The white-luck warrior

'Wutteat.'

Like some beast in nocturnal seas, the Wracu shrank into the darkness. Laughter like sloughing cliffsides crashed through the ancient hollows.

'He dies from the outside,' Cleric said, 'because Hell sustains him from within.'

'Cunning…' the Wracu groaned out from the black.

'Cunning-cunning Ishroi!'

'I have seen this before,' Nil'giccas said, peering after the thing. He turned to the old Wizard and smiled. 'I remember.'

Achamian gazed at the Nonman, found himself wondering who was more hoary, more impossible: the ancient, undead Dragon or the ancient, inhuman King.

'So what do we do?'

Something resembling dark humour flashed in the Nonman's eyes. Without explanation, he began picking his way toward the wheezing blackness.

'Run,' he called to the old Wizard behind him. 'Save them while you still can.'

'Them?'

A passing glance over his nimil-armoured shoulder.

'Your wife and child.'

Like most dwellings in the slums of Carythusal, the Worm, the brothel Mimara had lived in was walled against everything surrounding and open only within. Two mercenaries-little more than thugs, really-manned the entrance, festooned with ornamental menace. Every mouth needs fangs. But once past them, all was carpeted invitation. Gold paint. Garish tapestries representing battles that may or may not have happened. Incense and obscure liquors. Sunlight showered the courtyard gardens. Patrons reclined on embroidered settees in the reception hall, talking and laughing in low, shameless voices…

Their eyes flicking to and fro, as if counting the bare-chested children.

The bedding cells lined the eastward wall, as demanded by luck and tradition. Despite her price she would be chosen. She was always chosen. Leading him by a single, callus-horned finger, she would hear grunts and whimpers and moans, and sometimes shrieks and sobs. A kind of numbness would own her, and she would flatten against her motions as if against a wall in a slice of shadow. And she would be hidden, even as she scampered nude before the lecherous eyes of many.

Very similar to Qirri, when she thought about it, watching Galian's hanging grin.

Perhaps this would be easy… dying.

The old Wizard did not flee. He found himself chasing the Nonman King instead, muttering Wards as he tripped across the floors. With every step the Nonman King dragged his Surillic Point with him, illuminating the wasted interior of the Coffers.

Rather than retreat, the great Wracu watched eyeless.

'Wutteat!' Cleric bellowed.

Cold pricked the Wizard's skin, for Wutteat was a name drawn from the most ancient days of the War, when Men were little more than slaves or vermin. Wutteat the Terrible. The Black-and-Golden…

The Father of Dragons.

Revealed in all his decayed glory, the Wracu reared with chitinous grace, its neck hooking like a swan's, its mammoth head poised low. Blinding vomit cracked its lizard grin.

Fire.

Stone blasting. Gold melting. Unlike anything Achamian had ever dreamed. The world vanished, and all became white blindness, roaring, sparking. His outermost Wards simply blew away. His innermost buckled about cracks like incandescent veins.

'Cleric!' he cried, feeling a tongue of flame lap his arm and cheek.

There was no time. Blinking, he stepped into the air, into utter blackness-the Nonman's Surillic Point had winked into nonexistence.

Everyone was blind.

The wheezing grate of furnace bellows. Then a second geyser of fiery gold, this one roiling beneath his feet. Thunder and clacking stone. The light of it painted the ceiling and high pillars in pulsing tan and yellow. Crying out new Wards, Achamian climbed into the gap of a collapsed lintel, stepped through the grand chamber's false ceiling high into the dark.

'I am Quya!' the Nonman King cried from places unseen. 'I am Ishroi! Five of your sons and daughters have I slain!'

'You are but a snail!' the impossible beast roared. 'A snail torn from its shell!'

'I am Nil'giccas- I am Cleric! And you will hear my sermon!'

Even high and hidden, Achamian could tell the Nonman ran as he called out, sprinted over ruin.

'Fool. I am the first. My hide is bronze. My bones are iron!'

Above the ceiling, the old Wizard floated through a second, more barren world, one roofed with hanging precipices and floored with racks of masonry, ancient and enormous.

'You are blind!' Cleric shouted, the resonance of his voice thinned by the thunder that it followed. 'You are a beggar, a scavenger, a prisoner of your own spite! Your flesh is rotted. The stone of your strength cracked long ago!'

'As the ages have rotted your soul, Cunuroi!'

The beast spit another cataract of roaring fire, illuminating all the chinks and breaches in the ceiling. Achamian walked across emptiness, toward the central pit, which given the darkness of the cavernous attic, glowed like an afterlife of fire. Robbed of their supporting columns, the granite lintels had sheered according to the caprice of load and fracture. He alighted on the longest of these ribs, strode down the length of its powdered back. Fires small and large burned throughout the pillared spaces below. He saw Cleric-the briefest of glimpses-flit between distant pillars and vanish into far shadows. He was running circles…

'If I perish a fool!' the Nonman cried, 'then I perish my own fool! Not a slave like you, Wracu'jaroi!'

Achamian paused at the hanging precipice, gazed down upon the heaving beast. Coiled like a bloated serpent, the Father of Dragons turned and turned to the sound of Cleric's voice, like a leashed dog about its stake, only retching fire instead of barking, maelstroms that engulfed the scorched aisles.

'I exceed my makers,' the scale-shining beast thundered. 'Not even the Black Heaven commands me!'

The old Wizard swayed on his perch, squinted against the smoke and sparks that buffeted his Wards. Cleric distracted the creature, he knew. Using taunts to goad its pride, the Nonman King provoked it precisely so that Achamian could do what he was doing…

If only he knew what that was.

'Spinning in circles,' Cleric cried laughing, 'twisting hide against hide! So it has always been, Wracu'jaroi! Think! Think of the desolate ages!'

The blind beast stamped to and fro directly below. It swung its horn-crowned head in an attempt to anticipate the running Nonman, spewed torrents of braided fire. Achamian swayed, nearly retched for the reek of putrescence.

'Desolation is my birthright!'

Think, old man! Think!

'Such things that I remember, Cunuroi! Twisting in the void for sailing ages! Watching my makers descend as locusts upon world after world, reducing each to one hundred and forty-four thousand-and wailing to find themselves still damned!'

Dragons! Monstrosities literally bred to battle and destroy the ancient Quya. So much of the Gnostic armoury was devoted to sorcerous duals or the mass killing of mundane Men…

What did Seswatha use?

'Only to arrive here broken and exhausted!' Cleric cried.

'Yes- yes! At last, the promised world! I was the first-the first! With Dread Sil upon my shoulders, I was the first to step from our hallowed ark, to set eyes upon the land of our