The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

Kellhus descended a broad stair hewn from the walls. As elsewhere in the mansion, every surface had been rendered with heroic carvings across more pornographic reliefs, though on a far greater scale. Kellhus could make out immense vaults, their tangled figures encrusted with the mineral residue of water and millennia. The falls themselves towered into darkness, raucous, white foam wheeling, dropping with the weight of glaciers, so tall they threatened to press him to his knees.

  A series of chutes, like halved versions of the long curved horns the Thunyeri used to communicate in battle, had been raised to the tumbling skirts of the waterfalls. There were dozens of them, hooking outward and downward, arranged to convey water to the sprawling floor below, though only three still reached into the crashing white, the others having broken. Green about the edges, they gleamed copper where the water still runnelled them.

  The stair wound away from the falls, curled across the back of the vast chamber, where it met its mirror image and broadened in a monumental fan. Bronze weaponry and armour lay scattered across the steps, remnants of the ancient battle that had been lost here. As he neared the stair’s base, the sounds of smaller waters were braided into the background roar: the gurgling of eaves, and the slap and whish of small streams across stone. A cavernous must permeated the air.

  “They gathered here in the hundreds,” a voice called across the gloom, clear despite the ambient rumble. “Even thousands, in the days before the Womb-Plague …”

  A Kûniüric voice.

  Kellhus paused on the steps, searched the gloom.

  At last.

  As broad as the Siricus Arena in Momemn, the floor opened before him, matted with detritus and the small mounds which were all that remained of the fallen. Ripples dilated in endless procession across the broad pool set in the floor’s centre. Like a black mirror, it reflected the braziers burning along its far rim, the fat bronze faces looming over them, and the great cascading column of the waterfall. At the terminus of the chutes, a series of immense bronze statues had been erected: kneelers, obese and naked, with channels cut into their backs and with heads hollowed into great-jowled masks. They squatted in a broad semi-circle facing the pool, their expressions lurid in the orange light. Water streamed from the eyes and mouths of three of them, slapping across the stone. The hollowed head of one had broken off altogether. It now rested near the far end of the pool, its single unsubmerged eye staring across the black waters.

  “Bathing was holy for them,” the voice continued.

  Kellhus descended the last of the monumental stair, slowly walked across the floor. He had grown accustomed to listening through voices, but this one was smooth as porcelain—seamless and inscrutable. Even still, he knew it very well. How could he not, when it was his own?

  Advancing around the pool, he saw a pale figure, sitting cross-legged behind the sheets of water that poured from one of the monstrous faces. A man, white-skinned, obscured by rushing translucence.

  “The fires are for you,” the figure said. “I have lived in darkness for a long, long time.”

  Her calm terrified Achamian almost as much as the clamour on the horizon. The very wind stank of sorcery.

  “So he uses everyone,” she finally said. “His every word is bent upon manipulation …” She stared as though her eyes had forgotten how to blink. “Don’t you mean he uses me?”

  “I—I haven’t thought it all through yet, but I think he wants … children … Children with his strength, his intellect, and you—”

  “So he breeds. Is that it? I’m his prized mare?”

  “I know how hateful these words must—”

  “Why would you think that? I’ve been used my whole life.” She paused, glared at him with as much remorse as outrage. “My whole life, Akka. And now that I’ve become the instrument of something higher, higher than men and their rutting hunger—”

  “But why? Why be an instrument at all?”

  “You speak as if we had a choice—you, a Mandate Schoolman! There’s no escape. You know that. With every breath, we are used!”

  “Then why the bitterness, Esmi? Shouldn’t a prophet’s vessel sound ex—”

  “Because of you, Akka!” she cried with alarming ferocity. “You! Why can’t you just let me go? You know that I love you, so you cling to that, you dig in with grubby nails and you yank and yank and yank, you bruise and batter my heart, and you refuse to let me go!”

  “Esmi…Iasked and you came.”

  Long silence.

  “All this,” she said, her voice almost inaudible for the crack of faraway sorceries, “everything Cnaiür said … what makes you think that Kellhus hasn’t already told me?”

  Achamian swallowed, ignored the lights that flashed across his periphery.

  “Because you say you love him.”

  Cymbals crashed in a relentless tempo, measuring the hellish advance of the Scarlet Spires. They laid waste to all before them. Whatever resistance the heathen mustered, they puffed out like candle flames. Companies of horsemen, bowmen arrayed across the rooftops—all mummified in Anagogic fire.

  Save for the adept Watchers who walked the sky in their wake, most of the seventy-four surviving sorcerers of rank marched on foot through the conflagration, sheltering themselves and their Javreh shield-men with Wards. Bathed in the light of successive Cants, each cadre trailed a flickering array of shadows. They climbed ramps of blackened stone, mounds of smashed brick, found their footing, and worked more thunderous devastation. Stones arced skyward, trailing streamers of smoke. Cornices and pillars collapsed upon their footings, swallowed by the black-billowing issue of their destruction. The whole world seemed rendered in luminous bloods and abyssal blacks. They stepped over sizzling limbs.

  Above towering flames and through curtains of smoke, the First Temple and the Ctesarat loomed ever closer, until they encompassed the horizon. Again and again the Scarlet Schoolmen called out with destruction, but none would answer.

  The Fanim ran before them, like flame-maddened beasts.

  Only the sky …

  Of all this world, only the sky offered them surcease, a momentary reprieve from spikes of terrestrial congestion. Through furnace eyes they gazed across the world’s dark curvature. The sun flared white and preternaturally bright. Thunderheads roiled beneath, trailing into nothingness in the distance, like snow kicked across ice. They saw pale coastlines, vast tracts of bleached ochre and blue. They flexed their frames in languorous vanity, beat their air-scooping wings.

  Zioz. Setmahaga. Sohorat …

  Only here, at the limits of this cursed world.

  Then the Voice called them, crackling with torment and rebuke. As one, they bent their elephantine heads back, howled into the indigo depths, then plunged backward, diving into the skein of angry clouds. Wind burned eyes that could not tear.

  Like stones, they dropped from the belly of the clouds.

  Shimeh encircled the nearing ground, dark save where fires scored her. They sensed the mortals, loping like monkeys down murky streets, raping, murdering, warring …

  Would that they could devour it all.

  But the Voice! The Voice! Like a thing of needles. More agonizing than the million teeth of this surrounding world.

  They soared toward the city’s heart, following the yaw and pitch of the eastern wind, then alighted, one after another, on the eaves of the First Temple.

  The Voice approved.

  They flattened like beetles against the slate. They could sense the eyeless ones within, waiting.

  Fall upon them! the Voice screeched. Rend them! Only in their midst will you be safe from the Chorae!

  They smashed through the shingles, tore aside the braces, cracked the great stone lintels asunder, then dropped in a hail of debris. A dozen saffron-robed men scrambled about them, blue lights flashing from their foreheads. Great arcs of energy sizzled across their incandescent hides.

  Sohorat roared, and plaster rained throughout the forest of columns. Flies burst from his maw. Raving wolves bubb
led from his palms, smashed the sheets of light, gorged on those cringing behind them. Zioz swept burning threads into his fist, wrenched souls from their housing meat. Setmahaga clawed aside flimsy defences, struck heads from bodies, gloried in the blood that smoked across his limbs. He squealed like a thousand pigs, such was his exultation.

  “Demon!” A voice like a thunderclap.

  They turned from the blood-soaked marble, saw an old, eyeless man approach from the deeper temple. Something flashed from his forehead, like a stolen star. Others spilled between the flanking columns. More blind men.

  Flee, the Voice whispered in his soul.

  Setmahaga fell first, struck in the eye by an absence affixed to the end of a stick. An explosion of burning salt …

  Flee!

  Then Sohorat, his slavering form caught in torrents of light, screamed.

  Zioz leapt into the clouds.

  Return me, manling! Throw off these chains!

  But the Scarlet Schoolman was obstinate.

  One last task … One more offending eye …

  Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowling over his father, watched him lean back into absolute shadow.

  “You came to the world,” unseen lips said, “and you saw that Men were like children.”

  Lines of radiance danced across the intervening waters.

  “It is their nature to believe as their fathers believed,” the darkness continued. “To desire as they desired … Men are like wax poured into moulds: their souls are cast by their circumstances. Why are no Fanim children born to Inrithi parents? Why are no Inrithi children born to Fanim parents? Because these truths are made, cast by the particularities of circumstance. Rear an infant among Fanim and he will become Fanim. Rear him among Inrithi and he will become Inrithi …

  “Split him in two, and he would murder himself.”

  Without warning, the face re-emerged, water-garbled, white save the black sockets beneath his brow. The action seemed random, as though his father merely changed posture to relieve some vagrant ache, but it was not. Everything, Kellhus knew, had been premeditated. For all the changes wrought by thirty years in the Wilderness, his father remained Dûnyain …

  Which meant that Kellhus stood on conditioned ground.

  “But as obvious as this is,” the blurred face continued, “it escapes them. Because they cannot see what comes before them, they assume nothing comes before them. Nothing. They are numb to the hammers of circumstance, blind to their conditioning. What is branded into them, they think freely chosen.

  So they thoughtlessly cleave to their intuitions, and curse those who dare question. They make ignorance their foundation. They confuse their narrow conditioning for absolute truth.”

  He raised a cloth, pressed it into the pits of his eyes. When he withdrew it, two rose-coloured stains marked the pale fabric. The face slipped back into the impenetrable black.

  “And yet part of them fears. For even unbelievers share the depth of their conviction. Everywhere, all about them, they see examples of their own self-deception … ‘Me!’ everyone cries. ‘I am chosen!’ How could they not fear when they so resemble children stamping their feet in the dust? So they encircle themselves with yea-sayers, and look to the horizon for confirmation, for some higher sign that they are as central to the world as they are to themselves.”

  He waved his hand out, brought his palm to his bare breast. “And they pay with the coin of their devotion.”

  “And what of you, Akka?” Esmenet said, her voice become scathing. “Haven’t you yielded your precious Gnosis as readily as I’ve yielded my womb?” Why couldn’t she just hate him, this drab and broken sorcerer? It would all be so much easier then.

  Achamian cleared his throat. “Yes … yes, I have …”

  “Then tell me why, Holy Tutor. Why would a Mandate Schoolman do such an unthinkable thing?”

  “Because the Second Apocalypse … It comes …”

  “The very world is at stake and you complain that he makes weapons of all things? Akka, you should rejoi—”

  “I’m not saying he’s not the Harbinger! He may even be a prophet for all I know …”

  “Then what are you saying, Akka? Do you even know?”

  Two tears threaded his cheeks.

  “That he stole you from me! Stole!”

  “Picked your purse, did he? That’s funny, because I feel more shit than gold.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Isn’t it? You love me, yes, Akka, but I’ve never been anything more than a—”

  “But you’re not thinking! You see only your love for him. You’re not thinking of what he sees when he gazes upon you.”

  A moment of silent horror.

  “But he lies! The Scylvendi lies! I’m Nansur. I know—”

  “Tell me, Esmi! Tell me what he sees!”

  She shook. Why was she shaking? The earth seemed like stone beneath her knees.

  “The truth,” she murmured. “He sees the truth!”

  Somehow his arms had scooped her to her feet. And she clutched him, sobbed and wailed into his shoulders.

  He whispered into her ear. “He doesn’t see, Esmi … He watches.”

  And the words were there, at once deafening and unspoken.

  … without love.

  She looked up to him, and he stared at her with an intensity, a desperation, she knew she would never find in Kellhus’s endless blue eyes. He smelled warm … bitter.

  His lips were wet.

  Eleäzaras gazed across the infernal landscape. He could hear himself cackle, but he knew not the voice. What was this he felt? Glee, dark and gloating, like watching a hated sibling struck at last. Remorse, and fear—terror, even! It was as though he dropped and dropped and never struck ground.

  And, yes … omnipotence. Like liquor burning through his veins, or opium sweltering his soul.

  Like the spectres of decapitated snakes, dragonheads reared above various cadres and masticated about streaming fire. To his immediate right, someone—Nem-Panipal?—sang boiling clouds of black. Lightning flashed out in a blinding skein. Stone exploded outward. Sheering along a diagonal, a tower fell onto the ruins of its own foundation, where it lay like an overturned hull.

  The Grandmaster cackled as the wave of dust rolled over him. Shimeh burned! Shimeh burned!

  Somehow Sarothenes, his shield-bearers nowhere to be seen, had found his way to his side. Why would the fool risk—

  “You press too hard!” the rail-thin sorcerer cried. Lines of black scored his rutted face, where he had wiped at flecks of soot, no doubt. “You exhaust us on women, children, and dumb stone!”

  “Kill them!” Eleäzaras spat. “I care not!”

  “But the Cishaurim, Eli! We must conserve ourselves!”

  For some reason, he thought of all the slaves who had swallowed his member, of clutching tight silken sheets, of the luxurious agony of release. This was what it was like, he realized. He had seen them, the Men of the Tusk, filing back from battle, matted in blood, smiling with those terrifying eyes …

  As though to show those eyes to Sarothenes, he turned to the man, held out a hand to the sulphurous calamity before them.

  “Behold!” he spat contemptuously. “Behold what we—we!—have wrought.”

  The soot-stained sorcerer stared at him in horror. Lights flashed across his sweaty cheek.

  Eleäzaras turned back to exult in the wages of his impossible labour.

  Shimeh burned … Shimeh.

  “Our power,” he grated. “Our glory!”

  From the parapets of the Mirraz Gate, Proyas gazed in disbelief.

  A vast plate of clouds—dark, churning in unnatural, ingrown ways—moved in ponderous revolutions about the city, taking the Sacred Heights as its axis. Simply staring at it dizzied his footing. From where he stood, the First Temple seemed impo
ssibly near. He could even see armoured men—Fanim—emerge from the darkness beyond the outermost ring of pillars, bounding down stairs and across landings before disappearing behind the battlements of the Heterine Wall. But what dismayed him was the great curtain of smoke and fire that approached the Heights from the ruins of the Massus Gate. Chalk-white streamers. Mists of ochre dust. Rolling veils of grey. Plumes like liquid basalt, solid and black. And through them, glowering fires, threads of lightning, and flying cataracts of gold. Whole tracts of the city had been blasted and consumed, reduced to a great thumb of smouldering ruin.

  Ingiaban laughed maniacally. “Have you ever seen such a thing!”

  Proyas turned to rebuke him, only to glimpse a figure draped in shimmering crimson picking his way over the matted dead immediately behind them. The man teetered for a moment, skidding in blood. His iron-grey braid swung across his left shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” Proyas cried.

  The Scarlet Schoolman ignored him, took up a position facing west, and stretched his arms wide beneath the sky.

  “You’re destroying the city!”

  The old man whirled, so quickly that his ornate gowns were a heartbeat in following. Despite his phlegmatic eyes and stooped frame, his voice was as forceful as it was furious. “Conriyan ingrate! The Cishaurim own the skies. They use the darkness to hide their Chorae! If we lose this contest, then all is lost, do you understand? Holy Shimeh … Fie on your fucking city!”

  Shocked as much by the man’s bearing as by his vehemence, Proyas retreated a step, speechless. Cursing, the Schoolman returned to his task, and Proyas found himself peering down the wall to the nearest tower. Tiny figures teemed atop the parapet, and among them, another white-bearded Schoolman stood leaning against the battlements, his arms held out to the west, his eyes flaring bright as he sang. Black clouds ribbed the sky above, though the Meneanor beyond still winked blue and white, bathed in distant sunshine.

  The sorcerer before Proyas began singing as well. A sudden wind bellied his gaping sleeves.