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"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
I appreciate you, TCA.
Presumably, will you be doing the ARC: TTT now?
Cheers!
...Everywhere he looked, he saw men kneeling...
Yes... The Thousandfold Thought
And it seemed there was nothing, no dwarfing frame, that could restrict him to this place, to any place... He was all things, and all things were his...
He was one of the Conditioned. Dunyain.
He was the Warrior-Prophet.
...They sang, the Men of the Tusk, overcome with strange passions: joy that knew no laughter, terror that knew no fear. They sang and they marched, walking with the grace of almost-broken men.
As though driven by inevitability, the iron men marched forward. When the heathen charged, they grabbed at bridles and were trampled. They punched spears deep into the haunches of Fanim horses. They fended hacking swords, pulled heathen shrieking to the ground, where they knifed them in armpit, face, or groin. They shrugged off piercing arrows. When the heathen relented, some Men of the Tusk, the madness of battle upon them, hurled their helms at the feeling horseman. Time and again the Kianene charged, broke, then withdrew, while the iron men trudged on, through the olive trees, across the fallow fields. They would walk with the God - whether he favoured them or no,
...Men cast about for sign of the Cishaurim...Clearly under orders from Mallahet, to keep out of it.
...And to anyone who listened, they would whisper a revelation... The secret of battle.
Indomitable conviction. Unconquerable belief.
...descendants of the Apocalypse. They dwelt among the unerathed bones of greater things.
... a different, more wicked clan - one never before encountered. Some of them were even horsed - something unheard of the the Sranc
Then he saw... it. An abomination walking through dawn twilight.
It was half-again taller than a man, with long, folded wings curved liked scythes over its powerful frame. Save where it was mottled by black, cancerous spots, its skin was translucent, and sheathed about a great flared skull shaped like an oyster set on edge. And within the gaping jaws of that skull was fused another, more manlike, so that an almost human face grinned from its water features
Who are the Dunyain?
You, the abomination said, still command the ears of the Great. He remembers Sarcellus killing Serwe.
The hunt need not end!
He understood the Dunyain's plan - or part of it... If only Proyas would have listened!
"You must free Anasurimbor Kellhus"
..."I haven't come to tell you whether Prince Kellhus is truly a Prophet, nor even whether he's a prince of anything at all. I've come, rather, to warn you of a different cancer... One that you've overlooked, though indeed some of you know its presence. There are spies among us, my lords..." - a collective murmur momentarily filled the chamber - "abominations that wear false faces of skin".
The sorceror bent beneath the table, hoisted a fouled sack of some kind. In a single motion, he unfurled it across the table. Something like silvery eels about a blackened cabbage rolled onto the polished surface, came to rest against an impossible reflection. A severed head?
Lie made flesh
It hungered, the thing called Sarcellus. For blood. For fucking things living and dead. But more than anything it hungered for consummation. All of it, from its anus to the sham it called its soul, was bent to ends of its creators. Everything was twisted to the promise of climax, to the jet of hot salt.
But the Architects had been shrewd, so heartlessly astute, when they laid its foundations...
Although subtle beyond reason, the thing called Sarcellus walked a far simpler than that walked by men. There was no war of competing passions, no need for discipline or denial. It lusted only to execute the will of its authors. In appeasing its hunger, it appeased the good.
So it been forged. Such was the cunning of its manufacture.
The Warrior-Prophet must die...
How? How can he afflict me so?
But then that was Moenghus' lesson. The Dunyain made disciples of all men, whether they revered him or no. One need only breathe.
Even my hate! Cnaiur thought. Even my hate he uses to his advantage!
Though his heart rankled at this, it rankled far more at the thought of losing Moenghus. Kellhus had spoken true those long months past in the Utemot camp: his heart had only one quarry, and it could not be fed on surrogates. He was bound to the Dunyain as the Dunyain was bound to Serwe's corpse - bound by the cutting ropes of an unconquerable hate.
Any sham. Any indignity. He would bear any injury, commit any atrocity, to whet his vengeance. He would see the whole world burn before he would surrender his hate. Hate! That was the obsessive heart of his strength. not his blade. not his frame. His neck-breaking, shield-cracking hate! Hatred has secured him the White Yaksh. Hatred had banded his body with the Holy Scars. Hatred had preserved him from the Dunyain when they crossed the Steppe. Hatred had inured him to the claims these outlanders made on his heart.
Hatred and hatred alone, had kept him sane.
Of course the Dunyain had known this...
...For this was the most paramount of the Unwritten Laws: a man - a true man - conquered, and did not suffer himself to be used.
Hence the torment of his pact with Kellhus. All this time Cnaiur had jealously guarded his heart and soul, spitting upon the fiend's every word, never thinking that the man could rule him by manipulating the circumstances about him. The Dunyain had unmanned him no differently than he had those Inrithi fools.
Moenghus! He named him Moenghus! My son!...
...There were no codes. There was no honour. The world between men was as trackless as the Steppe - as the desert! There were no men... Only beasts, clawing, craving, mewling, braying. Gnawing at the world with their hungers. Beaten like bears into dancing to this absurd custom or that. All these thousands, these Men of the Tusk, killed and died in the name of delusion. Save hunger, nothing commanded the world.
This was the secret of the Dunyain. This was their monstrosity. This was their fascination.
"But why this moment?" Cnaiur heard the Grandmaster cry over the growing thunder of the masses.
"Because!" Cnaiur boomed in his mightiest battlefield voice. "He bears a grudge no man can fathom!"
He'd been outmatched, Achamian realised. Conphas knew his answer, knew how the others would scoff and dismiss. The Consult was the stuff of children's tales and Mandate madmen. He stared wordlessly at the Exalt-General, struggling to mask his dismay with contempt. Even with proof, they could undo him with mere words. Even with proof, they refused to believe!
Achamian remembered Nautzera, in what seemed another lifetime, asking him if the life of Inrau, his student, was worth the Apocalypse. He'd conceded then, had admitted that no man, no love, was worth such a risk. And here, he'd conceded once again. He would save the man who'd halved his heart, because his heart was not worth the world, not worth the Second Apocalypse...
...Sitting speechless before the Great Names, Drusas Achamian realised that he held his Heart in one hand and Apocalypse in the other. And as he hefted them in his soul, it seemed that he couldn't tell which was the heavier.
It was no different for these men.
The Holy War suffered, and someone must die. Even if it meant the World/
..."You know not what you do, Scylvendi..." His face flexed, twitched like a dying insect. "You know not what you do".Eleazaras and the Javreh arrive, and demand Kellhus.
...And suddenly Achamian understood what he had to do...
He had to tell a story.
Esmenet had loved him just yesterday. But then so too had the world ended!
"We worship the same God, you and I."
The breeze had calmed, and the sun's heat leapt into its wake. It seemed to Cnaiur that he could smell rotting flesh - rotting flesh mingled with the bitter spit of eucalyptus leaves.
Serwe...
"This", Cnaiur said calmly, "is the sum of my worship."
Rest, my sweet, for I shall bear you...
He clutched his tunic about its blood-clotted collar, tore it to his waist. He raised his broadsword straight before him.
I shall avenge
I shall butcher
All hungered here. All starved.
Everything, Cnaiur realised, had transpired according to the Dunyain's mad gambit. What difference did it make whether he perished now, hanging from this tree, or several days hence, when the Padirajah at last overcame the walls? So he'd given himself to his captors, knowing that no man was so innocent as the accused who exposed his accusers.
... Suddenly, Sarcellus was swatting his blade as though it were a game.Cnaiur is stabbed through the thigh.
"Sarcellus..." "The Grandmaster's eyes were slack with disbelief. "Where..." - a hesitant swallow - "where did you learn to fight so?"
The Knight of the Tusk whirled, his face the very mask of reverent subservience
...Gotian fells to his knees. Eleazaras stumbled back into his slaves. The mob's thunder - horror, exultation - broke across the Scylvendi. The riot of revelation.
He tossed the hoary thing at the sorceror's feet.
Dog-eyed drunks!. He can hear Kellhus' voice, and answers it.
"They were supposed to kill the whore!"
The look of Apocalypse
Achamian pursed his lips, troubled by the fear-to-hope tone of the Marshal's voice.What is the 'World Between'? 'Tell me what you see' Cishaurim?
"You did see," he said carefully, "in a manner... There's many of seeing. And all of us possess eyes that never breach skin. Men are wrong to think nothing lies between blindness and sight."
"And the Cishaurim?" Xinemus pressed. "Is that... Is that how they-"
"The Cishaurim are masters of this interval. They blind themselves, they say to better see the World Between. According to some, it's the key to their metaphysics."
Though Achamian heard the words clearly, they seemed to reach him as though from a great distance, their speaker too distant to truly matter. No, he realised, he couldn't forgive, not because his heart had hardened, but because it has receded. He saw they boy, Prosha, whom he'd loved, but he saw a stranger as well, a man who walked questionable and competing paths. A man of faith.
A murderous fanatic.
How could he think these men were his brothers?
WHAT DO YOU SEE?... TELL ME...
\he would hold her while she sobbed. He would speak his every thought, tell her what she'd meant to him through his captivity. He would tell her that he, a Mandate Schoolman, would take her as his wife - his wife! And her eyes would weep wonder... He almost laughed with joy.I thought they were already man and wife.
...His first thought was to set it alight, to transform it into a blazing beacon of his wrath - a funeral pyre for the betrayer, the seducer! But he could sense the absences that encircled the man, the three Chorae the Men of the Tusk had bound to his bronze ring. And he could see that he suffered...
"You've made a whore of her, Kellhus... You've made a whore of my Esmi..."
"Achamian" Kellhus whispered.
The words winded him, struck him dumb with horror.
No... He's not allowed to speak...
"He said you would come" Spoken from a dead woman's cheek.
"Shikol was wrong... I am right!"
It all came down to truth
In some ways, he's as extraordinary as Kellhus...He found Esmi in Kellhus' bed. As prince of 'nothing', Kellhus is transgressing caste - a very serious matter in the Three Seas.
The Schoolman silenced him with an outstretched hand. "You once asked me, Proyas, whether I had more than Dreams to warrant my fears. Do you remember?"
All too well. It was the same night Achamian has asked him to write to Maithanet.
"I remember, yes."
Without warning, Achamian stood and stepped out onto the balcony. He vanished into the morning glare only to reappear moments afterward, hoisting something dark in his hands.
By some coincidence, the sun vanished the moment Proyas reached out to shield his eyes.
He stared at the soil- and blood-stained bundle. A pungent odour slowly filled the room.
"Look at it!" Achamian commanded, brandishing it. "Look! Then send you quickest riders out to the Great Names!"
"Call them," Achamian said. "Summon the others to Council."
Gone was the golden morning. Rain poured from black skies.
Kellhus seeks a path.QuoteNo 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.QuoteSometimes, Esmi, we must cross death to reach our destination"...
... Was this what Inri Sejenus had said to his nameless lover? That loss could somehow secure glory?
But this is madness
"The Shortest Path," she said, horrified by the teary-eyed contemptuousness of her tone.
But the blond-bearded face smiled.
"Yes," the Warrior-Prophet said. "The Logos"
They take the baby from Serwe.
'Sarcellus' kills her.
'Sarcellus' finds the Synthese, now revealed asQuoteThe shell of the Old Father... Aurang, Great General of the World-Breaker, ancient prince of the InchoroiQuote"The Holy War is doomed. We must deal with the Cishaurim some other way..." Again, the eyes clicked shut. "You must ensure this Kellhus dies with the Men of the Tusk. He must not escape."
Celebration had turned to terror and disbelief. They were imprisoned in a city that had already been besieged for weeks.
...Like a wronged child, his thoughts had stamped about the fact of his piety. Who among the Great Names had toiled as he'd toiled? Who'd burned more sacrifices, intoned more prayers? But now he no longer dared ask these questions.
Thoughts of Achamian and Xinemus had seen to that.
"We're cursed," he murmured. "They're right... The God does punish us!"
What are you saying?"
"That maybe Conphas and the others are right about him!"
The brutal face hardened into a scowl. "Him?"
"Kellhus"...
secure your heart
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.
Her skin tingled. The Thanes of the Warrior-Prophet watched her, and she looked through their faces, glimpsed their yearning hearts. To think! So many deluded souls, living illusory lives in unreal worlds! So many! It both boggled her and broke her heart.
And at the same time, it was her triumph.
Something absolute
Her heart fluttered, pinioned by Kellhus' shining gaze. She felt at once smoke and naked flesh - something seen through and something desired.
There's more then me... More than this - yes!
"Tell us, Esmi," Kellhus hissed through Serwe's mouth. "Tell us what you see!"
There's more than them.
"We must take the knife to them," she said, speaking as she knew her Master would have her speak. "We must show them the demons in their midst"
So much more!.
The Warrior-Prophet smiled with he own lips.
"We must kill them", her voice said.
"Ah," Sarcellus said, suddenly understanding. "You belong to him... What is it you call yourselves?"
"Zaudunyani." The man smiled, and for a moment, it seemed the most terrifying smile Sarcellus had ever witnessed: pale lips pressed into a thin, passionless line.
The shell of the Old Father... Aurang, Great General of the World-Breaker, ancient prince of the Inchoroi
"The Holy War is doomed. We must deal with the Cishaurim some other way..." Again, the eyes clicked shut. "You must ensure this Kellhus dies with the Men of the Tusk. He must not escape."
Working his jaw, Cnaiur glared at the Shrial Knight, wondering what could cause such a strange disposition of burns across a man's face. He thought of the Battle of Anwurat, of the relish with with which he'd driven his knife into Kelhus' chest - or the thing that had looked like him. He thought of Serwe gasping beneath him, and a pang watered his eyes. Only she knew his heart. Only she understood when he awoke weeping...
Serwe, first wife of his heart.
I will have her! someone within him wept. She belongs to me.
So beautiful... My proof!
Suddenly everything seemed to slump, as though the world itself had been soaked in numbers in numbness and lead. And he realised - without anguish, without heartbreak - that Anasurimbor Moenghus was beyond him. Despite all his hate, all his tooth-gnashing fury, the blood trail he followed ended here... In a city.
We're dead. All of us...
If Caraskand was to be their tomb, he would see certain blood spilled first.
"Silence-silence-silence! They told me you would do this! They warned me!"Does this explain why sorceror's persevere with their magic? Scarlet Spires in particular?
"Indeed. They warned you against the truth. Against wandering into the nets of the Warrior-Prophet".
"How can you know this?" Saubon cried, overcome be incredulous woe. "How?"
"Because it's Truth."
"The fie on it" Fie on the truth!"
"And what of you immortal soul?"
"Then let it be damned!" he roared, leaping to his feet. "I embrace it - embrace it all" Damnation in this life! Damnation in all others!. Torment heaped upon torment! I would bear all to be King for a day! I would see you broken and blooded if that meant I could own this throne! I would see the God's own eyes plucked out".
Sometimes, Esmi, we must cross death to reach our destination"...
... Was this what Inri Sejenus had said to his nameless lover? That loss could somehow secure glory?
But this is madness
"The Shortest Path," she said, horrified by the teary-eyed contemptuousness of her tone.
But the blond-bearded face smiled.
"Yes," the Warrior-Prophet said. "The Logos"
"No." His flashing eyes found them among the masses:Saubon, Proyas, Conphas, and the others. "You fear that as my power waxes, yours will wane. You do what you do not in the name of the God, but
in the name of avarice. You wouldn't tolerate even the God to possess you Holy War. And yet, in each of you hearts there is an itch, an anguished question that I alone can see: What if he truly is the Prophet? What doom awaits us then?"
"You turn to fury in the absence of certainty," he continued sadly. "I only ask you this: What moves your soul? What moves you to condemn me? It is indeed the God? The God strides with certainty, with glory, through the hearts of men! Does the God so stride through you? Does the God so stride through you?
Bit then a Shrial Knight, the one named Sarcellus, whose face alone remained pious and devoid of hesitation, answered the Warrior-Prophet in a loud clear voice.
"All things both sacred and vile," the Knight-Commander said, quoting the Tusk, "Speak to the hearts of Men, and holding out their hands to darkness, they name it light"
The Warrior-Prophet stared at him sharply, and quoted in turn: "Hearken Truth, for it strides fiercely among you, and will not be denied".
Possessed of beatific calm, Sarcellus answered: "Fear him, for he is the deceiver, the Lie made Flesh, come among you to foul the waters of your heart."
And the Warrior-Prophet smiled sadly. "Lie made flesh, Sarcellus?" Serwe watched his eyes search the crowds, then settle on the nearby Scylvendi. "Lie made flesh," he repeted staring into the fiend's embattled face. "The hunt need not end... Remember this when you recall the secret of battle. You still command the ears of the Great."
"False Prophet," Sarcellus continued. "Prince of nothing"
Proyas was still sick - grievously so, it appeared. He sat bundled beneath wool blankets in a camp chair, his normally hale face drawn and pale. In any other man, Cnaiur would have such weakness disgusting, but Proyas wasn't any other man. Over the months the young prince had come to command something troubling within him, a respect not fit for a fellow Scylvendi, let alone an outlander. Even sick he seemed regal.
He's just another Inrithi dog
...For weeks he'd been little more than a corpse bound to maddened horse. How his soul had galloped!
... he'd spent weeks alone with the man - weeks alone with a Dunyain. Now, after watching the inhuman fiend devour heart after Inrithi heart, it scarcely seemed possible he'd survived. The bottomless scrutiny. The narcotic voice. The demonic truths... How could he not take Serwe after enduring such an ordeal Besides beautiful, she was simple, honest, passionate - everything Kellhus wasn't. He warred against a spider. How could he not crave the company of flies?
Yes... That was it! He'd taken her as a landmark, as a reminder of what was human. He should've known she'd known she'd become a battleground instead.
He used her to drive me mad!
He eats you, and you know it not. And when he's done, there will be only bones...Foreshadowing the Great Ordeal
There was a hate that eclipsed the hater, a hunger that encompassed the very ground of appetite.
Bent low, his broadsword before him, Cnaiur urs Skiotha stole across the heights of the wall toward the postern gate, thinking of Kellhus, Moenghus, and murder.
Need me... I must find some way to make him need me!
Yes... The madness was lifting
The Galeoth Prince's grin broadened. "Truth shines," he said.
Cnaiur squashed the urge to sneer. "So do pigs' teeth".
He spat across the ancient stonework. There was no escaping the Dunyain - not any more. It sometimes seemed the abomination spoke from every mouth, watched from all eyes. And it was only getting worse.
Something... There must be something I can do!
But what? There pact to murder Moenghus was a farce. The Dunyain honoured nothing for its own sake. For them only the ends mattered, and everything else, from warlike nations to shy glances, was a tool - something to be used. And Cnaiur possessed nothing of use - not any more. He'd squandered his every advantage. He couldn't even offer his reputation among the Great Names, not after the degradation of Anwurat.
No. There was nothing Kellhus needed from him. Nothing except...
Cnaiur actually gasped aloud.
Except my silence
Despite the blood threading his face, there was a majesty to his look, a paternal confidence that chilled Cnaiur's heart. Coithus Saubon was already king, and he belonged to Kellhus
The Men of the Tusk cast the bodies from the rooftops. They rifled the pockets of the dead, tugging rings from grey fingers, or just sawing at the knuckles to save time. Shrieking children were torn from their mothers, tossed across rooms and caught on sword point. The mothers were beaten and raped while their gutted husbands wailed about their entrails. The Inrithi were like wild-eyed beasts, drunk with howling murder. Moved by the God's own fury, they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sharp sword.
The anger of the God burned bright against the people of Caraskand.
...They were so near! So close! Soon the Children would gather, and they would rain ruin upon this despicable world! The End of Ends was coming...
One did not gamble with such things. They would kill this Anasurimbor Kellhus, then they would seize the others, the Scylvendi and the women, to learn what they needed to know.
The Holy War must be purged
Kellhus watched, wondering at the spectacle and at the promise of deeper dimensions of understanding. Sorcery was the only unconquered knowledge, the last bastion of world-born secrets. He was one of the Few - as Achamian had both feared and hoped. What kind of power would he wield?
And his father, who was Cishaurim, what kind of power did he already wield?...
... Uncanny hymns ached in Kellhus' ears. How could such things be said? How could words come before?
"you walk the Shortest Path. Soon you will grasp the Thousandfold Thought"
Father?
Sheathing his sword, Kellhus opened himself to every outward sign the man offered. He saw desperation and purpose. Purpose above all...
"How did you find me?"
"We see you. All of us." Behind the man, the smoke rising from the Citadel opened like a great velvet rose.
"Us?"
"All of us who serve him - the Possessors of the Third Sight"
...knows the Pragma sent me as an assassin... He needs to be certain of me ...
"I must warn you," Hifanat was saying. "The Padirajah himself comes with the South. Even now his outriders ponder the smoke they see on the horizon"
"The trial is about to begin, Esmi. The true trial"
"What about the Holy War?" Achamian asked.
"I'm an old sailor. I've seen enough voyages blown off course, enough vessels, to know the God gives no guarantees, no matter who the captain or what the cargo." He looked back to Achamian. "There's one thing certain about this Holy War: there's never been a greater bloodletting."
Achamian knew different, but refrained from saying as much...
Achamian now heard dread in Xinemus' every word. It was as though something horrific loomed in the blackness, something he feared might recognise the sound of his voice. As the weeks passed, it was becoming more and more apparent: the Scarlet Spires had taken more than his eyes; they had taken the light and devilry than once filled them as well. With the Cants of Compulsion, Iyokus had moved Xinemus' soul in perverse ways, had forced him to betray both dignity and love. Achamian had tried to explain that it wasn't he who'd thought those thoughts, who'd uttered those words, but it didn't matter. As Kellhus said, men couldn't see what moved them. the frailties Xinemus had witnessed were his frailties. Confronted by the true dimensions of wickedness, he'd held his own infirmity accountable."
Esmenet and Kellhus. They lived! The woman who could save his heart, and the man who could save the world...
There will be fire when I return, Zin"
...Cumor, Proyas, Chepheramunni, and Skaiyelt all succumbed within days of one another. At times, it seemed the sick outnumbered the healthy...
A great fear seized the surviving leaders of the Holy War. Caraskand continued to rebuke them.. Akkeagni oppressed them with misery and death, and the Padirajah himself marched upon them with yet another heathen host.
They were far from home, among hostile lands and wicked peoples, and the God had turned his face from them. They were desperate.
And for such men questions of why, sooner or later became questions of who...
Conphas had never trusted Shrial Knights. Too much devotion. Too much renunciation... Self-sacrifice, he'd always thought, was more madness than foolishness.
He'd come to this conclusion in his adolescence, after perceiving just how often - and how happily - others injured or destroyed themselves in the name of faith or sentiment. It was as though, he realised, everyone took instructions from a voice he couldn't hear - a voice from nowhere. They committed suicide when dishonoured, sold themselves into slavery to feed their children. They acted as though the world possessed fates worse than death or enslavement, as though they couldn't live with themselves if harm befell others...
Wrack his intellect as he might, Conphas could neither fathom the sense nor imagine the sensation. Of course there was the God, the Scriptures, and all that rubbish. That voice he could understand. The threat of eternal damnation could wring reason out of the most ludicrous sacrifice. That voice came from somewhere. But this other voice...
.."But he saved the Holy War," he said. "Your life... My life..."
...For a time, it seemed they alone survived, that all mankind and not just the Holy War had perished. They alone spoke. They alone gazed and understood that they gazed. They alone loved, across all lands and all waters, to the world's very pale. It seemed all passion, all knowing, was here, ringing in one penultimate note. It wasn't like a flower. It wasn't like a child's careless laugh.
They has become the measure... Absolute. Unconditioned.
When they made love in the river, it seemed they sanctified the sea.
...Without knowing, Esmenet had lived her entire life for him - for Anasurimbor Kellhus.
Grief for his compassion. Delusion for his revelation. Sin so he might forgive. Degradation so he might raise her high. He was the origin. He was the destination. He was the from where and the to which, and he was here!
For an instant, just and instant, Esmenet thought she'd heard the voice of someone hated.
Men, Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen - they could only truly the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others...
...The measure of wisdom, Kellhus had said, was found in the distance between these two selves.
Only afterwards had she thought of Kellhus in these terms. With a kind of surpriseless shock, she realised that not once - not once! - had she glimpsed shortcomings in his words or actions. And this, she understood, was why he seemed limitless, like the ground, which extended from the small circle about her feet to the great circle about the sky. He had become her horizon.
For Kellhus, there was no distance between seeing and being seen. He alone was whole. And what was more, he somehow stood from without and saw from within. He made whole...
...Had this been the gift of the Scarlet Spires? Had they burned some lesson into him?
Or had they simply beaten him numb?
Whatever the answer, he would see them burn - especially Iyokus. He would show them the wages of his newfound certainty.
Perhaps that had been their gift. Hatred.
...he heard gurgling water - the sound of life...
...The green of living things blurred the distance.
There were no innocents. This was the secret they carried away from the desert.
All were guilty.
For all their merciless cunning, what the Scarlet Magi never understood was that they plied two men, not one.
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...
"ZIN!" Achamian shrieked.
But there was his hanging shadow, smeared across mortared glass, whispering,
I know not this man
Achamian swallowed painfully. "I know he was. And someday soon, so will you."
"Perhaps. Perhaps... But for now, my Grandmaster has decided these spies must be Cishaurim. One cannot substitute legends for what is known.
"You substitute what you fear for what you don't know, Iyokus"
... as would be those who followed.
"I have bound you"
Thou art damned! Dost thou not recognise he who shall keepeth thee for Eternity?
"YOU ARE OVERMATCHED, IYOKUS!"..
...Then he was falling, borne down by a raving demon, perched upon his wards, hammering with great nailed fists.
Achamian charred its crocodile hide, ribboned its otherwordly flesh, smote its elephantine skull with ponderous cudgels of stone, and it bled fire from a hundred wounds. But it refused to fall. It howled obscenities that cracked rock and rifled the ground with chasms. More floors collapsed, and they grappled through dark cellars made bright by flickering fury.
Sorceror and demon.
Unholy Ciphrang, a tormented soul thrust into the agony of the World, harnessed by words like a lion by strings, yoked to the task that would see it freed.
Achamian endured its unearthly violence, heaped injury after injury upon its agony.
And in the end it grovelled beneath his song, cringed like a beaten animal, then faded into blackness...
...wondered that he'd been the catastrophe that had wrought this devastation...
"I'm sorry, Akka. I'm so sorry..."
But the only words Achamian could remember were those that killed.
That damned.
I suspected that it was intellect on behalf of Kellhus to find water in the desert.
The Holy War continued its nocturnal march. Despite the blood-curdling raids, many found themselves awed by the beauty of the Carathay. There were no insects, saved the odd crazed beetle rolling its ball of dung across the sands. The Inrithi called them "shit chasers". And there were no animals, except of course the vultures circling endlessly above. Where there was no water, there was no life, and apart from the heavy skins draped about the shoulders of the Holy War, there was no water in the Carathay. It was as if the sun had burnt the whole world to sterile bone. The Men of the Tusk stood apart from the sun, stone and sand, and it was beautiful, like a haunting nightmare described by another. It was beautiful because they need not suffer the consequences of what they witnessed.
mules, slaves, camp-followersare left. Many thousands are butchered.
Very little water remained the ensuing night, and the Men of the Tusk, their skin like parchment, overcome by irritability and fatigue, began casting away their food. They no longer hungered. They thirsted, thirsted as they'd never thirsted before. Hundreds of horses collapsed and were left to snort their final breaths in the dust. A strange apathy descended upon the men. When the Khirgwi assailed them, many simply continued to walk, not hearing or not caring that their kinsmen perished behind them.
Wherever Prince Kellhus and his two women went, men crowded about them, begging to be touched, to be cured, to be forgiven. Stained by dust, his face bronzed and his flowing hair almost bleached white, he seemed the very incarnation of sun, stone, and sand. He, and he alone, could stare into the endless Carathay and laugh, hold out his arms to the Nail of Heaven and give thanks fo their suffering.
"The God chooses!" he would cry. "The God".
And the words he spoke were like water.
They passed beyond the sea of dunes and entered land like a burning plate, a flat expanse where the air fairly hissed with heat. Once again the water was strictly rationed. Men became dizzy with thirst, and some began casting away armour, weapons, and clothes, walking like naked madmen until they fell, their skin blackened by thirst and blistered by sun. The last of the horses died, and the footmen, ever resentful that their lords tended to their mounts more faithfully than their men, would curse and kick gravel at the wooden corpses as they passed. Old Gothyelk collapsed and was strapped to a litter made by his sons, who shared their rations of water with him. Lord Ganyatti, the Conriyan Palatine of Ankirioth, whose bald head looked so much like a blistered thumb jutting from a torn glove, was bound like a sack.
When night had at last fallen, the Holy War continued its march south, once again stumbling along the backs of sandy dunes. The Men of the Tusk walked and walked, but the cool desert night proved little relief. none talked. They formed an endless procession of silent wraiths, passing across Carathay's folds. Dusty, harrowed, hollow-eyed, and with drunken limbs, they walked. Like a pinch of mud dropped in water they crumbled, wandered from one another, until the Holy War became a cloud of disconnected figures, feet scraping across gravel and dust.
The morning sun was a shrill rebuke, for still the desert had not ended. The Holy War had become an army of ghosts. Dead and dying men lay scattered in their thousands behind it, and as the sun rose still more fell. Some simply lost the will, and fell seated in the dust, their thoughts and bodies buzzing with thirst and fatigue. Others pressed themselves until their wrecked bodies betrayed them. They struggled feebly across the sand, waving their head like worms, perhaps croaking for help, for succour.
But only death would come swirling down.
Tongues swelled in mouths. Parchment skin went black and tightened until it split about purple flesh, rendering the dying unrecognisable. Legs buckled, folded, refused one's will as surely as if one's spine had been broken. And the sun beat them, scorching chapped skin, cooking lips to hoary leather.
There was no weeping, no wails or astonished shouts. Brothers abandoned brothers and husbands abandoned wives. Each man had become a solitary circle of misery that walked and walked.
Gone was the promise of sweet Sempis water. Gone was the promise of Enathpaneah...
Gone was the voice of the Warrior-Prophet.
Only the trail remained, drawing out warm, thrumming hearts into an agonized line, desert thin - desert simple. Frail heartbeats stranded in the wastes, pounding with receding fury at seeping, water-starved blood.
Men died in the thousands, gasping, each breath more improbable than the last, at furnace air, sucking final moments of anguished, dreamlike life through throats of charred wood. Heat like a cool wind. Black fingers twitching through searing sands. Flats, waxy eyes raised to blinding sun.
Whining silence and endless loneliness.
The figure was thin, but dressed in voluminous scarlet silk robes, with deep sleeves embroidered with golden herons. His face was the clearest, because it was bathed in impossible light. Rutted cheeks lost in the slick curls of a lavishly braided beard, bulbous eyes, bore by the tedium of waking from place to place, all illuminated by a teardrop of candlelight suspended a cubit before his forehead, without any candle.
Xinemus could hear Dinch's breath hiss through clenched teeth.
The figure and the ghostly light paused at a juncture in the corridor, as if he had stumbled across a peculiar smell. The old face scowled for a moment, and the sorcerer seemed to peer into the darkness at them. They stood still as three pillars of salt. Three heartbeats... It was as though the eyes of Death itself sought them.
Someone had spoken its name
What is the meaning of a deluded life?
- AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN
