The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, Book 3) (76 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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Ajencis, in the end, argued that ignorance was the only absolute.
According to Parcis, he would tell his students that he knew only
that he knew more than when he was an infant. This comparative
assertion was the only nail, he would say, to which one could tie
the carpenter-string of knowledge. This has come down to us as the
famed “Ajencian Nail,” and it is the only thing that prevented the
Great Kyranean from falling into the tail-chasing scepticism of
Nirsolfa, or the embarrassing dogmatism of well-nigh every philosopher
and theologian who ever dared scratch ink across parchment.
But even this metaphor, “nail,” is faulty, a result of what happens
when we confuse our notation with what is noted. Like the numeral
“zero” used by the Nilnameshi mathematicians to work such
wonders, ignorance is the occluded frame of all discourse, the unseen
circumference of our every contention. Men are forever looking for
the one point, the singular fulcrum they can use to dislodge all
competing claims. Ignorance does not give us this. What it provides,
rather, is the possibility of comparison, the assurance that not all
claims are equal. And this, Ajencis would argue, is all that we need.
For so long as we admit our ignorance, we can hope to improve our
claims, and so long as we can improve our claims, we can aspire to
the Truth, even if only in rank approximation.
And this is why I mourn my love of the Great Kyranean. For
despite the pull of his wisdom, there are many things of which I am
absolutely certain, things that feed the hate which drives this very
quill.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN,
THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh
The Ciphrang had sailed drunken across the skies, shrieking at the pinch of the needle world. Hanging from its claws, Achamian glimpsed lines and blots that were warring men, and the smudge of a burning city. The thing’s blood trailed earthward, burning like naphtha.
The ground spiralled closer and closer …
He awoke scarcely alive, breathing dust he could not lick from his teeth. With the one eye he could open, he saw sand cupped about the base of waving reeds. He heard the sea—the Meneanor Sea—pounding nearby shores.
Where were his brothers? Soon, he thought, the nets would be dry and his father would shout across the wind, summoning his nimble fingers. But he couldn’t move. He wanted to weep at the thought of the beating his father would administer, but it seemed one more thing that did not matter.
Then something was dragging him, drawing him across the sand; he could see the clots where his blood blackened it. Dragging him, a shadow leaning against the sun, drawing him down into the darkness of ancient wars, into Golgotterath …
Into a golden labyrinth of horrors more vast than any Nonmen Mansion, where a student, who was more a son, gazed at him with horror and incredulity. A Kûniüric Prince, just beginning to fathom his surrogate father’s betrayal.
“She’s dead!” Seswatha shouted as much at the unbearable expression as at the man. “She’s gone to you now! And if she lives, then what you find
you will not keep,
no matter how deep you think your passion!”
“But you said,” Nau-Cayûti cried, his brave face broken in grief. “You said!”
“I lied.”
“How? How could you do this? You were the only one, Sessa!
The only one!
”
“Because
I couldn’t succeed,
” Achamian said. “Not alone. Because what we do here is more important than truth or love.”
Nau-Cayûti’s eyes gleamed like bared teeth in the gloom. This, Seswatha knew, was the look that had sealed the final heartbeat of so very many—Man and Sranc alike.
“And what do we do here, old teacher? Pray tell.”
“We search,” Achamian murmured. “We search for the Heron Spear.” Then there was rinsing water—fresh water, though the air smelled of salt. And the mutter of voices, concerned and compassionate, but calculating as well. Something soft daubed his cheeks. He glimpsed a wisp of cloud, and beneath it a little girl’s face, both brown and freckled, like Esmenet’s. He watched her pick at the long strands of hair the wind had drawn across her lips.
“Memest ka hoterapi,”
a voice cooed from some other place. It was too matronly to belong to the girl. “Shhhh … shhhh …”
The sea rolled white into unseen breakers. He thought of the lice that would abandon him when finally, irresistibly, he breathed his last.
Wakefulness, true wakefulness in the sense of being still and watchful, was slow in coming. For the first few days it seemed he rolled, as though he had been bound to a great spinning wheel, only a small portion of which breached the surface of hot, amniotic waters. There was the pallet upon which he tossed and writhed, the murky room where the woman and her daughter came with water and basin, and sometimes fish ground into a stomach-warming gruel. And there were the nightmares, drawn into a grinding slurry of torment and loss. An ancient world ending without ending, just wound stacked upon immortal wound, and endless screaming.
He suffered the Fevers, as he had once so very long ago. He recalled them well enough.
When they broke, he found himself alone, blinking at the palm-thatched ceiling. Sheaves of spring herbs hung from the rafters, which were little more than poles. Old nets hung from the walls. There was a table heaped with dried fish like the soles of sandals. He could see the stains and smell the odours of countless guttings. Above the crash of breakers, he could hear the walls creak and rattle in the wind. Twine fluttered in the drafts. In the corner, a momentary dust devil spun flecks of chaff …
Home,
he thought.
I’ve come home
. And he slept his first true sleep.
In the chariot of the Kyranean High King, he stood dumbfounded.
For years now, an inexplicable sense of doom had hung upon the horizon, a horror that had no form, only direction … All Men could feel it. And all Men knew that it bore responsibility for their stillborn sons, that it had broken the great cycle of souls.
Now at last they could see it—the bone that would gag Creation.
Bashrag beat the ground with their great hammers, while Sranc heaved in imbecile masses. They swallowed the surrounding plains, loping in armour of tanned human skin, gibbering like apes, throwing themselves at the ramparts the Men of Kyraneas had made of Mengedda’s ruins. And behind them,
the whirlwind
… a great winding rope sucking the dun earth into black heavens, elemental and indifferent, roaring ever nearer, come to snuff out the last light of Men.
Come to seal the World shut.
The storm clouds firmed their grip on the sun, and all became twilight and thunder. Clutching their groins, the Sranc fell to their knees, heedless of the mannish swords that fell upon them. Then, through the snarling mouths of its children, Seswatha heard it, the million-throated voice of Tsuramah, the No-God …
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
“What,” Anaxophus said, “do you see?”
Seswatha gaped at the High King. Though the man’s tone and expression were entirely his own, he had spoken the selfsame words as the No-God.
“My Lord High King …” Achamian knew not what else to say.
The surrounding plains writhed and warred. As tall as the horizon, the dread whirlwind approached,
the No-God walked,
so vast that it made gravel of Mengedda’s ruin, motes of men.
I MUST KNOW WHAT YOU SEE
“I must know what you see …”
The painted eyes fixed him, honest and intent, as though demanding a boon whose significance had yet to be determined.
“Anaxophus!” Seswatha cried through the clamour. “The Spear! You must take up the Spear!”
This isn’t what happens …
A chorus of roars. The men about them were leaning into the wind, crying out to their Gods. Sand pelted bronze plates. The No-God walked, rising with yawning dimension, transcending the span of a single look, upending the hierarchy of the moving and the immovable, so that it seemed the whirlwind stood still while all Creation flew about it.
TELL ME
“Tell me …”
“By all that’s holy, Anaxophus! Anaxophus! Take up the Spear!”
No … this can’t be …
The No-God advanced across the Mengedda Plain, sweeping up legions of Sranc, tossing them about its thunderhead base like dolls knitted of cheap flesh. And in its winding heart Seswatha glimpsed it, the glint of the Carapace, hanging like a black jewel … He turned back to the Kyranean High King.
WHAT AM I?
“What am I?” the dark and regal face said, frowning. His oiled braids thrashed like snakes about his shoulders. The last of the light glimmered across the lions wrought into his bronze armour.
“The World, Anaxophus!
The very World!
”
This isn’t how it happens!
The whirlwind towered over them, a mountainous pillar of fury so high one had to kneel to see the cloud-shrouded summits. Cycling winds roared over them. The horses screamed and kicked from side to side. The chariot rocked beneath their feet. All had become ochre shadow. More scouring gusts, buffeting them with the power of riptides, bottomless and all-encompassing. The grit peeled the skin from his knuckles, from his cheeks.
The No-God walked.
Too late …
Strange … the way passion flickered out before life.
Horses shrieking. Chariot tipping.
TELL ME, ACHAMIA—
He bolted awake, crying out.
The woman, who happened to be standing at the door, dropped her basin and ran to him. Instinctively, he grabbed her arms, the way a dismayed husband might. When she tried to pull away, he clutched her tighter, used her to find his unsteady feet. She cried out, but he did not let go. He felt his fingers cramp into her arms, so hard they had to hurt—but he couldn’t let go!
The door crashed open. A man rushed in, fists high and swinging.
There was a blow that Achamian couldn’t recollect afterward. He only saw the man draw his wife away as he struggled to regain his feet. His cheek throbbed. The man hollered in some language, gesticulated wildly, while the woman seemed to plead with him, clutching at his left arm even though he shrugged her hands away each time.
Achamian stood, quite naked. There was something wrong, he realized, with his right leg. He grabbed a rough blanket from his pallet, wrapped himself with it. Then, bewildered, he circled the man and his wife, made his way to the door, stumbled backward out into the sunlight, felt his heels kick hot sand. He raised a hand against the brightness of sun, beach, and heaving sea. He saw the little girl with the freckles, cringing behind the back wall. Then he saw others, far out, past where the black rocks broke the white sand, drawing their boats through the diamond foam.
He turned and, as fast as he could manage, fled across the shore.
Please don’t kill me!
he wanted to cry out, though he knew he could burn them all.
He began walking east, to Shimeh. It seemed the only direction he knew.

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