Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The Warrior Prophet (49 page)

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet

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And he found other tomes and scrolls—curiosities mostly. An account of the Age of Warring Cities by a historian he’d never encountered before. A strange, vellum-paged book, called
On the Temples and Their Iniquities,
which made him wonder if the Sareots might not have had heretical leanings. And some others.

After a time, both his excitement at finding things intact and his outrage at finding them destroyed flagged. He tired, and finding a stone bench in a niche, he arranged his discoveries and his humble belongings around him as though they were totems in a magic circle, then ate some stale bread and drank wine from his skin. He thought of Esmenet while he ate, cursed himself for his sudden longing.

He did his best not to think of Kellhus.

He replaced his sputtering candle and decided to read.
Alone with books, yet again
. Suddenly he smiled.
Again? No, at last …

A book was never “read.” Here, as elsewhere, language betrayed the true nature of the activity. To say that a book was read was to make the same mistake as the gambler who crowed about winning as though he’d taken it by force of hand or resolve. To toss the number-sticks was to seize a moment of helplessness, nothing more. But to open a book was by far the more profound gamble. To open a book was not only to seize a moment of helplessness, not only to relinquish a jealous handful of heartbeats to the unpredictable mark of another man’s quill, it was to allow oneself to be
written
. For what was a book if not a long consecutive surrender to the movements of another’s soul?

Achamian could think of no abandonment of self more profound.

He read, and was moved to chuckle by ironies a thousand years dead, and to reflect pensively on claims and hopes that had far outlived the age of their import.

He wouldn’t remember falling asleep.

There was a dragon in his dream, old, hoary, terrible—and malevolent beyond compare. Skuthula, whose limbs were like knotted iron, and whose black wings, when he descended, were broad enough to blot half the sky. The great fountain of luminescent fire that vomited from Skuthula’s maw burnt the sand around his Wards to glass. And Seswatha fell to one knee, tasted blood, but the old sorcerer’s head was thrown back, his white hair whipped into ribbons by the wind of beating dragon-wings, and the impossible words thundered like laughter from his incandescent mouth. Needles of piercing light filled the sky …

But the corners of this scene were crimped, and then suddenly, as though dreams were painted across parchment, it crumpled and was tossed into blackness …

The blackness of
open
eyes … Gasping breath. Where was he? The Library, yes … The candle must have gone out.

But then he realized just
what
had awakened him. His Wards of Exposure, which he’d maintained ever since joining the Holy—

Sweet Sejenus … The Scarlet Spires.

He fumbled in the darkness, gathered his satchel.
Quickly, quickly
… He stood in the blackness, and peered with different eyes.

The chamber was long, with low ceilings, and galleried by rows of racks and shelves. The intruders were somewhere near, hastening between queues of mouldering knowledge, closing on him from various points throughout the Library.

Did they come for the Gnosis? Knowledge ever found itself on the scales of greed, and no knowledge in the Three Seas, perhaps, was as valuable as the Gnosis. But to abduct a Mandate Schoolman in the midst of the Holy War? One would think the Scarlet Spires would have more pressing concerns—like the Cishaurim.

One would think … But what of the skin-spies? What of the Consult?

They’d known he was bound to investigate even the rumour of a Gnostic text. And they had known a Library would be where he felt safest. Who would risk such treasures? Certainly not fellow Schoolmen, no matter how ill their will …

The entire thing, he realized, was an outrageously extravagant trap—a trap that had included Xinemus. What better way to lull an ever suspicious Mandate Schoolman than to dangle the lure through the lips of his most trusted friend?

Xinemus?
No. It couldn’t be.

Sweet Sejenus …

This was actually happening!

Achamian grabbed his satchel and lunged through the blackness, crashed into a heavy rack of scrolls, felt papyrus crumble in his fingers like the mud that skins the bottom of dried puddles. He thrust his satchel into the leafy debris.
Quickly, quickly
. Then he stumbled back in the direction he’d come.

They were closer now. Lights smeared the ceiling over the black shelves facing him.

He backed into the small alcove where he’d snoozed, then began uttering a series of Wards, short strings of impossible thoughts. Light flashed from his lips. Luminescence sheeted the air before him, like the glare of sunlight across mist.

Dark muttering from somewhere amid the teetering queues—skulking, insinuating words, like vermin gnawing at the walls of the world.

Then fierce light, transforming, for a heartbeat, the shelves before him into a dawn horizon … Explosion. A geyser of ash and fire.

The concussion sucked the air from his lungs. The heat cracked the stone of the surrounding walls. But his Wards held.

Achamian blinked. A moment of relative darkness …

“Yield Drusas Achamian … You’re overmatched!”

“Eleäzaras?” he cried. “How many times have you fools tried to wrest the Gnosis from us? Tried and failed!”

Shallow breath. Hammering heart.

“Eleäzaras?”

“You’re doomed, Achamian! Would you doom the riches about you as well?”

As precious as they were, the words rolled and stacked about him meant nothing. Not now.

“Don’t do this, Eleäzaras!” he cried in a breaking voice.
The stakes! The stakes!

“It’s already—”

But Achamian had whispered secrets to his first attacker. Five lines glittered along the gorge of blasted shelves, through smoke and wafting pages. Impact. The air cracked. His unseen foe cried out in astonishment—they always did at the first touch of the Gnosis. Achamian muttered more ancient words of power, more Cants. The Bisecting Planes of Mirseor, to continuously stress an opponent’s Wards. The Odaini Concussion Cants, to stun him, break his concentration. Then the Cirroi Loom …

Dazzling geometries leapt through the smoke, lines and parabolas of razor light, punching through wood and papyrus, shearing through stone. The Scarlet Schoolman screamed, tried to run. Achamian boiled him in his skin.

Darkness, save for glowering fires scattered through the ruin. Achamian could hear the other Schoolmen shouting to each other in shock and dismay. He could feel them scramble among the queues, hasten to assemble a Concert.

“Think on this, Eleäzaras! How many are you willing to sacrifice?”

Please. Don’t be a—

The roar of flame. The thunder of toppling shelves. Fire broke like foaming surf about his Wards. A blinding flash, illuminating the vast chamber from corner to corner. The crack of thunder. Achamian stumbled to his knees. His Wards groaned in his thoughts.

He struck back with Inference and Abstraction. He was a Mandate Schoolman, a Gnostic Sorcerer-of-the-Rank, a War-Cant Master. He was as a mask held before the sun. And his voice slapped the distances into char and ruin.

The hoarded knowledge of the Sareots was blasted and burned. Convections whipped pages into fiery cyclones. Like leathery moths, books spiralled into the debris. Dragon’s fire cascaded between the surviving shelves. Lightning spidered the air, crackled across his defences. The last queues fell, and across the ruin Achamian glimpsed his assailants: seven of them, like silk-scarlet dancers in a field of funeral pyres: the Schoolmen of the Scarlet Spires.

The glimpse of tempests disgorging bolts of blinding white. The heads of phantom dragons dipping and belching fire. The sweep of burning sparrows. The Great Analogies, shining and ponderous, crashing and thundering about his Wards. And through them, the Abstractions, glittering and instantaneous …

The Seventh Quyan Theorem. The Ellipses of Thosolankis … He yelled out the impossible words.

The leftmost Scarlet Schoolman screamed. The ghostly ramparts about him crumbled beneath an arcana of encircling lines. The Library walls behind him exploded outward, and he was puffed like paper into the evening sky.

For a moment, Achamian abandoned the Cants, began singing to save his Wards.

Cataracts of hellfire. The floor failed. Great ceilings of stone clapped about him like angry palms to prayer. He fell through fire and rolling, megalithic ruin. But still he
sang
.

He was a Scion of Seswatha, a Disciple of Noshainrau the White. He was the slayer of Skafra, mightiest of the Wracu. He had pitched his song against the dread heights of Golgotterath. He had stood proud and impenitent before Mog-Pharau himself …

Jarring impact. Different footing, like the pitched deck of a ship. Shrugging slabs and heaped ruin away, tossing thundering stone into sky. Plunging through meaning after dark meaning, the hard matter of the world collapsing, falling away like lover’s clothing, all in answer to his singing song.

And at last the sky, so water-cool when seen from the inferno’s heart.

And there: the Nail of Heaven, silvering the breast of a rare cloud.

The Sareotic Library was a furnace in the husk of ragged, free-standing walls. And above, the Scarlet Magi hung as though from wires, and pummelled him with Cant after wicked Cant. The heads of ghostly dragons reared and vomited lakes of fire. Rising and spitting, wracking him with dazzling, bone-snapping fire. Sun after blinding sun set upon him.

On his knees, burned, bleeding from mouth and eyes, encircled by heaped stone and text, Achamian snarled Ward after Ward, but they cracked and shattered, were pinched away like rotted linen. The very firmament, it seemed, echoed the implacable chorus of the Scarlet Spires. Like angry smiths they punished the anvil.

And through the madness, Drusus Achamian glimpsed the setting sun, impossibly indifferent, framed by clouds piled rose and orange …

It was, he thought, a good song.

Forgive me, Kellhus.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SHIGEK