The White Luck Warrior

  “But Fate has many whims. How can you be sure?”

  Fanayal’s laughter revealed the perfect crescent of his teeth. “If I’m wrong, I always have Meppa.” He turned to the enigmatic rider trailing them. “Eh, Meppa? Raise your mask.”

  Malowebi twisted in his saddle to better regard the man. Meppa raised bare hands, pulled back the deep cowl that had obscured his face. The mask Fanayal referred to was not so much a mask as a kind of blindfold: a band of silver as wide as a child’s palm lay about his upper face, as if a too-large crown had slipped over his eyes. The sun flashed across its circuit, gleamed across the innumerable lines etched into it: water rushing sideways, around and around in an infinite cataract.

  His cowl thrown back, Meppa raised the band from his head. His hair was as white as the peaks of the Atkondras, his skin nut brown. No eyes glinted from the shadow of his sockets …

  Malowebi fairly gasped aloud. Suddenly, it seemed absurd that he had missed the hue of ochre in the man’s dust-rimmed robes or that he had mistaken the serpent rising from the folds about the man’s collar for a black tongue.

  Cishaurim.

  “Look about you, my friend,” Fanayal continued, as if this revelation should settle the Second Negotiant’s every misgiving. He gestured to the pillars of smoke bent across the sky before them. “This land simmers with rebellion. All I need do is ride fast. So long as I ride fast, I outnumber the idolaters everywhere!”

  But the sorcerer could only think, Cishaurim!

  Like every other School, the Mbimayu had assumed the Water-Bearers were extinct—and like every other School, they had been happy for it. The Tribe of Indara-Kishauri was too dangerous to be allowed to live.

  Small wonder the Bandit Padirajah had such a talent for survival.

  “Then what need do you have of Zeüm?” Malowebi asked quickly. He had hoped Fanayal would overlook his obvious fluster, but the sly glint in the man’s eye confirmed what the Second Negotiant had already known: very little escaped the claws of Fanayal’s acumen. Perhaps he was the first foe worthy of the Aspect-Emperor.

  Perhaps …

  “Because I am but one,” the Padirajah said. “If a second strikes, then a third will join us, and a fourth …” He flung out his arms in an expansive gesture, setting alight the innumerable links of his nimil mail. “The New Empire—all of it, Malowebi!—will collapse into the blood and lies from which it was raised.”

  The Zeümi Emissary nodded as though acknowledging the logic, if not the attraction, of his argument. But all he really could think was, Cishaurim.

  So … the accursed Water still flowed.

  Discord is the way of imperial power. Triamis the Great once described empire as the perpetual absence of peace. “If your nation wars,” he wrote, “not at the periodic whim of aggressors both internal and external, but always, then your people continually imposes its interests upon other peoples, and your nation is no longer a nation, but an empire.” War and empire, for the legendary Near Antique ruler, were simply the same thing glimpsed from different summits, the only measure of power and the only surety of glory.

  In the Hoshrut, the Carythusali agora famed for the continuous view it afforded of the Scarlet Spires, the Judges publicly lashed a slave they had apprehended for blasphemy. She was lucky, they reasoned, since they could have charged her with sedition, a capital crime, in which case the dogs would already be lapping her blood from the flagstones. For some reason the unruly temper of the crowds that surrounded them escaped their notice. Perhaps because they were true believers. Or perhaps because the Hoshrut Pole, like the thousands of others scattered across the Three Seas, was so often used for matters of expedited justice. Either way, they were entirely unprepared for the mob’s rush. Within a matter of moments they had been beaten, stripped, and hung from the hanging stone gutters of the Imperial Custom House. Within a watch, a greater part of the city rioted, slaves and caste-menials mostly, and the Imperial Garrison found itself engaged in pitched battles in the streets. Thousands died over the days following. Nearly an eighth of the city burned to the ground.

  In Oswenta, Hampei Sompas, a high-ranking Imperial Apparati, was found in bed with his throat cut. He was but the first of many—very many—assassinations. As the days passed more and more Shrial and Imperial functionaries, from the lowest tax-farmers to highest judges and assessors, were murdered, either by their body-slaves or by the bands of armed menials that had taken to revenge killings in the streets.

  There were more riots. Seleukara burned for seven days. Aöknyssus was only wracked for two, but tens of thousands were killed, so savage were the Imperial reprisals. The wife and children of King Nersei Proyas were removed to Attrempus for safety’s sake.

  Long-running insurrections flared into renewed violence, for there was no shortage of old and sequestered foes eager to take advantage of the general discord. In the southwest, the Fanim under Fanayal ab Kascamandri stormed and seized the fortress of Gara’gûl in the province of Mongilea, and in numbers so alarming that the Empress ordered four Columns rushed to defend Nenciphon, the former capital of the Kianene Empire. In the east, the wilder Famiri tribes from the steppes below the Araxes Mountains overthrew their Imperial administrators and massacred the Zaudunyani converts among them: sons of the families that had ruled them from time immemorial. And the Scylvendi raided the Nansur frontier with a daring and viciousness not seen for a generation.

  Middle-aged veterans were called up. Militias were levied. A dozen small battles were fought across lands famous and obscure. Curfews were extended. The Yatwerian temples were closed, and those priestesses who did not flee were imprisoned and interrogated. Plots and conspiracies were uncovered. In more orderly provinces, the executions were celebrated in garish spectacles. Otherwise, they were carried out in secret, and bodies were buried in ditches. The Slave Laws, which had afforded protections the enslaved had not known since the days of Cenei, were repealed. In a series of emergency sessions, the Greater Congregate passed several laws curtailing congress according to caste. Speaking at public fountains became punishable by immediate execution.

  The caste-nobility of all nations suddenly found unity in their general terror of their servants and slaves. Suits were dropped, freeing the courts for more pressing prosecutions. Old and honourable enmities were set aside. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples summoned high-ranking Cultic priests from across the Three Seas for what would be called the Third Pan-Sumni Council, urging them to set aside their parochial worship, to recall the God behind the Gods. Shrial Priests everywhere inveighed on behalf of their Prophet and Sovereign. Those Zaudunyani who had not joined the Great Ordeal raised their voices to harangue their peers and their lessers. Groups of them took to murdering in the dark of night those they deemed unfaithful.

  Sons and husbands simply vanished.

  And though the New Empire tottered, it did not fall.

  Momemn

  Anasûrimbor Kelmomas sat where he always sat when attending the Imperial Synod, in the Prince’s Box on a bench cushioned with plush red leather: the same place where his older siblings had sat when they were young—even Thelli before she had joined Mother beneath the Circumfix Throne.

  “Recall who it is you address, Pansulla,” Mother called down in a tight voice.

  Though positioned relatively low on the palace heights, the chamber, the Synodine, was one of the more luxurious ones in the palace, and certainly among the most curious. Unlike other council chambers, it possessed no gallery for visiting observers and absolutely no windows. Where airy grandeur was the rule elsewhere, the chamber was long and narrow, with elaborately panelled boxes—the Prince’s Box one of them—lining the short walls and with steep benches stepping the entire length of the long walls, as if an amphitheatre had been straightened and then snapped in half, forcing the audience to confront itself.

  To accommodate the Circumfix Throne, a deep marble recess shelved the stepped slope to Kelmomas’s left, blue-white stone trimmed with bands of
black diorite. A scale replica of the Circumfix as it had hung in Caraskand, including his father hanging spread-eagled and upside down, rose in sinuous gold from the throne’s back. His mother’s chair and Thelli’s had been cut into the marble tier immediately below it, their simple design concentrating the glory of the throne above. Some thirty identical seats had been set into the steps rising opposite, one for each of the Great Factions, whose interests governed the New Empire.

  The floor lay well below all the seats, forcing those who walked it to continually crane their heads up and around to meet the gaze of their interlocutors. It was a narrow strip of bare floor, no bigger than several prison cells set end to end. Kelmomas had heard several functionaries refer to it—and with no little dread—as the Slot.

  Because the man who now paced its length was so fat, Cutias Pansulla, the Nansur Consul, it looked even more narrow than usual. He had been strutting back and forth for several moments now, long enough for dark stains to bloom from his armpits.

  “But I must … I must dare speak it!” he cried, his shaved jowls trembling. “The people are saying that the Hundred are against us!”

  The Imperial Synod, his mother had told Kelmomas, was a kind of boiled-down version of the Greater Congregate, what other kings in other lands often called a privy council, the place where representatives of the New Empire’s most important interests could confer with their divine ruler. Of course, he always pretended to forget this explanation when he spoke to his mother and to always whine as he accompanied her to the sessions, but he secretly adored the Synod and the games within games it invariably revealed—at least when his father failed to attend them. Elsewhere, the words always seemed to be the same, glory this and glory that, and the lofty tone seemed to drone on and on and on. It was like watching men dual with bars of iron. But in the Synodine, both the words and the voices were honed to a cutting edge.

  Real disputes instead of pantomime. Real consequences instead of heavenly petitions. Lives, sometimes in the thousands, were decided in this place as in no other. The young Prince-Imperial could almost smell the smoke and blood. This was where real cities were burned, not ones carved of balsa.

  “Ask yourself,” Mother cried to the assembled men. “Who will you be when the scripture of these days is written? The craven? The weak-kneed doubter? All of you—All of you! As the trial deepens, and the trial always deepens, all of you will be judged. So stop thinking of me as his weaker vessel!”

  Kelmomas jammed his mouth into his forearms to conceal his smile. Though his mother angered often, she only rarely expressed it as anger. The boy wondered whether the fat Consul below understood the peril of his situation.

  He certainly hoped not.

  “Holy Empress, please!” Pansulla exclaimed. “This … this talk … it does not answer our fears! At the very least you must give us something to tell the people!”

  The Prince-Imperial sensed the power in these words, even though he did not fully understand their import. He certainly could see the indecision in Mother’s eyes, the realization she had erred …

  That one, the secret voice whispered.

  Pansulla?

  Yes. His breathing offends me.

  Ever keen to exploit weakness, the round-bellied Consul pressed his advantage. “All we ask, Most Holy Empress, is for the tools to work your will …”

  Mother glared at him for a moment, then glanced nervously across the assembly. She seemed to flinch from the gravity of their regard. At last she waved a loose-wristed hand in weariness and capitulation. “Read The Sagas …” she began but without breath. She paused to firm her voice. “Read The Sagas, the history of the First Apocalypse, and ask yourself, Where are the Gods? How can the Hundred allow this?”

  And the little boy could see the craft behind his mother’s manner and words. Silence had seized the Imperial Synod, such was the force of her question.

  “Thelli …” his mother said, gesturing to her daughter who sat gowned in absurd intricacy at her side. Dreadfully thin, she looked like a bird stranded between too many crumbs and the inability to choose. “Tell them what the Mandate Schoolmen say.”

  “The Gods are-are finite,” Theliopa declared in a voice that contradicted the stark angularity of her frame. “They can only apprehend a finite por-portion of existence. They fathom the future-future, certainly, but from a vantage that limits them. The No-God dwells in their blind spots, follows a path-path they are utterly oblivious to …” She turned, looking from man to man with open curiosity. “Because he is oblivion.”

  Mother rested her hand atop Thelli’s in a thoughtless gesture of thanks. Behind the panels of his box, the young Prince-Imperial fairly cut open his palms for balling his fists.

  She loves me more! he thought.

  Yes, the voice agreed, she loves you more.

  The Empress spoke with renewed confidence. “There is a world, my Lords, a world concealed, a world of shadow that the Gods cannot see …” She looked from Consul to Consul. “I fear we now walk that world.”

  A wall of bewildered looks greeted her. Even Pansulla seemed taken aback. Kelmomas almost chirped in glee, so proud was he of his mother.

  “And the Hundred?” old Tûtmor, the Consul for King Hoga Hogrim of Ce Tydonn croaked, his eyes rimmed with real fear. Alarmed voices clamoured in his wake.

  Their Empress graced them all with a sour smile. “The Gods chafe, because like all souls, they call evil what they cannot comprehend.”

  More astounded silence. Kelmomas found himself squinting in hilarity. Why anyone should fear the Gods was quite beyond him, let alone fools as privileged and powerful as these.

  Because they are old and dying, the secret voice whispered.

  Pansulla still held the Slot. He now stood directly beneath his Empress.

  “So …” he said, looking to the others with a strategically blank face. “So it is true, then? The Gods …”—his gaze wandered—“the almighty Gods … are against us?”

  Disaster. It fairly slapped the blood from Mother’s painted face. Her lips retreated, the way they always did during such moments, into a thin line.

  He offends me … the secret voice cooed. The fat one.

  “Now …” she began, only to halt to master the emotion in her voice. “Now … Pansulla, is the time for care. Heretical superstition will be the end of us all. Now is the time to recall the God of Gods and his Prophet.”

  The threat was clear—enough to trigger another exchange of whispers among the tiered men. Smiling with greasy insincerity, Pansulla knelt to the floor, so big and so floridly gowned that he looked more a heap of laundry than a man.

  “But of course, Holy Empress.”

  For the slightest instant, his mother’s hatred lay plain on her face.

  “Courage, Pansulla,” she said. “And you too, loyal Tûtmor. You must find courage, not in the Hundred, but, as Inri Sejenus and my divine husband have taught, in their sum.”

  The Nansur Consul struggled back to his feet.

  “Indeed, Empress,” he said, smoothing his silk robes. “Courage … Of course …” His eyes strayed to the others. “We must remind ourselves that we know better … than the Gods.”

  Kelmomas grappled with the squeal of joy clawing at his throat. He so loved his mother’s fury!

  We’ve never killed someone so fat before.

  “Not ‘we,’ Cutias Pansulla. Not you, and certainly not me. Your Holy Aspect-Emperor. Anasûrimbor Kellhus.”

  The young Prince-Imperial understood what his mother was trying to achieve with these appeals to his father. Always using him as a goad. Always trying to vanish into the might of his name. But he could also see, with a kind of child-cunning, how this undermined her authority.

  Once again the obese Consul nodded in jowl-quivering exaggeration. “Ah, yes-yes … When the Cults fail us, we must turn to the Thousand Temples.” He glanced up as if to say, How could I be such a fool? He made of a show of turning to Maithanet’s vacant seat, then looked to his E
mpress with mock confusion. “But when can we hope to hear our Holy Shriah’s most wise couns—?”

  “Tidings!” a voice pealed. “Tidings, Empress! Most dire tidings!”

  All eyes in the Synodine turned to the figure gasping on the chamber’s threshold: an Eothic Guardsman, red-faced for exertion.

  “Most Holy Empress …” The guardsmen swallowed against his wind. “The Kianene—the loathsome bandit, Fanayal!”

  “What of him?” Mother demanded.

  “He has struck Shigek.”

  Kelmomas watched his mother blink in confusion.

  “But … he’s marching on Nenciphon …” A frantic note climbed into her voice. “Don’t you mean Nenciphon?”

  The messenger shook his head in sudden terror.

  “No, most Holy Empress. Iothiah. Fanayal has taken Iothiah.”

  The Andiamine Heights was a city in its own right, albeit one enclosed beneath a welter of rooftops, with gilded concourses instead of processional avenues and mazed dormitories instead of alley-riddled slums. Any number of routes could be taken between any two points, allowing the inhabitants to travel in celebrity or discretion. Unlike his father, Kelmomas’s mother almost always chose the most discreet route possible, even if it made the journey twice as lengthy. Though some might think this was yet one more sign of her general insecurity, the young boy knew otherwise. Anasûrimbor Esmenet simply despised the sight of people falling to their faces.

  The Imperial Synod dissolved, the Empress led her small retinue down into the Apparatory before turning to climb the rarely used stairs and halls that threaded the palace’s eastward reaches. She clutched Kelmomas’s hand with the too-tight desperation he so adored, tugging him when his pace faltered. Theliopa followed close behind with Lord Biaxi Sankas breathing hard at her side.

  “Will Uncle Maithanet get mad at you again?” Kelmomas asked.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because he blames you for everything that goes wrong! I hate him!”