The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (16 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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“Where is Prince Kellhus?”
The silhouette remained motionless. “Indisposed.”
“But I was told …” Iyokus trailed. His breath had grown cold and hard about his heart. Eleäzaras knew, he realized.
He gave me to them … That was why he dra—
“You were deceived,” the Mandate Schoolman said.
“What do y—”
“Do you remember what you felt that night in Iothiah? You must have heard me coming for you. You must have heard the others screaming, calling for your help.”
There had been nightmares.
“What is this?” the Master of Spies demanded. “What happens here?”
“He’s given you to me, Iyokus. The Warrior-Prophet. I asked for vengeance. I
begged
.”
Somehow Achamian had muttered something between these words, and his eyes and mouth flared incandescent.
“And he said
yes
.”
Iyokus stiffened. “You begged?”
The fire-coal eyes lowered in an unseen nod. Branches and blossoms were etched blood-red against the greater black. “Yes.”
“Then,” Iyokus said, “I shall not.”
There were rules for overmatched sorcerers, rules that Iyokus did not follow. There was no retreat from this place, not while his death lay pinched on bowstrings about him. He had been trapped.
The same as Achamian in the Sareotic Library.
A turret of translucent stone leapt into existence about him: his reflexive Wards. Then the air reverberated with his arcane mutter-song, a guttural counterpoint to the more keening cadences of Achamian.
To either side of the Mandate Schoolman, two thunderheads unfolded from nothingness, each black-hearted, each tilted to the axis of the man’s position—the Houlari Twin-Tempests. A flare of lightning. Gossamer threads of incandescence danced in spasms about Achamian’s spherical Wards. Shadows swung like maces about the feet of the surrounding colonnades. Momentary light gleamed across the Chorae poised within the portico. Carved white as salt behind his abstract defences, Achamian continued chanting.
Iyokus sang faster, yoked his desperation to the tortured meanings that tumbled from soul into voice. Passion became semantics, and semantics
became real
. Lightning forked and flashed, its fury redoubled, until Achamian looked a ghost suspended in a half-buried sun. Limbs snapped. Blossoms exploded skyward, wheeled like burning moths against the firmament. The surrounding trees erupted in flame, became shining pillars of fire. The dolmens loomed orange from the black.
Achamian stepped forward, past the blasted trees.
Horrified, Iyokus realized that Achamian toyed with him. The chanv addict abandoned the Houlari, seized on the great maul of his School: the Dragonhead.
A scaled neck reared into existence above him. The unseen maw dipped, vomited a cataract of golden fire. Crying out his song, Iyokus watched the deluge part about the man’s Wards. Ropes of fire glided down and away, as though burning oil had been cast across a sphere of glass. But there were
cracks,
fractures that bled sheets of faint vertical light.
Again the Dragonhead struck, illuminating the entirety of the grove, blowing petals skyward in locust-clouds. And still the Mandate Schoolman
advanced,
stepping through coiling wreaths of flame, singing that mad, incomprehensible song. The fractures had multiplied, deepened …
Iyokus screamed the words, but there was a flash of something brighter than lightning. The pure dispensation of force, unmuted by image or interpretation.
Geometries scythed through the air. Parabolas of blinding white, swinging from perfect lines, all converging upon his Ward. Ghost-stone shivered and cracked, fell away like shale beneath a hammer …
An explosion of brilliance, then—
Heedless of the dark, the Chieftain of the Utemot rode from the Gate of Horns and into the surrounding Enathpanean hills. He hobbled his horse, a Eumarnan black apportioned to him following the destruction of Padirajah’s host, then struck a fire atop a high promontory overlooking the city. The hollow in his belly had crept into his chest, where it congealed, clawing—like the crow his mad grandmother always said lived within her breast. He lay awhile, his broad back against a still-warm boulder, his arms out and swaying, his fingertips teased by trembling grasses. He savoured the warmth and breathed. Gradually the crow ceased thrashing.
And he thought,
So many stars
.
He was no longer of the People. He was more. There was no thought he could not think. No act he could not undertake. No lips he could not kiss … Nothing was forbidden.
Staring into the infinite fields of black, he drifted asleep. He dreamed that he was bound to Serwë upon the Circumfix, pressed hard against her—within her … And it seemed no coupling could be more profound. “You’re mad,” she whispered, her breath moist with urgency.
“I am yours,” he gasped in an outland tongue. “You are the only track remaining.”
A corpse’s gaping grin.
“But I’m dead.”
These words struck like stone, and he awoke, curled half naked across gravel and grasses. He scrambled, bleary and numb, to his feet. He drunkenly brushed grit and chaff from his skin. What dreams were these? What kind of man—
Then he saw her.
Standing above his fire, wearing a simple linen shift, her skin orange and lithe and flawless, like an Inrithi goddess conjured from the flames. Her eyes shone with miniature conflagrations. Sheets of hair twined about her chin and cheeks, as blonde as slaves …
Serwë.
Cnaiür shook his head and mane, clawed his cheeks. He opened his mouth, but breath would not come. The wind seemed glacial.
Serwë.
She smiled, then leapt into the blackness that framed her.
Snarling, he sprinted after her, fully expecting to find nothing. Pausing where she had stood, he kicked through the grasses as though searching for a lost coin or weapon. The sight of her footprint knocked him to his knees.
“Serwë?” he cried, peering across the dark. He stumbled to his feet.
“Serwë!”
Then he saw her again, leaping from rock to rock down the shadowy slope, silver in moonlight. Suddenly all the world seemed
steep,
a concatenation of cliff faces. He glimpsed her silhouette slip between the fists of two great boulders. Caraskand sprawled across the distances below her, a labyrinth of turquoise and black. He lurched forward, began racing down the darkling slopes, leaping into the void. He crashed into a stand of dwarf yuccas, tripped through a grotesquerie of limbs. A brace of thrushes exploded into the black sky, screeching. He rolled to his feet, then ran, seemingly without breath or heartbeat, his feet magically finding their sandalled way across the murky ground.
“Serwë!”
He paused between the boulders, scanned the moonlit terrain. There! Her willowy figure, racing like a hare across the footings of the hill.
Spring grasses whisking across bare shins. Great loping strides, like a wolf across a killing field. Then he was skidding across gravel, flying over sudden plummets. Leaning low, he threw himself at her distant figure, his many-scarred arms scything to and fro at his side, chest heaving, spittle trailing across his chin and cheeks. The night roared. But he could not close the interval. She sprinted across fallow earth, disappeared over the lip of a terraced meadow.
“You’re mine!”
he howled.
Before him, Caraskand grew until it riddled the whole horizon with snaking streets and innumerable rooftops. The forward bastions of the Triamic Walls loomed larger, swallowing the city’s nearer quarters. Soon only the heights and their monumental structures were visible.
He glimpsed her shape again, just before she vanished into the blackness harboured by a grove of olive trees. He dashed after her, through the rush of stationary limbs. When he broke the grove’s far side, he found himself on the battlefield, near the remains of a burned-out byre. She was little more than a thread of white, climbing the roll of dead fields, heading toward the great heaps where the Fanim dead had been thrown.
For a moment part of him despaired. His head swam, his limbs burned with the strain of his exertions. His wind had abandoned him, yet his legs still pounded across the rutted earth. The moon cast his shadow before him, and with reckless limbs he raced it, leaping dead horses, bruising mats of spring clover. He lost sight of her among the dead, but somehow he knew she would wait.
It seemed he no longer breathed, but he could smell the dead as he willed himself up the last fallow slope. The stench soon became overpowering, a sourness so raw, so earthen deep, it clawed convulsions from his stomach. It possessed a flavour that could be tasted only on the bottom of the tongue.
So holy.
He stumbled to his knees and retched, then found himself staggering across a landscape of corpses. In some places they merely matted the ground, a macramé of stripped limbs, but elsewhere they’d been heaped dozens, even hundreds, deep—into mounds that seeped something like bone-oil from their base. Moonlight fell plain across naked skin, gleamed across exposed teeth, probed the hollows of innumerable gaping mouths.
He found her standing alone in a clearing rutted by the wains that had been used to gather the dead. Her back was turned to him. He approached warily, wondering at her nightmarish beauty. Beyond her, above a black screen of trees, a signal fire glittered atop one of Caraskand’s towers.
“Serwë,” he gasped.
She whirled and her face flew apart, as though snakes had been braided about her skull. He charged into her, bore her down, and for an instant he was inside her impossible expression, saw gums reaching, pink and moist, to wild lidless eyes. They rolled among the dead, until he threw himself free with an inarticulate roar. He staggered backward …
There was no time for horror.
She twirled in the air and something exploded across his jaw. He sailed headfirst into the corpses. He clutched a cold hand in the scramble to regain his feet. He tripped on a bloated torso, reached back, braced himself against the mud of dead faces.
The skin-spy regarded him, reassembled its features into those of another. As Cnaiür watched, the blonde hair fell from its pate in a feathery cascade, drawn away by the breeze, and for some reason this seemed the most horrific of all.
He stood, slicked by sweat, gasping for breath. He was unarmed, and though part of him had shouted this from the beginning, it seemed he realized it only now.
I’m dead
.
But the thing turned to the sky instead of attacking, drawn by the sound of beating wings.
Cnaiür followed its gaze, saw a raven descending in the dark. To the right of the skin-spy, one corpse lay askew a heap of others, its elbows bent out backward, its face turned toward Cnaiür, eyes drooling from sunken sockets, lips drawn back from black-leather gums. The bird landed on its grey cheek. It regarded him with a white
human
face, no larger than an apple.
Cnaiür cursed, stumbled backward. What new outrage was this?
“Old,” the tiny face said in a reedy voice. “Old is the covenant between our peoples.”
Cnaiür stared in horror. “I belong to no people,” he said blankly.
A vertiginous silence. It peered at him with an avian canniness, as though forced to revisit certain long-standing assumptions.
“Perhaps,” it said. “But
something
binds you to him. You would not have saved him otherwise. You would not have killed my child.”
Cnaiür spat. “Nothing binds me!”
It craned its tiny face to the side, bird-curious.
“But the past binds us all, Scylvendi, as the bow binds the flight of an arrow. All of us have been nocked, raised, and released. All that remains is to see where we land … to see whether we strike true.”
He couldn’t breathe. It seemed agony simply to look, as though everything chattered with a million masticating teeth. Everything
real
. Why could nothing be simple? Why could nothing be pure? Why must the world continually heap indignities upon him, and obscenities about … How much must he endure?

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