The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (32 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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

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A brilliant flash deflected their attention to the harbour. No doubt Tirnemus and his men—those who yet survived—were fleeing into the city.

“It will be dark,” Cnaiür shouted over the resulting thunder. “It will be dark before the Nansur can organize an assault on the Tooth. Aside from spotters, we must abandon the walls. We must withdraw into the city.”

Sanumnis frowned.

“The Saik can do nothing so long as we stand in the midst of their countrymen,” Cnaiür explained. “That is cause to hope …”

“Hope?”

“We must
bleed him
! We are not the only Men of the Tusk.”

The Baron suddenly bared clenched teeth—and Cnaiür saw it, the spark he had needed to strike. He glanced down the length of the parapet at the dozens of anxious faces that stared back at him. Others, mostly Thunyeri, watched from the Tooth’s cobbled mall below. He looked to the harbour, saw curtains of smoke rolling orange and black in the setting sun.

He strode to the wall’s inner brink, held out his arms in grand address. “Listen to me. I will not lie to you. The Nansur can afford no quarter, because they can afford no Truth! We all die this night!”

He let these words ring into silence.

“I know nothing of your Afterlife. I know nothing of your Gods or their greed for glory. But I do know this: In days to come, widows shall curse me as they weep! Fields shall go to seed! Sons and daughters shall be sold into slavery! Fathers shall die desolate, knowing their line is extinct! This night, I shall carve my mark into the Nansurium, and
thousands shall cry out for want of my
mercy!”

And the spark became flame.

“Scylvendi!” they roared. “Scylvendi!”

The mall behind the Tooth had been a market of some kind before the coming of the Holy War. An expanse of some twenty lengths extended from the base of the barbican to the mouth of the Pull. An ancient tenement of Ceneian construction fronted the Pull’s north side, its base riddled with derelict shops and stalls. Cnaiür had concealed himself opposite, in one of the smaller buildings that ran along the south. If he peered, he could make out the glint of arms belonging to the shadowy myriad crowded within the tenement. A small window in the western wall afforded him a view across the gravel and dust of the mall, but since the moon rose to the west, the inner wall and barbican were little more than monoliths of impenetrable black.

Behind him, Troyatti whispered to the Hemscilvara, detailing the weaknesses in Nansur armour and tactics that Cnaiür had described to him, Sanumnis, Tirnemus, and Skaiwarra earlier. Outside, the shouts of Nansur officers echoed through the clear night air: Conphas making final preparations.

As Cnaiür had expected, the Saik had refused to leave their transports, which meant they owned the harbour and nothing else. While keeping a close eye on the arriving Columns—so far the Faratas, the Horial, and the famed Mossas had assembled—Cnaiür had dispersed teams of men throughout the buildings surrounding the Tooth, armed with what sledges and pickaxes they could muster. In a few short hours they had managed to knock out hundreds of walls, transforming, in effect, a broad tract of the western city into a labyrinth. Then, fumbling their way through the dark, they had taken up positions—and waited.

This was not, Cnaiür realized, what the Dûnyain would do.

Either Kellhus would find a way—some elaborate or insidious track—that led to the domination of these circumstances, or he would flee. Was that not what had happened at Caraskand? Had he not walked a path of miracles to prevail? Not only had he united the warring factions
within
the Holy War, he had given them the means to war without.

No such path existed here—at least none that Cnaiür could fathom.

So why not flee? Why cast his lot with doomed men? For honour? There was no such thing. For friendship? He was the enemy of all. Certainly there were truces, the coming together of coincidental interests, but nothing else, nothing
meaningful
.

Kellhus had taught him that.

He cackled aloud when the revelation struck, and for a moment the world itself wobbled. A sense of
power
suffused him, so intense it seemed something
other
might snap from his frame, that throwing out his arms he could shear Joktha’s walls from their foundations, cast them to the horizon.
No reason
bound him. Nothing. No scruple, no instinct, no habit, no calculation, no
hate
… He stood beyond origin or outcome. He stood
nowhere
.

“The men wonder,” Troyatti said cautiously, “what amuses you, Lord.”

Cnaiür grinned. “That I once cared for my life.”

Even as he said this, he heard something, a surreal muttering like the susurrus of insects through the riddled world around them. Words coiled through the sounds, the way flames glowered through smoke, and it bent the soul somehow simply hearing them, as though meaning had become contortion …

Brilliance. A concatenation of fires boiled over the parapets. Suddenly the barbican seemed a shield held against a blinding light. One of the spotters toppled, thrashing flames all the way to the ground.

They were coming.

Within the barbican, lines of brilliance sketched the seams about the iron-banded doors. A thread of gold flared down their centre, and in a blink both were blown outward against the portcullis. Iron screeched. Stone cracked. Another burst. Like sound from a horn, light blasted from the underpass. The portcullis sailed into the old Ceneian tenement. A wave of smoke rolled outward and upward, across buildings and down the Pull.

Cnaiür blinked spots from his eyes. Everything had gone dark. His warriors coughed, beat the air with their hands. They fell still when they heard the growing roar … Shouting men. Thousands of them.

Cnaiür motioned for everyone to shrink back into the blackness.

It seemed to drone on for an extraordinary length of time, but the roar lost none of its ardour, and ever so gradually it became louder—and louder … Columnaries, spears out, square-shields tight, materialized from the black maw of the barbican. They ran screaming, rank after rank of them, setting up shield-walls to either flank, hacking at the doors to the barbican and rushing forward down the Pull. Cnaiür knew how they had been trained: strike hard and deep, cut upon your enemy’s flank, sever him from his kinsmen. “The wise spear,” their officers bawled, “finds the back!”

The heartbeats that followed were absurd. Like gleaming shadows, Nansur after Nansur flashed past the opening of their abandoned stall. Hundreds rushed down the Pull, their helms glossed in moonlight, their pale calves dancing in the gloom. Then a horn—the first—sounded in the blackness. Across the way, Cnaiür saw wild-haired Thunyeri dropping from the tenement’s second-storey windows, hooting their unnerving war cry.

The ring of steel. The clap of shields. Then all became roaring clamour.

Almost as one, the Nansur stopped and turned. Some even jumped to better glimpse the axes pitching to their left. A few canny souls turned apprehensively to black windows and entrances about them.

Then the second horn sounded, and Cnaiür leapt, screaming the war cry of his fathers. They crashed into the backs of the stunned infantrymen. He caught the first man in the jaw as he turned, the second in the armpit as he struggled to free his spear. Within seconds, hundreds had died. Then suddenly the Conriyans on the south found themselves facing the Thunyeri on the north.

A ragged cheer was raised, which Cnaiür silenced with his raving voice. “Off the streets!
Off
the streets!”

The unholy muttering had started anew.

The battle that followed was unlike any Cnaiür had experienced. The pitch of night struck in the hues of sorcerous light. Catching unawares and being so caught. Hunted and hunting through a labyrinthine slum, then warring in open streets, hilt to hilt, spitting blood from one’s teeth. In the dark, his life hung from a thread, and time and again only his strength and fury saved him. But in the light, whether by moon or, more likely, the burning of nearby structures, the Nansur flinched from him and attacked only with the haft of their spears.

Conphas wanted him.

Cnaiür had not the arms for the swazond he earned that night.

The last he saw of Skaiwarra, the chieftain-thane and a band of his wild-haired axemen had butchered a company of infantrymen and turned to face down a Kidruhil charge. Sanumnis actually died in his arms, coughing blood and spittle in the gloom. Troyatti, and many of the other Hemscilvara, fell in a rain of sorcerous naphtha that left Cnaiür himself untouched. He would never learn what happened to Tirnemus or Saurnemmi.

In the end, he and a handful of strangers—some three Conriyans, like eerie automatons with their war-masks drawn, and six Thunyeri, one with the shrunken heads of Sranc swinging from his flaxen braids—found themselves driven from the flaming wreck of a millery back onto a broad stair beneath the ruins of a Fanim tabernacle. They hacked and hammered at the rush of Columnaries until only Cnaiür and the nameless Thunyeri stood, chests heaving, shoulder to shoulder. The dead formed a skirt of tangled limbs across the steps below them; the dying rocked and kicked like drunks. All the world seemed slicked in blood. Officers bawled through the dark ranks arrayed below them. Framed by the burning millery, the Nansur charged them again. The Norsirai laughed and roared, hewing and crushing with great swings of his battleaxe. A spear caught him in the neck and he stumbled into the threshing of swords.

Cnaiür howled in exultation. They came at him with the butts and hafts of their spears, their faces screwed in terror and determination. Cnaiür leapt into their midst, scarred arms hacking. “Demon!” he roared.
“Demon!”

Hands clutched for his arms and he shattered wrists, punctured faces. Forms tackled his torso and he snapped necks, crushed spines. He tossed lifeblood skyward, nailed beating hearts still. All the world had become rotted leather, and he the only iron. The only
iron
.

He was of the People.

Without warning, the Nansur relented, crowded back into the shields of those behind, away from the advance of his dripping aspect. They stared in horror and astonishment. All the world seemed afire.

“For a thousand years!” he grated. “Fucking your wives! Strangling your children! Striking down your fathers!” He brandished his broken sword. Blood spilled in loops from his elbow. “For a thousand years I have stalked you!”

He threw aside the blade, kicked a spear into his hand, then cast it at the soldier before him. It punched through his shield, through his banded cuirass, and erupted from the small of his back.

Cnaiür laughed. The roaring flames took up his voice, made it sorcerous with dread.

Cries and shouts. Some even dropped their weapons.

“Take him!” a voice was shrieking. “You are
Nansur! Nansur!
”

A familiar voice.

It exerted a collective force, a consciousness of shared blood.

Cnaiür lowered his chin, smiled …

They came as one this time, an encompassing wave of blows and clutching hands. He hammered and wrenched, but they bore him down. Everything became eye-watering numbness. They seemed howling apes, dancing and punishing, dancing and punishing.

Afterward, they cleared a path for their all-conquering Exalt-General. Smoke towered into the firmament beyond the battered beauty of his face, shrouding stars. His eyes were the same, though they appeared unnerved—very unnerved. “No different,” his broken lips spat. “No different than Xunnurit after all.”

And as the darkness came swirling down, Cnaiür at last understood. The Dûnyain had not sent him to be Conphas’s assassin …

He had sent him to be his victim.

CHAPTER EIGHT

XERASH