What if every night you relived the destruction of the world as it happened two thousand years ago? What if you and those who shared those dreams were the only people who believed that those events had actually occurred? If it was your job, along with those few others, to track down every rumour that could potentially signify the return of the evil that would bring about a second apocalypse, could you do so in the face of the scorn and disbelief of the whole world?
In the first two books of his trilogy, The Prince of Nothing - The Darkness That Comes Before and The Warrior Prophet - R. Scott Bakker introduced readers to just such a man. Drusas Achamian is a sorcerer, or as they are known in the world of the Three Seas, a schoolman. Of the four schools of sorcery - The Mandate, The Scarlet Spires, The Imperial Saik, and The Mysunsai - only Drusas' Mandate fellows and himself retain the memory of the end of the world.
We have walked with Drusas into the midst of a holy war, a crusade whose leader he has been ordered to investigate on suspicion that he is a harbinger of the second apocalypse. Although he is unable to gain access to Maithahet, the initial impetus behind the war, he finds signs of the return of the Mandate's great enemy amongst the combatants.
The Skin Spies can assume the shape of another person and live behind their assumed body's face. They have superhuman strength and are extreme perversions of humans. Even more alarming, if possible, is his discovery of a man named Anasurimbor Kellhus amongst those gathering to march in the crusade.
It was an Anasurimbor who marched through the first apocalypse and Drusas must discover if this man from the forgotten Northlands where the ancient kingdoms lay is the one who will be the cause of the second cataclysm. By the beginning of The Thousandfold Thought, book three of the series, all signs are pointing towards Anasurimbor being along the same lines as his forbearer.
He has been elevated by the lords and nobility of the crusade to the rank of prophet and has won over complete control of their hearts and minds. He has even succeeded in wining Dusas's confidence sufficiently for him to teach him the sorceries of The Mandate School, by far the most powerful of all the schools.
It is Kellhus' ability to discern the Skin Spies and destroy them that wins Drusas over to his side. Even though he is filled with misgivings about teaching him the songs of power, or Cants, he is unable to see another option. Almost against his will he has been forced to believe in the man's abilities and power.
In the Thousandfold Thought R. Scott Bakker continues to spin his complex tale of magic, religion and philosophy. The world he has created offers a fun house mirror of our own history. Everything is suspiciously familiar but is distorted or exaggerated beyond the normal into an almost grotesque caricature of events that have occurred in our own world.
Article comments
1 - WildHeart
This book was the fo shiz!!
2 - The Log
It was good, but I've readd better. The storyline was confusing at some points.