Shimeh.
This, she had thought as the great eyes of the city walls stared her down, is where we all die.
Her head buzzing, she threw aside her sheets, called to the crane-embroidered screen behind which Burulan sometimes slept. Moments later she was dressed and interrogating Gayamakri. He knew only that Kellhus had left the Umbilica to wander on foot through the camp. Apparently, the dark-eyed man said with a frown, he had refused any escort.
There had been a time, not so long ago, when Esmenet would have feared walking alone through the encamped Holy War, but now she could imagine no place safer. The moon was bright, and save for the odd guy rope strung across her path, she found the going easy. Most firepits either were dark or tinkled with orange coals, but an inevitable few remained awake, carousing to no purpose or drinking in sullen circles. Those who recognized her fell immediately to their knees. None had seen the Warrior-Prophet.
Then she fairly collided with a man, an Ainoni knight by the look of him, and with horror she realized he had bedded her several times before her … renewal. Before then she had continually told herself that she ruled her coupling, not her custom. But the smirk on his face told her otherwise. The smirk on all their faces told her otherwise. Instantly she understood that he took great pride in using her, the Prophet-Consort, as his sheath.
He caught her elbows and pressed her back. “Yes,” he said, as though to confirm her mortification. He was very drunk. His leash, they would have said back in Sumna, had been soaked in liquor. Decorum. Honour. He could easily slip these things.
“Do you know who I am?” she said sharply.
“Yes,” he repeated, his manner lurid. “I know you …”
“Then you know how close you stand to death.”
A look of dank puzzlement. She advanced and struck him with an open palm.
“Insolent dog! Kneel!”
He stared, stunned, unmoving.
“Kneel! Or I’ll have you flayed alive … Do you understand?”
It took several heartbeats for his astonishment to lurch into terror. And several more for his knees to buckle. Drink always added to the momentum of such things. He fairly blubbered his apologies. And more importantly, he told her he’d seen Kellhus leave the camp to climb the westward slopes.
Esmenet left him, hugging her shoulders to keep from shaking. She could understand her clenched teeth, but her smile baffled her. She thought about having her agents hunt the man down on the morrow. Though she had always detested the brutality that her new station had forced upon her, the thought of his screams thrilled her for some reason. Scenarios roiled through her thoughts, and though she knew they were both petty and absurd, she exulted in them nonetheless.
What was it? Her shame? His smirk? Or was it the mere fact that she could do these things?
I am, she breathlessly thought, his vessel.
Lost in her worries, she climbed the shallow hillside, bemoaned the hem of her gown as she waded through thistles and moist grasses. High over the Meneanor Sea, the Nail of Heaven flashed against the greater black. Twice she turned to stare at Shimeh in the moonlight.
It scarcely seemed real.
She discovered Kellhus sitting perched upon the ruins of one of the mausoleums that dotted the hillside, staring intently across the Shairizor at the dark city. She thought of climbing the collapsed portion then using the wall like a catwalk, but she recalled the life she bore within her. She strode to the mossy foundations beneath him instead. He sat cross-legged, his hands upturned and clasped in his lap. He had tied his hair into a Galeoth war-knot. His face looked marmoreal in the moonlight, which gleamed across the curls of his beard. As always, there was something indefinable about his pose or his manner that seemed to dwarf his immediate surroundings. Where others would seem lonely, even desolate, he seemed an unfaltering sentinel, white in the moonlight, black in its shadow.
Without looking away from Shimeh, he said, “You think of Caraskand. You remember the way I withdrew from you before the events leading to the Circumfix. You fear that I do the same for similarly perilous reasons.”
Hands on her hips, she stared upward, scowled in mock disapproval. “I’m trying not to.”
He smiled. His eyes glittered when he looked down.
“Why this?” she asked. “Why here?”
“Because soon I must leave.” He crouched and held down his hand.
She reached up to his wrist, then suddenly found herself standing beside him, steadied by his powerful arms. For a moment it seemed they stood perched on the point of a needle. She glanced nervously about, at the slopes dropping toward the plain, at the blackness between the thin poplars that thronged from the interior of the ruined mausoleum. She breathed deep his smell: oranges, cinnamon, the musk of masculine sweat. Despite the fear his words had engendered, she savoured him as she always did. His beard seemed white in the moonlight.
She gingerly stepped back, the better to look up into his eyes. “Where are you going?”
He studied her for a moment. In the distance beyond him, Shimeh looked both intricate and stone-ancient, a great fossil uncovered by the wash of tides.
“To Kyudea.”
Esmenet scowled. Kyudea was Shimeh’s dead sister, destroyed long ago by some Ceneian Aspect-Emperor whose name she couldn’t remember. “Your father’s house,” she said sourly.
“Truth has its seasons, Esmi. Everything will be made clear in due course.”
“But, Kellhus …” What did it mean that they had to assail Shimeh without him?
“Proyas knows what must be done,” he said decisively. “The Scarlet Spires will act as they see fit.”
Desperation welled through her. You can’t leave us.
“I must, Esmi. I answer to a different voice.”
Not her voice, something fragile within her realized. But then neither did he answer to her customs, her concerns, or even her hopes … The things that moved her simply didn’t touch him. Though they stood together, Kellhus had planted his feet across a far more unfathomable ground. What moved him moved on the scale of the planets and their cycles across the night sky.
Suddenly he seemed a wild stranger, like the Scylvendi … The son of something terrible.
“And Akka?” she asked quickly, hoping to cover this moment of weakness. “Shouldn’t he accompany you?”
You must stay safe!
“Where I walk, no one can follow,” he said. “Besides, I’m beyond his protection. He knows that now.” Despite the onerous implications of what he said, he spoke with matter-of-fact ease.
“He’ll want to know where you’ve gone.”
Kellhus smiled and nodded as though to say, That Akka … “He knows. Do you think you’re the only one who stalks me with well-meaning questions?”
For some reason his gentle humour made her want to cry. Suddenly she was bending her knees to the broken stone, lowering her face to the moss at his sandalled feet. How absurd she must look, she thought, kneeling atop a wall’s broken lip, playing out in pantomime what others did on solid ground. A wife before her husband.
But she didn’t care. He was the only measure. The only judgement …
Use me.
No matter where they turned, men found themselves encircled by greater things. Usually they ignored them. And sometimes, moved by pride and base hunger, they warred against them. But either way, those things remained just as great, and men, no matter how lunatic their conceit, remained just as small. Only by kneeling, by offering themselves as one might offer the haft of a weapon, could men recognize their place in this world. Only by submitting could they recognize themselves.
There was rapture in submission. The vulnerability of another towering overhead—precarious, like letting a stranger touch one’s face. The sense of profound communing, as though only those who acknowledged their insignificance could themselves be acknowledged. The relief of surrender, the disburdening that accompanied the yielding of responsibility.
The paradoxical sense
of licence.
The nattering voices fell silent. The exhaustion of endless posturing melted away. She found it narcotic, even arousing … the domination of another.
With a forbearing laugh, Kellhus helped her to her feet. He even bent to brush the grit from her gown. “Do you know,” he said, looking up, “that I love you?”
She smiled, and though part of her gushed like an adolescent, something older and wiser watched him with a whore’s callused eyes. “I know,” she said. “ButI…I…”
“You should fear what’s about to happen,” he said. “All Men should fear.”
She hesitated. “I couldn’t survive without you.”
Hadn’t she told Akka the same thing?
He placed a warm and radiant hand upon the swell of her belly, and it seemed that he blessed her womb. “Nor I without you.”
He enclosed her in his arms, stole her worries with a deep kiss. Though he held her with a strange fierceness afterward, she could feel his gaze drift back to Shimeh. She clutched his hard frame, thinking of the strength coiled within his heart, within his limbs. She thought of the gift of prophecy, and how it seemed to kill all those who dared wield it.
Never let go, she told herself. Never.
And somehow he heard. He always heard.
“Fear for the future, Esmi, not me.” Fingers combed through her hair, drew tingling lines across her scalp. “This flesh is but my shadow.”
How far had he walked?
Kellhus thought of snow-hooded mountains, the flash of sunlight across glacial heights. He thought of deep forests and lost cities, of moss-limned statuary leaning from the humus. He thought of unmanned walls …
It seemed he could hear someone shrieking his name through frozen forest arcades.
“Kellhus? Kelllhuuss!”
How far had he come?
After sending Esmenet back to the encampment, he’d travelled westward across the broken pasture, climbing the ramped hillsides. At the very summit he paused amid several dead oaks, turned his back to the Nail of Heaven, which now lay over Shimeh and the Meneanor, so that he could follow its axis across the dark landscape before him …
Toward Kyudea.
“I know you can hear me,” he said to the world, dark and sacred. “I know that you listen.”
A sourceless wind pulled the grasses into streamers, drawing them to the southwest. Against the constellations, dead branches clacked and creaked without rhythm.
“What was I to do?” he replied. “They attend only to what lies before their eyes. They listen only to what pleases their ears. Things unseen, things unheard … they trust to you.”
The wind subsided, leaving an unearthly silence in its wake. He heard the pasty hiss of maggots squirming through the gut of a dead crow some five paces to his right. He heard the chatter of termites seething beneath the bark of the surrounding oaks.
He tasted the sea on the air.
“What was I to do? Tell them the truth?”
He stooped, pulled a twig from the straps of his right sandal. He studied it by moonlight, followed the thin, muscular branchings that seized so much emptiness from the sky. Tusk sprouting from tusk. Though the trees about him had died seasons previously, the twig possessed two leaves, one waxy green, the other brown …
“No,” he said. “I cannot.”
The Dûnyain had sent him into the world as an assassin. His father had imperilled their isolation, had threatened Ishuäl, the great sanctuary of their hallowed meditations. They had no choice but to send Kellhus, even knowing that they served Moënghus’s ends … What else could they do?
So Kellhus had walked the length of Eärwa, from the ruined wastes of the North to the raucous cities of the South. Every advantage had been exploited, be it a single smile or a thousand fists. Every liability had been minimized. He had learned as much as the world would yield: languages, histories, factions, the peculiarities of innumerable hearts. He had mastered her mightiest weapons … Faith. War. Sorcery.
He was Dûnyain, one of the Conditioned. At every turn he followed the Logos, the Shortest Path.
And yet he had come so far.
Bound to the Circumfix, slowly turning beneath Umiaki’s dark bowers. Serwë gaping past him, as cold as stone against his nakedness. Her face swollen and black.
I wept.
Casting aside the twig, Kellhus leaned into the night and began sprinting across the grasses, toward the Betmulla Mountains piling black across the horizon before him. He leapt thickets, pedalled into black ravines, then lunged up broken slopes.
He ran. Not once did he stumble, nor did he slow to determine his bearings. The ground was his … Conditioned.
Everywhere, all about him, one world. The crossings were infinite, but they were not equal.
They were not equal.
To those few Kianene and Amoti who heard the noise, it sounded like tapestries being beaten by slaves in the distance. But it moved above, against the stars.
Along the walkways of the First Temple, it became a shadow, crept along vault and ceiling fresco. For a moment it obscured what lay beneath, then it was gone. It drank with its eyes, while its soul dreamed a million years. Wise and cunning. Animal in its fury. How this place cut with its endless edges and cramped skies.
Thorns. Its every glimpse speared like thorns.
The stone is weak. We could wash it away …
Do nothing, the Voice replied. Just watch.
They know we are here. If we do not move, they will find us.
Then test them.
The Ciphrang fell to the floor and huddled, cringed from all things exterior, all things surface. It waited, longed for the pitching deeps. Soon one of them came. The manling had no eyes, and yet saw … saw as it did, though without the pain. But the salt of his fear tasted no different.
It rose and revealed its Form. Zioz, his face as bright as the sun.
The manling made noise in terror, then unleashed his own light: a thread of raw energy. With one hand, Zioz grasped the thread, curious. When he pulled, the soul was yanked from the manling. The light vanished. The meat slapped the floor.
Weak …
There are others, the Voice said. Far, far stronger.
Perhaps I will die.
You are too mighty.
Perhaps you will die with me … Iyokus.
Something—a pendulous absence—circled above Achamian … He should be awake.
But the smell had pummelled Seswatha to his knees, forced him to retch again and again. Burning spittle was the most he could manage, but still his innards heaved and heaved. Standing in the gloom above, Nau-Cayûti watched him, too weary for expression.
Through endless dark they had climbed, higher and higher, knowing that sooner or later the emptiness had to yield to horrors. It began with raining waste: urine, excrement, trailing from seams, spilling in skirts they had to leap through. They passed wells that had once been corridors, where streams of slurry toppled down into endless dark. They circled great pits of rotting flesh, where corpses—some fetal and malformed, others full-grown—had been thrown from unknown heights. And once, they had even crossed a lake filled with brackish water—what must have been the accumulation of thousands of years of rain.
They had wept for relief while bathing. It was no mean thing to be cleansed in such a place.
Of course, Seswatha had heard rumours. Once he’d even had occasion to speak at length with Nil-Giccas, who had battled through the halls of this place thousands of years before. But nothing could prepare Seswatha for the horrid immensity of the Incû-Holoinas. According to the Nonman King, not one in a hundred Inchoroi survived the Ark’s fall from the heavens, and yet a thousand thousand of them had warred against the Nonmen over the course of their innumerable wars. The Ark, Nil-Giccas insisted, was an ingrown world, a labyrinth of labyrinths. “Be wary,” the white lips had intoned. “No matter how deep, the cup of evil always overflows.”
Nau-Cayûti had seen the light first, a pale glimmer han
ging at the terminus of a side passage. Dousing their own light, they crept along the incline. Silence came easily. The planks that righted the skewed floors had long since given way to a kind of earth, the accretion, Seswatha decided, of detritus shed and packed over the ages. With every step the reek became more pungent. The roaring clamour swelled only as they crossed the last few paces.
The passage simply ended. What had been a single light was broken into thousands and pitched across yawning space. Nau-Cayûti had gasped and cursed, while Seswatha, after gaping for several breathless moments, had fallen to his knees and vomited. What he smelled was human, and it seemed the most unbearable stench of all.
A city. They found themselves staring across a city. The steaming heart of Golgotterath.
He should be awake!
A cavernous void opened before them. It reminded Seswatha of a ship’s ribbed hold, though pitched on its end, and far too vast to truly resemble any work of Men. Sheer golden faces reared into obscurity, hazed by the smoke of countless fires. Structures of mortise and hacked stone climbed their foundations, crusting their sides like stacked hornets’ nests, not dwellings but open cells, squalid and innumerable. It all would have looked like something revealed by low tide were it not for the fires and the figures teeming like mites across it. Lumbering files of Bashrag. Gibbering masses of Sranc. And among them, human captives, untold numbers of them, some shackled to sledges in great groaning trains, others scattered across the open-air harems of their captors, gagging beneath convulsing shadows, their mouths working, their eyes rolled up to the dark, pink and naked and bloodied, countless men, women, and children. The bodies of the broken choked the alleys below.
He should be awake …
The pealing roar, screams upon screams, wailing across heights of alien gold, reverberating through bones and heart, reverberating, reverberating …
The Thousandfold Thought Page 36
