Read The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (13 page)

BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
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You have doomed your School.
“You’re drunk,” the chanv addict said, his tone both unnerved and disgusted.
Eleäzaras raised his hand in a foppish wave. “Go speak to him yourself. He’ll discern more than pickled meat through your skin. You’ll see—”
He heard the man snort, then kick away a metal bowl as he withdrew.
The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires reclined in his settee, resumed his study of the Fama Palace through the afternoon haze. The network of walls, terraces, and Fanic colonnades. The faint smoke rising from what had to be the kitchens. The clots of distant penitents filing beneath the square gates.
Somewhere … He’s in there somewhere.
“Oh, yes, and Iyokus?” he abruptly called.
“What?”
“I would beware the Mandate Schoolman if I were you.” He absently pawed the table beside him, looking for more wine—or something. “I think he plans to kill you.”
CHAPTER THREE
CARASKAND
If soot stains your tunic, dye it black. This is vengeance.
—EKYANNUS I,
44 EPISTLES
 
 
Here we find further argument for Gotagga’s supposition that the world is round. How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?
—AJENCIS,
DISCOURSE ON WAR
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand
The dry season. On the Steppe, it betrayed its coming with a variety of signs: the first sight of the Lance among the stars on the northern horizon; the quickness with which the milk soured; the first trailers of the
caünnu,
the midsummer wind.
At the beginning of the rainy season, Scylvendi herdsmen ranged the Steppe in search of the sandy ground where the grasses grew quicker. When the rains waxed, they drove their herds to harder ground, where the grasses grew slower but remained green longer. Then, when the hot winds chased the clouds to oblivion, they simply followed the forage, always searching for the wild herbs and short grasses that made for the best meat and milk.
This pursuit always caught someone, particularly those who were too greedy to cull wilful animals from their herd. Headstrong cattle could lead an entire herd too far afield, into vast tracts of over-grazed or blighted pasture. Every season, it seemed, some fool returned without horse or cattle.
Cnaiür now knew himself to be that fool.
I have given him the Holy War.
In the council chamber of the dead Sapatishah, Cnaiür sat high on the tiers that surrounded the council table, watching the Dûnyain intently. He did his best to ignore the Inrithi crowding the seats about him, but he found himself continually accosted—congratulated. One fool, some Tydonni thane, even had the temerity to kiss his knee—his knee! Once again they called out “Scylvendi!” as though in salute.
Flanked by hanging gold-on-black representations of the Circumfix, the Warrior-Prophet sat upon a raised dais, so that he looked down upon the Great Names sitting about the council table. His beard had been oiled and braided. His flaxen hair tumbled across his shoulders. Beneath a stiff knee-length vestment, he wore a white silk gown embroidered by the forking of silvery leaves and grey branches. Braziers had been set about him, and in their light he seemed aqueous, surreal—every bit the otherworldly prophet he claimed to be. His luminous eyes roamed the room, stirring gasps and whispers wherever they passed. Twice his look found Cnaiür, who cursed himself for looking away.
Wretched! Wretched!
The sorcerer, the woman-hearted buffoon whom everyone had thought dead, stood before the dais to the Dûnyain’s left, wearing an ankle-length vest of crimson over a white linen frock. He, at least, wasn’t festooned like a slaver’s concubine—as were the others. But he had a look in his eyes that Cnaiür recognized, as though he too couldn’t quite believe the lot fortune had cast him. Cnaiür had overheard Uranyanka on the tier below saying that the man, Drusas Achamian, was now the Warrior-Prophet’s Vizier, his teacher and protector.
Whatever he was, he looked obscenely fat compared with the rakish Inrithi caste-nobles. Perhaps, Cnaiür thought, the Dûnyain planned to use his bulk as a shield should the Consult or Cishaurim attack.
The Great Names sat about the table as before, though now stripped of the hauteur belonging to their station. Where once they had been bickering kings, the Lords of the Holy War, they were now little more than counsellors, and they knew it. They were silent for the most part, pensive. Occasionally one of them would lean to mutter something in his neighbour’s ear, but nothing more.
In the course of a single day, the world these men had known had been struck to its foundation, utterly overturned. There was wonder in that—Cnaiür knew this only too well—but there was an absurd uncertainty also. For the first time in their lives they stood upon trackless ground, and with few exceptions they looked to the Dûnyain to show them the way. Much as Cnaiür had once looked to Moënghus.
As the last of the Lesser Names hunted seats across the tiers, the rumble of hushed voices trailed into expectant silence. The air beneath the corbelled dome seemed to whine with a collective discomfort. For these men, Cnaiür realized, the Warrior-Prophet’s presence collapsed too many intangible things. How could they speak without praying? Disagree without blaspheming? Even the presumption to advise would seem an act of outrageous conceit.
In the safety of unanswered prayers, they had thought themselves pious. Now they were like boasting gossips, astounded to find their story’s principal in their midst. And he might say
anything,
throw their most cherished conceits upon the pyre of his condemnation. What would they do, the devout and self-righteous alike? What would they do now that their hallowed scripture
could talk back?
Cnaiür almost barked with laughter. He lowered his head and spat between his knees. He cared not if others marked his sneer. There was no honour here, only advantage—absolute and irremediable.
There was no honour—but there was
truth
. Was there not?
The insufferable ritual and pageantry, which seemed obligatory to all things Inrithi, began with Gotian reciting the Temple Prayer. He stood as rigid as an adolescent in vestments that appeared newly made: white cloth with intricate panels, each embroidered with two golden tusks crossing a golden circle—yet another version of the Circumfix. His voice shook as he spoke, and he halted once, overcome with passion.
Cnaiür found himself looking about the chamber, his breath tight in his chest, quietly astounded that men wept rather than jeered. And then, for the first time, the depths of the dread purpose that moved these men became
palpable
.
He had seen it. He had witnessed it on the fields beyond Caraskand’s wall—the lunatic determination, enough to shame even his Utemot. He had watched men vomit boiled grass as they stumbled forward. He had seen others who could scarce walk throw themselves upon the weapons of the heathen—just to disarm them! He had seen men smile—cry out in joy!—as the mastodons descended upon them. He could remember thinking that these men, these
Inrithi,
were the true People of War.
Cnaiür had seen it, but he had not understood—not fully. What the Dûnyain had wrought here would never be undone. Even if the Holy War should perish, the
word
of these events would survive. Ink would make this madness immortal. Kellhus had given these men more than gestures or promises, more even than insight or direction. He had given them
dominion
. Over their doubts. Over their most hated foes. He had made them strong.
But how could
lies
do such a thing?
The world these men dwelt within was a fever-dream, a delusion. And yet it seemed as real to them, Cnaiür knew, as his world seemed to him. The only difference—and Cnaiür was curiously troubled by the thought—was that he could, in meticulous detail, track the origins of their world within his, and only then because he knew the Dûnyain. Of all those congregated in this room, he alone knew the ground, the treacherous footing, beneath their feet.
Suddenly everything Cnaiür witnessed was parsed in two, as though his eyes had become enemies, one against the other. Gotian had completed the Temple Prayer, and several of the Dûnyain’s high priests, his Nascenti, had begun a Whelming for those among the Lesser Names who’d been too ill to partake in the ceremony previously. A flaming basin of oil had been set before the Warrior-Prophet, who sat idol still. The first of the initiates, a Thunyeri by the look of his braids, knelt beside the tripod, then exchanged inaudible orisons with the administering priest. Though his face had been battered by pestilence and war, his eyes were those of a ten-year-old, pinned wide in hope and apprehension. In a single motion the priest dipped his hand into the burning oil then drew it across the Thunyeri’s features. For a heartbeat the man gazed from a face aflame, until a second priest doused him with a wet towel. The room thundered with exultant cries, and the thane, his expression bent by profound passion, staggered into the jubilant arms of his comrades.
For the Inrithi, the man had crossed an intangible threshold. They had watched a profound transformation, a base soul raised to the assembly of the elect. Where before he’d been polluted, now he was cleansed. And they had witnessed this
with their own eyes
. Who could question it?
But for Cnaiür, the only threshold crossed was that between foolishness and outright idiocy. He had watched an instrument, not a sacred rite—a mechanism, like the elaborate mills he had seen in Nansur, a way for the Dûnyain to grind these men into something he could digest. And this too was something he had seen with his own eyes.
Unlike the Inrithi, he did not stand within the circle of the Dûnyain’s deceit. Where they saw things from within, he saw them from without. He saw
more
. It was strange the way beliefs could have an inside and an outside, that what looked like hope or truth or love from within could be a scythe or a hammer, things wielded for other ends, when seen from without.
Tools.
Cnaiür breathed deeply. This thought had tormented him once. It had been one too many.
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, absently watching the farce unfold.
The Inrithi, Proyas had told him once, believed it was the lot of men to live within the designs, inscrutable or otherwise, of those greater than themselves. And in this sense, Cnaiür realized, Kellhus truly
was
their prophet. They were, as the memorialists claimed, willing slaves, always striving to beat down the furies that drove them to sovereign ends. That the designs—the tracks—they claimed to follow were authored in the Outside simply served their vanity, allowed them to abase themselves in a manner that fanned their overweening pride. There was no greater tyranny, the memorialists said, than that exercised by slaves over slaves.
But now the slaver stood among them. What did it matter, Kellhus had asked as they crossed the Steppe, that he mastered those already enslaved? There was no honour, only advantage. To believe in honour was to stand
inside
things, to keep company with slaves and fools.
The Whelming had come to a close, and Saubon, the titular King of Caraskand, was standing—called to account by the Warrior-Prophet.
“I will not march,” the Galeoth Prince said in a dead voice. “Caraskand is mine. I will not relinquish it—even if I be damned as a result.”
“But the Warrior-Prophet has
demanded
that you march,” silver-haired Gotian cried. Something about the way the man said “Warrior-Prophet” made Cnaiür’s hackles rise—something febrile and unmanly. The Grandmaster of the Shrial Knights, who had been the Dûnyain’s most implacable foe before the exposure of Sarcellus, had since become his most fervent devotee. Such fickleness of spirit only deepened Cnaiür’s contempt for these people.
“I will not march,” Saubon repeated, as though speaking from a nightmare. The Galeoth Prince, Cnaiür noted, actually had the temerity to wear his iron crown to this particular Council. Even though tall, ruddy with sun and warlike health, the man looked an adolescent playing king beneath the Warrior-Prophet. “By my hand I have seized this city, and by my hand I shall keep it!”
“Sweet Sejenus!” Gothyelk cried. “By
your
hand? And a thousand others, maybe!”
“I opened the gates!” Saubon retorted fiercely. “I delivered the city to the Holy War!”
“You delivered precious little that you haven’t kept,” Lord Chinjosa quipped. He looked pointedly at the iron crown as he spoke, smirking as though recalling a joke traded in secret.
“Headaches,” Gothyelk added, clenching a grey-haired fist. “He’s delivered many a headache …”
“I simply demand what’s mine by
right
!” Saubon snarled. “Proyas—you agreed to support me, Proyas!”
The Conriyan Prince glanced uneasily at the Dûnyain, then stared evenly at the would-be Caraskandi King. During the siege, he had refused to eat more than his men, so he was gaunt, and he looked older now that he was growing his beard out square like his father’s kinsmen. “No. I’ll not renege on my pledge, Saubon.” Indecision slackened his handsome face. “But things … have changed.”
BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
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