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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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The ruins were far too old to contradict the forest outright. They had been submerged, worn and unbalanced by ages of its weight. Sheltered in mossy hollows, walls breached earthen mounds, only to suddenly end, as though restrained by vines that wrapped them like great veins over bone.
But there was something in them, something not
now,
that bent Kellhus toward unfamiliar passions. When he brushed his hands across the stone, he knew he touched the breath and toil of Men—the mark of a destroyed people.
The ground wheeled. He leaned forward and pressed his cheek against the stone. Grit, and the cold of uncovered earth. Above, the sunlight was broken by a span of knotted branches. Men . . . here in the stone. Old and untouched by the rigour of the Dûnyain. Somehow they had resisted the sleep, had raised the work of hands against the wilderness.
Who built this place?
Kellhus wandered over the mounds, sensing the ruins buried beneath. He ate sparingly from his forgotten satchel—dried wafers and acorns. He peeled leaves from the surface of a small pool of rainwater, drank, then stared curiously at the dark reflection of his own face, at the growth of blond hair across his scalp and jaw.
Is this me?
He studied squirrels and those birds he could pick from the dim confusion of the trees. Once he glimpsed a fox slipping through the brush.
I am not one more animal.
His intellect flailed, found purchase, and grasped. He could sense wild cause sweep around him in statistical tides. Touch him and leave him untouched.
I am a man. I stand apart from these things.
As evening waxed, it began to rain. Through branches he watched the clouds build chill and grey. For the first time in weeks, he sought shelter.
He picked his way into a small gully where erosion had caused a sheaf of earth to fall away, revealing the stone facade of some structure. He climbed over the leafy clay into an opening, dark and deep. Inside he broke the neck of the wild dog that attacked him.
He was familiar with darkness. Light had been forbidden in the depths of the Labyrinth. But there was no mathematical insight in the cramped blackness he found, only a random jumble of earth-pinched walls. Anasûrimbor Kellhus stretched out and slept.
When he awoke the forest was quiet with snow.
The Dûnyain had no real knowledge of just how far Shimeh lay. They had merely provided him with as many provisions as he could efficiently carry. His satchel grew flimsier with the days. Kellhus could only passively observe as hunger and exposure wracked his body.
If the wilderness could not possess him, it would kill him.
His food ran out, and he continued to walk. Everything—experience, analysis—became mysteriously sharp. More snow came, and cold, harsh winds. He walked until he could no longer.
The way is too narrow, Father. Shimeh is too far.
 
The trapper’s sled dogs yelped and nosed through the snow. He pulled them away and fastened their harness to the base of a stunted pine. Astonished, he brushed the snow away from the limbs curling beneath. His first thought was to feed the dead man to his dogs. The wolves would have him otherwise, and meat was scarce in the abandoned north.
He removed his mittens and placed his fingertips against the bearded cheek. The skin was grey, and he was certain the face would be as cold as the snow that half buried it. It was not. He cried out, and his dogs responded with a chorus of howls. He cursed, then countered with the sign of Husyelt, the Dark Hunter. The limbs were slack when he lifted the man from the snow. His wool and hair were stiff in the wind.
The world had always been strange with significance to the trapper, but now it had become terrifying. Running as the dogs pulled the sled, he fled before the wrath of the encroaching blizzard.
 
“Leweth,” the man had said, placing a hand to his naked chest. His cropped hair was silver with a hint of bronze and far too fine to adequately frame his thick features. His eyebrows seemed perpetually arched in surprise, and his restless eyes were given to excuses, always feigning interest in trivial details to avoid his ward’s watchful gaze.
Only later, after learning the rudiments of Leweth’s language, did Kellhus discover how he’d come to be in the trapper’s care. His first memories were of sweaty furs and smouldering fires. Animal pelts hung in sheaves from a low ceiling. Sacks and casks heaped the corners of a single room. The smell of smoke, grease, and rot crowded what little open space remained. As Kellhus would later learn, the chaotic interior of the cabin was actually an expression, and a painstaking one at that, of the trapper’s many superstitious fears. Each thing had its place, he would tell Kellhus, and those things out of place portended disaster.
The hearth was large enough to hug all the interior, including Kellhus himself, in golden warmth. Beyond the walls, winter whistled through trackless leagues of forest, ignoring them for the most part, but periodically shaking the cabin hard enough to rock the furs on their hooks. The land was called Sobel, Leweth would tell him, the northernmost province of the ancient city of Atrithau—although it had been abandoned for generations. He preferred, he would say, to live far from the troubles of other men.
Though Leweth was a sturdy man of middle years, for Kellhus he was little more than a child. The fine musculature of his face was utterly untrained, bound as though by strings to his passions. Whatever moved Leweth’s soul moved his expression as well, and after a short time Kellhus needed only to glance at his face to know his thoughts. The ability to anticipate his thoughts, to re-enact the movements of Leweth’s soul as though they were his own, would come later.
In the meantime a routine developed. At dawn Leweth harnessed his dogs and left to check his runs. On the days he returned early, he enlisted Kellhus to mend snares, prepare skins, draw up a new pot of cony stew—to “earn his keep,” as he put it. At night Kellhus worked, as the trapper had taught him, on stitching his own coat and leggings. Leweth would watch from across the fire, his hands living an arcane life of their own, carving, stitching, or simply straining against each other—small labours that paradoxically gifted him with patience, even grace.
Kellhus saw Leweth’s hands at rest only when he slept or was extraordinarily drunk. Drink, more than anything else, defined the trapper.
Through the morning, Leweth never looked Kellhus in the eye, acknowledging him only at nervous angles. A curious halfness deadened the man, as though his thought lacked the momentum to become speech. If he spoke at all, his voice was tight, constricted by an ambient dread. By afternoon, a flush would have crept into his expression. His eyes would flare with brittle sunshine. He would smile, laugh. But by dark, his manner would be bloated, a distorted parody of what it had been just hours earlier. He would bludgeon his way through conversation, would be overcome by squalls of rage and bitter humour.
Kellhus learned much from Leweth’s drink-exaggerated passions, but the time came when he could no longer allow his study to trade in caricatures. One night he rolled the casks of whisky out into the forest and drained them across the frozen ground. During the suffering that followed, he carried on with the chores.
 
They sat facing each other across the hearth, their backs against cozy heaps of animal pelts. His expression etched by firelight, Leweth talked, animated by the honest vanity of sharing his life with someone who was captive to the facts as he described them. Old pains returned in the telling.
“I had no choice but to leave Atrithau,” Leweth admitted, speaking yet again of his dead wife.
Kellhus smiled sorrowfully. He gauged the subtle interplay of muscles beneath the man’s expression.
He pretends to mourn in order to secure my pity.
“Atrithau reminded you of her absence?”
This is the lie he tells himself.
Leweth nodded, his eyes at once tear-filled and expectant. “Atrithau seemed a tomb after she died. One morning they called the muster for the militia to man the walls, and I remember staring off to the north. The forests seemed to . . . beckon me somehow. The terror of my childhood had become a sanctuary! Everyone in the city, even my brothers and my compatriots in the district cohort, seemed to secretly exult in her death—in my misery! I had to . . . I was
forced
to . . .”
Avenge yourself.
Leweth looked down to the fire. “Flee,” he said.
Why does he deceive himself in this way?
“No soul moves alone through the world, Leweth. Our every thought stems from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of words spoken before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another soul to carry our own.” He paused, cutting short his reply in order to bewilder the man. Insight struck with so much more force when it clarified confusion. “This is truly why you fled to Sobel, Leweth.”
For an instant Leweth’s eyes slackened in horror. “But I don’t understand . . .”
Of everything I might say, he fears most the truths he already knows and yet denies. Are all world-born men this weak?
“But you
do
understand. Think, Leweth. If we’re nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us. Who you once were, Leweth, ceased to exist the moment your wife died.”
“And that’s why I fled!” Leweth cried, his eyes both beseeching and provoked. “I couldn’t bear it. I fled to
forget!
”
Flare in his pulse rate. Hesitation in the flex of delicate muscles about his eyes.
He knows this is a lie.
“No, Leweth. You fled to
remember
. You fled to conserve all the ways your wife had moved you, to shield the ache of her loss from the momentum of others. You fled to make a bulwark of your misery.”
Tears spilled across the trapper’s sagging cheeks. “Ah, cruel words, Kellhus! Why would you say such things?”
To better possess you.
“Because you’ve suffered long enough. You’ve spent years alone by this fire, wallowing in your loss, asking your dogs over and over whether they love you. You hoard your pain because the more you suffer, the more the world becomes an outrage. You weep because weeping has become evidence. ‘See what you’ve done to me!’ you cry. And you hold court night after night, condemning the circumstances that have condemned you by reliving your anguish. You torment yourself, Leweth, in order to hold the world accountable for your torment.”
BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
10.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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