The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (46 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
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The Holy War crossed the last of the Jarta Highlands, their mood sombre, their thoughts now filled with apprehension. Gothyelk joined them mere miles short of Besral, and though the Tydonni were dismayed to learn of Athjeäri’s fall, the rest of the Holy War were heartened. Here, on the very land that had birthed the Latter Prophet, the Men of the Tusk had been reunited. Only one last task lay before them.
Then, the morning they wound down the last of the Jartic heights, they came to an abandoned Nansur villa at the end of the Shairizor Plains. Here the Warrior-Prophet called a halt, though hours of daylight remained. The Lords of the Holy War beseeched him to continue, so eager were they to at last lay eyes on the Holy City.
Denying them, he took up residence behind the fortified walls.
Esmenet begged him not to move.
She braced her hands against his hard chest, then, staring into his eyes, she slowly pressed down, taking him to his pelvis. He shuddered, and for a grinding instant she felt herself welded to him in singular bliss. He came, and she followed, bucking about iron and ringing heat, crying out …
“Thank you,” she gasped in his ear afterward. “Thank you.” It seemed she so rarely touched him anymore.
He sat on the edge of the bed, and though his breath was heavy, she knew he was not winded. He was never winded. He stood, and she watched him walk naked across the polished floor to the elaborate laver carved into the sill of the opposing wall. In the gloom, the tripods painted him in orange and crimson hues. As he washed, his shadow fell bloated across the frescoed walls. She lay watching, admiring his ivory form, savouring the memory of him slick between her thighs.
She hugged tight the sheets, suddenly greedy for what little warmth they offered. She stared across the suite, recognizing in its lines memories of her former home. The Empire. Centuries previous, she knew, some Patridomos had coupled in this very room, his thoughts miraculously innocent of words like “Fanim” or “Consult.” He would have recognized “Kianene” perhaps, but only as the name of an obscure desert people. Not just individuals but entire ages, she realized, could be innocent of dreadful things.
She thought of Serwë. The perpetual anxiousness returned.
How had the joy of her new circumstances become so elusive? In her old life, she had often quizzed the priests who came to her, and in her darker moods she had even presumed to school them in what she saw as their hypocrisy. With some, those unlikely to return, she had asked what could be missing from their faith for them to find solace in whores. “Strength,” they sometimes answered; several had even wept. But more often than not they denied missing anything at all.
After all, how could they be miserable, when Inri Sejenus had claimed their hearts?
“Many make that mistake,” Kellhus said, standing at the side of the bed.
Without thinking, she reached out and grasped his phallus, began stroking its head with her thumb. He knelt on the edge of the bed and his great shadow encompassed her. A nimbus of gold outlined his mane.
Blinking tears, she looked to him.
Please … take me again
.
“They think misery inconsistent with faith,” he continued, “and so they start to pretend. They act as others act, thinking they alone have doubts, they alone are weak … In the company of the joyous they become desolate, and hold themselves accountable for their own desolation.”
He became hard and long beneath her touch, curved like a strung bow.
“But I have you,” she murmured. “I lie with you. I bear your child.”
Kellhus smiled, gently disengaged her hand. He leaned forward to kiss her palm. “I’m the
answer,
Esmi. Not the cure.”
Why was she crying? What was wrong with her?
“Please,” she said, clutching his member once again, as though it were her only purchase, her only possible hold on this godlike man. “Please take me.”
This one thing I can
give
…
“There’s more,” he said, drawing back the sheets and placing a shadowy hand upon her belly. “So much more.”
His look was long and sad. Then he left her for Achamian and the secrets of the Gnosis.
She lay awake for some time, listening to the fragments of arcane voice that surfaced from the stonework about her. Then, the gloom thickening as the braziers failed, she stretched naked across the sheets and drowsed, her soul circling about sorrow after sorrow. The death of Achamian. The death of Mimara.
Nothing stayed dead in her life. Her past least of all.
“Walking between Wards is easy,” a voice hummed, “when their author practises other arcana.”
She awoke suddenly, if not completely, and through blinking eyes watched yet another man walk to the side of her bed … He was tall, dressed in a black cloak over a silvered brigandine. With relief she realized he was quite handsome. There was compensation of a different sort in—
His shadow had hooked wings.
She tumbled from the far side of the bed, shrank toward the far wall.
“And to think,” he said, “that I thought twelve talents an outrage.”
She tried to scream, but somehow he was there, pressed like a lover against her, his smooth hand clamped about her mouth. She felt the thick arch of him pressed against her buttocks. When he licked her ear, her body shuddered in treacherous delight.
“How,” he gasped, “could the same peach command such different prices, hmm? Can the bruises be washed away? The juices sweetened?” His free hand roamed the planes of her body, and she could feel herself tense, not against him, but for … as though her desires were as easily moulded as clay.
“Or is it simply the vendor?”
It seemed that fire had stolen her breath. “Please!” she gasped.
Take me …
Stubble chafed the spit-softened skin below her ears. She knew that it was an illusion, but …
“My children,” he said, “only imitate what they see …”
She whimpered into his suffocating hand—tried to cry out even as her legs slackened to the touch of his probing fingers.
“But
me,
” he murmured in a voice that ran tickling over her skin, “I take.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
HOLY AMOTEU
Death, in the strict sense, cannot be defined, for whatever predicate we, the living, attribute to it necessarily belongs to Life. This means that Death, as a category, behaves in a manner indistinguishable from the Infinite, and from God.
—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN
 
 
One cannot assume the truth of what one declares without
presuming the falsity of all incongruous declarations. Since all
men assume the truth of their declarations, this presumption becomes
at best ironic and at worst outrageous. Given the infinity of possible
claims, who could be so vain as to think their dismal claims true?
The tragedy, of course, is that we cannot but make declarations.
So it seems we must speak as Gods to converse as Men.
—HATATIAN, EXHORTATIONS
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Amoteu
Incû-Holoinas, the Nonmen had called it. The Ark-of-the-Skies.
After his ancient victory over the Inchoroi, Nil’giccas had ordered a census of the vessel, the results of which were recorded in the
Isûphiryas,
the great annal of the Nonmen. Three thousand cubits in length, over two thousand of which were buried with the prow in the mangled depths. Five hundred in width. Three hundred in depth …
It was a many-chambered mountain, wrought in a gold-gleaming metal that could not be scored, let alone broken. A city rolled into the warped planes of some misbegotten fish. A ruin that the world could not stomach, that the ages could not digest.
And, as Seswatha and Nau-Cayûti discovered, a great, gilded crypt.
They wandered its abandoned bowels, their steps creaking across the planks of rotted gopher wood that had been used to level the canted walls. Passage after winding passage, chamber after yawning chamber, some as wide as canyons. And everywhere they turned, they found bones—innumerable bones. Most were little more than chalk. They crumbled underfoot, hazing the air about their ankles with dust. The bones of Men or Nonmen, the remains of ancient warriors perhaps, or captives left to starve in the absolute dark. The fused bones of Bashrag, thick as a prophet’s staff and grafted together in threes. The bones of Sranc, scattered like those of fish about an abandoned camp. And others they found impossible to identify, bones with singular shapes, some as small as earrings, others as long as a skiff′s mast. They gleamed like oiled bronze, and could not be broken, despite the legendary strength of Nau-Cayûti’s arms.
Never had Seswatha suffered such a horror, diffuse enough to ignore moment by moment, but possessing a tidal profundity, as though all that he cherished lay exposed, not just to harm, but to some horrifically contrary
truth
. Intellectually he understood the why and the wherefore, even as his viscera quailed. They walked the pits of Min-Uroikas, a place where the Inchoroi, in their wickedness, had gnawed at boundaries between the world and the Outside for thousands of years. And now the howl of their damnation lay near … very near.
This was a topos, a place where hard lines of reality had become shading. They could hear it in the cavernous echoes. Gibbering screams in the scrape of their steps. Groaning multitudes in the rattle of their coughs. Inhuman roaring in the ring of their voices. And they could see it, as though images had been stitched to their periphery. Many-jawed faces, snapping out of the black. Weeping children … Achamian lost count of the times he saw Nau-Cayûti abruptly whirl, trying to catch apparitions in the certainty of direct sight.
Where the going was not treacherous, Achamian staggered in Nau-Cayûti’s wake, staring thoughtlessly at what little the light of his hooded lantern revealed. The husk of detritus, hanging in place like discarded skin. The walls of gold, their uterine curves skewed to the pitch of the Ark’s final descent. The miniature panels of script stamped, it seemed, across every interior surface. Even their reflections, stretched grotesque across the surrounding walls and haloed with an unnatural nimbus of black.
Exhausted to the point of shambling steps and shaking hands, they finally paused, hoping to steal some furtive sleep. Achamian sat huddled in the crotch between bulkheads, at once drowsing and wringing his tight-clutched limbs in horror. He found himself revisiting every footstep, every gaping blackness, every mouldering passage, wondering where his hope had at last guttered out. How could they ever escape such a place? Even if they found what he searched for …
He could feel them, piling labyrinthine into the distances above and below him, the consuming hollows. It seemed hell itself roared inaudible about them.
This place.
“Bones,” Nau-Cayûti spat between chattering teeth. “They had to be bones!”
Achamian cringed at the sound of his voice, looked to his forlorn shadow. The Prince hugged himself the same as he, as though shielding nakedness from blowing ice.

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