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 your 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 pained line. "It means that you you, Proyas, not we, have betrayed Achamian."

The handsome face slackened in horror. His pulse drummed. I must move carefully. I must move carefully.

"No," Proyas said.

Kellhus closed his eyes as though in disappointment. "Yes. You accuse us because you hold yourself accountable."

"Accountable? Accountable for what?" He snorted like a frightened adolescent. "I did nothing."

"But you did everything, Proyas. You needed the Scarlet Spires, and the Scarlet Spires needed Achamian."

"No one knows what happened to Achamian!"

"But you you know . . . I can see this knowledge within you." know . . . I can see this knowledge within you."

The Conriyan Prince stumbled backward. "You see nothing!"

So 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 . . . That word . . .

"Doubt?" Proyas fairly cried. "How could I not doubt? The Holy War stands upon the precipice, Kellhus!"

Kellhus smiled the way Xinemus had once smiled at things both touching and foolish.

"The God tries tries us, Proyas. He's yet to pass sentence! Tell me, how can there be trial without doubt?" us, Proyas. He's yet to pass sentence! Tell me, how can there be trial without doubt?"

"He tries us . . ." Proyas repeated, his face blank.

"Of course course," Kellhus said plaintively. "Simply open your heart and you'll see!"

"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 his misgivings, suddenly collapsed into suspicion and disbelief.

Someone has warned him . . . The Scylvendi? Has he wandered so far?

"Proyas . . ."

I should have killed him.

"And how about you, Kellhus? Kellhus?" Proyas spat. "Do you doubt? Does the great Warrior-Prophet fear for the future?"

Kellhus looked to Esmenet, saw that she wept. He reached out and clasped her cold hands.

"No," he said.

I do not fear.

Proyas was already backing out the double doors, into the brighter light of the antechamber. "You will."

For over a thousand years Caraskand's great limestone walls had stared across the broken countryside of Enathpaneah. When Triamis I, perhaps the greatest of the Aspect-Emperors, had raised them, his detractors in Imperial Cenei had scoffed at the expenditure, claiming that he who conquers all foes has no need of walls. Triamis, the chroniclers write, had dismissed them by saying, "No man can conquer the future." And indeed, over the ensuing centuries Caraskand's "Triamic Walls," as they were called, would blunt the rush of history many times, if not redirect it altogether. And sometimes, they would cage it.

Day after day, it seemed, Inrithi horns blared from the high towers, calling the Men of the Tusk to the ramparts, for the Padirajah threw his people at Triamis's mighty fortifications with reckless fury, each time convinced the strength of the starving idolaters would fail. Haggard and hungry, Galeoth, Conriyans, and Tydonni manned the war engines abandoned by Caraskand's erstwhile defenders, casting pots of flaming pitch from mangonels, great iron bolts from ballistae. Thunyeri, Nansur, and Ainoni gathered on the walls, crowding beneath the battlements and huddling beneath shields to avoid volleys of arrows that at times darkened the sun. And day after day, it seemed, they beat the heathen back.

Even as they cursed them, the Kianene could only marvel at their desperate fury. Twice young Athjeari led daring sorties across the rutted plain, once seizing the sappers' trenches and collapsing their tunnels, once charging over slovenly earthworks and sacking an isolated encampment. All the world could see they were doomed, and yet they fought as though they knew it not.

But they knew-as only men stalked by famine could know.

The hemoplexy, or the hollows, was running its course. Many, such as Chepheramunni, the King-Regent of High Ainon, lingered on death's marches, while others, such as Zursodda, Palatine-Governor of Koraphea, or Cynnea, Earl of Agmundr, finally succumbed. The funeral pyres still burned, but more and more they took casualties, and not the sick, as their fuel. As the flames consumed the Earl of Agmundr, his famed longbowmen launched burning arrows over the walls, and the Kianene wondered at the madness of the idolaters. Cynnea would be among the last of the great Inrithi lords to perish in the grip of the Disease.

But even as the plague waned, the threat of starvation waxed. Dread Famine, Bukris, the God who devoured men and vomited up skin and bones, walked the streets and halls of Caraskand.

Throughout the city, men began hunting cats, dogs, and finally even rats for sustenance. Poorer caste-nobles had taken to opening veins in their mounts. The horses themselves quickly consumed what thatched roofs could be found. Many bands began holding lotteries to see who would butcher their horse. Those without horses scratched through the dirt, looking for tubers. They boiled grapevines and even thistles to quiet the nagging madness of their bellies. Leather-from saddles, jerkins, or elsewhere-was also boiled and consumed. When the horns sounded the harnesses of many would swing like skirts, having lost their straps and buckles to some steaming pot. Gaunt men roamed the streets, looking for anything to eat, their faces blank, their movements sluggish, as though they walked through sand. Rumours circulated of men feasting on the bloated corpses of the Kianene, or committing murder in the dead of night to quiet their mad hunger.

In the wake of Famine, foul Disease returned, preying on the weak. Men, particularly among the caste-menials, began losing teeth to scurvy. Dysentery punished others with cramps and bloody diarrhoea. In many quarters, one could find warriors wandering without their breeches, wallowing, as some are wont to do, in their degradation.

During this time, the furor surrounding Kellhus, Prince of Atrithau, and the tensions between those who acclaimed him and those who condemned him, escalated. In Council, Conphas, Gothyelk, and even Gotian relentlessly denounced him, claiming he was a False Prophet, a cancer that must be excised from the Holy War. Who could doubt the God punished them? The Holy War, they insisted, could have only one Prophet, and his name was Inri Sejenus. Proyas, who'd once eloquently defended Kellhus, withdrew from all such debates, and refused to say anything. Only Saubon still spoke in his favour, though he did so half-heartedly, not wishing to alienate those whose approval he needed to secure his claim to Caraskand.

Despite this, none dared move against the so-called Warrior-Prophet. His followers, the Zaudunyani, numbered in the tens of thousands, though they were less numerous among the upper castes. Many still remembered the Miracle of Water in the desert, how Kellhus had saved the Holy War, including those miscreants who now called him anathema. Strife and riot broke out, and for the first time Inrithi swords shed Inrithi blood. Knights repudiated their lords. Brothers forsook brothers. Countrymen turned upon one another. Only Gotian and Conphas, it seemed, were able to command the loyalty of their men.

Nevertheless, when the horns sounded, the Inrithi forgot 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. And to the heathens who assailed them, it seemed dead men defended the walls. Safe about their fires, the Kianene whispered tales of wights and damned souls, of a Holy War that had already perished, but fought on, such was its hate.

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 luxury of the place reminded Serwe of her indolent days as a concubine in House Gaunum. Through the open colonnade on the far side of the room she could see Caraskand wander across the hills beneath the sky. She was reclined on a green couch, her arms drawn out of her gown's shoulders so that it hung from the gorgeous sash about her waist. Her pink son squirmed against her naked chest, and she had just begun feeding when she heard the latch drawn. She had expected it to be one of the Kianene house slaves, so she gasped in surprise and delight when she felt the Warrior-Prophet's hand about her bare neck. The other brushed her bare breast as he reached to draw a gentle finger along the infant's chubby back.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, as she raised her lips through his beard to give him a kiss.

"Much happens," he said gently. "I wanted to know you were safe . . . Where's 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?"

"Moenghus."

Serwe furrowed her brow. "I thought his name was . . . Aethel, or something like that."

"Aethelarius," the Warrior-Prophet said. "In Atrithau, Kings take a great ancestor's name when they ascend the throne. Moenghus is his true name."

"Then," she said, running fingers over the fuzz of the infant's pale scalp, "that's what his name will be when he's anointed: Moenghus." This wasn't an assertion. In the Warrior-Prophet's presence all declarations became questions.

Kellhus grinned. "That's what we shall name our child."

"What kind of man is your father, my Prophet?"

"A most mysterious one, Serwe."

Serwe laughed softly. "Does he know that he fathered the voice of the God?"

Kellhus pursed his lips in mock concentration. "Perhaps."

Serwe, 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 now 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 sin? To find rapture where others suffer?"

"Not for you, Serwe. Not for you."

Serwe gasped and looked down at her suckling babe.

"Moenghus is hungry," she laughed.

Glad to have concluded their long search, Rash and Wrigga paused along the crest of the wall. Dropping his shield, Rash sat with his back to the parapet, while Wrigga stood, leaning against the stonework, staring through an embrasure at the fires of the enemy across the Tertae Plain. Neither man paid heed to the shadowy figure crouched beneath the battlements farther down.

"I saw the child," Wrigga said, still staring into the dark.

"Did you?" Rash asked with genuine interest. "Where?"

"Before the lower gates of the Fama Palace. The Anointing was public . . . You didn't know, did you?"

"Because no one tells me anything!"

Wrigga resumed his scrutiny of the night. "Surprisingly dark, I thought."

"What?"

"The child. The child seemed so dark."

Rash snorted. "Birth hair . . . It'll soon fall out. I swear my second daughter had sideburns!"

Friendly laughter. "Someday, when all this is over, I'll come and woo your hairy daughters."

"Please . . . Start with my hairy wife!"

More laughter, choked by a sudden realization. "Oh ho! So that's how you got your nickname!"

"Saucy bastard!" Rash cried. "No, my skin's just-"

"The child's name," a voice grated from the darkness. "What is it?"

Both men started, turned to the towering spectre of the Scylvendi. They'd seen the man before-few Men of the Tusk hadn't-but neither had ever found themselves so close to the barbarian. Even in moonlight, his aspect was unnerving. The wild black hair. The fuming brow above eyes like chips of ice. The powerful shoulders, faintly stooped, as though bent by the preternatural strength of his back. The lean, adolescent waist. And the arms, thatched by scars both ritual and incidental, strapped by unfatted muscle. He seemed a thing of stone, ancient and famished.

"Wh-what's this?" Rash stammered.

"The name!" Cnaiur snarled. "What did they name it?"

"Moenghus!" Wrigga blurted. "They anointed him by the name, Moenghus . . ."

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.

Some other way, Father. There must be.

No one came to the Citadel of the Dog, not even the most desperate of the rat eaters.

Standing high upon the crest of a ruined wall, Kellhus gazed across the dark expanse of Caraskand with her thousand points of smouldering light. Beyond the walls, particularly across the plains to the north, he could see the innumerable fires of the Padirajah's army.

The path, Father . . . Where's the path?

No matter how many times he submitted to the rigors of the Probability Trance, all the lines were extinguished, either by disaster or by the weight of excessive permutations. The variables were too many, the possibilities too precipitous.

Over the past weeks he'd exerted whatever influence he'd possessed, hoping to circumvent what now seemed more and more inevitable. Of the Great Names, only Saubon still openly supported him. Though Proyas had so far refused to join Conphas's coalition of caste-nobles, the Conriyan Prince continued to rebuff Kellhus's every overture. Among the lesser Men of the Tusk, the divisions between the Zaudunyani and the Orthodox, as they were now calling themselves, were deepening. And the threat of further, more determined attacks by the Consult made it impossible for him to move freely among them-as he must to secure those he already possessed and to conquer those he did not.

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 naught. 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 . . . He'd relived his brief encounter with the Cishaurim messenger a thousand times, analyzing, evaluating, weighing alternate interpretations-all for naught. 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?

He heard the rattle of rock against rock, then a small cascade of gravel and grit. He peered through the shadows amassed about the ruin's roots. The blasted walls formed a roofless labyrinth beyond the Nail of Heaven's pale reach. A darker shadow clambered across heaped debris. He glimpsed a round face in starlight . . .

He called down. "Esmenet? How did you find me?"

Her grin was pure mischief, though Kellhus could see the concern beneath.

She's never loved another as she loves me. Not even Achamian.