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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before

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From the heights, Kellhus looked south across the winter forests. Ishuäl lay somewhere behind him, hidden in the glacial mountains. Before him lay a pilgrimage through a world of men bound by arbitrary custom, by the endless repetition of tribal lies. He would come to them as one
awake
. He would shelter in the hollows of their ignorance, and through truth he would make them his instruments. He was Dûnyain, one of the Conditioned, and he would possess all peoples, all circumstances. He would come before.

But another Dûnyain awaited him, one who had studied the wilderness far longer: Moënghus.

How great is your power, Father?

Turning from the panorama, he noticed something odd. On the far side of the stele he saw tracks in the snow. He studied them momentarily before resolving to ask the trapper about them. Their author had walked upright but had not been quite human.

“They look like this,” Kellhus said. With a bare finger he quickly pressed a replica of the track in the snow.

Leweth watched him, his manner stern. Kellhus needed only to glance at him to see the horror he tried to hide. In the background, the dogs yelped, trotted circles at the ends of their leather leashes.

“Where?” Leweth asked, staring intently at the strange track.

“The old Kûniüric stele. They move at a tangent to the cabin, to the northwest.”

The bearded face turned to him. “And you don’t know what these tracks are?”

The significance of the question was plain.
You’re from the north, and you don’t know these?
Then Kellhus understood.

“Sranc,” he said.

The trapper looked beyond him, sifting through the surrounding wall of trees. The monk registered the flutter in the man’s bowels, his quickening heartbeat and the litany of his thoughts, too quick to be a question:
What-do-we-do-what-do-we-do . . .

“We should follow the tracks,” Kellhus said. “Make sure they don’t cross your runs. If they do . . .”

“It’s been a hard winter for them,” Leweth said. He needed to wring some significance from his terror. “They’ve come south for food . . . They hunt food. Yes, food.”

“And if not?”

Leweth glanced at him, eyes wild. “For Sranc, Men are a sustenance of a different sort. They hunt us to calm the madness of their hearts.” He stepped among his dogs, was distracted by their accumulation around his legs. “Quiet, shh, quiet.” He slapped their ribs, pressed their chins to the snow by vigorously rubbing the backs of their heads. His arms swung wide and randomly, dispensing his affection among them equally.

“Could you bring me the muzzles, Kellhus?”

The trail was thin and grey through the drifts. The sky darkened. Winter evenings brought a strange hush to the interior of the forest, the sense that something greater than daylight was drawing to conclusion. They had run far in their snowshoes, and now they stopped.

They stood beneath the desolate limbs of an oak.

“We shouldn’t return,” Kellhus said.

“But we can’t leave the dogs.”

The monk watched Leweth for several breaths. Their exhalations fell on hard air. He could easily dissuade the trapper, he knew, from returning for anything. Whatever it was they followed knew of the runs, and perhaps even of the cabin itself. But tracks in the snow—empty marks—were far too little for him to use. For Kellhus the threat existed only in the fear manifested by the trapper. The forest was still his.

Kellhus turned and together they made for the cabin, running with the shambling grace of snowshoes. But after a short distance, Kellhus halted the man with a firm hand on his shoulder.

“What—” the trapper began to ask, but he was silenced by the sounds.

A chorus of muffled howls and shrieks perforated the quiet. A single yelp pierced the hollows, followed by dread, wintry silence.

Leweth stood as still as the dark trees. “Why, Kellhus?” His voice cracked.

“There’s no time for why. We must flee.”

Kellhus sat in ashen gloom, watching the dawn’s rosy fingers poke through thickets of branch and dark pine. Leweth still slept.

We’ve run hard, Father, but have we run hard enough?

He saw something. A movement quickly obscured by the forest depths.

“Leweth,” he said.

The trapper stirred. “What?” the man said, coughing. “It’s still dark.”

Another figure. Farther to the left. Closing.

Kellhus remained still, his eyes lost in explorations of the wooded recesses. “They come,” he said.

Leweth bent forward from his frozen blankets. His face was ashen. Bewildered, he followed Kellhus’s gaze into the surrounding gloom. “I see nothing.”

“They move with stealth.”

Leweth began shivering.

“Run,” Kellhus said.

Leweth stared at him in astonishment. “Run? The Sranc run down everything, Kellhus. You don’t flee them. They’re too fast!”

“I know,” Kellhus replied. “I’ll remain here. Slow them.”

Leweth could only stare at him. He could not move. The trees thundered about him. The sky tugged with its emptiness. Then an arrow jutted through his shoulder and he fell to his knees, stared at the red tip protruding from his breast.
“Kellllhuuss!”
he gasped.

But Kellhus was gone. Leweth rolled in the snow, searching for him, found him sprinting through the near trees, a sword in his hand. The first of the Sranc was beheaded, and the monk moved, moved like a pale wraith through the drifts. Another died, its knife sketching uselessly through open air. The others closed upon Kellhus like leathery shadows.

“Kellhus!”
Leweth cried, perhaps out of anguish, perhaps hoping to draw them away, toward one who was already dead.
I would die for you.

But the forms fell, clutching themselves in the snow, and a weird, inhuman howl rifled through the trees. More fell, until only the tall monk was left.

Far away, the trapper thought he heard his dogs barking.

Kellhus pulled him along. Points of snow winked in the rising sun as they crashed through the thickets. Leweth felt cramped around the agony in his shoulder, but the monk was relentless, yanked him to a pace he could scarcely have managed uninjured. They blundered through drifts, around trees, half tumbled into ravines and clawed their way out again. The monk and his arms were always there, a thin rack of iron that propped him again and again.

He still thought he could hear dogs.

My dogs . . .

At last he was thrown against a tree. The tree behind him felt a pillar of stone, a prop to die against. He could scarcely distinguish Kellhus, his beard and hood clotted with ice, from the canopy of bare branches.

“Leweth,”
Kellhus was saying, “you must
think!
”

Cruel words! They grasped him to clarity, thrust him against his anguish. “My dogs,” he sobbed. “I hear . . . them.”

The blue eyes acknowledged nothing.

“More Sranc come,” Kellhus said between laboured breaths. “We need shelter. A place to hide.”

Leweth rolled his head back, swallowed at the spike of pain in the back of his throat, tried to gather himself. “What . . . what direction have w-we c-come?”

“South. Always south.”

Leweth pushed himself from the tree, hugged the monk’s shoulders. He was seized by uncontrollable shivers. He coughed and peered through the trees. “How many st-streams”—he sucked air—“streams have we cr-crossed?”

He felt the heat of Kellhus’s breath.

“Five.”

“Wessst!” he gasped. He leaned back to look into the monk’s face, still clutching him. He did not feel shame. There was no shame with this man. “W-we must g-go west,” he continued, putting his forehead to the monk’s lips. “Ruins. Ruins. N-Nonmen ruins. Many places to h-h-hide.” He groaned. The world wheeled. “You c-can see it a sh-short distance fr-from here.”

Leweth felt snowy ground slam into his body. Stunned, all he could do was curl into his knees. Through the trees he saw Kellhus’s figure, distorted by tears, recede amidst the trees.

No-no-no.

He sobbed. “Kellhus?
Kelllhuuss!
”

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