The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

  Like Kellhus.

  There was compassion in her eyes now … He looked away.

  “Akka … what did he say?”

  Figures passed to and fro before the bonfire, and shadows swept the ground between them. When he matched her gaze, it seemed he was falling. “He said …” A pause. He cleared his throat. “He said that pity was the only love I could hope for.”

  He saw her swallow, blink. “Oh, Akka …”

  Of all the world, only she truly understood. Of all the world.

  Longing crashed about the pilings of his resolution—to crush her in his arms, to press her back tenderly then kiss the faint saddle of freckles across her nose.

  He resumed walking instead, found peevish relief in the way she obediently followed.

  “H-he said things,” Achamian continued, coughing against a voice-cracking ache. “He said things without hope of forgiveness. Now he can’t bring himself to stop.”

  Esmenet seemed baffled. “But that was months back.”

  Blinking, Achamian looked to the sky, saw the Round of Horns glittering in an arc over the northern hills. It was an ancient Kûniüric constellation, unknown to the astrologers of the Three Seas. “Think of the soul as a network of innumerable rivers. With the Cants of Compulsion, the old banks are swamped, dikes are washed away, new channels are cut … Sometimes when the floodwaters recede, things resume their old course. Sometimes they don’t.”

  Four silent steps in the dark. When she replied, there was genuine horror in her voice. “Are you saying …” Her brow slackened in incredulous astonishment. “Are you saying the Zin we knew is dead?”

  The thought had never occurred to Achamian, as obvious as it was. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure what I’m saying.”

  He turned to her, reached out to clasp her forbidden hand. She didn’t resist. He tried to say something, but his jaw could only jerk back and down, as though something different, something deeper than his lungs, demanded breath. He pulled her against him, amazed that she remained so light.

  Then the old habits seized them, locked them together like hands. She bent to him, as she had a thousand times. He fell into her lips, her smell. He wrapped himself around her trembling frame …

  They kissed.

  Then she was fighting him, striking him about the face and shoulders. He released her, overcome by rage and ardour and horror. “N-no!” she sputtered, beating the air as though fending off the mere idea of him.

  “I dream of murdering him!” Achamian cried. “Murdering Kellhus! I dream that all the world burns, and I rejoice, Esmi, I rejoice. All the world burns, and I exult for love of you!”

  Her eyes were wide and uncomprehending.

  Every part of him beseeched her. “Do you love me? Esmi, I need to know!”

  “Akka …”

  “Do you love me?”

  “He knows me! He knows me like no other!”

  And suddenly he understood. It seemed so clear! All this time mourning, thinking he had nothing to offer, nothing to lay at the foot of her altar. “That’s it! Don’t you see? That’s the difference!”

  “This is madness!” she cried. “Enough, Akka. Enough! This cannot be.”

  “Please, listen. You must listen! He knows everyone, Esmi. Everyone!”

  She was the only one. How could she not see? Like a kicked scroll, the logic of it rolled through him: love required ignorance. Like any candle, it needed darkness to burn bright, to illuminate. “He knows everyone!” His lips were still wet with the taste of her.

  Bitter, like tears across cosmetics.

  “Yes,” Esmenet said, retreating step after step. “And he loves me!”

  Achamian looked down to gather his wits, his breath. He knew she would be gone when he looked up, but somehow he had forgotten the others—the Inrithi—who had walked and caroused about them. More than a dozen of them stood like sentinels in the firelight, staring at him, their faces blank. Achamian thought of how easily he could destroy them, blast the flesh from their bones, and he matched their astonished scrutiny with this knowledge in his eyes. To a man they looked away.

  That night, he beat the matted earth in fury. He cursed himself for a fool until dawn. The arguments were assembled and were defeated. The reasons railed and railed. But love had no logic.

  No more than sleep.

  When next he saw her, he could find no trace of this encounter, save perhaps for a certain blankness in her expression. It was mad, the moment they had shared—as she had said—and for days afterward Achamian half expected the Hundred Pillars to bring charges against him. For the first time he realized the dimensions of his plight, that he had lost her not simply to another man but to a nation. There would be no outbursts of jealous rage, no confrontations, only cloaked officials in the night, discharging their writ without passion.

  Just as when he’d been a spy.

  He wasn’t surprised when no one came, just as he wasn’t surprised when Kellhus said nothing, even though he most certainly knew. The Warrior-Prophet needed him too much—that was the bitter explanation. The other was that he understood, that he too mourned the contested ground between them.

  How could one love one’s oppressor? Achamian didn’t know, but he loved nonetheless. He loved them both.

  Every evening, following a typically lavish meal with the Nascenti, Achamian would wend his way through the hanging corridors of the Umbilica to a leather chamber in the lesser wing—what the Nascenti had come to call, for no reason Achamian could fathom, the Scribal Room. At the entrance, a lantern-bearing guard would always lower his face and murmur either “Vizier” or “Holy Tutor” in greeting. Once within, Achamian would spend time rearranging the rugs and cushions so that he and Kellhus could sit comfortably face to face instead of peering about the pole in the room’s centre. Twice he’d upbraided the slaves, but they never learned. Then he would wait, staring across the woven pastorals set, as was the fashion for the Kianene, in a geometric maze of panels. He wrestled with the inevitable demons.

  Protecting Kellhus had been the charge of his School. As real as it was, the prospect of a Consult attack seemed to concern Kellhus little. Achamian often worried that Kellhus merely tolerated him out of courtesy, as a way to build trust with a formidable ally. Teaching Kellhus the Gnosis, however, was an altogether different matter. This was the Warrior-Prophet’s own charge. Even before their first lesson together, Achamian had known these exchanges would be things of wonder and terror.

  From the very first, even as far back as Momemn, there had been something remarkable about Kellhus’s company. Even then he’d been someone whom others sought to please, as if they grasped without knowing what it meant to stand tall in his eyes. The disarming charisma. The endearing candour. The breathtaking intellect. Men opened themselves to him because he lacked all those deficiencies that led brother to injure brother. His humility was invariable, utterly disconnected from the presence of other men. Where others crowed or fawned depending upon whose company they kept, Kellhus remained absolute. He never boasted. He never flattered. He simply described.

  Such men were addicting, especially for those who feared what others saw.

  Long ago, Achamian and Esmenet had made a game of sorts out of their attempts to understand Kellhus—particularly after they had acknowledged his divinity. Together they had watched him grow. They had watched him struggle with truths that everyone else had secretly accepted. They had watched him set aside his immaculate humility, his desire to be less than he was, and take up his calamitous destiny.

  He was the Warrior-Prophet, the Voice and Vessel, sent to save Men from the Second Apocalypse. And yet somehow he remained Kellhus, the lackland Prince of Atrithau. He commanded obedience, certainly, but he never presumed, no more than he had about Xinemus’s fire. And how could he, when presumption measured the gap between what was demanded and what was justified? Kellhus had never exacted anything beyond his due. It just so happened all the world fell within the circle of his authority.
/>
  Sometimes Achamian found himself joking with him in the old way, as though the revelations of Caraskand had never happened. As though Esmenet had never happened. Then something—a glimpse of a circumfix embroidered on a sleeve, a whiff of feminine perfume—would strike him, and Kellhus would be transformed before his eyes. An unbearable intensity would shine from his aspect, as though he were a kind of lodestone made flesh, drawing things unseen yet palpable into his orbit. Silences seethed. Words thundered. It was as though every passing moment resonated with the unvoiced intonations of a thousand thousand priests. Sometimes Achamian gripped his knees against the sensation of vertigo. Sometimes he blinked against the glimpse of haloes about his hands.

  To sit in his presence was overwhelming enough. But to teach him the Gnosis?

  To limit Kellhus’s vulnerability to Chorae, they had agreed they should start with everything—linguistic and metaphysical—short of actual Cants. As with the exoterics, instruction in the esoterics required prior skills, arcane analogues to reading and writing. In Atyersus, teachers always started with what were called denotaries, small precursor Cants meant to gradually develop the intellectual flexibility of their students to the prodigious point where they could both comprehend and express arcane semantics. Denotaries, however, bruised students with the stain of sorcery as surely as any Cant, which meant that in some respects Achamian had to start backward.

  He began by teaching him Gilcûnya, the arcane tongue of the Nonmen Quya and the language of all the Gnostic Cants. This took less than two weeks.

  To say that Achamian was astonished or even appalled would be to name a confluence of passions that could not be named. He himself had required three years to master the grammar, let alone the vocabulary, of that exotic and alien tongue.

  By the time the Holy War marched from the Enathpanean hills into Xerash, Achamian started discussing the philosophical underpinnings of Gnostic semantics—what were called the Aeturi Sohonca, or the Sohonc Theses. There was no bypassing the metaphysics of the Gnosis, though they were as incomplete and inconclusive as any philosophy. Without some understanding of them, the Cants were little more than soul-numbing recitations. Whether Gnostic or Anagogic, sorcery depended on meanings, and meanings depended on systematic comprehension.

  “Think,” Achamian explained, “of how the same words can mean different things to different people, or even different things to the same people in different circumstances.”

  He racked his memory for an example, but all he could recall was the one his own teacher, Simas, had used so many years ago. “When a man says ‵love,′ for instance, the word means entirely different things depending not only on who listens—be it his son, his whore, his wife, the God—but on who he is as well. The ‵love′ spoken by a heartbroken priest shares little with the ‘love’ spoken by an illiterate adolescent. The former is tempered by loss, learning, and a lifetime of experience, while the latter knows only lust and ardour.”

  He could not help but wonder in passing what “love” had come to mean for him? As always, he dispelled such thoughts—thoughts of her—by throwing himself into his discourse.

  “Preserving and expressing the pure modalities of meaning,” he continued, “this is the heart of all sorcery, Kellhus. With each word, you must strike the perfect semantic pitch, the note that will drown out the chorus of reality.”

  Kellhus held him with his unwavering gaze, as poised and motionless as a Nilnameshi idol. “Which is why,” he said, “you use an ancient Nonman tongue as your lingua arcana.”

  Achamian nodded, no longer surprised by his student’s preternatural insight. “Vulgar languages, especially when native, stand too close to the press of life. Their meanings are too easily warped by our insights and experiences. The sheer otherness of Gilcûnya serves to insulate the semantics of sorcery from the inconstancies of our lives. The Anagogic Schools”—he tried to smooth the contempt from his tone—“use High Kunna, a debased form of Gilcûnya, for the same reason.”

  “To speak as the Gods do,” Kellhus said. “Far from the concerns of Men.”

  Following a fleet survey of the Theses, Achamian moved on to the Persemiota, the meaning-fixing meditative techniques that Mandate Schoolmen, thanks to the Seswathan homunculus within them, largely ignored. Then he delved into the technical depths of the Semansis Dualis, the very doorstep of what had been, until the coming of the man who sat before him, a final precursor to damnation.

  He explained the all-important relation between the two halves of every Cant: the inutterals, which always remained unspoken, and the utterals, which always were spoken. Since any single meaning could be skewed by the vagaries of circumstance, Cants required a second, simultaneous meaning, which, though as vulnerable to distortion as the first, braced it nonetheless, even as it too was braced. As Outhrata, the great Kûniüric metaphysician, had put it, language required two wings to fly.

  “So the inutterals serve to fix the utterals,” Kellhus said, “the way the words of one man might secure the words of another.”

  “Precisely,” Achamian replied. “One must think and say two different things at once. This is the greatest challenge—even more so than the mnemonics. The thing that requires the most practice to master.”

  Kellhus nodded, utterly unconcerned. “And this is why the Anagogic Schools have never been able to steal the Gnosis. Why simply reciting what they hear is useless.”

  “There’s the metaphysics to consider as well. But, yes, in all sorcery the inutterals are key.”

  Kellhus nodded. “Has anyone experimented with further inutteral strings?”

  Achamian swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  By some coincidence two of the hanging lanterns guttered at the same time, drawing Achamian’s eyes upward. They instantly resumed their soundless illumination.

  “Has anyone devised Cants consisting of two inutteral strings?”

  The “Third Phrase” was a thing of myth in Gnostic sorcery, a story handed down to Men during the Nonman Tutelage: the legend of Su’juroit, the great Cûnuroi Witch-King. But for some reason, Achamian found himself loath to relate the tale. “No,” he lied. “It’s impossible.”

  From this point, a strange breathlessness characterized their lessons, an unsettling sense that the banality of what Achamian said belied unthinkable repercussions. Years ago he had participated in a Mandate-sanctioned assassination of a suspected Ainoni spy in Conriya. All Achamian had done was hand a folded oak leaf containing belladonna to a scullery slave. The action had been so simple, so innocuous …

  Three men and one woman had died.

  As always with Kellhus, Achamian needed only to gloss the various topics, and then only once. Within the course of single evenings Kellhus mastered arguments, explanations, and details that had taken Achamian years to internalize. His questions always struck to the heart. His observations never failed to chill with their rigour and penetration. Then at last, as the first elements of the Holy War invested Gerotha, they came to the precipice.

  Kellhus beamed with gratitude and good humour. He stroked his flaxen beard in an uncharacteristic gesture of excitement, and for an instant resembled no one so much as Inrau. His eyes reflected three points of light, one for each of the lanterns suspended above Achamian.

  “So the time has finally come.”

  Achamian nodded, knowing his apprehension was plain to see. “We should start with some basic Ward,” he said awkwardly. “Something you can use to defend yourself.”

  “No,” Kellhus replied. “Begin with a Cant of Calling.”

  Achamian frowned, but he knew better than to counsel or contradict. Breathing deeply, he opened his mouth to recite the first utteral string of the Ishra Discursia, the most ancient and most simple of the Gnostic Cants of Calling. But for some reason no sound escaped his lips. It seemed he should be speaking, but something … inflexible had seized his throat. He shook his head and laughed, glancing away in embarrassment, then tried once again.

  Sti
ll nothing.

  “I …” Achamian looked to Kellhus, more than baffled. “I cannot speak.”

  Kellhus watched him carefully, peering first at his face, then apparently at an empty point in the air between them. “Seswatha,” he said after a moment. “How else could the Mandate have safeguarded the Gnosis for so many years? Even with the nightmares …”

  An unaccountable relief washed through Achamian. “It—it must be …”

  He looked to Kellhus helplessly. Despite all his turmoil, he truly wanted to yield the Gnosis. Somehow it had become oppressive in the manner of shameful acts, and for whatever reason, all secrets clamoured for light in Kellhus’s presence. He shook his head, lowered his face into his hands, saw Xinemus screaming, his face clenched about the knifepoint in his eye.

  “I must speak with him,” Kellhus said.

  Achamian gaped at the man, incredulous. “With Seswatha? I don’t understand.”

  Kellhus reached to his belt and drew one of his daggers: the Eumarnan one, with a black pearl handle and a long thin blade, like those Achamian’s father had used for deboning fish. For a panicked instant Achamian thought that Kellhus meant to debone him, to cut Seswatha from his skin, perhaps the way physician-priests sometimes cut living infants from dying mothers. Instead he merely twirled the pommel across the table of his palm, holding it balanced so that the Seleukaran steel flashed in the light of their fire-pot.

  “Watch the play of light,” he said. “Watch only the light.”

  With a shrug, Achamian gazed at the weapon, found himself captivated by the multiple ghosts that formed about the spinning blade’s axis. He had the sense of watching silver through dancing water, then …

  What followed defeated description. There was a peculiar impression of elongation, as though his eyes had been drawn across open space into airy corners. He could remember his head falling back, and the sense that, even though he still owned his bones, his muscles belonged to someone else, so that it seemed he was restrained by the force of another in a manner more profound than chains or even inhumation. He could remember speaking, but could recollect nothing of what he said. It was as though his memory of the exchange had been affixed to the edges of his periphery, where it remained no matter how quickly he snapped his head. Always just on the threshold of the perceptible …