The Warrior Prophet (41 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

“Esmi?” Serwë said. “Is something wrong?”
Esmenet’s look became faraway. When it returned, her handsome face wrinkled into another smile—more sad, but just as genuine.
Serwë looked nervously to her hands, suddenly terrified that Esmenet somehow
knew
. In her soul’s eye, she glimpsed the Scylvendi toiling above her in the dark.
But it wasn’t him!
“The hills,” she said quickly. “The hills are so hard … Kellhus
says
he’ll get me a mule.”
Esmenet nodded. “Make sure he …” She paused, frowned at the darkness. “What’s he up to now?”
Achamian had returned from the darkness, bearing a small doll about as long as a forearm. He sat the doll down on the earth, with its back resting against the bonelike stone he’d been using as a seat moments earlier. With the exception of the head, it was carved from dark wood, with jointed limbs, a small rusty knife for a right hand, and engraved with rows of tiny text. The head, however, was a silken sack, shapeless, and no larger than a poor man’s purse. Staring at it, it suddenly seemed a dreadful thing to Serwë. The firelight gleamed across its polished surfaces and gave the illusion that the words had been carved inches deep. The small shadow that framed it was black as pitch against the stone and shifted uneasily with the twining glitter of the flames. It looked like a little dead man propped before a towering fire.
“Does Achamian scare you, Serchaa?” Esmenet asked. Something wicked and mischievous glinted in her eyes.
Serwë thought about that night at the ruined shrine, when he’d sent light to the stars. She shook her head. “No,” she replied. He was too sad to frighten.
“He will after this,” Esmenet said.
“He leaves for proof,” Xinemus jeered, “and he returns with a toy!”
“This is no ‘toy,’” Achamian muttered, annoyed.
“He’s right,” Kellhus said seriously. “It is some kind of sorcerous artifact. I can see the Mark.”
Achamian looked at Kellhus sharply, but said nothing. The fire crackled and hissed. He finished adjusting the doll, took two steps back. Suddenly, framed by the darkness and the shining fires of the greater encampment, he seemed less a weary scholar and more a Mandate Schoolman. Serwë shivered.
“This is called a ‘Wathi Doll,’” he explained, “something I … I purchased from a Sansori witch a couple of years ago … There’s a soul trapped in this doll.”
Xinemus coughed wine through his nose.
“Akka,”
he rasped, “I won’t tolerate—”
“Humour me, Zin! Please … Kellhus says he’s one of the Few. This is the one way for him to prove it without damning himself—or you, Zin. Apparently for me, it’s already too late.”
“What should I do?” Kellhus asked.
Achamian knelt and fetched a twig from the ground at his feet. “I’ll simply scratch two words into the earth, and you’ll speak them, aloud. You won’t be uttering a Cant, so you won’t be marked by the blood-of-the-onta. No one will look at you and know you for a sorcerer. And you’ll still be pure enough to handle Trinkets without discomfort. You’ll just be uttering the artifact’s cipher … The doll will awaken only if you truly
are
one of the Few.”
“Why’s it bad that anyone recognize Kellhus as a sorcerer?” Bloody Dinch asked.
“Because he’d be
damned!
” Xinemus nearly shouted.
“That,” Achamian acknowledged, “and he’d quickly be dead. He’d be a sorcerer without a school, a
wizard,
and the Schools don’t brook wizards.”
Achamian turned to Esmenet; they exchanged a quick, worried look. Then he walked over to Kellhus. Serwë could tell that a large part of him already regretted this spectacle.
With the twig, Achamian deftly scratched a line of signs in the earth before Kellhus’s sandalled feet. Serwë assumed that they were two words, but she couldn’t read. “I’ve written them in Kûniüric,” he said, “to spare the others any indignity.” He stepped back, nodded slowly. Despite the brown of innumerable days spent in the sun, he looked grey. “Speak them,” he instructed.
Kellhus, his bearded face solemn, studied the words for a moment, then in a clear voice said,
“Skuni ari’sitwa …”
All eyes scrutinized the doll lying slack against the stone in the firelight. Serwë held her breath. She’d expected that perhaps the limbs might twitch and then drawl into drunken life, as though the doll were a puppet, something that might prance on the end of invisible strings. But that didn’t happen. The first thing to move, rather, was the stained, silk head—but it didn’t loll with lazy life, or even slowly nod; instead, something moved from
within
. Serwë gasped in horror, realizing that a
tiny face
—nose, lips, brow, and eye sockets—now strained against the fabric …
It was as though a narcotic haze had settled upon them, the torpor of bearing witness to the impossible. Serwë’s heart hammered. Her thoughts wheeled …
But she couldn’t look away. A human face, small enough to palm, pressed against the silk. She could see tiny lips part in a soundless howl.
And then the limbs moved—suddenly, deftly, with none of the swaying stagger of a puppet. Whatever moved those limbs moved them from within, with the compact elegance of a body assured of its extremities. And with half-panicked thoughts, Serwë understood that it was a soul, a
self-moving
soul … In a single, languorous motion, it leaned forward, braced its arms against the earth, bent its knees, then came to its feet, casting a slender shadow across the earth, the shadow of man with a sack bound about his head.
“By all that’s holy …”
Bloody Dinch hissed in a breathless voice.
The wooden man turned its eyeless face from side to side, studied the dumbstruck giants.
It raised the small, rusty blade it possessed in lieu of a right hand. The fire popped, and it jumped and whirled. A smoking coal bounced to a stop at its feet. Looking down, it knelt with the blade, flicked the coal back into the fire.
Achamian muttered something unspeakable, and it collapsed in a jumble of splayed limbs. He looked blankly at Kellhus, and in a voice as ashen as his expression, said, “So you’re one of the Few …”
Horror, Serwë thought. He was horrified. But why? Couldn’t he see?
Without warning, Xinemus leapt to his feet. Before Achamian could even glance at him, the Marshal had seized his arm, yanked him violently about.
“Why do you do this?” Xinemus cried, his face both pained and enraged. “You
know
that it’s difficult enough for me to … to … You
know!
And now
displays such as this? Blasphemy?
”
Stunned, Achamian looked at his friend aghast. “But Zin,” he cried. “This is what I am.”
“Perhaps Proyas was right,” he snapped. With a growl he thrust Achamian away, then paced off into the darkness. Esmenet leapt from her place by Serwë and grasped one of Achamian’s slack hands. But the sorcerer stared off into the blackness that had encompassed the Marshal of Attrempus. Serwë could hear Esmenet’s insistent whisper:
“It’s okay, Akka! Kellhus will speak to him. Show him his folly …”
But Achamian, his face turned from those watching about the fire, pushed at her feebly.
Still bewildered, her skin still tingling in dread, Serwë looked to Kellhus beseechingly:
Please … you must make this better!
Xinemus must forgive Achamian this. They must all learn to forgive!
Serwë didn’t know when she’d begun speaking to him with her face, but she did it so often now that many times she couldn’t sort what she’d told him from what she’d shown him. This was part of the infinite peace between them. Nothing was hidden.
And for some reason, his look reminded her of something he’d once said:
“I must reveal myself to them slowly Serwë, slowly. Otherwise they’ll turn against me …”
 
Late that night, Serwë was awakened by voices—angry voices, just outside their tent. Reflexively she grasped for her belly. Her innards churned with fright.
Dear Gods … Mercy! Please, mercy!
The Scylvendi had returned.
As she knew he would. Nothing could kill Cnaiür urs Skiötha, not so long as Serwë remained alive.
Not again … please-please …
She could see nothing, but the menace of his presence already clutched at her, as though he were a wraith, something feral and malevolent bent upon consuming her, scraping out her heart the way Cepaloran women scrape pelts clean with sharpened oyster shells. She began to cry, softly, secretly, so he wouldn’t hear … Any moment, she knew, he would thrash into the tent, fill it with the stink of a man who’d just shed his hauberk, grip her about the throat and …
Pleaasse! I know I’m supposed to be a good girl—I’ll be a good girl! Please!
She heard his harsh voice, low so as not to be overheard, but fierce nonetheless.
“I tire of this, Dûnyain.”
“Nuta’tharo hirmuta,”
Kellhus replied with an impassiveness that unnerved her—until she realized:
He’s cold because he hates him … Hates him as I do!
“I will not!” the Scylvendi spat.
“Sta puth yura’gring?”
“Because you ask me too! I tire hearing you defile my tongue. I tire of being mocked. I tire of these fools you ply. I tire of watching you defile my prize!
My prize!
”
A moment of silence. Buzzing ears.
“Both of us,” Kellhus said in taut Sheyic, “have secured places of honour. Both of us have gained the ears of the great. What more could you want?”
“I want only one thing.”
“And together, we walk the shortest path to—”
Kellhus abruptly halted. A hard moment passed between them.
“You intend to leave,” Kellhus said.
Laughter, like a wolf ’s growl broken into fragments.
“There is no need to share the same yaksh.”
Serwë gasped for air. The scar on her arm, the swazond the plainsman had given beneath the Hethanta Mountains, flared in sudden pain.
No-no-no-no-no …
“Proyas …” Kellhus said, his voice still blank. “You intend to camp with Proyas.”
Please God noooo!
“I have come for my things,” Cnaiür said. “I have come for my prize.”
Never in all her violent life had Serwë felt herself pitched upon such a precipice. The breath was choked from her mid-sob, and she became very still. The silence shrieked. Three heartbeats it took Kellhus to answer, and for three heartbeats her very life hung as though from a gibbet between the voices of men. She would die for him, she knew, and she would die without him. It seemed she’d always known this, from the first clumsy days of her childhood. She almost gagged for fear.
And then Kellhus said: “No. Serwë stays with me.”
Numb relief. Warm tears. The hard earth beneath her had become as fluid as the sea. Serwë very nearly swooned. And a voice that wasn’t hers spoke through her anguish and her rapture and said:
Mercy … At last mercy
…
She heard nothing of their ensuing argument; succour and joy possessed their own thunder. But they didn’t speak long, not with her weeping aloud. When Kellhus returned to his place beside her, she threw herself upon him, showered him with desperate kisses and held his strong body so tight she could scarcely breathe. And at last, when the great weariness of the unburdened overwhelmed her and she lay spinning on the threshold of sweet, childlike sleep, she could feel callused yet gentle fingers slowly caressing her cheek.
A God touched her. Watched over her with divine love.

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