The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (60 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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Screams. Men combusting, burning like autumnal leaves, trailing oily ribbons of black. Thunder upon thunder, a chorus roaring at depths only the shivering stone could hear. Those cringing along the inner base of the fortifications saw the shadows of battlements flicker across the nearby tenements.
The heads of ghost dragons reared from the forward Scarlet Cadres, then like dogs straining for their master’s hand, they bent forward and vomited incendiary streams. Fire gushed up across masonry, orange and gold in the gloom, blazing between crenellations, swirling down stair and ramp, rolling over men and transforming them into flailing shadows.
Within heartbeats, the Fanim packed across the barbican and adjacent walls ceased to exist. Stone cracked, exploded. The bastions of the gate buckled, and men winced, as though watching knees fold backward. The towers leaned out through the smoke, then dropped into obscurity. A great hemisphere of dust and debris rolled out and over the sorcerers and their unearthly song.
At long last, the Scarlet Spires marched.
Kellhus climbed through deeper ruins.
At the base of the stair he found a lantern made of horn and translucent paper—something neither Kianene nor Nilnameshi in manufacture. When ignited, it cast a diffuse orange glow …
The halls were not human.
The drafts came to him, murmuring their secrets. His soul reached out, calculating probabilities, transforming inferences into space. About him, the galleries scrawled on and on into the immured blackness.
So like the Thousand Thousand Halls … So like Ishuäl.
Kellhus forged ahead, the scattered detritus cracking beneath his feet. He watched the walls resolve from cold blackness, studied the mad detail that thronged across them.
Statuary,
not reliefs, had been carved into them: figures no taller than his knee, posed in narratives that outran the light of his lantern, and stacked one atop another, even across the vaulted ceiling, so that it seemed he walked through stone grille work. He paused, held his lantern before a string of naked figures raising spears against a lion, then realized that another frieze had been carved
behind
this first. Peering through miniature limbs, he saw deeper, more licentious representations, depicting all manner of poses and penetrations.
The work of Nonmen.
A trail had been scuffed across the hide of ancient dust—and by someone, Kellhus realized, who possessed a stride and gait identical to his own. Following it, he pressed deeper into the derelict mansion, knowing that he walked in his father’s very footsteps. After descending several hundred paces, he entered a domed vestibule where the renderings across the walls were chiselled large as life but continued telling the same twofold tale of martial exploit and priapic excess. Copper bands, their bright green bleeding into the limestone, had been set into the walls, bearing a strange wedge script. But whether they were benedictions, explanations, or recitations of some hallowed text, Kellhus could not say. He knew only that the inhabitants of this place had celebrated deeds in all their ambivalent complexity, rather than—as was the wont of Men—reproducing only flattering surfaces.
Ignoring the alternate passages, Kellhus continued following the track through the dust. It wound deep into the abandoned labyrinth, always descending. Save for the pitted remains of bronze arms, he found no artifacts, only chamber after florid chamber, each as ornate as the last. He passed through a vast library where scroll-racks towered higher than his lantern light could reach, and where queues and twining stairs—all exquisitely carved from living rock—loomed from the darkness as though from the ocean deeps. He did not pause, though he held out his lantern to each room he passed by or through: infirmaries, granaries, barracks, and personal apartments—warrens of them. Everything he saw, he pondered, knowing he understood nothing of the souls for whom these things were natural and immediate.
He pondered four thousand years of absolute dark.
He crossed a vast processional gallery where sculptured
events
spilled from the walls, epic scenes of strife and passion: nude penitents prostrate before the court of a Nonman King, warriors striving against mobs of Sranc or Men. Though Moënghus’s trail often passed through these grand dioramas, Kellhus found himself walking around—heeding some voice from nowhere. Towering columns soared into the darkness, worked with arms gripping arms, twining upward and around, squared with bent-back wrists and open hands that cast the shadow of fingers. The ceilings remained cloaked in black obscurity. The silence was that of mighty hollows, at once oppressive and fragile, as though the clatter of a single stone might thunder.
Upraised palms braced his every step. Blank eyes studied his every angle. The Nonmen who had authored this place had possessed more than a fascination with the living form; it had been their obsession. Everywhere, they had cut their image into the dead stone about them, transforming the suffocating weights that hemmed them in into extensions of themselves. And Kellhus realized: the
mansion itself
had been their devotional work—their Temple. Unlike Men, these Nonmen had not rationed their worship. They did not distinguish between prayer and speech, idol and statue …
Which spoke to their terror.
Collapsing possibilities with every step, Anasûrimbor Kellhus followed his father’s trail into the blackness, his lantern raised to the issue of artisans, ancient and inhuman.
Where are you taking me?
Nowhere … Nowhere good.
He said nothing as he led her through the encampment, away from Shimeh, toward the greening heights to the west. She too said nothing, and spent much of the journey watching the grass stain the toes of her white silk slippers. She even made a game of it, kicking through the tangle of blades and stalks purposefully. Once she even wandered to her right so that she might walk across untrod ground, and for a moment it almost seemed they were Achamian and Esmenet once again, condemned and derided rather than exalted or revered. The sorcerer and his melancholy whore. She even dared clutch his chill hand.
What harm could come of it?
Please … keep walking. Let us flee this place!
Only when they passed through the final battery of tents did she actually
notice
him, the forward-fixed eyes misted by inscrutable thoughts, the strong jaw working beneath the plaits of his beard. They began climbing—toward the very gutted mausoleum where she had found Kellhus the night previous.
It seemed different in daylight, somehow. The walls …
“You never came to Zin’s funeral,” he finally said.
She squeezed his hand. “I couldn’t bear to.” Her voice faltered, speaking the words. They seemed cruel, horribly so, despite what she herself had suffered the night the Marshal of Attrempus died.
His only friend.
“Was the fire bright?” she asked. The customary question.
He climbed several more steps, his sandalled feet swishing through yellow-blooming bitterweed. Several bees spun in angry circles, buzzing through the thunder that rumbled across the distances—the clamour of battle. Through some trick of sound, the faint raving of one man floated to the fore, at once hoarse and metallic.
“The fire was bright.”
The bricked ruin rose before them, its foundations ringed with thronging sumac and weeds. Poplars shot young and straight from the interior, brushing the highest of the truncated walls with their branches. She wondered at details that had escaped her in the gloom with Kellhus. At the webbed nest of caterpillars bobbing in the breeze. At the ovals which might once have been faces, set into the eastward walls.
What am I doing?
For an absurd instant she found herself fearing for her life. Many men would have murdered her for crimes she had committed … What about Achamian? Could loss have unearthed such a man within him? But then, unaccountably, she was angry at the way he had yielded her.
You should have fought for me
!
“Why are we here, Akka?”
Oblivious to her mad thoughts, he turned with one arm held wide, as though boasting of hard-won lands.
“I wanted you to see this,” he said.
Following his hand, she looked out across the encampment, whose tent-enclosed avenues wheeled out in broken seashell patterns, over the razed groves, fields, and buildings of the intervening ground. And there it was, scored by pluming smoke, motionless and gloomy beneath the preternatural dark of the sky … Shimeh.
From their seaward faces the Tatokar Walls wound white as teeth about the warren of street and structure that engulfed the heights of the Juterum. Both the ground and the parapets winked with flashing arms. The two siege-towers given to Proyas were pressed against the ramparts, surrounded by lines and squares of men. The northern one burned like a miniature paper votive. A great pillar of smoke rose from what had been the Massus Gate, leaning low over the city, its nethers burnished by the wicked glare of sorceries. To either side, several of the great eyes had been broken, and the towers appeared abandoned. Farther to the south, on the far side of the ruined aqueduct, the two siege-towers given to Chinjosa had also reached the walls, and dark masses of Ainoni teemed about their bases, queuing to climb their runged backs.
And in the near distance, clear through passing sheets of smoke, stood the First Temple.
She raised a balled fist to her brow. Perhaps it was some trick of scale or perspective, but it all seemed so
slow,
as though it happened through water—or something more viscous than human understanding.
Nevertheless, it
happened
…
“We’ve gained the heights,” she said—a murmur that somehow became a cry. “The city is ours!” She turned to Achamian, who seemed to watch with the same horror and wonder—
awe
—that numbed her expression.
“Akka … Can’t you see? Shimeh falls!
Shimeh falls!
”
There had been so much in these words—far more than fervour, far more than the tears that clotted her eyes. Love. Rape and revelation. Disease, starvation, and massacre. Everything they had survived. Everything she had endured.
But he shook his head, his eyes still fixed on the vista before them. “It’s all a lie.”
Horns pealed to the lowing clouds.
“What?”
He turned to her, his look possessed by a terrifying blankness. She recognized it, for the same blankness had owned her eyes the night he had returned to Caraskand.
“The Scylvendi came to me last night.”

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