Free The Thousandfold Thought by R. Scott Bakker

surrender, Akka, even as they seek to dominate. It’s their nature to submit. The question is never whether they will surrender, but rather to whom …”
    “Your heart, Chigraa…I shall make it my apple …”
    “I—I don’t understand.” Achamian glanced from the abomination to Kellhus’s sky-blue eyes.
    “Some, like so many Men of the Tusk, submit— truly submit—only to the God. It preserves their pride, kneeling before what is never heard, never seen. They can abase themselves without fear of degradation.”
    “I shall eat …”
    Achamian held an uncertain hand against the sun to better see the Warrior-Prophet’s face.
    “One,” Kellhus was saying, “can only be tested, never degraded, by the God.”
    “You said ‘some,’” Achamian managed. “What of the others?” In his periphery he saw the thing’s face knuckle as though into interlocking fists.
    “They’re like you, Akka. They surrender not to the God but to those like themselves. A man. A woman. There’s no pride to be preserved when one submits to another. Transgress, and there’s no formula. And the fear of degradation is always present, even if not quite believed. Lovers injure each other, humiliate and debase, but they never test, Akka—not if they truly love.”
    The thing was thrashing now, like something brandished in an invisible fist. Suddenly the bees seemed to buzz on the wrong side of his skull.
    “Why are you telling me this?”
    “Because part of you clings to the hope that she tests you …” For a mad moment it seemed Inrau watched him, or Proyas as a boy, his eyes wide and imploring. “She does not.”
    Achamian blinked in astonishment. “What are you saying, then? That she degrades me? That you degrade me?”
    A series of mewling grunts, as though beasts coupled. Iron rattled and screeched.
    “I’m saying that she loves you still. As for me, I merely took what was given.”
    “Then give it back!” Achamian barked with savagery. He shook. His breath cramped in his throat.
    “You’re forgetting, Akka. Love is like sleep . One can never seize, never force love.”
    The words were his own, spoken that first night about the fire with Kellhus and Serwë beneath Momemn. In a rush, Achamian recalled the sprained wonder of that night, the sense of having discovered something at once horrific and ineluctable. And those eyes, like lucid jewels set in the mud of the world, watching from across the flames—the same eyes that watched him this very moment … though a different fire now burned between them.
    The abomination howled.
    “There was a time,” Kellhus continued, “when you were lost.” His voice seethed with what seemed an inaudible thunder. “There was a time when you thought to yourself, ‘There’s no meaning, only love. There’s no world …’”
    And Achamian heard himself whisper, “Only her.”
    Esmenet. The Whore of Sumna.
    Even now, murder stared from his sockets. He couldn’t blink without seeing them together, without glimpsing her eyes wide with bliss, her mouth open, his chest arching back, shining with her sweat … He need only speak, Achamian knew, and it would be all over. He need only sing, and the whole world would burn.
    “Not I, not even Esmenet, can undo what you suffer, Akka. Your degradation is your own.”
    Those grasping eyes! Something within Achamian shrank from them, beseeched him to throw up his arms. He must not see!
    “What are you saying?” Achamian cried.
    Kellhus had become a shadow beneath a tear-splintered sun. At long last he turned to the obscenity writhing across the tree, its face clutching at sun and sky.
    “This, Akka …” There was a blankness to his words, as though he offered them up as parchment, to be rewritten as Achamian wished. “This is your test.”
    “We shall cut you from your meat!” the obscenity howled. “From your meat!”
    “You, Drusas Achamian, are a Mandate Schoolman.”

     
    After Kellhus left him, Achamian stumbled to one of