Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The Warrior Prophet (101 page)

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet

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Cnaiür found Proyas standing near the table, his head bent in concentration as he listened to a stocky man in blue and grey. The man’s robes were soiled about the knees, and compared with the rakish frames of those about him, he looked almost obscenely fat. Someone shouted from the tiers, and the man turned to the sound, revealing the five white lines that marred his unplaited beard. Cnaiür stared incredulously.

It was the sorcerer. The dead sorcerer …

What happened here?

“Proyas!” he shouted, for some reason loath to come any closer. “We must speak!”

The Conriyan Prince looked about, and upon locating him, scowled much as Gaidekki had. The sorcerer, however, continued speaking, and Cnaiür found himself waved away with a harried gesture.

“Proyas!” he barked, but the Prince spared him only a furious glance.

Fool!
Cnaiür thought. The siege could be broken! He knew what they must do!

The secret of battle. He remembered …

He found a spot on the tiers with the other Lesser Names and their retinues, and watched the Great Names settle into their usual bickering. The hunger in Caraskand had reached such straits that even the great among the Inrithi had been reduced to eating rats and drinking the blood of their horses. The leaders of the Holy War had grown hollow-cheeked and gaunt, and the hauberks of many, particularly those who’d been fat, hung loosely from their frames, so they resembled juveniles playing in their father’s armour. They looked at once foolish and tragic, possessed of the shambling pageantry of dying rulers.

As Caraskand’s titular king, Saubon sat in a large black-lacquered seat at the head of the table. He leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair, as though preparing to exercise a pre-eminence no one else recognized. To his right reclined Conphas, who looked about with the lolling impatience of someone forced to treat lessers as equals. To his left sat Prince Skaiyelt’s surviving brother, Hulwarga the Limper, who’d represented Thunyerus ever since Skaiyelt had succumbed to the hemoplexy. Next to Hulwarga sat Gothyelk, the grizzled Earl of Agansanor, his wiry beard as unkempt as usual, his combative look more menacing. To his left sat Proyas, his manner both wary and thoughtful. Though he spoke to the sorcerer, who sat on a smaller seat immediately next to him, his eyes continued to search the faces of those about the table. And lastly, positioned between Proyas and Conphas, sat the decorous Palatine of Antanamera, Chinjosa, whom according to rumour the Scarlet Spires had installed as interim King-Regent in the wake of Chepheramunni’s demise—also to the hemoplexy.

“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?”

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet

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