The Thousandfold Thought by R. Scott Bakker

Author:R. Scott Bakker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fantasy
Published: 2011-03-02T17:57:51.700000+00:00

Relying on Serwл's preternatural vision, they led their horses through the pitch of night, knowing their only advantage lay in whatever distance they could travel before sunrise. They picked their way across high scrub and grass slopes, then down into a wooded vale where the bitter of cedars braced the air. Despite his injuries, Cnaiьr shambled after them, drawing on something as inexhaustible as lust or fear. About him, the world reeled more and more, and simple things became nightmarish with intent. Dark trees clutched at him, drew nails across his cheeks and shoulders. Unseen rocks kicked at his sandalled toes. The ringed moon laid him bare.

Thought slurred into thought. He spat blood continually. The path before him, shadowy and granular, rolled beneath his staggering legs. A greater dark unfolded through the night, and he passed out of memory, wondering, how could souls flicker?

Then Serwл was staring down at him. He felt her thighs beneath his neck, firm and warm through her linen tunic. She leaned forward and her breast brushed his temple. She retrieved a waterskin, used it to wet a rag. She had been tending to the cuts on his face.

She smiled and a ragged breath stole through him. There was such sanctuary in the lap of woman, a stillness that made the world, with all its threshing fury, seem small instead of encompassing, errant instead of essential. He winced as she dabbed a cut above his left eye. He savoured the sense of cool water warming against his skin.

The black plate of night was beginning to grey. Looking up, he saw the faint nimbus of hair about her jaw. He reached up to brush it, but hesitated when he glimpsed the scabs across his knuckles. He became alarmed. Though the pain of his wounds lay like a weight upon him, he jerked himself upright, coughed, and spat a mouthful of bloody sputum. They sat upon a grassy round on the summit of some hill. The east warmed to the unseen sun. Ridgelines wandered across the intervening miles, dark with vegetation, pale with nude stone faces.

"I'm forgetting something," he said.

She nodded and smiled the blithe and jubilant way she always did when she knew some answer.

"The one you hunt," she said. "The murderer."

He felt his face darken. "But I am the murderer! The most violent of all men! They slouch forward in chains. They ape their fathers, just as their fathers aped their fathers before them, all the way back to the beginning. Covenants of earth. Covenants of blood. I stood and found my chains were smoke. I turned and saw the void ... I am unfettered!"

She studied him for a moment, her perfect face poised between thought and moonlight. "Yes ... like the one you hunt."

What were these shallow creatures?

"You call yourself my lover? You think yourself my proof? My prize?"

She blinked in dread and sorrow. "Yes ..."

"But you are a knife! You are a spear and hammer. You are nepenthe—opium! You would make a haft of my heart, and brandish me.

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