The White-Luck Warrior by R. Scott Bakker Read Free Book Online

passions require quite so much certainty as spite.
    "Kellhus," Esmenet replied, her voice dim and damaged. You win, her eyes conceded as she turned to leave. "I chose Kellhus."
    Now, watching the Wizard by moonlight, Mimara cannot stop thinking about her mother. She imagines the wrack that had to have been her soul, coming to her daughter again and again, each time with new hope, only to be punished and rebuked. Guilt and remorse crash through her, for a time. Then she thinks of the little girl who had shrieked in the arms of slavers, the child sobbing, "Mumma!" into the creaking dark. She remembers the stink and the pillows, the child who wept within her still, even though her face had become as flat and chill as new fallen snow.
    "Why did she leave you?" she asks the old Wizard the following afternoon on the trail. "Mother, I mean."
    "Because I died," the old Wizard says, his brown eyes lost in the fog of distant seeing. He refuses to say anything more specific. "The world is too cruel to wait for the dead."
    "And the living?"
    He stops and fixes her with that curious stare of his, the one that makes her think of artisans reviewing the work of more gifted rivals.
    "You already know the answer to that one," he says.
    "I do?"
    He seems to catch his smile, condense it into pursed lips. Galian and Sutadra file between them, the former frowning, the latter intent and oblivious. There are times when they all become strangers to one another, and now is one of them—though it seems that Sutadra has been a stranger all along. Bald stone ridges flange the distances beyond the Wizard, promising toil and arms bundled against high wind.
    "Why..." the Wizard begins, then trails. "Why didn't you leave me back in the pit?"
    Because I lov—
    "Because I need you," she says without breath. "I need your knowledge."
    He stares at her, his beard and hair trembling in the breeze. "So the old wineskin has a few swallows left," he says inexplicably.
    He ignores her glare, turns to follow the others. More riddles! She fumes in silence for the remainder of the afternoon, refuses to even look at the old fool. He laughs at her, she decides—and after acknowledging that she had saved him! Bent-back ingrate.
    Some starve. Some eat. Disparity is simply the order of things. It's only when fat men make sauce out of other's starvation that it becomes a sin.
    —|—
    She belongs.
    The others have shown this to her in ways numerous and infinitesimal. The pitch of their talk does not change when she enters their midst. They tease her with brotherly skepticism instead of masculine daring. Their eyes are less inclined to linger on her limbs and more inclined to remain fixed on her gaze.
    The Skin Eaters are less and they are more. Less because of what Cil-Aujas has taken, more because she has become one of them. Even the Captain seems to have accepted her. He now looks through her the way he looks through all his men.
    They make camp on a ridge that falls in a series of gravel sheaves into the Mop. She stares at the forests for a time, at the play of sunlight across the humped canopy. Birds like floating dots. She thinks of how the expedition will crawl across the landscape, like lice picking their way through the World's own pelt. She has heard the others mutter about the Mop, about the dangers, but after Cil-Aujas, nothing seems particularly dangerous, nothing that touches sky.
    They dine on what remains of Xonghis's previous kill, but she finds herself more eager for the smudge of Qirri that Cleric dispenses. Afterward, she keeps to herself, makes a point of avoiding Achamian's many looks, some questioning, others... searching. He does not understand the nature of his crime—like all men.
    Somandutta once again tries to engage her, but she simply glares at the young caste-noble until he slouches away. He had saved her in Cil-Aujas, actually carried her for a mad term, only to abandon her when her need was greatest—and this she cannot forgive.
    To think