Reread of Prince of Nothing Trilogy
Book 2: The Warrior Prophet
by R. Scott Bakker
Part 3
The Third March
Chapter 22
Caraskand
Welcome to Chapter Twenty-Two of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Twenty-One!
For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty.
—SONGS 57:3, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
Like many old tyrants, I dote upon my grandchildren. I delight in their tantrums, their squealing laughter, their peculiar fancies. I willfully spoil them with honey sticks. And I find myself wondering at their blessed ignorance of the world and its million grinning teeth. Should I, like my grandfather, knock such childishness from them? Or should I indulge their delusions? Even now, as death’s shadowy pickets gather about me, I ask, Why should innocence answer to the world? Perhaps the world should answer to innocence…. Yes, I rather like that. I tire of bearing the blame.
—STAJANAS II, RUMINATIONS
My Thoughts
Both quotes are about the hardships of life, that we have only a finite amount of time before it’s taken from us. The second quote deals more into the guilt of actions. Stajanas II (based off the II) was a ruler, and all rulers have to make terrible decisions. He clearly regrets his. He’s made some that he wishes to undo, so know he yearns to shelter his grandchildren from that same pain. He wishes for a world without suffering, a world that answers to goodness. A delusion that helps to ease his own turmoil.
A world that answers to innocence sounds like many fantasy series of the past, the ones full of hope and idealism, of heroes incorruptible, of clear delineation of good and evil. But our world, like this book series, isn’t that. The world does not answer to the innocence. But we can always try to make that happen. We can protect children from the world for a time before they have to discover harsh realities and the “million grinning teeth” hungry to rip them apart.
And as we see in this chapter, the only innocent character in the series also couldn’t be protected from the “million grinning teeth.”
Winter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand
The morning after the siege, smoke hangs over Caraskand. The dead pile the streets and burned tabernacles. A horn awakens the Men of the Task, but not one to start the expected day of “repentance and sombre celebration.” The alarm sounds.
Kascamandri I, Padirajah of Kian, arrives with his host.
The Great Names muster their forces, but it’s difficult, their men scattered through the city. Gothyelk is in mourning for his son, the Thunyeri shattered into feuding clans with the death of their leader, Prince Skaiyelt. Even the Ainoni feud as Chepheramunni lies dying. The Fanim seize the Holy War’s camps, including stockpiled food and the siege engines. The sick left behind are massacred. Those still outside the walls flee for the city as the Holy War prepares to defend Caraskand’s walls. Worse, they learn Imbeyan had burned the city’s granaries to die provisions and whatever supplies the Citadel of the Dog held were lost to the Scarlet Spire’s assault, the fortress still burning.
Kascamandri watches his army envelop the city. After ignoring the Holy War and idling in the “fleshpot sanctuaries” of his palace, he realizes the Inrithi are not hapless in war like he thought. So he raised a host “worthy of his jihadic fathers.” He rallies the survivors of Anwurat and adds the southern grandees to them, fielding as many soldiers as the Holy War. Fresh troops with proper equipment. That evening, his army makes its assault, hoping to find the Inrithi disorganized. They use Inrithi ladders and siege towers, and batter at the gates with the Holy War’s own rams. But the Iron Men hold the wall.
When the sun finally set, the Men of the Tusk greeted the darkness with both relief and horror. For they were saved and they were doomed.
Proyas listens to Fanim drums beating while standing the battlements with Cnaiür. He peers at the Kianene army that “teemed across the landscape, dragging Inrithi wares and shelters to immense bonfires.” They mass at the same spot the Holy War chose to make their assaults on the city. He can’t believe this is happening, remembering the rapture of Caraskand’s fall, then the crushing despair of the Padirajah’s appearance. He first thought it “a catastrophic mistake, that everything would resolve itself once the chaos of the city’s ransacking passed.” Proyas feel they are so close to Shimeh, believing Caraskand’s smoke could be seen fro the holy city. He asks Cnaiür for his estimate of the enemy strength. Cnaiür says it doesn’t matter.
Unnerved by the man’s turquoise gaze, Proyas turned back to the smoke-grey vista. Yesterday, while the dimensions of the disaster slowly unfolded, he’d found himself asking why over and over again. Like a wronged child, his thoughts had stamped about the fact of his piety. Who among the Great Names had toiled as he’d toiled? Who’d burned more sacrifices, intoned more prayers? But now he no longer dared ask these questions.
Thoughts of Achamian and Xinemus had seen to that.
“It is you,” the Marshal of Attrempus had said, “who surrender everything…”
But in the God’s name! For the God’s glory!
Proyas says the size matters, they have to find some way out of this mess. Cnaiür agrees. Proyas then asks if Cnaiür trusts Conphas’s count on the food, which Cnaiür does. Proyas is less sure, since he’s a good liar. “We’ll have to wait… See if he stays fat while we grow thin.” Proyas is angered how Cnaiür can bait him at times like this. Cnaiür then continues, explaining about how the Holy War spent weeks starving. It doesn’t matter if Conphas hordes food. They have to strike now with the Scarlet Spire before the Cishaurim can be assembled. The Holy War has to attack. Proyas already tried, but Eleäzaras says they’ve already suffered needless losses, which Proyas scoffs at, balancing a dozen sorcerers against a hundred thousand faithful souls.” He wishes all wars to be so bloodless.
Cnaiür says they are doomed then. Proyas mutters about them being cursed, that the God is punishing us. He wonders if Conphas is right about Kellhus. And then Proyas realizes he is floundering, like other man have in times of crisis. Despite knowing this, it doesn’t give him strength. Knowing it only makes it worse. Proyas then admits that Gotian, Gothyelk, and others are calling Kellhus a False prophet. They’ve asked for Proyas’s help to move against him.
“You would risk a war within these walls? Inrithi against Inrithi?”
Proyas swallowed, struggled to shore up his gaze. “If that’s what the Gods demands of me.”
“And how does one know what your God demands?”
Proyas stared at the Scylvendi in horror.
Proyas begin to cry, the burdens of everything too much. All the battles, the deaths, his sickness, and abandoning Achamian and Xinemus. “The two men he respected most in the world, given up to the Holy War.” Not enough. He’s never good enough. He then begs for Cnaiür to tell him what to do.
Now it was the Scylvendi who looked horrified.
“Go to Kellhus,” the barbarian said. “But I warn you”—he raised a mighty, battle-scarred fist—“secure your heart. Seal it tight!” He lowered his chin and glared, the way a wolf might…
“Go, Proyas. Go ask the man yourself.”
Kellhus strokes Esmenet’s cheek as she sleeps, staring at the signs of her pregnancy, his blood continuing on. He learned from Achamian that “only sons could conquer death.” Kellhus wonders if his father is dying, prompting the summons.
Esmenet wakes up, asking him what’s going on. Then Proyas bursts in “without warning” struggling with two guards. Proyas is shouting, telling Kellhus to order his men to stand down. Kellhus does and focuses his senses on Proyas, realizing the man is desperate, but the “wildness of his passion made the specifics difficult to ascertain.” Kellhus realizes Proyas needs to know if he’s a false prophet or not. He asks Proyas whats wrong.
But the Prince’s eyes had found Esmenet, rigid with shock. Kellhus instantly saw the peril.
He searches for excuses.
An interior porch had been raised about the doors; Proyas took an unsteady step toward the railing. “What’s she doing?” He blinked in confusion. “Why’s she in your bed?”
He doesn’t want to understand.
Kellhus says she’s his wife, but Proyas grows angry at that. Kellhus deduces that Proyas heard the rumors but gave him the benefit of the doubt. Kellhus tries to explain how the desert changed them, but Proyas is angry. That’s Akka’s wife. He loved her. He was Kellhus’s friends. Kellhus claims Achamian would want this. Which only angers Proyas more, questioning that Achamian would want “his best friend fucking the wo—” Esmenet cuts him off, angry that he’s speaking about Achamian to her. That sets him back. Kellhus sees an opportunity in Proyas’s passions, opened by horror.
“But you already know,” Kellhus said. “Of all people, you’ve no right to judge.”
The Conryian Prince flinched. “What do you mean?”
Now… Offer him truce. Show him understanding. Make stark his trespasses…
“Please,” Kellhus said, reaching out with word, tone, and every nuance of expression. “You let despair rule you… And me, I succumb to ill manners. Proyas! You’re among my dearest friends…” He cast aside the sheets, swung his feet to the floor. “Come, let us drink and talk.”
But Proyas had fastened on his earlier comment—as Kellhus had intended. “I would know why I’ve no right to judge. What’s that supposed to mean, ‘dear friend’?”
Kellhus drew his lips into a painted line. “It means that you, Proyas, not we, have betrayed Achamian.”
Horror strikes Proyas. Kellhus knows he must move carefully. Proyas disagrees. Kellhus says Proyas accuses them [Kellhus and Esmenet] because he knows he’s the one responsible, that he betrayed Achamian when he cut his deal with the Scarlet Spire. Proyas makes an excuse, saying no one knows what happened to Achamian. Kellhus presses, saying Proyas does know. He can see it. But Proyas stumbles back, shouting Kellhus sees nothing. Kellhus knows he’s close.
“Of course I do, Proyas. How, after all this time, could you still doubt?”
But as he watched, something happened: an unforeseen flare of recognition, a cascade of inferences, too quick to silence. That word…
Proyas asks how can he doubt when the Holy War is on the verge of annihilation. Kellhus shifts gears, putting on a Xinemus-like smile and says the God is testing the Holy War but hasn’t passed sentence. “How can there be trial without doubt?” Kellhus urges Proyas to open his heart to the truth.
“Open my…” Proyas trailed, his eyes brimming with incredulous dread. “He told me!” he abruptly whispered. “This is what he meant!” The yearning in his look, the ache that had warred against misgivings, suddenly collapsed into suspicion and disbelief.
Kellhus realizes Cnaiür warned him and realizes he should have killed Cnaiür after all. Angry, Proyas demands if the “great Warrior-Prophet” has doubts or fears for the future. Kellhus looks to Esmenet, sees her crying, and takes her cold hand.
“No,” he [Kellhus] said.
I do not fear.
Proyas was already backing out of the double doors, into the brighter light of the antechamber.
“You will.”
The days passed with the starving Men of the Tusk defending Caraskand’s Triamic Walls, proving that the emperor who raised them, Triamis I, had proved his detractors right when he said: “No Man can conquer the future.” Even as the Kianene curse their enemies as another sortie is beaten back, they can only “marvel at their [the Inrithi’s] desperate fury.” Athjeäri even leads raids to hamper enemy sappers. But their doom was obvious “as only men stalked by famine could know.”
At the same time, the plague of hemoplexy died down, with Chepheramunni lingering at death and others dying. The funeral pyres burn but “more and more they took casualties, and not the sick, as their fuel.” As famine grows, the god Bukris stalking the city, the men hunt cats, dogs, and rats for food. Horses are butchered. Leather boiled and eaten. “When the horns sounded the harnesses of many would swing like skirts, having lost their straps and buckles to some steaming pot.” Starving men wander the streets and rumors persist about cannibalism. New sicknesses arrive, brought on by famine, teeth lost to scurvy, dysentery afflicting cramps and diarrhea.
The debate about Kellhus intensifies with Conphas, Gothyelk, and Gotian condemning him as False Prophet. “Who could doubt the God punished them?” Only Inri Sejenus could be their prophet. Proyas no longer defends Kellhus, but holds his tongue. But still none move against Kellhus, his Zaudunyani now numbering in the tens of thousands. Riots break out and Inrithi kill each other as people take sides, even against lords, brothers, and countrymen. Only when the horns sound did they put aside their differences. “They roused themselves from the torpor of disease and sickness, and they battled with a fervour only those truly wracked by the God could know.” To the Kianene, it appeared dead men held the walls, their hate manifesting as wights.
Caraskand, it seemed, named not a city, but misery’s own precinct. Her very walls—walls raised by Triamis the Great—seemed to groan.
The palace Kellhus lives in reminds Serwë of her time as a concubine to House Gaunum. But here she reclines in luxury, her “pink son” cradled to her breast. Kellhus surprises her from behind and she asks what he’s doing here. He says much happens and asks after Esmi.
It always seemed so strange to hear him ask such simple questions. It reminded her that the God was still a man. “Kellhus,” she asked pensively, “what’s your father’s name.”
She asks after his father’s name, and he has to make up a lie why his father is named Moënghus despite the King of Atrithau, his supposed father, is named Aethelarius. Serwë then declares her son to be named Moënghus. Though she says it as a statement, it’s really a question. Kellhus agrees. She then asks about what kind of man his father is. “A most mysterious one.” She asks if he knows his son is a prophet. Kellhus isn’t sure.
Serwë, who’d grown accustomed to cryptic conversations such as this, smiled. She blinked at the tears in her eyes. With her child warm against her breast, and the breath of the Prophet warmer still across her neck, the World seemed a closed circle, as though woe had been exiled from joy at long last. No longer taxed by cruel and distant things, the hearth answered to the heart.
A sudden pang of guilt struck her. “I know that you grieve,” she said. “So many suffer…”
He lowered his face. Said nothing.
“But I’ve never been so happy,” she continued. “So whole… Is that a sin? To find rapture where others suffer?”
“Not for you, Serwë. Not for you.”
Serwë gasped and looked down at her suckling babe.
“Moënghus is hungry,” she laughed.
Two soldiers named Rash and Wigga are talking about how Wigga saw Kellhus’s child at the public anointing. The other soldier missed it. Wigga comments on how dark the child’s hair is, surprised since Kellhus and Serwë are blondes. Cnaiür appears, demanding to know the child’s name. They stare at the wild figure before them, more myth than man. Wigga says its Moënghus.
The air of menace suddenly vanished. The barbarian became curiously blank, motionless to the point where he seemed inanimate. His manic eyes looked through them, to places far and forbidding.
A taut moment passed, then without a word, the Scylvendi turned and walked into the darkness.
Sighing, the two men looked to each other for what seemed a long time, then just to be certain, they resumed their fabricated conversation.
As they’d been instructed.
Kellhus has doubts, wanting another way. In the Probability Trance, he can’t see any farther because “all the lines were extinguished, either by disaster or by the weight of excess permutations.” He’s worked hard, but now only Saubon still supports him. While Proyas hasn’t condemned him, he’s ignored all of Kellhus’s overtures. Things only worsen between Zaudunyani and the Orthodox. Worse, the threat of more Consult attacks limits his movement.
Meanwhile, the Holy War died.
You told me mine was the Shortest Path… He’d relived his brief encounter with the Cishaurim messenger a thousand times, analyzing, evaluating, weighing alternate interpretations—all for naughty. Every step was darkness now, no matter what his father said. Every word was risk. In so many ways, it seemed, he was no different from these world-born men…
What is the Thousandfold Thought.
Esmenet finds him, and he asks her how. She just gives him a grin of “pure mischief.” Though she’s also concerned. She says Werjau told her. Kellhus notes the man fears women. Then she almost falls and Kellhus is surprised by “a sudden shortness of breath” before she caught herself, almost falling to her death. Esmenet then declares that Werjau fears her before she laughs and hugs them looking out over the city and the world.
She knows… She knows I struggle.
“We all fear you,” Kellhus said, wondering at the clamminess of his skin.
She comes to comfort.
“You tell such delicious lies,” she murmured, raising her lips to his.
Kellhus’s nine senior disciples, the Nascenti, arrive at dusk. Esmenet watches them from the shadows. They seem more upset than usual. She knows that they, as the administrators of the Zaudunyani, no more about the Holy War’s problems than she does. They fall silent as Kellhus enters, Serwë behind him, a retinue of guards around them.
Esmenet cursed herself for catching her breath. How could he make her heart pound so? Glancing down, she realized she’d folded her right hand over the tattoo marring the back of her left.
Those days are over.
Esmenet greets her husband and sits to his right. He’s dressed like a warrior, a mix of Galeoth and Ainoni styles which Esmenet suspects Serwë had a hand in. Kellhus says all gathered here are “branches of me” and they know what moves them. As he speaks, Esmenet reflects on the differences between this serious meeting and her old life in Xinemus’s camp, full of “mirth and mischief.” She misses Achamian holding her too tight. She imagines that even then, she must have loved Kellhus and Serwë secretly, like she didn’t know about it. She remembers the last time she saw Xinemus and his two men, wondering what happened to them.
Had he found Achamian.
She suffered a moment of gaping horror… Kellhus’s melodic voice retrieved her.
Then Kellhus says Esmenet is his second, to be obeyed when he’s not around. This shocks them and she realizes “old bigotries die hard.” Werjau says it sounds like Kellhus fears being taken from them. Then Esmenet realizes they aren’t shocked that a woman is put above them, but that Kellhus fears his own death, which he doesn’t contradict. Fear strikes her. Serwë squeezes her hand, the girl trembling in shock. “The lunatic dimensions of Serwë’s belief had always baffled and troubled Esmenet.” It’s so great, her belief feels unmovable. Esmenet thinks that this belief, this love for Kellhus, is what lets her share him with Esmenet. The Nascenti argues, some wanting to fight, others to negotiate. With a look, Kellhus silences them.
It frightened her [Esmenet] sometimes, the way he effortlessly commanded these men. But then it could be no other way. Where others blundered from moment to moment, scarcely understanding their own wants, hurts, or hopes, let alone those of others, Kellhus caught each instant—each soul—like a fly. His world, Esmenet had realized, was one without surfaces, one where everything—from word and expression to war and nation—was smoky glass, something to be peered through…
He was the Warrior-Prophet… Truth. And Truth commanded all things.
She stops herself showing joy that she was here at the right hand of “the most glorious soul to have walked the world.” She lies with Truth. To her, this is beyond a gift. Werjau gets angry at her smiling. Kellhus says it’s because she can see what Werjau can’t. Esmenet doesn’t feel the same, thinking she daydreamed like a teenager in love. But she feels something in the air and wonders what she sees.
Her skin tingled. The Thanes of the Warrior-Prophet watched her, and she looked through their faces, glimpsed their yearning hearts. To think! So many deluded souls, living illusory lives in unreal worlds! So many! It both boggled her and broke her heart.
And at the same time, it was her triumph.
Something absolute.
Her heart fluttered, pinioned by Kellhus’s shining gaze. She fell at once smoke and naked flesh—something seen more through and something desired.
There’s more than me… More than this—yes!
“Tell us, Esmi,” Kellhus hissed through Serwë’s mouth. “Tell us what you see!”
There’s more than them.
“We must take the knife to them,” she said, speaking as she knew her Master would have her speak. “We must show them the demons in their midst.”
So much more!
The Warrior-Prophet smiled with her own lips.
“We must kill them,” her voice said.
The skin-spy Sarcellus heads to Conphas’s pavilion after receiving a message speaking of an imminent threat. He pushes through starving men, begging for food. He barrels through them. Normally, he didn’t begrudge the beggars because he could kill them and satiate his other hungers.
Besides, they were apt reminders of what Men were in truth.
Pale hands reached from looted silks. Piteous cries seed through the gloom. Then, in the gravelly voice of a drunkard, a rag-draped man before him said, “Truth shines.”
This surprises Sarcellus. He turns on the speaker and sees iron eyes. The man says truth doesn’t die. Sarcellus thinks it’s robbery, but the man shakes his head. Then Sarcellus understands it’s a Zaudunyani. The man smile momentarily frightens the skin-spy. Then he remembers what he is and gets an erection, calling them slaves and growing arrogant with what he is, asking if they know what he is.
“Dead,” someone said from behind.
Sarcellus laughed, sweeping his gaze over the necks he would break. Oh, rapture! How he would shoot hot across his thigh! He was certain of it!
Yes! With so many! This time…
But his humor vanished when his look returned to the man with the iron eyes. The face beneath his face twitched into a vestigial frown… They’re not af—
Oil suddenly drenches him, dousing his would-be assassins. He calls them fools, saying they’ll burn with him. But that’s the plan. The iron-eyed man leaps at Sarcellus as a flaming arrow sets him alight. “The thing called Sarcellus howled, shrieked with its entire face.” Horror fills him. As they burned, the iron-eyed man whispers “Truth…”
General Martemus watches Conphas, thinking him looking like a child as he sleeps. The general is here to kill Conphas on Kellhus’s orders.
Martemus had spent most of his life following commands, and though he’d unstintingly tried to execute each and every one, even those that proved disastrous, their origins had always haunted him. NO matter how tormented or august the channels, the commands he followed had always come from somewhere, from someplace within a beaten and debauched world: peevish officers, spiteful apparati, vainglorious generals… As a result, he had thought that thought, so catastrophic for a man who’d been bred to serve: I am greater than what I obey.
But the command he followed this night…
Martemus believes obeying this commands is more than worship or prayer, it was a lesson from Kellhus. He raises the knife. He already pictures his commander dead, wondered how the army would react when he’s found. Martemus thinks that he has wanted to do this for so long. Tells himself to strike now.
Conphas wakes up, shocked. “Truth,” declares Martemus and strikes. But Sarcellus, roasted, unable to keep his face closed, stops him, smacking away the blade. Snarling curses at Kellhus, the skin spy kills Martemus.
Conphas is shocked to see Martemus’s head sever from his neck. In fear, he scrambles back from the death, shocked by the death of his general. He realizes Sarcellus killed him and thinks he’s having a nightmare. Still stunned, he asks what happens.
“Belonged to him,” the voice from the dark corner said.
“Prince Kellhus,” Conphas said in dawning recognition. Suddenly he understood all that he needed to know: a battle had just been fought—and won. He grinned in relief—and wondrous admiration. The man had used Martemus! Martemus!
And here I thought I’d won the battle for his soul!
Conphas asks for light, but Sarcellus tells him not to, saying he was also attacked. This irks Conphas. It’s his tent. Conphas starts to object, but Sarcellus says they have to act now or the Holy War is lost. Conphas realizes Sarcellus was burned, smelling roasted pork. Sarcellus races out to the balcony. Conphas, calling for guards, follows. He doesn’t find Sarcellus, only notices Martemus’s blood on his body. He returns to his guards, telling them to hurl Martemus body at the Kianene then send for General Sompas. “The truce had ended.” The guards asks about what to do with the head.
“No,” Ikurei Conphas said, slipping into a robe held out by one of his haeturi. He laughed at the absurdity of the man’s head, which lay like a cabbage near the foot of his bed. It was odd how he could feel so little after all they suffered together.
“The General never leaves my side, Triah. You know that.”
Fustaras, a Proadjunct in the Selial Column of the Nansur army, is on a mission for General Sompas with several others. “When children go astray, they must be beaten.” He’s a “Threesie,” a veteran who’s enlisted three times. The senior NCOs that form the “stubborn heart” of any unit. “They were men who saw things through.” Him and the others with him enter an area Zaudunyani gather. They find a judge and asks him is said about truth. The man answers, “That it shines.” holding his cudgel, Fustaras asks if instead bleeds.
The man’s [the judge’s] sparkling gaze darted from Fustaras’s eyes to the club, then back. “That, too,” he said in the rigid manner of someone resolved to master their quailing heart. He pitched his voice so those nearby could hear. “If not, then why the Holy War?”
Thinking the judge too clever, Fustaras clubs him to death. His men form up around him as they are mobbed by so many Zaudunyani. He has doubts about the plan now, bur remembers he’s a Threesie. He yells defiance but is struck by a rock. It dazes him. His men are cut down around him. He’s more confused, General Sompas promising an easy task. But then a Thunyeri “with three shriveled Sranc heads jangling between his thighs” crushes his throat before a spear is rammed through his back.
The wounded Sarcellus has spent the last three days hiding “unable to close its face for pain.” As it stomps through a burned out tabernacle kicking charred skulls, it’s reminded of the Plains of Agongorea covered in snow, remembering how soothing those winds were. But that snow was far away. As far as Holy Golgotterath. While the fire burns so near. He curses Kellhus over and over. The Synthese arrives, asking if he suffers, calling Sarcellus by his skin spy name Gaörta. Sarcellus looks at it, studying its inscrutable face.
In the shell of the Old Father… Aurang, Great General of the World-Breaker, ancient Prince of the Inchoroi.
Sarcellus cries out that it hurts. He’s told to savor it. “A taste for what is to come.” The skin spy pleads and blubbers as the Synthese says he failed. The Holy War will perish. Sarcellus is terrified, knowing what failure means, but compelled to obey the Architect. He tries to shift the blame on the Cishaurim.
“Fault, Gaörta?” the Old Father said. “The very poison we would suck from this world?”
Sarcellus begs for forgiveness. He’s given one more task “in the name of spite.” Sarcellus will do anything. The Synthese orders Sarcellus to make sure Kellhus is killed with the Holy War. No longer does Sarcellus think about snow to cool his burning flesh. Vengeance will soothe him.
“Now,” the palm-sized expression grated, and Gaörta had the sense of vast power, ancient and hoary, forced through a reed throat. Here and there, small showers of dust trailed down the broken walls.
“Close your face.”
Gaörta obeyed as he must, screamed as he must.
Cnaiür crumples Proyas’s missive in his hand as he strides through Proyas’s residence in the city. Spotting a discarded orange peel in a pile of dust, his hunger compels him to eat it. As he does, he’s minds in turmoil that Kellhus would name his son Moënghus. He believes Kellhus did this to gall Cnaiür, to remind him who to hate.
He reaches Proyas and is angry to be summoned by words, reminding the man he can’t read. Proyas apologizes, trying to regain his composure, and says that his guests have made claims and wants Cnaiür to confirm it. The Scylvendi realizes Conphas is in the room. He hadn’t even noticed and thinks his madness lifts. He barks, demanding to know what he wants while also noticing Sarcellus is with them. Sarcellus, it seems, has word from Atrithau.
Cnaiür stared at the man [Sarcellus], for the first time noticing the bandages about his hands and the odd network of angry red lines across his sumptuous face. “Atrithau? But how is that possible?”
Sarcellus spins a story about three men who say they knew a fourth, conveniently dead in the desert, who claims Kellhus is lying. King Aethelarius has no living children. Kellhus is a pretender. As he speaks, Cnaiür notes the obvious pain Sarcellus is in. Then Cnaiür asks what these men want. Conphas gets annoyed. Proyas says there might be a way to prosecute Kellhus as a False Prophet without causing civil war. Cnaiür asks why he’s needed. Proyas trust him.
Cnaiür swallowed. Outland dogs! someone raged. Kine!
For some reason a look of alarm flickered across Conphas’s face.
Proyas refuses to trust hearsay on such an important matter, which irks Sarcellus. Cnaiür studies the Shrial knight, reminded of fighting the thing that looked like Kellhus. This makes him think of Serwë, “first wife of his heart.”
I will have her! someone within him wept. She belongs to me!
So beautiful… My proof!
Suddenly everything seemed to slump, as though the world itself had been soaked in numbness and lead. And he realized—without anguish, without heartbreak—that Anasûrimbor Moënghus was beyond him. Despite all the hate, all his tooth-gnashing fury, the blood trail he followed ended here… In a city.
We’re dead. All of us…
If Caraskand was to be their tomb, he would see certain blood spilled first.
But Moënghus! someone cried. Moënghus must die! And yet he could no longer recall the hated face. He saw only a mewling infant…
“The man you call Prince Kellhus is an impostor… A prince of nothing.”
Saubon sits upon Imbeyan’s throne as the King of Caraskand, even though his mighty and ostentatious throne room, in the Sapatishah’s Palace, feel like a hovel. But it didn’t matter, because he was king. Kellhus asks why he was summoned. Saubon warns him that he has to flee. Kellhus can’t because of the besieging army and won’t abandon his followers.
“But you must! They will condemn you. Even Proyas!”
“And you, Coithus Saubon? Will you condemn me?”
“No… Never!”
“But you’ve already given them your guarantees.”
“Who said this? What liar dares—”
“You. You say this.”
“But… But you must understand!”
“I understand. They’ve ransomed your city. All you need do is pay.”
Saubon pleads for understanding, saying it’s not that way. But Kellhus explains how Saubon has acted for “the trappings of a tyrant” just like his father. Kellhus asks who Saubon fled to after being beaten. Saubon objects he never was beaten and Kellhus deduces it was Kussalt. He then asks what was worse, Kussalt dying or learning the man hated him.
“Silence!”
“All your long life, no one has known you.”
“Silence!”
“All your long life you’ve suffered, you’ve questioned—”
“No! No! Silence!”
“—and you’ve punished those who would love you.”
Saubon slapped burly hands about his ears. “Cease! I command it!”
“As you punished Kussalt, as you punish—”
“Silence-silence-silence! They told me you would do this! They warned me!”
“Indeed. They warned you against the truth. Against wandering into the nets of the Warrior-Prophet.”
Saubon asks how Kellhus could know this, struck by woe. Kellhus says it is Truth. Saubon curses the truth. Kellhus asks about Saubon’s soul. He’s willing to be damned. He embraces damnation. He would accept it all the pain and suffering “to be King for a day!” He would even pluck out God’s eye. His words echo as he falls to his knees. Soldiers come running. But Kellhus isn’t there. Saubon realizes he never was, but he’s still haunted by his guilt, imagining Kellhus is beating him.
For days, every sunrise and sunset, Esmenet would leave a bowl of water for Kellhus as he spends his time “lost in whatever worlds he searched in his trances.” She also left him food, though he only wanted water. She would watch him, feeling like a child kneeling before an idol offering sacrifices. But he touched none of the food. Then one dawn, he was gone. In a panic, she rushes through the palace and finds him joking with Serwë.
Serwë asks Esmi to bring her Moënghus. So relieved she doesn’t object and fetches the baby and “found the winter blue of his eyes unnerving.” When she returns, Kellhus reveals the Great Names want to parley.
He mentioned nothing, of course, about his mediation. He never did.
Esmenet is fearful, saying this parley is meant to be a trap. Serwë is confused by this, saying “Everyone loves Kellhus.” But Esmenet objects and says that he is hated by many. They want to see him dead.
Serwë laughed in the obvious way of which only she seemed capable. “Esmenet…” she said, shaking her had as though at a beloved fool. She boosted little Moënghus into the air. “Auntie Esmi forgets,” she cooed to the infant. “Yeeesss. She forgets who your father is!”
Esmenet watched dumbstruck. Sometimes she wanted nothing more than to wring the girl’s neck. How? How could he love such a simpering fool?
“Esmi…” Kellhus said abruptly. The warning in his voice chilled her heart. She turned to him, shouted Forgive me! with her eyes.
But at the same time, she couldn’t relent, not now, not after what she had found. “Tell her, Kellhus! Tell her what’s about to happen!”
Not again. Not again!
Kellhus tells her that he has to. They can’t go to war with the Orthodox. But she begs him that the Holy War, the city, is meaningless compared to him. She knows this is too important “for selfish grief” but she’s lost everyone else she loves. She reminds him of Akka’s belief that he’s “the world’s only hope.”
“Sometimes, Esmi, we must cross death to reach our destination.”
She thought of King Shikol in The Tractate, the demented Xerashi King who’d commanded the Latter Prophet’s execution. She thought of his gilded thighbone, the instrument of judgment, which to this day remained the most potent symbol of evil in Inrithidom. Was this what Inri Sejenus had said to his nameless lover? That loss could somehow secure glory?
But this is madness!
“The Shortest Path,” she said, horrified by the teary-eyed contemptuousness of her tone.
But the blond-bearded face smiled.
“Yes,” the Warrior-Prophet said. “The Logos.”
Serwë watches, dumbstruck, as Gotian condemns Kellhus as a False Prophet and pretender to the warrior-caste. He is condemned to be “scourged in the manner decreed by Scripture.” She holds her sobbing son, surrounded by Kellhus’s bodyguards who face the Shrial Knights. She looks at the multitude on the verge of war.
It seemed a thousand half-starved faces cried a thousand hungry things. Accusations. Curses. Laments. The air was flushed by humid cries. Hundreds had gathered within the ruined shell of the Citadel of the Dog to hear the Warrior-Prophet answer the charges of the Great and Lesser Names. Hot in the sun, the black ruins towered about them: walls unconsummated by vaults, foundations obscured by heaped wreckage, the side of a fallen tower bare and rounded against the debris, like the flanks of a whale breaching the surface of a choppy sea. The Men of the Tusk had congregated across every pitched slop and beneath every monolithic remnant. Fist-waving faces packed every pocket of clear ground.
Instinctively pulling her baby tight to her breast, Serwë glanced around in terror. Esmi was right… We shouldn’t have come! She looked up to Kellhus, and wasn’t surprised by the divine calm with which he observed the masses. Even here, he seemed the godlike nail which fastened what happened to what should happen.
He’ll make them see!
Violence is on the cusp of breaking out. The Great Names even look nervous as the mobs began skirmishing. One man breaks through the Hundred Pillars to knife Kellhus, only for Kellhus to disarm him “as though he were a child.” As Kellhus holds the man by the neck with one hand, silence spreads out from him. Serwë is confused why they would risk Kellhus’s anger.
“What is it that you fear?” the Warrior-Prophet asked. His tone was both plaintive and imperious—not the overbearing manner of a King certain of his sanction, but the despotic voice of Truth.
Gotian says the God’s punishment for harboring a false prophet. Kellhus says they fear their power fading as his rises. “You wouldn’t tolerate even the God to possess your Holy War.” He tries to implant doubt in their actions. But Conphas screams for silence. Kellhus asks Conphas what he hides.
“His words are spears!” Conphas cried to the others. “His very voice is an outrage!”
“But I ask only your question: What if you are wrong?”
Even Conphas was dumbstruck by the force of these words. It was as though the Warrior-Prophet had made this demand in the God’s own voice.
“You turn to fury in the absence of certainty,” he continued sadly. “I only ask you this: What moves your soul? What moves you to condemn me? Is it indeed the God? The God strides with certainty, with glory, through the hearts of men! Does the God so stride through you? Does the God so stride through you?”
Silence descends. Serwë cries in triumph, believing they see it. Then Sarcellus quotes from the Tusk about how both good and evil things speak to men’s heart, confusing them. Kellhus responds with a quote that Truth cannot be denied.
Possessed by a beatific calm, Sarcellus answered: “Fear him, for he is the deceiver, the Lie made Flesh, come among you to foul the waters of your heart.”
And the Warrior-Prophet smiled sadly. “Lie made flesh, Sarcellus?” Serwë watched his eyes search the crowds, then settle on the nearby Scylvendi. “Lie made flesh,” he repeated, staring into the fiend’s embattled face. “The hunt need not end… Remember this when you recall the secret of battle. You still command the ears of the Great.”
“False Prophet,” Sarcellus continued. “Prince of nothing!”
With those words, the Shrial Knights attacked. Men are cut down as the watching mob joins them. Serwë holds her baby and Kellhus’s sleeve in disbelief that it’s over. In moments, the Shrial knight are upon them. Kellhus fights back, killing a knight who attacks him, his punch so powerful the knight’s head ruptures like a melon. Gotian yells at them to stop. A knight then grabs her. But he’s cut down, killed by Cnaiür. Serwë is shocked at that.
The Shrial Knights back down from their assault on Kellhus. Gotian demands Kellhus yield to be scourged while Serwë rips herself free of Cnaiür’s grasp. She reaches Kellhus’s side, pressing herself and her child into him. She begs him to yield. To not die in this place.
She could feel her Prophet’s tender eyes upon her, his divine embrace encompass her. She looked up into his face and saw love in his shining, god-remote eyes. The love of the God for her! For Serwë, first wife and lover of the Warrior-Prophet. For the girl who was nothing…
Glittering tears branched across her cheeks. “I love you!” she cried. “I love you and you cannot die!”
She looked down at the squalling babe between them. “Our son!” she sobbed. “Our son needs the God!”
Rough hands pull her back. She shrieks that Kellhus is The god. Sarcellus grabs her, asking to Gotian, “According to Scripture?” Gotian agrees. Cnaiür objects, saying she has an infant. Serwë is so confused. Cnaiür is a dark blur in her tear-stained vision. Gotian says that doesn’t matter.
“My child!” Was there desperation, pain in the Scylvendi’s voice?
No… not your child. Kellhus? What happened.
“Then take it.” Curt, as though seeking to snuff further mortification.
Someone pulled her wailing son from her arms. Another heart gone. Another ache.
No… Moënghus? What’s happening?
Serwë shrieked, until it seemed her eyes must shimmer into flame, her face crumble into dust.
The flash of sunlight across a knife. Sarcellus’s knife. Sounds. Celebratory and horrified.
Serwë felt her life spill across her breasts. She worked her lips to speak to him, that godlike man so near, to say something final, but there was no sound, no breath. She raised her hands and beads of dark wine fell from her outstretched fingers…
My Prophet, my love, how could this be?
I know not, sweet Serwë…
And as sky and the howling faces beneath darkened, she remembered his words, once spoken.
“You are innocence, sweet Serwë, the one heart I need not teach…”
Last flare of sunlight, drowsy, as though glimpsed by a child stirring from dreams beneath an airy tree.
Innocence, Serwë.
The limb-vaulted canopy, growing darker, warm-woolen like a shroud. No more sun.
You are the mercy you seek.
But my baby, my—
My Thoughts
The Holy War anticipated a “day of repentance.” Which sins are they repenting? The guilt of the massacre they performed while taking the city, or do most of the Holy War only expect to pray for other sins, not seeing what they did as wrong at all.
Does not look good for the holy war. Bakker sets it up elegantly. The Padirajah arrives before the Holy War can regroup and mount a defense outside the city, to at the very least bring in their supplies and destroy their own siege engines. Now the very weapons they used on Caraskand’s walls will be used against them. And they have no food. They’ll starve. It looks hopeless for the Holy War.
Of course Sirol, the Padirajah’s youngest daughter, weeps at the burning mastodons. Humans would rather weep for an animal than their fellow species dying by the hundreds. It shows how we’re so desensitized to human death, even in modern times thanks to media. It also shows how sheltered his daughter is. Humans who spend time around livestock are not nearly as emotional about animals as those who by their meat from the supermarket.
Also shows the arrogance of the Padirajah. He ignored the Holy War all this time, and now that he realized he can’t ignore them any longer, he brings his daughters with him on the campaign. He expects to win just like he expected to win at Mengedda and at Anwurat. It’s clear he loves his daughters, cares for them greatly (last chapter he did not look forward to telling his daughter her husband Imbeyan is dead).
The relief and horror quote is great. Humans want to survive, will keep fighting and fighting even if they’re only bough themselves a little more time. It’s like in the show Babylon 5 where John Sheridan is talking about standing on the edge of the cliff with the choice of staying and dying or jumping. You should jump because you might always learn to fly before you hit the ground. He does exactly that when faced with the situation. And while he didn’t learn to fly, he was caught.
I think we’ve all had that Proyas moment, getting such bad news that we can’t believe it happened, that we first want to deny it. The first stage of grief. It’s not just about mourning a dead one. Losing a job or an opportunity, beset by an illness, all of it can send us down that path.
Proyas is realizing his piety and belief that made him better is childish because he realizes others have suffered too. The child is selfish. That’s one of the defining trait. They can’t see past themselves. They haven’t learned to care for others needs. It’s something humans do for survival, to build communities and tribes, small bands of trusted people. And that means thinking about other’s and what they go to, as well.
Cnaiür is right. The Holy War has to take the initiative. They have to force a breakout, and to do that, they need to surprise the Padirajah’s army. Hit them with the Scarlet spire, fight their way free. It’s the end of the Holy war’s mission, but they might live to see their homes.
Proyas is utterly crushed and broken by the weight of everything. How worse to know it and still be unable to do anything, like drowning when you know how to swim but it doesn’t matter. You’re just too tired to keep kicking.
Cnaiür is horrified because he respects Proyas. Likes him. And now to see him so broken, weeping. Just like Cnaiür does. The same weakness Cnaiür hides in himself on display before him. And then he betrays Kellhus, armoring Proyas against the Dûnyain. Out of compassion. In the Unholy Consult, I wonder if Cnaiür felt the same, seeing the broken, dying Proyas in the pavilion.
As I read this passage, I’m thinking of the same Proyas at the end, broken by Kellhus, sinking into madness for his God, doing everything he can for Kellhus. He gave up his humanity for his God, and still wasn’t enough.
I hate Kellhus even more after reading that book.
An interesting moment from Kellhus. His vestigial emotions are bubbling up. He claims he loves her in the Unholy Consult, that is why he doesn’t kill Kelmomas. Maybe he does. She’s carrying his son right now, the only way for immortality. But that doesn’t stop him from using her, from making her miserable in the end, from taking her from a man that could truly love her and giving her only the illusion of it. Because even if Kellhus loves her in his own, stunted way, she learns the truth about what he is and can never believe it, especially not with the way he acts.
So in the Proyas and Kellhus exchange, we see how Kellhus isn’t infallible in numerous ways. He’s caught abed with Esmenet by the one person who needed to be eased into this new reality: Proyas. It’s unanticipated and “without warning.” Then he makes the mistake by using doubt, a word that Achamian always uses with Proyas, which forces the skeptical part of Proyas back up, focusing it on the betrayal to his mentor he is witnessing. Then Kellhus is blind-sided by Cnaiür’s interference. He didn’t anticipate Cnaiür doing that at all. Now Proyas is wholly lost to him without proving he’s a prophet.
Despite knowing that the Circumflex is coming, Kellhus doesn’t have enough emotions to be afraid of what will most likely lead to his death. This probably explains why he’s getting touch emotional with pregnant Esmenet and the knowledge that the only true immortality is through offpsrings. He’s facing his imminent death and doesn’t see a way out of it, even if he kept Proyas’s aid.
He only has to hope for a miracle. See, Kellhus is already crazy. I think all the Dûnyain are, they just don’t realize it. But Kellhus’s madness is accelerated by learning that effect can precede cause. That miracles can happen. The Shortest Path is now to prove himself a prophet, and only a true miracle, something he can’t fake, can do it.
Triamis I had a lot of practical wisdom. You can never conquer the future. That’s why people have to think about their actions and not just assume the status quo will continue. Say, if you don’t mind passing laws that will affect your political enemies because you can’t envision your political enemies gaining power one day and using those very laws on you.
It is not going well for the Holy War. Just when it seemed likes nothing worst can happen, it does. But still they fight. Desperation to live keeps them going. They have come so far, survived the desert. These are the men who don’t give up. Those who did perished a long time ago.
Serwë has a pink son. Not a blue baby.
Serwë has a lot of detractors. I’ve always liked her. People hate her naivety, her innocence. They see in her what we’ve all lost, what the world has stolen from her. She, like Xinemus, are our most stock fantasy characters. Those people from other, more romantic tales of the fantastic. Ones full of hope and optimism. With clear delineations between good and evil. And she’s stranded in this murky, gray, brutal world of Grimdark Fantasy. And like Xinemus, it ends badly for her. She’s not fit for this world. She’s got too much of us in her. Too much of what we secretly yearn for. Such simple joy and happiness even while the world burns around her, unburdened from the stresses of life.
She’s free. For now.
Another clue that Kellhus does love Esmenet, and probably Serwë, is his sudden fear when she almost falls to her death. Kellhus’s first emotion as an adult was for Serwë. And he’s feeling others with Esmenet and the child she carries. His child, which is why Serwë’s pregnancy doesn’t stir these feelings him him. But I do think he loves Serwë. The guilt for her death, and subsequently learning of her damnation, I believe is one of the things driving his actions in the next series. If such an innocent girl like her is damned, then something really has to be done about it.
He loves Esmenet, but she doesn’t really love him. We see that when Achamian returns, how it conflicts her, eats at her. And while she ultimately chooses to stay with Kellhus because of her pregnancy, she never stops loving Achamian and only grows to hate Kellhus more as she realizes what he did to her and those around him.
But with Kellhus’s weak emotions, does that even bother him? Her hatred? Her love for Achamian? We got so little POV of Kellhus in the last series. So little insight into him. I think that’s the greatest shame of The Aspect Emperor Series. Bakker had to keep us out of Kellhus’s head to keep us from guessing his motivations, about what would happen in Golgotterath there at the end. And yet we don’t get to know anymore about his character, not really, after the Thousandfold Thoughts. He’s a cipher that’s impossible to truly puzzle out from the outside.
Kellhus has an Ainoni style beard and Galeoth styled hair. A mix of Norsirai and Ketyai, showing he’s for the two different races of the Holy War.
Kellhus speaks to his followers like a cult-leader, love-bombing them by telling them how special they are. Flattery is such a hard thing to resist.
Esmenet almost realized that she never had confirmation of Achamian’s death, and it fills her with horror. Why? Because she knows, deep down, that she betrayed their love, tossed it aside for something new.
We see Esmenet take her first steps to become Empress, giving counsel. She’s so smart, she realizes just how Kellhus is manipulating her, how even Serwë’s voice is really coming at Kellhus’s manipulation. He’s molded her for this moment, and she surrenders utterly to him. Because she believes in him. It’s not romantic love Esmenet has for him, it’s worship. Adoration. It’s delusional.
Just like Serwë’s. Only that girl never had her delusions of Kellhus’s shattered.
Kellhus turned Martemus, one of the most loyal men in the series, the Xinemus in Conphas’s retinue, into an assassin. He led him down a road by first appearing as more than men, then helping Xinemus to understand that he’s better than the men who gave him commands, then even Conphas. That he had more worth than following the orders of a narcissist. Then Kellhus just had to build that into resentment, into murderous hate and unleash him.
In other stories, Conphas would have done something that galled Martemus. Something that went beyond the general’s moral code. An act too far across the pale, or something personal. But that never happens.
Conphas narcissism is on full display. Martemus is the closest thing he had to a friend, and learning that the man betrayed him, came to kill him, and now is dead has no negative effect. He has the sense of relief at surviving and admires the skill Kellhus said, like one general admiring the tactics of his rival. Especially one he just “beat.” Notice how Conphas thinks he won though he did nothing. If Sarcellus hadn’t survived his own assassination, Conphas would be dead.
So Kellhus’s last ditch effort to advert the Circumfix has failed. Readers like to believe Kellhus is infallible. That he doesn’t make mistakes, but he does. He has weaknesses that Bakker puts in the text, and those weaknesses come to matter in the Unholy Consult. He can plan and strategize, but no one can predict how something as messy as combat will fall out.
Fustaras has all the hallmark of that gruff NCO trope. Which Bakker subverts by the man getting terrified when it all goes wrong, shocked that the plan of marching into the heart of Zaudunyani territory and attacking their judges (which are their priests) wouldn’t result in the massacre.
Fault is the poison the Consult wishes to cleanse from the world. Fault is sin. Fault is condemnation. Fault is blame. It’s answering for your actions. And in this world, those actions mostly lead to damnation. This maybe the first real clue we get about the Consult’s motivations in the book. (It’s all so jumbled up when you learn what information after reading the books so many times).
We can see Cnaiür’s madness is still lurking. He’s still trying to be of the People, and Proyas’s admittance of trust is a further reminder that Cnaiür likes the man as a friend. But he shouldn’t. He’s “kine,” prey for the hunter.
“First wife of my heart.” Serwë has become a proxy for Anissi. She was his proof to manhood before but also the on he could be weak with. He didn’t have to be the perfect Scylvendi with her. Serwë never gave him that no matter how hard he tried. Perhaps this is what drove him to be more and more harsh with her, to mold her into what he needed her to be. But she refused. She instead let Kellhus mold her. Just like Moënghus did with Cnaiür. In a way, Cnaiür tried to be Dûnyain with Serwë but his anger and madness thwarted his attempts at communication, at forming that connection he had with Anise. But he still wants her, needs her. And he needs his son. He can’t hate Moënghus any longer. Because it’s his son now.
And he’s found his way to get it all back.
Despite how bad everything is going, Saubon is happy. He got what he wanted. He won’t be king long at this rate. But he’ll hold it for as long as he can.
Well, Saubon, you will be damned. Maybe not for what you did by betraying Kellhus, but by all the acts of your life. You will suffer an eternity of torment, buried in the mud of Mengedda, wracked by your guilt.
Kellhus was never there, he’s hallucinating out of guilt. Perhaps he had this conversation with Kellhus, or perhaps he’s spent enough time with the Dûnyain to know the sort of words he would say, the Truths that Saubon tries so hard to deny in his heart. But Truths he knows because of Kellhus before.
Also notice it is Kellhus beating him at the end of this section. “But the gold-ringed fists kept falling. They would never stop.” No longer is he haunted by his actual father’s beatings, but by the metaphysical beatings of the prophet he’s betrayed, as seen by the haloed hands administering his current beatings.
We see Kellhus is deep in the probability trances for days trying to find a way out. He doesn’t.
Esmenet finding baby Moënghus’s eyes unnerving is a subtle reminder to who his real father is.
Serwë’s faith in Kellhus is absolute. I’ve often wondered about what Serwë did to earn damnation. And I think this is it. She put her faith in a man and not in one of the gods. She believed in Kellhus, and it earned her damnation for it. Perhaps this is part of what motivates Kellhus in his plan going forward. After all, he ensured she’d die so Esmenet would live in case Kellhus survived crossing death to reach his destination.
Esmenet spells it out though. Kellhus has found the Shortest Path. Submitting to the Circumflex. Just like he saw in a vision at far earlier in the novel. Possibly given to him by Ajolki, the horned god. The god of murder. The trickster.
Then we do the literary equivalent of the smash cut to Kellhus being condemned. As a reader, you expect Kellhus to somehow talk his way out of this, to plead his case, to win over his enemies. And it is taken away, witnessed from the one person who has the most faith in Kellhus: Serwë.
“All things both sacred and vile speak to the hearts of Men, and they are bewildered, and holding out their hands to darkness, they name it light.” This quote from the Tusk is very telling. The Inchoroi wrote the tusk, twisting the beliefs of the humans to their own end. This maybe one of their verses put in there to muddy the waters even more by making sacred and vile equals.
And even in the midst of his last attempt to stop the circumflex, Kellhus is planting the seeds for Cnaiür’s intervention. After all, the Scylvendi is about to lose his prize, the reason he betrayed Kellhus to begin with. And at the hands of another “lie made flesh” like he fought at Anwurat.
Innocence is slain, throat slit, her blood allowed to pour out like dark wine. The heroine of a thousand fantasy stories, the beautiful maiden who’s the lover of our hero, executed. Condemned to torment for believing in him. Seduced by the Dûnyain’s lies.
But she had one child born pink.