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

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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

The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (56 page)

BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
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The passage simply ended. What had been a single light was broken into thousands and pitched across yawning space. Nau-Cayûti had gasped and cursed, while Seswatha, after gaping for several breathless moments, had fallen to his knees and vomited. What he smelled was
human,
and it seemed the most unbearable stench of all.
A city. They found themselves staring across a city. The steaming heart of Golgotterath.
He should be awake!
A cavernous void opened before them. It reminded Seswatha of a ship’s ribbed hold, though pitched on its end, and far too vast to truly resemble any work of Men. Sheer golden faces reared into obscurity, hazed by the smoke of countless fires. Structures of mortise and hacked stone climbed their foundations, crusting their sides like stacked hornets’ nests, not dwellings but open cells, squalid and innumerable. It all would have looked like something revealed by low tide were it not for the fires and the figures teeming like mites across it. Lumbering files of Bashrag. Gibbering masses of Sranc. And among them, human captives, untold numbers of them, some shackled to sledges in great groaning trains, others scattered across the open-air harems of their captors, gagging beneath convulsing shadows, their mouths working, their eyes rolled up to the dark, pink and naked and bloodied, countless men, women, and children. The bodies of the broken choked the alleys below.
He should be awake …
The pealing roar, screams upon screams, wailing across heights of alien gold, reverberating through bones and heart, reverberating, reverberating …
Nau-Cayûti slumped to his knees. “What is this?” More of a breath than a whisper.
He turned to his teacher, his pupils ringed by crazed white.
“Th-this?”
Spoken like a bereaved child.
Awake!
Seswatha felt himself hoisted and thrown back into shadow. Something cracked his skull, and murk encompassed everything until he could see only his beloved student’s anguish—his lunatic hurt!
“Where is she? Whe—”
Awake, you fool!
With a gasp Achamian clawed his way to consciousness.
Shimeh!
he thought.
Shimeh!
There was a shadow above him, framed by the whining ring of his unanswered Wards. And there was a great and crushing absence, swinging in small circles from the end of a leather string. A Trinket, hanging the breadth of a finger above his breast …
“Some time ago,” the Scylvendi grated, “during all the empty hours thinking, I understood that you die as I do …” A tremor passed through the hand holding the string.
“Without Gods.”
Even from this distance, Eleäzaras could see the faint glow of lights spilling from the Ctesarat Tabernacle upon the Sacred Heights. He sat with Iyokus beneath the open canopy that flared from the south face of his pavilion. Circles of blood had been painted across the flattened grasses. Tomorrow they would at last engage their mortal enemy, and though the meaning of that engagement now escaped him, he would see it through.
Which meant he would use every weapon at his disposal—no matter how wicked.
“The Cishaurim flee,” Iyokus said, his mouth aglow with the Diamotic Communion. “As we suspected, they have no Chorae upon the Juterum. But they call … they call.”
The Snakeheads had no choice. They would disperse their Trinkets to guard against further incursions by Ciphrang, which meant that tomorrow his brother Schoolmen would face fewer in their initial assault.
Eleäzaras leaned forward. “We shouldn’t have used a Potent when a Debile would have suited our purposes just the same. And especially
not
Zioz! You told me yourself he was becoming dangerous.”
“All is well, Eli.”
“You grow reckless …”
Have I become such a coward?
Iyokus turned to him. Blood soiled his bandages where they pressed against his translucent cheeks.
“They must fear us,” the man said. “Now they do.”
The bizarre terror of awakening to a mortal threat: a pang wrapped round with a sluggish incredulity, as though something deep believed he still slept. Like a knife probing wool.
“Scylvendi!” Achamian gasped. It seemed he mouthed ice more than sound. The stink of the man filled the cramped confines of his tent, a smell somewhere between horse and dog.
“Where,”
the voice growled from the darkness,
“is he?”
Achamian knew he referred to Kellhus, either because of the intensity with which he said “he” or perhaps because he could scarcely think of anyone else himself. But then, all men searched for Kellhus, even those who knew him not.
“I don’t—”
“
Lies!
You are always with him. You are his protector—I know this!”
“
Please
…” he gasped, tried to cough without raising his chest. The Chorae had become unbearable. It seemed his heart might crack his sternum, leap into its absence. He could feel the stinging of his skin about his right nipple, the beginnings of the Salt. He thought of Carythusal, of Geshrunni, now long dead, holding a Trinket above his hand in the Holy Leper. Strange how this one seemed to have a different …
taste
.
I was never meant to escape.
The shadow hunched over him in fury, seemed to growl. Though he could see no more than the man’s outline limned in the faintest moonlight, Achamian saw him clearly in his soul’s eye: the strapped arms, the neck-breaking hands, the face rutted by murderous wrath.
“I will not ask again.”
What was happening here?
Don’t panic, old fool
.
“You think,” Achamian managed, “I would betray
his
trust, Scylvendi? You think I value my life
over his
?” Desperation, not conviction, had animated these words, for he did not believe them. Even still, they seemed to give the Scylvendi pause.
A moment of brooding dark, then the barbarian said, “I will trade, then … barter.”
Why the sudden reversal? And the man’s voice … had it actually quavered? The barbarian yanked the Chorae into his palm, like a child with a well-practised toy. Achamian fairly cried out in relief. For a moment he lay panting, still terrified and utterly dumbfounded. The shadow watched, motionless.
“Trade?” Achamian exclaimed. For the first time he noticed the two figures sitting behind the barbarian, though the gloom was such that he could tell only that one was a woman and the other a man. “Trade
what
?”
“Truth.”
This word, intoned as it was with exhaustion and a profound, barbaric candour, struck him like a blow. Achamian pressed himself onto his elbows, glared at the man, his eyes wild with outrage and confusion.
“And what if I’ve had my fill of Truth?”
“The truth of
him,
” the Scylvendi said.
Achamian peered at the man, squinted as if into the distance, even though he loomed so very near. “I already know that truth,” he said numbly. “He’s come to—”
“You know
nothing
!” the barbarian snarled. “Nothing! Only what he has let you know.” He spat in the corner next to Achamian’s uncovered feet, wiped his lips with the hand holding his Chorae. “The same as all his slaves.”
“I’m no sla—”
“But you are! In his presence
all men are slaves,
sorcerer.” With the Chorae clutched tight in his fist, the Scylvendi leaned back to sit cross-legged. “He is
Dûnyain
.”
Never had Achamian heard such shaking hate in a word, and the world was filled with such epithets: Scylvendi, Consult, Fanim, Cishaurim, Mog-Pharau … It sometimes seemed there were as many hatreds as there were names.
“That word,” Achamian said carefully, “‘Dûnyain’ … it simply means ‘truth’ in a dead tongue.”
“The tongue is not dead,” Cnaiür snapped, “and the word no longer means ‘truth.’”
Achamian recalled that first meeting outside Momemn, the Scylvendi standing proud and savage before Proyas, while Kellhus had held Serwë amid Xinemus’s knights. He hadn’t believed Cnaiür then, but the revelation of Kellhus and his name,
Anasûrimbor,
had overturned all his suspicions. What was it Kellhus had said? That the Scylvendi had accepted his wager? Yes, and that he had dreamed of the Holy War from afar …
“What you told us,” Achamian said, glimpsing the sheen of teeth, “that first day with Proyas … you lied.”
“I lied.”
“And Kellhus?” For some reason, asking this made his throat ache.
A pause. “Tell me where he went.”
“No,” Achamian said. “You promised me Truth…I will not barter untested wares.”
The barbarian snorted, but it didn’t strike Achamian as an expression of derision or contempt. There was a pensiveness to the man, a vulnerability of movement and manner that contradicted the violence of his aspect. Somehow Achamian knew that Cnaiür
wanted
to speak of these things, as though they burdened him in the way of crimes or powerful grievances. And this realization terrified him more thoroughly than any Trinket ever could.
“You think Kellhus was sent,” the Scylvendi said in a hollow voice, “when he was
summoned
. You think he is unique, when he is but one of a number. You think he is a saviour, when he is nothing more than a slaver.”
These statements clawed all blood and sensation from Achamian’s face.
“I don’t understand—”
“Then
listen
! For thousands of years they have hidden in the mountains, isolated from the world. For thousands of years they have bred, allowing only the quickest of their children to live. They say you know the passing of ages better than any, sorcerer, so think on it!
Thousands of years
… Until we, the natural sons of true fathers, have become little more than children to them.”
What followed was too … naked not to be true. The two shadows sitting behind him did not move while he talked, not by the slightest measure. The Scylvendi’s voice was harsh, marred by the guttural cadences of his mother tongue, but he spoke with an eloquence that gave the lie to the severity of his race. He told the story of a boy just outgrowing his native fragility, who found himself captured by the words of a mysterious slave, and led across trackless expanses between sane acts and upright men.
A story of patricide.
“I was his accomplice,” the Scylvendi said. Toward the end of his story he had slouched in thought, speaking more and more to his palms, as though each word were a pebble added to a back-breaking load. Suddenly he raised his fists to his temples. “I was his accomplice,
but I was not willing
!”
He lowered his forearms to his knees, held his fists out, as though snapping a bone.
“They see our thoughts through our faces—our hurts, our hopes, our rage, and our passion! Where we guess, they
know,
the way herdsmen can read the afternoon’s weather in the morning sky … And what men know, men dominate.”
Somehow it seemed a shaft of light had found his face, so bright was the anguish in his voice. Achamian could hear his tears, his sneering grimace.
BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
10.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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