The Thousandfold Thought

  Servants and functionaries screamed and scattered as Cnaiür barged past them with his hostage. Alarums had been raised throughout the palace—he could hear them shouting—but none of the fools knew what to do. He had saved their precious Prophet. Did that not make him divine as well? He would have laughed had not his sneer been a thing of iron. If only they knew!

  He halted at a juncture in the marmoreal halls, jerked the girl about by the throat. “Which way?” he snarled.

  She sobbed and gasped, looked with wide, panicked eyes down the hallway to their right. He had seized a Kianene slave, knowing she would care more for her skin than her soul. The poison had struck too deep with the Zaudunyani.

  Dûnyain poison.

  “Door!” she cried, gagging. “There—there!”

  Her neck felt good in his hand, like that of a cat or a feeble dog. It reminded him of the days of pilgrimage in his other life, when he had strangled those he raped. Even still, he had no need of her, so he released his grip, watched her stumble backward then topple, skirts askew, across the black floor.

  Shouts rang out from the galleries behind them.

  He sprinted to the door she’d indicated, kicked it open.

  The crib stood in the nursery’s centre, carved of wood like black rock, standing as high as his waist, and draped with gauze sheets that hung from a single hook set in the frescoed ceiling. The walls were ochre, the lamp-light dim. The room smelled of sandalwood—there was no hint of soil.

  All the world seemed to hush as he circled the ornate cradle. He left no track across the cityscapes woven into the carpet beneath his feet. The lamplights fluttered, but nothing more. With the crib between himself and the entrance, he approached, parted the gauze with his right hand.

  Moënghus.

  White-skinned. Still young enough to clutch his toes. Eyes at once vacant and lucid, in the way only an infant’s could be. The penetrating white-blue of the Steppe.

  My son.

  Cnaiür reached out two fingers, saw the scars banding the length of his forearm. The babe waved his hands, and as though by accident caught Cnaiür’s fingertip, his grip firm like that of a father or friend in miniature. Without warning, his face flushed, became wizened with anguished wrinkles. He sputtered, began wailing.

  Why, Cnaiür wondered, would the Dûnyain keep this child? What did he see when he looked upon it? What use was there in a child?

  There was no interval between the world and an infant soul. No deception. No language. An infant’s wail simply was its hunger. And it occurred to Cnaiür that if he abandoned this child, it would become an Inrithi, but if he took it, stole away, and rode hard for the Steppe, it would become a Scylvendi. And his hair prickled across his scalp, for there was magic in that—even doom.

  This wail would not always be one with the child’s hunger. The interval would lengthen, and the tracks between its soul and its expression would multiply, become more and more unfathomable. This singular need would be unbraided into a thousand strands of lust and hope, bound into a thousand knots of fear and shame. And it would wince beneath the upraised hand of the father, sigh at the soft touch of the mother. It would become what circumstance demanded. Inrithi or Scylvendi …

  It did not matter.

  And suddenly, improbably, Cnaiür understood what it was the Dûnyain saw: a world of infant men, their wails beaten into words, into tongues, into nations. Kellhus could see the measure of the interval, he could follow the thousand tracks. And that was his magic, his sorcery: he could close the interval, answer the wail … Make souls one with their expression.

  As his father had before him. Moënghus.

  Stupefied, Cnaiür gazed at the kicking figure, felt the tug of its tiny hand about his finger. And he realized that though the child had sprung from his loins, it was more his father than otherwise. It was his origin, and he, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, was nothing but one of its possibilities, a wail transformed into a chorus of tortured screams.

  He remembered a villa deep in the Nansurium, burning with a brightness that had turned the surrounding night into black. Wheeling to the laughing calls of his cousins, he had caught a babe on sword point …

  He yanked his finger free. In fits and starts, Moënghus fell silent. “You are not of the land,” Cnaiür grated, drawing high a scarred fist.

  “Scylvendi!” a voice cried out. He turned, saw the sorcerer’s whore standing on the threshold of an adjoining chamber. For a heartbeat they simply stared at each other, equally dumbfounded.

  “You will not!” she suddenly cried, her voice shrill with fury. She advanced into the nursery, and Cnaiür found himself stepping back from the crib. He did not breathe, but then it seemed he no longer needed to.

  “He’s all that remains of Serwë,” she said, her voice more wary, more conciliatory. “All that’s left … Proof that she was. Would you take that from her as well?”

  Her proof.

  Cnaiür stared at Esmenet in horror, then glanced at the child, pink and writhing in blue silk sheets.

  “But its name!” he heard someone cry. Surely the voice was too womanish, too weak, to be his.

  Something’s wrong with me … Something’s wrong …

  Her brows furrowed and she seemed about to speak, but at that instant the first of the guardsmen, garbed in the green-and-gold surcoat of the Hundred Pillars, burst through the shambles of the door Cnaiür had kicked in.

  “Sheathe your weapons!” she cried as they tumbled into the chamber. They turned to her, stunned. “Sheathe!” she repeated. Their swords were lowered and stowed, though their hands remained ready upon the pommels. One of the guardsmen, an officer, began to protest, but Esmenet silenced him with a furious look. “The Scylvendi came only to kneel,” she said, turning her painted face to Cnaiür, “to honour the first-born son of the Warrior-Prophet.”

  And Cnaiür found that he was on his knees before the crib, his eyes blank, dry, and so very wide.

  It seemed he had never stood.

  Xinemus sat at Achamian’s battered desk, squarely facing a wall whose fresco had largely sloughed away; aside from a speared leopard, random eyes and limbs were all that remained. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  Achamian wilfully ignored the warning in his tone. He spoke to his humble belongings, which he had spread across his bed. “I already told you, Zin … I’m gathering my things, going to the Fama Palace.” Esmenet had always teased him about the way he packed, for taking inventories of what he could count on his fingers. “Better hike your tunic,” she would always say. “The little things are the easiest to forget.”

  A bitch in heat … What else could she be?

  “But Proyas has forgiven you.”

  This time he noticed the Marshal’s tone, but it caught his ire more than his concern. All the man did was drink anymore. “I haven’t forgiven Proyas.”

  “And me?” Xinemus finally said. “What of me?”

  Achamian’s scalp prickled. There was always something about the way drunks said me. He turned to the man, trying to remind himself that this was his friend … his only friend.

  “What of you?” he asked. “Proyas still has need of your counsel, your wisdom. You have a place here. I don’t.”

  “That isn’t what I meant, Akka.”

  “But why would I …” Achamian trailed, suddenly realizing what his friend had in fact meant. He was accusing Achamian of abandoning him. Even still, after everything that had happened, the man dared blame. Achamian turned back to his pathetic estate.

  As though his life weren’t madness enough.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” he ventured, only to be shocked by the insincerity of his tone. “We can … we can talk … talk with Kellhus.”

  “What need would Kellhus have of me?”

  “You need, Zin. You need to talk with him. You need—”

  Somehow, Xinemus had vacated the desk without making a sound. Now he loomed over Achamian, wild-haired, ghastly for more than the absence of his eye
s.

  “You talk to him!” the Marshal roared, seizing and shaking him. Achamian clawed at his arms, but they were as wood. “I begged you! Remember? I begged, and you watched while they gouged out my fucking eyes! My fucking eyes, Akka! My fucking eyes are gone!”

  Achamian found himself on the hard floor, scrambling backward, his face covered in warm spittle.

  The great-limbed man sagged to his knees. “I can’t seeeee!” he at once whispered and wailed. “I-haven’t-the-courage-I-haven’t-the-courage …” He shook silently for several more moments, then became very still. When he next spoke, his voice was thick, but eerily disconnected from what had racked him only moments before. It was the voice of the old Xinemus, and it terrified Achamian.

  “You need to talk to him for me, Akka. To Kellhus …”

  Achamian lacked the will either to move or to hope. He felt bound to the floor by his own entrails.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  The first flutter of the eyes against the morning light. The first tasted breath. The drowsy ache of cheek against pillow. These, and these alone, connected Esmenet to the woman—the whore—she had once been.

  Sometimes she would forget. Sometimes she would awaken to the old sensations: the anxiousness floating through her limbs, the reek of her bedding, the ache of her sex—once she had even heard the tink-tinktinking of the copper-smithies from the adjoining street. Then she would bolt erect, and muslin sheets would whisk from her skin. She would blink, peer across the dim chamber at the heroic narratives warring across her walls, and she would focus on her body-slaves—three adolescent Kianene girls—prostrate on the floor, their foreheads pressed down in morning Submission.

  Today was no different. Squinting in disorientation, Esmenet arose to the fussing of their hands. They chattered in their curiously soothing tongue, venturing to explain what they said in broken Sheyic only when their tone prompted Esmenet to fix one of them—usually Fanashila—with a curious look. They brushed out her hair with combs of bone, rubbed life back into her legs and arms with quick little palms, then waited patiently as she urinated behind her privacy screen. Afterward, they attended to her bath in the adjacent chamber, scrubbing her with soaps, oiling and scraping her skin.

  As always, Esmenet endured their ministrations with quiet wonder. She was generous with her praise, delighted them with her own expressions of delight. They heard the gossip, Esmenet knew, in the slaves’ mess. They understood that captivity possessed its own hierarchy of rank and privilege. As slaves to a queen, they had become queens—of a sort—to their fellow slaves. Perhaps they were as astounded as she was.

  She emerged from the baths light-headed, slack-limbed, and suffused with that sense of murky well-being only hot water could instill. They dressed first her then her hair, and Esmenet laughed at their banter. Yel and Burulan teased Fanashila—who possessed that outspoken earnestness that condemned so many to be the butt of endless jokes—with lighthearted mercilessness. About some boy, Esmenet imagined.

  When they were finished, Fanashila left for the nursery, while Yel and Burulan, still tittering, ushered Esmenet to her night table, and to an array of cosmetics that, she realized with some dismay, would have made her weep back in Sumna. Even as she marvelled at the brushes, paints, and powders, she worried over this new-found jealousy for things. I deserve this, she thought, only to curse herself for blinking tears.

  Yel and Burulan fell silent.

  It’s just more … more that will be taken away.

  It was with awe that Esmenet greeted her own image in the mirror, an awe she saw reflected in the admiring eyes of her body-slaves. She was beautiful—as beautiful as Serwë, only dark. Staring at the exotic stranger before her, she could almost believe she was worth what so many had made of her. She could almost believe that all this was real.

  Her love of Kellhus clutched at her like the recollection of an onerous trespass. Yel stroked her cheek; she was always the most matronly of the three, the quickest to sense her afflictions. “Beautiful,” she cooed, staring at her with unwavering eyes. “Like goddess …”

  Esmenet squeezed her hand, then reached down to her own still-flat belly. It is real.

  Shortly before they finished, Fanashila returned with Moënghus and Opsara, his surly wet nurse. Then a small train of kitchen slaves entered with her breakfast, which she took in the sunlit portico while asking Opsara questions about Serwë’s son. Unlike her body-slaves, Opsara continually counted everything she rendered to her new masters: every step taken, every question answered, every surface scrubbed. Sometimes she fairly seethed with impertinence, but somehow she always managed to fall just short of outright insubordination. Esmenet would have replaced her long ago had she not been so obviously and so fiercely devoted to Moënghus, whom she treated as a fellow captive, an innocent to be shielded from their captors. Sometimes, as he suckled, she would sing songs of unearthly beauty.

  Opsara made no secret of her contempt for Yel, Burulan, and Fanashila, who for their part seemed to regard her with general terror, though Fanashila dared sniff at her remarks now and again.

  After eating, Esmenet took Moënghus and retreated back to her canopied bed. For a time she simply sat, holding him on her knees, staring into his dumbstruck eyes. She smiled as tiny hands clutched tiny toes.

  “I love you, Moënghus,” she cooed. “Yes I do-I-do-I-do-I-dooo.”

  Yet again, it all seemed a dream.

  “You’ll never be hungry again, my sweet. I promise … I-do-I-do-I-dooo!”

  Moënghus squealed with joy beneath her tickling fingers. She laughed aloud, smirked at Opsara’s stern glare, then winked at the beaming faces of her body-slaves. “Soon you’ll have a little brother. Did you know that? Or perhaps a sister … And I’ll call her Serwë, just like your mother. I-will-I-will-I-will!”

  Finally she stood and, returning the babe to Opsara, announced her imminent departure. They fell to their knees, performed their mid-morning Submission—the girls as though it were a beloved game, Opsara as though dragged down by gravel in her limbs.

  As Esmenet watched them, her thoughts turned to Achamian for the first time since the garden.

  By coincidence she met Werjau, scrolls and tablets bundled in his arms, in the corridors leading to her official chambers. He organized his materials while she mounted the low dais. Her scribal secretaries had already taken their places at her feet, kneeling before the knee-high writing lecterns the Kianene favoured. Holding the Reports in the crook of his left arm, Werjau stood between them some paces distant, in the heart of the tree that decorated the room’s crimson carpet. Golden branches curled and forked about his black slippers.

  “Two men, Tydonni, were apprehended last night painting Orthodox slogans on the walls of the Indurum Barracks.” Werjau looked to her expectantly. The secretaries scribbled for a furious moment, then their quills fell still.

  “What’s their station?” she asked.

  “Caste-menial.”

  As always, such incidents filled her with a reluctant terror—not at what might happen, but at what she might conclude. Why did this residue of defiance persist?

  “So they could not read.”

  “Apparently they simply painted figures written for them on scraps of parchment. It seems they were paid, though they know not by whom.”

  The Nansur, no doubt. More petty vengeance wreaked by Ikurei Conphas.

  “Well enough,” she replied. “Have them flayed and posted.”

  The ease with which these words fell from her lips was nothing short of nightmarish. One breath and these men, these piteous fools, would die in torment. A breath that could have been used for anything: a moan of pleasure, a gasp of surprise, a word of mercy …

  This, she understood, was power: the translation of word into fact. She need only speak and the world would be rewritten. Before, her voice could conjure only custom, ragged breaths, and quickened seed. Before, her cries could only forestall affliction and wheedle what small merci
es might come. But now her voice had become that mercy, that affliction.

  Such thoughts made her head swim.

  She watched the secretaries record her judgement. She had quickly learned to conceal her astonishment. She found herself yet again holding her left hand, her tattooed hand, to her belly, clutching as though it had become her totem of what was real. The world about her might be a lie, but the child within…A woman knew no greater certainty, even as she feared.

  For a moment Esmenet marvelled at the warmth beneath her palm, convinced she felt the flush of divinity. The luxury, the power—these were but trifles compared with the other, inner transformations. Her womb, which had been a hospice to innumerable men, was now a temple. Her intellect, which had been benighted by ignorance and misunderstanding, was becoming a beacon. Her heart, which had been a gutter, was now an altar to him … to the Warrior-Prophet.

  To Kellhus.

  “Earl Gothyelk,” Werjau continued, “was thrice heard cursing our Lord.”

  She waved in a gesture of dismissal. “Next.”

  “With all due respect, Consort, I think the matter warrants further scrutiny.”

  “Tell me,” Esmenet said testily, “whom doesn’t Gothyelk curse? As soon as he stops cursing our Lord and Master, then I shall worry.” Kellhus had warned her about Werjau. The man resented her, he said, both because she was a woman and because of his native pride. But since both she and Werjau knew and accepted his debility, their relationship seemed more that of combative yet repentant siblings than antagonists, as they most surely would have been otherwise. It was strange to work with others knowing that no secrets were safe, that nothing petty could be concealed. It made their interactions with outsiders seem tawdry—even tragic—by comparison. Amongst themselves, they never feared what others thought, because Kellhus made sure they always knew.

  She graced the man with an apologetic smile. “Please continue.”

  Werjau nodded, his expression bemused. “There was another murder among the Ainoni. One Aspa Memkumri, a client of Lord Uranyanka.”