The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

  Bait it.

  “Across the world in Golgotterath,” Kellhus gasped, still stamping out the coals of his manic lust, “the Mangaecca squat about your true flesh, rocking to the mutter of endless Cants. The Synthese is but a node. You are no more than the reflection of a shadow, an image cast upon the water of Esmenet. You possess subtlety, yes, but you haven’t the depth to confront me.”

  Achamian had told him of this creature, that its capacities would be largely restricted to glamours, compulsions, and possessions. The great shout that was its true form, the Schoolman had said, could be heard only as whispers and insinuations at such a distance. I must own this encounter!

  “Come,” she said, springing to her feet, stalking him as he retreated across the verandah, “kill me, then. Strike me down!”

  A mask of counterfeit horror. Once again Kellhus unlaced the bindings of selfhood, rolled open the inner surfaces of his soul. Once again he reached …

  The past possessed weight. Where the young were like flotsam, forever drawn spinning into the current of passing events, the old were like stone. The proverbs and parables spoke of sobriety, restraint, but more than anything it was boredom that rendered the aged immune to the press of events. Repetition, not enlightenment, was the secret of their detachment. How did one move a soul that had witnessed all the world’s permutations?

  “But you can’t,ʺ she cackled, “can you? Look upon this pretty shell … these lips, these eyes, this cunny. I am what you love …”

  What was more, the Scylvendi had schooled it. The non sequiturs. The sudden questions. The thing had made whim the principle of its action—just as Cnaiür had …

  Kellhus reached.

  “After all,” she said, “what man would strike down his wife?”

  He drew his sword, Enshoiya, pressed its point against the white tile floor between them. “A Dûnyain,” he replied.

  She stopped above the blade, close enough to pinch the tip between the toes of her right foot. She glared with ancient fury. “I am Aurang. Tyranny! A son of the void you call Heaven…I am Inchoroi, a raper of thousands! I am he who would tear this world down. Strike, Anasûrimbor!”

  Kellhus reached …

  … and saw himself through the obscenity’s eyes, the enigma who would draw out his father, Moënghus. Kellhus reached, though with fingers lacking tips, palms without heat. He reached and he grasped …

  A soul that had snaked across all the world’s ages, taking lover after lover, exulting in degradation, spilling seed across innumerable dead. The Nonmen of Ishoriol. The Norsirai of Trysë and Sauglish. Warring, endlessly warring, to forestall damnation …

  A race with a hundred names for the vagaries of ejaculation, who had silenced all compassion, all pity, to better savour the reckless chorus of their lusts. Stalking, endlessly stalking, the world they would make their shrieking harem …

  A life so old that only he, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, was unprecedented. Only the Dûnyain were new.

  Who were these Men—these Anasûrimbor!—who hailed from Golgotterath’s very shadow? who could see through masks of skin? who could subvert ancient faiths? who could enslave Holy Wars with nothing more than words and glances?

  Who bore the name of their ancient foe …

  And Kellhus realized there was only one question here: Who were the Dûnyain?

  They fear us, Father.

  “Strike!” Esmenet cried, her arms back, her shining breasts pressed forward.

  And he did strike, though with the flat of his palm. Esmenet sailed backward, rolled nude across the tiles.

  “The No-God,” he said, advancing, “he speaks to me in my dreams.”

  “I,” Esmenet replied, spitting blood as she pressed herself from the floor, “don’t believe you.”

  Kellhus seized the black maul of her hair, heaved her to her feet. He hissed into her ear. “He says that you failed him on the Plains of Mengedda!”

  “Lies! Lies!”

  “He comes, Warlord. For this world … for you!ʺ

  “Strike me again,” she whispered. “Please …”

  He threw her back to the floor. She writhed at his feet, thrusting her sex like an accusatory finger. “Fuck me,” she whispered. “Fuck me.”

  But the lustful glamour fell from him, deflected by the Dara Ward. He stood unmoved.

  “Your secrets have been uncovered,” he said in high oratorical tones. “Your agents are scattered, your designs overthrown … You’ve been defeated, Warlord.”

  And for the first time she replied according to his anticipations.

  “Ahhhh … but there are as many battlefields as there are moments, Dûnyain.”

  Pause. The cycling of possibilities.

  “You’re a distraction …” Kellhus said.

  Esmenet herself had said it: they would do anything to deny him the Gnosis.

  Her eyes flared white, and for an instant she looked like a leering Nilnameshi demon. A strange and preternatural laughter filtered through the overgrown garden, twined like snakes across the open spaces.

  “Achamian,” Kellhus whispered.

  “Is already dead,” the thing sneered. It rolled her head like a doll, then slumped across the cold stone.

  The sound of clinking stone, scarcely audible over the urgent counterpoint of voices in the garden beyond the iron-fretted windows.

  A single plate of marble ran across the threshold of what once, back when the Nansur had ruled Amoteu, had been an ancestor shrine. As though of its own volition, it tipped upright then slipped aside, revealing a black slot scarcely large enough to fit a Tydonni shield. A foot swung out, its toes popping as they stretched. Rising like a stalk, the knee and thigh followed. Another foot appeared, then a hand, until all three limbs were bent and braced about the aperture like some deformed spider.

  Then slowly, deliberately, the figure of a woman emerged, as though drawn from the pages of a book.

  Fanashila.

  She danced across the pallid floors, encountered a bleary-eyed Opsara shuffling back to the nursery from the latrine. She broke her neck, then paused, breathing, willing her erection to subside. At some point crossing shadows, she became Esmenet. It pressed her cheek against the bronze-strapped mahogany of his chamber door, heard nothing save the deep breathing of its quarry. The air fairly sang with residual odours: garlic from the kitchens, rotted teeth, armpits and anuses …

  Soot, myrrh, and sandalwood.

  It retrieved the Chorae from a pocket in her linen shift, then with deft movements tied it against her throat with leather string. It pressed open the door, leaning hard on the handle to silence the unoiled hinges. It had hoped to find him asleep, but of course his Wards had awakened him.

  It stood at the dark entrance, her false face swollen with tears. Moonlight cast an oblong of pale squares across the floor at her feet. He was sitting in his bed, alarmed and ashen-faced. Though he peered, it could see him quite clearly: the astonished eyes, the thoughtful brow, the five white streaks of his beard.

  He reeked of terror.

  “Esmi?” he hissed. “Esmi? Is that you?”

  Hunching its shoulders, it pulled her arms from the linen shift so that it fell to the cord tied about her waist. She heard his breath catch at the sight of her breasts.

  “Esmi! What are you doing?”

  “I need you, Akka …”

  “The Chorae about your throat…I thought they were forbidden.”

  “Kellhus asked that I wear it.”

  “Please … remove it.”

  Raising her arms to the back of her neck, she untied it, let it clatter to the floor. She stepped into the pale, fretted light, so that it mapped the contours of her stolen body. It knew she was a thing of beauty. “Akka,” it whispered. “Love me, Akka …”

  “No … this is wrong! He’ll know, Esmi. He’ll know!”

  “He already knows,” it said, crawling onto the foot of his bed.

  She could smell his hammering heart, the promise of hot blood. Th
ere was such fear in him!

  “Please,” she gasped, drawing her breasts over the outline of his knees and thighs. His face so near, hanging in darkness.

  The blow struck true, through the silken sheets, through her sternum, her heart and spine. Even still, it managed to heave forward across the blade, to strike his windpipe. And as the blackness swirled down, it saw him through the deceiving glamour, Captain Heörsa, thrashing in his very own death throes …

  The Dûnyain had outwitted them.

  Traps within traps, the thing called Esmenet carelessly thought. So beautiful …

  In what passed for its dying soul.

  Achamian …

  The lantern fell to the rotted floor, light rolled across heaped bones, and Seswatha felt himself lifted and thrown back into the blackness. Something hard cracked against the base of his skull. The world darkened, until all he could see was his student’s raving face.

  “Where is she?” Nau-Cayûti cried. “Where?”

  And all he could think of was his voice pealing through the inhuman spaces, reaching, filtering—sealing their doom. They walked the halls of Golgotterath. Golgotterath!

  Achamian! It’s Zin …

  “You lied!”

  “No!” Achamian cried, shielding his eyes against the light hanging above him. “Listen! Listen!”

  But it was Proyas before him, his face drawn, grave with the utter absence of expression.

  “I’m sorry, old tutor,” the Prince said, “but it’s Zin … He’s calling for you.”

  Without any real comprehension, he cast his blankets aside and bolted from his cot. For an instant he teetered: unlike the Incû-Holoinas, the canvas walls of the Prince’s pavilion were square with the ground. Proyas steadied him, and they shared a long and sombre look. For so long the Marshal of Attrempus had stood at their borderlands, guarding the frontier across which the doubt of the one had warred with the certainty of the other. It seemed terrifying to stand face to face without him. But it also seemed true, a kind of human proof.

  They had always stood this near, Achamian realized; they had merely stared off in different directions. Without warning, he found himself clasping the younger man’s hand. It was not warm, but it seemed so very alive.

  “I did not mean to disappoint you,” Proyas murmured.

  Achamian swallowed.

  Only when things were broken did their meaning become clear.

  Kellhus held her shaking in their bed.

  “I do love you!” Esmenet cried. “I do!”

  Shouts still echoed through the corridors. The Hundred Pillars, Kellhus knew, fanned across the grounds, searching for the Inchoroi’s Synthese. But they would find nothing. Save for Captain Heörsa’s death, everything had transpired as he’d expected. Aurang had sought only to deny him the Gnosis, not his life. So long as they knew nothing of the Dûnyain, the Consult were trapped in the pincers of a paradox: the more they needed to kill him, the more they needed to learn him—and to find his father.

  Which was why Achamian had been their target—not Kellhus.

  Kellhus hadn’t known whether Esmenet would recall her possession, but the instant her eyes fluttered open, he’d realized that she not only remembered, she remembered as though she herself had spoken what was spoken, said what was said. There had been many hard words.

  “I do love you,ʺ she wept.

  “Yes,” he replied, his voice far deeper, far wider, than she could possibly hear.

  Quivering lips. Eyes parsed between horror and remorse. Panting breath. “But you said! You said!ʺ

  “Only,” he lied, “what needed to be heard, Esmi. Nothing more.”

  “You have to believe me!”

  “I do, Esmi…I do believe.”

  She clutched her cheeks, scratched welts across them. “Always the whore! Why must I always be the whore?”

  He looked through her, past her bewildered hurt, down to the beatings and the abuse, to the betrayals, and beyond, out to a world of rank lust, shaped by the hammers of custom, girded with scripture, scaled by ancient legacies of sentiment and belief. Her womb had cursed her, even as it made her what she was. Immortality and bliss—this was the living promise all women bore between their thighs. Strong sons and gasping climax. If what men called truth were ever the hostage of their desires, how could they fail to make slaves of their women? To hide them like hoarded gold. To feast on them like melons. To discard them like rinds.

  Was this not why he used her? The promise of sons in her hips?

  Dûnyain sons.

  Her eyes were like silver spoons in the gloom, shimmering with scarcely held waters. He looked through them and saw so much he could never undo …

  “Hold me,” she whispered. “Hold me, please.”

  Like so many others, she bore his toll. And it was only beginning …

  Achamian had always thought it strange that so little was felt at the appropriate moment—only afterward, and even then it never seemed … proper.

  When the Pederisk, the title given to Mandate Schoolmen devoted to finding the Few among Nron’s children, had come to their hovel bent on taking Achamian—a boy with “great promise”—to Atyersus, Achamian’s father had denied him—not for love of his son, Achamian would later decide, but for reasons both more pragmatic and more principled. Achamian had proven himself a quick study at sea, one who need not be hit as often as the others. And more importantly, Achamian was his son, and none other might have him.

  The Pederisk, a willowy man with a face as hard and weathered as any mariner’s, was neither surprised nor impressed by his father’s drunken defiance. Achamian would never forget the way his smell—rosewater and jasmine—had owned the sour room. His father became violent, and with a dreadful air of routine the Schoolman’s men-at-arms began beating him. Achamian’s mother had shrieked. His brothers and sisters had squalled. But a strange coldness had settled upon Achamian, the monolithic selfishness of which only children and madmen are sometimes capable.

  He had gloated.

  Before that day, Achamian would never have believed his father could be so easily broken. For children, hard-hearted fathers were elemental, more deity than human. As judges, they seemed to stand beyond all possible judgement. Witnessing the humiliation of his father produced the first truly sorrowful day of his life—as well as a day of triumph. To see the great breaker broken … How couldn’t this transform the proportions of a young boy’s world?

  “Damnation!” his father had screeched. “Hell has come for you, boy! Hell!ʺ

  Only afterward, as they trundled up the coast in the Schoolman’s cart, would he cry, overwhelmed by loss and delinquent regret.

  Far, far too late.

  “I see it, Akka …” A voice barely more than a rasp. Xinemus. “Where I’m going. I see it now.”

  “And what do you see?” Humour them. This was what one did with the grievously ill …

  “Nothing.”

  “Shush. I’ll describe it all to you. The Many-Eyed Walls. The First Temple. The Sacred Heights. I’ll be your eyes, Zin. You’ll see Shimeh through me.”

  Through the eyes of a sorcerer.

  Proyas’s slaves had used screens to mark off an ad hoc sickroom for the Marshal of Attrempus. Embroidered pheasants cavorted across them, their tail feathers twining into the very trees they perched upon. Only two lanterns provided illumination, both of them hooded in blue cloth at the insistence of the physician-priests. Apparently Akkeägni was more discriminating with his colours than with his victims … The result was peculiar, even eerie—something between firelight and moonlight. Everything in the spare chamber—the sagging canvas ceilings, the rush-matted ground, the blankets hanging from the Marshal’s cot—possessed the nauseous pall of sickness.

  Achamian knelt at the side of the cot, gently wiping his friend’s brow with a wetted cloth. He dabbed the water pooled in his sockets, more because of the unnerving way it glinted in the gloom—like liquid eyes—than for the comfort of his friend.
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  Yet again he found himself at war with the urge to flee. Of all the unclean spirits, few were as terrifying or bloodthirsty as those belonging to dread Disease. Pulma had possessed him, the physician-priests had said, one of the most fearsome of Akkeägni’s innumerable demons.

  The lung-plague.

  The Marshal jerked and convulsed. He arched across his cot as though his body were a bow taken up and drawn by something unseen. He made noises that could only be described as … unmanly. Achamian clutched his bearded cheek, whispered words he could not recall afterward. Then, just as abruptly, Xinemus went slack. Once again his limbs were lost between the folds of his blankets.

  Achamian wiped the sweat from the quivering planes of his face. “Shush,” he whispered between the man’s clawing breaths."Shush …ʺ

  “How the rules,” the Marshal coughed, “have changed …ʺ

  “What do you mean?”

  “The game between us … benjuka.”

  Achamian still had no clue as to his meaning, but he could think of nothing to say. It seemeda…sin somehow, to question him twice.

  “Remember how it was?” Xinemus asked. “The way you would wait in the dark while I took council with the Great?”

  “Yes…I remember.ʺ

  “Now it’s I who wait.”

  Again Achamian couldn’t think of anything to say. It was as though words had come to their end, to the point where only impotence and travesty could follow. Even his thoughts prickled.

  “Did you?” the Marshal abruptly asked.

  “Did I what?ʺ

  “Did you ever win?”

  “Benjuka?” Achamian blinked, stretched his face into an aching smile. “Not against you, Zin … But someday …ʺ

  “I think not.”

  “And why’s that?” He hesitated, fearful of what answer this question might elicit.

  “Because you try too hard,” Xinemus said. “And when the plate doesn’t yield—” He coughed, convulsed about pustulate lungs.

  Achamian repeated, “When the plate doesn’t yield …ʺ He humoured him no longer. Selfish fool!