The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

  And then they left her with the slaves and the ill.

  The Whore of Sumna, some had called her, but in tones of exaltation, not condemnation, as though only by falling so far could one be raised so high. She found herself thinking of her namesake from The Chronicle of the Tusk, Esmenet, wife of Angeshraël, daughter of Shamanet. Was that her fate, to be a reference buried among holy articles? Would they call her Esmenet-allikal, or “Esmenet-the-other,” the way The Tractate distinguished those with namesakes from the Tusk? Or would she simply be the Prophet-Consort …

  The Whore of Sumna.

  The sky darkened, and the murderous roar swelled on the morning breeze. At long last it was happening … and she could not bear it. She could not bear it.

  Ignoring several entreaties to go watch the assault from the edge of the encampment, she returned to the Umbilica. It was deserted save for a handful of slaves gathered about their breakfast fires. Only one of the Hundred Pillars—a Galeoth with a bandaged thigh—stood guard. He bowed low and stiff as she barged past him into the closeted murk of the interior. She called out twice as she walked the tapestried halls, received no reply. All was quiet, still. The clamour of the Holy War seemed impossibly distant, as though she listened to another world through the joints of this one. Eventually she found herself in the dead Padirajah’s bedchamber, staring at the great gilded bed where she and Kellhus slept and coupled. She piled her books and scrolls on it, then, crawling across the covers, surrounded herself with them. Rather than read, she touched, savoured their smooth and dry surfaces. Some she held until they became as warm as her skin. Then, for no reason she could fathom, she counted them, like a child jealous of her toys.

  “Twenty-seven,” she said to no one. Distant sorceries cracked faraway air, made the gold and glass settings hum with their rumble.

  Twenty-seven doors opened, and not one way out.

  “Esmi,” a hoarse voice said.

  For a moment she refused to look up. She knew who it was. Even more, she knew what he looked like: the desolate eyes, the haggard posture, even the way his thumb combed the hair across his knuckles … It seemed a wonder that so much could be hidden in a voice, and an even greater wonder that she alone could see.

  Her husband. Drusas Achamian.

  “Come,” he said, casting a nervous glance about the room. He did not trust this place. “Please … come with me.”

  Through the canvas warren, she could hear Moënghus’s infant wail. She blinked tears and nodded.

  Always following.

  Screams. Men combusting, burning like autumnal leaves, trailing oily ribbons of black. Thunder upon thunder, a chorus roaring at depths only the shivering stone could hear. Those cringing along the inner base of the fortifications saw the shadows of battlements flicker across the nearby tenements.

  The heads of ghost dragons reared from the forward Scarlet Cadres, then like dogs straining for their master’s hand, they bent forward and vomited incendiary streams. Fire gushed up across masonry, orange and gold in the gloom, blazing between crenellations, swirling down stair and ramp, rolling over men and transforming them into flailing shadows.

  Within heartbeats, the Fanim packed across the barbican and adjacent walls ceased to exist. Stone cracked, exploded. The bastions of the gate buckled, and men winced, as though watching knees fold backward. The towers leaned out through the smoke, then dropped into obscurity. A great hemisphere of dust and debris rolled out and over the sorcerers and their unearthly song.

  At long last, the Scarlet Spires marched.

  Kellhus climbed through deeper ruins.

  At the base of the stair he found a lantern made of horn and translucent paper—something neither Kianene nor Nilnameshi in manufacture. When ignited, it cast a diffuse orange glow …

  The halls were not human.

  The drafts came to him, murmuring their secrets. His soul reached out, calculating probabilities, transforming inferences into space. About him, the galleries scrawled on and on into the immured blackness.

  So like the Thousand Thousand Halls … So like Ishuäl.

  Kellhus forged ahead, the scattered detritus cracking beneath his feet. He watched the walls resolve from cold blackness, studied the mad detail that thronged across them. Statuary, not reliefs, had been carved into them: figures no taller than his knee, posed in narratives that outran the light of his lantern, and stacked one atop another, even across the vaulted ceiling, so that it seemed he walked through stone grille work. He paused, held his lantern before a string of naked figures raising spears against a lion, then realized that another frieze had been carved behind this first. Peering through miniature limbs, he saw deeper, more licentious representations, depicting all manner of poses and penetrations.

  The work of Nonmen.

  A trail had been scuffed across the hide of ancient dust—and by someone, Kellhus realized, who possessed a stride and gait identical to his own. Following it, he pressed deeper into the derelict mansion, knowing that he walked in his father’s very footsteps. After descending several hundred paces, he entered a domed vestibule where the renderings across the walls were chiselled large as life but continued telling the same twofold tale of martial exploit and priapic excess. Copper bands, their bright green bleeding into the limestone, had been set into the walls, bearing a strange wedge script. But whether they were benedictions, explanations, or recitations of some hallowed text, Kellhus could not say. He knew only that the inhabitants of this place had celebrated deeds in all their ambivalent complexity, rather than—as was the wont of Men—reproducing only flattering surfaces.

  Ignoring the alternate passages, Kellhus continued following the track through the dust. It wound deep into the abandoned labyrinth, always descending. Save for the pitted remains of bronze arms, he found no artifacts, only chamber after florid chamber, each as ornate as the last. He passed through a vast library where scroll-racks towered higher than his lantern light could reach, and where queues and twining stairs—all exquisitely carved from living rock—loomed from the darkness as though from the ocean deeps. He did not pause, though he held out his lantern to each room he passed by or through: infirmaries, granaries, barracks, and personal apartments—warrens of them. Everything he saw, he pondered, knowing he understood nothing of the souls for whom these things were natural and immediate.

  He pondered four thousand years of absolute dark.

  He crossed a vast processional gallery where sculptured events spilled from the walls, epic scenes of strife and passion: nude penitents prostrate before the court of a Nonman King, warriors striving against mobs of Sranc or Men. Though Moënghus’s trail often passed through these grand dioramas, Kellhus found himself walking around—heeding some voice from nowhere. Towering columns soared into the darkness, worked with arms gripping arms, twining upward and around, squared with bent-back wrists and open hands that cast the shadow of fingers. The ceilings remained cloaked in black obscurity. The silence was that of mighty hollows, at once oppressive and fragile, as though the clatter of a single stone might thunder.

  Upraised palms braced his every step. Blank eyes studied his every angle. The Nonmen who had authored this place had possessed more than a fascination with the living form; it had been their obsession. Everywhere, they had cut their image into the dead stone about them, transforming the suffocating weights that hemmed them in into extensions of themselves. And Kellhus realized: the mansion itself had been their devotional work—their Temple. Unlike Men, these Nonmen had not rationed their worship. They did not distinguish between prayer and speech, idol and statue …

  Which spoke to their terror.

  Collapsing possibilities with every step, Anasûrimbor Kellhus followed his father’s trail into the blackness, his lantern raised to the issue of artisans, ancient and inhuman.

  Where are you taking me?

  Nowhere … Nowhere good.

  He said nothing as he led her through the encampment, away from Shimeh, toward the greening heights to the w
est. She too said nothing, and spent much of the journey watching the grass stain the toes of her white silk slippers. She even made a game of it, kicking through the tangle of blades and stalks purposefully. Once she even wandered to her right so that she might walk across untrod ground, and for a moment it almost seemed they were Achamian and Esmenet once again, condemned and derided rather than exalted or revered. The sorcerer and his melancholy whore. She even dared clutch his chill hand.

  What harm could come of it?

  Please … keep walking. Let us flee this place!

  Only when they passed through the final battery of tents did she actually notice him, the forward-fixed eyes misted by inscrutable thoughts, the strong jaw working beneath the plaits of his beard. They began climbing—toward the very gutted mausoleum where she had found Kellhus the night previous.

  It seemed different in daylight, somehow. The walls …

  “You never came to Zin’s funeral,” he finally said.

  She squeezed his hand. “I couldn’t bear to.” Her voice faltered, speaking the words. They seemed cruel, horribly so, despite what she herself had suffered the night the Marshal of Attrempus died.

  His only friend.

  “Was the fire bright?” she asked. The customary question.

  He climbed several more steps, his sandalled feet swishing through yellow-blooming bitterweed. Several bees spun in angry circles, buzzing through the thunder that rumbled across the distances—the clamour of battle. Through some trick of sound, the faint raving of one man floated to the fore, at once hoarse and metallic.

  “The fire was bright.”

  The bricked ruin rose before them, its foundations ringed with thronging sumac and weeds. Poplars shot young and straight from the interior, brushing the highest of the truncated walls with their branches. She wondered at details that had escaped her in the gloom with Kellhus. At the webbed nest of caterpillars bobbing in the breeze. At the ovals which might once have been faces, set into the eastward walls.

  What am I doing?

  For an absurd instant she found herself fearing for her life. Many men would have murdered her for crimes she had committed … What about Achamian? Could loss have unearthed such a man within him? But then, unaccountably, she was angry at the way he had yielded her. You should have fought for me!

  “Why are we here, Akka?”

  Oblivious to her mad thoughts, he turned with one arm held wide, as though boasting of hard-won lands.

  “I wanted you to see this,” he said.

  Following his hand, she looked out across the encampment, whose tent-enclosed avenues wheeled out in broken seashell patterns, over the razed groves, fields, and buildings of the intervening ground. And there it was, scored by pluming smoke, motionless and gloomy beneath the preternatural dark of the sky … Shimeh.

  From their seaward faces the Tatokar Walls wound white as teeth about the warren of street and structure that engulfed the heights of the Juterum. Both the ground and the parapets winked with flashing arms. The two siege-towers given to Proyas were pressed against the ramparts, surrounded by lines and squares of men. The northern one burned like a miniature paper votive. A great pillar of smoke rose from what had been the Massus Gate, leaning low over the city, its nethers burnished by the wicked glare of sorceries. To either side, several of the great eyes had been broken, and the towers appeared abandoned. Farther to the south, on the far side of the ruined aqueduct, the two siege-towers given to Chinjosa had also reached the walls, and dark masses of Ainoni teemed about their bases, queuing to climb their runged backs.

  And in the near distance, clear through passing sheets of smoke, stood the First Temple.

  She raised a balled fist to her brow. Perhaps it was some trick of scale or perspective, but it all seemed so slow, as though it happened through water—or something more viscous than human understanding.

  Nevertheless, it happened …

  “We’ve gained the heights,” she said—a murmur that somehow became a cry. “The city is ours!” She turned to Achamian, who seemed to watch with the same horror and wonder—awe—that numbed her expression.

  “Akka … Can’t you see? Shimeh falls! Shimeh falls!”

  There had been so much in these words—far more than fervour, far more than the tears that clotted her eyes. Love. Rape and revelation. Disease, starvation, and massacre. Everything they had survived. Everything she had endured.

  But he shook his head, his eyes still fixed on the vista before them. “It’s all a lie.”

  Horns pealed to the lowing clouds.

  “What?”

  He turned to her, his look possessed by a terrifying blankness. She recognized it, for the same blankness had owned her eyes the night he had returned to Caraskand.

  “The Scylvendi came to me last night.”

  Fanim drums throbbed. The clouds continued to darken, answering to the Cishaurim and their malevolent will.

  Urged on by the cries of their Captains, phalanxes of Javreh charged the slopes, clambered across the heaped ruin of the Massus Gate, then sprinted into the towering veils of smoke that slowly drifted across the city. The first of the Scarlet Cadres followed, picking their way forward carefully, keeping their sorcerers shielded at all times.

  The outlines of the surviving walls resolved from the haze, and as the formations passed beneath them, geysers of glittering fire reached up to lave their heights. More stonework came tumbling to ground. The world itself seemed to mutter curses.

  Sarothenes was the first of the Scarlet Schoolmen to set foot in Shimeh, followed by Ptarramas the Older and Ti, who, despite his great age, continually scolded his Javreh for their sloth. Before them loomed a warren of alleyways and buildings that stretched to the foot of the Juterum. Their Javreh pickets fanned out in their hundreds, cutting down hapless Amoti, sifting through the buildings. Screams pealed out from hidden places.

  Ptarramas the Older was the first to die, struck in the shoulder by a Chorae as he pressed his cadre forward. He fell to the street, cracked like statuary. Bellowing arcana, Ti sent flocks of burning sparrows into the black windows of the adjacent tenement. Explosions spit blood and debris across the street. Then, from the ruins of the outer wall, Inrûmmi struck the building’s westward face with brilliant lightning. The air cracked. Burnt brick walls sloughed to the ground. In an exposed room, a burning figure stumbled over the lip of the floor and plummeted to the ruin below.

  Sheltered by his Javreh and their wide shields, Eleäzaras gained the summit of the ruined Massus, surveyed his cadres deploying before him. He leaned against the iron prongs jutting from the debris at his feet—the remains of the portcullis. Though he couldn’t see Ptarramas, he knew that something had already happened.

  They had hoped to draw the Snakeheads out in a decisive engagement, but Seokti was too canny. The Shigeki fiend, it appeared, hoped to bleed them. Pick them off one by one.

  Eleäzaras looked across the maze of structures before him, the welter of walls and rooftops extending to the slopes of the Juterum and marble bastions of the First Temple upon its summit. He could sense the Chorae out there, buried in cellars, crouched in lethal vantages, waiting …

  Everywhere. Hidden enemies.

  Too much … too many.

  “Fire cleanses!” he cried. “Raze it! Burn it all to ash!”

  The long-awaited horns sounded, a coarse peal over the throb of heathen drums. Towering amid his shield-brothers, Yalgrota Sranchammer raised his axe to the darkling sky, howled bloodthirsty oaths to Gilgaöl—mighty War. His kinsmen answered with raucous shouts. Then the Thunyeri surged into the Scarlet Schoolmen’s wake, racing over the smoking ruins of the Massus Gate. Shattered tile cracked beneath their booted feet.

  To their north, Proyas and his Conriyans battled across the parapets. Of their two siege-towers, one had been lost to inferno, but hundreds clambered up the back of the other, dashing through arrows to reinforce their Prince. To their south, Chinjosa and his Ainoni watched with amazement as the F
anim defenders fled the ponderous approach of their two siege-towers. Bellicose Uranyanka and his Moserothi would be the first of their number to set foot upon the Tatokar Walls.

  The black-armoured Thunyeri spilled unopposed into the city. Prince Hulwarga and Earl Goken struck south, leading the Skagwi and the wild-haired Auglishmen into the unruined streets behind the Ainoni section of the wall. Earl Ganbrota, meanwhile, drove north with his Ingraulish, their shields adorned with shrunken heads. The east they left to the Scarlet Gurwikka and their dark-skinned slaves.

  Soon the Kianene and Amoti were dissolving in panic. Everywhere they looked, they saw chain-armoured myriads, loosed like blond wolves into the streets.

  The lantern faltered, and for a moment Kellhus cradled it as though trying to coax it to life with the fire of his own body. With a final hiss, it faded into nothing.

  But that was not the end of light. He saw the faintest of glimmers off to his right, toward the sound of booming water. Rather than use any Cant that might announce his presence, he continued in blackness.

  The sound grew more and more thunderous as he followed the pitch hallway. A fine mist sheened his skin, matted his hair and robe. The light grew more and more distinct: orange shining across the black of wet stone. Twice he stooped, drew his fingers across the floor to ensure that he still followed his father’s trail.

  The hallway opened onto a balcony that overlooked a vast cavern. At first all he could discern were the mighty curtains of water tumbling from abyssal blackness, and on such a scale that the flooring beneath him seemed to float upward. Then he noticed the points of light below, several of them, arrayed across a platform beyond the waterfalls’ reach, and reflected in the oily surface of some kind of pool. Braziers, he realized, dim-burning because of the sodden air.

  Father?