The White-Luck Warrior (14 page)

The trees seemed to claw at them with stationary malice, slow them with insinuations of frailty and doom. The Hags, who had no Qirri to brace them, cried out from time to time, begging them to stop, or to at least slow their pace. But no one, not even Achamian or Mimara, listened, let alone answered their pleas. This was the Slog of Slogs. The sooner they understood that, the greater their prospects for survival.

The lesson was dear. Two of them fell behind, never to be seen again.

Dawn rose in sheets of brightening green. The impenetrable black yielded to the murk of deep forest hollows. They encountered a surging river the scalpers called the Throat. It fairly raged with spring melt, the water brown with sediment, spouting white plumes where the current crashed against the boulders it had rolled down from the mountains. The sunlight it afforded was welcome, but the glimpse of smoke in the distance apparently was not. "Fatwall," Xonghis explained to Achamian and Mimara. "It burns." They were forced to follow the river's thundering course several miles before finding a crossing. Even still, they lost another of the Hags to the kicking waters.

They plunged back into the Mop and its temple gloom, the mossed ground wheezing beneath their feet. As always they found themselves craning their necks from side to side as if to catch some secret observer. Achamian need only glance at the others to know they suffered the same plaguing sense he did, as if they were the people hated, like the mummer tribes that migrated across the Three Seas.

Some fluke of the terrain delivered them back to the Throat, this time opposite the point they had first encountered it. Cleric bid them pause. "Listen," he called over the white roar. Achamian could hear nothing, but like the others he could see... On the far bank, through the screens of foliage stacked beneath the canopy's verge, he glimpsed shadows running.
Hundreds
of them, following the path they had taken down-river.

"Skinnies, boys!" Sarl cried with a gurgling laugh. "
Mobs
of them! Didn't I promise you a chopper? Eh?
Eh?
"

They continued climbing, the grades at times so steep that thighs burned and sputum flew. If the Qirri failed to whip them forward, then the glimpse of the Sranc who pursued them certainly did. Despite the profundity of their exhaustion, the sight of sunlight through the gallery ahead spurred them to a run.

They found themselves at the Mop's blinking edge, squinting across a slope of felled trees.

Fatwall. The long-dead fortress of Aenku Maimor.

Maimor was a name that Achamian had encountered only a few times in his dreams. The ancient Meori Empire had been little more than a tarp thrown across the fractious tribes of the Eastern White Norsirai, and Maimor had been one of several nails that had held it in place over the generations, a High Royal Fastness, which would house the High-King during his seasonal tour of his more rebellious provinces. Like everything else during the First Apocalypse, it had come crashing down in a hail of fire and Sranc.

The old Wizard wondered whether a Meorishman of yore would recognize what remained. The Maimor lost versus the Maimor cut from the Wilderness some two thousand years later...

Fatwall.

Trees had overgrown the ruined outer defences, strangler oaks mostly. The great stumps yet stood, as tall as towers, clutched like fists about the foundations. The scalpers had incorporated them in their reclamation of the fortress, using them as ad hoc bastions. Elsewhere they had raised palisades across the gaps and timber hoardings along the ruined heights. This was what smoked and burned, the flames all but invisible in direct sunlight.

The Skin Eaters lingered in the shadows, panting and peering. Something had attacked the fortress—and recently.

Achamian heard Galian murmur,
"Bad..."
to Pokwas, who towered at his side. Catching the old Wizard's look, the former Columnary said, "Skinnies behind us and now skinnies before us? This is more than just a mobbing."

"Then what is it?"

Galian shrugged in the scalper manner, as if to say,
We're all dead anyway.
Achamian thought of these men, Skin Eater and Stone Hag alike, spending season after season letting blood in these wastes. They feared for their lives, certainly, but not the same as other men feared. How could they? Coin lost to the number-sticks is far different from coin lost to thieves, even if the penury that resulted was the same.

Scalpers knew the gamble.

When nobody could discern any sign of friend or foe, the Captain instructed Cleric to scout ahead. The Nonman strode into the sky, his skin shining, his nimil hauberk gleaming. The mongrel company watched with exhausted wonder. He walked high over the slope of felled trees, receding until he was little more than a thin dash of black hanging over Maimor's ruined precincts.

Veils of smoke wafted about him, drawn to the lazy west. The Osthwai Mountains loomed in the distance beyond, clouds massing about their summits. After several moments of peering, Cleric waved them forward.

The company set across the bone-yard of trees, following the zigzag of trunks like beached whales, picking their way through wickets of skeletal branches. At times it seemed a labyrinth. Open daylight offered Achamian another opportunity to appraise the newcomers, the Hags, who seemed even more mangy and forlorn. They had the watchful look of captives and the voices of slaves living in fear of a violent and mercurial master. Like the Skin Eaters, they hailed from across the Three Seas. But who they were did not seem to matter, at least not to Achamian. They were Stone Hags, bandit scalpers who killed Men to profit from Sranc. In a real sense they were no better than cannibals and perhaps even more deserving of death. But they were
human
, and in a land of mobbing Sranc, that kinship trumped all other considerations.

Any reckoning of their crimes would have to come after.

Maimor's gate had collapsed into utter ruin long, long ago. A makeshift replacement had been raised across its uneven remains, a timber palisade untouched by the fires that smouldered elsewhere. The doors stood open and unmarked. The company filed beneath the crude fortifications, gazing about in different directions. Achamian had braced himself for the sight of slaughter within—few things were more disturbing than the aftermath of a Sranc massacre. But there was nothing. No dead. No blood. No seed.

"They've fled," Xonghis said, referring to the Ministerial contingent that was supposed to be stationed here. "The Imperials... This is their work. They've evacuated."

In some places the ruins spilled into gravel, while elsewhere they seemed remarkably intact. Hanging sections of wall. Alleyways through waist-high remnants. Blocks breached the interior turf, scattered and heaped, creating innumerable slots and crevices for rats. Several more massive stumps hunched over and across the stonework, their roots splayed out in veinlike skirts—two storeys high in some places. The fundamental layout of the fortress followed the ancient sensibility, where recreating some original model trumped more practical considerations. Even though the heights formed a distended oval, the walls were rectilinear. The citadel, in contrast, was round, forming the circle-in-square pattern that Achamian immediately recognized from his dreams of ancient Kelmeol, the lost capital of the Meori Empire, when Seswatha had stayed at the fortress of Aenku Aumor.

The stone was pitted and multicoloured, here black with moulds, there frosted with white and turquoise lichens. What ornamentation that survived, though plain in comparison to Cil-Aujas, seemed exceedingly elaborate by human standards. Every surface had been worked in patterns, animal totems for the most part, beasts standing, their arms articulated in humanlike poses. As numerous as the reliefs were, Achamian found only one intact representation of Meori's ancient crest: seven wolves arrayed like daisy petals about a shield.

His whole body hummed, at once scraped of all strength and steeped in giddy vigour. Qirri. Despite everything, Achamian found himself gazing and wandering as he had so many years ago, lost in thoughts of times long dead. He had always found sanctuary in ruins, freedom from the demands of his calling as well as connection with the ancient days that so tyrannized his nights. He had always felt whole in the presence of fragments.

"Akka..." Mimara called, her voice so like her mother's that goosepimples climbed the old Wizard's spine. A plaintive echo.

He turned, surprised by his smile. This was her first time, he realized, her first glimpse of the ancient Norsirai and their works.

"Remarkable, isn't it? To think ruins like this are all that remain of..."

He trailed, realizing that she looked at the others, not the ruined pockets climbing about them.

She turned to him, her eyes pinned with indecision. "Skin-spy..." she said in Ainoni.

"What?"

She blinked in momentary indecision. "Skin-spy...
Somandutta...
He's a... a skin-spy."

"What? What are you saying?" Achamian asked, struggling to collect his thoughts. She was a Princess-Imperial, which meant she had doubtless received extensive training regarding Consult skin-spies: who they were inclined to replace, how they were apt to reveal themselves.

She probably knew more about the creatures than he did.

"When the Sranc attacked," she continued under her breath, watching the Nilnameshi caste-noble where he stood with the others. "Earlier... The way he moved..." She turned to the Wizard, fixed him with a look of utter feminine certainty, as serious as famine or disease. "What he did was impossible, Akka."

Achamian stood dumbstruck. A skin-spy?

Half-remembered passions galloped through him. The heat and misery of the First Holy War. Images of old enemies. Old terrors...

He turned to where the Nilnameshi stood. "Soma..." he called, his voice rising thin.

"He saved my life," she murmured beside him, obviously every bit as bewildered as he was. "He revealed himself to save me..."

"Soma!" Achamian called again.

The man spared him a sideways glance before turning back to the mutter of those about him. Conger. Pokwas. Achamian blinked, suddenly feeling very feeble and very old. The Consult? Here?

The entire time.

"He revealed himself to save me..."

The confusion did not so much lift as part about necessity, leaving only naked alarm and the focus that came with it.

"
Somandutta!
I am speaking to you!"

The affable brown face turned to him, smiling with...

An Odaini Concussion Cant was the first thing to the old Wizard's lips.

Without warning, Soma leapt
over
the milling scalpers, boggling eyes and snuffing voices. He twisted mid-air with an acrobat's grace, landed with the scuttling fury of a crab. He was two-thirds across the courtyard before Achamian had finished. He leapt, sailing over the ruined wall as the Cant smashed stone and scabbed mortar.

The company stood pale and uncomprehending.

"Let that be a warning!" Sarl cackled in abject glee. He turned to the Hags as if they were unkempt cousins requiring lessons in jnanic etiquette. "Steer clear the
peach
, lads!" He glanced at Achamian, his eyes possessing enough of the old canniness to unnerve the old Wizard.

"What the Captain doesn't gut, the Schoolman blasts!"

—|—

They slept in bare sunlight.

As was proper, since nothing was as it should be. Battling men instead of Sranc. Taking refuge in a fallen fortress. Finding a skin-spy in their midst, then saying nothing of it.

The Qirri had faded and, despite the longing looks, the Nonman kept his pouch hidden in his satchel. Of exhaustion's many modalities, perhaps none is so onerous as apathy, the loss of sense and desire, where you wish only to cease wishing, where mere breathing becomes a kind of thoughtless toil.

Achamian's sleep was fitful, plagued by flies—the biting kind—and worries, too numerous and inchoate to resolve into anything comprehensible. Soma. The Sranc pursuing them. The Captain. Cleric. Mimara. The dead in Cil-Aujas. His lies. Her curse...

And of course Kellhus... and Esmenet.

Fire and their lack of numbers had convinced Lord Kosoter that the outer walls were indefensible, so they had retreated to the shattered citadel. At some point the structure had collapsed inward, leaving only the great blocks of the foundation intact. Centuries of vegetation had choked the inner ruin with uneven earth so that the remaining walls, which towered the height of three men along their outer faces, climbed only chest high for those standing within. The scalpers salvaged what they could find, those few trifles left behind by the retreating "Imperials," as they called them. Then they climbed into the citadel's earthen gut to await the inevitable.

The subsequent vigil was as surreal as it was forlorn. While the rest dozed in what shade they could find, Cleric took a position on one of the great blocks, sitting cross-legged, gazing over the ruins below, across the field of felled trees, to the Mop's black verge. Achamian actually found comfort in the sight of him, a being who had survived who knew how many sieges and battles, back into the mists of history.

The Nonman waited until late afternoon to begin his sermon, when the air had cooled enough and the shade had grown enough to provide the possibility of real sleep. He stood on the lip and turned to regard them below, his slim and powerful figure bathed in light. The sky reached blue and infinite beyond him. Achamian found himself watching and listening the way the others watched and listened.

"Again, my brothers," he said in impossibly deep tones. "Again we find ourselves
stranded
, trapped in another of the World's hard places..."

Stranded. A word like a breath across a dying coal.

Stranded. Lost with none to grieve them. Trapped.

"Me," the Nonman continued, letting his head sag. "I know only that I have stood here a thousand times over a thousand years—more! This... this is
my
place! My
home
..."