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

she had thought the fool charming.
    She watches Sarl instead: he alone has not bathed since climbing out of the Ziggurat's bowel, so he sometimes seems more shade than man. Sranc blood has soaked into the very texture of his skin. His hauberk is intact, but his tunic is as foul as rags worn by a latrine beggar. He huddles against a rust-stained boulder the size of a cart, huddles in a way that suggests hiding one moment, conspiring the next. The boulder is his friend, she realizes. Sarl now sits with everything as if it were his closest friend.
    "Ah, yes..." he murmurs in the gurgle that is his voice. His small black eyes glitter. "Ah... yesss..." The dusk carves his wrinkles so deep that his face looks woven of bundled string.
    "The fucking Mop... The Mop . Eh, lads? Eh? "
    Viscous laughter, followed by a snapping cough. The back of his thought is broken, she realizes. He can only kick and claw where he has fallen.
    "More darkness, yes. Tree darkness..."
    —|—
    She does not remember what happened at the bottom of the Great Medial Screw, and yet she knows nonetheless, knows with the knowledge that moves limbs and drums hearts.
    Something was open that should not have been open. She closed it...
    Somehow.
    Achamian, during one of his many attempts to sound her out on the matter, mentions the line between the World and the Outside, of souls returning as demons. "How, Mimara?" he asks with no small wonder. "What you accomplished... It should not have been possible. Was it the Chorae?"
    No, she wants to say, it was the Tear of God... But she nods and shrugs instead, in the bored manner of those who pretend to have moved on to more decisive things.
    She has been given something. What she has always considered a blight, a deformity of the soul, has become fraught with enigma and power . The Judging Eye opened. At the moment of absolute crisis, it opened and saw what needed to be seen...
    A tear of the God , blazing in her palm. The God of Gods!
    She has been a victim her whole life. So her instinct is the immediate one, to raise a concealing hand, to turn a shoulder in warding. Only a fool fails to hide what is precious.
    Precious—and of course utterly incompatible with the one thing she desperately wants. Chorae and witches, as the Ainoni would say, rarely prosper beneath the same roof.
    She finds a sour comfort in this—even a kind of warrant. Had it been pure and simple she would have shunned it out of jaded, melancholy reflex. But now it is something that demands to be understood—on her terms...
    So of course the old Wizard refuses to tell her anything.
    More comfort. Frustration and torment is the very shape of her life. The one thing she trusts.
    That night she awakens to the sound of Sarl crooning in a low, lilting voice. A song like smoke, quickly drawn into soundlessness by the ridge's height. She listens, watching the Nail of Heaven as it peeks through the tattered garments of a cloud. The words to the song, if there are any, are incomprehensible.
    After a time, the song trails into rasping murmur, then a moan.
    Sarl is old, she realizes. He left more than his wits in the bowel of the mountain.
    Sarl is dying.
    A pang of terror bolts through her. She turns to look for the Wizard among the rocks, only to find him immediately behind her, bestial with hair. He had crept to her side after she had fallen asleep, she realizes.
    She stares into the shadow of his rutted face and smiles, thinking, At least he does not sing. She crinkles her nose at his smell. She drifts back asleep to the fluttering image of him.
    I understand, Mother... I finally see... I really do.
    —|—
    She dreams of her stepfather, wakes with the frowning confusion that always accompanies dreams too sticky with significance. With every blink she sees him : the Aspect-Emperor, not as he is but as he would be were he the shade that haunted the accursed deeps of Cil-Aujas...
    Not a man but an emblem. A living Seal, rising on tides of hellish