The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (8 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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Old fool!
His arrival at the Fama Palace had thoroughly flummoxed the Zaudunyani functionaries. They treated him with deference—he was their master’s erstwhile teacher—but there was also trepidation in their manner, an
anxious
trepidation. Had they acted suspicious, Achamian would have attributed their reaction to his sorcerous calling; they were religious men, after all. But they didn’t seem unnerved by him so much as they seemed troubled by their own thoughts. They knew him, Achamian decided, the way men knew those they derided in private. And now that he stood before them, a man who would figure large in the inevitable scriptures to follow, they found themselves dismayed by their own impiety.
Of course, they knew he was a cuckold. By now the stories of everyone who had broken bread or sawed joint at Xinemus’s fire would be known in some distorted form or another. There were no intimacies left. And his story in particular—the sorcerer who loved the whore who would become the Prophet-Consort—had doubtless come quick to a thousand lips, multiplying his shame.
While waiting for the hidden machinery of messengers and secretaries to relay his request, Achamian wandered into an adjoining courtyard, struck by the other immensities that framed his present circumstance. Even if there were no Consult, no threat of the Second Apocalypse, he realized, nothing would be the same. Kellhus would change the world, not in the way of an Ajencis or a Triamis, but in the way of an Inri Sejenus.
This, Achamian realized, was Year One. A new age of Men.
He stepped from the cool shade of the portico into crisp morning sunlight. For a moment he stood blinking against the gleam of white and rose marble, then his eyes fell to the earthen beds in the courtyard’s heart, which, he was surprised to note, had been recently turned and replanted with white lilies and spear-like agave—wildflowers looted from beyond the walls. He saw three men—penitents like himself, he imagined—conferring in low tones on the courtyard’s far side, and he was struck that things had become so sedate—so
norma
l—so quickly. The week previous, Caraskand had been a place of blight and squalor; now he could almost believe he awaited an audience in Momemn or Aöknyssus.
Even the banners—white bolts of silk draped along the colonnades—spoke of an eerie continuity, a sense that nothing had changed, that the Warrior-Prophet had always been. Achamian stared at the stylized likeness of Kellhus embroidered in black across the fabric, his outstretched arms and legs dividing the circle into four equal segments. The Circumfix.
A cool breeze filtered through the courtyard, and a fold rolled across the image like a serpent beneath sheets. Someone, Achamian realized, must have started stitching these before the battle had even begun.
Whoever they were, they had forgotten Serwë. He blinked away images of her bound to Kellhus and the ring. It had been so very dark beneath Umiaki, but it seemed he could see her face arched back in rigour and ecstasy …
“He is as you said,”
Kellhus had confessed that night.
“Tsuramah. Mog-Pharau …”
“Master Achamian.”
Startled, Achamian turned to see an officer decked in green and gold regalia stepping into the sunlight. Like all Men of the Tusk, he was gaunt, though not nearly as cadaverous as many of those found outside the Fama Palace. The man fell to his knees at Achamian’s feet, spoke to the ground in a thick Galeoth accent. “I am Dun Heörsa, Shield-Captain of the Hundred Pillars.” There was little courtesy in his blue eyes when he looked up, and a surfeit of intent. “He has instructed me to deliver you.”
Achamian swallowed, nodded.
He …
The sorcerer followed the officer into the gloom of scented corridors.
He. The Warrior-Prophet.
His skin tingled. Of all the world, of all the innumerable men scattered about all the innumerable lands, he, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, communed with the God—the
God
! And how could it be otherwise, when he knew what no other man could know, when he spoke what no other man could speak?
Who could blame Achamian for his incredulity? It was like holding a flute to the wind and hearing song. It seemed beyond belief …
A miracle. A prophet in their midst.
Breathe when you speak to him. You must remember to breathe.
The Shield-Captain said nothing as they continued their march. He stared forward, possessed of the same eerie discipline that seemed to characterize everyone in the palace. Ornate rugs had been set at various points along the floor; the man’s boots fell silent as they crossed each.
Despite his nerves, Achamian appreciated the absence of speech. Never, it seemed to him, had he suffered such a throng of conflicting passions. Hatred, for an impossible rival, for a fraud who had robbed him of his manhood—of his wife. Love, for an old friend, for a student who was at once his teacher, for a voice that had quickened his soul with countless insights. Fear, for the future, for the rapacious madness that was about to descend upon them all. Jubilation, for an enemy momentarily undone.
Bitterness. Hope.
And awe … Awe before all.
The eyes of men were but pinholes—no one knew this better than Mandate Schoolmen. All their books, even their scriptures, were nothing more than pinholes. And yet, because they couldn’t see what was unseen, they assumed they saw everything, they confused pinpricks with the sky.
But Kellhus was something different. A doorway. A mighty gate.
He’s come to save us. This is what I must remember. I must hold on to this!
The Shield-Captain escorted him past a rank of stone-faced guardsmen, their green surcoats also embroidered with the golden mark of the Hundred Pillars: a row of vertical bars over the long, winding slash of the Tusk. They passed through fretted mahogany doors and Achamian found himself on the portico of a much larger courtyard. The air was thick with the smell of blossoms.
In the sunlight beyond the colonnade, an orchard soaked bright and motionless. The trees—some kind of exotic apple, Achamian decided—twined black beneath constellations of blooming flowers, each petal like a white swatch dipped in blood. At different points through the orchard, great sentinels of stone—dolmens—towered over the surrounding queues, dark and unwrought, more ancient than Kyraneas, or even Shigek. The remnants of some long-overthrown circle.
Achamian turned to Captain Heörsa with questioning eyes, only to glimpse movement through braces of leaf and flower. He turned—and there she was, strolling beneath the boughs with Kellhus.
Esmenet.
She was speaking, though Achamian could only hear the memory of her voice. Her eyes were lowered, thoughtfully studying the petalled ground as it passed beneath her small feet. She smiled in a manner at once rueful and heartbreaking, as though she answered teasing proposals with loving admissions.
It was the first time, Achamian realized, that he’d seen the two of them together. She seemed otherworldly, self-assured, slender beneath the sheer turquoise lines of her Kianene gown—something fitted, Achamian had no doubt, for one of the dead Padirajah’s concubines. Graceful. Dark of eye and face, her hair flashing like obsidian between the golden ribs of her headdress—a Nilnameshi Empress on the arm of a Kûniüric High King. And wearing a Chorae—a
Trinket
!—pressed against her throat. A Tear of God, more black than black.
She was Esmenet and yet she wasn’t Esmenet. The woman of loose life had fallen away, and what remained was more, so much more, than she’d been at his side. Resplendent.
Redeemed.
I dimmed her,
he realized.
I was smoke and he … is a mirror
.
At the sight of his Prophet, Captain Heörsa had fallen to his knees, his face pressed to the ground. Achamian found himself doing the same, though more because his legs refused to bear him.
“So what will it be the next time I die?”
he had asked her that night she had broken him.
“The Andiamine Heights?”
What a fool he’d been!
He blinked womanishly, swallowed against the absurd pang that nettled the back of his throat. For a moment the world seemed nothing more than a criminal ledger, with all he’d surrendered—and he’d surrendered so much!—balanced against
one
thing. Why couldn’t he have this
one
thing?
Because he would ruin it, the way he ruined everything.
“I carry his child.”
For a heartbeat her eyes met his own. She raised a hesitant hand only to lower it, as though recalling new loyalties. She turned to kiss Kellhus’s cheek, then fled, her eyes seemingly closed, her lips drawn into a heart-frosting line.
It was the first time he had seen the two of them together.
“So what will it be the next time I die?”
Kellhus stood before one of the apple trees, watching him with gentle expectation. He wore a white silk cassock patterned with a grey arboreal brocade. As always, the pommel of his curious sword jutted over his left shoulder. Like Esmenet, he bore a Trinket, though he had the courtesy to keep it concealed against his chest.
“You need never kneel in my presence,” he said, waving for Achamian to join him. “You are my friend, Akka. You will always be my friend.”
His ears roaring, Achamian stood, glanced at the shadows where Esmenet had disappeared.
How has it come to this?
Kellhus had been little more than a beggar the first time Achamian had seen him, a puzzling accessory to the Scylvendi, whom Proyas had hoped to use in his contest with the Emperor. But even then there had been something, it now seemed, a glimpse of this moment in embryo. They had wondered why a Scylvendi—and of Utemot blood, no less—would seek employ in an Inrithi Holy War.
“I am the reason,”
Kellhus had said.
The revelation of his name, Anasûrimbor, had been but the beginning.
Achamian crossed the interval only to feel strangely bullied by Kellhus’s height. Had he always been this tall? Smiling, Kellhus effortlessly guided him between a gap in the trees. One of the dolmens blackened the sun. The air hummed with the industry of bees. “How fares Xinemus?” he said.
Achamian pursed his lips, swallowed. For some reason he found this question disarming to the point of tears.
“I—I worry for him.”
“You must bring him, and soon. I miss eating and arguing beneath the stars. I miss a fire nipping at my feet.”
And as easy as that, Achamian found himself tripping into the old rhythm. “Your legs always were too long.”
Kellhus laughed. He seemed to shine about the pit of the Chorae. “Much like your opinions.”
Achamian grinned, but a glimpse of the welts about Kellhus’s wrists struck the nascent humour from him. For the first time he noticed the bruising about Kellhus’s face. The cuts.
They tortured him … murdered Serwë.
“Yes,” Kellhus said, ruefully holding out his hands. He looked almost embarrassed. “Would that everything healed so quickly.”
Somehow these words found Achamian’s fury.
“You could see the Consult all along—all along!—and yet you said nothing to me … Why?”
Why Esmenet?
Kellhus raised his brows, sighed. “The time wasn’t right. But you already know this.”
“Do I?”
Kellhus smiled while pursing his lips, as though at once pained and bemused. “Now, you and your School must parlay, where before you would have simply seized me. I concealed the skin-spies from you for the same reason you concealed me from your Mandate masters.”
But you already know this,
his eyes repeated.
Achamian could think of no reply.
“You’ve told them,” Kellhus continued, turning to resume their stroll between the blooming queues.
“I’ve told them.”
“And do they accept your interpretation?”
“What interpretation?”
“That I’m more than the sign of the Second Apocalypse.”
More
. A tremor passed through him, body and soul.
“They think it unlikely.”
“I should imagine you find it difficult to describe me … to make them understand.”
Achamian stared for a helpless moment, then looked to his feet.
“So,” Kellhus continued, “what are your interim instructions?”
“To pretend to give you the Gnosis. I told them you would go to the Spires otherwise. And to ensure that nothing”—Achamian paused, licked his lips—“that nothing happens to you.”
Kellhus both grinned and scowled—so like Xinemus before his blinding.
“So you’re to be my bodyguard?”
“They have good reason to worry—as do you. Think of the catastrophe you’ve wrought. For centuries the Consult has hidden in the fat of the Three Seas, while we were little more than a laughingstock. They could act with impunity. But now that fat has been cooked away. They’ll do anything to recover what they’ve lost.
Anything
.”

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