The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  No, Proyas decided. It must be something else … Something the Shriah thought beyond his tolerance or his ken. Otherwise, why not explain his reasons?

  Could it be the Consult?

  “The Dreams,” Achamian had said at Momemn. “They’ve been so forceful of late.”

  “Ah, back to the nightmares again …”

  “Something is happening, Proyas. I know it. I feel it!”

  Never had he looked so desperate.

  Could it be?

  No. It was too absurd. Even if they did exist, how could the Shriah find them when the Mandate themselves couldn’t?

  No … It had to be the Scarlet Spires. After all, that had been Achamian’s mission, hadn’t it? Watch the Scarlet Spires …

  Proyas yanked at his hair and snarled under his breath.

  Why?

  Why couldn’t this one thing be pure? Why must everything holy—everything!—be riddled by tawdry and despicable intent?

  He sat very still, drawing breath after shuddering breath. He imagined drawing his sword, slashing and hacking wildly through his chambers, howling and shrieking … Then he collected himself to the beat of his own pulse.

  Nothing pure … Love transformed into betrayal. Prayers bent into accusations.

  This was Maithanet’s point, wasn’t it? The holy followed upon the wicked.

  Proyas had thought himself the moral leader of the Holy War. But now he knew better. Now he knew he was merely one more piece upon the benjuka plate. The players were perhaps known to him—the Thousand Temples, House Ikurei, the Scarlet Spires, the Cishaurim, and perhaps even Kellhus—but the rules, which were the most treacherous element of any game of benjuka, were definitely not known.

  I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

  The Holy War had only triumphed, and yet never had he felt so desperate.

  So weak.

  I told you, old tutor. I told you …

  As though stirring from a stupor, Proyas called for Algari, his old Cironji body-slave, and bid the man to bring him his writing chest. As tired as he was, he had no choice but to answer the Shriah now. Tomorrow the Holy War marched into the desert.

  For some reason, after unlatching the small mahogany and ivory chest and running his fingers over the quill and curled parchment, Nersei Proyas felt like a young boy once again, about to begin his writing drills under Achamian’s hawkish but all-forgiving eyes. He could almost feel the sorcerer’s friendly shadow, looming watchfully over his boy-slender shoulders.

  “That House Nersei could produce a boy so daft!”

  “That the School of Mandate could send a tutor so blind!”

  Proyas almost laughed his tutor’s world-wise laugh.

  And tears clotted his eyes as he completed the first line of his baffled reply to Maithanet.

  … but it would seem, Your Eminence, that Drusas Achamian is dead.

  Esmenet smiled, and Kellhus saw through her olive skin, through the play of muscles over bone, all the way to the abstract point that described her soul.

  She knows I see her, Father.

  The campsite bustled with activity and rumbled with open-hearted conversation. The Holy War was about to march across the deserts of Khemema, and Kellhus had invited all fourteen of his senior Zaudunyani, which meant “the Tribe of Truth” in Kûniüric, to his fire. They already knew their mission; Kellhus need only remind them of what he promised. Beliefs alone didn’t control the actions of men. There was also desire, and these men, his apostles, must shine with that desire.

  The Thanes of the Warrior-Prophet.

  Esmenet sat across from him on the far side of the fire, laughing and chatting with her neighbours, Arweal and Persommas, her face flushed with a joy she wouldn’t have dared imagine and couldn’t yet dare admit. Kellhus winked at her, then looked to the others, smiling, laughing, calling out …

  Scrutinizing. Dominating.

  Each was a riotous font of significance. The downcast eyes, quickened heart, and fumbling words of Ottma spoke to the overpowering presence of Serwë, who blithely gossiped at his side. The momentary sneer the instant before Ulnarta smiled meant he still disapproved of Tshuma because he feared the blackness of his skin. The way Kasalla, Gayamakri, and Hilderath oriented their shoulders toward Werjau, even while speaking to others, meant they still considered him to be first among them. And indeed, the way Werjau tended to call across the fire more and more, leaning forward with his palms down, while the others generally restricted their conversation to those beside them, spoke to the assertion of unconscious relations of dominance and submission. Werjau even thrust out his chin …

  “Tell me, Werjau,” Kellhus called out. “What is it you see within your heart?”

  Such interventions were inevitable. These were world-born men.

  “Joy,” Werjau said, smiling. Faint deadening about the eyes. Flare in pulse. Blush reflex.

  He sees, and he doesn’t see.

  Kellhus compressed his lips, rueful and forbearing. “And what is it I see?”

  This he knows …

  The sound of other voices trailed into silence.

  Werjau lowered his eyes.

  “Pride,” the young Galeoth said. “You see pride, Master.”

  Kellhus grinned, and the anxiety was swept from them.

  “Not,” he said, “with that face, Werjau.”

  All of them, including Serwë and Esmenet, howled with laughter, and Kellhus glanced around the fire, satisfied. He could tolerate no posturing among them. It was the utter absence of presumption that made his company so utterly unique, that made their hearts leap and their stomachs giddy at the prospect of seeing him. The weight of sin was found in secrecy and condemnation. Strip these away, deny men their deceptions and their judgements, and their self-sense of shame and worthlessness simply vanished.

  They felt greater in his presence, both pure and chosen.

  Pragma Meigon stared through young Kellhus’s face, saw his fear. “They’re harmless,” he said.

  “What are they, Pragma?”

  “Exemplary defectives … Specimens. We retain them for purposes of education.” The Pragma simulated a smile. “For students such as you, Kellhus.”

  They stood deep beneath Ishuäl, in a hexagonal room within the mighty galleries of the Thousand Thousand Halls. Save for the entrance, staggered racks of knobbed and runnelled candles covered the surrounding walls, shedding a light without shadows and as bright and clear as the noonday sun’s. This alone made the room extraordinary—light was otherwise forbidden in the Labyrinth—but what made the room astonishing were the many men shackled in its sunken centre.

  Each of them was naked, linen pale, and bound with greening copper straps to boards that leaned gently backward. The boards themselves had been arranged in a broad circle, with each man lying fixed within arm’s reach of his comrades and positioned at the edge of the floor’s central depression, so that a boy Kellhus’s height could stand at the lip of the surrounding floor and look the specimens directly in the face …

  Had they possessed faces.

  Their heads were drawn forward into open iron frames, where they were held motionless by bracketing bars. Behind their heads, wires had been fixed to the base of each frame. These swept forward in a radial fashion, ending in tiny silver hooks that anchored the obscuring skin. Slick muscle gleamed in the light. To Kellhus, it looked as though each man had thrust his head into a spider web that had peeled away his face.

  Pragma Meigon had called it the Unmasking Room.

  “To begin,” the old man said, “you’ll study and memorize each of their faces. Then you’ll reproduce what you’ve seen on parchment.” He nodded to a battery of worn scrivening tables along the southern walls.

  His limbs as light as autumn leaves, Kellhus stepped forward. He heard the masticating of pasty mouths, a chorus of voiceless grunts and gaspings.

  “Their larynxes have been removed,” Pragma Meigon explained. “To assist concentration.”

&n
bsp; Kellhus paused before the first specimen.

  “The face possesses forty-four muscles,” the Pragma continued. “Operating in concert, they are capable of signifying every permutation of passion. All those permutations, young Kellhus, derive from the fifty-seven base and base-remove types found here in this room.”

  Despite the absence of skin, Kellhus immediately recognized horror in the flayed face of the specimen strapped before him. Like warring flatworms, the fine muscles about his eyes strained outward and inward at the same time. The larger, rat-sized muscles about his lower face yanked his mouth into a perpetual fear-grin. Lidless eyes stared. Rapid breaths hissed …

  “You’re wondering how he can maintain that particular expressive configuration,” the Pragma said. “Centuries ago we found we could limit the range of behaviours by probing the brain with needles—with what we now call neuropuncture.”

  Kellhus stood transfixed. Without warning, an attendant loomed over him, holding a narrow reed between his teeth. He dipped the reed into the bowl of fluid he carried, then blowing, sprayed the specimen with a fine orangish mist. He then continued on to the next.

  “Neuropuncture,” the Pragma continued, “made possible the rehabilitation of defectives for instructional purposes. The specimen before you, for instance, always displays fear at a base-remove of two.”

  “Horror?” Kellhus asked.

  “Precisely.”

  Kellhus felt the childishness of his own horror fade in understanding. He looked to either side, saw the specimens curving out of sight, rows of white eyes set in shining red musculatures. They were only defectives—nothing more. He returned his gaze to the man before him, to fear base-remove two, and committed what he saw to memory. Then he moved on to the next gasping skein of muscles.

  “Good,” Pragma Meigon had said from his periphery. “Very good.”

  Kellhus turned once more to Esmenet, peeled away her face with the hooks of his gaze.

  She’d already made two trips from the fire to her tent—promenades to draw his attention and covertly gauge his interest. She periodically looked from side to side, feigning amusement in things elsewhere to see if he watched her. Twice he let her catch him. Each time he grinned with boyish good nature. Each time she looked down, blushing, pupils dilated, eyes blinking rapidly, her body radiating the musk of nascent arousal. Though Esmenet had not yet come to his bed, part of her ached for him, even wooed him. And she knew it not.

  For all her native gifts, Esmenet remained a world-born woman. And for all world-born men and women, two souls shared the same body, face, and eyes. The animal and the intellect. Everyone was two.

  Defective.

  One Esmenet had already renounced Drusas Achamian. The other would soon follow.

  Esmenet blinked against the turquoise sky, held a hand against the sun. No matter how many times she witnessed it, she was dumbstruck.

  The Holy War.

  She’d paused with Kellhus and Serwë on the summit of a rise so that Serwë could readjust her pack. Fields of Inrithi warriors and camp-followers walked past them, toward the crumbling cliffs of the southern escarpment. Esmenet looked from man to armoured man, each farther than the next, past clots and through thickening screens, until losing them in the teeming distances, where they winked in the sunlight like metal filings. She turned, saw the sand-coloured walls of Ammegnotis behind them, dwindling against the black and green of the river and her verdant banks.

  Shigek.

  Goodbye, Akka.

  Teary-eyed, she deliberately struck out on her own, simply waving a hand when Kellhus called out to her.

  She walked among strangers, feeling the aim of hooded eyes and muttered words—as she so often did. Some men actually accosted her, but she ignored them. One even angrily grabbed her tattooed hand, as though to remind her of something she owed all men. The parched grasses became thinner and thinner, leaving gravel that burned toes and cooked air. She sweat and suffered and somehow knew it was only the beginning.

  That evening she found Kellhus and Serwë without much difficulty. Though they had little fuel, they managed dinner with a small fire. The air cooled as quickly as the sun descended, and they enjoyed their first desert dusk. The ground radiated warmth like a stone drawn from a hearth. To the east, sterile hills ringed the distance, obscuring the sea. To the south and west, beyond the riot of the encampment, the horizon formed a perfect shale line that thickened into red as it approached the sun. To the north, Shigek could still be glimpsed between the tents, its green becoming black in the growing twilight.

  Serwë was already snoozing, curled across her mat close to the little lapping tongue of their fire.

  “So how was your walk?” Kellhus asked.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shamefaced. “I—”

  “There’s no need to apologize, Esmi … You walk where you choose.”

  She looked down, feeling both relieved and grief-stricken.

  “So?” Kellhus repeated. “How was your walk?”

  “Men,” she said leadenly. “Too many men.”

  “And you call yourself a harlot,” Kellhus said, grinning.

  Esmenet continued staring at her dusty feet. A shy smile stole across her face.

  “Things change …”

  “Perhaps,” he said in a manner that reminded Esmenet of an axe biting into wood. “Have you ever wondered why the Gods hold men higher than women?”

  Esmenet shrugged. “We stand in the shadow of men,” she replied, “just as men stand in the shadow of the Gods.”

  “So you think you stand in the shadow of men?”

  She smiled. There was no deception with Kellhus, no matter how petty. That was his wonder.

  “Some men, yes …”

  “But not many?”

  She laughed, caught in an honest conceit. “Not many at all,” she admitted. Not even, she breathlessly realized, Akka …

  Only you.

  “And what of other men? Aren’t all men overshadowed in some respect?”

  “Yes, I suppose …”

  Kellhus turned his palms upward—a curiously disarming gesture. “So what makes you less than a man?”

  Esmenet laughed again, certain he played some game. “Because everywhere I’ve been—every place I’ve heard of for that matter—women serve men. That’s simply the way. Most women are like …” She paused, troubled by the course of her thoughts. She glanced at Serwë, her perfect face illuminated by the wavering light of the fire.

  “Like her,” Kellhus said.

  “Yes,” Esmenet replied, her eyes forced to the ground by a strange defensiveness. “Like her … Most women are simple.”

  “And most men?”

  “Well, certainly more men than women are learned … Wise.”

  “And is this because men are more than women?”

  Esmenet stared at him, dumbfounded.

  “Or is it,” he continued, “because men are granted more than women in this world?”

  She stared, her thoughts spinning. She breathed deeply, set her palms carefully upon her knees. “You’re saying women are … are actually equal?”

  Kellhus hoisted his brows in pained amusement. “Why,” he asked, “are men willing to exchange gold to lie with women?”

  “Because they desire us … They lust.”

  “And is it lawful for men to purchase pleasure from a woman?”

  “No …”

  “So why do they?”

  “They can’t help themselves,” Esmenet replied. She lifted a rueful eyebrow. “They’re men.”

  “So they have no control over their desire?”

  She grinned in her old way. “Witness the well-fed harlot sitting before you.”

  Kellhus laughed, but softly, and in a manner that effortlessly sorted her pain from her humour.

  “So why,” he said, “do men herd cattle?”

  “Cattle?” Esmenet scowled. Where had all these absurd thoughts come from? “Well … to slaughter for …”


  She trailed in sudden understanding. Her skin pimpled. Once again she sat in shadow, and Kellhus hoarded the failing sun, looking for all the world like a bronze idol. The sun always seemed to relinquish him last …

  “Men,” Kellhus said, “cannot dominate their hunger, so they dominate, domesticate, the objects of their hunger. Be it cattle …”

  “Or women,” she said breathlessly.

  The air prickled with understanding.

  “When one race,” Kellhus continued, “is tributary to another, as the Cepalorans are to the Nansur, whose tongue do both races speak?”

  “The tongue of the conqueror.”

  “And whose tongue do you speak?”

  She swallowed. “The tongue of men.”

  With every blink, it seemed, she saw man after man, arched over her like dogs …

  “You see yourself,” Kellhus said, “as men see you. You fear growing old, because men hunger for girls. You dress shamelessly, because men hunger for your skin. You cringe when you speak, because men hunger for your silence. You pander. You posture. You primp and preen. You twist your thoughts and warp your heart. You break and remake, cut and cut and cut, all so you might answer in your conqueror’s tongue!”

  Never, it seemed, had she been so motionless. The air within her throat, even the blood within her heart, seemed absolutely still … Kellhus had become a voice falling from somewhere between tears and firelight.

  “You say, ‘Let me shame myself for you. Let me suffer you! I beg you, please!’”

  And somehow, Esmenet knew where these words must lead, so she thought of other things, like how parched skin and cloth seemed so clean …

  Filth, she realized, needed water the same as men.

  “And you tell yourself,” Kellhus continued, “‘These tracks I will not follow!’ Perhaps you refuse certain perversities. Perhaps you refuse to kiss. You pretend to scruple, to discriminate, though the world has forced you onto trackless ground. The coins! The coins! Coins for everything, and everything for coins! For the landlord. For the apparati, when they come for their bribes. For the vendors who feed you. For the toughs with scabbed knuckles. And secretly, you ask yourself, ‘What could be unthinkable when I’m already damned? What act lies beyond me, when I have no dignity?’