The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (22 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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“Exalt-General …”
Scowling, Conphas turned to his General. “What is it, Sompas?”
“How …” the man sputtered. His eyes flashed with scarcely restrained fury. “How does he expect …”
“The conditions are clear. I retain my freedom, so long as I remain within Joktha’s walls. I retain my staff, and all the slaves that service it. I’m heir to the
Mantle,
Sompas. To antagonize me is to antagonize the Empire. So long as they think me neutered, they’ll play their game by the rules.”
“But …”
Conphas scowled. Martemus had never hesitated with his questions, but then neither had he feared Conphas. Not really. Perhaps Sompas was the smarter man.
“You think we’ve been humiliated?”
“This is an outrage, Exalt-General! An outrage!”
It was the Scylvendi, Conphas realized. The disarming had been salt enough, but to submit to a
Scylvendi
? He mused for a moment, surprised that he’d thought only of the implications and nothing of this slight. Had the past months sheared away so many of the old intuitions? “You’re mistaken, General. The Warrior-Prophet does us a favour.”
“
Favour?
How …” Sompas trailed as though horrified by his own vehemence. The man was forever forgetting and remembering his place. Conphas found it quite amusing, actually.
“Of course. He’s returned to me my most precious possession.”
The fool could only stare.
“My men. He’s returned to me my men. He’s even culled them for me.”
“But we are
disarmed
.”
Conphas looked back at the great train of beggars that was his army. They looked shadowy in the dust, at once dark and pale, like a legion of wraiths too insubstantial to threaten, let alone harm.
Perfect.
He glanced one last time at his General. “Hold on to your worries, Sompas …” He turned back to the Scylvendi, raising his hand in the mockery of a salute. “Your dismay,” he muttered askance, “lends the stamp of authenticity to these proceedings.”
I’m forgetting something.
The terrace was broad. The marmoreal paving stones were cracked here and there, as might be expected in a nation that suffered frost, but not in Enathpaneah. Even in the dark they were clearly visible, like rivers inked across maps. Cracks. No doubt the original residents had their slaves cast carpets over the offending stones, at least while entertaining guests. No Fanim Prince would tolerate such a defect. No Inrithi Lord.
Only an Utemot Chieftain.
Cnaiür nodded, rubbed his eyes, stamped his foot in an effort to stay awake. Blinking, he stared over the balustrade and out across the city and port. Rooftop piled onto rooftop, climbing the near and distant slopes, and forming a broad basin about the piers and quays that ringed the inner harbour. A dishevelled landscape of structure, struck by streets like river canyons, all leading to the sea.
Joktha … He need only blink to see it burn.
Above, innumerable stars dusted the firmament, curving into a perfect bowl so vast, so hollow, that it seemed a single twitch might send him floating skyward, falling. It reminded him of awakening at Kiyuth. He could almost smell his kinsmen sprawling dead in ever-widening gyres.
I’m forgetting …
He drowsed. His copper wine bowl slipped from his fingers and rolled across the cracked stone. Events from the previous evening slurred through his soul. Conphas baiting him at the gates. Conphas arguing the terms of his internment. Conphas restrained by his Generals. His cuirass glaring white in the sunlight. His long-lashed eyes.
I’m …
The Scylvendi stirred in sudden remembrance, rolled his head about his massive shoulders.
I’m Cnaiür … Breaker-of-horses-and-men.
He laughed, drowsed some more, dreamed …
He walked toward Shimeh, though it was identical to the Utemot camp of his youth, a congregation of several thousand yaksh. Herds ranged the surrounding plains, but no cattle dared approach him. He passed the first of the yaksh, their hides tight against their poles, like skin about the ribs of dogs. The Utemot crowded the lanes between, limbs hanging from rotted sockets, viscera draped across their thighs. He saw all of them: his father’s brother, Bannut, his brother-in-law, Balait, even Yursalka and his crippled wife. They watched him with the parchment eyes of the dead. He came across the first of his butchered chattel—a brown foal with his threefold mark. Then three cows, their throats cut, followed by a four-year-old bull, its head cudgelled. Soon he found himself climbing across mounds of horse and cattle carcasses, all of them bearing his mark.
For some reason, he felt no surprise.
Then at last he came to the White Yaksh—the very heart of Shimeh. A spear had been driven into the ground next to the entrance. His father’s head adorned the haft, pale skin drawn like water-sodden linen. Cnaiür tore his gaze away, drew aside the doeskin flap. Somehow he already knew that Moënghus had made a harem of his wives, so he was neither shocked nor outraged. But the blood unnerved him, as did the fishlike way Serwë opened and closed her mouth … Anissi was screaming.
Moënghus looked up from his passion and grinned a broad and welcoming grin.
The Ikurei still lives,
he said.
Why don’t you kill him?
“The time … the time …”
Are you drunk?
“Nepenthe … All that the bird gave to me …”
Ah … so you yearn to forget after all.
“No … not forget. Sleep.”
So why not kill him?
“Because
he
wants me to.”
The Dûnyain? You think this is a trap?
“His every word is a feint. His every look a spear!”
Then what’s his intent?
“To keep me from his father. To deny me my hate. To betray—”
But all you need do is kill the Ikurei. Kill him, and you are free to follow the Holy War.
“No! There is something! Something I’m …”
You’re a fool.
Somehow Cnaiür raised his face to the muck of wakefulness, peered through ocean-swimming eyes, and saw
it
perched on the balustrade before him, its scalp polished in starlight, its feathers shot with black silk, the world floating like smoke beyond it.
“Bird!” he cried. “Devil!”
The tiny face leered. The eyes became heavy-lidded, like a demon dreaming.
“Kiyuth,” it said, “where the Ikurei humiliated you and your People. Avenge the Battle of Kiyuth!”
I’m forgetting something.
How could absent things remain? How could they
be
?
Each swazond a dead man grinning. Each night a dead woman’s embrace …
Days passed, and Cnaiür tried hard to fathom the depths that pitched about him. Conphas and his Nansur were his immediate concern—or should have been. Proyas had given him the barons Tirnemus and Sanumnis with their 370-odd client knights, as well as the 58 survivors of his old band from Shigek. Like all Men of the Tusk, they were battle-hardened, but they made no effort to conceal their dismay at having been left behind. “Blame the Nansur,” Cnaiür told them. “Blame Conphas.” They were thoroughly outnumbered by their Nansur charges, and Cnaiür needed as much aggression as they could muster.
When Baron Sanumnis expressed misgivings, Cnaiür reminded him that these men had conspired to betray
the Holy War,
and that no one knew when the Emperor’s transports would arrive. “They can overwhelm us at will,” he said. “So we must strip their will from them.”
Of course, he said nothing of his true motives. These men had chosen Ikurei Conphas over the
Dûnyain
… One must always chain the dog before murdering the master.
A squalid camp of sorts was struck along Joktha’s walls, far enough from the Oras to keep a good number of the Columnaries occupied with drawing and delivering water. Knowing well the organizational strengths of the Imperial Army, Cnaiür segregated the older soldiers—the Threesies as they were called—from the younger. The officers he interned in a different camp altogether. Because of the mutual enmity between the largely caste-noble cavalrymen and the caste-menial infantrymen, Cnaiür had the Kidruhil dissolved and scattered through the Columns. As a further measure, he had his Conriyans continually circulate rumours: that Conphas had been overheard blubbering in his chambers, that the officers had rioted when they learned their rations were no different from the enlisted men’s—the kinds of rumours that gnawed at every army’s heart. Even when universally dismissed, they served to distract idle souls and to drown those truths that did surface.
Cnaiür restricted Conphas and the forty-two men of his immediate coterie to the city—as per the Conditions of Internment. He forbade all contact with his Columnaries, for obvious reasons. Since imprisoning him outright could provoke a revolt, he allowed the Imperial Nephew what liberty Joktha provided. Even as he obsessively pondered the man’s murder.
He understood why Kellhus wanted Conphas dead: the Dûnyain suffered no rivals. Likewise, he understood why Kellhus had chosen
him
as his assassin. Of
course
the savage had killed the Lion. Was he not
Scylvendi
? Was he not a survivor of
Kiyuth
?
What tormented him was what these understandings implied. If murdering Moënghus was Kellhus’s sole mission, then preserving the Holy War should be his sole concern. Why assassinate Conphas when he need only remove him from the game—as he had? And why use Cnaiür to conceal his involvement, when the consequences—open war with the Empire—would have no bearing on the imminent conquest of Shimeh?
And Cnaiür realized … There was no way around it: the Dûnyain was looking beyond the Holy War—
past Shimeh
. And to see past Shimeh was to see past
Moënghus
.
Men draped assumptions, endless assumptions, about their acts; they could scarce do otherwise, given their errant hunger for meaning. Since the beginning, Cnaiür had conceived their journey as a
hunt,
as a collusion of enemies in pursuit of a greater foe. Their quest had always seemed an arrow fired into darkness. No matter how deep his misgivings, he had always come back to this understanding. But now … Now it seemed like nothing other than a
collar;
that Moënghus and Kellhus, father and son, were but different ends of a mighty torc that he, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, had bent about the very neck of the world. A slaver’s collar.
Something … something …
He found himself scrutinizing Tirnemus and Sanumnis whenever the opportunity afforded. Baron Tirnemus, he quickly decided, was an outright fool, a man more bent on recovering the belly he had lost at Caraskand than anything else. Sanumnis, on the other hand, was both clever and taciturn, and seemed to wield an obvious, yet inexplicable, authority over his stouter countryman. He was a watcher.
Had they been given secret orders? Orders that made one the senior? That would explain why Tirnemus deferred and Sanumnis watched. What, after all, would be the penalty for murdering the Nansur Emperor’s only heir? For contravening the Warrior-Prophet’s solemn vow?

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