The Warrior Prophet (78 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The plague intensified, and Disease’s Hand spared no one, not even members of the blessed castes. Cumor, Proyas, Chepheramunni, and Skaiyelt all succumbed within days of one another. At times, it seemed the sick outnumbered the healthy. Shrial Priests wandered through the wretched alleyways of the encampment, stumping through mud from tent to tent, searching for the dead. The funeral pyres burned continuously. In one grievous night three hundred Inrithi died, among them Imrothus, the Conriyan Palatine of Aderot.
And the miserable rains waxed on and on, rotting canvas, hemp, and hope.
Then the Earl of Gaenri returned, bearing news of doom.
Ever impatient, Athjeäri had abandoned Caraskand in the early days of the siege, charging through Enathpaneah with his Gaenrish knights and some thousand more Kurigalders and Agmundrmen given to him by his uncle, Prince Saubon. He stormed the old Ceneian fortress of Bokae on the western frontier of Enathpaneah, taking it with few losses. Then he ranged southward, crushing those local Grandees who dared take the field against him and raiding the northern frontiers of Eumarna, where his knights were heartened to find good, green land.
For a time he besieged the immense fortress of Misarat, but withdrew once word came that Cinganjehoi himself had set out to relieve the fortress. Athjeäri struck northeast. He evaded the Tiger in the cedar-wooded ravines of the Betmulla Mountains, then descended into Xerash, where he met and routed the small army of Utgarangi, the Sapatishah of Xerash. The Sapatishah proved a compliant captive, and in exchange for five hundred horses and intelligence, Athjeäri delivered him unharmed to his ancient capital, Gerotha, the city reviled in
The Tractate
as the “harlot of Xerash.” Then he rode hard for Caraskand.
What he found dismayed him.
He recounted his journey for those Great Names fit to attend Council, moving quickly to the intelligence offered by Utgarangi. According to the Sapatishah, the Padirajah himself, the great Kascamandri, marched from Nenciphon with the survivors of Anwurat, the Grandees of Chianadyni—the homeland of the Kianene—and the warlike Girgash, the Fanim of Nilnamesh.
That night Prince Skaiyelt died, and the Thunyeri filled the showering sky with their uncanny dirges. The following day, word arrived that Cerjulla, the Tydonni Earl of Warnute, had also fallen, encamped about the walls of nearby Joktha. Not long after, Sepherathindor, the Ainoni Count-Palatine of Hinnant, stopped breathing. And according to the physician-priests, Proyas and Chepheramunni would soon follow …
A great fear seized the surviving leaders of the Holy War. Caraskand continued to rebuke them, Akkeägni oppressed them with misery and death, and the Padirajah himself marched upon them with yet another heathen host.
They were far from home, among hostile lands and wicked peoples, and the God had turned his face from them. They were desperate.
And for such men questions of why, sooner or later always became questions of
who
…
 
The rain drummed down across his pavilion, filling it with a humid, ambient roar.
“So just what,” Ikurei Conphas asked, “do you want, Knight-Commander?” He frowned. “Sarcellus is it?”
Though Sarcellus often accompanied Gotian at council, Conphas had never been introduced to him—not formally. The man’s dark hair matted his scalp, bled rainwater across what in childhood must have been a lovely and brattish face. The white surcoat over his hauberk was improbably clean, so much so that he looked an anachronism, a throwback to the days when the Holy War still camped beneath Momemn. Everyone else, Conphas included, had been reduced to rags or plundered Kianene attire.
The Shrial Knight nodded without breaking eye contact. “Merely to speak about troubling things, Exalt-General.”
“I’m always keen for troubling news, Knight-Commander, let me assure you.” Conphas grinned, adding, “I’m something of a masochist, or have you noticed?”
Sarcellus smiled winsomely. “The Councils have made this fact exceedingly clear, Exalt-General.”
Conphas had never trusted Shrial Knights. Too much devotion. Too much renunciation … Self-sacrifice, he’d always thought, was more madness than foolishness.
He’d come to this conclusion in his adolescence, after perceiving just how often—and how happily—others injured or destroyed themselves in the name of faith or sentiment. It was as though, he realized, everyone took instructions from a voice he couldn’t hear—a voice from nowhere. They committed suicide when dishonoured, sold themselves into slavery to feed their children. They acted as though the world possessed fates
worse
than death or enslavement, as though they couldn’t live with themselves if harm befell others …
Wrack his intellect as he might, Conphas could neither fathom the sense nor imagine the sensation. Of course there was the God, the Scriptures, and all that rubbish.
That
voice he could understand. The threat of eternal damnation could wring reason out of the most ludicrous sacrifice.
That
voice came from somewhere. But this other voice …
Hearing voices made one mad. One need only stroll through a local agora, listen to the hermits cry, “What? What?” to confirm that fact. And for Shrial Knights, hearing voices made one fanatic as well.
“So what’s your trouble?” Conphas asked.
“This man they call the Warrior-Prophet.”
“Prince Kellhus,” Conphas said.
He leaned forward in his camp chair, gestured for Sarcellus to take a seat. He could smell mustiness beneath the aromatic steam of his pavilion’s censers. The rain had trailed, and now merely drummed fingers across the canvas slopes above.
“Yes … Prince Kellhus,” Sarcellus said, squeezing water from his hair.
“What about him?”
“We know tha—”
“We?”
The Shrial Knight blinked in irritation. Despite his pious appearance, there was, Conphas thought, something about his bearing, some whiff of conceit perhaps, that belied the gold-embroidered tusk across his breast … Perhaps he’d misjudged this Sarcellus.
Perhaps he’s a man of reason.
“Yes,” the man continued. “Myself, and a handful of my brothers …”
“But not Gotian?”
Sarcellus grimaced in a fashion that Conphas found most agreeable. “No, not Gotian … Not yet, anyway.”
Conphas nodded. “By all means, continue …”
“We know you’ve tried to assassinate Prince Kellhus.”
The Exalt-General snorted, at once amused and offended. The man was either exceedingly bold or insufferably impertinent. “You
know,
do you?”
“We
think
…” Sarcellus amended. “Whatever … What’s important is that you realize
we share your sentiment
. Especially after the madness of the desert …”
Conphas frowned. He knew what the man meant: Prince Kellhus had walked from the Carathay commanding the worship of thousands, and the wonder of everyone, it sometimes seemed, save himself. But Conphas would’ve expected a Shrial Knight to argue signs and omens, not power …
The desert
had
been madness. At first Conphas had shambled through the sands no different from the rest, cursing that damned fool Sassotian, whom he’d installed as General of the Imperial Fleet, and pondering, endlessly pondering, mad scenarios that would see him saved. Then, after he burned through the hope that fuelled these ruminations, he found himself harassed by a peculiar disbelief. For a while, the prospect of death seemed something he merely indulged for decorum’s sake, like the fatuous assurances caste-merchants heaped onto their wares. “Yes, yes, you will die! I guarantee!”
Please,
he thought.
Who do you think I am?
Then, with the shadowy lassitude that characterized so much of that march, his doubt flipped into certainty, and he felt an almost intellectual wonder—the wonder of finding the conclusion to one’s life. There was no final page, he realized, no last cubit to the scroll. The ink simply gave out, and all was blank and desert white.
So here,
he thought, looking across the wind-rippled dunes,
lies my life’s destination. This is the place that has waited for me, waited since before I was born
…
But then he’d found
him,
Prince Kellhus, scooping up water in that sandy pit—
wading
while he, Ikurei Conphas, died of thirst! Of all the deranged possibilities he’d considered, none seemed quite as mad as this: saved by the man he’d failed to kill. What could be more galling? More ludicrous?
But at the time … At the time, his heart had caught—it still fluttered at the memory!—and for an instant, Conphas had wondered if Martemus had been right … Perhaps there
was
more to this man. This Warrior-Prophet.
Indeed. The desert had been madness.
Conphas fixed the Shrial Knight with an appraising stare. “But he saved the Holy War,” he said. “Your life … My life …”
Sarcellus nodded. “Indeed, and
that,
I would say, is the problem.”
“How so?” Conphas snapped, even though he knew exactly what the man meant.
The Knight-Commander shrugged. “Before the desert, Prince Kellhus was simply another zealot with some claim to the Sight. But now …
Especially
now with the Dread God walking among us …” He sighed and leaned forward, his hands folded together, his forearms against his knees.
“I fear for the Holy War, Exalt-General.
We
fear for the Holy War. Half of our brothers acclaim this fraud as another Inri Sejenus, as our salvation, while the other half decry him as an anathema, as the cause of our misery.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Conphas asked mildly. “Why are you
here,
Knight-Commander?”
Sarcellus’s grin was crooked. “Because there’ll be mass mutinies, riots, perhaps even open warfare … We need someone with the skill and power to minimize or forestall such eventualities, someone who yet commands the loyalty of his men. We need someone who can preserve the Holy War.”
“After you’ve killed Prince Kellhus …” Conphas said derisively. He shook his head, as though disappointed by his own lack of surprise. “He camps with his followers now, and they guard him as though he were the Tusk. They say that in the desert a hundred of them surrendered their water—their lives—to him and his women. And now another hundred have stepped forward as his bodyguard, each of them sworn to die for the Warrior-Prophet. Not even the Emperor could claim such protection! And still you think you can kill him.”
A drowsy blink, which made Conphas certain—absurdly—that Sarcellus had beautiful sisters.
“Not think, Exalt-General … Know.”
 
Serwë’s scream was like an animal thing, as much a grunt as a wail. Esmenet bent over her, combing her fingers through the girl’s sweaty hair. Rain pulsed across the bellied ceiling of their makeshift pavilion, and here and there a trickle of water glittered in the gloom, slapping against plaited mats. For Esmenet, it seemed they crouched in the illuminated heart of a cave, littered by musty cloth and rotting reeds.
The Kianene woman Kellhus had summoned cooed to Serwë in a tongue only Kellhus seemed to understand. Esmenet found the throaty sound of the woman’s voice soothing. They stood, she realized, in a place where differences of language and faith no longer mattered.

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