The Thousandfold Thought

  Achamian stepped forward, past the blasted trees.

  Horrified, Iyokus realized that Achamian toyed with him. The chanv addict abandoned the Houlari, seized on the great maul of his School: the Dragonhead.

  A scaled neck reared into existence above him. The unseen maw dipped, vomited a cataract of golden fire. Crying out his song, Iyokus watched the deluge part about the man’s Wards. Ropes of fire glided down and away, as though burning oil had been cast across a sphere of glass. But there were cracks, fractures that bled sheets of faint vertical light.

  Again the Dragonhead struck, illuminating the entirety of the grove, blowing petals skyward in locust-clouds. And still the Mandate Schoolman advanced, stepping through coiling wreaths of flame, singing that mad, incomprehensible song. The fractures had multiplied, deepened …

  Iyokus screamed the words, but there was a flash of something brighter than lightning. The pure dispensation of force, unmuted by image or interpretation.

  Geometries scythed through the air. Parabolas of blinding white, swinging from perfect lines, all converging upon his Ward. Ghost-stone shivered and cracked, fell away like shale beneath a hammer …

  An explosion of brilliance, then—

  Heedless of the dark, the Chieftain of the Utemot rode from the Gate of Horns and into the surrounding Enathpanean hills. He hobbled his horse, a Eumarnan black apportioned to him following the destruction of Padirajah’s host, then struck a fire atop a high promontory overlooking the city. The hollow in his belly had crept into his chest, where it congealed, clawing—like the crow his mad grandmother always said lived within her breast. He lay awhile, his broad back against a still-warm boulder, his arms out and swaying, his fingertips teased by trembling grasses. He savoured the warmth and breathed. Gradually the crow ceased thrashing.

  And he thought, So many stars.

  He was no longer of the People. He was more. There was no thought he could not think. No act he could not undertake. No lips he could not kiss … Nothing was forbidden.

  Staring into the infinite fields of black, he drifted asleep. He dreamed that he was bound to Serwë upon the Circumfix, pressed hard against her—within her … And it seemed no coupling could be more profound. “You’re mad,” she whispered, her breath moist with urgency.

  “I am yours,” he gasped in an outland tongue. “You are the only track remaining.”

  A corpse’s gaping grin. “But I’m dead.”

  These words struck like stone, and he awoke, curled half naked across gravel and grasses. He scrambled, bleary and numb, to his feet. He drunkenly brushed grit and chaff from his skin. What dreams were these? What kind of man—

  Then he saw her.

  Standing above his fire, wearing a simple linen shift, her skin orange and lithe and flawless, like an Inrithi goddess conjured from the flames. Her eyes shone with miniature conflagrations. Sheets of hair twined about her chin and cheeks, as blonde as slaves …

  Serwë.

  Cnaiür shook his head and mane, clawed his cheeks. He opened his mouth, but breath would not come. The wind seemed glacial.

  Serwë.

  She smiled, then leapt into the blackness that framed her.

  Snarling, he sprinted after her, fully expecting to find nothing. Pausing where she had stood, he kicked through the grasses as though searching for a lost coin or weapon. The sight of her footprint knocked him to his knees.

  “Serwë?” he cried, peering across the dark. He stumbled to his feet. “Serwë!”

  Then he saw her again, leaping from rock to rock down the shadowy slope, silver in moonlight. Suddenly all the world seemed steep, a concatenation of cliff faces. He glimpsed her silhouette slip between the fists of two great boulders. Caraskand sprawled across the distances below her, a labyrinth of turquoise and black. He lurched forward, began racing down the darkling slopes, leaping into the void. He crashed into a stand of dwarf yuccas, tripped through a grotesquerie of limbs. A brace of thrushes exploded into the black sky, screeching. He rolled to his feet, then ran, seemingly without breath or heartbeat, his feet magically finding their sandalled way across the murky ground.

  “Serwë!”

  He paused between the boulders, scanned the moonlit terrain. There! Her willowy figure, racing like a hare across the footings of the hill.

  Spring grasses whisking across bare shins. Great loping strides, like a wolf across a killing field. Then he was skidding across gravel, flying over sudden plummets. Leaning low, he threw himself at her distant figure, his many-scarred arms scything to and fro at his side, chest heaving, spittle trailing across his chin and cheeks. The night roared. But he could not close the interval. She sprinted across fallow earth, disappeared over the lip of a terraced meadow.

  “You’re mine!” he howled.

  Before him, Caraskand grew until it riddled the whole horizon with snaking streets and innumerable rooftops. The forward bastions of the Triamic Walls loomed larger, swallowing the city’s nearer quarters. Soon only the heights and their monumental structures were visible.

  He glimpsed her shape again, just before she vanished into the blackness harboured by a grove of olive trees. He dashed after her, through the rush of stationary limbs. When he broke the grove’s far side, he found himself on the battlefield, near the remains of a burned-out byre. She was little more than a thread of white, climbing the roll of dead fields, heading toward the great heaps where the Fanim dead had been thrown.

  For a moment part of him despaired. His head swam, his limbs burned with the strain of his exertions. His wind had abandoned him, yet his legs still pounded across the rutted earth. The moon cast his shadow before him, and with reckless limbs he raced it, leaping dead horses, bruising mats of spring clover. He lost sight of her among the dead, but somehow he knew she would wait.

  It seemed he no longer breathed, but he could smell the dead as he willed himself up the last fallow slope. The stench soon became overpowering, a sourness so raw, so earthen deep, it clawed convulsions from his stomach. It possessed a flavour that could be tasted only on the bottom of the tongue.

  So holy.

  He stumbled to his knees and retched, then found himself staggering across a landscape of corpses. In some places they merely matted the ground, a macramé of stripped limbs, but elsewhere they’d been heaped dozens, even hundreds, deep—into mounds that seeped something like bone-oil from their base. Moonlight fell plain across naked skin, gleamed across exposed teeth, probed the hollows of innumerable gaping mouths.

  He found her standing alone in a clearing rutted by the wains that had been used to gather the dead. Her back was turned to him. He approached warily, wondering at her nightmarish beauty. Beyond her, above a black screen of trees, a signal fire glittered atop one of Caraskand’s towers.

  “Serwë,” he gasped.

  She whirled and her face flew apart, as though snakes had been braided about her skull. He charged into her, bore her down, and for an instant he was inside her impossible expression, saw gums reaching, pink and moist, to wild lidless eyes. They rolled among the dead, until he threw himself free with an inarticulate roar. He staggered backward …

  There was no time for horror.

  She twirled in the air and something exploded across his jaw. He sailed headfirst into the corpses. He clutched a cold hand in the scramble to regain his feet. He tripped on a bloated torso, reached back, braced himself against the mud of dead faces.

  The skin-spy regarded him, reassembled its features into those of another. As Cnaiür watched, the blonde hair fell from its pate in a feathery cascade, drawn away by the breeze, and for some reason this seemed the most horrific of all.

  He stood, slicked by sweat, gasping for breath. He was unarmed, and though part of him had shouted this from the beginning, it seemed he realized it only now. I’m dead.

  But the thing turned to the sky instead of attacking, drawn by the sound of beating wings.

  Cnaiür followed its gaze, saw a raven descending in the dark. To the rig
ht of the skin-spy, one corpse lay askew a heap of others, its elbows bent out backward, its face turned toward Cnaiür, eyes drooling from sunken sockets, lips drawn back from black-leather gums. The bird landed on its grey cheek. It regarded him with a white human face, no larger than an apple.

  Cnaiür cursed, stumbled backward. What new outrage was this?

  “Old,” the tiny face said in a reedy voice. “Old is the covenant between our peoples.”

  Cnaiür stared in horror. “I belong to no people,” he said blankly.

  A vertiginous silence. It peered at him with an avian canniness, as though forced to revisit certain long-standing assumptions.

  “Perhaps,” it said. “But something binds you to him. You would not have saved him otherwise. You would not have killed my child.”

  Cnaiür spat. “Nothing binds me!”

  It craned its tiny face to the side, bird-curious.

  “But the past binds us all, Scylvendi, as the bow binds the flight of an arrow. All of us have been nocked, raised, and released. All that remains is to see where we land … to see whether we strike true.”

  He couldn’t breathe. It seemed agony simply to look, as though everything chattered with a million masticating teeth. Everything real. Why could nothing be simple? Why could nothing be pure? Why must the world continually heap indignities upon him, and obscenities about … How much must he endure?

  “I know whom you hunt.”

  “Lies!” Cnaiür raved. “Lies upon lies!”

  “He came to you, didn’t he? The father of the Warrior-Prophet.” Diminutive amusement flickered across the creature’s face. “The Dûnyain.”

  The Chieftain of the Utemot gazed at the thing, his thoughts battered senseless by a chorus of conflicting passions: confusion, outrage, hope … Then at last he recalled the only track remaining—the only true track—though his heart had known it all along. The one certainty.

  Hate.

  He grew very calm. “The hunt is over,” he said. “Tomorrow the Holy War marches for Xerash and Amoteu. I am to remain behind.”

  “You have been moved, nothing more. In benjuka, every move bespeaks a new rule.” The small face regarded him, its bald scalp shining beneath the white moon. “We are that new rule, Scylvendi.”

  Eyes tiny and impossibly old. An intimation of power, rumbling through vein, heart, and bone.

  “Not even the dead escape the Plate.”

  When Achamian found Xinemus in his rooms, the Marshal was as drunk as he had ever seen him.

  Xinemus coughed—a sound like gravel crashing across the planked box of a wain. “Did you do it?”

  “Yes …”

  “Good—good! Were you injured? Did he hurt you in any way?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have them?”

  Achamian paused, unsettled that Xinemus hadn’t said “Good” in response to his second answer as well. Does he want me to suffer?

  “Do you have them?” Xinemus exclaimed.

  “Y-yes.”

  “Good … good!” Xinemus said. He bolted from his chair, but with the same rigid aimlessness with which he seemed to do everything now that he had no eyes. “Give them to me!”

  He had shouted this as though Achamian were a Knight of Attrempus.

  “I …” Achamian swallowed. “I don’t understand …”

  “Leave them … Leave me!”

  “Zin … You must help me understand!”

  “Leave!”

  Achamian started, such was the intensity of his cry.

  “All right,” he muttered, moving for the door. His stomach heaved and hitched as though the floor pitched asea. “All right …” He yanked the door wide, but for some perverse reason simply stood still for a heartbeat then slammed it shut as though leaving in fury. He stood breathless, watching his friend turn and stride toward the westward wall, his left hand pawing the air before him, his right clutching tight the bloodstained cloth.

  “Finally,” Xinemus muttered under his breath, either sobbing or laughing. “Finalleeee …”

  He stamped palm and fingers across the wall, moving to his left. He left a trail of blood-prints across the cerulean panels, then the Nilnameshi pastoral. When he reached the mirror, he stopped, his finger fluttering across the ivory frame as he positioned himself squarely before it. He became very still—so much so that Achamian feared he would hear the breath that rasped so loudly in his own ears. For a time it seemed Xinemus gazed into the phlegmatic pits where his eyes had once laughed and fumed. There was an air of longing to his blind scrutiny.

  With horror Achamian watched him fumble with the cloth, then bring one hand to each of his sockets. When he drew away his hands, Iyokus’s weeping eyes stared askew from phalanges of angry skin.

  Walls and ceiling lurched.

  “Open!” the Marshal of Attrempus wailed. He jerked his dead and bloody gaze about the room, pausing for a heart-stopping moment on Achamian. “Ooopen!”

  Then he began thrashing through his apartments.

  Achamian slipped through the door and fled.

  In the dark, Eleäzaras clutched his friend, rocked him back and forth, knowing that he held a far greater dark in his arms.

  “Sh-shhhh …”

  “E-Eli,” his Master of Spies gasped. The man shook and blubbered, yet somehow seemed wane even in his anguish. “Eli!”

  “Shhhh, Iyokus. Do you remember what it is to see?”

  A shudder passed through the addict’s form. The translucent head rolled in a drunken nod. Blood spilled from the linen dressings, traced dark lines across his transparent cheek.

  “The words,” Eleäzaras hissed. “Do you remember the words?”

  In sorcery, everything depended on the purity of meaning. Who knew what blinding might do?

  “Y-yessss.”

  “Then you are whole.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ENATHPANEAH

  Like a stern father, war shames men into hating their childhood games.

  —PROTATHIS, ONE HUNDRED HEAVENS

  I returned from that campaign a far different man, or so my mother continuously complained. “Now only the dead,” she would tell me, “can hope to match your gaze.”

  —TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES

  Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Momemn

  Perhaps, Ikurei Xerius III mused, tonight would be a night of desserts.

  From the vantage of the Imperial Apartments on the Andiamine Heights, the Meneanor seemed a vast shining plate beneath the moon. Xerius could scarce remember ever seeing the Great Sea so preternaturally calm. He considered summoning Arithmeas, his augur, but decided against it—more out of hubris than generosity. The man was a fawning charlatan. They all were. As his mother would say, every man was a spy in the end, an agent of contrary interests. Every face was made of fingers …

  Like Skeaös.

  Despite the vertigo, he leaned against the balustrade, staring, clutching tight a mantle of fine-brushed Galeoth wool against the chill. As always, his eyes were drawn southward, to the dark sockets of the coast. Shimeh lay out there—and Conphas. It seemed perverse, somehow, that men might plot and strive so far beyond his capacity to see or know. Perverse and terrifying.

  He heard the approach of sandalled feet behind him.

  “God-of-Men,” his new Exalt-Captain, Skala, said in a hushed voice. “The Empress wishes to speak with you.”

  Xerius exhaled, surprised to find he’d been holding his breath. He turned, looked up into the towering Cepaloran’s face, which seemed ugly or handsome by turns of shadow or light. His blond hair tumbled about his shoulders, crimped into tails with silver bands—a sign of some fierce tribe or other. Skala wasn’t the most pleasing ornament, but he’d proven an able replacement ever since Gaenkelti’s death.

  Ever since that mad night with the Mandate sorcerer.

  “Show her in.”

  He drained his bowl of Anpleian red. Seized by a sudden recklessness, he cast it at the southern horiz
on, as though daring the distances to be anything other than what they appeared. Why shouldn’t he be suspicious? The philosophers said this world was smoke, after all. He was the fire.

  He watched the golden bowl pirouette out, then sink into the obscurity of the lower palace. The faint ring and clatter brought a smile to his lips. He felt such contempt for things.

  “Skala?” he called to the withdrawing man.

  “Yes, God-of-Men?”

  “Some slave will steal it … that bowl.”

  “Indeed, God-of-Men.”

  Xerius belched, though with decorum. “Whoever it is, have him flogged.”

  Expressionless, Skala nodded, then turned to the golden interior of the Imperial Apartments. Xerius followed, struggling not to reel. He directed the flanking Eothic Guardsmen to close the folding doors and draw the drapes behind him. There was nothing to see out there, save calm seas and endless stars. Nothing.

  He lingered over the flames of the nearest tripod, warming his fingers. Already his mother was ascending the steps from the lower suites, and he found himself clenching his thumbs, trying to purge the slop from his thoughts. Only wit, Xerius had learned long ago, could preserve him from Ikurei Istriya.

  Peering over stair and past tapestried wall, he glimpsed her giant eunuch, Pisathulas, looming over his Guardsmen in the antechamber. Not for the first time he found himself wondering whether she ever fucked the oiled whale. He should be wondering at her motives, he knew, but she had seemed so … predictable of late, and besides, the mood had come upon him. Had she but pestered him moments later, he was sure he would have been … indisposed.