The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (28 page)

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

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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

BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
8.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
He looked to his sandalled feet.
“You think the question stupid?” Esmenet snapped. “You think—”
“No, Esmi.”
There had been too much honesty in the way he spoke her name—too much pain.
“You … you’ve no idea what Kellhus has shown me,” she said. “I too was Horomon, and now—the world that I see, Akka! The world that
I see
! The woman you knew, the woman you loved … you must know, that woman was—”
He couldn’t bear these words, so he interrupted. “Zin lost more than his eyes in Iothiah.”
Four silent steps in the dark.
“What do you mean?”
“The Cants of Compulsion, they … they …” His voice trailed.
“If I’m to be Master of Spies, I need to know these things, Akka.”
Esmenet was right—she did need to know these things. But she pressed the issue, Achamian knew, for far different reasons. The estranged always resorted to talk of third parties. It was the most convenient course between insincere pleasantries and dangerous truths.
“The Cants of Compulsion,” Achamian continued, “are misnamed. They’re not, as many seem to think, ‘torments of the soul,′ as though our soul were some kind of miniature thing, something vulnerable to sorcerous instruments the way the body is to physical. The Compulsions are different. Our
soul
is different …”
She studied his profile, but looked away when he dared glance at her. “Souls compelled,” he continued, “are souls
possessed
.”
“What are you saying?”
Achamian cleared his throat. She had spoken as one accustomed to cutting through the verbal dross of underlings. “They used him against me, Esmi. The Scarlet Spires …” He blinked, saw the Hundred Pillars Guardsman gouge out Iyokus’s eyes. “They used him against me.”
They had passed near a crowded bonfire. He could see her face in the intermittent firelight. Her look narrowed, but in the careful way of those sceptical of someone they pity.
She thinks me weak.
He stopped, glared at her impossibly grand aspect. “You think I fish for sympathy.”
“Then what’s your point?”
He beat down the anger that welled through him. “The great paradox of the Compulsions is that their victims
in no way feel compelled
. Zin sincerely
meant
everything he said to me,
he chose to say them,
even though others spoke the words.”
Whenever Achamian had explained this in the past, the questions and challenges had been immediate. How could such a thing be possible? How could men take compulsion for choice?
Esmenet asked only, “What did he say?”
He shook his head, graced her with a false smile. “The Scarlet Spires … Trust me, they know which words wield the sharpest edges.”
Like Kellhus.
There was compassion in her eyes now … He looked away.
“Akka … what did he say?”
Figures passed to and fro before the bonfire, and shadows swept the ground between them. When he matched her gaze, it seemed he was falling. “He said …” A pause. He cleared his throat. “He said that pity was the only love I could hope for.”
He saw her swallow, blink. “Oh, Akka …”
Of all the world, only she truly understood. Of all the world.
Longing crashed about the pilings of his resolution—to crush her in his arms, to press her back tenderly then kiss the faint saddle of freckles across her nose.
He resumed walking instead, found peevish relief in the way she obediently followed.
“H-he said things,” Achamian continued, coughing against a voice-cracking ache. “He said things without hope of forgiveness. Now he can’t bring himself to stop.”
Esmenet seemed baffled. “But that was months back.”
Blinking, Achamian looked to the sky, saw the Round of Horns glittering in an arc over the northern hills. It was an ancient Kûniüric constellation, unknown to the astrologers of the Three Seas. “Think of the soul as a network of innumerable rivers. With the Cants of Compulsion, the old banks are swamped, dikes are washed away, new channels are cut … Sometimes when the floodwaters recede, things resume their old course. Sometimes they don’t.”
Four silent steps in the dark. When she replied, there was genuine horror in her voice. “Are you saying …” Her brow slackened in incredulous astonishment. “Are you saying the Zin we knew is dead?”
The thought had never occurred to Achamian, as obvious as it was. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure what I’m saying.”
He turned to her, reached out to clasp her forbidden hand. She didn’t resist. He tried to say something, but his jaw could only jerk back and down, as though something different, something deeper than his lungs, demanded breath. He pulled her against him, amazed that she remained so light.
Then the old habits seized them, locked them together like hands. She bent to him, as she had a thousand times. He fell into her lips, her smell. He wrapped himself around her trembling frame …
They kissed.
Then she was fighting him, striking him about the face and shoulders. He released her, overcome by rage and ardour and horror. “N-no!” she sputtered, beating the air as though fending off the mere idea of him.
“I dream of murdering him!” Achamian cried. “Murdering Kellhus! I dream that all the world burns, and I rejoice, Esmi,
I rejoice
. All the world burns, and I exult for love of you!”
Her eyes were wide and uncomprehending.
Every part of him beseeched her. “Do you love me? Esmi, I need to know!”
“Akka …”
“Do you love me?”
“He
knows me
! He knows me like no other!”
And suddenly he understood. It seemed so clear! All this time mourning, thinking he had nothing to offer, nothing to lay at the foot of her altar. “That’s it! Don’t you see? That’s the difference!”
“This is madness!” she cried. “Enough, Akka. Enough! This cannot be.”
“Please, listen. You must listen! He knows
everyone,
Esmi. Everyone!”
She was the
only one.
How could she not see? Like a kicked scroll, the logic of it rolled through him: love required ignorance. Like any candle, it needed darkness to burn bright, to illuminate. “He knows everyone!” His lips were still wet with the taste of her.
Bitter, like tears across cosmetics.
“Yes,” Esmenet said, retreating step after step. “And
he loves
me!”
Achamian looked down to gather his wits, his breath. He knew she would be gone when he looked up, but somehow he had forgotten the others—the Inrithi—who had walked and caroused about them. More than a dozen of them stood like sentinels in the firelight, staring at him, their faces blank. Achamian thought of how easily he could destroy them, blast the flesh from their bones, and he matched their astonished scrutiny with this knowledge in his eyes. To a man they looked away.
That night, he beat the matted earth in fury. He cursed himself for a fool until dawn. The arguments were assembled and were defeated. The reasons railed and railed. But love had no logic.
No more than sleep.
When next he saw her, he could find no trace of this encounter, save perhaps for a certain blankness in her expression. It was mad, the moment they had shared—as she had said—and for days afterward Achamian half expected the Hundred Pillars to bring charges against him. For the first time he realized the dimensions of his plight, that he had lost her not simply to another man but to a nation. There would be no outbursts of jealous rage, no confrontations, only cloaked officials in the night, discharging their writ without passion.
Just as when he’d been a spy.
He wasn’t surprised when no one came, just as he wasn’t surprised when Kellhus said nothing, even though he most certainly knew. The Warrior-Prophet needed him too much—that was the bitter explanation. The other was that he
understood,
that he too mourned the contested ground between them.
How could one love one’s oppressor? Achamian didn’t know, but he loved nonetheless. He loved them both.
Every evening, following a typically lavish meal with the Nascenti, Achamian would wend his way through the hanging corridors of the Umbilica to a leather chamber in the lesser wing—what the Nascenti had come to call, for no reason Achamian could fathom, the Scribal Room. At the entrance, a lantern-bearing guard would always lower his face and murmur either “Vizier” or “Holy Tutor” in greeting. Once within, Achamian would spend time rearranging the rugs and cushions so that he and Kellhus could sit comfortably face to face instead of peering about the pole in the room’s centre. Twice he’d upbraided the slaves, but they never learned. Then he would wait, staring across the woven pastorals set, as was the fashion for the Kianene, in a geometric maze of panels. He wrestled with the inevitable demons.
Protecting Kellhus had been the charge of his School. As real as it was, the prospect of a Consult attack seemed to concern Kellhus little. Achamian often worried that Kellhus merely tolerated him out of courtesy, as a way to build trust with a formidable ally. Teaching Kellhus the Gnosis, however, was an altogether different matter. This was the Warrior-Prophet’s own charge. Even before their first lesson together, Achamian had known these exchanges would be things of wonder and terror.
From the very first, even as far back as Momemn, there had been something remarkable about Kellhus’s company. Even then he’d been someone whom others sought to please, as if they grasped without knowing what it meant to stand tall in his eyes. The disarming charisma. The endearing candour. The breathtaking intellect. Men opened themselves to him because he lacked all those deficiencies that led brother to injure brother. His humility was invariable, utterly disconnected from the presence of other men. Where others crowed or fawned depending upon whose company they kept, Kellhus remained absolute. He never boasted. He never flattered. He simply described.
Such men were addicting, especially for those who feared what others saw.
Long ago, Achamian and Esmenet had made a game of sorts out of their attempts to understand Kellhus—particularly after they had acknowledged his divinity. Together they had watched him
grow
. They had watched him struggle with truths that everyone else had secretly accepted. They had watched him set aside his immaculate humility, his desire to be less than he was, and take up his calamitous destiny.
He was the Warrior-Prophet, the Voice and Vessel, sent to save Men from the Second Apocalypse. And yet somehow he remained Kellhus, the lackland Prince of Atrithau. He commanded obedience, certainly, but he never
presumed,
no more than he had about Xinemus’s fire. And how could he, when presumption measured the gap between what was demanded and what was justified? Kellhus had never exacted anything beyond his due. It just so happened all the world fell within the circle of his authority.
Sometimes Achamian found himself joking with him in the old way, as though the revelations of Caraskand had never happened. As though Esmenet had never happened. Then something—a glimpse of a circumfix embroidered on a sleeve, a whiff of feminine perfume—would strike him, and Kellhus would be transformed before his eyes. An unbearable intensity would shine from his aspect, as though he were a kind of lodestone made flesh, drawing things unseen yet palpable into his orbit. Silences seethed. Words thundered. It was as though every passing moment resonated with the unvoiced intonations of a thousand thousand priests. Sometimes Achamian gripped his knees against the sensation of vertigo. Sometimes he blinked against the glimpse of haloes about his hands.
To sit in his presence was overwhelming enough. But to teach him the Gnosis?
To limit Kellhus’s vulnerability to Chorae, they had agreed they should start with everything—linguistic and metaphysical—short of actual Cants. As with the exoterics, instruction in the esoterics required prior skills, arcane analogues to reading and writing. In Atyersus, teachers always started with what were called denotaries, small precursor Cants meant to gradually develop the intellectual flexibility of their students to the prodigious point where they could both comprehend and express arcane semantics. Denotaries, however, bruised students with the stain of sorcery as surely as any Cant, which meant that in some respects Achamian had to start backward.

Other books

Expel by Addison Moore
The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard
Innocent as Sin by Elizabeth Lowell
Hot as Hades by Alisha Rai
Cajun Hot by Nikita Black
The House at Royal Oak by Carol Eron Rizzoli
Boys Rock! by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor