The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (35 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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His arm waved dead in the current.
Suddenly she was gasping and shaking in Kellhus’s perfumed embrace. He shushed her, stroked hair from her eyes, explained that it was all a nightmare.
The desperation with which she held him shocked her. “I don’t want to share you,” she whispered, kissing the soft curls about his neck.
“Nor I you,” he said.
She had never told him about Achamian, about their kiss that horrid night with Proyas and Xinemus. But it was not a secret between them—merely something unspoken. She had spent hours pondering his silence, and hours more cursing her own. Why, when Kellhus had so consistently coaxed her every weakness from her, would he pass over this one in silence? But she dared not ask. Especially not while labouring through
The Sagas
.
She could see it all so clearly now. The derelict cities. The smoking temples. The strings of dead that marked the slave roads to Golgotterath. She followed the Nonmen Erratics as they rode across the countryside hunting survivors. She saw the Sranc digging up the stillborn and burning them on raised pyres. She watched it all from afar, more than two thousand years too late.
Never had she read anything so dark, so despairing, or so glorious. It seemed poison had been poured into wonder’s own decanter.
This,
she thought time and again, is his night …
And though she tried to beat the words from her heart, they rose nonetheless, as cold as accusatory truth, as relentless as earned affliction.
I was his morning
.
One evening, shortly before completing the last of the cantos, she happened upon Achamian sitting oblivious on a tilted table of stone, soaking his feet in the green of the Nazimel River. A gladness of heart struck her, so sudden and so simple that she actually gasped. Her dismay was equally abrupt, and far more complicated. She would have called out something like, “Killing the river now, are we?” for the man was nothing if not ripe. She would have plopped her bum alongside him, traded lame jokes as they swished the water together. She would have quietly crept up behind him and shouted “Look out!” in his ear. But now, just watching him seemed … menacing.
It was his fault for dying! If only he had stayed, if only Xinemus had said nothing of the Library, if only her hand hadn’t lingered in Kellhus’s lap … She felt his heart hush for terror.
Esmi,
he had said the night of his return from the dead,
“it’s me
… Me.”
Beyond him a band of Thunyeri stripped nude, hopping as they struggled with their leggings. One of them ran howling, vaulted from a boulder into the burnished water. On the far shore, where the water trilled across gravel shallows, several women—slaves laundering clothes—held their sides in laughter. Out where the shade of the catalpa trees reached across the water, the Thunyeri broke the surface with a triumphant roar. Either ignoring the ruckus or insensible to it, Achamian leaned forward to scoop water into his palms. He splashed it across his face, grimaced and blinked. Sunlight winked from the black curls of his beard.
As though stunned, he stared into the waters, opening and shutting his eyes.
She had the abrupt sensation of awakening, as if the past months had been naught but one of those devious nightmares that somehow cloaked acts of horror in thoughtless normality. She had never succumbed to Kellhus. She had never repudiated Achamian. And she could call out, “Akka!”
But it was no dream.
Kellhus ran his warm palm from her shoulder to her breast, and she gasped as he pinched her nipple. Then his hand swept down across her belly to the bone-smooth curve of her hip, along her outer thigh, then around … inside. She raised and spread her legs … and Akka wept, clawed his beard in horror and disbelief. “Esmi!” he cried—he shrieked. “Esmi, please! It’s me! It’s me!
“I’m alive.”
Tears had blurred him into the sepia glare. She stood upon stony earth and yet she plummeted, for she understood that her betrayal was without bottom, that her infidelity was without compare. The buzzing thoughts, the flush through face and thighs, that afternoon when Kellhus had accidentally brushed her breast. The hammering heart, the stinging breath, that night when Kellhus had hardened against the touch of her hand. The secret looks, the wanton reveries. The wonder of awakening beside him. The slick warmth between her legs when all was desert dry. The rapture of taking him, inside her knees, her womb—her heart. The strength of him, bearing into her. The moans.
The horror in Achamian’s eyes.
Who was that base and treacherous woman? For Esmenet
knew
she could never do such a thing. She simply wasn′t capable. Not to
Akka
. Not him!
Then she recalled her daughter, somewhere out
there
across the seas. Sold into slavery.
Reaching back to hook a sandal, Achamian pulled a foot from the water. He hunched against his knee, began lacing the leather strings. There was resignation in his manner, and tragedy too, as though his acts were both aimless and irresistible. Breathless, her hands pressed to her belly, Esmenet stole away.
She abandoned him by the river, a sole survivor of the Apocalypse, a man grieving his single trust, his one beauty.
Mourning the whore, Esmenet.
That night she returned to
The Sagas,
slack of limb and heart. She wept when she finished the final canto …
 
The pyres gutted, the towers fallen and black,
The foeman glutted, our glory slung ’cross his back,
The world’s keel broken, our blood thinner than our tears.
The story spoken, as though the dead possessed ears.
 
She wept and she whispered,
“Akka.”
For she was his world, and all lay in ruin.
Akka. Akka, please …
According to Nonman legend, the falling of the Incû-Holoinas, the Ark-of-the-Skies, had cracked the world’s mantle, striking wedges into the endless dark. Seswatha now knew this legend to be true.
With Nau-Cayûti at his side, Achamian crouched in the darkness, peering across the yawning fall before them. For days they had groped through the black, too terrified to dare any light. At times it seemed they climbed through blackened lungs, so choked and multitudinous were the tunnels. Their elbows bled from crawling on their bellies.
During the years of the Great Investiture, the Sranc had burrowed out from Golgotterath far beneath the armies camped across the surrounding plains. When the siege was broken, the Consult had forgotten the mines, thinking themselves invincible. And why would they not? The Ordeal, the holy war called by Anasûrimbor Celmomas against Golgotterath, had dissolved in acrimony and cannibal pride. And the unholy advent was near. So very near …
Who would dare what Seswatha and the High King’s youngest son now dared?
Please wake up.
“What is it?” Nau-Cayûti murmured. “A postern of some kind?”
Lying prone, they stared over the lip of an upturned ledge, across what could only be a mighty chasm. Entire mountains seemed to hang about them, cliff from towering cliff, plummet from plummet, dropping down into blackness, reaching up to pinch a great curved plane of gold. It loomed above them, impossibly immense, wrought with never-ending strings of text and panels, each as broad as a war galley’s sail, engraved with alien figures warring in relief. The lights from below cast a gleaming filigree across its expanse.
They looked upon the dread Ark itself, Seswatha knew, rammed deep into the sockets of the earth. They had reached the deepest pits of Golgotterath.
Below their vantage, across some hundred lengths of cavernous space, there was a door set perpendicular to the fall. Stonework had been raised beneath it, a platform with two immense braziers whose fires had blackened the Ark’s surface where it bowed above them. A network of landings and stairs twined into the black obscurity below. Partially screened by curtains of fire, several Sranc reclined and rutted on the gate’s threshold. Yammering squeals rang through the emptiness.
Akka …
“What should we do?” Seswatha whispered. The exercise of sorcery couldn’t be risked, not here, where the slightest bruise would be sure to draw the Mangaecca. His mere presence was fatal.
With characteristic decisiveness, Nau-Cayûti had already started stripping his bronze armour. Achamian watched the profile of his face, struck by the contrast between his pitch-blackened skin and the blond of his thickening beard. There was determination in his eyes, but it was born of desperation, not the zest and confidence that had made him such a miraculous leader of men.
Achamian turned away, unable to bear the falsehoods he had told him. “This is madness,” he murmured.
“But she’s
here
!” the warrior hissed. “You said yourself!”
Wearing only his hide kilt, Nau-Cayûti stood and ran his hands across the immediate stone faces. Then, clutching thin lips of rock, he hauled himself over the abyss. His heart in his throat, Seswatha watched him edge out across the gaping spaces, his back and calves shining with exertion and sweat.
Something—a shadow—above him.
Akka, you’re
dreaming …
A spark of light, frail and glaring.
“Please …”
At first she seemed an apparition before him, a glowing mist suspended in void, but as he blinked, he saw her lines drawn off into darkness, the lantern illuminating her oval face.
“Esmi,” he croaked.
She knelt beside his bed, leaning over him. His thoughts reeled. What was the time? Why hadn’t his Wards awakened him? The horror of Golgotterath still tingled through his sweaty limbs. She had been crying, he could see that. He raised his hands, sheepish with slumber, but she pulled away from his instinctive embrace.
He remembered Kellhus.
“Esmi?” Then, softer, “What is it?”
“I…I just need you to know …ʺ
Suddenly his throat ached. He glimpsed her breasts, like smoke beneath the sheer fabric of her shift. “What?”
Her face crumpled, then recomposed. “That you are strong.”
She fled, and once again all was dark and absolute.
It flew at night, wary of the ground below. It beat its way higher, and higher, until the air became needles, and tears fractured the million-starred void. Then it coasted, wings wide and scooping.
Urgency did not come easily to such an ancient intellect.
It pondered in the manner of its race, though its thought balked at the limits of its Synthese frame. Millennia had passed since last it had warred across such a benjuka plate. The Mandate vindicated. Their children discovered, dragged into the light. The Holy War reborn as an instrument of unknown machinations …
That vermin could be so cunning! Mad the Scylvendi might be, but the testimony of events could not be denied. These Dûnyain …
The rushing air had grown warm, and the ground rose as though upon a swell. Trees and bracken sunned their backs beneath the cold moon. Slopes pitched and dropped. Streams roped along dark and stony courses. The Synthese wound over and through the shadowy landscape, unto the ends of Enathpaneah.

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