The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

  Save for a handful of incidents, there were no atrocities like those that marred their earlier marches. In the Councils of Great and Lesser Names, the Warrior-Prophet made it clear that the Inrithi either kept or betrayed his word with their actions. “The Xerashi,” he said, “need not love me to trust me. Just as we need not murder them to demonstrate our hate. Spare them, and their gates will be opened. Kill them, and you kill your brothers.”

  Though Xerash had been emptied of Kianene, Athjeäri found himself sorely pressed in Holy Amoteu. All across the Jarta Highlands, distant streamers of smoke plied the skies as the Fanim hastened to burn any and all structures possessing timber that could be used for siege engines. Taking Mer-Porasas as his base, the brash young Earl ranged to the very edges of the Shairizor Plains, visiting ruin upon the Fanim where he could. But after each encounter he returned with more empty saddles, until very soon his five hundred thanes and knights had dwindled to fewer than two hundred. Though he possessed daring in excess, he lacked the manpower required to secure his position, let alone fence with Fanayal and the heathen army that concentrated about Shimeh.

  His missives to the Warrior-Prophet, which had begun as dispassionate appraisals of the situation in the field, soon became pleas for assistance. The Warrior-Prophet begged patience and fortitude, even as he exhorted the Great Names to hasten their march.

  The main column climbed into the Jarta Highlands some ten days following the fall of Gerotha—a remarkable pace, given the size of the train, which included the perennially slothful Scarlet Spires, and the fact that they foraged as they marched. Then something peculiar happened.

  Accounts of the incident would vary greatly, though all agreed that it involved an encounter between an old man—an old blind man—and the Warrior-Prophet. This in itself was extraordinary, since the Hundred Pillars were at great pains to either drive away or, failing that, kill every blind man found in the path of the Sacral Retinue. The nearer the Holy War drew to Shimeh, the more the Warrior-Prophet’s Consort and Intricati feared the possibility of a Cishaurim attack.

  Apparently, a blind Xerashi beggar had been overlooked, and as the Sacral Retinue passed through the Jartic town of Gim, he cried out to the Warrior-Prophet. In a letter to his father, Prince Nersei Proyas would write the following description: No one understood what he said, though Arishal and the other bodyguards understood the danger well enough. They immediately charged toward the man, only to be brought up short by the resounding crack of the Warrior-Prophet’s voice. Everyone stood milling, confused, while the Blessed One regarded the shambling old beggar. The man’s skin was almost black, so that his wild hair and beard seemed as white as a Zeümi’s teeth. As we watched, quite astonished, the Blessed One dismounted and walked toward the old man—as though he were the penitent! When he towered over the bent figure, he asked, “Who are you to make demands?” to which the remarkable fool replied, “One who has something to whisper into your ear.” Cries of alarm erupted among us. I know I, Father, was concerned to the point of terror. “And why,” the Blessed One asked, “must you whisper?” to which the man responded, “Because my words are the words of my doom. Truthfully, you will kill me after you hear them.” I know I shouted that this was a trick of some kind, some foul Cishaurim deceit, and I know there were many such shouts of apprehension, but the Blessed One did not listen. He even kneeled, Father, to one knee, so that the blind man could better reach his ear. We sat motionless, gutted by horror, while he whispered his doom. And it was his doom, Father! For no sooner had he finished than the Warrior-Prophet drew Enshoiya, his holy sword, and struck the miscreant down, cutting him from his collar to his heart. We had scarcely recovered our breaths when he commanded that the Holy War halt and make camp across the fields of Gim. And to those who dared ask for an explanation, he would say nothing.

  What did the old fool whisper?

  There had been a time when he’d walked in glory and horror. Spear-Bearer to mighty Sil, the great King After-the-Fall. He had dared the wrath of Cu’jara Cinmoi on the plains of Pir Pahal. He had ridden the back of Wutteät, Father of Dragons. He had wrestled Ciögli the Mountain—thrown him from his feet! Sarpanur, the Nonmen of Ishriol had called him at first, after the keystone that fixed their crude subterranean arches. And then, following the Womb-Plague, Sin-Pharion, “the Angel of Deceit.”

  Ah, the raucous glory of that age! He had been young then, before the accretions of graft after graft had sapped his monumental frame. And such a contest! But for Sil’s impatience, he and his brothers would have won, and all this—this world—would be moot.

  Driven from Min-Uroikas. Scattered. Hunted. So far they had dwindled!

  And then, from nowhere, a second age of glory. Who would have guessed that the cunning of Men could resurrect their aborted designs, that the vermin could restore his destiny? Horde-General to dread Mog-Pharau, Breaker of Worlds. He had burned the Great Library of Sauglish. He had stormed the heights of Holy Trysë. He had made fires of their cities, beacons that shone through the very void. He had extinguished nations—bled whole peoples white! Aurang, the Norsirai of Kûniüri had called him “the Warlord.” Perhaps the most far-seeing of his many names.

  So how had it come to this? Bound to a Synthese, like a king to a leper’s robes. Frail and fugitive. Skulking about the fires of a roused enemy. There had been a time when the screams of thousands had heralded his coming.

  He circled the hilltop compound the way a vulture might, slow and high, and with a patience that could run out all life. To the west, the Hills of Jarta lay blanched and broken in the moonlight. To the east, the Plains of Shairizor fanned to the black horizon, scored by grove and field, pocked by barn and byre. Beyond, the Horde-General knew, lay Shimeh …

  The very heart of the mannish world. The Three Seas.

  Everywhere, he could see the furtive mark of their generations, the residue of once-dominant themes and long-lost reprises. The shadows of the Shigeki fortress that had once commanded these heights. The Ceneian road that struck straight as a rule across the plain. The defensive sensibilities of the Nansur in the compound’s concentric design. The frosting of Kianene ornament. Petalled battlements. Iron-fretted windows.

  He was deeper than all this. Older than their blasted stone.

  He spiralled downward, toward the outer courtyard, where he could see his children’s horses. He alighted on one of the eaves, where the sun’s warmth still radiated from the clay tiles. He called to them in the sacred pitch only they and rats could hear. They came leaping through dark and abandoned halls, faithful, faithless things. They grovelled before him, their groins slick from their victims. His eyes flared and they clutched themselves in anguish and ecstasy. His children. His flowers.

  For decades, the Consult had assumed that the alien metaphysics of the Cishaurim had been responsible for uncovering their children in Shimeh. This had made the prospect of the Empire’s fall to the Fanim intolerable. Half the Three Seas immune to their poison? The Holy War had seemed a rare opportunity.

  But the plate had changed all too quickly. To realize that the Cishaurim were but a mask for a far more ancient foe. To come so very close, only to discover their sublime deceptions subverted by something deeper. Something new.

  The Dûnyain.

  There was more to this than a son hunting for his father—far more. Their devious methods and disconcerting abilities aside, these Dûnyain were Anasûrimbor. Even without the Mandate prophecies, enmity was a fact of their accursed blood. Who was this Moënghus? And if his son could seize the armed might of the Three Seas in a single year, what had he accomplished in thirty? What awaited the Holy War in Shimeh?

  Despite the rank disorder of his soul, the Scylvendi had been right about one thing: these Dûnyain had seized too much already. They could not be allowed the Gnosis as well.

  Aurang, his hoary soul wrenching at the seams of the Synthese that housed him, smiled an odd, bird-twitching smile. How long since his last true contest?

  H
is children continued straining and clutching, their cracked faces bent to the stars.

  “Prepare this place,” he commanded.

  “But, Old Father,” the daring one, Ûssirta, said, “how could you be certain?”

  He knew. He was the Warlord.

  “The Anasûrimbor marches the Herotic Way. He will pause before crossing the plain, reorganize, revise his plans. The Scylvendi is right—he isn’t like the others.” A normal man—even an Anasûrimbor—would succumb to the eagerness that so quickened the legs of those who set eyes upon a hard-won destination. But not a Dûnyain.

  Men. They had been little more than packs of wild dogs during the First Wars. How had they grown so?

  “Is it near, Old Father?” the other, Maörta, exclaimed. “Does it come?”

  He regarded the piteous thing, his wretched instrument. And so few of them remained.

  “The sacrifice has been made,” he said, ignoring its question. “The Anasûrimbor will be lulled into thinking he has already anticipated us. Then, when he comes to this place …”

  Before the coming of these Dûnyain, the Consult could trust to their tools. Now Aurang had no choice but to intervene, to tyrannize what their tools could only mock, to possess what they could only mimic …

  “Trust me, my children, he will be caught unawares when we strike. There is treachery in his wife’s heart.”

  They would test the limits of this Prophet’s penetration. They would deny him the Gnosis.

  The thing gurgled and clacked its teeth.

  “We probe their faces with pins,” Eleäzaras said, affecting the droll tone that had once come so naturally to him.

  “And that was how you found him?” Her tone was sharp and obviously sarcastic. Eleäzaras glanced derisively at Iyokus, even though all such looks were wasted upon him now. How little these menials knew of jnan!

  “Need I explain it again?”

  The painted lips smiled. “That depends whether he wishes to hear your story, now, doesn’t it?”

  Eleäzaras snorted, availed himself of his wine bowl once again, drinking deep. She was clever—he would cede her that. Damnably clever. No-no … no need to bring him into this.

  The fact that she had learned of their discovery so quickly spoke not only to her ability but to the efficacy of the organization she had assembled following the Warrior-Prophet’s ascendancy. He would not make the mistake of underestimating either her or her resources again. This whore-cum-Consort.

  This … Esmenet.

  She was attractive, though. Well worth rutting … To do to her what they had done to that thing’s face. Yes, very attractive.

  The slaves had finished pitching the pavilion no more than a watch previously. Eleäzaras had arrived with Iyokus to study the beast—the first live one they’d apprehended—when the Intricati had appeared in the wake of exclaiming and bewildered Javreh. She had just walked in …

  One of the Nascenti accompanied her, Werjau or something—Eleäzaras was too drunk to remember—as well as four of those Hundred-fucking-Pillars. All with Chorae bound to their palms, of course. They stood, a small and confrontational crowd, framed by the evening light that filtered through the entrance. Eleäzaras wondered if she even grasped the outrageousness of her presumption. Sweet Sejenus! They were the Scarlet Spires! No one simply intruded upon their affairs, no matter what their writ or who their lord and master. Especially a woman.

  The chamber was both hot and foul, a result of all the felt the slaves had draped across the walls to muffle sound. Suspended face down, the thing lay shackled to the crude iron scaffold that propped the ceiling. A leather thong had been tied about the tip of each facial digit, drawing them out like the ribs of a parasol. In the corner of Eleäzaras’s eye, it looked a grotesque parody of the Circumfix. Its crotch-face glistened in the lantern light, wet and vaginal.

  Blood tapped the reed mats in a steady rhythm.

  “We fully intended,” Iyokus was saying, “to share any information we exacted.”

  Whether this was true or false, of course, depended entirely on the information exacted.

  “Oh,” the Intricati said, “I see …” Despite her small stature, she cut an imposing figure in her Kianene gown and wrap. “And when might that have been?” she continued. “Sometime after Shimeh?”

  Penetrating bitch. That was the thing, of course, the reason they had no hope of merely talking their way out of this small and likely inconsequential treachery: Shimeh lay mere days away.

  The impossible had become imminent.

  It was strange the way events had shown him the divisions in what had once been the singular morass of his soul. Even as he laughed at the thought of Shimeh—and the Cishaurim—something gibbered within him, panicked and sputtered, like that day his uncles had hauled him into the breakers to teach him how to swim. Some other day, please … Some other day!

  Where was the justice? His contract with Maithanet and the Thousand Temples had been struck in a different world. There had been no mention of the Consult or the Second Apocalypse. No mention of the Mandate being right … And certainly nothing had been said about a living prophet!

  How could they have been so deceived? And now to be bent upon murder, to have their knife drawn, only to discover that they had no motive … except self-preservation.

  What have I done?

  For weeks now, the members of the Scarlet Spires’ privy council, the Two-Palms, had quarrelled over question after question. Is the Atrithau Prince truly a prophet? And if he is, why should the Scarlet Spires accede to his demands? And what of the Second Apocalypse? The Consult and their skin-spies … they had replaced Chepheramunni! They had ruled High Ainon in their name! What did that portend? And how should they respond? Should they retreat, abandon the Holy War? What would be the consequences of that?

  Or should they continue prosecuting their war against the Cishaurim?

  Burning questions, and all of them with no answer apart from decisive leadership—something that their present Grandmaster clearly lacked. The insinuations had already started, the niggling comments that accused all the more for their ambiguity. “Curse the implications!” he felt like screaming at Inrûmmi, Sarosthenes, and the others. “Just say what you mean!”

  That said it all, he supposed. What was it the Conriyans said about an Ainoni demanding clarity?

  It meant throats would be soon cut.

  And Iyokus, especially, had become quarrelsome, despite the fact that Eleäzaras had renamed him to his old position. Who’d ever heard of a blind Master of Spies? Even before the bitch Intricati’s arrival, the chanv addict had started, demanding that Eleäzaras parse the undecidable, that he recall his station, treat with the “new fanatics,” as he called them, from a position of strength …

  “Don’t say it!” Eleäzaras had cried. “Don’t even think it.”

  “So what? Are we to simply endure these indignities? You would yield our—”

  “He sees, Iyokus! He reads our souls in our faces! What you say to me, you say to him, no matter what! All he need ask is, ‘What does your Master of Spies make of all this?’ and no matter what answer I give him, he will hear these very words you speak!”

  “Pfah!”

  There was strength in ignorance, Eleäzaras realized. All his life he had thought knowledge a weapon. “The world repeats,” the Shiradic philosopher Umartu had written. “Know these repetitions, and you may intervene.” Eleäzaras had taken this as his mantra, had used it as the hammer with which to pound cunning into his wit. You may intervene, he would tell himself, no matter what the circumstance.

  But there was knowledge beyond hope of intervention, knowledge that mocked, degraded … gelded and paralyzed. Knowledge that only ignorance could contradict. Iyokus and Inrûmmi simply did not know what he knew, which was why they thought him castrate. They didn’t even believe.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that the Intricati appear here and now. That the Warrior-Prophet intervene.

  “And w
hy wasn’t I summoned?” the Intricati was asking. “Why was the Warrior-Prophet not informed?”

  “We thought it a School matter,” Iyokus said.

  “A School matter …”

  Eleäzaras smirked. “It is we who face the Snakeheads, not you.”

  She actually had the temerity to take a step closer. “These things have nothing to do with the Cishaurim,” she snapped. “I would ponder that word ‘we,’ Eleäzaras. I assure you, its meaning is more treacherous than even you might think.”

  Impertinent! Outrageous, impertinent whore! “Pfah!” he cried. “Why am I even speaking to the likes of you?”

  Her eyes flashed. “The likes?”

  Something, her tone or perhaps his own better judgement, caused him to reconsider. He felt his contempt drain away, his eyes dull with anxiety. He blinked, looked to the skin-spy, which writhed in the constrained way of couples making love with only blankets to conceal them. Suddenly everything seemed so … dreary.

  So hopeless.

  “I apologize,” he said. Out of habit he had tried to sound scathing, but the words had sounded scared instead. What was happening to him? When would this nightmare end?

  A smile of triumph crept across her face. She—a caste-menial whore!

  Eleäzaras could feel Iyokus stiffen in outrage; apparently one did not need eyes to witness what had just happened. Consequences! Why must there always be consequences? He would pay for this … this … humiliation. To remain the Grandmaster, one had to act the Grandmaster …

  What did I do wrong? something churlish cried within.

  “The creature will be transferred,” she was saying. “These things have no soul for your Cants to compel … Other means are required.”

  She spoke the language of edict, and Eleäzaras found himself understanding—though Iyokus, he knew, could not hope to follow. She was a handsome woman—beautiful, even. He would enjoy fucking her … And the fact that she belonged to the Warrior-Prophet? Sugar on the peach, as the Nansur would say.