Scrutiny. Calculation.
“I have not my eyes with me,” Moënghus said, and Kellhus understood instantly that he referred to the asps used by his Cishaurim brethren. “I walk these halls by memory.”
For all the signs he betrayed, this man who was his father could be a statue of stone. He seemed a face without a soul.
“The God,” Kellhus said. “He doesn’t speak to you?”
Scrutiny. Calculation.
“No.”
“Curious …”
“And from where does his voice hail?” Moënghus asked. “From what darkness?”
“I know not … Thoughts come. I know only that they’re not mine.”
Another infinitesimal pause. He dips in the Probability Trance, the same as I …
“The mad say much the same,” Moënghus said. “Perhaps your trials have deranged you.”
“Perhaps …”
Scrutiny. Calculation.
“It’s not in your interest to deceive me.” A stone-faced pause. “Unless …”
“Unless,” Kellhus said, “I’ve come to assassinate you, as our Dûnyain brothers have decreed … Is this your apprehension?”
Scrutiny. Calculation.
“You have not the power to overcome me.”
“But I do, Father.”
Another pause, imperceptibly longer.
“How,” his father finally said, “could you know this?”
“Because I know why you were compelled to summon me.”
Scrutiny. Calculation.
“So you have grasped it.”
“Yes … the Thousandfold Thought.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SHIMEH
Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion.
Verily, it is conviction that kills.
—PARCIS, THE NEW ANALYTICS
Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh
Oily torchlight. Orange faces, slack with anxiety. Orange brickwork stained and smeared with offal. Hunched ceilings, so low that even the shortest of the bowmen had to stoop. Men coughed, some continuously, but not because of the sewage soaking their boots. The fires above were eating the air …
Or so the Waterbearer had said.
The Cishaurim stood beneath the exit. The asps wound about his neck peered upward, their thumb-sized heads a silvery black. The idolaters had fallen silent. The vaulted ceiling no longer thrummed with impact and explosion. Grit no longer tinkled across their helms.
He cocked his shaved pate, as though listening …
“Douse the light,” he commanded. “Cover your eyes.”
They dropped their torches into the slop. For a moment, sputtering blue light illuminated their shins. Everything went black …
Then impossibly bright. A thunderous crack.
“Move!” the Waterbearer cried. “Climb! Climb!”
Suddenly all was blue, illuminated by a coin of incandescence that flared on the Waterbearer’s brow. They jostled forward, spitting at the dust. One by one they shouldered their way past the blind man, struggled up a slope of broken and blistering stone, then found themselves dashing through fiery ruins.
“This voice you hear,” the old Dûnyain said, “is not part of the Thousandfold Thought.”
Kellhus ignored these words. “Take me to them.”
“To whom?”
“To those you hold captive.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Why would you refuse?”
“Because I need to revise my assumptions, to explore these unforeseen permutations. I had discounted this possibility.”
“What possibility?”
“That the Wilderness would break rather than enlighten. That you would come to me a madman.”
Water, endlessly dropping, pounded air and stone. The thunder of inevitability.
“Refuse me anything, and I will kill you, Father.”
Hunched low on their saddles, the Kianene raced from the ruins of the Tantanah Gate to the River Jeshimal, their many-coloured khalats slapping against the rings of their mail, at first just a few dozen, then hundreds, in a long arrow-shaped stream. Still others filed out the Jeshimal Gate, which lay so close to the Ainoni flank.
The Tydonni hornsmen, who could see the Fanim quite clearly from the Shrine, sounded their alarums again and again. But the old Earl of Agansanor plodded onward at a trot. He could see the great cloud rising from the far quarters of the city, but the half-ruined arches of the Skilura Aqueduct, which was very near, obscured his view. When the horns continued to sound, he cursed and sent scouts forward.
By then it was too late.
The first of the Kianene, their horses lathered by the sprint, had reached the Jeshimal. They began to secure the crossings. For the hornsmen watching from the Shrine of Azoreah, it seemed that Shimeh had been tipped so that war itself might spill from it. Soon numbers that dwarfed the Tydonni reserves were racing across the Shairizor. Several of the mastodons, which had been the first to cross the toppled wall, were now tramping in their wake, dragging the same timber rafts that had been used to bridge the low ridge of debris. And the hornsmen saw it with far more clarity than any could—the cunning of the Padirajah’s plan.
By now, Earl Gothyelk had urged his knights into a ranging gallop, leaving his more numerous footmen behind. As he picked his way past the aqueduct, he saw his dilemma immediately, for hundreds of heathen had already crossed the river and were forming up over the razed fields and groves. Raising his mace high, he called his kinsmen to formation. When he saw that his peers, the Earls Iyengar, Damergal, and Werijen Greatheart, had also cleared the ruined aqueduct, he cried out and charged headlong toward the seething banks of the River Jeshimal.
Raising a mighty shout, the thanes and knights of Ce Tydonn followed.
In absolute darkness they walked, through halls more ancient than the Tusk. A father leading his son.
The roar of the waterfall receded, became a wash as featureless as the black. The scuff of their steps echoed across walls as pitted with representation as those that had come before. And Kellhus talked, explained all that inference had taught him of his father. He spoke in generalities, mostly. The details he hazarded, particularly with regard to Moënghus’s manipulation of Cnaiür, he secured through the assignation of probabilities.
“After fleeing the Utemot, you turned south rather than east. You knew the same swazond that would see you survive the Steppe would also see you dead in the Nansurium. This was how you found yourself in Fanim lands.
“They imprisoned you at first, for though their hatred fell short of the Nansur’s homicidal fury—the Battle of Zirkirta had not yet happened—they had no love of the Scylvendi. After learning their language, you professed your devotion to Fane. Because of your literacy, it was easy to convince your captors to sell you as a slave. You fetched a respectable price.
“Not long after, you were freed, for the love you instilled in your masters quickly became awe. Not even the Fanic Priests could match your command of the pillai-a-fan, or any of the other subsidiary scriptures you were able to obtain. Those who would whip you now implored you to travel to Shimeh … to the Cishaurim, and the possibility of power beyond anything the Dûnyain had conceived.”
Five steps. Kellhus could smell the water drying across his father’s bare skin.
“My inference was warranted,” Moënghus said from the black before him.
“Indeed. We dwarf the worldborn. They are less than children to us. No matter what we encounter, be it their philosophy, their medicine, their poetry, or even their faith, we see so much deeper, and our strength is that much greater.
“So you assumed taking up the Water would be no different, that becoming one of the Indara-Kishauri would make you godlike in comparison. And since the Cishaurim themselves scarcely understand the metaphysics of their practice, there was nothing you could learn that would contradict this assumption. You couldn’t know that the Psûkhe was a metaphysic of the heart, not the i
ntellect. Of passion …
“So you let them blind you, only to find your powers proportionate to your vestigial passions. What you thought to be the Shortest Path was in fact a dead end.”
The air shivered to the rhythm of hammering drums.
High above the wreckage of street and structure, those Scarlet Schoolmen designated Watchers waited, standing upon the ground’s echo in the sky. Plumes towered between them. Firestorms raged beneath their slippered feet. The black clouds wheeled above. Only with difficulty could they see the cadres of their brothers, spread across forward limits of the tossed and broken landscape. They sensed the Chorae before they saw the first of the Thesji Bowmen: absences like wraiths, weaving across the shattered ground below. Shouts of warning were traded, but no one knew what to do. Not since the Scholastic Wars had the Scarlet Spires waged such a battle.
There was a flash, white ringed with a nacre of black. One of their number, Rimon, plummeted to ground, where he shattered salt.
The others ran across sky.
Dismayed shouts drew Eleäzaras’s attention to the cloudscape behind him. He saw gouts of flame falling from the hanging heights, roaring across already scourged ground. He glanced about, saw the fright and bewilderment of his people. But for some reason his own terror was nowhere to be found. Instead, hot tears burned down his cheeks. Great and intangible weights fell away, so quickly he thought he might pop into the sky, like a bladder of air released from drowning waters.
It happened … It happened!
He looked up to the heights looming before them, to the gilded dome of the Ctesarat, the Cishaurim Tabernacle, wavering in the heat of the intervening fires. Then he swept his gaze to either flank, to the burning buildings that ringed the arena they had created. They were all around him—as they had always been. Cishaurim filth. Surrounding. Surrounding.
“They come!” he boomed in a laughing, sorcerous voice. “At long last, they come!”
Arrayed across the pitched ruin, so small beneath the fires they had kindled, the Schoolmen of the Scarlet Spires cried out in exultant acclaim. Their Grandmaster had come back to them.
Then threads of incandescence, blinding blue and white, lashed through the encircling walls of flame.
“Seökti and the others respect you,” Kellhus continued. “Indeed, as Mallahet you have a reputation that reaches across Kian and beyond. And you shine in the Third Sight. But secretly, they all think you cursed by the Solitary God. Why else would the Water elude you?
“And without your eyes, your ability to discern what comes before is much reduced. The snakes are but pinholes. For years you waged futile war against your circumstance, and though your intellect could astound those about you and earn you access to their most privileged counsels, the instant they found themselves beyond the force of your presence, the undermining whispers were rekindled. ‘He is weak.’
“Then, about twelve years ago, you discovered the first of the Consult skin-spies—probably through discrepancies in their voices. The Cishaurim were thrown into an uproar, that much is certain. And even though no one knew the slightest thing about the creatures, the blame was placed on the Scarlet Spires. For only the greatest of the Schools, they thought, could dare, let alone execute, such an outrage. Infiltrate the Cishaurim?
“But you were Dûnyain, and though our brothers know nothing of the arcane, our understanding of the mundane is without peer. You realized that these things weren’t sorcerous artifacts, that they were engines of the flesh. But you couldn’t convince the others, who sought to instruct the Scarlet Spires on the perilous course they had taken. There must be consequences. So the Cishaurim assassinated the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, prompting a war that will find its conclusion this very day …”
Just then, Kellhus inadvertently kicked something lying upon the graven floor. Something hollow and fibrous. A skull?
“But you,” he continued without hesitation, “kept the creatures, and over years of torment you eventually broke them down. You learned of Golgotterath, her ramparts heaped about the horns of an ancient derelict, a vessel fallen from the void in the days when Nonmen yet ruled Eärwa; of the Inchoroi and the great war they waged against long-dead Nonmen Kings. You learned how the last survivors of that fell race, Aurang and Aurax, perverted the heart of their Nonman captor, Mekeritrig, and how he corrupted Shauriatis, the Grandmaster of the Mangaecca, in his turn. You learned how this wicked cabal broke the glamour about Golgotterath, and made its horrors their own …
“You learned of the Consult.”
“These words you speak,” Moënghus said from the black, “‘wicked,’ ‘corrupted,’ ‘perverted’ … why would you use them when you know they are nothing more than mechanisms of control?”
“Of course, you had heard of the Consult,” Kellhus continued, ignoring his question. “And like most in the Three Seas, you thought them long dead—the stuff of Mandate delusions. But the stories you extracted from your captives … there was too much consistency, too much detail, for them to be fabrications.
“The deeper you probed, the more troubling the story became. You had read The Sagas, and you had doubted them, thinking them too fanciful. Destroying the world? No malice could be so great. No soul could be so deranged. After all, what could be gained? Who follows paths over precipices?
“But the skin-spies explained it all. Speaking in shrieks and howls, they taught you the why and wherefore of the Apocalypse. You learned that the boundaries between the World and the Outside were not fixed, that if the World could be cleansed of enough souls, it could be sealed shut. Against the Gods. Against the heavens and the hells of the Afterlife. Against redemption. And, most importantly, against the possibility of damnation.
“The Consult, you realized, were labouring to save their souls. And what was more, if your captives could be believed, they were drawing near the end of their millennial task.”
In the absence of light, Kellhus studied his father through the lens of different senses: the scent of naked skin, the displacement of drafts, the sound of bare feet scuffing through the dark.
“The Second Apocalypse,” Moënghus said simply.
“Only you knew their secret. Only you could detect their spies.”
“They have to be stopped,” Moënghus replied. “Destroyed.”
“So you brooded over what the skin-spies told you, spent years immersed in the depths of the Probability Trance.”
From the very first, ever since descending the glaciers into the wastes of Kûniüri, Kellhus had pondered the man now leading him through these galleries of darkness. Scheme after probabilistic scheme. The branching of innumerable alternatives, waxing and waning with each mile walked, with every insight and apprehension.
I’m here, Father. In the house you have prepared for me.
“You began,” Kellhus said, “contemplating what would become the Thousandfold Thought.”
“Yes,” Moënghus replied, a simple affirmation. Even as he said this, Kellhus sensed the changes—in acoustics, odours, even ambient temperature. The pitch-black corridor had opened onto a chamber of some kind. One where things still lived, and where things had died—many things.
“We have arrived,” his father said.
Beneath the eaves of the clouds, the Inrithi knights of Ce Tydonn thundered across dead fields and stumped orchards. Pennants slapped against the smoking expanse of Shimeh: the Three Black Shields of Nangaelsa, the White Stag of Numaineiri, the Red Swords of Plaideol, and other ancient marks of northern peoples. Beneath the black and gold Circumfix, Lord Gothyelk, Earl of Agansanor, galloped before them, and all the world rumbled.
The distance closed. More and more Fanim climbed the ramped banks of the Jeshimal and hastened to join the milling ranks. Arrows began falling among the Inrithi, disorganized volleys that either clattered harmlessly from their great kite-shields or were stilled by thick pads of felt. Several horses fell screaming, throwing their riders to earth, but the masses simply parted about them and pound
ed on. Spurs urged chargers faster. Lances were lowered. Long-bearded warriors began roaring out to Gilgaöl—mighty War.
The heathen began charging toward them, haphazardly at first, like clutches of seed falling from laden trees, then en masse. The whole horizon moved, at once dark and many-coloured. Among the Tydonni some glimpsed the triangular standard of Cinganjehoi, the famed Tiger of Eumarna.
The Men of the Tusk leaned into their lances, both grinning and grimacing. It seemed they rattled the world to its foundations. “Shimeh!” a voice pealed out—the grizzled old Earl, riding hard in their lead. Soon they were all shouting, “Shimeh! Shimeh! Shimeh!”
Then all was snapping wood and screaming horses, hacking swords and pummelling maces. Men shouting, dying. Gauslas, son of Earl Cerjulla, was the first of the caste-nobility to fall, beheaded by silver-helmed Cinganjehoi himself. But his Warnutishmen, howling in grief, could not be broken, nor could any of the Tydonni. The iron men hammered down shields and smashed faces. They shattered scimitars with their long notched swords. They brained shrieking horses.
Then, like a miracle, they were reining to stop before blue and black waters. They had taken the riverbank.
The Grandees of Eumarna were broken, killed or beaten away, but there was no respite. Like angry bees the Fanim reassembled beyond their flanks, even behind them, riding in hard arcs, loosing arrow after arrow. Across the ground, the wounded howled through forests of stamping legs. The bridgeheads were retaken, and the Inrithi Earls thundered at their men, exhorting them to hold them. Vicious melees raged across the bridges and the rapids. But the Fanim were already uncoupling the timber rafts that their mastodons had dragged from the levelling of the Tantanah Gate. On the Jeshimal’s far bank all the world seemed to throng with the enemy. Fanim riders crowded onto the first of the rafts. More and more arrows fell among the Inrithi.