Read The Warrior Prophet Online
Authors: R. Scott Bakker
The Warrior Prophet (90 page)
“What are you doing here?” she asked, as she raised her lips through his beard to give him a kiss.
“Much happens,” he said gently. “I wanted to know you were safe … Where’s Esmi?”
It always seemed so strange to hear him ask such simple questions. It reminded her that the God was still a man. “Kellhus,” she asked pensively, “what’s your father’s name?”
“Moënghus.”
Serwë furrowed her brow. “I thought his name was … Aethel, or something like that.”
“Aethelarius,” the Warrior-Prophet said. “In Atrithau, Kings take a great ancestor’s name when they ascend the throne. Moënghus is his true name.”
“Then,” she said, running fingers over the fuzz of the infant’s pale scalp, “that’s what his name will be when he’s anointed:
Moënghus
.” This wasn’t an assertion. In the Warrior-Prophet’s presence all declarations became questions.
Moënghus
.” This wasn’t an assertion. In the Warrior-Prophet’s presence all declarations became questions.
Kellhus grinned. “That’s what we shall name our child.”
“What kind of man is your father, my Prophet?”
“A most mysterious one, Serwë.”
Serwë laughed softly. “Does he know that he fathered the voice of the God?”
Kellhus pursed his lips in mock concentration. “Perhaps.”
Serwë, who’d grown accustomed to cryptic conversations such as this, smiled. She blinked at the tears in her eyes. With her child warm against her breast, and the breath of the Prophet warmer still across her neck, the World seemed a closed circle, as though woe had been exiled from joy at long last. No longer taxed by cruel and distant things, the hearth now answered to the heart.
A sudden pang of guilt struck her. “I know that you grieve,” she said. “So many suffer …”
He lowered his face. Said nothing.
“But I’ve never been so happy,” she continued. “So whole … Is that a sin? To find rapture where others suffer?”
“Not for you, Serwë. Not for you.”
Serwë gasped and looked down at her suckling babe.
“Moënghus is hungry,” she laughed.
Glad to have concluded their long search, Rash and Wrigga paused along the crest of the wall. Dropping his shield, Rash sat with his back to the parapet, while Wrigga stood, leaning against the stonework, staring through an embrasure at the fires of the enemy across the Tertae Plain. Neither man paid heed to the shadowy figure crouched beneath the battlements farther down.
“I saw the child,” Wrigga said, still staring into the dark.
“Did you?” Rash asked with genuine interest. “Where?”
“Before the lower gates of the Fama Palace. The Anointing was public … You didn’t know, did you?”
“Because no one tells me anything!”
Wrigga resumed his scrutiny of the night. “Surprisingly dark, I thought.”
“What?”
“The child. The child seemed so dark.”
Rash snorted. “Birth hair … It’ll soon fall out. I swear my second daughter had sideburns!”
Friendly laughter. “Someday, when all this is over, I’ll come and woo your hairy daughters.”
“Please … Start with my hairy wife!”
More laughter, choked by a sudden realization. “Oh ho! So that’s how you got your nickname!”
“Saucy bastard!” Rash cried. “
No,
my skin’s just—”
No,
my skin’s just—”
“The child’s name,” a voice grated from the darkness. “What is it?”
Both men started, turned to the towering spectre of the Scylvendi. They’d seen the man before—few Men of the Tusk hadn’t—but neither had ever found themselves so close to the barbarian. Even in moonlight, his aspect was unnerving. The wild black hair. The fuming brow above eyes like chips of ice. The powerful shoulders, faintly stooped, as though bent by the preternatural strength of his back. The lean, adolescent waist. And the arms, thatched by scars both ritual and incidental, strapped by unfatted muscle. He seemed a thing of stone, ancient and famished.
“Wh-what’s this?” Rash stammered.
“The name!” Cnaiür snarled. “What did they name it?”
“Moënghus!” Wrigga blurted. “They anointed him by the name, Moënghus …”
The air of menace suddenly vanished. The barbarian became curiously blank, motionless to the point where he seemed inanimate. His manic eyes looked through them, to places far and forbidding.
A taut moment passed, then without a word, the Scylvendi turned and walked into the darkness.
Sighing, the two men looked to each other for what seemed a long time, then just to be certain, they resumed their fabricated conversation.
As they’d been instructed.
Some other way, Father. There must be.
No one came to the Citadel of the Dog, not even the most desperate of the rat eaters.
Standing high upon the crest of a ruined wall, Kellhus gazed across the dark expanse of Caraskand with her thousand points of smouldering light. Beyond the walls, particularly across the plains to the north, he could see the innumerable fires of the Padirajah’s army.
The path, Father … Where’s the path?
No matter how many times he submitted to the rigours of the Probability Trance, all the lines were extinguished, either by disaster or by the weight of excessive permutations. The variables were too many, the possibilities too precipitous.
Over the past weeks he’d exerted whatever influence he’d possessed, hoping to circumvent what now seemed more and more inevitable. Of the Great Names, only Saubon still openly supported him. Though Proyas had so far refused to join Conphas’s coalition of caste-nobles, the Conriyan Prince continued to rebuff Kellhus’s every overture. Among the lesser Men of the Tusk, the divisions between the Zaudunyani and the Orthodox, as they were now calling themselves, were deepening. And the threat of further, more determined attacks by the Consult made it impossible for him to move freely among them—as he must to secure those he already possessed and to conquer those he did not.
Meanwhile, the Holy War died.
You told me mine was the Shortest Path
… He’d relived his brief encounter with the Cishaurim messenger a thousand times, analyzing, evaluating, weighing alternate interpretations—all for naught. Every step was darkness now, no matter what his father said. Every word was risk. In so many ways, it seemed, he was no different from these world-born men …
… He’d relived his brief encounter with the Cishaurim messenger a thousand times, analyzing, evaluating, weighing alternate interpretations—all for naught. Every step was darkness now, no matter what his father said. Every word was risk. In so many ways, it seemed, he was no different from these world-born men …
What is the Thousandfold Thought?
He heard the rattle of rock against rock, then a small cascade of gravel and grit. He peered through the shadows amassed about the ruin’s roots. The blasted walls formed a roofless labyrinth beyond the Nail of Heaven’s pale reach. A darker shadow clambered across heaped debris. He glimpsed a round face in starlight …
He called down. “Esmenet? How did you find me?”
Her grin was pure mischief, though Kellhus could see the concern beneath.
She’s never loved another as she loves me. Not even Achamian.
“Werjau told me,” she said, picking her way up and along the truncated wall.
“Ah, yes,” Kellhus said, understanding immediately. “He fears women.” Esmenet wobbled for a moment, threw out her arms. She caught herself, but not before Kellhus found himself puzzled by a sudden shortness of breath. The fall would have been fatal.
“No …” She concentrated for a moment, her tongue between her lips. Then she danced up the remaining length. “He fears
me!
” She threw herself into his arms, laughing. They held each other tight on the dark and windy heights, surrounded by a city and a world—by Caraskand and the Three Seas.
me!
” She threw herself into his arms, laughing. They held each other tight on the dark and windy heights, surrounded by a city and a world—by Caraskand and the Three Seas.
She knows … She knows I struggle.
“We all fear you,” Kellhus said, wondering at the clamminess of his skin.
She comes to comfort.
“You tell such delicious lies,” she murmured, raising her lips to his.
They arrived shortly after dusk, the nine Nascenti, the senior disciples of the Warrior-Prophet. A grand teak-and-mahogany table, no higher than their knees, had been pulled onto the terrace of the merchant palace Kellhus had taken as their base and refuge in Caraskand. Standing unnoticed in the shadows of the garden, Esmenet watched them as they knelt or sat cross-legged upon the cushions set about the table. These days worry lined the faces of most everyone, but the nine of them seemed particularly upset. The Nascenti spent their time in the city, organizing the Zaudunyani, consecrating new Judges, and laying the foundation of the Ministrate. They knew better than most, she imagined, the straits of the Holy War.
Raised about the northern face of the Heights of the Bull, the terrace overlooked a greater part of the city. The labyrinthine streets and byways of the Bowl, which formed the heart of Caraskand, ascended into the distance, hanging from the surrounding heights like a cloth draped between five stumps. The ruined shell of the Citadel reared to the east, the wandering lines of her blasted walls etched in moonlight. To the northwest, the Sapatishah’s Palace sprawled across the Kneeling Heights, which were low enough to afford glimpses of lamp-lit figures over rose marble walls. The night sky was rutted by black clouds, but the Nail of Heaven was clear, brilliant, sparkling from the dark depths of the firmament.
A sudden hush fell across the Nascenti; as one they lowered their chins to their breast. Turning, Esmenet saw Kellhus stride from the golden interior of the adjacent apartments. He cast a fan of shadows before him as he walked past a row of flaming braziers. Two bare-chested Kianene boys flanked him, bearing censers that boiled with steely blue smoke. Serwë followed in his train, along with several men in hauberks and battle helms.
Esmenet cursed herself for catching her breath. How could he make her heart pound so? Glancing down, she realized she’d folded her right hand over the tattoo marring the back of her left.
Those days are over.
She stepped from the garden and greeted him at the head of the table. He smiled, and holding the fingers of her left hand, seated her to his immediate right. His white silk robe swayed in the breeze that touched them all, and for some reason, the Twin Scimitars embroidered about its hems and cuffs did not seem incongruous in the least. Someone, Serwë likely, had knotted his hair into a Galeoth war braid. His beard, which he now wore plaited and square-cut like the Ainoni, gleamed bronze in the light of nearby braziers. As always, the long pommel of his sword jutted high over his left shoulder. Enshoiya, the Zaudunyani now called it: Certainty.
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