Read The Warrior Prophet Online
Authors: R. Scott Bakker
The Warrior Prophet (106 page)
Emptiness always laughed.
Cnaiür charged the creature, his sword pummelling the space between them. Feint, then a breathtaking sweep. The Shrial Knight leapt, batted away the thunder of his steel.
Iron honed to the absence of surface, sketching circles and points in the air, reaching, probing …
They locked hilts. Leaned against each other. Cnaiür heaved, but the man seemed immovable.
“Such talent!” Sarcellus cried.
Concussion in his face. How? Cnaiür stumbled across leaves and hot stone, rolled to his feet. He glimpsed Umiaki, clutching the sun with a tree’s crone fingers. Then Sarcellus’s blade was everywhere, cutting, hammering down his guard. A string of desperations saved his life. He leapt clear.
The famished mobs yammered and shrieked. The very ground thrummed beneath his sandals.
Exhaustion and stings, the weight of old wounds.
Their blades scissored, winced apart, brushed sweaty skin, then circled round the sun. Like teeth they clacked and gnashed.
Lathered in sweat. Each breath a knife in his chest.
Pressed to the bowers of Umiaki, he glimpsed Serwë sagging against the Dûnyain, her face black and bent back, her teeth leering from shrunken lips. The surrounding riot thinned. The boundaries between him, the ground, and the black tree crumbled. Something filled him, swept him forward, unleashed his corded arms. And he howled, the very mouth of the Steppe, his sword
raping
the air between …
raping
the air between …
One. Two. Three … Blows that could have halved bulls.
Sarcellus faltered, stumbled—saved himself with an inhuman leap. Back, pirouetting through the air. Landing in a crouch.
The smile was gone.
His black mane ribboned by sweat, his chest heaving over the hollow of his belly, Cnaiür raised his arms to the tumultuous mobs.
“Who?”
he screamed.
“Who will take the knife to my heart?”
he screamed.
“Who will take the knife to my heart?”
Again he fell upon the Shrial Knight, battered him back from the shadows of Umiaki, from the leaves curled about palmed water. But even as the man’s style crumbled beneath his frothing attack, it revealed something beautiful in its precision—as beautiful as it was unconquerable. Suddenly, Sarcellus was swatting his blade as though it were a game. The man’s longsword became a glittering wind, scoring his cheek, clipping his shin …
Cnaiür fell back, wailed rabid frustration, bellowed defiance.
A sword tip sheared through his thigh. He skidded in blood, fell forward, bare throat exposed … Stone bruised his bones. Grit gouged his skin.
No …
A powerful voice pierced the roar of the Holy War.
“Sarcellus!”
It was Gotian. He’d broken with Eleäzaras, and was warily approaching his zealous Knight-Commander. The crowds abruptly grew subdued.
“Sarcellus …” The Grandmaster’s eyes were slack with disbelief. “Where …”—a hesitant swallow—“where did you learn to fight so?”
The Knight of the Tusk whirled, his face the very mask of reverent subservience.
“My lord, I’ve—”
Sarcellus suddenly convulsed, coughed blood through gritted teeth. Cnaiür guided his thrashing body to the ground with his sword. Then, within reach of the dumbstruck Grandmaster, he hacked off its head with a single stroke. He gathered the thick maul of black hair in his hand, raised the severed head high. Like bowels from a split belly, its face relaxed, opened like a harem of limbs. Gotian fell to his knees. Eleäzaras stumbled back into his slaves. The mob’s thunder—horror, exultation—broke across the Scylvendi. The riot of revelation.
He tossed the hoary thing at the sorcerer’s feet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CAR ASKAND
What is the meaning of a deluded life?
—AJENCIS,
THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN
THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN
Crying out to one another in eager terror, the Nascenti cut the Warrior-Prophet from his dead wife. A hush, it seemed, had settled across the whole of Caraskand.
He knew he should be weak unto death, but something inexplicable moved him. He rolled from Serwë, braced his arms against his knees, then waving his frantic disciples away, stood impossibly erect. Hands wrapped him in a shroud of white linen. He stumbled clear of Umiaki’s gloom, lifted his face to sun and sky. He could feel awe shiver through the masses—awe of him. He raised his palms to the great hollows of the earth, and it seemed he embraced all the Three Seas.
I think I see, Father …
Cries of rapture and disbelief rang across the packed reaches of the Kalaul. Several paces away Cnaiür stood dumbstruck, as did Eleäzaras a length behind him. Incheiri Gotian staggered forward, fell to his knees and wept. Kellhus smiled with boundless compassion. Everywhere he looked, he saw men kneeling …
Yes … The Thousandfold Thought.
And it seemed there was nothing, no dwarfing frame, that could restrict him to this place, to any place … He was all things, and all things were his …
He was one of the Conditioned. Dûnyain.
He was the Warrior-Prophet.
Tears roared down his cheeks. With a haloed hand, he reached beneath his breast, firmly wrested the heart from his ribs. He thrust it high to the thunder of their adulation. Beads of blood seemed to crack the stone at his feet … He glimpsed Sarcellus’s uncoiled face.
I see …
“They said!” he cried in a booming voice, and the howling chorus trailed into silence.
“They said that I was False, that I caused the anger of the God to burn against us!”
He looked into their wasted faces, answered their fevered eyes. He brandished Serwë’s burning heart.
“But I say that we—
WE!
—are that anger!”
WE!
—are that anger!”
Kascamandri, the indomitable Padirajah of Kian, sent a message to the Men of the Tusk, whom he knew were doomed. The message was an offer—an extremely gracious one, the Padirajah thought. If the Holy War relented, yielded Caraskand and forswore their idolatrous worship of False Gods, they would be spared and given lands. They would be made Grandees of Kian as befitted their rank among the idolatrous nations.
Kascamandri was not so foolish as to think this offer would be accepted outright, but he knew something of desperation, knew that in the competition of hungers, piety often lost in the end. Besides, news that the Holy War had been defeated, not by the swords of the Prophet Fane but by his words, would shake the wicked Thousand Temples to the core.
The reply came in the form of a dozen almost skeletal Inrithi knights, dressed in simple cotton tunics and wearing only knives. After disputing the knives, which the idolaters refused to relinquish, Kascamandri’s Ushers received them with all jnanic courtesy and brought them directly to the great Padirajah, his children, and the ornamental Grandees of his court.
There was a moment of astonished silence, for the Kianene could scarce believe the bearded wretches before them could author so much woe. Then, before the first ritual declaration, the twelve men cried out,
“Satephikos kana ta yerishi ankapharas!”
in unison, then drew their knives and cut their own throats.
“Satephikos kana ta yerishi ankapharas!”
in unison, then drew their knives and cut their own throats.
Horrified, Kascamandri clasped his two youngest daughters tight in his elephantine arms. They sobbed and cried out, while his older children, especially his boys, chirped in excited tones. He turned to his dumbstruck interpreter …
“Th-they said,” the ashen-faced man stammered, “‘the Warrior-Prophet shall … shall
come before you
…’” He gazed helplessly at his Padirajah’s gold-slippered feet.
come before you
…’” He gazed helplessly at his Padirajah’s gold-slippered feet.
When he demanded to know just who this Warrior-Prophet was, no one could answer him. Only when little Sirol began crying anew did he cease ranting. Dismissing his slaves, he rushed her to the incense-fogged chambers of his pavilion, promising sweets and other beautiful things.
The following morning the Men of the Tusk filed from the Ivory Gate onto the greening Tertae Plain. War horns pealed from hill to hill. Thousand-throated songs drifted on the breeze. No longer would the Holy War endure hunger and disease. No longer would it suffer itself to be besieged.
It would march.
The tattered columns wound from the gates onto the fields. Stricken with illness, Gothyelk was too weakened to battle, so his middle son, Gonrain, rode in his stead. The Great Names had agreed to give the Tydonni the right flank, so the Earl of Agansanor could watch his son from Caraskand’s walls. Then came Ikurei Conphas, flanked by the Sacred Suns of his Imperial Columns. Nersei Proyas followed, at the head of the once magnificent knights of Conriya. And after him came Hulwarga the Limper, whose Thunyeri looked more like savage wraiths than men. Then rode Chinjosa, the Count-Palatine of Antanamera, who’d been appointed King-Regent of High Ainon after Chepheramunni’s death. The great army the Scarlet Spires had brought from High Ainon was but a ruined shadow of what it had once been, though those who remained possessed bitter strength. King Saubon was the last to issue from Caraskand’s great Ivory Gate, leading trains of wild-eyed Galeoth.
Worried that a precipitous attack would simply drive the idolaters back to the shelter of Caraskand’s walls, Kascamandri let the Inrithi form unmolested across the fields. The Men of the Tusk mustered between byres and before abandoned farmsteads, their lines somewhat over a mile in length. The weak stood next to the strong, hauberks rusted, jerkins rotted. Strapless harnesses swung from emaciated frames. The arms of some, it seemed, were no thicker than their swords. Knights wearing Enathpanean vests, cassocks, and khalats milled on horses that looked like starved nags. Even those few noncombatants who’d survived—women and priests for the most part—stood among them. Everyone had come to the Fields of Tertae—all those with strength to bear arms. Everyone had come to conquer or to perish. They formed long, haggard ranks, singing hymns, beating blades against shoulder and shield.
Some one hundred thousand Inrithi had stumbled from the Carathay, and less than fifty thousand now ranged across the plain. Another twenty thousand remained within Caraskand, too weak to do more than cheer. Many had dragged themselves from their sickbeds and now crowded the Triamic Walls, especially about the Ivory Gate. Some cried out encouragement and prayers, while others wept, tormented by the collision of hope and hopelessness.
But on wall and field alike, everyone looked anxiously to the centre of the battle line, hoping for a glimpse of the new banner that graced the threadbare standards of the Holy War. There! through budding grove or across rolling pasture, flaring in the breeze: black on white, a ring bisected by the figure of a man, the Circumfix of the Warrior-Prophet. The glory of it scarcely seemed possible …
War horns sounded the advance, and the grim ranks began marching forward, into distances screened by orchards and copses of ash and sycamore. Kascamandri had ordered his host to draw up more than two miles distant, where rolling plain broadened between the city and the surrounding hills, knowing it would be difficult for the Inrithi to cover the intervening distance without exposing their flanks or opening gaps in their line.
Songs keened over the throbbing of Fanim drums. The deep war chants of the Thunyeri, which had once filled the forests of their homeland with the sound of doom. The keening hymns of the Ainoni, whose cultivated ears savoured the dissonance of human voices. The dirges of the Galeoth and the Tydonni, solemn and foreboding. They sang, the Men of the Tusk, overcome with strange passions: joy that knew no laughter, terror that knew no fear. They sang and they marched, walking with the grace of almost-broken men.
Hundreds collapsed, faint for the lack of food. Their kinsmen hauled them to their feet, dragged them forward through the muck of fallow fields.
First blood was shed to the north, nearest the Triamic Walls. The Tydonni under Thane Unswolka of Numaineiri sighted waves of Fanim cresting the hillocks before them, their black-braided goatees bouncing to the rhythm of their trotting horses. The Numaineiri, their faces painted red to terrify their foes, braced their great kite shields with gaunt shoulders. Their archers loosed thin volleys at the advancing Fanim, only to be answered by dark clouds of arrows fired from horseback. Led by Ansacer, the exiled Sapatishah of Gedea, the dispossessed Grandees of Shigek and Enathpaneah charged with fury into the tall warriors of Ce Tydonn.
Other books
A Test of Wills by Charles Todd
Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir by Padma Lakshmi
Hush (The Infected: Ripped to Shreds Book 1) by P.S. Power
Love in Vogue by Eve Bourton
The Adventures of Sir Lancelot the Great by Gerald Morris
Homicide by David Simon
Protocol 7 by Armen Gharabegian
Playing for Keeps by Dara Girard
Declare by Tim Powers
BWWM Interracial Romance 5: Love After Halftime by Elena Brown
