The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (65 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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“You taught them
ignorance
.
“And throughout, you insisted that you were only a man like any other. You even feigned anger when others dared voice their suspicions. You did not impose, and you never presumed. You
conditioned
. You gave one man a wheel, another an axle, another a harness or a box, knowing that sooner or later they themselves would put the pieces together—that
the revelation would be theirs
. You bound them with inferences, knowing that someday they would make
you
their conclusion.”
The clean-shaven face leaned into the uncertain light. It seemed a grinning skull through the veiling water.
“That they would make you their Prophet.
“But even this wasn’t enough,” the lips continued. “Those without authority lost nothing by inserting you between them and their Gods, for they already yielded their actions to others. Servitude is the most instinctive of habits. But those with authority … To rule in the name of an absent king is to rule outright. Sooner or later the caste-nobility had to move against you. Crisis was inevitable …”
Moënghus stood, pale, indistinct, like a vapour exhaled by the earth. He stepped beneath the spouting eyes. For a moment water sluiced about his figure, then he was clear, dripping, standing eye to socket with his son, naked save for his sodden loincloth.
Pubic curls darkened the linen. Steam coiled about his beaded skin.
“This,” the eyeless face said, “was where the Probability Trance failed me …”
“So you did not anticipate the visions?” Kellhus asked.
His father’s face remained absolute and impassive.
“What visions?”
It seemed that he had screeched his throat raw. Several moments passed, but eventually the red-robed sorcerers ceased their fell singing. The glitter of sorceries dampened, then dulled into nothingness. Drums throbbed beneath the cackling rush of fires.
Red fires.
Eleäzaras no longer laughed. Behind the forward cadres, he stood in the heart of the great swath of hell his School had hacked from the city. Fumes steamed about the shell of foundations, fires twined into roaring towers, walls rose like fins from mounds of smashed brick; on and on, through slow-rolling veils of smoke, back to the battered ridge that had been the mighty Tatokar Walls. The slopes of the Juterum reared above the curtains of flame, its heights fenced by the ramparts of the Heterine Walls. So close! He had to crane his neck to see the dome and cornices of the Ctesarat above the battlements.
There they would find them … the assassins.
The Cishaurim had sent their invitation, and they had come. After innumerable miles and deprivations—after all the humiliation!—they had come. They had kept
their
end of the bargain. Now it was time to balance the ledgers. Now! Now!
What kind of game do they play?
No matter. No matter. He would raze all Shimeh if he had to. Upend the very earth!
Eleäzaras pressed a crimson sleeve against his face. It came away dark with soot and sweat. Despite the protestations of Shalmessa, his Javreh Captain, he pushed aside the tall woven shields and strode to the tip of a monolithic finger of stone that jutted from the debris. Waves of heat buffeted him.
“Fight!” he howled at the wavering images in the distance above. The black sky wheeled.
“Fight!”
Someone’s hands pulled at him. He slapped them away.
Sarothenes.
“There are Chorae near, Eli! Great numbers of them … Can’t you feel them?”
It would be good to bathe, Eleäzaras thought inanely. To scrub this madness from him.
“Of course,” he snapped. “Beneath the ruin. Held fast by the dead.”
The world about him seemed black and hollow and glittering white. Kellhus raised his palm. “My hands … when I look upon them, I see haloes of gold.”
Scrutiny. Calculation.
“I have not my eyes with me,” Moënghus said, and Kellhus understood instantly that he referred to the asps used by his Cishaurim brethren. “I walk these halls by memory.”
For all the signs he betrayed, this man who was his father could be a statue of stone. He seemed a face without a soul.
“The God,” Kellhus said. “He doesn’t speak to you?”
Scrutiny. Calculation.
“No.”
“Curious …”
“And from where does his voice hail?” Moënghus asked. “From what darkness?”
“I know not … Thoughts come. I know only that they’re not mine.”
Another infinitesimal pause.
He dips in the Probability Trance, the same as I …
“The mad say much the same,” Moënghus said. “Perhaps your trials have deranged you.”
“Perhaps …”
Scrutiny. Calculation.
“It’s not in your interest to deceive me.” A stone-faced pause. “Unless …”
“Unless,” Kellhus said, “I’ve come to assassinate you, as our Dûnyain brothers have decreed … Is this your apprehension?”
Scrutiny. Calculation.
“You have not the power to overcome me.”
“But I do, Father.”
Another pause, imperceptibly longer.
“How,” his father finally said, “could you know this?”
“Because I know
why
you were compelled to summon me.”
Scrutiny. Calculation.
“So you have grasped it.”
“Yes … the Thousandfold Thought.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SHIMEH
Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion.
Verily, it is conviction that kills.
—PARCIS,
THE NEW ANALYTICS
Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh
Oily torchlight. Orange faces, slack with anxiety. Orange brickwork stained and smeared with offal. Hunched ceilings, so low that even the shortest of the bowmen had to stoop. Men coughed, some continuously, but not because of the sewage soaking their boots. The fires above were eating the air …
Or so the Waterbearer had said.
The Cishaurim stood beneath the exit. The asps wound about his neck peered upward, their thumb-sized heads a silvery black. The idolaters had fallen silent. The vaulted ceiling no longer thrummed with impact and explosion. Grit no longer tinkled across their helms.
He cocked his shaved pate, as though listening …
“Douse the light,” he commanded. “Cover your eyes.”
They dropped their torches into the slop. For a moment, sputtering blue light illuminated their shins. Everything went black …
Then impossibly bright. A thunderous crack.
“Move!” the Waterbearer cried. “Climb! Climb!”
Suddenly all was blue, illuminated by a coin of incandescence that flared on the Waterbearer’s brow. They jostled forward, spitting at the dust. One by one they shouldered their way past the blind man, struggled up a slope of broken and blistering stone, then found themselves dashing through fiery ruins.
“This voice you hear,” the old Dûnyain said, “is not part of the Thousandfold Thought.”
Kellhus ignored these words. “Take me to them.”
“To whom?”
“To those you hold captive.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Why would you refuse?”
“Because I need to revise my assumptions, to explore these unforeseen permutations. I had discounted this possibility.”
“What possibility?”
“That the Wilderness would break rather than enlighten. That you would come to me a madman.”
Water, endlessly dropping, pounded air and stone. The thunder of inevitability.
“Refuse me anything, and I
will
kill you, Father.”
Hunched low on their saddles, the Kianene raced from the ruins of the Tantanah Gate to the River Jeshimal, their many-coloured khalats slapping against the rings of their mail, at first just a few dozen, then hundreds, in a long arrow-shaped stream. Still others filed out the Jeshimal Gate, which lay so close to the Ainoni flank.
The Tydonni hornsmen, who could see the Fanim quite clearly from the Shrine, sounded their alarums again and again. But the old Earl of Agansanor plodded onward at a trot. He could see the great cloud rising from the far quarters of the city, but the half-ruined arches of the Skilura Aqueduct, which was very near, obscured his view. When the horns continued to sound, he cursed and sent scouts forward.
By then it was too late.
The first of the Kianene, their horses lathered by the sprint, had reached the Jeshimal. They began to secure the crossings. For the hornsmen watching from the Shrine of Azoreah, it seemed that Shimeh had been tipped so that war itself might spill from it. Soon numbers that dwarfed the Tydonni reserves were racing across the Shairizor. Several of the mastodons, which had been the first to cross the toppled wall, were now tramping in their wake, dragging the same timber rafts that had been used to bridge the low ridge of debris. And the hornsmen saw it with far more clarity than any could—the cunning of the Padirajah’s plan.

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