The Warrior Prophet (89 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Was this why you summoned me? Do you die?
“What is it?” Esmenet asked, drawing sheets up to her breast.
Kellhus had jerked forward, sitting cross-legged upon the bed. He peered across the candle-lit gloom, tracking the muffled sounds of some commotion beyond the doors.
What does he
—
Without warning, the double doors burst open, and Kellhus saw Proyas, still weak from his convalescence, struggling with two of the Hundred Pillars.
“Kellhus!” the Conriyan Prince barked. “Tell your dogs to kennel, or by the God there’ll be blood!”
At a word, the bodyguards released him, assumed positions at either side of the door. The man stood, his chest heaving, his eyes searching through the shadows of the lavish bedchamber. Kellhus encircled him with his senses … The man shouted desperation from every pore, but the wildness of his passion made the specifics difficult to ascertain. He feared the Holy War was lost, as did all men, and that Kellhus was somehow to blame—as did many.
He needs to know what I am.
“What happens, Proyas? What ails you, that you’d commit such an outrage?”
But the Prince’s eyes had found Esmenet, rigid with shock. Kellhus instantly saw the peril.
He searches for excuses.
An interior porch had been raised about the doors; Proyas took an unsteady step toward the railing. “What’s she doing?” He blinked in confusion. “Why’s she
in your bed?”
He doesn’t want to understand.
“She’s my wife … What business—”
“Wife?” Proyas exclaimed. He raised a half-opened hand to his brow. “She’s your
wife?”
He’s heard the stories … But all this time he’s afforded me his doubt.
“The desert, Proyas. The desert marked us all.”
He shook his head. “Fie on the desert,” he murmured, then looked up in sudden fury. “Fie on the desert! She’s … She’s … Akka loved her!
Akka!
Don’t you recall? Your
friend
…”
Kellhus lowered his eyes in penitent sadness. “We thought he would want this.”
“Want? Want his best friend fucking the wo—”
“Who,” Esmenet spat, “are you to speak of Akka to me!”
“What do you say?” Proyas said, blanching. “What do you mean?” His lips pursed; his eyes slackened. His right hand fell to his chest. Horror had opened a still point in the throng of his passions—an opportunity …
“But you already know,” Kellhus said. “Of all people, you’ve no right to judge.”
The Conriyan Prince flinched. “What do you mean?”
Now … Offer him truce. Show him understanding. Make stark his trespasses …
“Please,” Kellhus said, reaching out with word, tone, and every nuance of expression. “You let your despair rule you … And me, I succumb to ill manners. Proyas! You’re among my dearest friends …” He cast aside the sheets, swung his feet to the floor. “Come, let us drink and talk.”
But Proyas had fastened on his earlier comment—as Kellhus had intended. “I would know why I’ve no right to judge. What’s that supposed to mean, ‘dear friend’?”
Kellhus drew his lips into a pained line. “It means that
you,
Proyas, not we, have betrayed Achamian.”
The handsome face slackened in horror. His pulse drummed.
I must move carefully.
“No,” Proyas said.
Kellhus closed his eyes as though in disappointment. “Yes. You accuse us because you hold yourself accountable.”
“Accountable? Accountable for what?” He snorted like a frightened adolescent. “I did nothing.”
“But you did everything, Proyas. You needed the Scarlet Spires, and the Scarlet Spires needed Achamian.”
“No one knows what happened to Achamian!”
“But
you
know … I can see this knowledge within you.”
The Conriyan Prince stumbled backward. “You see nothing!”
So close …
“Of course I do, Proyas. How, after all this time, could you still doubt?”
But as he watched, something happened: an unforeseen flare of recognition, a cascade of inferences, too quick to silence.
That word
…
“Doubt?” Proyas fairly cried. “How could I not doubt? The Holy War stands upon the precipice, Kellhus!”
Kellhus smiled the way Xinemus had once smiled at things both touching and foolish.
“The God
tries
us, Proyas. He’s yet to pass sentence! Tell me, how can there be trial without doubt?”
“He tries us …” Proyas repeated, his face blank.
“Of
course,
” Kellhus said plaintively. “Simply open your heart and you’ll see!”
“Open my …” Proyas trailed, his eyes brimming with incredulous dread. “He told me!” he abruptly whispered. “This is what he meant!” The yearning in his look, the ache that had warred against his misgivings, suddenly collapsed into suspicion and disbelief.
Someone has warned him … The Scylvendi? Has he wandered so far?
“Proyas …”
I should have killed him.
“And how about you,
Kellhus?
” Proyas spat. “Do you doubt? Does the great Warrior-Prophet fear for the future?”
Kellhus looked to Esmenet, saw that she wept. He reached out and clasped her cold hands.
“No,” he said.
I do not fear.
Proyas was already backing out the double doors, into the brighter light of the antechamber.
“You will.”
 
For over a thousand years Caraskand’s great limestone walls had stared across the broken countryside of Enathpaneah. When Triamis I, perhaps the greatest of the Aspect-Emperors, had raised them, his detractors in Imperial Cenei had scoffed at the expenditure, claiming that he who conquers all foes has no need of walls. Triamis, the chroniclers write, had dismissed them by saying, “No man can conquer the future.” And indeed, over the ensuing centuries Caraskand’s “Triamic Walls,” as they were called, would blunt the rush of history many times, if not redirect it altogether. And sometimes, they would cage it.
Day after day, it seemed, Inrithi horns blared from the high towers, calling the Men of the Tusk to the ramparts, for the Padirajah threw his people at Triamis’s mighty fortifications with reckless fury, each time convinced the strength of the starving idolaters would fail. Haggard and hungry, Galeoth, Conriyans, and Tydonni manned the war engines abandoned by Caraskand’s erstwhile defenders, casting pots of flaming pitch from mangonels, great iron bolts from ballistae. Thunyeri, Nansur, and Ainoni gathered on the walls, crowding beneath the battlements and huddling beneath shields to avoid volleys of arrows that at times darkened the sun. And day after day, it seemed, they beat the heathen back.
Even as they cursed them, the Kianene could only marvel at their desperate fury. Twice young Athjeäri led daring sorties across the rutted plain, once seizing the sappers’ trenches and collapsing their tunnels, once charging over slovenly earthworks and sacking an isolated encampment. All the world could see they were doomed, and yet they fought as though they knew it not.
But they knew—as only men stalked by famine could know.
The hemoplexy, or the hollows, was running its course. Many, such as Chepheramunni, the King-Regent of High Ainon, lingered on death’s marches, while others, such as Zursodda, Palatine-Governor of Koraphea, or Cynnea, Earl of Agmundr, finally succumbed. The funeral pyres still burned, but more and more they took casualties, and not the sick, as their fuel. As the flames consumed the Earl of Agmundr, his famed longbowmen launched burning arrows over the walls, and the Kianene wondered at the madness of the idolaters. Cynnea would be among the last of the great Inrithi lords to perish in the grip of the Disease.
But even as the plague waned, the threat of starvation waxed. Dread Famine, Bukris, the God who devoured men and vomited up skin and bones, walked the streets and halls of Caraskand.
Throughout the city, men began hunting cats, dogs, and finally even rats for sustenance. Poorer caste-nobles had taken to opening veins in their mounts. The horses themselves quickly consumed what thatched roofs could be found. Many bands began holding lotteries to see who would butcher their horse. Those without horses scratched through the dirt, looking for tubers. They boiled grapevines and even thistles to quiet the nagging madness of their bellies. Leather—from saddles, jerkins, or elsewhere—was also boiled and consumed. When the horns sounded the harnesses of many would swing like skirts, having lost their straps and buckles to some steaming pot. Gaunt men roamed the streets, looking for anything to eat, their faces blank, their movements sluggish, as though they walked through sand. Rumours circulated of men feasting on the bloated corpses of the Kianene, or committing murder in the dead of night to quiet their mad hunger.
In the wake of Famine, foul Disease returned, preying on the weak. Men, particularly among the caste-menials, began losing teeth to scurvy. Dysentery punished others with cramps and bloody diarrhea. In many quarters, one could find warriors wandering without their breeches, wallowing, as some are wont to do, in their degradation.
During this time, the furor surrounding Kellhus, Prince of Atrithau, and the tensions between those who acclaimed him and those who condemned him, escalated. In Council, Conphas, Gothyelk, and even Gotian relentlessly denounced him, claiming he was a False Prophet, a cancer that must be excised from the Holy War. Who could doubt the God punished them? The Holy War, they insisted, could have only one Prophet, and his name was Inri Sejenus. Proyas, who’d once eloquently defended Kellhus, withdrew from all such debates, and refused to say anything. Only Saubon still spoke in his favour, though he did so half-heartedly, not wishing to alienate those whose approval he needed to secure his claim to Caraskand.
Despite this, none dared move against the so-called Warrior-Prophet. His followers, the Zaudunyani, numbered in the tens of thousands, though they were less numerous among the upper castes. Many still remembered the Miracle of Water in the desert, how Kellhus had saved the Holy War, including those miscreants who now called him anathema. Strife and riot broke out, and for the first time Inrithi swords shed Inrithi blood. Knights repudiated their lords. Brothers forsook brothers. Countrymen turned upon one another. Only Gotian and Conphas, it seemed, were able to command the loyalty of their men.
Nevertheless, when the horns sounded, the Inrithi forgot their differences. They roused themselves from the torpor of disease and sickness, and they battled with a fervour only those truly wracked by the God could know. And to the heathens who assailed them, it seemed dead men defended the walls. Safe about their fires, the Kianene whispered tales of wights and damned souls, of a Holy War that had already perished, but fought on, such was its hate.
Caraskand, it seemed, named not a city, but misery’s own precinct. Her very walls—walls raised by Triamis the Great—seemed to groan.
 
The luxury of the place reminded Serwë of her indolent days as a concubine in House Gaunum. Through the open colonnade on the far side of the room she could see Caraskand wander across the hills beneath the sky. She was reclined on a green couch, her arms drawn out of her gown’s shoulders so that it hung from the gorgeous sash about her waist. Her pink son squirmed against her naked chest, and she had just begun feeding when she heard the latch drawn. She had expected it to be one of the Kianene house slaves, so she gasped in surprise and delight when she felt the Warrior-Prophet’s hand about her bare neck. The other brushed her bare breast as he reached to draw a gentle finger along the infant’s chubby back.

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