The Warrior Prophet (99 page)

Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Images boiled through his thoughts … Esmenet gasping beneath the hot plunge of Kellhus’s hips. The brushing of breathless lips. Her startled cry. Her climax. The two of them, naked and entwined beneath blankets, staring at the light of a single candle, and Kellhus asking:
“How did you bear that man? How did you ever bring yourself to lie with a sorcerer?”
“He fed me. He was a warm plump pillow with gold in his pockets … But he wasn’t you, my love. No one is you.”
His mouth was wrenched open by a soft inarticulate cry … How. Why.
Then savagery.
“I could
break
you, Kellhus. See you
burn! Burn
until your eyes burst!
Dog!
Treacherous dog! I’ll see you shriek until you gag on your own heart, until your limbs snap for agony! I can
do it!
I can burn
hosts
with my song! I can pack the anguish of a thousand men into your skin! With tongue and teeth,
I can peel you to nothing! Grind your corpse to chalk!
”
He began weeping. The dark world about him buzzed and burned.
“Damn you …” he gasped. He couldn’t breathe … Where was the air to breathe?
He rolled his head, like a boy whose anger had been stripped hollow by hurt … He beat an awkward fist against the dead leaves.
“Damn-you-damn-you-damn-you …”
He looked around numbly, and wiped at his face with a half-hearted sleeve. Sniffled and tasted the salt of tears in the back of his throat …
“You’ve made a whore of her, Kellhus … You’ve made a whore of my Esmi …”
They swayed round in shadowy circles. The sound of laughter carried on the night wind. The dark tree seemed to exhale an endless, ambient breath.
“Achamian …”
Kellhus whispered.
The words winded him, struck him dumb with horror.
No … He’s not allowed to speak …
“He said you would come.”
Spoken from a dead woman’s cheek.
Kellhus stared as though from the surface of a coin, his dark eyes glittering, his face pressed against Serwë’s, whose head had drawn back in rigor, gaping mouth filled with dusty teeth. For a moment, it seemed that he lay spread-eagle across a mirror, and that Serwë was no more than his reflection.
Achamian shuddered.
What have they done to you?
Impossibly, the ring had ceased its ponderous revolutions.
“I see them, Achamian. They walk among us, hidden in ways you cannot see …”
The Consult.
His hackles stirred. Cold sweat set his skin afire.
“The No-God returns, Akka … I’ve seen him! He is as you said. Tsurumah. Mog-Pharau …”
“Lies!” Achamian cried. “Lies to spare you my wrath!”
“My Nascenti … Tell them to show you what lies in the garden.”
“What? What lies in the garden?”
But the shining eyes were closed.
A grievous howl echoed across the Kalaul, chilling blood and drawing men with torches to the blackness beneath Umiaki. The ring continued its endless roll.
 
Dawn light streamed over the balcony and through the gauze, etching the bedchamber in radiant surfaces and pockets of black shadow. Stirring in his bed, Proyas scowled at the light, raised an arm against it. For several heartbeats, he lay utterly still, trying to swallow away the pain at the back of his throat—the last residue of the hemoplexy. Then the shame and remorse of the previous evening came flooding back.
Achamian and Xinemus had returned. Akka and Zin … Both of them irrevocably transformed.
Because of me.
A cold morning breeze tossed through the sheers. Proyas huddled, hoarding whatever warmth his blankets offered. He tried to doze, but found himself fencing with worry and dismay instead. In his boyhood, he’d cherished the luxurious laziness of such mornings. He drifted through legends and fancies, dreaming of all the great things he was destined to accomplish. He studied the shadows thrown by the morning sun and wondered at the way they crept across the walls. On cold mornings like this one, he wrapped his blankets about him, savouring them the way the elderly savoured hot baths. The warmth had never stopped short of his bones as it did now.
Some time passed before Proyas realized someone watched him.
At first he simply blinked, too astonished to move or shout. Both the decor and the design of the compound were Nilnameshi. Aside from extravagantly detailed imagery, the chamber possessed low ceilings propped with fat and fluted columns imported, no doubt, from Invishi or Sappathurai. Almost invisible for the morning glare, a figure reclined against one of the columns flanking the balcony …
Proyas shot forward from the covers.
“Achamian?”
Several heartbeats passed before his eyes adjusted enough to recognize the man.
“What are you doing, Achamian? What do you want?”
“Esmenet,” the sorcerer said. “Kellhus has taken her as his wife … Did you know that?”
Proyas gaped at the Schoolman, robbed of his outrage by something in his voice: a queer kind of drunkenness, a recklessness, but born of loss instead of drink.
“I knew,” he admitted, squinting at Achamian’s figure. “But I thought that …” He trailed and swallowed. “Kellhus will soon be dead.”
He immediately felt a fool: it sounded like he offered compensation.
“Esmenet is lost to me,” Achamian said. The sorcerer’s expression was little more than a shadow against the glare, but somehow Proyas could see its exhausted resolve.
“But how could you say that? You don’t—”
“Where’s Xinemus?” the Schoolman interrupted.
Proyas raised his eyebrows, gestured with a leftward tilt of his head. “One wall over,” he said. “The next room.”
Achamian pursed his lips. “Did he tell you?”
“About his eyes?” Proyas looked to the outline of his feet beneath the vermilion covers. “No. I hadn’t the courage to ask. I assumed that the Spires …”
“Because of
me,
Proyas. They blinded him as a way to coerce me.”
The message was obvious.
It’s not your fault,
he was saying.
Proyas raised a hand as though to pinch more sleep from his eyes. He wiped away tears instead.
Damn you, Akka … I don’t need your protection!
“For the Gnosis?” he asked. “Was that what they wanted?”
Krijates Xinemus, a Marshal of Conriya, blinded for blasphemy’s sake.
“In part … They also thought I had information regarding the Cishaurim.”
“Cishaurim?”
Achamian snorted. “The Scarlet Spires are terrified, did you know that? Terrified of what they cannot see.”
“It stands to reason: all they do is hide. Eleäzaras still refuses to take the field, even though I’m told they’ve begun boiling their books out of hunger.”
“I doubt they stray far from their latrines,” Achamian said, the old twinkle surfacing through the exhaustion of his voice, “the rot they read.”
Proyas laughed, and an almost forgotten sense of comfort stole over him. This, he realized, was how they’d once talked, their cares and worries directed outward rather than at each other. But instead of taking heart at the realization, Proyas suffered only more dismay, understanding that what trust and camaraderie had once given them, only dread and exhaustion could now deliver.
A long silence passed between them, fuelled by the sudden collapse of their good humour. Proyas found his gaze wandering to the trains of priapic revellers, brown-skinned and half-nude, that marched across the painted walls, their arms filled with various bounty. With every passing heartbeat it seemed the silence buzzed louder.
Then Achamian said, “Kellhus cannot die.”
Proyas pursed his lips. “But of course,” he said numbly. “I say he must die, so
you
say he must live.” He glanced, not without nervousness, at his nearby work table. The parchment sat in plain view, its raised corners translucent in the sun: Maithanet’s letter.
“This has nothing to do with you, Proyas. I am past you.”
The tone as much as the words chilled Proyas to the pith.
“Then why are you here?”
“Because of all the Great Names, only you can understand.”
“Understand,” Proyas repeated, feeling the old impatience rekindle in his heart. “Understand what? No, let me guess … Only I can understand the significance of the name ‘Anasûrimbor.’ Only I can understand the peril—”
“Enough!” Achamian shouted. “Can’t you see that when you make light of these matters you
make light of me?
When have I ever scoffed at the Tusk? When have I ever mocked the Latter Prophet? When?”
Proyas caught his retort, which had been all the harsher for the truth of what Achamian said.
“Kellhus,” he said, “has already been judged.”
“Have care, Proyas. Remember King Shikol.”
For the Inrithi, the name “Shikol,” the Xerashi King who had condemned Inri Sejenus, was synonymous with hatred and tragic presumption. The thought that his own name might someday possess the same poison caused Proyas no small terror.
“Shikol was wrong … I am right!”
It all came down to Truth.
“I wonder,” Achamian said, “what Shikol would say …”
“What?” Proyas exclaimed. “So the great sceptic thinks a new prophet walks among us? Come, Akka … It’s too absurd!”
These are Conphas’s words
… Another unkind thought.
Achamian paused, but whether out of care or hesitation Proyas couldn’t tell.
“I’m not sure what he is … All I know is that he’s too important to die.”
Sitting rigid in his bed, Proyas peered against the sun, struggling to see his old teacher. Aside from his outline against the blue pillar, the most he could discern were the five lines of white that streaked the black of his beard. Proyas sighed loudly through his nostrils, looked down to his thumbs.
“I thought much the same not so long ago,” he admitted. “I worried that what Conphas and the others said was true, that he was the reason the anger of the God burned against us. But I’d shared too many cups with the man not to … not to realize he’s more than simply remarkable …
“But then …”
From nowhere, it seemed, a great cloud crawled before the sun, and a dim chill fell across the room. For the first time, Proyas could see his old teacher clearly: the haggard face, the forlorn eyes and meditative brow, the blue smock and woollen travel robes, soiled black about the knees …
So poor. Why did Achamian always look so poor?
“Then what?” the Schoolman asked, apparently unconcerned with his sudden visibility.
Proyas heaved another sigh, glanced once again at the parchment upon his table. Distant thunder rumbled in on the wind, which whisked through the black cedars below.
“Well,” he continued, “first there was the Scylvendi … His hatred of Kellhus. I thought to myself, ‘How could this man, this man who knows Kellhus better than any other, despise him so?’”
“Serwë,” Achamian said. “Kellhus once told me the barbarian loved Serwë.”
“Cnaiür said much the same when I first asked him … But there was something, something about his manner, that made me think there was more. He’s such a fierce and melancholy man. And complicated—very complicated.”
“His skin is too thin,” Achamian said. “But I suppose it scars well.”
A sour smirk was the most Proyas could afford. “There’s more to Cnaiür urs Skiötha than you know, Akka. Mark me. In some ways, he’s as extraordinary as Kellhus. Be thankful he’s our pet, and not the Padirajah’s.”
“Your point, Proyas?”
The Conriyan Prince frowned. “The point is that I questioned him about Kellhus again, shortly after we found ourselves besieged …”

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