Read The Warrior Prophet Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The Warrior Prophet (102 page)

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet
9.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
“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 would 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.
Moënghus! He named him Moënghus! My son!
What better way to gall him? What better way to gull? He had been used. Even now, thinking these very thoughts, the Dûnyain used him!
But it did not matter …
There were no codes. There was no honour. The world between men was as trackless as the Steppe—as the desert! There were no
men
… Only beasts, clawing, craving, mewling, braying. Gnawing at the world with their hungers. Beaten like bears into dancing to this absurd custom or that. All these thousands, these Men of the Tusk, killed and died in the name of delusion. Save hunger, nothing commanded the world.
This was the secret of the Dûnyain. This was their monstrosity. This was their fascination.
Ever since Moënghus had abandoned him, Cnaiür had thought
himself
the traitor. Always one thought too many, always one lust, one hunger! But now he knew that the treachery dwelt in the chorus of condemning voices, the recriminations that howled out from nowhere, calling him names, such hateful names!
She was my proof!
Liars! Fools! He would make them see!
Any shame. Any indignity. He would strangle infants in their cribs. He would kneel beneath the fall of hot seed. He would see his hate through!
There was no honour. Only wrath and destruction.
Only hate.
The hunt need not end!
The abandoned tenements fell away, and Cnaiür found himself galloping across one of Caraskand’s bazaars. Corpses, little more than sodden bundles of skin, bone, and fabric, flashed beneath. Halfway across the grim expanse, he spied the obelisks of Csokis rising above a low scarp of buildings. After passing through a complex of several mud-brick storehouses, decrepit to the point of collapse, he found an avenue he recognized and whipped his horse along a row of what looked like fire-gutted residences. After a sharp right, his mount was forced by momentum to leap an overturned piss basin, a great stone bowl that must have belonged to a nearby launderer. He felt before he heard his Eumarnan white throw a shoe. The horse screamed, faltered, then limped to a halt—apparently lamed.
Cursing the thing, he leapt to the ground and began sprinting, knowing there was no way for him to overtake the Knight-Commander now. Beyond the first turn, however, the white Kalaul miraculously yawned wide before him, criss-crossed by the water-soaked joints between paving stones and darkened by crowds of starving thousands.
At first, he didn’t know whether he should be dismayed or heartened by the sight of so many Inrithi. Most of them, he imagined, would be Zaudunyani, which might prevent Sarcellus from killing the Dûnyain outright—if that was what the man in fact intended to do. Thrusting his way between startled onlookers, Cnaiür gazed across the crowds, searching in vain for the Shrial Knight. He saw the tree, Umiaki, in the distance, dark and hunched against a hazy band of colonnades and temple facades. The sudden certainty that the Dûnyain was dead struck him breathless.
It’s over.
It seemed he’d never suffered such a harrowing thought. He frantically peered across the distances. The unobscured sun was boiling steam from the damp masses. He looked to the men crowding about him, and felt a sudden, dizzying relief. Many chanted or sang. Others simply looked to the branches reaching skyward. All seemed anxious with hunger, but nothing more.
BOOK: The Warrior Prophet
9.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Independent Jenny by Sarah Louise Smith
Ken's War by B. K. Fowler
The Flesh Cartel by Rachel Haimowitz, Heidi Belleau
Hostage Bride by Anne Herries
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear
On Edge by Gin Price
Alicia Jones 4: Enigma by D. L. Harrison