The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (63 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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And, yes …
omnipotence
. Like liquor burning through his veins, or opium sweltering his soul.
Like the spectres of decapitated snakes, dragonheads reared above various cadres and masticated about streaming fire. To his immediate right, someone—Nem-Panipal?—sang boiling clouds of black. Lightning flashed out in a blinding skein. Stone exploded outward. Sheering along a diagonal, a tower fell onto the ruins of its own foundation, where it lay like an overturned hull.
The Grandmaster cackled as the wave of dust rolled over him. Shimeh burned! Shimeh burned!
Somehow Sarothenes, his shield-bearers nowhere to be seen, had found his way to his side. Why would the fool risk—
“You press too hard!” the rail-thin sorcerer cried. Lines of black scored his rutted face, where he had wiped at flecks of soot, no doubt. “You exhaust us on women, children, and dumb stone!”
“Kill them!” Eleäzaras spat. “I care not!”
“But the
Cishaurim,
Eli! We must conserve ourselves!”
For some reason, he thought of all the slaves who had swallowed his member, of clutching tight silken sheets, of the luxurious agony of release. This was what it was like, he realized. He had seen them, the Men of the Tusk, filing back from battle, matted in blood, smiling with those terrifying eyes …
As though to show those eyes to Sarothenes, he turned to the man, held out a hand to the sulphurous calamity before them.
“Behold!” he spat contemptuously. “Behold what we—
we!
—have wrought.”
The soot-stained sorcerer stared at him in horror. Lights flashed across his sweaty cheek.
Eleäzaras turned back to exult in the wages of his impossible labour.
Shimeh burned …
Shimeh
.
“Our power,” he grated. “Our
glory
!”
From the parapets of the Mirraz Gate, Proyas gazed in disbelief.
A vast plate of clouds—dark, churning in unnatural, ingrown ways—moved in ponderous revolutions about the city, taking the Sacred Heights as its axis. Simply staring at it dizzied his footing. From where he stood, the First Temple seemed impossibly near. He could even see armoured men—Fanim—emerge from the darkness beyond the outermost ring of pillars, bounding down stairs and across landings before disappearing behind the battlements of the Heterine Wall. But what dismayed him was the great curtain of smoke and fire that approached the Heights from the ruins of the Massus Gate. Chalk-white streamers. Mists of ochre dust. Rolling veils of grey. Plumes like liquid basalt, solid and black. And through them, glowering fires, threads of lightning, and flying cataracts of gold. Whole tracts of the city had been blasted and consumed, reduced to a great thumb of smouldering ruin.
Ingiaban laughed maniacally. “Have you ever seen such a thing!”
Proyas turned to rebuke him, only to glimpse a figure draped in shimmering crimson picking his way over the matted dead immediately behind them. The man teetered for a moment, skidding in blood. His iron-grey braid swung across his left shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Proyas cried.
The Scarlet Schoolman ignored him, took up a position facing west, and stretched his arms wide beneath the sky.
“You’re destroying the city!”
The old man whirled, so quickly that his ornate gowns were a heartbeat in following. Despite his phlegmatic eyes and stooped frame, his voice was as forceful as it was furious. “Conriyan ingrate! The Cishaurim own the skies. They use the darkness to hide their Chorae! If we lose this contest, then
all is lost,
do you understand?
Holy Shimeh
… Fie on your fucking city!”
Shocked as much by the man’s bearing as by his vehemence, Proyas retreated a step, speechless. Cursing, the Schoolman returned to his task, and Proyas found himself peering down the wall to the nearest tower. Tiny figures teemed atop the parapet, and among them, another white-bearded Schoolman stood leaning against the battlements, his arms held out to the west, his eyes flaring bright as he sang. Black clouds ribbed the sky above, though the Meneanor beyond still winked blue and white, bathed in distant sunshine.
The sorcerer before Proyas began singing as well. A sudden wind bellied his gaping sleeves.
And a voice whispered,
No … not like this
.
Screens of tumbling water, breaking the world beyond them into glittering lines and smeared shadows. Kellhus had ceased trying to penetrate them.
“Power,” Anasûrimbor Moënghus said, “is always power
over
. When an infant may be either, what is the difference between a Fanim and an Inrithi? Or between a Nansur and a Scylvendi? What could be so malleable in Men that anyone, split between circumstances, could be his own murderer?
“You learned this lesson quickly. You looked across Wilderness and you saw thousands upon thousands of them, their backs bent to the field, their legs spread to the ceiling, their mouths reciting scripture, their arms hammering steel … Thousands upon thousands of them, each one a small circle of repeating actions, each one a wheel in the great machine of nations …
“You understood that when men stop bowing, the emperor ceases to rule, that when the whips are thrown into the river, the slave ceases to serve. For an infant to be an emperor or a slave or a merchant or a whore or a general or whatever, those about him
must act accordingly
. And Men act as they
believe
.
“You saw them, in their thousands, spread across the world in great hierarchies, the actions of each exquisitely attuned to the expectations of others. The identity of Men, you discovered, was determined by the beliefs, the assumptions, of others.
This
is what makes them emperors or slaves … Not their gods. Not their blood.
“Nations live as Men act,” Moënghus said, his voice refracted through the ambient rush of waters. “Men act as they
believe
. And Men believe as they are conditioned. Since they are blind to their conditioning, they do not doubt their intuitions …”
Kellhus nodded in wary assent. “They believe absolutely,” he said.
He found himself clutching her hand, pulling her away, toward the derelict mausoleum. He saw her smile despite her tears, her face so heartbreakingly beautiful, while beyond her, just to the left of her cheek, the First Temple, freckle-small in the distance, presided over smoke and burning streets.
The walls had collapsed to their footings at the mausoleum’s southeastern corner. He stepped over them, sweeping weeds flat with a sandalled foot. He drew her into the interior, into the dappled gloom where the young trees had rooted. Insects whirred up into the last of the sunlight. They kissed again, embraced in a more profound manner. Then they were upon the ground, cold, hard, and matted with living things.
No,
something whispered within him.
Not like this … not like this!
And he knew—they both knew!—what it was they were doing: blotting one crime with another … But he couldn’t stop. Even though he knew she would hate him afterward. Even though he knew
that was what she wanted
…
Something unforgivable.
She was weeping, whispering things—inaudible things. It seemed the roaring of ache and need and accusation was all Achamian could hear.
What am I doing?
“I can’t hear you,” he murmured, fumbling with the tails of her gown that had bunched between her legs. Why so frantic? What was this terror he felt?
Sweet Sejenus! How could a heart pound so hard?
Please. Please.
Beneath him, she rocked her face back and forth, bit the knuckle of her thumb.
“We’re dead,”
she gasped.
“He does love me … He will kill …”
Then Achamian was inside her.
They fled the walls, the Amoti and their Kianene overseers, and ran into the darkening streets. The iron men had come with blistering sorceries and shrieking horns. The accursed idolaters. And it seemed that none could resist them. Where was the Padirajah? Where were his Wellkeepers? His Grandees and their shining horses? And the Water-bearers! Where were they?
Smoke drifted faint and sheer over Shimeh’s western quarters. Ash fell like snow. Here and there, panicked groups were run down by the Conriyans and their silver-masks-without-expression. The encounters were as disastrous as they were brief. Some careered into their countrymen running in the opposite direction. Words of breathless horror were exchanged, descriptions of the crimson qurraji who blasted everything in their path, of the black-mailed northmen swinging severed heads and hooting in animal voices. The idolaters seemed to be everywhere.
But many stumbled onto the expanse of the Esharsa Market, where the triangular pennant of a
real
Grandee, Prince Hûkal of Mongilea, awaited them, along with four hundred riders, true desert men from the unforgiving plains of the Great Salt. The Amoti conscripts found themselves arrayed in new ranks across the open cobble, while the black-garbed Prince cried out reminders of Fane and his indomitable courage. Soon, some two thousand faithful occupied the open cobble, their shoulders squared, their hearts renewed.
And not a moment too soon. Melee had already engulfed the surrounding streets, where the Fanim defended hasty barricades against unmounted Conriyan knights. The idolaters’ numbers swelled as more and more of the bands ranging the streets joined the fracas. Those who came upon the market paused, and only ventured to attack when several hundred of them had gathered. The Anpleian barons and knights led the assault, eager to avenge the death of Shressa Gaidekki, their beloved Count-Palatine, but they were undone, driven back by the charges of Hûkal and his Mongileans. Only when the Prince Nersei Proyas arrived with the Palatines Ingiaban and Ganyatti were they able to organize a determined assault. The Amoti broke easily enough, fled into the eastern streets, many of which the Conriyans had already overrun on the flanks. But the Mongilean horsemen proved far more stubborn, and their charges exacted a horrible toll. Even as their horses failed them, they fought with ferocious zeal. Lord Ganyatti, the Palatine of Ankirioth, traded blows with mighty Prince Hûkal himself. The heathen lord beat aside his shield and cracked his collarbone with a blow that snapped his scimitar. Lord Ganyatti toppled back, was crushed by pummelling hooves.

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