The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (73 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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Untouched on the heights, the First Temple observed with monumental repose.
There was a stupendous crack, and Proyas fairly toppled from his perch. He hugged the roof to the point of breathlessness, blinked the dazzle from his eyes.
Almost immediately below him he saw two crimson-robed Schoolmen, one old and decrepit, surrounded by headless pillars in the gallery of a destroyed temple, the other middle-aged and corpulent, balanced upon a crest of tossed debris. Their Wards shone, like silver in moonlight, or steel in dark alleys. Mouths flaring, they sang, and fires whooshed and thundered. Some fifty paces out, the ground exploded as if hammered by a rod the size of a great netia pine. Showers of smoking gravel rained across the wreckage.
Somehow, impossibly, a figure cloaked in saffron floated through it. Blue incandescence surged from his forehead, plummeted
over
the ground, sweeping away pillars like sticks, breaking across the Wards of the old Scarlet Schoolman. Proyas threw a forearm across his eyes, so bright was the contact.
The Cishaurim climbed skyward until he hung level with Proyas, flew out and around, all the while assailing the old sorcerer with gouts of blue-flashing energy. Black clouds had boiled into being in the air behind him, discharging lines of lightning like cracks in glass, but the Cishaurim ignored them, intent on overcoming the Scarlet Schoolman below. The air hummed with crashing reverberations, the clacking of mountain-sized stones. Against this tumult the screams of men could be no more than the chirps of infant mice. Or nothing at all.
Trailing thunder. Fading light. The hanging figure had relented, turning both face and serpents to the other madly singing Schoolman. His robes boiled a shimmering ochre in the wind. His asps fanned like iron hooks from about his neck.
Proyas didn’t have to look to know the old sorcerer was dead, or that the other soon would be. He found himself standing windswept on the pediment, perched on the very ledge, ruined streets and blasphemous fire careering across the distances before him.
“Sweet God of Gods!” he cried to the acrid wind. With bare hands he tore the Chorae from the chain about his neck.
“Who walk among us …” He drew back his sword-weary arm, secured his footing.
“Innumerable are your holy names …” And he cast his Tear of God, a gift from his mother on his seventh birthday.
It seemed to vanish against the iron horizon …
Then a flash, a black-ringed circle of light, from which the saffron figure plummeted like a sodden flag.
Proyas fell to his knees on the brink, leaned out over the fall. His holy city gaped before him. And he wept, though he knew not why.
Again and again the thanes and knights of Ce Tydonn charged, but they could not staunch the breach. Soon they were engulfed in howling desert horsemen, beset on all sides. In an endless stream, silk-garbed Kianene galloped beneath the arches and into view of the Inrithi encampment. Hundreds of them climbed the teetering pilings, gained the summit of the aqueduct, where pitched battles were waged beneath the withering fire of the heathen horse-archers. Others charged the length of the stonework, into Earl Damergal and his hard-pressed Cuärwethi trying to roll back the flanks of the breach. Still others beat their horses toward the stunned crowds of onlookers about the rim of the encampment.
A shout was raised among the Nangaels, where a spear took down King Pilaskanda, and set his Girgashi reeling back in disorder. The mastodons panicked in the withdrawal, began stomping through their own lines. The Ainoni cheered Palatine Uranyanka, who rode along their lines holding high the severed head of Cinganjehoi, who had been trapped behind the Moserothi after being driven back by Lord Soter and his Kishyati.
But the doom of the Inrithi rode with Fanayal ab Kascamandri, who led his shimmering Grandees far behind the lines of the idolaters. To the north and the south, cohorts of Kianene spread across the Shairizor Plain, shrugging past clots of battling knights and hooking back to the east, to charge into the far side of the ancient aqueduct. Earl Damergal was killed by a block thrown from the arches above. Earl Iyengar found himself stranded with his household to the rear of his Nangaels. Howling oaths, he watched his kinsmen broken into warring clots. A Mongilean Grandee silenced him with an arrow through the throat. Death came swirling down.
The Fanim wept with fury, with outrage, as they cut down the Inrithi invaders. They cried out glory to Fane and the Solitary God, even as they wondered that the Men of the Tusk did not flee.
Think-think-must-think!
An Odaini Concussion Cant, knocking her clear of the thing’s monstrous descent, back toward the mausoleum.
It landed hard and leaden, as though it had been wrought of twisted anchors, yet it moved as if its limbs floated in some unseen ether. The thing turned to him, hunched and slavering.
“The Voice,”
it wheezed, taking one dread step forward. All life crumbled to tan dust about it.
“It says, an eye for an eye.”
Waves of heat rolled outward, as dry as bone become ash.
“Then the hurting ends …”
And Achamian knew this was no common demon. Its Mark was like light, concentrated to the point where the parchment of the world blackened, curled, and burned. The Daimos …
What had Iyokus loosed?
“Esmi!” he cried. “Flee! Please! I beg you!
Flee!
”
The thing leapt toward him.
Achamian began singing—the deepest of the Cirroi Looms. Glorious Abstractions knitted the air about and before him, a thresher of light. The demon laughed and screamed.
His father staggered against the panels that pitted the walls. Snakes curled out of the recesses, shining and black. They curled about his throat, like eyes that strangled.
Kellhus stepped back, focused his eyes on a point the size of a thumbnail held at arm’s length. What was one became many. What was soul became
place.
Here
.
Calling out from bones of things.
With
three voices
he sang, one utteral pitched to the world and two inutterals directed to the
ground
. What had been an ancient Cant of Calling became something far, far more…A Cant of
Transposing
.
Blue fractal lights mapped the air about him, cocooned him in brilliance. Through scribbling filaments he saw his father press himself upright, turn with his asps to the girded corridor. Anasûrimbor Moënghus … that he could look so pale in the light of his son!
Existence cringed before the whip of his voice. Space cracked. Here was pried into there. Beyond his father he saw
Serwë,
her blonde hair tied into a war-knot. He saw her leap out of the black …
Even as he toppled into one far greater.
Drusas Achamian shouted out destruction. Light scored the creature, parabolas of knifing white. Molten blood flecked the grasses. Chits of fiery flesh sailed like kicked coals.
Waves of heat burned Esmenet’s cheeks. She stared as one transfixed, though she could not bear to watch. Surrounded by withered, burning grasses, he stood behind his sheets of light, at once glorious with power and dreadful with frailty. But the thing was upon him, a raving nightmare, hammering and clawing, blows that cracked the stone about her, that brought blood to her nose. Wards buckled and fractured. Achamian called out great concussions and the demon’s head was battered. Horns snapped. Spider-eyes ruptured light.
Its assault became a frenzy, a jerking blur of violence, until it seemed hell itself tore and gnashed at his gates.
Achamian staggered, blinked white-burning eyes, cried out—
An instant of wasted voice.
Rats screamed through its exultant roar. Achamian falling, his mouth working. The closing of dragon claws …
Achamian falling.
She could not scream.
The monstrosity leapt into the sky, punishing the air with rent wings.
She could not scream.
“I live!” Ikurei Conphas cried one more time, only to hear nothing above the crack and thunder of sorcerous battle, both near and far. No resounding cheer, no individual shouts of relief or acclaim. They couldn’t see him—that was it! They mistook him for one of their own. For a man …
He whirled back to his stunned rescuers.
“You!” he shouted to a dumbstruck Selial Captain. “Find General Baxatas. Tell him to join me here at once!”

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