R. Bakker - The white-luck warrior

Cleric stood atop the heights of a shattered inner wall, gazing high after the thing. Brush fires raged beyond him, throwing lines of orange across his jaw and cheek. His nimil chain glistened in the dry sunlight, and for the first time the old Wizard saw the faint lines of filigree worked across its innumerable links.

Herons. Herons and lions.

"Triumph!" Achamian cried out in relief and exaltation. "A victory worthy The Sagas!"

He hesitated in sudden realization. What did glory mean, when none could remember it?

And what was life, without glory to illuminate it?

The Nonman turned his profile to him, said nothing.

"You won't remember, will you?"

"Shadow," Nil'giccas replied, resuming his study of the distant sky. "I will remember the shadow it casts…" He turned to regard the Wizard. "Across the grief that follows."

The grief that follows.

The old Wizard matched the Nonman King's gaze for what seemed a hundred heartbeats. Finally, he nodded in slow resignation, scratched his chin beneath what remained of his beard.

"Yes," Achamian said. "Seswatha loved you as well."

Galian makes a noise, a grunt or a sob-she is not sure.

One moment he's an iron shadow grinding flaccid against her. Then he is gone.

She bolts upright, sees him arched across the forest floor, kicking his left foot, desperately clutching at his back. Koll stands above him, hunched and famine-frail, his hands clenching and unclenching. Galian flops onto his stomach, gags and screams. She sees a pommel jutting from below his left shoulder blade, a flower of crimson and black blooming through the links of his hauberk.

A breathless heartbeat passes. Xonghis rushes to assist Galian while Pokwas draws his great tulwar from his waist, sweeps it through the air before falling into his Sword-dancer stance.

"Fucking Stone Hag!" he cries. "I knew I should have cut your throat!"

Still clutching Lord Kosoter's head, Sarl sits rocking on the Captain's inert back, begins cackling. Light sparkles through the screens of foliage beyond him-from the direction of the Holy Library. A roaring whoosh follows…

Pokwas falls upon Koll in sweeping fury. His blade seems like silver ink, sketching sigils through open air. Koll effortlessly threads the gauntlet, ducking, leaping…

The Zeumi Sword-dancer pauses, eyes round in disbelief.

Koll dives to his right, cartwheels across the ground like a crab, toward Sarl and his Captain's draining corpse. The Sergeant scrambles backward.

Koll flits past him, rolls past the Captain's forgotten pack, then comes to his feet brandishing Squirrel. His stance low, his look darts from Pokwas to Xonghis, who has taken up a flanking position, his bow drawn.

More explosions rock the near distance. A titanic roar shivers the sky.

The starved Stone Hag begins laughing, a sound that begins human but ends like screaming wolves. Xonghis releases his shaft. Koll swats with Squirrel but misses. The arrow thuds into his neck.

Koll falls backward but somehow rolls back onto his feet. With his free hand he clutches the shaft. Pulls.

Screams.

The fingers of his face break apart, then fly open.

Mimara lurches to her feet, stumbles to Galian, who lies dying.

Crying out in Zeumi, Pokwas rushes the thing called Koll, his tulwar cutting poetry into the air. Steel rings against steel. Squirrel is nicked but does not shatter. Xonghis lets fly two more arrows. The thing lunges clear the first, but the second catches it high in the thigh. It barely survives the black giant's hollering assault.

Mimara stands breathless. Qirri pulses through her, makes a war-drum of her heart.

Xonghis whirls at the sound of her approach, releases. His arrow whistles past her left ear-a sound like a rip. She plunges Galian's sword into the Imperial Tracker's exposed armpit. She feels his death, the inside of him, communicated through blade and grip.

Beyond their clearing, the forest burns about the silhouette of stumped ruins. Sarl has resumed his phlegmatic howl, his expression crushed into a thousand laughing lines.

The whooshing tulwar catches the thing called Koll mid-leap. It careens through the air, tries to land on its remaining leg, tumbles backward. Closing for the kill, the Zeumi howls in triumph…

Fails to hear her naked approach.

Smoke piled over the derelict fortifications, drawn twisting into the high blue sky. Within the ruined Library, several smaller fires fanned bright in the gusting wind, sending showers of sparks and ash over the old Wizard and the Nonman King.

"You don't have to do this!" Achamian cried.

Still standing upon the wall he had climbed to peer after the dragon, Cleric tore his runed purse from its leather cord. He stared at it meditatively, hefted it in his palm. Achamian felt his heart clutch at his breast, seeing it dandled so near open flame. He realized he has worshipped this thing. The shrivelled folds pinched into creases about its drawstring. The faint impression of weight bulging within, as though it contained a mouse. It seemed absurd that such a low object could become the talisman, the fetish from which the whole expedition had come to hang. A pouch filled with soot.

"No!" Achamian cried.

But it was too late. Cleric bent his head sideways, as if to itch his ear against his shoulder, then swung the pouch upside down. The ashes of Cu'jara Cinmoi poured out in a dun stream. The wind fanned it into ghostly nothingness.

"You don't have to do this!" the old Wizard cried.

The dark eyes fixed him.

"I do…"

"Why? Why?"

"Because I remember no triumph…" He flinched, seemed to lose the thread of his voice. Sudden fury claimed the heights of his expression. "Only betrayal!" he roared. "Heartbreak and ruin!"

A kind of indignation welled through the Wizard, the outrage that overcomes Men whenever absurdities are stacked too high. "No!" he bellowed. "I will name you! I will be your book, and you will read me! You are Nil'giccas! The Last King of Mansions-the greatest of the Siqu!"

The fires seemed to wax at the sound of Cleric's warbling laughter.

"Seswatha!" the Nonman called. "Old dead friend… Will you hear my sermon?"

Achamian could only gaze in disgust and disbelief.

The Nonman muttered blasphemies that filled his eyes and mouth with light. He stepped from the summit and was aloft, climbing a floating arc that took him high above the fires surging through the courtyard.

"'Nil'giccas!' you call- beseech! as if trying to awaken some truth slumbering within me."

Flames roiled about the silhouettes of trees. Smoke wreathed him. Heat rippled across his hanging form. And the Wizard realized that he was actually going to attack.

A Quya Master of old, a hero of wars older than the Tusk, made ready his murder.

"You think Nil'giccas is something I have lost!" the Nonman King called down. "And therefore something that I can recover!"

Achamian was weary. He was bruised and he was burned-even well rested and whole, he would not dare a contest such as this. At least he was practised, thanks to the dragon. He could feel the Cants and Wards within him, tingling weaves of arcane meaning, hanging like possibilities…

Yet he did not strike.

"You forget," Cleric shouted, "that before the Nonman King's passing, I did not exist!"

The figure continued floating on a rising arc, one that took Achamian as its compass point. Sheets of stone toppled into the inferno below, kicking constellations of sparks in the wind.

"I can no more recover him than you can recover your mother's virgin womb."

Achamian stood rooted and frail before the rising conflagration. Strike! something howled within him. Strike now!

"I am Incariol!" the Nonman screamed. " Cleric! And you shall not survive my lesson!"