The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  What was this man? Who were the Dûnyain?

  These were questions that needed to be answered. According to Gaörta, the man’s Zaudunyani, his “tribe of truth,” numbered in the tens of thousands. It was only a matter of weeks, Gaörta insisted, before the Holy War succumbed to him entirely. But the questions these facts raised were overmatched by the perils. Nothing could interfere with the Holy War’s mission. Shimeh must be taken. The Cishaurim must be destroyed!

  Despite the questions, the man’s existence could no longer be tolerated. He had to die, and for reasons that transcended their war against the Cishaurim. More troubling than his preternatural abilities, more troubling than even his slow conquest of the Holy War, was the man’s name. An Anasûrimbor had returned—an Anasûrimbor! And though Golgotterath had long scoffed at the Mandate and their prattle regarding the Celmomian Prophecy, how could they afford to take chances? They were so near! So close! Soon the Children would gather, and they would rain ruin upon this despicable world! The End of Ends was coming …

  One did not gamble with such things. They would kill this Anasûrimbor Kellhus, then they would seize the others, the Scylvendi and the women, to learn what they needed to know.

  The Dûnyain’s distant figure dashed into some kind of compound—disappeared. The Synthese craned its small human neck, banked against the sweeping sky, watched his slaves disappear after him.

  Good. Gaörta and his brothers were closing …

  The Warrior-Prophet … The Old Name had already decided he would couple with his corpse.

  The percussive slap of sandals, the rhythmic pant of tireless, animal lungs, the slap of fabric about hooking arms.

  They’re too fast!

  Kellhus ran. As fleet as memories, chambers rushed past him, each possessing the spare elegance of desert peoples. Behind him, Sarcellus and the others fanned through the surrounding corridors. Kellhus kicked through a door, rolled down a stone stair, came to his feet in the gloom. They followed, mere heartbeats behind. He heard steel whisk against wood—a sheath. He ducked right and rolled. A knife flashed to his left, chipped dim stone, clattered to the floor. Kellhus plunged down another stair, into pitch blackness. He blundered through a brittle wooden door, felt the air bloom into emptiness about him, smelled stale cistern waters.

  The skin-spies hesitated.

  All eyes need light.

  Kellhus spun about the room, his every surface alive, reading the warp and weft of drafts, the crunch and rasp of his sandals scuffing stone, the flutter of his clothing. His outstretched fingers touched table, chair, brick oven, a hundred different surfaces in a handful of instants. He fell into stance in the room’s far corner. Drew his sword.

  Motionless.

  Somewhere in the pitch, a wood splinter snapped.

  He could feel them slip through the entrance, one after the other. They spread across the far wall, their hearts thudding in competing rhythms. Kellhus could smell their musk roll through the room.

  “I’ve tasted both of your peaches,” the one called Sarcellus said—to mask the sounds of the others, Kellhus realized. “I tasted them long and hard—did you know that? I made them squeal …”

  “You lie!” Kellhus cried in mimicry of desperate fury. He heard the skin-spies pause, then close on the corner where he’d thrown his voice.

  “Both were sweet,” Sarcellus called, “and so very juicy … The man, they say, ripens the peach.”

  Kellhus had punched his sword point through the ear of the creature that glided before him, lowered it as soundlessly as he could to the ground.

  “Eh, Dûnyain?” Sarcellus asked. “That makes you twice the cuckold!”

  One bumped into a chair.

  Kellhus leapt, gutted it, rolled under the table as it squealed and shrieked.

  “He plays us!” one cried. “Unza, pophara tokuk!”

  “Smell him!” the thing called Sarcellus shouted. “Cut anything that smells his smell!”

  The disembowelled creature flopped and flailed, screaming in demonic voices—as Kellhus had hoped. He ducked from under the table, backed to the wall to the left of the entrance. He pulled free his samite robe, tossed it onto the back of a chair he couldn’t see—but remembered …

  Kellhus stood motionless. The drafts came to him, murmuring. He could feel their bestial heartbeats, taste the feral heat of their bodies. Two leapt at his robe before him. Swords swooped and cracked into the chair. Lunging, he skewered the one to the left in the throat, only to have his blade wrenched from him as the creature toppled backward. Kellhus leaned back and to the left, felt steel whip the air. He caught an arm, exploded the elbow, blocked the knife-bearing fist that hooked about. He reached into its throat and jerked out its windpipe.

  He jumped backward. Sarcellus’s sword whistled through the blackness. Twisting into a handstand, Kellhus caught the back of a chair and vaulted to a crouch at the far edge of the trestle table.

  The gutted skin-spy thrashed immediately below him. Even still, he heard the thing called Sarcellus bound out of the cellar. Flee …

  For several moments Kellhus remained still, drawing long deep breaths. Inhuman screaming resounded through the blackness. It sounded like something—many somethings—burning alive.

  How are such creatures possible? What do you know of them, Father?

  Retrieving his long-pommelled sword, Kellhus struck off the living skin-spy’s head. Sudden silence. He wrapped it, still streaming blood, in his slashed robe.

  Then he climbed back toward slaughter and daylight.

  The great black fortress the Men of the Tusk called the Citadel of the Dog dominated the easternmost of Caraskand’s nine hills. They called her such because the way her inner and outer curtain walls enclosed the towering central keep vaguely resembled a dog curled about his master’s leg. The Fanim simply called her “Il’huda,” “the Bulwark.” Raised by the great Xatantius, the most warlike of the early Nansur emperors, the Citadel of the Dog reflected the scale and ingenuity of a people who’d managed to flourish in the shadow of the Scylvendi: round towers, massive barbicans, offset inner and outer gates. The fortress’s defences were tiered, so that each concentric ring overshadowed the next. And her outer walls were shelled in a glossy, well-nigh impenetrable, basalt.

  Knowing that the fortress—which the Nansur called “Insarum,” her original name—was the key to the city, Ikurei Conphas had assailed it almost immediately, hoping to storm the walls before Imbeyan could organize any concerted defence. The men of the Selial Column gained the southern heights only to be thrown back after horrifying losses. Soon the Galeoth were on the steep slopes with them, and then the Tydonni: Saubon and Gothyelk were not so foolish as to leave such a prize to the Exalt-General. Siege engines constructed to assail Caraskand’s curtain walls were drawn up. Mangonels hurled burning tar over the fortifications. Trebuchets rained granite boulders and Fanim bodies. Tall, iron-hooked ladders were pressed against the walls, and the Kianene hefted rocks and boiling oil over the battlements to crush and burn those that climbed them. Protected by hide mantlets, an iron-headed battering ram was brought under the immense barbican and beneath a hail of fire and missiles began hammering at the gate. Clouds of arrows reached into the sky. Saubon himself was carried down with a Kianene arrow in his thigh.

  Sheer numbers and ferocity gained the Warnutishmen of Ce Tydonn the western wall. Tall, bearded knights, clients of the dead Earl Cerjulla, hacked through the crowds of heathen who swarmed up to dislodge them. They were pelted by archers from the inner compound, but the arrows, if they could punch through the heavy mail, were merely embedded in the thick layers of felt beneath. Many roared and fought with several shafts jutting from their backs. The dead and dying were thrown headlong from the walls to crash onto the rocks or the men teeming below. The Tydonni planted their feet and refused to give ground, while behind them, more of their cousins, Agansi under Gothyelk’s youngest son, Gurnyau, gained the summit. Under the direction of the wounded Saubon, the lo
ngbowmen of Agmundr raked the heights of the inner wall, forcing the Enathpanean and Kianene archers to shelter behind crenellations. Someone raised the Mark of Agansanor, the Black Stag, upon one of the outer towers. A great shout was raised by the Inrithi encircling the heights.

  Then came a light more blinding than the sun. Men cried out, pointing to mad, saffron-robed figures hanging between the towers of the black keep. Eyeless Cishaurim, each with two snakes wrapped about their throats.

  Threads of unholy incandescence waved across the outer wall like ropes in water. Stone cracked beneath the flashing heat. Hauberks were welded to skin. The Tydonni crouched beneath their great tear-shaped shields, leaning against the light, shouting in horror and outrage before being swept away. The Agmundrmen fired vainly at the floating abominations. Teams of Chorae Crossbowmen watched bolt after bolt whistle wide because of the range.

  The tall knights of Ce Tydonn were decimated. Many, seeing the hopelessness of their plight, brandished their longswords, howled curses until the end. Others ran. Those who could scrambled down the ladders. Several warriors leapt from the battlements, their beards and hair aflame. An unholy torrent consumed Gothyelk’s Standard.

  Then the lights flickered out.

  For a moment all was silent save for those left screaming upon the heights. Then the Kianene upon the walls burst into cheers. They rushed across the stolen summits, cast those Tydonni still living from the wall, including Gothyelk’s youngest son, Gurnyau. Mad with grief, the old Earl had to be dragged away.

  The Men of the Tusk withdrew in turmoil. Riders were dispatched, charged with finding the Scarlet Spires, who’d yet to enter Caraskand. They bore but one message: “Cishaurim defend the Citadel of the Dog.”

  Still bearing his trophy, Kellhus strode out onto the terrace of an abandoned palatial compound. He passed through a small garden of winter blooms and sculpted shrubs. The body of a dead woman, her gown hiked over her head, lay motionless between two junipers. Stepping over her, Kellhus walked out across the shining marble to the terrace balustrade. The breeze carried a bouquet of foul and sweet odours—the smell of precious things burning.

  The Citadel of the Dog dominated the near distance, black and hazy, rising mountainous from the welter of walls and roofs crowding the valley below. He glimpsed tiny Kianene soldiers rushing along the heights, their silvered helms winking as they passed between battlements. He saw Inrithi bodies dumped from the walls.

  To the north and to the south, Caraskand continued to die. Peering through screens of smoke, he studied the riot of distant buildings, glimpsed dozens of miniature dramas: pitched battles, petty atrocities, bodies being stripped, women wailing, even a child jumping from a rooftop. A sudden shriek drew his eyes downward, and he saw a band of black-armoured Thunyeri rushing through the enclosed garden of the compound immediately below the terrace. He quickly lost sight of them. Harsh laughter wafted up through the breeze.

  He looked past the Citadel, south to the hills beyond Caraskand’s far-wandering walls. To Shimeh.

  I grow near, Father. Very near.

  He swung the bloody sack he’d made of his robe from his shoulder, and the thing’s severed head tumbled across the marmoreal floor. He studied its face, which seemed little more than a tangle of snakes with human-skin. A lidless eye gleamed in the shadows beneath. Kellhus already knew these creatures weren’t sorcerous artifacts; he’d learned enough from Achamian to conclude they were worldly weapons, fashioned by the ancient Inchoroi the way swords were fashioned by Men. But with their faces undone, this fact seemed all the more remarkable.

  Weapons. And the Consult had finally wielded them.

  Wars within wars. It has finally come to this.

  Kellhus had already encountered several of his Zaudunyani. Even now his instructions were spreading through the city. Serwë and Esmenet would be evacuated from the camp. Soon his Hundred Pillars would be securing this nameless merchant palace. The Zaudunyani he’d charged with watching the skin-spies he’d so far identified were being sought. If he could organize before the chaos ended …

  The Holy War must be purged.

  Just then, light flared across the Citadel. A crack boomed over the city, like thunder rising out from the ground. A chorus of unsettling disharmonies reverberated in its wake. More flashes of light, and Kellhus saw sheets of masonry crash down the Citadel’s foundations. Debris tumbled down the hillside.

  Hanging in the air, the sorcerers of the Scarlet Spires had formed a great semicircle about the Citadel’s immense barbican. Through a dark hail of arrows, glittering fire washed over the turrets, and even from this distance Kellhus could see burning Fanim leap into the baileys. Lightning leapt from phantom clouds, exploding stonework and limbs alike. Flocks of incandescent sparrows swarmed over the battlements, plummeting into face after howling face.

  Despite the destruction, one Scarlet Schoolman, then another, and then another still, plunged to the rooftops below, struck into salt by heathen Chorae. His eye drawn by a blinding flash, Kellhus saw one sorcerer crash into the hillside, where he broke and tumbled like a thing of stone. Hellish lights scourged the ramparts. Tower tops exploded in flame. All living things were consumed.

  The song of the Scarlet Schoolmen trailed. The thunder rumbled into the distances. For several heartbeats, all Caraskand stood still.

  The fortress walls steamed with the smoke of burning flesh.

  Several of the sorcerers strode forward. Achamian had told Kellhus once that no sorcerer truly flew, but rather walked a surface that wasn’t a surface—the ground’s echo in the sky. The Schoolmen advanced through the curtains of smoke until they dangled over the narrow baileys of the inner keep. Kellhus glimpsed the outline of their ghostly Wards. They seemed to be waiting … or searching.

  Suddenly, from various points across the Citadel, seven lines of piercing blue swept across smoke and sky, intersecting on the centremost Schoolman …

  Cishaurim, Kellhus realized. Cishaurim shelter in the Citadel.

  The ring of crimson figures, mere specks in the distance, answered their hidden foe. Kellhus raised a hand against the brilliance. The air shivered with concussions. A western tower buckled beneath the weight of fire, then ponderously toppled. Breaking over the outer curtain wall, it plunged to slopes below, where it collapsed into an avalanche of rubble and pluming dust.

  Kellhus watched, wondering at the spectacle and at the promise of deeper dimensions of understanding. Sorcery was the only unconquered knowledge, the last remaining bastion of world-born secrets. He was one of the Few—as Achamian had both feared and hoped. What kind of power would he wield?

  And his father, who was Cishaurim, what kind of power did he already wield?

  The Scarlet Schoolmen pummelled the Citadel without pause or remorse. There was no sign of the Cishaurim who’d attacked moments earlier. Smoke and dust billowed and plumed, encompassing the black-walled heights. Sorcerous lights flashed through what clear air remained; otherwise they flickered and pulsed as though through veils of black gossamer.

  Uncanny hymns ached in Kellhus’s ears. How could such things be said? How could words come before?

  Another tower collapsed in the south, crashing upon its foundations, swelling into a black cloud that rolled down over the surrounding tenements. Watching Men of the Tusk flee through the streets, Kellhus glimpsed a figure in yellow silks soar free of the surging eclipse, arms to his side, sandalled feet pointing downward. The Inrithi warriors scattered beneath him.

  A surviving Cishaurim.

  Kellhus watched the figure glide low over the stepped rooftops, dip into avenues. For a moment he thought the man might escape—smoke and dust had all but engulfed the Scarlet Schoolmen. Then he realized …

  The Cishaurim was turning in his direction.

  Rather than continuing south, the figure hooked westward, using what structures he could to cover his passage from the far-seeing Schoolmen. Kellhus tracked his progress as he zigzagged through the streets, averaging the m
ean of his sudden turns to determine his true trajectory. As improbable—as impossible—as it seemed, there could be no doubt: the man was coming toward him. Could it be?

  Father?

  Kellhus backed away from the balustrade, bent to rewrap the skin-spy’s severed head in his ruined robe. Then he gripped one of two Chorae his Zaudunyani had given him … According to Achamian, it offered immunity to the Psûkhe as much as it did sorcery.

  The Cishaurim was climbing the slopes to the terrace, kicking loose leaves as he skimmed the odd tree-top. Birds burst into the air in his wake. Kellhus could see the black pits of his eyes, the two distended snakes about his neck, one looking forward, the other scanning the Citadel’s continuing destruction.

  A dragon’s howl gouged the distances, followed by another thunder-clap. The marble tingled beneath his feet. More clouds of black bloomed about the Citadel …

  Father? This cannot be!

  The Cishaurim glided low over the compound where Kellhus had seen the Thunyeri a short time earlier, then swooped upward. Kellhus actually heard the flutter of his silken robes.

  He leapt backward, drawing his sword. The sorcerer-priest sailed over the balustrade, his hands pressed together, fingertip to fingertip.

  “Anasûrimbor Kellhus!” the descending figure called.

  Meeting his reflection, the Cishaurim came to a jarring halt. Flecks of debris chattered across the polished marble.

  Kellhus stood motionless, holding tight his Chorae.

  He’s too young—

  “I am Hifanat ab Tunukri,” the eyeless man said breathlessly, “a Dionoratë of the tribe Indara-Kishauri … I bear a message from your Father. He says, ‘You walk the Shortest Path. Soon you will grasp the Thousandfold Thought.’”

  Father?

  Sheathing his sword, Kellhus opened himself to every outward sign the man offered. He saw desperation and purpose. Purpose above all …

  “How did you find me?”

  “We see you. All of us.” Behind the man, the smoke rising from the Citadel opened like a great velvet rose.