In the sunlight beyond the colonnade, an orchard soaked bright and motionless. The trees—some kind of exotic apple, Achamian decided—twined black beneath constellations of blooming flowers, each petal like a white swatch dipped in blood. At different points through the orchard, great sentinels of stone—dolmens—towered over the surrounding queues, dark and unwrought, more ancient than Kyraneas, or even Shigek. The remnants of some long-overthrown circle.
Achamian turned to Captain Heörsa with questioning eyes, only to glimpse movement through braces of leaf and flower. He turned—and there she was, strolling beneath the boughs with Kellhus.
Esmenet.
She was speaking, though Achamian could only hear the memory of her voice. Her eyes were lowered, thoughtfully studying the petalled ground as it passed beneath her small feet. She smiled in a manner at once rueful and heartbreaking, as though she answered teasing proposals with loving admissions.
It was the first time, Achamian realized, that he’d seen the two of them together. She seemed otherworldly, self-assured, slender beneath the sheer turquoise lines of her Kianene gown—something fitted, Achamian had no doubt, for one of the dead Padirajah’s concubines. Graceful. Dark of eye and face, her hair flashing like obsidian between the golden ribs of her headdress—a Nilnameshi Empress on the arm of a Kûniüric High King. And wearing a Chorae—a Trinket!—pressed against her throat. A Tear of God, more black than black.
She was Esmenet and yet she wasn’t Esmenet. The woman of loose life had fallen away, and what remained was more, so much more, than she’d been at his side. Resplendent.
Redeemed.
I dimmed her, he realized. I was smoke and he … is a mirror.
At the sight of his Prophet, Captain Heörsa had fallen to his knees, his face pressed to the ground. Achamian found himself doing the same, though more because his legs refused to bear him.
“So what will it be the next time I die?” he had asked her that night she had broken him. “The Andiamine Heights?”
What a fool he’d been!
He blinked womanishly, swallowed against the absurd pang that nettled the back of his throat. For a moment the world seemed nothing more than a criminal ledger, with all he’d surrendered—and he’d surrendered so much!—balanced against one thing. Why couldn’t he have this one thing?
Because he would ruin it, the way he ruined everything.
“I carry his child.”
For a heartbeat her eyes met his own. She raised a hesitant hand only to lower it, as though recalling new loyalties. She turned to kiss Kellhus’s cheek, then fled, her eyes seemingly closed, her lips drawn into a heart-frosting line.
It was the first time he had seen the two of them together.
“So what will it be the next time I die?”
Kellhus stood before one of the apple trees, watching him with gentle expectation. He wore a white silk cassock patterned with a grey arboreal brocade. As always, the pommel of his curious sword jutted over his left shoulder. Like Esmenet, he bore a Trinket, though he had the courtesy to keep it concealed against his chest.
“You need never kneel in my presence,” he said, waving for Achamian to join him. “You are my friend, Akka. You will always be my friend.”
His ears roaring, Achamian stood, glanced at the shadows where Esmenet had disappeared.
How has it come to this?
Kellhus had been little more than a beggar the first time Achamian had seen him, a puzzling accessory to the Scylvendi, whom Proyas had hoped to use in his contest with the Emperor. But even then there had been something, it now seemed, a glimpse of this moment in embryo. They had wondered why a Scylvendi—and of Utemot blood, no less—would seek employ in an Inrithi Holy War.
“I am the reason,” Kellhus had said.
The revelation of his name, Anasûrimbor, had been but the beginning.
Achamian crossed the interval only to feel strangely bullied by Kellhus’s height. Had he always been this tall? Smiling, Kellhus effortlessly guided him between a gap in the trees. One of the dolmens blackened the sun. The air hummed with the industry of bees. “How fares Xinemus?” he said.
Achamian pursed his lips, swallowed. For some reason he found this question disarming to the point of tears.
“I—I worry for him.”
“You must bring him, and soon. I miss eating and arguing beneath the stars. I miss a fire nipping at my feet.”
And as easy as that, Achamian found himself tripping into the old rhythm. “Your legs always were too long.”
Kellhus laughed. He seemed to shine about the pit of the Chorae. “Much like your opinions.”
Achamian grinned, but a glimpse of the welts about Kellhus’s wrists struck the nascent humour from him. For the first time he noticed the bruising about Kellhus’s face. The cuts.
They tortured him … murdered Serwë.
“Yes,” Kellhus said, ruefully holding out his hands. He looked almost embarrassed. “Would that everything healed so quickly.”
Somehow these words found Achamian’s fury.
“You could see the Consult all along—all along!—and yet you said nothing to me … Why?”
Why Esmenet?
Kellhus raised his brows, sighed. “The time wasn’t right. But you already know this.”
“Do I?”
Kellhus smiled while pursing his lips, as though at once pained and bemused. “Now, you and your School must parlay, where before you would have simply seized me. I concealed the skin-spies from you for the same reason you concealed me from your Mandate masters.”
But you already know this, his eyes repeated.
Achamian could think of no reply.
“You’ve told them,” Kellhus continued, turning to resume their stroll between the blooming queues.
“I’ve told them.”
“And do they accept your interpretation?”
“What interpretation?”
“That I’m more than the sign of the Second Apocalypse.”
More. A tremor passed through him, body and soul.
“They think it unlikely.”
“I should imagine you find it difficult to describe me … to make them understand.”
Achamian stared for a helpless moment, then looked to his feet.
“So,” Kellhus continued, “what are your interim instructions?”
“To pretend to give you the Gnosis. I told them you would go to the Spires otherwise. And to ensure that nothing”—Achamian paused, licked his lips—“that nothing happens to you.”
Kellhus both grinned and scowled—so like Xinemus before his blinding.
“So you’re to be my bodyguard?”
“They have good reason to worry—as do you. Think of the catastrophe you’ve wrought. For centuries the Consult has hidden in the fat of the Three Seas, while we were little more than a laughingstock. They could act with impunity. But now that fat has been cooked away. They’ll do anything to recover what they’ve lost. Anything.”
“There have been other assassins.”
“But that was before … The stakes are far higher now. Perhaps these skin-spies act on their own. Perhaps they’re … directed.”
Kellhus studied him for a moment. “You fear one of the Consult might be directly involved … that an Old Name shadows the Holy War.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Kellhus did not immediately reply, at least not with words. Instead, everything about him—his stance, his expression, even the fixity of his gaze—grew sharp with monumental intent. “The Gnosis,” he finally said. “Will you give it to me, Akka?”
He knows. He knows the power he would wield. Somewhere, beneath some footing of his soul, the ground seemed to fall away.
“If you demand it … though I …” He looked to Kellhus, somehow understanding that the man already knew what he was about to say. Every path, it seemed, every implication, had already been travelled by those shining blue eyes. Nothing surprises him.
“Yes,” Kellhus
said with a peculiar moroseness. “Once I accept the Gnosis, I yield the protection afforded by the Chorae.”
“Exactly.”
In the beginning Kellhus would possess only the vulnerabilities of a sorcerer, none of the strengths. The Gnosis, far more than the Anagogis, was an analytic and systematic sorcery. Even the most primitive Cants required extensive precursors, components that damned nonetheless for being inert.
“Which is why you must protect me,” Kellhus concluded. “Henceforth you will be my Vizier. You will reside here, in the Fama Palace, at my disposal.” Words spoken with the authority of a Shrial Edict, but infused with such force of certainty, such inevitability, that it seemed they described more than they demanded, that Achamian’s compliance was some ancient and conspicuous fact.
Kellhus did not wait for his reply—none was needed.
“Can you protect me, Akka?”
Achamian blinked, still trying to digest what had just happened. “You will reside here …”
With her.
“F-from an Old Name?” he sputtered. “I’m not sure.”
Where had this treacherous joy come from? You will show her! Win her!
“No,” Kellhus said evenly. “From yourself.”
Achamian stared, glimpsed Nautzera screaming beneath Mekeritrig’s incandescent touch. “If I cannot,” he said with a voice that seemed a gasp, “Seswatha can.”
Kellhus nodded. Motioning for Achamian to follow, he abruptly turned, pressing through interlocking branches, crossing rows. Achamian hastened after him, waving at the bees and fluttering petals. Three rows over, Kellhus paused before an opening between two trees.
Achamian could only gape in horror.
The apple tree before Kellhus had been stripped of its blossoming weave, leaving only a black knotted trunk with three boughs bent about like a dancer’s waving arms. A skin-spy had been pulled naked across them, bound tight in rust-brown chains. Its pose—one arm trussed back and the other forward—reminded Achamian of a javelin thrower. Its head hung from drawn shoulders. The long, feminine digits of its face lay slack against its chest. Sunlight showered down upon it, casting inscrutable shadows.
“The tree was dead,” Kellhus said, as though in explanation.
“What …” Achamian began in a thin voice, but halted when the creature stirred, raised the shambles of its visage. The digits slowly clawed the air, like a suffocating crab. Lidless eyes glared in perpetual terror.
“What have you learned?” Achamian finally managed.
The abomination masticated behind lipless teeth. “Ahh,” it said in a long, gasping breath. “Chigraaaa …”
“That they are directed,” Kellhus said softly.
“Woe comes, Chigraaa. You have found us too late.”
“By whom?” Achamian exclaimed, staring, clutching his hands before him. “Do you know by whom?”
The Warrior-Prophet shook his head. “They’re conditioned—powerfully so. Months of interrogation would be required. Perhaps more.”
Achamian nodded. Given time, he realized, Kellhus could empty this creature, own it as he seemed to own everything else. He was more than thorough, more than meticulous. Even the swiftness of this discovery—wrested, no less, from a creature that had been forged to deceive—demonstrated his … inevitability.
He makes no mistakes.
For a giddy instant a kind of gloating fury descended upon Achamian. All those years—centuries!—the Consult had played them for fools. But now—now! Did they know? Could they sense the peril this man represented? Or would they underestimate him like everyone else had?
Like Esmenet.
Achamian swallowed. “Either way, Kellhus, you must surround yourself with Chorae bowmen. And you need to avoid large structures, anyplace where—”
“It troubles you,” Kellhus interrupted, “to see these things.”
A breeze had descended upon the grove, and countless petals spun through the air as though along unseen strings. Achamian watched one settle upon the skin-spy’s pubis.
Why bind the abomination here, amid such beauty and repose—like a cancer on a young girl’s skin? Why? It seemed the act of someone who knew nothing of beauty … nothing.
He matched Kellhus’s gaze. “It troubles me.”
“And your hatred?”
For an instant it had seemed that everything—who he was and who he would become—wanted to love this godlike man. And how could he not, given the sanctuary of his mere presence? And yet intimations of Esmenet clung to him. Glimpses of her passion …
“It remains,” he said.
As though provoked by this response, the creature began jerking, straining against its fetters. Slick muscle balled beneath sunburned skin. Chains rattled. Black boughs creaked. Achamian stepped back, remembering the horror of Skeaös beneath the Andiamine Heights. The night Conphas had saved him.
Kellhus ignored the thing, continued speaking. “All men surrender, Akka, even as they seek to dominate. It’s their nature to submit. The question is never whether they will surrender, but rather to whom …”
“Your heart, Chigraa…I shall make it my apple …”
“I—I don’t understand.” Achamian glanced from the abomination to Kellhus’s sky-blue eyes.
“Some, like so many Men of the Tusk, submit—truly submit—only to the God. It preserves their pride, kneeling before what is never heard, never seen. They can abase themselves without fear of degradation.”
“I shall eat …”
Achamian held an uncertain hand against the sun to better see the Warrior-Prophet’s face.
“One,” Kellhus was saying, “can only be tested, never degraded, by the God.”
“You said ‘some,’” Achamian managed. “What of the others?” In his periphery he saw the thing’s face knuckle as though into interlocking fists.
“They’re like you, Akka. They surrender not to the God but to those like themselves. A man. A woman. There’s no pride to be preserved when one submits to another. Transgress, and there’s no formula. And the fear of degradation is always present, even if not quite believed. Lovers injure each other, humiliate and debase, but they never test, Akka—not if they truly love.”
The thing was thrashing now, like something brandished in an invisible fist. Suddenly the bees seemed to buzz on the wrong side of his skull.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because part of you clings to the hope that she tests you …” For a mad moment it seemed Inrau watched him, or Proyas as a boy, his eyes wide and imploring. “She does not.”
Achamian blinked in astonishment. “What are you saying, then? That she degrades me? That you degrade me?”
A series of mewling grunts, as though beasts coupled. Iron rattled and screeched.
“I’m saying that she loves you still. As for me, I merely took what was given.”
“Then give it back!” Achamian barked with savagery. He shook. His breath cramped in his throat.
“You’re forgetting, Akka. Love is like sleep. One can never seize, never force love.”
The words were his own, spoken that first night about the fire with Kellhus and Serwë beneath Momemn. In a rush, Achamian recalled the sprained wonder of that night, the sense of having discovered something at once horrific and ineluctable. And those eyes, like lucid jewels set in the mud of the world, watching from across the flames—the same eyes that watched him this very moment … though a different fire now burned between them.
The abomination howled.
“There was a time,” Kellhus continued, “when you were lost.” His voice seethed with what seemed an inaudible thunder. “There was a time when you thought to yourself, ‘There’s no meaning, only love. There’s no world …’”
And Achamian heard himself whisper, “Only her.”
Esmenet. The Whore of Sumna.
Even now, murder stared from his sockets. He couldn’t blink without seeing them together, without glimpsing her eyes wide with bliss, her m
outh 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
I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.
—HATATIAN, EXHORTATIONS
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand