The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (9 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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“There have been other assassins.”
“But that was before … The stakes are far higher now. Perhaps these skin-spies act on their own. Perhaps they’re … directed.”
Kellhus studied him for a moment. “You fear one of the Consult might be directly involved … that an Old Name shadows the Holy War.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Kellhus did not immediately reply, at least not with words. Instead, everything about him—his stance, his expression, even the fixity of his gaze—grew sharp with monumental intent. “The Gnosis,” he finally said. “Will you give it to me, Akka?”
He knows. He knows the power he would wield
. Somewhere, beneath some footing of his soul, the ground seemed to fall away.
“If you demand it … though I …” He looked to Kellhus, somehow understanding that the man already knew what he was about to say. Every path, it seemed, every implication, had already been travelled by those shining blue eyes.
Nothing surprises him
.
“Yes,” Kellhus said with a peculiar moroseness. “Once I accept the Gnosis, I yield the protection afforded by the Chorae.”
“Exactly.”
In the beginning Kellhus would possess only the vulnerabilities of a sorcerer, none of the strengths. The Gnosis, far more than the Anagogis, was an analytic and systematic sorcery. Even the most primitive Cants required extensive precursors, components that damned nonetheless for being inert.
“Which is why you must protect me,” Kellhus concluded. “Henceforth you will be my Vizier. You will reside here, in the Fama Palace, at my disposal.” Words spoken with the authority of a Shrial Edict, but infused with such force of certainty, such inevitability, that it seemed they
described
more than they demanded, that Achamian’s compliance was some ancient and conspicuous fact.
Kellhus did not wait for his reply—none was needed.
“
Can
you protect me, Akka?”
Achamian blinked, still trying to digest what had just happened.
“You will reside here …”
With her.
“F-from an Old Name?” he sputtered. “I’m not sure.”
Where had this treacherous joy come from?
You will show her! Win her!
“No,” Kellhus said evenly. “From yourself.”
Achamian stared, glimpsed Nautzera screaming beneath Mekeritrig’s incandescent touch. “If I cannot,” he said with a voice that seemed a gasp, “Seswatha can.”
Kellhus nodded. Motioning for Achamian to follow, he abruptly turned, pressing through interlocking branches, crossing rows. Achamian hastened after him, waving at the bees and fluttering petals. Three rows over, Kellhus paused before an opening between two trees.
Achamian could only gape in horror.
The apple tree before Kellhus had been stripped of its blossoming weave, leaving only a black knotted trunk with three boughs bent about like a dancer’s waving arms. A skin-spy had been pulled naked across them, bound tight in rust-brown chains. Its pose—one arm trussed back and the other forward—reminded Achamian of a javelin thrower. Its head hung from drawn shoulders. The long, feminine digits of its face lay slack against its chest. Sunlight showered down upon it, casting inscrutable shadows.
“The tree was dead,” Kellhus said, as though in explanation.
“What …” Achamian began in a thin voice, but halted when the creature stirred, raised the shambles of its visage. The digits slowly clawed the air, like a suffocating crab. Lidless eyes glared in perpetual terror.
“What have you learned?” Achamian finally managed.
The abomination masticated behind lipless teeth.
“Ahh,”
it said in a long, gasping breath.
“Chigraaaa …”
“That they are directed,” Kellhus said softly.
“Woe comes, Chigraaa. You have found us too late.”
“By whom?” Achamian exclaimed, staring, clutching his hands before him. “Do you know by whom?”
The Warrior-Prophet shook his head. “They’re conditioned—powerfully so. Months of interrogation would be required. Perhaps more.”
Achamian nodded. Given time, he realized, Kellhus
could
empty this creature, own it as he seemed to own everything else. He was more than thorough, more than meticulous. Even the swiftness of this discovery—wrested, no less, from a creature that had been forged to deceive—demonstrated his … inevitability.
He makes no mistakes.
For a giddy instant a kind of gloating fury descended upon Achamian. All those years—centuries!—the Consult had played them for fools. But now—
now
! Did they know? Could they sense the peril this man represented? Or would they underestimate him like everyone else had?
Like Esmenet.
Achamian swallowed. “Either way, Kellhus, you must surround yourself with Chorae bowmen. And you need to avoid large structures, anyplace where—”
“It troubles you,” Kellhus interrupted, “to see these things.”
A breeze had descended upon the grove, and countless petals spun through the air as though along unseen strings. Achamian watched one settle upon the skin-spy’s pubis.
Why bind the abomination here, amid such beauty and repose—like a cancer on a young girl’s skin? Why? It seemed the act of someone who knew nothing of beauty … nothing.
He matched Kellhus’s gaze. “It troubles me.”
“And your hatred?”
For an instant it had seemed that everything—who he was and who he would become—wanted to love this godlike man. And how could he not, given the sanctuary of his mere presence? And yet intimations of Esmenet clung to him. Glimpses of her passion …
“It remains,” he said.
As though provoked by this response, the creature began jerking, straining against its fetters. Slick muscle balled beneath sunburned skin. Chains rattled. Black boughs creaked. Achamian stepped back, remembering the horror of Skeaös beneath the Andiamine Heights. The night Conphas had saved him.
Kellhus ignored the thing, continued speaking. “All men surrender, Akka, even as they seek to dominate. It’s their nature to submit. The question is never
whether
they will surrender, but rather
to whom
…”
“Your heart, Chigraa…I shall make it my apple …”
“I—I don’t understand.” Achamian glanced from the abomination to Kellhus’s sky-blue eyes.
“Some, like so many Men of the Tusk, submit—
truly
submit—only to the God. It preserves their pride, kneeling before what is never heard, never seen. They can abase themselves without fear of degradation.”
“I shall eat …”
Achamian held an uncertain hand against the sun to better see the Warrior-Prophet’s face.
“One,” Kellhus was saying, “can only be tested, never degraded, by the God.”
“You said ‘some,’” Achamian managed. “What of the others?” In his periphery he saw the thing’s face knuckle as though into interlocking fists.
“They’re like you, Akka. They surrender not to the God but to those like themselves. A man. A woman. There’s no pride to be preserved when one submits to another. Transgress, and there’s no formula. And the fear of degradation is always present, even if not quite believed. Lovers injure each other, humiliate and debase, but they never
test,
Akka—not if they truly love.”
The thing was thrashing now, like something brandished in an invisible fist. Suddenly the bees seemed to buzz on the wrong side of his skull.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because part of you clings to the hope that she tests you …” For a mad moment it seemed Inrau watched him, or Proyas as a boy, his eyes wide and imploring. “She does not.”
Achamian blinked in astonishment. “What are you saying, then? That she degrades me? That
you
degrade me?”
A series of mewling grunts, as though beasts coupled. Iron rattled and screeched.
“I’m saying that she loves you still. As for me, I merely took what was given.”
“Then give it back!” Achamian barked with savagery. He shook. His breath cramped in his throat.
“You’re forgetting, Akka. Love
is like sleep
. One can never seize, never force love.”
The words were his own, spoken that first night about the fire with Kellhus and Serwë beneath Momemn. In a rush, Achamian recalled the sprained wonder of that night, the sense of having discovered something at once horrific and ineluctable. And those eyes, like lucid jewels set in the mud of the world, watching from across the flames—the same eyes that watched him this very moment … though a different fire now burned between them.
The abomination howled.
“There was a time,” Kellhus continued, “when you were lost.” His voice seethed with what seemed an inaudible thunder. “There was a time when you thought to yourself, ‘There’s no meaning, only love. There’s no world …’”
And Achamian heard himself whisper, “Only her.”
Esmenet. The Whore of Sumna.
Even now, murder stared from his sockets. He couldn’t blink without seeing them together, without glimpsing her eyes wide with bliss, her mouth open, his chest arching back, shining with her sweat … He need only speak, Achamian knew, and it would be all over. He need only sing, and the whole world would burn.
“Not I, not even Esmenet, can undo what you suffer, Akka. Your degradation is your own.”
Those
grasping
eyes! Something within Achamian shrank from them, beseeched him to throw up his arms.
He must not see!
“What are you saying?” Achamian cried.
Kellhus had become a shadow beneath a tear-splintered sun. At long last he turned to the obscenity writhing across the tree, its face clutching at sun and sky.
“This, Akka …” There was a blankness to his words, as though he offered them up as parchment, to be rewritten as Achamian wished. “This is your test.”
“We shall cut you from your meat!”
the obscenity howled.
“From your meat!”
“You, Drusas Achamian, are a Mandate Schoolman.”
After Kellhus left him, Achamian stumbled to one of the massive dolmens, leaned against it, and vomited into the grasses about its base. Then he fled through the blooming trees, past the guards on the portico. He found some kind of pillared vestibule, a vacant niche. Without thinking, he crawled into the shadowy gap between wall and column. He hugged his knees, his shoulders, but he could find no sense of shelter.
Nothing was concealed. Nothing was hidden.
They believed me dead! How could they know?
But he’s a prophet … Isn’t he?
How could he
not
know? How—
Achamian laughed, stared with idiot eyes at the dim geometries painted across the ceiling. He ran a palm over his forehead, fingers through his hair. The skin-spy continued to thrash and bark in his periphery.
“Year One,” he whispered.
CHAPTER TWO
CARASKAND
I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.
—HATATIAN,
EXHORTATIONS
Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Caraskand
Servants and functionaries screamed and scattered as Cnaiür barged past them with his hostage. Alarums had been raised throughout the palace—he could hear them shouting—but none of the fools knew what to do. He had saved their precious Prophet. Did that not make him divine as well? He would have laughed had not his sneer been a thing of iron. If only they knew!
He halted at a juncture in the marmoreal halls, jerked the girl about by the throat. “Which way?” he snarled.

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