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you told them?”
    Achamian took a deep breath. “Because when I do, they’ll come for you, Kellhus.”
    “Perhaps they should.”
    “You don’t know my brothers.”

     
    Crouching naked in the pre-dawn gloom of the tent he shared with Kellhus, Cnaiür urs Skiötha peered at Serwë’s sleeping face and used the tip of his knife to hook and draw away obscuring threads of her hair. The veil parted, he set aside the knife and ran two callused fingers along her cheek. She twitched and sighed, nestled deeper in her blanket. So beautiful. So like his forgotten wife.
    Cnaiür watched her, as motionless and awake as she was motionless and asleep. All the while, he listened to the voices outside: Kellhus and the sorcerer, speaking nonsense.
    In some ways it seemed a miracle. Not only had he traversed the length of the Empire, he’d spat at the feet of the Emperor, humiliated Ikurei Conphas before his peers, and attained the rights and privileges of an Inrithi Prince. Now he rode as a general in the greatest host he’d ever witnessed. A host that could crush cities, strike down nations, murder whole peoples. A host for memorialists’ songs. A Holy War.
    And it was bent on storming Shimeh, the stronghold of the Cishaurim. The Cishaurim!
    Anasûrimbor Moënghus was Cishaurim.
    Despite the deranged scale of its ambition, the Dûnyain’s plan seemed to be working. In his dreams, Cnaiür had always come across Moënghus alone. Sometimes there would be words, sometimes not. There would always be bleeding. But now those dreams seemed little more than juvenile fantasies. Kellhus was right. After thirty years, Moënghus would be far more than someone who could be cut down in some alley; he would be a potentate. His would be an empire. And how could it be any other way? He was Dûnyain.
    Like his son, Kellhus.
    Who could say how far Moënghus’s power reached? Certainly it encompassed the Cishaurim and the Kianene—the question was only one of degree. But was that power with them now, in the Holy War?
    Did it include Kellhus?
    Send them a son. What better way could a Dûnyain overthrow his enemies?
    Already in their councils with Proyas, the Inrithi caste-nobles fell instantly silent at the sound of Kellhus’s voice. Already they watched him when they thought him preoccupied, whispered when they thought he couldn’t hear. And as pompous as they were, they deferred to him, not the way men accede to rank or station, but the way men yield to those who possess something they need. Somehow Kellhus had convinced them he stood outside the circle of the commonplace, outside even the extraordinary. It was more than just his claim to have dreamt of the Holy War from afar, more than the nefarious ways he spoke to them, as though he were a father playing upon the well-known conceits of his children. It was what he said as well, the truths .
    “But the God favours the righteous!” Ingiaban, the Palatine of Kethantei, had cried one night at council. At Cnaiür’s insistence, they’d been discussing various strategies the Sapatishah of Shigek, Skauras, might use to undo them. “Sejenus himself—”
    “And you,” Kellhus interrupted, “are you righteous?”
    The air in the Royal Pavilion became tense with a strange, aimless expectation.
    “ We are the righteous, yes,” the Palatine of Kethantei replied. “If not, then what in Juru’s name are we doing here ?”
    “Indeed,” Kellhus said. “What are we doing here?”
    Cnaiür glimpsed Lord Gaidekki turning to Xinemus—a worried glance.
    Wary, Ingiaban purchased time by sipping his anpoi. “Raising arms against the heathen. What else?”
    “So we raise arms against the heathen because we’re righteous?”
    “And because they’re wicked.”
    Kellhus smiled with stern compassion. “‘He who’s righteous is he who’s not found wanting in the ways of the God …’ Isn’t this what Sejenus himself writes?”
    “Yes. Of course.”
    “And who finds men wanting in the ways of