The Warrior Prophet (95 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Somewhere impossibly far away, she heard Gotian roar at his men, thunder at them to stop.
She saw a manic-faced Knight rush her, sword raised to the sun, but then he was on the ground, fumbling with a fountain of blood that had bloomed from his side, and then a rough arm was about her, tiger-striped by scars and impossibly strong.
The Scylvendi? The Scylvendi had saved her?
At last bridled by their Grandmaster, the Shrial Knights relented, and stood back. They were lean and wolfish beneath their hauberks. The Tusks they bore on their stained and tattered surcoats looked threadbare and wicked.
It seemed the whole world had erupted in a chorus of howling throats.
Gotian stepped from the sweaty thunder beyond his men, and after glancing a dark moment at Cnaiür, he turned to the Warrior-Prophet. His once aristocratic face looked haggard and bitter, the look of a man who had been harrowed by a hateful world.
“Yield, Anasûrimbor Kellhus,” he said hoarsely. “You will be scourged according to Scripture.”
Serwë thrashed against the plainsman until he released her. He stared at her with savage horror, and she felt only hate—bone-snapping hate. She stumbled to Kellhus’s side, and buried her face and her child against his robes.
“Yield!”
she sobbed. “My lord and master you must yield! Do not die in this place! You must not die!”
She could feel her Prophet’s tender eyes upon her, his divine embrace encompass her. She looked up into his face and saw love in his shining, god-remote eyes. The love of the God for her! For
Serwë,
first wife and lover of the Warrior-Prophet. For the girl who was nothing …
Glittering tears branched across her cheeks. “I love you!” she cried. “I love you and you cannot die!”
She looked down at the squalling babe between them. “Our son!” she sobbed.
“Our son needs the God!”
She felt rough hands pull her back, and an ache such as she’d never suffered as they pulled her from his embrace.
My heart! They tear me from my heart!
“He’s the God!” she shrieked. “Can’t you see? He’s
the God!
”
She struggled against the man who held her, but he was too strong.
“The God!”
The man who held her spoke: “According to Scripture?” It was Sarcellus.
“According to Scripture,” the Grandmaster replied, but there was now pity in his voice.
“But she has a newborn child!” another cried—the Scylvendi … What did he mean? She looked to him, but he was a dark shadow against the congregation of warlike men, spliced by tears and sunlight.
“It matters not,” Gotian replied, his voice hardening with mad resolve.
“My child!” Was there desperation, pain in the Scylvendi’s voice?
No … not your child. Kellhus?
What happened?
“Then take it.” Curt, as though seeking to snuff further mortification.
Someone pulled her wailing son from her arms. Another heart gone. Another ache.
No
… Moënghus? What’s happening?
Serwë shrieked, until it seemed her eyes must shimmer into flame, her face crumble into dust.
The flash of sunlight across a knife. Sarcellus’s knife. Sounds. Celebratory and horrified.
Serwë felt her life spill across her breasts. She worked her lips to speak to him, that godlike man so near, to say something final, but there was no sound, no breath. She raised her hands and beads of dark wine fell from her outstretched fingers …
My Prophet, my love, how could this be?
I know not, sweet Serwë …
And as sky and the howling faces beneath darkened, she remembered his words, once spoken.
“You are innocence, sweet Serwë, the one heart I need not teach …”
Last flare of sunlight, drowsy, as though glimpsed by a child stirring from dreams beneath an airy tree.
Innocence, Serwë.
The limb-vaulted canopy, growing darker, warm-woollen like a shroud. No more sun.
You are the mercy you seek.
But my baby, my—
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
 
CAR ASKAND
 
For Men, no circle is ever closed. We walk ever in spirals.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN,
THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
 
 
Bring he who has spoken prophecy to the judgement of the priests, and if his prophecy is judged true, acclaim him, for he is clean, and if his prophecy is judged false, bind him to the corpse of his wife, and hang him one cubit above the earth, for he is unclean, an anathema unto the Gods.
—WARRANTS 7:48,
THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
 
Late Winter, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand
 
It was as though someone had struck the back of his knees with a staff. Eleäzaras stumbled forward, but was steadied by the strong arms of Lord Chinjosa, Count-Palatine of Antanamera.
No … No.
“Do you know what this means?” Chinjosa hissed.
Eleäzaras pushed the Palatine away and took two more drunken steps toward Chepheramunni’s body. The gloom of his sickroom was alleviated by a cluster of candles at the head of his bed. The bed itself was lavish, set between four marble columns that braced the low vaults of the ceiling. But it reeked of feces, blood, and pestilence.
Chepheramunni’s head lay beneath the congregated candles, but his face …
It was nowhere to be seen.
Where his face
should
have been lay what resembled an overturned spider, its legs clutched in death about its abdomen. What had been Chepheramunni’s face lay unspooled across the knuckles and shins of the steepled limbs. Eleäzaras saw familiar fragments: a lone nostril, the haired ridge of an eyebrow. Beneath he glimpsed lidless eyes and the shine of human teeth, bared and lipless.
And just as that fool Skalateas had claimed, nowhere could he sense the bruise of sorcery.
Chepheramunni—a Cishaurim skin-spy.
Impossible.
The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires coughed, blinked back uncharacteristic tears. This was too much. The very air seemed nightmarish with mad implication. The ground tipped beneath his feet. Once again, he felt Chinjosa steady him.
“Grandmaster! What does this mean?”
That we’re doomed. That I’ve led my School to its destruction.
A string of catastrophes. The disastrous losses at the battle of Anwurat. General Setpanares killed. Fifteen sorcerers of rank dead between the desert and the plague. And the disaster at Iothiah, which had claimed the lives of two others. The Holy War besieged and starving.
And now this … To find their hated enemy here, standing with him upon the summit. How much did the Cishaurim know?
“We’re doomed,” Eleäzaras muttered.
“No, Grandmaster,” Chinjosa replied, his own deep voice still tight with horror.
Eleäzaras turned to him. Chinjosa was a large, burly man geared for war in his ring-mail hauberk, over which he wore an open Kianene coat of red silk. The white cosmetics made his strong-featured face stark against his black, square-cut beard. Chinjosa had proven himself indomitable in battle, an able commander, and in Iyokus’s absence, a shrewd adviser.
“We
would
be doomed had this abomination led us into battle. Perhaps the Gods have favoured us with their afflictions.”
Eleäzaras stared numbly into Chinjosa’s face, struck by a further terrifying thought. “You are who you are, Chinjosa?”
The Palatine of Antanamera, the province that had so often proven itself the spine of High Ainon, looked at him sternly. “It
is
me, Grandmaster.”
Eleäzaras studied the caste-noble, and it seemed as though the man’s simple, warlike strength pulled him back from the brink of despair. Chinjosa was right. This wasn’t yet another catastrophe; it was a … blessing of a sort. But if Chepheramunni could be replaced … There must be others.
“No one is to know of this, Chinjosa.
No one
.”
The Palatine nodded in the dim light.
If only that Mandate ingrate had broken!
“Remove its head,” Eleäzaras said, his voice terse with growing outrage, “then throw the carcass onto the pyre.”
 
Achamian and Xinemus walked the ways of twilight, between light and dark, where only shadows are known. There was no food in this place, no life-giving water, and their bodies, which they carried across their backs the way one might carry a corpse, suffered horribly.
The twilight way. The shadow way. From the port city of Joktha to Caraskand.
When they passed near the camps of the enemy, they could feel the Cishaurim’s plucked eyes—brilliant, pure, like a lamplight before a silvered mirror—search for them from beyond the horizon. Many times Achamian felt that otherworldly light throw shadows from their shadows. Many times Achamian thought they were doomed. But always those eyes turned away their inhuman scrutiny, either deceived or … Achamian could not say why.
Gaining the walls, they revealed themselves beneath a small postern gate. It was night, and torches glittered between the battlements above. With Xinemus slumped against him, Achamian called to the astonished guards: “Open the gates! I am Drusas Achamian, a Mandate Schoolman, and this is Krijates Xinemus, the Marshal of Attrempus … We have come to share your plight!”
“This city is both doomed and damned,” someone shouted down. “Who seeks entry to such a place? Who but madmen or traitors?”
Achamian paused before answering, struck by the bleak conviction of the man’s tone. The Men of the Tusk, he realized, had lost all hope.
“Those who would attend their loved ones,” he said. “Even unto death.”
After a pause, the outer doors burst open and a troop of hollow-cheeked Tydonni seized them. At long last they found themselves inside the horror of Caraskand.
 
The temple-complex of Csokis, Esmenet had heard some say, was as old as the Great Ziggurat of Xijoser in Shigek. It occupied the heart of the Bowl, and from the limestone-paved reaches of its central campus, the Kalaul, all five of the surrounding heights could be seen. In the centre of the campus rose a great tree, an ancient eucalyptus that Men had called Umiaki since time immemorial. Esmenet wept in its cavernous shadow, staring up at the hanging forms of Kellhus and Serwë. The infant Moënghus dozed in her arms—oblivious.
“Please … Please wake up, Kellhus, please!”
Before roaring mobs, Incheiri Gotian had stripped Kellhus of his clothing, then whipped him with cedar branches until he’d bled from a hundred places. Afterward, they bound his bleeding body to Serwë’s nude corpse, ankle to ankle, wrist to wrist, face to face. Then they lashed the two of them, limbs outstretched, to a great bronze ring, which they hoisted and chained—upside down no less—to the winding girth of Umiaki’s lowest and mightiest limb. Esmenet had wailed her voice to nothing.

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