The Thousandfold Thought Part 39

Nowhere ... Nowhere good.

He said nothing as he led her through the encampment, away from s.h.i.+meh, toward the greening heights to the west. She too said nothing, and spent much of the journey watching the gra.s.s stain the toes of her white silk slippers. She even made a game of it, kicking through the tangle of blades and stalks purposefully. Once she even wandered to her right so that she might walk across untrod ground, and for a moment it almost seemed they were Achamian and Esmenet once again, condemned and derided rather than exalted or revered. The sorcerer and his melancholy wh.o.r.e. She even dared clutch his chill hand.

What harm could come of it?

Please ... keep walking. Let us flee this place!

Only when they pa.s.sed through the final battery of tents did she actually notice notice him, the forward-fixed eyes misted by inscrutable thoughts, the strong jaw working beneath the plaits of his beard. They began climbing-toward the very gutted mausoleum where she had found Kellhus the night previous. him, the forward-fixed eyes misted by inscrutable thoughts, the strong jaw working beneath the plaits of his beard. They began climbing-toward the very gutted mausoleum where she had found Kellhus the night previous.

It seemed different in daylight, somehow. The walls ...

"You never came to Zin's funeral," he finally said.

She squeezed his hand. "I couldn't bear to." Her voice faltered, speaking the words. They seemed cruel, horribly so, despite what she herself had suffered the night the Marshal of Attrempus died.

His only friend.

"Was the fire bright?" she asked. The customary question.

He climbed several more steps, his sandalled feet swis.h.i.+ng through yellow-blooming bitterweed. Several bees spun in angry circles, buzzing through the thunder that rumbled across the distances-the clamour of battle. Through some trick of sound, the faint raving of one man floated to the fore, at once hoa.r.s.e and metallic.

"The fire was bright."

The bricked ruin rose before them, its foundations ringed with thronging sumac and weeds. Poplars shot young and straight from the interior, brus.h.i.+ng the highest of the truncated walls with their branches. She wondered at details that had escaped her in the gloom with Kellhus. At the webbed nest of caterpillars bobbing in the breeze. At the ovals which might once have been faces, set into the eastward walls.

What am I doing?

For an absurd instant she found herself fearing for her life. Many men would have murdered her for crimes she had committed ... What about Achamian? Could loss have unearthed such a man within him? But then, unaccountably, she was angry at the way he had yielded her. You should have fought for me You should have fought for me!

"Why are we here, Akka?"

Oblivious to her mad thoughts, he turned with one arm held wide, as though boasting of hard-won lands.

"I wanted you to see this," he said.

Following his hand, she looked out across the encampment, whose tent-enclosed avenues wheeled out in broken seash.e.l.l patterns, over the razed groves, fields, and buildings of the intervening ground. And there it was, scored by pluming smoke, motionless and gloomy beneath the preternatural dark of the sky ... s.h.i.+meh.

From their seaward faces the Tatokar Walls wound white as teeth about the warren of street and structure that engulfed the heights of the Juterum. Both the ground and the parapets winked with flas.h.i.+ng arms. The two siege-towers given to Proyas were pressed against the ramparts, surrounded by lines and squares of men. The northern one burned like a miniature paper votive. A great pillar of smoke rose from what had been the Ma.s.sus Gate, leaning low over the city, its nethers burnished by the wicked glare of sorceries. To either side, several of the great eyes had been broken, and the towers appeared abandoned. Farther to the south, on the far side of the ruined aqueduct, the two siege-towers given to Chinjosa had also reached the walls, and dark ma.s.ses of Ainoni teemed about their bases, queuing to climb their runged backs.

And in the near distance, clear through pa.s.sing sheets of smoke, stood the First Temple.

She raised a balled fist to her brow. Perhaps it was some trick of scale or perspective, but it all seemed so slow, slow, as though it happened through water-or something more viscous than human understanding. as though it happened through water-or something more viscous than human understanding.

Nevertheless, it happened happened ... ...

"We've gained the heights," she said-a murmur that somehow became a cry. "The city is ours!" She turned to Achamian, who seemed to watch with the same horror and wonder-awe-that numbed her expression.

"Akka ... Can't you see? s.h.i.+meh falls! s.h.i.+meh falls! s.h.i.+meh falls!"

There had been so much in these words-far more than fervour, far more than the tears that clotted her eyes. Love. Rape and revelation. Disease, starvation, and ma.s.sacre. Everything they had survived. Everything she had endured.

But he shook his head, his eyes still fixed on the vista before them. "It's all a lie."

Horns pealed to the lowing clouds.

"What?"

He turned to her, his look possessed by a terrifying blankness. She recognized it, for the same blankness had owned her eyes the night he had returned to Caraskand.

"The Scylvendi came to me last night."

Fanim drums throbbed. The clouds continued to darken, answering to the Cishaurim and their malevolent will.

Urged on by the cries of their Captains, phalanxes of Javreh charged the slopes, clambered across the heaped ruin of the Ma.s.sus Gate, then sprinted into the towering veils of smoke that slowly drifted across the city. The first of the Scarlet Cadres followed, picking their way forward carefully, keeping their sorcerers s.h.i.+elded at all times.

The outlines of the surviving walls resolved from the haze, and as the formations pa.s.sed beneath them, geysers of glittering fire reached up to lave their heights. More stonework came tumbling to ground. The world itself seemed to mutter curses.

Sarothenes was the first of the Scarlet Schoolmen to set foot in s.h.i.+meh, followed by Ptarramas the Older and Ti, who, despite his great age, continually scolded his Javreh for their sloth. Before them loomed a warren of alleyways and buildings that stretched to the foot of the Juterum. Their Javreh pickets fanned out in their hundreds, cutting down hapless Amoti, sifting through the buildings. Screams pealed out from hidden places.

Ptarramas the Older was the first to die, struck in the shoulder by a Chorae as he pressed his cadre forward. He fell to the street, cracked like statuary. Bellowing arcana, Ti sent flocks of burning sparrows into the black windows of the adjacent tenement. Explosions spit blood and debris across the street. Then, from the ruins of the outer wall, Inrummi struck the building's westward face with brilliant lightning. The air cracked. Burnt brick walls sloughed to the ground. In an exposed room, a burning figure stumbled over the lip of the floor and plummeted to the ruin below.

Sheltered by his Javreh and their wide s.h.i.+elds, Eleazaras gained the summit of the ruined Ma.s.sus, surveyed his cadres deploying before him. He leaned against the iron p.r.o.ngs jutting from the debris at his feet-the remains of the portcullis. Though he couldn't see Ptarramas, he knew that something had already happened.

They had hoped to draw the Snakeheads out in a decisive engagement, but Seokti was too canny. The s.h.i.+geki fiend, it appeared, hoped to bleed them. Pick them off one by one.

Eleazaras looked across the maze of structures before him, the welter of walls and rooftops extending to the slopes of the Juterum and marble bastions of the First Temple upon its summit. He could sense the Chorae out there, buried in cellars, crouched in lethal vantages, waiting ...

Everywhere. Hidden enemies.

Too much ... too many.

"Fire cleanses!" he cried. "Raze it! Burn it all to as.h.!.+"

The long-awaited horns sounded, a coa.r.s.e peal over the throb of heathen drums. Towering amid his s.h.i.+eld-brothers, Yalgrota Sranchammer raised his axe to the darkling sky, howled bloodthirsty oaths to Gilgaol-mighty War. His kinsmen answered with raucous shouts. Then the Thunyeri surged into the Scarlet Schoolmen's wake, racing over the smoking ruins of the Ma.s.sus Gate. Shattered tile cracked beneath their booted feet.

To their north, Proyas and his Conriyans battled across the parapets. Of their two siege-towers, one had been lost to inferno, but hundreds clambered up the back of the other, das.h.i.+ng through arrows to reinforce their Prince. To their south, Chinjosa and his Ainoni watched with amazement as the Fanim defenders fled the ponderous approach of their two siege-towers. Bellicose Uranyanka and his Moserothi would be the first of their number to set foot upon the Tatokar Walls.

The black-armoured Thunyeri spilled unopposed into the city. Prince Hulwarga and Earl Goken struck south, leading the Skagwi and the wild-haired Auglishmen into the unruined streets behind the Ainoni section of the wall. Earl Ganbrota, meanwhile, drove north with his Ingraulish, their s.h.i.+elds adorned with shrunken heads. The east they left to the Scarlet Gurwikka and their dark-skinned slaves.

Soon the Kianene and Amoti were dissolving in panic. Everywhere they looked, they saw chain-armoured myriads, loosed like blond wolves into the streets.

The lantern faltered, and for a moment Kellhus cradled it as though trying to coax it to life with the fire of his own body. With a final hiss, it faded into nothing.

But that was not the end of light. He saw the faintest of glimmers off to his right, toward the sound of booming water. Rather than use any Cant that might announce his presence, he continued in blackness.

The sound grew more and more thunderous as he followed the pitch hallway. A fine mist sheened his skin, matted his hair and robe. The light grew more and more distinct: orange s.h.i.+ning across the black of wet stone. Twice he stooped, drew his fingers across the floor to ensure that he still followed his father's trail.

The hallway opened onto a balcony that overlooked a vast cavern. At first all he could discern were the mighty curtains of water tumbling from abyssal blackness, and on such a scale that the flooring beneath him seemed to float upward. Then he noticed the points of light below, several of them, arrayed across a platform beyond the waterfalls' reach, and reflected in the oily surface of some kind of pool. Braziers, he realized, dim-burning because of the sodden air.

Father?

Kellhus descended a broad stair hewn from the walls. As elsewhere in the mansion, every surface had been rendered with heroic carvings across more p.o.r.nographic reliefs, though on a far greater scale. Kellhus could make out immense vaults, their tangled figures encrusted with the mineral residue of water and millennia. The falls themselves towered into darkness, raucous, white foam wheeling, dropping with the weight of glaciers, so tall they threatened to press him to his knees.

A series of chutes, like halved versions of the long curved horns the Thunyeri used to communicate in battle, had been raised to the tumbling skirts of the waterfalls. There were dozens of them, hooking outward and downward, arranged to convey water to the sprawling floor below, though only three still reached into the cras.h.i.+ng white, the others having broken. Green about the edges, they gleamed copper where the water still runnelled them.

The stair wound away from the falls, curled across the back of the vast chamber, where it met its mirror image and broadened in a monumental fan. Bronze weaponry and armour lay scattered across the steps, remnants of the ancient battle that had been lost here. As he neared the stair's base, the sounds of smaller waters were braided into the background roar: the gurgling of eaves, and the slap and whish of small streams across stone. A cavernous must permeated the air.

"They gathered here in the hundreds," a voice called across the gloom, clear despite the ambient rumble. "Even thousands, in the days before the Womb-Plague ..."

A Kuniuric voice.

Kellhus paused on the steps, searched the gloom.

At last.

As broad as the Siricus Arena in Momemn, the floor opened before him, matted with detritus and the small mounds which were all that remained of the fallen. Ripples dilated in endless procession across the broad pool set in the floor's centre. Like a black mirror, it reflected the braziers burning along its far rim, the fat bronze faces looming over them, and the great cascading column of the waterfall. At the terminus of the chutes, a series of immense bronze statues had been erected: kneelers, obese and naked, with channels cut into their backs and with heads hollowed into great-jowled masks. They squatted in a broad semi-circle facing the pool, their expressions lurid in the orange light. Water streamed from the eyes and mouths of three of them, slapping across the stone. The hollowed head of one had broken off altogether. It now rested near the far end of the pool, its single unsubmerged eye staring across the black waters.

"Bathing was holy for them," the voice continued.

Kellhus descended the last of the monumental stair, slowly walked across the floor. He had grown accustomed to listening through voices, but this one was smooth as porcelain-seamless and inscrutable. Even still, he knew it very well. How could he not, when it was his own?

Advancing around the pool, he saw a pale figure, sitting cross-legged behind the sheets of water that poured from one of the monstrous faces. A man, white-skinned, obscured by rus.h.i.+ng translucence.

"The fires are for you," the figure said. "I have lived in darkness for a long, long time."

Her calm terrified Achamian almost as much as the clamour on the horizon. The very wind stank of sorcery.

"So he uses everyone," she finally said. "His every word is bent upon manipulation ..." She stared as though her eyes had forgotten how to blink. "Don't you mean he uses me me?"

"I-I haven't thought it all through yet, but I think he wants ... children children ... Children with his strength, his intellect, and you-" ... Children with his strength, his intellect, and you-"

"So he breeds breeds. Is that it? I'm his prized mare?"

"I know how hateful these words must-"

"Why would you think that? I've been used my whole life." She paused, glared at him with as much remorse as outrage. "My whole life, Akka. And now that I've become the instrument of something higher, higher, higher than men and their rutting hunger-" higher than men and their rutting hunger-"

"But why? Why be an instrument at all?"

"You speak as if we had a choice-you, a Mandate Schoolman Mandate Schoolman! There's no escape. You know that. With every breath, we are used!"

"Then why the bitterness, Esmi? Shouldn't a prophet's vessel sound ex-"

"Because of you, Akka!" she cried with alarming ferocity. "You! Why can't you just let me go? You know that I love you, so you cling to that, you dig in with grubby nails and you yank and yank and yank, you bruise and batter my heart, and you refuse to let me go!"

"Esmi...Iasked and you came."

Long silence.

"All this," she said, her voice almost inaudible for the crack of faraway sorceries, "everything Cnaiur said ... what makes you think that Kellhus hasn't already told me?"

Achamian swallowed, ignored the lights that flashed across his periphery.

"Because you say you love him."

Cymbals crashed in a relentless tempo, measuring the h.e.l.lish advance of the Scarlet Spires. They laid waste to all before them. Whatever resistance the heathen mustered, they puffed out like candle flames. Companies of hors.e.m.e.n, bowmen arrayed across the rooftops-all mummified in Anagogic fire.

Save for the adept Watchers who walked the sky in their wake, most of the seventy-four surviving sorcerers of rank marched on foot through the conflagration, sheltering themselves and their Javreh s.h.i.+eld-men with Wards. Bathed in the light of successive Cants, each cadre trailed a flickering array of shadows. They climbed ramps of blackened stone, mounds of smashed brick, found their footing, and worked more thunderous devastation. Stones arced skyward, trailing streamers of smoke. Cornices and pillars collapsed upon their footings, swallowed by the black-billowing issue of their destruction. The whole world seemed rendered in luminous bloods and abyssal blacks. They stepped over sizzling limbs.

Above towering flames and through curtains of smoke, the First Temple and the Ctesarat loomed ever closer, until they encompa.s.sed the horizon. Again and again the Scarlet Schoolmen called out with destruction, but none would answer.

The Fanim ran before them, like flame-maddened beasts.

Only the sky ...

Of all this world, only the sky offered them surcease, a momentary reprieve from spikes of terrestrial congestion. Through furnace eyes they gazed across the world's dark curvature. The sun flared white and preternaturally bright. Thunderheads roiled beneath, trailing into nothingness in the distance, like snow kicked across ice. They saw pale coastlines, vast tracts of bleached ochre and blue. They flexed their frames in languorous vanity, beat their air-scooping wings.

Zioz. Setmahaga. Sohorat ...

Only here, at the limits of this cursed world.

Then the Voice called them, crackling with torment and rebuke. As one, they bent their elephantine heads back, howled into the indigo depths, then plunged backward, diving into the skein of angry clouds. Wind burned eyes that could not tear.

Like stones, they dropped from the belly of the clouds.