R. Bakker - The white-luck warrior

Still propped between stone jaws, Sarl watches them from a distance. Sunlight warms the world beyond him.

Once again they sit knee to knee, as father and daughter. Once again they taste the other's finger. But this time the ash is more white than black, and the strength that shivers through them has a more melancholy tenor. The Captain and the mad Sergeant are still watching them when they turn.

Mimara gazes at him, thinking she should at least call out. But even from a distance she can see the blood painting the creases of his face. And the Captain's mood looks exceedingly foul.

"A real chopper!"

By some miracle an oak leaf falls before her, swinging to and fro through the air. She picks it out of emptiness. Purple lines vein the lobes of waxy green. Yielding to an unaccountable impulse, she takes Cleric's pouch and taps a small pile of ash into the bowl of the leaf, which she then folds around it. Gazing at Sarl, she sets the small packet upon a low marble stump jutting from the earth before her-an armless shoulder.

"What are you doing?" Achamian asks.

"I don't know."

The scalper watches them, as taut and intent as any other starving animal. They hear a low-clucking gurgle…

Then horns, Sranc horns, pitch doom across the horizon. Mimara clutches her belly through her armour.

"Come," she says to the old Wizard. "I tire of Sauglish."

Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Kuniuri

They flee through the forests and valleys of what was once Kuniuri, more exposed, more fugitive, than at any time in their tumultuous lives. A week passes before the skinnies find them.

Nights of madness follow.

She finds it strange the way they simply appear out of otherwise idyllic forests. Sranc. Famished mobs of them. They are like a nocturnal cancer, poisonous for not belonging. The Wizard explains their manufacture, how in ages lost the Inchoroi used the Tekne to pervert the Bios of the Nonmen. "They coveted the world," he says, "so they fashioned a race that would spare it, creatures that would hunt their foes only, consuming the low things of the earth otherwise."

The fugitive couple cleaves to the sun as much as possible during the days, but they are often attacked regardless. The old Wizard wants to walk above the mayhem, but she refuses to abandon her two Chorae. So each night they search for high places where they can huddle behind his Wards.

It is always the same. The old Wizard bids her to crouch at his side, to take care that she not let her Chorae stray too close to the circuit of his sorcerous defences. And he sings his mad-muttering song, assails their howling rush with wicked lights. They do not stop. They never stop, not even when the smoke of their burning bodies pillars the sky. They throw themselves at the glowing curves, shrieking and wheezing and hacking. Crude axes, hammers, and swords. Loose strips of iron for armour. Gibbering chieftains decked in what totems and heirlooms the brutes recognize. And their deranged faces, indistinguishable from the porcelain perfection of Nil'giccas when expressionless, crazed with seams and wrinkles otherwise, enough to make Sarl seem a smooth-cheeked youth in comparison.

The Wizard lets the abominations gather, until all is threshing madness about them-until it seems the two of them occupy a glowing bubble in Hell. Then, while Mimara hugs the earth, he cuts them down with glittering Compasses of Noshainrau. The slaughter is magnificent and appalling. And yet still they come, night after night, their dog phalluses prodding their dog bellies.

The rare nights when they fail to appear, she dreams of them, night terrors that give voice to the screams she denies herself while awake.

Food is scarce, so much so they sometimes sob for the rare deer the Wizard is able to take down. Once, on the reeded verge of a marsh, he fells a massive, hoary old creature he calls a musk-ox. The smell alone would have made her gag were she still a child of the brothel, let alone the Andiamine Heights. Yet they fall upon the carcass like starving dogs. The mosquitoes are so bad the Wizard raises Wards against them.

Sleep is the rarest of luxuries. They double their ration of Qirri, then double it yet again. She comes to appreciate the subtlety of tyranny, the way it lurches into stark prominence in times of scarcity and withdraws into invisibility in times of plenty. She manages to forget her old misgivings. For all the Wizard's power, they would be dead a hundred times were it not for the Qirri and the illicit strength that is its gift…

Were it not for Nil'giccas.

She whispers prayers for him sometimes, Cleric, even though she knows his soul is irrevocably lost to Hell. There is no harm in prayers.

He screams somewhere, she thinks. His shade.

The attacks begin to abate when the Demua Mountains first serrate the curtains of mist across the horizon. The Wizard's ancient Map makes no sense whatsoever to her eyes. Scroll-work frames the interior, the pale residue of paints that had once illuminated the thing but had long since moulted. Achamian tells her how the ancient Kuniuri, like all peoples, observed customs of representation peculiar to them and them alone. The Map, he says, counts mountains, uses them as markers to find Ishual.

"What do you expect to find?"

"Honeycakes and beer!" he snaps.

The testiness of his old manner is quick to return whenever she raises questions that recall the mad proportions of his gambit. After all the death and toil, the possibility that they will find nothing remains-a fact the old Wizard is loathe to consider.

But she has learned how to weather his moods, just as he has learned how to master hers. They no longer fall into spirals of senseless retribution-at least not as frequently.

"Akka… Come now."

"The truth of Kellhus! I've told you this a hundred times, Mimara-more!"

She glares at him.

Achamian collects himself with a long-drawn breath. "One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten," he says, reciting a proverb she has heard before. "And nothing is so forgotten as Ishual. For two thousand years it has survived-in the very shadow of Golgotterath, no less!"

She watches him the way she always watches him when he annoys her with the vehemence of his claims. Never, it seems to her, has she known a man more desperate to be believed. She looks down to her belly, which she holds in two palms, murmurs, "Your father can be a fool sometimes…"

" Think, Mimara," he says, balling his fists about his exasperation. As much as he hates discussing Ishual, he despises recalling his paternity more. "The Dunyain sent one son into the wild. One son, and within twenty years he commands all the Three Seas! We are here to remember — nothing more, nothing less. Remember and if need be, raise walls."

"Against the Aspect-Emperor."

"Against the Truth."

Days of peace follow. The mountains pile into prominence on the horizon. They remind her, curiously enough, of the Meneanor Sea in winter, with dark waves arrayed in chaotic ranks, white-capped and cloven. After spending several watches examining the Map and staring across the range, the Wizard decides they have come too far south, so they strike north across the Demua's gullied foundations.

She wonders at her burgeoning pregnancy. In the brothel pregnancy was nothing less than a horrific affliction-suffering for those forced to abort, heartbreak for those who carried to term, since invariably the infant would be taken. What little she knows she has gleaned from her mother when she carried the twins. But where the Empress had continually huffed and complained, Mimara's swollen womb seems little more than a flimsy satchel, she carries it so easily.