The Warrior Prophet (The Prince of Nothing, #2)

by R. Scott Bakker

“And ‘barbarity,’ I fear, is simply a word for unfamiliarity that threatens.”

Then the earth began spitting up bones. Wasn’t this proof that the ground answered to the tribulations of men, that it was not indifferent? And if earth—earth!—wasn’t indifferent, then what of the future? Could what came after actually determine what came before? What if the line running between past and future was neither singular nor straight, but multiple and bent, capable of looping in ways that contradicted the Law of Before and After? Could he be the Harbinger, as Achamian insisted?

Men like Conphas, on the other hand, they tested. Men like themselves …

If one couldn’t trust the God’s own voice, if one refused to listen—even for sentiment’s sake!—then everything became scepticism and scholarly disputation. Xinemus listened to his heart, and this was at once his strength and his weakness. The heart recited no scripture.

“Everywhere … Everywhere we’re surrounded by the blessed and the cursed, the sacred and the profane. But our hearts are like hands, they grow callous to the world. And yet, like our hands even the most callous heart will blister if overworked or chafed by something new. For some time we may feel the pinch, but we ignore it because we have so much work to do.” Kellhus had looked down into his right hand. Suddenly he balled it into a fist, raised it high. “And then one strike, with a hammer or a sword, and the blister breaks, our heart is torn. And then we suffer, for we feel the ache for the blessed, the sting of the cursed. We no longer see, we witness

world-born men, Kellhus had found, despised complexity as much as they cherished flattery. Most men would rather die in deception than live in uncertainty.

Now the fact that others have begun calling him Prophet is disturbing, I agree. But it is not his doing. People are weak, Conphas. Is it so surprising that they look to him and see his strength for more than what it is?”

Men are forever pointing at others, which is why I always follow the knuckle and not the nail. —ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN

Cnaiür looked down, startled. A young woman, her leg slicked in blood, an infant strapped to her back, clutched his knee, beseeching him in some unknown tongue. He raised his boot to kick her, then unaccountably lowered it. He leaned forward and hoisted her before him onto his saddle. She

Doubt, he would say, set men free … Doubt, not truth! Beliefs were the foundation of actions. Those who believed without doubting, he would say, acted without thinking. And those who acted without thinking were enslaved.

How many faiths are there? How many competing beliefs? And you would murder another on the slender hope that yours is somehow the only one?”

Vengeance roamed the halls of the compound—like a God. And he sang his song with a beast’s blind fury, parting wall from foundation, blowing ceiling into sky, as though the works of man were things of sand. And when he found them, cowering beneath their Analogies, he sheared through their Wards like a rapist through a cotton shift. He beat them with hammering lights, held their shrieking bodies as though they were curious things, the idiot thrashing of an insect between thumb and forefinger … Death came swirling down.

vulgar think the God by analogy to man and so worship Him in the form of the Gods. The learned think the God by analogy to principles and so worship Him in the form of Love or Truth. But the wise think the God not at all. They know that thought, which is finite, can only do violence to the God, who is infinite. It is enough, they say, that the God thinks them.

There was no final page, he realized, no last cubit to the scroll. The ink simply gave out, and all was blank and desert white.