The Warrior Prophet (85 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Motionless.
Somewhere in the pitch, a wood splinter snapped.
He could feel them slip through the entrance, one after the other. They spread across the far wall, their hearts thudding in competing rhythms. Kellhus could smell their musk roll through the room.
“I’ve tasted both of your peaches,” the one called Sarcellus said—to mask the sounds of the others, Kellhus realized. “I tasted them long and hard—did you know that? I made them squeal …”
“You lie!” Kellhus cried in mimicry of desperate fury. He heard the skin-spies pause, then close on the corner where he’d thrown his voice.
“Both were sweet,” Sarcellus called, “and so very juicy … The man, they say, ripens the peach.”
Kellhus had punched his sword point through the ear of the creature that glided before him, lowered it as soundlessly as he could to the ground.
“Eh, Dûnyain?” Sarcellus asked. “That makes you twice the cuckold!”
One bumped into a chair.
Kellhus leapt, gutted it, rolled under the table as it squealed and shrieked.
“He plays us!” one cried.
“Unza, pophara tokuk!”
“
Smell
him!” the thing called Sarcellus shouted. “Cut anything that smells his smell!”
The disembowelled creature flopped and flailed, screaming in demonic voices—as Kellhus had hoped. He ducked from under the table, backed to the wall to the left of the entrance. He pulled free his samite robe, tossed it onto the back of a chair he couldn’t see—but remembered …
Kellhus stood motionless. The drafts came to him, murmuring. He could feel their bestial heartbeats, taste the feral heat of their bodies. Two leapt at his robe before him. Swords swooped and cracked into the chair. Lunging, he skewered the one to the left in the throat, only to have his blade wrenched from him as the creature toppled backward. Kellhus leaned back and to the left, felt steel whip the air. He caught an arm, exploded the elbow, blocked the knife-bearing fist that hooked about. He reached into its throat and jerked out its windpipe.
He jumped backward. Sarcellus’s sword whistled through the blackness. Twisting into a handstand, Kellhus caught the back of a chair and vaulted to a crouch at the far edge of the trestle table.
The gutted skin-spy thrashed immediately below him. Even still, he heard the thing called Sarcellus bound out of the cellar. Flee …
For several moments Kellhus remained still, drawing long deep breaths. Inhuman screaming resounded through the blackness. It sounded like something—many somethings—burning alive.
How are such creatures possible? What do you know of them, Father?
Retrieving his long-pommelled sword, Kellhus struck off the living skin-spy’s head. Sudden silence. He wrapped it, still streaming blood, in his slashed robe.
Then he climbed back toward slaughter and daylight.
 
The great black fortress the Men of the Tusk called the Citadel of the Dog dominated the easternmost of Caraskand’s nine hills. They called her such because the way her inner and outer curtain walls enclosed the towering central keep vaguely resembled a dog curled about his master’s leg. The Fanim simply called her “Il’huda,” “the Bulwark.” Raised by the great Xatantius, the most warlike of the early Nansur emperors, the Citadel of the Dog reflected the scale and ingenuity of a people who’d managed to flourish in the shadow of the Scylvendi: round towers, massive barbicans, offset inner and outer gates. The fortress’s defences were tiered, so that each concentric ring overshadowed the next. And her outer walls were shelled in a glossy, well-nigh impenetrable, basalt.
Knowing that the fortress—which the Nansur called “Insarum,” her original name—was the key to the city, Ikurei Conphas had assailed it almost immediately, hoping to storm the walls before Imbeyan could organize any concerted defence. The men of the Selial Column gained the southern heights only to be thrown back after horrifying losses. Soon the Galeoth were on the steep slopes with them, and then the Tydonni: Saubon and Gothyelk were not so foolish as to leave such a prize to the Exalt-General. Siege engines constructed to assail Caraskand’s curtain walls were drawn up. Mangonels hurled burning tar over the fortifications. Trebuchets rained granite boulders and Fanim bodies. Tall, iron-hooked ladders were pressed against the walls, and the Kianene hefted rocks and boiling oil over the battlements to crush and burn those that climbed them. Protected by hide mantlets, an iron-headed battering ram was brought under the immense barbican and beneath a hail of fire and missiles began hammering at the gate. Clouds of arrows reached into the sky. Saubon himself was carried down with a Kianene arrow in his thigh.
Sheer numbers and ferocity gained the Warnutishmen of Ce Tydonn the western wall. Tall, bearded knights, clients of the dead Earl Cerjulla, hacked through the crowds of heathen who swarmed up to dislodge them. They were pelted by archers from the inner compound, but the arrows, if they could punch through the heavy mail, were merely embedded in the thick layers of felt beneath. Many roared and fought with several shafts jutting from their backs. The dead and dying were thrown headlong from the walls to crash onto the rocks or the men teeming below. The Tydonni planted their feet and refused to give ground, while behind them, more of their cousins, Agansi under Gothyelk’s youngest son, Gurnyau, gained the summit. Under the direction of the wounded Saubon, the longbowmen of Agmundr raked the heights of the inner wall, forcing the Enathpanean and Kianene archers to shelter behind crenellations. Someone raised the Mark of Agansanor, the Black Stag, upon one of the outer towers. A great shout was raised by the Inrithi encircling the heights.
Then came a light more blinding than the sun. Men cried out, pointing to mad, saffron-robed figures hanging between the towers of the black keep. Eyeless Cishaurim, each with two snakes wrapped about their throats.
Threads of unholy incandescence waved across the outer wall like ropes in water. Stone cracked beneath the flashing heat. Hauberks were welded to skin. The Tydonni crouched beneath their great tear-shaped shields, leaning against the light, shouting in horror and outrage before being swept away. The Agmundrmen fired vainly at the floating abominations. Teams of Chorae Crossbowmen watched bolt after bolt whistle wide because of the range.
The tall knights of Ce Tydonn were decimated. Many, seeing the hopelessness of their plight, brandished their longswords, howled curses until the end. Others ran. Those who could scrambled down the ladders. Several warriors leapt from the battlements, their beards and hair aflame. An unholy torrent consumed Gothyelk’s Standard.
Then the lights flickered out.
For a moment all was silent save for those left screaming upon the heights. Then the Kianene upon the walls burst into cheers. They rushed across the stolen summits, cast those Tydonni still living from the wall, including Gothyelk’s youngest son, Gurnyau. Mad with grief, the old Earl had to be dragged away.
The Men of the Tusk withdrew in turmoil. Riders were dispatched, charged with finding the Scarlet Spires, who’d yet to enter Caraskand. They bore but one message: “Cishaurim defend the Citadel of the Dog.”
 
Still bearing his trophy, Kellhus strode out onto the terrace of an abandoned palatial compound. He passed through a small garden of winter blooms and sculpted shrubs. The body of a dead woman, her gown hiked over her head, lay motionless between two junipers. Stepping over her, Kellhus walked out across the shining marble to the terrace balustrade. The breeze carried a bouquet of foul and sweet odours—the smell of precious things burning.
The Citadel of the Dog dominated the near distance, black and hazy, rising mountainous from the welter of walls and roofs crowding the valley below. He glimpsed tiny Kianene soldiers rushing along the heights, their silvered helms winking as they passed between battlements. He saw Inrithi bodies dumped from the walls.
To the north and to the south, Caraskand continued to die. Peering through screens of smoke, he studied the riot of distant buildings, glimpsed dozens of miniature dramas: pitched battles, petty atrocities, bodies being stripped, women wailing, even a child jumping from a rooftop. A sudden shriek drew his eyes downward, and he saw a band of black-armoured Thunyeri rushing through the enclosed garden of the compound immediately below the terrace. He quickly lost sight of them. Harsh laughter wafted up through the breeze.
He looked past the Citadel, south to the hills beyond Caraskand’s far-wandering walls. To Shimeh.
I grow near, Father. Very near.
He swung the bloody sack he’d made of his robe from his shoulder, and the thing’s severed head tumbled across the marmoreal floor. He studied its face, which seemed little more than a tangle of snakes with human-skin. A lidless eye gleamed in the shadows beneath. Kellhus already knew these creatures weren’t sorcerous artifacts; he’d learned enough from Achamian to conclude they were worldly weapons, fashioned by the ancient Inchoroi the way swords were fashioned by Men. But with their faces undone, this fact seemed all the more remarkable.
Weapons. And the Consult had finally wielded them.
Wars within wars. It has finally come to this.
Kellhus had already encountered several of his Zaudunyani. Even now his instructions were spreading through the city. Serwë and Esmenet would be evacuated from the camp. Soon his Hundred Pillars would be securing this nameless merchant palace. The Zaudunyani he’d charged with watching the skin-spies he’d so far identified were being sought. If he could organize before the chaos ended …
The Holy War must be purged.
Just then, light flared across the Citadel. A crack boomed over the city, like thunder rising out from the ground. A chorus of unsettling disharmonies reverberated in its wake. More flashes of light, and Kellhus saw sheets of masonry crash down the Citadel’s foundations. Debris tumbled down the hillside.
Hanging in the air, the sorcerers of the Scarlet Spires had formed a great semicircle about the Citadel’s immense barbican. Through a dark hail of arrows, glittering fire washed over the turrets, and even from this distance Kellhus could see burning Fanim leap into the baileys. Lightning leapt from phantom clouds, exploding stonework and limbs alike. Flocks of incandescent sparrows swarmed over the battlements, plummeting into face after howling face.
Despite the destruction, one Scarlet Schoolman, then another, and then another still, plunged to the rooftops below, struck into salt by heathen Chorae. His eye drawn by a blinding flash, Kellhus saw one sorcerer crash into the hillside, where he broke and tumbled like a thing of stone. Hellish lights scourged the ramparts. Tower tops exploded in flame. All living things were consumed.
The song of the Scarlet Schoolmen trailed. The thunder rumbled into the distances. For several heartbeats, all Caraskand stood still.
The fortress walls steamed with the smoke of burning flesh.
Several of the sorcerers strode forward. Achamian had told Kellhus once that no sorcerer truly flew, but rather walked a surface that wasn’t a surface—the ground’s echo in the sky. The Schoolmen advanced through the curtains of smoke until they dangled over the narrow baileys of the inner keep. Kellhus glimpsed the outline of their ghostly Wards. They seemed to be waiting … or searching.
Suddenly, from various points across the Citadel, seven lines of piercing blue swept across smoke and sky, intersecting on the centremost Schoolman …

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