The Warrior Prophet (94 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

This last scream pealed through the hollow recesses of the audience hall, returned to him in a haunting shiver:
pluck-plucked-out-out
…
He fell to his knees before his throne, felt the heat of his King-Fires bite tear-soaked skin. There was shouting, the clank of armour and weaponry. Guards had come rushing …
But of the Warrior-Prophet there was no sign.
“He-he’s not real,” Saubon mumbled to the hollows of his court. “He doesn’t exist!”
But the gold-ringed fists kept falling. They would never stop.
 
He’d spent days seated upon the terrace, lost in whatever worlds he searched in his trances. At sunrise and sunset, Esmenet would go to him and leave a bowl of water as he’d directed. She brought him food as well, though he’d asked her not to. She would stare at his broad, motionless back, at his hair waving in the breeze, at the dying sun upon his face, and she would feel like a little girl kneeling before an idol, offering tribute to something monstrous and insatiable: salted fish, dried prunes and figs, unleavened bread—enough to cause a small riot in the lower city.
He touched none of it.
Then one dawn she went out to him, and he wasn’t there.
After a desperate rush through the galleries of the palace, she found him in their apartments, unkempt and rakish, joking with Serwë, who had just arisen.
“Esmi-Esmi-Esmi,” the swollen-eyed girl pouted. “Could you bring me little Moënghus?”
Too relieved to feel exasperated, Esmenet ducked into the adjoining nursery and plucked the black-haired babe from his cradle. Though his dumbfounded stare made her smile, she found the winter blue of his eyes unnerving.
“I was just saying,” Kellhus said as she delivered the child to Serwë, “that the Great Names have summoned me …” He reached out a haloed hand. “They want to parley.”
He mentioned nothing, of course, about his meditation. He never did.
Esmenet took his hand, sat beside him on their bed, only just understanding the implications of what he had said.
“Parley?” she suddenly cried. “Kellhus, they summon you to
condemn you!
”
“Kellhus?” Serwë asked. “What does she mean?”
“That this parley is a
trap,
” Esmenet exclaimed. She stared hard at Kellhus. “You know this!”
“What can you mean?” Serwë exclaimed. “Everyone loves Kellhus … Everyone
knows
now.”
“No, Serwë. Many hate him—very many. Very many want him dead!”
Serwë laughed in the oblivious way of which only she seemed capable. “Esmenet …” she said, shaking her head as though at a beloved fool. She boosted little Moënghus into the air. “Auntie Esmi forgets,” she cooed to the infant. “Yeeesss. She forgets who your father is!”
Esmenet watched dumbstruck. Sometimes she wanted nothing more than to wring the girl’s neck. How? How could he love such a simpering fool?
“Esmi …” Kellhus said abruptly. The warning in his voice chilled her heart. She turned to him, shouted
Forgive me!
with her eyes.
But at the same time, she couldn’t relent, not now, not after what she had found. “Tell her, Kellhus! Tell her what’s about to happen!”
Not again. Not again!
“Listen to me, Esmi. There’s no other way. The Zaudunyani and the Orthodox cannot go to war.”
“Not even for you?” she cried. “This Holy War, this city, is but a pittance compared to you! Don’t you see, Kellhus?” Her desperation swelled into sudden anguish and desolation, and she angrily wiped at her tears. This was too important for selfish grief!
But I’ve lost so many!
“Don’t you see how precious you are? Think of what Akka said! What if you’re the world’s only hope?”
He cupped her cheek, brushed her eyebrow with his thumb, which he held warm against her temple.
“Sometimes, Esmi, we must cross death to reach our destination.”
She thought of King Shikol in
The Tractate,
the demented Xerashi King who’d commanded the Latter Prophet’s execution. She thought of his gilded thighbone, the instrument of judgement, which to this day remained the most potent symbol of evil in Inrithidom. Was this what Inri Sejenus had said to his nameless lover? That loss could somehow secure glory?
But this is madness!
“The Shortest Path,” she said, horrified by the teary-eyed contemptuousness of her tone.
But the blond-bearded face smiled.
“Yes,” the Warrior-Prophet said. “The Logos.”
 
“Anasûrimbor Kellhus,” Gotian intoned in his powerful voice, “I hereby denounce you as a False Prophet, and as a pretender to the warrior-caste. It is the judgement of the Council of Great and Lesser Names that you be scourged in the manner decreed by Scripture.”
Serwë heard a wail pierce the thunderous outcry, and only afterward realized that it was her own. Moënghus sobbed in her arms, and she reflexively began rocking him, though she was too frightened to coo reassurances. The Hundred Pillars had drawn their swords, and now thronged to either side of them, trading fierce glares with the Shrial Knights.
“You judge no one!”
someone was bellowing.
“The Warrior-Prophet alone speaks the judgement of the Gods! It is you who’ve been found wanting! You who shall be punished!”
“False! False!—”
It seemed a thousand half-starved faces cried a thousand hungry things. Accusations. Curses. Laments. The air was flushed by humid cries. Hundreds had gathered within the ruined shell of the Citadel of the Dog to hear the Warrior-Prophet answer the charges of the Great and Lesser Names. Hot in the sun, the black ruins towered about them: walls unconsummated by vaults, foundations obscured by heaped wreckage, the side of a fallen tower bare and rounded against the debris, like the flanks of a whale breaching the surface of a choppy sea. The Men of the Tusk had congregated across every pitched slope and beneath every monolithic remnant. Fist-waving faces packed every pocket of clear ground.
Instinctively pulling her baby tight to her breast, Serwë glanced around in terror.
Esmi was right … We shouldn’t have come!
She looked up to Kellhus, and wasn’t surprised by the divine calm with which he observed the masses. Even here, he seemed the godlike nail which fastened what happened to what
should
happen.
He’ll make them see!
But the roar was redoubled, and reverberated through her body. Several men had drawn their knives, as though the sound of fury were grounds enough for murderous riot.
So much hatred.
Even the Great Names, gathered in the clear centre of the fortress’s courtyard, looked apprehensive. They gazed blank-faced at the thundering mobs, almost as though they were counting. Already several fights had broken out; she could see the flash of steel and flailing monkey limbs amidst the packed mobs—believers beset by unbelievers.
A starved fanatic with a knife managed to slip past the Hundred Pillars, rushed the Warrior-Prophet …
… who pinched the knife from his hand as though he were a child, clasped his throat with one hand and lifted him from the ground, like a gasping dog.
The pocked grounds gradually quieted as more and more turned their horrified eyes to the Warrior-Prophet and his thrashing burden—until shortly only the would-be assassin could be heard, gagging. Serwë’s skin pimpled in dread.
Why do they do this? Why do they dare his wrath?
Kellhus tossed the man to the ground, where he lay inert, a heap of slack limbs.
“What is it that you fear?” the Warrior-Prophet asked. His tone was both plaintive and imperious—not the overbearing manner of a King certain of his sanction, but the despotic voice of Truth.
Gotian shouldered his way passed the interceding onlookers. “The wrath of the God,” he cried, “who punishes us for harbouring an abomination!”
“No.” His flashing eyes found them from among the masses: Saubon, Proyas, Conphas, and the others. “You fear that as my power waxes, yours will wane. You do what you do not in the name of the God, but in the name of avarice. You wouldn’t tolerate even the God to possess your Holy War. And yet, in each of your hearts there is an itch, an anguished question that I alone can see:
What if he truly is the Prophet? What doom awaits us then?
”
“SILENCE!”
Conphas roared, spittle flying from his contorted lips.
“And you, Conphas? What is it that you hide?”
“His words are spears!” Conphas cried to the others. “His very voice is an outrage!”
“But I ask only
your
question:
What if you are wrong?
”
Even Conphas was dumbstruck by the force of these words. It was as though the Warrior-Prophet had made this demand in the God’s own voice.
“You turn to fury in the absence of certainty,” he continued sadly. “I only ask you this: What moves your soul? What moves you to condemn me? Is it indeed the God? The God strides with certainty, with
glory,
through the hearts of men! Does the God so stride through you?
Does the God so stride through you?
”
Silence. The poignant hush of dread, as though they were a congregation of debauched children suddenly confronted by the rebuke of their godlike father. Serwë felt tears flood her cheeks.
They see! They at last see!
But then a Shrial Knight, the one named Sarcellus, whose face alone remained pious and devoid of hesitation, answered the Warrior-Prophet in a loud, clear voice.
“‘All things both sacred and vile,’” the Knight-Commander said, quoting the Tusk, “‘speak to the hearts of Men, and they are bewildered, and holding out their hands to darkness,
they name it light
.’”
The Warrior-Prophet stared at him sharply, and quoted in turn: “‘Hearken Truth, for it strides fiercely among you, and will not be denied.’”
Possessed of beatific calm, Sarcellus answered: “‘Fear him, for he is the deceiver, the Lie made Flesh, come among you to foul the waters of your heart.’”
And the Warrior-Prophet smiled sadly. “Lie made flesh, Sarcellus?” Serwë watched his eyes search the crowds, then settle on the nearby Scylvendi. “Lie made flesh,” he repeated, staring into the fiend’s embattled face. “The hunt need not end … Remember this when you recall the secret of battle. You still command the ears of the Great.”
“False Prophet,” Sarcellus continued. “Prince of
nothing
.”
As if these words had been a sign, the Shrial Knights rushed the Hundred Pillars, and there was the clash of fierce arms. Someone shrieked, and one of the Knights fell to his knees, grasping in his left hand the gushing stump where his right hand should have been. Another shriek, and then yet another, and then the starving mobs, as though sobered from a drunken stupor by the sight of blood, surged forward.
Serwë screamed, clawed at the Warrior-Prophet’s white sleeve, grasped her baby with fierce desperation.
This isn’t happening
…
But it was hopeless. After several moments of howling butchery, the Shrial Knights were upon them. With nightmarish horror she watched the Warrior-Prophet catch a blade in his palms, break it, and then touch the neck of his assailant. The man crumpled. Another he caught by the arm, which suddenly went limp as sackcloth, and then drove his fist through his face, as though the man’s head were a melon.

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