Conphas regarded the man thoughtfully, troubled for some reason.
“No doubt you’re right.”
Martemus fixed him with a bland stare. “Will you tell me what this is about? Why summon the Great and Lesser Names secretly?”
The Exalt-General turned to the black, rain-curtained hills of Enathpaneah. “To save the Holy War, of course.”
“I thought we cared only for the Empire.”
Once again Conphas scrutinized his subordinate, trying to decipher the man more than the remark. Since the debacle with Prince Kellhus, he continuously found himself wanting to suspect the General of treachery. He begrudged Martemus much for what had happened in Shigek. But not, strangely enough, his company.
“The Empire and the Holy War travel the same road, Martemus.” Though soon—he found himself thinking, they would part ways. It would be so very tragic …
First Caraskand, then Prince Kellhus. The Holy War must wait. Order must be observed in all things.
Martemus had not so much as blinked. “And if—”
“Come,” Conphas interrupted. “Time to tease the lions.”
The Exalt-General had instructed his attendants—after the desert he’d been forced to enlist soldiers to do the work of slaves—to take the Inrithi caste-nobles to a large indoor riding room adjacent to the stables. Conphas and Martemus found them spread in clots throughout the airy gloom, warming themselves over the orange glow of coal braziers, muttering in the low voices of sodden men—some fifty or sixty of them all told. For an instant, no one noticed their arrival, and Conphas stood motionless beneath the arched entranceway, studying them, from their eyes, which seemed desert bright in the grey light, to the straw clinging to their wet boots.
How much, he idly wondered, would the Padirajah pay for this room?
The voices trailed as more and more men noticed his presence.
“Where’s the Anasûrimbor?” Palatine Gaidekki called out, his look as sharp and as cynical as always.
Conphas grinned. “Oh, he’s here, Palatine. In theme if not in body.”
“More than Prince Kellhus is missing,” Earl Gothyelk said. “So is Saubon, Athjeäri … Proyas is sick, of course, but I see none of Kellhus’s more ardent defenders here …”
“A felicitous coincidence, I am sure …”
“I thought this was about Caraskand,” Palatine Uranyanka said.
“But of course! Caraskand resists us. We’re here to ask why.”
“So why does she resist us?” Gotian asked, his tone contemptuous.
Not for the first time Conphas realized that they despised him—almost to a man. All men hate their betters.
He opened his arms and walked into their midst. “Why?” he called out, glaring at them, challenging them. “This is the question, isn’t it? Why do the rains keep falling, rotting our feet, our tents, our hearts? Why does the hemoplexy strike us down indiscriminately? Why do so many of us die thrashing in our own bowel?” He laughed as though in astonishment. “And all this after the desert! As if the Carathay weren’t woe enough! So why? Need we ask old Cumor to consult his omen-texts?”
“No,” Gotian said tightly. “It is plain. The anger of the God burns against us.”
Conphas inwardly smiled. Sarcellus had insisted the so-called Warrior-Prophet would be dead within days. But whether he succeeded or not—and Conphas suspected not—they would need allies following the attempt. No one knew precisely how many “Zaudunyani” Prince Kellhus commanded, but they numbered in the tens of thousands at least … The more the Men of the Tusk suffered, it seemed, the more they turned to the fiend.
But then, as the saying went, no dog so loved its master as when it was beaten.
Conphas glared at the assembled lords, pausing in the best oratorical fashion. “Who could disagree? The anger of the God does burn against us. And well it should …”
He swept his gaze across them.
“Given that we harbour and abet a False Prophet.”
Howls erupted from among them, more in protest than in assent. But Conphas had expected as much. At this juncture, the important thing was to get these fools talking. Their bigotries would do the rest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CAR ASKAND
And We will give over all of them, slain, to the Children of Eänna; you shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire. You shall bathe your feet in the blood of the wicked.
—TRIBES 21:13, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
Winter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand
Coithus Saubon bound through the rain, skidded across a section of slop, leapt a small ravine, and climbed the far side. He raised his face to the grey sky and laughed.
It’s mine! By the Gods it will be mine!
Realizing that this moment demanded a certain modicum of jnan, composure at the very least, he reduced his gait, walking briskly through the clusters of ad hoc shelters. When finally he spied Proyas’s pavilion near a copse of rain-dreary sycamores, he hastened toward it.
King! Yes I shall be King!
The Galeoth Prince halted before the pavilion, puzzled by the absence of guards. Proyas was somewhat soft-hearted with his men—perhaps he’d bid them stay within, out of the fucking rain. All around, muddy ground sizzled with waters. The turf was moated with flooded ruts and puddles. The rain drummed across the sagging canvas before him.
King of Caraskand!
“Proyas!” he shouted through the ambient roar. He could feel the rain at long last soak through the heavy felt beneath his hauberk. It felt like a warm kiss against his skin. “Proyas! Blast you man, I need to talk! I know you’re in there!”
At length he heard a muffled voice cursing from within. When the flap was at last pulled aside, Saubon was taken aback. Proyas stood before him, thin, haggard, a dark wool blanket wrapped about his shivering frame.
“They said you’d recovered,” Saubon said, embarrassed.
“Of course I’m recovered, you idiot. I stand.”
“Where are your guards? Your physician?”
A gravelly cough wracked the ailing Prince. He cleared his throat, blew strings of sputum from his mouth. “Sent them all away,” he said, wiping his lip with a sleeve. “Needed to sleep,” he added, raising a pained brow.
Saubon roared with laughter, almost grabbed the man in his mailed arms. “You won’t be able to sleep now, my pious friend!”
“Saubon. Prince. Please, to the point if you will. I’m grievously sick.”
“I’ve come to ask a question, Proyas … One question only.”
“Ask it then.”
Saubon suddenly calmed, became very serious.
“If I deliver Caraskand, will you support my bid to be its King?”
“What do you mean ‘deliver’?”
“I mean throw open its gates to the Holy War,” the Galeoth Prince replied, fixing him with a penetrating, blue-eyed stare.
Proyas’s whole bearing seemed transformed. The pallor fell from his face. His dark eyes became lucid and attentive. “You’re serious about this.”
Saubon cackled like a greedy old man. “Never have I been so serious.”
The Conriyan Prince scrutinized him for several moments, as though gauging the alternatives.
“I like not this game you—”
“Just answer the question, damn you! Will you support my bid to be crowned King of Caraskand?”
Proyas was silent for a moment, but then slowly nodded. “Yes … You deliver Caraskand, and I assure you, you’ll be its King.”
Saubon raised his face and his arms to the menacing sky and howled out his battle cry. The rains plummeted upon him, rinsed him in soothing cold, fell between his lips and teeth and tasted of honey. He’d tumbled in the breakers of circumstance, so violently that mere months ago he’d thought he would die. Then he’d met Kellhus, the Warrior-Prophet, the man who’d set him onto the path toward his own heart, and he’d survived calamities that could break ten lesser men. And now this, the
lifelong moment come at last. It seemed a giddy, impossible thing.
It seemed a gift.
Rain, so heartbreakingly sweet after Khemema. Beads pattered against his forehead, cheeks, and closed eyes. He shook water from his matted hair.
King … I will be King at long last.
“Where,” Proyas asked, “have all these hard silences come from?”
Cnaiür regarded him from the pavilion’s gloomy heart. The Conriyan Prince, he realized, hadn’t been idle during his convalescence. He’d been thinking.
“I don’t understand,” Cnaiür said.
“But you do, Scylvendi … Something happened to you at Anwurat. I need to know what.”
Proyas was still sick—grievously so, it appeared. He sat bundled beneath wool blankets in a camp chair, his normally hale face drawn and pale. In any other man, Cnaiür would have found such weakness disgusting, but Proyas wasn’t any other man. Over the months the young prince had come to command something troubling within him, a respect not fit for a fellow Scylvendi, let alone an outlander. Even sick he seemed regal.
He’s just another Inrithi dog!
“Nothing happened at Anwurat,” Cnaiür said.
“What do you mean, nothing? Why did you run? Why did you disappear?”
Cnaiür scowled. What was he supposed to say?
That he went mad?
He’d spent many sleepless nights trying to wring sense from Anwurat. He could remember the battle slipping from his grasp. He could remember murdering a Kellhus who wasn’t Kellhus. He could remember sitting on the strand, watching the Meneanor hammer the shore with fists of foaming white. He could remember a thousand different things, but they all seemed stolen, like stories told by a childhood friend.
Cnaiür had lived the greater part of his life with madness. He heard the way his brothers spoke, he understood how they thought, but despite endless recriminations, despite years of roaring shame, he couldn’t make those words and thoughts his own. His was a fractious and mutinous soul. Always one thought, one hunger, too many! But no matter how far his soul wandered from the tracks of the proper, he’d always borne witness to its treachery—he’d always known the measure of his depravity. His confusion had been that of one who watches the madness of another. How? he would cry. How could these thoughts be mine?
He had always owned his madness.
But at Anwurat, that had changed. The watcher within had collapsed, and for the first time his madness had owned him. For weeks he’d been little more than a corpse bound to a maddened horse. How his soul had galloped!
“What does it matter to you, my comings and goings?” Cnaiür fairly cried. He hooked his thumbs in his iron-plated girdle. “I am not your client.”
Proyas’s expression darkened. “No … But you stand high among my advisers.” He looked up, his eyes hesitant. “Especially since Xinemus …”
Cnaiür grimaced. “You make too mu—”
“You saved me in the desert,” Proyas said.
Cnaiür quashed the sudden yearning that filled him. For some reason, he missed the desert—far more so than the Steppe. What was it? Was it the anonymity of footsteps, the impossibility of leaving track or trail? Was it respect? The Carathay had killed far more than he … Or had his heart recognized itself in her desolation?
So many cursed questions! Shut up! Shut—
“Of course I saved you,” Cnaiür said. “What prestige I hold, remember, I hold through you.” Almost instantly he regretted the remark. He had meant it as a dismissal, but it had sounded like an admission.
For a moment, Proyas looked as though he might cry out in frustration. He lowered his face instead, studied the mats beneath his bare white feet. When he looked up, his expression was at once plaintive and challenging.
“Did you know that Conphas recently called a secret council to discuss Kellhus?”
Cnaiür shook his head. “No.”
Proyas was watching him very closely.
“So you and Kellhus still don’t speak.”
“No.” Cnaiür blinked, glimpsed an image of the Dûnyain, his face cracking open as he screamed. A memory? When had it happened?
“And why’s that, Scylvendi?”
Cnaiür struggled to hide his sneer. “Because of the woman.”
“You mean Serwë?”
He could remember Serwë shrieking, covered in blood. Had that happened at Anwurat as well? Had it happened at all?
She was my mistake.
What had possessed him to take her that day he and Kellhus had killed the Munuäti? What had possessed him to take a woman—a woman!—on the trail? Was it her beauty? She was a prize—there could be no doubt about that. Lesser chieftains would have flaunted her at every opportunity, would have entertained offers just to see how many cattle she could fetch, all the while knowing she was beyond bartering.
But still, it was Moënghus he hunted! Moënghus!
No. The answer was plain: he’d taken her because of Kellhus. Hadn’t he?
She was my proof.
Before finding her, he’d spent weeks alone with the man—weeks alone with a Dûnyain. Now, after watching the inhuman fiend devour heart after Inrithi heart, it scarcely seemed possible he’d survived. The bottomless scrutiny. The narcotic voice. The demonic truths … How could he not take Serwë after enduring such an ordeal? Besides beautiful, she was simple, honest, passionate—everything Kellhus wasn’t. He warred against a spider. How could he not crave the company of flies?
Yes … That was it! He’d taken her as a landmark, as a reminder of what was human. He should’ve known she’d become a battleground instead.
He used her to drive me mad!
“You must pardon my scepticism,” Proyas was saying. “Many men are strange when it comes to women … But you?”
Cnaiür bristled. What was he saying?
Proyas looked down to the sheafs on the table next to him, their corners curling in the wet. He absently tried to straighten one with thumb and forefinger. “All this madness with Kellhus has set me thinking,” he said. “Especially about you. By the thousands they flock to him, they abase themselves before him. By the thousands … And yet you, the one man who knows him best, can’t abide his company. Why is that, Cnaiür?”
“As I said, because of the woman. He stole my prize.”
“You loved her?”
Men, the memorialists said, often strike their sons to bruise their fathers. But then why did they strike their wives? Their lovers?
Why had he beaten Serwë? To bruise Kellhus? To injure a Dûnyain?
Where Kellhus caressed, Cnaiür had slapped. Where Kellhus whispered, Cnaiür had screamed. The more the Dûnyain compelled love, the more he exacted terror, and without any true understanding of what he did. At the time, she had simply deserved his fury. Wayward bitch! he would think. How could you? How could you?
Did he love her? Could he?
Perhaps in a world without Moënghus …
Cnaiür spat across the Prince’s matted floor. “I owned her! She was mine!”
“And this is all?” Proyas asked. “This is the sum of your grudge against Kellhus?”
The sum of his grudge … Cnaiür nearly cackled aloud. There was no sum for what he felt.
“I find your silence unnerving,” Proyas said.
Cnaiür spat once again. “And I find your interrogation offensive. You presume too much, Proyas.”
The drawn yet handsome face flinched. “Perhaps,” the Prince said, sighing deeply. “Perhaps not … Nevertheless, Cnaiür, I would have your answer. I must know the truth!”
The truth? What would these dogs make of the truth? How would Proyas react?
He eats you, and you know it not. And when he’s done, there will be only bones …
“And what truth would that be?” Cnaiür snapped. “Whether Kellhus is truly an Inrithi Prophet? You think that is a question I can answer?”
Proyas had leaned forward in agitation; he now collapsed back in his chair.
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“No,” he gasped, drawing a hand to his forehead. “I merely hoped that …” He trailed, shaking his head wearily. “But none of this is to the point. I called you here to discuss other matters.”
Cnaiür watched the man closely, found himself troubled by the evasiveness of his eyes.
Conphas has approached him … They plan to move against Kellhus.
Why should he continue lying for the Dûnyain? He no longer believed the man would honour their pact …
So just what did he believe?
“Saubon has come to me,” Proyas continued. “He’s exchanged missives—and now even hostages—with a Kianene officer named Kepfet ab Tanaj. Apparently, Kepfet and his fellows hate Imbeyan so fiercely they’re prepared to sacrifice anything just to see him dead.”
“Caraskand,” Cnaiür said. “He offers Caraskand.”
“A section of her walls, to be more precise. To the west, near a small postern gate.”
“So you want my counsel? Even after Anwurat?”
Proyas shook his head. “I want more than your counsel, Scylvendi. You’re always saying we Inrithi carve up honour the way others carve up stags, and this is no different. We have suffered much. Whoever breaks Caraskand will be immortalized …”
“And you are too sick.”
The Conriyan Prince snorted. “First you spit at my feet, now you call out my infirmities … Sometimes I wonder whether you earned those scars murdering manners instead of men!”
Cnaiür felt like spitting, but refrained.
“I earned these scars murdering fools.”
Proyas started laughing but finished hacking phlegm from his lungs. He leaned back and blew strings of mucus into a spittoon set in the shadows behind his chair. Its brass rim gleamed in the uncertain light.
“Why me?” Cnaiür asked. “Why not Gaidekki or Ingiaban?”
Proyas groaned and shuddered beneath his blankets. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and clutched his head. Clearing his throat, he raised his face to Cnaiür. Two tears, relics of his coughing fit, fell across his cheek.
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