The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (72 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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Suddenly, in the disjointed manner of great assemblies, the Fanim host reined to a halt a mere hundred paces before the ranks drawn across the aqueduct’s foundations. Everywhere, stitched across flapping banners, painted across round shields, the horsemen bore the Two Scimitars of Fanimry. Their horses, caparisoned in skirts of fine iron rings, stamped and snorted, but beneath their helms the expressions of the Fanim possessed a murderous calm. Struck by wonder, the Men of the Tusk let their song trail. Even the archers lowered their bows.
With no more than the dead and slender tracts of ground between them, the sons of Fane and Sejenus regarded one another.
Sunlight showered across the fields, gleamed from clammy metal. Blinking, men looked to the heavens, saw vultures circling the glare.
Mastodons screamed among the Girgashi. An anxious rustling passed through the lines, both heathen and idolater. Spotters along the aqueduct’s crown shouted out warnings: heathen horsemen seemed to be repositioning themselves behind their motionless brethren. But all eyes were drawn to the Coyauri, where the banner of the Padirajah himself pressed forward through the ranks—the Maned Desert Tiger, embroidered in silver on a triangular bolt of black silk. The rows parted and, draped in golden mail, Fanayal himself spurred his black onto the intervening ground.
“Who?”
he cried to the astonished onlookers—and in Sheyic no less.
“Who is the true voice of God?”
His voice was youthful and strident, but it was also a signal to his kinsmen. Thousands erupted forward, lances lowered, mouths howling.
Limbs numb in shock, the Inrithi braced themselves. The sun’s heat now seemed to sicken.
Fanayal led a hurtling wedge of Coyauri into the Gesindalmen and their Galeoth brothers—all those who had elected to abandon King Saubon in Caraskand. Earl Anfirig cried out to his blue-tattooed countrymen, but the surprise was too much. All seemed confusion. The forward ranks had been bowled under, and the heathen cavalrymen hacked and slashed in their very midst. The Padirajah fought his way into the shadow of the arches, while his bowmen raked the summit of the aqueduct above.
A sudden cheer boomed out among the heathen, for Cinganjehoi had broken through the Ainoni farther to the north and now fenced with Lord Soter and his merciless Kishyati knights. Heeding the calls of their Padirajah, the Coyauri redoubled their fury, battled their way forward, through to the sunlight on the far side. Then suddenly they were galloping across open turf, cutting down the scrambling survivors. The glorious Grandees of Nenciphon and Chianadyni streamed into their wake.
But the thanes and knights of Ce Tydonn awaited them. In wave after wave, the iron men crashed into the expanding mass of heathen. Lances shattered arms, threw men from saddles. Horses jostled neck to neck, hoof to hoof. Swords and scimitars rang. Kissing the golden Tusk that hung about his neck, Earl Gothyelk charged directly toward the Padirajah’s standard. His householders scattered several dozen Coyauri, fought their way forward. The Earl, whom his men called “the Old Hammer,” laid low all who dared oppose him. Then he found himself knee to greave with golden Fanayal.
According to witnesses, the confrontation was short-lived. The Earl’s famed mace was no match for the Padirajah’s swift blade. Hoga Gothyelk, the red-faced Earl of Agansanor, leader of the Tydonni-over-the-Sea, slumped from his saddle.
Death came swirling down.
There was a sterility to the sorcerous light, a pallor that refused to discriminate the stone of the Nonman carvings from the flesh of his father’s face and limbs.
“Tell me, Father … what is the No-God?”
Moënghus stood motionless before him. “The trial broke you.”
His time, Kellhus knew, was running short. He could no longer afford his father’s distractions. “If it was destroyed, if it no longer exists, how could it send me dreams?”
“You confuse the madness within you for the darkness without—the same as the worldborn.”
“The skin-spies—what have they told you? What is the No-God?”
Though walled in by the flesh of his face, Moënghus seemed to scrutinize him. “They do not know. But then, none in this world know what they worship.”
“What are the possibilities you’ve considered?”
But his father would not relent. “The darkness comes before you, Kellhus—
it owns you
. You are one of the Conditioned. Surely you—” He paused abruptly, turned his blind face to open air. “You have brought others … Who?”
Then Kellhus heard them as well, creeping through black toward their light and their voices. There were three of them. The Scylvendi he recognized by his heartbeat … But who accompanied him?
“I have been
chosen,
Father. I
am
the Harbinger.”
The quiet of alternating breaths. The sound of grit beneath palm and heel.
“These voices,” Moënghus said with slow deliberation, “what do they say of
me
?”
His father, Kellhus realized, had finally grasped the principles of this encounter. Moënghus had assumed that his son would be the one requiring instruction. He had not foreseen it as possible, let alone inevitable, that the Thousandfold Thought would outgrow the soul of its incubation—and discard it.
“They warn me,” Kellhus said, “that you are Dûnyain still.”
One of the captive skin-spies convulsed against its chains, vomited threads of spittle into the pit below.
“I see. And this is why I am to die?”
Kellhus looked to the haloes about his hands. “The crimes you’ve committed, Father … the
sins
… When you learn of the damnation that awaits you, when you come to
believe,
you will be no different from the Inchoroi. As Dûnyain, you will be compelled to master the consequences of your wickedness. Like the Consult, you will come to see tyranny in what is holy … And you will war as they war.”
Kellhus fell back into himself, opened his deeper soul to the details of his father’s nearly naked form, assessing, appraising. The strength of limbs. The speed of reflexes.
Must move quickly.
“To shut the World against the Outside,” the pale lips said. “To seal it through the extermination of mankind …”
“As Ishuäl is shut against the Wilderness,” Kellhus replied.
For the Dûnyain, it was axiomatic: what was compliant had to be isolated from what was unruly and intractable. Kellhus had seen it many times, wandering the labyrinth of possibilities that was the Thousandfold Thought: The Warrior-Prophet’s assassination. The rise of Anasûrimbor Moënghus to take his place. The apocalyptic conspiracies. The counterfeit war against Golgotterath. The accumulation of premeditated disasters. The sacrifice of whole nations to the gluttony of the Sranc. The Three Seas crashing into char and ruin.
The Gods baying like wolves at a silent gate.
Perhaps his father had yet to apprehend this. Perhaps he simply couldn’t see past the arrival of his son. Or perhaps all this—the accusations of madness, the concern over his unanticipated turn—was simply a ruse. Either way, it was irrelevant.
“You are Dûnyain still, Father.”
“As are—”
The eyeless face, once perfectly obdurate and inscrutable, suddenly twitched in the ghost of a grimace. Kellhus pulled his knife from his father’s chest, retreated several steps. He watched his father probe the wound with his fingers, a weeping perforation just beneath his rib cage.
“I am more,” the Warrior-Prophet said.
A broad swath of ground cooked and smoked about him.
Achamian whirled, turned in a half-circle, saw the last of the fleeing Kidruhil, the Inrithi encampment congesting the nearer reaches of the plain, and Shimeh, still dark beneath the clouds, bleeding smoke. He looked back to the crest, to where two of the four Saik Schoolmen lay burning. The whole of the Imperial Army, he realized, climbed the far side. Any second now their banners would float above the grasses and wildflowers. He recalled his Mandate training …
Just below high ground.
He needed to run. To where the approach of Chorae bowmen could be seen, and where the earth provided the most cover. But part of him already mourned the futility of it. The only reason he had survived this long was that he’d caught them so entirely unawares. That wouldn’t last, not with Conphas still breathing.
I’m dead.
Then he remembered Esmenet. How could he forget? He looked to the ruined mausoleum, took fright that it lay so near. Then he saw her, her face small and boylike, peering through the shadowy recesses of the sumac that thronged about the foundation. She had seen it all, he realized …
It shamed him for some reason.
“Esmi, no!” he cried, but it was too late. She had already leapt the foundations, had already started sprinting toward him across the browned and blackened turf.
He saw it
twinkle
first—a flash in his periphery. Then the Mark, gouged nauseatingly deep.
He looked up …
“Nooo!”
he howled. Glass cracked beneath his feet.
Long-winged, black scales about molten limbs, scimitar talons, an eye-encircled maw …
A Ciphrang, called from the hellish bowels of the Outside. A sulphurous godling.
A gust swept up her skirts, knocked her to her knees. Esmenet turned her face skyward …
A demon descending.
Iyokus …
Proyas found himself on the roof of an ancient fullery—the only structure overlooking the Juterum’s westward approaches that wasn’t aflame. Though sunlight ringed the distances, all was smoke and twilight. If he looked at the sky overlong, he could feel himself spin, so he concentrated on the clay tiles beneath his feet. He scrambled across the shallow pitch, stumbled once, kicking free sheaves of rotted tile. He lowered himself onto his stomach, crawled out onto a south-facing pediment.
Gazed across Shimeh.
Streamers and veils of smoke lent the sky the perspective of city streets, making it easy to judge the relative distance of the hanging sorcerers and their warring lights. Below, all was black ruin and smouldering fire. Free-standing walls, as ragged as ripped parchment. Guttered foundations. The wounded crying out, waving pale hands. The charcoal dead.

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