The Prince of Nothing 03 – Bakker, Scott

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R. Scott Bakker

The Thousandfold Thought

To Keith and Tina

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To think I started this journey almost twenty years ago …

Like anything else, life has a life of its own. If anyone had told me years back that the summer of 2005 would find me completing The Prince of Nothing, I likely would have coughed beer out of my nose. But here I am, and I have a long list of debts to prove it.

First, to my wife, Sharron, who has literally supported me unto the brink of insolvency. Even after so many years, I stand tallest when she’s at my side.

Then, the usual suspects: my brother, Bryan Bakker, for the gift of second sight; my friend, Roger Eichorn, for the gift of his second sight; and my agent, Chris Lotts, for his honesty and his acumen, not to mention the odd eleventh-hour bombshell!

I would also like to thank:

Steve Erikson.

My family and friends, for indulging my obsession in conversation after conversation. Joe Edmiston, for his squash-court criticisms. And my neighbour, Mike Brown, for helping me sort out the difference between mystery and obscurity.

The entire crew at Penguin Canada: Barbara Berson, Tracy Bordian, Karen Alliston, and Leslie Horlick. As well as Darren Nash and everyone at Orbit, U.K.

But the people I most need to thank are the fans of the series. This includes everyone at www.three-seas.com and the “other author” forum at sffworld.com. The names that come immediately to mind are: Jack Brown, Wil Horsley, Gary Wassner, White Lord, Dylanfanatic, Ainulindale, Mithfanion, Leiali, Texmex, and, of course, Saintjon. Through innumerable discussions across several different venues, you have all made your mark.

These aren’t what you might call “normal” books. And in a world bent on reaping the efficiencies of standardization, only fans can make something as demented as The Prince of Nothing possible.

What has come before …

The First Apocalypse destroyed the great Norsirai nations of the North. Only the South, the Ketyai nations of the Three Seas, survived the onslaught of the No-God, Mog-Pharau, and his Consult of generals and magi. The years passed, and the Men of the Three Seas forgot, as Men inevitably do, the horrors endured by their fathers.

Empires rose and empires fell: Kyraneas, Shir, Cenei. The Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus, reinterpreted the Tusk, the holiest of artifacts, and within a few centuries, the faith of Inrithism, organized and administered by the Thousand Temples and its spiritual leader, the Shriah, came to dominate the entire Three Seas. The great sorcerous Schools, such as the Scarlet Spires, the Imperial Saik, and the Mysunsai, arose in response to the Inrithi persecution of the Few, those possessing the ability to see and work sorcery. Using Chorae, ancient artifacts that render their bearers immune to sorcery, the Inrithi warred against the Schools, attempting, unsuccessfully, to purify the Three Seas. Then Fane, the Prophet of the Solitary God, united the Kianene, the desert peoples of the southwestern deserts, and declared war against the Tusk and the Thousand Temples. After centuries and several jihads, the Fanim and their eyeless sorcerer-priests, the Cishaurim, conquered nearly all the western Three Seas, including the holy city of Shimeh, the birthplace of Inri Sejenus. Only the moribund remnants of the Nansur Empire continued to resist them.

Now war and strife rule the South. The two great faiths of Inrithism and Fanimry continually skirmish, though trade and pilgrimage are tolerated when commercially convenient. The great families and nations vie for military and mercantile dominance. The minor and major Schools squabble and plot, particularly against the upstart Cishaurim, whose sorcery, the Psыkhe, the Schoolmen cannot distinguish from the God’s own world. And the Thousand Temples pursue earthly ambitions under the leadership of corrupt and ineffectual Shriahs.

The First Apocalypse has become little more than legend. The Consult, which had survived the death of the Mog-Pharau, has dwindled into myth, something old wives tell small children. After two thousand years, only the Schoolmen of the Mandate, who relive the Apocalypse each night through the eyes of their ancient founder, Seswatha, recall the horror and the prophecies of the No-God’s return. Though the mighty and the learned consider them fools, their possession of the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, commands respect and mortal envy. Driven by nightmares, they wander the labyrinths of power, scouring the Three Seas for signs of their ancient and implacable foe— for the Consult.

And as always, they find nothing.

Book One: The Darkness That Comes Before

The Holy War is the name of the great host called by Maithanet, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, to liberate Shimeh from the heathen Fanim of Kian. Word of Maithanet’s call spreads across the Three Seas, and faithful from all the great Inrithi nations—Galeoth, Thunyerus, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, High Ainon, and their tributaries—travel to the city of Momemn, the capital of the Nansur Empire, to become Men of the Tusk.

Almost from the outset, the gathering host is mired in politics and controversy. First, Maithanet somehow convinces the Scarlet Spires, the most powerful of the sorcerous Schools, to join his Holy War. Despite the outrage this provokes—sorcery is anathema to the Inrithi—the Men of the Tusk realize they need the Scarlet Spires to counter the heathen Cishaurim, the sorcerer-priests of the Fanim. The Holy War would be doomed without one of the Major Schools. The question is one of why the Scarlet Schoolmen would agree to such a perilous arrangement. Unknown to most, Eleдzaras, the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, has waged a long and secret war against the Cishaurim, who for no apparent reason assassinated his predecessor, Sasheoka, some ten years previously.

Second, Ikurei Xerius III, the Emperor of Nansur, hatches an intricate plot to usurp the Holy War for his own ends. Much of what is now heathen Kian once belonged to the Nansur, and Xerius has made recovering the Empire’s lost provinces his heart’s most fervent desire. Since the Holy War gathers in the Nansur Empire, it can only march if provisioned by the Emperor, something he refuses to do until every leader of the Holy War signs his Indenture, a written oath to cede all lands conquered to him.

Of course, the first caste-nobles to arrive repudiate the Indenture, and a stalemate ensues. As the Holy War’s numbers swell into the hundreds of thousands, however, the titular leaders of the host begin to grow restless. Since they war in the God’s name, they think themselves invincible, and as a result see little reason to share the glory with those yet to arrive. A Conriyan noble named Nersei Calmemunis comes to an accommodation with the Emperor, and convinces his fellows to sign the Imperial Indenture. Once provisioned, most of those gathered march, even though their lords and a greater part of the Holy War have yet to arrive. Because the host consists primarily of lordless rabble, it comes to be called the Vulgar Holy War.

Despite Maithanet’s attempts to bring the makeshift host to heel, it continues marching southward, and passes into heathen lands, where—precisely as the Emperor has planned—the Fanim destroy it utterly.

Xerius knows that in military terms, the loss of the Vulgar Holy War is insignificant, since the rabble that largely constituted it would have proven more a liability than an advantage in battle. In political terms, however, the Vulgar Holy War’s destruction is invaluable, since it has shown Maithanet and the Men of the Tusk the true mettle of their adversary. The Fanim, as the Nansur well know, are not to be trifled with, even with the God’s favour. Only an outstanding general, Xerius claims, can assure the Holy War’s victory—a man like his nephew, Ikurei Conphas, who, after his recent victory over the dread Scylvendi at the Battle of Kiyuth, has been hailed as the greatest tactician of his age. The leaders of the Holy War need only sign the Imperial Indenture, and Conphas’s preternatural skill and insight will be theirs.

Maithanet, it seems, now finds himself in a dilemma. As Shriah, he can compel the Emperor to provision the Holy War, but he cannot compel him to send Ikurei Conphas, his only living heir. The first truly great Inrithi potentates of the Holy War—Prince Nersei Proyas of Conriya, Prince Coithus Saubon of Galeoth, Earl Hoga Gothyelk of Ce Tydonn, King-Regent Chepheramunni of High Ainon— arrive in the midst of this controversy, and the Holy War amasses new strength, though it remains a hostage in effect, bound by the scarcity of food to the walls of Momemn and the Emperor’s granaries. To a man, the caste-nobles repudiate Xerius’s Indenture and demand that he provision them. The Men of the Tusk begin raiding the surrounding countryside. In retaliation, the Emperor calls in elements of the Imperial Army. Pitched battles are fought.

In an effort to forestall disaster, Maithanet calls a Council of Great and Lesser Names, and all the leaders of the Holy War gather in the Emperor’s palace, the Andiamine Heights, to make their arguments. Here Nersei Proyas shocks the assembly by offering a many-scarred Scylvendi Chieftain, a veteran of past wars against the Fanim, as a surrogate for the famed Ikurei Conphas. The Scylvendi, Cnaiьr urs Skiцtha, shares hard words with both the Emperor and his nephew, and the leaders of the Holy War are impressed. The Shriah’s Envoy, however, remains undecided: the Scylvendi are as apostate as the Fanim, after all. Only the wise words of the Prince Anasыrimbor Kellhus of Atrithau settle the matter. The Envoy reads the decree demanding that the Emperor, under pain of Shrial Censure, provision the Men of the Tusk.

The Holy War will march.

Drusas Achamian is a sorcerer sent by the School of Mandate to investigate Maithanet and his Holy War. Though he no longer believes in his School’s ancient mission, he travels to Sumna, where the Thousand Temples is based, in the hope of learning more about the mysterious Shriah, whom the Mandate fears could be an agent of the Consult. In the course of his probe, he resumes an old love affair with a harlot named Esmenet, and despite his misgivings he recruits a former student of his, a Shrial Priest named Inrau, to report on Maithanet’s activities. During this time, his nightmares of the Apocalypse intensify, particularly those involving the so-called “Celmomian Prophecy,” which foretells the return of a descendant of Anasыrimbor Celmomas before the Second Apocalypse.

Then Inrau dies under mysterious circumstances. Overcome by guilt, and heartbroken by Esmenet’s refusal to cease taking custom, Achamian flees Sumna and travels to Momemn, where the Holy War gathers under the Emperor’s covetous and uneasy eyes. A powerful rival of the Mandate, a School called the Scarlet Spires, has joined the Holy War to prosecute its long contest with the sorcerer-priests of the Cishaurim, who reside in Shimeh. Nautzera, Achamian’s Mandate handier, has ordered him to observe them and the Holy War. When he reaches the encampment, Achamian joins the fire of Xinemus, an old friend of his from Conriya.

Pursuing his investigation of Inrau’s death, Achamian convinces Xinemus to take him to see another old student of his, Prince Nersei Proyas of Conriya, who’s become a confidant of the enigmatic Shriah. When Proyas scoffs at his suspicions and repudiates him as a blasphemer, Achamian implores him to write Maithanet regarding the circumstances of Inrau’s death. Embittered, Achamian leaves his old student’s pavilion certain his meagre request will go unfulfilled.

Then a man hailing from the distant north arrives—a man calling himself Anasыrimbor Kellhus. Battered by his recurrent dreams of the Apocalypse, Achamian finds himself fearing the worst: the Second Apocalypse. Is Kellhus’s arrival a mere coincidence, or is he the Harbinger foretold in the Celmomian Prophecy? Achamian questions the man, only to find himself utterly disarmed by his humour, honesty, and intellect. They talk history and philosophy long into the night, and before retiring, Kellhus asks Achamian to be his teacher. Inexplicably awed and affected by the stranger, Achamian agrees …

But he finds himself in a dilemma. The reappearance of an Anasыrimbor is something the School of Mandate simply has to know—few discoveries could be more significant. But he fears what his brother Schoolmen will do: a lifetime of dreaming horrors, he knows, has made them cruel and pitiless. And he blames them, moreover, for the death of Inrau.

Before he can resolve this dilemma, Achamian is summoned by the Emperor’s nephew, Ikurei Conphas, to the Imperial Palace in Momemn, where the Emperor wants him to assess a highly placed adviser of his—an old man called Skeaцs—for the Mark of sorcery. The Emperor himself, Ikurei Xerius III, brings Achamian to Skeaцs, demanding to know whether the old man bears the blasphemous taint of sorcery. Achamian sees nothing amiss.

Skeaos, however, sees something in Achamian. He begins writhing against his chains, speaking a tongue from Achamian’s ancient dreams. Impossibly, the old man breaks free, killing several before being burned by the Emperor’s sorcerers. Dumbfounded, Achamian confronts the howling Skeaцs, only to watch horrified as his face peels apart and opens into scorched limbs …

The abomination before him, he realizes, is a Consult spy, one who can mimic and replace others without bearing sorcery’s telltale Mark. A skin-spy. Achamian flees the palace without warning the Emperor and his court, knowing they would think his conviction nonsense. For them, Skeaцs can only be an artifact of the heathen Cishaurim, whose art also bears no Mark. Senseless to his surroundings, Achamian wanders back to Xinemus’s camp, so absorbed by his horror that he fails to see or hear Esmenet, who has come to rejoin him at long last.

The mysteries surrounding Maithanet. The coming of Anasыrimbor Kellhus. The discovery of the first Consult spy in generations … How could he doubt it any longer? The Second Apocalypse is about to begin.

Alone in his humble tent, he weeps, overcome by loneliness, dread, and remorse.

Esmenet is a Sumni prostitute who mourns both her life and her dead daughter. When Achamian arrives on his mission to learn more about Maithanet, she readily takes him in. During this time, she continues to take and service her customers, knowing full well the pain this causes Achamian. But she really has no choice: sooner or later, she realizes, Achamian will be called away. And yet she falls ever deeper in love with the hapless sorcerer, in part because of the respect he accords her, and in part because of the worldly nature of his work. Though her sex has condemned her to sit half naked in her window, the world beyond has always been her passion. The intrigues of the Great Factions, the machinations of the Consult: these are the things that quicken her soul.

Then disaster strikes: Achamian’s informant, Inrau, is murdered, and the bereaved Schoolman is forced to travel to Momemn. Esmenet begs him to take her with him, but he refuses, and she finds herself once again marooned in her old life. Not long after, a threatening stranger comes to her room, demanding to know everything about Achamian. Twisting her desire against her, the man ravishes her, and Esmenet finds herself answering all his questions. Come morning he vanishes as suddenly as he appears, leaving only pools of black seed to mark his passing.

Horrified, Esmenet flees Sumna, determined to find Achamian and tell him what happened. In her bones, she knows the stranger is somehow connected to the Consult. On her way to Momemn, she pauses in a village, hoping to find someone to repair her broken sandal. When the villagers recognize the whore’s tattoo on her hand, they begin stoning her—the punishment the Tusk demands of prostitutes. Only the sudden appearance of a Shrial Knight named Sarcellus saves her, and she has the satisfaction of watching her tormentors humbled. Sarcellus takes her the rest of the way to Momemn, and Esmenet finds herself growing more and more infatuated with his wealth and aristocratic manner. He seems so free of the melancholy and indecision that plague Achamian.

Once they reach the Holy War, Esmenet stays with Sarcellus, even though she knows that Achamian is only miles away. As the Shrial Knight continually reminds her, Schoolmen such as Achamian are forbidden to take wives. If she were to run to him, he says, it would be only a matter of time before he abandoned her again.

Weeks pass, and she finds herself esteeming Sarcellus less and pining for Achamian more and more. Finally, on the night before the Holy War is to march, she sets off in search of the portly sorcerer, determined to tell him everything that has happened. After a harrowing search, she finally locates Xinemus’s camp, only to find herself too ashamed to make her presence known. She hides in the darkness instead, waiting for Achamian to appear, and wondering at the strange collection of men and women about the fire. When dawn arrives without any sign of Achamian, Esmenet wanders across the abandoned site, only to see him trudging toward her. She holds out her arms to him, weeping with joy and sorrow …

And he simply walks past her as though she were a stranger.

Heartbroken, she flees, determined to make her own way in the Holy War.

Cnaiьr urs Skiцtha is a Chieftain of the Utemot, a tribe of Scylvendi, who are feared across the Three Seas for their skill and ferocity in war. Because of the events surrounding the death of his father, Skiцtha, some thirty years previously, Cnaiьr is despised by his own people, though none dare challenge him because of his savage strength and his cunning in war. Word arrives that the Emperor’s nephew, Ikurei Conphas, has invaded the Holy Steppe, and Cnaiьr rides with the Utemot to join the Scylvendi horde on the distant Imperial frontier. Knowing Conphas’s reputation, Cnaiьr senses a trap, but his warnings go unheeded by Xunnurit, the chieftain elected King-of-Tribes for the coming battle. Cnaiьr can only watch as the disaster unfolds.

Escaping the horde’s destruction, Cnaiьr returns to the pastures of the Utemot more anguished than ever. He flees the whispers and the looks of his fellow tribesmen and rides to the graves of his ancestors, where he finds a grievously wounded man sitting upon his dead father’s barrow, surrounded by circles of dead Sranc. Warily approaching, Cnaiьr nightmarishly realizes he recognizes the man—or almost recognizes him. He resembles Anasыrimbor Moлnghus in almost every respect, save that he is too young …

Moлnghus had been captured thirty years before, when Cnaiьr was little more than a stripling, and given to Cnaiьr’s father as a slave. He claimed to be Dыnyain, a people possessed of an extraordinary wisdom, and Cnaiьr spent many hours with him, speaking of things forbidden to Scylvendi warriors. What happened afterward—the seduction, the murder of Skiцtha, and Moлnghus’s subsequent escape—has tormented Cnaiьr ever since. Though he once loved the man, he now hates him with a deranged intensity. If only he could kill Moлnghus, he believes, his heart could be made whole.

Now, impossibly, this double has come to him, travelling the same path as the original.

Realizing the stranger could make possible his vengeance, Cnaiьr takes him captive. The man, who calls himself Anasыrimbor Kellhus, claims to be Moлnghus’s son. The Dыnyain, he says, have sent him to assassinate his father in a faraway city called Shimeh. As much as Cnaiьr wants to believe this story, however, he’s wary and troubled. After years of obsessively pondering Moлnghus, he’s come to realize the Dыnyain are gifted with preternatural skills and intelligence. Their sole purpose, he now knows, is domination, though where others used force and fear, they used deceit and love.

The story Kellhus has told him, Cnaiьr realizes, is precisely the story a Dыnyain seeking escape and safe passage across Scylvendi lands would tell. Nevertheless, he makes a bargain with the man, agreeing to accompany him on his quest. The two of them strike out across the Steppe, locked in a shadowy war of word and passion. Time and again, Cnaiьr finds himself drawn into Kellhus’s insidious nets, only to recall himself at the last moment. Only his hatred of Moлnghus and knowledge of the Dыnyain preserve him.

Near the Imperial frontier, they encounter a party of hostile Scylvendi raiders. Kellhus’s unearthly skill in battle both astounds and terrifies Cnaiьr. In the battle’s aftermath, they find a captive concubine, a woman named Serwл, cowering among the raiders’ chattel. Struck by her beauty, Cnaiьr takes her as his prize, and through her he learns of Maithanet’s Holy War for Shimeh, the city where Moлnghus supposedly dwells … Can this be a coincidence?

Coincidence or not, the Holy War forces Cnaiьr to reconsider his original plan to travel around the Empire, where his Scylvendi heritage will mean almost certain death. With the Fanim rulers of Shimeh girding for war, the only possible way they can reach the holy city is to become Men of the Tusk. They have no choice, he realizes, but to join the Holy War, which, according to Serwл, gathers about the city of Momemn in the heart of the Empire—the one place he cannot go. Now that they have safely crossed the Steppe, Cnaiьr is convinced Kellhus will kill him: the Dыnyain brook no liabilities.

Descending the mountains into the Empire, Cnaiьr confronts Kellhus, who claims he has use of him still. While Serwл watches in horror, the two men battle on the mountainous heights, and though Cnaiьr is able to surprise Kellhus, the man easily overpowers him, holding him by the throat over a precipice. To prove his intent to keep their bargain, he spares Cnaiьr‘s life. After so many years among worldborn men, Kellhus claims, Moлnghus will be far too powerful for him to face alone. They will need an army, he says, and unlike Cnaiьr he knows nothing of war.

Despite his misgivings, Cnaiьr believes him, and they resume their journey. As the days pass, Cnaiьr watches Serwл become more and more infatuated with Kellhus. Though troubled by this, he refuses to admit as much, reminding himself that warriors care nothing for women, particularly those taken as the spoils of battle. What does it matter that she belongs to Kellhus during the day? She is Cnaiьr‘s at night.

After a desperate journey and pursuit through the heart of the Empire, they at last find their way to Momemn and the Holy War, where they are taken before one of the Holy War’s leaders, a Conriyan Prince named Nersei Proyas. In keeping with their plan, Cnaiьr claims to be the last of the Utemot, travelling with Anasыrimbor Kellhus, a Prince of the northern city of Atrithau, who has dreamed of the Holy War from afar. Proyas, however, is far more interested in Cnaiьr‘s knowledge of the Fanim and their way of battle. Obviously impressed by what he has to say, the Conriyan Prince takes Cnaiьr and his companions under his protection.

Soon afterward, Proyas takes Cnaiьr and Kellhus to a meeting of the Holy War’s leaders and the Emperor, where the fate of the Holy War is to be decided. Ikurei Xerius III has refused to provision the Men of the Tusk unless they swear to return all the lands they wrest from the Fanim to the Empire. The Shriah, Maithanet, can force the Emperor to provision them, but he fears the Holy War lacks the leadership to overcome the Fanim. The Emperor offers his brilliant nephew, Ikurei Conphas, flush from his spectacular victory over the Scylvendi at Kiyuth, but only—once again—if the leaders of the Holy War pledge to surrender their future conquests. In a daring gambit, Proyas offers Cnaiьr in Conphas’s stead. A vicious war of words ensues, and Cnaiьr manages to best the precocious Imperial Nephew. The Shriah’s representative orders the Emperor to provision the Men of the Tusk. The Holy War will march.

In a mere matter of days, Cnaiьr has gone from a fugitive to a leader of the greatest host ever assembled in the Three Seas. What does it mean for a Scylvendi to treat with outland princes, with peoples he is sworn to destroy? What must he surrender to see his vengeance through?

That night, he watches Serwл surrender to Kellhus body and soul, and he wonders at the horror he has delivered to the Holy War. What will Anasыrimbor Kellhus—a Dыnyain— make of these Men of the Tusk? No matter, he tells himself, the Holy War marches to distant Shimeh—to Moлnghus and the promise of blood.

Anasыrimbor Kellhus is a monk sent by his order, the Dыnyain, to search for his father, Anasыrimbor Moлnghus.

Since discovering the secret redoubt of the Kыniьric High Kings during the Apocalypse some two thousand years previously, the Dыnyain have concealed themselves, breeding for reflex and intellect, and continually training in the ways of limb, thought, and face—all for the sake of reason, the sacred Logos. In the effort to transform themselves into the perfect expression of the Logos, the Dыnyain have bent their entire existence to mastering the irrationalities that determine human thought: history, custom, and passion. In this way, they believe, they will eventually grasp what they call the Absolute, and so become true self-moving souls.

But their glorious isolation is at an end. After thirty years of exile, one of their number, Anasыrimbor Moлnghus, has reappeared in their dreams, demanding they send to him his son. Knowing only that his father dwells in a distant city called Shimeh, Kellhus undertakes an arduous journey through lands long abandoned by men. While wintering with a trapper named Leweth, he discovers he can read the man’s thoughts through the nuances of his expression. Worldborn men, he realizes, are little more than children in comparison to the Dыnyain. Experimenting, he finds that he can exact anything from Leweth—any love, any sacrifice—with mere words. So what of his father, who has spent thirty years among such men? What is the extent of Anasыrimbor Moлnghus‘s power?

When a band of inhuman Sranc discovers Leweth’s steading, the two men are forced to flee. Leweth is wounded, and Kellhus leaves him for the Sranc, feeling no remorse. The Sranc overtake him, and after driving them away, he battles their leader, a deranged Nonman, who nearly undoes him with sorcery. Kellhus flees, racked by questions without answers: Sorcery, he’d been taught, was nothing more than superstition. Could the Dыnyain have been wrong? What other facts had they overlooked or suppressed?

Eventually he finds refuge in the ancient city of Atrithau, where, using his Dыnyain abilities, he assembles an expedition to cross the Sranc-infested plains of Suskara. After a harrowing trek he crosses the frontier, only to be captured by a mad Scylvendi Chieftain named Cnaiьr urs Skiotha— a man who both knows and hates his father, Moлnghus.

Though his knowledge of the Dыnyain renders Cnaiьr immune to direct manipulation, Kellhus quickly realizes he can turn the man’s thirst for vengeance to his advantage. Claiming to be an assassin sent to murder Moлnghus, he asks the Scylvendi to join him on his quest. Overpowered by his hatred, Cnaiьr reluctantly agrees, and the two men set out across the Jiьnati Steppe. Time and again, Kellhus tries to secure the trust he needs to possess the man, but the barbarian continually rebuffs him. His hatred and his penetration are too great.

Then, near the Imperial frontier, they find a concubine named Serwл, who informs them of a Holy War gathering about Momemn—a Holy War for Shimeh. The fact that his father has summoned him to Shimeh at the same time, Kellhus realizes, can be no coincidence. But what could Moлnghus be planning?

They cross the mountains into the Empire, and Kellhus watches Cnaiьr struggle with the growing conviction that he’s outlived his usefulness. Thinking that murdering Kellhus is as close as he’ll ever come to murdering Moлnghus, Cnaiьr attacks him, only to be defeated. To prove that he still needs him, Kellhus spares his life. He must, Kellhus knows, dominate the Holy War, but he as yet knows nothing of warfare. The variables are too many. Though Cnaiьr‘s knowledge of Moлnghus and the Dыnyain renders him a liability, his skill in war makes him invaluable. To secure this knowledge, Kellhus starts seducing Serwл, using her and her beauty as detours to the barbarian’s tormented heart.

Once in the Empire, they stumble across a patrol of Imperial cavalrymen; their journey to Momemn quickly becomes a desperate race. When they finally reach the encamped Holy War, they find themselves before Nersei Proyas, the Crown Prince of Conriya. To secure a position of honour among the Men of the Tusk, Kellhus lies, and claims to be a Prince of Atrithau. To lay the groundwork for his future domination, he claims to have suffered dreams of the Holy War—implying, without saying as much, that they were godsent. Since Proyas is more concerned with Cnaiьr and how he can use the barbarian’s knowledge of battle to thwart the Emperor, these claims are accepted without any real scrutiny. Only the Mandate Schoolman accompanying Proyas, Drusas Achamian, seems troubled by him—especially by his name.

The following evening, Kellhus dines with the sorcerer, disarming him with humour, flattering him with questions. He learns of the Apocalypse and the Consult and many other sundry things, and though he knows Achamian harbours some terror regarding the name Anasыrimbor, he asks the melancholy man to become his teacher. The Dыnyain, Kellhus has come to realize, have been mistaken about many things, the existence of sorcery among them. There is so much he must know before he confronts his father …

A final gathering is called to settle the issue between the Lords of the Holy War, who want to march, and the Emperor, who refuses to provision them. With Cnaiьr at his side, Kellhus charts the souls of all those present, calculating the ways he might bring them under his thrall. Among the Emperor’s advisers, however, he observes an expression he cannot read. The man, he realizes, possesses a false face. While Ikurei Conphas and the Inrithi caste-nobles bicker, Kellhus studies the man, and determines that his name is Skeaцs by reading the lips of his interlocutors. Could this Skeaцs be an agent of his father?

Before he can draw any conclusions, however, his scrutiny is noticed by the Emperor himself, who has the adviser seized. Though the entire Holy War celebrates the Emperor’s defeat, Kellhus is more perplexed than ever. Never has he undertaken a study so deep.

That night he consummates his relationship with Serwл, continuing the patient work of undoing Cnaiьr—as all Men of the Tusk must be undone. Somewhere, a shadowy faction lurks behind faces of false skin. Far to the south in Shimeh, Anasыrimbor Moлnghus awaits the coming storm.

Book Two: The Warrior-Prophet

Free of the Emperor’s machinations, the Lords of the Holy War fall to squabbling among each other, and the Holy War fractures into its various nationalities as it marches toward the heathen frontier. Contingent by contingent, it gathers beneath Asgilioch on the heathen frontier.

But Prince Saubon, the leader of the Galeoth contingent, is too impatient, and on the prophetic advice of Prince Kellhus, he marches with the Tydonni, the Thunyeri, and the Shrial Knights. The Imperial Army under Ikurei Conphas and the Conriyans under Prince Proyas remain at Asgilioch, awaiting the Ainoni and the all-important Scarlet Spires.

Skauras, the leader of the Kianene host, surprises Saubon and his impetuous peers on the Plains of Mengedda. A desperate battle follows, where, just as Prince Kellhus predicted, the Shrial Knights suffer grievously saving the Holy War from a cadre of Cishaurim. As the day wanes, the rest of the Holy War appears in the hills, and the Fanim host is completely routed.

The Governorate of Gedea falls, though the Emperor manages to take her capital, Hinnereth, through trickery. The Men of the Tusk continue south. Broken by their defeat on the Plains of Mengedda, the Kianene fall back to the south bank of the River Sempis, yielding northern Shigek to the Inrithi invaders. Prince Kellhus begins giving regular sermons beneath the famed Ziggurats of Shigek. Many in the Holy War begin referring to him as the “Warrior-Prophet.”

With Cnaiьr as their general, the Men of the Tusk cross the Sempis Delta, and a second great battle is fought beneath the Kianene fortress of Anwurat. Despite the dissolution of Cnaiьr‘s command and the martial cunning of Skauras, the Men of the Tusk prevail once again. The sons of Kian are hacked to ruin.

Anxious to press the advantage, the Great Names then lead the Holy War south across the coastal deserts of Khemema, depending on the Imperial Fleet to keep them supplied with fresh water. The Padirajah, however, surprises the fleet at the Bay of Trantis, and the Men of the Tusk find themselves stranded in the burning wastes without water. Thousands upon thousands die. Only Prince Kellhus’s discovery of water beneath the dunes saves the Inrithi from total annihilation.

The remnants of the Holy War drift from the desert and descend upon the great mercantile city of Caraskand. After a number of abortive assaults, the Men of the Tusk prepare for a long siege. The winter rains come, and with them, disease. At the height of the plague, hundreds of Inrithi perish every night. Only a Fanim traitor allows the Holy War to breach Caraskand’s mighty fortifications. The Men of the Tusk show no quarter.

But even as the city falls, Kascamandri, the Padirajah himself, approaches with another great host. Suddenly the besiegers find themselves besieged in a sacked city. Diseases of malnutrition, then outright starvation soon begin afflicting them. Meanwhile, the tensions between traditional Inrithi and those acclaiming Prince Kellhus as a prophet— the Orthodox and the Zaudunyani—grow to the point of riot and violence.

Incited by the accusations of Sarcellus and Ikurei Conphas, the Lords of the Holy War turn against Prince Kellhus. He is denounced, declared a False Prophet, and, in accordance with The Chronicle of the Tusk, seized and bound to the corpse of his wife, Serwл, who is executed by Sarcellus. He is then lashed to an iron ring—a circumfix—and hung from a tree. Thousands gather in solemn vigil.

After Cnaiьr reveals Sarcellus as a skin-spy, the Men of the Tusk repent, and the Warrior-Prophet is cut down from the Circumfix. Moved by a profound fervour, they assemble outside the gates of Caraskand. The Grandees of Kian charge their grim ranks and are utterly undone. The Padirajah himself falls before the Warrior-Prophet, though his son, Fanayal, survives to flee east with the remnants of the heathen army.

The road to Holy Shimeh is now open.

But far to the north, in the shadow of dread Golgotterath, the Consult rides openly once again, torturing those Men they find with a single, implacable question: ”Who are the Dыnyain?”

Drusas Achamian faces a dilemma, the greatest he’s ever encountered. Using the Cants of Calling, he contacts the Mandate and informs them of his dread discovery beneath the Andiamine Heights, but he says nothing of Anasыrimbor Kellhus, even though the man’s name could very well mean the Celmomian Prophecy—that an Anasыrimbor would return at the end of the world—has been fulfilled.

The omission torments him, but the more time he spends teaching Kellhus on the march, the more he finds himself in awe of the man. With strokes of a stick across the ground, Kellhus rewrites classical logic, devises new and more subtle geometries. He regularly anticipates the insights of Eдrwa’s greatest thinkers, even extends them in astonishing ways. And he never forgets anything.

Achamian, especially after the debacle with Inrau in Sumna, is under no illusions regarding his School. He knows what they would do with Prince Anasыrimbor Kellhus. So he convinces himself that he needs time to determine whether Kellhus is in fact the Harbinger of the Apocalypse. He decides to betray the Mandate, to risk the very future of humanity, for the sake of a single, remarkable man.

While the Holy War awaits the arrival of the last stragglers about Asgilioch, he turns to drink and whores to silence his misgivings, only to find Esmenet among the camp-followers. Their reunion is both ardent and awkward. Afterward, Achamian takes her to his tent as his wife. After a lifetime of fruitless wandering, he finds himself terrified by the prospect of happiness. How can anyone be happy in the shadow of the Apocalypse?

As the Holy War marches ever deeper into Fanim territory, he continues teaching Kellhus. During this time, Achamian and Esmenet make a game of interpreting Kellhus, becoming more and more convinced of his divinity. In the course of these ruminations, Achamian confesses his fear that Kellhus may be one of the Few—those who can work sorcery. When Kellhus claims as much shortly after, Achamian insists on proof, using a small, demon-haunted Wathi Doll he obtained in High Ainon. Xinemus is outraged by the blasphemous demonstration, and Achamian finds himself estranged from his old friend.

When the Holy War reaches Shigek, Kellhus finally asks Achamian to teach him the Gnosis—something that would complete his betrayal of the Mandate. Needing solitude, Achamian travels alone to the Sareotic Library, where the sorcerers of the Scarlet Spires ambush and abduct him.

The torment drags on for weeks. Iyokus, the lead interrogator, even captures and blinds Xinemus in an attempt to wring more information from Achamian. The Scarlet Spires, it seems, have learned of the events beneath the Andiamine Heights. They know about Skeaцs and the skin-spies, and with the very future of his School at stake, Eleдzaras is desperate to extract as much intelligence as possible.

Despite his sorcerous constraints, Achamian is able to call out to his Wathi Doll, which has been buried in the ruins of the Sareotic Library. After a long wait the Doll arrives and breaks the Uroborian Circle that imprisons him. Achamian at last shows the Gnosis to the Scarlet Spires. Though Iyokus escapes his vengeance, he and Xinemus are at last free.

After recuperating, the two friends set out to rejoin the Holy War, their relationship now marred by the resentment Xinemus bears for losing his eyes. They find the Men of the Tusk trapped and starving in Caraskand and learn of the Circumfixion of Kellhus and Serwл. Achamian immediately sets out to find Esmenet, relieved beyond words to discover that she survived the desert.

He finds her with the Zaudunyani. She tells him that she is pregnant with Kellhus’s child.

Achamian goes to the ring-bound Kellhus thinking only of murder. Instead he learns that Consult skin-spies riddle the Holy War. Kellhus, it seems, can see them. He tells Achamian that the Second Apocalypse has in fact begun.

Despite his sorrow and hatred, Achamian goes to Proyas arguing that Kellhus must be saved. Proyas agrees to summon the other Great Names, and Achamian presents his case, arguing that the world is doomed without Anasыrimbor Kellhus, only to be made a laughingstock by Ikurei Conphas.

He fails to convince the Lords of the Holy War.

Thinking Achamian has repudiated her, Esmenet loses herself in the Holy War and eventually joins a troop of camp prostitutes. But at Asgilioch, she finds Achamian kneeling in the crowds, drunk and beaten. Never has she seen him so desperate. They reconcile, even though she cannot confess the truth of her affair with Sarcellus.

He tells her about Skeaцs and the events beneath the Andiamine Heights, about his failure to tell the Mandate about Kellhus. She consoles him even as she struggles to grasp the dread import of his words. He insists the Second Apocalypse is coming, and though it seems something too horrific, too abstract, to be real, she finds herself believing him. She joins him in his humble tent, and becomes his wife in spirit if not in ritual.

Achamian introduces her to Kellhus, Serwл, Xinemus, and everyone else about their motley yet extraordinary camp fire. At first she regards Kellhus with suspicion, but she soon finds the wonder of the man as irresistible as everyone else.

As the Holy War marches across Gedea, she watches as Kellhus grows in prestige and reputation, becoming more and more convinced that he must be the prophet he claims not to be. During the same time her love of Achamian deepens, though she has difficulty trusting it.

Then, in Shigek, Kellhus asks Achamian to teach him the Gnosis. Since this would represent a final, ultimate betrayal of the Mandate, Achamian leaves for the Sareotic Library to meditate alone. He and Esmenet exchange hard words. The following night Kellhus awakens her with grim tidings: the Sareotic Library burns, and Achamian is missing.

She mourns him the way she once mourned her dead daughter. While the Men of the Tusk assail the South Bank, she remains alone in Achamian’s tent, refusing, despite Xinemus’s entreaties, to rejoin the Holy War. How would Achamian find her if she moved? After the Battle of Anwurat, Kellhus comes to her with Serwл, and with reason and compassion convinces her to join them on the continued march.

She finds their company awkward at first, but Kellhus is able to make sense of her melancholy, to give shape to the morass of accumulated sorrow that burdens her heart. He begins teaching her how to read—as a way to distract her, she suspects. As the weeks pass and the Holy War begins its disastrous march across the desert, she starts to resign herself to the fact that Achamian is dead.

She also finds herself more and more attracted to Kellhus.

Despite her shame, despite her resolutions, the chance intimacies accumulate. His words seem to carve her at the joints, cutting ever closer to truths she cannot bear. She admits her affair with Sarcellus, all her small betrayals of Achamian. Then, at last, overcome by shame and grief, she confesses the truth about her daughter: Mimara didn’t die all those years ago. Esmenet sold the girl to slavers to forestall starvation.

She and Kellhus make love the following morning.

The long suffering in the desert seems to sanctify their relationship. Everything appears transformed. She even casts away her Whore’s Shell, the contraceptive charm used by most prostitutes, something she never even considered with Achamian. Esmenet becomes the Warrior-Prophet’s second wife. For the first time in her life she feels shriven—pure.

Caraskand is besieged and overcome. Serwл gives birth to the infant Moлnghus. And Kellhus yields Esmenet more and more power within the growing ranks of Zaudunyani, raising her above even his closest disciples, the Nascenti. She becomes pregnant.

Then suddenly everything seems to collapse. The Padirajah traps the Holy War in Caraskand. Misery and riot own the streets. The Great Names execute Serwл and condemn Kellhus to the Circumfix. All seems lost …

Until Achamian returns.

Cnaiьr urs Skiotha’s torment deepens. Though the Men of the Tusk mean nothing to him, he sees his own undoing in their slow capitulation to Kellhus. He alone knows the truth of the Dыnyain, which means he knows that Kellhus will eventually betray him in the prosecution of his obscure ends. Just as he knows the man will betray the Holy War.

As the Holy War marches deeper into Fanim territory, he tries to teach Prince Proyas the rudiments of war as practised by the Kianene. Assigned by Proyas to command a cohort of Conriyan outriders, he returns to the camp he shares with Kellhus, Achamian, and the others of the less and less. He knows that Kellhus now possesses Serwл body and soul, and when he returns, he finds himself punishing her for Kellhus’s outrage. Secretly he loves her, or so he tells himself.

In the arid highlands of Gedea, he decides he can tolerate no more. He refuses to share Kellhus’s fire, and demands that Serwл, whom he claims as his prize, come with him. Kellhus denies him. Since concern for women is unmanly, Cnaiьr relinquishes her, though she continues to tyrannize his thoughts. His madness burns brighter. Some nights he roams the countryside, raping and murdering indiscriminately.

After the Holy War seizes the north bank of the River Sempis, the Lords of the Holy War assign Cnaiьr the task of planning the assault on southern Shigek. Impressed by his insight and cunning, they acclaim him their general for the impending battle. Kellhus comes to him, offering Serwл in exchange for the secrets of battle. Cnaiьr knows that his knowledge of war is the last advantage he possesses over the Dыnyain, the only thing Kellhus still needs from him, but Serwл has somehow become more important than anything. She is his prize, his proof …

Cnaiьr agrees. Riven by recriminations, he teaches Kellhus the principles of war.

Despite all his efforts, Skauras outwits him on the battlefield; only determination and good fortune save the Holy War from defeat. Something breaks within Cnaiьr. At the height of the crisis he leaves Kellhus and the others, abandons his command to collect his prize. But when he finds Serwл, another Kellhus is beating her, demanding information. He surprises the second Kellhus, stabbing him in the shoulder. The man flees, but not before Cnaiьr glimpses his face crack open …

Cnaiьr seizes Serwл, begins dragging her to his camp. She rages at him, tells him that he beats her because she lies with Kellhus the way he had lain with Kellhus’s father. She tries to cut her own throat.

Bewildered and undone, Cnaiьr wanders aimlessly through the camp. Later that night, as the Men of the Tusk celebrate their victory, Kellhus finds him at the edge of the Meneanor, howling at the breakers. Thinking he is Moлnghus, Cnaiьr begs him to end his misery. The Dыnyain refuses.

Throughout the disastrous desert march and the siege of Caraskand, madness rules Cnaiьr‘s heart. Not until the city falls does he recover some semblance of his former self. Fomenting against Kellhus, the Great Names come to him, hoping to confirm rumours that Kellhus is not a true prince of Atrithau. The estrangement between Cnaiьr and Kellhus is no secret. Thinking the Holy War doomed, Cnaiьr decides to take what compensation he can. He names Kellhus a “prince of nothing.”

Only when Serwл is murdered by Sarcellus does he realize the consequences of his betrayal. “Lie made flesh,” Kellhus calls out to him before he is seized. “The hunt need not end.” Cnaiьr flees, and in a moment of resurgent madness cuts a swazond across his own throat.

He obsesses over the Dыnyain‘s final words. When the Mandate Schoolman confronts the Lords of the Holy War with the severed head of a Consult skin-spy, he finally grasps their meaning. He follows Sarcellus, who hastens from the assembly to the temple-complex where his brother Shrial Knights guard .Kellhus upon the Circumfix. Knowing he intends to kill the Dыnyain, Cnaiьr intercepts him, and they duel before the starving masses gathered about the dying Warrior-Prophet. But the skin-spy is too fast, too skilled. Cnaiьr is saved only when Gotian, the Grandmaster of the Shrial Knights, distracts Sarcellus by demanding to know how he learned to fight so. Exhausted, bloodied, Cnaiьr beheads the counterfeit Shrial Knight.

Raising its severed head to the sky, he shows the Holy War the true face of the Warrior-Prophet’s adversary. The hunt for Moлnghus need not end.

Anasыrimbor Kellhus requires three things to prepare for his father in Shimeh: knowledge of battle and of sorcery, and possession of the Holy War.

From the outset, he uses his claim to caste-nobility to insinuate himself into the councils of Proyas and the other Great Names. He proceeds cautiously, patiently laying the groundwork of his domination. From his readings of Inrithi scripture, he learns what the Men of the Tusk expect from a prophetic figure, so he sets out to emulate—as far as he can—all of those characteristics. He becomes a pilot of souls, crafting others’ impressions of him with subtle inflections of word, tone, and expression. Soon, almost all those who know him find themselves in awe. Throughout the Holy War men whisper that a prophet walks among them.

At the same time, he plies Achamian with particular care. While mining him for his knowledge of the Three Seas, Kellhus subtly conditions him, instilling the passions and beliefs that will eventually force him to do the impossible: teach Kellhus the Gnosis, the deadly sorcery of the Ancient North.

In the course of his study, however, he discovers dozens of skin-spies mimicking men in various positions of power. He realizes, moreover, that they now know he can see them. One of them, a high-ranking Shrial Knight called Sarcellus, approaches him, probing for details. Kellhus uses the opportunity to make himself even more enigmatic, into a puzzle the Consult will be loath to destroy before solving. As long as he remains a benign mystery to the Consult, Kellhus realizes, they will not move against him.

He needs time to consolidate his position. Until the Holy War is his, he cannot risk an open confrontation.

He says nothing to Achamian for much the same reason. He knows the Mandate Schoolman believes him to be the Harbinger of the Second Apocalypse, and that the only thing preventing Achamian from telling this to his Mandate handlers is the recent death of his former student, Inrau, as a result of their machinations. Knowing that Kellhus could actually see Consult agents in their midst would prove too much. And as Achamian himself admits, the Mandate would likely seize Kellhus rather than treat with him as an equal.

Once the Holy War secures Shigek, Kellhus begins asserting himself more and more, giving what are called the Sermons of the Ziggurat. Though many now refer to him openly as the Warrior-Prophet, he continues to insist he is simply a man like any other. Knowing that Achamian has succumbed—that he believes him to be the world’s only hope—Kellhus finally asks the Schoolman to teach him the Gnosis. But when Achamian leaves for the Sareotic Library to meditate on this request, he is abducted by the Scarlet Spires.

Assuming Achamian lost, Kellhus turns to Esmenet, not out of any errant sense of lust, but because her extraordinary native intelligence makes her useful both as a subordinate and as a potential mate. The differences between the Dыnyain and the worldborn makes his bloodline invaluable. He knows that whatever sons he produces, especially by a woman of Esmenet’s intellect, will prove powerful tools.

So he begins seducing her by teaching her to read, by showing the hidden truths of her own heart, and by drawing her ever deeper into his circle of power and influence. Far from proving an obstacle, her bereavement actually facilitates his plan by rendering her more emotionally vulnerable and prone to suggestion. By the time the Holy War enters the desert, she has willingly joined him and Serwл in their bed.

Despite its calamities, the journey across the desert provides ample opportunity for him to exercise his otherworldly abilities. He rallies the Men of the Tusk with demonstrations of indomitable will and courage. He even saves them, using his preternatural senses to find well-springs beneath the sand. By the time the remnants of the Holy War fall upon Caraskand, thousands upon thousands openly hail him as the Warrior-Prophet. At long last he yields to the title.

He names his followers the Zaudunyani, the “Tribe of Truth.”

But now he faces an added danger. As the numbers of Zaudunyani swell, so too do the misapprehensions of the Great Names. For many, following the dictates of a living— as opposed to a long-dead—prophet proves too much. Ikurei Conphas becomes the de facto leader of the Orthodox, those Men of the Tusk who repudiate Kellhus and his revisionary Inrithism. Even Proyas finds himself increasingly troubled.

The Consult, as well, have been watching Kellhus with growing trepidation. In the confusion of Caraskand’s fall, Sarcellus leads several of his brother skin-spies in an assassination attempt that very nearly costs Kellhus his life. Knowing that it might prove useful, Kellhus saves one of their severed heads.

Shortly after this attempt, Kellhus is finally contacted by one of his father’s agents: a Cishaurim fleeing the Scarlet Spires. He tells Kellhus that he follows the Shortest Path, and that soon he will comprehend something called the Thousandfold Thought. Kellhus has innumerable questions, but it is too late: the Scarlet Spires approach. To avoid compromising his position, Kellhus beheads the man.

When the Padirajah arrives and seals the Holy War up within Caraskand, the situation becomes even more dire. According to Conphas and the Orthodox, the God punishes the Men of the Tusk for following a False Prophet. To defuse their threat, Kellhus plots the assassination of both Conphas and Sarcellus. Neither attempt succeeds, and General Martemus, Conphas’s closest adviser, is killed.

The dilemma now facing Kellhus is almost insuperable. The Holy War starves. The Zaudunyani and the Orthodox stand upon the brink of open war. And the Padirajah continues to assail Caraskand’s walls. For the first time, Kellhus is confronted by circumstances he cannot master.

He sees only one possible way to unify the Holy War under his leadership: he must let the Men of the Tusk condemn him and Serwл, and trust that Cnaiьr, driven to avenge Serwл, will save him. Only a dramatic reversal and vindication can possibly win over the Orthodox in time.

He must make a leap of faith.

Serwл is executed, and Kellhus is bound to her naked corpse. Then he is lashed to a circumfix and hung from a great tree to die of exposure. Visions of the No-God plague him, as does Serwл pressed dead against him. Never has he suffered so …

For the first time, Anasыrimbor Kellhus weeps.

Achamian comes to him wild with rage because of Esmenet. Kellhus tells him about the skin-spies, about his visions of the impending Apocalypse.

Then, miraculously, he is cut down, and he knows that at last the Holy War is his, and that they will have the ardour and conviction they need to overcome the Padirajah.

Standing before the exultant masses, he grasps the Thousandfold Thought.

The

Final

March

Chapter One

Caraskand

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 Trysл, 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 Aцrsi. Now she was but a way station of the world’s ruin. Aцrsi was dead, her people extinct, and the great cities of Kыniьri were little more than gutted shells. The Nonmen had fled to their mountain fastnesses, and the remaining High Norsirai nations—Eдmnor 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 Anasыrimbor 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 Anasыrimbor 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 Anasыrimbor‘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 Anasыrimbor 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 Anasыrimbor—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 Anasыrimbor. 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, Eleдzaras 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 lothiah. 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 Anasыrimbor—what do Eleдzaras 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 Anasыrimbor 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 Eleдzaras 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 Gilgaцl 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, Zeьmi 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 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 Aцknyssus.

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 Serwл. 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 Heцrsa, 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, Anasыrimbor 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 Heцrsa 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 Kыniьric 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 Heцrsa 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 1 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, Anasыrimbor, 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 Serwл.

“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, Chigraa. 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 Skeaцs 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 Serwл 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.

Chapter Two

Caraskand

Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand

Servants and functionaries screamed and scattered as Cnaiьr barged past them with his hostage. Alarums had been raised throughout the palace—he could hear them shouting—but none of the fools knew what to do. He had saved their precious Prophet. Did that not make him divine as well? He would have laughed had not his sneer been a thing of iron. If only they knew!

He halted at a juncture in the marmoreal halls, jerked the girl about by the throat. “Which way?” he snarled.

She sobbed and gasped, looked wfth wide, panicked eyes down the hallway to their right. He had seized a Kianene slave, knowing she would care more for her skin than her soul. The poison had struck too deep with the Zaudunyani.

Dыnyain poison.

“Door!” she cried, gagging. “There—there!”

Her neck felt good in his hand, like that of a cat or a feeble dog. It reminded him of the days of pilgrimage in his other life, when he had strangled those he raped. Even still, he had no need of her, so he released his grip, watched her stumble backward then topple, skirts askew, across the black floor.

Shouts rang out from the galleries behind them.

He sprinted to the door she’d indicated, kicked it open.

The crib stood in the nursery’s centre, carved of wood like black rock, standing as high as his waist, and draped with gauze sheets that hung from a single hook set in the frescoed ceiling. The walls were ochre, the lamplight dim, The room smelled of sandalwood—there was no hint of soil.

All the world seemed to hush as he circled the ornate cradle. He left no track across the cityscapes woven into the carpet beneath his feet. The lamplights fluttered, but nothing more. With the crib between himself and the entrance, he approached, parted the gauze with his right hand.

Moлnghus.

White-skinned. Still young enough to clutch his toes. Eyes at once vacant and lucid, in the way only an infant’s could be. The penetrating white-blue of the Steppe.

My son.

Cnaiьr reached out two fingers, saw the scars banding the length of his forearm. The babe waved his hands, and as though by accident caught Cnaiьr‘s fingertip, his grip firm like that of a father or friend in miniature. Without warning, his face flushed, became wizened with anguished wrinkles. He sputtered, began wailing.

Why, Cnaiьr wondered, would the Dыnyain 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. An infant’s wail simply was its hunger. And it occurred to Cnaiьr 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 Scilvendi- 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 of fear and shame. And it would wince beneath the upraised hand of the 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, Cnaiьr understood what it was the Dыnyain 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 follow the thousand tracks. And that was his magic, his sorcery: he could close the interval, answer the wail… Make souls one with their expression.

As his father had before him. Moлnghus.

Stupefied, Cnaiьr gazed at the kicking figure, felt the tug of its tiny hand about his finger. And he realized that though the child had sprung from his loins, it was more his father than otherwise. It was his origin, and he, Cnaiьr urs Skiotha, was nothing but one of its possibilities, a wail transformed into a chorus of tortured screams.

He remembered a villa deep in the Nansurium, burning with a brightness that had turned the surrounding night into black. Wheeling to the laughing calls of his cousins, he had caught a babe on sword point …

He yanked his finger free. In fits and starts, Moлnghus fell silent.

“You are not of the land,” Cnaiьr grated, drawing high a scarred fist.

“Scylvendi!” a voice cried out. He turned, saw the sor cerer’s whore standing on the threshold of an adjoining chamber. For a heartbeat they simply stared at each other, equally dumbfounded.

“You will not!” she suddenly cried, her voice shrill with fury. She advanced into the nursery, and Cnaiьr found himself stepping back from the crib. He did not breathe, but then it seemed he no longer needed to.

“He’s all that remains of Serwл,” she said, her voice more wary, more conciliatory. “All that’s left … Proof that she was. Would you take that from her as well?”

Her proof.

Cnaiьr stared at Esmenet in horror, then glanced at the child, pink and writhing in blue silk sheets.

“But its name!” he heard someone cry. Surely the voice was too womanish, too weak, to be his.

Something’s wrong with me … Something’s wrong …

Her brows furrowed and she seemed about to speak, but at that instant the first of the guardsmen, garbed in the green-and-gold surcoat of the Hundred Pillars, burst through the shambles of the door Cnaiьr had kicked in.

“Sheathe your weapons!” she cried as they tumbled into the chamber. They turned to her, stunned. “Sheathe!” she repeated. Their swords were lowered and stowed, though their hands remained ready upon the pommels. One of the guardsmen, an officer, began to protest, but Esmenet silenced him with a furious look. “The Scylvendi came only to kneel,” she said, turning her painted face to Cnaiьr, “to honour the first-born son of the Warrior-Prophet.”

And Cnaiьr found that he was on his knees before the crib, his eyes blank, dry, and so very wide.

It seemed he had never stood.

Xinemus sat at Achamian’s battered desk, squarely facing a wall whose fresco had largely sloughed away; aside from a speared leopard, random eyes and limbs were all that remained. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Achamian wilfully ignored the warning in his tone. He spoke to his humble belongings, which he had spread across his bed. “I already told you, Zin … I’m gathering my things, going to the Fama Palace.” Esmenet had always teased him about the way he packed, for taking inventories of what he could count on his fingers. “Better hike your tunic,” she would always say. “The little things are the easiest to forget.”

A bitch in heat … What else could she be?

“But Proyas has forgiven you.”

This time he noticed the Marshal’s tone, but it caught his ire more than his concern. All the man did was drink anymore. “I haven’t forgiven Proyas.”

“And me?” Xinemus finally said. “What of me?”

Achamian’s scalp prickled. There was always something about the way drunks said me. He turned to the man, trying to remind himself that this was his friend … his only friend.

“What of you?” he asked. “Proyas still has need of your counsel, your wisdom. You have a place here. I don’t.”

“That isn’t what I meant, Akka.”

“But why would I …” Achamian trailed, suddenly realizing what his friend had in fact meant. He was accusing Achamian of abandoning him. Even still, after everything that had happened, the man dared blame. Achamian turned back to his pathetic estate.

As though his life weren’t madness enough.

“Why don’t you come with me?” he ventured, only to be shocked by the insincerity of his tone. “We can … we can talk … talk with Kellhus.”

“What need would Kellhus have of me?”

“You need, Zin. You need to talk with him. You need—”

Somehow, Xinemus had vacated the desk without making a sound. Now he loomed over Achamian, wild-haired, ghastly for more than the absence of his eyes.

“You talk to him!” the Marshal roared, seizing and shaking him. Achamian clawed at his arms, but they were as wood. “I begged you! Remember? I begged, and you watched while they gouged out my fucking eyes! My fucking eyes, Akka! My fucking eyes are gone!”

Achamian found himself on the hard floor, scrambling backward, his face covered in warm spittle.

The great-limbed man sagged to his knees. “I can’t seeeee!” he at once whispered and wailed. “I-haven’t-the-courage-I-haven’t-the-courage …” He shook silently for several more moments, then became very still. When he next spoke, his voice was thick, but eerily disconnected from what had racked him only moments before. It was the voice of the old Xinemus, and it terrified Achamian.

“You need to talk to him for me, Akka. To Kellhus …”

Achamian lacked the will either to move or to hope. He felt bound to the floor by his own entrails.

“What do you want me to say?”

The first flutter of the eyes against the morning light. The first tasted breath. The drowsy ache of cheek against pillow. These, and these alone, connected Esmenet to the woman— the whore—she had once been.

Sometimes she would forget. Sometimes she would awaken to the old sensations: the anxiousness floating through her limbs, the reek of her bedding, the ache of her sex—once she had even heard the tink-tink-tinking of the copper-smithies from the adjoining street. Then she would bolt erect, and muslin sheets would whisk from her skin. She would blink, peer across the dim chamber at the heroic narratives warring across her walls, and she would focus on her body-slaves—three adolescent Kianene girls—prostrate on the floor, their foreheads pressed down in morning Submission.

Today was no different. Squinting in disorientation, Esmenet arose to the fussing of their hands. They chattered in their curiously soothing tongue, venturing to explain what they said in broken Sheyic only when their tone prompted Esmenet to fix one of them—usually Fanashila—with a curious look. They brushed out her hair with combs of bone, rubbed life back into her legs and arms with quick little palms, then waited patiently as she urinated behind her privacy screen. Afterward, they attended to her bath in the adjacent chamber, scrubbing her with soaps, oiling and scraping her skin.

As always, Esmenet endured their ministrations with quiet wonder. She was generous with her praise, delighted them with her own expressions of delight. They heard the gossip, Esmenet knew, in the slaves’ mess. They understood that captivity possessed its own hierarchy of rank and privilege. As slaves to a queen, they had become queens—of a sort— to their fellow slaves. Perhaps they were as astounded as she was.

She emerged from the baths light-headed, slack-limbed, and suffused with that sense of murky well-being only hot water could instill. They dressed first her then her hair, and Esmenet laughed at their banter. Yel and Burulan teased Fanashila— who possessed that outspoken earnestness that condemned so many to be the butt of endless jokes—with lighthearted mercilessness. About some boy, Esmenet imagined.

When they were finished, Fanashila left for the nursery, while Yel and Burulan, still tittering, ushered Esmenet to her night table, and to an array of cosmetics that, she realized with some dismay, would have made her weep back in Sumna. Even as she marvelled at the brushes, paints, and powders, she worried over this new-found jealousy for things. I deserve this, she thought, only to curse herself for blinking tears.

Yel and Burulan fell silent.

It’s just more … more that will be taken away.

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 Serwл, 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.

Her love of Kellhus clutched at her like the recollection of an onerous trespass. Yel stroked her cheek; she was always the most matronly of the three, the quickest to sense her afflictions. “Beautiful,” she cooed, staring at her with unwavering eyes. “Like goddess …”

Esmenet squeezed her hand, then reached down to her own still-flat belly. It is real.

Shortly before they finished, Fanashila returned with Moлnghus and Opsara, his surly wet nurse. Then a small train of kitchen slaves entered with her breakfast, which she took in the sunlit portico while asking Opsara questions about Serwл‘s son. Unlike her body-slaves, Opsara continually counted everything she rendered to her new masters: every step taken, every question answered, every surface scrubbed. Sometimes she fairly seethed with impertinence, but somehow she always managed to fall just short of outright insubordination. Esmenet would have replaced her long ago had she not been so obviously and so fiercely devoted to Moлnghus, whom she treated as a fellow captive, an innocent to be shielded from their captors. Sometimes, as he suckled, she would sing songs of unearthly beauty.

Opsara made no secret of her contempt for Yel, Burulan, and Fanashila, who for their part seemed to regard her with general terror, though Fanashila dared sniff at her remarks now and again.

After eating, Esmenet took Moлnghus and retreated back to her canopied bed. For a time she simply sat, holding him on her knees, staring into his dumbstruck eyes. She smiled as tiny hands clutched tiny toes.

“I love you, Moлnghus,” she cooed. “Yes I do-I-do-I-do-I-dooo.”

Yet again, it all seemed a dream.

“You’ll never be hungry again, my sweet. I promise … I-do-I-do-I-dooo!”

Moлnghus squealed with joy beneath her tickling fingers. She laughed aloud, smirked at Opsara’s stern glare, then winked at the beaming faces of her body-slaves. “Soon you’ll have a little brother. Did you know that? Or perhaps a sister … And I’ll call her Serwл, just like your mother. I-will-I-will-I-will!“

Finally she stood and, returning the babe to Opsara, announced her imminent departure. They fell to their knees, performed their mid-morning Submission—the girls as though it were a beloved game, Opsara as though dragged down by gravel in her limbs.

As Esmenet watched them, her thoughts turned to Achamian for the first time since the garden.

By coincidence she met Werjau, scrolls and tablets bundled in his arms, in the corridors leading to her official chambers. He organized his materials while she mounted the low dais. Her scribal secretaries had already taken their places at her feet, kneeling before the knee-high writing lecterns the Kianene favoured. Holding the Reports in the crook of his left arm, Werjau stood between them some paces distant, in the heart of the tree that decorated the room’s crimson carpet. Golden branches curled and forked about his black slippers.

“Two men, Tydonni, were apprehended last night painting Orthodox slogans on the walls of the Indurum Barracks.”

Werjau looked to her expectantly. The secretaries scribbled for a furious moment, then their quills fell still.

“What’s their station?” she asked.

“Caste-menial.”

As always, such incidents filled her with a reluctant terror—not at what might happen, but at what she might conclude. Why did this residue of defiance persist?

“So they could not read.”

“Apparently they simply painted figures written for them on scraps of parchment. It seems they were paid, though they know not by whom.”

The Nansur, no doubt. More petty vengeance wreaked by Ikurei Conphas.