The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  Cnaiür, Xinemus, and the other Conriyan caste-nobles comprising their party chased him all the way to Conphas’s headquarters, where the Exalt-General explained, in his infuriatingly glib way, that the morning of the day previous, Coithus Saubon had decided to make the most of Proyas’s absence. The Shrial Knights, of course, couldn’t lay hoof or boot in the tracks of another when it came to heathen land, and as for Gothyelk, Skaiyelt, and their barbaric kinsmen, how could they be expected to distinguish fools from wise men, what with all that hair in their eyes?

  “Didn’t you argue with them?” Proyas had cried. “Didn’t you reason?”

  “Saubon wasn’t interested in reason,” Conphas replied, speaking, as he always did, as though intellectually filing his nails. “He was listening to a louder voice—apparently.”

  “The God?” Proyas asked.

  Conphas laughed. “I was going to say ‘greed,’ but, yes, I suppose ‘the God’ will do. He said your friend, the Prince of Atrithau, had a vision …” He glanced at Cnaiür.

  “You mean Kellhus?” Proyas cried. “Kellhus told him to march?”

  “So the man said,” Conphas replied. Such is the madness of the world, his tone added, though his eyes suggested something far different.

  There was a moment of communal hesitation. Over the past weeks, the Dûnyain’s name had gathered much weight among the Inrithi, as though it were a rock they held at arm’s length. Cnaiür could see it in their faces: the look of beggars with gold sewn into their hems—or of drunkards with over-shy daughters … What, Cnaiür wondered, would happen when the rock became too heavy?

  Afterward, when Proyas confronted the Dûnyain at Xinemus’s camp, Cnaiür could only think, He makes mistakes!

  “What did you do?” Proyas asked the fiend, his voice quavering with rage.

  Everyone, Serwë, Dinchases, even that babbling sorcerer and his shrew whore, sat stunned about the evening fire. No one spoke to Kellhus that way … No one.

  Cnaiür almost cackled aloud.

  “What would you have me say?” the Dûnyain asked.

  “What happened?” Proyas cried.

  “Saubon came to us in the hills,” Achamian said quickly, “while you were in Tus—”

  “Silence!” the Prince cried, without so much as glancing at the Schoolman. “I have asked you—”

  “You’re not my better!” Kellhus thundered. All of them, Cnaiür included, jumped—and not merely in surprise. There was something in his tone. Something preternatural.

  The Dûnyain had leapt to his feet, and though a length away, somehow seemed to loom over the Conriyan Prince. Proyas actually stepped backward. He looked as though he had remembered something unspoken between them.

  “You’re my peer, Proyas. Do not presume to be more.”

  From where Cnaiür stood, the ochre walls and turrets of squat Asgilioch framed the head and shoulders of the two men. Kellhus, his trim beard and long hair shining gold in the evening sun, stood a full head taller than the swarthy Conriyan Prince, but both men emanated grace and potency in equal measure. Proyas had recovered his angry glare.

  “What I presume, Kellhus, is to be party to all decisions of moment regarding the Holy War.”

  “I made no decision. You know that. I told Saubon only …” For a fleeting moment, a strange, almost lunatic vulnerability animated his expression. His lips parted. He seemed to look through the Conriyan Prince.

  “Only what?”

  The Dûnyain’s eyes refocused, his stance hardened—everything about him … converged somehow, as though he were somehow more here than anyone else. As though he stood among ghosts.

  He speaks in hidden cues, Cnaiür reminded himself. He wars against all of us!

  “Only what I see,” Kellhus said.

  “And just what is it you see?” The words sounded forced.

  “Do you wish to know, Nersei Proyas? Do you really want me to tell you?”

  Now Proyas hesitated. His eyes flickered to those surrounding, fell upon Cnaiür for a heartbeat, no more. Without expression he said, “You’ve doomed us.” Then turning on his heel, he strode in the direction of his quarters.

  Afterward, in the stuffy confines of their pavilion, Cnaiür set upon the Dûnyain in Scylvendi, demanding to know what had really happened. Serwë huddled in her watchful little corner, like a puppy beaten by two masters.

  “I said what I said to secure our position,” Kellhus asserted, his voice passionless, bottomless—the way it always was when he affected to reveal his “true self.”

  “And this is how you secure our position? By alienating our patron? By sending half the Holy War to its destruction? Trust me, Dûnyain, I have fought the Fanim; this Holy War, this … this migration, or whatever it is, has precious little chance of overcoming them as it is—let alone conquering Shimeh! And you would cut it in half? By the Dead God, you do need me to teach you war, don’t you?”

  Kellhus, of course, was unmoved. “Alienating Proyas is to our advantage. He judges men harshly, holds all in suspicion. He opens himself only when he’s moved to regret. And he will regret. As for Saubon, I told him only what he wanted to hear. Every man yearns to hear their flattering delusions confirmed. Every man. This is why they support—willingly—so many parasitic castes, such as augurs, priests, memorial—”

  “Read my face, dog!” Cnaiür grated. “You will not convince me this is a success!”

  Pause. Shining eyes blinking, watching. The intimation of a horrifying scrutiny.

  “No,” Kellhus said, “I suppose not.”

  More lies.

  “I didn’t,” the monk continued, “anticipate the others—Gothyelk and Skaiyelt—would follow his lead. With just the Galeoth and the Shrial Knights, I deemed the risk acceptable. The Holy War could survive their loss, and given what you’ve said regarding the liabilities of unwieldy hosts, I though it might even profit. But without the Tydonni …”

  “Lies! You would have stopped them otherwise! You could have stopped them if you wished.”

  Kellhus shrugged. “Perhaps. But Saubon left us the very night he found us in the hills. He roused his men when he returned, and set out before dawn yesterday. Both Gothyelk and Skaiyelt had already followed him into the Southron Gates by the time we returned. It was too late.”

  “You believed him, didn’t you? You believed all that tripe about Skauras fleeing Gedea. You still believe!”

  “Saubon believed it. I merely think it probable.”

  “As you said,” Cnaiür snarled with as much spite as he could muster, “every man yearns to hear their flattering delusions confirmed.”

  Another pause.

  “First I require one Great Name,” Kellhus said, “then the others will follow. If Gedea falls, then Prince Coithus Saubon will turn to me before making any decision of moment. We need this Holy War, Scylvendi. I deemed it worth the risk.”

  Such a fool! Cnaiür regarded Kellhus, even though he knew his expression would betray nothing, and his own, everything. He considered lecturing him on the treacherous ways of the Fanim, who invariably used feints and false informants, and who invariably gulled fools like Coithus Saubon. But then he glimpsed Serwë glaring at him from her corner, her eyes brimming with hatred, accusation, and terror. This is always the way, something within him said—something exhausted.

  And suddenly he realized that he’d actually believed the Dûnyain, believed that he had made a mistake.

  And yet it was often like this: believing and not believing. It reminded him of listening to old Haurut, the Utemot memorialist who’d taught him his verses as a child. One moment Cnaiür would be sweeping across the Steppe with a hero like the great Uthgai, the next he would be staring at a broken old man, drunk on gishrut, stumbling on phrases a thousand years old. When one believed, one’s soul was moved. When one didn’t, everything else moved.

  “Not everything I say,” the Dûnyain said, “can be a lie, Scylvendi. So why do you insist on thinking I deceive you in all things?”
<
br />   “Because that way,” Cnaiür grated, “you deceive me in nothing.”

  Riding on the flank to avoid the dust, Cnaiür glanced at Proyas and his entourage of caste-nobles and servants. Despite the lustre of their armour and dress, they looked grim. They had negotiated the Southron Gates through the Unaras, and at long last they rode across heathen land, across Gedea. But their mood was neither jubilant nor assured. Two days ago, Proyas had sent several advance parties of horsemen to search for Saubon, the Galeoth Prince. This morning, outriders belonging to Lord Ingiaban had found one of those parties dead.

  Gedea, at least in the shadow of the Unaras, was a broken land, a jumble of gravel slopes and stunted promontories. Save for clutches of hardy cedars, the green of spring was growing tawny beneath the summer sun. The sky was a plate of turquoise, featureless, sere—so different from the cloudy depths of Nansur skies.

  Vultures and jackdaws screeched into the air at their approach.

  With a curse, Proyas reined to a halt. “So what does this mean?” he asked Cnaiür. “That Skauras has somehow positioned himself behind Saubon and the others? Have the Fanim encircled them?”

  Cnaiür raised a hand against the sun. “Perhaps …”

  The bodies had been stripped where they’d fallen: some sixty or seventy dead men, bloating in the hot sun, scattered like things dropped in flight. Without warning, Cnaiür spurred ahead, forcing the Prince and his entourage to gallop after him.

  “Sodhoras was my cousin,” Proyas snapped, reining to a violent halt beside him. “My father will be furious!”

  “Another cousin,” Lord Ingiaban said darkly. He referred to Calmemunis and the Vulgar Holy War.

  Cnaiür sniffed the air, contemplated the smell of rot. He’d almost forgotten what it was like: the scribbling flies, the swelling bellies, the eyes like painted cloth. He’d almost forgotten how holy.

  War … The very earth seemed to tingle.

  Proyas dismounted and knelt over one of the dead. He waved away flies with his gauntlets. Turning to Cnaiür, he asked, “How about you? Do you still believe him?” He looked away, as though embarrassed by the honesty of his tone.

  Him … Kellhus.

  “He …” Cnaiür paused, spat when he should have shrugged. “He sees things.”

  Proyas snorted. “Your manner does little to reassure me.” He stood, casting his shadow across the dead Conriyan, slapping the dust from the ornamental skirt he wore over his mail leggings. “This is always the way of it, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean, my Prince?” Xinemus asked.

  “We think things will be more glorious than they are, that they’ll unfold according to our hopes, our expectations …” He unstopped his waterskin, took too long a drink. “The Nansur actually have a word for it,” he continued. “We ‘idealize.’”

  Statements such as this, Cnaiür had decided, partially explained the awe and adoration Proyas roused in his men, including those who were names in their own right, such as Gaidekki and Ingiaban. The admixture of honesty and insight …

  Kellhus did much the same. Didn’t he?

  “So what do you think?” Proyas was asking. “What happened here?” He’d clambered back onto his horse.

  “Hard to tell,” Cnaiür replied, glancing once again over the dead.

  “Pfah,” Lord Gaidekki snorted. “Sodhoras was no fool. He was overwhelmed by numbers.”

  Cnaiür disagreed, but rather than dispute the man, he jerked his horse about and spurred toward the ridge. The soil was sandy, the turf shallow-rooted; his mount—a sleek, Conriyan black—stumbled several times before reaching the crest. Here he paused, leaning against his saddle’s cantle to relieve a vagrant pain in his back. Before him, the far side sloped gradually down, lending the entire ridge the appearance of a titanic shoulder blade. To the immediate north, the bald heights of the Unaras Spur gathered in the haze.

  Cnaiür followed the crest a short distance, studying the scuffed ground and counting the dead. Seventeen more, stripped like the others, their arms askew, their mouths teeming with flies. The sound of Proyas arguing with his Palatines wafted up from below.

  Proyas was no fool, but his fervour made him impatient. Despite hours of listening to Cnaiür describe the resources and methods of the Kianene, he as yet possessed no clear understanding of their foe. His countrymen, on the other hand, possessed no understanding whatsoever. And when men who knew little argued with men who knew nothing, tempers were certain to be thrown out of joint.

  Since the earliest days of the march, Cnaiür had harboured severe doubts regarding the Holy War and its churlish nobles. So far, nearly every measure he’d suggested in council had been either summarily rejected or openly scoffed at—the yapping fools!

  In so many ways, the Holy War was the antithesis of a Scylvendi horde. The People brooked few if any followers. No pampering slaves, no priests or augurs, and certainly no women, which could always be had when one ranged enemy country. They carried little baggage over what a warrior and his mount could bear, even on the longest campaigns. If they exhausted their amicut and could secure no forage, they either let blood from their mounts or went hungry. Their horses, though small, unbecoming, and relatively slow, were bred to the land, not to the stable. The horse he now rode—a gift from Proyas—not only required grain over and above fodder, but enough to feed three men!

  Madness.

  The only thing Cnaiür had not protested was the very thing the dog-eyed idiots ceaselessly clucked and fretted over: the breakup of the Holy War into separate contingents. What was it with these Inrithi? Did brothers bed their sisters? Did they beat their children about the head? The larger the host, the slower the march. The slower the march, the more supplies the host consumed. It was that simple! The problem wasn’t that the Holy War had divided. It simply had no choice: Gedea, by all accounts, was a lean country, scarcely cultivated and sparsely populated. The problem was that it had done so without planning, without advance intelligence of what to expect, without agreed-upon routes or secure communications.

  But how to make them understand? And understand they must: the Holy War’s survival depended on it. Everything depended on it …

  Cnaiür spat across the dust, listened to them bicker, watched them gesticulate.

  Murdering Anasûrimbor Moënghus was all that mattered. It was the weight that drew all lines plumb.

  Any indignity … Anything!

  “Lord Ingiaban,” Cnaiür called down, startling them into silence. “Ride back to the main column and return with at least a hundred of your men. The Fanim are fond of surprising those who come to dispense with the dead.”

  When none of the milling nobles moved, Cnaiür cursed and urged his horse back down the slope. Proyas scowled as he approached, but said nothing.

  He tests me.

  “I care not if you think me impertinent,” Cnaiür said. “I speak only of what must be done.”

  “I’ll go,” Xinemus offered, already drawing his horse around.

  “No,” Cnaiür said. “Lord Ingiaban goes.”

  Ingiaban grunted, ran fingers over the blue sparrows embroidered across his surcoat—the sign of his House. He glared at Cnaiür. “Of all the dogs who’ve dared piss on my leg,” he said, “you’re the first to aim higher than my knee.” Several guffaws broke from the others, and the Count-Palatine of Kethantei grinned bitterly. “But before I change my leggings, Scylvendi, please tell me why you choose to piss on me.”

  Cnaiür wasn’t amused. “Because your household is the closest. Because the life of your Prince is at stake.”

  The lantern-jawed Palatine paled.

  “Do as he bids!” Xinemus cried.

  “Watch yourself, Marshal,” Ingiaban snarled. “Playing benjuka with our Prince doesn’t make you my better.”

  “Which means, Zin,” Lord Gaidekki quipped, “that you must piss no higher than his waist.”

  Another burst of laughter. Ingiaban ruefully shook his head. He paused before riding off, dipp
ing his square-bearded chin to Scylvendi, but whether in conciliation or warning the Scylvendi couldn’t tell.

  An uncomfortable pause followed. The shadow of a vulture flickered across the group, and Proyas glanced skyward. “So, Cnaiür,” he said, blinking away the sun, “what happened here? Were they overwhelmed by numbers?”

  Cnaiür scowled. “They were outwitted, not outnumbered.”

  “How do you mean?” Proyas asked.

  “Your cousin was a fool. He was accustomed to riding with his men in file, as horsemen must when using a road. They wound into this depression and began climbing the slope, some three or four abreast. The Kianene waited for them above, holding their horses to the ground.”

  “They were ambushed …” Proyas raised a hand to better peer along the ridge line. “Do you think the heathen simply happened on them?”

  Cnaiür shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Since Sodhoras thought himself an outrider, he obviously saw no need to deploy scouts of his own. The Fanim are more canny. They could have tracked him for some time without his knowledge, judged that sooner or later he would come here …” He brought his horse about and pointed to the group of bloating dead who littered the centre of the ridge line. They looked oddly peaceful, like eunuchs snoozing in the sun after bathing. “But this is moot. The Fanim attacked when the first men crested the ridge, Sodhoras among them—”

  “How in hell,” Lord Gaidekki blurted, “could you know wheth—”

  “Because the horsemen below broke ranks to rush to their lord’s defence, only to find the Fanim arrayed along the entire ridge line. Though it looks harmless, that slope is treacherous. Sand and gravel. Many were slain by arrows at close range as their horses floundered. Those few who gained the summit caused the Fanim quite some grief—I saw far more blood than bodies up there—but were eventually overwhelmed. The rest, some twenty or so more sober but hopelessly courageous men, realized the futility of saving their lord, and pulled back—there—perhaps intending to draw the Fanim down and exact some revenge.”

  Cnaiür glanced at Gaidekki, daring the brash Palatine to contradict him. But the man studied the disposition of the dead, like the others.