The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

  And Kellhus had struck, cleaving him to the heart.

  He had been used, deceived—all along, from the very beginning … That had been the Scylvendi’s claim.

  “But I’m not like the others!” Achamian had protested. “I don’t believe for my heart’s sake!”

  A shrug of powerful, many-scarred shoulders. “Which is why he would concede you your concerns … make them the ground of an even deeper devotion. Truths are his knives, and we are all of us cut!”

  “What are you saying?”

  Ink-bloodied parchment in hand, Achamian wandered through the camp, pressed through masses of armed and arming Inrithi, neither seeing nor hearing those who bowed and addressed him as “Holy Tutor.” He passed from the radial avenues of the Conriyan encampment to more haphazard ones of the Tydonni. He saw an armoured man, an aging Meigeirish knight, his beard long and grey, on his knees before the smoking pit of his fire.

  “Take my hand,” Achamian heard the man sing, “and kneel before …”

  Without warning, the knight opened his eyes, glared at him even as he wiped away his tears. The ensuing verse, He who raises light …, seemed to hang unsung in the air between them. Then he turned, angrily collected his weapons and gear. Horns brayed in the morning distance.

  “Take My Hand” … One of a hundred hymns to the Warrior-Prophet, most of which Achamian knew by heart.

  He gazed down the length of the congested avenue, saw others kneeling, some alone, others in groups of two or three. Where the avenue curved out of sight, he could see a Judge exhort dozens of penitents. Everywhere he looked he saw Circumfixes, painted across kite-shields, wired into necklaces, embroidered across chests and high banners. The entire world seemed to rumble with devotion.

  How had this happened?

  What Kellhus had said in the Apple Garden was true: to kneel low before the God was to stand high among the fallen. The servants of an absent king invariably ruled in his stead. “What I do,” the pious said, “I do for Him,” calling on writs so ancient, so metaphoric, that any hatred or conceit could be interpreted into them. It was as though what transcended, what stood outside the dim and slovenly circle of this life, was nothing more than a sheath hidden beyond the horizon. One needed only reach out to draw weapons …

  Kneeling! What was it but another outrageous gluttony? Who begrudged sweets when flesh so soon would be served? Even the world found itself on the table, its clamour become music, its caprice become courses served for the sake of the pious alone. Everything was for them.

  And the others? They need only beg.

  “What are you saying?” he had cried to the Scylvendi.

  “That even you, the proud naysayer, are his slave. That he hunches at the springs of your every thought, draws you as water to his cup.”

  “But my soul is my own!”

  Laughter, dark and guttural and vicious, as though all sufferers, in the end, were no more than fools.

  “He prizes no thought higher.”

  Achamian had found certainty in Kellhus, despite losing Esmenet to him. He’d even made his torment into a kind of proof. So long as his charge pained him, he told himself, it must be real. He did not, as so many did, believe for flattery’s sake. Seswatha’s Dreams assured that his importance would be more a thing of terror than pride. And his redemption had been a thing too … abstract.

  To love one who had wronged him—that was his test! And he had been rooted—so rooted …

  Now everything toppled, hurtled across steepening moments in an avalanche of hungers and hatreds, rushing toward … toward …

  Shimeh.

  He knew not what.

  “Truths are his knives, and we are all of us cut …”

  What was happening?

  To know anything was to know, in some measure, where one stood. Small wonder he clutched his chest for fear of falling, even here on the wide ground of Shairizor—in the long shadow of Shimeh.

  “Ask yourself, sorcerer … What do you have that he hasn’t taken?”

  He had much preferred his damnation.

  The fires along the walls of Shimeh dulled in dawn’s early light. Soon they were little more than orange smears between the battlements.

  The Fanim upon the walls stared out in wonder across the fields. The impossible sight of the four siege-towers, two to either side of the Massus Gate, had dismayed them, for everyone had agreed it would take the idolaters weeks to prepare any assault. Now they watched at the strange formations gathering before the gate proper. Most of them were conscripts, armed with tools or relics of forgotten wars, but some two thousand survivors of the long backward battle from Mengedda stood among them, and even they were perplexed by the idolaters. Their lord, Hamjirani, was called to the turrets so that he might see for himself. For some time he argued with lesser Grandees, only to finally withdraw in disgust.

  Arrayed across the slopes of the Juterum, the Hill of Ascension, the heathen drummers began beating their skins. As though in reply, Inrithi horns brayed loud, hanging for the length of a man’s lungs.

  Opposite the gate the Fanim called Pujkar and the Inrithi called Massus, small clots of men began advancing over the fields. Across the walls, men cried out for their officers, assuming the idolaters sought to parley. But the nobles among their number shouted them down. Archers were called to the ready.

  Spread out across a hundred or more yards, the formations approached, some forty of them, each some ten paces from the others, and consisting, the defenders could now see, of six men—five abreast and one back, garbed in crimson beneath silver corselets. Small pennants fluttered from a horn set into their battlecaps, a different colour and sign adorning each cadre. All their faces were painted white, as was the manner of the Ainoni in war. The outermost men bore heavy crossbows, as did a lone man who trailed in the rear. Two like-armoured men marched on the inside of the flanking crossbowmen, bearing immense basketwork shields that almost entirely obscured them from anything but the most extreme angles. Save shadows, not much could be seen of the figures who marched between and behind the shields.

  The more ignorant among the watching Fanim began jeering, but a whisper circulated among them, passing from ear to ear until all was rigid silence. A single Kianene word that even the most ignorant of the Amoti knew and feared: qurraj …

  Sorcerer.

  As though answering a pause in conversation, an otherworldly chorus droned out from the approaching formations, not so much through the air as under the scorched crops and razed structures, and up through the bones of Shimeh’s mighty curtain wall. The engines cast the first of the firepots. Eruptions of liquid flame revealed the Wards curving about each cadre. A cloud swallowed the sunlight, and as one the defenders saw the foundations of spectral towers.

  True horror struck them then. Where were Indara’s Water-bearers?

  Those Fanim who tried to run were cut down by their own officers. The unholy chorus grew louder. The forward cadres halted some fifty lengths from the ramparts. The odd panicked arrow winked into smoke against their Wards. Columns of foot soldiers streamed forward between the cadres. To the rear of the formations, out of bowshot, several solitary figures stepped into air, their crimson gowns flapping, their eyes and mouths shining bright.

  There was a collective intake of breath along the battlements …

  Then glittering light.

  The great siege-tower Proyas’s men called Tippytoes groaned and creaked as the oxen and slaves pressed it forward across the fields. As the construction neared completion the previous dusk, Ingiaban had wondered aloud whether the siege-tower—which had been constructed to breach Gerotha’s walls—would be tall enough “to give Shimeh’s towers a kiss.” With typical wit Gaidekki had replied that “she need only stand on her tippytoes.” Somehow the name had stuck.

  The great structure dipped and righted itself. Standing upon its packed crown, Proyas tightened an already white-knuckled grip on the railing. Men shouted, both about him and throughout the floors b
elow. The crack of whips rose from behind. Before him, he could see the siege-tower’s path marked in the raw dirt the sappers had used to level the irrigation ditches runnelling the fields. At the track’s end, the white-and-ochre walls of Shimeh waited, their heights bristling with heathen men and heathen spears.

  To his left, Tippytoes’ counterpart, which the men had come to call Sister, lumbered forward as well, matching their progress. Taller than most any tree, she had been sheathed in mats of sodden seaweed, so that she seemed something otherworldly, a limbless beast. Hatches had been propped open along each of her six floors, behind which, Proyas knew, dozens of ballistae stood cocked and waiting, prepared to rake the parapets of the Tatokar Walls as soon as they entered range. The carpenter-overseers who had directed the assembly of both towers swore they were miracles of engineering—as they should be, given that the Warrior-Prophet had designed them.

  Tippytoes teetered and advanced, her axles and joints screaming. The white-tiled walls and their giant eyes loomed closer …

  Please God, Proyas found himself praying, let this one thing be!

  The first of the stones arced toward them, flung by great engines hidden in the city. They fell wide, thumping into the earth short of their positions, but there was something surreal about watching them, as though the soul refused to believe weights so great could be cast so high. Men hollered in warning. A missile whooshed over them—close enough to touch! It missed, but crashed with deadly effect into the long train that drove them forward. Tippytoes lurched still for a moment, long enough for Sister to pull ahead. Proyas could see her runged backside, which was naught but a giant ladder. Then Tippytoes heaved forward again.

  Count-Palatine Gaidekki suddenly appeared among the men crowding the rear of Sister’s top platform, his dark face beaming.

  “Glory goes to the fleet of foot!” he cried. “We’ll wash up the blood so you don’t slip when you arrive!”

  Though teeth remained clenched, all laughed, and a number began shouting for more speed. The laughter redoubled when a near hit forced Gaidekki and his men to fairly dive.

  Then the first of the lights flashed about Massus Gate, and all heads turned. It seemed they could hear screams …

  Even if sorcery was no longer anathema, few men among the pious—especially among the Conriyans—wished to follow the Scarlet Spires anywhere, let alone to Holy Shimeh. Proyas watched numb as great gouts of flame washed across the barbicans …

  There was a chorus of plank-muffled shouts from directly beneath him, followed by a staccato snap, as though someone had broken a dozen twigs over his knee. Iron-tipped bolts whirred out from the ballistae arrayed behind the hatches below him, fanned across the teeming parapets. Moments later, Sister responded in kind. Save for those that exploded in small ceramic showers against the wall, the missiles seemed to vanish into the defenders crowding the battlements.

  “Shields!” Proyas cried, not because they would help against the heathen artillery, but because they had come within extreme bow range.

  Something dimmed the morning sun … Clouds?

  The first hail of arrows fell upon them and those heaving them forward.

  “Fire!” Proyas cried to the archers about him. “Clear the walls!”

  The Massus Gate had become a mad play of lights in his periphery. But there was no time to watch. With every heartbeat, the unblinking eyes of Shimeh’s walls drew closer and the air grew thicker with missiles. When he dared lower his shield, he could discern individual heathen in the bristling mass of defenders. He glimpsed one old man, a kettle bound to his head, taken in the throat by a bolt and carried backward into the city. Flaming pots crashed about the towers. Two smashed into the side of Sister, flinging burning tar across the seaweed. Suddenly smoke wreathed every sight, and the roar of fire bloated every sound. There was a crack and a concussion that brought all of them to their knees. One of the mighty stones had found its target. But miraculously, Tippytoes groaned onward. The floor beneath Proyas heaved like the deck of a ship. He hunched under his shield. The archers about him nocked, stood, fired, then crouched to nock once again. Every second man, it seemed, fell backward, swatting at a jutting shaft. The knights dragged them, dropped them over the side to make room for the others surging up from the lower floors. There was a roar, then a titanic clacking of stones that could only come from the Massus Gate. But a chorus of shrieks drew his attention to his left, to Sister, where a pot had exploded across the upper deck. Burning knights dove, heedless of the height, crashed onto their comrades below.

  “Gaidekki!” Proyas screamed across the interval. “Gaidekki!”

  The Count-Palatine’s scowling face appeared between the timber hoardings, and Proyas actually smiled, despite the arrows buzzing between them. Then Gaidekki was gone. Proyas slipped to his knees, blinking against the image of the man’s neck and shoulders snapping about an unstoppable stone.

  The sky blackened. Closer and closer the siege-towers lumbered, though Sister had become a shining inferno. Then there were the white-tiled walls, close enough to hit with thrown clothing, crammed with arms and howling faces. Proyas could see a great eye opening across the white-tiled planes below, glimpse the wide expanse of street and structure reaching out to the Sacred Heights. There! There! There was the First Temple!

  Shimeh! he thought. Shimeh!

  Proyas lowered his silver war-mask, glimpsed his stooped kinsmen doing the same. The flying bridge dropped, its iron hooks biting the battlements. Tippytoes was tall enough to kiss after all.

  Crying out to Prophet and God, the Crown Prince leapt into the swords of his enemy …

  The tree could not be missed.

  It stood at the edge of a greater hill near the heart of the debris fields, the twin of black Umiaki in girth and height. Its great tendons were stripped of their bark, and its limbs reached into the air like winding tusks.

  Climbing the remnants of a monumental stair set into the hillside, Kellhus soon found himself beneath its massive sinews. Beyond the tree, upturned blocks and rows of headless pillars stretched across the levelled summit. Save in the direction of Shimeh, where the ground had given way altogether, paving stones encircled the tree’s base, rising and cracking about the immense roots.

  He placed a hand against the immovable trunk, ran his fingertips across the lines that scored its surface. The spoor of old worms. He paused where the ground sheered away, staring at the black clouds that had accumulated on the horizon—above Shimeh. It seemed he could hear the thrum of distant thunder. Then he lowered himself over the fall, using exposed roots to anchor his descent.

  Sheets of gravel clattered across the slopes below.

  He found his footing. Above him, the tree soared, its trunk smooth and phallic, its boughs curved like canines, reaching far into the airy heights. Before him, roots twined like cuttlefish limbs. At some point—many years ago, from the look of the hatchet work—an opening had been hacked through them. Peering into the excavated gloom, Kellhus saw the lines of stonework, stairs dropping into blackness …

  He pressed his way forward, descended into the belly of the hillside.

  Holding out his hand to alert Serwë and her brother, Cnaiür reined his stolen horse to a hard stop. Four vultures took soundlessly to the sky. On the slopes of a neighbouring rise, five saddled but riderless horses momentarily raised their heads, then continued grazing.

  The three of them had paused on a low rise overlooking the carnage. The Betmulla Mountains rose grey and hunched in the distances before them—and there was still no sign of Kyudea, though Serwë insisted they followed the Dûnyain’s path exactly. She could smell him, she said.

  Cnaiür dismounted, strode into the midst of the sprawled bodies. He hadn’t slept for days, but the exhaustion that buzzed through his limbs seemed an abstract thing, as easily ignored as a philosopher’s argument. Ever since his discussion with the Mandate sorcerer, a strange intensity had seized him—a vigour he could only identify with hate.

  �
��He goes to Kyudea,” the fat fool had finally said.

  “Kyudea?”

  “Yes, Shimeh’s ruined sister. It lies to the southwest, near the headwaters of the Jeshimal.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “No one knows … Most think he goes to speak with the God.”

  “Why do they think that?”

  “Because he said he goes to his father’s house.”

  “Kidruhil,” Cnaiür called back, identifying the dead. “Likely hunting us.”

  He stared at the tracks across the ground, then stooped to examine several of the corpses. He pressed knuckles against the cheek of one, gauging its warmth. The skin-spies watched impassively, stared with unnerving directness as he walked back and remounted his horse.

  “The Dûnyain surprised them,” he said.

  How many seasons had he pined for this moment? How many thoughts scattered and broken?

  I shall kill them both.

  “Are you sure it was him?” her brother asked. “We smell others … Fanim.”

  Cnaiür nodded and spat. “It’s him,” he said with weary disgust. “Only one had time to draw his weapon.”

  War, she realized—war had given the world to men.

  They had fallen to their knees before her, the Men of the Tusk. They had beseeched her for her blessing. “Shimeh,” one man had cried. “I go to die for Shimeh!” And Esmenet did, though she felt foolish and so very far from the idol they seemed to make of her; she blessed them, saying words that would give them the certainty they so desperately needed—to die or to kill. In a voice she knew so well—at once soothing and provoking—she repeated something she had heard Kellhus say: “Those who do not fear death live forever.” She held their cheeks and smiled, though her heart was filled with rot.

  How they had thronged about her! Their arms and armour clattering. All of them reaching, aching for her touch, much as they had in her previous life.