The White-Luck Warrior (18 page)

That night, while the others slept, the young King of Sakarpus rolled to his side on his sleeping mat and, in the way anxious bodies choose small tasks of their own volition, started picking at the grasses before him. Porsparian—his cheeks rutted like withered apples, his eyes like wet chips of obsidian—floated beneath his soul's eye the entire time, spitting fire into his palm, rubbing mud into his cheeks...

Only when he had bared a small patch of earth did Sorweel realize what he was doing: moulding the dread Mother's face the way Porsparian had the day the Aspect-Emperor had declared him a Believer-King. It seemed a kind of crazed game, one of those acts that send the intellect laughing even as the stomach quails.

He could not pinch and mould the way the Shigeki slave had because the earth was so dry, so he raised the cheeks by cupping dust beneath his palms, sculpted the brow and nose with a trembling fingertip. He held his breath clutched and shallow, lest he mar his creation with an errant exhalation. He fussed over the work, even used the edge of his fingernail to render details. It was a numb and loving labour. When he was finished, he rested his head in the crook of his arm and gazed at the thing's shadowy profile, trying to blink away the deranged impossibility of it. For a mad moment, it seemed the whole of the World, all the obdurate miles he had travelled, multiplied on and on in every direction, was but the limbless body of the face before him.

King Harweel's
face.

Sorweel hugged his shoulders with a wrestler's fury, grappled with the sobs that kicked through him. "Father?" he cried on a murmur.

"Son..."
the earthen lips croaked in reply.

He felt himself bend back... as if he were a bow drawn by otherworldly hands.

"Water,"
the image coughed on a small cloud of dust,
"climbs the prow..."

Eskeles's words?

Sorweel raised a crazed fist, dashed the face into the combed grasses.

—|—

He neither slept nor lay awake.

He waited in the in-between.

"So all this time?"
he heard himself ask Eskeles.

"The clans have been driven before the Great Ordeal and its rumour, accumulating... Like water before the prow of a boat..."

"Hording..."

Sorweel had seen few boats in his life: fishing hulls, of course, and the famed river galley at Unterpa. He understood the significance of the sorcerer's description.

The problem was that the Scions tracked game to the southwest of the Great Ordeal.

So very far from the prow.

He bided his time in turmoil. His body had lost its instinct for breathing, so he drew air in its stead. Never did the sun seem so long in climbing.

—|—

"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.

—
C
ANTICLES 18:9,
T
HE
C
HRONICLE OF THE
T
USK

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

—
A
SANSIUS,
T
HE
L
IMPING
P
ILGRIM

L
ATE
S
PRING, 20
N
EW
I
MPERIAL
Y
EAR (4132
Y
EAR-OF-THE-
T
USK),
S
OMEWHERE
S
OUTH OF
G
IELGATH...

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.

—|—

T
HE
R
IVER
S
EMPIS

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.