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January 13 - January 25, 2025
If war was worship, then Cnaiür would be the most pious of the Scylvendi—not simply of the People, but the greatest among them as well. He told himself his arms were his glory. He was Cnaiür urs Skiötha, the most violent of all men.
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.
What if the choice isn’t between certainties, between this faith and that, but between faith and doubt? Between renouncing the mystery and embracing it?”
‘What could be unthinkable when I’m already damned? What act lies beyond me, when I have no dignity?’
“‘What love lies beyond sacrifice?’”
“Surely,” he said, “it’s better to wager suffering to avoid death than to wager death to avoid suffering.”
The 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.
Then, with the shadowy lassitude that characterized so much of that march, his doubt flipped into certainty, and he felt an almost intellectual wonder—the wonder of finding the conclusion to one’s life. 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.
Grief for his compassion. Delusion for his revelation. Sin so he might forgive. Degradation so he might raise her high. He was the origin. He was the destination. He was the from where and the to which, and he was here!
Men, Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen—they could only truly know the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others.
“Men praise what flatters and mock what rebukes—you know that.
The healthy always begrudged the sick: being shackled by another’s incapacities was no easy thing.
“Look at the wages of my devotion!” he’d once shouted. “Do the sockets weep, for my cheek feels dry. Do the lids wither, eh, Akka? Describe them to me, for I can no longer see!”
“I’m an old sailor. I’ve seen enough voyages blown off course, enough vessels founder, to know the God gives no guarantees, no matter who the captain or what the cargo.”
“There’s only one thing certain about this Holy War: there’s never been a greater bloodletting.”
If sorcerers sneered at men of faith, they did so because faith had rendered them pariahs, and because faith, it seemed to them, knew nothing of the very transcendence it claimed to monopolize. Why submit when one could yoke?
For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty.
“You would risk a war within these walls? Inrithi against Inrithi?” Proyas swallowed, struggled to shore up his gaze. “If that’s what the God demands of me.” “And how does one know what your God demands?”
Tell me, how can there be trial without doubt?”
Is that a sin? To find rapture where others suffer?”
“And what of your immortal soul?” “Then let it be damned!” he roared, leaping to his feet. “I embrace it—embrace it all! Damnation in this life! Damnation in all others! Torment heaped upon torment! I would bear all to be King for a day! I would see you broken and blooded if that meant I could own this throne! I would see the God’s own eyes plucked out!”
“You fear that as my power waxes, yours will wane. You do what you do not in the name of the God, but in the name of avarice. You wouldn’t tolerate even the God to possess your Holy War. And yet, in each of your hearts there is an itch, an anguished question that I alone can see: What if he truly is the Prophet? What doom awaits us then?”
“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?”
“‘Hearken Truth, for it strides fiercely among you, and will not be denied.’”
“‘Fear him, for he is the deceiver, the Lie made Flesh, come among you to foul the waters of your heart.’”
There’s many ways of seeing. And all of us possess eyes that never breach skin. Men are wrong to think nothing lies between blindness and sight.”
Hope was never so poison as when it deluded loved ones.
And this demand, I think, is no real demand at all, since listening without bias, without bigotry, is simply what all wise men do.”
“Because!” Cnaiür boomed in his mightiest battlefield voice. “He bears a grudge no man can fathom!”
It was strange the way memory cared nothing for the form of the past. Perhaps this was why those dying of old age were so often incredulous. Through memory, the past assailed the present, not in queues arranged by calender and chronicle, but as a hungry mob of yesterdays.
‘Those who speak truth,’ the Latter Prophet tells us, ‘have naught to fear, though they should perish for it …’”
For all of us parse and ration our words, pitch them to the ears of the listener.
By calling them such, you simply do what all men do when assailed by the Unknown: you drag it into the circle of what you know. You clothe new enemies in the trappings of old.
Are you so certain this man is merely what you think? And whence comes this certainty? From wisdom? Or from desperation?
