The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (54 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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BOOK: The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3)
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No matter what the tale, the idolaters were either assured victory or doomed.
The consensus among the Great Names was that none of these tales were true. The Warrior-Prophet disagreed, pointing out that the captives repeated the
same
half-dozen stories. “Fanayal has planted these rumours,” he said. “He makes noise to obscure truth’s call.” He admonished them to remember the man who strove against them. “Don’t forget his daring on the fields of Mengedda and Anwurat. Fanayal may be the son of Kascamandri,” he said, “but he’s a student of Skauras.”
The decision was made to confine their assault to Shimeh’s westward walls, not only because the encampment lay to the west of the city but because the Juterum lay on the west bank of the Jeshimal, and everyone agreed that the Sacred Heights must be their first objective. So long as the Cishaurim remained undefeated, they knew, all was jeopardy.
Proyas and Gotian then petitioned the Blessed One, begging to lead the assault in advance of the Scarlet Spires. Though the Tusk’s condemnation of sorcery had been rescinded, they still loathed the thought of sorcerers being the first to set foot in the Sacred City. But Chinjosa and Gothyelk vehemently disagreed. “I’ve lost one son to Scarlet sloth,” the old Tydonni Earl exclaimed, referring to the death of his youngest in Caraskand. “I shall not lose another!”
But as always, the Warrior-Prophet decided the issue. “We—
all of us
—will attack together,” he said. “Who attacks first, who stands where in the order of battle: these things mean nothing. Surely, after so much suffering,
success
can be our only point of honour … Success.”
Meanwhile, the Men of the Tusk occupied themselves with preparations, threw themselves at their tasks with sweat and song. Parties were sent into the hills for timber—though not much was required. Raiders were dispatched down the Amoti coast, ordered to secure what supplies they could. Knights wove mantlets from olive branches; for miles, surrounding groves were stripped to their gnarled trunks. Haphazard ladders were constructed of poplars and palm. Great stones were gathered from the shoreline to be used as ammunition. The siege engines built at Gerotha, which the Warrior-Prophet had ordered disassembled and borne by Xerashi captives in the host’s train, were brought forward and rebuilt, some even in darkness.
Late that night, as they stretched their limbs before their fires, they talked long of the strangeness of it all, their words and manner somewhere between exhaustion and exultation. They traded accounts of the Warrior-Prophet’s words at the Council of Great and Lesser Names. And though they took heart, many Men of the Tusk found their haste troubling, as though they, like the inconstant and the irresolute, had lost heart at the moment of consummation, and sought only to bring the ordeal to a swift conclusion.
And as the fires went out, leaving only the most stubborn and thoughtful awake, the sceptics dared argue their misgivings.
“But think,” the faithful retorted. “When we die surrounded by the spoils of a long and daring life, we will look up to those who adore us and we will say, ‘I knew him. I knew the Warrior-Prophet.’”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SHIMEH
Some say I learned dread knowledge that night. But of this, as with so many other matters, I cannot write for fear of summary execution.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN,
THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
 
 
Truth and hope are like travellers in contrary directions. They meet but once in any man’s life.
—AINONI PROVERB
Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh
Esmenet dreamed that she was a prince, an angel fallen from the dark, that her heart had beaten, her loins had ached, for tens of thousands of years. She dreamed that Kellhus stood before her, an outrage to be blotted, an enigma to be dissected, and above all a burning question …
Who are the Dûnyain?
When she awoke, several moments passed before she recognized herself. Reaching out through the gloom, she clutched only cool sheets where Kellhus should have been. For some reason she was unsurprised, as well as uncommonly concerned. There was an oppressive sense of finality in the air, like the smell of drying ink.
Kellhus?
Ever since reading
The Sagas,
a foreboding had grown within her, an accumulation that had filled her heart and limbs with a sense of rolling heaviness. The night in the Nansur villa—the night of her possession—had stained this listless dread with a bewildering urgency. Every time she blinked, she saw things penetrated and penetrating. She could still feel the creature’s hands upon her flesh, and the memory of her obedient lust seemed ever-present. The hunger she had suffered that night! A thirst that only terror could touch, and that no horror could slake. At once bestial and remote, it had been a wantonness that eclipsed obscenity … and became something pure.
The Inchoroi had taken her, but the
want,
the insatiable desire … those had been hers.
Of course, Kellhus had tried to console her, even as he plied her with endless questions. He said much the same thing Achamian had said when explaining Xinemus’s torment: that the self never stood apart when one was compelled, because it was the very thing possessed. “You can’t distinguish yourself from him,” Kellhus explained, “because for a time, he
was
you. That’s why he tried to provoke me into killing you, because he feared the memories you might have of his memories.”
“But the things!” she could only reply. “The things I ached for!” Grimacing faces. Grinning orifices and gaping wounds. The rush of hot fluids.
“Those desires weren’t yours, Esmi. They only seemed to be yours because you couldn’t see where they came from … You simply suffered them.”
“But then, how does any desire belong to me?”
When she learned of Xinemus’s death, she told herself that
he
had been the cause of her distress, that her sense of encroaching doom was nothing more than concern for his well-being. But the lie was too obvious for even her to believe, and she spent hours cursing herself for her inability to mourn the man who had been such an uncompromising friend. And when, shortly after, Achamian moved with his things out of the Umbilica, she once again tried to wrap explanations around the chill morass of her heart. And even though this lie, through force of partial truth, had lasted a day and a night, it collapsed the instant she had laid wondering eyes on the actual origin of her misapprehension.
Shimeh.
This,
she had thought as the great eyes of the city walls stared her down,
is where we all die
.
Her head buzzing, she threw aside her sheets, called to the crane-embroidered screen behind which Burulan sometimes slept. Moments later she was dressed and interrogating Gayamakri. He knew only that Kellhus had left the Umbilica to wander on foot through the camp. Apparently, the dark-eyed man said with a frown, he had refused any escort.
There had been a time, not so long ago, when Esmenet would have feared walking alone through the encamped Holy War, but now she could imagine no place safer. The moon was bright, and save for the odd guy rope strung across her path, she found the going easy. Most firepits either were dark or tinkled with orange coals, but an inevitable few remained awake, carousing to no purpose or drinking in sullen circles. Those who recognized her fell immediately to their knees. None had seen the Warrior-Prophet.
Then she fairly collided with a man, an Ainoni knight by the look of him, and with horror she realized he had bedded her several times before her … renewal. Before then she had continually told herself that
she
ruled her coupling, not her custom. But the smirk on his face told her otherwise. The smirk on
all
their faces told her otherwise. Instantly she understood that he took great pride in using her, the Prophet-Consort, as his sheath.
He caught her elbows and pressed her back. “Yes,” he said, as though to confirm her mortification. He was very drunk. His leash, they would have said back in Sumna, had been soaked in liquor. Decorum. Honour. He could easily slip these things.
“Do you know who I am?” she said sharply.
“Yes,” he repeated, his manner lurid. “I
know
you …”
“Then you know how close you stand to death.”
A look of dank puzzlement. She advanced and struck him with an open palm.
“Insolent
dog
! Kneel!”
He stared, stunned, unmoving.
“Kneel! Or I’ll have you
flayed alive
… Do you understand?”
It took several heartbeats for his astonishment to lurch into terror. And several more for his knees to buckle. Drink always added to the momentum of such things. He fairly blubbered his apologies. And more importantly, he told her he’d seen Kellhus leave the camp to climb the westward slopes.
Esmenet left him, hugging her shoulders to keep from shaking. She could understand her clenched teeth, but her smile baffled her. She thought about having her agents hunt the man down on the morrow. Though she had always detested the brutality that her new station had forced upon her, the thought of his screams thrilled her for some reason. Scenarios roiled through her thoughts, and though she knew they were both petty and absurd, she exulted in them nonetheless.
What was it? Her shame? His smirk? Or was it the mere fact that she
could do
these things?
I am,
she breathlessly thought,
his vessel
.
Lost in her worries, she climbed the shallow hillside, bemoaned the hem of her gown as she waded through thistles and moist grasses. High over the Meneanor Sea, the Nail of Heaven flashed against the greater black. Twice she turned to stare at Shimeh in the moonlight.
It scarcely seemed real.
She discovered Kellhus sitting perched upon the ruins of one of the mausoleums that dotted the hillside, staring intently across the Shairizor at the dark city. She thought of climbing the collapsed portion then using the wall like a catwalk, but she recalled the life she bore within her. She strode to the mossy foundations beneath him instead. He sat cross-legged, his hands upturned and clasped in his lap. He had tied his hair into a Galeoth war-knot. His face looked marmoreal in the moonlight, which gleamed across the curls of his beard. As always, there was something indefinable about his pose or his manner that seemed to dwarf his immediate surroundings. Where others would seem lonely, even desolate, he seemed an unfaltering sentinel, white in the moonlight, black in its shadow.
Without looking away from Shimeh, he said, “You think of Caraskand. You remember the way I withdrew from you before the events leading to the Circumfix. You fear that I do the same for similarly perilous reasons.”
Hands on her hips, she stared upward, scowled in mock disapproval. “I’m trying not to.”
He smiled. His eyes glittered when he looked down.
“Why this?” she asked. “Why here?”
“Because soon I must leave.” He crouched and held down his hand.
She reached up to his wrist, then suddenly found herself standing beside him, steadied by his powerful arms. For a moment it seemed they stood perched on the point of a needle. She glanced nervously about, at the slopes dropping toward the plain, at the blackness between the thin poplars that thronged from the interior of the ruined mausoleum. She breathed deep his smell: oranges, cinnamon, the musk of masculine sweat. Despite the fear his words had engendered, she savoured him as she always did. His beard seemed white in the moonlight.
She gingerly stepped back, the better to look up into his eyes. “Where are you going?”
He studied her for a moment. In the distance beyond him, Shimeh looked both intricate and stone-ancient, a great fossil uncovered by the wash of tides.
“To Kyudea.”
Esmenet scowled. Kyudea was Shimeh’s dead sister, destroyed long ago by some Ceneian Aspect-Emperor whose name she couldn’t remember. “Your father’s house,” she said sourly.
“Truth has its seasons, Esmi. Everything will be made clear in due course.”
“But, Kellhus …” What did it mean that they had to assail Shimeh without him?
“Proyas knows what must be done,” he said decisively. “The Scarlet Spires will act as they see fit.”
Desperation welled through her.
You can’t leave us
.
“I must, Esmi. I answer to a different voice.”
Not
her
voice, something fragile within her realized. But then neither did he answer to her customs, her concerns, or even her hopes … The things that moved her simply didn’t touch him. Though they stood together, Kellhus had planted his feet across a far more unfathomable ground. What moved him moved on the scale of the planets and their cycles across the night sky.
Suddenly he seemed a wild stranger, like the Scylvendi … The son of something terrible.

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