The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (34 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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But what would strike the old Esmenet the most, she had no doubt, would be the
knowledge
. In that one respect, she’d been extraordinary. Very few pondered their ignorance as she had. Their conceit compelled them to prize only what they knew beforehand. And since significance
followed from
the already known, they always thought they possessed everything relevant to any question of truth. Obliviousness made obvious.
She had always understood that her world, for all its grand immensity, was a sham. This was why she had made her custom into apertures, windows onto the world’s various corners. This was why she had used Achamian as a doorway to the past. And now Kellhus …
He had rewritten the world down to its very foundations. A world where all were slaves of repetition, of the twin darknesses of custom and appetite. A world where beliefs served the powerful instead of the true. The old Esmenet would be astounded, even outraged. But she would come to believe—eventually.
The world indeed held miracles, though only for those who dared abandon old hopes.
Breathing deeply, Esmenet untied the leather string about the first scroll.
Like
The Third Analytic, The Sagas
were one of those works familiar even to illiterate caste-menials such as herself. She found it strange recalling her impressions of such things before Achamian or Kellhus. The “Ancient North,” she knew, had always seemed weighty and profound, a phrase with a palpable, skin-prickling air. It lay like cold lead among the other names she knew, a marker of loss, hubris, and the implacable judgement of ages. She knew of the No-God, the Apocalypse, the Ordeal, but they were little more than curiosities. The Ancient North was a
place,
something she could point to. And for whatever reason, everyone had agreed that it was one of
those
words, enunciations that, like “Scylvendi” or “Tusk,” bore the whiff of overarching doom.
The Sagas
had been little more than a rumour attached to that word. Books, to be certain, were frightful things, but in the way of snakes to city dwellers. Something safely ignored.
Those times Achamian mentioned
The Sagas,
he did so only to dismiss or disparage. For a Mandate Schoolman, he said, they were like pearls strung across a corpse. He spoke of the Apocalypse and the No-God the way others described running arguments with their relatives, with a thoughtless, first-hand immediacy, and in terms and tones that would often set her hair on end. With Achamian, the “Ancient North,” which for all its dread had remained blank and obdurate, became something intricate and encompassing, a frame for what seemed an inexhaustible litany of extinguished hopes. By comparison,
The Sagas
had come to seem something foolish, perhaps even criminal. Those rare times she heard others mention them, she would smile inwardly and scoff. What could they know of these things? Even those who could read …
But as much as she had learned about the Apocalypse, the fact remained that she knew nothing of
The Sagas
themselves. The moment she gingerly unrolled the first section of scroll, that ignorance struck her with the curious force of undone deceptions. Despite the title, she was surprised to discover that
The Sagas
consisted of a number of different works written by a number of different authors, though only two, Heyorthau and Nau-Ganor, were named. There were nine “sagas” in total, starting with “The Kelmariad.” Some, she would later discover, were verse epics while others were prose chronicles. She chided herself for her surprise. Once again she’d found complexity where she had expected simplicity. Was that not always the way?
She had no idea where Kellhus had obtained the scroll, but it was very old, and as much painted as inked—the prize of some dead scholar’s library. The parchment was uterine, soft and unmottled. Both the style of the script and the diction and tone of the translator’s dedicatory seemed bent to the sensibilities of some other kind of reader. For the first time she found herself appreciating the fact that this history was itself historical. For some reason she had never considered that writings could be part of what they were about. They always seemed to hang …
outside
the world they depicted.
It was strange. Here she lay curled on her marriage bed, her head propped on silk-threaded pillows, the scroll at a lazy angle before her. But when she read the opening invocation,
Rage—Goddess! Sing of your flight,
From our fathers and our sons.
Away, Goddess! Secret your divinity!
From the conceit that makes kings of fools,
From the scrutiny that makes corpses of souls.
Mouths open, arms thrown wide, we beseech thee:
Sing us the end of your song.
everything about her—the wrought canopy, the dim grottoes behind the screens, the hanging panels—disappeared. Reading, she realized,
resituated
. It made gauze of what was immediate, and allowed what was ancient and faraway to rise into view. It unpinned here from the senses, and made it everywhere. It released now from the cage of the present, and lent it the aspect of eternity.
Infected by a kind of floating wonder, she fell into the first of
The Sagas
.
She found the going both difficult and curiously erotic, as though, aside from the masturbatory solitude of reading, her struggle to accommodate the writer’s ancient assumptions was something too intimate not to be carnal. The realization that “The Kelmariad” was actually the history of
Anasûrimbor
Celmomas stole her breath—and sparked her first premonition of dread. This was not only the story of Achamian’s dreams, it was also the story of Kellhus’s blood. These times and places, she realized, were neither so ancient nor so faraway as she might have wished.
She gathered that the Dynasty of Anasûrimbor was old and venerable even in those days of Far Antiquity. In fact, the verses were replete with references to times and places—the Cond Yoke, the God-Kings of Ûmerau, the Rape of Omindalea—of which she knew nothing. For some reason, she had always thought of the First Apocalypse as the beginning of history rather than the end of one. Once again, what had been blank and monolithic became encompassing, a mansion with many rooms.
The birth of Celmomas II had been as ill-starred as any birth could be: he was the twin of a stillborn brother, named Huörmomas. The line,
His rosy wail could not stir his brother’s blue slumber,
made her restless with thoughts of Serwë and Moënghus. And the way the poet used this macabre image to explain the High King’s flint-hearted brilliance made her inexplicably anxious. Huörmomas, the poet insisted, ever stalked his brother’s side, chilling his heart even as he quickened his intellect:
Grim kinsman, frosting the breath of his every counsel.
Dark reflection! Even the Knight-Chieftains bundle their cloaks
When they catch your glint in their Lord’s eye.
After this, the strange intensity that had nagged everything, from the mere thought of reading
The Sagas
to the weight of the scrolls in her palm, took on the character of a compulsion. It was as if something—a second voice—whispered beneath what she read. Once she even bolted from the bed and pressed her ear to the embroidered canvas walls. She enjoyed stories as much as anyone. She knew what it was to hang in suspense, to feel the tug of some almost-grasped conclusion. But this was different. Whatever it was she thought she heard, it spoke not to some climactic twist, nor even to some penetrating illumination—it spoke to
her
. The way a person might.
The next four days would be haggard. Jealousy, murder, rage, and doom before all … The First Apocalypse engulfed her.
She quickly realized that, despite all her discussions with Achamian, her understanding of the Old Wars was merely episodic. “The Kelmariad” struck them into the shape of the Kûniüric High King’s life, beginning with the dire warnings of his arcane counsellor, Seswatha, and culminating with his death on the Eleneöt Fields. In many ways it began as a common tale: Seswatha was the Doomsayer, the only one who could correctly read the gathering signs. Celmomas, meanwhile, was the Arrogant King, the one who could see only what was self-serving.
Apparently, long before, a fugitive Gnostic School called the Mangaecca had somehow pierced the ancient glamour the Nonmen Quya had used to conceal Min-Uroikas, the legendary stronghold of the Inchoroi. While Celmomas was still a young man, emissaries of Nil’giccas, the Nonman King of Ishterebinth, approached Seswatha, the High King’s childhood friend and Vizier. The Nonmen worried that the Inchoroi, whom they had driven to the four corners of the world in the days of Cu’jara Cinmoi, had found their way back to Min-Uroikas and with the Mangaecca had renewed their harrowing studies. They told him of the rumours they had extracted from their long-dead captives. They told him of the No-God.
So Seswatha began his Long Argument, his attempt to convince the Ancient Norsirai Kings of the impending Apocalypse.
Though none of the sagas took Seswatha as its subject, he surfaced and resurfaced throughout, like something continually kicked up in the rolling flotsam of events. In “The Kelmariad” he was a principal, the stalwart of a mighty and inconstant king. The same was true of “The Kayûtiad,” the verse epic of Celmomas’s youngest and most glorious son, Nau-Cayûti, where Seswatha was both teacher and surrogate father. In “The Book of Generals,” the prose inventory of events following Nau-Cayûti’s death, his was the most powerful and most resented voice in council after council. In “The Trisiad,” the verse account of Trysë’s destruction, he was a shining beacon on the parapets, clawing dragons from the sky with sorcerous light. In “The Eämnoriad” he was the scheming foreigner who, for all his grand declarations, fled on the eve of the No-God’s approach. In “The Annal Akksersa” he was hope incarnate, the Raised Shield of High King Cundraul III. In “The Annal Sakarpa” he was a lunatic refugee, cast out after cursing King Hûruth V for not fleeing to Mehtsonc with the Chorae Hoard. And in “The Anaxiad,” the grand and tragic saga of Kyraneas’s fall, he was nothing less than the world’s saviour, the Bearer of the Heron Spear.
Hated or adored, Seswatha was the pin in the navigator’s bowl, the true hero of
The Sagas,
though not one cycle or chronicle acknowledged him as such. And each time Esmenet encountered some variant of his name, she would clutch her breast and think,
Achamian
.
It was no small thing to read of war, let alone apocalypse. No matter how pressing her daily routine, images from
The Sagas
dogged her soul’s eye: Sranc armoured in mandibles freshly cut from their victims. The burning Library of Sauglish and the thousands who’d sought refuge within her hallowed halls. The Wall of the Dead, the cloak of corpses draped about the seaward ramparts of Dagliash. Foul Golgotterath, her golden horns curving mountainous into dark skies. And the No-God, Tsurumah, a great winding tower of black wind …
War and more war, enough to engulf every city, every hearth, to sweep up all innocents—even the unborn—into its merciless jaws.
The thought that Achamian continually
lived
these things oppressed her with an evasive, even cringing, sense of guilt. Each night, he saw the horizon move with hordes of Sranc; he shrank beneath the pitch of dragons swooping from black-bellied clouds. Each night, he witnessed Trysë, the Holy Mother of Cities, washed in the blood of her bewildered children. Each night, he literally relived the No-God’s dread awakening, he
actually heard
the mothers wail over their stillborn sons.
Absurdly, this made her think of his dead mule, Daybreak. She had never understood, not truly, how much weight that name must have possessed for him. Such poignant hope. And this, she realized with no little horror, meant that she’d never understood
Achamian himself
—not truly. To be used night after night. To be debased by hungers vast, ancient, and rutting. How could a
whore
fail to see the outrage that had been heaped upon his soul?
You are my morning, Esmi … my dawn light.
What could it mean? For a man who lived and relived the ruin of all, what could it mean to awake to her touch, to
her face
? Where had he found the courage? The trust?
I was his morning.
Esmenet felt it then, overpowering her, and in the strange fashion of moving souls, she struggled to ward it away. But it was too late. For what seemed the first time, she
understood:
his pointless urgency, his desperation to be believed, his haggard love, his short-winded compassion—shadows of the Apocalypse, all. To witness the dissolution of nations, to be stripped night after night of everything cherished, everything fair. The miracle was that he still loved, that he still recognized mercy, pity … How could she not think him strong?
She understood, and it terrified her, for it was a thing too near to love.
That night, she dreamed that she floated over the deeps, stranded in the heart of some nameless sea. Terror pulled at her, like rocks bound about her ankles. But when she peered down, she could only see shadows in the blackening water beyond her feet. They bewitched her with their almost-clarity. Ponderous and vast, coiling about enormities. Though at first she refused to countenance it, her eyes gradually adjusted, and the monstrous forms became more and more distinct. Never had she felt so small, so exposed. The entire sea, beyond all the drowned horizons, lay placid and sun-green above black-boiling deeps. Flexing movement. Great milky eyes. Palisades of translucent teeth. And there, pale and naked, floating like a tuft through the midst of it …
Achamian
.

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