The Thousandfold Thought Part 9

"Because of Conphas."

"Yes ... You're to remain with Conphas in Joktha, while the Holy War continues to s.h.i.+meh."

For a long time the Scylvendi said nothing, though his look and pose spoke of howling rage. The barbarian even trembled. At last, with unnerving calm, he said, "I am to be his nursemaid."

Proyas breathed deep, frowned at the solicitations of several pa.s.sersby. "No," he replied, lowering his voice, "and yes ..."

"What do you mean?"

"You are to kill him."

The smell of blossoms in the dark.

"Await him here," the attendant said, then without another word withdrew the way they had both come. A hinge pealed as the doors ground shut.

Iyokus peered across the grove, but the black beneath the trees confounded his eyes. Moonlight showered down in pale mockery of the sun, etching the flowering crowns. The blossoms were blue and black.

He was not alone. From the absences pitting his perception, Iyokus knew that some two dozen Chorae bowmen had been positioned throughout the porticoes surrounding the grove. Even now they watched him, strings drawn.

It was an understandable precaution, especially given recent events.

Iyokus could scarce credit what he had seen and heard this day. He had entertained many apprehensions over the course of his journey from s.h.i.+gek. The harrowing tales of what the Holy War-and by extension, the Scarlet Spires-had endured had plagued him with premonitions of catastrophe. As the pilot had guided his s.h.i.+p into Joktha's harbour five days before, he had braced himself for any number of disastrous revelations ...

But surely not this. The Holy War yoked to the whims of a living prophet. The Consult made fact-the Consult Consult!

And yet Iyokus had always been a meticulous man, long before the chanv had wrapped its cool and luxurious coils about his heart. Things, he understood, possessed their own intrinsic order. It would take days for him to learn the extraordinary particulars of their new circ.u.mstance, and even longer for him to grasp the implications. He would not, as had Eleazaras apparently, despair before understanding. He would not break beneath their weight.

Such a waste. Eli had been a great man, an inspired Grandmaster-once ... The other Rank-Princ.i.p.als would have to be consulted, and perhaps someone new elected ... someone rational rational. But first he had to sound this so-called Warrior-Prophet. This man with a two-thousand-year-old name: Anasurimbor.

For the first time, Iyokus noticed the great stone dolmens rearing into moonlight from the obscurity of trees, and for a moment he pondered the long-dead people who had raised them. Such remnants, he thought, were the metric of ages, the pilings of the present. They spoke of a time when no Caraskand had encompa.s.sed these hills, a time when his own ancestors had ranged the endless plains beyond the Great Kayarsus. To lay eyes upon such monuments, he knew, to truly see them, was to understand the terrifying dimensions of what had been forgotten.

Iyokus had always lamented the fact that for the Scarlet Spires the past was little more than a resource, something to be looted of knowledge and authority. For his brothers, ruins were quarries, nothing more. In their eagerness to claim superiority over the Mandate, they had even gone so far as to make a virtue virtue out of forgetfulness. "The past cannot be bribed," they would say, "and the future cannot be buried." out of forgetfulness. "The past cannot be bribed," they would say, "and the future cannot be buried."

This, he suspected, was about to change. The No-G.o.d. The Second Apocalypse ... What if these things were real real?

Iyokus reeled at the thought. Images blighted his soul's eye: corpses bobbing down the River Sayut, Carythusal burning like some lurid scene from The Sagas, The Sagas, dragons descending on their hallowed Spires ... dragons descending on their hallowed Spires ...

First things first, he reminded himself. Alacrity in thought. Patience in knowledge Alacrity in thought. Patience in knowledge ... ...

A breeze descended on the grove. It wheezed through the trees, combing thousands of petals into the air. For a moment they described the twists and eddies of various gusts, the way flotsam might reveal currents in water. Iyokus knew they should be beautiful. Then he sensed the Mark ... another sorcerer approaching through the dark lanes between the apple trees.

Who? Iyokus resisted the urge to illuminate the courtyard, recalling the Chorae trained upon him. Peering, he discerned a shadowy silhouette striding between black boughs, glimpsed the brow and left cheek of a bearded face in white moonlight.

Yes. Another rumour transformed into mad fact: that the Mandate Schoolman now served as Prince Kellhus's Vizier. That he taught him the Gnosis. There was no end to the absurdities, it seemed.

"Achamian," he called out. How it must pain the man, he thought, having to treat with those who'd so wronged him. Iyokus had told Eleazaras that nothing good would come of abducting the man. So many miscalculations! It was a miracle their School yet possessed the strength it did.

More shadow than man, Achamian paused some fifteen paces away, gazed at Iyokus through hunched tree limbs. His voice was hard. "If an eye offends thee, Iyokus ..."

A bolt of terror struck the chanv addict. What was this? Eleazaras's drunken warning rang loud in his ears. "Beware the Mandate Schoolman ..." "Beware the Mandate Schoolman ..."

"Where is Prince Kellhus?"

The silhouette remained motionless. "Indisposed."

"But I was told ..." Iyokus trailed. His breath had grown cold and hard about his heart. Eleazaras knew, he realized. He gave me to them ... That was why he dra- He gave me to them ... That was why he dra- "You were deceived," the Mandate Schoolman said.

"What do y-"

"Do you remember what you felt that night in Iothiah? You must have heard me coming for you. You must have heard the others screaming, calling for your help."

There had been nightmares.

"What is this?" the Master of Spies demanded. "What happens here?"

"He's given you to me, Iyokus. The Warrior-Prophet. I asked for vengeance. I begged begged."

Somehow Achamian had muttered something between these words, and his eyes and mouth flared incandescent.

"And he said yes yes."

Iyokus stiffened. "You begged?"

The fire-coal eyes lowered in an unseen nod. Branches and blossoms were etched blood-red against the greater black. "Yes."

"Then," Iyokus said, "I shall not."

There were rules for overmatched sorcerers, rules that Iyokus did not follow. There was no retreat from this place, not while his death lay pinched on bowstrings about him. He had been trapped.

The same as Achamian in the Sareotic Library.

A turret of translucent stone leapt into existence about him: his reflexive Wards. Then the air reverberated with his arcane mutter-song, a guttural counterpoint to the more keening cadences of Achamian.

To either side of the Mandate Schoolman, two thunderheads unfolded from nothingness, each black-hearted, each tilted to the axis of the man's position-the Houlari Twin-Tempests. A flare of lightning. Gossamer threads of incandescence danced in spasms about Achamian's spherical Wards. Shadows swung like maces about the feet of the surrounding colonnades. Momentary light gleamed across the Chorae poised within the portico. Carved white as salt behind his abstract defences, Achamian continued chanting.

Iyokus sang faster, yoked his desperation to the tortured meanings that tumbled from soul into voice. Pa.s.sion became semantics, and semantics became real became real. Lightning forked and flashed, its fury redoubled, until Achamian looked a ghost suspended in a half-buried sun. Limbs snapped. Blossoms exploded skyward, wheeled like burning moths against the firmament. The surrounding trees erupted in flame, became s.h.i.+ning pillars of fire. The dolmens loomed orange from the black.

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 gla.s.s. But there were cracks, cracks, fractures that bled sheets of faint vertical light. 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, advanced, stepping through coiling wreaths of flame, singing that mad, incomprehensible song. The fractures had multiplied, deepened ... 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 gra.s.ses. He savoured the warmth and breathed. Gradually the crow ceased thras.h.i.+ng.

And he thought, So many stars 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 Serwe upon the Circ.u.mfix, 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." "But I'm dead."

These words struck like stone, and he awoke, curled half naked across gravel and gra.s.ses. 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 s.h.i.+ft, her skin orange and lithe and flawless, like an Inrithi G.o.ddess conjured from the flames. Her eyes shone with miniature conflagrations. Sheets of hair twined about her chin and cheeks, as blonde as slaves ...

Serwe.

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

Serwe.

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 gra.s.ses as though searching for a lost coin or weapon. The sight of her footprint knocked him to his knees.

"Serwe?" he cried, peering across the dark. He stumbled to his feet. "Serwe!" "Serwe!"

Then he saw her again, leaping from rock to rock down the shadowy slope, silver in moonlight. Suddenly all the world seemed steep, 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. 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.

"Serwe!"

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

Spring gra.s.ses whisking across bare s.h.i.+ns. 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. 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 macrame 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.

"Serwe," 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, rea.s.sembled its features into those of another. As Cnaiur 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 I'm dead.

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

Cnaiur followed its gaze, saw a raven descending in the dark. To the right of the skin-spy, one corpse lay askew a heap of others, its elbows bent out backward, its face turned toward Cnaiur, 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 human face, no larger than an apple. face, no larger than an apple.

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

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

Cnaiur 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 a.s.sumptions.

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

Cnaiur 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 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!" Cnaiur raved. "Lies upon lies!"