The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (59 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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Something dimmed the morning sun … Clouds?
The first hail of arrows fell upon them and those heaving them forward.
“Fire!” Proyas cried to the archers about him. “Clear the walls!”
The Massus Gate had become a mad play of lights in his periphery. But there was no time to watch. With every heartbeat, the unblinking eyes of Shimeh’s walls drew closer and the air grew thicker with missiles. When he dared lower his shield, he could discern individual heathen in the bristling mass of defenders. He glimpsed one old man, a kettle bound to his head, taken in the throat by a bolt and carried backward into the city. Flaming pots crashed about the towers. Two smashed into the side of Sister, flinging burning tar across the seaweed. Suddenly smoke wreathed every sight, and the roar of fire bloated every sound. There was a crack and a concussion that brought all of them to their knees. One of the mighty stones had found its target. But miraculously, Tippytoes groaned onward. The floor beneath Proyas heaved like the deck of a ship. He hunched under his shield. The archers about him nocked, stood, fired, then crouched to nock once again. Every second man, it seemed, fell backward, swatting at a jutting shaft. The knights dragged them, dropped them over the side to make room for the others surging up from the lower floors. There was a roar, then a titanic clacking of stones that could only come from the Massus Gate. But a chorus of shrieks drew his attention to his left, to Sister, where a pot had exploded across the upper deck. Burning knights dove, heedless of the height, crashed onto their comrades below.
“Gaidekki!” Proyas screamed across the interval.
“Gaidekki!”
The Count-Palatine’s scowling face appeared between the timber hoardings, and Proyas actually smiled, despite the arrows buzzing between them. Then Gaidekki was gone. Proyas slipped to his knees, blinking against the image of the man’s neck and shoulders snapping about an unstoppable stone.
The sky blackened. Closer and closer the siege-towers lumbered, though Sister had become a shining inferno. Then there were the white-tiled walls, close enough to hit with thrown clothing, crammed with arms and howling faces. Proyas could see a great eye opening across the white-tiled planes below, glimpse the wide expanse of street and structure reaching out to the Sacred Heights. There! There! There was the First Temple!
Shimeh!
he thought.
Shimeh!
Proyas lowered his silver war-mask, glimpsed his stooped kinsmen doing the same. The flying bridge dropped, its iron hooks biting the battlements. Tippytoes was tall enough to kiss after all.
Crying out to Prophet and God, the Crown Prince leapt into the swords of his enemy …
The tree could not be missed.
It stood at the edge of a greater hill near the heart of the debris fields, the twin of black Umiaki in girth and height. Its great tendons were stripped of their bark, and its limbs reached into the air like winding tusks.
Climbing the remnants of a monumental stair set into the hillside, Kellhus soon found himself beneath its massive sinews. Beyond the tree, upturned blocks and rows of headless pillars stretched across the levelled summit. Save in the direction of Shimeh, where the ground had given way altogether, paving stones encircled the tree’s base, rising and cracking about the immense roots.
He placed a hand against the immovable trunk, ran his fingertips across the lines that scored its surface. The spoor of old worms. He paused where the ground sheered away, staring at the black clouds that had accumulated on the horizon—above Shimeh. It seemed he could hear the thrum of distant thunder. Then he lowered himself over the fall, using exposed roots to anchor his descent.
Sheets of gravel clattered across the slopes below.
He found his footing. Above him, the tree soared, its trunk smooth and phallic, its boughs curved like canines, reaching far into the airy heights. Before him, roots twined like cuttlefish limbs. At some point—many years ago, from the look of the hatchet work—an opening had been hacked through them. Peering into the excavated gloom, Kellhus saw the lines of stonework, stairs dropping into blackness …
He pressed his way forward, descended into the belly of the hillside.
Holding out his hand to alert Serwë and her brother, Cnaiür reined his stolen horse to a hard stop. Four vultures took soundlessly to the sky. On the slopes of a neighbouring rise, five saddled but riderless horses momentarily raised their heads, then continued grazing.
The three of them had paused on a low rise overlooking the carnage. The Betmulla Mountains rose grey and hunched in the distances before them—and there was still no sign of Kyudea, though Serwë insisted they followed the Dûnyain’s path exactly. She could smell him, she said.
Cnaiür dismounted, strode into the midst of the sprawled bodies. He hadn’t slept for days, but the exhaustion that buzzed through his limbs seemed an abstract thing, as easily ignored as a philosopher’s argument. Ever since his discussion with the Mandate sorcerer, a strange intensity had seized him—a vigour he could only identify with hate.
“He goes to Kyudea,”
the fat fool had finally said.
“Kyudea?”
“Yes, Shimeh’s ruined sister. It lies to the southwest, near the headwaters of the Jeshimal.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“No one knows … Most think he goes to speak with the God.”
“Why do they think that?”
“Because he said he goes to his father’s house.”
“Kidruhil,” Cnaiür called back, identifying the dead. “Likely hunting us.”
He stared at the tracks across the ground, then stooped to examine several of the corpses. He pressed knuckles against the cheek of one, gauging its warmth. The skin-spies watched impassively, stared with unnerving directness as he walked back and remounted his horse.
“The Dûnyain surprised them,” he said.
How many seasons had he pined for this moment? How many thoughts scattered and broken?
I shall kill them both.
“Are you sure it was him?” her brother asked. “We smell others … Fanim.”
Cnaiür nodded and spat. “It’s him,” he said with weary disgust. “Only one had time to draw his weapon.”
War, she realized—war had given the world to men.
They had fallen to their knees before her, the Men of the Tusk. They had beseeched her for her blessing. “Shimeh,” one man had cried. “I go to die for Shimeh!” And Esmenet did, though she felt foolish and so very far from the idol they seemed to make of her; she blessed them, saying words that would give them the certainty they so desperately needed—to die or to kill. In a voice she knew so well—at once soothing and provoking—she repeated something she had heard Kellhus say: “Those who do not fear death live forever.” She held their cheeks and smiled, though her heart was filled with rot.
How they had thronged about her! Their arms and armour clattering. All of them reaching, aching for her touch, much as they had in her previous life.
And then they left her with the slaves and the ill.
The Whore of Sumna, some had called her, but in tones of exaltation, not condemnation, as though only by falling so far could one be raised so high. She found herself thinking of her namesake from
The Chronicle of the Tusk,
Esmenet, wife of Angeshraël, daughter of Shamanet. Was that her fate, to be a reference buried among holy articles? Would they call her Esmenet-allikal, or “Esmenet-the-other,” the way
The Tractate
distinguished those with namesakes from the Tusk? Or would she simply be the Prophet-Consort …
The Whore of Sumna.
The sky darkened, and the murderous roar swelled on the morning breeze. At long last it was
happening
… and she could not bear it. She could not bear it.
Ignoring several entreaties to go watch the assault from the edge of the encampment, she returned to the Umbilica. It was deserted save for a handful of slaves gathered about their breakfast fires. Only one of the Hundred Pillars—a Galeoth with a bandaged thigh—stood guard. He bowed low and stiff as she barged past him into the closeted murk of the interior. She called out twice as she walked the tapestried halls, received no reply. All was quiet, still. The clamour of the Holy War seemed impossibly distant, as though she listened to another world through the joints of this one. Eventually she found herself in the dead Padirajah’s bedchamber, staring at the great gilded bed where she and Kellhus slept and coupled. She piled her books and scrolls on it, then, crawling across the covers, surrounded herself with them. Rather than read, she touched, savoured their smooth and dry surfaces. Some she held until they became as warm as her skin. Then, for no reason she could fathom, she counted them, like a child jealous of her toys.
“Twenty-seven,” she said to no one. Distant sorceries cracked faraway air, made the gold and glass settings hum with their rumble.
Twenty-seven doors opened, and not one way out.
“Esmi,” a hoarse voice said.
For a moment she refused to look up. She knew who it was. Even more, she knew what he looked like: the desolate eyes, the haggard posture, even the way his thumb combed the hair across his knuckles … It seemed a wonder that so much could be hidden in a voice, and an even greater wonder that she alone could see.
Her husband. Drusas Achamian.
“Come,” he said, casting a nervous glance about the room. He did not trust this place. “Please … come with me.”
Through the canvas warren, she could hear Moënghus’s infant wail. She blinked tears and nodded.
Always following.

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