The Thousandfold Thought

  The eyeless face, once perfectly obdurate and inscrutable, suddenly twitched in the ghost of a grimace. Kellhus pulled his knife from his father’s chest, retreated several steps. He watched his father probe the wound with his fingers, a weeping perforation just beneath his rib cage.

  “I am more,” the Warrior-Prophet said.

  A broad swath of ground cooked and smoked about him.

  Achamian whirled, turned in a half-circle, saw the last of the fleeing Kidruhil, the Inrithi encampment congesting the nearer reaches of the plain, and Shimeh, still dark beneath the clouds, bleeding smoke. He looked back to the crest, to where two of the four Saik Schoolmen lay burning. The whole of the Imperial Army, he realized, climbed the far side. Any second now their banners would float above the grasses and wildflowers. He recalled his Mandate training …

  Just below high ground.

  He needed to run. To where the approach of Chorae bowmen could be seen, and where the earth provided the most cover. But part of him already mourned the futility of it. The only reason he had survived this long was that he’d caught them so entirely unawares. That wouldn’t last, not with Conphas still breathing.

  I’m dead.

  Then he remembered Esmenet. How could he forget? He looked to the ruined mausoleum, took fright that it lay so near. Then he saw her, her face small and boylike, peering through the shadowy recesses of the sumac that thronged about the foundation. She had seen it all, he realized …

  It shamed him for some reason.

  “Esmi, no!” he cried, but it was too late. She had already leapt the foundations, had already started sprinting toward him across the browned and blackened turf.

  He saw it twinkle first—a flash in his periphery. Then the Mark, gouged nauseatingly deep.

  He looked up …

  “Nooo!” he howled. Glass cracked beneath his feet.

  Long-winged, black scales about molten limbs, scimitar talons, an eye-encircled maw …

  A Ciphrang, called from the hellish bowels of the Outside. A sulphurous godling.

  A gust swept up her skirts, knocked her to her knees. Esmenet turned her face skyward …

  A demon descending.

  Iyokus …

  Proyas found himself on the roof of an ancient fullery—the only structure overlooking the Juterum’s westward approaches that wasn’t aflame. Though sunlight ringed the distances, all was smoke and twilight. If he looked at the sky overlong, he could feel himself spin, so he concentrated on the clay tiles beneath his feet. He scrambled across the shallow pitch, stumbled once, kicking free sheaves of rotted tile. He lowered himself onto his stomach, crawled out onto a south-facing pediment.

  Gazed across Shimeh.

  Streamers and veils of smoke lent the sky the perspective of city streets, making it easy to judge the relative distance of the hanging sorcerers and their warring lights. Below, all was black ruin and smouldering fire. Free-standing walls, as ragged as ripped parchment. Guttered foundations. The wounded crying out, waving pale hands. The charcoal dead.

  Untouched on the heights, the First Temple observed with monumental repose.

  There was a stupendous crack, and Proyas fairly toppled from his perch. He hugged the roof to the point of breathlessness, blinked the dazzle from his eyes.

  Almost immediately below him he saw two crimson-robed Schoolmen, one old and decrepit, surrounded by headless pillars in the gallery of a destroyed temple, the other middle-aged and corpulent, balanced upon a crest of tossed debris. Their Wards shone, like silver in moonlight, or steel in dark alleys. Mouths flaring, they sang, and fires whooshed and thundered. Some fifty paces out, the ground exploded as if hammered by a rod the size of a great netia pine. Showers of smoking gravel rained across the wreckage.

  Somehow, impossibly, a figure cloaked in saffron floated through it. Blue incandescence surged from his forehead, plummeted over the ground, sweeping away pillars like sticks, breaking across the Wards of the old Scarlet Schoolman. Proyas threw a forearm across his eyes, so bright was the contact.

  The Cishaurim climbed skyward until he hung level with Proyas, flew out and around, all the while assailing the old sorcerer with gouts of blue-flashing energy. Black clouds had boiled into being in the air behind him, discharging lines of lightning like cracks in glass, but the Cishaurim ignored them, intent on overcoming the Scarlet Schoolman below. The air hummed with crashing reverberations, the clacking of mountain-sized stones. Against this tumult the screams of men could be no more than the chirps of infant mice. Or nothing at all.

  Trailing thunder. Fading light. The hanging figure had relented, turning both face and serpents to the other madly singing Schoolman. His robes boiled a shimmering ochre in the wind. His asps fanned like iron hooks from about his neck.

  Proyas didn’t have to look to know the old sorcerer was dead, or that the other soon would be. He found himself standing windswept on the pediment, perched on the very ledge, ruined streets and blasphemous fire careering across the distances before him.

  “Sweet God of Gods!” he cried to the acrid wind. With bare hands he tore the Chorae from the chain about his neck.

  “Who walk among us …” He drew back his sword-weary arm, secured his footing.

  “Innumerable are your holy names …” And he cast his Tear of God, a gift from his mother on his seventh birthday.

  It seemed to vanish against the iron horizon …

  Then a flash, a black-ringed circle of light, from which the saffron figure plummeted like a sodden flag.

  Proyas fell to his knees on the brink, leaned out over the fall. His holy city gaped before him. And he wept, though he knew not why.

  Again and again the thanes and knights of Ce Tydonn charged, but they could not staunch the breach. Soon they were engulfed in howling desert horsemen, beset on all sides. In an endless stream, silk-garbed Kianene galloped beneath the arches and into view of the Inrithi encampment. Hundreds of them climbed the teetering pilings, gained the summit of the aqueduct, where pitched battles were waged beneath the withering fire of the heathen horse-archers. Others charged the length of the stonework, into Earl Damergal and his hard-pressed Cuärwethi trying to roll back the flanks of the breach. Still others beat their horses toward the stunned crowds of onlookers about the rim of the encampment.

  A shout was raised among the Nangaels, where a spear took down King Pilaskanda, and set his Girgashi reeling back in disorder. The mastodons panicked in the withdrawal, began stomping through their own lines. The Ainoni cheered Palatine Uranyanka, who rode along their lines holding high the severed head of Cinganjehoi, who had been trapped behind the Moserothi after being driven back by Lord Soter and his Kishyati.

  But the doom of the Inrithi rode with Fanayal ab Kascamandri, who led his shimmering Grandees far behind the lines of the idolaters. To the north and the south, cohorts of Kianene spread across the Shairizor Plain, shrugging past clots of battling knights and hooking back to the east, to charge into the far side of the ancient aqueduct. Earl Damergal was killed by a block thrown from the arches above. Earl Iyengar found himself stranded with his household to the rear of his Nangaels. Howling oaths, he watched his kinsmen broken into warring clots. A Mongilean Grandee silenced him with an arrow through the throat. Death came swirling down.

  The Fanim wept with fury, with outrage, as they cut down the Inrithi invaders. They cried out glory to Fane and the Solitary God, even as they wondered that the Men of the Tusk did not flee.

  Think-think-must-think!

  An Odaini Concussion Cant, knocking her clear of the thing’s monstrous descent, back toward the mausoleum.

  It landed hard and leaden, as though it had been wrought of twisted anchors, yet it moved as if its limbs floated in some unseen ether. The thing turned to him, hunched and slavering.

  “The Voice,” it wheezed, taking one dread step forward. All life crumbled to tan dust about it.

  “It says, an eye for an eye.”

  Waves of heat rolled outward, as dry as bon
e become ash.

  “Then the hurting ends …”

  And Achamian knew this was no common demon. Its Mark was like light, concentrated to the point where the parchment of the world blackened, curled, and burned. The Daimos …

  What had Iyokus loosed?

  “Esmi!” he cried. “Flee! Please! I beg you! Flee!”

  The thing leapt toward him.

  Achamian began singing—the deepest of the Cirroi Looms. Glorious Abstractions knitted the air about and before him, a thresher of light. The demon laughed and screamed.

  His father staggered against the panels that pitted the walls. Snakes curled out of the recesses, shining and black. They curled about his throat, like eyes that strangled.

  Kellhus stepped back, focused his eyes on a point the size of a thumbnail held at arm’s length. What was one became many. What was soul became place.

  Here.

  Calling out from bones of things.

  With three voices he sang, one utteral pitched to the world and two inutterals directed to the ground. What had been an ancient Cant of Calling became something far, far more…A Cant of Transposing.

  Blue fractal lights mapped the air about him, cocooned him in brilliance. Through scribbling filaments he saw his father press himself upright, turn with his asps to the girded corridor. Anasûrimbor Moënghus … that he could look so pale in the light of his son!

  Existence cringed before the whip of his voice. Space cracked. Here was pried into there. Beyond his father he saw Serwë, her blonde hair tied into a war-knot. He saw her leap out of the black …

  Even as he toppled into one far greater.

  Drusas Achamian shouted out destruction. Light scored the creature, parabolas of knifing white. Molten blood flecked the grasses. Chits of fiery flesh sailed like kicked coals.

  Waves of heat burned Esmenet’s cheeks. She stared as one transfixed, though she could not bear to watch. Surrounded by withered, burning grasses, he stood behind his sheets of light, at once glorious with power and dreadful with frailty. But the thing was upon him, a raving nightmare, hammering and clawing, blows that cracked the stone about her, that brought blood to her nose. Wards buckled and fractured. Achamian called out great concussions and the demon’s head was battered. Horns snapped. Spider-eyes ruptured light.

  Its assault became a frenzy, a jerking blur of violence, until it seemed hell itself tore and gnashed at his gates.

  Achamian staggered, blinked white-burning eyes, cried out—

  An instant of wasted voice.

  Rats screamed through its exultant roar. Achamian falling, his mouth working. The closing of dragon claws …

  Achamian falling.

  She could not scream.

  The monstrosity leapt into the sky, punishing the air with rent wings.

  She could not scream.

  “I live!” Ikurei Conphas cried one more time, only to hear nothing above the crack and thunder of sorcerous battle, both near and far. No resounding cheer, no individual shouts of relief or acclaim. They couldn’t see him—that was it! They mistook him for one of their own. For a man …

  He whirled back to his stunned rescuers.

  “You!” he shouted to a dumbstruck Selial Captain. “Find General Baxatas. Tell him to join me here at once!”

  The man hesitated—for scarcely an eye-blink, but it sparked a cold fire in Conphas’s belly. Then the fool was off, sprinting through grass and clover toward distant formations.

  “And you!” Conphas snapped at a run-of-the-mill Columnary. “Find some hornsmen. Quick-quick! Tell them to signal the general advance!

  “And y—” He broke off. There was shouting on the wind. Of course! It had just taken them time to recover their hearts. To gather their wits. The hapless fools …

  They thought me dead!

  Grinning, he turned back to the vista of his army …

  Only to see the horsemen he had glimpsed earlier, several hundred of them, riding unchallenged along the stationary flanks of the Selial Column. “There are no more nations!” a voice cried from their galloping midst. “There are no more nations!”

  For several moments Conphas could scarce credit his eyes—or even his ears, for that matter. They were obviously Inrithi, despite their white-and-blue khalats. The banner of the Circumfix hung above the forward riders, trailing a skirt of golden tassels. And behind it … the Red Lion.

  “Kill them!” Conphas howled. “Attack! Attack! Attack!”

  For an instant it seemed nothing would happen, that nobody had heard. His army continued to mill in imbecile crowds; the interlopers continued to ride unmolested among them.

  “There are no more nations!”

  Then the white-clad knights abruptly changed direction, began riding toward him.

  Conphas turned to the remaining Columnaries, at once laughed and snarled. And he remembered his grandmother, back when her beauty had yet burned as bright as legend. He remembered her drawing him up onto her lap and laughing at the way he squirmed and kicked his legs.

  “It’s good you prefer to keep your feet on the ground! For an Emperor that is the first thing …”

  “And what is the second?”

  A laugh like a clear fountain. “Ahhh … The second is that you must ceaselessly measure.”

  “Measure what, gramama?”

  He could remember tapping his fingers on her cheek. How small his fingernails had been …

  “The purses of those who serve you, my little godling. For if you ever find them empty …”

  Of the dozen Nansur Columnaries who faced him, two fell to their knees, weeping, and three offered their swords. Five ran like madmen, and two simply walked away. He could hear the rumbling climb into the sky behind him.

  “I defeated the Scylvendi,” he said to the remainder. “You were there …”

  Hooves pounding the turf. The ground shivered through his sandals.

  “No man could do such a thing,” he said.

  “No man!” one of the kneelers cried. The soldier clutched his hand, kissed his Imperial Ring.

  Such a deep sound, the charge of the Inrithi. Thunder about horses snorting, gear clanking. So this was what the heathen heard.

  The Emperor of Nansur turned, not really believing …

  He saw King Saubon leaning from his saddle, his face ruddy with murderous intent. More than sun glinted in the man’s blue eyes.

  He saw the broadsword that took his head.

  Striding through smoke and over towering bonfires, Eleäzaras advanced on the Heresiarch of the Cishaurim. Seökti ravaged the ground before him, raising up skirts of smoking debris, tossing and breaking the black-armoured Thunyeri that surged toward him.

  His voice bleeding, Eleäzaras shouted out the most powerful of the Great Analogies. He was the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires, the greatest School of Near Antiquity. He was Heir to Sampileth Fire-Singer, to Amrezzer the Black. He would avenge his beloved teacher! His School!

  “Sasheoka!” he screamed between Cants.

  Dragon fire buffeted the Heresiarch earthward, and for a moment the man rolled in golden fire, sheathed in foaming blue, fouled in his shimmering yellow gowns. Again and again Eleäzaras smote him. Magma burst from the earth beneath him. Suns crashed from the heavens. Great burning palms slapped about his alien defences, a fiery crush, into which Eleäzaras sang more and more power, until he saw the blind face cry out. His feet braced across smoke and sky, Eleäzaras laughed as he sang, for vengeance had made hatred a thing of rapture and glory.

  But from a different direction, flurries of blue plasma, the Holy Water of the Indara-Kishauri, rained across his Wards, rocking them, then glancing off into the clouds above, where they vanished in smudges of glowing blue. The ghosts of cracks appeared. Sheets of ethereal stone fell away …

  Another Incandati soaring up from the ruin, disgorging world-cracking power … Eleäzaras turned back to his Wards, singing deeper Ramparts, sturdier Shields. He glimpsed Seökti, climbing back into the sky. Glari
ng cataracts flaring from an impossible point between his missing eyes …

  Where were his brother Schoolmen? Ptarramas? Ti?

  All about him the world had become a tidal surge of brilliant white and blue, tearing, pounding. Markless, as virginal as the Godspun world.

  Tearing. Pounding.

  The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires grunted, cursed. Jets of incandescence exploded through his Wards, immolating his left arm even as he screamed deeper defences. A fissure opened before him. Light blew across his scalp and brow. Like a doll, he was thrown backward.

  His corpse toppled into the burning tracts below.

  All along the length of the Skilura Aqueduct, the Fanim enveloped the despairing Men of the Tusk. Horsemen swept in flurries about the pilings, loosing shafts from point-blank range. Others charged into haphazard shield-walls, hacking their way past pikes and spears. Lord Galgota, the Palatine of Eshganax, fell to the merciless fervour of the Kirgwi.

  Lord Gotian charged into the fray with all that remained of his Shrial Knights. At first their conviction and fury won them long expanses of ground, but they were too few. The heathen swarmed about their flanks, shot their horses out from under them. The Knights of the Tusk fought on, singing hymns that no calamity could break. Gotian fell, struck by an arrow in his armpit as he held his sword high, and still the warrior-monks sang.

  Until death came swirling down.

  Then horns sounded from the west. For a moment all those across the Shairizor, heathen and idolater alike, turned to the heights where the ancient Amoti had buried their Kings. And there, above the encampment, they saw the Imperial Army assembled in long lines along the crest.

  The Men of the Tusk boomed in jubilation. At first the heathen raised ragged cheers of their own, and jeered at the arm-waving Inrithi, for their Grandees had told them not to fear should the Nansur arrive. But a presentiment of doom was traded among them, passing from band to slowing band. More than a few had seen the Circumfix and the Red Lion among the sacred standards of the Nansur Columns.