The sturdy General frowned, pursed his lips. He shook his head. “No.”
“I worry that you are, Martemus.”
Martemus turned away from the sun and studied him with pinched eyes. “I worried too … But no longer.”
“No longer … Why so, Martemus?”
“I watched,” the General said. “I saw him kill all these heathen. He killed and he killed until they fled in terror.” Martemus turned back to the sunset. “He’s not human.”
“Neither was Skeaös,” Conphas replied.
Martemus looked to his callused palms.
“I am a practical man, Lord Exalt-General.”
Conphas studied the sun-burnished carnage, the open mouths and unclosed eyes, the hands like good-luck monkey paws. He followed the smoke pluming from Anwurat—not so far away. Not so far.
He gazed back into Martemus’s sun. There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.
“You are at that, Martemus. You are at that.”
Skauras ab Nalajan had dismissed his subordinates, servants, and slaves, the long train of men that defined any station of power, and sat alone at a polished mahogany table drinking Shigeki wine. For the first time, it seemed, he truly tasted the sweetness of those things he had lost.
Though old, the Sapatishah-Governor was still hale. His white hair, oiled to his scalp in the Kianene fashion, was as thick as that of any younger man. He had a distinguished face, made severe and wise by his long moustaches and thin braided beard. His eyes glittered dark beneath a brooding brow.
He sat in a high turret room of Anwurat’s citadel. Through the narrow window he could hear the sounds of desperate battle below, the voices of beloved friends and followers crying out.
Though he was a pious man, Skauras had committed many wicked acts in his life—wicked acts were ever the inescapable accessories of power. He contemplated them with regret and pined for a simpler life, one with fewer pleasures, surely, but with fewer burdens as well. Certainly nothing so crushing as this …
I have doomed my people … my faith.
It had been a good plan, he reflected. Give the idolaters the illusion of a single fixed line. Convince them he would fight their battle. Draw their right into the north. Break their line, not through punishing and futile charges, but by breaking—or appearing to—in the centre. Then crush their left with Cinganjehoi and Fanayal.
How glorious it should have been.
Who could have guessed such a plan? Who could have anticipated him?
Probably Conphas.
Old enemy. Old friend—if such a man could be anyone’s friend.
Skauras reached beneath his jackal-embroidered coat and withdrew the parchment the Nansur Emperor had sent him. For months it had pressed against his breast, and now, after the day’s disaster, it was perhaps the only remaining hope of stopping the idolaters. Sweat had rounded it to the curve of his body, had rendered it cloth-soft. The word of Ikurei Xerius III, the Emperor of Nansur.
Old foe. Old friend.
Skauras didn’t read it. He didn’t need to. But the idolaters—they must never read it.
He placed its corner in the brilliant teardrop of his lamp. Watched it curl and ignite. Watched the spindly threads of smoke rise before they were yanked out the window.
By the Solitary God, it was still daylight!
“And they looked up, and saw that lo, the day had not gone, and that their shame lay open, for all to see …”
The Prophet’s words. May he grant them mercy.
He let the parchment go as fluttering wings of flame engulfed it. It thrashed feebly, like a living thing. The finish of the table blistered and blackened beneath.
A fitting mark, the Sapatishah-Governor supposed. A hint. A small oracle to future doom.
Skauras drank more wine. Already the idolaters were ramming the door. Quick, deadly men.
Are we all dead? he wondered.
No. Only me.
In the depths of his final, most pious prayer to the Solitary God, he didn’t hear the fibrous snapping of wood. Only the final crash and the sound of kindling skating across the tiled floor told him that the time had come to draw his sword.
He turned to face the rush of strapping, battle-crazed infidels.
It would be a short battle.
She awoke with her head cradled in his lap. He wiped her cheeks and brow with a wetted cloth. His eyes glittered with tears in the lantern light.
“The baby?” she gasped.
Kellhus closed his eyes and nodded. “Is fine.”
She smiled and began weeping. “Why? How have I angered you?”
“It wasn’t me, Serwë.”
“But it was you! I saw you!”
“No … You saw a demon. A counterfeit with my face …”
And suddenly she knew. What had been familiar became alien. What had been inexplicable became clear.
A demon visited me! A demon …
She looked to him. More hot tears spilled across her cheeks. How long could she cry?
But I … He …
Kellhus blinked slowly. He took you.
She gagged. She rolled her cheek onto his thigh. Convulsions wracked her, but no vomit would come.
“I …” she sobbed. “I …”
“You were faithful.”
She turned to him, her face crumpling.
But it wasn’t you!
“You were deceived. You were faithful.”
He wiped at her tears, and she glimpsed blood on his cloth. They lay silently for a time, simply staring into each other’s eyes. She felt her stinging skin soothed, her hurts fade into a strange buzzing ache. How long, she wondered, could she stare into those eyes? How long could her heart bask in their all-knowing sight?
Forever?
Yes, forever.
“The Scylvendi came,” she finally said. “He tried to take me.”
“I know,” Kellhus replied. “I told him he could.”
And somehow she knew this too.
But why?
He smiled glory.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t let him.”
How much have they learned?
In the lonely light of a single lantern, Kellhus talked to Serwë in cooing tones, matching her rhythms, heartbeat for heartbeat, breath for breath. With a patience no world-born man could fathom, he slowly lured her into the trance the Dûnyain called the Whelming, to the place where voice could overwrite voice. Eliciting a long string of automatic responses, he reviewed her interrogation at the hands of the skin-spy. Then he gradually scraped the thing’s assault from the parchment of her soul. Come morning, she would awaken puzzled by her cuts and bruises, nothing more. Come morning, she would awaken cleansed.
Afterward, he pressed through the raucous and celebratory alleys of the encampment, walking toward the Meneanor, toward the Scylvendi’s seaside camp. He ignored all those who hailed him, adopting an air of brooding distraction that wasn’t so far from the truth … Those who persisted shrank from his angry glare.
He had one task remaining.
Of all his studies, none had been so deep or so perilous as the Scylvendi. There was the man’s pride, which like Proyas and the other Great Names had made him exceedingly sensitive to relations of dominance. And there was his preternatural intelligence, his ability not only to grasp and penetrate but to reflect on the movements of his own soul—to ask after the origins of his own thoughts.
But more than anything there was his knowledge—his knowledge of the Dûnyain. Moënghus had yielded too much truth in his effort to escape the Utemot those many years ago. He’d underestimated what Cnaiür would make of the fragments he’d revealed. Through his obsessive rehearsal of the events surrounding his father’s death, the plainsman had come to many troubling conclusions. And now, of all world-born men, he alone knew the truth of the Dûnyain. Of all world-born men, Cnaiür urs Skiötha was awake …
Which was why he had to die.
Almost to a man, the Men of Eärwa adhered without thought or knowledge to the customs of their people. A Conriyan didn’t shave because bare cheeks were effeminate. A Nansur didn’t wear leggings because they were crude. A Tydonni didn’t consort with dark-skinned peoples—or picks, as they called them—because they were polluted. For world-born men, such customs simply were. They gave precious food to statues of dead stone. They kissed the knees of weaker men. They lived in terror of their wanton hearts. They each thought themselves the absolute measure of all others. They felt shame, disgust, esteem, reverence …
And they never asked why.
Not so with Cnaiür. Where others adhered out of ignorance of the alternatives, he was continually forced to choose, and more importantly, to affirm one thought from the infinite field of possible thoughts, one act from the infinite field of possible acts. Why upbraid a wife for weeping? Why not strike her instead? Why not laugh, ignore, or console? Why not weep with her? What made one response more true than another? Was it one’s blood? Was it another’s words of reason? Was it one’s God?
Or was it, as Moënghus had claimed, one’s goal?
Encircled by his people, born of them and destined to die among them, Cnaiür had chosen his blood. For thirty years he tried to beat his thoughts and passions down the narrow tracks of the Utemot. But despite his brutal persistence, despite his native gifts, his fellow tribesmen could always smell a wrongness about him. In the intercourse between men, every move was constrained by others’ expectations; it was a kind of dance, and as such, it brooked no hesitation. The Utemot glimpsed his flickering doubts. They understood that he tried, and they knew that whoever tried to be of the People couldn’t be of the People.
So they punished him with whispers and guarded eyes—for more than a hundred seasons …
Thirty years of shame and denial. Thirty years of torment and terror. A lifetime of cannibal hatred … In the end, Cnaiür had cut a trail of his own making, a solitary track of madness and murder.
He had made blood his cleansing waters. If war was worship, then Cnaiür would be the most pious of the Scylvendi—not simply of the People, but the greatest among them as well. He told himself his arms were his glory. He was Cnaiür urs Skiötha, the most violent of all men.
And so he continued telling himself, even though his every swazond marked not his honour, but the death of Anasûrimbor Moënghus. For what was madness, if not a kind of overpowering impatience, a need to seize at once what the world denied? Moënghus not only had to die, he had to die now—whether he was Moënghus or not.
In his fury, Cnaiür had made all the world his surrogate. And he avenged himself upon it.
Despite the accuracy of this analysis, it availed Kellhus little in his attempts to possess the Utemot Chieftain. Always the man’s knowledge of the Dûnyain barred his passage. For a time, Kellhus even considered the possibility that Cnaiür would never succumb.
Then they found Serwë—a surrogate of a different kind.
From the very beginning, the Scylvendi had made her his track, his proof that he followed the ways of the People. Serwë was the erasure of Moënghus, whose presence Kellhus’s resemblance so recalled. She was the incantation that would undo Moënghus’s curse. And Cnaiür fell in love, not with her, but with the idea of loving her. Because if he loved her, he couldn’t love Anasûrimbor Moënghus …
Or his son.
What followed had been almost elementary.
Kellhus began seducing Serwë, knowing that he showed the barbarian his own seduction at the hands of Moënghus some thirty years previous. Soon, she became both the erasure and the repetition of Cnaiür’s heartbreaking hate. The plainsman began beating her, not simply to prove his Scylvendi contempt for women, but to better beat himself. He punished her for repeating his sins, even though he at once loved her and despised love as weakness …
And so as Kellhus intended, contradiction piled upon contradiction. World-born men, he’d discovered, possessed a peculiar vulnerability to contradictions, particularly those that provoked conflicting passions. Nothing, it seemed, so anchored their hearts. Nothing so obsessed.
Once Cnaiür had utterly succumbed to the girl, Kellhus simply took her away, knowing the man would trade anything for her return, and that he would do so without even understanding why.
And now the usefulness of Cnaiür urs Skiötha was at an end.
The monk climbed the sparsely grassed pate of a dune. The wind whipped through his hair, yanked his white samite robe about his waist. Before him, the Meneanor swept out to where the earth seemed to spill into the great void of the night. Immediately below, he saw the Scylvendi’s simple round tent; it had been kicked down and trampled. No fire burned before it.
For a moment Kellhus thought he was too late, then he heard raw shouts on the wind, glimpsed a figure amid the heaving waves. He walked through the ruined camp to the water’s edge, felt the crunch of shells and gravel beneath his sandalled feet. Moonlight silvered the rolling waters. Gulls cried out, hanging like kites in the night wind.
Kellhus watched the waves batter the Scylvendi’s nude form.
“There are no tracks!” the man screamed, beating the surf with his fists. “Where are the—”
Without warning, he went rigid. Dark water swelled about him, engulfed him almost to his shoulders, then tumbled forward in clouds of crystalline foam. He turned his head, and Kellhus saw his weathered face, framed by long tails of sodden black hair. There was no expression.
Absolutely no expression.
Cnaiür began wading to shore; the surf broke about him, as insubstantial as smoke.
“I did everything you asked,” he called over the surrounding thunder. “I shamed my father into battling you. I betrayed him, my tribe, my race …”
The water dropped from his massive chest to the concave plane of his stomach and groin. A wave crashed about his white thighs, tugged upon his long phallus. Kellhus filtered out the Meneanor’s clamour, bound his every sense to the approaching barbarian. Steady pulse. Bloodless skin. Slack face …
Dead eyes.
And Kellhus realized: I cannot read this man.
“I followed you across the trackless Steppe.”
The slap of bare feet across waterlogged sand. Cnaiür paused before him, his great frame glistening as though enamelled in the moonlight.
“I loved you.”
Kellhus reached back, drew his Dûnyain sword, levelled it before him. “Kneel,” he said.
The Scylvendi fell to his knees. He held out his arms, trailing fingers through the sand. He bent his face back to the stars, exposing his throat. The Meneanor surged and seethed behind him.
Kellhus stood motionless above him.
What is this, Father? Pity?
He gazed at the abject Scylvendi warrior. From what darkness had this passion come?
“Strike!” the man cried. The great scarred body trembled in terror and exultation.
But still, Kellhus couldn’t move.
“Kill me!” Cnaiür shouted to the bowl of the night. With uncanny swiftness he seized Kellhus’s blade, jerked its point to his throat. “Kill! Kill!”
“No,” Kellhus said. A wave crashed, and the wind whipped cold spray across them.
Leaning forward, he gently pried his blade from the man’s heavy grip.
Cnaiür’s arms snapped about either side of his head, wrenched him to the cool sand.
Kellhus remained motionless. Whether by luck or instinct, the barbarian had yanked him within a coin’s edge of death. The merest twitch, Kellhus knew, could break his neck.
Cnaiür drew him close enough for him to feel his humid body heat.
“I loved you!” he both whispered and screamed. Then he thrust Kellhus backward, nearly tossing him back to his feet. Wary now, Kellhus rolled his chin to straighten a kink from his neck. Cnaiür stared at him in hope and horror …
Kellhus sheathed his sword.
The Scylvendi swayed backward, raising his fists to his
head. He clutched handfuls of hair, wrested them from his scalp.
“But you said!” he raved, holding out bloody shocks of hair. “You said!”
Kellhus watched, utterly unmoved. There were other uses.
There were always other uses.
The thing called Sarcellus followed a narrow track along the embankments between fields. Despite the uncharacteristic humidity, it was a clear night, and the moon etched the surrounding clots of eucalytpus and sycamore in blue. He slowed as he passed the first ruins, and guided his mount between a long gallery of columns that jutted from a collection of grassy mounds. Beyond the columns, the Sempis lay as still as any lake, bearing the white moon and the shadowy line of the northern escarpments upon its mirror back. Sarcellus dismounted.
This place had once belonged to the ancient city of Girgilioth, but that mattered little to the thing called Sarcellus. He was a creature of the moment. What mattered was that it was a landmark, and landmarks were good places for spies to confer with their handlers—human or otherwise.
Sarcellus sat with his back against one of the columns, lost in thoughts both predatory and impenetrable. Cylindrical friezes of leopards standing like men soared across the moon-pale column above. The flutter of wings stirred him from his reverie and he looked up with his large brown eyes, reminded of different pillars.
A bird the size of a raven alighted upon his knee—a bird like any raven save for its white head.
White, human head.
The face twitched with bird-nervousness, regarded Sarcellus with tiny turquoise eyes.
“I smell blood,” it said in a thin voice.
Sarcellus nodded. “The Scylvendi … He interrupted my interrogation of the girl.”
“Your effectiveness?”
“Is unimpaired. I heal.”
A tiny blink. “Good. Then what have you learned?”
“He’s not Cishaurim.” The thing had spoken this softly, as though to preserve tiny eardrums.
A cat-curious turn of the head. “Indeed,” the Synthese said after a moment. “Then what is he?”
“Dûnyain.”
Tiny grimace. Small, glistening teeth, like grains of rice, flashed between its lips. “All games end with me, Gaörtha. All games.”
The Warrior Prophet Page 39
