The White-Luck Warrior (71 page)

"Mother once told me they dwelt some place in the northern wastes, that they have spent thousands of years breeding themselves the way Kianene breed horses or the Ainoni breed dogs. Breeding and training."

Sorweel struggled to recall what it was Zsoronga had told him about the heretic, the Wizard named Achamian, and his claims against the Aspect-Emperor.

"Breeding and training for what?"

She looked at him with a wisp of a scowl, as if noting a regrettable sluggishness in his soul.

"To grasp the Absolute."

"Absolute?" he asked, speaking the word, which he had never before heard, slowly so as to make it his own.

"Ho!" Moënghus called, yanking a small bass onto the riverbank. It thrashed silver and gold even as it blackened the bare stone with wetness.

"The God of Gods," Serwa said, beaming at her brother.

—|—

The Men of the Circumfix were born to proud War. Most all of them had been tested on a dozen battlefields and had not so much developed a contempt for numbers as an appreciation for skill and training. They had seen single companies of hard-bitten knights rout whole armies of Orthodox rabble. Numbers often meant nothing on the field of war. But there were numbers, and then there were
numbers
. A mob, when it became great enough, became a living thing, vast and amorphous, shrinking when pricked, engulfing when roused, always too numerous to possess a singular will. The Horde, the Believer-Kings were beginning to realize, was unconquerable simply because it was too enormous to ever
realize
that it was conquered.

"Ours is the station of glory," King Umrapathur declared, "for we have been given the yoke of victory. The fate of the Great Ordeal now turns upon us—the fate of the
very World
—and we shall not fail!"

"Ours is the station of death!" Carindûsû cried out in heretical contradiction.

And indeed, despite the lofty rhetoric of their lords, a presentiment of doom began shadowing the hearts of the common warriors. They were simple men, for the most part, hailing from Cironj, Girgash, Nilnamesh, and beyond. They thirsted and they starved. They had marched to the ends of the earth, into lands where cities were overgrown graves, surrounded by an enemy they could not close with, whose numbers curtained the very sky with dust. They had witnessed the might of the Schoolmen. They knew well the indomitable strength of their mounted lords. And now they knew that power, for all its miraculous glory, was naught but a nuisance to their inscrutable foe.

What difference could their hungry ranks make?

No one dared speak this question, not so much for fear of the Judges as for fear of the answers. But it began filing down the sharp edge of their resolve nevertheless. The songs they raised became ever more listless and half-hearted, until many of their caste-nobles forbade singing altogether. Soon the Army of the South trudged in exhausted silence, fields of dusty men, shambling without spark or purpose, their faces blank with long-hanging apprehension. In the evenings, they swapped rumours of doom while gnawing on their meagre repast.

The attempts to clear their flanks were abandoned—the losses among the cavalry, in particular, had become prohibitive. Other tactics were explored, especially with regards to the Culling, but an air of ritual futility began subverting their efforts, arcane or otherwise. Daily the Interval tolled and the pickets rode out, the Schoolmen walked the low sky above them, and together they pricked the elephantine Horde with mere needles.

The true fanatics among the Zaudunyani, those who repelled for the violence of their belief, began haranguing the more skeptical souls, for their thoughts were so disordered as to see
redemption
in the horror looming about them. Of those they exhorted, some took heart, but many others took exception. Fights began breaking out among nobles and menials alike, many of them lethal. The Judges found themselves condemning ever more men to the lash and gibbet.

Meanwhile, the Horde grew ever greater, until its unearthly howl could be heard at all times. At night men held their breath listening... and despaired.

To his father's chagrin, Prince Charapatha told the council about the typhoon he once survived at sea. "Sunlight fell," he said, his eyes vacant with unwelcome recollection. "You could drop a feather onto the deck, so calm was the wind. Yet thunderheads wreathed the whole world about us, a ring of dark that would span nations..." He looked across the assembled Lords of the Ordeal. "I fear we march in just such an eye of false peace."

Afterward in the privacy of his pavilion, Umrapathur struck his famed son full across the mouth, such was his outrage. "Speak of
glory
, if you speak at all!" he roared. "Speak of will and iron and enemies gagging beneath your heel! Are you such a fool, Chara? Can you not see that
fear
is our foe? By feeding it you feed
them
—even as you rob us of the stomach to fight!"

And Charapatha wept, such was his shame. He repented, vowed never to speak save in the name of hope and courage.

"
Belief
, my son," Umrapathur said, wondering that a famed hero such as his son could still act a little boy in paternal eyes. "Belief empowers men far more than knowledge."

And so was their rift healed with respect and wisdom. What father does not correct his son? But several among their householders overheard their quarrel, and rumours of discord and indecision slipped from tongue to ear to tongue, until all the host feared their King-General desperate and weak. Umrapathur, it was said, had stopped his ears even to those he loved and would no longer countenance the Truth.

—|—

The three hostages-to-be had come to what seemed a great forested basin, so vast its outer rim rose into hazed oblivion but proved to be a valley. A river wound through it, roping across the floodplains in meandering loops, broad enough to enclose slender islands. The Holy Aumris, Serwa declared, awed and excited despite the toll of their leap. The very nursery of Mannish civilization.

"This was how
they
found it... the first Men who set foot in this vale so many thousands of years ago."

While she slept, Sorweel found a seat overlooking the vista between the roots of a towering oak that stood poised over a slope so steep as to seem half of a gorge. He sat dozing, watching as the iron dark of the river transformed with the climbing sun, becoming green and brown and blue and, along certain sections, a miraculous silver. The River Aumris... where the High Norsirai had raised the first great cities of stone, where Men had knelt like children at the knee of their Nonmen foes and learned the ways of art and commerce and sorcery.

Some time passed before he saw the ruins.

At first he noticed only their sum, like a ghostly pictogram glimpsed through the trees, lines writ for the Heavens to read. Then he found himself picking out individual works, some actually breaching the forest canopy: the arcs of dead towers, the lines of once-imposing fortifications. Where before he had gazed across mere wilderness, now he peered across a monumental cemetery, a place humming with loss and history. It seemed absurd, even impossible, that he had failed to see it. But there it was, as clear as a Galeoth tattoo, only laid across the reach of the earth...

The remains of some mighty city.

Serwa began crying out in her sleep so violently as to send both Sorweel and Moënghus sprinting to her. The Prince-Imperial shrugged Sorweel aside when he hesitated over her thrashing form, then pulled her in his powerful embrace. She awoke sobbing.

For some reason, the sight of her clutching her brother with weeping
gratitude
unnerved him as much as anything he had witnessed since Sakarpus's fall. Everything but everything seemed to attest to the righteousness of the Aspect-Emperor's war against the World's second ending. The sheer might of the Great Ordeal. Eskeles and his unnerving lesson on the plain. The skin-spy so dramatically revealed in the Umbilicus. The terror of the Horde and the cunning of the Ten-Yoke Legion. Even the trust and charity the Anasûrimbor had extended to
him
, their enemy...

Not to mention the shining presence of the Aspect-Emperor himself.

She had dreamed of the nameless city below them, Sorweel knew. She had
relived
the horror of its destruction even as he had pondered its overgrown imprint. And it struck him breathless, stationary in a way he had never known. The sight of her weeping somehow resurrected the circumstances that had so reduced her, a woman who seemed impervious to grief. He could almost hear the horns clawing the wind, glimpse the dread Whirlwind that Eskeles had always described in hand-wringing tones...

Nothing is quite so easy as dismissing the folly of the dead—so long as they remain dead.

—|—

She brought them to the ruins, though she could have leapt much farther, across the valley if need be. The Cant taxed her as profoundly as any, but she insisted on wandering with them, through the ruins of ancient Trysë, the Holy Mother of Cities.

The trees towered, formed high-hanging canopies that made gloom of the forest floor. The walls and bastions still loomed where not pulled down by the ages, their foundations buried, their torsos stained black, the blocks spangled with moss and lichens. In some places the rising tide of earth had inundated all, leaving only mossed debris scattered across the forest floor, fragments that would be taken for mere rocks and boulders in a deeper gloom. In other places, the loam and life had not so accumulated, leaving random stretches of nude ruin: heaped bricks, canted steps, walls finning the ground, the drums of toppled pillars.

Serwa led them across the destruction, her face flushed with excitement, her voice fluting in the manner Sorweel had heard so many times from girls her age, only about matters far more profound and tragic. The Sakarpi King thought he recognized some of the things she spoke of, either directly or through the slanted similarity of names. But far and away most of what she told them he had never heard before—nor had he imagined that Men period, let alone those who had fathered his ancestors, had battled and strived and conquered in days that were thought ancient
by the ancients
.

He had never heard of Cûnwerishau, the first God-King to extend the might of his hand along the length of the River Aumris. And aside from Sauglish, he had never heard of any of the other cities that perpetually vied with Trysë for dominance: Etrithatta, Lokor, and Ûmerau, whose might would grow to exceed even that of Trysë, and whose language would remain the Sheyic of the Ancient North long after she was broken by a people called the Cond. "
Your people
, Horse-King," she said, her eyes alight with connections Sorweel could not fathom. "Or the cousins of your ancestors, to be exact, born to the lands just north of what you Sakarpi call the Pale. More than three thousand years ago, they cracked the walls of ancient Ûmerau and swept through this valley. Their ardour glutted, they spared all the great works they found and made slaves of those they would pillage."

She spoke as if he should celebrate these facts, take heart in the far-flung incarnations of his people's blood. But again Sorweel was afflicted with doubt and wonder. To know a man among the Sakarpi was to know his father. And here was this woman, telling him the truth of his fathers'
fathers
... The truth of
himself
!

What did it mean to be better known by outlanders than by oneself? What kind of fools were the Sakarpi, to find heart and honour—let alone
self
—in flattering fables spun across the ages?

How wrong had they been? Even proud Harweel.

They came to rockier ground, and she quickened her stride so much that Sorweel found himself breathless for trying to match her pace up the slope. A mysterious clearing opened between the trees, and for the first time they found themselves wandering among truly monumental works: blocks of hewn granite, as tall as a man and as long as a four-wheeled wain, some spilled, others assembled into cyclopean walls. She rushed forward without hesitation, wending through slots of stone and inciting any number of curses from her brother. They raced after her.

Panting, Sorweel paused before the sight of open sky, the blue so much deeper than the plains. He squinted against the sudden collusion of light and openness. A broad rectangle extended before him, heaped with stone ruin, yet miraculously devoid of overgrowth. The encroaching forest loomed about its perimeter as if leaning against some unseen barricade—or restrained by some unknown horror. He stood upon a far corner so that he could see the aisle of gargantuan pillars that braced the concourse in its entirety, as well as the lesser columns that lined its outer precincts. Most of them had tumbled—the smaller, outer columns especially—but enough remained standing to conjure the sense of the whole and to deliver the image of the long-lost ceilings to the soul's eye.

Sorweel watched a bee spiral from the gloom, then reel away to the edges of the clearing until it found a circumventing line. Even the birds he saw batting between the crowns of the surrounding elms and oaks seemed to avoid the open spaces, as if loathe to dare the scrutiny of the stage...

The Sakarpi King caught his breath, knowing he stood before an arena of lost glories—phantoms. A place that had lived too fiercely to ever truly die.

Oblivious, Serwa raced ahead, darted across the heaped stone and between the monstrous columns that remained. "Behold!" she cried with girlish disbelief. "Behold the King-Temple!"

Sorweel and Moënghus shared a hesitant glance.

"Bah!" the Prince-Imperial spat, running after her.

Sorweel trailed walking, trying hard to smile.

"How many times?" she called. It seemed she jostled with long-dead shades in his soul's eye.

"Stow your voice!" her brother commanded.

But she just frowned and continued, crying, "Here!
Here!
" looking about as though trying to orient her waking eyes with her sleeping. "On this
very
spot, Podi, I have supped and celebrated with the High-King, Celmomas—our little brother's namesake!—and his Knights-Chieftain."