The Warrior Prophet (60 page)

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Hundreds of Inrithi would be lost for following the tribesmen too far.

Cnaiür saw his charred knife on the mats.

Clutching a bloodstained blanket, Serwë staggered after Kellhus, screaming like a lunatic. When Cnaiür restrained her, she began clawing at his eyes. He pushed her to the ground.

“He neeeeds me,” she wailed.
“He’s hurt!”

“It wasn’t him,” Cnaiür murmured.

“You killed him! You killed him!”

“It wasn’t him!”

“You’re sick! You’re mad!”

Somehow the old rage swamped his disbelief. He grabbed her by the arm and wrenched her through the flaps. “I’m taking you! You’re my prize!”

“You’re mad!” she shrieked. “He’s told me everything about you! Everything!”

He struck her to the ground.

“What has he said?”

She wiped blood from her lip, and for the first time didn’t seem afraid. “Why you beat me. Why your thoughts never stray far from me, but return, always return to me in fury. He’s told me
everything!
”

Something trembled through him. He raised his fist but his fingers would not clench.

“What has he said?”

“That I’m nothing but a sign, a token. That you strike not me, but yourself!”

“I will strangle you! I will snap your neck like a cat’s! I will beat blood from your womb!”

“Then do it!” she shrieked. “Do it, and be done with it!”

“You are my prize! My prize! To do with as I please!”

“No! No! I’m not your prize! I’m your shame! He told me this!”

“Shame? What shame? What has he said?”

“That you beat me for surrendering as you surrendered! For fucking him the way
you fucked his father!
”

She still lay on the ground, legs askew. So beautiful. Even beaten and broken. How could anything human be so beautiful?

“What has he said?” he asked blankly.

He. The Dûnyain.

She was sobbing now. Somehow the knife had appeared in her hands. She held it to her throat, and he could see the perfect curve of her neck reflected. He glimpsed the single swazond upon her forearm.

She has killed!

“You’re mad!” she wept. “I’ll kill myself! I’ll kill myself! I’m not your prize! I’m his! HIS!”

Serwë …

Her fist hooked inward. The blade parted flesh.

But somehow he’d captured her wrist. He wrenched the knife from her hand.

He left her weeping outside the Dûnyain’s pavilion. He stared out over the trackless Meneanor as he wandered between the tents, through the growing crowds of jubilant Inrithi.

So unnatural, he thought, the sea …

When Conphas found Martemus, the sun was an orb smouldering in the cloudless skies of the west, gold across pale blue—colours stamped into every man’s heart. With a small cadre of bodyguards and officers, the Exalt-General had ridden to the hillock where the accursed Scylvendi had established his command. On the summit, he found the General sitting cross-legged beneath the Scylvendi’s leaning standard, surrounded by ever widening circles of Khirgwi dead. The man stared at the sunset as though he hoped to go blind. He had removed his helmet, and his short, silvered hair fluttered in the breeze. The man looked at once younger, Conphas thought, and yet more fatherly without his helmet.

Conphas dismissed his entourage, then dismounted. Without a word he strode to the General, drew his longsword, then hacked at the Swazond Standard’s wooden pole. Once, twice … With a crack, the wind bore the obscene banner slowly down.

Satisfied, Conphas stood over his wayward General, gazing out to the sunset as though to share in whatever nonsense Martemus thought he saw.

“He’s not dead,” Martemus said.

“Pity.”

Martemus said nothing.

“Do you remember,” Conphas asked, “that time we rode across the fields of dead Scylvendi after Kiyuth?”

Martemus’s eyes flickered to him. He nodded.

“Do you recall what I said to you?”

“You said war was intellect.”

“Are you a casualty of that war, Martemus?”

The sturdy General frowned, pursed his lips. He shook his head. “No.”

“I worry that you are, Martemus.”

Martemus turned away from the sun and studied him with pinched eyes. “I worried too … But no longer.”

“No longer … Why so, Martemus?”

“I watched,” the General said. “I saw him kill all these heathen. He killed and he killed until they fled in terror.” Martemus turned back to the sunset. “He’s not human.”

“Neither was Skeaös,” Conphas replied.

Martemus looked to his callused palms.

“I am a practical man, Lord Exalt-General.”

Conphas studied the sun-burnished carnage, the open mouths and unclosed eyes, the hands like good-luck monkey paws. He followed the smoke pluming from Anwurat—not so far away. Not so far.

He gazed back into Martemus’s sun. There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.

“You are at that, Martemus. You are at that.”

Skauras ab Nalajan had dismissed his subordinates, servants, and slaves, the long train of men that defined any station of power, and sat alone at a polished mahogany table drinking Shigeki wine. For the first time, it seemed, he truly tasted the sweetness of those things he had lost.

Though old, the Sapatishah-Governor was still hale. His white hair, oiled to his scalp in the Kianene fashion, was as thick as that of any younger man. He had a distinguished face, made severe and wise by his long moustaches and thin braided beard. His eyes glittered dark beneath a brooding brow.

He sat in a high turret room of Anwurat’s citadel. Through the narrow window he could hear the sounds of desperate battle below, the voices of beloved friends and followers crying out.

Though he was a pious man, Skauras had committed many wicked acts in his life—wicked acts were ever the inescapable accessories of power. He contemplated them with regret and pined for a simpler life, one with fewer pleasures, surely, but with fewer burdens as well. Certainly nothing so crushing as this …

I have doomed my people … my faith.

It had been a good plan, he reflected. Give the idolaters the illusion of a single fixed line. Convince them he would fight their battle. Draw their right into the north. Break their line, not through punishing and futile charges, but by
breaking
—or appearing to—in the centre. Then crush their left with Cinganjehoi and Fanayal.

How glorious it should have been.

Who could have guessed such a plan? Who could have anticipated him?

Probably Conphas.

Old enemy. Old friend—if such a man could be anyone’s friend.

Skauras reached beneath his jackal-embroidered coat and withdrew the parchment the Nansur Emperor had sent him. For months it had pressed against his breast, and now, after the day’s disaster, it was perhaps the only remaining hope of stopping the idolaters. Sweat had rounded it to the curve of his body, had rendered it cloth-soft. The word of Ikurei Xerius III, the Emperor of Nansur.

Old foe. Old friend.

Skauras didn’t read it. He didn’t need to. But the idolaters—they must never read it.

He placed its corner in the brilliant teardrop of his lamp. Watched it curl and ignite. Watched the spindly threads of smoke rise before they were yanked out the window.

By the Solitary God, it was still daylight!

“And they looked up, and saw that lo, the day had not gone, and that their shame lay open, for all to see …”

The Prophet’s words. May he grant them mercy.

He let the parchment go as fluttering wings of flame engulfed it. It thrashed feebly, like a living thing. The finish of the table blistered and blackened beneath.

A fitting mark, the Sapatishah-Governor supposed. A hint. A small oracle to future doom.

Skauras drank more wine. Already the idolaters were ramming the door. Quick, deadly men.

Are we all dead?
he wondered.

No. Only me.

In the depths of his final, most pious prayer to the Solitary God, he didn’t hear the fibrous snapping of wood. Only the final crash and the sound of kindling skating across the tiled floor told him that the time had come to draw his sword.

He turned to face the rush of strapping, battle-crazed infidels.

It would be a short battle.