Why? Why hadn’t he killed the fiend? What vice or vanity had stayed his hand? Was it the iron hand clamped about his neck? The burn of the man’s seed upon his back?
“Sompas!” he fairly cried.
“Yes, God-of-Men?”
“How does ‘Exalt-General’ suit you as a title?”
The ingrate swallowed. “Very well, God-of-Men.”
How he missed Martemus and the cool cynicism of his gaze. “Take the Kidruhil—all of them. Hunt down this demon for me, Sompas. Bring me his head and that shall be your title … Exalt-General, Spear-of-the-Empire.” His eyes narrowed in menace as he smiled. “Fail me and I shall burn you, your sons, your wives—every Biaxi breathing. I shall burn you all alive.”
Relying on Serwë’s preternatural vision, they led their horses through the pitch of night, knowing their only advantage lay in whatever distance they could travel before sunrise. They picked their way across high scrub and grass slopes, then down into a wooded vale where the bitter of cedars braced the air. Despite his injuries, Cnaiür shambled after them, drawing on something as inexhaustible as lust or fear. About him, the world reeled more and more, and simple things became nightmarish with intent. Dark trees clutched at him, drew nails across his cheeks and shoulders. Unseen rocks kicked at his sandalled toes. The ringed moon laid him bare.
Thought slurred into thought. He spat blood continually. The path before him, shadowy and granular, rolled beneath his staggering legs. A greater dark unfolded through the night, and he passed out of memory, wondering, how could souls flicker?
Then Serwë was staring down at him. He felt her thighs beneath his neck, firm and warm through her linen tunic. She leaned forward and her breast brushed his temple. She retrieved a waterskin, used it to wet a rag. She had been tending to the cuts on his face.
She smiled and a ragged breath stole through him. There was such sanctuary in the lap of woman, a stillness that made the world, with all its threshing fury, seem small instead of encompassing, errant instead of essential. He winced as she dabbed a cut above his left eye. He savoured the sense of cool water warming against his skin.
The black plate of night was beginning to grey. Looking up, he saw the faint nimbus of hair about her jaw. He reached up to brush it, but hesitated when he glimpsed the scabs across his knuckles. He became alarmed. Though the pain of his wounds lay like a weight upon him, he jerked himself upright, coughed, and spat a mouthful of bloody sputum. They sat upon a grassy round on the summit of some hill. The east warmed to the unseen sun. Ridgelines wandered across the intervening miles, dark with vegetation, pale with nude stone faces.
“I’m forgetting something,” he said.
She nodded and smiled the blithe and jubilant way she always did when she knew some answer.
“The one you hunt,” she said. “The murderer.”
He felt his face darken. “But I am the murderer! The most violent of all men! They slouch forward in chains. They ape their fathers, just as their fathers aped their fathers before them, all the way back to the beginning. Covenants of earth. Covenants of blood. I stood and found my chains were smoke. I turned and saw the void…I am unfettered!”
She studied him for a moment, her perfect face poised between thought and moonlight. “Yes … like the one you hunt.”
What were these shallow creatures?
“You call yourself my lover? You think yourself my proof? My prize?”
She blinked in dread and sorrow. “Yes …”
“But you are a knife! You are a spear and hammer. You are nepenthe—opium! You would make a haft of my heart, and brandish me. Brandish me!”
“And me,” a masculine voice said. “What of me?”
One of her brothers had sat to his right—only it wasn’t one of her brothers. It was him … the serpent whose coils ever tightened about his heart: Moënghus, the murderer, wearing the armour and insignia of a Nansur infantry captain.
Or was he Kellhus?
“You …”
The Dûnyain nodded, and the air became yaksh dank—yaksh sour. “What am I?”
“I …”
What kind of madness? What kind of devilry?
“Tell me,” Moënghus said.
How long had he hidden in Shimeh? How long had he prepared? It did not matter. It did not matter! Cnaiür would crack open the sun with his hate! He would carve out its heart and bury all the world in endless black!
“Tell me … what do you see?”
“The one,” Cnaiür grated, “that I hunt.”
“Yes,” Serwë said from behind him. “The murderer.”
“He murdered my father with words! Consumed my heart with revelation!”
“Yes …”
“He set me free.”
Cnaiür turned back to Serwë, filled with a longing so great it seemed his chest must implode. Crevasses opened across her forehead, cheek, and chin; knuckled limbs reared from the perfect planes of her outer face. With a gentle tug, they pulled their tips apart. Her lips vanished. She leaned forward with a slow, encompassing ardour. Limbs, long and gracile, drew back, stretched outward, then clasped the back of his skull. As though within a fist, she held him tight to her hot mouth. Her true mouth.
He drew his legs beneath him, then effortlessly hoisted her into his banded arms. So light … The dawn sun flashed across their intertwined forms.
“Come,” Moënghus said. “The track awaits us. We must run down our prey.”
In the distance they heard horns. Nansur horns.
Knowing Conphas would spare nothing to capture them, they rode as far as they could press their horses, heeding the cycles of exhaustion rather than those of sun, moon, and stars. According to the creatures, Conphas had sent a Column south of Joktha immediately after debarking. His plan relied on the Holy War’s ignorance, and since Saubon was certain to discover his treachery, Conphas needed to bar all the ways between Caraskand and Xerash. This meant that the Nansur lay both behind and before their small party. The best they could do was strike due south, slipping across Enathpaneah, then work their way eastward through the Betmulla, where the terrain would make interdiction unlikely and pursuit difficult.
Occasionally, Cnaiür spoke to them, learned something of their lean ways. They called themselves the Last Children of the Inchoroi, though they were loath to speak of their “Old Fathers.” They claimed to be Keepers of the Inverse Fire, though the merest question regarding either their “keeping” or their “fire” pitched them into confusion. They never complained, save to say they hungered for unspeakable congress, or to insist they were falling—always falling. They declared he could trust them, because their Old Father had made them his slaves. They were, they said, dogs that would sooner starve than snap meat from a stranger’s hand.
They carried, Cnaiür could see, the spark of the void within them. Like the Sranc.
As a child, Cnaiür had been fascinated by trees. Given their rarity on the Steppe, he only saw them in the winter months, when the Utemot moved their camp into the Swarut, the highlands that bounded the sea the Inrithi called Jorua. Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman’s eyes.
Men were like this, Cnaiür realized, binding their manifold roots then branching in a thousand different directions, twining into the greater canopy of other men. But these things—these skin-spies—were something altogether different, though they could mimic men well enough. They did not bleed into their surroundings as men did. They struck through circumstances, rather than reaching out to claim them. They were spears concealed in the thickets of human activity. Thorns …
Tusks.
And this lent them a curious beauty, a dread elegance. They were simple in the way of knives, these skin-spies. He envied them that, even as he loved and pitied.
“Two centuries ago I was Scylvendi,” it said once. “I know your ways.”
“Who else have
you been?”
“I have been many.”
“And now?”
“I am Serwë … your lover.”
The determination of Conphas’s pursuit became evident the third night of their southward flight. Along the Enathpanean frontier, they crossed hills arranged like longitudinal dunes, with sharp, wandering ridgelines and steep slip faces. Everything was green, but in the way of tenacious rather than lush things. Carp grasses choked the clearings, thronging along the cracks of even the sheerest of escarpments. Thickets of catclaw thatched the slopes, and stands of carob dominated many of the valleys, though it was too early in the year for them to offer any forage. At dusk, while filing along the crest of one of these hills, Cnaiür saw several dozen fires winking orange on a flat top some miles to the north.
The nearness of the fires didn’t surprise him; if anything, he was comforted by the distance. The Nansur, he knew, had intentionally chosen the highest ground possible, hoping to spook them into pressing their horses too hard. It was the numbers that troubled him. If they had tracked them this far, they knew their party hadn’t fled to Caraskand to shelter with Saubon, which meant they knew Cnaiür meant to cleave east at some point. Whoever commanded the pursuit had likely already dispatched bands to the southeast in hopes of cutting them off. It would be like shooting arrows in the dark, certainly, but his quiver looked deep.
Over the course of the following day, they encountered an Enathi goatherd. The old fool surprised them, and before Cnaiür could utter a word, Serwë had killed him. The soil was too rocky to effectively bury the man, so they were forced to tie the body to one of the spare horses—which of course further tired the beast. Even then, the vultures, which forever soared the margins of the world and the Outside, found and followed them. With vultures circling, they might as well have carried a banner as high as the clouds. That night they paused in one of the valleys, and though the sky was clear and moonbright, they burned the body.
They continued across the rugged Enathpanean countryside for a week, avoiding all signs of men save for one meagre village, which they plundered for sport and supplies. For two consecutive nights the skies were overcast and the darkness impenetrable. Cnaiür cooked his blade in a small fire, then scarred his shoulders and chest with the lives he had taken at Joktha. He avoided looking at Serwë and the other two creatures, who sat opposite, as silent and watchful as leopards. When he finished, he raved at them, only to weep in remorse afterward. There had been no judgement in their eyes, he realized. No humanity.
On no fewer than three different nights, they saw the fires of what had to be their Nansur pursuers, and though it seemed to Cnaiür they were more distant each time, he was not heartened. It was a strange thing, fleeing the pursuit of unseen men. Things unseen could not be pinned with the foibles and debilities that made men mere men. They lay unfixed and restless in the soul. As such, they had the habit of expanding into principle, into something that transcended the mundane world and lorded over it.
Each time Cnaiür saw the fires of the Nansur, they seemed markers of something greater. And even though he was the one who rode with abominations, it seemed all obscenity lay on the horizon behind him. The North became despotic, the West tyrannical.
They wandered red-eyed, exchanging moon-pale landscapes for sun-bright, and Cnaiür fell to reckoning the oddities of his soul. He supposed he was insane, though the more he pondered the word, the more uncertain its meaning became. On several occasions he had presided over the ritual throat-cutting of Utemot pronounced insane by the tribal elders. According to the memorialists, men went feral in the manner of dogs and horses, and in like manner had to be put down. The Inrithi, he knew, thought insanity the work of demons.
One night during the infancy of the Holy War—and for reasons Cnaiür could no longer recall—the sorcerer had taken a crude parchment map of the Three Seas and pressed it flat over a copper laver filled with water. He had poked holes of varying sizes throughout the parchment, and when he held his oil lantern high to complement the firelight, little beads of water glinted across the tanned landscape. Each man, he explained, was a kind of hole in existence, a point where the Outside penetrated the world. He tapped one of the beads with his finger. It broke, staining the surrounding parchment. When the trials of the world broke men, he explained, the Outside leaked into the world.
This, he had said, was madness.
At the time, Cnaiür had been less than impressed. He had despised the sorcerer, thinking him one of those mewling souls who forever groaned beneath burdens of their own manufacture. He had dismissed all things him out of hand. But now, the force of his demonstration seemed indisputable. Something other inhabited him.
It was peculiar. Sometimes it seemed that each of his eyes answered to a different master, that his every look involved war and loss. Sometimes it seemed he possessed two faces, an honest outer expression, which he sunned beneath the open sky, and a more devious inner countenance. If he concentrated, he could almost feel its muscles—deep, twitching webs of them—beneath the musculature that stretched his skin. But it was elusive, like the presentiment of hate in a brother’s glance. And it was profound, sealed like marrow within living bone. There was no distance! No way to frame it within his comprehension. And how could there be? When it thought, he was …
The bead had been broken—there could be no doubt of that. According to the sorcerer, madness all came down to the question of origins. If the divine possessed him, he would be some kind of visionary or prophet. If the demonic …
The sorcerer’s demonstration seemed indisputable. It accorded with his nagging intuitions. It explained, among other things, the strange affinities between madness and insight—why the soothsayers of one age could be the bedlamites of another. The problem, of course, was the Dûnyain.
He contradicted all of it.
Cnaiür had watched him ply the roots of man after man and thus command their branching actions. Nursing their hatred. Cultivating their shame and their conceit. Nurturing their love. Herding their reasons, breeding their beliefs! And all with nothing more than mundane word and expression—nothing more than worldly things.
The Dûnyain, Cnaiür realized, acted as though there were no holes in the sorcerer’s parchment map, no beads to signify souls, no water to mark the Outside. He assumed a world where the branching actions of one man could become the roots of another. And with this elementary assumption he had conquered the acts of thousands.
He had conquered the Holy War.
This insight sent Cnaiür reeling, for it suddenly seemed that he rode through two different worlds, one open, where the roots of men anchored them to something beyond, and another closed, where those selfsame roots were entirely contained. What would it mean to be mad in such a closed world? But such a world could not be! Ingrown and insensate. Cold and soulless.
There had to be more.
Besides, he couldn’t be mad, he decided, because he possessed no origins. He had kicked free of all earth. He didn’t even possess a past. Not really. What he remembered, he always remembered now. He—Cnaiür urs Skiötha—was the ground of what came before. He was his own foundation!
Laughing, he thought of the Dûnyain and how, upon their fatal reunion, this would overthrow him.
He tried—once—to share these ruminations with Serwë and the others, but they could offer him only the simulacrum of understanding. How could they fathom his depths when they themselves possessed none? They were not bottomless holes in the world, as he was. They were animate, yet they did not live, not truly. They, he realized with no little horror, had no souls. They dwelt utterly within the world.
And for no reason, his love of them—his love of her—became all the more fierce.
Several more days passed before they sighted the first true peaks of the Betmulla, though Cnaiür suspected they had crossed out of Enathpaneah sometime earlier. They made toward them, intending to traverse the great sloping aprons piled across their northern faces. They crossed
a rugged tableland, then followed the winding course of a braided stream, riding beneath the bowers of water birches. As the mountains loomed ever greater and darker above them, Cnaiür could not help but recall the Hethantas and his harsh use of Serwë. He had been a fool then, a free man trying to make himself a slave of his people, but he knew not the words that would make her understand.
“Our child,” he called lamely, “was conceived in mountains like these.”
When she said nothing, he cursed himself and the sensitivities of women.
Later that afternoon, one of their horses was lamed descending a slope of earth and shale. They left it behind rather than put it down, for fear of vultures giving their path away. Leading their mounts, they continued long into the darkness, exploiting the preternatural sight of the skin-spies. Barring disaster, there was no way the fires behind them, no matter how dread their abstraction, could hope to overtake them.
Come morning, the ramps of the Betmulla towered into the southwestern sky. They came across a dead lake, its depths swollen with crimson algal blooms. Not far away, on a promontory rising from a pure stand of canyon oak, they found the ruined footings of some shrine. Faceless forms jutted from the rolling carpets of fallen leaves. An artesian spring trickled from the altar, and they refilled their skins. Some kind of deer grazed the slopes about the lake, and with great mirth Cnaiür watched Serwë and her brothers run a juvenile down on foot alone. Afterward, he stumbled across some cousin of orpine while making mud in the brush. The tubers, though far from ready, tasted delicious with the venison.
Their fire, as small as it was, proved a mistake. The wind was blowing directly from the west, across the lake. The skin-spies smelled them first, but far too late.
“They come,” Serwë said suddenly, looking to her brothers. Within a heartbeat, it seemed, the two of them vanished into the canopy’s recesses. Then Cnaiür heard the distinctive snort and chop of horses labouring up a humus slope, the clink and clatter of gear filtering through the gloomy interior of the wood.
The Thousandfold Thought Page 25
