When Xinemus had told him that certain books pertaining to the Gnosis had been found in the Sareotic Library, he could read the subtext well enough. You should leave, his friend had said without saying. Ever since the night with the Wathi Doll, Achamian had expected to be banished from his friend’s fire, even if temporarily. Even more, he needed to be banished, to be forced from the company of those who overwhelmed him …
But it cut nonetheless.
No matter, he told himself. Just another feud born of the awkwardness of their friendship. A caste-noble and a sorcerer. “There is no friend more difficult,” one of the poets of the Tusk had written, “than a sinner.”
And Achamian was nothing if not a sinner.
Unlike some sorcerers, he rarely pondered the fact of his damnation. For much the same reason, he imagined, men who beat their wives didn’t ponder their fists …
But there were other reasons. In his youth, he’d been one of those students who’d delighted in irreverence and impiousness, as though the mortal blasphemy he learned licensed any blasphemy, large and small. He and Sancla, his cellmate in Atyersus, used to actually read The Tractate aloud and laugh at its absurdities. The passages dealing with the circumcision of caste-priests. And of course the passages dealing with manural purification rites. But one passage, more than any other, would haunt him over the years: the famous “Expect Not Admonition” from the Book of Priests.
“Listen!” Sancla had cried from his pallet one night. “‘And the Latter Prophet said: Piety is not the province of money-changers. Do not give food for food, shelter for shelter, love for love. Do not throw the Good upon the balance, but give without expectation. Give food for nothing, shelter for nothing, love for nothing. Yield unto him who trespasses against you. For these things alone, the wicked do not do. Expect not, and you shall find glory everlasting.’ ”
The older boy fixed Achamian with his dark, always-laughing eyes—eyes that would make them lovers for a time. “Can you believe it?”
“Believe what?” Achamian asked. He already laughed because he knew that whatever Sancla cooked up was certain to be deliriously funny. He was simply one of those people. His death in Aöknyssus three years later—he’d been killed by a drunken caste-noble with a Trinket—would crush Achamian.
Sancla tapped the scroll with his forefinger, something that would have earned him a beating in the scriptorium. “Essentially Sejenus is saying, ‘Give without expectation of reward, and you can expect a huge reward!’”
Achamian frowned.
“Don’t you see?” Sancla continued. “He’s saying that piety consists of good acts in the absence of selfish expectation. He’s saying you give nothing—nothing!—when you expect something in exchange … You simply don’t give.”
Achamian caught his breath. “So the Inrithi who expect to be exalted in the Outside …”
“Give nothing,” Sancla had said, laughing in disbelief. “Nothing! But we, on the other hand, dedicate our lives to continuing Seswatha’s battle … We give everything, and we can expect only damnation as a result. We’re the only ones, Akka!”
We’re the only ones.
As tempting as those words were, as moving and as important as they’d been, Achamian had become too much a sceptic to trust them. They were too flattering, too self-aggrandizing, to be true. So instead, he’d thought it simply had to be enough to be a good man. And if it wasn’t enough, then there was nothing good about those who measured good and evil.
Which was likely the case.
But of course Kellhus had changed everything. Achamian now pondered his damnation a great deal.
Before, the question of his damnation had merely seemed an excuse for self-torment. The Tusk and The Tractate couldn’t be more clear, though Achamian had read many heretical works suggesting that the Scriptures’ manifold and manifest contradictions proved that the prophets, olden day and latter, were simply men—which they were. “All Heaven,” Protathis had once written, “cannot shine through a single crack.”
So there was room to doubt his damnation. Perhaps, as Sancla had suggested, the damned were in fact the elect. Or perhaps, as Achamian was more inclined to believe, the uncertain were the Chosen Ones. He’d often thought the temptation to assume, to sham certainty, was the most narcotic and destructive of all temptations. To do good without certainty was to do good without expectation … Perhaps doubt itself was the key.
But then of course the question could never be answered. If genuine doubt was in fact the condition of conditions, then only those ignorant of the answer could be redeemed. To ponder the question of his damnation, it had always seemed, was itself a kind of damnation.
So he didn’t think of it.
But now … Now there could be an answer. Every day he walked with its possibility, talked …
Prince Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
It wasn’t as though he thought Kellhus could simply tell him the answer, even if he could ever summon the courage to ask. Nor did he think that Kellhus somehow embodied or exemplified the answer. That would make him too small. He was not, in some mystic Nonmen fashion, the living sign of Drusas Achamian’s fate. No. The question of his damnation or his exaltation, Achamian knew, depended on what he himself was willing to sacrifice. He himself would answer the question …
With his actions.
And as much as this knowledge horrified him, it also filled him with an abiding and incredulous joy. The fear it engendered was old: for some time he’d feared the fate of the entire world depended on those selfsame actions. He’d grown numb to consequences of deranged proportions. But the joy was something new, something unexpected. Anasûrimbor Kellhus had made salvation a real possibility. Salvation.
Though you lose your soul, the Mandate catechism began, you shall win the world.
But it need not be! Achamian knew that now! Finally he could see how desolate, how bereft of hope, his prior life had been. Esmenet had taught him how to love. And Kellhus, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, had taught him how to hope.
And he would seize them, love and hope. He would seize them, and he would hold them fast.
He need only decide what to do …
“Akka,” Kellhus had said the previous night, “I need ask you something.”
Only the two of them sat about the fire. They boiled water for some midnight tea.
“Anything, Kellhus,” Achamian replied. “What troubles you?”
“I’m troubled by what I must ask …”
Never had Achamian seen such a poignant expression, as though horror had been bent to the point where it kissed rapture. A mad urge to shield his eyes almost overcame him.
“What you must ask?”
Kellhus had nodded.
“Each day, Akka, I am less my self.”
Such words! Their mere memory struck him breathless. Standing in an islet of sunlight, Achamian paused along the trail, pressed his palms to his chest. A cloud of birds erupted into the sky. Their shadows flickered across him, soundless. He blinked at the sun.
Do I teach him the Gnosis?
To his gut he balked at the notion—the mere thought of surrendering the Gnosis to someone outside his School made him blanch. He wasn’t even sure he could teach Kellhus the Gnosis, even if he desired. His knowledge of the Gnosis was the one thing he shared with Seswatha, whose imprint owned every movement of his slumbering soul.
Will you let me? Do you see what I see?
Never—never!—in the history of their School had a sorcerer of rank betrayed the Gnosis. Only the Gnosis had allowed the Mandate to survive. Only the Gnosis had allowed them to carry Seswatha’s war through the millennia. Lose it, and they became no more than a Minor School. His brothers, Achamian knew, would fight themselves to extinction to prevent that from happening. They would hunt both of them without relenting, and they would kill them if they could. They would not listen to reasons … And the name, Drusas Achamian, would become a curse in the dark halls of Atyersus.
But what was this other
than greed or jealousy? The Second Apocalypse was imminent. Hadn’t the time come to arm all the Three Seas? Hadn’t Seswatha himself bid them share their arsenal before the shadow fell?
He had …
And wouldn’t this make Achamian the most faithful of all Mandate Schoolmen?
He resumed walking, as though in a stupor.
In his bones he knew that Kellhus had been sent. The peril was too great, and the promise too breathtaking. He’d watched as Kellhus consumed a lifetime of knowledge in the space of months. He’d listened, breathless, as Kellhus voiced truths of thought more subtle than Ajencis, and truths of passion more profound than Sejenus. He’d sat in the dust gaping as the man extended the geometries of Muretetis beyond the limits of comprehension, as he corrected the ancient logic then drafted new logics the way a child might scribble spirals with a stick.
What would the Gnosis be to such a man? A plaything? What would he discover? What power would he wield?
Glimpses of Kellhus, striding as a god across fields of war, laying low host of Sranc, striking dragons from the sky, closing with the resurrected No-God, with dread Mog-Pharau …
He’s our saviour! I know it!
But what if Esmenet were right? What if Achamian were merely the test? Like old, evil Shikol in The Tractate, offering Inri Sejenus his thighbone sceptre, his army, his harem, everything save his crown, to stop preaching …
Achamian halted once again, was bumped forward two steps by his mule, Daybreak. Stroking his snout, he smiled in the lonely way of men with hapless animals. A breeze swept across the shining reaches of the Sempis, hissed through the trees. He began trembling.
Prophet and sorcerer. The Tusk called such men Shaman. The word lay like a ziggurat in his thoughts, immovable.
Shaman.
No … This is madness!
For two thousand years Mandate Schoolmen had kept the Gnosis safe. Two thousand years! Who was he to forsake such tradition?
Nearby, a crowd of young children was gathered beneath the sweep of a sycamore, chirping and jostling like sparrows over spilled bread. And Achamian saw two young boys, no more than four or five, making arm-waving declarations each with a hand firmly clasped in the hand of the other. The innocence of the act struck him, and he found himself wondering how old they would be when they saw the error of holding hands.
Or would they discover Kellhus?
A whining sound drew his eyes upward. He nearly cried out in shock.
A naked corpse had been nailed to the rafters of the tree above, purple and marbled with black-green. After the surprise passed he thought of kicking or cutting the man down, but then where would he carry him? To some nearby village? The Shigeki were so terrified of the Inrithi he’d be surprised if they looked at him, let alone touched him.
A pang of remorse struck him, and inexplicably, he thought of Esmenet.
Be safe.
Leading Daybreak, Achamian continued past the children, through the sun-dappled shade and toward Iothiah, the ancient capital of the Shigeki God-Kings, whose walls wandered across the distance, belts of faint stone glimpsed through dark eucalyptus limbs. Achamian walked, and wrestled with impossibilities …
The past was dead. The future, as black as a waiting grave.
Achamian wiped his tears on his shoulder. Something unimaginable was about to happen, something historians, philosophers, and theologians would argue for thousands of years—if years or anything else survived. And the acts of Drusas Achamian would loom so very large.
He would simply give. Without expectation.
His School. His calling. His life …
The Gnosis would be his sacrifice.
Behind her mighty curtain walls, Iothiah was a warren of four-storey mud-brick buildings welded continuously together. The alleyways were narrow, screened from above by palm-leaf awnings, so that Achamian felt as though he walked through desert tunnels. He avoided the Kerothotics: he didn’t like the look of triumph in their eyes. But when he encountered armed Men of the Tusk he would ask them for directions, and then pick his way through a further welter of alleys. The fact that most of the Inrithi he encountered were Ainoni concerned him. And once or twice, when the walls opened enough for him to spy the monuments of the city, he thought he could sense the deep bruise of the Scarlet Spires somewhere in the distance.
But then he encountered a troop of Norsirai horsemen—Galeoth, they said—and he was somewhat relieved. Yes, they knew how to find the Sareotic Library. Yes, the Library was in Galeoth hands. Achamian lied as he always lied, and told them that he was a scholar, come to chronicle the exploits of the Holy War. As always, their eyes brightened at the thought of finding some small mention in the annals of written history. They instructed him to follow as best he could, claiming they would pass the Library on their way to wherever it was they were stationed.
Noon saw him in the shadow of the Library, more apprehensive than ever.
If rumours of the existence of Gnostic texts had reached him, wouldn’t they also have reached the Scarlet Spires? The thought of jostling for scrolls with the red-robed Schoolmen filled him with more than a little dread.
“What do you think?” he asked Daybreak, who snorted and nosed his palm.
The idea that Gnostic texts might have lain hidden here all this time wasn’t as preposterous as it seemed. The Library was as old as the Thousand Temples, built and maintained by the Sareots, an esoteric College of priests dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. There was a time, during the Ceneian Empire, when it was law in Iothiah for all those entering the city in possession of a book to surrender it to the Sareots so that it might be copied. The problem, however, was that the Sareotic College was a religious institution, and as such, it necessarily forbade any of the Few from entering the famed Library.
When, many centuries later, the Sareots were massacred by the Fanim in the fall of Shigek, it was rumoured that the Padirajah himself had entered the Library. From his vest, the legend went, he pulled a slender, leather-bound copy of the kipfa’aifan, the Witness of Fane, bent to the shape of his breast. Holding it high in the airy gloom, he declared, “Here lies all written truth. Here lies the one path for all souls. Burn this wicked place.” At that instant, it was said, a single scroll spilled from the racks and came rolling to his booted feet. When the Padirajah opened it he found a detailed map of all Gedea, which he later used to crush the Nansur in a number of desperate battles.
The Library was spared, but if it was closed to Schoolmen under the Sareots, it might well have ceased to exist under the Kianene.
There very well could be Gnostic texts in this Library, Achamian knew. They’d been discovered before. If there were any reason, aside from their dreams of the Old Wars, why the sorcerers of the Mandate were the most scholarly of the Schoolmen, it was their jealousy of the Gnosis. The Gnosis gave them a power far out of proportion to the size of their School. If a School like the Scarlet Spires were to come into its possession—who could say what might happen? Things wouldn’t fare well with the Mandate, that much was certain.
But then, all that was about to change—now that an Anasûrimbor had returned.
Achamian led his mule into the middle of a small walled courtyard. The cobble had long ago been ground into red dust, save for the odd stones surfacing here and there like turtle shells. The Library itself presented the square front of a Ceneian temple, with columns soaring to brace a crumbling lintel pocked by figures that may have once been gods or men. Two large Galeoth swordsmen reclined in the shade against the two pillars flanking the entrance. They acknowledged him with bored stares as he approached.
“Greetings,” he called, hoping they spoke Sheyic. “I am Drusas Istaphas, chronicler to Prince Nersei Proyas of Conriya.”
When they failed to reply, he paused. Achamian found himself particularly unnerved by the one with a scar that dimpled his face from his hairline to his chin. These didn’t seem like friendly men. But then, what cheer would a warrior find guarding something as
useless as books?
Achamian cleared his throat. “Have there been many other visitors to the Library?”
“No,” the scarless man replied, shrugging his shoulders beneath his hauberk. “Just a few thieving merchants, is all.” The man spat something across the dust, and Achamian realized he’d been sucking on a peach pit.
“Well I can assure you I’m not of that caste. Assuredly not …” Then, with a mixture of curiosity and deference: “Do I have your leave to enter?”
The man nodded to his mule. “Can’t bring that thing,” he said. “Can’t have a donkey shitting in our hallowed halls now can we?” He smirked, and turned to his scarred friend, who continued to stare at Achamian. He looked like a bored boy deciding whether to poke a dead fish.
After gathering several things from his mule, Achamian rushed up the steps past the two guards. The great doors were gilded in tarnished bronze, and one of them lay ajar enough to admit a single man. As Achamian ducked into the gloom he heard one of the Galeoth—the scarred one, he thought—mutter “Filthy pick.”
But the old Norsirai slur didn’t bother him. Rather, he was excited. A sudden urge to cackle almost overcame him. Only now, it seemed, did the fact that this was the Sareotic Library fully strike him. The damned Sareots, hoarding text after text for over a thousand years. What might he find? Absolutely anything, and not just Gnostic works, might lie hidden within. The Nine Classics, the early Dialogues of Inceruti—even the lost works of Ajencis!
He passed through the darkness of a great vaulted antechamber, across a mosaic floor that once, he decided, had portrayed Inri Sejenus holding out haloed hands—at least before the Fanim, who’d obviously never used this place, had defaced it. He retrieved a candle from his saddlebag and ignited it with a secretive word. Holding the small point of light before him, he plunged into the hallowed halls of the Library.
The Warrior Prophet Page 31
