“And what do we do here, old teacher? Pray tell.”
“We search,” Achamian murmured. “We search for the Heron Spear.” Then there was rinsing water—fresh water, though the air smelled of salt. And the mutter of voices, concerned and compassionate, but calculating as well. Something soft daubed his cheeks. He glimpsed a wisp of cloud, and beneath it a little girl’s face, both brown and freckled, like Esmenet’s. He watched her pick at the long strands of hair the wind had drawn across her lips.
“Memest ka hoterapi,” a voice cooed from some other place. It was too matronly to belong to the girl. “Shhhh … shhhh …”
The sea rolled white into unseen breakers. He thought of the lice that would abandon him when finally, irresistibly, he breathed his last.
Wakefulness, true wakefulness in the sense of being still and watchful, was slow in coming. For the first few days it seemed he rolled, as though he had been bound to a great spinning wheel, only a small portion of which breached the surface of hot, amniotic waters. There was the pallet upon which he tossed and writhed, the murky room where the woman and her daughter came with water and basin, and sometimes fish ground into a stomach-warming gruel. And there were the nightmares, drawn into a grinding slurry of torment and loss. An ancient world ending without ending, just wound stacked upon immortal wound, and endless screaming.
He suffered the Fevers, as he had once so very long ago. He recalled them well enough.
When they broke, he found himself alone, blinking at the palm-thatched ceiling. Sheaves of spring herbs hung from the rafters, which were little more than poles. Old nets hung from the walls. There was a table heaped with dried fish like the soles of sandals. He could see the stains and smell the odours of countless guttings. Above the crash of breakers, he could hear the walls creak and rattle in the wind. Twine fluttered in the drafts. In the corner, a momentary dust devil spun flecks of chaff …
Home, he thought. I’ve come home. And he slept his first true sleep.
In the chariot of the Kyranean High King, he stood dumbfounded.
For years now, an inexplicable sense of doom had hung upon the horizon, a horror that had no form, only direction … All Men could feel it. And all Men knew that it bore responsibility for their stillborn sons, that it had broken the great cycle of souls.
Now at last they could see it—the bone that would gag Creation.
Bashrag beat the ground with their great hammers, while Sranc heaved in imbecile masses. They swallowed the surrounding plains, loping in armour of tanned human skin, gibbering like apes, throwing themselves at the ramparts the Men of Kyraneas had made of Mengedda’s ruins. And behind them, the whirlwind … a great winding rope sucking the dun earth into black heavens, elemental and indifferent, roaring ever nearer, come to snuff out the last light of Men.
Come to seal the World shut.
The storm clouds firmed their grip on the sun, and all became twilight and thunder. Clutching their groins, the Sranc fell to their knees, heedless of the mannish swords that fell upon them. Then, through the snarling mouths of its children, Seswatha heard it, the million-throated voice of Tsuramah, the No-God …
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
“What,” Anaxophus said, “do you see?”
Seswatha gaped at the High King. Though the man’s tone and expression were entirely his own, he had spoken the selfsame words as the No-God.
“My Lord High King …” Achamian knew not what else to say.
The surrounding plains writhed and warred. As tall as the horizon, the dread whirlwind approached, the No-God walked, so vast that it made gravel of Mengedda’s ruin, motes of men.
I MUST KNOW WHAT YOU SEE
“I must know what you see …”
The painted eyes fixed him, honest and intent, as though demanding a boon whose significance had yet to be determined.
“Anaxophus!” Seswatha cried through the clamour. “The Spear! You must take up the Spear!”
This isn’t what happens …
A chorus of roars. The men about them were leaning into the wind, crying out to their Gods. Sand pelted bronze plates. The No-God walked, rising with yawning dimension, transcending the span of a single look, upending the hierarchy of the moving and the immovable, so that it seemed the whirlwind stood still while all Creation flew about it.
TELL ME
“Tell me …”
“By all that’s holy, Anaxophus! Anaxophus! Take up the Spear!”
No … this can’t be …
The No-God advanced across the Mengedda Plain, sweeping up legions of Sranc, tossing them about its thunderhead base like dolls knitted of cheap flesh. And in its winding heart Seswatha glimpsed it, the glint of the Carapace, hanging like a black jewel … He turned back to the Kyranean High King.
WHAT AM I?
“What am I?” the dark and regal face said, frowning. His oiled braids thrashed like snakes about his shoulders. The last of the light glimmered across the lions wrought into his bronze armour.
“The World, Anaxophus! The very World!”
This isn’t how it happens!
The whirlwind towered over them, a mountainous pillar of fury so high one had to kneel to see the cloud-shrouded summits. Cycling winds roared over them. The horses screamed and kicked from side to side. The chariot rocked beneath their feet. All had become ochre shadow. More scouring gusts, buffeting them with the power of riptides, bottomless and all-encompassing. The grit peeled the skin from his knuckles, from his cheeks.
The No-God walked.
Too late …
Strange … the way passion flickered out before life.
Horses shrieking. Chariot tipping.
TELL ME, ACHAMIA—
He bolted awake, crying out.
The woman, who happened to be standing at the door, dropped her basin and ran to him. Instinctively, he grabbed her arms, the way a dismayed husband might. When she tried to pull away, he clutched her tighter, used her to find his unsteady feet. She cried out, but he did not let go. He felt his fingers cramp into her arms, so hard they had to hurt—but he couldn’t let go!
The door crashed open. A man rushed in, fists high and swinging.
There was a blow that Achamian couldn’t recollect afterward. He only saw the man draw his wife away as he struggled to regain his feet. His cheek throbbed. The man hollered in some language, gesticulated wildly, while the woman seemed to plead with him, clutching at his left arm even though he shrugged her hands away each time.
Achamian stood, quite naked. There was something wrong, he realized, with his right leg. He grabbed a rough blanket from his pallet, wrapped himself with it. Then, bewildered, he circled the man and his wife, made his way to the door, stumbled backward out into the sunlight, felt his heels kick hot sand. He raised a hand against the brightness of sun, beach, and heaving sea. He saw the little girl with the freckles, cringing behind the back wall. Then he saw others, far out, past where the black rocks broke the white sand, drawing their boats through the diamond foam.
He turned and, as fast as he could manage, fled across the shore.
Please don’t kill me! he wanted to cry out, though he knew he could burn them all.
He began walking east, to Shimeh. It seemed the only direction he knew.
It was morning, and the sun seemed to flee the very earth he yearned to reach, as though fearing he might somehow catch it. So long as the sand lay hard and flat, he followed the seashore, savouring the warm rush of the Meneanor about his ankles. Red-throated gulls hung motionless in the gaping sky. Everything moved both faster and slower, as they always did on the earthly edges of a great sea. The vast planes of water heaved ponderously before a motionless horizon, and yet lights sparkled across the slow-rolling surfaces, and the frayed edges of things trembled in a never-ending wind.
He paused four times. Once to make a staff of some sea-worn wood. Once to tie a section of rotted rope about his black blanket, which he had folded into what the Nansur called a “hermit’s robe.”
A third time to inspect his leg, which had been gashed about his shin and ankle. He had no recollection of receiving the wound, though he clearly remembered gasping a Skin Ward the instant before the demon had overcome his defences. Perhaps he hadn’t gasped quickly enough.
He paused a fourth time just before the piling breakers forced him from the beaches. He came upon a tidal pool so sheltered from the wind that its surface seemed glass. He knelt at its edge to study the reflection of his face. He saw that the Two Scimitars had been drawn in soot or lampblack across his forehead—the work of his caregivers, he supposed. A charm or blessing or prayer of some sort.
For some reason he was loath to wash it away, so he only rinsed his matted beard.
When the water settled, he studied his reflection again—the dark, smallish eyes, the beard climbing high on his cheeks, the five white streaks. He pressed his finger into the image, watched it bend and waver about the intrusion, a thing of pure surface. How could men feel so deep?
He struck inland, carefully picking his way through the pasture to avoid thistles. Though the wind continued to blow—he could see its gusts in the shadows it chased across the rolling distance—it seemed to miss him more and more, the way it always was when one left the shore. The heat of thronging green embalmed him, and insects wended to and fro with aimless precision. Once, he startled a thrush, and nearly cried out as it exploded from his feet, battling its dry way to some other crotch in the grasses.
The ground swelled before him, and he came across a broad swath of trampled earth, the residue of passing horsemen—hundreds of them. He was not so very far after all.
He crossed the summit, where the mausoleums of the ancient Amoti Kings wasted in the sunlight. The glass of burnt earth cut his bare feet.
He crossed the worn and packed expanses where the Holy War had pitched its encampment.
He walked through the fields of battle, near the ruined aqueduct, where stench and yellowed grass marked the points where man and horse had fallen.
He walked through the ruins of the Massus Gate, and across an overturned fragment of wall he saw an iris wrought in black tile on white.
He picked his way through the blasted streets, and paused to stare at a Scarlet Schoolman who jutted from the debris, poised in his final moment, salted to the pith.
He climbed the great stair cut into the side of the Juterum, though he did not pause at any of the pilgrim’s stations.
He saw no one until he reached the western gates of the Heterine Wall, where two Conriyans he vaguely recognized stood guard. Crying out “Truth shines!” they fell to their knees before him, implored him for his blessing.
He spat on them instead.
As he climbed toward the First Temple, he gazed across the still-smoking foundations of the Ctesarat, the High Tabernacle of the Cishaurim. It meant nothing to him.
The First Temple loomed so very near, its circular façade soaring white over the thousands of Inrithi congregated about it. The sun rained down. The shadows were sharp. The sky was cloudless, a turquoise bowl marked only by the Nail of Heaven, which glittered like something lost and precious glimpsed in the deeps.
Leaning heavily on his staff, Achamian climbed the last stretch. Without exception, the Men of the Tusk made way for him. He was more important than they were—more important by far. He stood at the centre of the world—teacher to their Warrior-Prophet. He brushed past them, indifferent to their entreaties. Finally he paused on the topmost stair and glared at them. Glared and laughed.
Turning his back, he limped into the airy gloom, passed beneath the blessing tablets strung from the lintels. So different, he thought, from the templed gloom of Sumna, where all was garish and painted. The marble soothed his bleeding feet.
All were kneeling as he passed through the outer ring of pillars. Pressing through their murmuring midst, he found himself thinking of the strange … hollow that had opened within him. He stood, he breathed, which meant his heart still beat within his breast, but its pulse was lost to him. He thought of the lice that would soon spill from his scalp.
Then he heard stern proclamations, the kind that made so many shiver with awe. And he recognized the voice of Maithanet, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples. He could almost glimpse him through the concentric forest of pillars.
“Arise, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, for all authority now resides in thee …”
A moment of silence, sullied by the gentle sound of weeping.
“Behold, the Warrior-Prophet!” the obscured Shriah bellowed. “Behold, the High King of Kûniüri!
“Behold, the Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas!”
The words winded Achamian as surely as a father’s blow. While the Men of the Tusk leapt to their feet, crying out in rapture and adulation, he staggered against one of the white pillars, feeling the cool of engraved figures pressed against his cheek.
What was this hollow that had so consumed him? What was this yearning that felt so like mourning?
They make us love! They make us love!
Some time passed before he realized that Kellhus himself was speaking. Achamian found himself drawn forward—irresistibly, inevitably. Dressed in the silk khalats of their enemy, thanes and knights pressed clear of his path, staring as though he were a leper.
“With me,” Kellhus declared, “everything is rewritten. Your books, your parables, and your prayers, all that was your custom, are now nothing more than childhood curiosities. For too long has Truth languished in the vulgar hearts of Men. What you call tradition is naught but artifice, the fruit of your vanity, of your lust, of your fear and your hate.
“With me, all souls shall find a more honest footing. With me, all the world is born anew!”
Year One.
Achamian continued to limp forward. With every tap, his staff hummed and tingled in his palm. Cracked … like everything else in this miserable world. “The old world is dead!” he cried out. “Is this what you say, Prophet?”
The silence of gasps and rustling silk.
The last of the obscuring figures parted, more astonished than scandalized. And at last Achamian could see … He blinked, struggling to separate what was familiar from the pomp and the glory.
The Holy Court of the Aspect-Emperor.
He saw Maithanet, draped in the golden vestments of his station. He saw Proyas, Saubon, and other surviving Lords of the Holy War, a new caste-nobility, less numerous but more radiant than the old. He saw the Nascenti and other high-ranking apparati of the Ministrate, decked in the glory of their fraudulent station. He saw Nautzera and the Quorum, flashing crimson-gold in the Mandate’s finest ceremonial robes. He even saw Iyokus, standing as pale as glass in Eleäzaras’s magisterial gowns.
He saw Esmenet, her mouth open, her painted eyes shining with tears that spilled…a Nilnameshi Empress once again.
He could not see Serwë. He could not see Cnaiür or Conphas.
Neither was Xinemus anywhere to be found.
But he saw Kellhus, sitting leonine before a great hanging Circumfix of white and gold, his hair flashing about his shoulders, his flaxen beard plaited. He saw him drawing the nets of the future, just as the Scylvendi had said, measuring, theorizing, categorizing, penetrating …
He saw the Dûnyain.
Kellhus nodded to him, his frown amiable and perplexed. “This is what I decree, Akka. The old world is dead.”
Leaning against his staff, Achamian glanced across the astonished assembly. “So you speak,” he said without urgency or rancour, “of an apocalypse.”
“It’s not so simple. You know that …” His voice, his expression—everything about him—beamed indulgent good humour. He raised a welcoming hand, gestured to the space to his right. “Come … take your place at my side.”
Just then Esmenet cried out, flew from the dais toward Achamian, only to stumble and fall weeping … Her palms to the floor, she raised her face to him, hopeless and beseeching.
“No,” Achamian said to Kellhus. “I’ve returned f
or my wife. Nothing more.”
A moment of crushing, monolithic silence.
“Preposterous!” Nautzera cried out. “You will do as he commands!”
Even though Achamian heard the grand old sorcerer, he did not heed him. Years had passed since he last understood his scholastic brothers. He held out his hand. “Esmi?”
He watched her find her feet, saw the crescent of her belly. She was showing … How could he not have seen that before?
Kellhus simply … watched.
“You’re a Mandate Schoolman,” Nautzera grated with admirable menace. “A Mandate Schoolman!”
“Esmi,” Achamian said, his eyes and outstretched hand directed only at her. “Please …”
This was the only thing that could mean anymore.
“Akka,” she sobbed. She glanced about, seemed to wilt beneath the rapt gazes that encircled them. “I’m the mother of … of …”
So the hollow could not be shut. Achamian nodded, wiped the last tear he knew he would ever shed. He would be heartless now. A perfect man.
She approached him—with longing, yes, but with wariness and horror as well. She clutched the hand he had held out, the one that did not lean against his staff. “The world, Akka. Don’t you see? The very world hangs in the balance!”
What will it be the next time I die?
With a savagery that both thrilled and frightened him, he snatched her left wrist, twisted and bent it back, so that she could see the blurred tattoo that blackened the back of her hand. He thrust her away from him.
The crowd erupted in outrage. But strangely, no one moved to seize him.
“No!” Esmenet shrieked from the floor. “Leave him alone! Leave him! You don’t know him! You don’t kn—”
“I renounce!” Achamian roared, sweeping his scathing gaze across all assembled. “I renounce my station as Holy Tutor, as Vizier to the court of the Anasûrimbor Kellhus!” He glanced at Nautzera, not caring whether the old man sneered or no.