The Warrior Prophet

  “You still command the ears of the Great …”

  No matter how hard Cnaiür peered, he could see nothing of the Dûnyain—or Serwë.

  “Does he still breathe?” he cried. “Does his heart still beat?”

  The Inrithi massed about him turned to one another, shared looks of anxious bewilderment. No one replied.

  Dog-eyed drunks!

  He plowed through them in disgust, yanking men aside to move forward. Finally he reached the perimeter of Shrial Knights, one of whom pressed a palm to his chest to hold him back. Cnaiür scowled until the man withdrew his hand, then peered yet again into the darkness beneath Umiaki.

  He could see nothing.

  For a time, he pondered cutting his way to the tree. Then a procession of Shrial Knights bearing torches passed on the far side of Umiaki, and for a fleeting moment Cnaiür glimpsed his sprawled silhouette—or was it hers?—against the glittering lights.

  The forward ranks of Inrithi began shouting, some in rapture, others in derision. Through the uproar, Cnaiür heard a velvety voice, spoken in timbres only his heart could hear.

  “It’s good that you’ve come … Proper.”

  Cnaiür stared in horror at the figure across the ring. Then the string of torches marched on, and darkness reclaimed the ground beneath Umiaki. The surrounding clamour subsided, fractured into individual shouts.

  “All men,” the voice said, “should know their work.”

  “I come to watch you suffer!” Cnaiür cried. “I come to watch you die!”

  In his periphery, he glimpsed men turning to him in alarm.

  “But why? Why would you want such a thing?”

  “Because you betrayed me!”

  “How? How have I betrayed you?”

  “You need only speak! You’re Dûnyain!”

  “You make too much of me … More even then these Inrithi.”

  “Because I know! I alone know what you are! I alone can destroy you!” He laughed as only a many-blooded Chieftain of the Utemot could, then gestured to the darkness beneath Umiaki. “Witness …”

  “And my father? The hunt need not end—you know this.”

  Cnaiür stood breathless, as motionless as a horse-laming stone hidden among the Steppe grasses.

  “I’ve made a trade,” he said evenly. “I’ve yielded to the greater hate.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes! Yes! Look at her! Look at what you’ve done to her!”

  “What I’ve done, Scylvendi? Or what you’ve done?”

  “She’s dead. My Serwë! My Serwë is dead! My prize!”

  “Oh, yes … What will they whisper, now that your proof has passed? How will they measure?”

  “They killed her because of you!”

  Laughter, full and easy-hearted, like that of a favourite uncle just into his cups.

  “Spoken like a true Son of the Steppe!”

  “You mock me?”

  A heavy hand seized his shoulder. “Enough!” someone was shouting. “Stow your madness! Cease speaking that foul tongue!”

  In a single motion, Cnaiür snatched the hand and twisted it about, wrenching tendon and bone. He effortlessly wheeled the fool who’d grabbed him from his place among the others. He struck the cow-faced ingrate to the ground.

  “Mock? Who would dare mock a murderer?”

  “You!” Cnaiür screamed at the tree. He reached out neck-breaking arms. “You killed her!”

  “No, Scylvendi. You did … When you sold me.”

  “To save my son!”

  And Cnaiür saw her, limp and horrified in Sarcellus’s arms, blood spouting across her gown, her eyes drowning in darkness … The darkness! How many eyes had he watched it consume?

  He heard a babe bawling from the black.

  “They were supposed to kill the whore!” Cnaiür screamed.

  Several Inrithi were shouting at him now. He felt a blow glance his cheek, glimpsed the flash of steel. He grabbed a man about the head, drove his thumbs into his eyes. Something sharp pricked his thigh. Fists pounded against his back. Something—a club or a pommel—cracked against his temple; he released the man, reeling backward. He glimpsed black Umiaki, and heard the Dûnyain laughing, laughing as the Utemot had laughed.

  “Weeper!”

  “You!” he roared, beating down men with stone-fisted blows. “YOU!”

  Suddenly the clutching, cutting mob scrambled back from a brawling figure to his right. Several cried out in apology. Cnaiür glanced at the man, who stood almost as tall as he, though not so broad.

  “Have you lost your wits, Scylvendi? It’s me! Me!”

  “You murdered Serwë.”

  And suddenly, the stranger became Coithus Saubon, dressed in a penitent’s shabby robes. What kind of devilry?

  “Cnaiür,” the Galeoth Prince exclaimed, “who are you speaking to?”

  “You …” the darkness cackled.

  “Scylvendi?”

  Cnaiür shook free of the man’s firm grip. “This is a fool’s vigil,” he grated.

  He spat, then turned to fight his way free of the stink.

  Esmi …

  His heart leapt at the thought.

  I’m coming, my sweet. I’m so very close!

  It seemed he could smell the musky orange of her scent. It seemed he could hear her gasps hot against his cheek, feel her grind against his loins, desperately, as though to smother a perilous fire. It seemed he could see her throwing back her hair—a glimpse of sultry eyes and parted lips.

  So very close!

  The Tydonni—five Numaineiri knights and a motley of men-at-arms—escorted them through the dark streets. The Tydonni had been courteous enough, given the circumstances of their arrival, but until someone in authority vouched for the two of them, the knights refused to say much of anything. Achamian saw other Men of the Tusk on their route, most of them as wretched as the guards upon the gate. Whether sitting in windows, or leaning with others against the pilasters, they stared, their faces pale and blank, their eyes impossibly bright, as though housing the fires that wasted their frames.

  Achamian had seen such looks before. On the Fields of Eleneöt, after the death of Anasûrimbor Celmomas. In great Trysë, watching the fall of the Shinoth Gate. On the Plains of Mengedda, awaiting the approach of dread Tsurumah. The look of horror and fury, of Men who could only exact and never overcome.

  The look of Apocalypse.

  Whenever Achamian matched their gazes, no threat or challenge was exchanged, only the thoughtless understanding of exhausted brothers. Something—demon or reptile—crawled into the skulls of those who endured the unendurable, and when it looked out their eyes, as it inevitably did, it could recognize itself in others. He belonged, Achamian realized. Not just here in Caraskand with those he loved, but here with the Holy War. He belonged with these men—even unto death.

  We share the same doom.

  Moving slowly for Xinemus’s sake, they trudged between two heights whose names Achamian didn’t know, and into an area one of the Numaineiri had called the Bowl—where Proyas and his household were supposedly quartered. They passed through a veritable labyrinth of streets and alleyways, and more than once the knights had to ask passersby for directions. Despite everything—the prospect of finding Kellhus and Esmenet, of seeing Proyas after so many bitter months—Achamian found himself pondering the carelessness of his declaration beneath Caraskand’s walls: “I am Drusas Achamian, a Mandate Schoolman …”

  How long had it been since he’d last spoken those words aloud?

  A Mandate Schoolman …

  Was that what he was? And if so, why did he shy from the thought of contacting Atyersus? In all likelihood, they’d learned of his abduction. They were certain to have informants he knew nothing about among the Conriyan contingent at least. He imagined they assumed him dead.

  So why not contact them? The threat of the Second Apocalypse hadn’t dwindled during his captivity. And the Dreams, they wracked him as they ever did …


  Because I’m no longer one of them.

  For all the ferocity with which he’d defended the Gnosis—to the point of sacrificing Xinemus!—he’d forsaken the Mandate. He’d forsaken them, he realized, even before his abduction by the Scarlet Spires. He’d forsaken them for Kellhus …

  I was going to teach him the Gnosis.

  Even to think this stole his breath, reminded him that so much more than Esmenet awaited him within these walls. The old mysteries surrounding Maithanet. The threat of the Consult and their skin-spies. The promise and enigma of Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The premonitions of the Second Apocalypse!

  But even as his skin pimpled with dread, something balked within him, something old and obdurate, as callous as crocodiles. Let the mysteries rot! he found himself thinking. Let the world crash about us! For he was Drusas Achamian, a man like any other, and he would have his lover, his wife—his Esmenet. Like so many things in the aftermath of Iothiah, the rest seemed childish, like tropes in an over-read book.

  I know you live. I know it!

  At long last, their small troop came to a pause before the faceless walls of some compound. Xinemus at his side, Achamian watched while two of the Numaineiri knights fell to arguing with the guards posted before the compound’s gate. He turned at the sound of his friend’s voice.

  “Akka,” Xinemus said, scowling in his queer, eyeless fashion. “When we walked as shadows …”

  The Marshal hesitated, and for a moment Achamian feared an onslaught of recriminations. Before Iothiah, the notion of using sorcery to slip past the enemy would have been unthinkable for Xinemus. And yet he’d acquiesced with scarcely a complaint when Achamian had suggested the possibility in Joktha. Did he repent? Or had he, like Achamian, been gouged of his previous cares as well?

  “I’m blind,” Xinemus continued. “Blind as blind could be, Akka! And yet I saw them … The Cishaurim. I saw them seeing!”

  Achamian pursed his lips, troubled by the fear-to-hope tone of the Marshal’s voice.

  “You did see,” he said carefully, “in a manner … There’s many ways of seeing. And all of us possess eyes that never breach skin. Men are wrong to think nothing lies between blindness and sight.”

  “And the Cishaurim?” Xinemus pressed. “Is that … Is that how they—”

  “The Cishaurim are masters of this interval. They blind themselves, they say, to better see the World Between. According to some, it’s the key to their metaphysics.”

  “So …” Xinemus began, unable to contain the passion in his voice.

  “Not now, Zin,” Achamian said, watching the most senior of the Tydonni knights, a choleric thane called Anmergal, stride toward them from the compound gate. “Some other time …”

  In broken but workable Sheyic, Anmergal stated that Proyas’s people had agreed to take them—despite their better judgement. “No one steals into Caraskand,” he explained. “Only out.” Then, heedless of any reply they might make, he barged past them, yelling out to his troops. At the same time, men-at-arms, dressed as Kianene but bearing the Black Eagle of House Nersei on their shields, appeared from the darkness. Within moments, Achamian and Xinemus found themselves ushered into the compound.

  They were greeted by an emaciated steward dressed in the threadbare yet lustrous white and black livery of Proyas’s House. Soldiers in tow, the man led them down a carpeted hallway. They passed a Kianene woman—a slave, no doubt—kneeling in the doorway of an adjoining chamber, and Achamian found himself shocked, not by her obvious terror, but by the fact that she was the first Kianene he’d seen since entering Caraskand …

  No wonder the city seemed a tomb.

  They rounded a corner and found themselves in a tall antechamber. Set between two corpulent pillars—Nilnameshi by the look of them—a door of greening bronze lay partially ajar. The steward ducked his head in. Nodding to someone unseen, he pressed the door open and, after a nervous glance at Xinemus, gestured for them to follow. Achamian cursed the knot in his gut …

  Then found himself staring at Nersei Proyas.

  Though more haggard and far thinner—his linen tunic hung from shoulders like sword pommels—the Crown Prince of Conriya still looked much the same. The shock of curly black hair, which his mother had both cursed and adored. The trim beard etching a jaw that, though not as youthful as it once was, remained set in the old way. The nimble brow. And of course the lucid brown eyes, which were deep enough, it seemed, to contain any admixture of passion, no matter how contradictory.

  “What is it?” Xinemus asked. “What happens?”

  “Proyas …” Achamian said. He cleared his throat. “It’s Proyas, Zin.”

  The Conriyan Prince stared at Xinemus, his face expressionless. He advanced two steps from a lavishly worked table in what must have been his bedchamber. As though from a stupor, he said, “What happened?”

  Achamian said nothing, struck dumb by a rush of unexpected passions. He felt his face grow hot with fury. Xinemus stood beside him, absolutely motionless.

  “Speak up,” Proyas commanded, his voice ringing with desperation. “What happened?”

  “The Scarlet Spires took his eyes,” Achamian said evenly. “As a … As a way to—”

  Without warning, the young Prince flew to Xinemus, clutched him in a wild embrace, not cheek to cheek as between men, but as a child might, with his forehead pressed against the Marshal’s collar. He shuddered with sobs. Xinemus clutched the back of his head with thick fingers, crushed his beard against his scalp.

  A moment of fierce silence passed.

  “Zin,” Proyas hissed. “Please forgive me! Please, I beg of you!”

  “Shhh … It’s enough to feel your embrace … To hear your voice.”

  “But Zin! Your eyes! Your eyes!”

  “Shush, now … Akka will fix me. You’ll see.”

  Achamian flinched at the words. Hope was never so poison as when it deluded loved ones.

  Gasping, Proyas pressed his cheek against the Marshal’s shoulder. His glittering look found Achamian, and for a moment they gazed unblinking each at the other.

  “You too, Old Teacher,” the young man croaked. “Can you find it in your heart to forgive?”

  Though Achamian heard the words clearly, they seemed to reach him as though from a great distance, their speaker too distant to truly matter. No, he realized, he couldn’t forgive, not because his heart had hardened, but because it had receded. He saw the boy, Prosha, whom he’d once loved, but he saw a stranger as well, a man who walked questionable and competing paths. A man of faith.

  A murderous fanatic.

  How could he think these men were his brothers?

  With his face as blank as he could manage, Achamian said, “I’m a teacher no longer.”

  Proyas squeezed shut his eyes. They were hooded in the old way when he opened them. Whatever hardships the Holy War had endured, Proyas the Judge had survived.

  “Where are they?” Achamian asked. The circles were so much clearer now. Aside from Xinemus, only Esmenet and Kellhus possessed any claim to his heart. In the whole world, only they mattered.

  Proyas visibly stiffened, pressed himself from Xinemus’s breast. “Hasn’t anyone told you?”

  “No one would tell us anything,” Xinemus said. “They feared we were spies.”

  Achamian couldn’t breathe. “Esmenet?” he gasped.

  The Prince swallowed, a stricken look upon his face.

  “No … Esmenet is safe.” He ran a hand through his cropped hair, both anxious and ominous.

  Somewhere, a wick sizzled in a guttering candle.

  “And Kellhus?” Xinemus asked. “What about him?”

  “You must understand. Much, very much, has happened.”

  Xinemus pawed the air before him, as though needing to touch those he spoke to. “What are you saying, Proyas?”

  “I’m saying Kellhus is dead.”

  Of all Caraskand, only the great bazaar carried any memory of the Steppe, and even then it was only the bones
of such a memory: its flatness purchased by masons, its openness enclosed by dark-windowed facades. No grasses grew between the paving stones.

  “Swazond,” he had said. “The man you have killed is gone from the world, Serwë. He exists only here, a scar upon your arm. It is the mark of his absence, of all the ways his soul will not move, and of all the acts he will not commit. A mark of the weight you now bear.”

  And she had replied, “I don’t understand …”

  Such a dear fool, that girl. So innocent.

  Cnaiür lay against the ribbed belly of a dead horse, surrounded by ever-widening circles of Kianene dead—victims of the city’s glorious sack three weeks before.

  “I will bear you,” he said to the blackness. And never, it seemed, had he uttered a mightier oath. “You will not want, so long as my back is strong.”

  Traditional words, uttered by the groom as the memorialist braided his hair in marriage.

  He raised the knife to his throat.

  Bound to a circle, swinging from the limb of a dark tree.

  Bound to Serwë.

  Cold and lifeless against him.

  Serwë.

  Spinning in slow circles.

  A fly crawled across her cheek, paused before a breathless nostril. He puffed air across her dead skin, and the fly was gone. Must keep her clean.

  Her eyes half-open, papyrus-dry.

  Serwë! Breathe girl, breathe! I command it!

  I come before you. I come before!

  Bound skin-to-skin to Serwë.

  What have I … What? What?

  A convulsion of some kind.

  No … No! I must focus. I must assess …

  Unblinking eyes, staring down black cheeks, out to the stars.

  There’s no circumstance beyond … No circumstance beyond …

  Logos.

  I’m one of the Conditioned!

  From his shins to his cheek, he could feel her, radiating a cold as deep as her bones.

  Breathe! Breathe!

  Dry … And so still! So impossibly still!

  Father, please! Please make her breathe!

  I … I can walk no farther.

  Face so dark, mottled like something from the sea … How had she ever smiled?