The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (66 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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By now, Earl Gothyelk had urged his knights into a ranging gallop, leaving his more numerous footmen behind. As he picked his way past the aqueduct, he saw his dilemma immediately, for hundreds of heathen had already crossed the river and were forming up over the razed fields and groves. Raising his mace high, he called his kinsmen to formation. When he saw that his peers, the Earls Iyengar, Damergal, and Werijen Greatheart, had also cleared the ruined aqueduct, he cried out and charged headlong toward the seething banks of the River Jeshimal.
Raising a mighty shout, the thanes and knights of Ce Tydonn followed.
In absolute darkness they walked, through halls more ancient than the Tusk. A father leading his son.
The roar of the waterfall receded, became a wash as featureless as the black. The scuff of their steps echoed across walls as pitted with representation as those that had come before. And Kellhus talked, explained all that inference had taught him of his father. He spoke in generalities, mostly. The details he hazarded, particularly with regard to Moënghus’s manipulation of Cnaiür, he secured through the assignation of probabilities.
“After fleeing the Utemot, you turned south rather than east. You knew the same swazond that would see you survive the Steppe would also see you dead in the Nansurium. This was how you found yourself in Fanim lands.
“They imprisoned you at first, for though their hatred fell short of the Nansur’s homicidal fury—the Battle of Zirkirta had not yet happened—they had no love of the Scylvendi. After learning their language, you professed your devotion to Fane. Because of your literacy, it was easy to convince your captors to sell you as a slave. You fetched a respectable price.
“Not long after, you were freed, for the love you instilled in your masters quickly became awe. Not even the Fanic Priests could match your command of the
pillai-a-fan,
or any of the other subsidiary scriptures you were able to obtain. Those who would whip you now implored you to travel to Shimeh … to the Cishaurim, and the possibility of power beyond anything the Dûnyain had conceived.”
Five steps. Kellhus could smell the water drying across his father’s bare skin.
“My inference was warranted,” Moënghus said from the black before him.
“Indeed. We dwarf the worldborn. They are
less
than children to us. No matter what we encounter, be it their philosophy, their medicine, their poetry, or even their faith, we see so much deeper, and our strength is that much greater.
“So you assumed taking up the Water would be no different, that becoming one of the Indara-Kishauri would make you godlike in comparison. And since the Cishaurim themselves scarcely understand the metaphysics of their practice, there was nothing you could learn that would contradict this assumption. You couldn’t know that the Psûkhe was a metaphysic of the
heart,
not the intellect. Of
passion
…
“So you let them blind you, only to find your powers proportionate to your vestigial passions. What you thought to be the Shortest Path was in fact a dead end.”
The air shivered to the rhythm of hammering drums.
High above the wreckage of street and structure, those Scarlet Schoolmen designated Watchers waited, standing upon the ground’s echo in the sky. Plumes towered between them. Firestorms raged beneath their slippered feet. The black clouds wheeled above. Only with difficulty could they see the cadres of their brothers, spread across forward limits of the tossed and broken landscape. They sensed the Chorae before they saw the first of the Thesji Bowmen: absences like wraiths, weaving across the shattered ground below. Shouts of warning were traded, but no one knew what to do. Not since the Scholastic Wars had the Scarlet Spires waged such a battle.
There was a flash, white ringed with a nacre of black. One of their number, Rimon, plummeted to ground, where he shattered salt.
The others ran across sky.
Dismayed shouts drew Eleäzaras’s attention to the cloudscape behind him. He saw gouts of flame falling from the hanging heights, roaring across already scourged ground. He glanced about, saw the fright and bewilderment of his people. But for some reason his own terror was nowhere to be found. Instead, hot tears burned down his cheeks. Great and intangible weights fell away, so quickly he thought he might pop into the sky, like a bladder of air released from drowning waters.
It happened … It happened!
He looked up to the heights looming before them, to the gilded dome of the Ctesarat, the Cishaurim Tabernacle, wavering in the heat of the intervening fires. Then he swept his gaze to either flank, to the burning buildings that ringed the arena they had created. They were all around him—as they had always been. Cishaurim filth. Surrounding. Surrounding.
“They come!”
he boomed in a laughing, sorcerous voice.
“At long last, they come!”
Arrayed across the pitched ruin, so small beneath the fires they had kindled, the Schoolmen of the Scarlet Spires cried out in exultant acclaim. Their Grandmaster had come back to them.
Then threads of incandescence, blinding blue and white, lashed through the encircling walls of flame.
“Seökti and the others respect you,” Kellhus continued. “Indeed, as Mallahet you have a reputation that reaches across Kian and beyond. And you shine in the Third Sight. But secretly, they all think you cursed by the Solitary God. Why else would the Water elude you?
“And without your eyes, your ability to discern what comes before is much reduced. The snakes are but pinholes. For years you waged futile war against your circumstance, and though your intellect could astound those about you and earn you access to their most privileged counsels, the instant they found themselves beyond the force of your presence, the undermining whispers were rekindled. ‘He is weak.’
“Then, about twelve years ago, you discovered the first of the Consult skin-spies—probably through discrepancies in their voices. The Cishaurim were thrown into an uproar, that much is certain. And even though no one knew the slightest thing about the creatures, the blame was placed on the Scarlet Spires. For only the greatest of the Schools, they thought, could dare, let alone execute, such an outrage. Infiltrate the
Cishaurim
?
“But you were Dûnyain, and though our brothers know nothing of the arcane, our understanding of the
mundane
is without peer. You realized that these things weren’t sorcerous artifacts, that they were engines of the flesh. But you couldn’t convince the others, who sought to instruct the Scarlet Spires on the perilous course they had taken. There must be consequences. So the Cishaurim assassinated the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, prompting a war that will find its conclusion this very day …”
Just then, Kellhus inadvertently kicked something lying upon the graven floor. Something hollow and fibrous. A skull?
“But you,” he continued without hesitation, “kept the creatures, and over years of torment you eventually broke them down. You learned of Golgotterath, her ramparts heaped about the horns of an ancient derelict, a vessel fallen from the void in the days when Nonmen yet ruled Eärwa; of the Inchoroi and the great war they waged against long-dead Nonmen Kings. You learned how the last survivors of that fell race, Aurang and Aurax, perverted the heart of their Nonman captor, Mekeritrig, and how he corrupted Shauriatis, the Grandmaster of the Mangaecca, in his turn. You learned how this wicked cabal broke the glamour about Golgotterath, and made its horrors their own …
“You learned of the Consult.”
“These words you speak,” Moënghus said from the black, “‘wicked,’ ‘corrupted,’ ‘perverted’ … why would you use them when you know they are nothing more than mechanisms of control?”
“Of course, you had heard of the Consult,” Kellhus continued, ignoring his question. “And like most in the Three Seas, you thought them long dead—the stuff of Mandate delusions. But the stories you extracted from your captives … there was too much consistency, too much detail, for them to be fabrications.
“The deeper you probed, the more troubling the story became. You had read
The Sagas,
and you had doubted them, thinking them too fanciful. Destroying the world? No malice could be so great. No soul could be so deranged. After all, what could be gained? Who follows paths over precipices?
“But the skin-spies explained it all. Speaking in shrieks and howls, they taught you the why and wherefore of the Apocalypse. You learned that the boundaries between the World and the Outside were not fixed, that if the World could be cleansed of enough souls, it could be
sealed shut
. Against the Gods. Against the heavens and the hells of the Afterlife. Against redemption. And, most importantly, against the possibility of damnation.
“The Consult, you realized, were labouring to
save their souls
. And what was more, if your captives could be believed, they were drawing near the end of their millennial task.”
In the absence of light, Kellhus studied his father through the lens of different senses: the scent of naked skin, the displacement of drafts, the sound of bare feet scuffing through the dark.
“The Second Apocalypse,” Moënghus said simply.
“Only you knew their secret. Only you could detect their spies.”
“They have to be stopped,” Moënghus replied. “Destroyed.”
“So you brooded over what the skin-spies told you, spent years immersed in the depths of the Probability Trance.”
From the very first, ever since descending the glaciers into the wastes of Kûniüri, Kellhus had pondered the man now leading him through these galleries of darkness. Scheme after probabilistic scheme. The branching of innumerable alternatives, waxing and waning with each mile walked, with every insight and apprehension.
I’m here, Father. In the house you have prepared for me.
“You began,” Kellhus said, “contemplating what would become the Thousandfold Thought.”
“Yes,” Moënghus replied, a simple affirmation. Even as he said this, Kellhus sensed the changes—in acoustics, odours, even ambient temperature. The pitch-black corridor had opened onto a chamber of some kind. One where things still lived, and where things had died—many things.
“We have arrived,” his father said.

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