The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (75 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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“Just as I knew you would.”

Cnaiür stopped at the threshold, mere paces from the man who had butchered his heart. He glanced uneasily about the room, saw Serwë splayed motionless to his right, her long blonde hair swept across a bloodied floor, and the captive skin-spies hanging abject within a curtain of pulleys and chains. The walls warred with inhuman images. He squinted at the light that hung impossibly beneath the graven vaults.

“Nayu … put down your sword. Please.”

Blinking, he saw the notched blade in the air before him, though he had no recollection of drawing it. The light rolled like liquid across it.

“I am Cnaiür urs Skiötha,” he said. “The most violent of all men.”

“No,” Moënghus said softly. “That is but a lie that you use to conceal your weakness from other men, just as weak.”

“It is you who lie.”

“But I see it within you. I see … the truth of you. I see your love.”

“I hate!”
he screamed, so loud that the halls returned the words to them as a thousand whispers.

Though blind, Moënghus somehow managed to look to the ground in pensive pity. “So many years,” he said. “So many seasons … Everything I showed you has scarred your heart, set you apart from the People. Now you hold me accountable for what I taught.”

“Desecration! Deceit!” Spittle burned his unshaven chin.

“Then why does it torment you so? Surely lies, when uncovered, fade like smoke. It is
truth
that burns, Nayu—as you know … for you have burned in it for uncounted seasons.”

Suddenly Cnaiür could feel it: the miles of earth heaped above them, the clawing inversion of
ground
. He had come too far. He had crawled too deep.

The sword dropped from the stranger’s senseless fingers, rang like something pathetic across the floor. His face broke, like a thing wrapped about twitching vermin. The sobs whispered across the pitted stone.

And Moënghus was holding him, enclosing him, healing his innumerable scars.

“Nayu …”

He loved him … this man who had
shown
him, who had led onto the trackless steppe.

“I am dying, Nayu.”
Hot whispers in his ear.
“I need your strength …”

Abandoned him. Forsook.

He had loved only him. In all the world …

Weeping faggot!

The kiss was deep; the smell strong. His heart hammered. Shame bled from his every pore, skittered across his trembling limbs, and somehow ignited an even deeper ardour.

He breathed shuddering air into Moënghus’s hot mouth. The snakes twisted through his hair, pressed hard and phallic against his temples. Cnaiür groaned.

So unlike Serwë or Anissi. A wrestler’s clasp, firm and unyielding. The promise of surrender, of shelter in stronger arms.

He reached beneath his girdle, into his breeches …

His eyes leaden with ardour, he murmured, “I wander trackless ground.”

Moënghus gasped, jerked, and spasmed as Cnaiür rolled the Chorae across his cheek. White light flared from his gouged sockets. For an instant, Cnaiür thought, it seemed the God watched him through a man’s skull.

What do you see?

But then his lover fell away, burning as he must, such was the force of what had possessed them.

“Not again!” Cnaiür howled at the sagging form. He stumbled to his knees, weeping, raving. “How could you leave me?”

His screech pealed through the derelict halls, filled the very earth.

And he laughed, thinking of the final swazond he would cut into his throat. One last thought too many …
See! See!

He cackled with grief.

He knelt over his lover’s corpse—for how many heartbeats, he would never know. Then, just as the sorcerous light began to fade, a cool hand fell upon his cheek. He turned and saw Serwë … For an instant her face cracked, as though gasping for air. But then it was seamless once again. Seamless and perfect.

Yes. Serwë … The first wife of his heart.

His proof and prize.

Absolute darkness engulfed them.

The walls of flame that fenced the great swath of destruction wrought by the Scarlet Spires crawled outward, leaving smoking husks in their wake. But somehow, miraculously, the ancient fullery, with its open galleries and queued basins, had escaped unscathed. Kneeling on the lip of its southern pediment, Proyas had seen it all, as though from the edge of a mighty cliff.

The destruction of the Scarlet Spires.

The drums of the heathen had replaced the unearthly thrum of incantations. Even now the last of the Cishaurim—he could see only five—floated over the charred and derelict landscape, the asps about their necks hooked downward, searching for survivors. Every several heartbeats, brilliance fell from them and crackling booms rifled through the darkling sky.

He knew not what it meant. He knew nothing …

Save that this was Shimeh.

He turned his face skyward. Through the haze he glimpsed the first vestiges of blue, a rim of gold about fleecy black.

There was a flash, a sparkle in the corner of his eye. He looked to the Sacred Heights, saw a point of light hanging above the eaves of the First Temple. The point lingered, painting the slate shingles of the dome white, then it burst, so bright that it struck circles across the firmament. Like sails cut from the mast, great sheets of smoke bloomed outward, swept over the hanging Cishaurim and out across the devastation.

And Proyas saw a
figure
standing where the light had been, so distant he could scarce make out his features, save that his hair was gold and his gown billowed white.

Kellhus!

The Warrior-Prophet.

Proyas blinked. Shivers splashed across his skin.

The figure leapt from the Temple’s edge, soared over the astonished Fanim manning the Heterine Wall, then down the slopes, through the rim of burning buildings. Even from so far, Proyas could hear his world-reaming song.

As one, the scattered Cishaurim turned. With eyes like twin Nails of Heaven, the Warrior-Prophet walked across the heights toward them. With every step, it seemed, debris flew from the ground toward him, where it was drawn into circling loops, one after another, smaller circles bisecting the orbits of those larger, until rings of spinning ruin fairly obscured him.

The sun burst forth, as after the deluge. Mountainous shafts of white pillared the streetscape, made pearl of the fallen, burnished the plumes that still piled black and grey into the sky. And Proyas saw the reason for the rings: heathen bowmen scrounging the ruin for Chorae. The Warrior-Prophet cried out, and sequential explosions fanned across the ground beneath him, making missiles of snapping stone and brick. Even still, Proyas glimpsed bolts rising toward him. Some sailed wide; others glanced from the rings, cracking the sorceries that bound them, flinging debris across the city.

More and more ground-raking explosions. Bodies were tossed. Foundations shattered. The thunder of it silenced the relentless throbbing of the drums.

Soaring over the haze, their saffron robes flashing in the sunlight, the five Cishaurim closed with Kellhus. Like cataracts of water, blinding energies crashed across his spherical Wards, burning with a brilliance that forced Proyas to throw up a hand against the glare. Somehow, perfect lines flickered from the maelstrom, coiled into knifing geometries about the nearest of the Cishaurim. The blind man seemed to claw the air with his hands, then rained across the ground in blood and pieces.

But Kellhus’s Wards were failing, cracked and shattered by tempests of unholy light. No more Gnostic lines glittered out to assail the hanging Cishaurim. And Proyas realized that Kellhus could not win, that he could only cry out Wards lest he be swept away. That it was only a matter of time.

Then—impossibly—it was over. The Cishaurim relented, and the roar of their assault trailed away like distant thunder. Proyas could see nothing … only smoke, ruin, and sunlight.

He found himself gaping for breath—or was it a soundless howl?

Sweet God … Sweet God of Gods!

There was a flash behind one of the assailants, and suddenly Kellhus
was there,
a hand clamped about the Cishaurim’s jaw, Enshoiya’s blade jutting bright through the saffron across his breast. Proyas stumbled to his feet, nearly teetered in a fatal fall. He caught himself, laughed through his tears. Cried out.

Then Kellhus was gone and the body dropped. The three remaining Cishaurim hung motionless, dumbstruck. Had they eyes, Proyas was certain they would have blinked.

And the Warrior-Prophet was behind another, beheading him, halving his snakes, in the space of a heartbeat. Proyas saw Kellhus jerk as the body tumbled down, realized he had caught a crossbow bolt fired from below. In a single snapping motion, he threw it like a knife at the nearest sorcerer-priest. There was a burst of incandescence rimmed by a nacre of black. The figure dropped.

Proyas whooped. Never had he felt so renewed, so young!

And Anasûrimbor Kellhus was singing the Abstractions once again. White robes boiled in the clearing sun. Planes and parabolas crackled about him. The very ground, to the pith of its ruin, hummed. The surviving Cishaurim floated in a broad and wary circle. He knew he had to keep moving, Proyas realized, to avoid the fate of his brothers. But it was already far too late …

There was no escaping the Warrior-Prophet’s holy light.

The sun slipped red into the iron west. The clouds crumbled in the southern winds and were dragged into purple streamers over the Meneanor. The gloom reared from the gullies and ravines of the devastation. Blood cooled across pitted stone.

In the dying light, something clink-clinked over the wheezing of subterranean fires. Amid stone heaped and tossed about unmoving foundations, a small boy hunched over a shattered figure of white, using a stone to chip salt into the palm of his little hand. Though the battle was over, he cast terrified looks over his shoulder. When he had filled his purse, he turned to the dead sorcerer’s face, regarded it with an eerie blankness that a grown man might have confused with sorrow but his mother, had she still breathed, would have known as hope.

He stood, bent to study a small cut on his knee. He smeared the blood away with his thumb, watched a new bead well in its place. Then, spooked by some sound, he whirled and saw the strange human-headed bird that regarded him.

“Would you like to know a secret?” a thin voice cooed. The miniature face grinned, as though finding unexpected pleasure in playing a half-hearted game.

Too numb to be terrified, the young boy nodded, clutched tight the salt that would be his fortune.

“Come closer.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SHIMEH