The Warrior Prophet

  “I cannot,” she said, staring in horror at the shadowy, leather and branch hut housing the voice. Kellhus had cloistered the sick, allowing only the survivors of earlier outbreaks to attend those still ailing. The Dread God, he said, communicated the disease through lice.

  “I roll about in my own excrement!”

  “I can’t …”

  “How?” the wretched voice asked. “How?”

  “Please,” Esmenet softly cried. “You must understand. It’s forbidden.”

  “He can’t hear you …”

  Kellhus. Hearing his voice seemed an inevitable thing. She felt his arms encompass her, his silky beard comb across her bare neck. These didn’t seem inevitable; they almost surprised …

  “They hear only their own suffering,” he explained.

  “Like me,” Esmenet replied, suddenly overcome with remorse. Why had she run?

  “You must be strong, Esmenet.”

  “Sometimes I feel strong. Sometimes I feel new, but then …”

  “You are new. My Father has remade all of us. But your past remains your past, Esmenet. Who you once were, remains who you once were. Forgiveness between strangers takes time.”

  How could he do this? How could he so effortlessly speak her heart?

  But she knew the answer to that question—or so she thought.

  Men, Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen—they could only truly know the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others.

  At first Esmenet thought this foolish. Was not the inner half the whole, what was only imperfectly apprehended by others? But Kellhus bid her to think of everything she’d witnessed in others. How many unwitting mistakes? How many flaws of character? Conceits couched in passing remarks. Fears posed as judgements …

  The shortcomings of men—their limits—were written in the eyes of those who watched them. And this was why everyone seemed so desperate to secure the good opinion of others—why everyone played the mummer. They knew without knowing that what they saw of themselves was only half of who they were. And they were desperate to be whole.

  The measure of wisdom, Kellhus had said, was found in the distance between these two selves.

  Only afterward had she thought of Kellhus in these terms. With a kind of surpriseless shock, she realized that not once—not once!—had she glimpsed shortcomings in his words or actions. And this, she understood, was why he seemed limitless, like the ground, which extended from the small circle about her feet to the great circle about the sky. He had become her horizon.

  For Kellhus, there was no distance between seeing and being seen. He alone was whole. And what was more, he somehow stood from without and saw from within. He made whole …

  She bent her head back and gazed up into his eyes.

  You’re here, aren’t you? You’re with me … inside.

  “Yes,” Kellhus said, and it seemed a god looked upon her.

  She blinked two wondrous tears.

  I am your wife! Your wife!

  “And you must be strong,” he said over the piteous voice of the invalid. “The God purges the Holy War, purifies us for the march on Shimeh.”

  “But you said we needn’t fear the disease.”

  “Not the disease—the Great Names. Many of them are beginning to fear me … Some think the God punishes the Holy War because of me. Others fear for their power and privilege.”

  Did he fear an attack, a war within the Holy War?

  “Then you must speak to them, Kellhus. You must make them see!”

  He shook his head. “Men praise what flatters and mock what rebukes—you know that. Before, when it was just the slaves and the men-at-arms, they could afford to overlook me. But now that their most trusted advisers and clients take the Whelming, they’re beginning to understand the truth of their power, and with it, their vulnerability.”

  He holds me! This man holds me!

  “And what’s that?”

  “Belief.”

  Esmenet looked hard into his eyes.

  “You and Serwë,” he continued, “aren’t to travel unaccompanied under any circumstances. They would use you against me if they could …”

  “Have things become so desperate?”

  “Not yet. But they could very soon. So long as Caraskand continues to resist us …”

  Sudden, bottomless horror. In her soul’s eye she glimpsed assassins dispatched in the black of night, gold-adorned conspirators scowling by candlelight. “They’ll try to kill you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you must kill them!”

  The thoughtless ferocity of these words shocked her. But she didn’t repent them.

  Kellhus laughed. “To say such things on such a night!” he chided.

  Her earlier remorse came rushing back. Serwë had given birth tonight! Kellhus had a son! And all she could do was wallow in her own lacks and losses. Why did you leave me, Akka?

  An aching sob welled through her. “Kellhus,” she murmured. “Kellhus, I feel so ashamed! I envied her! I so envied her!”

  He chuckled and nuzzled her scalp.

  “You, Esmenet, are the lens through which I’ll burn. You … You’re the womb of tribes and nations, the begetting fire. You’re immortality, hope, and history. You’re more than myth, more than scripture. You’re the mother of these things! You, Esmenet, are the mother of more …”

  Breathing deep the dark, rainy world, she clutched his arms tight against her. She’d known this, ever since the earliest days of the desert, she’d known this. It was why she’d cast her whore’s shell, the contraceptive charm the witches sell, across the sands.

  You are the begetting fire …

  No more would she turn aside seed from her womb.

  Early Winter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, the Meneanor coast, near Iothiah

  TELL ME …

  A towering whirlwind, joining armed earth to hoary heavens, belching dust and Sranc into the skies.

  WHAT DO YOU SEE?

  Achamian awoke without crying out. He lay still, searching for his breath. He blinked tears, but he did not weep. Sunlight shone through his fretted window, illuminating the banded crimson carpet in the room’s heart. He nestled deep into the warm sockets of his sheets, wondering at the peace of his mornings.

  The luxury alone seemed impossible. Somehow, after the destruction of the Scarlet Spires compound in Iothiah, he and Xinemus had found themselves honoured guests of Baron Shanipal, the representative Proyas had left behind in Shigek. Apparently one of the Baron’s client knights had found them wandering naked through the city. Recognizing Xinemus, he’d delivered them to Shanipal, who’d brought them here—a luxurious Kianene villa on the Meneanor coast—to convalesce.

  For weeks now, they’d enjoyed the Baron’s protection and hospitality, long enough to forget their wonder at having escaped and to begin obsessing over their losses. Survival, Achamian was fast learning, was itself something to be survived.

  He coughed and kicked his feet free of his covers. His Shigeki attendant, one of two slaves Baron Shanipal had assigned him, appeared from behind a floral-brocaded partition. The Baron, who was one of those odd men whose graciousness or viciousness depended on how convincingly one catered to his eccentricities, had determined they must live like the dead Grandees who once owned this villa. Apparently, the Kianene slept with slaves in their rooms—like the Norsirai with their dogs.

  After bathing and dressing, Achamian prowled the halls of the villa, searching for Xinemus, who obviously hadn’t returned to his room the previous night. The Kianene had left enough behind—mahogany-veneered furniture, soft-brushed rugs, and cerulean wall hangings—that Achamian could almost believe he was the guest of a true Fanim Grandee instead of an Inrithi Baron who happened to dress and live like one.

  He found himsel
f cursing the Marshal as he searched the rooms. The healthy always begrudged the sick: being shackled by another’s incapacities was no easy thing. But the resentment Achamian suffered was curiously ingrown, almost labyrinthine in its complexity. With Xinemus, every day seemed more difficult than the last.

  In so many ways, the Marshal was his oldest and truest friend—this alone made Achamian responsible. The fact the man had sacrificed what he’d sacrificed, suffered what he’d suffered, to save Achamian simply compounded this responsibility. But Xinemus still suffered. Despite the sunlight, despite the silk and submissive slaves, he still screamed in those basements, he still betrayed secrets, he still cracked teeth in anguish … Every day it seemed, he lost his eyes anew. And because of this, he didn’t simply hold Achamian accountable, he accused …

  “Look at the wages of my devotion!” he’d once shouted. “Do the sockets weep, for my cheek feels dry. Do the lids wither, eh, Akka? Describe them to me, for I can no longer see!”

  “No one asked you to save me!” Achamian had cried. How long must he repay unwanted favours? “No one asked you for your folly!”

  “Esmi,” Xinemus had replied. “Esmi asked.”

  No matter how hard Achamian tried to forgive these tantrums, their poison struck deep. He often found himself mulling the limits of his responsibility, as though they were a matter for debate. What exactly did he owe? Sometimes he told himself that Xinemus, the true Xinemus, had died, and that this blind tyrant was no more than a stranger. Let him beg with the others in the gutter! Other times he convinced himself that Xinemus needed to be abandoned, if only to scrub him of his cursed caste-noble pride.

  “You hold fast what you must relinquish,” he once told the Marshal, “and you relinquish what you must hold fast … This cannot go on, Zin. You must remember who you are!”

  And yet Xinemus wasn’t alone. Achamian had changed also—irrevocably.

  Not once had he wept for his friend. He, the weeper … Nor had he cried out upon awakening from the Dreams—not since escaping. For some reason, he just did not feel … capable. He could remember the sensations, the roaring ears, the burning eyes and panged throat, but they seemed rootless, abstract, like something read rather than known.

  What was strange was that Xinemus seemed to need his tears, as though worse than the torments, worse than blindness even, was the fact that he, and not Achamian, had become the weak one. Stranger still, the more Xinemus seemed to need his tears, the farther they slipped from Achamian’s grasp. Often it seemed they wrestled when they spoke, as though Xinemus were the failing father who continually shamed himself by trying to assert ascendency over his son.

  “I’m the strong one!” he’d once bawled in a drunken stupor. “Me!”

  Watching, Achamian could muster no more than breathless pity.

  He could mourn, he could feel, but he couldn’t weep for his friend. Did this mean he too had been gouged of something essential? Or had he recovered something? He felt neither strong nor decisive, and yet he somehow knew he’d become these things. “Torment teaches,” the poet Protathis wrote, “what love has forgotten.” Had this been the gift of the Scarlet Spires? Had they burned some lesson into him?

  Or had they simply beaten him numb?

  Whatever the answer, he would see them burn—especially Iyokus. He would show them the wages of his newfound certainty.

  Perhaps that had been their gift. Hatred.

  After querying several slaves, he found Xinemus drinking alone on one of the terraces overlooking the sea. The morning sun promised hot skin in cool air—a sensation Achamian had always found heartening. The crash of breakers and the smell of brine tickled him with memories of his youth. The Meneanor swept out to the horizon, the turquoise of the shallows dropping into bottomless blue.

  Drawing a deep breath, he approached the Marshal, who reclined with a bowl in his hands, his feet kicked upon the glazed brick railing. The previous night Shanipal had offered to pay their way by ship to Joktha, the port city of Caraskand. Achamian intended—no, needed—to leave as soon as possible, but he couldn’t do so without Xinemus. For some reason, he knew Xinemus would die if he left him behind. Grief and bitterness had killed greater men.

  He paused, mustering his arguments, steeling his nerves …

  Without warning, Xinemus exclaimed, “All this dark!”

  He was drunk, Achamian realized, noticing the pale red stains across the breast of his white linen tunic. Dead drunk.

  Achamian opened his mouth, but no words came. What could he say? That Proyas needed him? Proyas had stripped him of his land and titles. That the Holy War needed him? He would only be a burden—he knew that …

  Shimeh! He came to see—

  Xinemus pulled his feet down, leaned forward in his chair.

  “Where do you lead, eh, Dark? What do you mean?”

  Achamian stared at his friend, studied the planes of sunlight across his bearded profile. As always, he caught his breath at the sight of his empty eye sockets. It was as though Xinemus would forever have knives jutting from his eyes.

  The Marshal pressed a palm outward to the sun, as though reassuring himself of some fact of distance. “Eh, Dark? Were you always like this? Were you always here?”

  Achamian looked down, stricken with remorse. Say something!

  But the words would not come. What was he to say? That he had no choice but to find Esmenet?

  Then go! Go find your whore! Just leave me be!

  Xinemus cackled, stumbling as drunks often do from one passion to another.

  “Do I sound bitter, Dark? Oh, I know you’re not so bad. You spare me the indignity of Akka’s face! And when I piss, I need not convince myself my hands are big! To think …”

  At first, Achamian had been desperate for news regarding the Holy War, so much so he could scarcely grieve for Xinemus and his loss. For the entirety of his torment, Esmenet had seemed unthinkable, as though some part of him had understood the vulnerability she represented. But from the moment he recovered his senses, he could think of no one else—save perhaps Kellhus. What he would give to hold her in his arms, to smother her with laughter, tears, and kisses! What joy he would find in her joy, in her weeping disbelief!

  He could see it all so clearly … How it would be.

  “I just want to know,” Xinemus cried in a drunk’s cajoling manner, “who you fucking are!”

  Though at first he had only cause to fear the worst, Achamian knew she lived. According to the rumours, the Holy War had almost perished crossing Khemema. But according to Xinemus, she travelled with Kellhus, and he could imagine no place safer. Kellhus couldn’t die, could he? He was the Harbinger, sent to save humanity from the Second Apocalypse.

  Yet another certainty born of his torment.

  “You feel like wind!” Xinemus cried, his voice growing more shrill. “You smell like sea!”

  Kellhus would save the world. And he, Drusas Achamian, would be his counsellor, his guide.

  “Open your eyes, Zin!” the Marshal cried, his voice cracking. Achamian glimpsed spittle flash in the sunlight. “Open your fucking eyes!”

  A powerful breaker exploded across the black rocks below. Salty mist hazed the air.

  Xinemus dropped his wine bowl, slapped madly at the sky, crying, “Huhh! Huhh!”

  Achamian dashed forward two steps. Paused.

  “Every sound,” the Marshal gasped. “Every sound makes me cringe! Never have I suffered such fear! Never have I suffered such fear! Please, God … Please!”

  “Zin,” Achamian whispered.

  “I’ve been good! So good!”

  “Zin!”

  The Marshal fell absolutely still.

  “Akka?” His arms fell inward, and he clutched at himself, as though trying to squeeze into the darkness only he could see. “Akka, no! No!”

  Without thinking, Achamian hastened to him, embraced him.

  “You’re the cause of this!” Xinemus screeched into his chest. “This is your doing!” br />
  Achamian held tight his sobbing friend. The broadness of Xinemus’s shoulders surprised his outstretched arms.

  “We need to leave,” he murmured. “We must find the others.”

  “I know,” the Marshal of Attrempus gasped. “We must find Kellhus!”

  Achamian lowered his jaw against his friend’s scalp. He wondered that his cheeks were dry.

  “Yes … Kellhus.”

  Early Winter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, near Caraskand

  The hub of the abandoned estate had been built by the ancient Ceneians. On his first visit, Conphas had amused himself by touring the structures according to their historical provenance, finishing with the small marble tabernacle some Kianene Grandee had raised generations past. He despised not knowing the layout of the buildings that housed him. It was a general’s habit, he supposed, to think of all places as battlefields.

  The Inrithi caste-nobles began arriving in the afternoon, troops of mounted men cloaked against the interminable drizzle. Standing with Martemus in the gloom of a covered veranda, Conphas watched them hasten across the courtyard. They’d changed so much, it seemed, since that afternoon in his uncle’s Privy Garden. If he closed his eyes he could still see them, scattered among the ornamental cypresses and tamarisks, their faces hopeful and unguarded, their manner arrogant and theatrical, their finery reflecting the peculiarities of their respective nations. Looking back, everything about them seemed so … untested. And now, after months of war, desert, and disease, they looked grim and hard, like those infantrymen in the Columns who continually renewed their terms—the flint-hearted veterans that recruits admired and young officers mortally feared. They seemed a separate people, a new race, as though the differences that distinguished Conriyans from Galeoth, Ainoni from Tydonni, had been hammered out of them, like impurities from steel.

  And of course they all rode Kianene horses, all wore Kianene clothes … One must not overlook the superficial; it ran too deep.

  Conphas glanced at Martemus. “They look more heathen than the heathen.”

  “The desert made the Kianene,” the General said, shrugging, “and it has remade us.”