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killed.
    The dilemma now facing Kellhus is almost insuperable. The Holy War starves. The Zaudunyani and the Orthodox stand upon the brink of open war. And the Padirajah continues to assail Caraskand’s walls. For the first time, Kellhus is confronted by circumstances he cannot master.
    He sees only one possible way to unify the Holy War under his leadership: he must let the Men of the Tusk condemn him and Serwë, and trust that Cnaiür, driven to avenge Serwë, will save him. Only a dramatic reversal and vindication can possibly win over the Orthodox in time.
    He must make a leap of faith.
    Serwë is executed, and Kellhus is bound to her naked corpse. Then he is lashed to a circumfix and hung from a great tree to die of exposure. Visions of the No-God plague him, as does Serwë pressed dead against him. Never has he suffered so …
    For the first time, Anasûrimbor Kellhus weeps.
    Achamian comes to him wild with rage because of Esmenet. Kellhus tells him about the skin-spies, about his visions of the impending Apocalypse.
    Then, miraculously, he is cut down, and he knows that at last the Holy War is his, and that they will have the ardour and conviction they need to overcome the Padirajah.
    Standing before the exultant masses, he grasps the Thousandfold Thought.



THE FINAL MARCH

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