The Warrior Prophet Read Online Free PDF Page B

Achamian described the Ceneian Empire’s disarray at the end of the third millennium, Kellhus pressed him with questions—many of which Achamian couldn’t answer—regarding trade, currency, and social structure. Within moments he was offering explanations and interpretations as fine as any Achamian had read.
    “How?” Achamian blurted on one occasion.
    “How what?” Kellhus replied.
    “How is it that … that you see these things? No matter how deep I peer …”
    “Ah,” Kellhus laughed. “You’re starting to sound like my father’s tutors.” He regarded Achamian in a manner that was at once submissive and strangely indulgent, as though he conceded something to an overbearing yet favoured son. The sunlight teased golden threads from his hair and beard. “It’s simply a gift I have,” he said. “Nothing more.”
    But such a gift! It was more than what the ancients called noschi —genius. There was something about the way Kellhus thought, an elusive mobility Achamian had never before encountered. Something that made him seem, at times, a man from a different age.
    Most, by and large, were born narrow, and cared to see only that which flattered them. Almost without exception, they assumed their hatreds and yearnings to be correct, no matter what the contradictions, simply because they felt correct. Almost all men prized the familiar path over the true. That was the glory of the student, to step from the well-worn path and risk knowledge that oppressed, that horrified. Even still, Achamian, like all teachers, spent as much time uprooting prejudices as implanting truths. All souls were stubborn in the end.
    Not so with Kellhus. Nothing was dismissed outright. Any possibility could be considered. It was as though his soul moved over something trackless. Only the truth led him to conclusions.
    Question after question, all posed with precision, exploring this or that theme with gentle relentlessness, so thoroughly that Achamian was astonished by how much he himself knew. It was as though, prompted by Kellhus’s patient interrogation, he’d undertaken an expedition through a life he’d largely forgotten. Kellhus would ask about Memgowa, the antique Zeumi sage who had recently become the rage among literate Inrithi caste-nobles, and Achamian would remember reading his Celestial Aphorisms by candlelight at Xinemus’s coastal villa, savouring the exotic turn of his Zeumi sensibilities while listening to the wind scour the orchards outside the shuttered window, the plums thudding like iron spheres against the earth. Kellhus would question his interpretation of the Scholastic Wars, and Achamian would remember arguing with his own teacher, Simas, on the black parapets of Atyersus, thinking himself a prodigy, and cursing the inflexibility of old men. How he had hated those heights that day!
    Question after question. Nothing repeated. No ground covered twice. And with each answer, it seemed to Achamian that he exchanged guesses for true insight, and abstractions for recovered moments of his life. Kellhus, he realized, was a student who taught even as he learned, and Achamian had never known another like him. Not Inrau, not even Proyas. The more he answered the man, the more Kellhus seemed to hold the answer to his own life.
    Who am I? he would often think, listening to Kellhus’s melodious voice. What do you see?
    And then there were the questions regarding the Old Wars. Like most Mandate Schoolmen, Achamian found it easy to mention the Apocalypse and difficult to discuss it—very difficult. There was the pain of reliving the horror, of course. To speak of the Apocalypse was to wrestle heartbreak into words—an impossible task. And there was shame as well, as though he indulged some humiliating obsession. Too many men had laughed.
    But with Kellhus the difficulty was compounded by the fact of the man’s blood. He was an Anasûrimbor . How does one describe the end of the world to its unwitting messenger? At times,