The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (39 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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She jerked her head to the left. An arrowhead popped from the back of her neck. She whimpered, as a little girl might.
But she never ceased moving. Blood flew out in beads and lines, flashed in arcs beneath the sun.
Meanwhile the chorus of shouts and cries grew louder and louder. A horn pealed out, then was cut short. But Cnaiür could see nothing save her dance. Limbs lithe and pale beneath threads of crimson, pierced and weeping. The linen of her shift taut and bloody about her swaying breasts.
Serwë
…
His prize.
The cries faltered. Hooves rumbled down the slopes …
She stopped. As though preparing for prayer, she slumped to one knee. She craned her head forward, silently gagging. She raised a pierced arm, snapped the birch shaft in her mouth. Her motions were deliberate—stiff. She reached back, fumbled for the arrowhead jutting from the base of her skull, pulled the shaft clear on a stream of blood.
Then she turned to look at him. Her smiling eyes shimmered with tears. She tried to wipe at the blood pulsing from her lips, only to scratch her neck with the arrow piercing her hand. She looked at him, unpuzzled, then slouched forward across the platform. Cnaiür heard the pop of buried wood.
“Serwë!” he cried.
When he shook her, her perfect face fell apart.
Numb, desolate, he stood, stared in horror at the carnage across the slopes. The brothers stood amid the dead Nansur, watching him without expression. Both had several arrows buried in their limbs, but they seemed … unconcerned.
Over a dozen riderless horses wandered the near distance, but he could see no sign of the Kidruhil.
“We must bury her,” he called.
Serwë helped him.
CHAPTER TEN
XERASH
Souls can no more see the origins of their thought than they can see the backs of their heads or the insides of their entrails. And since souls cannot differentiate what they cannot see, there is a peculiar sense in which the soul cannot self-differentiate. So it is always, in a peculiar sense, the same time when they think, the same place where they think, and the same individual who does the thinking. Like tipping a spiral on its side until only a circle can be seen, the passage of moments always remains now, the carnival of spaces always sojourns here, and the succession of people always becomes me. The truth is, if the soul could apprehend
itself the
way it apprehended the world—if it could apprehend its origins—it would see that there is no now, there is no here, and there is no me. In other words, it would realize
that just
as there is no circle, there is no soul.
—MEMGOWA, CELESTIAL APHORISMS
 
 
You are fallen from Him like sparks from the flame. A dark wind blows, and you are soon to flicker out.
—SONGS 6:33, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Xerash
The long mule-trains of the Scarlet Spires finally arrived several days into the siege of Gerotha. As though on cue, a new embassy issued from the city—this one walking in the manner of abject petitioners. The gates were not closed behind them. As the Warrior-Prophet had promised, the ancient capital of Xerash had capitulated of her own accord.
As a gift, the embassy brought the twelve heads of those who had orchestrated the earlier closing of the gates, including that of Captain Hebarata, who had mortally offended the Warrior-Prophet. But the Lords of the Holy War were not appeased, and the Warrior-Prophet spoke harshly to the Gerothans, saying that some example had to be set, some sacrifice made, both to atone for and to warn against what had happened. As though justice were to be found in the clarity of proportion, he announced his Toll of Days, saying that since four days had passed since Gerotha had shut its gates against him, so four out of ten Gerothans had to forfeit their lives.
“By dawn’s light tomorrow,” he decreed, “twenty thousand heads must be hung from the battlements of your city walls. If you do not do this, verily you shall all perish.”
That night, while the Holy War celebrated, all Gerotha screamed. Dawn’s light found her walls slicked in blood, their entire circuit ornamented with severed heads, thousands of them, either bundled in fishing nets or strung through the jaw along hanging ropes of hemp. When the heads were counted, it was found that the Gerothans had exceeded their measure by 3,056.
In all of Xerash, no city, town, or fortress would bar her gates against the Holy War again.
Athjeäri, meanwhile, became the first Lord of the Holy War to enter the Sacred Lands. Some time passed before he and his Gaenri realized they had actually entered Holy Amoteu. There was little to distinguish the Xerashi—or the Sons of Shikol, as they called them—from the Amoti in appearance or tongue. They crossed the tablelands of Jarta, whose people had once waged generational war against the ancient Amoti, then descended into a war of their own.
With no more than five hundred thanes and knights, Athjeäri battled his way ever deeper into Holy Amoteu. His sunburned Galeoth found the Amoti to be treacherous and supportive by turns. Though most called themselves Fanim, they had no love of the Kianene, and after months of dreadful rumours many thought the idolaters and their False Prophet invincible. The Padirajah himself had fallen. The great Kascamandri was dead, and here came none other than the mercurial kinsmen of Saudoun, the ruthless Blond Beast of Enathpaneah.
There were encounters at Gim, the famed Anothrite Shrine, Mer-Porasas … Athjeäri himself was wounded in the knee at Girameh, where the Latter Prophet’s mother had been born. Soon their blood-smeared standard, a Circumfix over the Red Horse of Gaenri, became a general sign of panic and terror. And though Fanayal sent more and more of his Grandees to hunt him, the Earl of Gaenri either vanished or, even worse, prevailed.
Hurall’arkeet,
the desert men began to call him—the “Wind Has Teeth.”
Finally, on the Day of Palms, the iron-clad knights rode into Besral, the ancestral home of the Latter Prophet’s now-extinct line. Though the Inrithi mission had fled long ago, many Amoti gathered to cheer the haggard wayfarers.
For such hearts, they told one another, had to be holy.
They walked before him, talking as though oblivious to Achamian’s presence mere paces behind.
Esmenet and Kellhus.
What was already being called the Toll of Days had been exacted, and the city was strangely mute, either for the want of voices or out of collective shock. Along the visible length of the alley, onlookers shrank or fell to their knees. The Xerashi in particular were careful to keep their black-ringed eyes to the ground as the Sacral Retinue filed past. The Warrior-Prophet toured Gerotha as much to be seen, Achamian imagined, as to inspect his prize.
In
The Tractate,
Gerotha was sometimes called The City of a Hundred Villages, and after two thousand years the epithet still suited. The alleys were as narrow and as numerous as those of the Worm in Carythusal. But unlike the Worm, where the ways followed the illogic of countless disconnected decisions over countless years, these continually converged onto what the Xerashi called “smalls”—miniature bazaars where the sun actually baked the cobbles—as if Gerotha were indeed a collection of intertwined villages, grown into one another like spots of mould on bread.
Esmenet had been telling Kellhus of her morning audience with the Scarlet Spires. According to Saurnemmi, routine remained the rule in Joktha, either because or in spite of the Scylvendi’s harsh ways. Otherwise, Eleäzaras claimed to have spoken to Palatine Uranyanka personally, warning him of the arcane consequences of any sedition, perceived or otherwise. “The Grandmaster,” she said, “wanted me to assure you that the Palatine of Moserathu will cause you no more troubles.”
Achamian could only watch and listen with dismay and admiration. It was a marvel to see her thus. There was her appearance, of course, her hair pinned in a jewelled brace, her gown—a Kianene chiton—sewn for the courts and pleasure gardens of the White Sun Palace in Nenciphon. But there was her bearing as well. Upright. Guileless. Penetrating and ironic. She was a match, and an easy one at that, for her new-found station.
It made breathing difficult.
I have to stop this!
Before, it had been just the two of them. Before, he could simply reach out, place a relaxed hand upon her waist, and she would turn into his arms. Now everything had been put to rout. Somehow, Kellhus had become the centre, the waystation that all must cross to find one another—to find themselves. Somehow everything had been dragged into the brilliant light of his judgement. And now Achamian found himself trailing after
them,
like some heartbroken beggar …
Why would she call him strong?
“Eleäzaras insulted you,” Kellhus said, turning to her, so that Achamian could see his bearded profile. He wore a magnificent sleeved gabardine over his tunic—an ornamental version of those worn by the Girgashi—with vertical bands of gold that flashed whenever he walked through sunlight. It looked altered about the shoulders, as one might expect given the dead Padirajah’s reputed bulk.
“He fairly called me a whore,” Esmenet said.
“You should expect such. You’re unfamiliar coin to them.”
Her smile was bland and cynical. “So where’s the moneychanger?”
Kellhus laughed. Achamian watched the gratification break across the faces of those about him. Some of them laughed as well, creating a melancholy echo. Everywhere Kellhus went, a part of him passed through others. Like a stone tossed into calm waters.
“Men are simple,” he replied. “They think primarily in terms of
things,
not relations. This is why they think it’s the gold or silver that makes coins valuable, not the
obedience
they command. Tell them the Nilnameshi use pottery for their coins and they scoff.”
“Or,” Esmenet said, “that the Warrior-Prophet uses a woman.”
A sliver of sunshine flickered across her, and for an instant everything about her, from the pleats along her chiton to her red-painted lips, gleamed silk. The two of them seemed something otherworldly in that moment—too beautiful, too
pure,
for the dingy brick and unkempt hearts that surrounded them.
“Exactly,” Kellhus said. “They ask, ‘Where’s the gold?’” He grinned at her sidelong. “Or in your case …”
“ ‵Where′s the
thumb
?′ ” Esmenet said ruefully.
Thumb. Sumni slang for “phallus.” Why did it pain him so, listening to her speak in the old way?
Kellhus grinned. “They can’t see that gold is only relevant insofar as it plays a role within our expectations—insofar as
we make it relevant
…” He paused, his eyes sparkling with mirth. “The same,” he continued, “might be said of thumbs.”
Esmenet grimaced. “Even one named Eleäzaras?”
The Sacral Retinue had crowded to a stop. They had come to one of the many smalls that knotted the labyrinthine alleyways of Gerotha. Blank faces seemed to watch from every window. A few Men of the Tusk gazed adoring from their knees. The ever-present guardsmen of the Hundred Pillars stood pensive, staring down adjoining alleys as though they could see around corners. Someone had painted lotus vine along the weathered cornices of several buildings. A babe cried.
Shaking his leonine head, the Warrior-Prophet laughed to the heavens. And though Achamian could feel the laughter’s contagion, its preternatural
demand
to celebrate things great and small, grief struck all breath from him. Anasürimbor Esmenet glanced about, her look shy with joy. Her eyes clicked away the instant she met his desolate gaze.
She took her husband’s hand.

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