The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (51 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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“And if you
wait,
” Maithanet continued, now staring directly at Nautzera, “if you wait, their true aspect will be revealed.”
The old sorcerer struggled for his breath. There was something about the way Simas shook. Something not
old
. Something not …
“He’s killing hi—”
“Silence!” Nautzera shouted.
“We learned of this one through our interrogations of the others,” Maithanet said, his voice possessing a resonance that brushed aside the alarmed prattle. “It’s an accident, an anomaly that, thankfully, its architects have been unable to recreate.”
It?
“What are you saying?” Nautzera cried.
Thrashing slack limbs, the thing called Simas began howling in a hundred lunatic voices. Maithanet braced his feet, rocked like a fisherman holding a twisting shark. Nautzera stumbled back, his hands raised in Warding. With abject horror, he watched the man’s oh-so-familiar face crack open, clutch at the skies with hooked digits.
“A skin-spy with the ability to work sorcery,” the Shriah of the Thousand Temples said, grimacing with exertion. “A skin-spy with a soul.”
And the grand old sorcerer realized he had known all along.
Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh
Ecstatic shouts rang out over the whisk and thud of galloping horsemen. Someone let go a long, low whistle. Proyas reined his horse to a halt at the fore of his household knights. His face blank in the manner of knotted stomachs, he stared dumbstruck at the eastern horizon.
At first he struggled with a dismaying sense of banality. For days now he’d known this vista lay just beyond the horizon. Unseen, it had seemed something at once dark and golden, a monument so terrible with holiness that he could do naught but fall on his belly when confronted by its aspect. But now …
He felt no urge to fall. In fact he felt no urge to do anything whatsoever, save to breathe and to watch. When he glanced at his fellow Men of the Tusk, they seemed little more than brigands appraising a victim, or wolves watching the herd that would fatten them for winters to come. He found himself wondering if this was always the way when dreams confronted the actuality that conceived them. He felt the customary wonder of sighting a great city from a great distance, he supposed, the sense of standing far from the carnival of brick and humanity that would soon encompass him. Nothing more.
The tears struck before the passion. He tasted them first. When he reached up to wipe his lips, the length and thickness of his beard surprised his hand. Where was Xinemus? He’d promised to describe …
His shoulders hitched in silent sobs. Sky and city reeled through broken sunlight. He clutched tight his saddle’s iron pommel. He thumbed the frayed knots that secured his canteen.
Finally he cleared his throat, blinked, and looked about. He heard and saw other men weeping. He sighted a sunburned man farther down the line of accumulating Inrithi, kneeling shirtless in the grasses with his arms thrown wide, screaming at the city as though confessing hatred to a tyrannical father.
“Sweet God of Gods,” someone behind Proyas began intoning, “Who walk among us … Innumerable are your hallowed names.”
The words swelled with deep-throated resonance, became ever more implacable and embalming as horseman after horseman took them up. Soon the slopes thrummed with cracked voices. They were the faithful, come with arms to undo long centuries of wickedness. They were the Men of the Tusk, bereaved and heartbroken, laying eyes on the ground of countless fatal oaths … How many brothers? How many fathers and sons?
“May your bread silence our daily hunger …”
Proyas joined them in their prayer, even as he grasped the reason for his turmoil. They were the swords of the Warrior-Prophet, he realized, and this was the city of Inri Sejenus. Moves had been made, and rules had been changed. Kellhus and the Circumfixion had hamstrung all the old points and purposes. So here they stood, signatories to an obsolete indenture, celebrating a destination that had become a waystation …
And no one knew what it meant.
“Judge us not according to our trespasses …”
Shimeh.
“But according to our temptations …”
Shimeh at long last.
If she was not holy before, Proyas decided, Xinemus and all the uncounted dead had made her such. There was no working back from what was final.
The Ainoni of Moserothu stood scattered across the shallow heights, watching their Palatine, the hard-hearted Uranyanka, lead the Warrior-Prophet to the best vantage. The two men paused beside a wall so ancient that grasses thronged along its broken crest—one of several ruined mausoleums set across the hillside.
Before them stretched the Plains of Shairizor, still blackened from the recent burning of fields and plantations. The River Jeshimal bisected the distances, winding like a rope into the violet and mauve foothills of the Betmulla Mountains. A great city occupied the heart of the plain, gathered about a pair of promontories overlooking the Meneanor. Her curtain walls, which had been tiled in white, gleamed in the sunlight. Great eyes, each as tall as a tree, marred their circuit and seemed to stare back at them.
Shimeh. The Sacred City of the Latter Prophet. At long last.
Some fell to their knees, bawling like children. But most simply stared, their faces blank.
Names were like baskets. Usually they came to men already filled, with refuse, banalities, and valuables mixed in various measures. But sometimes the passage of events overthrew them. Sometimes they came to bear different burdens. Heavier things. Darker things.
Shimeh was such a name.
From the four corners of Eärwa they had come. They had hungered about the walls of Momemn. They had survived the great bloodlettings of Mengedda and Anwurat. They had cleansed Shigek with their fury, walked the furnace plains of the Great Carathay. They had endured pestilence, starvation, and insurrection. They had nearly murdered the God’s own Prophet. Now, at last, they apprehended the
purpose
of their heartbreaking labour.
For the pious and the sentimental, this was a moment of consummation. But for those scarred by their innumerable trials, this could only be a time of
measure
. What could be worth what they had suffered? What could repay what they had exacted? This place? This chalk-white city?
Shimeh?
Somewhere, somehow, the name had been overturned.
But as always, the words of the Warrior-Prophet circulated among them. “This,” he was said to have said, “is not your destination. It’s your
destiny
.”
Parties of knights struck across the plain, while more and more Men of the Tusk crowded the hillside. Soon the entire Holy War stood arrayed along the summits, staring and pointing.
There, to the south, was the Shrine of Azoroa, where Inri Sejenus had given the first of his sermons. And there was the High Round, the great fortress raised by Triamarius II, its black concentric walls overlooking the Meneanor. And to its right, with its ochre stone and cyclopean pillars, was the Mokhal Palace, the ancient seat of the Amoti Kings. And that line, running from the hills to the city across the Shairizor Plain, marked the remnants of the Skiluran Aqueduct, named after the most gluttonous of Amoteu’s Nansur rulers.
And there, on the Juterum, the Holy Heights, stood the First Temple, the great circular gallery of columns that marked the site of the Latter Prophet’s Ascension. And to its right, with a gold-flaring dome above a façade of stacked colonnades, was the dread Ctesarat, the cancer they had come to excise …
The great tabernacle of the Cishaurim.
Only as the sun drew their shadows to the footings of the many-eyed walls did they abandon the hillsides to strike camp on the plain below. Few slept that night, such was their confusion. Such was their wonder.
Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Amoteu
Every Biaxi breathing,
the Exalt-General—the
Emperor
—had said.
I shall burn you all alive
.
General Biaxi Sompas found himself obsessing over these words. Would he do such a thing? The answer to that question was obvious. Ikurei Conphas was capable of anything—one need only spend a day in his company to know that. And there was always Martemus to remember. But
could
he? That was the question. Old Xerius would never dare. He understood, even respected, the power of House Biaxi. There would be uproar in the Houses of the Congregate, even insurrection. If one House could be scratched from the Lines, then any House could be.
Besides, the Ikureis had enough enemies as it was … Conphas wouldn’t dare!
But he would. Sompas could feel it in his bones. Conphas would dare. And what was more, the other Houses would simply stand by and watch. Who would raise arms against the
Lion of Kiyuth
? Sweet Sejenus, the Army had chosen him over a
prophet
.
No. No. He did the right thing, the only thing he could do … under the circumstances.
“We’ve come too far east,” Captain Agnaras said in his dour, matter-of-fact way.
Of course, you idiot! That’s the idea …
They had been fleeing for several days now: himself, his Captain, his sorcerer, and some eleven other Kidruhil. They still called it “hunting,” but, with the possible exception of the Saik Schoolman, they knew: they were being hunted. He could no longer remember the last contact they’d had with any of the other parties, though he knew others had to be out there, somewhere. They still rode across the wrinkled feet of the Betmulla, though the forests had become temple deep, almost reminiscent of those beneath the Hethanta Mountains. The sun had drawn low on the western horizon, its warmth and light baffled by the soaring canopy. Their horses trod across soft and uneven humus. The deepening shadows seemed to whine with horror.
He had panicked, he realized that now. He’d felt the Scylvendi slipping away, so he’d divided his search parties into even smaller units, telling himself he needed a finer net. That was when things began falling apart, when the trail they followed became strewn with Kidruhil, dead and desecrated. Riders were dispatched to muster the scattered parties, never to return. The sense of dread had grown, like a rash made gangrenous from scratching. Then one morning—Sompas could no longer remember which—they had woken up fugitives.

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