The Warrior Prophet (4 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

 
CHAPTER ONE
 
ANSERCA
 
Ignorance is trust.
—ANCIENT KÛNIÜRIC PROVERB
 
Late Spring, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, south of Momemn
 
Drusas Achamian sat cross-legged in the darkness of his tent, a silhouette rocking slowly to and fro, muttering dark words. Light spilled from his mouth. Though the moon-shining length of the Meneanor Sea lay between him and Atyersus, he walked the ancient halls of his School—walked among sleepers.
The dimensionless geometry of dreams never ceased to startle Achamian. There was something monstrous about a world where nothing was remote, where distances dissolved into a froth of words and competing passions. Something no knowledge could overcome.
Pitched from nightmare to nightmare, Achamian at last found the sleeping man he sought: Nautzera in his dream, seated on blood-muddied turf, cradling a dead king on his lap. “Our King is dead!” Nautzera cried in Seswatha’s voice. “Anasûrimbor Celmomas is dead!”
An unearthly roar hammered his ears. Achamian whirled, raising his hands against a titanic shadow.
Wracu … Dragon.
Billowing gusts staggered those standing, waved the arms of those fallen. Cries of dismay and horror rifled the air, then a cataract of boiling gold engulfed Nautzera and the High King’s attendants. There was no time for screams. Teeth cracked. Bodies tumbled like coals from a kicked fire.
Achamian turned and saw Nautzera amid a field of smoking husks. Shielded by his Wards, the sorcerer laid the dead king on the ground, whispering words Achamian could not hear but had dreamed innumerable times: “Turn your soul’s eye from this world, dear friend … Turn so that your heart might be broken no more.”
With the force of a toppled tower, the dragon thundered to earth, his descent yanking smoke and ash into towering veils. Portcullis jaws clacked shut. Wings like war-galley sails stretched out. The light of burning corpses shimmered across iridescent scales of black.
“Our Lord,”
the dragon grated,
“hath tasted thy King’s passing, and he saith, ‘It is done.’”
Nautzera stood before the golden-horned abomination. “Not while I draw breath, Skafra!” he cried.
“Never!”
Laughter, like the wheezing of a thousand consumptive men. The Great Dragon reared his bull-chest above the sorcerer, revealing a necklace of steaming human heads.
“Thou art overthrown, sorcerer. Thy tribe hath perished, dashed like a potter’s vessel by our fury. The earth is sown with thy nation’s blood, and soon thine enemies will compass thee with bent bow and whetted bronze. Wilt thou not repent thy folly? Wilt thou not abase thyself before our Lord?”
“As do you, mighty Skafra? As the exalted Tyrant of Cloud and Mountain abases himself?”
Membranes flickered across the dragon’s quicksilver eyes. A blink.
“I am not a God.”
Nautzera smiled grimly. Seswatha said, “Neither is your lord.”
Great stamping limbs and the gnashing of iron teeth. A cry from furnace lungs, as deep as an ocean’s moan and as piercing as an infant’s shriek.
Uncowed by the dragon’s thrashing bulk, Nautzera suddenly turned to Achamian, his face bewildered.
“Who are you?”
“One who shares your dreams …”
For a moment they were like two men drowning, two souls kicking for sharp air … Then darkness. The silent nowhere that housed men’s souls.
Nautzera … It is I.
A place of pure voice.
Achamian! That dream … It plagues me so of late. Where are you? We feared you dead.
Concern? Nautzera betraying concern for him, the one Schoolman he despised above all others? But then Seswatha’s Dreams had a way of sweeping aside petty enmities.
With the Holy War,
Achamian replied.
The contest with the Emperor has been resolved. The Holy War marches on Kian.
Images accompanied these words: Proyas addressing rapt mobs of armoured Conriyans; the endless trains of armed lords and their households; the many-coloured banners of a thousand thanes and barons; a distant glimpse of the Nansur Columns, marching through vineyard and grove in perfect formation …
So it begins,
Nautzera said decisively.
And Maithanet? Were you able to learn anything more of him?
I thought Proyas might assist me, but I was wrong. He belongs to the Thousand Temples … To Maithanet.
What is it with your students, Achamian? Why do they all turn to our rivals, hmm?
The ease with which Nautzera had recovered his sarcasm both stung and curiously relieved Achamian. The grand old sorcerer would need his wits for what followed.
I have seen them, Nautzera
. A flash of Skeaös’s naked body, chained and flailing like a holy shaker in the dust.
Seen whom?
The Consult. I’ve seen them. I know how they’ve eluded us for all these long years
. A face unclenching, like a miser’s fist from a golden ensolarii.
Are you drunk?
They’re here, Nautzera. Among us. They’ve always been.
Pause.
What are you saying?
The Consult still plies the Three Seas.
The Consult …
Yes! Witness.
More images flashed, reconstructions of the madness that had occurred in the bowels of the Andiamine Heights. The hellish face unfolding, again and again.
Without sorcery, Nautzera. Do you understand? The onta was unmarked! We cannot see these skin-spies for what they are …
Even though Inrau’s death had intensified his hatred of Nautzera, Achamian had called him because he was a fanatic, the only man extreme enough in temper to soberly appraise the extremity of his revelation.
The Tekne,
Nautzera said, and for the first time Achamian heard fear in the man’s voice.
The Old Science … It must be! The others must dream this, Achamian! Send this dream to the others!
But …
But what? There’s more?
Far more. An Anasûrimbor had returned, a living descendent of the dead king Nautzera had just dreamed.
Nothing of significance
, Achamian replied. Why had he said this? Why conceal Anasûrimbor Kellhus from the Mandate? Why protect—
Good. I can scarce digest this as it is … Our ancient foe discovered at last! And behind faces of skin! If they could penetrate the sequestered heights of the Imperial Court, they could penetrate nearly any faction, Achamian. Any faction! Send this dream to the entire Quorum! All Atyersus trembles this night.
 
Daybreak seemed bold, and Achamian found himself wondering whether mornings always seemed such when greeted by a thousand spear points. Sunlight swept out from the edge of the purple earth, illuminating hillsides and tree lines with crisp morning brilliance. The Sogian Way, an old coastal road that predated the Ceneian Empire, shot straight to the southwest, bending only to the rise and fall of the distant hills. A long line of armed men trudged along it, knotted by baggage trains and flanked by companies of mounted knights. Where the sun touched them, it stretched their shadows far across the surrounding pasture.
The sight filled Achamian with wonder.
For so many years the concern of his days had been dwarfed by the horror of his nights. What he’d witnessed through Seswatha’s eyes possessed no waking measure. Certainly the daylight world could still injure, could still kill, but it all seemed to happen at the scale of rats.
Until now.
Men of the Tusk, as far as the eye could see, scattered across the countryside, clustered about the road like ants on an apple peel. There a band of outriders following a faraway ridge line. Here a broken wain stranded amid streaming thickets of spears. Horsemen galloping through flowering groves. Local youths hollering from the tops of young birches. Such a sight! And it comprised only a fraction of their true might.
Shortly after leaving Momemn, the Holy War had splintered into disparate armies, each under one of the Great Names. According to Xinemus, this had been motivated in part by prudence—divided they could better forage if the Emperor fell short on his promise of provisions—and in part by stubbornness: the Inrithi lords simply could not agree on the best route to Asgilioch.
Proyas had struck for the coast, intending to follow the Sogian Way south to its terminus before turning west for Asgilioch. The other Great Names—Gothyelk with his Tydonni, Saubon and his Galeoth, Chepheramunni and the Ainoni, and Skaiyelt with his Thunyeri—had struck across the fields, vineyards, and orchards of the densely populated Kyranae Plain, thinking Proyas used a circle to travel in a straight line. With the ancient roads of Cenei little more than ruined tracks strewn across their homelands, they had no idea how much time the long way could save so long as it were paved.
At their present pace, Xinemus claimed, the Conriyan contingent would reach Asgilioch days before the others. And though Achamian worried—How could they win a war when simple marches defeated them?—Xinemus seemed convinced this was a good thing. Not only would it win glory for his nation and his prince, it would teach the others an important lesson. “Even the Scylvendi know roads are fucking better!” the Marshal had exclaimed.
Achamian plodded with his mule along the road’s verge, surrounded by creaking wains. From the first day of the Holy War’s march, he had taken to skulking in the baggage trains. If the columns of marching soldiery seemed like great rolling barracks, then the baggage trains seemed like great rolling barns. The smell of livestock, so like that of wet dogs. The groan and squeal of ungreased axles. The muttering of ham-fisted, ham-hearted men, punctuated now and again by the crack of whips.
He studied his feet—the pulp of trampled grasses had stained his toes green. For the first time, the question of why he shadowed the baggage trains struck him. Seswatha had always ridden at the right hand of kings, princes, and generals. So why didn’t he do the same? Though Proyas maintained his veneer of indifference, Achamian knew he would accept his company—if only for Xinemus’s sake. What student did not secretly crave their old teacher’s presence in uncertain times?
So why did he march with the baggage? Was it habit? He was an aging spy, after all, and nothing concealed so well as humility in humble circumstances. Or was it nostalgia? For some reason, marching as he did reminded him of following his father to the boats as a child, his head thick with sleep, the sand cold, the sea dark and morning-warm. Always the same glance to the east, where cold grey promised a punishing sun. Always the heavy breath as he resigned himself to the inevitable, to the hardship become ritual that men called work.
But what comfort could such memories offer? Drudgery didn’t soothe; it numbed.
Then Achamian realized: he marched with the beasts and baggage, not out of habit or nostalgia, but out of
aversion
.
I’m hiding,
he thought.
Hiding from him
…
From Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
Achamian slowed, tugged his mule from the verge into the surrounding meadow. The dew-cold grasses made his feet ache. The wains continued to trundle by, an endless file.
Hiding …
More and more, it seemed, he caught himself doing things for obscure reasons. Retiring early, not because he was exhausted from the day’s march—as he told himself—but because he feared the scrutiny of Xinemus, Kellhus, and the others. Staring at Serwë, not because she reminded him of Esmi—as he told himself—but because the way she stared at Kellhus worried him—as though she knew something …
And now this.
Am I going mad?
Several times now, he’d found himself cackling aloud for no apparent reason. Once or twice he’d raised a hand to his cheek to discover he’d been weeping. Each time he’d simply mumbled away his shock: few things are more familiar, he supposed, than finding oneself a stranger. Besides, what else could he do? Rediscovering the Consult was cause enough to go mad about the edges, certainly. But to suspect—no, to
know
—that the Second Apocalypse was beginning … And to be
alone
with such knowledge!

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