The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  “It was the Scourge they used, then?”

  Iyokus nodded. “I would say so. And perhaps the Lash, as well.”

  “So they were Secondaries or Tertiaries?”

  “Without question,” the Master of Spies replied, “perhaps under one or two Primaries … It’s a pity we didn’t have the foresight to post observers among the Norsirai: aside from what you and I witnessed ten years ago, we know next to nothing about their Concerts. And unfortunately no one seems to know just who any of them were—not even the higher ranking Kianene captives.”

  Eleäzaras nodded. “It would be nice to know who … Even still, a dozen of them dead, Iyokus. A dozen!”

  The Schoolmen of the Three Seas were called the “Few” for good reason. The Cishaurim, according to their informants in Shimeh and Nenciphon, could field at most one hundred to one hundred and twenty ranking psûkari, very near the number of sorcerers of rank the Scarlet Spires itself could field. When one counted in thousands, the loss of twelve scarcely seemed significant, and Eleäzaras had no doubt that many in the Holy War, among the Shrial Knights in particular, gnashed their teeth at the thought of how many they had lost for the sake of so few. But when one counted, as Schoolmen did, in tens, the loss of twelve was nothing short of catastrophic—or glorious.

  “An astounding victory,” Iyokus said. He gestured to the Men of the Tusk passing them in shadowy clots: spectators, Eleäzaras imagined, returning from the Council of Great and Lesser Names. “And from what I gather, the Men of the Tusk have only the dimmest notion.”

  So much the better, Eleäzaras thought. Strange, the way cruelty and jubilation could strike such sweet chords.

  “This,” he said with an air of declaration, “will be our strategy then. We conserve ourselves at all costs, allow these dogs to continue killing as many Cishaurim as they can.” He paused to secure Iyokus’s gaze. “We must save ourselves for Shimeh.”

  How many times had he, Iyokus, and the others debated this issue? Despite the sometimes unfathomable power of the Psûkhe, it remained, they all agreed, inferior to the Anagogis. The Scarlet Spires would win an open confrontation with the Cishaurim—there was no doubt. But how many of them would die? What power would the Scarlet Spires wield after destroying the Cishaurim? A triumph which saw them reduced to the status of a Minor School wouldn’t be a triumph at all.

  They must do more than defeat the Cishaurim, they must obliterate them. No matter how lunatic his thirst for vengeance, Eleäzaras would not gut his School.

  “A wise course, Grandmaster,” Iyokus said. “Yet I fear the Inrithi won’t fare so well in a second encounter.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “The Cishaurim walked, probably to conceal themselves from Saubon’s Chorae bowmen and crossbowmen, whom he’d positioned too far behind his forward ranks. The strange thing, however, is that they approached without a cavalry escort …”

  “They walked in the open? But I thought striking from opening waves of horsemen was their traditional tactic …”

  “So the Emperor’s specialists claimed.”

  “Arrogance,” Eleäzaras said. “Whenever they engage the Nansur, they face the Imperial Saik. This time they knew we were days away, still crossing the Southron Gates.”

  “So they waived precautions because they thought themselves invincible …” Iyokus looked down, as though watching his sandalled feet and bruised toenails peep from the hem of his shining gown. “Possible,” he finally said. “Their intent seems to have been to decimate the Inrithi centre, nothing more, to ensure it would collapse in the next assault. They probably thought themselves cautious …”

  They’d walked beyond the camp fires and embroidered round tents of their Ainoni countrymen to the perimeter of lost Mengedda. The ground sloped upward, breached by broad stone foundations—the remnants of some ancient wall, Eleäzaras realized. Taking care not to soil their gowns, they gained the stony summit. Around them stretched a great swath of debris fields, truncated walls, and on the skyline, an ancient acropolis crowned by a gallery of cyclopean pillars standing desolate beneath the constellation of Uroris.

  Something broke the back of this place, Eleäzaras thought. Something breaks the back of every place …

  “What news of Drusas Achamian?” he asked. For some reason, he felt breathless.

  The chanv addict stared into the night, lost in another of his annoying reveries. Who knew what happened in that spidery and methodical soul? Finally he said, “I fear you may be right about him …”

  “You fear?” Eleäzaras fairly snapped. “You concluded the interrogation of Skalateas yourself. You know what happened that night beneath the Emperor’s palace better than anyone—save the principals, perhaps. The abomination recognized Achamian, ergo, Achamian is somehow connected to the abomination. The abomination could only be a Cishaurim spy, ergo Achamian is connected to the Cishaurim.”

  Iyokus turned to him, his face as mild as milk. “But is the connection significant?”

  “That is the very question we must answer.”

  “Indeed. And how do you propose we answer it?”

  “How else? By seizing him. By interrogating him.” Did he think the menace of these changelings didn’t warrant such extreme measures? Eleäzaras couldn’t imagine any greater threat!

  “Just like Skalateas?”

  Eleäzaras thought of the shallow grave they had left in Anserca, suppressed an uncharacteristic shudder.

  “Just like Skalateas.”

  “And that,” Iyokus said, “is precisely what I fear.”

  Suddenly Eleäzaras understood. “You think,” he said, “that it would be useless to ply him …”

  Over the centuries, the Scarlet Spires had abducted dozens of Mandate Schoolmen, hoping to wrest from them the secrets of the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North. Not one of them had succumbed. Not one.

  “I think plying him for the Gnosis would be useless,” Iyokus said. “What I fear is that even under torment or the Compulsions, he’ll simply insist the abomination that replaced Skeaös was a Consult and not a Cishaurim—”

  “But we already know,” Eleäzaras cried, “that the man plays a tune far different from the one he sings! Think of Geshrunni! Drusas Achamian cut off his face … And then, a little over a year later, he’s recognized by a faceless spy in the Emperor’s dungeons? This is no mere coincidence!”

  Eleäzaras glared at the man, clutched his shaking hands. He did not, he decided, like the reptilian way Iyokus listened.

  “I know these arguments,” Iyokus said. He turned to once again scrutinize the moonlit ruins, his expression translucent and unreadable. “I simply fear there’s more to this …”

  “There’s always more, Iyokus. Why else would men murder men?”

  Esmenet had tried, many times since her daughter’s death, to attend to the void within her.

  She tried questioning it away by asking the priests she bedded, but they always said the same thing, that the God dwelt only in temples, and that she’d made a brothel of her body. Then they would brothel her again. For a time, she tried smearing it away by coupling with men for anything, half-coppers, bread, even a rotted onion—once. But men could never fill, only muddy.

  So she turned to others like her, watching, observing. She studied the always-laughing whores, who somehow exulted in being guttered day for night, or the chirping slave girls, their faces anchored forward beneath their water-urns, smiling and rolling their eyes from side to side. She made their motions her motions, as though certainty were a kind of dance. And for a time she discovered comfort, as though habits of gesture and expression could drum for a deadened heart.

  For a time she forgot the distance between a fact and a face.

  She had never tried to love. If joy in gesture couldn’t unseat desolation, then perhaps, joy in desperation.

  For five days now, they’d camped together in the hills overlooking the Battleplain. Ranging ahead, Achamian had found a small stream, which they�
��d followed into the stony heights. They climbed into a band of pitch pine, whose massive cones rocked in slow circles in the wind, and found a pool of translucent green. They camped nearby, though the lack of forage for Achamian’s mule, Daybreak, forced them to trek for an hour or so every day to gather fodder to supplement his grain.

  Five days. Joking and brewing tea in the cool mornings, making love to the rush of dry wind through the trees, eating hare and squirrel—snared by Achamian, no less!—with their rations in the evening, touching each other’s faces with wonder in the moonlight.

  And swimming, floating. The crush of ardent heat in cool waters.

  How she wished it would never end.

  Esmenet pulled their sleeping mats from the tent, slapped them one after the other in the wind, then set them across warm rock. They’d pitched their tent across the soft ground beneath an ancient and massive pitch pine, a lone sentinel near the terminus of a broad shelf that terraced the north and eastern faces of the hill.

  This, she thought, is our place … Without visitors, without ruins, without memories, save for the animal bones they’d found curled beneath the tree when they’d first arrived.

  She ducked back into the tent, pulled Achamian’s worn leather satchel from the corner. It was musty, slick and damp where it had lain against the grasses. Powdery white mould had crept up the stitching.

  She carried it out into the sunlight, sitting cross-legged on a soft but prickly carpet of pine needles. She pulled out various sheaves of vellum, and weighting them down with stones, set them out to dry. She found a small doll, human shaped, wooden, but with a simple silken nob for a head and a small rusty knife for a right hand. Humming an old tune from Sumna, she bounced it around, kicked its wooden legs in a little jig. After laughing at her foolishness, she set it out in the sun as well, crossing its legs and pressing its arms behind its head so that it looked like a daydreaming field-slave. What would Achamian be doing with a doll?

  Then she pulled out a sheet that had been folded separate from the others. Opening it, she saw a series of brief, vertical scribbles arrayed across it, each joined to one, two, or several others by hastily scratched lines. Even though she couldn’t read—she’d yet to meet a woman who could—she somehow knew this sheet was important. She resolved to ask Achamian when he returned.

  After securing it under an axe-shaped flint, she turned to the stitching, began scratching away the mould with a twig.

  Achamian emerged from the shadows of the deeper wood a short time afterward, bare to the waist, the firewood in his arms braced against his black-furred belly. He shot her a friendly frown as he walked past, glancing at his doll and papers. She grinned and snorted. She adored seeing him like this: a sorcerer playing woodsman, down to the breeches, no less. Even after all her time travelling with the Holy War, breeches still looked outlandish, barbaric—even curiously erotic. They were illegal in many Nansur cities.

  “Do you know why the Nilnameshi think cats are more human than monkeys?” he asked, stacking his wood against the trunk of their great pine.

  “No.”

  He turned toward her, slapping his palms against his breeches. “Curiosity. They think curiosity is what defines men.” He walked up to her, grinning. “It certainly defines you.”

  “Curiosity has nothing to do with it,” she replied, trying to sound cross. “Your bag smells like mouldy cheese.”

  “I always thought that was me.”

  “You smell like ass.”

  Achamian laughed, raised devilish brows. “But I washed my beard …”

  She tossed pine needles at his face, but the wind tugged them away. “And what’s that for?” she asked, gesturing to the doll. “To lure little girls into your tent?”

  He sat next to her on the ground. “That,” he said, “is a Wathi Doll … You’d make me throw it away if I told you more.”

  “I see … And this,” she continued, lifting the folded sheet. “What’s this?”

  His good humour evaporated.

  “That’s my map.”

  She held the parchment out between them, waved away a small wasp. “What’s this writing? Names?”

  “Individuals and different Factions. Everyone with some bearing on the Holy War … The lines mark their interrelationships … See,” he said, pointing to a line of vertical script on the centre left edge, “that says, ‘Maithanet.’”

  “And below?”

  “Inrau.”

  Without thinking she reached out and clutched his knee.

  “What about the top corner, here,” she said, a little too quickly.

  “The Consult.”

  She listened to him recite the names, the Emperor, the Scarlet Spires, the Cishaurim, explaining their different intents and how he thought each might be related to the others. He said nothing that she hadn’t heard before, but for some reason it suddenly seemed a powerful thing scratched in ink across this cured animal hide. It suddenly seemed horrifyingly real … A world of implacable forces. Hidden. Violent …

  Chills pimpled her skin. Achamian, she realized, didn’t belong to her—not truly. He never could. What was she compared with these mighty things?

  I can’t even read …

  “So why, Akka?” she found herself saying. “Why have you stopped?”

  “What do you mean?” He stared fixedly at the sheet, as though absorbed.

  “I know what you’re supposed to do, Akka. In Sumna, you were constantly out, making inquiries, courting informants. Either that or you were waiting on some news. You were constantly spying. But not any more … Not since you brought me to your tent.”

  “I thought it was only fair,” he said breezily. “After all, you gave up—”

  “Don’t lie, Akka.”

  He sighed, and though sitting, assumed the stooping air of slaves who carried onerous burdens. She stared into his eyes. Clear, glistening brown. Need-nervous. Sad and wise. As always when she was this near to him, she yearned to comb her fingers through his beard, to probe the chin and jaw beneath.

  How I love you.

  “It’s not you, Esmi,” he said. “It’s him …” His gaze fell to the name nearest ‘The Consult’ on the parchment sheet, the only one he’d yet to decipher for her.

  He didn’t need to.

  “Kellhus,” she said.

  They were silent for a time. A sudden gust whisked through the pine, and she glimpsed bits of fluff rolling away, up the granite slope and off into endless sky. For a moment she feared for the sheaves of parchment, but they were safe beneath their stones, their corners opening and closing like speechless mouths.

  They’d ceased speaking of Kellhus aloud, ever since fleeing the Battleplain. Sometimes it seemed an unspoken accord, the kind lovers used to numb shared hurts. Other times it seemed a coincidence of aversions, like avoiding issues of fidelity or sex. But for the most part it just seemed unnecessary, as though any words they might use had been always already said.

  For a time Kellhus had been a troubling figure, but he’d soon become intriguing, someone warm, welcoming, and mysterious—a man who promised pleasant surprises. Then at some point he’d become towering, someone who overshadowed all others—like a noble and indulgent father, or a great king breaking bread with his slaves. And now, even more so in his absence, he’d become a shining figure. A beacon of some kind. Something they must follow, if only because all else was so dark …

  What is he? she wanted to say, but looked speechlessly to her lover instead.

  To her husband.

  They smiled at each other, shyly, as though just remembering they weren’t strangers. They clasped dry, sun-warm hands. Never have I been so happy.

  If only her daughter …

  “Come,” Achamian abruptly said, pressing himself to his feet. “I want to show you something.”

  She followed him from the matted humus onto the bare, sun-hot stone. She hissed and scampered to avoid burning her feet, climbing to the rounded ledge. With each step, the vast grey-gre
en sweep of the Battleplain rose to brace the skies. Taking Achamian’s proffered hand, she joined him on the ledge. She raised a hand to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare. Then she saw them …

  “Sweet Sejenus,” she whispered.

  Like the shadows of truly mountainous clouds, they darkened the plain, great columns of them, their arms winking like powdered diamond in the sunlight.

  “The Holy War marches,” Achamian said, rigid with what could only be awe.

  Breathing hurt, or so it seemed. She glimpsed cohorts of knights, hundreds, even thousands, strong, and great files of infantrymen, as long as entire cities. She saw baggage-trains, rows of wains no bigger than grains of sand. And she saw banner after fluttering banner bearing the devices of a thousand Houses, each embroidered with silken Tusks …

  “So many!” she exclaimed. What terror the Fanim must feel …

  “More than two hundred and fifty thousand Inrithi warriors,” Achamian said, “or so Zin claims …” For some reason, his voice came to her as though from the deeps of some cave. It sounded trapped and hollow. “And as many camp-followers, perhaps … No one knows for sure.”

  Thousands upon thousands. With the ponderousness of distant things, they encompassed the nearer reaches of the plain. They moved, she thought, like wine bleeding through wool.

  How could so many be bent to one dreadful purpose? One place. One city.

  Shimeh.

  “Is it …” she found herself gasping, “is it like something from your dreams?”

  He paused, and though he neither swayed nor stumbled, Esmenet suddenly feared he was about to fall. She reached out, clutched his elbow.

  “Like my dreams,” he said.

  PART II:

  The Second March