Read The Warrior Prophet for Free Online Page B

”
    I CANNOT S—
    A thread of silver light, swaying across the spiralling heights, flashing across the Carapace. A crack that made ears bleed. Everywhere, raining debris. The anguished wail of innumerable inhuman throats.
    The whirlwind undone, like the smoke of a snuffed candle, spinning into oblivion.
    Seswatha fell to his knees, weeping, crying out in grief and exultation. The impossible! The impossible! Beside him, Anaxophus dropped the Heron Spear, placed an arm about him.
    “Are you okay, Achamian?”
    Achamian? Who was Achamian?
    “Come,” Kellhus said. “Stand up.”
    A stranger’s firm hands. Where was Anaxophus?
    “Achamian?”
    Again. It’s happening again.
    “Y-yes?”
    “What is the Heron Spear?”
    Achamian didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Rather, he walked silently for a long while, brooding over the moments before his tale had overwhelmed him, over the hideous loss of self and now —which seemed species of the same thing. Then he thought of Kellhus, who walked discreetly by his side. The overthrow of the No-God was a tale often referred to and rarely told by Mandate Schoolmen—in fact, Achamian couldn’t remember ever telling it, not even to Xinemus. And yet he had yielded it to Kellhus thoughtlessly—even demanded that he hear it. Why?
    He’s doing something to me.
    Stupefied, Achamian found himself staring at the man with the candour of a sleepy child.
    Who are you?
    Kellhus responded without embarrassment—such a thing seemed too small for him. He smiled as though Achamian were in fact a child, an innocent incapable of wishing him ill. The look reminded Achamian of Inrau, who’d so often seen him for what he wasn’t: a good man.
    Achamian looked away, his throat aching. Must I give you up, too?
    A student like no other.
    A handful of soldiers had started a hymn to the Latter Prophet, and the surrounding rumble of talk and laughter trailed into deep-throated song. Without warning, Kellhus stopped and knelt in the grasses.
    “What are you doing?” Achamian asked, more sharply than he would have wished.
    “Removing my sandals,” the Prince of Atrithau said. “Come, let’s bare our feet with the others.”
    Not sing with the others. Not rejoice with them. Just walk.
    Lessons, Achamian would later realize. While Achamian taught, Kellhus continually gave lessons. He was almost certain of it, even though he had no inkling as to what those lessons might be. Intimations of trust, perhaps, of openness, possibly. Somehow, through the course of teaching Kellhus, Achamian had become a student of a different kind. And all he knew for sure was that his education was incomplete.
    But as the days passed, this revelation simply complicated his anguish. One night he prepared the Cants of Calling no less than three times, only to have them collapse into mumbled curses and recriminations. The Mandate, his School—his brothers —must be told! An Anasûrimbor had returned! The Celmomian Prophecy was more than some backwater of Seswatha’s Dreams. Many saw it as their culmination, as the very reason Seswatha had passed from life into his disciples’ nightmares. The Great Warning. And yet he, Drusas Achamian, hesitated—no, more than hesitated, wagered. Sweet Sejenus … He wagered his School, his race, his world, on a man he’d known no more than a fortnight.
    Such madness! He played number-sticks with the end of the world! One man, frail and foolish—who was Drusas Achamian to take such risks? By what right had he shouldered such a burden? What right?
    One more day, he told himself, pulling on his beard and his hair. One more day …
    Kellhus found him in the general exodus from the camp the morning after this resolution, and despite the man’s good humour, hours passed before Achamian relented and began answering his questions. Too many things assailed him. Unspoken things.
    “You worry about our fortunes,” Kellhus finally said, his look solemn. “You fear that the Holy War won’t succeed