The warrior prophet, p.61
The Warrior Prophet, page 61
“Have you lost your wits, Scylvendi? It’s me! Me!”
“You murdered Serwë.”
And suddenly, the stranger became Coithus Saubon, dressed in a penitent’s shabby robes. What kind of devilry?
“Cnaiür,” the Galeoth Prince exclaimed, “who are you speaking to?”
“You …” the darkness cackled.
“Scylvendi?”
Cnaiür shook free of the man’s firm grip. “This is a fool’s vigil,” he grated.
He spat, then turned to fight his way free of the stink.
Esmi …
His heart leapt at the thought.
I’m coming, my sweet. I’m so very close!
It seemed he could smell the musky orange of her scent. It seemed he could hear her gasps hot against his cheek, feel her grind against his loins, desperately, as though to smother a perilous fire. It seemed he could see her throwing back her hair—a glimpse of sultry eyes and parted lips.
So very close!
The Tydonni—five Numaineiri knights and a motley of men-at-arms—escorted them through the dark streets. The Tydonni had been courteous enough, given the circumstances of their arrival, but until someone in authority vouched for the two of them, the knights refused to say much of anything. Achamian saw other Men of the Tusk on their route, most of them as wretched as the guards upon the gate. Whether sitting in windows, or leaning with others against the pilasters, they stared, their faces pale and blank, their eyes impossibly bright, as though housing the fires that wasted their frames.
Achamian had seen such looks before. On the Fields of Eleneöt, after the death of Anasûrimbor Celmomas. In great Trysë, watching the fall of the Shinoth Gate. On the Plains of Mengedda, awaiting the approach of dread Tsurumah. The look of horror and fury, of Men who could only exact and never overcome.
The look of Apocalypse.
Whenever Achamian matched their gazes, no threat or challenge was exchanged, only the thoughtless understanding of exhausted brothers. Something—demon or reptile—crawled into the skulls of those who endured the unendurable, and when it looked out their eyes, as it inevitably did, it could recognize itself in others. He belonged, Achamian realized. Not just here in Caraskand with those he loved, but here with the Holy War. He belonged with these men—even unto death.
We share the same doom.
Moving slowly for Xinemus’s sake, they trudged between two heights whose names Achamian didn’t know, and into an area one of the Numaineiri had called the Bowl—where Proyas and his household were supposedly quartered. They passed through a veritable labyrinth of streets and alleyways, and more than once the knights had to ask passersby for directions. Despite everything—the prospect of finding Kellhus and Esmenet, of seeing Proyas after so many bitter months—Achamian found himself pondering the carelessness of his declaration beneath Caraskand’s walls: “I am Drusas Achamian, a Mandate Schoolman …”
How long had it been since he’d last spoken those words aloud?
A Mandate Schoolman …
Was that what he was? And if so, why did he shy from the thought of contacting Atyersus? In all likelihood, they’d learned of his abduction. They were certain to have informants he knew nothing about among the Conriyan contingent at least. He imagined they assumed him dead.
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.
Bound to a circle, swinging from the limb of a dark tree.
Bound to Serwë.
Cold and lifeless against him.
Serwë.
Spinning in slow circles.
A fly crawled across her cheek, paused before a breathless nostril. He puffed air across her dead skin, and the fly was gone. Must keep her clean.
Her eyes half-open, papyrus-dry.
Serwë! Breathe girl, breathe! I command it!
I come before you. I come before!
Bound skin-to-skin to Serwë.
What have I … What? What?
A convulsion of some kind.
No … No! I must focus. I must assess …
Unblinking eyes, staring down black cheeks, out to the stars.
There’s no circumstance beyond … No circumstance beyond …
Logos.
I’m one of the Conditioned!
From his shins to his cheek, he could feel her, radiating a cold as deep as her bones.
Breathe! Breathe!
Dry … And so still! So impossibly still!
Father, please! Please make her breathe!
I … I can walk no farther.
Face so dark, mottled like something from the sea … How had she ever smiled?
Focus! What happens?
All is in disarray. And they’ve killed her. They’ve murdered my wife.
I gave her to them.
What did you say?
I gave her to them.
Why? Why would you do this?
For you …
For them.
Something dropped within him, and he tumbled into sleep, cold water rinsing bruised and broken skin.
Dreams followed. Dark tunnels, weary earth.
A ridge, curved like a sleeping woman’s hip, against the night sky.
And upon it two silhouettes, black against clouds of stars, impossibly bright.
The figure of a man seated, shoulders crouched like an ape, legs crossed like a priest.
And a tree with branches that swept up and out, forking across the bowl of the night.
And about the Nail of Heaven, the stars revolved, like clouds hurried across winter skies.
And Kellhus stared at the figure, stared at the tree, but he could not move. The firmament cycled, as though night after night passed without day.
Framed by the wheeling heavens, the figure spoke, a million throats in his throat, a million mouths in his mouth …
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
The silhouette stood, hands clasped like a monk, legs bent like a beast.
TELL ME …
Whole worlds wailed in terror.
The Warrior-Prophet awoke, his skin tingling against a dead woman’s cheek …
More convulsions.
Father! What happens to me?
Pang upon pang, wresting away his face, beating it into a stranger’s.
You weep.
The Zaudunyani on the Heights of the Bull immediately recognized him as a friend of the Warrior-Prophet, and Achamian found himself in a bright reception hall blinking at ivory plaques set in glossy black marble. After several moments, an Ainoni caste-noble called Gayamakri—one of the Nascenti, the others said—arrived and escorted him down dark halls. When Achamian asked him about the white-clad warriors he saw posted throughout the palace, the man yammered on about riots and the evil machinations of the Orthodox. But Achamian only had ears for his leaping heart …
At long last they paused before two grand doors—cherrywood beneath bronze fretting—and Achamian found himself thinking of jokes he could use to make her laugh …
“From a sorcerer’s tent to a caste-noble’s suite … Hmm.”
He could almost hear her laughter, almost see her eyes, wanton with love and devilry.
“So what will it be the next time I die? The Andiamine Heights?”
“She likely sleeps,” Gayamakri said apologetically. “Things have been especially hard on her.”
Jokes … What could he be thinking? She would need him, fiercely if what Proyas had said was true. Serwë dead and Kellhus dying. The Holy War starving … She would need him to hold her. How he would hold her!
Without warning Gayamakri whirled, clutched his hands. “Please!” he hissed. “You must save him! You must!” The man fell to his knees, held him with white-knuckled fervour. “You were his teacher!”
“I-I’ll do what I can,” Achamian stammered. “On that I give you my word.”
Tears branched across the man’s cheeks into his beard. He pressed his forehead to Achamian’s hands. “Thank you! Thank you!”
At a loss for words, Achamian pulled the Nascenti to his feet. The man fussed with his yellow and white robes, pathetically, as though just remembering a lifetime obsession with jnan.
“You’ll remember?” he gasped.
“Of course,” Achamian replied. “But first I must confer with Esmenet. Alone … Do you understand?”
Gayamakri nodded. He backed away three steps, then turned and fled down the hall.
He stood before the tall doors, breathing.
Esmi.
He would hold her while she sobbed. He would speak his every thought, tell her what she’d meant to him through his captivity. He would tell her that he, a Mandate Schoolman, would take her as his wife—his wife! And her eyes would weep wonder … He almost laughed with joy.
At last!
Rather than knocking, he pressed through the doors the way a husband might. Gloom and the scent of vanilla and balsam greeted him. Only six scattered candles illuminated the suite, which was broad with vaulted ceilings and decked with a luxurious array of carpets, screens, and hangings. Set upon a raised dais, a great pentagonal bed dominated the room’s heart, its sheets and blankets knotted as though by passion. To the left, the panelled walls opened onto what looked like a private garden. Outside the sky was bright with stars.
