The White-Luck Warrior (52 page)

"You must take."

—|—

The following weeks did not so much pass like a dream as they seemed like one in hindsight.

Despite Anasûrimbor Kayûtas's fine words the day following the Battle of the Horde, he did not so much as consult with Sorweel once when it came to the Sranc, let alone the mountain of trivial issues that confronted any great host on the march. Sorweel and Zsoronga spent most of their time mooning about the perimeter of the Prince-Imperial's entourage, waiting to be called into whatever the ongoing debate.

They were accorded the honour of martial advisers, but in reality they were little more than messengers—runners. This fact seemed to weigh more heavily on Zsoronga than Sorweel, who would have been a runner for his father eventually, had the past months never happened. The Successor-Prince sometimes spent entire watches cursing their lot while they supped together: the Zeümi court, Sorweel had come to realize, was a kind of arena, a place where the nobility were inclined to count slights and nurture grudges, and where politicking through the dispensation of privileges had been raised to a lethal form of art. Zsoronga did not so much despise the actual work of bearing missives—Sorweel himself genuinely savoured the freedom of riding through and about seas of trudging men. What he could not abide, Sorweel decided, was the
future
, the fact that, when he finally found his way back to Domyot, he would be forced to describe things his countrymen could not but see as indignities. That in the sly calms between official discourse, they might murmur "Zsoronga the Runner" to one another and laugh.

More and more, Sorweel saw fractions of his former self in the Zeümi Prince—glimpses of Sorweel the Orphan, Sorweel the Mourner. Zsoronga had learned a dismaying truth about himself in fleeing when Sorweel had turned to save Eskeles. He had also lost his entire entourage—his Brace, as the Zeümi called their boonsmen—as well as his beloved Obotegwa. For all his worldly manner, the Successor-Prince had never experienced
loss
in his privileged life. Now he was stranded, as Sorweel had been stranded, in the host of his enemy. And now he was burdened, as Sorweel had been burdened, with questions of his own worth and honour.

They did not so much speak of these things as act around them, the way young men are prone to do, with only brotherly looks and warm-handed teasing for proof of understanding.

Zsoronga still asked him about the Goddess from time to time, his manner too eager for Sorweel's comfort. The Sakarpi King would simply shrug and say something about waiting for signs, or make some weak joke about Zsoronga petitioning his dead relatives. The toll Zsoronga had paid in self-respect had turned the man's wary hope into a kind of pressing need. Where before he had feared for his friend's predicament, now he
wanted
Sorweel to be the instrument of the Goddess—even needed him to be. Each day seemed to add a granule of spite to the hatred he was slowly accumulating in his soul. He even began to take risks in Kayûtas's distracted presence—insolent looks, snide remarks—trifles that seemed to embolden him as much as they alarmed Sorweel.

"
Pray
to Her!" Zsoronga began to urge. "Mould faces in the earth!"

Sorweel could only look at him in horror, insist that he was trying to no avail, fretting all the while about what traces of his own intent the Anasûrimbor might glimpse in the man's face.

He had to be careful, exceedingly careful. He knew full well the power and cunning of the Aspect-Emperor, having lost his father, his city, and his dignity to him. He knew far better than Zsoronga.

This was why, when he finally mustered the courage to ask his friend about the narindari, those chosen by the Gods to kill, he did so in the guise of passing boredom.

"They are the most feared assassins in the World," the Successor-Prince replied. "Men for whom murder is prayer. Fairly all the Cults have them—and they say Ajokli has no devotees save narindari..."

"But what use would the Gods have of assassins, when they need only deliver calumny and disaster?"

Zsoronga frowned as if at uncertain memories. "Why do the Gods require devotion? Sacrifice? Lives are easy to take. But souls—souls must be
given
."

This was how Sorweel came to think of himself as a kind of divine thief.

"What the Mother gives... You must take."

The problem was that in the passage of days he felt nothing of this divinity. He ached and he hungered. He scratched his buttocks and throttled his little brother. He squatted as others squatted, holding his breath against the reek of the latrines. And he continually
doubted
...

Primarily because what divinity he witnessed belonged to the Anasûrimbor. As before, Kayûtas remained a lodestone for his gaze, but where Sorweel had peered after his Horse and Circumfix standard across the massing of faraway columns, now he could watch him from a distance of several spans. He was, Sorweel came to realize, a consummate commander, orchestrating the activities of numberless thousands with mere words and manner. Requests and appraisals would arrive, and responses and reprimands would be dispatched. Failures would be scrutinized, alternatives considered. Successes would be ruthlessly exploited. Of course, none of these things carried the stamp of divinity, not in and of themselves or in their sum. No, it was the
effortlessness
of the Prince-Imperial's orchestration that came to seem miraculous. The equanimity, the repose, and the ruthless efficacy of the man in the course of making a thousand mortal decisions. It was not, Sorweel eventually decided, quite human...

It was Dûnyain.

And there was the miracle of the Great Ordeal and its relentless northward crawl. Whatever heights the Istyuli afforded, no matter how meagre, he would find his gaze wandering across the Army of the Middle-North, the landslides of trudging men, columns drawing mountainous veils of dust. And if the vision seemed a thing of glory before, it fairly hummed with the
gravitas
of legend now, clothed as it was with crazed memories of what had been endured and with dire premonitions of what was to come.

For despite the toll the Men of the Ordeal had exacted, the Horde had not been defeated. It had reeled back, diminished, grievously wounded, too quick and too amorphous to be run down. Twice he and Zsoronga were called on to deliver missives to the forward pickets—once to Anasûrimbor Moënghus himself. The two of them had galloped ahead with abandon, relieved to be free of the dust and cramp, and wary of the tawny haze that rimmed the horizon before them. Solitary, riding hard across the desolate plain, they felt a peculiar freedom, knowing that Sranc fenced the north in unseen multitudes. Zsoronga told him about a cousin of his who captained a war galley, how he said he loved—and hated—nothing more than sailing in the shadow of an ocean tempest. "Only sailors," the Successor-Prince explained, "know where they stand in their God's favour."

The Schools had been fully mobilized by this time, so as the Horde's dust steamed mountainous above them, they glimpsed sheets of light, not high among the slow swirling veils, but low, near the darkening base—flickers of brilliance through funereal shrouds. They would crane their heads, draw their gaze from the high piling summits, floating bright beneath the sun, to the false night of the foundations, and the dread scale would humble and mortify them. Schools. Nations. Races both foul and illumined. And they understood that even kings and princes counted for nothing when thrown upon the balance with such things.

They would ride dumbstruck, until the first of the pickets became visible, the companies marked by lighter tassels of dust beneath the sky-spanning mark of the Horde. Finding Moënghus—who by this time was notorious for the daring of his exploits—forced them to ride perilously deep, until the sun became little more than a pale smear, and the haunting call of the Horde swelled into a deafening roar.

"Tell me!" the wild-eyed Prince-Imperial cried above the howl, gesturing with his clotted sword to the sunless world about them. "What do infidel eyes see when they look upon my father's foe?"

"Hubris!" Zsoronga called before Sorweel could restrain him. "Mad misadventure!"

"Bah!" Moënghus shouted laughing. "
This
, my friends! This is where Hell concedes Earth to Heaven! Most Men grovel because their fathers grovelled. But
you
! Simply for seeing this, you will know
why
you pray!"

And beyond the Prince-Imperial, Sorweel saw them, the Nuns, striding above obscurities, wracking the earth beneath them. A necklace of shining, warring beads, cast thin across the trackless miles, scattering the Sranc before them.

Day in and day out, burning the earth to glass.

And then there was the greatest witch of all, Anasûrimbor Serwa, who had come to seem a miracle of beauty amid the sweat and Mannish squalor of the march. She rode a glossy brown, perched with one knee drawn high on a Nilnameshi side-saddle, her flaxen hair folded about the perfection of her face, her body slender, almost waifish beneath the simple gowns she wore when not freighted with her billows. She never spoke to Sorweel even though she spent much of her time at her brother's side. She did not so much as look at him, though he could never shake the impression that out of all the shadows that crowded her periphery, she had picked him out for special scrutiny. He was not the only one bewitched by her beauty. He sometimes spent more time watching the others steal glances in her direction than watching her himself. But he did not worship her the way the Zaudunyani did. He did not see her as the daughter of a god. Though he was loathe to admit as much, he feared the yearning—and at times, the raw lust—she inspired in him. And so, as is the wont of men, he often found himself
resenting
, even hating her.

The crazed fact was that he
needed
to hate her. If he were narindari, a kind of divine executioner chosen by the Hundred to deliver the world from the Aspect-Emperor, then what struck him as divine in his enemies had to be demonic—
had
to be, otherwise
he
would be the one dancing from a demon's strings. A Narindar proper—a servant of Ajokli, the evil Four-Horned Brother.

When he was a child, Good and Evil had always
simplified
a world that was unruly and disordered otherwise. Now it vexed him to the point of heartbreak, the treachery of sorting the diabolical and the divine. Some nights he would lie sleepless, trying to
will
Serwa evil, trying to rub pollution into the image of her beauty. But as always the memories of her carrying him across heaving fields of Sranc would rise into his soul's eye, and with it the reeling sense of security and numbing gratitude.

And he would think of the murderous intent he concealed behind his mudded cheeks and of the Chorae he bore hidden in the ancient pouch bound to his hip, and he would despair.

Sometimes, during the more sombre meals he and Zsoronga shared together, he dared voice his more troubling questions, and the two would set aside their bluster and honestly consider all they had seen.

"Golgotterath is not a myth," Sorweel ventured one night. "The Great Ordeal marches against a real foe, and that foe
is
evil. We have seen him with our own eyes!"

"But what does that mean?" Zsoronga replied. "Wickedness is forever warring against wickedness—you should read the annals of my people, Horse-King!"

"Yes, but only when they covet the same things... What could the Aspect-Emperor want with these wastes?"

"For hatred's sake, as well. For hatred's sake."

Sorweel wanted to ask what could inspire such hatred, but he conceded the argument, for he already knew what the Successor-Prince's would say, his argument of final resort, the one that typically doomed Sorweel to watches of cringing sleeplessness.

"But what about the Hundred? Why would the Goddess raise
you
as a knife?"

Unless the Aspect-Emperor were a demon.

It made him feel a worm sometimes, a thing soft and blind and helpless. He would raise his face to the sky, and it would seem he could actually feel the great gears of the Dread Mother's design, churning the perpetual dust on the horizon, clacking inscrutable through the voices of innumerable men. He would feel himself carried on the arc of her epic intent, and he would feel a worm...

Until he remembered his father.

"
Father
—Father!
My bones are your bones!"

Sorweel had always flinched from thoughts of that final day before Sakarpus fell. For so long, recollecting those events had seemed like fumbling spines of glass with waterlogged fingers. But more and more he found himself returning to his memories, surprised to find all the cutting edges dulled. He wondered at the arrival of the stork in the moments before the Inrithi assault—at the way it had singled out his father. He wondered that his father had sent him away, and so
saved his life
, almost immediately after.

He wondered if the Goddess had chosen him even then.

But most of all he pondered their last moment alone together, before they had climbed to man the walls, when they had stood father and son warming themselves over glowering coals.

"There are many fools, Sorwa, men who conceive hearts in simple terms, absolute terms. They are insensible to the war within, so they scoff at it, they puff out their chests and they pretend. When fear and despair overcome them, as they must overcome us all, they have not the wind to
think
... and so they break."

King Harweel had known—even then. His father had known his city and his son were doomed, and he had wanted his son, at least, to understand that fear and cowardice were
inevitabilities
. Kayûtas had said it himself: sense was the plaything of passion. The night of the Ten-Yoke Legion, Zsoronga had fled when Sorweel called because stopping seemed the height of madness. He simply did what was
sensible
, and so found himself standing in the long shadow of his friend's bravery.