The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

  Flanked by hanging gold-on-black representations of the Circumfix, the Warrior-Prophet sat upon a raised dais, so that he looked down upon the Great Names sitting about the council table. His beard had been oiled and braided. His flaxen hair tumbled across his shoulders. Beneath a stiff knee-length vestment, he wore a white silk gown embroidered by the forking of silvery leaves and grey branches. Braziers had been set about him, and in their light he seemed aqueous, surreal—every bit the otherworldly prophet he claimed to be. His luminous eyes roamed the room, stirring gasps and whispers wherever they passed. Twice his look found Cnaiür, who cursed himself for looking away.

  Wretched! Wretched!

  The sorcerer, the woman-hearted buffoon whom everyone had thought dead, stood before the dais to the Dûnyain’s left, wearing an ankle-length vest of crimson over a white linen frock. He, at least, wasn’t festooned like a slaver’s concubine—as were the others. But he had a look in his eyes that Cnaiür recognized, as though he too couldn’t quite believe the lot fortune had cast him. Cnaiür had overheard Uranyanka on the tier below saying that the man, Drusas Achamian, was now the Warrior-Prophet’s Vizier, his teacher and protector.

  Whatever he was, he looked obscenely fat compared with the rakish Inrithi caste-nobles. Perhaps, Cnaiür thought, the Dûnyain planned to use his bulk as a shield should the Consult or Cishaurim attack.

  The Great Names sat about the table as before, though now stripped of the hauteur belonging to their station. Where once they had been bickering kings, the Lords of the Holy War, they were now little more than counsellors, and they knew it. They were silent for the most part, pensive. Occasionally one of them would lean to mutter something in his neighbour’s ear, but nothing more.

  In the course of a single day, the world these men had known had been struck to its foundation, utterly overturned. There was wonder in that—Cnaiür knew this only too well—but there was an absurd uncertainty also. For the first time in their lives they stood upon trackless ground, and with few exceptions they looked to the Dûnyain to show them the way. Much as Cnaiür had once looked to Moënghus.

  As the last of the Lesser Names hunted seats across the tiers, the rumble of hushed voices trailed into expectant silence. The air beneath the corbelled dome seemed to whine with a collective discomfort. For these men, Cnaiür realized, the Warrior-Prophet’s presence collapsed too many intangible things. How could they speak without praying? Disagree without blaspheming? Even the presumption to advise would seem an act of outrageous conceit.

  In the safety of unanswered prayers, they had thought themselves pious. Now they were like boasting gossips, astounded to find their story’s principal in their midst. And he might say anything, throw their most cherished conceits upon the pyre of his condemnation. What would they do, the devout and self-righteous alike? What would they do now that their hallowed scripture could talk back?

  Cnaiür almost barked with laughter. He lowered his head and spat between his knees. He cared not if others marked his sneer. There was no honour here, only advantage—absolute and irremediable.

  There was no honour—but there was truth. Was there not?

  The insufferable ritual and pageantry, which seemed obligatory to all things Inrithi, began with Gotian reciting the Temple Prayer. He stood as rigid as an adolescent in vestments that appeared newly made: white cloth with intricate panels, each embroidered with two golden tusks crossing a golden circle—yet another version of the Circumfix. His voice shook as he spoke, and he halted once, overcome with passion.

  Cnaiür found himself looking about the chamber, his breath tight in his chest, quietly astounded that men wept rather than jeered. And then, for the first time, the depths of the dread purpose that moved these men became palpable.

  He had seen it. He had witnessed it on the fields beyond Caraskand’s wall—the lunatic determination, enough to shame even his Utemot. He had watched men vomit boiled grass as they stumbled forward. He had seen others who could scarce walk throw themselves upon the weapons of the heathen—just to disarm them! He had seen men smile—cry out in joy!—as the mastodons descended upon them. He could remember thinking that these men, these Inrithi, were the true People of War.

  Cnaiür had seen it, but he had not understood—not fully. What the Dûnyain had wrought here would never be undone. Even if the Holy War should perish, the word of these events would survive. Ink would make this madness immortal. Kellhus had given these men more than gestures or promises, more even than insight or direction. He had given them dominion. Over their doubts. Over their most hated foes. He had made them strong.

  But how could lies do such a thing?

  The world these men dwelt within was a fever-dream, a delusion. And yet it seemed as real to them, Cnaiür knew, as his world seemed to him. The only difference—and Cnaiür was curiously troubled by the thought—was that he could, in meticulous detail, track the origins of their world within his, and only then because he knew the Dûnyain. Of all those congregated in this room, he alone knew the ground, the treacherous footing, beneath their feet.

  Suddenly everything Cnaiür witnessed was parsed in two, as though his eyes had become enemies, one against the other. Gotian had completed the Temple Prayer, and several of the Dûnyain’s high priests, his Nascenti, had begun a Whelming for those among the Lesser Names who’d been too ill to partake in the ceremony previously. A flaming basin of oil had been set before the Warrior-Prophet, who sat idol still. The first of the initiates, a Thunyeri by the look of his braids, knelt beside the tripod, then exchanged inaudible orisons with the administering priest. Though his face had been battered by pestilence and war, his eyes were those of a ten-year-old, pinned wide in hope and apprehension. In a single motion the priest dipped his hand into the burning oil then drew it across the Thunyeri’s features. For a heartbeat the man gazed from a face aflame, until a second priest doused him with a wet towel. The room thundered with exultant cries, and the thane, his expression bent by profound passion, staggered into the jubilant arms of his comrades.

  For the Inrithi, the man had crossed an intangible threshold. They had watched a profound transformation, a base soul raised to the assembly of the elect. Where before he’d been polluted, now he was cleansed. And they had witnessed this with their own eyes. Who could question it?

  But for Cnaiür, the only threshold crossed was that between foolishness and outright idiocy. He had watched an instrument, not a sacred rite—a mechanism, like the elaborate mills he had seen in Nansur, a way for the Dûnyain to grind these men into something he could digest. And this too was something he had seen with his own eyes.

  Unlike the Inrithi, he did not stand within the circle of the Dûnyain’s deceit. Where they saw things from within, he saw them from without. He saw more. It was strange the way beliefs could have an inside and an outside, that what looked like hope or truth or love from within could be a scythe or a hammer, things wielded for other ends, when seen from without.

  Tools.

  Cnaiür breathed deeply. This thought had tormented him once. It had been one too many.

  He leaned forward, elbows on knees, absently watching the farce unfold.

  The Inrithi, Proyas had told him once, believed it was the lot of men to live within the designs, inscrutable or otherwise, of those greater than themselves. And in this sense, Cnaiür realized, Kellhus truly was their prophet. They were, as the memorialists claimed, willing slaves, always striving to beat down the furies that drove them to sovereign ends. That the designs—the tracks—they claimed to follow were authored in the Outside simply served their vanity, allowed them to abase themselves in a manner that fanned their overweening pride. There was no greater tyranny, the memorialists said, than that exercised by slaves over slaves.

  But now the slaver stood among them. What did it matter, Kellhus had asked as they crossed the Steppe, that he mastered those already enslaved? There was no honour, only advantage. To believe in honour was to stand inside things, to keep company with sla
ves and fools.

  The Whelming had come to a close, and Saubon, the titular King of Caraskand, was standing—called to account by the Warrior-Prophet.

  “I will not march,” the Galeoth Prince said in a dead voice. “Caraskand is mine. I will not relinquish it—even if I be damned as a result.”

  “But the Warrior-Prophet has demanded that you march,” silver-haired Gotian cried. Something about the way the man said “Warrior-Prophet” made Cnaiür’s hackles rise—something febrile and unmanly. The Grandmaster of the Shrial Knights, who had been the Dûnyain’s most implacable foe before the exposure of Sarcellus, had since become his most fervent devotee. Such fickleness of spirit only deepened Cnaiür’s contempt for these people.

  “I will not march,” Saubon repeated, as though speaking from a nightmare. The Galeoth Prince, Cnaiür noted, actually had the temerity to wear his iron crown to this particular Council. Even though tall, ruddy with sun and warlike health, the man looked an adolescent playing king beneath the Warrior-Prophet. “By my hand I have seized this city, and by my hand I shall keep it!”

  “Sweet Sejenus!” Gothyelk cried. “By your hand? And a thousand others, maybe!”

  “I opened the gates!” Saubon retorted fiercely. “I delivered the city to the Holy War!”

  “You delivered precious little that you haven’t kept,” Lord Chinjosa quipped. He looked pointedly at the iron crown as he spoke, smirking as though recalling a joke traded in secret.

  “Headaches,” Gothyelk added, clenching a grey-haired fist. “He’s delivered many a headache …”

  “I simply demand what’s mine by right!” Saubon snarled. “Proyas—you agreed to support me, Proyas!”

  The Conriyan Prince glanced uneasily at the Dûnyain, then stared evenly at the would-be Caraskandi King. During the siege, he had refused to eat more than his men, so he was gaunt, and he looked older now that he was growing his beard out square like his father’s kinsmen. “No. I’ll not renege on my pledge, Saubon.” Indecision slackened his handsome face. “But things … have changed.”

  The debate was a sham, the preserving of certain motions to advance a sense of continuity. Proyas had fairly shouted this, though he would never admit to it. Only one decision mattered.

  All eyes had climbed to the Warrior-Prophet. Fierce before his peers, Saubon now seemed petulant—a king unmanned beneath the vaults of his own palace.

  “Those who carry the war to Holy Shimeh,” the Warrior-Prophet said, his voice falling upon them like a knife-prick, “must do so freely …”

  “No,” Saubon said hoarsely. “Please, no.”

  At first this answer escaped Cnaiür, then he realized the Dûnyain had forced Saubon to choose his own damnation. He returned their choices to them only when he needed them to be accountable. Such maddening subtlety!

  The Warrior-Prophet shook his leonine head. “There is nothing to be done.”

  “Strip him of his throne,” Ikurei Conphas said abruptly. “Have him dragged into the streets.” He shrugged in the manner of long-suffering men. “Have his teeth beaten from his head.”

  Astonished silence greeted his words. As the first among the Orthodox conspirators—and as Sarcellus’s confidant, no less—Conphas had become an outcast among the Great Names. In the Council preceding the battle, he’d contributed little, and when he did talk, it was with the awkwardness of one forced to speak an unfamiliar tongue. It seemed that his patience had at last been exhausted.

  The Exalt-General looked to his astounded peers, snorted. He wore his blue mantle in the Nansur fashion, thrown up and across the stamped gold of his breastplate. Among all those assembled, he alone seemed unmarked, unscarred, as though mere days had passed since that fateful Council on the Andiamine Heights.

  He turned to the Warrior-Prophet. “Such things lie within the scope of your power, do they not?”

  “Insolence!” Gothyelk hissed. “You don’t know what you’re saying!”

  “I assure you, old fool, I always know what I’m saying.”

  “And what,” the Warrior-Prophet said, “what might that be?” Conphas managed a defiant smile. “That this—all of this—is a sham. That you”—he glanced again at the surrounding faces—“are a fraud.”

  Whispers of hushed outrage rifled through the chamber. The Dûnyain merely smiled.

  “But this is not what you say.”

  It seemed that Conphas sensed, for perhaps the first time, the impossible dimensions of the Dûnyain’s authority over the men surrounding him. The Warrior-Prophet was more than their centre, as a general might be; he was their centre and their ground. These men had to trim not only their words and actions to conform to his authority, but their passions and hopes as well—the very movements of their souls now answered to the Warrior-Prophet.

  “But,” Conphas said blankly, “how could another—”

  “Another?” the Warrior-Prophet asked. “Don’t confuse me with any ‘other,’ Ikurei Conphas. I am here, with you.” He leaned forward in a way that made Cnaiür catch his breath. “I am here, in you.”

  “In me,” the Exalt-General repeated.

  He had tried to sound contemptuous, Cnaiür knew, but he sounded frightened instead.

  “I realize,” the Dûnyain continued, “that you speak these words out of impatience, that you’ve chafed at the changes my presence has wrought in the Holy War. I know that the strength I’ve delivered to the Men of the Tusk threatens your designs. I know that you’re unsure as to how to proceed, that you don’t know whether to offer the same pretence of submission that you offer your uncle or to discredit me with open words. So now you deny me out of desperation, not to prove to others that I’m a fraud but to prove to yourself that you are in fact my better. For an obscene arrogance dwells within you, Ikurei Conphas, the belief that you are the measure of all other men. It is this lie that you seek to preserve at all costs.”

  “Not true!” Conphas cried, bolting from his chair.

  “No? Then tell me, Exalt-General, how many times have you thought yourself a god?”

  Conphas licked tight lips. “Never.”

  The Warrior-Prophet nodded sceptically. “It is peculiar, isn’t it, the place you find yourself standing? To preserve your pride before me, you must endure the shame of lying. You must conceal who you are, in order to prove who you are. You must degrade yourself to remain proud. At this moment you see this more clearly than at any other time in your life, and yet still you refuse to relinquish, to yield to your tormented pride. You trade the anguish that breeds anguish for the anguish that breeds release. You would rather take pride in what you are not than take pride in what you are.”

  “Silence!” Conphas screeched. “No one speaks to me this way! No one!”

  “Shame is a stranger to you, Ikurei Conphas. An unbearable stranger.”

  Wild-eyed, Conphas stared at the congregated faces. The sound of weeping filled the room, the weeping of other men who’d recognized themselves in the Warrior-Prophet’s words. Cnaiür watched and listened, his skin awash with dread, his heart pounding in his throat. Ordinarily, he would have taken deep satisfaction in the Exalt-General’s humiliation—but this was of a different order. Shame itself now reared above them, a beast that devoured all certainties, that wrapped cold coils about the fiercest souls.

  How does he do this?

  “Release,” the Warrior-Prophet said, as though a word could be the world’s only unbarred door. “All I offer you, Ikurei Conphas, is release.”

  The Exalt-General stumbled back a step, and for a mad moment it almost seemed that his knees would buckle—that the Emperor’s nephew might kneel. But then a curious, almost blood-chilling laugh escaped his throat; a hidden madness flashed through the cracks of his mien.

  “Listen to him!” Gotian hissed plaintively. “Don’t you see, man? He’s the Prophet!”

  Conphas looked at the Grandmaster without comprehension. His beauty seemed all the more astonishing for the blankness of his expression.

>   “You are among friends here,” Proyas said. “Brothers.”

  Gotian and Proyas. Other men and other words. These apparently broke the spell of the Dûnyain’s voice for Conphas as much as for Cnaiür.

  “Brother?” he snarled. “I’m no brother to slaves! You think he knows you? That he speaks the hearts of men? He does not! Trust me, my ‘brothers, ’ we Ikurei know a thing or two about words and men. He plays you, and you know it not. He tacks ‘truth’ after ‘truth’ to your heart to better yoke the blood beating underneath! Gulls! Slaves! To think I once congratulated myself on your company!” He turned his back to the Great Names, began shouldering his way toward the crowded entrance.

  “Halt!” the Dûnyain thundered.

  Everyone, including Cnaiür, flinched. Conphas stumbled as though struck. Arms and hands clasped him, turned him, thrust him into the centre of the Warrior-Prophet’s attention.

  “Kill him!” someone to Cnaiür’s right cried.

  “Apostate!” pealed from the benches below.

  Then the tiers fairly erupted in hoarse outrage. Fists pounded the shivering air. Conphas looked about him, more stunned than terrified, like a boy struck by a beloved uncle.

  “Pride,” the Warrior-Prophet said, silencing the chamber like a carpenter sweeping sawdust from his workbench. “Pride is a sickness … For most it’s a fever, a contagion goaded by the glories of others. But for some, like you, Ikurei Conphas, it is a defect carried from the womb. For your whole life you’ve wondered what it was that moved the men about you. Why would a father sell himself into slavery, when he need only strangle his children? Why would a young man take the Orders of the Tusk, exchange the luxuries of his station for a cubicle, authority for servitude to the Holy Shriah? Why do so many give, when it is so easy to take?

  “But you ask these questions because you know nothing of strength. For what is strength but the resolve to deny base inclinations—the determination to sacrifice in the name of one’s brothers? You, Ikurei Conphas, know only weakness, and because it takes strength to acknowledge weakness, you call your weakness strength. You betray your brother. You fresco your heart with flatteries. You, who are less than any man, say to yourself, ‘I am a god.’”