The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (37 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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Cememketri insisted no sorcery was involved, and for the first time Conphas appreciated his uncle’s manic suspicion of the Saik. Could they have done it? Or could it be, as Cememketri had nervously suggested, the Faceless Ones? Several of his soldiers maintained they had seen
Sompas
leading the Scylvendi through the camp—a rank impossibility, given that Conphas himself had gone to the man immediately after leaving the Scylvendi.
Faceless Ones … Skin-spies the Mandate Schoolman had called them. Since learning from Cememketri that Xerius had been murdered by one of these things posing as his grandmother, Conphas had found himself rehearsing the Mandate fool’s arguments from that day in Caraskand when they had debated the Prince of Atrithau’s fate. They were not Cishaurim, Conphas had conceded that much. It was even more clear now that Xerius was dead. Why would the Cishaurim murder the only man who might save them?
They weren’t Cishaurim, but did that make them
Consult,
as the Mandati had insisted? Were these truly the opening hours of the
Second Apocalypse
?
Terror. How could he not be terrified?
All this time Conphas had assumed that he and his uncle had stood at the root of all that happened. No matter how the others plotted, they but thrashed in the nets of his hidden designs—or so he thought. Such errant conceit! All along,
others
had known, others had watched, and he hadn’t the slightest inkling of their intentions!
What was happening? Who ruled these events?
Not Emperor Ikurei Conphas I.
His aquiline face outlined by torchlight, Sompas looked at him expectantly, but he kept his counsel like the others. They could sense his humour, understood that it was more than merely “foul.” Conphas scanned the moon-blanched countryside, felt the despairing twinge all men felt when confronted by the dimensions of the world that had swallowed those they desired. Were he one, were he alone, it would be hopeless.
But he was not one. He was
many
. The ability to cede voice and limb to the will of another—herein lay the true genius of men. The ability to
kneel
. With such power, Conphas realized, he was no longer confined to the here and now. With such power, he could reach across the world’s very curve! He was Emperor.
How could he not cackle? Such a wondrous life he lived!
He need only make things
simple
. And he would start with this Scylvendi … He had no choice.
That he was
Scylvendi
could be no coincidence. Here Conphas stood on the cusp of restoring the Empire to all her past glory, only to discover that everything turned on killing a son of his ancestral enemy, the people who had overthrown the pretensions of his race time and again. He had said it himself, hadn’t He? He was Kyraneas. He was Cenei …
No wonder the savage had laughed!
The Gods were behind this—Conphas was certain of it. They begrudged their brother. Like children of a different father, they
resented
. There was a message to this—how could there
not
be? He had been served some kind of warning. He was Emperor now. A move had been made. The rules had been changed …
Why? Why hadn’t he killed the fiend? What vice or vanity had stayed his hand? Was it the iron hand clamped about his neck? The burn of the man’s seed upon his back?
“Sompas!” he fairly cried.
“Yes, God-of-Men?”
“How does ‘Exalt-General’ suit you as a title?”
The ingrate swallowed. “Very well, God-of-Men.”
How he missed Martemus and the cool cynicism of his gaze. “Take the Kidruhil—all of them. Hunt down this demon for me, Sompas. Bring me his head and that shall be your title … Exalt-General, Spear-of-the-Empire.” His eyes narrowed in menace as he smiled. “Fail me and I shall burn you, your sons, your wives—every Biaxi breathing. I shall burn you all alive
.”
Relying on Serwë’s preternatural vision, they led their horses through the pitch of night, knowing their only advantage lay in whatever distance they could travel before sunrise. They picked their way across high scrub and grass slopes, then down into a wooded vale where the bitter of cedars braced the air. Despite his injuries, Cnaiür shambled after them, drawing on something as inexhaustible as lust or fear. About him, the world reeled more and more, and simple things became nightmarish with intent. Dark trees clutched at him, drew nails across his cheeks and shoulders. Unseen rocks kicked at his sandalled toes. The ringed moon laid him bare.
Thought slurred into thought. He spat blood continually. The path before him, shadowy and granular, rolled beneath his staggering legs. A greater dark unfolded through the night, and he passed out of memory, wondering, how could souls flicker?
Then Serwë was staring down at him. He felt her thighs beneath his neck, firm and warm through her linen tunic. She leaned forward and her breast brushed his temple. She retrieved a waterskin, used it to wet a rag. She had been tending to the cuts on his face.
She smiled and a ragged breath stole through him. There was such sanctuary in the lap of woman, a stillness that made the world, with all its threshing fury, seem small instead of encompassing, errant instead of essential. He winced as she dabbed a cut above his left eye. He savoured the sense of cool water warming against his skin.
The black plate of night was beginning to grey. Looking up, he saw the faint nimbus of hair about her jaw. He reached up to brush it, but hesitated when he glimpsed the scabs across his knuckles. He became alarmed. Though the pain of his wounds lay like a weight upon him, he jerked himself upright, coughed, and spat a mouthful of bloody sputum. They sat upon a grassy round on the summit of some hill. The east warmed to the unseen sun. Ridgelines wandered across the intervening miles, dark with vegetation, pale with nude stone faces.
“I’m forgetting something,” he said.
She nodded and smiled the blithe and jubilant way she always did when she knew some answer.
“The one you hunt,” she said. “The murderer.”
He felt his face darken. “But
I
am the murderer! The most violent of all men! They slouch forward in chains. They ape their fathers, just as their fathers aped their fathers before them, all the way back to the beginning. Covenants of earth. Covenants of blood. I stood and found my chains were smoke. I turned and saw the void…I am unfettered!”
She studied him for a moment, her perfect face poised between thought and moonlight. “Yes … like the one you hunt.”
What were these shallow creatures?
“You call yourself my lover? You think yourself my proof? My prize?”
She blinked in dread and sorrow. “Yes …”
“But you are a knife! You are a spear and hammer. You are nepenthe—opium! You would make a haft of my heart, and brandish me. Brandish me!”
“And me,” a masculine voice said. “What of me?”
One of her brothers had sat to his right—only it wasn’t one of her brothers. It was him … the serpent whose coils ever tightened about his heart:
Moënghus,
the murderer, wearing the armour and insignia of a Nansur infantry captain.
Or was he Kellhus?
“You …”
The Dûnyain nodded, and the air became yaksh dank—yaksh sour. “What am I?”
“I …”
What kind of madness? What kind of devilry?
“Tell me,” Moënghus said.
How long had he hidden in Shimeh? How long had he prepared? It did not matter. It did not matter! Cnaiür would crack open the sun with his hate! He would carve out its heart and bury all the world in endless black!
“Tell me … what do you see?”
“The one,” Cnaiür grated, “that I hunt.”
“Yes,” Serwë said from behind him. “The murderer
.”
“He murdered my father with words! Consumed my heart with revelation!”
“Yes …”
“He set me free.”
Cnaiür turned back to Serwë, filled with a longing so great it seemed his chest must implode. Crevasses opened across her forehead, cheek, and chin; knuckled limbs reared from the perfect planes of her outer face. With a gentle tug, they pulled their tips apart. Her lips vanished. She leaned forward with a slow, encompassing ardour. Limbs, long and gracile, drew back, stretched outward, then clasped the back of his skull. As though within a fist, she held him tight to her hot mouth. Her true mouth.
He drew his legs beneath him, then effortlessly hoisted her into his banded arms. So light … The dawn sun flashed across their intertwined forms.
“Come,” Moënghus said. “The track awaits us. We must run down our prey.”
In the distance they heard horns. Nansur horns.
Knowing Conphas would spare nothing to capture them, they rode as far as they could press their horses, heeding the cycles of exhaustion rather than those of sun, moon, and stars. According to the creatures, Conphas had sent a Column south of Joktha immediately after debarking. His plan relied on the Holy War’s ignorance, and since Saubon was certain to discover his treachery, Conphas needed to bar all the ways between Caraskand and Xerash. This meant that the Nansur lay both behind and
before
their small party. The best they could do was strike due south, slipping across Enathpaneah, then work their way eastward through the Betmulla, where the terrain would make interdiction unlikely and pursuit difficult.
Occasionally, Cnaiür spoke to them, learned something of their lean ways. They called themselves the Last Children of the Inchoroi, though they were loath to speak of their “Old Fathers.” They claimed to be Keepers of the Inverse Fire, though the merest question regarding either their “keeping” or their “fire” pitched them into confusion. They never complained, save to say they hungered for unspeakable congress, or to insist they were falling—always falling. They declared he could trust them, because their Old Father had made them his slaves. They were, they said, dogs that would sooner starve than snap meat from a stranger’s hand.
They carried, Cnaiür could see, the spark of the void within them. Like the Sranc.
As a child, Cnaiür had been fascinated by trees. Given their rarity on the Steppe, he only saw them in the winter months, when the Utemot moved their camp into the Swarut, the highlands that bounded the sea the Inrithi called Jorua. Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something
flat,
like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman’s eyes.
Men were like this, Cnaiür realized, binding their manifold roots then branching in a thousand different directions, twining into the greater canopy of other men. But these things—these skin-spies—were something altogether different, though they could mimic men well enough. They did not bleed into their surroundings as men did. They struck through circumstances, rather than reaching out to claim them. They were
spears
concealed in the thickets of human activity. Thorns …
Tusks.
And this lent them a curious beauty, a dread elegance. They were simple in the way of knives, these skin-spies. He envied them that, even as he loved and pitied.
“Two centuries ago I was Scylvendi,” it said once. “I know your ways.”

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