The White-Luck Warrior (11 page)

Memories from a different age, a different trial.

"Some," Pokwas was saying, "will tell you the skinnies own the Mop."

"What do you say?"

"That they're tenants, same as us." He frowned and smiled, as if catching himself in the commission of some rank Three Seas folly. "The dead own this land."

—|—

The oblong of bare sky quickly darkened. After a sombre repast, the company spread across the three platforms built into the fallen giant, relishing what was likely a false sense of security even as they cursed the unforgiving edges that crooked their backs and poked their shoulders.

That night was a difficult one. The surrounding darkness was every bit as impenetrable as in Cil-Aujas, for one. And the threat of the Stone Hags had them "on the sharp," as Sarl might say. But the real problem, Achamian eventually decided, lay with the trees.

In the wild lore of witches—those scraps that Achamian had encountered, anyway—great trees were as much living souls as they were conduits of power. One hundred years to awake, the maxim went. One hundred years for the spark of sentience to catch and burn as a slow and often resentful flame. Trees begrudged the quick, the old witches believed. They hated as only the perpetually confused could hate. And when they rooted across blooded ground, their slow-creaking souls took on the shape of the souls lost. Even after a thousand years, after innumerable punitive burnings, the Thousand Temples had been unable to stamp out the ancient practice of tree-burial. Among the Ainoni, in particular, caste-noble mothers buried rather than burned their children, so they might plant a gold-leaf sycamore upon the grave—and so create a place where they could sit with the presence of their lost child...

Or as the Shrial Priests claimed, the diabolical simulacrum of that presence.

For his part, Achamian did not know what to believe. All he knew was that the Mop was no ordinary forest and that the encircling trees were no ordinary trees.

Crypts, Pokwas had called them.

A legion of sounds washed through the night. Sighs and sudden cracks. The endless creak and groan of innumerable limbs. The hum and whine of nocturnal insects. Eternal sounds. The longer Achamian lay sleepless, the more and more they came to resemble a language, the exchange of tidings both solemn and dire.
Listen,
they seemed to murmur,
and be warned...

Men trod our roots... Men bearing honed iron.

According to Pokwas, nightmares were common in the Mop. "You dream horrors," the towering man said, his eyes waxy with unwelcome memories. "Wild things that twist and throttle."

The Plains of Mengedda occurred to the old Wizard, and the Dreams he had suffered marching across them with the Men of the Tusk. Could the Mop be a topos, a place where trauma had worn away the hard rind of the world? Could the trackless leagues before them be soaked in Hell? He had been forced to flee the First Holy War some twenty years previous, so crazed had been his nightmare slumber. What would he suffer here?

Aside from his one nightmarish dream of the finding the No-God, he had dreamed of naught but the same episode since climbing free of Cil-Aujas: the High-King Celmomas giving Seswatha the map detailing the location of Ishuäl—the birthplace of Anasûrimbor Kellhus—telling him to secure it beneath the Library of Sauglish... In the Coffers, no less.

"Keep it, old friend. Make it your deepest secret..."

He lay on the crude platform, his back turned to Mimara. A warmth seeped through the exhausted weight of his body. Pondering rose out of pondering, thought out of thought. He drifted ever further from the mighty trees and their conspiracies, ever further from the ways of the wakeful. And as so often happened when he stood on the threshold of slumber, it seemed he could see, actually see, things that were no more than wisps, shreds of memory and imagination. The golden curve of the map-case. The twin Umeri inscriptions—token curses common to ancient Norsirai reliquaries—saying,
"Doom, should you find me broken."

And he thought,
Strange...

Finding knowledge in sleep.

He stood shackled, one among the gloom of many...

A line of captives, wrist chained to wrist, ankle to ankle, wretched for abuse...

Standing encased in horror and ignorance, a file running the length of a shadowy tunnel...

His eyes rolled in equine panic.
What now? What-what now?

He saw walls, which for an instant seemed golden but formed of mangled thatch, scrub and undergrowth, surging and twining to weave a black corridor about their miserable passage. He could even discern the terminus, over shoulders slouched in woe and capitulation, an opening of some kind, a clearing...

Bright with things he did not want to see.

His teeth were missing... Beaten?

Yes... Beaten from his skull.

"N-no," Achamian sputtered, awareness rising like a fog within him. The trees, he realized.

Trees! Crypts, the scalpers called them...

"Cease!" Achamian cried. But not one of the chained shadows raised their heads in acknowledgment. "Cease!" he raged. "Cease, or I
shall
burn you and your kin! I will make candles of your crowns! Cut trails of ash and black through your heart!"

And somehow he knew that he screamed with the wrong lips in the wrong world.

Gagging shrieks filtered down the hall, ringing as though across iron shields.

Something blared, a sound too engulfing, too guttural to be a mere horn. Without warning the chains yanked him and the shadowy procession forward, one stumbling step toward the light... the
clearing
.

And though all the world's terror loomed before him, the brutalized stranger thought,
Please...

Let this be the end.

—|—

Achamian found himself sitting, gripping his boney shoulders with boney fingers. His ears roared, and the blackness spun. He panted, gathering his wits and wind. Only then did the other sounds of the night creep into his hearing. The distant howl of wolves. The creak of sentience through vaulting limbs. The sound of Pokwas and his gentle snore. Sarl's mumbling growl...

And someone wailing without breath... on the platform below him.
"N-no..."
he heard a hitching, glutinous voice murmur in Gallish.
"Please..."
Then again, hissed through teeth clenched against returning waves of terror,
"Please!"

Hameron, he realized. The one most broken by Cil-Aujas.

There was a time when Achamian had thought himself weak, when he had looked on men such as these scalpers with a kind of complicated envy. But life had continued to heap adversity upon him, and he had continued to survive, to overcome. He was every bit the man he had been, too inclined to obsess, too ready to shoulder the burden of trivial sins. But he no longer saw these ingrown habits as weaknesses. To think, he now knew, was not a failure to act.

Some souls wax in the face of horror. Others shrink, cringe, bolt for an easy life and its many cages. And some, like young Hameron, find themselves trapped between inability and the inevitable. All men cry in the dark. Those who did not were something less than men. Something dangerous. Pity welled through the old Wizard, pity for a boy who had found himself stranded on scarps too steep to climb.

Pity and guilt.

Achamian heard the whine and scuff of someone on the platform above him. He blinked against the dark. The limbs of the fallen tree forked black across the stars. The Nail of Heaven glittered above, higher on the horizon than he had ever seen it before—with his waking eyes at least. The clearing lay bare and silent about them, a swatch of wool soaked in the absolute ink of shadows at night. Mimara lay curled at his side, as beautiful as porcelain in the bluing light.

The platform above formed a ragged rectangle shot with strings of luminance between the timbers. The figure who climbed down from its edge looked a wraith, his clothing was so shredded about the edges. Starlight rippled across the unrusted splints of his hauberk.

The Captain, Achamian realized with dim horror.

The figure shimmed along the trunk, black sheets of hair swaying. He had scarcely set foot on the corner of Achamian's platform before swinging down to the next as nimble as a monkey. The two men regarded each other—for scarce a heartbeat, but it was enough. Ravenous, was all Achamian could think. There was something starved about the eyes that glared from the disgusted squint, something famished about the grin that cut the plaited beard.

The man dropped out of sight. Still staring at the point where their eyes had connected, Achamian heard him land on the platform below, heard the knife whisk from the sheath...

"Sobber!"
a voice hissed.

There were three thuds in quick succession, each carrying the dread timbre of flesh.

Gasping. The choking rattle of pierced lungs. The sound of a heel scraping across barked wood—a feeble kicking.

Then nothing.

A poisonous fog seemed to fill the Wizard, steaming out from his gut into his extremities, something that at once burned and chilled. Without thinking he lay back beside Mimara, closed his eyes in the pretense of sleep. The noise of Lord Kosoter climbing back to his platform seemed scabrous thunder in his ears. It was all Achamian could do not to raise warding hands against the sound.

For several moments he simply breathed against the fact of what had happened—against the absence of the life that had been weeping below him only moments before. He had sat immobile and listened to it happen. Then he had pretended to sleep. He had sat there and watched a boy murdered in the name of his lie... The lie of a Wizard who had made benjuka pieces out of men.

The obsession.

Strength,
Achamian told himself.
This! This is what Fate demands of you...
If
his heart had not yet hardened to flint, he knew it would before this journey was done. You could not kill so many and still care.

Fail or succeed, he would become something less than a man. Something dangerous.

Like the Captain.

—|—

Nothing was said about the dead man in the morning. Not even Mimara dared speak, either because the atrocity was too obvious or too near. They simply gnawed and stared off in random directions while Hameron's blood dried to a rind along the bottom of his platform's timbers. Even Sarl seemed loathe to breach the silence. If any looks were exchanged, Achamian found Lord Kosoter's presence too oppressive to watch for them.

The fact that nothing was said about
anything
—including the Stone Hags and their attack—said everything: the Captain's new-found faith in the Rules did not sit well with his men. The company resumed its march through the deep forest gloom, somehow more desolate, more lost and exposed, for the absence of just two souls.

Once again they struck at a tangent to the mountains, down, so that walking at once seemed easier and harder on the knees. They skirted the banks of a swift-flowing tributary for a time, eventually crossing where it panned across boulder-chocked shallows. The elms and oaks, if anything, were even more gigantic. They threaded a makeshift path between the trunks, some of them so immense and hoary they seemed more natural formations than trees. All of their lowermost limbs were dead, shorn of bark, radial tiers stacked upon radial tiers, creating a false, skeletal canopy beneath the canopy proper. Whenever Achamian glanced up at them, they resembled black veins, networks of them, wending and forking across higher screens of sun-glowing green.

As the day wore on, the gaps between the walkers seemed to expand. This was when Pokwas and Galian, doing their best to shun Somandutta, happened to find themselves abreast Achamian and Mimara. They walked in guarded silence for a time. Pokwas softly hummed some tune—from his native Zeüm, Achamian decided, given its strange intonations.

"At this rate," Galian finally ventured, "it'll just be him sitting on a pile of bones by time the skinnies get to us." The Nansur spoke without looking at anyone.

"Aye," Pokwas agreed. "
Our
bones."

They were not so much searching for an understanding, it seemed, as they were acknowledging one that already existed. If anything proves that Men are bred for intrigue, it is the way conspiracies require no words.

"He's gone mad," Achamian said.

Mimara laughed—a sound the old Wizard found shocking. Ever since the Stone Hags and their abortive ambush, she had seemed bent on silent brooding. "
Gone
mad, you say?"

"No one's survived more slogs," Galian said.

"Yes," Pokwas snorted. "But then no one has a pet Nonman either."

"Things are topsy out here," Galian replied. "You know that. Crazy is sane. Sane is crazy." The former Nansur Columnary fixed his canny gaze on Achamian.

"So what do we do?" Achamian asked.

Galian's eyes roamed the surrounding gloom, then clicked back. "You tell me, Wizard..." There was anger in his tone, a resolution to voice hard questions. Achamian found his gaze as piercing as it was troubling—a fellow soldier's demand for honesty. "What are the chances a company this small will make your precious Coffers? Eh?"

This was when Achamian realized that he stood
against
these men. Mad or not, Lord Kosoter showed no signs of wavering. If anything his most recent acts of madness displayed a renewed resolve. As much as Achamian hated to admit it, Hameron
had
been a liability...

The old Wizard found himself warding away thoughts of Kellhus and his ability to sacrifice innocents.

"We've scarce reached the Fringe," Pokwas exclaimed, "and we're three-quarters dead!"

The Fringe, the Wizard recalled, was what scalpers called the boundary of Sranc country.

"As I said," Galian replied. "At this rate."

"Once we clear the Meorn Wilderness," Achamian declared with as much certitude as he could muster, "we'll be marching in the wake of the Great Ordeal. Our way will be cleared for us."