent man said. He rolled his bulk away from the young King. “Let me get back to my nightmares.”

  “It was alone, Eskeles. Don’t you see?”

  He raised his puffy face to blink at him over his shoulder. “What are you saying?”

  “We lie to the southwest of the Great Ordeal … What kind of water piles behind a boat?”

  The Schoolman stared at him for a blinking, beard-scratching moment, then with a groan rolled onto his rump. Sorweel helped haul him to his cursing feet and together they went to Harnilas, who was already ministering to his pony. Eskeles began by apologizing for Sorweel, something the young King had no patience for, especially when he could scarce understand what was being said.

  “We’re tracking an army!” he cried.

  Both men looked to him in alarm. Harnilas glanced at Eskeles for a translation, which the Schoolman provided with scarce a glance in the Captain’s direction. “What makes you say that?” he asked Sorweel on the same breath.

  “These Sranc, the ones who cut down the elk, they are being driven.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “We know this is no Hording,” the young King replied, breathing deep to harness his thoughts, which had become tangled for a long night of horror and brooding. “The Sranc, as you said, are even now fleeing before the Great Ordeal, clan bumping into clan, gathering into a hor—”

  “So?” Eskeles snapped.

  “Think about it,” he said. “If you were the Consult … You would know about the Hording, would you not?”

  “More than any living,” the Schoolman admitted, his voice taut with alarm. For Sorweel, the word Consult as yet possessed little meaning beyond the fear it sparked in the eyes of the Inrithi. But after the incident with the skin-spy in the Umbilicus, he had found it increasingly difficult to dismiss them as figments of the Aspect-Emperor’s madness. As with so many other things.

  “So they would know not only that the Great Ordeal will be attacked, but when as well …”

  “Very possibly,” Eskeles said.

  Sorweel thought of his father, of all the times he had heard him reason with his subjects, let alone his men. “To be a worthy King,” Harweel had once told him, “is to lead, not to command.” And he understood that all the bickering, all the discourse he had considered wasted breath, “tongue-measuring,” was in fact central to kingship.

  “Look,” he said. “We all know this expedition is a farce, that Kayûtas sent us to patrol a rear flank that would never have been patrolled otherwise simply because we are the Scions—the sons of his father’s enemies. We cover territory that a host would otherwise be blind to, territory a cunning enemy could exploit. While patrolling this imaginary flank, we stumble across a war-party with no sentries posted, oblivious enough to find respite in the shade. In other words, we find proof that for this corner of the Istyuli, at least, the Great Ordeal does not exist …”

  He trailed to let the Schoolmen complete his translation.

  “Then we find the slaughtered elk, something you say Sranc only do when Hording—which we know cannot be the case …”

  Sorweel hesitated, looked from man to man, the stern old veteran and the square-bearded sorcerer.

  “You have our attention, my King,” Eskeles said.

  “All I have are guesses …”

  “And we are dutifully astounded.”

  Sorweel looked out over the milling ponies to the vast elk trail, which was little more than the mottling of darker greys across the predawn landscape. Somewhere … Out there.

  “My guess,” he said, reluctantly turning back to the two men, “is that we’ve stumbled across some kind of Consult army, one that—” He paused to gulp air and swallow. “One that shadows the Great Ordeal using the elk both to feed itself and to conceal their trail. My guess is they plan to wait until the Great Ordeal comes against the Hording …” He swallowed and nodded as if suddenly recalling some adolescent insecurity. He flinched from an image of his father, speaking dust from the dirt. “Then … then attack the host from behind … But …”

  “But what?” Eskeles asked.

  “But I’m not sure how this could be possible. The Sranc, they …”

  Eskeles and Harnilas exchanged a worried glance. The Captain looked up, gazed at the young King in the fixed manner officers use to humble subordinates. Without breaking eye contact, he said, “Aethum souti sal meretten,” to the Mandate Schoolman beside him. Then he continued in Sheyic spoken slowly enough for Sorweel to follow. “So. What would you do?”

  The young King of Sakarpus shrugged. “Ride hard for the Aspect-Emperor.”

  The old officer smiled and nodded, slapped him on the shoulder before bawling for camp to be broken.

  “So it is possible?” Sorweel asked Eskeles, who remained beside him, watching with a strange, almost fatherly gleam in his eyes. “The Sranc could be doing what I think?”

  The Schoolman crushed his beard into his barrel chest, nodding. “In ancient times, before the coming of the No-God, the Consult would harness the Sranc, chain them into great assemblies that the Ancient Norsirai called Yokes …” He paused, blinking as though to pinch away unwanted memories. “They would drive them the way we drive slaves in the Three Seas, starve them until their hungers reached a fever pitch. Then, when they reached a position where the Sranc could smell Mannish blood on the wind, they would strike the chains and let them run.”

  Something within the Sakarpi King, a binding of fear and hope, slumped in relief. He almost reeled for exhaustion, as if alarm alone had sustained him through all the sleepless watches.

  The Schoolman steadied him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “My King?”

  Sorweel shook his head to dismiss the sorcerer’s worry. He looked out across the morning plain: Sakarpus could be directly behind him instead of weeks away, for all the difference the horizon made.

  “The Captain …” he said, returning the sorcerer’s gaze. “What did he say to you just then?”

  “That you possess the gifts of a great king,” Eskeles replied, squeezing his shoulder the way his father had, whenever he took pride in his son’s accomplishments.

  Gifts? something within him wanted to cry. No …

  Only things that the dirt had told him.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  The Western Three Seas

  As death is the sum of all harms, so is murder the sum of all sins.

  —CANTICLES 18:9, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK

  The world has its own ways, sockets so deep that not even the Gods can dislodge them. No urn is so cracked as Fate.

  —ASANSIUS, THE LIMPING PILGRIM

  Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), somewhere south of Gielgath …

  That which comes after determines what comes before—in this World.

  The Gift-of-Yatwer walked across ordained ground. His skin did not burn, thanks to the swarthiness he had purchased with his seed. His feet did not blister, thanks to the calluses he had purchased with his youth. But he grew weary as other men grew weary, for like them, he was a thing of flesh and blood. But he always tired when he should grow tired. And his every slumber delivered him to the perfect instant of waking. Once to the sound of lutes and to the generosity of travelling mummers. Another time to a fox that bolted, leaving the goose it had been laboriously dragging.

 
Indeed, his every breath was a Gift.

  He crossed the exhausted plantations of Anserca, drawing stares from those slaves who saw him. Though he walked alone, he followed a file of thousands across the fields, for he was always the stranger he pursued, and the back before him was forever his own. He would look up, see himself walking beneath a solitary, windswept tree, vanishing stride by stride over the far side of a hill. And when he turned, he would see that same tree behind him, and the same man descending the same slope. A queue of millions connected him to himself, from the Gift who coupled with the Holy Crone to the Gift who watched the Aspect-Emperor dying in blood and expressionless disbelief.

  He was the ripple across dark waters. The bow of force thrown across a length of a child’s rope.

  He saw the assassin gagging on his own blood. He saw the besieging armies, the hunger in the streets. He saw the Holy Shriah turn oblivious and bare his throat. He saw the Andiamine Heights crashing upon itself, the Empress’s eyes flutter about her final breath …

  And he walked alone, following a road of fields, stranded in the now of a mortal soul.

  Day after day, across mile after mile of tilled earth—the very bosom of his dread Mother. He slept between the rising stalks, the nascent heads, listening to his Mother’s soothing whisper, staring at stars that were silver lines.

  He followed his footprints across the dust, witnessing more than plotting the murder of the dead.

  The River Sempis

  At least, Malowebi thought to himself as he swayed in his saddle, he could say he had seen a ziggurat before he died. What could that fool, Likaro, say? There was more to travel than bedding Nilnameshi slave boys, just as there was more to diplomacy than wearing an ambassador’s wig.

  Cohorts of horsemen fanned across the land, filing along irrigation dikes, filtering through groves and across millet fields. Hills like broken molars fenced the north, marking the arid frontier of Gedea. The River Sempis lay to the immediate south, black and green and placid, broad enough to shroud the South Bank in blue-grey haze. Five plumes of smoke rose from disparate points on the horizon before them.

  One of those plumes, Malowebi knew, led the dusty army to Iothiah.

  “It is a dangerous thing,” Fanayal ab Kascamandri said from his side, a sharp grin drawing wide his elaborate goatee, “to parlay with the enemies of dangerous men. And in the whole wide world, my friend, no man is so dangerous as Kurcifra.”

  Despite the Padirajah’s smile, something shrewd and quite humourless glinted in his eyes.

  Second Negotiant Malowebi, Emissary of High Holy Zeüm, matched the man’s gaze, careful to conceal his frown. “Kurcifra …” he repeated. “Ah … you mean the Aspect-Emperor.”

  The Mbimayu sorcerer was old enough to remember the days when Kian ruled the Eastern Three Seas. Of all the outland peculiarities to leak into Zeüm, few proved more vexing than the Fanim missionaries who trickled across the frontier, bearing their absurd message of fear and damnation. The God was Solitary. The Gods were in fact devils. And all their ancestors had been damned for worshipping them—all of them! You would think that claims so preposterous and repulsive would require no rebuttal, but the very opposite had been the case. Even the Zeümi, it turned out, were quick to embrace tales of their own iniquity, so universal is self-loathing among Men. Not a month passed, it sometimes seemed, without some public flaying.

  Even still, when Fanayal’s Padirajah father had sent an embassy to attend the coronation of Malowebi’s cousin, Nganka’kull, the Kianene Grandees had caused a sensation among the kjineta. High Holy Zeüm had always been an inward nation, too distant and too vain to concern itself with events or peoples beyond its sacred frontier. But the Kianene’s pale skin, the stark luxury of their dress, their pious reserve—everything about them had hummed with exotic allure. Over night, it seemed, the Zeümi fondness for elaborate image and ornamentation had become dowdy and obsolete. Many caste-nobles even began cultivating goatees—until, that is, his cousin reinstated the ancient Grooming Laws.

  Malowebi could scarce imagine these Kianene inspiring an upheaval in fashion. Where the Grandees of Kascamandri’s embassy possessed the dress and bearing of heroes, Fanayal’s men were little more than desert bandits. He had expected to ride with the likes of Skauras or Cinganjehoi, men terrible in war and gracious in peace, not a ragtag army of horse-thieves and rapists.

  Fanayal alone reminded him of those ambassadors from long ago. He wore a helm of shining gold, five spikes rising from the peak, and perhaps the finest coat of mail Malowebi had ever seen—a mesh of inhuman manufacture, he eventually decided. His yellow-silk sleeves hung like pennants from his wrists. His curved sword was obviously a famed heirloom. The instant he had noticed it, Malowebi had known he would say, “That glorious blade—was that your father’s?” He even knew the solemn way he would pitch his voice. It was an old diplomat’s trick, making a conversational inventory of the items his counterparts wore.

  Relationships went much smoother, Malowebi had learned, in the absence of verbal holes.

  “Kurcifra …” the Padirajah repeated with a curious smile, as if considering the way the name might sound to an outsider. “The light that blinds.”

  Fanayal ab Kascamandri was nothing if not impressive. Handsome, in the hard way of desert breeding. His falcon eyes set close about a hooked nose. Arrogant to the point of being impervious to insult and slight—and being quite agreeable as a result.

  The Bandit Padirajah he might be, but he was no bandit, at least.

  “You said no man is so dangerous,” Malowebi pressed, genuinely curious. “Is this what you think? That the Anasûrimbor is a man?”

  Fanayal laughed. “The Empress is a woman—I know that much. I once spared a Shrial Priest for claiming he had bedded her when she was a whore. The Aspect-Emperor? I know only that he can be killed.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “Because I am the one doomed to kill him.”

  Malowebi shook his head in wonder. How the World revolved about the Aspect-Emperor. How many times had he poured himself some unwatered wine just to drink and marvel at the simple fact of the man? A refugee wanders into the Nansurium from the wilderness—with a Scylvendi savage, no less!—and within twenty years, he not only commands the obedience of the entire Three Seas but its worship as well.

  It was mad. Too mad for mere history, which was, as far as Malowebi could tell, every bit as mean and as stupid as the men who made it. There was nothing mean or stupid about Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

  “This is how Men reason in the Three Seas?” he asked. He repented the words even as he spoke them. Malowebi was Second Negotiant for no small reason. He was forever asking blunt questions, forever alienating instead of flattering. He had more teeth than tongue, as the menials would say.

  But the Bandit Padirajah showed no outward sign of offence. “Only those who have seen their doom, Malowebi! Only those who have seen their doom!”

  Fanayal, the Mbimayu sorcerer noted with no small relief, was a man who relished insolent questions.

  “I notice you ride without bodyguards,” he ventured.

  “Why should that concern you?”

  Though horsemen clotted the fields and berms about them, he and the Padirajah rode quite alone—aside from a cowled figure who trailed them by two lengths. Malowebi had assumed the man was a bodyguard of some description, but twice now he had glimpsed—or thought he had glimpsed—something resembling a black tongue within the cowl’s dun shadows. Even still, it was remarkable, really, that someone like Fanayal would treat with anyone face to face, let alone an outland sorcerer. Just the previous week the Empress had offered another ten thousand gold kellics for the Bandit Padirajah’s head.

  Perhaps it spoke to the man’s desperation …

  “Because,” the Mbimayu sorcerer said with a shrug, “your insurrection would not survive your loss … We would be fools to provoke the Aspect-Emperor on the promise of a martyr.”

  Fanayal mana
ged to rescue his grin before it entirely faltered. He understood the power of belief, Malowebi realized, and the corresponding need to project confidence, both fatuous and unrelenting.

  “You need not worry.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I cannot die.”

  Malowebi was beginning to like the man but in a way that cemented, rather than softened, his skepticism of him. The Second Negotiant always had a weakness for vainglorious fools, even as a child. But unlike the First Negotiant, Likaro, he never let his sympathies make his decisions for him.

  Commitments required trust, and trust required demonstrations. The Satakhan had sent him to assess Fanayal ab Kascamandri, not to parlay with him. For all his failings, Nganka’kull was no fool. With the Great Ordeal crawling into the northern wastes, the question was whether the New Empire could survive the absence of its Aspect-Emperor and his most fanatical followers. As the first real threat to the Zeümi people and nation since Near Antiquity, it needed to fail—and decisively.

  But wishing ill and doing actual harm were far different beasts. Care had to be taken—extreme care. High Holy Zeüm could ill afford any long throws of the number-sticks, not after Nganka’kull had so foolishly yielded his own son as a hostage. Malowebi had always been fond of Zsoronga, had always seen in him the makings of a truly great Satakhan. He needed some real assurance that this desert outlaw and his army of thieves could succeed before recommending the monies and arms they so desperately needed. To take isolated fortresses was one thing. But to assail a garrisoned city—that was quite another.

  Iothiah, the ancient capital of Old Dynasty Shigek. Iothiah would be an impressive demonstration. Most assuredly.

  “Kurcifra was sent as punishment,” Fanayal continued, “an unholy angel of retribution. We had grown fat. We had lost faith with the strict ways of our fathers. So the Solitary God burned the lard from our limbs, drove us back into the wastes where we were born …” He fixed the sorcerer with a gaze that was alarming for its intensity. “I am anointed, Outlander. I am the One.”