Then the second horn sounded, and Cnaiür leapt, screaming the war cry of his fathers. They crashed into the backs of the stunned infantrymen. He caught the first man in the jaw as he turned, the second in the armpit as he struggled to free his spear. Within seconds, hundreds had died. Then suddenly the Conriyans on the south found themselves facing the Thunyeri on the north.
A ragged cheer was raised, which Cnaiür silenced with his raving voice. “Off the streets! Off the streets!”
The unholy muttering had started anew.
The battle that followed was unlike any Cnaiür had experienced. The pitch of night struck in the hues of sorcerous light. Catching unawares and being so caught. Hunted and hunting through a labyrinthine slum, then warring in open streets, hilt to hilt, spitting blood from one’s teeth. In the dark, his life hung from a thread, and time and again only his strength and fury saved him. But in the light, whether by moon or, more likely, the burning of nearby structures, the Nansur flinched from him and attacked only with the haft of their spears.
Conphas wanted him.
Cnaiür had not the arms for the swazond he earned that night.
The last he saw of Skaiwarra, the chieftain-thane and a band of his wild-haired axemen had butchered a company of infantrymen and turned to face down a Kidruhil charge. Sanumnis actually died in his arms, coughing blood and spittle in the gloom. Troyatti, and many of the other Hemscilvara, fell in a rain of sorcerous naphtha that left Cnaiür himself untouched. He would never learn what happened to Tirnemus or Saurnemmi.
In the end, he and a handful of strangers—some three Conriyans, like eerie automatons with their war-masks drawn, and six Thunyeri, one with the shrunken heads of Sranc swinging from his flaxen braids—found themselves driven from the flaming wreck of a millery back onto a broad stair beneath the ruins of a Fanim tabernacle. They hacked and hammered at the rush of Columnaries until only Cnaiür and the nameless Thunyeri stood, chests heaving, shoulder to shoulder. The dead formed a skirt of tangled limbs across the steps below them; the dying rocked and kicked like drunks. All the world seemed slicked in blood. Officers bawled through the dark ranks arrayed below them. Framed by the burning millery, the Nansur charged them again. The Norsirai laughed and roared, hewing and crushing with great swings of his battleaxe. A spear caught him in the neck and he stumbled into the threshing of swords.
Cnaiür howled in exultation. They came at him with the butts and hafts of their spears, their faces screwed in terror and determination. Cnaiür leapt into their midst, scarred arms hacking. “Demon!” he roared. “Demon!”
Hands clutched for his arms and he shattered wrists, punctured faces. Forms tackled his torso and he snapped necks, crushed spines. He tossed lifeblood skyward, nailed beating hearts still. All the world had become rotted leather, and he the only iron. The only iron.
He was of the People.
Without warning, the Nansur relented, crowded back into the shields of those behind, away from the advance of his dripping aspect. They stared in horror and astonishment. All the world seemed afire.
“For a thousand years!” he grated. “Fucking your wives! Strangling your children! Striking down your fathers!” He brandished his broken sword. Blood spilled in loops from his elbow. “For a thousand years I have stalked you!”
He threw aside the blade, kicked a spear into his hand, then cast it at the soldier before him. It punched through his shield, through his banded cuirass, and erupted from the small of his back.
Cnaiür laughed. The roaring flames took up his voice, made it sorcerous with dread.
Cries and shouts. Some even dropped their weapons.
“Take him!” a voice was shrieking. “You are Nansur! Nansur!”
A familiar voice.
It exerted a collective force, a consciousness of shared blood.
Cnaiür lowered his chin, smiled …
They came as one this time, an encompassing wave of blows and clutching hands. He hammered and wrenched, but they bore him down. Everything became eye-watering numbness. They seemed howling apes, dancing and punishing, dancing and punishing.
Afterward, they cleared a path for their all-conquering Exalt-General. Smoke towered into the firmament beyond the battered beauty of his face, shrouding stars. His eyes were the same, though they appeared unnerved—very unnerved. “No different,” his broken lips spat. “No different than Xunnurit after all.”
And as the darkness came swirling down, Cnaiür at last understood. The Dûnyain had not sent him to be Conphas’s assassin …
He had sent him to be his victim.
CHAPTER EIGHT
XERASH
That hope is little more than the premonition of regret. This is the first lesson of history.
—CASIDAS, THE ANNALS OF CENEI
To merely recall the Apocalypse is to have survived it. This is what makes The Sagas, for all their cramped beauty, so monstrous.
Despite their protestations, the poets who authored them do not tremble, even less do they grieve. They celebrate.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Xerash
At the bidding of the Warrior-Prophet, the disparate elements of the Holy War began to converge on Gerotha. Using the Herotic Way, Lord Soter and his Kishyati were the first to spy the city’s black curtain walls. The imperious Ainoni Palatine rode directly to the gate that the Men of the Tusk would come to call the Twin Fists and demanded to parley with the Sapatishah-Governor. The Xerashi told him that it was only fear of atrocity that moved them to bar their gates. Lord Soter laughed at that, and without further word withdrew to the cultivated plains surrounding the city. He struck the first camp of the siege in the middle of a trampled sugar cane field.
The Warrior-Prophet, along with Proyas and Gotian, arrived early the following day. By evening the Gerothans had sent an embassy, as much simply to see the False Prophet who had struck down the Padirajah as to barter with him. They had no heart for hard bargains. Apparently, the Sapatishah of Xerash, Utgarangi, and all the surviving Kianene had evacuated the city days previously. Hours later the embassy returned to the Twin Fists, convinced they had no choice but to surrender, and to do so without condition.
After a long forced march, Gothyelk and the bulk of the Tydonni arrived during the night.
The following morning found the men of the Gerothan embassy strung from the battlements of the great gate, their entrails sagging to the foundations. According to defectors who managed to escape the city, there had been a coup that night, led by priests and officers loyal to their old Kianene overlords.
The Men of the Tusk began preparing their assault.
When the Warrior-Prophet rode to the Twin Fists to demand an explanation, he was greeted by an old veteran calling himself Captain Hebarata. With a vitriol only the old can summon, the man cursed the Warrior-Prophet as false and threatened the Solitary God’s retribution as though it were merely another coin in his purse. Then, at the end of his tirade, someone fired a crossbow bolt …
The Warrior-Prophet snatched it from the air just short of his neck. To the wonder of all, he raised the missile aloft. “Hear this, Hebarata,” he cried. “From this day I count!” A cryptic statement that troubled even the Inrithi.
During this time, Coithus Athjeäri ranged ever eastward with his hardened Gaenri Knights. They blundered into their first Kianene patrol south of a town called Nebethra. After a sharp melee, the Kianene broke and fled toward Chargiddo. Interrogating the survivors, the Galeoth Earl learned that Fanayal himself was in Shimeh, though none knew whether he planned to remain there. The Kianene claimed to have been sent out to gather intelligence on sites the Inrithi thought holy. According to one of the captives, the Padirajah hoped that securing and despoiling these places “would provoke the False Prophet to acts of stupidity.”
This deeply alarmed the pious young Earl. That night he held a council with his captains, where it was decided that if any man should be pr
ovoked to rashness, it should be Coithus Athjeäri. Using copies of antique Nansur maps, they staked out a route from holy place to holy place. After kneeling for the Temple Prayer, they joined their mailed kinsmen about the bonfires. Their Eumarnan and Mongilean chargers were led out of the darkness, and they mounted with a myriad of shouts. Then, wordlessly, they rode into the moonlit hills.
So began what came to be called Athjeäri’s Pilgrimage.
He rode first to survey Chargiddo, on the footings of the Betmulla. Since entering Xerash, the Men of the Tusk had heard much of this ancient fortress, and the Warrior-Prophet had bid Athjeäri send him a report. After dispatching messengers with sketches and estimates, he struck through the foothills, twice surprising and scattering Kianene under the banner of Cinganjehoi. They found the hilltop village and shrine of Muselah—where the Latter Prophet had returned to Horomon his sight—a smoking ruin.
Upon that ground they swore a mighty oath.
In the meantime, all but the last elements of the Holy War joined their brothers outside the walls of Gerotha. The fact that the Xerashi made no sorties attested to their weakness, and in the Council of Great and Lesser Names both Hulwarga and Gothyelk pressed for an immediate assault. But the Warrior-Prophet chided them, saying that the nearness of their destination and not their confidence motivated their anxiousness to attack. “Where hopes burn bright,” he said, “patience is quickly consumed.”
They need only wait, he explained, and the city would fall of its own accord.
Music. This was the first thing Esmenet heard the day she began reading The Sagas.
She hovered in that moment of consciousness that immediately follows awakening, a kind of twilight of thought, bereft of self or place, yet painfully alert. And there was music. She smiled in groggy recognition. The finger-drumming, the punctuated bow strokes, bold and dramatic: it was Kianene music, she realized, being played somewhere within the many-chambered Umbilica.
“Yes! Yes!” a muffled voice called as the performance continued. She listened carefully, hoping to discern his voice somewhere beneath the music and above the ambient rumble of the stirring encampment. He always spoke between sounds, it seemed. The song faltered, only to be drowned by the sound of laughter and sporadic clapping.
It was the morning of their fourth day encamped about Gerotha and her stubborn walls. After vomiting, she struggled with her breakfast while her body-slaves fussed over her attire. With Yel and Burulan rolling their eyes, Fanashila explained the earlier music in her broken, but improving, Sheyic. Apparently three Xerashi captives, enslaved as porters, had petitioned Gayamakri for an opportunity to demonstrate their musical skills. What was more, the girl continued, one of them was more handsome than even the Conriyan Prince, or “Poyus,” as she called him. Yel had laughed aloud at that.
After a moment’s pause Fanashila blurted, “Slave may marry slave, no, Mistress?”
Esmenet smiled, but because of a pang in her throat she could do no more than nod.
Afterward, she weathered Opsara’s glare as she visited Moënghus. As always, she marvelled at the way he seemed to grow from morning to morning, even as she avoided looking too long into his turquoise eyes. Their colour was not changing. She thought of Serwë, cursed herself for not missing the girl. Then she thought of the spark that burned within her own womb.
After learning the latest details of the siege from Captain Heörsa, she joined Werjau for the Summary of Reports. Everything seemed deceptively routine, from the kinds of incidents reported to the continuing challenges of maintaining a network of contacts and informants in an army on the march. They had all learned to stand on marbles by now, but every day it seemed someone disappeared and someone else re-emerged. Aside from the Xerashi musicians, the only matter of concern regarded Lord Uranyanka and his Moserothi clients. Though he’d publicly repented the massacres at Sabotha, he continued to rail against the Warrior-Prophet in private. Uranyanka was an evil, black-hearted fool. More than once Esmenet had counselled his arrest, but Kellhus had deemed the Ainoni Palatine too important, one of those who had to be mollified rather than admonished.
Her duties as Intricati busied her long into the afternoon. She had grown accustomed to them enough to become bored, especially when it came to administrative matters. Sometimes her old eyes would overcome her and she would find herself gauging the men about her with the carnal boredom of a whore sizing up custom. A sudden awareness of clothing and distance would descend upon her, and she would feel inviolate in a way that made her skin tingle. All the acts they could not commit, all the places they could not touch … These banned possibilities would seem to hang above her like the smoke hazing the canvas ceilings.
I am forbidden, she would think.
Why this should make her feel so pure, she could not fathom.
Late in the afternoon she baffled Proyas by laughingly calling him Lord Poyus during an extended briefing on the latest intelligence coming in from the field. Her bouts of impish humour were lost on him, she realized, not only because he was Conriyan, and so suffered an over-elaborate sense of gallantry, but because he continued to grieve their earlier animosity. Their parting was awkward. Then, following an update from Werjau regarding the Xerashi musicians, she somehow escaped the Nascenti and their endless requests, and discovered that she had nothing to do. This was how she found her way to The Sagas.
She still thought of reading as “practice,” though she’d found it quite effortless for some time now. In fact, she not only hungered for opportunities to read, she often found herself simply staring at her humble collection of scrolls and codices, suffused with the same miserly feelings she harboured toward her cosmetics chest. But where the paints merely balmed the fears of her former self, the writings were something altogether different—something transformative rather than recuperative. It was as though the inked characters had become rungs on a ladder, or an endlessly uncoiling rope, something that allowed her to climb ever higher, to see ever more.
“You’ve learned the lesson,” Kellhus had said on one of those rare mornings when he shared her breakfast.
“What lesson might that be?”
“That the lessons never end.” He laughed, gingerly sipped his steaming tea. “That ignorance is infinite.”
“How,” she asked, at once earnest and delighted, “can anyone presume to be certain?”
Kellhus smiled in the devilish way she so adored.
“They think they know me,” he said.
Esmenet had thrown a pillow at him for that, and it had seemed a thing of wonder. Throwing a pillow at a prophet.
She knelt before the ivory-panelled chest that contained her library, raised and pressed back the lid. As always, she savoured the smell of oiled bindings. There were few books within; the Fanim of Caraskand had possessed little interest in idolatrous works, let alone Sheyic translations of them. Because none of her slaves could read, she’d been forced to pack the works herself, sifting through the shelves and scroll racks in what had been Achamian’s room. She’d been reluctant to stow The Sagas then, and now, spying the scrolls beneath Protathis, she felt that same reluctance. Scowling, she gathered them and carried them to her bed, wondering that the Apocalypse could feel so light. She propped herself against her favourite barrel-pillow. Then, running her fingers along the soon-to-be-unrolled parchment, she glimpsed the tattoo across the back of her left hand.
It seemed a kind of charm or totem now—her version of an ancestor scroll. That woman, that Sumni harlot who had hung her legs bare from her window, was a stranger to her now. Blood joined them, perhaps, but little else. Her poverty, her smell, her degradation, her simplicity—everything seemed to argue against her.
The trappings, let alone the facts, of her power would be enough to make the old Esmenet weep for wonder. Within the concentric scheme of Nascenti and Judges that Kellhus had grafted onto the old Shrial and Cultic hierarchies, she, Consort and Intricati, occupied the second most powerful ring. Gayamakri answered to her. Gotia
n answered to her. Werjau … Even potentates in their own right, men such as Proyas and Eleäzaras, had to bow chin to chest. She had rewritten jnan! And this, Kellhus had promised her, was but the beginning.
Then there was the strength of her faith. The old Esmenet, the cynical harlot, would find this the most difficult to comprehend. Her world had been dark and capricious, a place where significance was apportioned only to those caught within some dread whimsy of the Gods. The old her wouldn’t fathom the indwelling awe that now accompanied her every heartbeat. If anything, her whorish hackles would rise, and in private moments she would counsel doubt and suspicion. She had lain with too many priests.
The old Esmenet would never accept an understanding indistinguishable from trust.
And the pregnancy, the thought that she carried not merely a son but a destiny within her womb … How she would laugh!
But what would strike the old Esmenet the most, she had no doubt, would be the knowledge. In that one respect, she’d been extraordinary. Very few pondered their ignorance as she had. Their conceit compelled them to prize only what they knew beforehand. And since significance followed from the already known, they always thought they possessed everything relevant to any question of truth. Obliviousness made obvious.
She had always understood that her world, for all its grand immensity, was a sham. This was why she had made her custom into apertures, windows onto the world’s various corners. This was why she had used Achamian as a doorway to the past. And now Kellhus …
He had rewritten the world down to its very foundations. A world where all were slaves of repetition, of the twin darknesses of custom and appetite. A world where beliefs served the powerful instead of the true. The old Esmenet would be astounded, even outraged. But she would come to believe—eventually.
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