The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (69 page)

Read The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Fantasy

BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
11.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Past the Esharsa Market, through slums and tangled alleyways, the Conriyans battled and chased the Fanim, losing more and more of their number to rapine and plunder, drawing up only when they reached the broad reed marshes that had once been Shimeh’s great harbour. Proyas had long since abandoned any attempt to impose order or restraint on his men. The madness of battle was on them, and though his heart grieved it, he understood what it meant to wager one’s life, and the bestial licence that men took as their prize.
Shimeh, it seemed, was no exception.
It wasn’t …
Separated in the pursuit, he found himself wandering the murky streets. He came upon a small market square where the escarpment of façades and cornices fell away, allowing him to see the heights of the Juterum: the Heterine Walls painted in flickering lights, the tall columns of the First Temple a motionless blue. Smoke rose from the heights’ footings to the west, great tattered curtains of it, climbing the way sand might fall through clear water. Boiling upward, it passed into and merged with the unnatural clouds, so that the whole of heaven seemed a thing of smoke spilling outward across the plane of an immense ceiling.
It wasn’t …
He looked across the abandoned kiosks sunk into the buildings before him, only to glimpse what seemed to be a
tusk
in the shadowy confines of one. Scowling against the press of his war-mask, he wandered past the threshold, past ropes hung with workaday pottery, shelves cluttered with wooden bowls and plates.
There it was … the size of his forearm perhaps, painted in pitch across a humble door. The crude simplicity of it struck a pang in the back of his throat. A giddiness, something like fear or expectation, made haze of his heart and limbs, the same as when his mother had brought him to temple as a child.
He raised a hand, felt the wood through the iron links about his fingertips. He caught his breath when the door swung open.
Aside from sleeping mats, the room was unfurnished—the abode of debt-slaves, perhaps. A man, a common Amoti by the look of him, sat slumped against the wall to his right, where he appeared to have bled to death. The haft of a knife lay just beyond the reach of his purple fingers. Another man, one of the Kianene they had fought across the Esharsa, lay sprawled across the floor, face downward. The floor listed toward the far wall, so that the blood spilled away, sheeting the planks, gumming about wood shavings, stretching thin claws along the grouted seams. Almost invisible in the murk, a woman and a juvenile girl cringed in the far corner, watching him with horror-round eyes.
He remembered his silver war-mask, raised it. He savoured the sudden cool across his face. The fear of the women did not diminish, though he had thought that it would. He looked down, and as though for the first time saw the blood daubed and smeared across his white and blue khalat. He raised his gauntleted hands. They too had been slicked in crimson.
Memories of savagery, of hacking death, of screams and horrified curses. Memories of Sumna, his forehead pressed against Maithanet’s knee, weeping as one reborn. How had he come so far?
Despite the rumbling drums and the distant horns, his footsteps seemed to burst across the silence. Thud. Thud. The mother wailed and rocked as he approached, began babbling something … something …
“… merutta k’al alkareeta! Merutta! Merutta!”
She desperately pawed at the blood across her lower lip and chin, then smeared
across the floor at his booted feet. A tusk?
“Merutta!”
she bawled, though whether she meant “tusk” or “mercy” he could not tell.
They screamed and shrank as he reached for them. He pulled the girl to her feet, found her lightness at once terrifying and arousing. She flailed at him ineffectually, then went very still, as though his hands might be jaws. The mother bawled and beseeched, smeared tusk after tusk across the gritty floor.
No, Prosha …
It wasn’t supposed to be … Not like this.
But then, it never was.
It seemed he could smell the girl over the reek of smoke and entrails—no perfumes, at once sour and musky and clean, the smell of young promise. He turned her to the sourceless light. Cropped black hair. Brimming eyes. Swollen cheeks. By the Gods, she was lovely, this daughter of his enemy. Narrow hips. Long legs …
If he were to strike her, would he feel death at the end of his arm? If he were to grow hot upon her …
An enormous crack shivered the air, thrummed through the building’s bones.
“Run,” he murmured, though he knew she wouldn’t understand. He pulled her back, held a soiled hand out to raise the mother. “You must find a better place to hide.”
This was Shimeh.
“In this world,” Moënghus said, “there’s nothing more precious than our blood—as you have no doubt surmised. But the children we bear by worldborn women lack the breadth of our abilities. Maithanet is not Dûnyain. He could do no more than prepare the way.”
Her name arose like a pang from the darkness:
Esmenet
.
“Only a true son of Ishuäl could succeed,” his father continued. “For all the Thousandfold Thought’s innumerable deductions, for all its elegance, there remained countless variables that could not be foreseen. Each of its folds possesses a haze of catastrophic possibilities, most of them remote, others nearly certain. I would have abandoned it long ago, were not the consequences of inaction so absolute.
“Only one of the Conditioned could follow its path. Only
you,
my son.”
Could it be? A tincture of sorrow in his father’s voice? Kellhus turned from the hanging skin-spies, once again enclosed his father within the circle of his scrutiny.
“You speak as though the Thought were a living thing.”
He could see nothing in the eyeless face.
“Because it is.” Moënghus stepped between the two hanging skin-spies. Though blind, he unerringly reached out to run a finger down one of the many hanging chains. “Have you heard of a game played in southern Nilnamesh, a game called
viramsata,
or ‘many-breaths’?”
“No.”
“Across the plains surrounding the city of Invishi, the ruling caste-nobles are very remote, very effete. The narcotics they cultivate assure them of the obedience of their populations. Over the centuries they have elaborated jnan to the point where it has eclipsed their old faiths. Entire lives are spent in what we would call gossip. But viramsata is far different from the rumours of the court or the clucking of harem-eunuchs—far more. The players of viramsata have made games of truth. They tell lies about who said what to whom, about who makes love to whomever, and so on. They do this
continually,
and what is more, they are at pains to
act out
the lies told by others, especially when they are elegant, so they might make them true. And so it goes from tongue to lip to tongue, until no distinction remains between what is a lie and what is true.
“In the end, at a great ceremony, it is the most
compelling
tale that is declared
Pirvirsut,
a word that means ‘this breath is ground’ in ancient Vaparsi. The weak, the inelegant, have died, while others grow strong, yielding only to the Pirvirsut, the Breath-that-is-Ground.
“Do you see? The viramsata, they become living things, and
we are their battle plain
.”
Kellhus nodded. “Like Inrithism and Fanimry.”
“Precisely. Lies that have conquered and reproduced over the centuries. Delusional world views that have divided the world between them. They are twin viramsata that even now war through shouts and limbs of men. Two great thoughtless beasts that take the souls of Men as their ground.”
“And the Thousandfold Thought?”
Moënghus turned to him, as precisely as if he could see. “An instigator that goads them, that bleeds them even as we speak. A formula of events that will rewrite the very course of history. A great transition rule that will see Inrithism and Fanimry transformed. The Thousandfold Thought is all these things.
“Beliefs
beget action,
Kellhus. If Men are to survive the dark years to come, they must all act
of one accord
. So long as there are Inrithi and Fanim, this will not be possible. They must yield before a new delusion, a new Breath-that-is-Ground. All souls must be rewritten … There is no other way.”
“And the Truth?” Kellhus asked. “What of that?”
“There is no Truth for the worldborn. They feed and they couple, cozening their hearts with false flatteries, easing their intellects with pathetic simplifications. The Logos, for them, is a tool of their lust, nothing more … They excuse themselves and heap blame upon others. They glorify their people over other peoples, their nation over other nations. They focus their fears on the innocent. And when they hear words such as these, they recognize them—but as defects belonging to others. They are children who have learned to disguise their tantrums from their wives and their fellows, and from themselves most of all …
“No man says, ‘
They
are chosen and
we
are damned.’ No worldborn man. They have not the heart for Truth.”
Stepping from between his faceless captives, Moënghus approached, his expression a mask of blind stone. He reached out as though to clasp Kellhus’s wrist or hand, but halted the instant Kellhus shrank back.
“But why, my son? Why ask me what you already know?”

Other books

Rest For The Wicked by Cate Dean
The House That Death Built by Michaelbrent Collings
A Touch of Spring by Hunter, Evie
Remembering Hell by Helen Downing
The Long Way Home by Lauraine Snelling
The Fern Tender by Price, A.M.