The Warrior Prophet by R. Scott Bakker Read Free Book Online

…”
    Of course Achamian feared for the Holy War. He’d witnessed too many defeats—in his dreams, anyway. But despite the thousands of armed men walking in his periphery, the Holy War was far from his thoughts. Even so, he pretended otherwise. He nodded without looking, as though making a painful admission. More unvoiced reproaches. More self-flagellation. With other men, small deceptions seemed both natural and necessary, but with Kellhus they … they itched.
    “Seswatha …” Achamian began, hesitating. “Seswatha was little more than a boy when the first wars against Golgotterath were waged. In those early days, not even the wisest of the ancients understood what was at stake. And how could they? They were Norsirai, and the world was their dominion. Their barbaric kinsmen had been subdued. The Sranc had been driven into the mountains. Not even the Scylvendi dared their wrath. Their poetry, their sorcery, and their craft were sought across all of Eärwa, even by the Nonmen who had once tutored them. Foreign emissaries wept at the beauty of their cities. In courts as far away as Kyraneas and Shir men adopted their manner, their cuisine, their style of dress …
    “They were the very measure of their time—like us. Everything was less, and they were always more. Even after Shauriatas, the Grandmaster of the Mangaecca—the Consult—awakened the No-God, no one truly believed the end had come. Each heartbreak seemed more impossible than the last. Even the Fall of Kûniüri, the mightiest of their nations, barely shook the conviction that somehow, some way, the High North would prevail. Only as disaster piled upon disaster did they come to understand …”
    Shielding his eyes he looked into the Prince’s face. “Glory doesn’t vouchsafe glory. The unthinkable can always come to pass.”
    The end is coming … I must decide.
    Kellhus nodded, squinting against the sun. “Everything has its measure,” he said. “Every man …” He looked directly at Achamian. “Every decision.”
    For an instant Achamian feared his heart might stop. A coincidence … It has to be!
    Without warning, Kellhus bent and retrieved a small stone. He stared at the slope for several moments, as though searching for something, a bird or a hare, to kill. Then he threw it, the sleeve of his silk cassock snapping like leather. The stone whistled through the air, then skipped along the edge of a chapped-stone shelf. A rock teetered forward, then plummeted, cracking against steeper faces, releasing whole skirts of gravel, dust, and debris. Shouts of warning echoed from below.
    “Did you intend that?” Achamian asked, his breath tight.
    Kellhus shook his head. “No …” He shot Achamian a quizzical look. “But then that was your point, wasn’t it? The unforeseen, the catastrophic, follows hard upon all our actions.”
    Achamian wasn’t so sure he’d even had a point. “And decisions,” he said, as though speaking through a stranger’s mouth.
    “Yes,” Kellhus replied. “Decisions.”
    That night Achamian prepared the Cants of Calling even though he knew he’d be unable to utter the first word. What right have you? he cried to himself. What right? You who are so small … Kellhus was the Harbinger. The Messenger. Soon, Achamian knew, the horror of his nights would burst across the waking world. Soon the great cities—Momemn, Carythusal, Aöknyssus—would burn. Achamian had seen them burn before, many times. They would fall as their ancient sisters had fallen: Trysë, Mehtsonc, Myclai. Screaming. Wailing to smoke-shrouded skies … They would be the new names of woe.
    What right? What could justify such a decision?
    “Who are you, Kellhus?” he murmured in the solitary darkness of his tent. “I risk everything for you … Everything!” So why?
    Because there was something … something about him. Something that bid Achamian to wait. A sense of impossible becoming … But what? What was he becoming? And was it enough? Enough