The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (23 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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I’ve been sent to murder myself
. The thought made Cnaiür cackle. Small wonder Proyas had been so unnerved relaying the Dûnyain’s murderous instructions.
The fact that he had been assigned a Schoolman only provided further confirmation of his suspicions. Saurnemmi he was called, a young Scarlet initiate with a fey and chronic cough. He had arrived the day after Conphas, accompanied by a sorcerer-of-rank, Inrûmmi, who departed immediately and inexplicably after inspecting his student’s quarters. Saurnemmi, the older sorcerer had told Cnaiür, was to be his link to the Holy War. “The boy,” as the pompous fool referred to him, was to sleep until noon every day so they might converse through sorcerous dreams. Saurnemmi, in other words, was to be the Dûnyain’s eyes in Joktha.
Depths! Everywhere he turned—mad, unfathomable depths!
Provoked by Saurnemmi’s presence, Cnaiür ordered Tirnemus to gather Conphas and his staff in the Petition Hall of the Donjon Palace, the citadel where Cnaiür had made his headquarters. He bid the young sorcerer study their captives from the balcony. Then, once the Exalt-General and his men had assembled, Cnaiür strode into their very midst, staring hard into various faces and taking pleasure in the way they blanched. The Nansur were such predictable scum, courageous in excess when armed in mobs, but cowering fawns when outside formation.
He found himself circling Conphas, who stood ramrod straight in full military dress. “You see your brothers on my arms,” he declared to the others. “Your wives …” He spat at the feet of those nearest. “How it must gall—”
“How many of your brothers,” Conphas cried out, “do I bear on
my
—?” Cnaiür struck him. The Exalt-General sailed backward, tripped to the ground. Cnaiür whirled to the sound of slapping sandals, caught an arcing wrist. He seized his assailant’s cuirass, smashed the man’s face against his forehead. The dagger the fool had concealed clattered across the shining tiles.
These dogs had to be broken! Broken!
The sound of swords whisking from sheaths. Tirnemus’s Conriyans suddenly appeared about him, blades outstretched. The Nansur backed away, ashen-faced. Several called out to their Exalt-General, who had rolled onto all fours, spitting blood.
“Make no mistake,” Cnaiür roared over their cries, “you will heed me!” He brought a boot down on the head of the man jerking at his feet. The ingrate went still, as though wrinkles had been smoothed from his limbs. Hot blood slipped along the cracks between tiles.
A moment of wilting silence.
“Do not,” Cnaiür said, raising his great banded arms, “make me the ledger of your folly!”
He could almost see them shrink. Suddenly they seemed children—frightened children—beneath the soaring pillars. His heart hammering in exultation, Cnaiür spat again, then raised his face to Saurnemmi, who watched from the gallery above, his adolescent frame bundled in silken crimson. His beard, Cnaiür noted, was little more than a mummer’s gag. “Which one?” he called.
Saurnemmi coughed the inane way he always did, then nodded toward the back of the crowd, at the men milling about General Sompas. “That one,” he said. “The one with”—another ceremonial cough, too soft to cut real phlegm—“with the silver bindings about his cuirass.”
Grinning, Cnaiür reached beneath his girdle, extracted his father’s Chorae.
Without warning, the slender man to Sompas’s right bolted across the polished floors. He was felled after five strides, a shaft jutting from the back of his neck. He cried out, began screaming words that made smoke of sound. His eyes flared bright. But Cnaiür was already upon him …
Incandescence, searing every surface chalk-white. Men raised arms, cried out.
The Nansur blinked and gaped. Cnaiür turned to them, away from the broken salt-statuary at his feet. He spat and grinned, then strode towering into their midst. He made for Conphas. The Exalt-General sputtered, shrank from his approach, but Cnaiür merely brushed past him, continued wordlessly up the monumental stair. One did not trade words with whipped dogs. It was mummery, Cnaiür knew, but then
everything
was mummery in the end. Another lesson learned at the Dûnyain’s heel.
Afterward, he found himself screaming in his apartments. He understood why, of course: if not for the Scarlet Schoolman’s arrival, he would never have thought that Conphas too had a sorcerer. But the why of this understanding escaped him … It always escaped him.
Was something wrong with him?
Enemies! All about him, enemies! They even dwelt within …
Even Proyas … Could he bring himself to break his neck as well?
He sent me to murder myself!
At night, Cnaiür drank—heavily—and the spears that lay hidden beneath every surface were blunted. The terrors, rather, oozed from the cracks in the floor. Despite the censers, the air smelled of yaksh: earth, smoke, and mouldering hides. He could hear Moënghus whisper through the dim interiors …
More lies. More confusions.
And the bird—the fucking bird! It seemed a knot, a yanking of all things foul into a single form. His chest tightened simply thinking of it. But of course it couldn’t be real. No more than Serwë …
He told her as much, every night she came to his bed.
Something … something is wrong with me
.
He knew this because he could see himself as the Dûnyain saw him. He understood that Moënghus had knocked him from the tracks of his People, that he had spent thirty years kicking through the grasses searching for the spoor of his own passing. For a way back.
Thirty accursed years! These too he understood. The Scylvendi were a
forward
people—as were all people save the Dûnyain. They listened to their storytellers. They listened to their hearts. Like dogs, they barked at strangers. They judged honour and shame the way they judged near and far. In their inborn conceit, they made themselves the absolute measure. They could not see that honour, like nearness, simply depended on where one stood.
That it was a lie.
Moënghus had lured him onto different ground. How could his kinsmen not think him an obscenity when his voice came to them from darknesses unseen? How could he rediscover their tracks when all grounds had been trampled? He could never be of the People, not after Moënghus. He could never think or curse himself back to their savage innocence. He had been a fool to try … Ignorance was ever the iron of certainty, for it was as blind to itself as sleep. It was the absence of questions that made answers absolute—not knowledge! To ask, this was what Moënghus had taught him. Simply to ask …
“Why follow this track and not another?”
“Because the Voice demands it.”
“Why follow this Voice and not another?”
That
everything
could be overthrown so easily. That all custom and conviction could lay so close to the brink. That outrage and accusation could be the only true foundations … All of it—everything
that was man
—perched on swords and screams.
Why?
cried his every step.
Why?
cried his every word.
Why?
cried his every breath.
For some reason … There must be some reason.
But why? Why?
The world itself had become his rebuke! He was no longer of the Land, but he could not beat the Steppe from the cant of his limbs. He was no longer of the People, but he could not wash his father from his blood. He cared nothing for the ways of the Scylvendi—nothing!—yet still they howled within him, railed and railed. He was not of the People! Yet still his degradations choked him. Still his longings clawed at his heart. Wutrim! Shame!
Absent things! How could absent things remain?
Each time he shaved, his thumb unerringly found the swazond puckered about his throat. He would track its ginger course.
Something … I’m forgetting something
…
There were two pasts; Cnaiür understood that now. There was the past that men remembered, and there was the past that
determined,
and rarely if ever were they the same. All men stood in thrall of the latter.
And knowing this made them insane.
Timing. Few things did Ikurei Conphas ponder more.
The Lords of the Holy War might begrudge them these lands, but the Nansur still held the keys. Joktha was an old Imperial possession with old Imperial ways. Familiar with the perils of governing conquered peoples, long-dead Nansur planners had excavated hundreds of tunnels in hundreds of different cities. Walls, after all, could be retaken; corpses could only be burned.
Nevertheless, escaping the city had proven far more stressful than Conphas had expected. Though he was loath to admit it, the incident with the Scylvendi in the Donjon Palace had rattled him—almost as much as losing Darastius, his Saik Caller, had inconvenienced him. The savage had
struck
him, batted him to the floor as easily as a woman or child. And against all expectation, Conphas had been paralyzed—utterly incapacitated—with fear. Lean, wild with unnameable hungers, Cnaiür urs Skiötha had seemed the very reaver worshipped by his people. He even
stank
of the Steppe, as though somehow, bound within that astounding frame, lay earth … Scylvendi earth.
Conphas had thought himself dead. Of course, he realized this was precisely the reaction the barbarian wanted. Frightened men, as the Galeoth said, thought with their skins. But for some reason,
knowing
this had made precious little difference. A thought-numbing dread had dogged every turn of their escape. Waiting for nightfall. Passing through the streets to the necropolis. Excavating the entrance to the tunnels. Only when he and Sompas crossed the River Oras did breath come to him easily—and even then …
Now, accompanied by a small band of Kidruhil, they waited at the designated rendezvous, an overgrown cairn located near the heart of what had been Imbeyan’s hunting preserve, several miles to the south and east of Joktha. The site had been Conphas’s choice—as it should be, since
he
inevitably would occupy the heights of the drama to follow.
A series of titanic gusts broke and fumbled across the earth. The ragged evergreens answered, bending back like girls with their faces to the wind. Winter detritus flew, caught up in the sweeping of invisible skirts. Distant treetops shook, as though concealing some monstrous feud beneath their bowers. Everything, it seemed, had conspired to create the sensation of depth. So often the world seemed flat to Conphas, like something painted across his eyes. Not so today, he mused. Today would be
deep
.
Sompas’s chestnut snorted, shook its head and mane to shoo a wasp. The General cursed in the petulant way of those who keep score with animals. Suddenly Conphas found himself mourning the loss of Martemus. Sompas was useful—even now, his pickets combed the countryside, searching for the Scylvendi’s spies—but his value lay more in his availability than his quality. He was an able tool, not a
foil
as Martemus had been. And all great men required foils.
Especially on occasions such as this.
If only he could forget the accursed Scylvendi! What was it about the man? Even now, in some small corner of his soul, a beacon fire burned at the ready in case of his return. It was as though the barbarian had somehow stained him with the force of his presence, and now it clung, like an odour that must be scrubbed rather than rinsed away. Never had any man possessed such an effect on him.
Perhaps this, Conphas mused, was what
sin
felt like for the faithful. The intimation of something greater watching. The sense of disapproval, at once immense and ineffable, as near as fog and yet as distant as the world’s rim. It was as though anger itself possessed eyes.
Perhaps faith was a kind of stain as well…a kind of odour.
He laughed aloud, not caring what Sompas or the others thought. His old self had returned, and he
liked
his old self … very much.
“Exalt-General?” Sompas said.
Biaxi fool. Always so desperate to be on the
inside
of things.
“They come,” Conphas said, nodding to the distance.
A band of riders, perhaps twenty-strong, had cleared the bowers of a cypress stand and were filing down the opposing slope, picking their way between the hummocks that jutted from the pasture like the moles on a dog’s chin. Affecting boredom, Conphas stole a glance at his small retinue, saw the first brows furrow in confusion and concern. He almost cackled aloud. What was he up to, their godlike Exalt-General?

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