The Warrior Prophet

by R. Scott Bakker

  … who pinched the knife from his hand as though he were a child, clasped his throat with one hand and lifted him from the ground, like a gasping dog.

  The pocked grounds gradually quieted as more and more turned their horrified eyes to the Warrior-Prophet and his thrashing burden—until shortly only the would-be assassin could be heard, gagging. Serwë’s skin pimpled in dread. Why do they do this? Why do they dare his wrath?

  Kellhus tossed the man to the ground, where he lay inert, a heap of slack limbs.

  “What is it that you fear?” the Warrior-Prophet asked. His tone was both plaintive and imperious—not the overbearing manner of a King certain of his sanction, but the despotic voice of Truth.

  Gotian shouldered his way passed the interceding onlookers. “The wrath of the God,” he cried, “who punishes us for harbouring an abomination!”

  “No.” His flashing eyes found them from among the masses: Saubon, Proyas, Conphas, and the others. “You fear that as my power waxes, yours will wane. You do what you do not in the name of the God, but in the name of avarice. You wouldn’t tolerate even the God to possess your Holy War. And yet, in each of your hearts there is an itch, an anguished question that I alone can see: What if he truly is the Prophet? What doom awaits us then?”

  “SILENCE!” Conphas roared, spittle flying from his contorted lips.

  “And you, Conphas? What is it that you hide?”

  “His words are spears!” Conphas cried to the others. “His very voice is an outrage!”

  “But I ask only your question: What if you are wrong?”

  Even Conphas was dumbstruck by the force of these words. It was as though the Warrior-Prophet had made this demand in the God’s own voice.

  “You turn to fury in the absence of certainty,” he continued sadly. “I only ask you this: What moves your soul? What moves you to condemn me? Is it indeed the God? The God strides with certainty, with glory, through the hearts of men! Does the God so stride through you? Does the God so stride through you?”

  Silence. The poignant hush of dread, as though they were a congregation of debauched children suddenly confronted by the rebuke of their godlike father. Serwë felt tears flood her cheeks.

  They see! They at last see!

  But then a Shrial Knight, the one named Sarcellus, whose face alone remained pious and devoid of hesitation, answered the Warrior-Prophet in a loud, clear voice.

  “‘All things both sacred and vile,’” the Knight-Commander said, quoting the Tusk, “‘speak to the hearts of Men, and they are bewildered, and holding out their hands to darkness, they name it light.’”

  The Warrior-Prophet stared at him sharply, and quoted in turn: “‘Hearken Truth, for it strides fiercely among you, and will not be denied.’”

  Possessed of beatific calm, Sarcellus answered: “‘Fear him, for he is the deceiver, the Lie made Flesh, come among you to foul the waters of your heart.’”

  And the Warrior-Prophet smiled sadly. “Lie made flesh, Sarcellus?” Serwë watched his eyes search the crowds, then settle on the nearby Scylvendi. “Lie made flesh,” he repeated, staring into the fiend’s embattled face. “The hunt need not end … Remember this when you recall the secret of battle. You still command the ears of the Great.”

  “False Prophet,” Sarcellus continued. “Prince of nothing.”

  As if these words had been a sign, the Shrial Knights rushed the Hundred Pillars, and there was the clash of fierce arms. Someone shrieked, and one of the Knights fell to his knees, grasping in his left hand the gushing stump where his right hand should have been. Another shriek, and then yet another, and then the starving mobs, as though sobered from a drunken stupor by the sight of blood, surged forward.

  Serwë screamed, clawed at the Warrior-Prophet’s white sleeve, grasped her baby with fierce desperation. This isn’t happening …

  But it was hopeless. After several moments of howling butchery, the Shrial Knights were upon them. With nightmarish horror she watched the Warrior-Prophet catch a blade in his palms, break it, and then touch the neck of his assailant. The man crumpled. Another he caught by the arm, which suddenly went limp as sackcloth, and then drove his fist through his face, as though the man’s head were a melon.

  Somewhere impossibly far away, she heard Gotian roar at his men, thunder at them to stop.

  She saw a manic-faced Knight rush her, sword raised to the sun, but then he was on the ground, fumbling with a fountain of blood that had bloomed from his side, and then a rough arm was about her, tiger-striped by scars and impossibly strong.

  The Scylvendi? The Scylvendi had saved her?

  At last bridled by their Grandmaster, the Shrial Knights relented, and stood back. They were lean and wolfish beneath their hauberks. The Tusks they bore on their stained and tattered surcoats looked threadbare and wicked.

  It seemed the whole world had erupted in a chorus of howling throats.

  Gotian stepped from the sweaty thunder beyond his men, and after glancing a dark moment at Cnaiür, he turned to the Warrior-Prophet. His once aristocratic face looked haggard and bitter, the look of a man who had been harrowed by a hateful world.

  “Yield, Anasûrimbor Kellhus,” he said hoarsely. “You will be scourged according to Scripture.”

  Serwë thrashed against the plainsman until he released her. He stared at her with savage horror, and she felt only hate—bone-snapping hate. She stumbled to Kellhus’s side, and buried her face and her child against his robes.

  “Yield!” she sobbed. “My lord and master you must yield! Do not die in this place! You must not die!”

  She could feel her Prophet’s tender eyes upon her, his divine embrace encompass her. She looked up into his face and saw love in his shining, god-remote eyes. The love of the God for her! For Serwë, first wife and lover of the Warrior-Prophet. For the girl who was nothing …

  Glittering tears branched across her cheeks. “I love you!” she cried. “I love you and you cannot die!”

  She looked down at the squalling babe between them. “Our son!” she sobbed. “Our son needs the God!”

  She felt rough hands pull her back, and an ache such as she’d never suffered as they pulled her from his embrace. My heart! They tear me from my heart!

  “He’s the God!” she shrieked. “Can’t you see? He’s the God!”

  She struggled against the man who held her, but he was too strong. “The God!”

  The man who held her spoke: “According to Scripture?” It was Sarcellus.

  “According to Scripture,” the Grandmaster replied, but there was now pity in his voice.

  “But she has a newborn child!” another cried—the Scylvendi … What did he mean? She looked to him, but he was a dark shadow against the congregation of warlike men, spliced by tears and sunlight.

  “It matters not,” Gotian replied, his voice hardening with mad resolve.

  “My child!” Was there desperation, pain in the Scylvendi’s voice?

  No … not your child. Kellhus? What happened?

  “Then take it.” Curt, as though seeking to snuff further mortification.

  Someone pulled her wailing son from her arms. Another heart gone. Another ache.

  No … Moënghus? What’s happening?

  Serwë shrieked, until it seemed her eyes must shimmer into flame, her face crumble into dust.

  The flash of sunlight across a knife. Sarcellus’s knife. Sounds. Celebratory and horrified.

  Serwë felt her life spill across her breasts. She worked her lips to speak to him, that godlike man so near, to say something final, but there was no sound, no breath. She raised her hands and beads of dark wine fell from her outstretched fingers …

  My Prophet, my love, how could this be?

  I know not, sweet Serwë …

  And as sky and the howling faces beneath darkened, she remembered his words, once spoken.

  “You are innocence, sweet Serwë, the one heart I need not teach …”

  Last flare of sunlight, drow
sy, as though glimpsed by a child stirring from dreams beneath an airy tree.

  Innocence, Serwë.

  The limb-vaulted canopy, growing darker, warm-woollen like a shroud. No more sun.

  You are the mercy you seek.

  But my baby, my—

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CAR ASKAND

  For Men, no circle is ever closed. We walk ever in spirals.

  —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

  Bring he who has spoken prophecy to the judgement of the priests, and if his prophecy is judged true, acclaim him, for he is clean, and if his prophecy is judged false, bind him to the corpse of his wife, and hang him one cubit above the earth, for he is unclean, an anathema unto the Gods.

  —WARRANTS 7:48, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK

  Late Winter, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand

  It was as though someone had struck the back of his knees with a staff. Eleäzaras stumbled forward, but was steadied by the strong arms of Lord Chinjosa, Count-Palatine of Antanamera.

  No … No.

  “Do you know what this means?” Chinjosa hissed.

  Eleäzaras pushed the Palatine away and took two more drunken steps toward Chepheramunni’s body. The gloom of his sickroom was alleviated by a cluster of candles at the head of his bed. The bed itself was lavish, set between four marble columns that braced the low vaults of the ceiling. But it reeked of feces, blood, and pestilence.

  Chepheramunni’s head lay beneath the congregated candles, but his face …

  It was nowhere to be seen.

  Where his face should have been lay what resembled an overturned spider, its legs clutched in death about its abdomen. What had been Chepheramunni’s face lay unspooled across the knuckles and shins of the steepled limbs. Eleäzaras saw familiar fragments: a lone nostril, the haired ridge of an eyebrow. Beneath he glimpsed lidless eyes and the shine of human teeth, bared and lipless.

  And just as that fool Skalateas had claimed, nowhere could he sense the bruise of sorcery.

  Chepheramunni—a Cishaurim skin-spy.

  Impossible.

  The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires coughed, blinked back uncharacteristic tears. This was too much. The very air seemed nightmarish with mad implication. The ground tipped beneath his feet. Once again, he felt Chinjosa steady him.

  “Grandmaster! What does this mean?”

  That we’re doomed. That I’ve led my School to its destruction.

  A string of catastrophes. The disastrous losses at the battle of Anwurat. General Setpanares killed. Fifteen sorcerers of rank dead between the desert and the plague. And the disaster at Iothiah, which had claimed the lives of two others. The Holy War besieged and starving.

  And now this … To find their hated enemy here, standing with him upon the summit. How much did the Cishaurim know?

  “We’re doomed,” Eleäzaras muttered.

  “No, Grandmaster,” Chinjosa replied, his own deep voice still tight with horror.

  Eleäzaras turned to him. Chinjosa was a large, burly man geared for war in his ring-mail hauberk, over which he wore an open Kianene coat of red silk. The white cosmetics made his strong-featured face stark against his black, square-cut beard. Chinjosa had proven himself indomitable in battle, an able commander, and in Iyokus’s absence, a shrewd adviser.

  “We would be doomed had this abomination led us into battle. Perhaps the Gods have favoured us with their afflictions.”

  Eleäzaras stared numbly into Chinjosa’s face, struck by a further terrifying thought. “You are who you are, Chinjosa?”

  The Palatine of Antanamera, the province that had so often proven itself the spine of High Ainon, looked at him sternly. “It is me, Grandmaster.”

  Eleäzaras studied the caste-noble, and it seemed as though the man’s simple, warlike strength pulled him back from the brink of despair. Chinjosa was right. This wasn’t yet another catastrophe; it was a … blessing of a sort. But if Chepheramunni could be replaced … There must be others.

  “No one is to know of this, Chinjosa. No one.”

  The Palatine nodded in the dim light.

  If only that Mandate ingrate had broken!

  “Remove its head,” Eleäzaras said, his voice terse with growing outrage, “then throw the carcass onto the pyre.”

  Achamian and Xinemus walked the ways of twilight, between light and dark, where only shadows are known. There was no food in this place, no life-giving water, and their bodies, which they carried across their backs the way one might carry a corpse, suffered horribly.

  The twilight way. The shadow way. From the port city of Joktha to Caraskand.

  When they passed near the camps of the enemy, they could feel the Cishaurim’s plucked eyes—brilliant, pure, like a lamplight before a silvered mirror—search for them from beyond the horizon. Many times Achamian felt that otherworldly light throw shadows from their shadows. Many times Achamian thought they were doomed. But always those eyes turned away their inhuman scrutiny, either deceived or … Achamian could not say why.

  Gaining the walls, they revealed themselves beneath a small postern gate. It was night, and torches glittered between the battlements above. With Xinemus slumped against him, Achamian called to the astonished guards: “Open the gates! I am Drusas Achamian, a Mandate Schoolman, and this is Krijates Xinemus, the Marshal of Attrempus … We have come to share your plight!”

  “This city is both doomed and damned,” someone shouted down. “Who seeks entry to such a place? Who but madmen or traitors?”

  Achamian paused before answering, struck by the bleak conviction of the man’s tone. The Men of the Tusk, he realized, had lost all hope.

  “Those who would attend their loved ones,” he said. “Even unto death.”

  After a pause, the outer doors burst open and a troop of hollow-cheeked Tydonni seized them. At long last they found themselves inside the horror of Caraskand.

  The temple-complex of Csokis, Esmenet had heard some say, was as old as the Great Ziggurat of Xijoser in Shigek. It occupied the heart of the Bowl, and from the limestone-paved reaches of its central campus, the Kalaul, all five of the surrounding heights could be seen. In the centre of the campus rose a great tree, an ancient eucalyptus that Men had called Umiaki since time immemorial. Esmenet wept in its cavernous shadow, staring up at the hanging forms of Kellhus and Serwë. The infant Moënghus dozed in her arms—oblivious.

  “Please … Please wake up, Kellhus, please!”

  Before roaring mobs, Incheiri Gotian had stripped Kellhus of his clothing, then whipped him with cedar branches until he’d bled from a hundred places. Afterward, they bound his bleeding body to Serwë’s nude corpse, ankle to ankle, wrist to wrist, face to face. Then they lashed the two of them, limbs outstretched, to a great bronze ring, which they hoisted and chained—upside down no less—to the winding girth of Umiaki’s lowest and mightiest limb. Esmenet had wailed her voice to nothing.

  Now they spun in slow circles, their golden hair mingling in the breeze, their arms and legs sweeping out like those of dancers. Esmenet glimpsed ashen breasts crushed against a shining ribcage, armpit hair twisted into horns, then Serwë’s slender back rolled into view, almost mannish because of the deep line of her spine. She glimpsed her sex, bared between outspread legs, pressed against the confusion of Kellhus’s genitalia …

  Serwë … Her face blackening as the blood settled, her limbs and torso carved in grey marble, as perfect in form as any artifice. And Kellhus … His face sheened in sweat, his muscular back gleaming white between lines of angry red. His eyes swollen shut.

  “But you said!” Esmenet wailed. “You said Truth can’t die!”

  Serwë dead. Kellhus dying. No matter how long she looked, no matter how deep her reason, no matter how shrill her threats …

  Around and around, the dying and the dead. A mad pendulum.

  Holding Moënghus close, Esmenet curled across the waxy mat of leaves. They smelled bitter where her body bruised them.
>
  “Remember when you recall the secret of battle …”

  The Inrithi fell silent as he passed, their eyes following him as they followed kings. Cnaiür knew well the effect his presence worked on other men. Even beneath starred skies, he needed no gold, no herald or banner, to announce the fact of his station. He wore his glory on the skin of his arms. He was Cnaiür urs Skiötha, breaker-of-horses-and-men; others need only look to fear him.

  “The hunt need not end …”

  Shut up! Shut up!

  The Kalaul, the broad central campus of Csokis, teemed with piteous and despicable humanity. Along the terminus of the campus, Inrithi crowded the monumental steps of temples that looked, to Cnaiür’s eyes, as ancient as any he’d seen in Shigek or Nansur. Others skulked beneath the pillared facades of dormitories and half-ruined cloisters. Across the outskirts, Inrithi sat upon mats and muttered to one another. Some even tended small fires, burning aromatic resins and woods—oblations, no doubt, for their Warrior-Prophet. The crowds thickened as he neared the great tree in the Kalaul’s heart. He saw men wearing only shirts, their hindquarters smeared with shit. He saw others whose stomachs seemed pinned to their spines. He encountered one bare-chested fool who leapt up and down shaking cupped hands over his head like a rattle. When Cnaiür shouldered the imbecile aside, something like pebbles scattered across the paving stones. He heard the madman wailing about teeth in his wake.

  “… the secret of battle …”

  Lies! More lies!

  Heedless of the threats and curses that greeted his passage, Cnaiür continued battling forward, pressing through what seemed a malodorous sea of heads, elbows, and shoulders. He paused only when he could clearly view the mighty tree that men called Umiaki. Like an immense, upturned root, it rose black and leafless into the night sky, shrouding its precincts in impenetrable darkness.