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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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“There’s
strength
in scepticism,” Simas continued. “Those who believe thoughtlessly in dangerous times are the first to die. But these
are
dangerous times, Achamian. More so than in many, many years. Perhaps dangerous enough to be sceptical even of our scepticism, hmm?”
Achamian turned to him, caught by something in his tone.
Simas’s gaze faltered. A small struggle darkened his face. He continued.
“You’ve noticed how intense the Dreams have become. I can see that much in your eyes. We’ve all become a little wild-eyed as of late . . . Something . . .” He paused, unfocused his eyes as though counting his own heartbeat. Achamian felt his hackles rise. He’d never seen Simas like this. Indecisive. Frightened, even.
“Ask yourself, Achamian,” he said finally, “if our adversary, the Consult, were to seize power in the Three Seas, what vehicle would be more effective than
the Thousand Temples?
Where better to hide from us and yet wield incredible power? And what better way to destroy the Mandate, the last memory of the Apocalypse, than by declaring a Holy War against the Few? Imagine Men waging war against the No-God without us to guide and protect them.”
Without Seswatha.
Achamian stared for a long moment at his old teacher. His doubt must have been plain for everyone to see. Nevertheless, images from the Dreams came to him—a trickle of small horrors. Seswatha’s internment at Dagliash. The crucifixion. The glint of sunlight across the bronze nails through his forearms. Mekeritrig’s lips reciting the Cants of Agony. His shrieks . . . His? But that was just it: these memories
weren’t
his! They belonged to another, to Seswatha, whose suffering must be seen through if they were to have any hope of moving on.
And yet Simas watched him so strangely, his eyes curious with their own indecision. Something
had
changed. The Dreams had grown more intense. Relentless. So much so that any lapse in concentration saw the present swept away in some past trauma, at times horrific enough to make one’s hands shake, one’s mouth form around voiceless cries. The
chance
that such horror could return. Was it worth sacrificing Inrau, his love? The boy who had so eased his weary heart. Who had taught him to taste the air he breathed . . .
Curse!
The Mandate was a curse! Dispossessed of the God. Dispossessed even of the present. Only the clawing, choking fear that the future might resemble the past.
“Simas—” he began, but stumbled. He wanted to concede, but the mere fact that Nautzera stood in his periphery silenced him.
Have I grown so petty?
Tumultuous times, certainly. A new Shriah, the Inrithi feverish with renewed faith, the possibility that the Scholastic Wars could be revived, the sudden violence of the Dreams . . .
These are the times I live in. All this happens now.
It seemed impossible.
“You understand our imperative as profoundly as any of us,” Simas said quietly. “And the stakes. Inrau was with us for a short time. He might be made to understand—
without
Cants, perhaps.”
“Besides,” Nautzera added, “if you refuse to go, you merely force us to send someone—how should I put it?—less sentimental.”
 
Achamian stood alone on the parapets. Even here, on the turrets overlooking the straits, he felt oppressed by the stonework of Atyersus, diminished by the cyclopean walls. The sea offered little compensation.
Things had happened so quickly, as though he’d been grasped by giant hands, rolled between palms, and then cast into a different direction. Different, but always the same. Drusas Achamian had worn many tracks across the Three Seas, had discarded many sandals, and never once had he even glimpsed that which he supposedly hunted. Absence—always the same absence.
The interview had gone on. It seemed obligatory that any audience with the Quorum be prolonged, weighted with ritual and insufferable seriousness. Perhaps such seriousness was appropriate to the Mandate, Achamian supposed, given the nature of the war—if groping in blackness could be called such.
Even after Achamian had capitulated, had agreed to recruit Inrau by means fair and foul, Nautzera had found it necessary to chastise him for his reluctance.
“How could you forget, Achamian?” the old sorcerer had implored, his expression at once sour and beseeching. “The Old Names still watch from the towers of Golgotterath—and where do they look? To the North? The North is wilderness, Achamian. Sranc and ruin. No. They look south—to us!—and plot with a patience that beggars the intellect. Only the Mandate shares that patience. Only the Mandate remembers.”
“Perhaps the Mandate,” Achamian had replied, “remembers too much.”
But now he could only think,
Have I forgotten?
The Schoolmen of the Mandate could never forget what had happened—the violence of Seswatha’s Dreams ensured that much. But if anything, the civilization of the Three Seas was insistent. The Thousand Temples, the Scarlet Spires, all the Great Factions warred interminably across the Three Seas. In the midst of such a labyrinth, the significance of the past might easily be forgotten. The more crowded the concerns of the present, the more difficult it became to see the ways in which the past portended the future.
Had his concern for Inrau, a student like a son, led him to forget this?
Achamian fully understood the geometry of Nautzera’s world. It had once been his own. For Nautzera, there was no present, only the clamour of a harrowing past and the threat of a corresponding future. For Nautzera, the present had receded to a point, had become the precarious fulcrum whereby history leveraged destiny. A mere formality.
And why not? The anguish of the Old Wars was beyond description. Almost all the great cities of the Ancient North had fallen to the No-God and his Consult. The Great Library of Sauglish ransacked. Trysë, the holy Mother-of-Cities, plundered of life. The Towers of Myclai pulled down. Dagliash, Kelmeol . . . Entire nations put to the sword.
For Nautzera, this Maithanet was significant not because he was Shriah but because he might belong to this world without a present, this world whose only frame of reference was past tragedy. Because he might be an author of the Second Apocalypse.
A Holy War against the Schools? The Shriah an agent of the Consult?
How could he not tremble at these thoughts?
Despite the warm wind, Achamian shivered. Below him, the sea heaved through the straits. Dark rollers warred against one another, clashed with unearthly momentum, as though the very Gods warred beneath.
Inrau
. . . For Achamian, to think this name was to know peace for a fleeting instant. He had known so little peace in his life. And now he was forced to throw that peace onto the scales with terror. He must sacrifice Inrau in order to answer these questions.
Inrau had been a coltish adolescent when he’d first come to Achamian, a boy still blinking in the daybreak of manhood. Though there had been nothing extraordinary about his appearance or his intellect, Achamian had immediately recognized something different about him—a memory, perhaps, of the first student he’d loved, Nersei Proyas. But where Proyas had grown proud, overfed on the knowledge that he would someday be King, Inrau had remained . . . Inrau.
Teachers found many self-serving reasons to love their students. More than anything, they loved them simply because they
listened
. But Achamian had not loved Inrau as a student. Inrau, he’d realized, was
good
. Not good in the jaded way of the Mandate, who trafficked in the mire as did all other men. No. The good he saw in Inrau had nothing to do with kind acts or praiseworthy purposes; it was something innate. Inrau harboured no secrets, no shadowy need to conceal faults or to write himself large in the estimation of other men. He was open in the way of children and fools, and he possessed the same blessed naïveté, an innocence that smacked of wisdom rather than ignorance.
Innocence. If there was anything Achamian had forgotten, it was innocence.
How could he not fall in love with such a boy? He could remember standing with him in this very place, watching silver sunlight roll across the back of swell after swell. “The sun!” Inrau had cried. And when Achamian had asked him what he meant, Inrau had merely laughed and said: “Can’t you see? Can’t you see the sun?” And then Achamian had seen: lines of liquid sunlight, dazzling the watery distance—an inexhaustible glory.
Beauty. This was Inrau’s gift. He never ceased to see beauty, and because of this, he always understood, always saw through and forgave the many blemishes that marred other men. With Inrau, forgiveness
preceded
rather than followed transgression.
Do what you will,
his eyes said,
for you are already forgiven
.
Inrau’s decision to abandon the Mandate for the Thousand Temples had at once dismayed and relieved Achamian. He’d been dismayed because he knew he’d lost Inrau and the reprieve of his company. But he’d been relieved because he knew the Mandate would obliterate Inrau’s innocence if the boy stayed. Achamian could never forget the night when he himself had first touched Seswatha’s Heart. The fisherman’s son had died that moment; his eyes had been doubled, and the world itself had been transformed, rendered cavernous by tragic history. Inrau would have likewise died. Touching Seswatha’s Heart would have charred his own. How could such innocence, any innocence, survive the terror of Seswatha’s Dreams? How could one find solace in mere sunlight, when the threat of the No-God loomed across every horizon? Beauty was denied victims of the Apocalypse.
But the Mandate did not tolerate defections. The Gnosis was far too precious to be trusted with malcontents. This had been Nautzera’s unspoken threat throughout their exchange:
“The boy is a defector, Achamian. Either way, he should die.”
How long had the Quorum known that his story of Inrau’s drowning was a sham? From the very beginning? Or had Simas truly betrayed him?
Of the innumerable acts Achamian had committed in his lifetime, securing Inrau’s escape was the one he considered a genuine accomplishment, the one act good in and of itself, even if he’d forsaken his School in order to achieve it. Achamian had protected innocence, had allowed it to flee to a safer place. How could anyone condemn such a thing?
But every act could be condemned. The same as all bloodlines could be traced to some long-dead king, all deeds could be chased to some potential catastrophe. One need only follow the forks far enough. If Inrau were seized by another of the Schools and forced to yield those few secrets he knew, then the Gnosis would be eventually lost, and the Mandate would be condemned to the impotent obscurity of a Minor School. Perhaps even destroyed.
Had he done the right thing? Or had he simply made a wager?
Was the pulse of a good man worth rolling the dice of Apocalypse?
Nautzera had argued no, and Achamian had agreed.
The Dreams. What had happened could not happen again. This world must not die. A thousand innocents—a thousand thousand! —were not worth the possibility of a Second Apocalypse. Achamian had agreed with Nautzera. He would betray Inrau for the reason innocents are always betrayed: fear.
He leaned against the stone and stared down and across the churning straits, struggling to remember what it had looked like that sunny day with Inrau. He could not.
Maithanet and holy war. Soon Achamian would leave Atyersus for the Nansur city of Sumna, the holiest of cities for the Inrithi, home of the Thousand Temples and the Tusk. Only Shimeh, the birthplace of the Latter Prophet, was as holy.
How many years had passed since he’d last visited Sumna? Five? Seven? He idly wondered if he would find Esmenet there, whether she still lived. She had always been able to ease his heart somehow.
And it would be good to see Inrau as well, despite the circumstances. At the very least the boy had to be warned.
They know, dear boy. I’ve failed you.
So little comfort in the sea. Filled by a wan loneliness, Achamian looked beyond the straits in the direction of far-away Sumna. He yearned to once again see these two people, one whom he’d loved only to lose to the Thousand Temples, the other whom he thought he might love . . .
BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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