The Warrior Prophet (97 page)

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

So why not contact them? The threat of the Second Apocalypse hadn’t dwindled during his captivity. And the Dreams, they wracked him as they ever did …

Because I’m no longer one of them.

For all the ferocity with which he’d defended the Gnosis—to the point of sacrificing Xinemus!—he’d forsaken the Mandate. He’d forsaken them, he realized, even before his abduction by the Scarlet Spires. He’d forsaken them for Kellhus …

I was going to teach him the Gnosis.

Even to think this stole his breath, reminded him that so much more than Esmenet awaited him within these walls. The old mysteries surrounding Maithanet. The threat of the Consult and their skin-spies. The promise and enigma of Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The premonitions of the Second Apocalypse!

But even as his skin pimpled with dread, something balked within him, something old and obdurate, as callous as crocodiles.
Let the mysteries rot!
he found himself thinking.
Let the world crash about us!
For he was Drusas Achamian, a man like any other, and he would have his lover, his wife—his Esmenet. Like so many things in the aftermath of Iothiah, the rest seemed childish, like tropes in an over-read book.

I know you live. I know it!

At long last, their small troop came to a pause before the faceless walls of some compound. Xinemus at his side, Achamian watched while two of the Numaineiri knights fell to arguing with the guards posted before the compound’s gate. He turned at the sound of his friend’s voice.

“Akka,” Xinemus said, scowling in his queer, eyeless fashion. “When we walked as shadows …”

The Marshal hesitated, and for a moment Achamian feared an onslaught of recriminations. Before Iothiah, the notion of using sorcery to slip past the enemy would have been unthinkable for Xinemus. And yet he’d acquiesced with scarcely a complaint when Achamian had suggested the possibility in Joktha. Did he repent? Or had he, like Achamian, been gouged of his previous cares as well?

“I’m blind,” Xinemus continued. “Blind as blind could be, Akka! And yet
I saw them
… The Cishaurim. I saw them
seeing!
”

Achamian pursed his lips, troubled by the fear-to-hope tone of the Marshal’s voice.

“You
did
see,” he said carefully, “in a manner … There’s many ways of seeing. And all of us possess eyes that never breach skin. Men are wrong to think nothing lies between blindness and sight.”

“And the Cishaurim?” Xinemus pressed. “Is that … Is that how they—”

“The Cishaurim are masters of this interval. They blind themselves, they say, to better see the World Between. According to some, it’s the key to their metaphysics.”

“So …” Xinemus began, unable to contain the passion in his voice.

“Not now, Zin,” Achamian said, watching the most senior of the Tydonni knights, a choleric thane called Anmergal, stride toward them from the compound gate. “Some other time …”

In broken but workable Sheyic, Anmergal stated that Proyas’s people had agreed to take them—despite their better judgement. “No one steals
into
Caraskand,” he explained. “Only out.” Then, heedless of any reply they might make, he barged past them, yelling out to his troops. At the same time, men-at-arms, dressed as Kianene but bearing the Black Eagle of House Nersei on their shields, appeared from the darkness. Within moments, Achamian and Xinemus found themselves ushered into the compound.

They were greeted by an emaciated steward dressed in the threadbare yet lustrous white and black livery of Proyas’s House. Soldiers in tow, the man led them down a carpeted hallway. They passed a Kianene woman—a slave, no doubt—kneeling in the doorway of an adjoining chamber, and Achamian found himself shocked, not by her obvious terror, but by the fact that she was the first Kianene he’d seen since entering Caraskand …

No wonder the city seemed a tomb.

They rounded a corner and found themselves in a tall antechamber. Set between two corpulent pillars—Nilnameshi by the look of them—a door of greening bronze lay partially ajar. The steward ducked his head in. Nodding to someone unseen, he pressed the door open and, after a nervous glance at Xinemus, gestured for them to follow. Achamian cursed the knot in his gut …

Then found himself staring at Nersei Proyas.

Though more haggard and far thinner—his linen tunic hung from shoulders like sword pommels—the Crown Prince of Conriya still looked much the same. The shock of curly black hair, which his mother had both cursed and adored. The trim beard etching a jaw that, though not as youthful as it once was, remained set in the old way. The nimble brow. And of course the lucid brown eyes, which were deep enough, it seemed, to contain any admixture of passion, no matter how contradictory.

“What is it?” Xinemus asked. “What happens?”

“Proyas …” Achamian said. He cleared his throat. “It’s Proyas, Zin.”

The Conriyan Prince stared at Xinemus, his face expressionless. He advanced two steps from a lavishly worked table in what must have been his bedchamber. As though from a stupor, he said, “What happened?”

Achamian said nothing, struck dumb by a rush of unexpected passions. He felt his face grow hot with fury. Xinemus stood beside him, absolutely motionless.

“Speak up,” Proyas commanded, his voice ringing with desperation. “What happened?”

“The Scarlet Spires took his eyes,” Achamian said evenly. “As a … As a way to—”

Without warning, the young Prince flew to Xinemus, clutched him in a wild embrace, not cheek to cheek as between men, but as a child might, with his forehead pressed against the Marshal’s collar. He shuddered with sobs. Xinemus clutched the back of his head with thick fingers, crushed his beard against his scalp.

A moment of fierce silence passed.

“Zin,”
Proyas hissed. “Please forgive me! Please,
I beg of you!”

“Shhh … It’s enough to feel your embrace … To hear your voice.”

“But Zin! Your eyes! Your eyes!”

“Shush, now … Akka will fix me. You’ll see.”

Achamian flinched at the words. Hope was never so poison as when it deluded loved ones.

Gasping, Proyas pressed his cheek against the Marshal’s shoulder. His glittering look found Achamian, and for a moment they gazed unblinking each at the other.

“You too, Old Teacher,” the young man croaked. “Can you find it in your heart to forgive?”

Though Achamian heard the words clearly, they seemed to reach him as though from a great distance, their speaker too distant to truly matter. No, he realized, he couldn’t forgive, not because his heart had hardened, but because it had receded. He saw the boy, Prosha, whom he’d once loved, but he saw a stranger as well, a man who walked questionable and competing paths. A man of faith.

A murderous fanatic.

How could he think these men were his brothers?

With his face as blank as he could manage, Achamian said, “I’m a teacher no longer.”

Proyas squeezed shut his eyes. They were hooded in the old way when he opened them. Whatever hardships the Holy War had endured, Proyas the Judge had survived.

“Where are they?” Achamian asked. The circles were so much clearer now. Aside from Xinemus, only Esmenet and Kellhus possessed any claim to his heart. In the whole world, only they mattered.

Proyas visibly stiffened, pressed himself from Xinemus’s breast. “Hasn’t anyone told you?”

“No one would tell us anything,” Xinemus said. “They feared we were spies.”

Achamian couldn’t breathe. “Esmenet?” he gasped.

The Prince swallowed, a stricken look upon his face.

“No … Esmenet is safe.” He ran a hand through his cropped hair, both anxious and ominous.

Somewhere, a wick sizzled in a guttering candle.

“And Kellhus?” Xinemus asked. “What about him?”

“You must understand. Much, very much, has happened.”

Xinemus pawed the air before him, as though needing to touch those he spoke to. “What are you saying, Proyas?”

“I’m saying Kellhus is dead.”

Of all Caraskand, only the great bazaar carried any memory of the Steppe, and even then it was only the bones of such a memory: its flatness purchased by masons, its openness enclosed by dark-windowed facades. No grasses grew between the paving stones.

“Swazond,”
he had said. “The man you have killed is gone from the world, Serwë. He exists only here, a scar upon your arm. It is the mark of his
absence,
of all the ways his soul will not move, and of all the acts he will not commit. A mark of the weight you now bear.”

And she had replied, “I don’t understand …”

Such a dear fool, that girl. So innocent.

Cnaiür lay against the ribbed belly of a dead horse, surrounded by ever-widening circles of Kianene dead—victims of the city’s glorious sack three weeks before.

“I will bear you,” he said to the blackness. And never, it seemed, had he uttered a mightier oath. “You will not want, so long as my back is strong.”

Traditional words, uttered by the groom as the memorialist braided his hair in marriage.

He raised the knife to his throat.