The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

  Nau-Cayûti slumped to his knees. “What is this?” More of a breath than a whisper.

  He turned to his teacher, his pupils ringed by crazed white. “Th-this?” Spoken like a bereaved child.

  Awake!

  Seswatha felt himself hoisted and thrown back into shadow. Something cracked his skull, and murk encompassed everything until he could see only his beloved student’s anguish—his lunatic hurt!

  “Where is she? Whe—”

  Awake, you fool!

  With a gasp Achamian clawed his way to consciousness. Shimeh! he thought. Shimeh! There was a shadow above him, framed by the whining ring of his unanswered Wards. And there was a great and crushing absence, swinging in small circles from the end of a leather string. A Trinket, hanging the breadth of a finger above his breast …

  “Some time ago,” the Scylvendi grated, “during all the empty hours thinking, I understood that you die as I do …” A tremor passed through the hand holding the string.

  “Without Gods.”

  Even from this distance, Eleäzaras could see the faint glow of lights spilling from the Ctesarat Tabernacle upon the Sacred Heights. He sat with Iyokus beneath the open canopy that flared from the south face of his pavilion. Circles of blood had been painted across the flattened grasses. Tomorrow they would at last engage their mortal enemy, and though the meaning of that engagement now escaped him, he would see it through.

  Which meant he would use every weapon at his disposal—no matter how wicked.

  “The Cishaurim flee,” Iyokus said, his mouth aglow with the Diamotic Communion. “As we suspected, they have no Chorae upon the Juterum. But they call … they call.”

  The Snakeheads had no choice. They would disperse their Trinkets to guard against further incursions by Ciphrang, which meant that tomorrow his brother Schoolmen would face fewer in their initial assault.

  Eleäzaras leaned forward. “We shouldn’t have used a Potent when a Debile would have suited our purposes just the same. And especially not Zioz! You told me yourself he was becoming dangerous.”

  “All is well, Eli.”

  “You grow reckless …”

  Have I become such a coward?

  Iyokus turned to him. Blood soiled his bandages where they pressed against his translucent cheeks.

  “They must fear us,” the man said. “Now they do.”

  The bizarre terror of awakening to a mortal threat: a pang wrapped round with a sluggish incredulity, as though something deep believed he still slept. Like a knife probing wool.

  “Scylvendi!” Achamian gasped. It seemed he mouthed ice more than sound. The stink of the man filled the cramped confines of his tent, a smell somewhere between horse and dog.

  “Where,” the voice growled from the darkness, “is he?”

  Achamian knew he referred to Kellhus, either because of the intensity with which he said “he” or perhaps because he could scarcely think of anyone else himself. But then, all men searched for Kellhus, even those who knew him not.

  “I don’t—”

  “Lies! You are always with him. You are his protector—I know this!”

  “Please …” he gasped, tried to cough without raising his chest. The Chorae had become unbearable. It seemed his heart might crack his sternum, leap into its absence. He could feel the stinging of his skin about his right nipple, the beginnings of the Salt. He thought of Carythusal, of Geshrunni, now long dead, holding a Trinket above his hand in the Holy Leper. Strange how this one seemed to have a different … taste.

  I was never meant to escape.

  The shadow hunched over him in fury, seemed to growl. Though he could see no more than the man’s outline limned in the faintest moonlight, Achamian saw him clearly in his soul’s eye: the strapped arms, the neck-breaking hands, the face rutted by murderous wrath.

  “I will not ask again.”

  What was happening here? Don’t panic, old fool.

  “You think,” Achamian managed, “I would betray his trust, Scylvendi? You think I value my life over his?” Desperation, not conviction, had animated these words, for he did not believe them. Even still, they seemed to give the Scylvendi pause.

  A moment of brooding dark, then the barbarian said, “I will trade, then … barter.”

  Why the sudden reversal? And the man’s voice … had it actually quavered? The barbarian yanked the Chorae into his palm, like a child with a well-practised toy. Achamian fairly cried out in relief. For a moment he lay panting, still terrified and utterly dumbfounded. The shadow watched, motionless.

  “Trade?” Achamian exclaimed. For the first time he noticed the two figures sitting behind the barbarian, though the gloom was such that he could tell only that one was a woman and the other a man. “Trade what?”

  “Truth.”

  This word, intoned as it was with exhaustion and a profound, barbaric candour, struck him like a blow. Achamian pressed himself onto his elbows, glared at the man, his eyes wild with outrage and confusion.

  “And what if I’ve had my fill of Truth?”

  “The truth of him,” the Scylvendi said.

  Achamian peered at the man, squinted as if into the distance, even though he loomed so very near. “I already know that truth,” he said numbly. “He’s come to—”

  “You know nothing!” the barbarian snarled. “Nothing! Only what he has let you know.” He spat in the corner next to Achamian’s uncovered feet, wiped his lips with the hand holding his Chorae. “The same as all his slaves.”

  “I’m no sla—”

  “But you are! In his presence all men are slaves, sorcerer.” With the Chorae clutched tight in his fist, the Scylvendi leaned back to sit cross-legged. “He is Dûnyain.”

  Never had Achamian heard such shaking hate in a word, and the world was filled with such epithets: Scylvendi, Consult, Fanim, Cishaurim, Mog-Pharau … It sometimes seemed there were as many hatreds as there were names.

  “That word,” Achamian said carefully, “‘Dûnyain’ … it simply means ‘truth’ in a dead tongue.”

  “The tongue is not dead,” Cnaiür snapped, “and the word no longer means ‘truth.’”

  Achamian recalled that first meeting outside Momemn, the Scylvendi standing proud and savage before Proyas, while Kellhus had held Serwë amid Xinemus’s knights. He hadn’t believed Cnaiür then, but the revelation of Kellhus and his name, Anasûrimbor, had overturned all his suspicions. What was it Kellhus had said? That the Scylvendi had accepted his wager? Yes, and that he had dreamed of the Holy War from afar …

  “What you told us,” Achamian said, glimpsing the sheen of teeth, “that first day with Proyas … you lied.”

  “I lied.”

  “And Kellhus?” For some reason, asking this made his throat ache.

  A pause. “Tell me where he went.”

  “No,” Achamian said. “You promised me Truth…I will not barter untested wares.”

  The barbarian snorted, but it didn’t strike Achamian as an expression of derision or contempt. There was a pensiveness to the man, a vulnerability of movement and manner that contradicted the violence of his aspect. Somehow Achamian knew that Cnaiür wanted to speak of these things, as though they burdened him in the way of crimes or powerful grievances. And this realization terrified him more thoroughly than any Trinket ever could.

  “You think Kellhus was sent,” the Scylvendi said in a hollow voice, “when he was summoned. You think he is unique, when he is but one of a number. You think he is a saviour, when he is nothing more than a slaver.”

  These statements clawed all blood and sensation from Achamian’s face.

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Then listen! For thousands of years they have hidden in the mountains, isolated from the world. For thousands of years they have bred, allowing only the quickest of their children to live. They say you know the passing of ages better than any, sorcerer, so think on it! Thousands of years … Until we, the natural sons of true fathers, have become little more than ch
ildren to them.”

  What followed was too … naked not to be true. The two shadows sitting behind him did not move while he talked, not by the slightest measure. The Scylvendi’s voice was harsh, marred by the guttural cadences of his mother tongue, but he spoke with an eloquence that gave the lie to the severity of his race. He told the story of a boy just outgrowing his native fragility, who found himself captured by the words of a mysterious slave, and led across trackless expanses between sane acts and upright men.

  A story of patricide.

  “I was his accomplice,” the Scylvendi said. Toward the end of his story he had slouched in thought, speaking more and more to his palms, as though each word were a pebble added to a back-breaking load. Suddenly he raised his fists to his temples. “I was his accomplice, but I was not willing!”

  He lowered his forearms to his knees, held his fists out, as though snapping a bone.

  “They see our thoughts through our faces—our hurts, our hopes, our rage, and our passion! Where we guess, they know, the way herdsmen can read the afternoon’s weather in the morning sky … And what men know, men dominate.”

  Somehow it seemed a shaft of light had found his face, so bright was the anguish in his voice. Achamian could hear his tears, his sneering grimace.

  “He chose me. He raised me up, and he shaped me, the way women shape flints to scrape their hides. He used me to kill my father. He used me to secure his escape. He used me …”

  The shadow crossed his fists over his bull chest.

  “Shame! Wutrim kut mi’puru kamuir! I could not stop thinking! I could not stop thinking! I laid eyes upon my degradation, I understood, and I stamped my heart with that understanding!”

  Without realizing, Achamian wrung finger against finger, joint against joint. There was the Scylvendi’s shadow and the pit that was his Chorae. Nothing else existed.

  “He was intellect … He was war! That is what they are! Do you not see? With every heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and whimper when they raise their hands …

  “They make us love! They make us love!”

  Vast was the night. Great was the ground.

  And yet they yielded. They yielded.

  Step-step-leap. Incantations of space. World crossing world.

  The hares darted from his path. The thrushes burst from his feet, hurtling into the stars. The jackals raced at his side, their tongues lolling, their loping limbs tiring.

  “Who are you?” they panted as their hearts failed them.

  “Your master!” cried the godlike man as he outdistanced them. And though humour was unknown to him, he laughed. He laughed until the sky shook.

  Your master.

  How could a heart hold such outrage?

  The sorcerer rocked back and forth in the candlelight, to and fro, muttering, muttering …

  “Back-back … m-must start at beginning …”

  But he could not—no, not yet. Never had he been party to such an exchange. Never had such words been thrown upon the balance of his heart.

  He knew the Scylvendi meant to kill him, his final, greatest student. He knew what the two shadows behind the barbarian had been. As they exited his tent, he had seen her face in a shaft of moonlight, as perfect as that night it had swayed and moaned above him. Serwë …

  You gave him up. The Warrior-Prophet … You told the barbarian where he goes!

  Because he lies! He steals what is ours! What is mine!

  But the world! The world!

  Fie on the world! Let it burn!

  “The beginning!” he cried. Please.

  Before him, spread across his silk bedding, were sheaves of parchment. He dipped his quill in his inkhorn, murmuring, murmuring … Quickly he wrote all the names of all the factions that had so bedevilled him, redrawing the map that had burned in the Sareotic Library.

  He paused over,INRAU

  searching for the memory of his sorrow, struck by remembrances that no longer mattered—or so it seemed. And he shuddered so violently at writing, THE CONSULT

  he was forced to set his quill down and hold his arms tight to his chest.

  You gave him up!

  No! No!

  When he was finished, it seemed he held the very same parchment he had lost, and he pondered the identity of things, the way words did not discriminate between repetitions. They were immortal, and yet they cared.

  With a bold stroke, he crossed out,THE EMPEROR

  and inked,CONPHAS

  underneath, thinking of all the Scylvendi had said regarding the new Emperor, of how even now he marched on the Holy War from the west—or from the sea. “Warn them,” the leering shadow had said. “I would not see Proyas dead.”

  He quickly scratched a welter of new lines, all the connections he had ignored since his abduction by the Scarlet Spires. Then, in a hand too steady to be his own—for he was mad, he knew that now—he wrote,THE DÛNYAIN

  in the open space to the left of,ANASÛRIMBOR KELLHUS

  He held his quill above the ancient word for some time. Two drops of ink—tap-tap—marred the script. He watched them bleed outward, chasing a million infinitesimal veins, obliterating the word.

  And for some reason, that spurred him to write, ANASÛRIMBOR MOËNGHUS

  above. The name, not of Kellhus’s son by Serwë, but of his father—the man who had summoned him to the Three Seas …

  Summoned!

  He dipped his quill into his inkhorn, his hand as light as an apparition. Then, as though crowded forward by dawning apprehension, he slowly wrote,ESMENET

  against the top left margin.

  How had her name become his prayer? Where did she fall in these monstrous events?

  Where was his own name?

  He stared at the completed map, insensible to the passage of time. The Holy War roused about him. Shouts and the chunk-chunk of hooves passed through his tent—passed through him. He had become a ghost that stared and stared, not really pondering but watching, as though the secret lay hidden in the ink’s immobility …

  Men. Schools. Cities. Nations.

  Prophets. Lovers.

  There was no pattern to these breathing things. There was no encompassing thought to give them meaning. Just men and their warring delusions … The world was a corpse.

  Xinemus’s lesson.

  Without knowing why, he began connecting each of the names to,SHIMEH

  where it lay centre bottom. Lines. One after another, drawn to the city that was about to devour so many, guilty and innocent alike. The bloodthirsty city.

  Her name he connected last of all, for he knew she needed Shimeh more than any other—save perhaps himself. Once the black thread was drawn tight, he returned the tip of his quill and drew it out once more. And again. And again. And again. Quicker and quicker. Until he slashed the vellum sheet in a frenzy. Cut after cut after cut—

  For he was sure that his quill had become a knife …

  And that flesh lay beneath the tattooed skin.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SHIMEH

  If war does not kill the woman in us, it kills the man.

  —TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES

  Like so many who undertake arduous journeys, I left a country of wise men and came back to a nation of fools. Ignorance, like time, brooks no return.

  —SOKWË, TEN SEASONS IN ZEÜM

  Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh

  Soundless light broken through beads of dew. Dark canvas faces steaming. Shadows stretching from engines of war, slowly shrinking. Hues of grey bleeding into a panoply of colours. The far tracts of the sea flashing gold.

  Morning. The beginning of the world’s slow bow before the sun.

  Slaves stirred smoke from the firepits, used dried grass to conjure flames from buried coals. The sleepless roused themselves, sat in the chill, watching the twining smoke, disbelieving …

  The fir
st of the horns pealed raw across the distances.

  The day had come. Shimeh awaited, black against a fan of rising light.

  “Your father,” the old man in Gim had rasped, “bids me tell you …”

  Kyudea rose from the pastures like a scattered cairn. Foundations snaked through the grasses. Weathered stone crowned the peaks of rambling mounds. Here and there, toppled columns breached the turf, as though the wrecked city had been swamped by the swells of an earthen sea.

  The Warrior-Prophet wandered the debris, a future mapped with each exhalation. His soul forked into the blackness of possibility, following the calculus of inference and association. Thoughts branching, shoot after shoot, until he filled the immediate world and struck beyond, down into the exhausted soil of the past, out across the ever-receding horizon of the future.

  Cities burned. Entire nations took flight. A whirlwind walked …

  “‘There is but one tree in Kyudea …’”

  Though only dead stone lay scattered about him, Kellhus could see what had come before: the grand processionals, the thronging thoroughfares, the ponderous temples. Kyudea had been as great as Shimeh, if not greater, in the days when the provinces south of the River Sempis had been nations. Now she was mute and fallow, a place for shepherds to shelter their flocks in time of storm.

  Glories had dwelt here once. Now there was nothing. Only overturned stone, the whisk of grasses beneath the wind …

  And answers.

  “‘There is but one tree,’” the old man had said, his voice not his own, “‘and I dwell beneath it.’”