He clawed away their flimsy Anagogic defences, raised them from the ruin like shrieking dolls, and dashed them against bone-breaking stone.
Seswatha was free, and he walked the ways of the present bearing tokens of ancient doom.
He would show them the Gnosis.
When the first shiver passed through the foundations, Iyokus thought, I should’ve known.
His next thought, unaccountably, was of Eleäzaras.
I told him ill would come of this.
For the completion of their task, Eleäzaras had left him only six Schoolmen, three of them sorcerers of rank, and some two hundred and fifty Javreh. Worse yet, they were scattered throughout the compound. Once he might have thought this would be more than enough to manage a Mandate sorcerer, but after the fury of the Sareotic Library he was no longer sure … Even had they been prepared.
We’re doomed.
Over the long years of his life, the chanv had rendered his passions as colourless as his skin. What he felt now was more the memory of a passion rather than the passion itself. The memory of fear.
But there was hope yet. The Javreh possessed at least a dozen Trinkets, and moreover, he, Heramari Iyokus, was here.
Like his brethren, he envied the Mandate the Gnosis, but unlike them, he did not hate. If anything, Iyokus respected the Mandate. He understood the pride of secret knowledge.
Sorcery was nothing if not a great labyrinth, and for a thousand years the Scarlet Spires had charted it, delving, always delving, mining knowledge both dread and disastrous. And even though they’d yet to discover the glorious precincts of the Gnosis, there were certain branches, certain forks, which they alone had mapped. Iyokus was a scholar of these forbidden forks, a student of the Daimos.
A Daimotic sorcerer.
In their darkest conferences, they sometimes wondered: How would the War-Cants of the Ancient North fare against the Daimos?
The sound of screams percolated through the halls. The walls thrummed with the reverberations of nearing blasts. Iyokus, who was wan and calculating even in circumstances as dreadful as these, understood the time had come to answer that question.
He threw aside the brilliant carpets and painted the circles across the tiles with deft, practised strokes. Light spilled from his colourless lips as he muttered the Daimotic Cants. And, as the tempest approached, he at last completed his interminable song. He dared speak the Ciphrang’s name.
“Ankaryotis! Heed me!”
From the safety of his circle of symbols, Iyokus gazed in wonder at the sheeted lights of the Outside. He looked upon a writhing abomination, scales like knives, limbs like iron pillars …
“Does it hurt?” he asked against the thunder of its wail.
What hast thou done, mortal?
Ankaryotis, a fury of the deep, a Ciphrang summoned from the Abyss.
“I have bound you!”
Thou art damned! Dost thou not recognize he who shall keepeth thee for Eternity?
A demon …
“Either way,” Iyokus cried, “such is my fate!”
The Javreh leapt like flaming dancers, screaming, stumbling, thrashing across the lavish Kianene carpets.
Battered, naked, Achamian walked between them.
“IYOKUS!” he thundered.
Sheets of falling stucco flashed into smoke against his Wards.
“IYOKUS!”
Dust shivered in the air.
With words, he tore the walls before him away. He walked over empty space, across a collapsed floor. Masonry crashed from the ceilings. He peered through the billowing clouds of powdered brick …
And was engulfed in brilliant dragon fire.
He turned to the chanv addict, laughed. Encircled by ghostly walls, the Master of Spies crouched on a floating fragment of floor, his pale face working to his staccato song … Vultures brighter than sunlight swept into Achamian’s defences. Shimmering lava exploded from beneath, washed across his Wards. Lightning danced from the room’s four dark corners …
“YOU ARE OVERMATCHED, IYOKUS!”
He struck with a Cirroi Loom, grasping the addict’s Wards with geometries of light.
Then he was falling, borne down by a raving demon, perched upon his Wards, hammering with great nailed fists.
With each blow he coughed blood.
He crashed into heaped debris, struck with an Odaini Concussion Cant, throwing the Ciphrang backward through shadowy ruin. He glanced up, searching for Iyokus. He glimpsed him scrambling through a breach in the far wall. He sung a Weära Comb, and a thousand lines of light flashed outward. The wall collapsed, riddled with innumerable holes, as did the ceiling beyond. Incandescent threads fanned across Iothiah and into the night sky.
He pushed himself to his feet.
“IYOKUS!”
Howling, the demon once again leapt upon him, blazing with hellish light.
Achamian charred its crocodile hide, ribboned its otherworldly flesh, smote its elephantine skull with ponderous cudgels of stone, and it bled fire from a hundred wounds. But still it refused to fall. It howled obscenities that cracked rock and rifled the ground with chasms. More floors collapsed, and they grappled through dark cellars made bright by flickering fury.
Sorcerer and demon.
Unholy Ciphrang, a tormented soul thrust into the agony of the World, harnessed by words like a lion by strings, yoked to the task that would see it freed.
Achamian endured its unearthly violence, heaped injury after injury upon its agony.
And in the end it grovelled beneath his song, cringed like a beaten animal, then faded into the blackness …
Achamian wandered naked through the smoking ruins, a husk animated by numb purpose. He stumbled down slopes of debris and wondered that he’d been the catastrophe that had wrought this devastation. He saw the mutilated corpses of those he’d burned and broken. He spat upon them in sudden memory of his hate.
The night was cool and he savoured the kiss of air across his skin. The stone bit his bare feet.
He passed blankly into the intact structures, like a ghost returning to where memories burn brightest. It took some time, but at last he found Xinemus, chained, huddled in his own excrement, and weeping as he clutched arms and knees over his nakedness. For a while Achamian simply sat next to him …
“I can’t see!” the Marshal wailed. “Sweet Sejenus, I can’t see!”
He groped for, then seized, Achamian’s cheeks.
“I’m so sorry, Akka. I’m so sorry …”
But the only words Achamian could remember were those that killed.
That damned.
When they finally hobbled from the ruined compound of the Scarlet Spires into the alleys of Iothiah, the astonished onlookers—Shigeki, armed Kerathotics, and the few Inrithi who garrisoned the city—gaped in both wonder and horror. But they dared not ask them anything. Nor did they follow the two men as they shuffled into the darkness of the city.
CHAPTER TWENTY
CAR ASKAND
The vulgar think the God by analogy to man and so worship Him in the form of the Gods. The learned think the God by analogy to principles and so worship Him in the form of Love or Truth. But the wise think the God not at all. They know that thought, which is finite, can only do violence to the God, who is infinite. It is enough, they say, that the God thinks them.
—MEMGOWA, THE BOOK OF DIVINE ACTS
… for the sin of the idolater is not that he worships stone, but that he worships one stone over others.
—8:9:4 THE WITNESS OF FANE
Early Winter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand
Immense timber and hide siege towers trundled toward Caraskand’s western walls, driven by vast teams of mud-splattered oxen and exhausted men. Catapults hurled stone and flaming pitch. Inrithi archers raked the parapets. From flanking towers and the streets beyond the wall, heathens released soaring clouds of arrows. Throughout the packed ranks of Inrithi, men cried out, rolled in the muck clutching wounded limbs. The towers groaned nearer, their sid
es sheeted in flaming tar. The men massed on their peaks hunched behind their shields, peered through smoke, waiting for the signal.
A horn blared through the din.
The timber bridges slammed onto the battlements. Iron-armoured knights surged across, crying “Die or conquer!” Swinging great broadswords, they leapt into the spears and scimitars of the Kianene. On the ground below, thousands more rushed forward, raising great iron-hooked ladders. Stones and corpses crashed down upon them. Blistering oil sent men screaming from the rungs. But somehow, they gained the summits, heaved themselves between the battlements and fell upon the Fanim. Pitched battles were fought against woollen skies. Faithful and heathen alike toppled from the heights.
The Nangaels, the Anpleians, and the dour Gesindalmen all managed to seize sections of the wall. More and more Inrithi spilled from the siege towers or clambered over the parapets, pausing only to glance in wonder at the great city exposed below. Some charged the nearest tower. Others were forced to crouch behind their teardrop shields as heathen bowmen began scouring the heights from nearby rooftops. Shafts flashed overhead, buzzing like dragonflies. Pots of burning pitch exploded among them. Men fell shrieking, trailing streamers of smoke. One of the siege towers erupted into an inferno. The other smoked so intensely that dozens of Nangaelish knights fell from the bridge, urged to rush blind by those choking behind.
Then Imbeyan and his Grandees charged from the towers. Men grappled, hacked, and roared.
Denied their siege towers and exposed to a whistling barrage of missiles from the city side of the wall, the Inrithi began falling more quickly than the ladders could replace them. Within moments, it seemed, every man boasted a dozen arrows jutting from his shield or armour. The knights striving against Imbeyan found themselves pressed back through the screams and corpses of their kinsmen. At last Earl Iyengar, seeing the mortal desperation in the eyes of his knights, signalled the retreat. The survivors fell back to the ladders. Very few reached the ground alive.
Twice more the Inrithi stormed the walls of Caraskand over the following weeks, and twice more the ferocity and craft of the Kianene drove them back with atrocious losses.
The siege wore on through the rains and pestilence.
Within days of identifying the sickness that caste-menials called “the hollows” and caste-nobles “hemoplexy,” the physician-priests found themselves overwhelmed with hundreds complaining of headaches and chills. When Hepma Scaralla, the ranking High Priest of Akkeägni, Disease, informed the Great Names that the rumours were true, that the dread God indeed groped among them with his hemoplectic Hand, panic seized the Holy War. Even after Gotian threatened deserters with Shrial Censure, hundreds fled into the Enathpanean hills, such was the terror of hemoplexy.
While the healthy warred and died beneath Caraskand’s walls, thousands remained within their sodden, makeshift tents, vomiting spittle, burning with fever, wracked by convulsive chills. After a day or two, eyes would dull, and aside from bouts of delirious ranting, men would be robbed of all spirit. After four or five days, skin would discolour—welts raised by the God’s Hand, the physician-priests explained. The fevers would peak after the first week, then rage for another, robbing even iron-limbed men of all remaining strength. Either it broke, or the invalid fell into a deathlike sleep from which very few ever awakened.
Throughout the encampments the physician-priests organized lazarets for those without retinues or comrades to care for them. The surviving priestesses of Yatwer, Anagke, Onkis, even Gierra, as well as other cultic servants of the Hundred Gods, attended to pallet after pallet of prostrate sick. And no matter how much aromatic wood they burned, the stench of death and bowel gagged passersby. Nowhere, it seemed, could a man walk without hearing delirious shrieks or smelling hemoplectic putrescence. The stench was such that many Men of the Tusk took to walking through the encampment holding urine-soaked rags to their faces—as was the Ainoni custom during times of pestilence.
The plague intensified, and Disease’s Hand spared no one, not even members of the blessed castes. Cumor, Proyas, Chepheramunni, and Skaiyelt all succumbed within days of one another. At times, it seemed the sick outnumbered the healthy. Shrial Priests wandered through the wretched alleyways of the encampment, stumping through mud from tent to tent, searching for the dead. The funeral pyres burned continuously. In one grievous night three hundred Inrithi died, among them Imrothus, the Conriyan Palatine of Aderot.
And the miserable rains waxed on and on, rotting canvas, hemp, and hope.
Then the Earl of Gaenri returned, bearing news of doom.
Ever impatient, Athjeäri had abandoned Caraskand in the early days of the siege, charging through Enathpaneah with his Gaenrish knights and some thousand more Kurigalders and Agmundrmen given to him by his uncle, Prince Saubon. He stormed the old Ceneian fortress of Bokae on the western frontier of Enathpaneah, taking it with few losses. Then he ranged southward, crushing those local Grandees who dared take the field against him and raiding the northern frontiers of Eumarna, where his knights were heartened to find good, green land.
For a time he besieged the immense fortress of Misarat, but withdrew once word came that Cinganjehoi himself had set out to relieve the fortress. Athjeäri struck northeast. He evaded the Tiger in the cedar-wooded ravines of the Betmulla Mountains, then descended into Xerash, where he met and routed the small army of Utgarangi, the Sapatishah of Xerash. The Sapatishah proved a compliant captive, and in exchange for five hundred horses and intelligence, Athjeäri delivered him unharmed to his ancient capital, Gerotha, the city reviled in The Tractate as the “harlot of Xerash.” Then he rode hard for Caraskand.
What he found dismayed him.
He recounted his journey for those Great Names fit to attend Council, moving quickly to the intelligence offered by Utgarangi. According to the Sapatishah, the Padirajah himself, the great Kascamandri, marched from Nenciphon with the survivors of Anwurat, the Grandees of Chianadyni—the homeland of the Kianene—and the warlike Girgash, the Fanim of Nilnamesh.
That night Prince Skaiyelt died, and the Thunyeri filled the showering sky with their uncanny dirges. The following day, word arrived that Cerjulla, the Tydonni Earl of Warnute, had also fallen, encamped about the walls of nearby Joktha. Not long after, Sepherathindor, the Ainoni Count-Palatine of Hinnant, stopped breathing. And according to the physician-priests, Proyas and Chepheramunni would soon follow …
A great fear seized the surviving leaders of the Holy War. Caraskand continued to rebuke them, Akkeägni oppressed them with misery and death, and the Padirajah himself marched upon them with yet another heathen host.
They were far from home, among hostile lands and wicked peoples, and the God had turned his face from them. They were desperate.
And for such men questions of why, sooner or later always became questions of who …
The rain drummed down across his pavilion, filling it with a humid, ambient roar.
“So just what,” Ikurei Conphas asked, “do you want, Knight-Commander?” He frowned. “Sarcellus is it?”
Though Sarcellus often accompanied Gotian at council, Conphas had never been introduced to him—not formally. The man’s dark hair matted his scalp, bled rainwater across what in childhood must have been a lovely and brattish face. The white surcoat over his hauberk was improbably clean, so much so that he looked an anachronism, a throwback to the days when the Holy War still camped beneath Momemn. Everyone else, Conphas included, had been reduced to rags or plundered Kianene attire.
The Shrial Knight nodded without breaking eye contact. “Merely to speak about troubling things, Exalt-General.”
“I’m always keen for troubling news, Knight-Commander, let me assure you.” Conphas grinned, adding, “I’m something of a masochist, or have you noticed?”
Sarcellus smiled winsomely. “The Councils have made this fact exceedingly clear, Exalt-General.”
Conphas had never trusted Shrial Knights. Too much devotion. Too much renunciation … Self-s
acrifice, he’d always thought, was more madness than foolishness.
He’d come to this conclusion in his adolescence, after perceiving just how often—and how happily—others injured or destroyed themselves in the name of faith or sentiment. It was as though, he realized, everyone took instructions from a voice he couldn’t hear—a voice from nowhere. They committed suicide when dishonoured, sold themselves into slavery to feed their children. They acted as though the world possessed fates worse than death or enslavement, as though they couldn’t live with themselves if harm befell others …
Wrack his intellect as he might, Conphas could neither fathom the sense nor imagine the sensation. Of course there was the God, the Scriptures, and all that rubbish. That voice he could understand. The threat of eternal damnation could wring reason out of the most ludicrous sacrifice. That voice came from somewhere. But this other voice …
Hearing voices made one mad. One need only stroll through a local agora, listen to the hermits cry, “What? What?” to confirm that fact. And for Shrial Knights, hearing voices made one fanatic as well.
“So what’s your trouble?” Conphas asked.
“This man they call the Warrior-Prophet.”
“Prince Kellhus,” Conphas said.
He leaned forward in his camp chair, gestured for Sarcellus to take a seat. He could smell mustiness beneath the aromatic steam of his pavilion’s censers. The rain had trailed, and now merely drummed fingers across the canvas slopes above.
“Yes … Prince Kellhus,” Sarcellus said, squeezing water from his hair.
“What about him?”
“We know tha—”
“We?”
The Shrial Knight blinked in irritation. Despite his pious appearance, there was, Conphas thought, something about his bearing, some whiff of conceit perhaps, that belied the gold-embroidered tusk across his breast … Perhaps he’d misjudged this Sarcellus.