The Thousandfold Thought

  “The Warrior-Prophet,” she continued, speaking his name like a well-worn threat, “wishes to know the details of your prep—”

  “Is what they say true?” he blurted. “Is it true you once belonged to Achamian? Drusas Achamian?” Of course, he knew it was, but for some reason he needed to hear her say it.

  She stared at him, dumbfounded. Suddenly Eleäzaras could actually hear the silence provided by the black felt walls—every stitch of it.

  Tap-tap-tap-tap … The thing bleeding faceless blood.

  “Don’t you see the irony?” he drawled on. “Surely you do…Iwas the one who ordered that Achamian be abducted. I was the one who stranded you with … with him.” He snorted. “I’m the reason you’re here at all, am I not?”

  She didn’t sneer—her face was far too beautiful—but her expression burned with contempt nonetheless. “More men,” she said evenly, “should take credit for their mistakes.”

  Eleäzaras tried to laugh, but she continued, speaking as though he were nothing more than a creaking pole or barking dog. Noise. She continued telling him—the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires!—what he had to do. And why not, when he so obviously had abandoned decisions?

  Shimeh was coming, she said. Shimeh.

  As though names could have teeth.

  Rain. It was one of those showers that came sudden upon dusk, foreshortening the sunlight and within moments casting the pall of woollen night. Water fell in sheets, vanishing into grasses, hissing across bare ground, bouncing across the dark welter of canvas slopes. Gusts made mist of the torrent, and sodden banners thrashed like fish on hooks. Hoarse shouts and curses echoed through the encampment. The delinquent battled to pitch their tents. Some few stripped and stood naked, letting the water cleanse the long, long road from their skin. Esmenet, like so many others, found herself running.

  She was thoroughly drenched by the time she found the small pavilion. Standing stoic in the downpour, the guardsmen of the Hundred Pillars could only regard her with bemused sympathy. The canvas flap was slicked in cold. Kellhus already awaited her in the warmly illuminated interior—as did Achamian.

  They both turned to her, though Achamian looked quickly back to the abomination—the skin-spy she had seized from Eleäzaras. It seemed to be muttering to him.

  Rain drummed across the tarpaulin, an ambient and humid roar. Water dripped from dents in the ceiling.

  The thing had been chained upright to the centremost post, its wrists hung high, its feet off the rush-covered ground to deny it leverage. Nude, it gleamed polished brown in the lantern light, the colour of the Sansori slave it had replaced. The wages of its captivity marred its skin: burns, welts, and inexplicable curlicues of broken skin, as though a child had scribbled upon it with an awl or knife. Its face disjointed and half clenched, it rolled its head as though dragging a weight. An expression of human astonishment seemed painted across its knuckled digits.

  Iyokus had taken his toll, she realized, even in such a short time. She tried not to think of Achamian suffering the man’s ministrations …

  “Chigraaaa … Ku’urnarcha murkmuk sreeee …”

  “Some inborn impulse …” Achamian was saying, as though he resumed an interrupted thought. “Like those caterpillars that curl into a ball whenever touched. The same must happen when they’re captured.”

  Shuddering, Esmenet bent over to squeeze water from her hair, then gently dabbed her face with the inner lining of her surcoat, knowing from the stains that the lampblack about her eyes had scored her cheeks to the hollow. She blinked at the obscene image of the skin-spy, tried to steady her breath. She had to harden herself to such things!

  Who are you fooling?

  Was this how it was for others of high station? Perpetual fear? From everything, every word, every act, the consequences hung so heavy, swung so far and deep. The Consult is real.

  “No,” Kellhus said. “You’re understanding them by reference to men.” He shot Achamian a chiding smile that Esmenet found herself returning. “You’re assuming they must possess some self to hide. But whatever subtlety of character they possess, they steal. Apart from that, they have only the bestial rudiments of self. They’re shells only. The mockery of souls.”

  “More than enough,” Achamian replied, grimacing.

  The implications were clear: More than enough to replace us …

  “More than enough,” Kellhus repeated, though his intonations—regret, sorrow, foreboding—made them seem entirely different words.

  Still quite sodden, Esmenet took her place by Kellhus’s side, making sure that he stood between her and Achamian. Suddenly she found herself at the dizzying centre of his attention.

  “The man it replaced,” he asked, “what was he?”

  She tried to purge the adulation from her look. “One of their slave-soldiers,” she replied. “Javreh … He belonged to the Rhumkar.”

  “A Weeper,” Achamian said, using the sorcerer’s pejorative for Chorae archers—those who “shed” the Tears of God. The Rhumkari, Esmenet had been told, were widely considered the most deadly marksmen in all the Three Seas.

  She nodded. “That was how he came to Eleäzaras’s attention, in fact. The Scarlet Spires encourage liaisons between members of their most elite formations. His lover reported him to his superiors. Apparently they probed his face with pins.” She looked to Kellhus with what she had assumed would be pride but felt like longing instead.

  “Effective,” he said, nodding, “but impractical on any useful scale.” Even though he didn’t look at her, he gently squeezed her shoulder as he circled the monstrosity. The space between her and Achamian suddenly seemed … nude.

  “So what do you think?” Achamian asked. “Could we have caught them preparing for an assassination attempt?” Despite her discomfort, Esmenet turned to him, drawn by the quaver in his voice. He met her gaze for one round-eyed moment, then glanced away.

  The anxiousness never lifted, she realized, the horror of making mistakes never went away.

  Not for people like us.

  “They know you bear the Mark now,” she said to Kellhus. “They think you vulnerable.”

  “But the risks …” Achamian said. “I can’t think of anyone the Scarlet Spires scrutinize more than their Rhumkari. This thing’s handler had to know as much.”

  “Indeed,” Kellhus said. “It implies desperation.”

  Unaccountably, she thought of that day in Sumna arguing the significance of Maithanet’s offer to the Scarlet Spires with Achamian and Inrau. The first day men had listened. “But think,” she said, rallying what confidence she could. “Yours is the greatest soul, Kellhus, the most subtle intellect. You’ve come to thwart the Second Apocalypse. Wouldn’t they do anything to deny you the Gnosis? Anything?”

  “Chigraaaaaaaa,” the thing wheezed. “Put hara ki zurot …”

  Achamian glanced at Kellhus before turning to her with uncommon boldness. “I think she’s right,” he said, gazing with open admiration. “Maybe we can breathe easy, maybe not. Either way, we should probably keep you cloistered as much as possible.” Though the patronage of his look should have offended her, there was apology in it as well, a heartbreaking admission.

  She could not bear it.

  Darkness and drumming rain.

  The thing lay motionless, though the scent of the guardsmen who doused the lanterns had pulled its phallus long and hard across its belly. The musk of terror.

  The shackles chafed, but it felt no pain. The air chilled, but it was not cold.

  It knew it had been sacrificed, knew the torments to come, yet it believed without contradiction that its Old Father would not abandon it. It had spoken long with its captive brothers. It knew the numbers that would guard it, the elaborate codes that would be required to see it. It was doomed, without hope of reprieve, and yet it would be saved—two certainties it could mull in what passed for its soul without any offence to consistency.

  There was but one measure, one Truth, and it was warm
and wet and bloody. The mere thought of it sent spasms through its member. How it yearned! How it ached!

  It hung in the twilight it called thought, dreamed of mounting enemies …

  When the apportioned time had passed, it jerked its head upright and, still groggy, fumbled to assemble its face. As though out of reflex, it tested its bonds and shackles. Metal whined. Wood creaked.

  Then it screamed, though not in any register mannish ears might detect.

  “Yut mirzur!”

  Shrill and piercing, ringing out across the army of Men, who slept huddled against the damp and chill, to where its brothers crouched like jackals in the rain.

  “Yut-yaga mirzur!”

  Two words in Aghurzoi, their holy tongue. “They believe.”

  From Gim, the Holy War struck across the Jarta Highlands. None could read the stele that marked their passage into Amoteu—though they somehow knew. Their scattered columns snaked across the dark and hazy hillsides, their arms and armour shining bright in the sunlight, their voices raised in booming song. They walked the ways of Holy Amoteu, and though the stacked landscape, with its pastures as flat as lakes across the valley floors, its slopes hunched about shale escarpments, was as novel as any they had crossed over the hard seasons, it seemed they had come home. Far more than Xerash, they knew this place. Its names. Its peoples. Its history.

  They had been schooled in this earth since childhood.

  By mid-afternoon of the following day, the Conriyans had reached the Anothrite Shrine, which lay some three miles off the Herotic Way. Seven men, Ankiriothi under Palatine Ganyatti, were drowned in the rush to bathe in the holy waters. With each day they trudged or rode across some greater threshold, some other marker of their great labour’s end. Soon they would be in Besral, where they might glimpse the blood of the Latter Prophet’s line in the eyes of the inhabitants. Then the River Hor. Then …

  Shimeh, it seemed, lay impossibly near. Shimeh!

  Like a shout on the horizon. A whisper become voice in their hearts.

  Meanwhile, a few days’ march to the east, the Padirajah himself, Fanayal ab Kascamandri, took to the field with his several hundred Coyauri and hand-picked Grandees, bent on hunting down the man his people called Hurall’arkreet—a name they were forbidden to speak in his presence. Knowing that Athjeäri’s numbers had dwindled, he ordered Cinganjehoi to ride in force across the south of the highlands with his Eumarnans. He guessed that the nimble Earl would skirt the Tiger’s flank rather than withdraw, following the River Hor beneath the hoof-shaped hills the Kianene called the Madas, or the “Nails.” Here he prepared an ambush, using, much to the disgust of the High Heresiarch, Seökti, a full cadre of Cishaurim to assure victory.

  The young Earl of Gaenri, however, stood his ground and, though outnumbered ten to one, met Cinganjehoi and his Grandees in pitched battle. Despite the ferocity of the Inrithi, the situation was hopeless. The Red Horse of Gaenri vanished in the tumult. Crying out to his men, Athjeäri spurred toward it, battled his way into the heathen’s midst, cowing them with shouts and hammering blows. Without warning, his Mongilean charger faltered, and an adolescent lancer, the son of a Seleukaran Grandee, stabbed him in the face.

  Death came swirling down.

  The Fanim keened in ululating triumph. Howling in outrage and horror, the Earl’s householders charged into the heathen horsemen, who desperately tried to abscond with his body. At a horrible cost the Galeoth retrieved him, hacked and mauled—desecrated.

  Bearing his body, the surviving Thanes and Knights of Gaenri fled westward, broken as few men could be. Within hours they encountered a strong band of Kishyati under Lord Soter, who scattered their pursuers. The Gaenri wept to know that deliverance had been so near, yet so very late. They would be called the Twenty, for out of hundreds no more than that number survived.

  At the Council of Great and Lesser Names, the death of Athjeäri occasioned solemn remembrance and no little dread. For so long the young Earl had been the eyes of the Holy War, the longest and surest of their many lances. It was a disastrous omen. Since Cumor, the High Cultist of Gilgaöl, was dead, the Warrior-Prophet himself conducted the ceremony declaring him Battle-Celebrant, speaking the Gilgallic Rites without rehearsal.

  “Inri Sejenus came after the Apocalypse,” he told the grieving caste-nobles, “when the world’s wounds had need of healing. I come before, when Men have need of warlike strength. Of all the Hundred Gods, far-striking Gilgaöl burns brightest within me, but not so bright as He burned within Coithus Athjeäri, son of Asilda, daughter of Eryeat, King of the Galeoth.”

  Afterward, the surviving priests of War washed his body and dressed him in clothing belonging to his recently arrived countrymen, so he wouldn’t suffer the indignity of burning in the khalats of his enemy. He was laid upon a great pyre of cedar and set alight—a lone beacon beneath the arch of heaven.

  The dirges of the Galeoth echoed long into the night.

  The Holy War crossed the last of the Jarta Highlands, their mood sombre, their thoughts now filled with apprehension. Gothyelk joined them mere miles short of Besral, and though the Tydonni were dismayed to learn of Athjeäri’s fall, the rest of the Holy War were heartened. Here, on the very land that had birthed the Latter Prophet, the Men of the Tusk had been reunited. Only one last task lay before them.

  Then, the morning they wound down the last of the Jartic heights, they came to an abandoned Nansur villa at the end of the Shairizor Plains. Here the Warrior-Prophet called a halt, though hours of daylight remained. The Lords of the Holy War beseeched him to continue, so eager were they to at last lay eyes on the Holy City.

  Denying them, he took up residence behind the fortified walls.

  Esmenet begged him not to move.

  She braced her hands against his hard chest, then, staring into his eyes, she slowly pressed down, taking him to his pelvis. He shuddered, and for a grinding instant she felt herself welded to him in singular bliss. He came, and she followed, bucking about iron and ringing heat, crying out …

  “Thank you,” she gasped in his ear afterward. “Thank you.” It seemed she so rarely touched him anymore.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, and though his breath was heavy, she knew he was not winded. He was never winded. He stood, and she watched him walk naked across the polished floor to the elaborate laver carved into the sill of the opposing wall. In the gloom, the tripods painted him in orange and crimson hues. As he washed, his shadow fell bloated across the frescoed walls. She lay watching, admiring his ivory form, savouring the memory of him slick between her thighs.

  She hugged tight the sheets, suddenly greedy for what little warmth they offered. She stared across the suite, recognizing in its lines memories of her former home. The Empire. Centuries previous, she knew, some Patridomos had coupled in this very room, his thoughts miraculously innocent of words like “Fanim” or “Consult.” He would have recognized “Kianene” perhaps, but only as the name of an obscure desert people. Not just individuals but entire ages, she realized, could be innocent of dreadful things.

  She thought of Serwë. The perpetual anxiousness returned.

  How had the joy of her new circumstances become so elusive? In her old life, she had often quizzed the priests who came to her, and in her darker moods she had even presumed to school them in what she saw as their hypocrisy. With some, those unlikely to return, she had asked what could be missing from their faith for them to find solace in whores. “Strength,” they sometimes answered; several had even wept. But more often than not they denied missing anything at all.

  After all, how could they be miserable, when Inri Sejenus had claimed their hearts?

  “Many make that mistake,” Kellhus said, standing at the side of the bed.

  Without thinking, she reached out and grasped his phallus, began stroking its head with her thumb. He knelt on the edge of the bed and his great shadow encompassed her. A nimbus of gold outlined his mane.

  Blinking tears, she looked to him. Please ??
? take me again.

  “They think misery inconsistent with faith,” he continued, “and so they start to pretend. They act as others act, thinking they alone have doubts, they alone are weak … In the company of the joyous they become desolate, and hold themselves accountable for their own desolation.”

  He became hard and long beneath her touch, curved like a strung bow.

  “But I have you,” she murmured. “I lie with you. I bear your child.”

  Kellhus smiled, gently disengaged her hand. He leaned forward to kiss her palm. “I’m the answer, Esmi. Not the cure.”

  Why was she crying? What was wrong with her?

  “Please,” she said, clutching his member once again, as though it were her only purchase, her only possible hold on this godlike man. “Please take me.”

  This one thing I can give …

  “There’s more,” he said, drawing back the sheets and placing a shadowy hand upon her belly. “So much more.”

  His look was long and sad. Then he left her for Achamian and the secrets of the Gnosis.

  She lay awake for some time, listening to the fragments of arcane voice that surfaced from the stonework about her. Then, the gloom thickening as the braziers failed, she stretched naked across the sheets and drowsed, her soul circling about sorrow after sorrow. The death of Achamian. The death of Mimara.

  Nothing stayed dead in her life. Her past least of all.

  “Walking between Wards is easy,” a voice hummed, “when their author practises other arcana.”

  She awoke suddenly, if not completely, and through blinking eyes watched yet another man walk to the side of her bed … He was tall, dressed in a black cloak over a silvered brigandine. With relief she realized he was quite handsome. There was compensation of a different sort in—