The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (10 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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She sobbed and gasped, looked with wide, panicked eyes down the hallway to their right. He had seized a Kianene slave, knowing she would care more for her skin than her soul. The poison had struck too deep with the Zaudunyani.
Dûnyain poison.
“Door!” she cried, gagging. “There—there!”
Her neck felt good in his hand, like that of a cat or a feeble dog. It reminded him of the days of pilgrimage in his other life, when he had strangled those he raped. Even still, he had no need of her, so he released his grip, watched her stumble backward then topple, skirts askew, across the black floor.
Shouts rang out from the galleries behind them.
He sprinted to the door she’d indicated, kicked it open.
The crib stood in the nursery’s centre, carved of wood like black rock, standing as high as his waist, and draped with gauze sheets that hung from a single hook set in the frescoed ceiling. The walls were ochre, the lamp-light dim. The room smelled of sandalwood—there was no hint of soil.
All the world seemed to hush as he circled the ornate cradle. He left no track across the cityscapes woven into the carpet beneath his feet. The lamplights fluttered, but nothing more. With the crib between himself and the entrance, he approached, parted the gauze with his right hand.
Moënghus.
White-skinned. Still young enough to clutch his toes. Eyes at once vacant and lucid, in the way only an infant’s could be. The penetrating white-blue of the Steppe.
My son.
Cnaiür reached out two fingers, saw the scars banding the length of his forearm. The babe waved his hands, and as though by accident caught Cnaiür’s fingertip, his grip firm like that of a father or friend in miniature. Without warning, his face flushed, became wizened with anguished wrinkles. He sputtered, began wailing.
Why, Cnaiür wondered, would the Dûnyain keep this child? What did he see when he looked upon it? What
use
was there in a child?
There was no interval between the world and an infant soul. No deception. No language. An infant’s wail simply
was
its hunger. And it occurred to Cnaiür that if he abandoned this child, it would become an Inrithi, but if he took it, stole away, and rode hard for the Steppe, it would become a Scylvendi. And his hair prickled across his scalp, for there was magic in that—even doom.
This wail would not always be one with the child’s hunger. The interval would lengthen, and the tracks between its soul and its expression would multiply, become more and more unfathomable. This singular need would be unbraided into a thousand strands of lust and hope, bound into a thousand knots of fear and shame. And it would wince beneath the upraised hand of the father, sigh at the soft touch of the mother. It would become what circumstance demanded. Inrithi or Scylvendi …
It did not matter.
And suddenly, improbably, Cnaiür understood what it was the Dûnyain saw: a
world
of infant men, their wails beaten into words, into tongues, into nations. Kellhus could see the measure of the interval, he could follow the thousand tracks. And
that
was his magic, his sorcery: he could close the interval, answer the wail … Make souls one with their expression.
As his father had before him. Moënghus.
Stupefied, Cnaiür gazed at the kicking figure, felt the tug of its tiny hand about his finger. And he realized that though the child had sprung from his loins, it was more
his
father than otherwise. It was his origin, and he, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, was nothing but one of its possibilities, a wail transformed into a chorus of tortured screams.
He remembered a villa deep in the Nansurium, burning with a brightness that had turned the surrounding night into black. Wheeling to the laughing calls of his cousins, he had caught a babe on sword point …
He yanked his finger free. In fits and starts, Moënghus fell silent. “You are not of the land,” Cnaiür grated, drawing high a scarred fist.
“Scylvendi!” a voice cried out. He turned, saw the sorcerer’s whore standing on the threshold of an adjoining chamber. For a heartbeat they simply stared at each other, equally dumbfounded.
“You
will not
!” she suddenly cried, her voice shrill with fury. She advanced into the nursery, and Cnaiür found himself stepping back from the crib. He did not breathe, but then it seemed he no longer needed to.
“He’s all that remains of
Serwë,
” she said, her voice more wary, more conciliatory. “All that’s left … Proof that she
was
. Would you take that from her as well?”
Her proof.
Cnaiür stared at Esmenet in horror, then glanced at the child, pink and writhing in blue silk sheets.
“But its
name
!” he heard someone cry. Surely the voice was too womanish, too weak, to be his.
Something’s wrong with me … Something’s wrong …
Her brows furrowed and she seemed about to speak, but at that instant the first of the guardsmen, garbed in the green-and-gold surcoat of the Hundred Pillars, burst through the shambles of the door Cnaiür had kicked in.
“Sheathe your weapons!” she cried as they tumbled into the chamber. They turned to her, stunned.
“Sheathe!”
she repeated. Their swords were lowered and stowed, though their hands remained ready upon the pommels. One of the guardsmen, an officer, began to protest, but Esmenet silenced him with a furious look. “The Scylvendi came only to kneel,” she said, turning her painted face to Cnaiür, “to honour the first-born son of the Warrior-Prophet.”
And Cnaiür found that he was on his knees before the crib, his eyes blank, dry, and so very wide.
It seemed he had never stood.
Xinemus sat at Achamian’s battered desk, squarely facing a wall whose fresco had largely sloughed away; aside from a speared leopard, random eyes and limbs were all that remained. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Achamian wilfully ignored the warning in his tone. He spoke to his humble belongings, which he had spread across his bed. “I already told you, Zin … I’m gathering my things, going to the Fama Palace.” Esmenet had always teased him about the way he packed, for taking inventories of what he could count on his fingers.
“Better hike your tunic,”
she would always say.
“The little things are the easiest to forget.”
A bitch in heat … What else could she be?
“But Proyas has forgiven you.”
This time he noticed the Marshal’s tone, but it caught his ire more than his concern. All the man did was drink anymore. “I haven’t forgiven Proyas.”
“And me?” Xinemus finally said. “What of
me
?”
Achamian’s scalp prickled. There was always something about the way drunks said
me
. He turned to the man, trying to remind himself that this was his friend … his only friend.
“What of you?” he asked. “Proyas still has need of your counsel, your wisdom.
You
have a place here. I don’t.”
“That isn’t what I meant, Akka.”
“But why would I …” Achamian trailed, suddenly realizing what his friend had in fact meant. He was accusing Achamian of abandoning him. Even still, after everything that had happened, the man dared blame. Achamian turned back to his pathetic estate.
As though his life weren’t madness enough.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he ventured, only to be shocked by the insincerity of his tone. “We can … we can
talk
… talk with Kellhus.”
“What need would Kellhus have of me?”
“
You
need, Zin. You need to talk with him. You need—”
Somehow, Xinemus had vacated the desk without making a sound. Now he loomed over Achamian, wild-haired, ghastly for more than the absence of his eyes.
“You talk to him!”
the Marshal roared, seizing and shaking him. Achamian clawed at his arms, but they were as wood. “I begged you! Remember? I
begged, and you watched while they gouged out my fucking eyes
! My fucking eyes, Akka! My fucking eyes are
gone
!”
Achamian found himself on the hard floor, scrambling backward, his face covered in warm spittle.
The great-limbed man sagged to his knees.
“I can’t seeeee!”
he at once whispered and wailed.
“I-haven’t-the-courage-I-haven’t-the-courage …”
He shook silently for several more moments, then became very still. When he next spoke, his voice was thick, but eerily disconnected from what had racked him only moments before. It was the voice of the old Xinemus, and it terrified Achamian.
“You need to talk to him for me, Akka. To Kellhus …”
Achamian lacked the will either to move or to hope. He felt bound to the floor by his own entrails.
“What do you want me to say?”
The first flutter of the eyes against the morning light. The first tasted breath. The drowsy ache of cheek against pillow. These, and these alone, connected Esmenet to the woman—the whore—she had once been.
Sometimes she would forget. Sometimes she would awaken to the old sensations: the anxiousness floating through her limbs, the reek of her bedding, the ache of her sex—once she had even heard the tink-tinktinking of the copper-smithies from the adjoining street. Then she would bolt erect, and muslin sheets would whisk from her skin. She would blink, peer across the dim chamber at the heroic narratives warring across her walls, and she would focus on her body-slaves—three adolescent Kianene girls—prostrate on the floor, their foreheads pressed down in morning Submission.
Today was no different. Squinting in disorientation, Esmenet arose to the fussing of their hands. They chattered in their curiously soothing tongue, venturing to explain what they said in broken Sheyic only when their tone prompted Esmenet to fix one of them—usually Fanashila—with a curious look. They brushed out her hair with combs of bone, rubbed life back into her legs and arms with quick little palms, then waited patiently as she urinated behind her privacy screen. Afterward, they attended to her bath in the adjacent chamber, scrubbing her with soaps, oiling and scraping her skin.
As always, Esmenet endured their ministrations with quiet wonder. She was generous with her praise, delighted them with her own expressions of delight. They heard the gossip, Esmenet knew, in the slaves’ mess. They understood that captivity possessed its own hierarchy of rank and privilege. As slaves to a queen, they had become queens—of a sort—to their fellow slaves. Perhaps they were as astounded as she was.
She emerged from the baths light-headed, slack-limbed, and suffused with that sense of murky well-being only hot water could instill. They dressed first her then her hair, and Esmenet laughed at their banter. Yel and Burulan teased Fanashila—who possessed that outspoken earnestness that condemned so many to be the butt of endless jokes—with lighthearted mercilessness. About some boy, Esmenet imagined.
When they were finished, Fanashila left for the nursery, while Yel and Burulan, still tittering, ushered Esmenet to her night table, and to an array of cosmetics that, she realized with some dismay, would have made her weep back in Sumna. Even as she marvelled at the brushes, paints, and powders, she worried over this new-found jealousy for things.
I deserve this,
she thought, only to curse herself for blinking tears.

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