The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (61 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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Fanim drums throbbed. The clouds continued to darken, answering to the Cishaurim and their malevolent will.
Urged on by the cries of their Captains, phalanxes of Javreh charged the slopes, clambered across the heaped ruin of the Massus Gate, then sprinted into the towering veils of smoke that slowly drifted across the city. The first of the Scarlet Cadres followed, picking their way forward carefully, keeping their sorcerers shielded at all times.
The outlines of the surviving walls resolved from the haze, and as the formations passed beneath them, geysers of glittering fire reached up to lave their heights. More stonework came tumbling to ground. The world itself seemed to mutter curses.
Sarothenes was the first of the Scarlet Schoolmen to set foot in Shimeh, followed by Ptarramas the Older and Ti, who, despite his great age, continually scolded his Javreh for their sloth. Before them loomed a warren of alleyways and buildings that stretched to the foot of the Juterum. Their Javreh pickets fanned out in their hundreds, cutting down hapless Amoti, sifting through the buildings. Screams pealed out from hidden places.
Ptarramas the Older was the first to die, struck in the shoulder by a Chorae as he pressed his cadre forward. He fell to the street, cracked like statuary. Bellowing arcana, Ti sent flocks of burning sparrows into the black windows of the adjacent tenement. Explosions spit blood and debris across the street. Then, from the ruins of the outer wall, Inrûmmi struck the building’s westward face with brilliant lightning. The air cracked. Burnt brick walls sloughed to the ground. In an exposed room, a burning figure stumbled over the lip of the floor and plummeted to the ruin below.
Sheltered by his Javreh and their wide shields, Eleäzaras gained the summit of the ruined Massus, surveyed his cadres deploying before him. He leaned against the iron prongs jutting from the debris at his feet—the remains of the portcullis. Though he couldn’t see Ptarramas, he knew that something had already happened.
They had hoped to draw the Snakeheads out in a decisive engagement, but Seokti was too canny. The Shigeki fiend, it appeared, hoped to bleed them. Pick them off one by one.
Eleäzaras looked across the maze of structures before him, the welter of walls and rooftops extending to the slopes of the Juterum and marble bastions of the First Temple upon its summit. He could sense the Chorae out there, buried in cellars, crouched in lethal vantages, waiting …
Everywhere. Hidden enemies.
Too much … too many.
“Fire cleanses!” he cried. “Raze it! Burn it all to ash!”
The long-awaited horns sounded, a coarse peal over the throb of heathen drums. Towering amid his shield-brothers, Yalgrota Sranchammer raised his axe to the darkling sky, howled bloodthirsty oaths to Gilgaöl—mighty War. His kinsmen answered with raucous shouts. Then the Thunyeri surged into the Scarlet Schoolmen’s wake, racing over the smoking ruins of the Massus Gate. Shattered tile cracked beneath their booted feet.
To their north, Proyas and his Conriyans battled across the parapets. Of their two siege-towers, one had been lost to inferno, but hundreds clambered up the back of the other, dashing through arrows to reinforce their Prince. To their south, Chinjosa and his Ainoni watched with amazement as the Fanim defenders fled the ponderous approach of their two siege-towers. Bellicose Uranyanka and his Moserothi would be the first of their number to set foot upon the Tatokar Walls.
The black-armoured Thunyeri spilled unopposed into the city. Prince Hulwarga and Earl Goken struck south, leading the Skagwi and the wild-haired Auglishmen into the unruined streets behind the Ainoni section of the wall. Earl Ganbrota, meanwhile, drove north with his Ingraulish, their shields adorned with shrunken heads. The east they left to the Scarlet Gurwikka and their dark-skinned slaves.
Soon the Kianene and Amoti were dissolving in panic. Everywhere they looked, they saw chain-armoured myriads, loosed like blond wolves into the streets.
The lantern faltered, and for a moment Kellhus cradled it as though trying to coax it to life with the fire of his own body. With a final hiss, it faded into nothing.
But that was not the end of light. He saw the faintest of glimmers off to his right, toward the sound of booming water. Rather than use any Cant that might announce his presence, he continued in blackness.
The sound grew more and more thunderous as he followed the pitch hallway. A fine mist sheened his skin, matted his hair and robe. The light grew more and more distinct: orange shining across the black of wet stone. Twice he stooped, drew his fingers across the floor to ensure that he still followed his father’s trail.
The hallway opened onto a balcony that overlooked a vast cavern. At first all he could discern were the mighty curtains of water tumbling from abyssal blackness, and on such a scale that the flooring beneath him seemed to float upward. Then he noticed the points of light below, several of them, arrayed across a platform beyond the waterfalls’ reach, and reflected in the oily surface of some kind of pool. Braziers, he realized, dim-burning because of the sodden air.
Father?
Kellhus descended a broad stair hewn from the walls. As elsewhere in the mansion, every surface had been rendered with heroic carvings across more pornographic reliefs, though on a far greater scale. Kellhus could make out immense vaults, their tangled figures encrusted with the mineral residue of water and millennia. The falls themselves towered into darkness, raucous, white foam wheeling, dropping with the weight of glaciers, so tall they threatened to press him to his knees.
A series of chutes, like halved versions of the long curved horns the Thunyeri used to communicate in battle, had been raised to the tumbling skirts of the waterfalls. There were dozens of them, hooking outward and downward, arranged to convey water to the sprawling floor below, though only three still reached into the crashing white, the others having broken. Green about the edges, they gleamed copper where the water still runnelled them.
The stair wound away from the falls, curled across the back of the vast chamber, where it met its mirror image and broadened in a monumental fan. Bronze weaponry and armour lay scattered across the steps, remnants of the ancient battle that had been lost here. As he neared the stair’s base, the sounds of smaller waters were braided into the background roar: the gurgling of eaves, and the slap and whish of small streams across stone. A cavernous must permeated the air.
“They gathered here in the hundreds,” a voice called across the gloom, clear despite the ambient rumble. “Even thousands, in the days before the Womb-Plague …”
A Kûniüric voice.
Kellhus paused on the steps, searched the gloom.
At last.
As broad as the Siricus Arena in Momemn, the floor opened before him, matted with detritus and the small mounds which were all that remained of the fallen. Ripples dilated in endless procession across the broad pool set in the floor’s centre. Like a black mirror, it reflected the braziers burning along its far rim, the fat bronze faces looming over them, and the great cascading column of the waterfall. At the terminus of the chutes, a series of immense bronze statues had been erected: kneelers, obese and naked, with channels cut into their backs and with heads hollowed into great-jowled masks. They squatted in a broad semi-circle facing the pool, their expressions lurid in the orange light. Water streamed from the eyes and mouths of three of them, slapping across the stone. The hollowed head of one had broken off altogether. It now rested near the far end of the pool, its single unsubmerged eye staring across the black waters.
“Bathing was holy for them,” the voice continued.
Kellhus descended the last of the monumental stair, slowly walked across the floor. He had grown accustomed to listening through voices, but this one was smooth as porcelain—seamless and inscrutable. Even still, he knew it very well. How could he not, when it was his own?
Advancing around the pool, he saw a pale figure, sitting cross-legged behind the sheets of water that poured from one of the monstrous faces. A man, white-skinned, obscured by rushing translucence.
“The fires are for you,” the figure said. “I have lived in darkness for a long, long time.”
Her calm terrified Achamian almost as much as the clamour on the horizon. The very wind stank of sorcery.
“So he uses everyone,” she finally said. “His every word is bent upon manipulation …” She stared as though her eyes had forgotten how to blink. “Don’t you mean he uses
me
?”
“I—I haven’t thought it all through yet, but I think he wants …
children
… Children with his strength, his intellect, and you—”
“So he
breeds
. Is that it? I’m his prized mare?”
“I know how hateful these words must—”
“Why would you think that? I’ve been used my whole life.” She paused, glared at him with as much remorse as outrage. “My whole life, Akka. And now that I’ve become the instrument of something
higher,
higher than men and their rutting hunger—”
“But why? Why be an instrument at all?”
“You speak as if we had a choice—you, a
Mandate Schoolman
! There’s no escape. You know that. With every breath, we are used!”
“Then why the bitterness, Esmi? Shouldn’t a prophet’s vessel sound ex—”
“Because of you, Akka!” she cried with alarming ferocity. “
You
! Why can’t you just let me go? You know that I love you, so you cling to that, you dig in with grubby nails and you yank and yank and yank, you bruise and batter my heart, and you refuse to let me go!”
“Esmi…Iasked and you came.”
Long silence.
“All this,” she said, her voice almost inaudible for the crack of faraway sorceries, “everything Cnaiür said … what makes you think that Kellhus hasn’t already told me?”
Achamian swallowed, ignored the lights that flashed across his periphery.
“Because you say you love him.”

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