The Exalt-General’s reply was little more than a whisper, but it resounded across every crook and span of the chamber. “No …”
Shame. Wutrim. Cnaiür had thought that his hatred of the Dûnyain was without measure, that it could be eclipsed by nothing, but the shame that filled this room, the bowel-loosening humiliation, knocked his rancour from him. For an instant he saw the Warrior-Prophet, not the Dûnyain, and he stood in awe of him. For an instant he found himself inside the man’s lies.
“Your Columns,” Kellhus continued, “will disarm. You will then decamp for Joktha, where you will await passage back to the Nansurium. You are no longer a Man of the Tusk, Ikurei Conphas. In truth, you never were.”
The Exalt-General blinked in astonishment, as though these words had offended his person and not those preceding. The man, Cnaiür realized, did suffer some defect of the soul, just as the Dûnyain had said.
“Why?” the Exalt-General asked, recovering the force of his old voice. “Why should I accede to these demands?”
Kellhus stood, approached the man. “Because I know,” he said, stepping from the dais. For some reason, leaving the illumination of the braziers did nothing to diminish his miraculous bearing. He wore all light to his advantage. “I know the Emperor has struck treaties with the heathen…I know that you plan to betray the Holy War before Shimeh is regained.”
Conphas shrank before his aspect, retreated until caught in the arms of the faithful. Cnaiür recognized several among them—Gaidekki, Tuthorsa, Semper—their eyes bright with something more than hatred. For some reason, they looked a thousand years old, ancient with certitude.
“Because,” Kellhus continued, looming over him, “if you fail to comply, I will have you flayed and hung from the gates.” The tenor of his voice was such that the word “flay” and the skinless images it conjured seemed to linger.
Conphas stared up in abject horror. His lower lip quivered, and his face broke into a soundless sob, only to stiffen, then break again. Cnaiür found himself clutching his breast. Why did his heart race so?
“Release him,” the Warrior-Prophet murmured, and the Exalt-General fled through the entranceway, shielding his face, waving his hands as though pelted with stones.
Again Cnaiür stood outside the Dûnyain’s machinations.
The accusations of treachery, he knew, were likely a contrivance, nothing more. What would the Emperor gain from abetting his ancestral enemies? Everything that had transpired, Cnaiür realized, had been premeditated. Everything. Every word, every look, every insight, had some function … But for what end? To make an example of Ikurei Conphas? To remove him? Why not simply cut his throat?
No. Of all the Great Names, only Ikurei Conphas, the far-famed Lion of Kiyuth, possessed the force of character to retain the loyalty of his men. Kellhus would brook no competitors, but neither would he risk what remained of the Holy War in internecine conflict. That alone had preserved the Exalt-General’s life.
Kellhus had withdrawn, and the Men of the Tusk stood and stretched on the tiers, calling, laughing, wondering. And once more Cnaiür found himself watching them with two sets of eyes. The Inrithi, he knew, would see themselves forged and reforged, their temper improved for the want of impurities. But he knew otherwise …
The dry season had not ended. Perhaps it never would.
The Dûnyain simply culled the wilful from his herd.
Struggling to remain stationary in the crush of bodies, Proyas scanned the milling crowds once again, searching for the Scylvendi. Only moments earlier the Warrior-Prophet had withdrawn to thunderous acclaim. Now the Lords of the Holy War rumbled amongst themselves, exchanging exclamations of hilarity and outrage. There was much to discuss: the Ikurei plot uncovered, the Nansur Columns cast out of the Holy War, the Exalt-General humiliated—debased …
“I wager the Imperial Loincloth warrants changing!” Gaidekki cried out from a nearby knot of Conriyan caste-nobles. Laughter boomed through the packed antechamber. It was both merciless and full-hearted—though not, Proyas noted, without strains of apprehension. The triumphal looks, the shrill declarations, the avid gestures and protestations, all spoke to the youth of their conversion. But there was something else as well, something Proyas could feel haunting the corners of his own aching face …
Fear.
Perhaps this was to be expected. As Ajencis was so fond of observing, habit ruled the souls of men. So long as the past governed the present, those habits could be depended on. But the past had been overturned, and now the Men of the Tusk found themselves stranded with judgements and assumptions they could no longer trust. They had learned that the metaphor cut both ways: to be reborn, Proyas had come to realize, one must murder who one was.
It seemed such a small price—ludicrously small—given what they had gained.
With the Scylvendi nowhere in sight, Proyas sorted the faces into those who had condemned Kellhus and those who had not. Many, like Ingiaban, stood quiet between outbursts, their eyes wide with contrition, their lips pinched in chagrin. But others, like Athjeäri, spoke with the easy bravado of the vindicated. Watching them, Proyas felt envy claw through him, forcing his eyes downward and away. Never, it seemed, had the need to undo so overwhelmed him. Not even with Achamian …
What had he been thinking? How could he, a man who had meticulously hammered his heart into the very shape of piety, have come so close to murdering the God’s own voice?
The thought still dizzied him, struck him nauseous with shame.
Conviction, no matter how narcotic its depth, simply did not make true. This was a hard lesson, made all the harder by its astounding conspicuousness. Despite the exhortations of kings and generals, despite the endless lays, belief unto death was cheap. After all, the Fanim threw themselves against the spears of their enemies as readily as the Inrithi. Someone had to be deluded. So what ensured that that someone was someone else? Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that was their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute?
And to make such obvious conceit the grounds of condemnation … of murder …
In all his life, Proyas had never wept so hard as he had at the Warrior-Prophet’s feet. For he, who had decried avarice in all its forms, had proven the most avaricious of all. He had coveted nothing so much as the truth, and since truth had so roundly eluded him, he had turned to his beliefs. How could he not when he’d spent a lifetime abasing himself before them, when they afforded him such luxury of judgement?
When they were so much who he was.
The promise of rebirth was at once the threat of murder, and Proyas, like so many others, had opted to kill rather than die.
“Hush,” the Warrior-Prophet had said. Mere hours had passed since Kellhus had been cut down from Umiaki. Blood still soaked the bandages about his wrists, forming black rings. “You need not weep, Proyas.”
“But I tried to kill you!”
A beatific smile, jarring given the obvious pain it contradicted. “All our acts turn upon what we assume to be true, Proyas, what we assume to know. The connection is so strong, so thoughtless, that when those things we need to be true are threatened, we try to make them true with our acts. We condemn the innocent to make them guilty. We raise the wicked to make them holy. Like the mother who continues nursing her dead babe, we act out our refusal.”
Kellhus had paused in the breathless way he so often did, as if communing with voices that others could almost hear. He raised his hand in a curious gesture—as though to ward away hard words. Proyas could still remember the blood smeared like ink into the whorls of his palm, dark against the gold that haloed his outstretched fingers.
“When we believe without ground or cause, Proyas, conviction is all we possess, and acts of conviction become our only demonstration. Our beliefs become our God, and we make sacrifices to appease them.”
And as simply as that, he had been absolved, as though
to be known was to be forgiven …
Without warning, the Scylvendi floated into view, towering above those crowded about the entrance to the audience chamber. Rather than a shirt, he sported a vest of coins netted in leather string—to let his wounds breathe, Proyas imagined. He wore the same iron-plated girdle as he had from the first, cinched over a kilt of black damask. His scarred arms were things of statuary, and Proyas noticed several flinch from them, as though the slaughter they signified might be contagious. Without exception, the Men of the Tusk shrank from his path, as dogs might before a lion or tiger.
There was something about the Scylvendi, Proyas knew, that sent panic muttering through the bones of even the most granite-hearted. It was more than his barbarous heritage, more than the feral power that seemed to emanate from every cord of his frame—more even than the air of brooding intelligence that lent such profundity to his look. There was a sense of void about Cnaiür urs Skiötha, an absence of constraint that suggested any brutality could be possible.
The most violent of men. That was what Kellhus had called him. And he had told Proyas to take care …
“Madness has claimed him.”
For not the first time, Proyas considered the puckered wound about the barbarian’s throat.
Heeding his gaze, Cnaiür soon hulked before him, his glacial eyes all the more striking for the black of his crazed mane. He nodded curtly when Proyas bid him follow. As Proyas turned, Xinemus caught his elbow, and the Conriyan Prince found himself leading both men through the red-glazed galleries of the Sapatishah’s Palace. No one said a word.
Pausing in the long shadows of the processional courtyard, he turned to the Scylvendi, resisted the urge to step outside the circuit of his reach.
“So … what did you think?”
“That Conphas will laugh himself to sleep,” Cnaiür snapped contemptuously. “But you did not summon me to sound my thoughts.”
“No.”
“Proyas?” Xinemus asked, as though only now realizing the impropriety of his presence. “I should leave you two …”
He came because there was nowhere else to go.
Cnaiür snorted.
The Scylvendi, Proyas imagined, had little use for the maimed. “No, Zin,” he said. “I trust you as no other.”
The barbarian scowled in sudden recognition. For an instant Proyas glimpsed something untoward in his eyes, an incestuous fury, as though the man berated himself for overlooking a mortal danger.
“He sent you,” Cnaiür said.
“He did.”
“Because of Conphas.”
“Yes … You’re to remain with Conphas in Joktha, while the Holy War continues to Shimeh.”
For a long time the Scylvendi said nothing, though his look and pose spoke of howling rage. The barbarian even trembled. At last, with unnerving calm, he said, “I am to be his nursemaid.”
Proyas breathed deep, frowned at the solicitations of several passersby. “No,” he replied, lowering his voice, “and yes …”
“What do you mean?”
“You are to kill him.”
The smell of blossoms in the dark.
“Await him here,” the attendant said, then without another word withdrew the way they had both come. A hinge pealed as the doors ground shut.
Iyokus peered across the grove, but the black beneath the trees confounded his eyes. Moonlight showered down in pale mockery of the sun, etching the flowering crowns. The blossoms were blue and black.
He was not alone. From the absences pitting his perception, Iyokus knew that some two dozen Chorae bowmen had been positioned throughout the porticoes surrounding the grove. Even now they watched him, strings drawn.
It was an understandable precaution, especially given recent events.
Iyokus could scarce credit what he had seen and heard this day. He had entertained many apprehensions over the course of his journey from Shigek. The harrowing tales of what the Holy War—and by extension, the Scarlet Spires—had endured had plagued him with premonitions of catastrophe. As the pilot had guided his ship into Joktha’s harbour five days before, he had braced himself for any number of disastrous revelations …
But surely not this. The Holy War yoked to the whims of a living prophet. The Consult made fact—the Consult!
And yet Iyokus had always been a meticulous man, long before the chanv had wrapped its cool and luxurious coils about his heart. Things, he understood, possessed their own intrinsic order. It would take days for him to learn the extraordinary particulars of their new circumstance, and even longer for him to grasp the implications. He would not, as had Eleäzaras apparently, despair before understanding. He would not break beneath their weight.
Such a waste. Eli had been a great man, an inspired Grandmaster—once … The other Rank-Principals would have to be consulted, and perhaps someone new elected … someone rational. But first he had to sound this so-called Warrior-Prophet. This man with a two-thousand-year-old name: Anasûrimbor.
For the first time, Iyokus noticed the great stone dolmens rearing into moonlight from the obscurity of trees, and for a moment he pondered the long-dead people who had raised them. Such remnants, he thought, were the metric of ages, the pilings of the present. They spoke of a time when no Caraskand had encompassed these hills, a time when his own ancestors had ranged the endless plains beyond the Great Kayarsus. To lay eyes upon such monuments, he knew, to truly see them, was to understand the terrifying dimensions of what had been forgotten.
Iyokus had always lamented the fact that for the Scarlet Spires the past was little more than a resource, something to be looted of knowledge and authority. For his brothers, ruins were quarries, nothing more. In their eagerness to claim superiority over the Mandate, they had even gone so far as to make a virtue out of forgetfulness. “The past cannot be bribed,” they would say, “and the future cannot be buried.”
This, he suspected, was about to change. The No-God. The Second Apocalypse … What if these things were real?
Iyokus reeled at the thought. Images blighted his soul’s eye: corpses bobbing down the River Sayut, Carythusal burning like some lurid scene from The Sagas, dragons descending on their hallowed Spires …
First things first, he reminded himself. Alacrity in thought. Patience in knowledge …
A breeze descended on the grove. It wheezed through the trees, combing thousands of petals into the air. For a moment they described the twists and eddies of various gusts, the way flotsam might reveal currents in water. Iyokus knew they should be beautiful. Then he sensed the Mark … another sorcerer approaching through the dark lanes between the apple trees.
Who? Iyokus resisted the urge to illuminate the courtyard, recalling the Chorae trained upon him. Peering, he discerned a shadowy silhouette striding between black boughs, glimpsed the brow and left cheek of a bearded face in white moonlight.
Yes. Another rumour transformed into mad fact: that the Mandate Schoolman now served as Prince Kellhus’s Vizier. That he taught him the Gnosis. There was no end to the absurdities, it seemed.
“Achamian,” he called out. How it must pain the man, he thought, having to treat with those who’d so wronged him. Iyokus had told Eleäzaras that nothing good would come of abducting the man. So many miscalculations! It was a miracle their School yet possessed the strength it did.
More shadow than man, Achamian paused some fifteen paces away, gazed at Iyokus through hunched tree limbs. His voice was hard. “If an eye offends thee, Iyokus …”
A bolt of terror struck the chanv addict. What was this? Eleäzaras’s drunken warning rang loud in his ears. “Beware the Mandate Schoolman …”
“Where is Prince Kellhus?”
The silhouette remained motionless. “Indisposed.”
“But I was told …” Iyokus trailed. His breath had grown cold and hard about his heart. Eleäzaras knew, he realized. He gave me to them … That was why he dra—
“You were deceived,” the Mandate Schoolman said.
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��What do y—”
“Do you remember what you felt that night in Iothiah? You must have heard me coming for you. You must have heard the others screaming, calling for your help.”
There had been nightmares.
“What is this?” the Master of Spies demanded. “What happens here?”
“He’s given you to me, Iyokus. The Warrior-Prophet. I asked for vengeance. I begged.”
Somehow Achamian had muttered something between these words, and his eyes and mouth flared incandescent.
“And he said yes.”
Iyokus stiffened. “You begged?”
The fire-coal eyes lowered in an unseen nod. Branches and blossoms were etched blood-red against the greater black. “Yes.”
“Then,” Iyokus said, “I shall not.”
There were rules for overmatched sorcerers, rules that Iyokus did not follow. There was no retreat from this place, not while his death lay pinched on bowstrings about him. He had been trapped.
The same as Achamian in the Sareotic Library.
A turret of translucent stone leapt into existence about him: his reflexive Wards. Then the air reverberated with his arcane mutter-song, a guttural counterpoint to the more keening cadences of Achamian.
To either side of the Mandate Schoolman, two thunderheads unfolded from nothingness, each black-hearted, each tilted to the axis of the man’s position—the Houlari Twin-Tempests. A flare of lightning. Gossamer threads of incandescence danced in spasms about Achamian’s spherical Wards. Shadows swung like maces about the feet of the surrounding colonnades. Momentary light gleamed across the Chorae poised within the portico. Carved white as salt behind his abstract defences, Achamian continued chanting.
Iyokus sang faster, yoked his desperation to the tortured meanings that tumbled from soul into voice. Passion became semantics, and semantics became real. Lightning forked and flashed, its fury redoubled, until Achamian looked a ghost suspended in a half-buried sun. Limbs snapped. Blossoms exploded skyward, wheeled like burning moths against the firmament. The surrounding trees erupted in flame, became shining pillars of fire. The dolmens loomed orange from the black.
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