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first time he noticed the bruising about Kellhus’s face. The cuts.
    They tortured him … murdered Serwë.
    “Yes,” Kellhus said, ruefully holding out his hands. He looked almost embarrassed. “Would that everything healed so quickly.”
    Somehow these words found Achamian’s fury.
    “You could see the Consult all along—all along!—and yet you said nothing to me … Why?”
    Why Esmenet?
    Kellhus raised his brows, sighed. “The time wasn’t right. But you already know this.”
    “Do I?”
    Kellhus smiled while pursing his lips, as though at once pained and bemused. “Now, you and your School must parlay, where before you would have simply seized me. I concealed the skin-spies from you for the same reason you concealed me from your Mandate masters.”
    But you already know this, his eyes repeated.
    Achamian could think of no reply.
    “You’ve told them,” Kellhus continued, turning to resume their stroll between the blooming queues.
    “I’ve told them.”
    “And do they accept your interpretation?”
    “What interpretation?”
    “That I’m more than the sign of the Second Apocalypse.”
    More . A tremor passed through him, body and soul.
    “They think it unlikely.”
    “I should imagine you find it difficult to describe me … to make them understand.”
    Achamian stared for a helpless moment, then looked to his feet.
    “So,” Kellhus continued, “what are your interim instructions?”
    “To pretend to give you the Gnosis. I told them you would go to the Spires otherwise. And to ensure that nothing”—Achamian paused, licked his lips—“that nothing happens to you.”
    Kellhus both grinned and scowled—so like Xinemus before his blinding.
    “So you’re to be my bodyguard?”
    “They have good reason to worry—as do you. Think of the catastrophe you’ve wrought. For centuries the Consult has hidden in the fat of the Three Seas, while we were little more than a laughingstock. They could act with impunity. But now that fat has been cooked away. They’ll do anything to recover what they’ve lost. Anything .”
    “There have been other assassins.”
    “But that was before … The stakes are far higher now. Perhaps these skin-spies act on their own. Perhaps they’re … directed.”
    Kellhus studied him for a moment. “You fear one of the Consult might be directly involved … that an Old Name shadows the Holy War.”
    He nodded. “Yes.”
    Kellhus did not immediately reply, at least not with words. Instead, everything about him—his stance, his expression, even the fixity of his gaze—grew sharp with monumental intent. “The Gnosis,” he finally said. “Will you give it to me, Akka?”
    He knows. He knows the power he would wield . Somewhere, beneath some footing of his soul, the ground seemed to fall away.
    “If you demand it … though I …” He looked to Kellhus, somehow understanding that the man already knew what he was about to say. Every path, it seemed, every implication, had already been travelled by those shining blue eyes. Nothing surprises him .
    “Yes,” Kellhus said with a peculiar moroseness. “Once I accept the Gnosis, I yield the protection afforded by the Chorae.”
    “Exactly.”
    In the beginning Kellhus would possess only the vulnerabilities of a sorcerer, none of the strengths. The Gnosis, far more than the Anagogis, was an analytic and systematic sorcery. Even the most primitive Cants required extensive precursors, components that damned nonetheless for being inert.
    “Which is why you must protect me,” Kellhus concluded. “Henceforth you will be my Vizier. You will reside here, in the Fama Palace, at my disposal.” Words spoken with the authority of a Shrial Edict, but infused with such force of certainty, such inevitability, that it seemed they described more than they demanded, that Achamian’s compliance was some ancient and conspicuous fact.
    Kellhus did not wait for his reply—none was needed.
    “ Can you protect me, Akka?”
    Achamian