The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (41 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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It was too absurd.
The sun hung low over the humid countryside by the time Kellhus dissolved the Council. His head buzzing from the heat, Achamian waited out the obligatory prayers and rounds of self-congratulation. The combination of sun and inaction made him want to scream. Perversely, he found himself hoping that the bird from earlier did omen some kind of Consult attack. Anything but this … stage.
Then, as if everyone had suddenly found themselves in agreement, the Council was over. The stone hollows between the ruins rumbled with shouts of greeting and casual conversation. Rubbing his neck, Achamian walked to the dais steps and unceremoniously dropped to his rump. He could feel Esmenet’s gaze prickle the small of his back, but Inrithi caste-nobles were already climbing the dais to pay her homage, and he was too weary to do much more than pad the sweat from his face with his saffron sleeves.
A hand brushed his shoulder, as though someone had thought to clasp him but then reconsidered. Achamian turned to see Proyas. With his deep brown skin and silk khalat, he could have been a Kianene prince.
“Akka,” he said with a perfunctory nod.
“Proyas.”
An awkward moment passed between them.
“I thought I should tell you,” he said, obviously discomfited. “You should see Zin.”
“Did he send you?”
The Prince shook his head. He looked strange, far more mature, with his beard grown and plaited. “He asks about you,” he said lamely. “You should go see—”
“I cannot,” Achamian replied, far more sharply than he had wished. “I’m all that stands between Kellhus and the Consult. I can’t leave his side.”
Proyas’s eyes narrowed in anger, but Achamian could not help but think that something had broken within the man. With Xinemus, he had abandoned seeking penance on his terms. He was someone who would no longer discriminate between afflictions. He would bear everything if he could.
“You’ve left his side before,” Proyas said evenly.
“Only at his request, and against my objections.”
Why this sudden need to punish? Now that Proyas required something of him, he was compelled to show him a reflection of his own callous disregard—to visit his own sins upon him. Even still, even after all Kellhus had taught him, Achamian carried the old ledgers in his heart, continued to tick off settled scores.
Why do I always do this?
Proyas blinked, pursed his lips as though about sour teeth. “You should go see Xinemus,” he said, this time making no attempt to disguise his bitterness. He left without saying farewell.
Too numb to think, Achamian watched the assembled caste-nobles. Gaidekki and Ingiaban fenced jokes—no surprise there. Iryssas stammered to keep up; sometimes he alone seemed unchanged from Momemn. Gotian upbraided some young Shrial Knight. Soter and several other Ainoni seemed to be laughing at the sight of Uranyanka kissing the Warrior-Prophet’s knee. Hulwarga stood mute in the shadow of his dead brother’s groom, Yalgrota. Everybody talking and belonging, forming little interlocking circles, like the links of some greater armour …
The thought struck Achamian without warning.
I’m alone.
He knew nothing of his family, save that his mother was dead. He despised his School almost as much as his School despised him. He had lost his every student, in one way or another, to the blasted Gods. Esmenet had betrayed him …
He coughed and swallowed, cursed himself for a fool. He called out to a passing slave—a surly-looking adolescent—told him to fetch some unwatered wine.
See,
he thought to himself as the boy ran off,
you have one friend
. His forearms against his knees, he stared down at his sandals, frowned at his untrimmed toenails. He thought of Xinemus.
I should see him
…
He did not turn when the shadow joined him sitting on the steps. The air suddenly smelled of myrrh. Somewhere, in a treacherous and juvenile part of his soul, he leapt with joy, even though he knew it wasn’t Esmenet. The shadow was too dark.
“Is it time?” Achamian asked.
“Soon,” Kellhus said.
Achamian had come to fear their nightly sessions with the Gnosis. To intuitively grasp logic or arithmetic might be a thing of wonder, but to do the same with ancient War-Cants was something altogether different. How could he not dread, when the man so effortlessly outran his ability to compare or categorize?
“What troubles you, Akka?”
What do you think?
something within him spat. Instead he turned to Kellhus and asked, “Why Shimeh?”
The clear blue eyes studied him in silence.
“You say you’ve come to save us,” Achamian pressed. “You admit as much. So then
why,
when our doom resides in Golgotterath, do we continue on to Shimeh?”
“You’re tired,” Kellhus said. “Perhaps we should resume our studies tomorr—”
“I’m fine,” Achamian snapped, only to be dismayed by his presumption. “Sleep and Mandate Schoolmen,” he added lamely, “are old enemies.”
Kellhus nodded, smiled sadly. “Your grief … It still overcomes you.” For some treacherous reason Achamian said, “Yes.”
The numbers of Inrithi had dwindled. Several personages had gathered at a discreet distance, obviously awaiting Kellhus, but he dismissed them with a gesture. Soon Achamian and Kellhus were quite alone, sitting side by side on the dais’s lip, watching the shadows swell and congregate in the crotches of the surrounding ruin. A dry wind dropped from the skies, and for a time Achamian closed his eyes, savouring its cool kiss across his skin, listening to it whisper through the sumacs that thronged beyond the floor. An occasional bee buzzed in and out of hearing.
It reminded Achamian of hiding from his father in the gullies far from the beaches. The hush concealed between the throng of living things. The sense of slowing light. The limitless sky. It seemed a moment outside consequence, where the profound repose of what was put flight to all thoughts of past or future. He could even smell the stone as it cooled in the lengthening shadows.
It seemed impossible that Shikol had dwelt in this place.
“Did you know,” Kellhus said, “that there was a time when I listened to the world and heard only noise?”
“No…I didn’t.”
Kellhus raised his face to the sky, closed his eyes. Sunlight curled into the silky depths of his hair. “I know different now … There’s more than noise, Akka. There is voice.”
Shivers unrolled like wet strings across Achamian’s skin.
His eyes fixed on the horizon, Kellhus pressed his palms across his thighs, drawing folds into arcs. Against the silk, Achamian thought he glimpsed the golden discs about his fingers.
“Tell me, Akka,” Kellhus said. “When you look into a mirror, what do you see?” He spoke as a bored child might.
Achamian shrugged. “Myself.”
A teacher’s indulgent look. “Are you so certain? Do you see yourself
looking
through your eyes, or do you simply see your eyes? Strip away your assumptions, Akka, and ask yourself, what do you really see?”
“My eyes,” he admitted. “I simply see my eyes.”
“Then you don’t see yourself.”
Achamian could only stare at his profile, dumbfounded.
Kellhus’s grin shouted intellectual mischief. “So where are you, if you can’t be seen?”
“Here,” Achamian replied after a moment of hesitation. “I’m here.”
“And just where is this ‘here’?”
“It’s …” He frowned for a moment. “It’s here … inside what you see.”
“Here? But how could you be here,” Kellhus laughed, “when
I’m
here, and you’re over there?”
“But …” Achamian scratched his beard in exasperation. “You play games with words!” he exclaimed.
Kellhus nodded, his expression at once cryptic and bemused. “Imagine,” he said, “that you could take the Great Ocean, in all its immensity, and fold it into the form and proportion of a man. There are depths, Akka, that go
in
rather than down—in without limit. What you call the Outside lies
within us,
and it’s everywhere. This is why, no matter where we stand, it’s always
here
. No matter where we dare tread,
we always stand in the same
place.”
Metaphysics, Achamian realized. He spoke of metaphysics.
“Here,” Achamian repeated. “You’re saying here is a place outside place?”
“Indeed. Your body is your surface, nothing more, the point where your soul breaches this world. Even now, as we look upon each other from across this span, from two different places, we also stand in the same place, the same nowhere. I watch myself through your eyes, and you watch yourself through mine—though you know it not.”
Somehow, at some point, insight had become a species of horror. He fairly stammered. “W-we′re the same person?”
Kellhus
was speaking this madness … Kellhus!
“Person? It would be more precise to say we’re the same here … But in a manner, yes. Just as there’s but one Here, there’s but one Soul, Akka, breaching the world in many different places. And almost always failing to apprehend itself as itself.”
Nilnameshi foolishness! It had to be …
“This is just metaphysics,” he said, the very instant Kellhus whispered,
“This
is just metaphysics …”
Achamian gaped at the man, utterly dumbstruck. His heart hammered, as though struggling to recover its rhythm through violence of action. For a moment he tried telling himself that Kellhus alone had spoken, but the taste of the words was too fresh on his tongue. The silence whined with a strange horror, a sense of dislocation unlike any he had ever experienced, a sense of things once sacred and intact now broken … Just
who
had spoken?
The world reeled through refracted sunlight.
He
is
me … How else could he know what he knows?
As though nothing untoward had happened, Kellhus said, “Tell me, how can some words work miracles, while others can’t?”
Achamian swallowed, tried to recover himself in his knowledge. “The Nonmen once believed it was the language that made sorcery possible. But when Men began reproducing their Cants in bastard tongues, it became clear this wasn’t so …” He breathed deeply, realizing that with this one question Kellhus had made plain not only Achamian’s ignorance but the ignorance of every sorcerer living.
I really do understand nothing
.
“It’s the
meanings,
” he continued. “The meanings are different somehow. No one knows why.”
Kellhus nodded and looked down to the hem of his robe. When he glanced up, Achamian found his brilliant eyes impossible to match. “The word ‘love,’” he said, “does it mean what it has always meant, or is the meaning different for you?”
Reward the intellect and punish the heart. It was always the same with Kellhus.
“What are you saying?”
“That the meaning is different because what it recollects is different.”
Esmenet.
“So you’re suggesting that sorcerous words
recollect
something other words do not?” Achamian asked this with more heat than he’d intended. Derision had stolen across his expression. “But what could
words
remember? Words aren′t …” He trailed, his voice silenced by sudden understanding.
One
soul …
“Not words, Akka.
You
. What could
you
remember that might make miracles of mere words?”
“I-I don’t understand …”
“But you do.”
Achamian blinked at the preposterous tears in his eyes. He thought of the Scarlet Spires and their compound in Iothiah, of the world flying apart beneath his outstretched fingers. And he remembered the
meanings
that had thundered from his chest and soul, his world-racking song, compelling fire from empty air, light from black shadow, and the obliteration of all that offended. The words! The words that were his calling—his curse! The words that exacted the impossible …
Penance from the world.
How could a mere man say such things?
“We kneel before idols,” Kellhus was saying, “we hold open our arms to the sky. We beseech the distances, clutch at the horizon … We look outward, Akka, always outward, for what
lies
within …” He splayed a hand against his chest. “For what lies
here,
in this Clearing that we share.”
The sun had crossed the crimson threshold. The air seemed to purple, and the ruins were burnished in failing reds. The earlier breeze had faded to a sun-warm draft.
“The God,” Achamian said, but the voice was not his own. “You’re saying that this … this one soul that looks out from behind all our eyes is the God.” Even though he spoke these words, even though he knew quite well what they meant, they escaped him somehow, fell from him without force of thought or comprehension. Achamian clutched his shoulders, felt a shudder pass through his portly frame.

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