The Warrior Prophet (83 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Cnaiür watched the man closely, found himself troubled by the evasiveness of his eyes.
Conphas has approached him … They plan to move against Kellhus.
Why should he continue lying for the Dûnyain? He no longer believed the man would honour their pact …
So just what did he believe?
“Saubon has come to me,” Proyas continued. “He’s exchanged missives—and now even hostages—with a Kianene officer named Kepfet ab Tanaj. Apparently, Kepfet and his fellows hate Imbeyan so fiercely they’re prepared to sacrifice anything just to see him dead.”
“Caraskand,” Cnaiür said. “He offers Caraskand.”
“A section of her walls, to be more precise. To the west, near a small postern gate.”
“So you want my counsel? Even after Anwurat?”
Proyas shook his head. “I want more than your counsel, Scylvendi. You’re always saying we Inrithi carve up honour the way others carve up stags, and this is no different. We have suffered much. Whoever breaks Caraskand will be immortalized …”
“And you are too sick.”
The Conriyan Prince snorted. “First you spit at my feet, now you call out my infirmities … Sometimes I wonder whether you earned those scars murdering manners instead of men!”
Cnaiür felt like spitting, but refrained.
“I earned these scars murdering fools.”
Proyas started laughing but finished hacking phlegm from his lungs. He leaned back and blew strings of mucus into a spittoon set in the shadows behind his chair. Its brass rim gleamed in the uncertain light.
“Why me?” Cnaiür asked. “Why not Gaidekki or Ingiaban?”
Proyas groaned and shuddered beneath his blankets. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and clutched his head. Clearing his throat, he raised his face to Cnaiür. Two tears, relics of his coughing fit, fell across his cheek.
“Because you’re”—he swallowed—“more capable.”
Cnaiür stiffened, felt a snarl twitch across his lips.
He means more disposable!
“I know you think that I lie,” Proyas said quickly. “But I don’t. If Xinemus were still … still …” He blinked, shook his head. “I would’ve asked him.”
Cnaiür studied him closely. “You fear this may be a trap … That Saubon might be deceived.”
Proyas chewed at the inside of his cheek, nodded. “An entire city for the life of one man? No hatred could be so great.”
Cnaiür did not bother contradicting him.
 
There was a hate that eclipsed the hater, a hunger that encompassed the very ground of appetite.
Bent low, his broadsword before him, Cnaiür urs Skiötha stole across the heights of the wall toward the postern gate, thinking of Kellhus, Moënghus, and murder.
Need me … I must find some way to make him need me!
Yes … The madness was lifting.
Cnaiür paused, pressed his armoured back against the wet stone. Saubon crowded close behind him, followed by some fifty other hand-picked men. Drawing long even breaths, Cnaiür tried to calm the anxiousness of his limbs. He glanced across the great weave of moonlit structures below. It was strange, seeing the city that had bitterly denied them so exposed, almost like lifting the skirts of a sleeping woman.
A heavy hand fell upon his shoulder, and Cnaiür turned to see Saubon in the gloom, his hard, grinning face framed by his mail hood. Moonlight rimmed his battle helm. Though he respected the Galeoth Prince’s prowess on the field, Cnaiür neither liked nor trusted him. The man had, after all, kennelled with the Dûnyain’s other dogs.
“She looks almost wanton …” Saubon whispered, nodding toward the city below. He looked back, his eyes bright. “Do you still doubt me?”
“I never doubted you. Only your faith in this Kepfet.”
The Galeoth Prince’s grin broadened. “Truth shines,” he said.
Cnaiür squashed the urge to sneer. “So do pigs’ teeth.”
He spat across the ancient stonework. There was no escaping the Dûnyain—not any more. It sometimes seemed the abomination spoke from every mouth, watched from all eyes. And it was only getting worse.
Something … There must be something I can do!
But what? Their pact to murder Moënghus was a farce. The Dûnyain honoured nothing for its own sake. For them only the ends mattered, and everything else, from warlike nations to shy glances, was a tool—something to be used. And Cnaiür possessed nothing of use—not any more. He’d squandered his every advantage. He couldn’t even offer his reputation among the Great Names, not after the degradation of Anwurat …
No. There was nothing Kellhus needed from him. Nothing except …
Cnaiür actually gasped aloud.
Except my silence.
In his periphery, he glimpsed Saubon turn to him in alarm.
“What’s wrong?”
Cnaiür glanced at him contemptuously. “Nothing,” he said.
The madness was lifting.
Cursing in Galeoth, Saubon started past him, crawling beneath the pitted battlements. Cnaiür followed, his breath rasping over-loud in his ears. Rainwater had pooled through the joints between flagstones, reflecting moonlight. He splashed through them, his fingers aching with cold. The farther they crept along the parapet, the more the balance of vulnerability seemed to shift. Before Caraskand had seemed exposed, but now, as the towers of the postern gate loomed nearer, they seemed the vulnerable ones. Torches glittered along the tower’s crest.
They paused before an iron-strapped door, looked to one another apprehensively, as though realizing this would be the definitive test of Kepfet and his unlikely hatred. Saubon looked almost terrified in the pallid light. Cnaiür scowled and yanked on the iron handle.
It grated open.
The Galeoth Prince hissed, laughed as though amused by his momentary doubt. Whispering “Die or conquer!” he slipped around the masonry into the black maw. Cnaiür glanced one last time at Caraskand’s moonlit expanse, then followed, his heart thundering.
Moving in dark, deadly files, they spilled through the corridors and down the stairwells. As Proyas had bidden him, Cnaiür stayed close to Saubon, jostling behind him through narrow hallways. He knew the layout of the gate must be simple, but tension and urgency made it seem a maze.
Saubon’s outstretched hand stopped him in the blackness, pulled him to the chapped wall. The Galeoth Prince had halted before a door. Threads of golden light traced its outline in the dark. Cnaiür’s skin prickled at the sound of muted shouts.
“The God,” Saubon whispered, “has given me this place, Scylvendi. Caraskand will be mine!”
Cnaiür peered at him in the darkness. “How do you know?”
“I know!”
The Dûnyain had told him. Cnaiür was certain of it.
“You brought Kepfet to Kellhus … Didn’t you?”
He let the Dûnyain read his face.
Saubon grinned and snorted. Without answering, he turned his back to Cnaiür, rapped the door with the pommel of his sword.
Wood scraped against stone—the sound of someone pushing back a chair. There was a muffled laugh, voices speaking Kianene. If the Norsirai sounded like grunting pigs, Cnaiür thought, the Kianene sounded like honking geese.
Saubon swung his broadsword around, gripping it like a dagger and raising it high. For a mad instant, he resembled a boy preparing to spear fish in a stream. The door jerked open; a human face surfaced …
Saubon snatched the man’s braided goatee, stabbed downward with his sword. The Kianene was dead before he clanked to the ground. Howling, the Galeoth Prince leapt into airy light beyond the door.
Cnaiür tumbled after him with the others, found himself in a narrow, candle-lit room. A great wheeled spool loomed before him, wrought in ancient wood, wrapped by chains that dropped from chutes in the fluted ceiling. Beyond, he glimpsed several red-jacketed Kianene soldiers scrambling for their weapons. Two simply sat dumbstruck, one with bread in hand, at a rough-hewn table set in the far corner.
Saubon hacked into their midst. One fell shrieking, clutching his face.
Cnaiür leapt into the fray, crying out in Scylvendi. He hammered the sword from the slack, panicked hand of the heathen guardsman before him: a stoop-shouldered adolescent sporting no more than wisps of a goatee. Cnaiür crouched and hacked at the legs of a second guardsman rushing his flank. The man toppled, and Cnaiür whirled back to the boy, only to see him vanish through a far door. A Galeoth knight he didn’t recognize speared the man he’d felled.
Nearby, Saubon hacked at two Kianene, brandishing his sword like a pipe, grunting obscenities with each swing. He’d lost his helm; blood matted his shaggy blond hair. Cnaiür charged to his side. With his first blow, he cracked the round, yellow and black shield of the nearest guardsman. The heathen skidded on blood, and as his arms reflexively opened, Cnaiür punched his sword through the man’s ring harness. His scream was a convulsive, gurgling thing. Glancing to his left, he saw Saubon shear off his foeman’s lower jaw. Hot blood sprayed across Cnaiür’s face. The heathen stumbled, flailed. Saubon silenced him with a blow that almost severed his head.
“Raise the gate!” the Galeoth Prince roared. “Raise the gate!”
Inrithi warriors, mostly ruddy-faced Galeoth, now packed the room. Several fell upon the wooden wheels. The sound of chains grating across stone drowned out their excited muttering.
The air reeked of pierced entrails.
Saubon’s captains and thanes had assembled about him. “Hortha! Fire the signal! Meärji, storm the second tower! You must take it, son! You must make your ancestors proud!” The radiant blue eyes found Cnaiür. Despite the blood threading his face, there was a majesty to his look, a paternal confidence that chilled Cnaiür’s heart. Coithus Saubon was already king, and he belonged to Kellhus.
“Secure the murder room,” the Galeoth Prince said. “Take as many men as you need …” His eyes swept across all those assembled. “Caraskand falls, my brothers! By the God,
Caraskand falls!
”
Cheers resounded through the room, fading into hoarse shouts and the sound of boots making muck of the glossy pools of red across the floor. “Die or conquer!” men cried. “Die or conquer!”
After crowding through a far hallway, Cnaiür barged through a likely door and found the murder room, though the gloom was so deep it took several moments for his eyes to adjust. Not far, a single point of candlelight sputtered in circles. He could hear the portcullis creaking up into the ancient machinery of the chamber. He could smell the humid cold of outside, feel air wash upward from his feet. He was standing upon a large grate, he realized, set over the passage between the two gates. Things and surfaces resolved from the gloom: wood stacked against the walls; rows of amphorae, no doubt filled with oil to pour through the grate; two ovens no higher than his knee, each stocked with kindling, furnished with bellows, and bearing iron pots for cooking the oil …
Then he saw the Kianene boy he’d disarmed earlier, huddled against the far wall, his brown eyes as wide as silver talents. For a heartbeat, Cnaiür couldn’t look away. The sound of screams and shouts echoed through unseen corridors.
“P-pouäda t’fada,”
the adolescent sobbed.
“Os-osmah … Pipiri osmah!”
Cnaiür swallowed.
From nowhere it seemed, a Galeoth thane—someone Cnaiür didn’t recognize—strode past him toward the boy, his sword raised. Just then, light glittered up from the passage below, and through the grate at his feet, Cnaiür saw a band of torch-bearing Galeoth rush toward the outer doors of the postern gate. He glanced up, saw the thane swing his sword downward as though clubbing an unwanted whelp. The boy had raised warding hands. The blade glanced from his wrist and struck along the bone of his forearm, slicing back a shank of meat the size of a fish. The boy screamed.
The doors burst open beneath. Exultant cries pealed through the room, followed by cold air and shining torchlight. The first of the thousands Saubon had concealed on the broken slopes beneath the gate began rushing through the passageway beneath. The thane hacked at the adolescent, once, twice …

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