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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The Warrior Prophet (36 page)

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet
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The doors were ground shut behind him.
His legs folded beneath him. A moment of hushed bewilderment. The cold floor against his knees. He placed a trembling hand to his forehead, was surprised by the sweat that ran between his fingers.
Foolishness! What would Conphas think?
Ringing ears. Airy darkness. Around him, that
name
shivered up from the stone.
Maithanet.
A thousand thousand voices—or so it seemed—crying like a prayer the name that Xerius spat as a curse.
Maithanet.
Feeling winded, he walked unsteadily across the antechamber, paused. Few of the great lamp wheels had been set alight. Pale circles of light were thrown across the vast temple floor, across the rows of faded prayer tile. Columns as thick as netia pine soared into gloom. The hymnal galleries above were barely discernible in the dark. During times of official worship this floor would billow with clouds of incense, making the temple’s recesses vague and ghostly, smearing the points of lamplight with haloes so that it seemed to the faithful that they stood at the very juncture of this world and the Outside. But now the place was cavernous and bare. Beneath the memory of myrrh, it smelled like a cellar. It was the juncture of nothing—only a pocket of peace purchased by dead stone.
In the distance, Xerius could see him, kneeling in the centre of the great hemisphere of idols.
There you are,
he thought, feeling some solidity return to his hollow limbs. His slippers whispered as he walked across the floor. Unconsciously, his hands strayed across his vests and gown, smoothing, straightening. His eyes flitted across the friezes etched into the columns: kings, emperors, and gods, all rigid with the supernatural dignity of figures in stone. He came to a stop before the first tier of stairs. The tallest, centre dome gaped above him.
He stared for several moments at the Shriah’s broad back.
Face your Emperor you fanatic ingrate!
“I’m pleased you’ve come,” Maithanet said with his back still turned to him. The voice was rich, enfolding. There was no deference in the tone. Jnan held Shriah and Emperor equal.
“Why this, Maithanet? Why here?”
The broad back turned. Maithanet was wearing a plain white frock with sleeves that ended mid-arm. For an instant he appraised Xerius with glittering eyes, then he raised his head to the distant sound of the mob, as though it were the sound of rain prayed for and received. Xerius could see the strong chin beneath the black of his oiled beard. His face was broad, like that of a yeoman, and surprisingly youthful, though nothing about the man’s manner spoke of youth.
How old are you?
“Listen!”
Maithanet hissed, raising his hands to the resonant sound of his name.
Maithanet-Maithanet-Maithanet
…
“I am not a proud man, Ikurei Xerius, but it moves me to hear them call thus.”
Despite the foolish dramatics, Xerius found himself awed by the man’s presence. The giddiness of moments before revisited his limbs.
“I haven’t the patience, Maithanet, for games of jnan.”
The Shriah paused, then smiled winningly. He began walking down the steps. “I’ve come because of the Holy War … I’ve come to look into your eyes.”
These words further disconcerted the Emperor. Xerius had known, before coming here, that the stakes of this meeting could be high.
“Tell me,” Maithanet said, “have you sealed a pact with the heathen? Have you vowed to betray the Holy War before it reaches the Sacred Land?”
Could he know?
“I assure you, Maithanet … No.”
“No?”
“I’m injured, Shriah, that you would—”
Maithanet’s laughter was sudden, loud, reverberant enough to fill even the hollows of great Xothei.
Xerius fairly gasped. The Writ of Psata-Antyu, the code governing Shrial conduct, forbade laughing aloud as a carnal indulgence. Maithanet, he realized, was giving him a glimpse of his depths. But for what purpose? All of this—the mobs, the demand to meet here in Xothei, even the chanting of his name—was a demonstration of some kind, terrifying in its premeditated lack of subtlety.
I’ll crush you,
Maithanet was saying.
If the Holy War fails, you’ll be destroyed
.
“Accept my apology, Emperor,” Maithanet said lightly. “It would seem that even a holy war may be poisoned by”—a pained smile—“
false
rumours, hmm?”
He tries to cow me … He knows nothing, so he tries to cow me!
Xerius remained silent, wrathful. He’d always possessed, he thought, a greater facility for hatred than Conphas. His precocious nephew could be vicious, savage even, but he inevitably slipped back into that glassy remoteness that so unnerved those in his company. For Xerius, hatred was something as enduring as it was implacable.
Such a strange habit, he suddenly realized, these momentary inquiries into his nephew’s nature. When had Conphas become the rule he used to measure the cubits of his own heart?
“Come, Ikurei Xerius,” the Shriah of the Thousand Temples solemnly said, as though the gravity of what would ensue might forever mark their lives. And for an brief instant, Xerius grasped the gift of character that had hurtled this man to such heights: the ability to impart sanctity to the moment, to touch people with awe as though it were bread drawn from his own basket.
“Come … Listen to what I say to my people.”
But over the course of this brief exchange, the sounds of thousands chanting Maithanet’s name had transformed, hesitantly at first, but with greater certitude with each passing moment. Changed.
Into screams.
Obviously, the nameless Captain had executed his Emperor’s instructions with blessed alacrity. Xerius grinned his own winning grin. At last he felt a match for this obscenely imposing man.
“Do you hear, Maithanet? Now they call out
my name
.”
“Indeed they do,” the Shriah said darkly. “Indeed they do.”
Late Summer, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Hinnereth, on the coast of Gedea
 
As though crowded by an antipathy to the sea, the land folded as it approached the broken coasts of Gedea. Since the coastal plains were narrow or nonexistent, save the alluvial flatlands surrounding Hinnereth, it seemed the land itself had conspired to bring the Holy War to the ancient city. As the first cohorts descended the terraced hills, Hinnereth sprawled before them, huddled against the Meneanor, a warren of mud and baked-brick structures enclosed by sandstone fortifications. The mournful wail of horns pierced the salty air, rang from hill to sea, and pronounced the city’s doom. Column after column wound down from the hills: the turbulent swordsmen of the Middle-North, the long-skirted knights of Conriya and High Ainon, the veteran infantrymen of the Nansurium.
Hinnereth was an old prize. Like all lands falling between great, competing civilizations, Gedea had been a perpetual tributary, little more than an anecdote in the chronicles of her conquerors. Hinnereth, her only city of note, had seen innumerable foreign governors: Shigeki, Kyranean, Ceneian, Nansur, and most recently, Kianene. And now the Men of the Tusk would cut their names onto that list.
The Holy War dispersed into several different camps around the fields and groves outside of Hinnereth’s walls. After conferring, the Great Names sent an embassy of thanes and barons to the gates demanding unconditional surrender. When the Fanim of Ansacer ab Salajka, the Kianene Sapatishah of Gedea, chased them away with arrows and ballistae, thousands were sent into the fields to harvest the wheat and millet secured the week previous by the advance forces of Earl Athjeäri, Palatine Ingiaban, and Earl Werijen Greatheart. Thousands more were sent into the hills to hew down trees for rams, towers, catapults, and mangonels.
The Siege of Hinnereth had begun.
After a week of preparations, the Men of the Tusk made their first assault. Clouds of arrows fell among them. Boiling oil poured down upon their mantlets. Men fell screaming from their ladders, or were cut down on the battlements. Fiery pitch transformed their siege towers into soaring pyres. They bled and burned beneath the walls of Hinnereth, and the Fanim mocked them from the heights.
In the wake of the disaster, some Great Names sent a delegation to the Scarlet Spires. Chepheramunni had already warned Saubon and the others that the Scarlet Schoolmen, short of Shimeh or a Cishaurim attack, had no intention of assisting the Men of the Tusk, so the decision was made to limit their demands. They asked for one breach in the walls, no more. Eleäzaras’s refusal was scathing, as was the condemnation of Proyas and Gotian, who had forsworn the use of blasphemy unless absolutely necessary.
Another round of preparations followed. Some toiled in the hills, harvesting timber for more siege engines. Others hunched in the darkness of sappers’ tunnels, dragging stone and sharp gravel out with blistered hands. Still others raised pyres of scrub and burned the dead. At night, they drank water carted down from the hills, ate bread, golden-red clusters of figs, roasted quail and goose—and cursed Hinnereth.
During this time, bands of Inrithi knights ranged south along the coasts, skirmishing with the remnants of Skauras’s host, plundering fishing villages, and sacking those walled towns that failed to immediately throw open their gates. Earl Athjeäri struck inland, scouring the hills in search of battle and plunder. Near a small fortress called Dayrut, he surprised a detachment of several thousand Kianene and put them to rout with as many hundred thanes and knights. Returning to the fortress, he forced the locals to build a small catapult, which he then used to lob severed Kianene heads into the fortress one at a time. One hundred and thirty-one heads later, the terrified garrison threw open the gates and prostrated themselves in the dust. Each of them was asked: “Do you repudiate Fane and accept Inri Sejenus as the true voice of the manifold God?” Those who answered no were immediately beheaded. Those who answered yes were bound with ropes and sent back to Hinnereth, where they were sold to the slavers who followed the Holy War.
Other strongholds likewise fell, such was the general terror of the iron warriors. The old Nansur fortresses of Ebara and Kurrut, the half-ruined Ceneian fortress of Gunsae, the Kianene citadel of Am-Amidai, built when the populace had been still largely Inrithi—all of them, like so many coins swept into the mailed fist of the Holy War. Gedea would fall, it seemed, as quickly as the Inrithi could ride.
At Hinnereth, meanwhile, the Great Names had completed their preparations for a second assault, only to be awakened by shouts of astonishment. Men tumbled from their tents and pavilions. At first, most pointed to the great flotilla of war galleys and carracks anchored in the bay, hundreds of them, bearing the Black Sun pennants of Nansur. But soon, they all stared in disbelief at Hinnereth. The great forward gates of the city had been thrown open. All along the curtain walls, tiny figures pulled down the triangular banners of Ansacer, the infamous Black Gazelle, and raised the Black Sun of the Nansur Empire.
Some cheered. Others howled. Bands of half-naked horsemen could be seen galloping toward the towering gates, where they were halted by phalanxes of Nansur infantrymen. For a moment swords flashed in the distance.
But it was too late. Hinnereth had fallen, not to the Holy War, but to Emperor Ikurei Xerius III.
At first, Ikurei Conphas ignored the summons of the Council, and the daunting task of placating Saubon and Gothyelk fell to General Martemus. With the arrival of the Nansur fleet the previous night, he brusquely explained, the Gedean Sapatishah had seen the hopelessness of his position, and so sent Conphas the terms of his surrender. Martemus even produced a letter, dark with the cursive script of the Kianene, which he claimed was in Ansacer’s own hand. The Sapatishah, he asserted, was deeply frightened of the fervour of the Inrithi, and would surrender only to the Nansur. In matters of mercy, Martemus said, a known enemy was always more preferable than an unknown. It had been the first instinct of the Exalt-General, he continued, to summon all the Great Names and present this letter for their appraisal, but Martemus himself had reminded the Exalt-General that the proffered capitulation of one’s enemy was always a delicate thing, the result perhaps of passing apprehension rather than real resolution. Accordingly, the Exalt-General had decided to be decisive rather than democratic.
When the Great Names demanded to know why, if Conphas had truly acted in the interests of the Holy War, Hinnereth still remained closed to them, Martemus merely shrugged and informed them that those were the terms of the Sapatishah’s surrender. Ansacer was a tender man, he said, and feared for the safety of his people. He had, moreover, great respect for the discipline of the Nansur.
In the end, only Saubon refused to accept Martemus’s explanation. Hinnereth was his by right, he bellowed, just spoils of his victory on the Battleplain. When Conphas finally arrived the Galeoth Prince had to be physically restrained. Afterward, Gothyelk and Proyas reminded him that Gedea was an empty and impoverished land. Let the Emperor gloat over his first, hollow prize, they said. The Holy War would continue its march south. And ancient Shigek, a land of legendary wealth, awaited them.
BOOK: The Warrior Prophet
6.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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