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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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Again he’ll deny me—
“And what if I do? The world
is
an outrage, Kellhus. An
outrage!
”
“Perhaps it is,” Kellhus replied, his tone one of pity and regret, “but the world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish. How many times have you cried out these very words? And each time they’ve been cramped by the same desperation, the desperation of one who needs to believe something he knows to be false. Only pause, Leweth, refuse to follow the grooves these thoughts have worn into you.
Pause,
and you’ll see.”
His thoughts forced inward, Leweth hesitated, his face stunned and slack.
He understands but lacks the courage to admit.
“Ask yourself,” Kellhus pressed, “why this desperation?”
“There’s no desperation,” Leweth replied numbly.
He sees the place I’ve opened for him, realizes the futility of all lies in my presence, even those he tells himself.
“Why do you continue to lie?”
“Because . . . because . . .”
Through the wheeze of the fire, Kellhus could hear the pounding of Leweth’s heart, fevered like that of a trapped animal. Sobs shuddered through the man. He raised his hands to bury his face but then paused. He looked up to Kellhus and wept the way a child might before his mother.
It hurts!
his expression cried.
It hurts so much!
“I know it hurts, Leweth. Release from anguish can be purchased only through more anguish.”
So much like a child . . .
“W-what should I do?” the trapper wept. “Kellhus . . . Please tell me!”
Thirty years, Father. What power you must wield over men such as this.
And Kellhus, his bearded face warm with firelight and compassion, answered: “No one’s soul moves alone, Leweth. When one love dies, one must learn to love another.”
 
After a time the hearth fire burned low, and the two of them sat silently, listening to the gathering fury of yet another storm. The wind sounded like mighty blankets flapping against the walls. Outside the forest groaned and whistled beneath the dark belly of the blizzard.
“Weeping may muddy the face,” Leweth said, broaching their silence with an old proverb, “but it does cleanse the heart.”
Kellhus smiled in reply, his expression one of bemused recognition. Why, the ancient Dûnyain had asked, confine the passions to words when they spoke first in expression? A legion of faces lived within him, and he could slip through them with the same ease with which he crafted his words. At the heart of his jubilant smile, his compassionate laugh, flexed the cold of scrutiny.
“But you distrust it,” Kellhus said.
Leweth shrugged. “Why, Kellhus? Why would the Gods send you to me?”
For Leweth, Kellhus knew, the world was fraught with gods, ghosts, even demons. It was steeped in their conspiracies, crowded with omens and portents of their capricious humours. Like a second horizon, their designs encompassed the struggles of men—shrouded, cruel, and in the end, always fatal.
For Leweth, discovering him beneath the snowdrifts of Sobel was no accident.
“You wish to know why I’ve come?”
“Why have you come?”
So far Kellhus had avoided any talk of his mission, and Leweth, terrified by the speed with which he had recovered and learned his language, had not asked. But the study had progressed.
“I search for my father, Moënghus,” Kellhus said. “Anasûrimbor Moënghus.”
“Is he lost?” Leweth asked, gratified beyond measure by this admission.
“No. He left my people long ago, while I was still a child.”
“Then why do you search for him?”
“Because he sent for me. He asked that I journey to see him.”
Leweth nodded, as though all sons must return to their fathers at some point. “Where is he?”
Kellhus paused for a heartbeat, his eyes apparently fixed upon Leweth, but actually focused on an empty point before him. As a cold man might curl into a ball, gather as much skin as possible into his arms and away from the world, Kellhus withdrew his surfaces from the room and sheltered within his intellect, unmoved by the press of outer events. The legions within were yoked, the variables isolated and extended, and the welter of possible consequences that might follow upon a truthful answer to Leweth’s question bloomed through his soul. The probability trance.
He rose, blinked against the firelight. As with so many questions regarding his mission, the answer was incalculable.
“Shimeh,” Kellhus said at length. “A city far to the south called Shimeh.”
“He sent for you from
Shimeh?
But how’s that possible?”
Kellhus adopted a faintly bewildered look that was not far from true. “Through dreams. He sent for me through dreams.”
“Sorcery . . .”
Always the curious intermingling of awe and dread when Leweth uttered this word. There were witches, Leweth had told him, whose urgings could harness the wild agencies asleep in earth, animal, and tree. There were priests whose pleas could sound the Outside, move the Gods who moved the world to give men respite. And there were sorcerers whose assertions were decrees, whose words dictated rather than described how the world had to be.
Superstition. Everywhere and in everything, Leweth had confused that which came after with that which came before, confused the effect for the cause. Men came after, so he placed them before and called them “gods” or “demons.” Words came after, so he placed them before and called them “scriptures” or “incantations.” Confined to the aftermath of events and blind to the causes that preceded him, he merely fastened upon the ruin itself, men and the acts of men, as the model of what came before.
But what came before, the Dûnyain had learned, was inhuman.
There must be some other explanation. There is no sorcery.
“What do you know of Shimeh?” Kellhus asked.
The walls shivered beneath a fierce succession of gusts, and the flame twirled with abrupt incandescence. The hanging pelts lightly rocked to and fro. Leweth looked about, his brow furrowed, as though he strained to hear someone.
“It’s a long way off, Kellhus, through dangerous lands.”
“Shimeh is not . . . holy for you?”
Leweth smiled. Like places too near, places too far could never be holy. “I’ve heard the name only a few times before,” he said.
“The Sranc own the North. The few Men who remain are endlessly besieged, bound to the cities of Atrithau and Sakarpus. We know little of the Three Seas.”
“The Three Seas?”
“The nations of the South,” Leweth replied, his eyes rounded in wonder. He found his ignorance, Kellhus knew, godlike. “You mean you’ve never heard of the Three Seas?”
“As isolated as your people are, mine are far more so.”
Leweth nodded sagely. Finally, it was his turn to speak of profound things. “The Three Seas were young when the North was destroyed by the No-God and his Consult. Now that we’re but a shadow, they’re the seat of power for Men.” He paused, disheartened by how quickly his knowledge had failed him. “I know little more than that—save a handful of names.”
“Then how did you learn of Shimeh?”
“I once sold ermine to a man from the caravans. A dark-skinned man. A Ketyai. Never saw a dark-skinned man before.”
“Caravans?” Kellhus had never heard the word before, but he spoke it as though he wanted to know which caravan the trapper referred to.
“Every year a caravan from the south arrives in Atrithau—if it survives the Sranc, that is. It travels from a land called Galeoth by way of Sakarpus, bringing spices, silks—wondrous things, Kellhus! Have you ever tasted pepper?”
“What did this dark-skinned man tell you of Shimeh?”
“Not much, really. He spoke mostly about his religion. Said he was Inrithi, a follower of the Latter Prophet, Inri”—his brows knotted for a moment—“something or another. Can you imagine? A
latter
prophet?” Leweth paused, eyes unfocused, struggling to render the episode in words. “He kept saying that I was damned unless I submit to his prophet and open my heart to the Thousand Temples—I’ll never forget that name.”
“So Shimeh was holy to this man?”
“The holiest of holies. It was the city of his prophet long ago. But there was some kind of problem, I think. Something about wars and about heathens having taken it from the Inrithi—” Leweth halted, as though struck by something of peculiar significance. “In the Three Seas
Men
war with
Men,
Kellhus, and care nothing for the Sranc. Can you imagine?”
“So Shimeh is a holy city in the hands of a heathen people?”
“All for the best, I think,” Leweth replied, abruptly bitter. “The dog kept calling
me
a heathen as well.”
They continued talking of distant lands far into the night. The wind howled and battered the sturdy walls of their cabin. And in the gloom of a faltering fire, Anasûrimbor Kellhus slowly drew Leweth into his own descending rhythms—slower breath, drowsy eyes. When the trapper was fully entranced, he peeled away his last secrets, hunted him until no refuge remained.
 
Alone, Kellhus snowshoed through frigid stands of spruce and toward the nearest of the heights that surrounded the trapper’s cabin. Snowdrifts scrawled around the dark trunks. The air smelled of winter silence.
Kellhus had refashioned himself over the past several weeks. The forest was no longer the stupefying cacophony it had once been. Sobel was a land of winter caribou, sable, beaver, and marten. Amber slumbered in her ground. Bare stone lay clean beneath her sky, and her lakes were silver with fish. There was nothing more, nothing worthy of awe or dread.
Before him, the snow fell away from a shallow cliff. Kellhus stared up, searching for the path that would see the heights yield to him most readily. He climbed.
Except for a few stunted and leafless hawthorns, the summit was clear. At its centre stood an ancient stele—a stone shaft leaning against the distance. Runes and small graven figures pitted all four sides. What drew Kellhus here, time and again, was not merely the language of the graven text—aside from the idiom, it was indistinguishable from his own—but the
name
of its author.
It began,
And I, Anasûrimbor Celmomas II, look from this place and
witness the glory worked by my hand . . .
and continued to catalogue a great battle between long-dead kings. According to Leweth, this land had once been the frontier of two nations: Kûniüri and Eämnor, both lost millennia ago in mythical wars against what Leweth called “the No-God.” As with many of Leweth’s stories, Kellhus dismissed his tales of the Apocalypse outright. But the name Anasûrimbor engraved in ancient diorite was something he could not dismiss. The world, he now understood, was far older than the Dûnyain. And if his bloodline extended as far as this dead High King, then so was he.
But such thoughts were irrelevant to his mission. His study of Leweth was drawing to conclusion. Soon he would have to continue south to Atrithau, where Leweth had insisted he could secure further means of travelling to Shimeh.
BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
9.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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