The Darkness that Comes Before (14 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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The very fabric of existence. The onta. He had—and he could still never adequately express this—“experienced” it. Unlike most others, he’d known immediately he was one of the Few, known with a child’s stubborn certainty. “Atyersus!” he could remember crying, feeling the vertigo of a life no longer to be determined by his caste, by his father, or by the past.
Those times when the Mandate had passed through his fishing village had profoundly marked him as a boy. First the clash of cymbals and then the cloaked figures, shielded by parasols and borne by slaves, steeped in the erotic aura of mystery. So remote! Faces impassive, touched only by the finest cosmetics, and by the proper jnanic contempt for low-caste fishermen and their sons. Only men of mythic stature could reside behind such faces—this he knew. Men braced by the glory of
The Sagas.
Dragon-slayers and assassins of kings. Prophets and abominations.
Mere months of training at Atyersus had seen that childishness wane. Jaded, pompous, and self-deceived—Atyersus differed only in scale.
Am I so different from this man?
Achamian asked himself, watching the captain in his periphery.
Not really,
he thought, but he ignored the man nonetheless and turned back to stare at Sumna, hazy against the dark hills.
And yet he
was
different. So many cares, and the wages so slight. Different in that his tantrums could sweep away city gates, pulverize flesh, and snap bone. Such power, and yet the same vanities, the same fears, and far darker whims. He had expected the mythic to raise him up, to exalt his every act, and instead he was set adrift . . . Detachment enlightened no one. He could turn this ship into a shining inferno, then walk unscathed across the surface of the water, and yet he could never be . . .
certain
.
He had almost whispered this aloud.
The captain left momentarily, visibly relieved to be called away by his crew. The pilot had drawn up to the rolling ship.
Why are they so distant to me?
Stung by this thought, he lowered his head, stared into the wine-dark depths.
Whom do I despise?
To ask this question was to answer it. How could one not feel isolated, detached, when existence itself answered to their tongue? Where was the hard ground on which one might stand when mere words could sweep everything away? It had become a truism among scholars in the Three Seas to compare sorcerers to poets, a comparison Achamian had always thought absurd. He could scarcely imagine two vocations so tragically at odds. Save fear or political machination, no sorcerer had ever created with his words. The power, the brilliant flurries of light, possessed an irresistible direction, and it was the wrong one: the direction of destruction. It was as though men could only ape the language of God, could only debase and brutalize his song. When sorcerers sing, the saying went, men die.
When sorcerers sing. And yet even among his own, he was anathema. The other Schools could never forgive the Mandate their heritage, their possession of the Gnosis, the knowledge of the Ancient North. Before their extinction, the great Schools of the North had possessed benefactors, pilots to navigate them through shoals no human mind could conceive of. The Gnosis of the Nonmen Magi, the Quya, refined through another thousand years of human cunning.
In so many ways he was a god to these fools. He needed always to remember this—not merely because it was flattering, but because it was
they
who could not forget. They who feared, and thus they who inevitably hated—so much that they would risk all in a Holy War against the Schools. A sorcerer who forgot this hatred forgot how to stay alive.
Standing before the blurred immensity of Sumna, Achamian listened to the seamen bicker in the background, and to the ship groan in rhythm with the swells. He thought of the burning of the White Ships in Neleost, thousands of years ago. He could still taste the musty smoke, see the glitter of doom across the evening waters, feel his other body shivering in the cold.
And Achamian wondered where it all went, the past, and why, if it were gone, it made his heart ache so.
 
In the choked streets beyond the quays, Achamian, who often became contemplative in the press of men, was once again struck by the absurdity of his presence here. It was a minor miracle that the Thousand Temples had ever allowed the Schools to maintain missions in Sumna. For the Inrithi, there was a sense that Sumna was not merely the heart of their faith and their priesthood, but the very heart of God. Literally.
The Chronicle of the Tusk
was the most ancient and therefore the most thunderous voice of the past, so ancient that it was itself without any clear history—“innocent,” as the great Ceneian commentator Gaeterius had written. Ribboned by characters, the Tusk recorded the great migratory invasions that marked the ascendancy of Men in Eärwa. For whatever reason, the Tusk had always been in the possession of one tribe, the Ketyai, and since the earliest days of Shigek, before even the rise of Kyraneas, it had been installed in Sumna—or so the surviving records suggested. As a result, Sumna and the Tusk had become inseparable in the thoughts of Men; pilgrimages to Sumna and to the Tusk were one and the same, as though the place had become an artifact and the artifact a place. To walk in Sumna was to walk through scripture.
Small wonder he felt out of place.
He found himself being jostled behind a small train of mules. Arms and shoulders, scowling faces and shouts. Movement through the small street came to a halt. Never had he seen the city so maddeningly crowded. He turned to one of the men pressing him, a Conriyan by appearance—solemn, broad-shouldered, with a heavy beard, a member of the warrior caste.
“Tell me,” Achamian asked in Sheyic, “what’s happening here?” He’d dispensed with jnan in his impatience: they were, after all, sharing sweat.
The man appraised him with dark eyes, a curious look on his face.
“You mean you don’t know?” he asked, raising his voice above the din.
“Know what?” Achamian replied, feeling a small tickle in his spine.
“Maithanet has called the faithful to Sumna,” he said, suspicious of Achamian’s ignorance. “He’s to reveal the object of the Holy War.”
Achamian was stunned. He glanced at the faces packed around them, abruptly realizing how many of them had the hard-bitten look of war. Nearly all of them were openly armed. The first half of his mission, to discover the object of Maithanet’s Holy War, was about to be accomplished for him.
Nautzera and the others must have known. But why didn’t they tell me?
Because they needed him to come to Sumna. They knew he would resist recruiting Inrau, so they’d assembled everything they could to convince him that he must. A lie of omission—perhaps not so great a sin—but it had rendered him pliant to their purposes nonetheless.
Manipulation upon manipulation. Even the Quorum played games with their own pieces. It was an old outrage, but it never failed to sting.
The man had continued speaking, his eyes bright with sudden fervour: “Pray that it’s the Schools we war against, my friend, rather than the Fanim. Sorcery is ever the greater cancer.”
Achamian almost agreed.
 
Achamian reached out, planning to draw a finger through the groove down the centre of Esmenet’s back, but he hesitated, clasping a handful of stained coverings instead. The room was dark, thick with the heat of their coupling. Through the shadows, he could see the scatter of crumbs and refuse across the floor. A blinding white crack in the shutters was the only source of light. The thunder of the street beyond had the rattle of thin walls.
“Nothing else?” he said, feeling remotely shocked by the unsteadiness in his own voice.
“What do you mean, ‘nothing else?’” Her voice was marked by an old and patient bruise.
She had misunderstood, but before he could explain, a sudden sense of nausea and suffocating heat struck him. He pushed himself from the bed to his feet and immediately felt as though he might fall to his knees. His legs buckled, and he drunkenly braced himself against the sideboards. Chills skittered through his arm hairs and across his scalp and back.
“Akka?” she asked.
“Fine,” he replied. “The heat.” He drew himself up and rolled back onto the wheeling mattress. Her body felt like burning eels against his own. Such heat so early in spring! It was as though the very world had grown feverish at the prospect of Maithanet’s Holy War.
“You’ve suffered the Fevers before,” she said, her voice apprehensive. The Fevers were not contagious—everyone knew this.
“Yes,” he said thickly, holding his forehead.
You’re safe
. “They possessed me six years ago, while on mission in Cingulat . . . I almost died.”
“Six years ago,” she repeated. “My daughter died the same year.” Bitterness.
He found himself resenting the ease with which his pain had become hers. An image of what her daughter might look like came to him: sturdy but fine-boned, dark languid hair chopped low-caste short, a cheek perfectly curved to the cup of a palm. But it was Esmi he actually envisaged. Her as a child.
They were silent a long time. His thoughts settled. The heat became embalming, lost the acrid edge of their exertions. She had mistaken what he’d said earlier, he realized, remembering the strange bruise in her tone. He had merely wanted to know if there was anything more to the rumours.
In a way, he’d always known he would return here, not only to Sumna, but to this place between the arms and legs of this tired woman. Esmenet. A strange, old-fashioned name for a woman of her character, but at the same time oddly appropriate for a prostitute.
Esmenet
. How could a name affect him so?
She had dwindled in the four years since he had last come to Sumna. More haggard, her humour gouged by the accumulation of small wounds. Without hesitation, he’d searched for her after struggling through the packed harbour, struck by his own eagerness. Seeing her sitting in her window had been strange, an intermingling of loss and vanity, as though he’d recognized a childhood rival behind the bitten face of a leper or a beggar.
“Still fetching sticks, I see,” she’d said, her eyes remarkably untouched by surprise.
The child-fat had also disappeared from her wit.
Gradually, she’d gathered him from his worries into her intricate world of anecdote and satire. Inexorably, the moments had led to this room, and Achamian had made love to her with an urgency that shocked him, as though he’d found an impossible reprieve in the animality of the act—a reprieve from the turmoil of his mission.
Achamian had come to Sumna for two reasons: to determine whether this new Shriah planned to wage his Holy War against the Schools, and to learn whether the Consult had any hand in these remarkable events. The first had been a tangible goal, something he could use to rationalize his betrayal of Inrau. The second . . . ghostly, possessing the feverish anemia of excuses that fall far short of absolution. How could he use the Mandate’s war against the Consult to rationalize betrayal when the war itself had come to seem so irrational?
How else could one describe a war without a foe?
“Tomorrow I must find Inrau,” he said, more to the darkness than to Esmenet.
“Do you still intend to . . . turn him?”

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