The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  Sarcellus became very still. “I play no game. This man is Dûnyain. That’s what the Scylvendi calls him. She said there’s no doubt.”

  “But there’s no order called ‘Dûnyain’ in Atrithau.”

  “No. But then we know that he’s not a Prince of Atrithau.”

  The Old Name paused, as though to cycle large human thoughts through a small bird intellect.

  “Perhaps,” it eventually said, “it’s no coincidence that this order takes its name from ancient Kûniüric. Perhaps this man’s name, Anasûrimbor, is not a clumsy Cishaurim lie after all. Perhaps he is of the Old Seed.”

  “Could the Nonmen have trained him?”

  “Perhaps … But we have spies—even in Ishterebinth. There is little that Nin-Ciljiras does that we don’t know. Very little.”

  The small face cackled. It folded and unfolded its obsidian wings.

  “No,” it continued, its small brow furrowed, “this Dûnyain is not a ward of the Nonmen … When the light of ancient Kûniüri was stamped out, many stubborn embers survived. The Mandate is just such an ember. Perhaps the Dûnyain is another, just as stubborn …”

  The blue eyes flickered—another blink. “But far more secretive.”

  Sarcellus said nothing. Speculation on such matters was beyond his warrant, beyond his making.

  The tiny teeth clicked, once, twice, as though the Old Name tested their mettle.

  “Yes … An ember … in the very shadow of Holy Golgotterath no less …”

  “He’s told the woman the Holy War will be his.”

  “And he’s not Cishaurim! Such a mystery, Gaörtha! Who are the Dûnyain? What do they want with the Holy War? And how, my pretty pretty child, can this man see through your face?”

  “But we don’t—”

  “He sees enough … Yes, more than enough …”

  It bent its head to the right, blinked, then straightened.

  “Indulge this Prince Kellhus for a while yet, Gaörtha. With the Mandate sorcerer removed from the game he’s become less of a threat. Indulge him … We must learn more about this ‘Dûnyain.’”

  “But even now he grows in power. More and more these Men call him ‘Warrior-Prophet’ or ‘Prince of God.’ If he continues, he will become very difficult to remove.”

  “Warrior-Prophet …” The Synthese cackled. “Very cunning, this Dûnyain. He leashes these fanatics with leather of their own making … What is his sermon, Gaörtha? Does it in any way threaten the Holy War?”

  “No. Not yet, Consult Father.”

  “Measure him, then do as you see fit. If it seems he might call the Holy War to kennel, you must silence him—no matter what the cost. He is but a curiosity. The Cishaurim are our foe!”

  “Yes, Old Father.”

  Gleaming like wet marble, the white head bobbed twice, as though in answer to some overriding instinct. A wing dropped to Sarcellus’s knee, dipped between his shadowy thighs … Gaörtha went rigid.

  “Are you badly hurt, my sweet child?”

  “Yessss,” the thing called Sarcellus gasped.

  The small head tilted backward. Heavy-lidded eyes watched the wingtip circle and stroke, stroke and circle. “Ah, but imagine … Imagine a world where no womb quickens, where no soul hopes!”

  Sarcellus sucked drool in delight.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SHIGEK

  Men never resemble one another so much as when asleep or dead.

  —OPPARITHA, ON THE CARNAL

  The arrogance of the Inrithi waxed bright in the days following Anwurat. Though the sober-minded demanded they press the attack, the great majority clamoured for respite. They thought the Fanim doomed, just as they thought them doomed after Mengedda. But while the Men of the Tusk tarried, the Padirajah plotted. He would make the world his shield.

  —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

  Early Autumn, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Iothiah

  Achamian suffered dreams …

  Dreams drawn from the sheath.

  Drizzle hazed the distances, obscuring the Ring Mountains behind drapes of woollen grey, granting the madness before him the span of all visible creation. Masses of Sranc, bristling with black-bronze weapons. Ranks of Bashrag, beating the mud with their massive hammers. And beyond them, the high ramparts of Golgotterath. Misty barbicans above precipitous cliffs, the two great horns of the Ark rearing into murky obscurity, curved and golden against the endless grey, trailing skirts of unguttered water.

  Hoary Golgotterath, raised about the greatest terror ever to fall from the heavens.

  Soon to yield …

  A great yawing rumbled from the parapets out and across the dreary plains.

  Like a tide of spiders, the Sranc surged forward, howling through pools, sprinting through mud. They crashed into the phalanxes of the warlike Aörsi, the long-haired bulwark of the North; they seethed against the shining ranks of the Kûniüri, the high tide of Norsirai glory. The Chieftain-Princes of the High Norsirai whipped their chariots forward and all perished before them. The standards of Ishterebinth, last of the Nonmen Mansions, charged deep into a sea of abominations, leaving black-blooded ruin in their wake. Great Nil’gikas stood like a point of brilliant sunlight amid smoke and violent shadow. And Nymeric sounded the Worldhorn, over and over, until the Sranc could hear nothing but the peal of their doom.

  Seswatha, Grandmaster of the Sohonc, raised his face to the rain and tasted sweet joy, for it was happening, truly happening! Unholy Golgotterath, ancient Min-Uroikas, was about to fall. He had warned them in time!

  Achamian would relive all eighteen years of that delusion.

  Dreams drawn from the knife’s sheath.

  And when he awakened, to the sound of harsh shouts or to the patter of cold water across his face, it would seem that one horror had merely replaced another. He would blink against torchlight, would dully note the bite of chains, a mouth stuffed with rank cloth, and the dark, scarlet-robed figures that surrounded him. And he would think, before succumbing to the Dreams once again, It comes … the Apocalypse comes …

  “Strange, isn’t it, Iyokus?”

  “And what is that?”

  “That men can be rendered so helpless so easily.”

  “Men and Schools …”

  “What are you implying?”

  “Nothing, Grandmaster.”

  “Look! He watches!”

  “Yes … He does that from time to time. But he must recover more of his strength before we can begin.”

  Esmenet cried out when she saw them walking their mounts across the field toward her. Kellhus and Serwë, haggard from long and sleepless travel. Suddenly she was running across the uneven pasture, as though drawn by a long irresistible line. Toward them. No, not them—toward him.

  She flew to him, clutched him harder than she thought her limbs capable. He smelt of dust and scented oils. His beard and hair kissed her bare skin with soft curls. She could feel her tears roll from her cheek to his neck in continuous lines.

  “Kellhus,” she sobbed. “Oh, Kellhus … I think I’m going mad!”

  “No, Esmi … It is grief.”

  He seemed a pillar of comfort. His square chest flattening her breasts. His long warding arms about her back and narrow waist.

  He pressed her back, and she turned to Serwë, who was also crying. They hugged, then together walked back to the lonely tent on the slope. Kellhus led their horses.

  “We missed you, Esmi,” Serwë said, strangely flustered.

  Esmenet regarded the girl with sorrow. Her left eye was bruised black and cherry and an angry red cut poked from beneath her hairline. Even if Esmenet had the heart—and she had none—she would wait for Serwë to explain rather than ask what had happened. With such marks, asking demanded lies, and silence afforded truth. That was the lot of women—especially when they were wanton …

  Aside from her face, the girl appeared healthy, almost aglow. Beneath her hasas, her belly had swelled in the narrow-hipped mann
er Esmenet could only envy. A hundred questions assailed Esmenet. How was her back? How often did she pee? Had there been any bleeding? Suddenly she realized how terrified the girl must be—even with Kellhus. Esmenet could remember her own joyous terror. But then, she’d been alone. Absolutely alone.

  “You must be famished!” she exclaimed.

  Serwë shook her head in feeble denial, and both Esmenet and Kellhus laughed. Serwë was always hungry—as a pregnant woman should be.

  For a moment, Esmenet felt the old sunshine flash from her eyes.

  “It’s so good to see you,” she said. “I’ve mourned more than the loss of Achamian.”

  Dusk had come, so she began drawing wood—mostly bone-coloured flotsam she’d found along the river—to throw into the fire. Kellhus sat cross-legged before the dwindling flames. Serwë leaned her head against his shoulder, her hair nearly bleached white by the sun, her nose red and peeling as always.

  “This is the same fire,” Kellhus said. “The one we struck after first coming to Shigek.”

  Esmenet paused, her arms wrapped about her wood.

  “It is!” Serwë exclaimed. She looked around the bare slopes, turned to the dark band of the river in the near distance. “But everything’s gone … All the tents. All the people …”

  Esmenet fed the fire piece by elaborate piece. She’d obsessed over her fires of late. There was no one else to tend.

  She could feel Kellhus’s gentle scrutiny.

  “Some hearths can’t be rekindled,” he said.

  “It burns well enough,” Esmenet murmured. She blinked tears, sniffled and wiped at her nose.

  “But what makes a hearth, Esmi? Is it the fire, or the family that keeps it?”

  “The family,” she finally said. A strange blankness had overcome her.

  “We’re that family … You know that.” Kellhus had bent his head sideways to look into her downturned face. “And Achamian knows that too.”

  Her legs became strangers, and she stumbled, fell onto her rump. She began weeping yet again.

  “B-but I-I have to-to stay … I-I have-have t-to wait for him … for him to come home.”

  Kellhus knelt beside her, lifted her chin. She glimpsed a tear’s shining track across his left cheek.

  “We are that home,” he said, and somehow that was the end of it.

  Over the course of dinner, Kellhus explained all that had happened the previous week. He was a most extraordinary storyteller—he always had been—and for a time Esmenet found herself lost in the Battle of Anwurat and its wrenching intricacies. Her heart pounded in her throat when he described the burning of the encampment and the charge of the Khirgwi, and she clapped and laughed every bit as hard as Serwë when he described his defence of the Swazond Standard, which according to him consisted of no more than a succession of outlandishly lucky blunders. And she found herself wondering that such a miraculous man—a prophet! for he could be nothing else—concerned himself with her, Esmenet, a caste-menial whore from the slums of Sumna.

  “Ah, Esmi,” he said, “it brings such peace to my heart to see you smile.”

  She bit her lip, laughed through a crying face.

  He continued, more seriously, to explain the events following the battle. How the heathens had been chased into the desert. How Gotian had held Skauras’s severed head before their victory fires. How even now the Holy War secured the South Bank. From the Delta to the deep desert, tabernacles burned …

  Esmenet had seen the smoke.

  They sat silently for a while, listening to the fire gorge on her wood. As always the sky was desert clear, and the vault of stars seemed endless. Moonlight silvered the eternal Sempis.

  How many nights had she pondered these things? Sky and sweeping landscape. Dwarfing her, terrifying her with their monstrous indifference, reminding her that hearts were no more than fluttering rags. Too much wind, and they were tossed into the great black. Too little, and they fell slack.

  What chance did Akka have?

  “I received word from Xinemus,” Kellhus finally said. “He still searches …”

  “So there’s hope?”

  “There’s always hope,” he said in a voice that at once encouraged and deadened her heart. “We can only wait and see what he finds.”

  Esmenet couldn’t speak. She glanced at Serwë, but the girl avoided her eyes.

  They think he’s dead.

  She knew better than to hope. This was the world. But dead seemed such an impossible thought. How could one think the end of thinking?

  Akka would—

  “Come,” Kellhus said, in the quick and open manner of someone assured of his new course. He strode around her small fire, sat with his knees in his hands next to her. With a stick he scratched an oddly familiar sign into the bare earth before them. “In the meantime, let’s teach you how to read.”

  It seemed all crying had been wrung from her, but somehow …

  Esmenet looked to Kellhus and smiled through her tears. Her voice felt small and broken.

  “I’ve always wanted to read.”

  The seamless transition of agonies—from Seswatha’s torture in the bowels of Dagliash two thousand years before to now … The pain of puckered burns, chafed wrists, joints contorted by the wrong distribution of his body’s weight. At first Achamian didn’t realize he was awake. It merely seemed that Mekeritrig’s face had transformed into that of Eleäzaras—the inhumanly beautiful face of the Mantraitor had become that of the Grandmaster, rutted and whiskered.

  “Ah, Achamian,” Eleäzaras said, “it’s good to see you seeing—things in this world at least. For some time we feared you wouldn’t awaken at all. You were very nearly killed, you know. The Library was absolutely ruined … All those books ash, simply because of your stubbornness. How the Sareots must howl in the Outside. All their poor books.”

  Achamian was gagged, naked, and chained, wrists above his head and ankle to ankle, so that he hung suspended over a great mosaic floor. The chamber was vaulted, but he couldn’t see the ceiling’s peak, nor could he see the terminus of the walls that framed the silk-gowned entourage before him. The surrounding spaces were lost in gloom. Three glowering tripods provided light, and only he, hanging in the confluence of their circles of illumination, was bright.

  “Ah yes …” Eleäzaras continued, watching him with a thin smile. “This place. It’s always good to have a sense of one’s prison, no? An old Inrithi chapel, by the looks of it. Built by the Ceneians, I suppose.”

  Suddenly he understood.

  The Scarlet Spires! I’m dead … I’m dead.

  Tears welled down his cheeks. His body, beaten, numb from hanging, betrayed him, and he felt the rush of urine and bowel along his naked legs, heard mud slap across the mosaic serpents at his feet.

  Nooo! This can’t be happening!

  Eleäzaras laughed, a thin, wicked thing. “And now,” he said, his tone jnanic and droll, “some long-dead Ceneian architect also howls.”

  There was uneasy laughter from his retinue.

  Seized by animal panic, Achamian writhed against his chains, hacked against the cloth in his throat. Spasms struck and he went limp. He swung in small circles, punished by wave after wave of pain.

  Esmi …

  “There’s much certainty here,” Eleäzaras said, holding a kerchief to his face, “don’t you think, Achamian? You know why you’ve been taken. And you also know the inevitable outcome. We’ll ply you for the Gnosis, and you, conditioned by years of Mandate training, will frustrate our every attempt. You’ll die in agony, your secrets clutched close to your heart, and we’ll be left with yet another useless Mandate corpse. This is the way that it’s supposed to happen, no?”

  Achamian simply stared in blank horror, an anguished pendulum slowly swinging to and fro, to and fro …

  What Eleäzaras said was true. He was supposed to die for his knowledge, for the Gnosis.

  Think, Achamian, think! Please-please-dear-God-you-must-think!

  Witho
ut the guidance of the Nonmen Quya, the Anagogic Schools of the Three Seas had never learned how to surpass what were called the Analogies. All their sorcery, no matter how powerful or ingenious, arose through the power of arcane associations, through the resonances between words and concrete events. They required detours—dragons, lightnings, suns—to burn the world. They could not, like Achamian, conjure the essence of these things, the Burning itself. They knew nothing of the Abstractions.

  Where they were poets, he was a philosopher. They were mere bronze to his iron, and he would show them.

  Achamian snorted air through his nostrils. Through bleary eyes, he glared at the Grandmaster.

  I will see you burn! I will see you burn!

  “But here,” Eleäzaras was saying, “in these tumultuous times, the past need not be our tyrant. Here, your torment, your death, isn’t assured … Here, nothing is for certain.”

  Eleäzaras walked from the others—five graceful, measured steps—and came to a stop very near to Achamian.

  “To prove this to you, I’ll have your gag removed. I’ll actually let you speak, rather than ply you, as we have your fellow Schoolmen in the past, with endless Compulsions. But I warn you, Achamian, it will be fruitless to try to assail us.” He produced a slender hand from the cuff of his glyphembroidered sleeve, gestured to the mosaic floor.

  Achamian saw a broad circle, painted in red, across the stylized animals of the mosaic floor: the representation of a snake scaled by pictograms and devouring its own tail.

  “As you can see,” Eleäzaras said mildly, “you’re chained above a Uroborian Circle … To even begin a Cant will invite immeasurable pain, I assure you. I’ve witnessed it before.”

  So had Achamian. The Scarlet Spires, it seemed, possessed many potent poetic devices.

  The Grandmaster retreated, and a lumbering eunuch appeared from the shadows. With fat but nimble fingers, he withdrew the gag. Achamian sucked air through his mouth, tasted the stink of his body’s earlier treachery. He hung his head forward, spit as best he could.