The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  Knowing that if he survived …

  The secret of battle!

  Sarcellus swept his longsword in a series of blinding exercises. His arms snapped out and down, like bolts thrown from siege engines. There was something inhuman to his movements.

  Cnaiür neither flinched nor moved. He was a Son of the People, a prodigy born of desolate earth, sent to kill, to reave. He was a savage from dark northern plains, with thunder in his heart and murder in his eyes … He was Cnaiür urs Skiötha, most violent of all men.

  He shrugged his bronzed limbs and planted his feet.

  “You will fear,” Sarcellus said, “before this is over.”

  “I cut you once,” Cnaiür grated.

  He could clearly see the threads of inflamed red branching across his face now. They were creases, he realized. Creases he’d seen open before …

  “I know why you loved her,” the Shrial Knight snarled. “Such a peach! I think I’ll chase the dogs from her corpse—after—and love her again …”

  Cnaiür stared, unmoved. Howls rifled the air. Upraised fists hammered the distances—thousands of them.

  Just the space of breaths between them now.

  Breaths.

  Their blades cut open space. Kissed. Circled. Kissed again. Whirling geometries, shocking the air with the staccato ring of steel. Leap. Crouch. Lunge … With bestial grace, the Scylvendi pounded the abomination, pressing him back. But the Shrial Knight’s sword was sorcery—it dazzled the air.

  Cnaiür fell back, gathered his breath, shook sweat from his mane.

  “My flesh,” Sarcellus whispered, “has been folded more times than the steel of your sword.” He laughed as though utterly unwinded. “Men are dogs and kine … But my kind, we’re wolves in the forest, lions on the plain. We’re sharks in the sea …”

  Emptiness always laughed.

  Cnaiür charged the creature, his sword pummelling the space between them. Feint, then a breathtaking sweep. The Shrial Knight leapt, batted away the thunder of his steel.

  Iron honed to the absence of surface, sketching circles and points in the air, reaching, probing …

  They locked hilts. Leaned against each other. Cnaiür heaved, but the man seemed immovable.

  “Such talent!” Sarcellus cried.

  Concussion in his face. How? Cnaiür stumbled across leaves and hot stone, rolled to his feet. He glimpsed Umiaki, clutching the sun with a tree’s crone fingers. Then Sarcellus’s blade was everywhere, cutting, hammering down his guard. A string of desperations saved his life. He leapt clear.

  The famished mobs yammered and shrieked. The very ground thrummed beneath his sandals.

  Exhaustion and stings, the weight of old wounds.

  Their blades scissored, winced apart, brushed sweaty skin, then circled round the sun. Like teeth they clacked and gnashed.

  Lathered in sweat. Each breath a knife in his chest.

  Pressed to the bowers of Umiaki, he glimpsed Serwë sagging against the Dûnyain, her face black and bent back, her teeth leering from shrunken lips. The surrounding riot thinned. The boundaries between him, the ground, and the black tree crumbled. Something filled him, swept him forward, unleashed his corded arms. And he howled, the very mouth of the Steppe, his sword raping the air between …

  One. Two. Three … Blows that could have halved bulls.

  Sarcellus faltered, stumbled—saved himself with an inhuman leap. Back, pirouetting through the air. Landing in a crouch.

  The smile was gone.

  His black mane ribboned by sweat, his chest heaving over the hollow of his belly, Cnaiür raised his arms to the tumultuous mobs.

  “Who?” he screamed. “Who will take the knife to my heart?”

  Again he fell upon the Shrial Knight, battered him back from the shadows of Umiaki, from the leaves curled about palmed water. But even as the man’s style crumbled beneath his frothing attack, it revealed something beautiful in its precision—as beautiful as it was unconquerable. Suddenly, Sarcellus was swatting his blade as though it were a game. The man’s longsword became a glittering wind, scoring his cheek, clipping his shin …

  Cnaiür fell back, wailed rabid frustration, bellowed defiance.

  A sword tip sheared through his thigh. He skidded in blood, fell forward, bare throat exposed … Stone bruised his bones. Grit gouged his skin.

  No …

  A powerful voice pierced the roar of the Holy War.

  “Sarcellus!”

  It was Gotian. He’d broken with Eleäzaras, and was warily approaching his zealous Knight-Commander. The crowds abruptly grew subdued.

  “Sarcellus …” The Grandmaster’s eyes were slack with disbelief. “Where …”—a hesitant swallow—“where did you learn to fight so?”

  The Knight of the Tusk whirled, his face the very mask of reverent subservience.

  “My lord, I’ve—”

  Sarcellus suddenly convulsed, coughed blood through gritted teeth. Cnaiür guided his thrashing body to the ground with his sword. Then, within reach of the dumbstruck Grandmaster, he hacked off its head with a single stroke. He gathered the thick maul of black hair in his hand, raised the severed head high. Like bowels from a split belly, its face relaxed, opened like a harem of limbs. Gotian fell to his knees. Eleäzaras stumbled back into his slaves. The mob’s thunder—horror, exultation—broke across the Scylvendi. The riot of revelation.

  He tossed the hoary thing at the sorcerer’s feet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CAR ASKAND

  What is the meaning of a deluded life?

  —AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

  Late Winter, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand

  Crying out to one another in eager terror, the Nascenti cut the Warrior-Prophet from his dead wife. A hush, it seemed, had settled across the whole of Caraskand.

  He knew he should be weak unto death, but something inexplicable moved him. He rolled from Serwë, braced his arms against his knees, then waving his frantic disciples away, stood impossibly erect. Hands wrapped him in a shroud of white linen. He stumbled clear of Umiaki’s gloom, lifted his face to sun and sky. He could feel awe shiver through the masses—awe of him. He raised his palms to the great hollows of the earth, and it seemed he embraced all the Three Seas.

  I think I see, Father …

  Cries of rapture and disbelief rang across the packed reaches of the Kalaul. Several paces away Cnaiür stood dumbstruck, as did Eleäzaras a length behind him. Incheiri Gotian staggered forward, fell to his knees and wept. Kellhus smiled with boundless compassion. Everywhere he looked, he saw men kneeling …

  Yes … The Thousandfold Thought.

  And it seemed there was nothing, no dwarfing frame, that could restrict him to this place, to any place … He was all things, and all things were his …

  He was one of the Conditioned. Dûnyain.

  He was the Warrior-Prophet.

  Tears roared down his cheeks. With a haloed hand, he reached beneath his breast, firmly wrested the heart from his ribs. He thrust it high to the thunder of their adulation. Beads of blood seemed to crack the stone at his feet … He glimpsed Sarcellus’s uncoiled face.

  I see …

  “They said!” he cried in a booming voice, and the howling chorus trailed into silence.

  “They said that I was False, that I caused the anger of the God to burn against us!”

  He looked into their wasted faces, answered their fevered eyes. He brandished Serwë’s burning heart.

  “But I say that we—WE!—are that anger!”

  Kascamandri, the indomitable Padirajah of Kian, sent a message to the Men of the Tusk, whom he knew were doomed. The message was an offer—an extremely gracious one, the Padirajah thought. If the Holy War relented, yielded Caraskand and forswore their idolatrous worship of False Gods, they would be spared and given lands. They would be made Grandees of Kian as befitted their rank among the idolatrous nations.

  Kascamandri was not so foolish as to think this offer woul
d be accepted outright, but he knew something of desperation, knew that in the competition of hungers, piety often lost in the end. Besides, news that the Holy War had been defeated, not by the swords of the Prophet Fane but by his words, would shake the wicked Thousand Temples to the core.

  The reply came in the form of a dozen almost skeletal Inrithi knights, dressed in simple cotton tunics and wearing only knives. After disputing the knives, which the idolaters refused to relinquish, Kascamandri’s Ushers received them with all jnanic courtesy and brought them directly to the great Padirajah, his children, and the ornamental Grandees of his court.

  There was a moment of astonished silence, for the Kianene could scarce believe the bearded wretches before them could author so much woe. Then, before the first ritual declaration, the twelve men cried out, “Satephikos kana ta yerishi ankapharas!” in unison, then drew their knives and cut their own throats.

  Horrified, Kascamandri clasped his two youngest daughters tight in his elephantine arms. They sobbed and cried out, while his older children, especially his boys, chirped in excited tones. He turned to his dumbstruck interpreter …

  “Th-they said,” the ashen-faced man stammered, “‘the Warrior-Prophet shall … shall come before you …’” He gazed helplessly at his Padirajah’s gold-slippered feet.

  When he demanded to know just who this Warrior-Prophet was, no one could answer him. Only when little Sirol began crying anew did he cease ranting. Dismissing his slaves, he rushed her to the incense-fogged chambers of his pavilion, promising sweets and other beautiful things.

  The following morning the Men of the Tusk filed from the Ivory Gate onto the greening Tertae Plain. War horns pealed from hill to hill. Thousand-throated songs drifted on the breeze. No longer would the Holy War endure hunger and disease. No longer would it suffer itself to be besieged.

  It would march.

  The tattered columns wound from the gates onto the fields. Stricken with illness, Gothyelk was too weakened to battle, so his middle son, Gonrain, rode in his stead. The Great Names had agreed to give the Tydonni the right flank, so the Earl of Agansanor could watch his son from Caraskand’s walls. Then came Ikurei Conphas, flanked by the Sacred Suns of his Imperial Columns. Nersei Proyas followed, at the head of the once magnificent knights of Conriya. And after him came Hulwarga the Limper, whose Thunyeri looked more like savage wraiths than men. Then rode Chinjosa, the Count-Palatine of Antanamera, who’d been appointed King-Regent of High Ainon after Chepheramunni’s death. The great army the Scarlet Spires had brought from High Ainon was but a ruined shadow of what it had once been, though those who remained possessed bitter strength. King Saubon was the last to issue from Caraskand’s great Ivory Gate, leading trains of wild-eyed Galeoth.

  Worried that a precipitous attack would simply drive the idolaters back to the shelter of Caraskand’s walls, Kascamandri let the Inrithi form unmolested across the fields. The Men of the Tusk mustered between byres and before abandoned farmsteads, their lines somewhat over a mile in length. The weak stood next to the strong, hauberks rusted, jerkins rotted. Strapless harnesses swung from emaciated frames. The arms of some, it seemed, were no thicker than their swords. Knights wearing Enathpanean vests, cassocks, and khalats milled on horses that looked like starved nags. Even those few noncombatants who’d survived—women and priests for the most part—stood among them. Everyone had come to the Fields of Tertae—all those with strength to bear arms. Everyone had come to conquer or to perish. They formed long, haggard ranks, singing hymns, beating blades against shoulder and shield.

  Some one hundred thousand Inrithi had stumbled from the Carathay, and less than fifty thousand now ranged across the plain. Another twenty thousand remained within Caraskand, too weak to do more than cheer. Many had dragged themselves from their sickbeds and now crowded the Triamic Walls, especially about the Ivory Gate. Some cried out encouragement and prayers, while others wept, tormented by the collision of hope and hopelessness.

  But on wall and field alike, everyone looked anxiously to the centre of the battle line, hoping for a glimpse of the new banner that graced the threadbare standards of the Holy War. There! through budding grove or across rolling pasture, flaring in the breeze: black on white, a ring bisected by the figure of a man, the Circumfix of the Warrior-Prophet. The glory of it scarcely seemed possible …

  War horns sounded the advance, and the grim ranks began marching forward, into distances screened by orchards and copses of ash and sycamore. Kascamandri had ordered his host to draw up more than two miles distant, where rolling plain broadened between the city and the surrounding hills, knowing it would be difficult for the Inrithi to cover the intervening distance without exposing their flanks or opening gaps in their line.

  Songs keened over the throbbing of Fanim drums. The deep war chants of the Thunyeri, which had once filled the forests of their homeland with the sound of doom. The keening hymns of the Ainoni, whose cultivated ears savoured the dissonance of human voices. The dirges of the Galeoth and the Tydonni, solemn and foreboding. They sang, the Men of the Tusk, overcome with strange passions: joy that knew no laughter, terror that knew no fear. They sang and they marched, walking with the grace of almost-broken men.

  Hundreds collapsed, faint for the lack of food. Their kinsmen hauled them to their feet, dragged them forward through the muck of fallow fields.

  First blood was shed to the north, nearest the Triamic Walls. The Tydonni under Thane Unswolka of Numaineiri sighted waves of Fanim cresting the hillocks before them, their black-braided goatees bouncing to the rhythm of their trotting horses. The Numaineiri, their faces painted red to terrify their foes, braced their great kite shields with gaunt shoulders. Their archers loosed thin volleys at the advancing Fanim, only to be answered by dark clouds of arrows fired from horseback. Led by Ansacer, the exiled Sapatishah of Gedea, the dispossessed Grandees of Shigek and Enathpaneah charged with fury into the tall warriors of Ce Tydonn.

  Near the centre, opposite the Circumfix, screaming mastodons lumbered forward, their howdahs packed with black-faced Girgashi wearing blue turbans and bearing shields of red-lacquered cowhide. But daring outriders, Anpliean knights under Palatine Gaidekki, had raced forward, setting dead winter grasses and thickets aflame. Oily smoke tumbled skyward, pulled to the southeast by the wind. Several mastodons panicked, causing uproar among King Pilaskanda’s Hetmen. But most crashed through the smoke and stamped trumpeting into the Inrithi’s midst. Soon little could be seen. Smoke and chaos enveloped the Mark of the Circumfix.

  Everywhere along the line Fanim horsemen crested rises, burst from citrus groves, or galloped clear of drifting smoke—magnificent divisions of them. Great Cinganjehoi, leading the proud Grandees of Eumarna and Jurisada, swept into the walking lines of Ainoni: Kishyati and Moserothu under Palatines Soter and Uranyanka. Farther to the south, the Grandees of Chianadyni assembled along the summits of the rising hills, awaiting King Saubon and his marching ranks of Galeoth. Wearing wide-sleeved khalats and Nilnameshi chainmail, they charged down the slopes, riding thoroughbreds raised on the hard frontiers of the Great Salt. Crown Prince Fanayal and his Coyauri struck Earl Anfirig’s blue-tattooed Gesindalmen, then swept into the confused lines of the Agmundrmen under Saubon’s personal command.

  Along Caraskand’s walls the infirm cried and howled to their kinsmen, struggling to see what happened. But through the thundering drums, over the ululating war cries of the heathen, they could hear their brothers sing. Smoke obscured the centre, but nearer the walls they saw the Tydonni stand firm before flurries of Fanim horsemen, fighting with grim and preternatural determination. Suddenly Earl Werijen Greatheart and the knights of Plaideöl broke forward, riding what few nags they possessed, and shattered the astonished Kianene. Then far to the south, someone sighted Athjeäri and the inveterate knights of Gaenri streaming down dark slopes, crashing into the rear of the Chianadyni. Saubon had sent his young nephew to counter any flanking manoeuvres in the hills. After breaking and pursuing the division of
cavalry Kascamandri had sent for this very purpose, the brash Earl of Gaenri found himself auspiciously positioned in the heathen’s rear.

  The Fanim fell back in disarray, while before them, all across the Fields of Tertae, the singing Inrithi resumed their forward march. Many upon the walls limped eastward, toward the Gate of Horns, where they could see the first Men of the Tusk fight clear the smoke of the centre and press onward in the wake of retreating Girgashi horsemen. Then they saw it, the Circumfix, fluttering white and unsullied in the wind …

  As though driven by inevitability, the iron men marched forward. When the heathen charged, they grabbed at bridles and were trampled. They punched spears deep into the haunches of Fanim horses. They fended hacking swords, pulled heathen shrieking to the ground, where they knifed them in the armpit, face, or groin. They shrugged off piercing arrows. When the heathen relented, some Men of the Tusk, the madness of battle upon them, hurled their helms at the fleeing horsemen. Time and again the Kianene charged, broke, then withdrew, while the iron men trudged on, through the olive trees, across the fallow fields. They would walk with the God—whether he favoured them or no.

  But the Kianene were a proud, warlike people, and the host the Padirajah had assembled was great both in number and in heart. Though dismayed, the pious Warriors of the Solitary God were not undone. Kascamandri himself took to the field, hoisted by his slaves upon the back of a massive horse. Outdistancing the Inrithi, division after division of Fanim horsemen reformed on the outskirts of the Padirajah’s camp. Men cast about for sign of the Cishaurim. Then King Pilaskanda, the Padirajah’s tributary and friend, loosed the last of the mastodons upon the black-armoured Thunyeri.