The Thousandfold Thought Page 4

  He names his followers the Zaudunyani, the “Tribe of Truth.”

  But now he faces an added danger. As the numbers of Zaudunyani swell, so too do the misapprehensions of the Great Names. For many, following the dictates of a living—as opposed to a long-dead—prophet proves too much. Ikurei Conphas becomes the de facto leader of the Orthodox, those Men of the Tusk who repudiate Kellhus and his revisionary Inrithism. Even Proyas finds himself increasingly troubled.

  The Consult, as well, have been watching Kellhus with growing trepidation. In the confusion of Caraskand’s fall, Sarcellus leads several of his brother skin-spies in an assassination attempt that very nearly costs Kellhus his life. Knowing that it might prove useful, Kellhus saves one of their severed heads.

  Shortly after this attempt, Kellhus is finally contacted by one of his father’s agents: a Cishaurim fleeing the Scarlet Spires. He tells Kellhus that he follows the Shortest Path, and that soon he will comprehend something called the Thousandfold Thought. Kellhus has innumerable questions, but it is too late: the Scarlet Spires approach. To avoid compromising his position, Kellhus beheads the man.

  When the Padirajah arrives and seals the Holy War up within Caraskand, the situation becomes even more dire. According to Conphas and the Orthodox, the God punishes the Men of the Tusk for following a False Prophet. To defuse their threat, Kellhus plots the assassination of both Conphas and Sarcellus. Neither attempt succeeds, and General Martemus, Conphas’s closest adviser, is killed.

  The dilemma now facing Kellhus is almost insuperable. The Holy War starves. The Zaudunyani and the Orthodox stand upon the brink of open war. And the Padirajah continues to assail Caraskand’s walls. For the first time, Kellhus is confronted by circumstances he cannot master.

  He sees only one possible way to unify the Holy War under his leadership: he must let the Men of the Tusk condemn him and Serwë, and trust that Cnaiür, driven to avenge Serwë, will save him. Only a dramatic reversal and vindication can possibly win over the Orthodox in time.

  He must make a leap of faith.

  Serwë is executed, and Kellhus is bound to her naked corpse. Then he is lashed to a circumfix and hung from a great tree to die of exposure. Visions of the No-God plague him, as does Serwë pressed dead against him. Never has he suffered so …

  For the first time, Anasûrimbor Kellhus weeps.

  Achamian comes to him wild with rage because of Esmenet. Kellhus tells him about the skin-spies, about his visions of the impending Apocalypse.

  Then, miraculously, he is cut down, and he knows that at last the Holy War is his, and that they will have the ardour and conviction they need to overcome the Padirajah.

  Standing before the exultant masses, he grasps the Thousandfold Thought.

  THE FINAL MARCH

  CHAPTER ONE

  CARASKAND

  My heart shrivels even as my intellect bristles. Reasons—I find myself desperate for reasons. Sometimes I think every word written is written for shame.

  —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

  Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Enathpaneah

  There had been a time, for Achamian, when the future had been a habit, something belonging to the hard rhythm of his days toiling in his father’s shadow. His fingers had stung in the morning, his back had burned in the afternoon. The fish had flashed silver in the sunlight. Tomorrow became today, and today became yesterday, as though time were little more than gravel rolled in a barrel, forever brightening what was the same. He expected only what he’d already endured, prepared only for what had already happened. His past had enslaved his future. Only the size of his hands had seemed to change.

  But now …

  Breathless, Achamian walked across the rooftop garden of Proyas’s compound. The night sky was clear. The constellations glittered against the black: Uroris rising in the east, the Flail descending to the west. The encircling heights of the Bowl reared across the distance, a riot of blue structures pricked by distant points of torchlight. Hoots and cries floated up from the streets below, sounding at once melancholy and besotted with joy.

  Against all reason, the Men of the Tusk had triumphed over the heathen. Caraskand was a great Inrithi city once again.

  Achamian pressed through a hedge of junipers, fouled his smock in the sharp branches. The garden was largely dead, the ground rutted and overturned during the height of the hunger. He stepped across a dusty gutter, then stomped about, making a carpet of grasses gone to hay. He knelt, still searching for his breath.

  The fish were gone. His palms no longer bled when he clenched his fists in the morning. And the future had been … unleashed.

  “I am,” he murmured through clenched teeth, “a Mandate Schoolman.”

  The Mandate. How long since he had last spoken to them? Since it was he who travelled, the onus was on him to maintain contact. His failure to do so for so long would strike them as an unfathomable dereliction. They would think him mad. They would demand of him impossible things. And then, tomorrow …

  It always came back to tomorrow.

  He closed his eyes and intoned the first words. When he opened them, he saw the pale circle of light they cast about his knees, the shadows of grass combed through grass. A beetle scrambled through the chiaroscuro, mad to escape his sorcerous aspect. He continued speaking, his soul bending to the sounds, giving inner breath to the Abstractions, to thoughts that were not his own, to meanings that limned the world to its foundation. Without warning, the ground seemed to pitch, then suddenly here was no longer here, but everywhere. The beetle, the grasses, even Caraskand fell away.

  He tasted the dank air of Atyersus, the great fortress of the School of Mandate, through the lips of another … Nautzera.

  The fetor of brine and rot tugged vomit to the back of his throat. Surf crashed. Black waters heaved beneath a darkling sky. Terns hung like miracles in the distance.

  No … not here.

  He knew this place well enough for terror to loosen his bowels. He gagged at the smell, covered his mouth and nose, turned to the fortifications … He stood upon the top tier of a timber scaffold. A shroud of sagging corpses loomed over him, to the limits of his periphery.

  Dagliash.

  From the base of the walls to the battlements, wherever the fortress’s ramparts faced the sea, countless thousands had been nailed across every surface: here a flaxen-maned warrior struck down in his prime, there an infant pinned through the mouth like a laurel. Fishing nets had been cast and fixed about them—to keep their rotting ligature intact, Achamian supposed. The netting sagged near the wall’s base, bellied by an accumulation of skulls and other human detritus. Innumerable terns and crows, even several gannets, darted and wheeled about the macabre jigsaw; it seemed he remembered them most of all.

  Achamian had dreamed of this place many times. The Wall of the Dead, where Seswatha, captured after the fall of Trysë, had been tacked to ponder the glory of the Consult.

  Nautzera hung immediately before him, suspended by nails through his thighs and forearms, naked save for the Agonic Collar about his throat. He seemed scarcely conscious.

  Achamian clutched shaking hands, squeezed them bloodless. Dagliash had been a great sentinel once, staring across the wastes of Agongorea toward Golgotterath, her turrets manned by the hard-hearted men of Aörsi. Now she was but a way station of the world’s ruin. Aörsi was dead, her people extinct, and the great cities of Kûniüri were little more than gutted shells. The Nonmen had fled to their mountain fastnesses, and the remaining High Norsirai nations—Eämnor and Akksersia—battled for their very lives.

  Three years had passed since the advent of the No-God. Achamian could feel him, a looming across the western horizon. A sense of doom.

  A gust buffeted him with cold spray.

  Nautzera … it’s me! Ach—

  A harrowing cry cut him short. He actually crouched, though he knew no harm could befall him, peered in the direction of the sound. He gripped the bloodstained t
imber.

  On a different brace of scaffolding farther down the fortifications, a Bashrag stooped over a thrashing shadow. Long black hair streamed from the fist-sized moles that pocked its massive frame. A vestigial face grimaced from each of its great and brutal cheeks. Without warning, it stood—each leg three legs welded together, each arm three arms—and hoisted a pale figure over the heights: a man hanging from a nail as long as a spear. For a moment the wretch kicked air like a child drawn from the tub, then the Bashrag thrust him against the husk of corpses. Wielding an immense hammer, the monstrosity began battering the nail, searching for unseen mortises. More cries pealed across the heights. The Bashrag clacked its teeth in ecstasy.

  Immobilized, Achamian watched the Bashrag raise a second nail to the man’s pelvis. The wails became raving shrieks. Then a shadow fell across the sorcerer. “Anguish,” a deep voice said, as close as a whisper in his ear.

  Intake of breath, sharp and sudden. The incongruent taste of warm Caraskandi air …

  For an instant his Cant faltered at this memory of the world’s true order, and Achamian glimpsed the Heights of the Bull framed by a field of stars. Then there he was—Mekeritrig—standing over him, staring at Nautzera where he hung flushed and alive among gaping mouths and groping limbs.

  “Anguish and degradation,” the Nonman continued, his voice resonant with inhuman tones. “Who would think, Seswatha, that salvation could be found in these words?”

  Mekeritrig stood in the curiously affected manner of Nonmen Ishroi, his hands clasped and pressed into the small of his back. He wore a gown of sheer black damask beneath a corselet of nimil that had been worked into circles of interlocking cranes. Tails of nimil chain followed the gown’s pleats to the ground.

  “Salvation …” Nautzera gasped in Seswatha’s voice. He raised his swollen gaze to the Nonman Prince. “Has it progressed so far, Cet’ingira? Do you recall so little?”

  A flicker of terror marred the Nonman’s perfect features. His pupils became thin as quill strokes. After millennia of practising sorcery, the Quya bore a Mark that was far, far deeper than that borne by any Schoolmen—like indigo compared with water. Despite their preternatural beauty, despite the porcelain whiteness of their skin, they seemed blasted, blackened, and withered, a husk of cinders at once animate and extinct. Some, it was said, were so deeply Marked that they couldn’t stand within a length of a Chorae without beginning to salt.

  “Recall?” Mekeritrig replied with a gesture at once plaintive and majestic. “But I have raised such a wall …” As though to emphasize his declaration, the sun flared across the wall’s length, warming the dead with crimson.

  “An obscenity!” Nautzera spat.

  The nets flapped about the nailed corpses. To his right, near to where the wall curved out of sight, Achamian glimpsed a carrion arm waving back and forth, as though warning away unseen ships.

  “As are all monuments, all memorials,” Mekeritrig replied, lowering his chin toward his right shoulder—the Nonman gesture of assent. “What are they but prostheses that pronounce our impotence, our debility? I may live forever, but alas, what I have lived is mortal. Your suffering, Seswatha, is my salvation.”

  “No, Cet’ingira …” Hearing the strain in Seswatha’s voice filled Achamian with an eye-watering ache. His body had not forgotten this Dream. “It need not be like this! I’ve read the ancient chronicles. I studied the engravings along the High White Halls before Celmomas ordered your image struck. You were great once. You were among those who raised us, who made the Norsirai first among the Tribes of Men! You were not this, my Prince! You were never this!”

  Again the eerie sideways nod. A single tear scored his cheek. “Which is why, Seswatha. Which is why …”

  A cut scarred where a caress faded away. In this simple fact lay the tragic and catastrophic truth of the Nonmen. Mekeritrig had lived a hundred lifetimes—more! What would it be like, Achamian wondered, to have every redeeming memory—be it a lover’s touch or a child’s warm squeal—blotted out by the accumulation of anguish, terror, and hate? To understand the soul of a Nonman, the philosopher Gotagga had once written, one need only bare the back of an old and arrogant slave. Scars. Scars upon scars. This was what made them mad. All of them.

  “I am an Erratic,” Mekeritrig was saying. “I do that which I hate, I raise my heart to the lash, so that I might remember! Do you understand what this means? You are my children!”

  “There must be some other way,” Nautzera gasped.

  The Nonman lowered his bald head, like a son overcome by remorse in the presence of his father. “I am an Erratic …” Tears sheened his cheeks when he looked up. “There is no other way.”

  Nautzera strained against the nails impaling his arms, cried out in pain, “Kill me, then! Kill me and be done with it!”

  “But you know, Seswatha.”

  “What? What do I know?”

  “The location of the Heron Spear.”

  Nautzera stared, eyes rounded in horror, teeth clenched in agony. “If I did, you would be the one bound, and I would be your tormentor.”

  Mekeritrig backhanded him with a ferocity that made Achamian jump. Droplets of blood sailed down the wall’s mangled length.

  “I will strip you to your footings,” the Nonman grated. “Though I love, I will upend your soul’s foundation! I will release you from the delusions of this word ‘Man,’ and draw forth the beast—the soulless beast!—that is the howling Truth of all things … You will tell me!”

  The old man coughed, drooled blood.

  “And I, Seswatha … I will remember!”

  Achamian glimpsed fused Nonman teeth. Mekeritrig’s eyes flared like spears of sunlight. Orange-burning circles appeared about each of his fingertips, boiling, seething with fractal edges. Achamian recognized the Cant immediately: a Quya variant of the Thawa Ligatures. With volcanic palms, Mekeritrig clenched Seswatha’s brow, serrated both body and soul.

  Nautzera howled in voices not his own.

  “Shhhh,” Mekeritrig whispered, clutching the old sorcerer’s cheek. He squeezed away tears with his thumb. “Hush, child …”

  Nautzera could only gag and convulse.

  “Please,” the Nonman said. “Please do not cry …”

  And Achamian howled, Nautzera! He couldn’t watch this, not again, not after the Scarlet Spires. You dream, Nautzera! You dream!

  Great Dagliash stood mute. Terns and crows swept and battled through the air about them. The dead stared vacant across the thundering sea.

  Nautzera turned from Mekeritrig’s palm to Achamian, heaving, heaving chill air. “But you’re dead,” he gasped.

  No, Achamian said. I survived.

  Gone was the scaffolding and the wall, the stench of rot and the shrill chorus of scavenger birds. Gone was Mekeritrig. Achamian stood nowhere, struck breathless by the impossibility of the transition.

  How is it you live? Nautzera cried in his thoughts. We were told the Spires had taken you!

  I …

  Achamian? Akka? Is everything okay?

  Why did he feel so small? He had reasons for his deception—reasons!

  I—I …

  Where are you? We’ll send someone for you. All will be made right. Vengeance will be exacted!

  Concern? Compassion for him?

  N-no, Nautzera. No, you don’t understand—

  My brother has been wronged! What more must I know?

  An instant of mad weightlessness.

  I lied to you.

  Then long, dark silence, at once perfect and raucous with inaudible things.

  Lied? Are you saying the Spires didn’t seize you?

  No—I mean, yes, they did seize me! And I did escape …

  Images of the madness at Iothiah flashed through the blackness. Iyokus and his dispassionate torments. The blinding of Xinemus. The Wathi Doll, and the godlike exercise of the Gnosis.

  Remembered men screamed.

  Yes! You did well, Achamian—well enough to be writt
en! Immortalized in our annals! But what’s this about lies?

  There’s a—his body in Caraskand swallowed—there’s a fact…a fact I’ve hidden from you and the others.

  A fact?

  An Anasûrimbor has returned …

  A long pause, strangely studied.

  What are you saying?

  The Harbinger has come, Nautzera. The world is about to end.

  The world is about to end.

  Said enough times, any phrase—even this one—was sure to be leached of its meaning, which was why, Achamian knew, Seswatha had cursed his followers with the imprint of his battered soul. But now, confessing to Nautzera, it seemed he’d never uttered these words before.

  Perhaps he’d simply never meant them. Certainly not like this.

  Nautzera had been too shocked to be outraged by his admission of betrayal. A troubling vacancy had dogged the tone of his Other Voice—even a premonition of senility. Only afterward would Achamian realize that the old man had simply been terrified, that, like Achamian himself a mere few months earlier, he feared himself unequal to the events unfolding before him.

  The world was about to end.

  Achamian began by describing his first meeting with Kellhus, that day outside Momemn’s walls when Proyas had summoned him to appraise the Scylvendi. He described the man’s intellect—even explained the man’s improvements on Ajencis’s logic as proof of his preternatural intelligence. He narrated Kellhus’s inexorable rise to ascendancy in the Holy War, both from what he himself had witnessed and from what he’d subsequently learned through Proyas. Nautzera had heard, apparently through informants near to the Imperial Court, that a man claiming to be a prophet had grown to prominence among the Men of the Tusk, but the name Anasûrimbor had become Nasurius by the time it reached Atyersus. They had dismissed it as simply one more fanatic contrivance.

  Then Achamian described everything that had happened in Caraskand: the coming of the Padirajah, the siege and starvation, the growing tension between the Orthodox and the Zaudunyani, Kellhus’s condemnation as a False Prophet—and ultimately, the revelation beneath dark-boughed Umiaki, where Kellhus had confessed to Achamian even as Achamian confessed now.