The Warrior Prophet (84 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The screams stopped.
Squares of light raced across the thane’s blood-spattered form. The blue-eyed man gazed in wonder at the spectacle beneath. He glanced at Cnaiür, grinned, and pawed at his teary cheeks.
“Truth shines!” he convulsively cried. “Truth shines!”
His eyes shouted glory.
Without thinking, Cnaiür dropped his sword and seized him, almost hoisted him from his feet. For a heartbeat, they grappled. Then Cnaiür smashed his forehead into the thane’s face. The man’s broadsword fell from senseless fingers. His head lolled backward. Cnaiür slammed his forehead down again, felt teeth snap. Shouts and clamour reverberated up through the iron grate. With each rushing torch lattices of shadow swept up and over them. Again, bone hammering against bone, face breaking beneath face. The bridge of the man’s nose collapsed, then his left cheek. Again and again, smashing his face into slurry.
I am stronger!
The twitching thing slouched to the ground, drained across the Men of the Tusk.
Cnaiür stood, his chest heaving, blood streaming in rivulets across the iron scales of his harness. The very world seemed to move, so great was the rush of arms and men beneath him.
Yes, the madness was lifting.
 
Horns pealed across the great city. War horns.
There was no rain in the morning, but a thin fog wearied the distances, drained Caraskand’s reaches of contrast and colour, rendering the far quarters ghostlike. Though overcast, one could feel the sun burning behind the clouds.
The Fanim, both native Enathpaneans and Kianene, crowded onto roofs and strained to see what was happening. As they watched a growing pall of smoke rise from the eastern quarters of the city, women clasped crying children tight, ashen-faced men scored their forearms with fingernails, and old mothers wailed into the sky. Below them, Kianene horsemen beat their way through the tight streets, riding down their own people, struggling to answer the call of the Sapatishah’s drums and make their way to the towering fortress in the city’s northwest, the Citadel of the Dog. And then, after a time, the terrified watchers could actually see, in those distant streets where the angles allowed them, the Men of the Tusk—small, wicked shadows through the smoke. Iron-draped figures rushed through the streets, swords rose and fell, and tiny, hapless forms collapsed beneath them. Some of the onlookers were so terror-stricken they became sick. Some rushed down into the congested streets to join in the mad, hopeless attempt to escape. Others remained, and watched the approaching columns of smoke. They prayed to the Solitary God, tore at their beards and their clothes, and thought panicked thoughts about everything they were about to lose.
Saubon had gathered his men and struck through the streets toward the mighty Gate of Horns. The massive barbican fell after fierce fighting, but the Galeoth had found themselves sorely pressed by those Fanim horsemen the Sapatishah’s officers had been able to muster. In the narrow streets, clots of men joined in dozens of small, pitched battles. Even with the constant string of reinforcements arriving from the postern gate, the Galeoth found themselves stubbornly giving ground.
But the mighty Gate of Horns was finally thrown open, and Athjeäri with his Gaenrish knights pounded into the city on their stolen horses, followed by rank after rank of Conriyans, invincible and inhuman behind their godlike masks. In their wake, their Prince, the ailing Nersei Proyas, was borne into Caraskand on a litter.
The Kianene were routed by this new onslaught, and their last chance to save their city was lost. Organized resistance crumbled and became confined to small pockets scattered throughout Caraskand. The Inrithi broke into roaming bands and began to pillage the city.
Houses were ransacked. Entire families were put to the sharp knife. Black-skinned Nilnameshi slave girls were dragged sobbing from their hiding places by the hair, violated, and then put to the sword. Tapestries were torn from the walls, rolled, or tied into sacks into which plates, statuary, and other articles of gold and silver were swept. The Men of the Tusk rifled through ancient Caraskand, leaving behind them scattered clothes and broken chests, death and fire. In some places the scattered looters were slaughtered and chased away by armed bands of Kianene, or held at bay until some thane or baron rallied enough men to close with the heathen.
The hard battles were fought across Caraskand’s great market squares and through the more magnificent of the buildings. Only the Great Names were able to hold enough men together to batter open the tall doors and then fight their way down the long, carpeted corridors. But in these places, the spoils were the greatest—cool cellars filled with Eumarnan and Jurisadi wines, golden reliquary behind fretted shrines, alabaster and jade statues of lions and desert wolves, intricate plaques of clear chalcedony. Their coarse shouts echoed beneath airy domes. They tracked blood and filth across broad, white-tiled floors. Men sheathed their weapons and fumbled with their breeches, strolling into the marmoreal recesses of some dead Grandee’s harem.
The doors of the great tabernacles were battered down, and the Men of the Tusk waded among masses of kneeling Fanim, hacking and clubbing until the tiled floors were matted with the dead and dying. They smashed down the doors of the adjoining compounds, wandered into the dim, carpeted interiors. Soft shadows and strange scents greeted them. Light rained down through tiny windows of coloured glass. At first they were fearful. These were the dens of the Unholy, where the monstrous Cishaurim worked their abominations. They walked quietly, numbed by their dread. But eventually the drunkenness of the screaming streets would return to them. Someone would reach out and spill a book from an ivory lectern, and when nothing happened the aura of foreboding would dissolve, replaced by sudden, righteous fury. They would laugh, cry out the names of Inri Sejenus and the Gods as they plundered the inner sanctums of the False Prophet. They tortured Fanic priests for their secrets. They set glorious, many-pillared tabernacles of Caraskand aflame.
The Men of the Tusk cast the bodies from the rooftops. They rifled the pockets of the dead, tugging rings from grey fingers, or just sawing at the knuckles to save time. Shrieking children were torn from their mothers, tossed across rooms and caught on sword point. The mothers were beaten and raped while their gutted husbands wailed about their entrails. The Inrithi were like wild-eyed beasts, drunk with howling murder. Moved by the God’s own fury, they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sharp sword.
The anger of the God burned bright against the people of Caraskand.
 
Sunlight broke across the city, cold and brilliant against a dark horizon. Wings outstretched, the Old Name floated on hot western winds. Caraskand pitched and yawed beneath him, a vista of flat-roofed structures, encrusting hillsides, enveloping distances in mud-brick confusion, opening about broad agoras and monumental complexes.
Fires burned in the east, screening the far quarters. He soared around mountainous plumes.
He saw Caraskandi crowding the rooftop gardens of the merchant quarter, howling in disbelief. He saw packs of armed Inrithi ranging through abandoned streets, dispersing into buildings. He saw the first of the domed tabernacles burning. From so far, they looked like bowls upended over firepits. He saw horsemen charging across the great market squares, and phalanxes of footmen battling down broad avenues toward the hazy blue ramparts of the Citadel of the Dog.
And he saw the man who called himself Dûnyain, fleeing across ramshackle rooftops, running like the wind, pursued by the jump and tumble of Gaörta and the others. He watched the man leap and pirouette onto a third floor, sprint, then vault beyond the far edge of the adjacent two-storey structure. He landed in a crouch amid a clot of Kianene footmen, then bounced away, taking four lives with him. The soldiers had scarcely drawn their swords when Gaörta and his brothers descended upon them.
What was this man? Who were the Dûnyain?
These were questions that needed to be answered. According to Gaörta, the man’s Zaudunyani, his “tribe of truth,” numbered in the tens of thousands. It was only a matter of weeks, Gaörta insisted, before the Holy War succumbed to him entirely. But the questions these facts raised were overmatched by the perils. Nothing could interfere with the Holy War’s mission. Shimeh must be taken. The Cishaurim must be destroyed!
Despite the questions, the man’s existence could no longer be tolerated. He had to die, and for reasons that transcended their war against the Cishaurim. More troubling than his preternatural abilities, more troubling than even his slow conquest of the Holy War, was the man’s
name
. An Anasûrimbor had returned—an
Anasûrimbor
! And though Golgotterath had long scoffed at the Mandate and their prattle regarding the Celmomian Prophecy, how could they afford to take chances? They were so near! So close! Soon the Children would gather, and they would rain ruin upon this despicable world! The End of Ends was coming …
One did not gamble with such things. They would kill this Anasûrimbor Kellhus, then they would seize the others, the Scylvendi and the women, to learn what they needed to know.
The Dûnyain’s distant figure dashed into some kind of compound—disappeared. The Synthese craned its small human neck, banked against the sweeping sky, watched his slaves disappear after him.
Good. Gaörta and his brothers were closing …
The Warrior-Prophet … The Old Name had already decided he would couple with his corpse.
 
The percussive slap of sandals, the rhythmic pant of tireless, animal lungs, the slap of fabric about hooking arms.
They’re too fast!
Kellhus ran. As fleet as memories, chambers rushed past him, each possessing the spare elegance of desert peoples. Behind him, Sarcellus and the others fanned through the surrounding corridors. Kellhus kicked through a door, rolled down a stone stair, came to his feet in the gloom. They followed, mere heartbeats behind. He heard steel whisk against wood—a sheath. He ducked right and rolled. A knife flashed to his left, chipped dim stone, clattered to the floor. Kellhus plunged down another stair, into pitch blackness. He blundered through a brittle wooden door, felt the air bloom into emptiness about him, smelled stale cistern waters.
The skin-spies hesitated.
All eyes need light.
Kellhus spun about the room, his every surface alive, reading the warp and weft of drafts, the crunch and rasp of his sandals scuffing stone, the flutter of his clothing. His outstretched fingers touched table, chair, brick oven, a hundred different surfaces in a handful of instants. He fell into stance in the room’s far corner. Drew his sword.

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