The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (20 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
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The Warrior-Prophet reacted quickly, dispatching edicts forbidding all acts of murder and rapine, and censuring those responsible for the most wanton atrocities. He even sent Gotian to have Lord Uranyanka, the Ainoni Palatine of Moserothu, flogged. Apparently the man had ordered his archers to massacre an enclave of lepers near the town of Sabotha.
But it was too late. Athjeäri soon returned, bearing word that Gerotha had scorched her fields and plantations. The Kianene had fled, but all Xerash was closed against them.
Despite the dread implications, despite all the astonishing differences, the journey to Xerash reminded Achamian of nothing so much as his days as Proyas’s tutor in Aöknyssus. Or so he told himself at first.
On one occasion, after Esmenet’s palfrey was lamed while descending a precarious switchback trail in the Enathpanean hills, Achamian watched as some dozen knights offered to
give
her their chargers—something tantamount to giving her their honour, since their mounts were their means of waging war. Achamian had witnessed much the same while accompanying Proyas and his mother to her dowager estates in Anplei. On another occasion, they encountered a party of Tydonni footmen—some of Lord Iyengar’s Nangaels, it turned out—bearing a fresh boar hoisted above them on the points of some seven or eight spears, an ancient rite of vassalage that Achamian had once witnessed in the court of Proyas’s father, Eukernas II.
But there was something more general, a myriad of smaller recognitions, that seemed to remind him of those more youthful days—despite the daily battery of riding so near Esmenet. For one, others in the Sacral Retinue treated him with deference and respect, their manner so grave it sometimes verged on the comic. He was, after all, the
teacher
of the Warrior-Prophet—an occupation that had quickly morphed into the preposterous honorific—Holy Tutor. For another, he no longer
walked
. Even more than slaves, horses were the yardstick of nobility, and Achamian, lowly Drusas Achamian, now found himself with his own: a sleek black—allegedly from Kascamandri’s own stock—whom he called Noon in memory of poor old Daybreak.
In fact, he found himself awash in small riches: Damask tunics, muslin gowns, felt robes—a wardrobe that included access to a pool of body-slaves for his frequent ceremonial fittings. A silvered corselet, restitched with leather pleats to accommodate his girth. An ivory jewel box containing rings and earrings that he felt too foolish to wear, as well as two black-pearl broaches that he secretly gave away. Ambergis from Zeüm. Myrrh from the Great Salt. Even a genuine bed—a bed on the trail!—for those few hours of sleep he could steal.
Achamian had disdained such comforts during his tenure at the Conriyan court. After all, he was a Gnostic Schoolman, not some “anagogic whore.” But now, after the innumerable deprivations he’d endured … The life of a spy was hard. To finally
have
things, even things he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy, eased his heart for some reason, as though they were balm for unseen wounds. Sometimes, when he ran his hands over soft fabric or yet again searched through the rings for one he might wear, a clutching sadness would come upon him, and he would remember how his father had cursed those who carved toys for their sons.
And there were the politics, of course, though they were largely confined to the jnanic posturing of the caste-nobles who continually drifted in and out of the Sacral Retinue. All manoeuvring, no matter what its stripe, would instantly collapse into uniform servility whenever Kellhus appeared, and just as quickly leap back into effect when he departed. Occasionally, when something particularly sour seemed to be brewing, Kellhus would call the principals to account, and everyone would watch with rigid wonder as he explained things—
people
—he could not possibly know. It was as though the writ of their hearts had been inked across their faces.
This no doubt explained the near-total absence of politicking among those who formed the core of the Sacral Retinue: the Nascenti, with their Zaudunyani functionaries, and the Liaisons, the caste-noble representatives of the different Great Names. In Aöknyssus, the closer one came to Proyas’s father, the quicker the knives had flashed—as one might expect. Politics, after all, was the pursuit of advantage within communities of men. One need not be Ajencis to see this. The more powerful the community, the greater the advantage; the greater the advantage, the more vicious the pursuit. It was axiomatic, something Achamian had witnessed time and again in courts across the Three Seas. And yet it in no way applied to the Sacral Retinue. All knives were sheathed in the Warrior-Prophet’s hallowed presence.
Among the Nascenti, Achamian found a camaraderie and a candour unlike anything he’d known before. Despite the inevitable lapses, they largely approached one another as men should: with humour, openness, understanding. For Achamian, the fact that they were as much
warriors
as apostles or apparati made it all the more remarkable … and troubling.
Usually, as they rode in clots or files, they would joke and argue—or make wagers, endless wagers. Sometimes, they simply sang the gorgeous hymns Kellhus had taught them, their eyes bright, devoid of oily thought or inclination, their voices clear and booming. And Achamian, though embarrassed at first, soon found himself joining them, wonderstruck by the words, the phrasing, and suffused with a joy that would seem impossible afterward—too simple, too profound. Then he would glimpse Esmenet rocking in her saddle amid her servants, or he would see another corpse mute in the surrounding grasses, and he would recall the purpose of their journey.
They rode to war—to kill. To conquer Holy Shimeh.
In these moments, the differences between his present circumstance and his time as Proyas’s tutor would loom stark before him, and the fleecy sense of reminiscence that seemed to permeate everything would grow hard with cold and dread. What was it he remembered?
Several days into the march, as the Holy War wound through one of the endless ravines that scored the Enathpanean countryside, a group of long-haired tribesmen—Surdu, Achamian would later learn—were brought to Kellhus under the sign of the Tusk. For centuries, they said, they had preserved their Inrithi heritage, and now they wished to pay obeisance to those who had come to deliver them. They would be the eyes of the Holy War, if they could, showing the Men of the Tusk secret ways through the low ranges of the Betmulla. Achamian missed most of what followed for the crowds, but he was able to see the Surdu chieftain curl over his knees on the earth while offering up an iron sword that had been bent into a
V
.
Inexplicably, Kellhus ordered the tribesmen seized. They were subsequently tortured, whereupon it was discovered that Kascamandri’s son, Fanayal, had sent them. Apparently, he had seized his father’s title, and was even now assembling what dregs he could at Shimeh. The Surdu were indeed Inrithi, but Fanayal had abducted their wives and children to compel them to lead the Holy War astray. The new Padirajah, it seemed, was desperate for time.
Kellhus had them flayed alive—publicly.
The image of the chieftain kneeling with the bent sword nagged Achamian for the remainder of the day. Once again he was certain he’d witnessed something remarkably similar—but not in Conriya. It couldn’t be … The sword he remembered had been
bronze
.
Then in a rush he understood. What he thought he recalled, what had suffused fairly everything with a ghostly air of familiarity, had nothing to do with his years as Proyas’s tutor in the Conriyan court. In fact, it had nothing to do with
him
at all. It was ancient
Kûniüri
he remembered. The time Seswatha spent campaigning with that other Anasûrimbor … High King Celmomas.
It always jarred Achamian, realizing that so much of what he was he in fact wasn’t. Now he found himself terrified by the contrary realization: that more and more he was
becoming
what he wasn’t—what he must never be. That he was becoming Seswatha.
For so long the sheer scale of the Dreams had offered him an immunity of sorts. The things he dreamed simply didn’t happen—at least not to the likes of him. With the Holy War, his life had taken a turn to the legendary, and the distance between his world and Seswatha’s closed, at least in terms of what he witnessed. But even then, what he
lived
remained banal and impoverished. “Seswatha never shat,” the old Mandate joke went. The dimensions of what Achamian lived could always fall into the dimensions of what he dreamed like a stone into a potter’s urn.
But now, riding as Holy Tutor at the Warrior-Prophet’s left hand?
In a way, he was as much as Seswatha, if not more. In a way,
he no longer shat either
. And knowing this was enough to make him shit.
Strangely enough, the Dreams themselves had become more bearable. Tywanrae and Dagliash continued to predominate, though as always he couldn’t fathom why they should follow this or any other rhythm of events. They were like swallows, swooping and circling in aimless patterns, sketching something almost, yet never quite, a language.
He still woke mouthing cries, but their force had been blunted somehow. At first he attributed this to Esmenet, thinking each man had a certain allotment of torment, and that like wine in the bottom of a bowl, it could be tipped this way and that, but never increased. The problem was that painful days had never made for restful nights in the past. So he decided it had to be Kellhus, and as with all realizations involving the Warrior-Prophet, it seemed painfully obvious after the fact. Through Kellhus, the scale of the present not only matched the scale of his Dreams, it counterbalanced them with hope.
Hope … Such a strange word.
Did the Consult know what they had created? How far could Golgotterath see?
Augury, Memgowa had written, said more about men’s fear than about their future. But how could Achamian resist? He slept with the First Apocalypse—she was an old and taxing lover. How could he not daydream about the Second, about the terrible power slumbering in Anasûrimbor Kellhus, and the overthrow of his School’s ancient Enemy? There would be glory this time. Victory would not come at the cost of all that mattered.
Min-Uroikas broken. Shauriatis, Mekeritrig, Aurang and Aurax—all of them destroyed! The No-God unresurrected. The Consult a memory stamped into the muck.
Despite their opiate glamour, there was something terrifying about these thoughts. The Gods were perverse. Natter as they might, the priests knew nothing of their malicious whims. Perhaps they
would
see the world burn just to punish the hubris of one man. Nothing, Achamian had long ago decided, was quite so dangerous as boredom in the absence of scruples.
And Kellhus, with his cryptic responses, only aggravated these apprehensions. Whenever Achamian asked him why he continued to march on Shimeh when the Fanim were no more than a distraction, he always said, “If I’m to succeed my brother, I must reclaim his house.”
“But the war isn’t here!” Achamian once exclaimed in exasperation.
Kellhus merely smiled—for it had become a kind of game at this point—and said, “But it must be, since the war is everywhere.”
Never had mystery seemed so taxing.
“Tell me,” Kellhus said one night following their Gnostic lessons, “why is it the future that plagues you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your questions always turn on what
will
happen, and very rarely on what I have already wrought.”
Achamian shrugged, too weary to care much for anything beyond sleep. “Because I dream the future every night, I suppose … That, and I have the ear of a living prophet.”
Kellhus laughed. “So it’s like hash and peaches,” he said, repeating the off-colour Nansur expression for irresistible combinations. “Even still, out of all the men who dare ask me questions, you’re entirely unique.”
“How so?”
“Most men ask after their souls.”
Achamian could not speak. It seemed his heart could scarce beat, let alone his lungs breathe.
“With me,” Kellhus continued, “the Tusk
is rewritten,
Akka.” A long, ransacking look. “Do you understand? Or do you simply prefer to think yourself damned?”
Though he could muster no retort, Achamian knew.
He preferred.
During this period he cast the Cants of Calling no fewer than three times, though he was only able to report to Nautzera once. Apparently the old fool was having difficulty sleeping. The man was imperious and obsequious by turns, as though at once denying and recognizing the sudden shift in the balance of power between them. As a member of the Quorum, Nautzera formally possessed absolute authority over Achamian—he could even command his execution, if he thought the mission warranted such drastic measures. But in fact, the situation was quite the reverse. The Consult had been rediscovered, an Anasûrimbor had returned, and the Second Apocalypse was nigh. These were the very things that gave their School meaning, the very
mandate
from which they derived their name, and for the moment only one of their number—a discontent, no less—secured their connection to them. During one peevish and heady moment of their discussion, Achamian realized that in a sense he had become their de facto Grandmaster.

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