Of course we make crutches of one another.  Why else would we crawl when we lose our lovers?
- ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN

History.  Logic.  Arithmetic.  These all should be taught by slaves.
- ANONYMOUS, THE NOBLE HOUSE

...As his mother would say, every man was a spy in the end, an agent of contrary interests. Every face was made of fingers...

It means, Mother, that Conphas has the field.  He shrugged amiably.  "I haven't recalled him".

His fingers and palm found warm skin.  His heart became a thunderclap.  He ran his hand along her calves, which she shaved in the fashion of the Ainoni, then across her still-smooth thighs.  Could it be?  He clutched at her groin, squeezed the shaft of her erection-"

Why should he care for Maithanet?  Men with gold rings gave no copper, unless they wanted to stick them.  Why should he care for Maithanet, who just try to stick him if he could?  Fucking priests any way.
But the tears in Hertata's eyes... Sol could see he was afraid to go alone.
Groaning, Sol stood and kicked about his rag bedding.  he tried his best to sneer at Hertata's beaming face.  He'd seen Hertata's ilk before.  Always whimpering "Mommy" in the middle of the night.  Always getting sticked for food because he was too afraid to steal.  They never survived.  None of them.  Just like his little brother...
But not Sol!  His feet were rabbit-quick...

Though he would never admit it, Sol was happy he had listened to Hertata.  Being surrounded by glad-hearted people all walking the same direction made him feel as though he belonged to something, as if through some inarticulate miracle he had found his way back inside from the filth and cold and contempt.
How long had it been since his father's murder?

...He found himself studying Hertata, who continually looked back, smiling with manic encouragement.  From where had his sudden courage come?  Everyone knew Hertata was a cringer, yet here he was, barging toward an almost certain.  Why would he risk such a thing?  For Maithanet?  As far as Sol was concerned, nothing was worth getting a beating - or even worse, getting clapped by slavers.  He would sooner be sticked.
And yet there was something in the air, something that made Sol feel uncertain in a way he had never felt uncertain before.  Something that made him feel small, not in the way of orphans or beggars or children, but in a good way.  In the way of souls.
He could remember his mother praying the night his father had dies.  Crying and praying.  Was that what drove Hertata?  Could he remember his mother praying?

Three lavishly garbed priests crossed the narrow slot of their view.  Then he stepped into sight. Younger.  Taller.  Paler.  A full beard.  Wearing only a simple vestment, so whit it pained the eyes to look.  A thousand pleading hands reached out toward him, to greet, to implore, to touch.  Hertata was fairly shrieking, trying to gain his majestic attention.  He merely walked, but it seemed he moved so fast, as though the ground itself pulled him forward.  For some reason, Sol raised hi hands and reached out, not to touch the luminous image before him but to jab his fingers at his friend - to point at the one soul that needed to be seen more than any other.
Perhaps it was that Sol alone, of all those lining the avenue, gestured to another.  Perhaps it was that Maithanet somehow knew.  Whatever the reason, the bright eyes flickered towards him.  Saw.
As Sol watched, Maithanet's eyes were drawn by his pointing fingers to Hertata, wailing and jumping beside him.  The Shriah of the Thousand Temples smiled.
For a breathless moment he held the boy's gaze, then the Knight's form swallowed his hallowed image.
"Yessss!"  Hertata howled, fairly weeping with disbelief.  "Yes-yes!"
Sol clutched his hand and laughed.  Still cheering, they both turned to a shadow.

...They fell silent, however, upon entering the city, appalled by the battered faces and perpetual stares that greeted them.  The ancient customs were observed - hands were shaken, countrymen embraced - but it was all a pretence.
The original Men of the Tusk - the survivors - were now sons of a different nation.  They had spilled whatever blood they once shared with these men.  The old loyalties and traditions had become tales of a a faraway country, like Zeum, a place too distant to be confirmed.  The hooks of the old ways, the old concerns, had been set in fat that no longer existed.  Everything they had known had been tested and found wanting.  Their vanity, their envy, their hubris, all the careless bigotries of their prior lives, had been murdered with with their fellows.  Their hopes had been burned to ashes.  Their scruples had been boiled to bone and tendon - or so it seemed.
out of calamity they had salvaged only the barest necessities; all else had been jettisoned.  Their spare manner, their guarded speech, their disinterested contempt for excess, all spoke to a dangerous thrift.  And nowhere was this more evident than in their eyes; they stared with the blank wariness of men who never slept - not peering, not watching, but observing, and with a directness that transcended "bold" or "rude".
They stared as though nothing stared back, as though all were objects.
Among the newcomers, even the costumed caste-nobles seemed unable or unwilling to match their gaze.  Many tried to maintain appearances - the wry glances, the nods of acknowledgement - but their looks always returned to their boots or sandals.  To stand in the sight of such men, they somehow understood, was to be measured, not by something as flawed and as arbitrary as a man, but by the length and breadth of what they had suffered.
Their very look had become judgement, so much had they witnessed.

By the Later Prophet's time, Xerash was an old and powerful kingdom, demanding and receiving tribute from both Amoteu and Enathpaneah.  The Amoti in particular thought the Xerashi an obscene race, a blight upon the land.  For the authors of The Tractate, it was a land of innumerable brothels, fratricidal kings, and rampant homosexuality.  And though the blood and custom of the Nilnameshi had been thinned into extinction long ago, for the Men of the Tusk "xeratic" still meant "sodomite", and they punished the Fanim of Xerash for the trespasses of others long dead.  The Xerashi that the Inrithi wandered through was a place of old and labyrinthine evils.  And her people found themselves called to account not once, but twice.

...all Xerash was closed to them

...awash in small riches.

...The live of a spy was hard.  To finally have things, even things he couldn't bring himself to enjoy, eased his heart for some reason, as though they were balm for unseen wounds...

...All knives were sheathed in the Warrior-Prophet's hallowed presence.

...Then he would glimpse Esmenet rocking in her saddle amid her servants, or he would see another corpse mute in the surrounding grasses, and he would recall the purpose of their journey.
They rode to war - to kill.  To conquer Holy Shimeh.
In these moments, the differences between his present circumstance and his time as Proyas' tutor would loom stark before him, and the fleecy sense of reminiscence that seemed to permeate everything would grow hard with cold and dread.  What was it he remembered?

The image of the chieftain kneeling with the bent sword nagged Achamian for the remainder of the day.  Once again he was certain he'd witnessed something remarkably similar - but not in Conriya.  It couldn't be... The sword he remembered had been bronze.

It always jarred Achamin, realising that so much of what he was he in fact wasn't.  Now he found himself terrified by the contrary realisation: that more and more he was becoming what he wasn't - what he must never be.  That he was becoming Seswatha.
For so long the sheer scale of the Dreams had offered him an immunity of sorts.  The things he dreamed simply didn't happen - at least not to the likes of him.  With the Holy War, his life had taken a turn to the legendary, and the distance between his world and Seswatha's closed, at least in terms of what he witnessed.  But even than, what he lived remained banal and impoverished.  "Seswatha never shat". the old Mandate joke went.  The dimensions of what Achamian lived could always fall into the dimensions of what he dreamed like a stone into a potter's urn.
But now, riding as Holy Tutor at the Warrior-Prophet's left hand?
In a way, he was as much as Seswatha, if not more.  In a way, he no longer shat either.  And knowing this was enough to make him shit.
Strangely enough, the Dreams themselves had become more bearable.  Tywanrae and Dagliash continued to predominate, though as always he couldn't fathom why they should follow this or any other rhythm of events.  They were like swallows, swooping and circling in aimless patterns, sketching something almost, yet never quite, a language...
...Through Kellhus, the scale of the present not only matched the scale of his Dreams, it counterbalanced them with hope...
...Augury, Memgowa had written, said more about men's fear than about their future.  But how could Achamian resist?  ...There would be glory this time.  Victory would not come at the cost of all that mattered.
Min-Uroikas broken.  Shauriatas, Mekeritrig, Aurang and Aurax - all of them destroyed!  The No-God unresurrected.  The Consult a memory stamped into the muck.
Despite their opiate glamour, there was something terrifying about these thoughts.  The Gods were perverse.  Natter as they might, the priests knew nothing of their malicious whims.  Perhaps thy would see the world burn just to punish the hubris of one man.  Nothing, Achamian had long ago decided, was quite so dangerous as boredom in the absence of scruples.

"With me," Kellhus continued, "the Tusk is rewritten, Akka."  A long, ransacking look.  "Do you understand?  Or do you simply prefer to think yourself damned?"
Though he could muster no retort, Achamian knew.
He preferred.

..."You are players in this war, nothing more.  The balance remains precarious.  Recall what it is you dream.  Recall the ancient errors.  Do not act out of conceit or ignorance"...
What?  Does he imply that he possesses this war?  Who is he compared with what we know, what we dream?...
"He, Nautzera, is the Warrior-Prophet".

Conphas tells them that the whole thing is a fraud.
Kellhus puts him in his place

Quote

"... you don't know whether to offer the same pretence of submission that you offer your uncle or to discredit me with open words.  So now you deny me out of desperation, not to to prove to others that I'm a fraud but to prove yourself that you are in fact my better.  For an obscene arrogance dwells within you, Ikurei Conphas, the belief that you are the measure of all other men.  It is this lie that you seek to preserve at all costs...

...To preserve your pride before me, you must endure the shame of lying.  You must conceal who you are, in order to prove who you are.  You must degrade yourself to remain proud.  At this moment you see this more clearly than at other time in your life, and yet still you refuse to relinquish, to yield to your tormented pride.  You trade the anguish that breeds anguish for the anguish that breeds release.  You would rather take pride in what you are not than take pride in what you are...

...Shame is a stranger to you, Ikurei Conphas.  An unbearable stranger"

Conphas speaks his contempt for the others and leaves.  Kellhus commands him to halt.

Quote

"... Pride is a sickness... For most it's a fever, a contagion goaded by the glories of others.  But for some, like you Ikurei Conphas, it is a defect carried from the womb.  For your whole life you've wondered what it was that moved the men about you.  Why would a father sell himself into slavery, when he need only strangle his children?  Why would a young man take the Orders of the Tusk, exchange the luxuries of his station for a cubicle, authority for servitude to the Holy Shriah?  Why do so many give, when it is so easy to take?
But you ask these questions because you know nothing of strength.  For what is strength but the resolve to deny base inclinations - the determination to sacrifice in the name of one's brothers?  You, Ikurei Conphas, know only weakness, and because it takes strength to acknowledge weakness, you call your weakness strength.  You betray your brother.  You fresco your heart with flatteries.  You, who are less than any man, say to yourself, 'I am a god'"

... when the hot winds chased the clouds to oblivion, they simply followed the forage, always searching for the wild herbs and short grasses that made for the best meat and milk.
This pursuit always caught someone, particularly those who were too greedy to cull wilful animals from their herd.  Headstrong cattle could lead an entire herd too far afield, into vast tracks of over-grazed or blighted pasture.  Every season, it seemed, some fool returned without horse of cattle.
Cnaiur now knew himself to be that fool.
I have given him the Holy War

The sorceror, that woman-hearted buffoon whom everyone thought dead...

... now little more than counsellors, and they knew it...
For the first time in their lives they stood upon trackless ground...

...What would they do, the devout and self-righteous alike?  What would they do now that their hallowed scripture could talk back?

... given them dominion.  Over their doubts.  Over their most hated foes. He had made them strong.
But how could lies do such a thing?

Unlike the Inrithi, he [Cnaiur] did not stand within the circle of the Dunyain's deceit.  Where they saw things from within, he saw them from without.  He saw more.  It was strange the way beliefs could have an inside and an outside, that what looked like hope or truth or love from within could be scythe or a hammer, things wielded for other ends, when seen from without.
Tools.

The Inrithi, Proyas had told him once, believed it was the lot of men to live within the designs, inscrutable or otherwise, of those greater than themselves.  And in this sense, Cnaiur realised, Kellhus truly was their prophet.  They were, as the memorialists claimed, willing slaves, always striving to beat down the furies that drove them to sovereign ends.  That the designs - the tracks - they claimed to follow were authored in the Outside simply served their vanity, allowed them to abase themselves in a manner that fanned their overweening pride.  There was no greater tyranny, the memorialists said, than that exercised by slaves over slaves.
But now the slaver stood among them.  What did it matter, Kellhus had asked as they crossed the Steppe, that he mastered those already enslaved?  There was no honour, only advantage.  To believe in honour was to stand inside things, to keep company with slaves and fools.

"... you don't know whether to offer the same pretence of submission that you offer your uncle or to discredit me with open words.  So now you deny me out of desperation, not to to prove to others that I'm a fraud but to prove yourself that you are in fact my better.  For an obscene arrogance dwells within you, Ikurei Conphas, the belief that you are the measure of all other men.  It is this lie that you seek to preserve at all costs...

...To preserve your pride before me, you must endure the shame of lying.  You must conceal who you are, in order to prove who you are.  You must degrade yourself to remain proud.  At this moment you see this more clearly than at other time in your life, and yet still you refuse to relinquish, to yield to your tormented pride.  You trade the anguish that breeds anguish for the anguish that breeds release.  You would rather take pride in what you are not than take pride in what you are...

...Shame is a stranger to you, Ikurei Conphas.  An unbearable stranger"

"... Pride is a sickness... For most it's a fever, a contagion goaded by the glories of others.  But for some, like you Ikurei Conphas, it is a defect carried from the womb.  For your whole life you've wondered what it was that moved the men about you.  Why would a father sell himself into slavery, when he need only strangle his children?  Why would a young man take the Orders of the Tusk, exchange the luxuries of his station for a cubicle, authority for servitude to the Holy Shriah?  Why do so many give, when it is so easy to take?
But you ask these questions because you know nothing of strength.  For what is strength but the resolve to deny base inclinations - the determination to sacrifice in the name of one's brothers?  You, Ikurei Conphas, know only weakness, and because it takes strength to acknowledge weakness, you call your weakness strength.  You betray your brother.  You fresco your heart with flatteries.  You, who are less than any man, say to yourself, 'I am a god'"

The Dunyain simply culled the wilful from his herd

What had he been thinking?  How could he, a man who had meticulously hammered his heart into the very shape of piety, have come so close to murdering the God's own voice?
The thought still dizzied him, struck him nauseous with shame.
Conviction, no matter how narcotic its depth, simply did not make true.  This was a hard lesson, made all harder by its astounding conspicuousness.  Despite the exhortations of kings and generals, despite the endless lays, belief unto death was cheap.  After all, the Fanim threw themselves against the spears of their enemies as readily as the Inrithi.  Someone had to be deluded.  So what ensured that that someone was someone else?  Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute?
And to make such obvious conceit the grounds condemnation... of murder...
In all his life, Proyas had never wept so hard as he had at the Warrior-Prophet's feet.  For he, who had decried avarice in all its forms, had proven the most avaricious of all.  He had coveted nothing so much as the truth, and since truth had so roundly eluded him, he had turned to his beliefs.  How could he not when he'd spent a lifetime abasing himself before them, when they afforded him such a luxury of judgement?
When they were so much who he was.
The promise of rebirth was at once the threat of murder, and Proyas, like so many others, had opted to kill rather than die.

...Such remnants, he thought, were the metric of ages, the pilings of the present. They spoke of a time when no Caraskand had encompassed these hills, a time when his own ancestors had ranged the endless plains beyond the Great Kayarsus.  To lay eyes on such monuments, he knew, to truly see them, was to understand the terrifying of dimensions of what had been forgotten.

"You were deceived," the Mandate Schoolman said...
..."He's given you to me, Iyokus.  The Warrior-Prophet.  I asked for vengeance.  I begged.

He was no longer of the People.  He was more.  There was no thought he could not think.  No act he could undertake.  No lips he could not kiss...  Nothing was forbidden.

"Old," the tiny face said in a reedy voice.  "Old is the covenant between our peoples."
Cnaiur stared in horror.  "I belong to no people," he said blankly.
A vertiginous silence.  It peered at him with an avian canniness, as though forced to revisit certain long standing assumptios.
"Perhaps," it said.  "But something binds you to him.  You would not have saved him otherwise.  You would not have killed my child"
Cnaiur spat.  "Nothing binds me"
It craned its tiny face to the side, bird-curious.
"But the past binds us all, Scylvendi, as the bow binds the flight of an arrow.  All of us have been nocked, raised and released.  All that remains is to see where we land... to see whether we strike true."

"The words," Eleazaras hissed.  "Do you remember the words?"
In sorcery, everything depended on the purity of meaning.  Who knew what blinding might do?
"Y-yessss."
"Then you are whole"

If soot stains your tunic, dye it black.  This is vengeance.
- EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES

Here we find further argument for Gotagga's supposition that the world is round.  How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?
- AJENCUS, DISCOURSE ON WAR

Why, Cnaiur wondered, would the Dunyain keep this child?  What did he see when he looked upon it?  What use was there in a child?
There was no interval between the world and an infant soul.  No deception.  No language.  A infant's wail simply was its hunger. And it occurred to Cnaiur that if he abandoned this child, it would become an Inrithi, but if he took it, stole away and rode hard for the Steppe, it would become a Scylvendi.  And his hair prickled across his scalp, for there was magic in that - even doom.
This wail would not always be one with the child's hunger.  The interval would lengthen, and the tracks between its soul and its expression would multiply, become more and more unfathomable. This singular need would be unbraided into a thousand strands of lust and hope, bound into a thousand knots and fear and shame.  And it would wince beneath the upraised hand of a father, sigh at the soft touch of the mother.  It would become what circumstance demanded.  Inrithi or Scylvendi...
It did not matter.
And suddenly, improbably, Cnaiur understood what it was the Dunyain saw: a world of infant men, their wails beaten into words, into tongues, into nations.  Kellhus could see the measure of the interval, he could close the interval, answer the wail... Make souls one with their expression.
As his father had before him.  Moenghus.

It was with awe that Esmenet greeted her own image in the mirror, an awe she saw reflected in the admiring eyes of her body slaves.  She was beautiful - as beautiful as Serwe, only dark.  Staring at the exotic stranger before her, she could almost believe she was worth what so many had made of her.  She could almost believe that all this was real.

"... Have them flayed and posted".
The ease with which these words fell from her lips was nothing short of nightmarish.  One breath and these men, these piteous fools, would die in torment.  A breath that could have been used for anything: a moan of pleasure, a gasp, a word of mercy...
This she understood, was power: the translation of word into fact.  She need only speak and the world would be rewritten.  Before, her voice could conjure only custom, ragged breaths, and quickened seed.  before, her cries could only forestall affliction and wheedle what small mercies might come.  But now her voice had become that mercy, that affliction.
Such thoughts made her head swim.

... Kellhus had warned her about Werjau.  The man resented her, he said, both because she was a woman and because of his native pride...

"I..." he began.  "I was your life... I know I was, Esmi."...
... What does he matter?  His heart was broken long before -
"Yes," she repeated, "you were my life".  When she raised her face, it was with weariness, not the ferocity she had expected. "And he is my world."

"He will not forgive," she whispered.
There was indecision in his look, frightening for its rarity.  "He will not forgive".

"Believe it.  The Consult exists.  All this time,laughing at the Mandati, and it was we who were the mumming fools".
A long accusatory silence.  Iyokus had always told him he should heed their claims more seriously...

"... the secrets you keep from yourself"... "He sees what breaks your heart"
You have doomed your School
"You're drunk," the chanv addict said, his tone both unnerved and disgusted.

extraordinary native intelligence