The Warrior Prophet (76 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

 
Late Autumn, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand
 
Flushed by their atrocities, the southward-wandering Men of the Tusk gathered about the great walls of Caraskand. In immense trains, they filed down from the heights and found their fury tempered by towering fortifications. The ramparts scrawled across the surrounding hills, immense sandstone belts the colour of copper, rising and falling across the haze of distant slopes.
Unlike the walls of Shigek’s great cities, these, the Inrithi found, were defended.
Standards were planted in rocky soil. Client nobles, who’d been flung far afield by the suffering of the desert, found their patron lords. Makeshift tents and pavilions were raised. Shrial and Cultic priests gathered the faithful, and long dirges were raised for those countless thousands claimed by the desert. The Councils of the Great and Lesser Names were held, and after long rites of benediction for their survival of Khemema, the investiture of Caraskand was planned.
Nersei Proyas rode out to meet with Imbeyan at the Ivory Gate, so named because its immense barbican was constructed of white limestone rather than the reddish rock of Enathpaneah’s quarries. Through an interpreter, the Conriyan Prince demanded the Sapatishah’s surrender and made promises regarding the release of Imbeyan’s household and the lives of the city’s inhabitants. Dressed in magnificent coats of blue and yellow, Imbeyan laughed and said that what the desert had started, the stubborn walls of Caraskand would see completed.
Raised upon steep slopes for the most part, Caraskand’s walls met level ground only along their northeastern sections, where the hills yielded to several miles of alluvial flatland, choked with field and grove and peppered with abandoned farms and estates—the Tertae Plain. Here, the Inrithi built their largest camps and prepared to storm the gates.
Sappers began dredging their tunnels. Teams of oxen and men were sent into the hills to fell timber for siege engines. Outriders were dispatched to scout and plunder the surrounding countryside. Blistered faces healed. Desert-gnawed limbs were thickened with hard work and the hearty spoils of Enathpaneah. The Inrithi once again began singing their songs. Priests led processions around the vast circuit of Caraskand’s walls, brushing the ground before them with rushes and cursing the stone of the fortifications. From the walls, the heathens would jeer and cast missiles, but they were little heeded.
For the first time in months, the Inrithi saw clouds, real clouds, curling through the sky like milk in water.
At night, when the Inrithi gathered about their fires, the tales of woe and redemption in Khemema were gradually replaced by remarks of wonder at their survival and ceaseless speculation about
Shimeh
. Caraskand was a name often mentioned in
The Tractate,
enough that it seemed the great gate to the Sacred Land. Blessed Amoteu, the country of the Latter Prophet, was very near.
“After Caraskand,” they said, “we shall cleanse Shimeh.”
Shimeh. In speaking this holy name, the fervour of the Holy War was rekindled.
Masses trekked into the hillsides to hear the sermons of the Warrior-Prophet, who many believed had delivered the Holy War from the desert. Thousands scarred their arms with tusks and became his Zaudunyani. In the Councils of the Great and Lesser Names, the lords of the Holy War listened to his counsel with trepidation. The Prince of Atrithau had joined the Holy War impoverished, but he now commanded a contingent as great as any.
Then, as the Men of the Tusk prepared their first assault against Caraskand’s turrets, the skies darkened, and it began to rain. Three hundred Tydonni were killed in a flash flood south of the city. Dozens more when a sapper’s tunnel collapsed. Dried stream beds became torrents. It rained and rained, so that parched leather began to rot and mail hauberks had to be continually rolled in barrels of gravel to defeat the rust. In many places the earth became as soft and slick as rotten pears, and when the Inrithi attempted to bring up their great siege towers they found them immovable.
The winter rains had come.
The first man to die of the plague was a Kianene captive. Afterward his body was launched from a catapult over the city’s walls—as would be those who followed.
 
Late Autumn, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Iothiah
 
Mamaradda had decided he would kill the sorcerer first. Though he wasn’t sure why, the Javreh Captain found the idea of killing a
sorcerer
thrilling to the point of arousal. That this might have anything to do with the fact that his masters were also sorcerers never occurred to him.
He entered the chapel briskly, clenching and unclenching the Trinket his masters had given him. The sorcerer hung like some huntsman’s prize at the far end of the chamber, his battered form bathed in the orange glow of the three tripods flanking him. As Mamaradda approached he noticed that the man swayed gently to and fro, as though in some gentle draft. Then he heard the sound of scraping, high-pitched, like iron against glass.
He paused midway beneath the airy vaults, instinctively peered at the floor beneath the sorcerer—at the black-red calligraphy of the Uroborian Circle.
He saw something small crouched at the edge of the Circle … A cat? Scratching to bury piss? He swallowed, squinted. The rapid scrape-scrape-scrape whined bright in his ears, as though someone filed his teeth with a rusty knife. What?
It was a
tiny man,
he realized. A tiny man bent over the Uroborian Circle, scraping at the arcane paint …
A doll?
Mamaradda hissed in sudden terror, clutched for his knife.
The scraping stopped. The hanging sorcerer raised his bleary, bearded face, fixed Mamaradda with glittering eyes. A heartbeat of abject horror.
The Circle is broken!
There was an impossible muttering …
Sunlight sparkled from the sorcerer’s mouth and eyes.
Impossible lights, curved like Khirgwi blades, pranced like spider’s legs around him. Geysers of dust and shards spat from the mosaic floor. The very air seemed to
crack
.
Mamaradda raised his arms and howled, was blinded by a flurry of unearthly incandescence.
But then the lights were gone, and he was untouched—
unharmed
…
He remembered the Trinket clenched fast in his fist. Mamaradda, Shield Captain of the Javreh, laughed.
The tripods spilled, as though kicked over by shadows. A shower of coals took Mamaradda in the face. Several found his mouth, cracked his teeth with their heat. He dropped his Trinket, screamed over the muttering …
His heart exploded in his chest. Fire boiled outward, flaring through his orifices and his fingernails. Mamaradda fell, little more than wet skin about char.
 
Vengeance roamed the halls of the compound—like a God.
And he sang his song with a beast’s blind fury, parting wall from foundation, blowing ceiling into sky, as though the works of man were things of sand.
And when he found
them,
cowering beneath their Analogies, he sheared through their Wards like a rapist through a cotton shift. He beat them with hammering lights, held their shrieking bodies as though they were curious things, the idiot thrashing of an insect between thumb and forefinger …
Death came swirling down.
He felt them scramble through the corridors, desperate to organize some kind of concerted defence. He knew that the sound of agony and blasted stone reminded them of their deeds. Their horror would be the horror of the
guilty
. Glittering death had come to redress their trespasses.
Suspended over the carpeted floors, encompassed by hissing Wards, he blasted his own ruined halls. He encountered a cohort of Javreh. Their frantic bolts were winked into ash by the play of lights before him. Then they were screaming, clawing at eyes that had become burning coals. He strode past them, leaving only smeared meat and charred bone. He encountered a dip in the fabric of the onta, and he knew that more awaited his approach armed with the Tears of God.
He brought the building down upon them.
And he laughed more mad words, drunk with destruction. Fiery lights shivered across his defences and he turned, seething with dark crackling humour, and spoke to the two Scarlet Magi who assailed him, uttered intimate truths, fatal Abstractions, and the world about them was wracked to the pith.
He clawed away their flimsy Anagogic defences, raised them from the ruin like shrieking dolls, and dashed them against bone-breaking stone.
Seswatha was free, and he walked the ways of the present bearing tokens of ancient doom.
He would show them the Gnosis.
 
When the first shiver passed through the foundations, Iyokus thought,
I should’ve known
.
His next thought, unaccountably, was of Eleäzaras.
I told him ill would come of this.
For the completion of their task, Eleäzaras had left him only six Schoolmen, three of them sorcerers of rank, and some two hundred and fifty Javreh. Worse yet, they were scattered throughout the compound. Once he might have thought this would be more than enough to manage a Mandate sorcerer, but after the fury of the Sareotic Library he was no longer sure … Even had they been prepared.
We’re doomed.
Over the long years of his life, the chanv had rendered his passions as colourless as his skin. What he felt now was more the memory of a passion rather than the passion itself. The memory of fear.
But there was hope yet. The Javreh possessed at least a dozen Trinkets, and moreover,
he,
Heramari Iyokus, was here.
Like his brethren, he envied the Mandate the Gnosis, but unlike them, he did not hate. If anything, Iyokus respected the Mandate. He understood the pride of secret knowledge.
Sorcery was nothing if not a great labyrinth, and for a thousand years the Scarlet Spires had charted it, delving, always delving, mining knowledge both dread and disastrous. And even though they’d yet to discover the glorious precincts of the Gnosis, there were certain branches, certain forks, which they
alone
had mapped. Iyokus was a scholar of these forbidden forks, a student of the Daimos.

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