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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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As Inrau said this, he glanced—involuntarily, Esmenet supposed—at the serpentine mark of the whore tattooed across the back of her hand. She bundled her fists under crossed arms.
Then, unaccountably, the real mystery behind these events struck her. She looked at each man in turn, her eyes wide. Inrau glanced down. Achamian, however, watched her keenly.
He knows,
Esmenet thought.
He knows that I have a gift for these things
.
“What is it, Esmi?”
“You say that the Mandate only just learned of the Scarlet Spires’ war against the Cishaurim?”
“Yes.”
She found herself leaning forward, as though these words were something best whispered. “If the Scarlet Spires can keep such a thing secret from the Mandate for ten years, Akka, then how is it that
Maithanet,
a man who has only recently become Shriah, knows?”
“What do you mean?” Inrau asked with alarm.
“No,” Achamian said thoughtfully. “She’s right. There’s no way Maithanet would even approach the Scarlet Spires unless he
knew
the School warred against the Cishaurim. It would be too absurd otherwise. The proudest School in the Three Seas joining a Holy War? Think about it.
How could he know?
”
“Perhaps,” Inrau offered, “the Thousand Temples simply stumbled across the knowledge—like you did, only earlier.”
“Perhaps,” Achamian repeated. “But unlikely. At the very least this demands we watch him more closely.”
Esmenet shivered yet again, but this time with exhilaration.
The world turns about people such as these, and I’ve just joined them
. The air, she thought, smelled of water and flowers.
Inrau looked momentarily at Esmenet before turning his plaintive eyes to his mentor. “I can’t do what you ask . . . I can’t.”
“You must get closer to Maithanet, Inrau. Your Shriah is altogether too canny.”
“What?” the young priest said with half-hearted sarcasm. “Too canny to be a man of faith?”
“Not at all, my friend. Too canny to be what he seems.”
Late Spring, 4110 Year-of-the-Tusk, Sumna
 
Rain. If a city was old, really old, the gutters and pools would always glitter black, sodden by the detritus of ages. Sumna was ancient, her waters like pitch.
Hugging himself, Paro Inrau scanned the dark courtyard. He was alone. Everywhere he could hear the sound of water: the dull roar of rain, the gurgle of eaves, and the slap of gutters. Through the wash, he could hear the supplicants wail. Arched into shapes of pain and sorrow, their song rang across the wet stone and cupped his thoughts in stretched notes. Hymns of suffering. Two voices: one pitched high and plaintive, asking why we must suffer, always why; the other low, filled with the brooding grandeur of the Thousand Temples and bearing the gravity of truth—that Men were at one with suffering and ruin, that tears were the only holy waters.
My life,
he thought.
My life
.
Inrau lowered his face, tried to grimace away his weeping. If only he could forget. If only . . .
The Shriah. But how could it be?
So lonely. Around him, Ceneian stoneworks loomed, piled away into the dark vastness of the Hagerna. He slid to a crouch and rocked against the wet stone. Fear this encompassing gave one no direction to run. He could only shrink inside, try to weep himself away into nothing.
Achamian, dear teacher . . . What have you done to me?
When Inrau thought of his years at Atyersus, studying under the watchful eyes of Drusas Achamian, he remembered those times he’d gone out with his father and uncle to cast nets far from the Nroni shore, those times when the clouds had grown dark and his father, heaving the silvery fish from the sea, had refused to return to the village.
“Look at this catch!” he would cry, his eyes frenzied by desperate good fortune. “Momas favours us, lads! The God favours us!”
Atyersus reminded Inrau of those perilous times not because Achamian resembled his father—no, his father had been strong, his legs bowed to the deck, his spirit indomitable before the pitching sea—but because like the fish, the riches he’d drawn from sorcery’s bosom had been purchased against the threat of doom. To Inrau, Atyersus had seemed a violent storm frozen in soaring pillars and black curtains of stone, and Achamian had resembled his uncle, subdued before his father’s wrath and yet striving ever harder to catch their fill so that he might save both his brother and his brother’s son. He owed his life to Drusas Achamian—Inrau was certain of this. The Schoolmen of the Mandate never returned to the shore, and they killed those who abandoned their nets to do so.
How did men repay such debts? With monies owed, a man simply returned the money borrowed with the usurer’s interest. What was given and what was returned were the same. But was the exchange this simple when a man owed his life to another? For returning him to shore, did Inrau owe Achamian one last voyage into stormy Mandate seas? To repay Achamian in the same coin he owed seemed wrong somehow, as though his old teacher had simply rescinded his gift rather than asking for a gift in return.
Inrau had made many exchanges in his life. By leaving the Mandate for the Thousand Temples, he’d traded the heartbreak of Seswatha for the tragic beauty of Inri Sejenus, the terror of the Consult for the hatred of the Cishaurim, and the condescending dismissal of faith for the pious condemnation of sorcery. And he had asked himself, in those early days, what it was that he’d gained by this exchange of callings.
Everything. He’d gained everything. Faith for knowledge, wisdom for cunning, heart for intellect—there were no scales for this, only men and their many-coloured inclinations. Inrau had been born for the Thousand Temples, and by allowing him to leave the School of Mandate, Achamian had given him everything. And because of this, the gratitude Inrau bore his old teacher was beyond measure or description.
Any price,
he would think as he wandered through the Hagerna, besotted by relief and joy.
Any price
.
And now the storm had come. He felt small, like a boy abandoned to dark, heaving seas.
Please! Let me forget this!
For an instant he thought he could hear the sound of boots echoing down one of the alleyways, but then the Summoning Horns sounded—impossibly deep, like ocean surf heard through a stone wall. He hurried across the courtyard toward the immense temple doors, pulling his cloak against the downpour. The doors of the Irreüma grated open, throwing a broad lane of light across cobblestones sizzling with rain. Careful to avoid curious eyes, he shouldered through the sudden crowds of priests and monks who filed from the temple. He sprinted up the broad steps, between the bronze serpents that graced the entrance.
The doorkeepers scowled as he entered. At first he cringed, but then he realized he had tracked water and grit across their floor. He ignored them. Before him, two rows of columns formed a broad aisle haphazardly illuminated by hanging braziers. The columns soared up to support the clerestory, the raised central section of the roof, too high for the light to reach. To either side of the clerestory aisle were two more rows of lesser columns, flanking the small godhouses of various Cultic deities. Everything seemed to be reaching, reaching.
He placed an absent hand on the limestone. Cool. Impassive. No sign of the great load borne. Such was the strength of inanimate things.
Give me this strength, Goddess. Make me as a pillar.
Inrau traced a circle around the column and walked into the shadow of her godhouse, felt soothed by her cool stone.
Onkis . . . beloved.
“God has a thousand thousand faces,”
Sejenus had said,
“but men only one heart.”
Every great faith was a labyrinth possessed of innumerable small grottoes, half-secret places where the abstractions fell away and where the objects of worship became small enough to comfort daily anxieties, familiar enough to weep openly about petty things. Inrau had found his grotto in the shrine of Onkis, the Singer-in-the-Dark, the Aspect who stood at the heart of all men, moving them to forever grasp far more than they could hold.
He knelt. Sobs wracked him.
If only he could have forgotten . . . forgotten what the Mandate had taught him. If he could’ve done that, then this last heartbreaking revelation would have been meaningless to him. If only Achamian had not come. The price was too high.
Onkis.
Could she forgive him for returning to the Mandate?
The idol was worked in white marble, eyes closed with the sunken look of the dead. At first glance she appeared to be the severed head of a woman, beautiful yet vaguely common, mounted on a pole. Anything more than a glance, however, revealed the pole to be a miniature tree, like those cultivated by the ancient Norsirai, only worked in bronze. Branches poked through her parted lips and swept across her face—nature reborn through human lips. Other branches reached behind to break through her frozen hair. Her image never failed to stir something within him, and this is why he always returned to her: she
was
this stirring, the dark place where the flurries of his thought arose. She came before him.
He started at the sound of voices from the direction of the temple gate.
Doorkeepers. Must be.
Then he fumbled with his cloak and produced a small satchel of food: dried apricots, dates, almonds, and some salted fish. He came close enough that she might feel the warmth of his breath and, with trembling hands, placed the food in a small trough gouged from her pedestal. All food had its essence, its animas—what the blasphemers called the onta. Everything cast shadows across the Outside, where the Gods moved. With shaking hands he pulled out his humble ancestor lists and whispered the names, pausing to beg his great-grandfather to intercede on his behalf.
“Strength,” he murmured. “Please, strength . . .”
The small scroll clattered to the floor. The silence was complete, oppressive. His heart ached, so much was at stake. These were the events upon which the world turned. Enough for a Goddess.
“Please . . . Speak to me.”
Nothing.
Tears branched across his face. He raised his arms, held them open until his shoulders burned.
“Anything!” he cried.
Run,
his thoughts whispered.
Run
.
Such a coward! How could he be such a coward?
Something behind him. The sound of flapping wings! Like the flutter of cloth among the towering pillars.
He turned his face to the shadowy ceiling, searching with his ears. Another flutter. Somewhere up in the clerestory. His skin prickled.
Is that you?
No.
Always doubting. Why was he always doubting?
Stumbling to his feet, he hastened from the godhouse. The temple gate had been closed, and the doorkeepers were nowhere to be seen. In a few moments he located the narrow stair that led up through the wall to the clerestory balconies. Midway up the stair the darkness became pitch. He paused for a moment and breathed deeply. The air smelled of dust.
The uncertainty, always so powerful in him, was snuffed out.
It’s you!
His head was buzzing with rapture by the time he crested the stairs. The door to the balcony was ajar. Greyish light sifted through the opening. Finally—after all his love, all his time—Onkis would sing
to
him instead of through. Tentatively, he stepped out onto the balcony. He licked his lips, his stomach leaping.
He could hear the roar of the rainfall through the stone. The pillar capitals were the first things to resolve from the gloom, then the ceiling looming close above. It seemed unnatural for so much weight to be suspended so high. The trunks of the columns gradually grew brighter as they fell out of sight. The light from below was distant and diffuse, as soft as the worn edges of the stonework.
The balcony railing had an aura of dizziness, so he kept his back to the wall. The masonry seemed brittle, chapped ancient in the gloom. The wall frescoes had fallen off in sloughs. The ceiling was encrusted with hundreds of clay hornet’s nests, and he was reminded of the barnacled hulls of warships hauled onto beach sand.
“Where are you?” he whispered.
Then he saw it, and horror throttled him.
It stood a short distance away, perched on the railing, watching him with shiny blue eyes. It had the body of a crow, but its head was small, bald, and human—about the size of a child’s fist. Stretching thin lips over tiny, perfect teeth, it smiled.
Sweet-Sejenus-oh-God-it-can’t-be-it-can’t-be!
A parody of surprise flashed across the miniature face. “You know what I am,” it said in a papery voice. “How?”
can’t-be-cannot-be-Consult-here-no-no-no!
“Because,” another voice replied, “he was once one of Achamian’s students.” The speaker had been concealed in the shadows farther down the clerestory. He now walked into the dim light.

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