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Caraskand
My heart shrivels even as my intellect bristles. Reasons—I find
myself desperate for reasons. Sometimes I think every word written
is written for shame.
—drusas achamian, the compendium of the first holy war
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Enathpaneah
There had been a time, for Achamian, when the future had been a
habit, something belonging to the hard rhythm of his days toiling in
his father’s shadow. His fingers had stung in the morning, his back
had burned in the afternoon. The fish had flashed silver in the
sunlight. Tomorrow became today, and today became yesterday, as
though time were little more than gravel rolled in a barrel, forever
brightening what was the same. He expected only what he’d already
endured, prepared only for what had already happened. His past had
enslaved his future. Only the size of his hands had seemed to
change.
But now …
Breathless, Achamian walked across the rooftop garden of Proyas’s
compound. The night sky was clear. The constellations glittered
against the black: Uroris rising in the east, the Flail descending
to the west. The encircling heights of the Bowl reared across the
distance, a riot of blue structures pricked by distant points of
torchlight. Hoots and cries floated up from the streets below,
sounding at once melancholy and besotted with joy.
Against all reason, the Men of the Tusk had triumphed over the
heathen. Caraskand was a great Inrithi city once again.
Achamian pressed through a hedge of junipers, fouled his smock in
the sharp branches. The garden was largely dead, the ground rutted
and overturned during the height of the hunger. He stepped across a
dusty gutter, then stomped about, making a carpet of grasses gone to
hay. He knelt, still searching for his breath.
The fish were gone. His palms no longer bled when he clenched his
fists in the morning. And the future had been … unleashed.
“I am,” he murmured through clenched teeth, “a Mandate Schoolman.”
The Mandate. How long since he had last spoken to them? Since it was
he who travelled, the onus was on him to maintain contact. His
failure to do so for so long would strike them as an unfathomable
dereliction. They would think him mad. They would demand of him
impossible things. And then, tomorrow …
It always came back to tomorrow.
He closed his eyes and intoned the first words. When he opened them,
he saw the pale circle of light they cast about his knees, the
shadows of grass combed through grass. A beetle scrambled through
the chiaroscuro, mad to escape his sorcerous aspect. He continued
speaking, his soul bending to the sounds, giving inner breath to the
Abstractions, to thoughts that were not his own, to meanings that
limned the world to its foundation. Without warning, the ground
seemed to pitch, then suddenly here was no longer here, but
everywhere. The beetle, the grasses, even Caraskand fell away.
He tasted the dank air of Atyersus, the great fortress of the School
of Mandate, through the lips of another … Nautzera.
The fetor of brine and rot tugged vomit to the back of his throat.
Surf crashed. Black waters heaved beneath a darkling sky. Terns hung
like miracles in the distance.
No … not here.
He knew this place well enough for terror to loosen his bowels. He
gagged at the smell, covered his mouth and nose, turned to the
fortifications … He stood upon the top tier of a timber scaffold. A
shroud of sagging corpses loomed over him, to the limits of his
periphery.
Dagliash.
From the base of the walls to the battlements, wherever the
fortress’s ramparts faced the sea, countless thousands had been
nailed across every surface: here a flaxen-maned warrior struck down
in his prime, there an infant pinned through the mouth like a
laurel. Fishing nets had been cast and fixed about them—to keep
their rotting ligature intact, Achamian supposed. The netting sagged
near the wall’s base, bellied by an accumulation of skulls and other
human detritus. Innumerable terns and crows, even several gannets,
darted and wheeled about the macabre jigsaw; it seemed he remembered
them most of all.
Achamian had dreamed of this place many times. The Wall of the Dead,
where Seswatha, captured after the fall of Trysë, had been tacked to
ponder the glory of the Consult.
Nautzera hung immediately before him, suspended by nails through his
thighs and forearms, naked save for the Agonic Collar about his
throat. He seemed scarcely conscious.
Achamian clutched shaking hands, squeezed them bloodless. Dagliash
had been a great sentinel once, staring across the wastes of
Agongorea toward Golgotterath, her turrets manned by the
hard-hearted men of Aörsi. Now she was but a way station of the
world’s ruin. Aörsi was dead, her people extinct, and the great
cities of Kûniüri were little more than gutted shells. The Nonmen
had fled to their mountain fastnesses, and the remaining High
Norsirai nations—Eämnor and Akksersia—battled for their very lives.
Three years had passed since the advent of the No-God. Achamian
could feel him, a looming across the western horizon. A sense of
doom.
A gust buffeted him with cold spray.
Nautzera … it’s me! Ach—
A harrowing cry cut him short. He actually crouched, though he knew
no harm could befall him, peered in the direction of the sound. He
gripped the bloodstained timber.
On a different brace of scaffolding farther down the fortifications,
a Bashrag stooped over a thrashing shadow. Long black hair streamed
from the fist-sized moles that pocked its massive frame. A vestigial
face grimaced from each of its great and brutal cheeks. Without
warning, it stood—each leg three legs welded together, each arm
three arms—and hoisted a pale figure over the heights: a man hanging
from a nail as long as a spear. For a moment the wretch kicked air
like a child drawn from the tub, then the Bashrag thrust him against
the husk of corpses. Wielding an immense hammer, the monstrosity
began battering the nail, searching for unseen mortises. More cries
pealed across the heights. The Bashrag clacked its teeth in ecstasy.
Immobilized, Achamian watched the Bashrag raise a second nail to the
man’s pelvis. The wails became raving shrieks. Then a shadow fell
across the sorcerer. “Anguish,” a deep voice said, as close as a
whisper in his ear.
Intake of breath, sharp and sudden. The incongruent taste of warm
Caraskandi air …
For an instant his Cant faltered at this memory of the world’s true
order, and Achamian glimpsed the Heights of the Bull framed by a
field of stars. Then there he was—Mekeritrig—standing over him,
staring at Nautzera where he hung flushed and alive among gaping
mouths and groping limbs.
“Anguish and degradation,” the Nonman continued, his voice resonant
with inhuman tones. “Who would think, Seswatha, that salvation could
be found in these words?”
Mekeritrig stood in the curiously affected manner of Nonmen Ishroi,
his hands clasped and pressed into the small of his back. He wore a
gown of sheer black damask beneath a corselet of nimil that had been
worked into circles of interlocking cranes. Tails of nimil chain
followed the gown’s pleats to the ground.
“Salvation …” Nautzera gasped in Seswatha’s voice. He raised his
swollen gaze to the Nonman Prince. “Has it progressed so far,
Cet’ingira? Do you recall so little?”
A flicker of terror marred the Nonman’s perfect features. His pupils
became thin as quill strokes. After millennia of practising sorcery,
the Quya bore a Mark that was far, far deeper than that borne by any
Schoolmen—like indigo compared with water. Despite their
preternatural beauty, despite the porcelain whiteness of their skin,
they seemed blasted, blackened, and withered, a husk of cinders at
once animate and extinct. Some, it was said, were so deeply Marked
that they couldn’t stand within a length of a Chorae without
beginning to salt.
“Recall?” Mekeritrig replied with a gesture at once plaintive and
majestic. “But I have raised such a wall …” As though to emphasize
his declaration, the sun flared across the wall’s length, warming
the dead with crimson.
“An obscenity!” Nautzera spat.
The nets flapped about the nailed corpses. To his right, near to
where the wall curved out of sight, Achamian glimpsed a carrion arm
waving back and forth, as though warning away unseen ships.
“As are all monuments, all memorials,” Mekeritrig replied, lowering
his chin toward his right shoulder—the Nonman gesture of assent.
“What are they but prostheses that pronounce our impotence, our
debility? I may live forever, but alas, what I have lived is mortal.
Your suffering, Seswatha, is my salvation.”
“No, Cet’ingira …” Hearing the strain in Seswatha’s voice filled
Achamian with an eye-watering ache. His body had not forgotten this
Dream. “It need not be like this! I’ve read the ancient chronicles.
I studied the engravings along the High White Halls before Celmomas
ordered your image struck. You were great once. You were among those
who raised us, who made the Norsirai first among the Tribes of Men!
You were not this, my Prince! You were never this!”
Again the eerie sideways nod. A single tear scored his cheek. “Which
is why, Seswatha. Which is why …”
A cut scarred where a caress faded away. In this simple fact lay the
tragic and catastrophic truth of the Nonmen. Mekeritrig had lived a
hundred lifetimes—more! What would it be like, Achamian wondered, to
have every redeeming memory—be it a lover’s touch or a child’s warm
squeal—blotted out by the accumulation of anguish, terror, and hate?
To understand the soul of a Nonman, the philosopher Gotagga had once
written, one need only bare the back of an old and arrogant slave.
Scars. Scars upon scars. This was what made them mad. All of them.
“I am an Erratic,” Mekeritrig was saying. “I do that which I hate, I
raise my heart to the lash, so that I might remember! Do you
understand what this means? You are my children!”
“There must be some other way,” Nautzera gasped.
The Nonman lowered his bald head, like a son overcome by remorse in
the presence of his father. “I am an Erratic …” Tears sheened his
cheeks when he looked up. “There is no other way.”
Nautzera strained against the nails impaling his arms, cried out in
pain, “Kill me, then! Kill me and be done with it!”
“But you know, Seswatha.”
“What? What do I know?”
“The location of the Heron Spear.”
Nautzera stared, eyes rounded in horror, teeth clenched in agony.
“If I did, you would be the one bound, and I would be your
tormentor.”
Mekeritrig backhanded him with a ferocity that made Achamian jump.
Droplets of blood sailed down the wall’s mangled length.
“I will strip you to your footings,” the Nonman grated. “Though I
love, I will upend your soul’s foundation! I will release you from
the delusions of this word ‘Man,’ and draw forth the beast—the
soulless beast!—that is the howling Truth of all things … You will
tell me!”
The old man coughed, drooled blood.
“And I, Seswatha … I will remember!”
Achamian glimpsed fused Nonman teeth. Mekeritrig’s eyes flared like
spears of sunlight. Orange-burning circles appeared about each of
his fingertips, boiling, seething with fractal edges. Achamian
recognized the Cant immediately: a Quya variant of the Thawa
Ligatures. With volcanic palms, Mekeritrig clenched Seswatha’s brow,
serrated both body and soul.
Nautzera howled in voices not his own.
“Shhhh,” Mekeritrig whispered, clutching the old sorcerer’s cheek.
He squeezed away tears with his thumb. “Hush, child …”
Nautzera could only gag and convulse.
“Please,” the Nonman said. “Please do not cry …”
And Achamian howled, Nautzera! He couldn’t watch this, not again,
not after the Scarlet Spires. You dream, Nautzera! You dream!
Great Dagliash stood mute. Terns and crows swept and battled through
the air about them. The dead stared vacant across the thundering
sea.
Nautzera turned from Mekeritrig’s palm to Achamian, heaving, heaving
chill air. “But you’re dead,” he gasped.
No, Achamian said. I survived.
Gone was the scaffolding and the wall, the stench of rot and the
shrill chorus of scavenger birds. Gone was Mekeritrig. Achamian
stood nowhere, struck breathless by the impossibility of the
transition.
How is it you live? Nautzera cried in his thoughts. We were told the
Spires had taken you!
I …
Achamian? Akka? Is everything okay?
Why did he feel so small? He had reasons for his deception—reasons!
I—I …
Where are you? We’ll send someone for you. All will be made right.
Vengeance will be exacted!
Concern? Compassion for him?
N-no, Nautzera. No, you don’t understand—
My brother has been wronged! What more must I know?
An instant of mad weightlessness.
I lied to you.
Then long, dark silence, at once perfect and raucous with inaudible
things.
Lied? Are you saying the Spires didn’t seize you?
No—I mean, yes, they did seize me! And I did escape …
Images of the madness at Iothiah flashed through the blackness.
Iyokus and his dispassionate torments. The blinding of Xinemus. The
Wathi Doll, and the godlike exercise of the Gnosis.
Remembered men screamed.
Yes! You did well, Achamian—well enough to be written! Immortalized
in our annals! But what’s this about lies?
There’s a—his body in Caraskand swallowed—there’s a fact … a fact
I’ve hidden from you and the others.
A fact?
An Anasûrimbor has returned …
A long pause, strangely studied.
What are you saying?
The Harbinger has come, Nautzera. The world is about to end.
The world is about to end.
Said enough times, any phrase—even this one—was sure to be leached
of its meaning, which was why, Achamian knew, Seswatha had cursed
his followers with the imprint of his battered soul. But now,
confessing to Nautzera, it seemed he’d never uttered these words
before.
Perhaps he’d simply never meant them. Certainly not like this.
Nautzera had been too shocked to be outraged by his admission of
betrayal. A troubling vacancy had dogged the tone of his Other
Voice—even a premonition of senility. Only afterward would Achamian
realize that the old man had simply been terrified, that, like
Achamian himself a mere few months earlier, he feared himself
unequal to the events unfolding before him.
The world was about to end.
Achamian began by describing his first meeting with Kellhus, that
day outside Momemn’s walls when Proyas had summoned him to appraise
the Scylvendi. He described the man’s intellect—even explained the
man’s improvements on Ajencis’s logic as proof of his preternatural
intelligence. He narrated Kellhus’s inexorable rise to ascendancy in
the Holy War, both from what he himself had witnessed and from what
he’d subsequently learned through Proyas. Nautzera had heard,
apparently through informants near to the Imperial Court, that a man
claiming to be a prophet had grown to prominence among the Men of
the Tusk, but the name Anasûrimbor had become Nasurius by the time
it reached Atyersus. They had dismissed it as simply one more
fanatic contrivance.
Then Achamian described everything that had happened in Caraskand:
the coming of the Padirajah, the siege and starvation, the growing
tension between the Orthodox and the Zaudunyani, Kellhus’s
condemnation as a False Prophet—and ultimately, the revelation
beneath dark-boughed Umiaki, where Kellhus had confessed to Achamian
even as Achamian confessed now.
He told Nautzera about everything except Esmenet.
After he was freed, even the most embittered of the Orthodox fell to
their knees before him—and how could they not? The Scylvendi’s duel
with Cutias Sarcellus—the First Knight-Commander a skin-spy! Think,
Nautzera! The Scylvendi’s victory proved that demons—demons!—had
sought the Warrior-Prophet’s death. It was exactly as Ajencis says:
Men ever make corruption proof of purity.
He paused, a peevish part of him convinced Nautzera had never read
Ajencis.
Yes yes, the old sorcerer said with soundless impatience.
He came upon them like a fever after that. Suddenly the Holy War
found itself unified as never before. All of the Great Names—with
the exception of Conphas, that is—knelt before him, kissed his knee.
Gotian openly wept, offered his bared breast to the Anasûrimbor’s
sword. And then they marched. Such a sight, Nautzera! As great and
terrible as anything in our Dreams. Starved. Sick. They shambled
from the gates—dead men moved to war …
Images of the already broken flickered through the black. Gaunt
swordsmen draped in strapless hauberks. Knights upon the ribbed
backs of horses. The crude standard of the Circumfix snapping in the
air.
What happened?
The impossible. They won the field. They couldn’t be stopped! I
still can’t rub the wonder from my eyes …
And the Padirajah? Nautzera asked. Kascamandri. What of him?
Dead by the Warrior-Prophet’s own hand. Even now, the Holy War makes
ready to march on Shimeh and the Cishaurim. There’s none left who
might bar their passage, Nautzera. They’ve all but succeeded!
But why? the old sorcerer asked. If this Anasûrimbor Kellhus knows
of the Consult, if he too believes the Second Apocalypse is nigh,
why would he continue this foolish war? Perhaps he said what he said
to deceive you. Have you considered that?
He can see them. Even now, the purges continue. No … I believe him.
After Sarcellus’s death, over a dozen men of rank and privilege had
simply vanished, leaving their clients astonished and delivering
even the most fanatical of the Orthodox to the Warrior-Prophet. In
the wake of the Padirajah’s overthrow, both Caraskand and the Holy
War had been ransacked, but as far as Achamian knew, only two of the
abominations had been found and … exorcized.
This … this is extraordinary, Akka! What you say … soon all the
Three Seas will believe!
Either that or burn.
There was grim satisfaction in thinking of the dismay and
incredulity that would soon greet Mandate embassies. For centuries
they’d been a laughingstock. For centuries they’d endured all manner
of scorn, even those insults that jnan reserved for the most
wretched. But now … Vindication was a potent narcotic. It would swim
in the veins of Mandate Schoolmen for some time.
Yes! Nautzera exclaimed. Which is why we mustn’t forget what’s
important. The Consult is never so easily rooted out. They’ll try to
murder this Anasûrimbor—there can be no doubt.
No doubt, Achamian replied, though for some reason the thought of
further assassination attempts hadn’t occurred to him.
Which means that first and foremost, Nautzera continued, you must do
everything in your power to protect him. No harm must come to him!
The Warrior-Prophet has no need of my protection.
Nautzera paused. Why do you call him that?
Because no other name seemed his equal. Not even Anasûrimbor. But
something, a profound indecision perhaps, held him mute.
Achamian? Do you actually think the man’s a prophet?
I don’t know what I think … Too much has happened.
This is no time for sentimental foolishness!
Enough, Nautzera. You haven’t seen the man.
No … but I will.
What do you mean? His brother Schoolmen coming here? The thought
troubled Achamian somehow. The thought that others from the Mandate
might witness his …
… humiliation.
But Nautzera ignored the question. So what does our cousin School,
the Scarlet Spires, make of all this? There was a note of sarcastic
hilarity in his tone, but it seemed forced, almost painfully so.
At Council, Eleäzaras looks like a man whose children have just been
sold into slavery. He can’t even bring himself to look at me, let
alone ask about the Consult. He’s heard of the ruin I wrought in
Iothiah. I think he fears me.
He will come to you, Achamian. Sooner or later.
Let him come.
Every night the ledgers were opened, the debtors called to account.
There would be amends.
There’s no room for vengeance here. You must treat with him as an
equal, comport yourself as though you were never abducted, never
plied … I understand your hunger for retribution—but the stakes! The
stakes of this game outweigh all other considerations. Do you
understand this?
What did understanding have to do with hatred?
I understand well enough, Nautzera.
And the Anasûrimbor—what do Eleäzaras and the others make of him?
They want him to be a fraud, I know that much. What they think of
him, I don’t know.
You must make it clear to them that the Anasûrimbor is ours,
Achamian. You must let them know that what happened at Iothiah is
but a trifle compared with what will happen if they try to seize
him.
The Warrior-Prophet cannot be seized. He’s … beyond that. Achamian
paused, struggled with his composure. But he can be purchased.
Purchased? What do you mean?
He wants the Gnosis, Nautzera. He’s one of the Few. And if I deny
him, I fear he might turn to the Scarlet Spires.
One of the Few? How long have you known this?
For some time …
And even then you said nothing! Achamian … Akka … I must know I can
trust you with this matter!
As I trusted you on the matter of Inrau?
A long pause, fraught with guilt and accusation. In the blackness,
it seemed to Achamian that he could see the boy looking to his
teacher in fear and apprehension.
Unfortunate, to be sure, Nautzera said. But events have borne me
out, wouldn’t you agree?
I will warn you just this once, Achamian grated. Do you understand?
How could he do this? How long must he wage two wars, one for the
world, the other against himself?
But I must know I can trust you!
What would you have me say? You haven’t met the man! Until then, you
can never know.
Know what? Know what?
That he’s the world’s only hope. Mark me, Nautzera, he’s more than a
mere sign, and he’ll be more than a mere sorcerer—far more!
Harness your passions! You must see him as a tool—a Mandate
tool!—nothing more, nothing less. We must possess him!
And if the Gnosis is his price for “possession,” what then?
The Gnosis is our hammer. Ours! Only by submitting—
And the Spires? If Eleäzaras offers him the Anagogis?
Hesitation, both outraged and exasperated.
This is madness! A prophet who would pit School against School for
sorcery’s sake? A Wizard-Prophet? A Shaman?
This word forced a silence, one filled by the ethereal boiling that
framed all such exchanges, as though the weight of the world
inveighed against their impossibility. Nautzera was right: the
circumstances were quite mad. But would he forgive Achamian the
madness of the task before him? With polite words and diplomatic
smiles Achamian had to court those who had tortured him. What was
more, he was expected to woo and win a prophet, the man who had
stolen from him his only love … Achamian beat at the fury that
welled up through his heart. In Caraskand, twin tears broke from his
sightless eyes.
Very well, then! Nautzera cried, his tone disconcertingly desperate.
The others will have my hide for this … Give him the Lesser
Cants—the denotaries and the like. Deceive him with dross into
thinking you’ve traded our deepest secrets.
You still don’t understand, do you, Nautzera? The Warrior-Prophet
cannot be deceived!
All men can be deceived, Achamian. All men.
Did I say he was a “man”? You haven’t yet seen him! There’s no other
like him, Nautzera. I tire of repeating this!
Nevertheless, you must yoke him. Our war depends upon it. Everything
depends upon it!
You must believe me, Nautzera. This man is beyond our abilities to
possess. He …
An image of Esmenet flashed through his thoughts, unbidden,
beguiling.
He possesses.
The hills teemed with the herds of their enemy, and the Men of the
Tusk rejoiced, for their hunger was like no other. The cows they
butchered for the feast, the bulls they burned in offerings to
flint-hearted Gilgaöl and the other Hundred Gods. They gorged
themselves to the point of sickness, then gorged again. They drank
until unconsciousness overcame them. Many could be found kneeling
before the banners of the Circumfix, which the Judges had raised
wherever men congregated. They cried out to the image; they cried
out in disbelief. When bands of revellers passed one another in the
darkness, they shouted, “We! We are the God’s fury!” in the argot of
the camp. And they clasped arms, knowing they held their brothers,
for together they had held their faces to the furnace. There were no
more Orthodox, no more Zaudunyani.
They were Inrithi once again.
The Conriyans, using inks looted from Kianene scriptoriums, tattooed
circles crossed with an X on their inner forearms. The Thunyeri, and
the Tydonni after them, took knives drawn from the fire to their
shoulders, where they cut representations of three Tusks—one for
each great battle—scarring themselves in the manner of the Scylvendi.
The Galeoth, the Ainoni—all adorned their bodies with some mark of
their transformation. Only the Nansur refrained.
A band of Agmundrmen discovered the Padirajah’s standard in the
hills, which they immediately brought to Saubon, who rewarded them
with three hundred Kianene akals. In an impromptu ceremony at the
Fama Palace, Prince Kellhus had the silk cut from the ash pole and
laid before his chair. He planted his sandals upon the image, which
may have been a lion or a tiger, and declared, “All their symbols,
all the sacred marks of our foemen, you shall deliver to my feet!”
For two days the Fanim captives toiled across the battlefield,
piling their dead kinsmen into great heaps outside Caraskand’s
walls. Innumerable carrion birds—kites and jackdaws, storks and
great desert vultures—harassed them, at times darkening the sky like
locusts. Despite the bounty, they squabbled like gulls over fish.
The Men of the Tusk continued their revels, though many fell ill and
a hundred or so actually died—from eating too much after starving
for so long, the physician-priests said. Then, on the fourth day
following the Battle of Tertae Fields, they made a great train of
the captives, stripping them naked to make manifest their
humiliation. Once assembled, the Fanim were encumbered with all the
spoils of camp and field: caskets of gold and silver, Zeümi silks,
arms of Nenciphon steel, unguents and oils from Cingulat. Then they
were driven with whips and flails through the Gate of Horns, across
the city to the Kalaul, where the greater part of the Holy War
greeted them with jeers and exaltation.
By the score they were brought to the black tree, Umiaki, where the
Warrior-Prophet sat upon a simple stool, awaiting their petitions.
Those who fell to their knees and cursed Fane were led as dogs to
the waiting slavers. Those who did not were cut down where they
stood.
When all was finished and the sun leaned crimson against the dark
hills, the Warrior-Prophet walked from his seat and knelt in the
blood of his enemies. He bid his people come to him, and upon the
forehead of each he sketched the mark of the Tusk in Fanim blood.
Even the most manly wept for wonder.
Esmenet is his …
Like all horrifying thoughts, this one possessed a will all its own.
It snaked in and out of his awareness, sometimes constricting,
sometimes lying still and cold. Though it seemed old and familiar,
it possessed the urgency of things remembered too late. It was at
once a screeching call to arms and a grievous admission of futility.
He had not simply lost her, he had lost her to him.
It was as though his soul only had fingers for certain things,
certain dimensions. And the fact of her betrayal was simply too
great.
Old fool!
His arrival at the Fama Palace had thoroughly flummoxed the
Zaudunyani functionaries. They treated him with deference—he was
their master’s erstwhile teacher—but there was also trepidation in
their manner, an anxious trepidation. Had they acted suspicious,
Achamian would have attributed their reaction to his sorcerous
calling; they were religious men, after all. But they didn’t seem
unnerved by him so much as they seemed troubled by their own
thoughts. They knew him, Achamian decided, the way men knew those
they derided in private. And now that he stood before them, a man
who would figure large in the inevitable scriptures to follow, they
found themselves dismayed by their own impiety.
Of course, they knew he was a cuckold. By now the stories of
everyone who had broken bread or sawed joint at Xinemus’s fire would
be known in some distorted form or another. There were no intimacies
left. And his story in particular—the sorcerer who loved the whore
who would become the Prophet-Consort—had doubtless come quick to a
thousand lips, multiplying his shame.
While waiting for the hidden machinery of messengers and secretaries
to relay his request, Achamian wandered into an adjoining courtyard,
struck by the other immensities that framed his present
circumstance. Even if there were no Consult, no threat of the Second
Apocalypse, he realized, nothing would be the same. Kellhus would
change the world, not in the way of an Ajencis or a Triamis, but in
the way of an Inri Sejenus.
This, Achamian realized, was Year One. A new age of Men.
He stepped from the cool shade of the portico into crisp morning
sunlight. For a moment he stood blinking against the gleam of white
and rose marble, then his eyes fell to the earthen beds in the
courtyard’s heart, which, he was surprised to note, had been
recently turned and replanted with white lilies and spear-like agave—wildflowers
looted from beyond the walls. He saw three men—penitents like
himself, he imagined—conferring in low tones on the courtyard’s far
side, and he was struck that things had become so sedate—so
normal—so quickly. The week previous, Caraskand had been a place of
blight and squalor; now he could almost believe he awaited an
audience in Momemn or Aöknyssus.
Even the banners—white bolts of silk draped along the
colonnades—spoke of an eerie continuity, a sense that nothing had
changed, that the Warrior-Prophet had always been. Achamian stared
at the stylized likeness of Kellhus embroidered in black across the
fabric, his outstretched arms and legs dividing the circle into four
equal segments. The Circumfix.
A cool breeze filtered through the courtyard, and a fold rolled
across the image like a serpent beneath sheets. Someone, Achamian
realized, must have started stitching these before the battle had
even begun.
Whoever they were, they had forgotten Serwë. He blinked away images
of her bound to Kellhus and the ring. It had been so very dark
beneath Umiaki, but it seemed he could see her face arched back in
rigour and ecstasy …
“He is as you said,” Kellhus had confessed that night. “Tsuramah.
Mog-Pharau …”
“Master Achamian.”
Startled, Achamian turned to see an officer decked in green and gold
regalia stepping into the sunlight. Like all Men of the Tusk, he was
gaunt, though not nearly as cadaverous as many of those found
outside the Fama Palace. The man fell to his knees at Achamian’s
feet, spoke to the ground in a thick Galeoth accent. “I am Dun
Heörsa, Shield-Captain of the Hundred Pillars.” There was little
courtesy in his blue eyes when he looked up, and a surfeit of
intent. “He has instructed me to deliver you.”
Achamian swallowed, nodded.
He …
The sorcerer followed the officer into the gloom of scented
corridors.
He. The Warrior-Prophet.
His skin tingled. Of all the world, of all the innumerable men
scattered about all the innumerable lands, he, Anasûrimbor Kellhus,
communed with the God—the God! And how could it be otherwise, when
he knew what no other man could know, when he spoke what no other
man could speak?
Who could blame Achamian for his incredulity? It was like holding a
flute to the wind and hearing song. It seemed beyond belief …
A miracle. A prophet in their midst.
Breathe when you speak to him. You must remember to breathe.
The Shield-Captain said nothing as they continued their march. He
stared forward, possessed of the same eerie discipline that seemed
to characterize everyone in the palace. Ornate rugs had been set at
various points along the floor; the man’s boots fell silent as they
crossed each.
Despite his nerves, Achamian appreciated the absence of speech.
Never, it seemed to him, had he suffered such a throng of
conflicting passions. Hatred, for an impossible rival, for a fraud
who had robbed him of his manhood—of his wife. Love, for an old
friend, for a student who was at once his teacher, for a voice that
had quickened his soul with countless insights. Fear, for the
future, for the rapacious madness that was about to descend upon
them all. Jubilation, for an enemy momentarily undone.
Bitterness. Hope.
And awe … Awe before all.
The eyes of men were but pinholes—no one knew this better than
Mandate Schoolmen. All their books, even their scriptures, were
nothing more than pinholes. And yet, because they couldn’t see what
was unseen, they assumed they saw everything, they confused
pinpricks with the sky.
But Kellhus was something different. A doorway. A mighty gate.
He’s come to save us. This is what I must remember. I must hold on
to this!
The Shield-Captain escorted him past a rank of stone-faced
guardsmen, their green surcoats also embroidered with the golden
mark of the Hundred Pillars: a row of vertical bars over the long,
winding slash of the Tusk. They passed through fretted mahogany
doors and Achamian found himself on the portico of a much larger
courtyard. The air was thick with the smell of blossoms.
In the sunlight beyond the colonnade, an orchard soaked bright and
motionless. The trees—some kind of exotic apple, Achamian
decided—twined black beneath constellations of blooming flowers,
each petal like a white swatch dipped in blood. At different points
through the orchard, great sentinels of stone—dolmens—towered over
the surrounding queues, dark and unwrought, more ancient than
Kyraneas, or even Shigek. The remnants of some long-overthrown
circle.
Achamian turned to Captain Heörsa with questioning eyes, only to
glimpse movement through braces of leaf and flower. He turned—and
there she was, strolling beneath the boughs with Kellhus.
Esmenet.
She was speaking, though Achamian could only hear the memory of her
voice. Her eyes were lowered, thoughtfully studying the petalled
ground as it passed beneath her small feet. She smiled in a manner
at once rueful and heartbreaking, as though she answered teasing
proposals with loving admissions.
It was the first time, Achamian realized, that he’d seen the two of
them together. She seemed otherworldly, self-assured, slender
beneath the sheer turquoise lines of her Kianene gown—something
fitted, Achamian had no doubt, for one of the dead Padirajah’s
concubines. Graceful. Dark of eye and face, her hair flashing like
obsidian between the golden ribs of her headdress—a Nilnameshi
Empress on the arm of a Kûniüric High King. And wearing a Chorae—a
Trinket!—pressed against her throat. A Tear of God, more black than
black.
She was Esmenet and yet she wasn’t Esmenet. The woman of loose life
had fallen away, and what remained was more, so much more, than
she’d been at his side. Resplendent.
Redeemed.
I dimmed her, he realized. I was smoke and he … is a mirror.
At the sight of his Prophet, Captain Heörsa had fallen to his knees,
his face pressed to the ground. Achamian found himself doing the
same, though more because his legs refused to bear him.
“So what will it be the next time I die?” he had asked her that
night she had broken him. “The Andiamine Heights?”
What a fool he’d been!
He blinked womanishly, swallowed against the absurd pang that
nettled the back of his throat. For a moment the world seemed
nothing more than a criminal ledger, with all he’d surrendered—and
he’d surrendered so much!—balanced against one thing. Why couldn’t
he have this one thing?
Because he would ruin it, the way he ruined everything.
“I carry his child.”
For a heartbeat her eyes met his own. She raised a hesitant hand
only to lower it, as though recalling new loyalties. She turned to
kiss Kellhus’s cheek, then fled, her eyes seemingly closed, her lips
drawn into a heart-frosting line.
It was the first time he had seen the two of them together.
“So what will it be the next time I die?”
Kellhus stood before one of the apple trees, watching him with
gentle expectation. He wore a white silk cassock patterned with a
grey arboreal brocade. As always, the pommel of his curious sword
jutted over his left shoulder. Like Esmenet, he bore a Trinket,
though he had the courtesy to keep it concealed against his chest.
“You need never kneel in my presence,” he said, waving for Achamian
to join him. “You are my friend, Akka. You will always be my
friend.”
His ears roaring, Achamian stood, glanced at the shadows where
Esmenet had disappeared.
How has it come to this?
Kellhus had been little more than a beggar the first time Achamian
had seen him, a puzzling accessory to the Scylvendi, whom Proyas had
hoped to use in his contest with the Emperor. But even then there
had been something, it now seemed, a glimpse of this moment in
embryo. They had wondered why a Scylvendi—and of Utemot blood, no
less—would seek employ in an Inrithi Holy War.
“I am the reason,” Kellhus had said.
The revelation of his name, Anasûrimbor, had been but the beginning.
Achamian crossed the interval only to feel strangely bullied by
Kellhus’s height. Had he always been this tall? Smiling, Kellhus
effortlessly guided him between a gap in the trees. One of the
dolmens blackened the sun. The air hummed with the industry of bees.
“How fares Xinemus?” he said.
Achamian pursed his lips, swallowed. For some reason he found this
question disarming to the point of tears.
“I—I worry for him.”
“You must bring him, and soon. I miss eating and arguing beneath the
stars. I miss a fire nipping at my feet.”
And as easy as that, Achamian found himself tripping into the old
rhythm. “Your legs always were too long.”
Kellhus laughed. He seemed to shine about the pit of the Chorae.
“Much like your opinions.”
Achamian grinned, but a glimpse of the welts about Kellhus’s wrists
struck the nascent humour from him. For the first time he noticed
the bruising about Kellhus’s face. The cuts.
They tortured him … murdered Serwë.
“Yes,” Kellhus said, ruefully holding out his hands. He looked
almost embarrassed. “Would that everything healed so quickly.”
Somehow these words found Achamian’s fury.
“You could see the Consult all along—all along!—and yet you said
nothing to me … Why?”
Why Esmenet?
Kellhus raised his brows, sighed. “The time wasn’t right. But you
already know this.”
“Do I?”
Kellhus smiled while pursing his lips, as though at once pained and
bemused. “Now, you and your School must parlay, where before you
would have simply seized me. I concealed the skin-spies from you for
the same reason you concealed me from your Mandate masters.”
But you already know this, his eyes repeated.
Achamian could think of no reply.
“You’ve told them,” Kellhus continued, turning to resume their
stroll between the blooming queues.
“I’ve told them.”
“And do they accept your interpretation?”
“What interpretation?”
“That I’m more than the sign of the Second Apocalypse.”
More. A tremor passed through him, body and soul.
“They think it unlikely.”
“I should imagine you find it difficult to describe me … to make
them understand.”
Achamian stared for a helpless moment, then looked to his feet.
“So,” Kellhus continued, “what are your interim instructions?”
“To pretend to give you the Gnosis. I told them you would go to the
Spires otherwise. And to ensure that nothing”—Achamian paused,
licked his lips—“that nothing happens to you.”
Kellhus both grinned and scowled—so like Xinemus before his
blinding.
“So you’re to be my bodyguard?”
“They have good reason to worry—as do you. Think of the catastrophe
you’ve wrought. For centuries the Consult has hidden in the fat of
the Three Seas, while we were little more than a laughingstock. They
could act with impunity. But now that fat has been cooked away.
They’ll do anything to recover what they’ve lost. Anything.”
“There have been other assassins.”
“But that was before … The stakes are far higher now. Perhaps these
skin-spies act on their own. Perhaps they’re … directed.”
Kellhus studied him for a moment. “You fear one of the Consult might
be directly involved … that an Old Name shadows the Holy War.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Kellhus did not immediately reply, at least not with words. Instead,
everything about him—his stance, his expression, even the fixity of
his gaze—grew sharp with monumental intent. “The Gnosis,” he finally
said. “Will you give it to me, Akka?”
He knows. He knows the power he would wield. Somewhere, beneath some
footing of his soul, the ground seemed to fall away.
“If you demand it … though I …” He looked to Kellhus, somehow
understanding that the man already knew what he was about to say.
Every path, it seemed, every implication, had already been travelled
by those shining blue eyes. Nothing surprises him.
“Yes,” Kellhus said with a peculiar moroseness. “Once I accept the
Gnosis, I yield the protection afforded by the Chorae.”
“Exactly.”
In the beginning Kellhus would possess only the vulnerabilities of a
sorcerer, none of the strengths. The Gnosis, far more than the
Anagogis, was an analytic and systematic sorcery. Even the most
primitive Cants required extensive precursors, components that
damned nonetheless for being inert.
“Which is why you must protect me,” Kellhus concluded. “Henceforth
you will be my Vizier. You will reside here, in the Fama Palace, at
my disposal.” Words spoken with the authority of a Shrial Edict, but
infused with such force of certainty, such inevitability, that it
seemed they described more than they demanded, that Achamian’s
compliance was some ancient and conspicuous fact.
Kellhus did not wait for his reply—none was needed.
“Can you protect me, Akka?”
Achamian blinked, still trying to digest what had just happened.
“You will reside here …”
With her.
“F-from an Old Name?” he sputtered. “I’m not sure.”
Where had this treacherous joy come from? You will show her! Win
her!
“No,” Kellhus said evenly. “From yourself.”
Achamian stared, glimpsed Nautzera screaming beneath Mekeritrig’s
incandescent touch. “If I cannot,” he said with a voice that seemed
a gasp, “Seswatha can.”
Kellhus nodded. Motioning for Achamian to follow, he abruptly
turned, pressing through interlocking branches, crossing rows.
Achamian hastened after him, waving at the bees and fluttering
petals. Three rows over, Kellhus paused before an opening between
two trees.
Achamian could only gape in horror.
The apple tree before Kellhus had been stripped of its blossoming
weave, leaving only a black knotted trunk with three boughs bent
about like a dancer’s waving arms. A skin-spy had been pulled naked
across them, bound tight in rust-brown chains. Its pose—one arm
trussed back and the other forward—reminded Achamian of a javelin
thrower. Its head hung from drawn shoulders. The long, feminine
digits of its face lay slack against its chest. Sunlight showered
down upon it, casting inscrutable shadows.
“The tree was dead,” Kellhus said, as though in explanation.
“What …” Achamian began in a thin voice, but halted when the
creature stirred, raised the shambles of its visage. The digits
slowly clawed the air, like a suffocating crab. Lidless eyes glared
in perpetual terror.
“What have you learned?” Achamian finally managed.
The abomination masticated behind lipless teeth. “Ahh,” it said in a
long, gasping breath. “Chigraaaa …”
“That they are directed,” Kellhus said softly.
“Woe comes, Chigraaa. You have found us too late.”
“By whom?” Achamian exclaimed, staring, clutching his hands before
him. “Do you know by whom?”
The Warrior-Prophet shook his head. “They’re conditioned—powerfully
so. Months of interrogation would be required. Perhaps more.”
Achamian nodded. Given time, he realized, Kellhus could empty this
creature, own it as he seemed to own everything else. He was more
than thorough, more than meticulous. Even the swiftness of this
discovery—wrested, no less, from a creature that had been forged to
deceive—demonstrated his … inevitability.
He makes no mistakes.
For a giddy instant a kind of gloating fury descended upon Achamian.
All those years—centuries!—the Consult had played them for fools.
But now—now! Did they know? Could they sense the peril this man
represented? Or would they underestimate him like everyone else had?
Like Esmenet.
Achamian swallowed. “Either way, Kellhus, you must surround yourself
with Chorae bowmen. And you need to avoid large structures, anyplace
where—”
“It troubles you,” Kellhus interrupted, “to see these things.”
A breeze had descended upon the grove, and countless petals spun
through the air as though along unseen strings. Achamian watched one
settle upon the skin-spy’s pubis.
Why bind the abomination here, amid such beauty and repose—like a
cancer on a young girl’s skin? Why? It seemed the act of someone who
knew nothing of beauty … nothing.
He matched Kellhus’s gaze. “It troubles me.”
“And your hatred?”
For an instant it had seemed that everything—who he was and who he
would become—wanted to love this godlike man. And how could he not,
given the sanctuary of his mere presence? And yet intimations of
Esmenet clung to him. Glimpses of her passion …
“It remains,” he said.
As though provoked by this response, the creature began jerking,
straining against its fetters. Slick muscle balled beneath sunburned
skin. Chains rattled. Black boughs creaked. Achamian stepped back,
remembering the horror of Skeaös beneath the Andiamine Heights. The
night Conphas had saved him.
Kellhus ignored the thing, continued speaking. “All men surrender,
Akka, even as they seek to dominate. It’s their nature to submit.
The question is never whether they will surrender, but rather to
whom …”
“Your heart, Chigraa … I shall make it my apple …”
“I—I don’t understand.” Achamian glanced from the abomination to
Kellhus’s sky-blue eyes.
“Some, like so many Men of the Tusk, submit—truly submit—only to the
God. It preserves their pride, kneeling before what is never heard,
never seen. They can abase themselves without fear of degradation.”
“I shall eat …”
Achamian held an uncertain hand against the sun to better see the
Warrior-Prophet’s face.
“One,” Kellhus was saying, “can only be tested, never degraded, by
the God.”
“You said ‘some,’” Achamian managed. “What of the others?” In his
periphery he saw the thing’s face knuckle as though into
interlocking fists.
“They’re like you, Akka. They surrender not to the God but to those
like themselves. A man. A woman. There’s no pride to be preserved
when one submits to another. Transgress, and there’s no formula. And
the fear of degradation is always present, even if not quite
believed. Lovers injure each other, humiliate and debase, but they
never test, Akka—not if they truly love.”
The thing was thrashing now, like something brandished in an
invisible fist. Suddenly the bees seemed to buzz on the wrong side
of his skull.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because part of you clings to the hope that she tests you …” For a
mad moment it seemed Inrau watched him, or Proyas as a boy, his eyes
wide and imploring. “She does not.”
Achamian blinked in astonishment. “What are you saying, then? That
she degrades me? That you degrade me?”
A series of mewling grunts, as though beasts coupled. Iron rattled
and screeched.
“I’m saying that she loves you still. As for me, I merely took what
was given.”
“Then give it back!” Achamian barked with savagery. He shook. His
breath cramped in his throat.
“You’re forgetting, Akka. Love is like sleep. One can never seize,
never force love.”
The words were his own, spoken that first night about the fire with
Kellhus and Serwë beneath Momemn. In a rush, Achamian recalled the
sprained wonder of that night, the sense of having discovered
something at once horrific and ineluctable. And those eyes, like
lucid jewels set in the mud of the world, watching from across the
flames—the same eyes that watched him this very moment … though a
different fire now burned between them.
The abomination howled.
“There was a time,” Kellhus continued, “when you were lost.” His
voice seethed with what seemed an inaudible thunder. “There was a
time when you thought to yourself, ‘There’s no meaning, only love.
There’s no world …’”
And Achamian heard himself whisper, “Only her.”
Esmenet. The Whore of Sumna.
Even now, murder stared from his sockets. He couldn’t blink without
seeing them together, without glimpsing her eyes wide with bliss,
her mouth open, his chest arching back, shining with her sweat … He
need only speak, Achamian knew, and it would be all over. He need
only sing, and the whole world would burn.
“Not I, not even Esmenet, can undo what you suffer, Akka. Your
degradation is your own.”
Those grasping eyes! Something within Achamian shrank from them,
beseeched him to throw up his arms. He must not see!
“What are you saying?” Achamian cried.
Kellhus had become a shadow beneath a tear-splintered sun. At long
last he turned to the obscenity writhing across the tree, its face
clutching at sun and sky.
“This, Akka …” There was a blankness to his words, as though he
offered them up as parchment, to be rewritten as Achamian wished.
“This is your test.”
“We shall cut you from your meat!” the obscenity howled. “From your
meat!”
“You, Drusas Achamian, are a Mandate Schoolman.”
After Kellhus left him, Achamian stumbled to one of the massive
dolmens, leaned against it, and vomited into the grasses about its
base. Then he fled through the blooming trees, past the guards on
the portico. He found some kind of pillared vestibule, a vacant
niche. Without thinking, he crawled into the shadowy gap between
wall and column. He hugged his knees, his shoulders, but he could
find no sense of shelter.
Nothing was concealed. Nothing was hidden. They believed me dead!
How could they know?
But he’s a prophet … Isn’t he?
How could he not know? How—
Achamian laughed, stared with idiot eyes at the dim geometries
painted across the ceiling. He ran a palm over his forehead, fingers
through his hair. The skin-spy continued to thrash and bark in his
periphery.
“Year One,” he whispered.
Excerpted from Thousandfold
Thought by R. Scott Bakker Copyright © 2006 by R. Scott Bakker . All rights reserved.
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