The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  Every tabernacle across the North Bank witnessed some kind of massacre. The Men of the Tusk hacked the screaming penitents into silence, then they kicked over the tripods, smashed the marmoreal altars, tore the tapestries from the walls and the grand kneeling rugs from the floors. Anything carrying the taint of Fanimry they heaved into colossal bonfires. Sometimes, beneath the rugs, they found the breathtaking mosaics of the Inrithi who had originally raised the temple, and the structure would be spared. Otherwise the great Fanim tabernacles of Shigek were burned. Beneath monstrous towers of smoke, dogs nosed the heaped dead and licked blood from the broad steps.

  In Iothiah, which had thrown open her gates in terror, hundreds of Kerathotics, an Inrithi sect that had managed to survive centuries of Fanim oppression, saved themselves by singing the ancient hymns of the Thousand Temples. Men who had wailed in terror suddenly found themselves embracing the long lost brothers of their faith. That night the Kerathotics took to the streets, kicking down doors, murdering old competitors, unscrupulous tax-farmers, anyone they had begrudged under the Sapatishah’s regime. Their grudges were many.

  In red-walled Nagogris, the Men of the Tusk actually began slaughtering one another. Almost as soon as the Holy War had arrived in Shigek, the Shigeki potentates remaining in the city sent emissaries to Ikurei Conphas, offering to surrender to the Emperor in exchange for Imperial protection. Conphas promptly dispatched General Numemarius and a cohort of Kidruhil. Through some unexplained blunder, however, the gates were relinquished to a large force of Thunyeri, fierce Ingraulish and Skagwamen for the most part, who promptly began plundering the city. The Kidruhil attempted to intervene, and pitched battles broke out in the streets. When General Numemarius met with Yalgrota Sranchammer under flag of truce, the giant brained him. Disorganized by the death of their general and unnerved by the ferocity of the blond-bearded warriors, the Kidruhil withdrew from the city.

  But none suffered more horribly than the Fanic priests.

  At night, around fires of heathen reliquary, the Inrithi used them for drunken sport, slicing open their bellies, leading them like mules by their own entrails. Some were blinded, some strangled, some were forced to watch their wives and daughters raped. Others were flayed alive. A great many were burned as witches. Scarcely a village could be found without the mutilated corpse of some Fanic priest or functionary nailed to the vaulting limbs of a eucalyptus tree.

  Two weeks passed, then suddenly, as though some precise measure had been exacted, the madness lifted. In the end, only a fraction of the Shigeki population had been killed, but no traveller could pass more than an hour without crossing paths with the dead. Instead of the humble boats of fishermen and traders, bloated corpses bobbed down the defiled waters of the Sempis and fanned out across the Meneanor Sea.

  At long last, Shigek had been cleansed.

  From the summit the ziggurat seemed far steeper than it had from the ground below. But then so did most things—after the fact.

  Cresting the last of the treacherous steps, Kellhus turned to the surrounding vista. To the north and west, all was cultivation. He saw diked fields, lines of sycamore and ash, and villages that looked like mounds of shattered pottery in the distance. Several smaller ziggurats reared in the near distance, staunch and stolid, anchoring a network of channels and embankments that reached out to the hazy Gedean escarpments. To the south, past the shoulders of the ziggurat Achamian had called Palpothis, he saw stands of marsh gingkos standing like bent sentinels amid thickets of sandbar willows. The mighty Sempis glittered in the sunlight beyond. And to the east he saw lines of red through green—raised footpaths and ancient roadways—passing beneath shadowy copses and between sunny fields, all converging on Iothiah, which darkened the horizon with her walls and smoke.

  Shigek. Yet another ancient land.

  So old and so vast, Father … Did you see it thus?

  He glanced down the stair that formed a causeway across the ziggurat’s mammoth back, saw Achamian still labouring up the steps. Sweat darkened the armpits and collar of his white linen tunic.

  “I thought you said the ancients believed their gods lived atop these things,” Kellhus called down. “Why do you tarry?”

  Achamian paused, scowled up at the remaining distance. Gasping for breath, he struggled to smile through his grimace. “Because the ancients believed their gods lived atop these things …”

  Kellhus grinned, then turned to study the wrecked summit. The ancient godhouse lay in shambles: ruined walls and spilled blocks. He inspected sundered engravings and indecipherable pictograms. The remains of gods, he imagined, and their earthly invocations.

  Faith. Faith had raised this black-stepped mountain—the beliefs of long dead men.

  So much, Father, and all in the name of delusion.

  It scarcely seemed possible. And yet the Holy War wasn’t so different. In some ways it was a far greater, if more ephemeral, work.

  In the months since arriving at Momemn, Kellhus had laid the foundation of his own ziggurat, insinuating himself into the confidence of the mighty, instilling the suspicion that he was more—far more—than the prince he claimed to be. With the reluctance proper to wisdom and humility, he’d finally assumed the role others had thrust upon him. Given the complexities involved, he had initially hoped to proceed with more caution, but his encounter with Sarcellus had forced him to accelerate his timetable, to take risks he would have otherwise avoided. Even now, he knew, the Consult watched him, studied him, and pondered his growing power. He had to seize the Holy War before their patience dwindled too far. He had to make a ziggurat of these men.

  You saw them too, didn’t you, Father? Is it you they hunt? Are they the reason you summoned me?

  Looking across the near distance, he saw a man walking with his oxen along a raised pathway, flicking them with his switch every third or fourth step. He saw backs bent in neighbouring fields of millet. A half-mile away, he saw a party of Inrithi horsemen riding in single file through yellowing wheat.

  Any one of them could be a Consult spy.

  “Sweet Seja!” Achamian cried as he gained the summit.

  What would the sorcerer do if he learned of his secret conflict with the Consult? The Mandate couldn’t be involved, Kellhus knew, not until he possessed power enough to parley with them as equals.

  Everything came to power.

  “What’s this called again?” Kellhus asked, though he forgot nothing.

  “The Great Ziggurat of Xijoser,” Achamian replied, still panting. “One of the mightiest works of the Old Dynasty … Remarkable, isn’t it?”

  “Yes …” Kellhus said with false forced enthusiasm.

  He must feel shame.

  “Something troubles you?” Achamian asked, leaning against his knees. He turned to spit over the summit’s edge.

  “Serwë …” Kellhus said with an air of admission. “Tell me, would you think her capable of being …” He feigned a nervous swallow.

  Achamian looked away to the hazy landscape, but not before Kellhus glimpsed a fleeting expression of terror. Palms turning upward, nervous stroke of his beard, flaring heart rate …

  “Being what?” the sorcerer asked with sham disinterest.

  Of all the souls Kellhus had mastered, few had proven as useful as Serwë. Lust and shame were ever the shortest paths to the hearts of world-born men. Ever since he’d sent her to Achamian the sorcerer had compensated for his half-remembered trespass in innumerable subtle ways. The old Conriyan proverb was true: no friend was more generous than the one who has seduced your wife …

  And generosity was precisely what he needed from Drusas Achamian.

  “Nothing,” Kellhus said with a shake of his head. “All men fear their women venal, I suppose.” Some openings must be continually worked and worried, while others must be left to fester.

  Avoiding his gaze, the Schoolman groaned and rubbed his lower back. “I’m getting too old for this,” he said with anxious good humour. He cleared his throat and spi
t one final time. “How Esmi would crow …”

  Esmenet. She too had a part to play.

  After so many weeks of prolonged contact, Kellhus had come to know Achamian far better than Achamian knew himself. Those who loved the Schoolman—Xinemus and Esmenet—often thought him weak. They softened hard words, pretended not to notice the unsteady hands or the fragile expressions, and they spoke with an almost parental defensiveness on his behalf. But Drusas Achamian, Kellhus knew, was stronger than anyone, especially Drusas Achamian, suspected. Some men frittered themselves away with incessant doubt and reflection until it seemed they had no shape they could grasp hold of. Some men had to be hewed by the crude axe of the world.

  Tested.

  “Tell me,” Kellhus said, “how much must a teacher give?”

  He knew that Achamian had long since stopped thinking himself his teacher, but the sorcerer was just vain enough not to disabuse him of this impression. The most powerful flatteries dwelt not in what was said but in the assumptions behind what was said.

  “That,” Achamian replied, daring his gaze once again, “depends upon the student …”

  “So the student must be known to prevent giving too little.”

  He must question himself.

  “Or too much.”

  This was an intellectual habit of Achamian’s: noting the importance of contrary and not so obvious things. He delighted in throwing aside the veil, in revealing the complexities that lurked beneath simple things. In this he was almost unique: world-born men, Kellhus had found, despised complexity as much as they cherished flattery. Most men would rather die in deception than live in uncertainty.

  “Too much …” Kellhus repeated. “You mean like Proyas?”

  Achamian glanced to his sandalled feet.

  “Yes. Like Proyas.”

  “What did you teach him?”

  “What we call the exoterics … Logic, History, Arithmetic—everything save the esoterics—sorcery.”

  “And that was too much?”

  The sorcerer paused in puzzlement, suddenly unsure as to what he’d meant.

  “No,” he conceded after a moment. “I guess not. I had hoped to teach him doubt, tolerance, but the clamour of his faith was too great. Perhaps if they’d let me finish his education … But he’s lost. Another Man of the Tusk.”

  Now show him ease.

  Kellhus snorted in a half laugh. “Like me.”

  “Exactly,” the Mandate Schoolman said, grinning in the both sly and shy way that others, Kellhus had noted, found so endearing. “Another bloodthirsty fanatic.”

  Kellhus laughed Xinemus’s laugh, then trailed, smiling. For some time he’d been mapping Achamian’s responses to the finer nuances of his expression. Though Kellhus had never met Inrau, he knew—with startling exactitude—the peculiarities of the young man’s manner and expression—so well that he could prompt Achamian to thoughts of Inrau with little more than a look or a smile.

  Paro Inrau. The student Achamian had lost in Sumna. The student he’d failed.

  “There’s more than one kind of fanaticism,” Kellhus said.

  The sorcerer’s eyes widened momentarily, then narrowed in anxious thoughts of Inrau and the events of the previous year—things he’d rather not remember.

  The Mandate must become more than a hated master, they must become an enemy.

  “But not all fanaticisms are equal,” Achamian said.

  “How do you mean? Not equal in principle, or not equal in consequence?”

  Inrau was such a consequence, as were the countless thousands the Holy War had murdered over the past several days. Your School, Kellhus had suggested, is no different.

  “The Truth,” Achamian said. “The Truth distinguishes them. No matter what the fanaticism, Inrithi, Consult, or even Mandate, the consequences are the same: men die or suffer. The question is one of what they die or suffer for …”

  “So purpose—true purpose—justifies suffering, even death?”

  “You must believe as much, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  Kellhus smiled as though abashed at having been exposed. “So it all comes to Truth. If one’s purposes are true …”

  “Anything can be justified. Any torment, any murder …”

  Kellhus rounded his eyes the way he knew Inrau would. “Any betrayal,” he said.

  Achamian stared, his nimble face as stony as he could manage. But Kellhus saw past the dark skin, past the sheath of fine muscle, past even the soul that toiled beneath. He saw arcana and anguish, a yearning steeped in three thousand years of wisdom. He saw a child beaten and bullied by a drunken father. He saw a hundred generations of Nroni fishermen pinioned between hunger and the cruel sea. He saw Seswatha and the madness of war without hope. He saw ancient Ketyai tribesmen surge down mountain slopes. He saw the animal, rooting and rutting, reaching back to time out of memory.

  He didn’t see what came after; he saw what came before …

  “Any betrayal,” the sorcerer repeated dully.

  He is close.

  “And your cause,” Kellhus pressed. “The prevention of the Second Apocalypse.”

  “Is true. There can be no doubt.”

  “So in the name of that cause, you can commit any act, any betrayal?”

  Achamian’s eyes slackened in dread, and Kellhus glimpsed a worry too fleet to become a question. The Schoolman had become accustomed to the efficiency of their discourse: rarely had they ever wandered from question to question as they did now.

  “It’s strange,” Achamian said, “the way things spoken with assurance by one can sound so outrageous when repeated by another …”

  An unanticipated turn, but an opportunity as well. A shorter path.

  “It troubles,” Kellhus said, “because it shows that conviction is as cheap as words. Any man can believe unto death. Any man can claim your claim.”

  “So you fear I’m no different from any other fanatic.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  How deep does his conviction go?

  “You are the Harbinger, Kellhus. If you dreamed Seswatha’s Dream as I did …”

  “But couldn’t Proyas say the same of his fanaticism? Couldn’t he say, ‘If you spoke to Maithanet as I did’?”

  How far would he follow it? To the death?

  The sorcerer sighed and nodded. “That’s always the dilemma, now isn’t it?”

  “But whose dilemma? Mine or yours?”

  Would he follow it beyond?

  Achamian laughed, but in the clipped manner of men who make light of what horrifies them.

  “It’s the world’s dilemma, Kellhus.”

  “I need more than that, Akka—more than bald assertions.”

  Would he follow it all the way?

  “I’m not sure—”

  “What is it you want of me?” Kellhus exclaimed in sudden desperation. Inrau’s indecision warbled through his voice. Inrau’s horror pulled wide his eyes.

  I must have it.

  The sorcerer stared, horror-stricken. “Kellhus, I …”

  “Think of what you’re telling me! Think, Akka, think! You’re saying that I’m the sign of the Second Apocalypse, that I augur mankind’s extinction!”

  But of course Achamian thought him more …

  “No, Kellhus … Not the end.”

  “Then what am I? Just what do you think I am?”

  “I think … I think you may be …”

  “What, Akka? What?”

  “Everything has a purpose!” the Schoolman cried in exasperation. “You’ve come to me for a reason, even if you’ve yet to embrace it.”

  This, Kellhus knew, was false. For events to have purpose, their ends had to determine their beginnings, and this was impossible. Things were governed by their origins, not their destinations. What came before determined what came after; his manipulation of these world-born men was proof enough of that … If the Dûnyain had been mistaken in their theorems, their axioms remained inviolate. The Logos had been co
mplicated—nothing more. Even sorcery, from what he’d gleaned, followed laws.

  “And what purpose is that?” Kellhus asked.

  Achamian hesitated, and though he remained utterly silent, everything from his expression to his scent to his pulse howled in panic. He licked his lips …

  “I think … to save the world.”

  Always it came to this. Always the same delusion.

  “So I’m your cause?” Kellhus said incredulously. “I’m the Truth that justifies your fanaticism?”

  Achamian could only stare in dread. Plundering the man’s expression, Kellhus watched the inferences splash and trickle through his soul, drawn of their own weight to a single, inexorable conclusion.

  Everything … By his own admission, he must yield everything.

  Even the Gnosis.

  How powerful have you become, Father?

  Without warning, Achamian stood and started down the monumental stair. He took each step with weary deliberation, as though counting them. The Shigeki wind tousled his shining black hair. When Kellhus called to him, he said only, “I tire of the heights.”

  As Kellhus had known he would.

  General Martemus had always considered himself a practical man. He was someone who always clarified his tasks, then methodically set about achieving his goals. He had no birthright, no pampered childhood, to cloud his judgement. He simply saw, appraised, and acted. The world was not so complicated, he would tell his junior officers, so long as one remained clearheaded and ruthlessly practical.

  See. Appraise. Act.

  He had lived his life by this philosophy. How easily it had been defeated.

  The task had seemed straightforward, if somewhat unusual, in the beginning. Watch Prince Anasûrimbor Kellhus of Atrithau, and attempt to gain his confidence. If the man collected followers to some insidious purpose, as Conphas suspected, then a Nansur General suffering a crisis of faith should have proven an irresistible opportunity.