The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (31 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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The air smelled of dank and rotting fish. Raising a hand against the sun, he watched a handful of boats row out toward the mouth of the harbour, drawing closer to the foremost Nansur carrack. They looked like overturned beetles, legs pitching water in time. Red-throated gulls drifted through the sky above, their screeches near and jarring. What had Tirnemus called them? Yes, gopas …
He watched as more and more boats gained the fleet.
Sanumnis arrived shortly after in full battledress, accompanied by a Thunyeri chieftain named Skaiwarra, who had disembarked three days earlier with some 300-odd kinsmen—Men of the Tusk all. A combination of Eumarnan wine and diarrhea, Sanumnis explained, had delayed their departure. The chieftain was a stout, blond-braided man possessing the same pocked fierceness that characterized so many of his countrymen. He spoke no Sheyic whatsoever, but between his and Sanumnis’s smattering of Tydonni, Cnaiür was able to bargain with him. It seemed Skaiwarra was a pirate of recent conversion, and as such had an abiding hatred of the Nansur and their pious fleets. He agreed to tarry yet one more day.
A messenger from Troyatti appeared during their exchange. Imyanax, Baxatas, and Areamanteras were even now being escorted to the harbour, the man said, but Conphas and Sompas were nowhere to be found. Apparently Conphas had been severely beaten the night before, and Sompas had taken him elsewhere in the city, searching for a physician.
Cnaiür matched Sanumnis’s dark gaze. “Seal the gates,” he said. “Man the walls … If anything happens, the city is yours—as is the Warrior-Prophet’s charge.”
The Baron flinched from the intensity of his look, then nodded in resignation. Cnaiür turned back to the sunlight as he and Skaiwarra withdrew. The first of the boats was returning, rowing between the towers of the harbour’s mouth, over the chain where it dipped in the water. The sun had climbed high enough for him to discern the crimson of the transport’s sails, bundled against black-painted masts.
Tirnemus and his entourage arrived moments before Troyatti’s men escorted the Nansur officers onto the berm. The man smelled of wine and fried pork. Cnaiür told him to muster his men along the docks. “If all is well,” he said, “you will need to organize the embarkation.”
“Is all well?” the Baron asked with open apprehension. They could all smell it now.
Cnaiür turned his back on the man, waved for his Hemscilvara to bring the captives to the end of the quay. Their arms were bound behind their backs, which meant they had resisted.
He glared at the Nansur Generals as they were prodded forward. “You had better pray these transports are empty …”
“Dog!” old Baxatas spat. “What do you know of prayer?”
“More than your Exalt-General.”
A moment of silence.
“We know what you did,” Areamanteras said, not without some caution.
Scowling, Cnaiür approached the General, pausing only when he towered over him. “What did I do?” he asked, his voice strange. “There was blood when I awoke … blood and shit.”
Areamanteras fairly quailed in his shadow. He opened his mouth to answer, then tried to purse away trembling lips.
“Fucking swine!” Baxatas cried to Cnaiür’s immediate right. “Scylvendi pig!” Despite his fury, there was fear in his eyes as well.
The gopas dipped and screamed in the air above.
“Where is he?” Cnaiür asked. “Where is the Ikurei?”
None of the three said a word, and only Baxatas dared meet his gaze. At one point he seemed about to spit at him, but apparently thought better of it.
Cnaiür turned back to the nearest boat’s approach. He looked down to the black water beyond the dock’s edge, watched it slap about the pilings. He saw a branch reaching up from the murk, its forking tip waving just above the surface, like fingers ringed by foam.
The boatmen were shouting across the water. The transports were empty.
By mid-afternoon all the carracks and their escort of war galleys had been piloted into the harbour. Cnaiür kept the gates sealed, not willing to expose himself in any way until he had Conphas in his clutches. He had set Tirnemus and his men to join Troyatti in ransacking the city.
The Admiral of the Nansur fleet, a man called Tarempas, explained that the seasonal winds that so determined travel across the Three Seas had been unexpectedly favourable. He was far more worried about his return trip—or so he claimed. He was one of those restless, small-statured men who, given the way their eyes darted, seemed far more interested in their surroundings than their interlocutors. It was as though he continually sized everything up.
Some time afterward, the Columnaries in the main camp began rioting. They had caught word of the fleet’s early arrival. When noon came without any official word, they organized a protest. Several times in the course of his travels across the city, Cnaiür had actually heard their commotion: raucous shouts followed by booming cheers. As much was to be expected from homesick men, he supposed, especially after nearly three weeks of internment.
Then word of their Exalt-General’s disappearance leaked out.
With Sanumnis and Skaiwarra in tow, Cnaiür climbed the curtain walls overlooking the camp. Gaining the heights was like stepping from a calm grotto into the heart of battle, such was the clamour. A slum of hovels and tents extended from the wall’s footings, filling a great swath of earth denuded by the milling of countless feet. The bare earth funnelled southward, drawn into a track running across abandoned fields to the Oras River, which wound blue and black behind hazy screens of trees. A vast mob had gathered along the westward regions of the camp, thousands of men in soiled red tunics, shaking fists at a thin line of Conriyan knights arrayed some hundred paces distant on the far side of a razed orchard. With the exception of their helms and masks, they looked for all the world like Kianene horsemen.
Sanumnis whistled in grim appreciation. “Should we cut them down?” he ventured.
“Your men would be swallowed whole. You would simply be arming them.”
“Leave them, then?”
Cnaiür shrugged. “I see no siege towers … Just keep them hemmed in, away from their officers. Give a mob a head and it becomes an army. If they start forming ranks—if they remember their discipline—summon me immediately.”
The Baron nodded in what seemed grudging admiration.
Word arrived from Troyatti not long afterward. The Captain was in the city’s crammed necropolis in the largely abandoned Kianene Quarter, where his men had apparently found some kind of tunnel. The certainty of it had coalesced long before Cnaiür found the man standing, shirtless, hands on hips, at the mouth of the half-ruined sepulchre.
Conphas was gone.
“It runs several hundred yards beyond the walls,” the Conriyan said in grim explanation. “They had to excavate some to breach the surface … Some.” He grimaced as though to say,
At least he got his hands dirty
.
Cnaiür studied the man for a moment, pondered the absurdity of Inrithi scarring themselves in the manner of Scylvendi. It made him seem more a man somehow. He glanced across the necropolis, at the leaning obelisks, sagging ash-houses, and leering images—all Nansur or Ceneian. He felt none of the dread that had prevented the Fanim from reclaiming this ground. Shouts echoed from the nearby streets: the Hemscilvara calling to one another.
“Call off the search,” Cnaiür said. He nodded to the entrance of the sepulchre. “Collapse it. Close the tunnel.”
He turned to search the harbour, but the burnt-brick façade of a tenement obscured it. Conphas had orchestrated all this … After so long with the Dûnyain, he knew the smell of premeditation.
This would not be another Kiyuth.
Something …
something
…
Without a further word to Troyatti, he galloped the short distance to the Donjon Palace. He strode through the ornate halls, shouting for the Scarlet Schoolman, Saurnemmi. He found the Initiate just as he stumbled from his chambers, eyes swollen from slumber.
“What Cants do you know?” he barked.
The insipid fool blinked in astonishment. “I-I—”
“Can you burn wood from a distance? Ships?”
“Yes—”
A lone Conriyan horn pealed from some hidden distance—the signal Sanumnis was to use to summon him. There was some kind of emergency along the walls.
“Get to the harbour!” Cnaiür snarled, already running. As he rounded the marble banister, he caught a final glimpse of Saurnemmi, standing awkward and dumbstruck, clutching the front of his silk nightshirt.
He rode hard to the Tooth, where the horn seemed to issue. It rang out three more times, metallic and mournful. He shouldered his way through the knights milling in the open mall about the Tooth’s inner gates. Shouting men waved to him from the barbican’s summit.
“Quickly,” Baron Sanumnis exclaimed as he crested the final stairs. “Come.”
Leaning between the floriated battlements, Cnaiür saw that the Columnaries had abandoned their camp and were making their way north. He saw clots of them scattered across the distance, jumping irrigation ditches, filing through groves …
“There,” Sanumnis said, clutching his beard with one hand and pointing to the first broad bend in the River Oras with the other.
Peering between black-boughed sand willows, Cnaiür saw a band of armoured horsemen riding in loose formation. They bore a crimson banner with a Black Sun halved by a horse head … Kidruhil.
“And there,” Sanumnis said, this time pointing to the hills, past a series of green-mottled slopes. Though they marched in valley gloom, Cnaiür could see them clearly: ranks of infantrymen.
“You’ve doomed us,” Sanumnis said in his periphery. His tone was strange. There was no accusation in his voice. Something worse.
Cnaiür turned to the man, saw immediately that Sanumnis understood their straits all too well. He knew that the Imperial transports had set ashore in one of the natural harbours to the north of the city, and there disembarked who knew how many thousands—an entire army, no doubt. And he knew, moreover, that Conphas could not afford to let even one of them escape alive.
“You were supposed to kill him,” Sanumnis said. “You were supposed to kill Conphas.”
Weeper! Faggot weeper!
Cnaiür frowned. “I am not an assassin,” he said.
Unaccountably, the Baron’s eyes softened. Something almost … kindred passed between them.
“No,” the man said, “I suppose you’re not.”
Weeper!
As though prompted by some kind of premonition, Cnaiür turned and stared down the Pull, the broad thoroughfare that opened onto the Tooth, all the way to the harbour. Over the welter of rooftops he could see the farthest of the black clapboard transports. The nearer ones were only masts.
A flash of light, glimpsed through a slot between walls. Cnaiür blinked. The thunderclap followed moments after. All those lining the parapet turned in astonishment.
More lights, glimpsed over obscuring buildings. Sanumnis cursed in Conriyan.
Schoolmen. Conphas had hidden Schoolmen on his transports. Imperial Saik. Cnaiür’s thoughts raced. He turned back to the formations advancing through the valley. Glanced at the setting sun. More cracks rumbled across the sky. “Chorae bowmen,” he said to the Baron. “You have, what, four Chorae bowmen?”
“The Diremti brothers and two besides. But they would be dead men … The Imperial Saik! Sweet Sejenus!”
Cnaiür grasped both his shoulders. “This treachery,” he said. “The Ikurei must kill all who might testify against him. You know this.”
Sanumnis nodded, expressionless.
Cnaiür released his grip. “Tell your Trinketmen to situate themselves in the buildings surrounding the harbour—to hide. Tell them they need kill only one—one of them—to pen the Saik in the harbour. With no infantry to prise their way, they’ll be loath to advance. Sorcerers are fond of their skins.”
The man’s eyes brightened in understanding. Cnaiür knew that Conphas had likely commanded the Schoolmen in the harbour to remain on their ships, that their primary purpose was to render escape impossible. The Exalt-General was not so foolish as to risk his most powerful and delicate tools. No, Conphas
meant
to come through the Tooth. But there was no harm in letting Sanumnis and his men think they had forced this on him.

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