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

the others—though they had yet to share their speculations. When he’d asked Kellhus about her, the man had simply shrugged and said, “She’s his prize.”
    For a time, Achamian and Cnaiür simply did their best to ignore each other. Shouts and cries echoed through the darkness, and shadowy clots of revellers filed along the unbounded edges of their firelight. Some stared—gawked even—but for the most part left them alone.
    After scowling at a boisterous party of Conriyan knights, Achamian finally turned to Cnaiür and said, “I guess we’re the heathens, eh, Scylvendi?”
    An uncomfortable silence followed while Cnaiür continued gnawing at the bone he held. Achamian sipped his wine, thought of excuses he might use to withdraw to his tent. What did one say to a Scylvendi?
    “So you teach him,” Cnaiür suddenly said, spitting gristle into the fire. His eyes glittered from the shadow of his heavy brow, studying the flames.
    “Yes,” Achamian replied.
    “Has he told you why?”
    Achamian shrugged. “He seeks knowledge of the Three Seas … Why do you ask?”
    But the Scylvendi was already standing, wiping greasy fingers against his breeches, then stretching his giant, sinuous frame. Without a word he strode off into the darkness, leaving Achamian baffled. Short of speaking, the man hadn’t acknowledged him in any way.
    Achamian resolved to mention the incident to Kellhus when he returned, but he quickly forgot the matter. Against the greater scheme of his fears, bad manners and enigmatic questions were of little consequence.
    Achamian typically pitched his humble wedge tent beneath the weathered slopes of Xinemus’s pavilion. Without exception, he would spend hours lying awake, his thoughts either choked by recriminations regarding Kellhus or smothered by the deranged enormity of his circumstances. And when these things passed into numbness, he would fret over Esmenet or worry about the Holy War. Too soon, it seemed, it would wander into Fanim lands—into battle.
    The nightmares were becoming more unbearable. Scarcely a night passed where he didn’t awaken long before the cockcrow horns, thrashing at his blankets or clawing his face, crying out to ancient comrades. Few Mandate Schoolmen enjoyed anything resembling peaceful slumber. Esmenet had once joked that he slept “like an old hound chasing rabbits.”
    “Try an old rabbit,” he’d replied, “fleeing hounds.”
    But sleep—or the absolute, oblivious heart of it anyway—began to elude him altogether, until it seemed he simply shuffled from one clamour to another. He would crawl from his tent into the predawn darkness, hugging himself to still the tremors, and he would simply stand as the blackness resolved into a cold, colourless version of the vista he’d seen the previous evening, watching the sun’s golden rim surface in the east, like a coal burning through painted paper. And it would seem he stood upon the very lip of the world, that if it tipped by the slightest measure, he would be cast into an endless black.
    So alone, he would think. He would imagine Esmenet sleeping in their room in Sumna, one slender leg kicked from the covers, banded by threads of light as the same sun boiled through the cracks of her shutters. And he would pray that she was safe—pray to the Gods who’d damned them both.
    One sun keeps us warm. One sun lets us see. One …
    Then he would think of Anasûrimbor Kellhus—thoughts of anticipation and dread.
    One evening, while listening to others argue about the Fanim, Achamian suddenly realized there was no reason to suffer his fears alone: he could tell Xinemus.
    Achamian glanced across the fire at his old friend, who was arguing battles that had yet to be fought.
    “Certainly Cnaiür knows the heathen!” the Marshal was protesting. “I never said otherwise. But until he sees us on the field, until he sees the might of Conriya, neither I—nor our Prince, I suspect—will take his word as scripture!”
    Could