The Warrior Prophet (69 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

 
Pragma Meigon stared through young Kellhus’s face, saw his fear. “They’re harmless,” he said.
“What are they, Pragma?”
“Exemplary defectives … Specimens. We retain them for purposes of education.” The Pragma simulated a smile. “For students such as you, Kellhus.”
They stood deep beneath Ishuäl, in a hexagonal room within the mighty galleries of the Thousand Thousand Halls. Save for the entrance, staggered racks of knobbed and runnelled candles covered the surrounding walls, shedding a light without shadows and as bright and clear as the noonday sun’s. This alone made the room extraordinary—light was otherwise forbidden in the Labyrinth—but what made the room astonishing were the many men shackled in its sunken centre.
Each of them was naked, linen pale, and bound with greening copper straps to boards that leaned gently backward. The boards themselves had been arranged in a broad circle, with each man lying fixed within arm’s reach of his comrades and positioned at the edge of the floor’s central depression, so that a boy Kellhus’s height could stand at the lip of the surrounding floor and look the specimens directly in the face …
Had they possessed faces.
Their heads were drawn forward into open iron frames, where they were held motionless by bracketing bars. Behind their heads, wires had been fixed to the base of each frame. These swept forward in a radial fashion, ending in tiny silver hooks that anchored the obscuring skin. Slick muscle gleamed in the light. To Kellhus, it looked as though each man had thrust his head into a spider web that had peeled away his face.
Pragma Meigon had called it the Unmasking Room.
“To begin,” the old man said, “you’ll study and memorize each of their faces. Then you’ll reproduce what you’ve seen on parchment.” He nodded to a battery of worn scrivening tables along the southern walls.
His limbs as light as autumn leaves, Kellhus stepped forward. He heard the masticating of pasty mouths, a chorus of voiceless grunts and gaspings.
“Their larynxes have been removed,” Pragma Meigon explained. “To assist concentration.”
Kellhus paused before the first specimen.
“The face possesses forty-four muscles,” the Pragma continued. “Operating in concert, they are capable of signifying every permutation of passion. All those permutations, young Kellhus, derive from the fifty-seven base and base-remove types found here in this room.”
Despite the absence of skin, Kellhus immediately recognized horror in the flayed face of the specimen strapped before him. Like warring flatworms, the fine muscles about his eyes strained outward and inward at the same time. The larger, rat-sized muscles about his lower face yanked his mouth into a perpetual fear-grin. Lidless eyes stared. Rapid breaths hissed …
“You’re wondering how he can maintain that particular expressive configuration,” the Pragma said. “Centuries ago we found we could limit the range of behaviours by probing the brain with needles—with what we now call neuropuncture.”
Kellhus stood transfixed. Without warning, an attendant loomed over him, holding a narrow reed between his teeth. He dipped the reed into the bowl of fluid he carried, then blowing, sprayed the specimen with a fine orangish mist. He then continued on to the next.
“Neuropuncture,” the Pragma continued, “made possible the rehabilitation of defectives for instructional purposes. The specimen before you, for instance, always displays fear at a base-remove of two.”
“Horror?” Kellhus asked.
“Precisely.”
Kellhus felt the childishness of his own horror fade in understanding. He looked to either side, saw the specimens curving out of sight, rows of white eyes set in shining red musculatures. They were only defectives—nothing more. He returned his gaze to the man before him, to fear base-remove two, and committed what he saw to memory. Then he moved on to the next gasping skein of muscles.
“Good,” Pragma Meigon had said from his periphery. “Very good.”
 
Kellhus turned once more to Esmenet, peeled away her face with the hooks of his gaze.
She’d already made two trips from the fire to her tent—promenades to draw his attention and covertly gauge his interest. She periodically looked from side to side, feigning amusement in things elsewhere to see if he watched her. Twice he let her catch him. Each time he grinned with boyish good nature. Each time she looked down, blushing, pupils dilated, eyes blinking rapidly, her body radiating the musk of nascent arousal. Though Esmenet had not yet come to his bed, part of her ached for him, even wooed him. And she knew it not.
For all her native gifts, Esmenet remained a world-born woman. And for all world-born men and women, two souls shared the same body, face, and eyes. The animal and the intellect. Everyone was two.
Defective.
One Esmenet had already renounced Drusas Achamian. The other would soon follow.
 
Esmenet blinked against the turquoise sky, held a hand against the sun. No matter how many times she witnessed it, she was dumbstruck.
The Holy War.
She’d paused with Kellhus and Serwë on the summit of a rise so that Serwë could readjust her pack. Fields of Inrithi warriors and camp-followers walked past them, toward the crumbling cliffs of the southern escarpment. Esmenet looked from man to armoured man, each farther than the next, past clots and through thickening screens, until losing them in the teeming distances, where they winked in the sunlight like metal filings. She turned, saw the sand-coloured walls of Ammegnotis behind them, dwindling against the black and green of the river and her verdant banks.
Shigek.
Goodbye, Akka.
Teary-eyed, she deliberately struck out on her own, simply waving a hand when Kellhus called out to her.
She walked among strangers, feeling the aim of hooded eyes and muttered words—as she so often did. Some men actually accosted her, but she ignored them. One even angrily grabbed her tattooed hand, as though to remind her of something she owed all men. The parched grasses became thinner and thinner, leaving gravel that burned toes and cooked air. She sweat and suffered and somehow knew it was only the beginning.
That evening she found Kellhus and Serwë without much difficulty. Though they had little fuel, they managed dinner with a small fire. The air cooled as quickly as the sun descended, and they enjoyed their first desert dusk. The ground radiated warmth like a stone drawn from a hearth. To the east, sterile hills ringed the distance, obscuring the sea. To the south and west, beyond the riot of the encampment, the horizon formed a perfect shale line that thickened into red as it approached the sun. To the north, Shigek could still be glimpsed between the tents, its green becoming black in the growing twilight.
Serwë was already snoozing, curled across her mat close to the little lapping tongue of their fire.
“So how was your walk?” Kellhus asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shamefaced. “I—”
“There’s no need to apologize, Esmi … You walk where you choose.”
She looked down, feeling both relieved and grief-stricken.
“So?” Kellhus repeated. “How was your walk?”
“Men,” she said leadenly. “Too many men.”
“And you call yourself a harlot,” Kellhus said, grinning.
Esmenet continued staring at her dusty feet. A shy smile stole across her face.
“Things change …”
“Perhaps,” he said in a manner that reminded Esmenet of an axe biting into wood. “Have you ever wondered why the Gods hold men higher than women?”
Esmenet shrugged. “We stand in the shadow of men,” she replied, “just as men stand in the shadow of the Gods.”
“So you think
you
stand in the shadow of men?”
She smiled. There was no deception with Kellhus, no matter how petty. That was his wonder.
“
Some
men, yes …”
“But not many?”
She laughed, caught in an honest conceit. “Not many at all,” she admitted. Not even, she breathlessly realized, Akka …
Only you.
“And what of other men? Aren’t all men overshadowed in some respect?”
“Yes, I suppose …”
Kellhus turned his palms upward—a curiously disarming gesture. “So what makes you less than a man?”
Esmenet laughed again, certain he played some game. “Because everywhere I’ve been—every place I’ve
heard
of for that matter—women serve men. That’s simply the way. Most women are like …” She paused, troubled by the course of her thoughts. She glanced at Serwë, her perfect face illuminated by the wavering light of the fire.
“Like her,” Kellhus said.
“Yes,” Esmenet replied, her eyes forced to the ground by a strange defensiveness. “Like her … Most women are simple.”
“And most men?”
“Well, certainly more men than women are learned … Wise.”
“And is this because men are
more
than women?”
Esmenet stared at him, dumbfounded.
“Or is it,” he continued, “because men are
granted
more than women in this world?”
She stared, her thoughts spinning. She breathed deeply, set her palms carefully upon her knees. “You’re saying women are … are actually
equal
?”
Kellhus hoisted his brows in pained amusement. “Why,” he asked, “are men willing to exchange gold to lie with women?”
“Because they desire us … They lust.”
“And is it lawful for men to purchase pleasure from a woman?”
“No …”
“So why do they?”
“They can’t help themselves,” Esmenet replied. She lifted a rueful eyebrow. “They’re
men
.”
“So they have no control over their desire?”
She grinned in her old way. “Witness the well-fed harlot sitting before you.”
Kellhus laughed, but softly, and in a manner that effortlessly sorted her pain from her humour.
“So why,” he said, “do men herd cattle?”
“Cattle?” Esmenet scowled. Where had all these absurd thoughts come from? “Well … to slaughter for …”

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