Free The Thousandfold Thought by R. Scott Bakker Page B

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