This wasn’t the treachery of an Emperor—an Ikurei—come to seal a pact with their Padirajah. The hated standard of the Exalt-General, with its distinctive Kyranean disc, was nowhere to be seen.
No. This wasn’t Ikurei Conphas. It was the Blond Beast …
King Saubon.
The Kianene horsemen withdrew from the surviving clots of Inrithi, milled in confusion across the plain. Even the Golden Padirajah seemed uncertain.
From the shadow of the aqueduct, Lord Werijen Greatheart cried out to the Tydonni of Plaideol. Raising a great shout, the blond-bearded warriors charged across the corpse-strewn turf, ran hacking into their wicked enemy’s midst. Others followed, heedless of wounds or numbers.
Black-robed Schoolmen stood astride the sky: the Imperial Saik, the Sorcerers of the Sun, advancing on the massed formations of their hated, ancestral foe.
Horse and man thrashed black in descending fire.
The Scylvendi fairly gagged for breath. There he was, slumped against the mad walls of this place, in a white-illuminated chamber that opened at the end of the corridor. Pale. Naked save a loincloth. There he was …
For hours Cnaiür had climbed through these obscene halls, following Serwë and her brother as they tracked Kellhus’s scent. Apart from the braziers beneath the cavernous waterfall, all had been black. Deep into deep. Dark into dark. Through an underworld of vile images. They passed through ruins, Serwë said, the mines of the Cûnuroi, long murdered by the ancestors of Men. And Cnaiür had known that no track could lead him farther from the Steppe. His heart had hammered in his ears. He had glimpsed his father, Skiötha, beckoning through the black. And now …
There he was—Moënghus!
Serwë assailed him first, her limbs and blade a whirring blur. But he stopped her with blue-flashing hands, swatted aside her slender figure …
Just as her brother descended, slashing at impossible palms, spinning and kicking, lunging and probing—only to be seized about the throat, to gape and thrash as the blind man lifted him off his feet, to blister and burn as blue light consumed his head, made a candle of his body. The thing’s face cramped open and the blind man threw him slack to the ground.
Throughout this, Cnaiür had advanced down the corridor, walking steadily, though the numbness of his gait made it seem that he shambled. He remembered approaching Kellhus the same way, that day he’d found him half dead upon his father’s barrow, surrounded by circles of lifeless Sranc. He remembered the limb-hollowing air of nightmares. The breath like needles. But this was different! That had been the point of departure, from his homeland, from his people, from everything he had thought hallowed and strong. This was his destination. This was him …
Him!
Three black snakes coiled about his throat, one hooked above either shoulder, another curled above his gleaming scalp. Cnaiür glimpsed the wound in his abdomen, the blood soaking pink across his loincloth, but he couldn’t recall seeing him cut.
“Nayu,” the blind face said in recognition. Kellhus’s voice! Kellhus’s features! When had the son become the father’s mould?
“Nayu … You have returned to me …”
The snakes watched him, their tongues lapping the air. Even without eyes, the face beseeched him, tugged with a look of long remorse and astonished joy.
“Just as I knew you would.”
Cnaiür stopped at the threshold, mere paces from the man who had butchered his heart. He glanced uneasily about the room, saw Serwë splayed motionless to his right, her long blonde hair swept across a bloodied floor, and the captive skin-spies hanging abject within a curtain of pulleys and chains. The walls warred with inhuman images. He squinted at the light that hung impossibly beneath the graven vaults.
“Nayu … put down your sword. Please.”
Blinking, he saw the notched blade in the air before him, though he had no recollection of drawing it. The light rolled like liquid across it.
“I am Cnaiür urs Skiötha,” he said. “The most violent of all men.”
“No,” Moënghus said softly. “That is but a lie that you use to conceal your weakness from other men, just as weak.”
“It is you who lie.”
“But I see it within you. I see … the truth of you. I see your love.”
“I hate!” he screamed, so loud that the halls returned the words to them as a thousand whispers.
Though blind, Moënghus somehow managed to look to the ground in pensive pity. “So many years,” he said. “So many seasons … Everything I showed you has scarred your heart, set you apart from the People. Now you hold me accountable for what I taught.”
“Desecration! Deceit!” Spittle burned his unshaven chin.
“Then why does it torment you so? Surely lies, when uncovered, fade like smoke. It is truth that burns, Nayu—as you know … for you have burned in it for uncounted seasons.”
Suddenly Cnaiür could feel it: the miles of earth heaped above them, the clawing inversion of ground. He had come too far. He had crawled too deep.
The sword dropped from the stranger’s senseless fingers, rang like something pathetic across the floor. His face broke, like a thing wrapped about twitching vermin. The sobs whispered across the pitted stone.
And Moënghus was holding him, enclosing him, healing his innumerable scars.
“Nayu …”
He loved him … this man who had shown him, who had led onto the trackless steppe.
“I am dying, Nayu.” Hot whispers in his ear. “I need your strength …”
Abandoned him. Forsook.
He had loved only him. In all the world …
Weeping faggot!
The kiss was deep; the smell strong. His heart hammered. Shame bled from his every pore, skittered across his trembling limbs, and somehow ignited an even deeper ardour.
He breathed shuddering air into Moënghus’s hot mouth. The snakes twisted through his hair, pressed hard and phallic against his temples. Cnaiür groaned.
So unlike Serwë or Anissi. A wrestler’s clasp, firm and unyielding. The promise of surrender, of shelter in stronger arms.
He reached beneath his girdle, into his breeches …
His eyes leaden with ardour, he murmured, “I wander trackless ground.”
Moënghus gasped, jerked, and spasmed as Cnaiür rolled the Chorae across his cheek. White light flared from his gouged sockets. For an instant, Cnaiür thought, it seemed the God watched him through a man’s skull.
What do you see?
But then his lover fell away, burning as he must, such was the force of what had possessed them.
“Not again!” Cnaiür howled at the sagging form. He stumbled to his knees, weeping, raving. “How could you leave me?”
His screech pealed through the derelict halls, filled the very earth.
And he laughed, thinking of the final swazond he would cut into his throat. One last thought too many … See! See!
He cackled with grief.
He knelt over his lover’s corpse—for how many heartbeats, he would never know. Then, just as the sorcerous light began to fade, a cool hand fell upon his cheek. He turned and saw Serwë … For an instant her face cracked, as though gasping for air. But then it was seamless once again. Seamless and perfect.
Yes. Serwë … The first wife of his heart.
His proof and prize.
Absolute darkness engulfed them.
The walls of flame that fenced the great swath of destruction wrought by the Scarlet Spires crawled outward, leaving smoking husks in their wake. But somehow, miraculously, the ancient fullery, with its open galleries and queued basins, had escaped unscathed. Kneeling on the lip of its southern pediment, Proyas had seen it all, as though from the edge of a mighty cliff.
The destruction of the Scarlet Spires.
The drums of the heathen had replaced the unearthly thrum of incantations. Even now the last of the Cishaurim—he could see only five—floated over the charred and derelict landscape, the asps about their necks h
ooked downward, searching for survivors. Every several heartbeats, brilliance fell from them and crackling booms rifled through the darkling sky.
He knew not what it meant. He knew nothing …
Save that this was Shimeh.
He turned his face skyward. Through the haze he glimpsed the first vestiges of blue, a rim of gold about fleecy black.
There was a flash, a sparkle in the corner of his eye. He looked to the Sacred Heights, saw a point of light hanging above the eaves of the First Temple. The point lingered, painting the slate shingles of the dome white, then it burst, so bright that it struck circles across the firmament. Like sails cut from the mast, great sheets of smoke bloomed outward, swept over the hanging Cishaurim and out across the devastation.
And Proyas saw a figure standing where the light had been, so distant he could scarce make out his features, save that his hair was gold and his gown billowed white.
Kellhus!
The Warrior-Prophet.
Proyas blinked. Shivers splashed across his skin.
The figure leapt from the Temple’s edge, soared over the astonished Fanim manning the Heterine Wall, then down the slopes, through the rim of burning buildings. Even from so far, Proyas could hear his world-reaming song.
As one, the scattered Cishaurim turned. With eyes like twin Nails of Heaven, the Warrior-Prophet walked across the heights toward them. With every step, it seemed, debris flew from the ground toward him, where it was drawn into circling loops, one after another, smaller circles bisecting the orbits of those larger, until rings of spinning ruin fairly obscured him.
The sun burst forth, as after the deluge. Mountainous shafts of white pillared the streetscape, made pearl of the fallen, burnished the plumes that still piled black and grey into the sky. And Proyas saw the reason for the rings: heathen bowmen scrounging the ruin for Chorae. The Warrior-Prophet cried out, and sequential explosions fanned across the ground beneath him, making missiles of snapping stone and brick. Even still, Proyas glimpsed bolts rising toward him. Some sailed wide; others glanced from the rings, cracking the sorceries that bound them, flinging debris across the city.
More and more ground-raking explosions. Bodies were tossed. Foundations shattered. The thunder of it silenced the relentless throbbing of the drums.
Soaring over the haze, their saffron robes flashing in the sunlight, the five Cishaurim closed with Kellhus. Like cataracts of water, blinding energies crashed across his spherical Wards, burning with a brilliance that forced Proyas to throw up a hand against the glare. Somehow, perfect lines flickered from the maelstrom, coiled into knifing geometries about the nearest of the Cishaurim. The blind man seemed to claw the air with his hands, then rained across the ground in blood and pieces.
But Kellhus’s Wards were failing, cracked and shattered by tempests of unholy light. No more Gnostic lines glittered out to assail the hanging Cishaurim. And Proyas realized that Kellhus could not win, that he could only cry out Wards lest he be swept away. That it was only a matter of time.
Then—impossibly—it was over. The Cishaurim relented, and the roar of their assault trailed away like distant thunder. Proyas could see nothing … only smoke, ruin, and sunlight.
He found himself gaping for breath—or was it a soundless howl?
Sweet God … Sweet God of Gods!
There was a flash behind one of the assailants, and suddenly Kellhus was there, a hand clamped about the Cishaurim’s jaw, Enshoiya’s blade jutting bright through the saffron across his breast. Proyas stumbled to his feet, nearly teetered in a fatal fall. He caught himself, laughed through his tears. Cried out.
Then Kellhus was gone and the body dropped. The three remaining Cishaurim hung motionless, dumbstruck. Had they eyes, Proyas was certain they would have blinked.
And the Warrior-Prophet was behind another, beheading him, halving his snakes, in the space of a heartbeat. Proyas saw Kellhus jerk as the body tumbled down, realized he had caught a crossbow bolt fired from below. In a single snapping motion, he threw it like a knife at the nearest sorcerer-priest. There was a burst of incandescence rimmed by a nacre of black. The figure dropped.
Proyas whooped. Never had he felt so renewed, so young!
And Anasûrimbor Kellhus was singing the Abstractions once again. White robes boiled in the clearing sun. Planes and parabolas crackled about him. The very ground, to the pith of its ruin, hummed. The surviving Cishaurim floated in a broad and wary circle. He knew he had to keep moving, Proyas realized, to avoid the fate of his brothers. But it was already far too late …
There was no escaping the Warrior-Prophet’s holy light.
The sun slipped red into the iron west. The clouds crumbled in the southern winds and were dragged into purple streamers over the Meneanor. The gloom reared from the gullies and ravines of the devastation. Blood cooled across pitted stone.
In the dying light, something clink-clinked over the wheezing of subterranean fires. Amid stone heaped and tossed about unmoving foundations, a small boy hunched over a shattered figure of white, using a stone to chip salt into the palm of his little hand. Though the battle was over, he cast terrified looks over his shoulder. When he had filled his purse, he turned to the dead sorcerer’s face, regarded it with an eerie blankness that a grown man might have confused with sorrow but his mother, had she still breathed, would have known as hope.
He stood, bent to study a small cut on his knee. He smeared the blood away with his thumb, watched a new bead well in its place. Then, spooked by some sound, he whirled and saw the strange human-headed bird that regarded him.
“Would you like to know a secret?” a thin voice cooed. The miniature face grinned, as though finding unexpected pleasure in playing a half-hearted game.
Too numb to be terrified, the young boy nodded, clutched tight the salt that would be his fortune.
“Come closer.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SHIMEH
Faith, they say, is simply hope confused for knowledge. Why believe when hope alone is enough?
—CRATIANAS, NILNAMESHI LORE
Ajencis, in the end, argued that ignorance was the only absolute.
According to Parcis, he would tell his students that he knew only
that he knew more than when he was an infant. This comparative
assertion was the only nail, he would say, to which one could tie
the carpenter-string of knowledge. This has come down to us as the
famed “Ajencian Nail,” and it is the only thing that prevented the
Great Kyranean from falling into the tail-chasing scepticism of
Nirsolfa, or the embarrassing dogmatism of well-nigh every philosopher
and theologian who ever dared scratch ink across parchment.
But even this metaphor, “nail,” is faulty, a result of what happens
when we confuse our notation with what is noted. Like the numeral
“zero” used by the Nilnameshi mathematicians to work such
wonders, ignorance is the occluded frame of all discourse, the unseen
circumference of our every contention. Men are forever looking for
the one point, the singular fulcrum they can use to dislodge all
competing claims. Ignorance does not give us this. What it provides,
rather, is the possibility of comparison, the assurance that not all
claims are equal. And this, Ajencis would argue, is all that we need.
For so long as we admit our ignorance, we can hope to improve our
claims, and so long as we can improve our claims, we can aspire to
the Truth, even if only in rank approximation.
And this is why I mourn my love of the Great Kyranean. For
despite the pull of his wisdom, there are many things of which I am
absolutely certain, things that feed the hate which drives this very
quill.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Spring, 411
2 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh
The Ciphrang had sailed drunken across the skies, shrieking at the pinch of the needle world. Hanging from its claws, Achamian glimpsed lines and blots that were warring men, and the smudge of a burning city. The thing’s blood trailed earthward, burning like naphtha.
The ground spiralled closer and closer …
He awoke scarcely alive, breathing dust he could not lick from his teeth. With the one eye he could open, he saw sand cupped about the base of waving reeds. He heard the sea—the Meneanor Sea—pounding nearby shores.
Where were his brothers? Soon, he thought, the nets would be dry and his father would shout across the wind, summoning his nimble fingers. But he couldn’t move. He wanted to weep at the thought of the beating his father would administer, but it seemed one more thing that did not matter.
Then something was dragging him, drawing him across the sand; he could see the clots where his blood blackened it. Dragging him, a shadow leaning against the sun, drawing him down into the darkness of ancient wars, into Golgotterath …
Into a golden labyrinth of horrors more vast than any Nonmen Mansion, where a student, who was more a son, gazed at him with horror and incredulity. A Kûniüric Prince, just beginning to fathom his surrogate father’s betrayal.
“She’s dead!” Seswatha shouted as much at the unbearable expression as at the man. “She’s gone to you now! And if she lives, then what you find you will not keep, no matter how deep you think your passion!”
“But you said,” Nau-Cayûti cried, his brave face broken in grief. “You said!”
“I lied.”
“How? How could you do this? You were the only one, Sessa! The only one!”
“Because I couldn’t succeed,” Achamian said. “Not alone. Because what we do here is more important than truth or love.”
Nau-Cayûti’s eyes gleamed like bared teeth in the gloom. This, Seswatha knew, was the look that had sealed the final heartbeat of so very many—Man and Sranc alike.