“Where’s Gotian?” Proyas demanded of the others.
“Perhaps,” Ikurei Conphas said with droll sarcasm, “the Grandmaster learned it was a sorcerer you’d summoned us to hear. Shrial Knights, I fear, tend to be rather Shrial …”
Proyas called out to Sarcellus, who sat on the lowest tier, clad ankle to wrist in the white Shrial vestments he typically wore to Council. Bowing low to the Great Names, the Knight-Commander professed ignorance as to his Grandmaster’s whereabouts. Cnaiür looked down at his right forearm while he spoke, not so much listening to as memorizing the hateful timbre of the man’s voice. He watched the veins and scars ripple as he clenched and unclenched his fist.
When he blinked, he saw the knife gashing Serwë’s throat, the shining, spilling red …
Cnaiür scarcely heard the procedural arguments that followed: something regarding the legalities of continuing without the Holy Shriah’s representative. Instead, he watched Sarcellus. Ignoring the Great Names and their debate, the dog was engrossed in counsel with some other Shrial Knight. The spidery network of red lines still marred his sensuous face, though much fainter than when Cnaiür had last seen the man with Proyas and Conphas. His expression appeared calm, but his large brown eyes seemed troubled and distant, as though he pondered matters that rendered this spectacle irrelevant.
What was it the Dûnyain had said?
Lie made flesh.
Cnaiür was hungry, very hungry—he hadn’t eaten a true meal for several days now—and the gnawing in his belly lent a curious edge to everything he witnessed, as though his soul no longer had the luxury of fat thoughts and fat impressions. The taste of his horse’s blood was fresh upon his lips. For a mad moment, he found himself wondering what Sarcellus’s blood would taste like. Would it taste like lies?
Did lies have a taste?
Everything since Serwë’s murder seemed unclear, and no matter how hard Cnaiür tried, he could not separate his days from his nights. Everything overflowed, spilled into everything else. Everything had been fouled—fouled! And the Dûnyain wouldn’t shut up!
And then this morning, for no reason whatsoever, he’d simply understood. He’d remembered the secret of battle … I told him! I showed him the secret!
And the cryptic words that Kellhus had spoken on the ruined heights of the Citadel became plain as lead.
The hunt need not end!
He understood the Dûnyain’s plan—or part of it … If only Proyas would have listened!
Suddenly the shouting about the table trailed, as did the rumbling along the tiers. An astonished hush fell across the ancient chamber, and Cnaiür saw the sorcerer, Achamian, standing at Proyas’s side, glaring at the others with the grim fearlessness of an exhausted man.
“Since my presence so offends you,” he said in a loud clear voice, “I will not mince words. You have all made a ghastly mistake, a mistake which must be undone, for the sake of the Holy War, and for the sake of the World.” He paused to appraise their scowling faces. “You must free Anasûrimbor Kellhus.”
Cries of outrage and reproach exploded from those about the table and those along the tiers alike. Cnaiür watched, rivetted to his seat, to his martial posture. He did not, it seemed, need to speak to Proyas after all.
“LISTEN to him!” the Conriyan Prince screeched over the warring voices. Astonished by the savagery of this outburst, the entire room seemed to catch its breath. But Cnaiür was already breathless.
He seeks to free him!
But did this mean they also knew the Dûnyain’s plan?
In the Councils of the Holy War, Proyas had always played the sober foil for the excessive passions of the other Great Names. To hear the man scream in this way was a dismaying thing. The other Great Names fell silent, like children chastised not by their father but by what they’d made their father do.
“This is no travesty,” Proyas continued. “This is no joke meant to gall or offend. More, far more, than our lives depend on what decision we make here today. I ask you to decide with me, as does any man with arguments to make. But I demand—I demand!—that you listen before making that decision! And this demand, I think, is no real demand at all, since listening without bias, without bigotry, is simply what all wise men do.”
Cnaiür glanced across the chamber, noted that Sarcellus watched the drama as intently as any of the others. He even angrily waved at his retinue to fall silent.
Standing before the great Inrithi lords, the sorcerer looked haggard and impoverished in his soiled gear, and he appeared hesitant, as though only now realizing how far he’d strayed from his element. But with his girth and unbroken health, he looked a king in the trappings of a beggar. The Men of the Tusk, on the other hand, looked like wraiths decked in the trappings of kings.
“You’ve asked,” Achamian called out, “why the God punishes the Holy War. What cancer pollutes us? What disease of spirit has stirred the God’s wrath against us? But there are many cancers. For the faithful, Schoolmen such as myself are one such cancer. But the Shriah himself has sanctioned our presence among you. So you looked elsewhere, and found the man many call the ‘Warrior-Prophet,’ and you asked yourself, ‘What if this man is false? Would that not be enough for the God’s anger to burn against us? A False Prophet?’” He paused, and Cnaiür could see that he swallowed behind pursed lips. “I haven’t come to tell you whether Prince Kellhus is truly a Prophet, nor even whether he’s a prince of anything at all. I’ve come, rather, to warn you of a different cancer … One that you’ve overlooked, though indeed some of you know of its presence. There are spies among us, my lords …”—a collective murmur momentarily filled the chamber—“abominations that wear false faces of skin.”
The sorcerer bent beneath the table, hoisted a fouled sack of some kind. In a single motion, he unfurled it across the table. Something like silvery eels about a blackened cabbage rolled onto the polished surface, came to rest against an impossible reflection. A severed head?
Lie made flesh …
A cacophony of exclamations reverberated beneath the chamber’s dome.
“—Deceit! Blasphemous deceit!—”
“—is madness! We cannot—”
“—but what could it—”
Surrounded by astonished cries and brandished fists, Cnaiür watched Sarcellus stand, then press his way through the clamour toward the exit. Once again, Cnaiür glimpsed the inflamed lines that marred the Knight-Commander’s face … Suddenly he realized he’d seen the pattern before … But where? Where?
Anwurat … Serwë bloodied and screaming. Kellhus naked, his groin smeared red, his face jerking open like fingers about a coal … A Kellhus who was not Kellhus.
Overcome by a trembling, wolfish hunger, Cnaiür stood and hurried to follow. At last he fathomed everything the Dûnyain had said to him the day he was denounced by the Great Names—the day of Serwë’s death. The memory of Kellhus’s voice pierced the thunder of the assembled Inrithi …
Lie made flesh.
A name.
Sarcellus’s name.
Sinerses fell to his knees just beyond the raised threshold of the entryway, then pressed his head to the faux-carpet carved into the stone. The Kianene, like most other peoples, considered certain thresholds sacred, but rather than anoint them on the appropriate days as did the Ainoni, they adorned them with elaborately carved renditions of reed-woven rugs. It was, Hanamanu Eleäzaras had decided, a worthy custom. The passage from place to place, he thought, should be marked in stone. Notice needed to be served.
“Grandmaster!” Sinerses gasped, throwing back his head. “I bear word from Lord Chinjosa!”
Eleäzaras had expected the man, but not his agitation. His skin crawling, he looked to his secretaries and ordered them from the room with a vague wave. Like most men of power in Caraskand, Eleäzaras had found himself very interested in the specifics of his dwindling supplies.
Everything it seemed, had conspired against him these past months. Caraskand’s slow starvation had
reached such a pitch that even sorcerers of rank went hungry—the most desperate had started boiling the leather binding and vellum pages of those texts that had survived the desert. The most glorious School in the Three Seas had been reduced to eating their books! The Scarlet Spires suffered with the rest of the Holy War, so much so that they now discussed meeting with the Great Names and declaring that henceforth the Scarlet Spires would war openly with the Inrithi—something that had been unthinkable mere weeks ago.
Wagers beget wagers, each typically more desperate than the last. In order to preserve his first wager, Eleäzaras now must make a second, one that would expose the Scarlet Spires to the deadly Trinkets of the Padirajah’s Thesji Bowmen, who’d so decimated the Imperial Saik, the Emperor’s own School, during the Jihads. And this, he knew, could very well weaken the Scarlet Spires beyond any hope of overcoming the Cishaurim.
Chorae! Accursed things. The Tears of the God cared nothing for those who brandished them, Inrithi or Fanim, so long as they weren’t sorcerers. Apparently one didn’t need to interpret the God correctly to wield Him.
Wager upon wager. Desperation upon desperation. The situation had become so dire, things had been stretched so tight, that any news, Eleäzaras realized, could break the back of his School. The more pinched the note, the more the string could snap.
Even the words of this slave-soldier kneeling at his feet could signal their doom.
Eleäzaras fought for his breath. “What have you learned, Captain?”
“Proyas has brought the Mandate Schoolman to the Council,” the man said.
Eleäzaras felt his skin pimple. Ever since hearing of their mission’s destruction in Iothiah, he’d found himself dreading the Mandati’s return …
“You mean Drusas Achamian?”
He’s come to exact vengeance.
“Yes, Grandmaster. He’s—”
“Has he come alone? Are there any others?” Please, please … Achamian on his own, they could easily manage. A corps of Mandate sorcerers, however, could prove ruinous. Too many had died already.
No more! We can afford to lose no more!
“No. He seems to be alone, but—”
“Does he bring charges against us? Does he malign our exalted School?”
“He speaks of skin-spies, Grandmaster! Skin-spies!”
Eleäzaras stared uncomprehending.
“He says they walk among us,” Sinerses continued. “He says they’re everywhere! He even brought one of their heads in a sack—so hideous, Master! That such a thing—but-but I forget myself! Lord Chinjosa himself sent me … He seeks instruction. The Mandate sorcerer is demanding the Great Names free the Warrior-Prophet …”
Prince Kellhus? Eleäzaras blinked, still struggling to make sense of the man’s blather …
Yes! Yes! His friend! They were friends before … The Mandate fiend was his teacher.
“Free?” Eleäzaras managed to say with some semblance of reserve. “Wh-what are his grounds?”
Sinerses’s eyes bulged from his half-starved face. “The skin-spies … He claims this Warrior-Prophet is the only one who can see them.”
The Warrior-Prophet. Since marching from the desert, they’d watched the man with growing trepidation—especially when it became apparent how many of their Javreh were secretly taking the Whelming and becoming Zaudunyani. When Ikurei Conphas had come to him promising to destroy the man, Eleäzaras had commanded Chinjosa to support the Exalt-General in all ways. Though he still fretted over the possibility of war between the Orthodox and the Zaudunyani, he’d thought the matter of Anasûrimbor Kellhus’s fate, at least, had been sealed.
“What do you mean?”
“He argues that since only this Prophet can see them, he must be released so that the Holy War might be cleansed. Only this way, he claims, will the God turn his anger from us.”
As an old master at jnan, Eleäzaras was loath to allow his true passions to surface in the presence of his slaves, but these past days … had been very hard. The face he showed Sinerses was bewildered—he seemed an old man who’d grown very afraid of the world.
“Muster as many men as you can,” he said distantly. “Immediately!”
Sinerses fled.
Spies … Everywhere spies! And if he couldn’t find them … If he couldn’t find them …
The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires would speak to this Warrior-Prophet—to this holy man who could see what was hidden in their midst. Throughout his life, Eleäzaras, a sorcerer who could peer into the world’s smokiest recesses, had wondered what it was the Holy thought they saw. Now he knew.
Malice.
It hungered, the thing called Sarcellus. For blood. For fucking things living and dead. But more than anything it hungered for consummation. All of it, from its anus to the sham it called its soul, was bent to the ends of its creators. Everything was twisted to the promise of climax, to the jet of hot salt.
But the Architects had been shrewd, so heartlessly astute, when they laid its foundations. So few things—the rarest of circumstances!—could deliver that release. Killing the woman, the Dûnyain’s wife, had been such a moment. The mere recollection was enough to make its phallus arch against its breeches, gasp like a fish …
And now that the Mandate sorcerer—accursed Chigra!—had returned seeking to deliver the Dûnyain … The promise! The fury! It had known instantly what it must do. As it strode from the Sapatishah’s Palace, the air swam with its yearning, the sun shimmered with its hate.
Although subtle beyond reason, the thing called Sarcellus walked a far simpler world than that walked by men. There was no war of competing passions, no need for discipline or denial. It lusted only to execute the will of its authors. In appeasing its hunger, it appeased the good.
So it had been forged. Such was the cunning of its manufacture.
The Warrior-Prophet must die. There were no interfering passions, no fear, no remorse, no competing lusts. It would kill Anasûrimbor Kellhus before he could be saved, and in so doing …
Find ecstasy.
Cnaiür need only see the route Sarcellus took down the Kneeling Heights to know where the dog was headed. The man rode into the Bowl, which meant he rode to the temple-complex where Gotian and the Shrial Knights were stationed—and where the Dûnyain and Serwë hung from black-limbed Umiaki.
Cnaiür spat, then hollered for his horse.
By the time he clattered free of the outer campus, he could no longer find the man. He barrelled downward, through the welter of structures that crowded the slopes below the Sapatishah’s Palace. Despite his mount’s perilous condition, he whipped it to a gallop. They raced past spiked garden walls, along abandoned shop fronts, and beneath looming tenements, turned only where the streets seemed to descend. Csokis, he remembered, lay near the bottom of the Bowl.
The very air seemed to buzz with omens.
Over and over, like a shard of glass in his stomach, images of Kellhus cycled through his thoughts. It seemed he could feel the man’s hand clamped about his neck, holding him, impossibly, over the precipice in the Hethanta Mountains. For a panicked moment, he even found it difficult to breathe, to swallow. The sensation passed only when he ran his fingertips along the clotted gash about his throat—his most recent swazond.
How? How can he afflict me so?
But then that was Moënghus’s lesson. The Dûnyain made disciples of all men, whether they revered him or no. One need only breathe.
Even my hate! Cnaiür thought. Even my hate he uses to his advantage!
Though his heart rankled at this, it rankled far more at the thought of losing Moënghus. Kellhus had spoken true those long months past in the Utemot camp: his heart had only one quarry, and it could not be fed on surrogates. He was bound to the Dûnyain as the Dûnyain was bound to Serwë’s corpse—bound by the cutting ropes of an unconquerable hate.
Any shame. Any indignity. He would bear any injury, commit any atrocity, to whet his vengeance. He would see the whole world burn before he w
ould surrender his hate. Hate! That was the obsessive heart of his strength. Not his blade. Not his frame. His neck-breaking, wife-striking, shield-cracking hate! Hatred had secured him the White Yaksh. Hatred had banded his body with the Holy Scars. Hatred had preserved him from the Dûnyain when they crossed the Steppe. Hatred had inured him to the claims these outlanders made on his heart.
Hatred, and hatred alone, had kept him sane.
Of course the Dûnyain had known this.
After Moënghus, Cnaiür had fled to the codes of the People, thinking they could preserve his heart. Having been cheated of them, they’d seemed all the more precious, akin to water in times of great thirst. For years he’d whipped himself down the tracks followed by his tribesmen—whipped himself bloody! To be a man, the memorialists said, was to take and not to be taken, to enslave and not to be enslaved. So he would be first among warriors, the most violent of all men! For this was the most paramount of the Unwritten Laws: a man—a true man!—conquered, and did not suffer himself to be used.
Hence the torment of his pact with Kellhus. All this time Cnaiür had jealously guarded his heart and soul, spitting upon the fiend’s every word, never thinking that the man could rule him by manipulating the circumstances about him. The Dûnyain had unmanned him no differently than he had these Inrithi fools.
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