The White-Luck Warrior (75 page)

Never had he witnessed such a thing, breath-stealing, filled with rage and horror and imperious lust. He was not who he was for seeing it. Not one of his concerns survived the trespass before him. Not his father. Not the Tear of God that would avenge him.

Nothing mattered save
this
...

The children of a god mating. The woman he loved
betraying
...

His little brother called out for him. He found him, grasped him, cold fingers opposite a burning palm.

And he coupled with the sinuous image writhing before him, arched in answer to the man's black-haired grunting, spilled his seed to the girl's high blonde cries.

—|—

The mounded heights of Irsûlor smoked and crawled.

The Schoolmen hung in the air above, raining death upon their wicked foe. They wept even as they spoke hacking lights, for when they looked out, all creation whorled and seethed with foul Sranc. And of the tens of thousands who had been their brothers, all were dead and desecrated...

Shields trampled. Corpses pierced, clotted with rutting forms, like ants upon apple peels.

The Schoolmen scourged the embankments, pummelled the slopes, until Irsûlor reared like a mountain burnt to the stub, sheeted in blasted, blackened dead. Man, Sranc, Bashrag...

And still the multitudes surged forward. The Horde reached out into obscurity, a cloak of twisting maggots thrown over the horizon, howling. Howling.

And the Schoolmen were so very alone.

His crimson billows black for filth and fire, Saccarees descended, set foot upon the charred summit in a heartbroken bid to recover Umrapathur's body. But he could scarce distinguish Sranc from Man, let alone man from man. He looked out, over the tiers of smoking carcasses, through the comb of brilliant sorceries, out across the tumult of the plains, and it seemed he gazed
upon the future
, what would become of the World should his Holy Prophet fail...

Raving. Vicious. Devoid of meaning or mercy.

The Schoolmen heard their Prophet before they saw him, shouting arcana in a voice like a thunderclap—the one voice that could shrug away the burden of the Horde's roar. He came from the west, the
Aspect-Emperor
, sparking a brilliant blue through miles of intervening filth. Where he walked the air, whole tracts of earth exploded beneath him, as though the God himself pummelled the powdered soil. Sranc were thrown in mangled thousands, flying hundreds of paces before raining across their inhuman brothers.

Anasûrimbor Kellhus came to them and bid them follow him home.

—|—

She lowered her head to his chest in carnal exhaustion and lay there, her breasts kissing the barrel of his chest, her back bent to the arc of an oyster shell. Sorweel stared, held motionless by the shock of his dwindling ardour. Shame. Elation. Terror.

Knowledge that he could not move without alerting them robbed him of the ability to breathe. He stood stupefied as she turned to him and smiled.

He ducked in abject panic and shame.

"Who are we," she called out in a drowsy laugh, "for you to abuse yourself so?"

He fumbled to fasten his breeches, then stood, knowing that the shadow of his lust could still be plainly seen. But it was almost as if their shamelessness demanded he be brazen in return. She climbed from her slack-limbed brother, stood in the dappled sunlight, entirely naked, and at one with the wilderness for it.

How? How could she do this to me?

Tears burned in his eyes. Did he
love
her? Was that it? Was the son of Harweel such an errant fool?

She stood utterly exposed before him, her limbs lithe, her hips narrow, her pale skin flushed for the violence of her passion. Sunlight drew the shadow of her breasts across her white ribs, made golden filaments of her sex.

"Well?" she asked, smiling.

Indifferent, Moënghus began dressing at his leisure behind her.

"But—!" Sorweel heard himself cry like a fool.

Her look was at once demure and arrogant. Moënghus glanced darkly over a muscled shoulder.

"You're
brother and sister
!" he blurted. "What you... you
did
... is a... is a..."

He could only stand and stare at them incredulously.

"Who are
you
to judge us?" she cried laughing. "We are the fruit of a far, far taller tree, Horse-King."

For the first time he realized the derision and contempt they concealed in that name.

"And if you get pregnant?"

She frowned and smiled, and for the first time Sorweel realized that whatever warmth she had showed him was mere pantomime. That for all the human blood coursing through her veins, she was, and always would be, Dûnyain.

"Then I fear my Holy Father would have
you
killed," she said.

"Me? But I have done nothing!"

"But you have
witnessed
, Sorweel—your thigh is sticky for it! And that is far from nothing."

His breeches fastened, Moënghus strode behind his sister, reached about her to place a scarred paw upon her womb. He kissed the hot of her neck, twiddled the fine blonde strands of her sex between finger and thumb.

"She's right, Sorweel," he said, grinning as if entirely oblivious to the madness between them. "People have a habit of dying around us..."

The Sakarpi King stood squinting against his turmoil. His heart pumped outrage instead of blood.

"As do nations!" he spat before turning on his heel.

"A son!" the Grandmistress of the Swayali called out after him, her voice mellow and bewitching. "A son. A daughter. And an
enemy
!"

He fairly convulsed, so violent was the shaking that overcame him. It wracked him all the way back to their camp on the promontory. He found himself fearing the drops beyond the edges. Never had he been so shamed... so humiliated.

Never had he hated with such dark intensity.

—|—

Though the Great Ordeal survived, though their inhuman enemy had been thrown back to the rim of the horizon, the Second Battle of the Horde was nothing less than a disaster. The Holy Aspect-Emperor declared the Breaking of the Ordeal undone and commanded the Armies of the West and the East to converge upon the Army of the Middle-North. None of the Believer-Kings doubted his decision, even though this most recent defeat of the Horde had increased the opportunities for forage. King Sasal Umrapathur, one of their number, was dead, as were his kinsmen and vassals. They felt his ruin keenly, for he had breathed as they breathed, ruled as they ruled, and, most importantly,
believed as they believed
. If they did not understand as much before, they appreciated the grim truth now: their faith was no surety.

"The righteous," King Proyas would remind his fellows, "bleed no less than the wicked."

The Armies gathered without fanfare or celebration, for the Men of the Circumfix were too hungry and astonished, and there were far too many absences among them. A pall had been drawn across the hosts, a shadow immune to the arid sun. Old friends were reunited in grief and lamentation. They traded stories of Irsûlor between them, and the truth suffered little for the inevitable distortions. They had witnessed events so extreme as to outrun the possibility of exaggeration.

They had come to a land called Akirsuäl. In times of old it had been a frontier province of Kûniüri, sparsely populated, famed only for a hill called Swaranûl, which rose solitary and inexplicable above broken flood plains. Swaranûl was a place holy to the ancient High Norsirai, for it was here that the Gods had come to the chieftains of their many tribes and granted them tenure for all the lands within a thousand leagues.

The Holy Aspect-Emperor called on his Believer-Kings to assemble and to follow him. Climbing broken and overgrown steps, he brought them to the summit of Swaranûl, into the pillared ruins of the Hiolis, and stood so they could see the Great Ordeal spread across the alluvial plains below. And though their losses had been grievous, the tents and pavilions of the combined host still embroidered the land to the horizon. Arms and armour winked in the sunlight, so that it seemed diamonds had been scattered across the whole earth. And they took no little heart in this vision of their glory.

Prince Charapatha was there, and many were the condolences extended to him. Saccarees, however, stood alone and brooding, shunned because of his rumoured fratricide.

The Holy Aspect-Emperor opened wide his haloed hands. The Lords of the Ordeal turned to him in reverence and sorrow.

"I have delivered you to the Waste," he said, the resonances of his voice cupping heart and ear alike. "And now even the stoutest hearts among you fear that I have brought you to your doom. For though I warned you of the Sranc, described for you the immensity of their number and the cunning of our Enemy's machinations, you find yourself dismayed."

Several called out in contradiction, and a cacophony of warlike declarations reverberated through the temple ruins. The Aspect-Emperor silenced them with a glowing palm.

"They are the filings and we are the lodestone. Were we to concentrate, march ranks closed along the shores of the Neleost, they would come. Were we to scatter across the High Istyuli's desolate heart, they would come. It matters not what path we take. It matters not what we do. The Sranc will come and come, and we will be forced to destroy them."

Like ethereal fingers, the intonations of his voice stretched wide then concentrated, to better seize the passions of his congregation, and to hold them...

"Irsûlor..."
he said, breathing horror into the name. "Irsûlor is the very proof of our greater peril. A dozen Ordeals could march as we have marched, slaughter as we have slaughtered, and still the Sranc would not be exhausted. Were the No-God to awaken, they would be seized by a single dark and malicious will, and for all its might and glory Mankind would be doomed. The very World," he said, balancing existence upon an outstretched hand, "would be given over to wretchedness and rutting darkness..."

Laments climbed into a ragged chorus.

"So what are we to do?" King Saubon called out. "We thirst, and are sickened for drinking. And we
hunger
, until our shoulders are naught but hooks, and our axes and cudgels grow heavy with our frailty. We have stumbled with Irsûlor. Now we stagger."

These words provoked consternation among many of the Believer-Kings, for they thought such doubts an insult to Saubon's exalted station. "Stay your impertinence!" the bellicose King Hogrim called out in reproach.

"No," the Holy Aspect-Emperor said to the long-bearded King. "We must speak plainly. Only honesty provides truth. Only truth delivers triumph."

He stepped into their midst, placed his blessed hand first upon Hogrim's shoulder, then upon Saubon's forearm.

"As many of you have surmised," he said, "I have deceived you as to our stores, saying we had less when we had more. I have
starved
you so that our rations would carry us as far as possible."

"So what are we to do?" King Saubon called out yet again.

More shouts climbed from the assembly, this time in discord, for as many called out in assent as against the Exalt-General's presumption.

The clamour wilted in the light of their Holy Prophet's sad smile.

"Scavenge what strength you will," he said, striding from their midst to reclaim the ritual heights. "Ponder your wives, your children—ponder your soul. Fear not the spectre of thirst, for soon the Neleost, the Misty Sea, will heave dark before us. And fear not starvation..."

He turned, taking two pillars as his frame and the enormity of the Great Ordeal as his beyond, the hundreds of thousands streaming and milling across all that could be seen. He burned as a beacon before it.

The breeze trilled through the plaited flax of his beard. The chutes of his gown swayed.

"To suffer is to bear evil," he said, "and we must suffer to see our World saved. No matter where it delivers us, what madness, what evil,
we must follow the Shortest Path...
"

The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas walked, luminous among the doubtful and afraid. He acknowledged each of them with the simple, loving profundity of his gaze. He gave them heart even as he appalled them. For they understood what he was about to say, the truth they dared not whisper even in solitude.

"Henceforth, our very foe shall sustain us..."

The dread command had been given, at long last.

"Henceforth, we eat Sranc."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Momemn

The truth of all polity lies in the ruins of previous ages, for there we see the ultimate sum of avarice and ambition. Seek ye to rule for but a day, because little more shall be afforded you. As the Siqû are fond of saying, Cû'jara Cinmoi is dead.

—
G
OTAGGA,
P
ARAPOLIS

Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.

—
A
JENCIS,
T
HE
T
HIRD
A
NALYTIC OF
M
EN

L
ATE
S
UMMER, 20
N
EW
I
MPERIAL
Y
EAR (4132
Y
EAR-OF-THE-
T
USK),
M
OMEMN

Some journeys required immobility.