The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (19 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Fantasy

BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
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He could remember his mother praying the night his father had died. Crying and praying. Was that what drove Hertata? Could he remember his mother praying?
They pressed through limbs and curses, and despite several swats suddenly found themselves staring about the armoured flanks of a Shrial Knight. Sol had never been so close to a Knight of the Tusk before, and he fairly trembled with dread. The white of the man’s surcoat was so clean, the gold embroidery so brilliant. He wore a hauberk of silvered mail, beneath which he seemed impossibly solid, rooted like a tree. Like most boys he knew, Sol feared warlike men as much as he envied them. But Hertata seemed entirely unimpressed; he poked his head past the Knight as though staring around a stone column.
Plucking up his courage, Sol followed Hertata’s lead and leaned forward to look up and down the street. Hundreds of Shrial Knights held the gathering masses in check. Others on horseback rode slowly along their lines, scanning the crowds as though expecting unwanted relatives. He was about to ask Hertata if he could see any sign of the Shriah when, without a word, the Knight gently pressed the two of them back into the midst of the other onlookers.
Hertata chattered endlessly about all the things his mother had told him about Maithanet. How he had cleansed the Thousand Temples, how he had smashed the heathen with his Holy War, how he slept on a mat beneath the Tusk-Tusk. How the
God himself
blessed his every word-word, his every glance-glance, and his every foot-fall-fall. “He need only see me, Sol! He need only look-look!”
“And then what?”
But Hertata would not say.
Suddenly they were hooting and cheering. They had both turned to the sound of a distant roar striated with faint cries of
“Maithanet!”
Then, for no reason Sol could fathom, they were roaring themselves. Hertata actually bounced up and down—that is, until the crowds pressed them forward into the Shrial Knight, who had locked arms with his holy brothers to either side. The cacophony seemed to go on and on, and for a time Sol feared his heart might burst for excitement. The Shriah! The Shriah was coming! Never had he stood so close to the Outside.
The shouts waxed on and on, slowly leached of their fervour by fatigue. Then, just as Sol decided all their commotion was stupid—who cheered the invisible?—he glimpsed sunlight flashing across jewelled rings …
The Shrial Procession.
His heart hammered in his chest. The sun seemed to spin in the sky above. Though breathless, he cried out, and it seemed his lungs, his mouth, his voice were innumerable.
Three lavishly garbed priests crossed the narrow slot of their view. Then
he
stepped into sight. Younger. Taller. Paler. A full beard. Wearing only a simple vestment, so white it pained the eyes to look. A thousand pleading hands reached out toward him, to greet, to implore, to touch. Hertata was fairly shrieking, trying to gain his majestic attention. He merely walked, but it seemed he moved
so fast,
as though the ground itself pulled him forward. For some reason, Sol raised his hands and reached out, not to touch the luminous image before him but to jab his fingers at his friend—to point at the one soul that needed to be seen more than any other.
Perhaps it was that Sol alone, of all those lining the avenue, gestured to another. Perhaps it was that Maithanet somehow knew. Whatever the reason, the bright eyes flickered toward him.
Saw
.
It was the first total moment in his entire life. Perhaps the only.
As Sol watched, Maithanet’s eyes were drawn by his pointing fingers to Hertata, wailing and jumping beside him. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples smiled.
For a breathless moment he held the boy’s gaze, then the Knight’s form swallowed his hallowed image.
“Yessss!” Hertata howled, fairly weeping with disbelief. “Yes-yes!”
Sol clutched his hand and laughed. Still cheering, they both turned to a shadow.
From nowhere, it seemed, a man loomed above and against them. His beard was full and square, which meant he was a foreigner. He stank of people. More ominous still, he stank of ships. He held a halved orange in his right hand and the back of Hertata’s filthy tunic bunched in his left.
“Where’re your parents?” he boomed with predatory good nature.
They had to ask that now. Whenever a real child disappeared, they always searched the slavers first. Slavers were hanged for stealing real children, just like the stickers were hanged for sticking them.
“O-o-over there-there,” Hertata whimpered, holding out a tentative finger.
Sol could smell his piss.
“You say?” the man laughed, but Sol was already running, past the Knights and into the crowds on the far side of the procession.
He was Sol. He was fleet.
Afterward, huddling between stacked amphorae, he wept, always throwing a cautious eye to be sure no one could see. He spat and spat, but the taste of orange peel would not go away. Finally he prayed. In his soul’s eye he glimpsed the flash of sunlight across jewelled rings.
Yes. Hertata had spoken true.
Maithanet was sailing across the sea.
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Enathpaneah
They were few—only some forty thousand of them remained—but in their breasts beat the hearts of many.
Beneath the slapping banners of Household, Tusk, and Circumfix, the Holy War departed from mighty Caraskand and left behind a city scarcely inhabited. There had been much furore in the Councils at Saubon’s decision to remain behind. The other Great Names petitioned the Warrior-Prophet to at least demand that Saubon allow his subordinates to march if they so desired. Many did so of their own accord anyway, including the tempestuous Athjeäri. In the end, only some two thousand Galeoth would remain behind with their King and his empty city. They said that Saubon wept as the Warrior-Prophet rode from the Gate of Horns.
A far different Holy War climbed the ways into the Enathpanean countryside. The newcomers, decked in the traditional tabards and surcoats of their homelands, provided the most stark measure of this transformation. Word of the Holy War’s straits in Caraskand had inspired several thousand Inrithi to dare winter seas and make for Joktha. They began arriving at the gates shortly after the breaking of the siege, posturing, boasting, just as those watching upon the walls had once postured and boasted beneath the gates of Momemn and Asgilioch. They fell silent, however, upon entering the city, appalled by the battered faces and perpetual stares that greeted them. The ancient customs were observed—hands were shaken, countrymen embraced—but it was all a pretence.
The original Men of the Tusk—the survivors—were now sons of a different nation. They had spilled whatever blood they once shared with these men. The old loyalties and traditions had become tales of a faraway country, like Zeüm, a place too distant to be confirmed. The hooks of the old ways, the old concerns, had been set in fat that no longer existed. Everything they had known had been tested and found wanting. Their vanity, their envy, their hubris, all the careless bigotries of their prior lives, had been murdered with their fellows. Their hopes had been burned to ashes. Their scruples had been boiled to bone and tendon—or so it seemed.
Out of calamity they had salvaged only the barest necessities; all else had been jettisoned. Their spare manner, their guarded speech, their disinterested contempt for excess, all spoke to a dangerous thrift. And nowhere was this more evident than in their eyes: they stared with the blank wariness of men who never slept—not peering, not watching, but
observing,
and with a directness that transcended “bold” or “rude.”
They stared as though nothing stared back, as though all were objects.
Among the newcomers, even the costumed caste-nobles seemed unable or unwilling to match their gaze. Many tried to maintain appearances—the wry glances, the nods of acknowledgment—but their looks always returned to their boots or sandals. To stand in the sight of such men, they somehow understood, was to be
measured,
not by something as flawed and as arbitrary as a man, but by the length and breadth of what they had suffered.
Their very look had become judgement, so much had they witnessed.
Thoroughly unnerved by their so-called brothers, only a few hundred newcomers dared question the Holy War’s other profound transformation: the Warrior-Prophet. Those of power and influence, such as Dogora Teör, the Tydonni Earl of Sumagalt, were eased into the Tribe of Truth by the Warrior-Prophet himself. Others found themselves befriended by Judges from their various homelands, who spirited them to sermons and Whelmings. Those who continued dissenting were separated from their fellows and assigned to companies of faithful. And the worst agitators, it was said, were brought before the Consort, never to be seen again.
The Inrithi found Enathpaneah abandoned by the enemy. Gothyelk, who marched along the coastline with his Tydonni, encountered the burned ruins of nearly a hundred villas. Though most of the native Enathi, a people of ancient Shigeki stock, remained shut in their villages, not one of their Kianene lords could be found. No heathen patrols loitered in the distances. No dwelling of scale survived intact. When Athjeäri and his Gaenri came to the ends of Enathpaneah, the old forts that guarded the tracks into Xerash were still smoking, but the enemy was nowhere to be seen.
The heathen’s back had been broken—just as the Warrior-Prophet had said. Save a triumphal march, it seemed nothing stood between them and Holy Shimeh.
The first elements of the Holy War descended into Xerash and camped across the Plains of Heshor, where they held a great celebration. Xerash figured large in the narratives of
The Tractate
—so much so that many argued they had already entered the Sacred Lands. Men gathered to listen to readings from the Book of Traders, the account of the Latter Prophet’s years of exile among the depraved Xerashi. It seemed a thing of awe to at last stand so close to those places named.
But names change over the centuries, and many spent long hours debating points of scripture and geography. Was not the town of Bengut actually the city of Abet-goka, where Amoti merchants concealed the Latter Prophet from the wrath of the Xerashi King? Were not the massive ruins reported near Pidast the remains of the great fortress of Ebaliol, where Inri Sejenus was imprisoned for prophesying the “thousand temples”? Throughout the following days, impromptu pilgrimages set out from the main columns to visit various sites. And even though the pilgrims were invariably disappointed by the stubborn silence of the ruins they found, the eyes of most would burn with fervour when they returned. For they walked the ways of Xerash.
At Ebaliol, the Warrior-Prophet climbed the broken foundations and addressed thousands. “I stand,” he cried, “where my brother stood!”
Twenty-two men died in the delirious crush. It would prove an omen of what was to follow.
For millennia the so-called Middle-Lands had been coveted by the Kings of Shigek to the north and the Kings of Old Nilnamesh to the south. After inflicting a crushing defeat on the Shigeki, Anzumarapata II, the Nilnameshi King of Invishi, settled the Plains of Heshor with untold thousands of his people, hoping to secure his empire through forced resettlement. These dark-skinned people brought with them their indolent Gods and their promiscuous customs. They raised Gerotha, the greatest city of Xerash, in the heart of the plains, and bent their backs to the fields as they had done in humid Nilnamesh.
By the Latter Prophet’s time, Xerash was an old and powerful kingdom, demanding and receiving tribute from both Amoteu and Enathpaneah. The Amoti in particular thought the Xerashi an obscene race, a blight upon the land. For the authors of
The Tractate,
it was a land of innumerable brothels, fratricidal kings, and rampant homosexuality. And though the blood and custom of the Nilnameshi had been thinned into extinction long ago, for the Men of the Tusk “xeratic” still meant “sodomite,” and they punished the Fanim of Xerash for the trespasses of others long dead. The Xerash that the Inrithi wandered through was a place of old and labyrinthine evils. And her people found themselves called to account not once, but twice.
Reports of massacre became common. There was the great fortress of Kijenicho along the coast, where Earl Iyengar had his Nangaels throw the garrison from the walls onto the breakers below. And the walled town of Naïth high in the Betmulla foothills, which Earl Ganbrota and his Ingraulish burned to the ground. There were the refugees along the Herotic Way—the very road to Shimeh!—who were ridden down for sport by Lord Soter and his Kishyati Knights.

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