The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (38 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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“Who else have you been?”
“I have been many.”
“And now?”
“I am Serwë … your lover.”
The determination of Conphas’s pursuit became evident the third night of their southward flight. Along the Enathpanean frontier, they crossed hills arranged like longitudinal dunes, with sharp, wandering ridgelines and steep slip faces. Everything was green, but in the way of tenacious rather than lush things. Carp grasses choked the clearings, thronging along the cracks of even the sheerest of escarpments. Thickets of catclaw thatched the slopes, and stands of carob dominated many of the valleys, though it was too early in the year for them to offer any forage. At dusk, while filing along the crest of one of these hills, Cnaiür saw several dozen fires winking orange on a flat top some miles to the north.
The nearness of the fires didn’t surprise him; if anything, he was comforted by the distance. The Nansur, he knew, had intentionally chosen the highest ground possible, hoping to spook them into pressing their horses too hard. It was the
numbers
that troubled him. If they had tracked them this far, they knew their party hadn’t fled to Caraskand to shelter with Saubon, which meant they knew Cnaiür meant to cleave east at some point. Whoever commanded the pursuit had likely already dispatched bands to the southeast in hopes of cutting them off. It would be like shooting arrows in the dark, certainly, but his quiver looked deep.
Over the course of the following day, they encountered an Enathi goatherd. The old fool surprised them, and before Cnaiür could utter a word, Serwë had killed him. The soil was too rocky to effectively bury the man, so they were forced to tie the body to one of the spare horses—which of course further tired the beast. Even then, the vultures, which forever soared the margins of the world and the Outside, found and followed them. With vultures circling, they might as well have carried a banner as high as the clouds. That night they paused in one of the valleys, and though the sky was clear and moonbright, they burned the body.
They continued across the rugged Enathpanean countryside for a week, avoiding all signs of men save for one meagre village, which they plundered for sport and supplies. For two consecutive nights the skies were overcast and the darkness impenetrable. Cnaiür cooked his blade in a small fire, then scarred his shoulders and chest with the lives he had taken at Joktha. He avoided looking at Serwë and the other two creatures, who sat opposite, as silent and watchful as leopards. When he finished, he raved at them, only to weep in remorse afterward. There had been no judgement in their eyes, he realized. No humanity.
On no fewer than three different nights, they saw the fires of what had to be their Nansur pursuers, and though it seemed to Cnaiür they were more distant each time, he was not heartened. It was a strange thing, fleeing the pursuit of unseen men. Things unseen could not be pinned with the foibles and debilities that made men
mere
men. They lay unfixed and restless in the soul. As such, they had the habit of expanding into principle, into something that transcended the mundane world and lorded over it.
Each time Cnaiür saw the fires of the Nansur, they seemed markers of something greater. And even though
he
was the one who rode with abominations, it seemed all obscenity lay on the horizon behind him. The North became despotic, the West tyrannical.
They wandered red-eyed, exchanging moon-pale landscapes for sun-bright, and Cnaiür fell to reckoning the oddities of his soul. He supposed he was insane, though the more he pondered the word, the more uncertain its meaning became. On several occasions he had presided over the ritual throat-cutting of Utemot pronounced insane by the tribal elders. According to the memorialists, men went
feral
in the manner of dogs and horses, and in like manner had to be put down. The Inrithi, he knew, thought insanity the work of demons.
One night during the infancy of the Holy War—and for reasons Cnaiür could no longer recall—the sorcerer had taken a crude parchment map of the Three Seas and pressed it flat over a copper laver filled with water. He had poked holes of varying sizes throughout the parchment, and when he held his oil lantern high to complement the firelight, little beads of water glinted across the tanned landscape. Each man, he explained, was a kind of
hole
in existence, a point where the Outside penetrated the world. He tapped one of the beads with his finger. It broke, staining the surrounding parchment. When the trials of the world broke men, he explained, the Outside leaked into the world.
This, he had said, was madness.
At the time, Cnaiür had been less than impressed. He had despised the sorcerer, thinking him one of those mewling souls who forever groaned beneath burdens of their own manufacture. He had dismissed all things
him
out of hand. But now, the force of his demonstration seemed indisputable. Something
other
inhabited him.
It was peculiar. Sometimes it seemed that each of his eyes answered to a different master, that his every look involved war and loss. Sometimes it seemed he possessed
two
faces, an honest outer expression, which he sunned beneath the open sky, and a more devious inner countenance. If he concentrated, he could almost feel its muscles—deep, twitching webs of them—beneath the musculature that stretched his skin. But it was elusive, like the presentiment of hate in a brother’s glance. And it was profound, sealed like marrow within living bone. There was no distance! No way to frame it within his comprehension. And how could there be? When it
thought,
he was …
The bead had been broken—there could be no doubt of that. According to the sorcerer, madness all came down to the question of
origins
. If the divine possessed him, he would be some kind of visionary or prophet. If the demonic …
The sorcerer’s demonstration seemed indisputable. It accorded with his nagging intuitions. It explained, among other things, the strange affinities between madness and insight—why the soothsayers of one age could be the bedlamites of another. The problem, of course, was the Dûnyain.
He contradicted all of it.
Cnaiür had watched him ply the roots of man after man and thus command their branching actions. Nursing their hatred. Cultivating their shame and their conceit. Nurturing their love. Herding their reasons, breeding their beliefs! And all with nothing more than mundane word and expression—nothing more than worldly things.
The Dûnyain, Cnaiür realized, acted as though
there were no holes
in the sorcerer’s parchment map, no beads to signify souls, no water to mark the Outside. He assumed a world where the branching actions of one man could become the roots of another. And with this elementary assumption he had conquered the acts of thousands.
He had conquered the Holy War.
This insight sent Cnaiür reeling, for it suddenly seemed that he rode through
two different worlds,
one open, where the roots of men anchored them to something beyond, and another closed, where those selfsame roots were entirely
contained
. What would it mean to be mad in such a closed world? But such a world could not be! Ingrown and insensate. Cold and soulless.
There had to be more.
Besides, he couldn’t be mad, he decided, because
he possessed no origins
. He had kicked free of all earth. He didn’t even possess a past. Not really. What he remembered, he always remembered
now
. He—Cnaiür urs Skiötha—was the ground of what came before. He was his own foundation!
Laughing, he thought of the Dûnyain and how, upon their fatal reunion, this would overthrow him.
He tried—once—to share these ruminations with Serwë and the others, but they could offer him only the simulacrum of understanding. How could they fathom his depths when they themselves possessed none? They were not bottomless
holes
in the world, as he was. They were animate, yet they did not live, not truly. They, he realized with no little horror,
had no souls
. They dwelt utterly within the world.
And for no reason, his love of them—his love of her—became all the more fierce.
Several more days passed before they sighted the first true peaks of the Betmulla, though Cnaiür suspected they had crossed out of Enathpaneah sometime earlier. They made toward them, intending to traverse the great sloping aprons piled across their northern faces. They crossed a rugged tableland, then followed the winding course of a braided stream, riding beneath the bowers of water birches. As the mountains loomed ever greater and darker above them, Cnaiür could not help but recall the Hethantas and his harsh use of Serwë. He had been a fool then, a free man trying to make himself a slave of his people, but he knew not the words that would make her understand.
“Our child,” he called lamely, “was conceived in mountains like these.”
When she said nothing, he cursed himself and the sensitivities of women.
Later that afternoon, one of their horses was lamed descending a slope of earth and shale. They left it behind rather than put it down, for fear of vultures giving their path away. Leading their mounts, they continued long into the darkness, exploiting the preternatural sight of the skin-spies. Barring disaster, there was no way the fires behind them, no matter how dread their abstraction, could hope to overtake them.
Come morning, the ramps of the Betmulla towered into the southwestern sky. They came across a dead lake, its depths swollen with crimson algal blooms. Not far away, on a promontory rising from a pure stand of canyon oak, they found the ruined footings of some shrine. Faceless forms jutted from the rolling carpets of fallen leaves. An artesian spring trickled from the altar, and they refilled their skins. Some kind of deer grazed the slopes about the lake, and with great mirth Cnaiür watched Serwë and her brothers run a juvenile down on foot alone. Afterward, he stumbled across some cousin of orpine while making mud in the brush. The tubers, though far from ready, tasted delicious with the venison.
Their fire, as small as it was, proved a mistake. The wind was blowing directly from the west, across the lake. The skin-spies smelled them first, but far too late.
“They come,” Serwë said suddenly, looking to her brothers. Within a heartbeat, it seemed, the two of them vanished into the canopy’s recesses. Then Cnaiür heard the distinctive snort and chop of horses labouring up a humus slope, the clink and clatter of gear filtering through the gloomy interior of the wood.
Knowing Serwë would follow, he sprinted up to the flat foundation of the shrine. The first of the Kidruhil cleared the oaks just as he turned upon the lip. They began hooting when they caught sight of him. Dozens materialized behind them, their uncaparisoned mounts throwing spittle from their bits as they worked their heads up and down. The Kidruhil in the forward ranks drew their longswords—
A shriek pealed through the trees.
Cnaiür saw cavalrymen yank on their reins, wheel their mounts about in confusion. He saw one fall, a crimson smear where his face should be … They were looking up now, shouting in alarm. Then Cnaiür glimpsed them, the brothers, sweeping down and out of the layered canopy, scooping up lives every time. The rearmost Kidruhil were panicking now.
To a man those galloping toward him were looking over their shoulders, veering to their right as they slowed. Cnaiür could hear an officer shouting, “Out of the trees! Out of the trees!” But his men needed no encouragement, they were already pounding across the smoking campsite. Riderless horses scattered in all directions.
Then Cnaiür noticed the bows … recurved, like the Scylvendi, drawn from lacquered leather cases set low and back on their saddles—also just like the Scylvendi. Renewing their shouts, the Kidruhil fanned back up the slope, guiding their mounts with spur and knee. The first three drew and released, raising and lowering their bows in the draw—again, just like the People. Serwë swept her arms in front of him, batting the first shaft from his path, ignoring the second, which whistled past him, and catching the third in the meat of her forearm.
Stunned, Cnaiür stepped back, fell to one knee. There was no cover.
“Serwë!” he cried.
The Kidruhil had split into two streams, one to each side of the shrine. Instinctively, Cnaiür scrambled to the back left corner of the ancient platform, crouched low, using the angles to shield himself from one band while exposing himself to the other. Almost immediately the riders to his left galloped into view, yelling “Hup-hup-hup!” to their horses, raising their bows …
Somehow, Serwë was in front of him. For an instant she stood, a poised beauty, arms out, flaxen hair gleaming in the mountain sun—
She danced for him.
Shielding, leaping, striking. She kept her back turned to him, as though in observance of some ritual modesty. Her sleeves snapped like leather. Shafts clattered across the platform. Others buzzed about his shoulders and head. She dipped, rolled her arms about. A shaft appeared in the palm of her hand. She kicked, swung her heel down from her raised knee. A shaft jutted from her calf. The fletching of two more materialized in her back. She cartwheeled, kicked an arrow away even as three others thudded into her chest and abdomen. She cycled her hands outward, batted away four in succession, threw her head back, thrust out her arms, caught one in the back of her right hand. Another in her left forearm.

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