The Warrior Prophet (45 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The impossibility …
The miracle of here.
“Kneel with me,”
a voice from nowhere said.
“Take my hand and do not fear. Throw your face into the furnace!”
A place had been prepared for these final words, words that traced the scripture of his heart. A place of rapture.
The multitude cried out, and Martemus cried with them. Some openly wept, and Martemus wept with them. Others reached out as though trying to clutch his image. Martemus raised two fingers to brush his distant face.
How long Prince Kellhus spoke he couldn’t say. But he spoke of many things, and upon whatever ground his words set foot, the world was transformed.
“What does it mean, to be a warrior? Is not war the fire? The furnace? Is not war the very truth of our frailty?”
He even taught them a hymn, which, he said, had come to him in a dream. And the song moved them the way only a song from the Outside could move them. A hymn sung by the very Gods. For the rest of his days, Martemus would awaken and hear that song.
And afterward, when the masses thronged about the Prince, fell to their knees and softly kissed the hem of his white robe, he bid them to stand, reminded them that he was just a man like other men. And at long last, when the crush of bodies delivered Martemus to him, the surreal blue eyes regarded him gently, glanced not at all at his golden cuirass, his blue cloak, or the insignia of his station.
“I have waited for you, General.”
The excited rumble of others grew distant, as though the two of them had been submerged. Martemus could only stare, dumbstruck, overawed, and so gratified …
“Conphas sent you. But that has changed now, hasn’t it?”
And Martemus felt a child before his father, unable to lie, unable to speak the truth.
The Prophet nodded as though he had spoken. “What will happen to your loyalty, I wonder?”
Somewhere distant, almost too far to touch, men cried out. Martemus watched the Prophet turn his head, reach back with a golden-haloed hand, and seize a flying arm, which bore a fist, which gripped a long and silvery knife.
Assassination,
he thought without concern.
The man before him couldn’t be killed. He knew that now.
The mobs pummelled the assassin to the earth. Martemus glimpsed a bloodied, howling face.
The Prophet turned back to him.
“I would not divide your heart,” he said. “Come to me again, when you are ready.”
 
“I’m warning you, Proyas. Something must be done about this man.”
Ikurei Conphas had said this somewhat more emphatically than he’d intended. But then these were emphatic times.
The Conriyan Prince reclined in his camp chair and looked at him blandly. He picked at his trim beard with an absent hand. “What do you suggest?”
Finally.
“That we convene a full Council of the Greater and Lesser Names.”
“And?”
“That we bring charges against him.”
Proyas frowned. “Charges? What charges?”
“Under the auspices of the Tusk. The Old Law.”
“Ah, I see. And what would you charge Prince Kellhus with?”
“With fomenting blasphemy. With pretensions to prophecy.”
Proyas nodded. “In other words,” he said scathingly, “with being a False Prophet.”
Conphas laughed incredulously. He could remember once—long ago it now seemed—thinking he and Proyas would become fast and famous friends over the course of the Holy War. They were both handsome. They were close in age. And in their respective corners of the Three Seas, they were considered prodigies of similar promise—that was, until his obliteration of the Scylvendi at the Battle of Kiyuth.
I have no peers.
“Could any charge be more appropriate?” Conphas asked.
“I agreed,” Proyas replied testily, “to discuss ways of surprising Skauras on the South Bank, not to discuss the piety of a man I consider to be my friend.”
Although Proyas’s pavilion was large and richly outfitted, it was both gloomy and intolerably hot. Unlike the others, who had traded their canvas for the marble of abandoned villas, Proyas maintained himself as though still on the march.
Only a fanatic.
“You’ve heard of these Sermons at Xijoser?” Conphas asked, thinking,
Martemus, you fool
…
But then, that was the problem. Martemus
wasn’t
a fool. Conphas could scarce imagine anyone less foolish … That was precisely the problem.
“Yes, yes,” Proyas replied with an exasperated breath. “I’ve been invited to attend on a number of occasions, but the field keeps me busy.”
“I imagine … Did you know that many among the rank and file—my men,
your
men—refer to him as the Warrior-Prophet? The
Warrior-Prophet?
”
“Yes. I know this as well …” Proyas said this with the same air of indulgent impatience as before, but his brows knitted together, as if pinching a troubling thought.
“As it stands,” Conphas said, speaking as though at the limits of his good humour, “this is the Holy War of the Latter Prophet … of
Inri Sejenus
. But if this fraud continues to gather followers, it will fast become the Holy War of the Warrior-Prophet. Do you understand?”
Dead prophets were useful, because one could rule in their name. But live prophets?
Cishaurim
prophets?
Perhaps I should tell him what happened with Skeaös …
Proyas shook his head in weary dismissal. “What would you have me do, eh, Conphas? Kellhus is … unlike other men. There’s no doubt about that. And he does have these dreams. But he makes no claim to be a prophet. And he’s angered when others call him so.”
“So what? So he must first
admit
to being a False Prophet? Being a False Prophet in
fact
isn’t enough?”
His expression pained, Proyas regarded him narrowly, looked him up and down as though assessing the appropriateness of his field armour. “Why does this concern you so, Conphas? You’re most assuredly not a pious man.”
What would you have me do, Uncle? Should I tell him?
Conphas suppressed the urge to spit like the Scylvendi, ran his tongue over his teeth instead. He despised indecision.
“The question of my piety is not the concern here.”
Proyas drew in and released a heavy breath. “I’ve sat long hours with the man, Conphas. Together, we’ve read aloud from
The Chronicle of the Tusk
and
The Tractate,
and not once, in all that time, have I detected the merest whisper of heresy. In fact, Kellhus is perhaps the most deeply pious man I’ve ever met. Now the fact that others have begun calling him Prophet is disturbing, I agree. But it is
not
his doing. People are weak, Conphas. Is it so surprising that they look to him and see his strength for more than what it is?”
Conphas felt sweet disdain unfold across his face. “Even
you
… He’s ensnared even you.”
What kind of man? Though he was loath to admit it, his briefing with Martemus had shook him deeply. Somehow, over a matter of mere weeks, this Prince Kellhus had managed to reduce his most dependable man to a babbling idiot. Truth! The frailty of men! The furnace!
What nonsense! And yet nonsense that was seeping through the Holy War like blood through linen. This Prince Kellhus was a wound. And if he was in fact a Cishaurim spy as dear old Uncle Xerius feared, he could well prove mortal.
Proyas was angered, and answered disdain with disdain. “Ensnaring,” he snorted. “Of course
you
would see it as such. Men of ambition never understand the pious. For them, goals must be worldly in order to be sensible. Solutions to base hungers.”
There was something forced, Conphas decided, about these words.
I’ve planted a seed at least.
“There’s much to be said for being well fed,” Conphas snapped, then turned on his heel. He’d exceeded his daily ration of idiots.
Proyas’s voice halted him before the curtains.
“One last thing, Exalt-General.”
Conphas turned, lids low, eyebrows raised. “Yes?”
“You’ve heard of the attempt on Prince Kellhus’s life?”
“You mean there’s another sober man in this world?”
Proyas smiled sourly. For a moment, real hatred flashed in his eyes.
“Prince Kellhus tells me the man who tried to kill him was Nansur. One of your officers, in fact.”
Conphas stared at the man blankly, realizing he’d been duped. All those questions … Proyas had asked them in order to
implicate
him, to see whether he had motive. Conphas cursed himself for a fool. Fanatic or not, Nersei Proyas was not a man to be underestimated.
This is becoming a nightmare.
“What?” Conphas said. “You propose to arrest me?”
“You propose to arrest Prince Kellhus.”
Conphas grinned. “You would find it hard to arrest an army.”
“I see no army,” Proyas said.
Conphas smiled. “But you do …”
 
Of course there was nothing Proyas could do, even if the assassin had survived to name Conphas directly. The Holy War needed the Empire.
Even still, there was a lesson to be learned. War was intellect. Conphas would teach this Prince Kellhus that …
His loitering Kidruhil snapped to attention as Conphas exited the pavilion. As a precaution he’d taken some two hundred of the heavily armoured cavalrymen as an escort. The Great Names were scattered from Nagogris on the edge of the Great Desert to Iothiah on the Sempis Delta, and Skauras had landed raiders on the North Bank to harry them. Risking death or capture clearing up a matter such as this wouldn’t do. So far, the problem of Anasûrimbor Kellhus remained more theoretical than practical.
As his attendants fetched his horse, the Exalt-General looked for Martemus, found him milling among the troopers. Martemus had always preferred the company of common soldiers to that of officers, something that Conphas had once thought quaint, but now found annoying—even seditious.
Martemus … What’s happened to you?
Conphas mounted his black and rode over to him. The taciturn General watched him, apparently without apprehension.
Like a Scylvendi, Conphas spat on the earth beneath the shod hooves of Martemus’s horse. Then he glanced back at Proyas’s pavilion, at the embroidered eagles splayed in black across the weathered white canvas, and at the guards who eyed him and his men suspiciously. The Eagle and Tusk pennant of House Nersei lolled in the lazy breeze, framed by the faint escarpments of the South Bank.
He turned back to his wayward General.
“It appears,” he said in a fierce voice that wouldn’t carry, “that you aren’t the only casualty of this spy’s sorcery, Martemus … When you kill this Warrior-Prophet, you’ll be avenging many, very many.”

Other books

To Please a Lady by Raven McAllan
Necrochip by Liz Williams
Rake's Honour by Beverley Oakley
Return to Vienna by Nancy Buckingham
The Healing by Frances Pergamo
Dead is the New Black by Marianne Stillings