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) (57 page)

BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)

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“He chose me. He raised me up, and he shaped me, the way women shape flints to scrape their hides. He used me to kill my father. He used me to secure his escape. He used me …”

The shadow crossed his fists over his bull chest.

“Shame!
Wutrim kut mi’puru kamuir
! I could not stop thinking! I could not stop thinking! I laid eyes upon my degradation, I
understood
, and I stamped my heart with that understanding!”

Without realizing, Achamian wrung finger against finger, joint against joint. There was the Scylvendi’s shadow and the pit that was his Chorae. Nothing else existed.

“He was intellect …
He was war! That
is what they are! Do you not see? With every heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and whimper when they raise their hands …

“They make us love! They make us love!”

Vast was the night. Great was the ground.

And yet they yielded. They yielded.

Step-step-leap. Incantations of space. World crossing world.

The hares darted from his path. The thrushes burst from his feet, hurtling into the stars. The jackals raced at his side, their tongues lolling, their loping limbs tiring.

“Who are you?” they panted as their hearts failed them.

“Your master!” cried the godlike man as he outdistanced them. And though humour was unknown to him, he laughed. He laughed until the sky shook.

Your master.

How could a heart hold such outrage?

The sorcerer rocked back and forth in the candlelight, to and fro, muttering, muttering …

“Back-back … m-must start at beginning …”

But he could not—no, not yet. Never had he been party to such an exchange. Never had such words been thrown upon the balance of his heart.

He knew the Scylvendi meant to kill
him,
his final, greatest student. He knew what the two shadows behind the barbarian had been. As they exited his tent, he had seen
her
face in a shaft of moonlight, as perfect as that night it had swayed and moaned above
him
. Serwë …

You gave him up. The Warrior-Prophet … You told the barbarian where he goes!

Because he lies! He steals what is ours! What is mine!

But the world! The world!

Fie on the world! Let it burn!

“The beginning!” he cried.
Please
.

Before him, spread across his silk bedding, were sheaves of parchment. He dipped his quill in his inkhorn, murmuring, murmuring … Quickly he wrote all the names of all the factions that had so bedevilled him, redrawing the map that had burned in the Sareotic Library.

He paused over,

INRAU

searching for the memory of his sorrow, struck by remembrances that no longer mattered—or so it seemed. And he shuddered so violently at writing,

THE CONSULT

he was forced to set his quill down and hold his arms tight to his chest.

You gave him up!

No! No!

When he was finished, it seemed he held the very same parchment he had lost, and he pondered the identity of things, the way words did not discriminate between repetitions. They were immortal, and yet they cared.

With a bold stroke, he crossed out,

THE EMPEROR

and inked,

CONPHAS

underneath, thinking of all the Scylvendi had said regarding the new Emperor, of how even now he marched on the Holy War from the west—or from the sea.
“Warn them,”
the leering shadow had said.
“I would not see Proyas dead.”

He quickly scratched a welter of new lines, all the connections he had ignored since his abduction by the Scarlet Spires. Then, in a hand too steady to be his own—for he
was
mad, he knew that now—he wrote,

THE DÛNYAIN

in the open space to the left of,

ANASÛRIMBOR KELLHUS

He held his quill above the ancient word for some time. Two drops of ink—tap-tap—marred the script. He watched them bleed outward, chasing a million infinitesimal veins, obliterating the word.

And for some reason, that spurred him to write,

ANASÛRIMBOR MOËNGHUS

above. The name, not of Kellhus’s son by Serwë, but of his
father
—the man who had summoned him to the Three Seas …

Summoned!

He dipped his quill into his inkhorn, his hand as light as an apparition. Then, as though crowded forward by dawning apprehension, he slowly wrote,

ESMENET

against the top left margin.

How had her name become his prayer? Where did she fall in these monstrous events?

Where was his own name?

He stared at the completed map, insensible to the passage of time. The Holy War roused about him. Shouts and the chunk-chunk of hooves passed through his tent—passed through him. He had become a ghost that stared and stared, not really pondering but
watching,
as though the secret lay hidden in the ink’s immobility …

Men. Schools. Cities. Nations.

Prophets. Lovers.

There was no pattern to these breathing things. There was no encompassing thought to give them meaning. Just men and their warring delusions … The world was a corpse.

Xinemus’s lesson.

Without knowing why, he began connecting each of the names to,

SHIMEH

where it lay centre bottom. Lines. One after another, drawn to the city that was about to devour so many, guilty and innocent alike. The bloodthirsty city.

Her name he connected last of all, for he knew she needed Shimeh more than any other—save perhaps himself. Once the black thread was drawn tight, he returned the tip of his quill and drew it out once more. And again. And again. And again. Quicker and quicker. Until he slashed the vellum sheet in a frenzy. Cut after cut after cut—

For he was sure that his quill had become a knife …

And that flesh lay beneath the tattooed skin.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SHIMEH

If war does not kill the woman in us, it kills the man.

—TRIAMIS I,
JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES

Like so many who undertake arduous journeys, I left a country of wise men and came back to a nation of fools. Ignorance, like time, brooks no return.

—SOKWË,
TEN SEASONS IN ZEÜM

Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh

Soundless light broken through beads of dew. Dark canvas faces steaming. Shadows stretching from engines of war, slowly shrinking. Hues of grey bleeding into a panoply of colours. The far tracts of the sea flashing gold.

Morning. The beginning of the world’s slow bow before the sun.

Slaves stirred smoke from the firepits, used dried grass to conjure flames from buried coals. The sleepless roused themselves, sat in the chill, watching the twining smoke, disbelieving …

The first of the horns pealed raw across the distances.

The day had come. Shimeh awaited, black against a fan of rising light.

“Your father,”
the old man in Gim had rasped,
“bids me tell you …”

Kyudea rose from the pastures like a scattered cairn. Foundations snaked through the grasses. Weathered stone crowned the peaks of rambling mounds. Here and there, toppled columns breached the turf, as though the wrecked city had been swamped by the swells of an earthen sea.

The Warrior-Prophet wandered the debris, a future mapped with each exhalation. His soul forked into the blackness of possibility, following the calculus of inference and association. Thoughts branching, shoot after shoot, until he filled the immediate world and struck beyond, down into the exhausted soil of the past, out across the ever-receding horizon of the future.

Cities burned. Entire nations took flight. A whirlwind walked …

“‘There is but one tree in Kyudea …’”

Though only dead stone lay scattered about him, Kellhus could see what had come before: the grand processionals, the thronging thoroughfares, the ponderous temples. Kyudea had been as great as Shimeh, if not greater, in the days when the provinces south of the River Sempis had been nations. Now she was mute and fallow, a place for shepherds to shelter their flocks in time of storm.

Glories had dwelt here once. Now there was nothing. Only overturned stone, the whisk of grasses beneath the wind …

And answers.

“‘There is but one tree,’”
the old man had said, his voice not his own,
“‘and I dwell beneath it.’”

And Kellhus had struck, cleaving him to the heart.