R. Scott Bakker - The Prince of Nothing 3 - The Thousandfold Thought

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CHAPTER ONE

Caraskand

My heart shrivels even as my intellect bristles. Reasons—I find myself desperate for

reasons. Sometimes I think every word written is written for shame.

—Drusas Achamian, The Compendium of the First Holy War

Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Enathpaneah

There had been a time, for Achamian, when the future had been a habit, something

belonging to the hard rhythm of his days toiling in his father’s shadow. His fingers had stung

in the morning, his back had burned in the afternoon. The fish had flashed silver in the

sunlight. Tomorrow became today, and today became yesterday, as though time were little

more than gravel rolled in a barrel, forever brightening what was the same. He expected only

what he’d already endured, prepared only for what had already happened. His past had

enslaved his future. Only the size of his hands had seemed to change.

But now . . .

Breathless, Achamian walked across the rooftop garden of Proyas’s compound. The

night sky was clear. The constellations glittered against the black: Uroris rising in the east,

the Flail descending to the west. The encircling heights of the Bowl reared across the

distance, a riot of blue structures pricked by distant points of torchlight. Hoots and cries

floated up from the streets below, sounding at once melancholy and besotted with joy.

Against all reason, the Men of the Tusk had triumphed over the heathen. Caraskand

was a great Inrithi city once again.

Achamian pressed through a hedge of junipers, fouled his smock in the sharp

branches. The garden was largely dead, the ground rutted and overturned during the height

of the hunger. He stepped across a dusty gutter, then stomped about, making a carpet of

grasses gone to hay. He knelt, still searching for his breath.

The fish were gone. His palms no longer bled when he clenched his fists in the morning.

And the future had been . . . unleashed.

“I am,” he murmured through clenched teeth, “a Mandate Schoolman.”

The Mandate. How long since he had last spoken to them? Since it was he who

travelled, the onus was on him to maintain contact. His failure to do so for so long would

strike them as an unfathomable dereliction. They would think him mad. They would demand

of him impossible things. And then, tomorrow . . .

It always came back to tomorrow.

He closed his eyes and intoned the first words. When he opened them, he saw the pale

circle of light they cast about his knees, the shadows of grass combed through grass. A

beetle scrambled through the chiaroscuro, mad to escape his sorcerous aspect. He

continued speaking, his soul bending to the sounds, giving inner breath to the Abstractions,

to thoughts that were not his own, to meanings that limned the world to its foundation.

Without warning, the ground seemed to pitch, then suddenly here was no longer here, but

everywhere. The beetle, the grasses, even Caraskand fell away.

He tasted the dank air of Atyersus, the great fortress of the School of Mandate, through

the lips of another . . . Nautzera.

The fetor of brine and rot tugged vomit to the back of his throat. Surf crashed. Black

waters heaved beneath a darkling sky. Terns hung like miracles in the distance.

No . . . not here.

He knew this place well enough for terror to loosen his bowels. He gagged at the smell,

covered his mouth and nose, turned to the fortifications . . . He stood upon the top tier of a

timber scaffold. A shroud of sagging corpses loomed over him, to the limits of his periphery.

Dagliash.

From the base of the walls to the battlements, wherever the fortress’s ramparts faced

the sea, countless thousands had been nailed across every surface: here a flaxen-maned

warrior struck down in his prime, there an infant pinned through the mouth like a laurel.

Fishing nets had been cast and fixed about them—to keep their rotting ligature intact,

Achamian supposed. The netting sagged near the wall’s base, bellied by an accumulation

of skulls and other human detritus. Innumerable terns and crows, even several gannets,

darted and wheeled about the macabre jigsaw; it seemed he remembered them most of all.

Achamian had dreamed of this place many times. The Wall of the Dead, where

Seswatha, captured after the fall of Trysë, had been tacked to ponder the glory of the

Consult.

Nautzera hung immediately before him, suspended by nails through his thighs and

forearms, naked save for the Agonic Collar about his throat. He seemed scarcely

conscious.

Achamian clutched shaking hands, squeezed them bloodless. Dagliash had been a

great sentinel once, staring across the wastes of Agongorea toward Golgotterath, her turrets

manned by the hard-hearted men of Aörsi. Now she was but a way station of the world’s

ruin. Aörsi was dead, her people extinct, and the great cities of Kûniüri were little more than

gutted shells. The Nonmen had fled to their mountain fastnesses, and the remaining High

Norsirai nations—Eämnor and Akksersia—battled for their very lives.

Three years had passed since the advent of the No-God. Achamian could feel him, a

looming across the western horizon. A sense of doom.

A gust buffeted him with cold spray.

Nautzera . . . it’s me! Ach—

A harrowing cry cut him short. He actually crouched, though he knew no harm could

befall him, peered in the direction of the sound. He gripped the bloodstained timber.

On a different brace of scaffolding farther down the fortifications, a Bashrag stooped

over a thrashing shadow. Long black hair streamed from the fist-sized moles that pocked its

massive frame. A vestigial face grimaced from each of its great and brutal cheeks. Without

warning, it stood—each leg three legs welded together, each arm three arms—and hoisted

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