The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  There were some, very few, who seemed impossibly strong during this trial. Nersei Proyas was one of the few caste-nobles who refused to water his horse while his men died. He walked among the steadfast knights and soldiers of Conriya, giving words of encouragement, reminding them that before all, faith was a matter of trial.

  Followed by two beautiful women, Prince Kellhus also spread words of strength. They didn’t merely suffer, he told men, they suffered for … For Shimeh. For the Truth. For the God! And to suffer for the God was to secure glory in the Outside. Many would be broken in this furnace, that was true, but those who survived would know the temper of their own hearts. They would be, he claimed, unlike other men. They would be more …

  The Chosen.

  Wherever Prince Kellhus and his two women went, men crowded about them, begging to be touched, to be cured, to be forgiven. Stained by dust into the colour of the desert, his face bronzed and his flowing hair almost bleached white, he seemed the very incarnation of sun, stone, and sand. He, and he alone, could stare into the endless Carathay and laugh, hold out his arms to the Nail of Heaven and give thanks for their suffering.

  “The God chooses!” he would cry, “The God!”

  And the words he spoke were like water.

  On the third night, he halted in a vast bowl between dunes. He marked a place across the trampled sands, and bid several of his closest adherents, his Zaudunyani, to begin digging. When they despaired of finding anything, he commanded them to continue. Very soon they felt moisture in the sand … Then he walked farther and bid those rushing past to dig more holes at various places. Others he organized into an armed perimeter. Held back by hedges of levelled spears, wondering thousands crowded around the lip of the depression, curious to see what happened. After several watches, some fourteen pools of dark water glittered in the moonlight. Spring-fed wells …

  The waters were muddy, but they were sweet, and unfouled by the taste of dead men.

  When the first of the Great Names at last beat and hollered their way to the floor of the depression, they found Prince Kellhus at the bottom of a pit, standing knee-deep in waters with a dozen others, hoisting brimming skins to the groping hands above.

  “He showed me,” he laughed, when they hailed them. “The God showed me!”

  More wells were dug at the behest of the Great Names, and water relays were once again organized. Since most of the Holy War had suffered severe dehydration, the Great Names decided to linger for several days. The remaining horses were butchered and eaten raw for lack of fuel. In the Councils, Prince Kellhus was congratulated for his discovery, but little more. Many in the Holy War, especially the caste-menials, openly hailed him as the Warrior-Prophet. In closed meetings the Great Names argued over the Prince of Atrithau, but they could find no consensus. The desert, Ikurei Conphas warned, had made a False Prophet of Fane as well.

  Meanwhile, the Khirgwi tribes gathered in the deep desert, thinking the Holy War, like a jackal, had found its place to die. The following night they attacked en masse, a wild rush of thousands spilling from the crests of dunes, confident they would ride down more corpses than men. Though surprised, the Men of the Tusk, their flesh revived, their faith renewed, encircled and slaughtered the desert tribesmen. Entire tribes, who’d bled much through the endless skirmishes across Khemema, were extinguished. The survivors withdrew to their hidden oasis homes.

  The last of the food gave out. Waterskins were once again filled and heaped across strong backs. Songs were raised across the dark, desert landscape, many of them hymns to the Warrior-Prophet. The Holy War resumed its southward march, unconquered and defiant. Between Mengedda, Anwurat, and the desert, they had lost almost a third of their number, but still their great columns spanned the horizon.

  They crossed deep wadis, cut by the infrequent winter rains, and climbed rolling dunes. They laughed once again at the shit-chasers scurrying with their dung across the sands. Day came, and they perched their canvas sheets against the punishing sun so they might sleep through the merciless heat.

  As evening fell on the second day, and the encampment once again made ready to march, many noticed clouds across the western sky—the first clouds they’d seen, it seemed to them, since Gedea. They were smeared across the horizon, deep purple, and they folded around the setting sun so that it seemed the iris of an angry red eye. Without their omen-texts, the priests could only guess at the meaning.

  The air still shimmered with heat, rolled like water over the sun-baked distances. And it was still—very still. A hush fell across the reaches of the Holy War. Men peered at the horizon, looked nervously at the wrathful eye, realizing the clouds belonged to the ground not the sky. And then they understood.

  Sandstorm.

  With the sluggish elegance of a scarf coiling in the wind, pummelling clouds of dust rolled toward them from the west. Old Carathay could still hate. The Great Thirst could still punish.

  Skin-serrating blasts. Gusts with a million stinging teeth. The Men of the Tusk howled to one another without being heard. They tried to look, perhaps glimpsed the shadowy figures of others through the brown haze, but were then blinded. They huddled in clots beneath the biting wind, felt the sand suck at them as it heaped around their limbs. Their makeshift shelters were torn away, thrashed like paper through mountainous gusts. A new calligraphy of dunes was scrawled about them. Forgotten waterskins were buried.

  The sandstorm raged until dawn, and when the winds receded, the Men of the Tusk wandered like stunned children across a transformed land. They salvaged what they could of their remaining baggage, found several dead men buried beneath the sands. The Great and Lesser Names met in Council. They hadn’t enough shelter from the sun, they realized, to remain through the day. They must march—that much was clear. But where? Most argued that they should return to the well discovered by Prince Kellhus—as he was still called in the Councils, as much by his own insistence as by the loathing some had taken to the name “Warrior-Prophet.” At least they had enough water to make it that far.

  But the dissenters, led by Ikurei Conphas, insisted the well was likely lost to the sands. They pointed to the surrounding dunes, so bright in the sun they sheared one’s eyes, and insisted the land around the wells was certain to have been just as disfigured if not more. If the Holy War used its remaining water to march away from Enathpaneah, and the wells couldn’t be found, then it was doomed. As it stood, Conphas claimed, once again relying upon his map, the Holy War was within two days march of water. If they marched now they would suffer, certainly, but they would survive.

  To the surprise of some, Prince Kellhus agreed. “Surely,” he said, “it’s better to wager suffering to avoid death than to wager death to avoid suffering.”

  The Holy War marched toward Enathpaneah.

  They passed beyond the sea of dunes and entered land like a burning plate, a flat stone expanse where the air fairly hissed with heat. Once again the water was strictly rationed. Men became dizzy with thirst, and some began casting away armour, weapons, and clothes, walking like naked madmen until they fell, their skin blackened by thirst and blistered by sun. The last of the horses died, and the footmen, ever resentful that their lords tended to their mounts more faithfully than to their men, would curse and kick gravel at the wooden corpses as they passed. Old Gothyelk collapsed and was strapped to a litter made by his sons, who shared their rations of water with him. Lord Ganyatti, the Conriyan Palatine of Ankirioth, whose bald head looked so much like a blistered thumb jutting from a torn glove, was bound like a sack to his horse.

  When night had at last fallen, the Holy War continued its march south, once again stumbling along the backs of sandy dunes. The Men of the Tusk walked and walked, but the cool desert night provided little relief. None talked. They formed an endless procession of silent wraiths, passing across Carathay’s folds. Dusty, harrowed, hollow-eyed, and with drunken limbs, they walked. Like a pinch of mud dropped in water they crumbled, wandered from one another, until the Holy War b
ecame a cloud of disconnected figures, feet scraping across gravel and dust.

  The morning sun was a shrill rebuke, for still the desert had not ended. The Holy War had become an army of ghosts. Dead and dying men lay scattered in their thousands behind it, and as the sun rose still more fell. Some simply lost the will, and fell seated in the dust, their thoughts and bodies buzzing with thirst and fatigue. Others pressed themselves until their wracked bodies betrayed them. They struggled feebly across the sand, waving their heads like worms, perhaps croaking for help, for succour.

  But only death would come swirling down.

  Tongues swelled in mouths. Parchment skin went black and tightened until it split about purple flesh, rendering the dying unrecognizable. Legs buckled, folded, refused one’s will as surely as if one’s spine had been broken. And the sun beat them, scorching chapped skin, cooking lips to hoary leather.

  There was no weeping, no wails or astonished shouts. Brothers abandoned brothers and husbands abandoned wives. Each man had become a solitary circle of misery that walked and walked.

  Gone was the promise of sweet Sempis water. Gone was the promise of Enathpaneah …

  Gone was the voice of the Warrior-Prophet.

  Only the trial remained, drawing out warm, thrumming hearts into an agonized line, desert thin—desert simple. Frail heartbeats stranded in the wastes, pounding with receding fury at seeping, water-starved blood.

  Men died in the thousands, gasping, each breath more improbable than the last, at furnace air, sucking final moments of anguished, dreamlike life through throats of charred wood. Heat like a cool wind. Black fingers twitching through searing sands. Flat, waxy eyes raised to blinding sun.

  Whining silence and endless loneliness.

  Esmenet stumbled by his side, kicking sand and fiery gravel with feet she could no longer feel. Above her, the sun shrieked and shrieked, but she’d long ceased worrying how light could make sound.

  He carried Serwë in his arms, and it seemed to Esmenet that she’d never witnessed anything so triumphant.

  Then he stopped before a deep and dark vista.

  She swayed and the wailing sun twirled above her, but somehow he was there, beside her, bracing her. She tried licking cracked lips, but her tongue was too swollen. She looked to him, and he grinned, impossibly hale …

  He leaned back and cried out to the hazy roll and pitch of distant green, to the wandering crease of a flashing river. And his words resounded across the compass of the horizon.

  “Father! We come, Father!”

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

  Xinemus’s fierce scowl silenced him, and the three men retreated into a grotto of darkness where the wall pinched one of the compound’s structures. They dragged the warrior-slave’s corpse with them.

  “I always thought these bastards were tough,” Bloody Dinch whispered, his eyes still wild from his kill.

  “They are,” Xinemus replied softly. He scanned the gloomy courtyard below them—a puzzle-box of open spaces, bare walls, and elaborate facades. “The Scarlet Spires purchase their Javreh from the Sranc Pits. They are hard men, and you’d do well to remember it.”

  Zenkappa smirked in the dark and added, “You got lucky, Dinch.”

  “By the Prophet’s Balls!” Bloody Dinch hissed, “I—”

  “Shhht!” Xinemus spat. Both Dinch and Zenkappa were good men, fierce men, Xinemus knew, but they were bred to battle in open fields, not to slink through shadows as they did now. And it bruised Xinemus in some strange way that they seemed incapable of grasping the importance of what they attempted. Achamian’s life meant little to them, he realized. He was a sorcerer, an abomination. Achamian’s disappearance, the Marshal imagined, was a matter of no small relief to the two of them. There was no place for blasphemers in the company of pious men.

  But if they failed to grasp the importance of their task, they were well aware of its lethality. To skulk like thieves among armed men was harrowing enough, but in the midst of the Scarlet Spires …

  Both were frightened, Xinemus realized—thus the forced humour and empty bravado.

  Xinemus pointed to a nearby building across a narrow portion of the courtyard. The bottom floor consisted of a long row of colonnades framing the pitch-black of its hollow interior.

  “Those abandoned stables,” he said. “With any luck, they’ll be connected to those barracks.”

  “Empty barracks, I hope,” Dinch whispered, studying the dark confusion of buildings.

  “So they look.”

  I’ll save you Achamian … Undo what I’ve done.

  The Scarlet Spires had taken up residence in a vast, semi-fortified complex that looked as though it dated back to the age of Cenei—the sturdy palace of some long-dead Ceneian Governor, Xinemus supposed. They had watched the compound for over a fortnight, waited as the great trains of armed men, supplies, and slave-borne litters wound from the narrow gates into Iothiah’s labyrinthine streets to join the march across Khemema. Xinemus had no definite idea of the size of the Scarlet Spires’ contingent, but he reckoned it numbered in the thousands. This meant the compound itself must be immense, a warren of barracks, kitchens, storerooms, apartments, and official chambers. And this meant that when the bulk of the School travelled south, those few remaining would find it difficult to defend against intruders.

  This was good … If in fact Achamian was actually imprisoned here.

  The Scarlet Spires wouldn’t dare take Achamian with them; Xinemus was sure of that much. The road was no place to interrogate a Mandate sorcerer, especially when one marched with a prince such as Proyas. And the fact that the Scarlet Spires had actually left a mission here meant that the School had unfinished business to attend to in Iothiah. Xinemus had wagered that Achamian was that unfinished business.

  If he wasn’t here, then he was very likely dead.

  He’s here! I feel it!

  When the three men reached the interior of the stables, Xinemus clutched at the Trinket about his neck as though it were holier than the small golden Tusk that clicked at its side. The Tears of God. Their only hope against sorcerers. Xinemus had inherited three Trinkets when his father had died, and this was the reason he attempted this with only Dinchases and Zenkappa. Three Trinkets for three men about to wander into a den of abominations. But Xinemus prayed they wouldn’t need them. Whatever their sins, sorcerers were men, and men slept.

  “Hold them in your bare fists,” Xinemus commanded. “Remember, they must be touching your skin to afford you any protection. Whatever you do, don’t let it go … This place is sure to be protected by Wards, and if the Trinket leaves your skin, even for a moment, we’ll be undone …” He ripped his own Trinket from about his neck, and felt comforted by the cold weight of its iron, the imprint of its deep runes against his palm.

  The stalls hadn’t been mucked, and the stable smelled of dried horse-shit and straw. After several moments of fumbling they found a passageway that led them into the abandoned barracks.

  Then their nightmarish journey through the maze began. The complex was as huge as Xinemus had both hoped and feared, and as much as he was relieved by the endless series of empty rooms and corridors, he despaired of ever finding Achamian. Once or twice they heard distant voices speaking Ainoni, and they would crouch in pitch shadows or behind exotic Kianene furniture. They passed through dusty audience halls, filled with enough moonlight that they might wonder at the grand, geometric frescoes across the vaulted ceilings. They skulked by sculleries and kitchens, and heard slaves snoring in the humid dark. They crept up stairs and down halls lined by apartments. Each door they opened seemed hinged upon a precipice: either Achamian or certain death lay on the far side. Every instant, every breath seemed an impossible gamble.

  And everywhere they imagined the ghosts of the Scarlet Magi, holding arcane conferences, summoning demons, or studying blasphemous tomes in the very rooms they glided past.

  Where were they holding him?

  After some ti
me, Xinemus began to feel bold. Was this how a thief or a rat felt, prowling at the edges of what others could see or know? There was exhilaration, and strangely enough, comfort in lurking unseen in the marrow of your enemy’s bones. Xinemus was overcome by a sudden certainty:

  We’re going to do this! We’re going to save him!

  “We should check the cellars …” Dinch hissed. A sheen of sweat covered his grizzled face and his grey square-cut beard was matted. “They’d put him someplace where his screams couldn’t be heard by visitors, wouldn’t they?”

  Xinemus grimaced, both at the loudness of the old majordomo’s voice and at the truth of what he said. Achamian had been tortured and tortured long … It was an unbearable thought.

  Akka …

  They returned to a stone stairwell they’d passed, descended down into pitch blackness.

  “We need some light!” Zenkappa exclaimed. “We won’t be able to find our hands down here!”

  They stumbled blindly into a carpeted corridor, packed close enough together to smell the sweat of one another’s fear. Xinemus despaired. This was hopeless!

  But then they saw a light, and a small sphere of illuminated hallway, moving …

  The corridor where they found themselves was narrow with a low rounded ceiling—they could see this now—and exceedingly long, as though it ran the greater length of the compound.

  A sorcerer walked through it.

  The figure was thin, but dressed in voluminous scarlet silk robes, with deep sleeves embroidered with golden herons. His face was the clearest, because it was bathed in impossible light. Rutted cheeks lost in the slick curls of a lavishly braided beard, bulbous eyes, bored by the tedium of walking from place to place, all illuminated by a teardrop of candlelight suspended a cubit before his forehead, without any candle.

  Xinemus could hear Dinch’s breath hiss through clenched teeth.

  The figure and the ghostly light paused at a juncture in the corridor, as if he had stumbled across a peculiar smell. The old face scowled for a moment, and the sorcerer seemed to peer into the darkness at them. They stood as still as three pillars of salt. Three heartbeats … It was as though the eyes of Death itself sought them.