The Warrior Prophet (74 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet
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Raised a little knife, no bigger than a cat’s tongue.
As though to touch the Nail of Heaven.
A Wathi Doll, stolen from a dead Sansori witch …
Someone had spoken its name.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
 
ENATHPANEAH
 
What vengeance is this? That he should slumber while I endure?
Blood douses no hatred, cleanses no sin. Like seed, it spills of its
own volition, and leaves naught but sorrow in its wake.
—HAMISHAZA,
TEMPIRAS THE KING
 
 
… and my soldiers, they say, make idols of their swords. But does not the sword make certain? Does not the sword make plain? Does not the sword compel kindness from those who kneel in its shadow? I need no other god.
—TRIAMIS,
JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES
 
Late Autumn, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Enathpaneah
 
The first sound Proyas heard was the rush of wind through leaves, the sound of openness. Then, impossibly, he heard gurgling water—the sound of life.
The desert …
He awoke with a start, blinked sunlight from eyes that teared in pain. It seemed a coal flared red-hot behind his forehead. He tried to call out for Algari, his body-slave, but could do no more than whisper. His lips stung, burned as though bleeding.
“Your slave is dead.”
Proyas remembered something … A great bloodletting across the sands.
He turned to the sound of the voice, saw Cnaiür crouched nearby, bent over what looked to be a belt. The man was shirtless, and Proyas noted the blistered skin of his massive shoulders, the stinging red of his scarred arms. His normally sensual lips were swollen and cracked. Behind him, a brook sloshed through a groove that wandered between earth and stone. The green of living things blurred the distance.
“Scylvendi?”
Cnaiür looked up, and for the first time Proyas noticed his age: the branching of wrinkles about his snow-blue eyes, the first greying hairs in his black mane. The barbarian was, he realized, not so much younger than his father.
“What happened?” Proyas croaked.
The Scylvendi resumed digging at the leather wrapped about his scarred knuckles. “You collapsed,” he said. “In the desert …”
“You … You saved me?”
Cnaiür paused without looking up. Then continued working.
 
They drifted like reavers come from the furnace, men hard-bitten by the trials of the sun, and they fell upon the villages and stormed the hillside forts and villas of northern Enathpaneah. Every structure they burned. Every man they smote with the edge of the sword, until none were left breathing. So too, every woman and child they found hidden they put to the sharp knife.
There were no innocents. This was the secret they carried away from the desert.
All were guilty.
They wandered southward, scattered bands of wayfarers, come from the plains of death to harrow the land as they’d been harrowed, to deliver suffering as they’d suffered. The horrors of the desert were reflected in their ghastly eyes. The cruelty of blasted lands was written into their gaunt frames. And their swords were their judgement.
Some three hundred thousand souls, perhaps three-fifths of them combatants, had marched under the Tusk into Khemema. Only one hundred thousand, almost all of them combatants, would leave. Despite these losses, with the exception of Palatine Detnammi, none of the Great had died. Using the Inrithi caste-nobles as compass points, Death had drawn circles, each one more narrow than the last, taking the slaves and the camp-followers, then the indentured caste-menial soldiers, and so on. Life had been rationed according to caste and station. Two hundred thousand corpses marked the Holy War’s march from the oasis of Subis to the frontier of Enathpaneah. Two hundred thousand dead, beat into black leather by the sun.
For generations the Khirgwi would call their route
saka’ilrait,
“the Trail of Skulls.”
The desert road had sharpened their souls into knives. The Men of the Tusk would lay the keel of another road, just as appalling, and far more furious.
 
Late Autumn, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Iothiah
 
How long had they plied him?
How much misery had he endured?
But no matter how they tormented him, with crude pokers or with the subtlest of sorcerous deceits, he could not be broken. He shrieked and shrieked, until it had seemed his howls were a faraway thing, the torment of some stranger carried upon the wind. But he did not break.
It had nothing to do with strength. Achamian wasn’t strong.
But Seswatha …
How many times had Achamian survived the Wall of Torment in Dagliash? How many times had he bolted from the anguish of his sleep, weeping because his wrists were free, because no nails pierced his arms? In the ways of torture, the Scarlet Spires were mere understudies compared with the Consult.
No. Achamian wasn’t strong.
For all their merciless cunning, what the Scarlet Magi never understood was that they plied
two
men, not one. Hanging naked from the chains, his face slack against shoulder and chest, Achamian could see the foremost of his diffuse shadows fan across the mosaic floor. And no matter how violent the agonies that shuddered through him, the shadow remained firm, untouched. It whispered to him, whether he wailed or gagged …
Whatever they do, I remain untouched. The heart of a great tree never burns. The heart of a great tree never burns.
Two men, like a circle and its shadow. The torture, the Cants of Compulsion, the narcotics—everything had failed because there were
two
men for them to compel, and the one, Seswatha, stood far outside the circle of the present. Whatever the affliction, no matter how obscene, his shadow whispered,
But I’ve suffered more
…
Time passed, misery piled upon misery, then the chanv addict, Iyokus, dragged a man before him, thrust him to his knees just beyond the Uroborian Circle, arms bound behind his back, naked save for his chains. A face, broken and bearded, looked up to him, seemed to weep and laugh.
“Akka!” the stranger cried out, his mouth mealy with blood. Spittle trailed from his lips. “Bease, Akka!
Beease tell them!
”
There was something about him, an irksome familiarity …
“We’ve exhausted the conventional methods,” Iyokus said, “as I suspected we would. You’ve proven yourself as stubborn as your predecessors.” The red-irised eyes darted to the stranger. “The time has come to break new ground …”
“I can bear no more,” the man sobbed. “No more …”
The Master of Spies pursed his bloodless lips in mock remorse. “He came hoping to save you, you know.”
Achamian peered at the man as though he were something accidentally glimpsed—something merely there.
No.
It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t permit it.
“So the question is,” Iyokus was saying, “how far does your indifference extend? Will it bear the mutilation of loved ones?”
No!
“I find dramatic gestures are more effective at the beginning, before a subject becomes too accustomed … So I thought we would start by putting out his eyes.”
He made a circling gesture with his index finger. One of the slave-soldiers behind Xinemus grabbed a fistful of hair, yanked his head back, then raised a shining knife.
Iyokus glanced at Achamian, then nodded to his Javreh. The man stabbed downward, almost gingerly, as though skewering a plum from a platter.
Xinemus shrieked, the pit of his eye cramped about polished steel.
Achamian gasped at the impossibility. That so familiar and so cherished face, crinkling into a thousand friendly frowns, splitting into a thousand rueful grins, asylum amid so much condemnation, now, now …
The Javreh lifted his knife.
“ZIN!” Achamian screeched.
But there was his hanging shadow, smeared across mortared glass, whispering,
I know not this man.
Iyokus was speaking. “Achamian. Achamian! I need you to listen to me carefully, Achamian, as one Schoolman to another. You and I both know you’ll never leave this room alive. But your friend, here, Krijates Xinemus …”
“Beaassee!” the Marshal wailed.
“Beeaaaaseee!”
“I am,” Iyokus continued, “the Master of Spies for the Scarlet Spires. No more and no less. I bear neither you nor your friend the slightest ill will. Unlike some, I need not hate my subjects to do what I do. You and your suffering are simply a means to an end. If you give me what my School needs, Achamian, your friend will become useless to me. I’ll order his chains removed, and set him free. You have my word as a Schoolman on that …”
Achamian believed him, and would have given anything if he could. But a sorcerer two thousand years dead looked from his eyes, watched with a horrific detachment …
Iyokus studied him, his membranous skin moist in the unsteady light. He hissed and shook his head.
“Such fanatic stubbornness! Such strength!”
The red-gowned sorcerer whirled, nodded to the slave-soldier holding Xinemus.
“Nooooo!” a piteous voice howled.
A stranger convulsed in sightless agony, soiling himself.
I know not this man.
 
The nameless orange tabby froze, crouched, his ears pricked forward, his eyes fastened on the debris-strewn alleyway before him. Something crept through the shadows, slow like a lizard in the cold … Suddenly it dashed across dusty sunlight. The tabby jumped.
For five years he’d skulked the alleys and gutters of Iothiah, feeding on mice, preying on rats, and when he could, scavenging rare scraps discarded by men. Once he’d even eaten from the corpse of a fellow cat that some boys had thrown from a rooftop.

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