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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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“Nooo!”
he shrieked.
The tall figure vanished.
 
The slope was treacherous. Kellhus hauled himself up by grasping limbs and securing his step in the deadfalls beneath the snow. The conifers begrudged any clear path across the pitched ground. Radial scaffolds of branches tore at him. A gloom unlike the pale of winter thatched his surroundings.
When he at last climbed free of the forest, the monk scowled at the sky and found himself stilled by the vista above him. Snow-covered, the ground rose with the hungry contours of a dog. The ruins of a gate and a wall towered over the nearer slopes. Beyond it, a dead oak of immense proportions bent against the sky.
Rain fell from dark clouds scrolling over the summit, froze against his coats.
Kellhus was astonished by the great stones of the gate. Many had a girth as huge as the oak they obscured. An uplifted face had been hewn from the lintel—blank eyes, as patient as sky. He passed beneath. The ground levelled somewhat. Behind him, the expanses of forest grew dim in the gathering rain. But the noise grew louder.
The tree had been long dead. Its colossal tendons were husked of their bark, and its limbs extended into the air like winding tusks. Stripped of its detail, the wind and rain sluiced through it with ease.
He turned as the Sranc broke from the bush, howling as they loped across the snow.
 
So clear, this place. Arrows hissed by him. He picked one from the air and studied it. Warm, as though it had been pressed against skin. Then his sword was in his hand, and it glittered through the space around him, seizing it like the branches of a tree. They came—a dark rush—and he was
there
before them, poised in the one moment they could not foresee. A calligraphy of cries. The thud of astonished flesh. He speared the ecstasy from their inhuman faces, stepped among them and snuffed out their beating hearts.
They could not see that circumstance was holy. They only hungered. He, on the other hand, was one of the Conditioned, Dûnyain, and all events yielded to him.
They fell back, and the howling subsided. They thronged for a moment around him—narrow shoulders and dog-shaped chests, stinking leather and necklaces of human teeth. He stood patient before their menace. Tranquil.
They fled.
He bent to one that still squirmed at his feet, lifting it by its throat. The beautiful face contorted with fury.
“Kuz’inirishka dazu daka gurankas. . .”
It spat at him. He nailed it to the tree with his sword. He stepped back. It shrieked, flailed.
What are these creatures?
A horse snorted behind him, stamped at the snow and ice. Kellhus retrieved his sword and whirled.
Through the sleet, the horse and rider were mere grey shapes. Kellhus watched their slow approach, standing his ground, his shaggy hair frozen into little tusks that clicked in the wind. The horse was large, some eighteen hands, and black. Its rider was draped in a long grey cloak stitched with faint patterns—abstracts of faces. He wore an uncrested helm that obscured his countenance. A powerful voice rang out, in Kûniüric:
“I can see that you’re not to be killed.”
Kellhus was silent. Watchful. The sound of rain like blowing sand.
The figure dismounted but maintained a wary distance. He studied the inert forms sprawled around them.
“Extraordinary,” the stranger said, then looked to him. Kellhus could see the glitter of his eyes beneath the brow of his helm. “You must be a
name
.”
“Anasûrimbor Kellhus,” the monk replied.
Silence. Kellhus thought he could sense confusion, strange confusion.
“It speaks the language,” the man muttered at length. He stepped closer, peering at Kellhus. “Yes,” he said. “Yes . . . You do not merely mock me. I can see
his
blood in your face.”
Kellhus again was silent.
“You have the patience of an Anasûrimbor as well.”
Kellhus studied him, noting that his cloak was not stitched with stylized representations of faces but with actual faces, their features distorted by being stretched flat. Beneath the cloak, the man was powerfully built, heavily armoured, and from the way he comported himself, entirely unafraid.
“I see that you are a student. Knowledge is power, eh?”
This one was not like Leweth. Not at all.
Still the sound of sleet, patiently drawing the dead into the cold snow.
“Should you not fear me, mortal, knowing what I am? Fear too is power. The power to survive.” The figure began to circle him, carefully stepping between Sranc limbs. “This is what separates your kind from mine. Fear. The clawing, grubbing, impulse to survive. For us life is always a . . . decision. For you . . . Well, let us just say
it
decides.”
At last, Kellhus spoke. “The decision, then, would seem to be yours.”
The figure paused. “Ah, mockery,” he said sorrowfully. “That is one thing we share.”
Kellhus’s provocation had been deliberate but had yielded little—or so it seemed at first. The stranger abruptly lowered his obscured face, rolled his head back and forth on the pivot of his chin, muttering,
“It baits me! The mortal baits me . . . It reminds me, reminds . . .”
He began fumbling with his cloak, seized upon a misshapen face.
“Of this one! Oh, impertinent—what a joy this one was! Yes, I remember . . .”
He looked up at Kellhus and hissed, “I remember!”
And Kellhus grasped the first principles of this encounter.
A Nonman. Another of Leweth’s myths come true.
With solemn deliberation the figure drew his broadsword. It shined unnaturally in the gloom, as though reflecting some otherworldly sun. But he turned to one of the dead Sranc, rolled it onto its back with the flat of the blade. Its white skin was beginning to darken.
“This Sranc here—you could not pronounce its name—was our
elju
. . . our ‘book,’ you would say in your tongue. A most devoted animal. I’ll be wrecked without it—for a time, anyway.” He surveyed the other dead. “Nasty, vicious creatures, really.” He looked back up to Kellhus. “But most . . . memorable.”
An opening. Kellhus would explore. He said: “So reduced. You’ve become so pitiful.”
“You pity me? A
dog
dares pity?” The Nonman laughed harshly. “The Anasûrimbor pities me! And so he should . . .
Ka’cûnuroi souk ki’elju, souk hus’jihla
.” He spat, then gestured with his sword to the surrounding dead. “These . . . these Sranc are our children now. But
before!
Before, you were our children. Our heart had been cut out and so we cradled yours. Companions to the ‘great’ Norsirai kings.”
The Nonman stepped nearer.
“But no longer,” he continued. “As the ages waxed, some of us needed more than your childish squabbles to remember. Some of us needed a more exquisite brutality than any of your feuds could render. The great curse of our kind—do you know it? Of course you know it! What slave fails to exult in his master’s degradation, hmm?”
The wind wrapped his hoary cloak about him. He took another step.
“But I make excuses like a Man. Loss is written into the very earth. We are only its most dramatic reminder.”
The Nonman had raised the point of his sword to Kellhus, who had fallen into stance, his own curved sword poised above his head.
Again silence, deadly this time.
“I am a warrior of ages, Anasûrimbor . . .
ages
. I have dipped my
nimil
in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and
for
the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury.”
“Then why,” Kellhus asked, “raise arms now, against a lone man?”
Laughter. The free hand gestured to the dead Sranc. “A pittance, I agree, but still you would be
memorable
.”
Kellhus struck first, but his blade recoiled from the mail beneath the Nonman’s cloak. He crouched, deflected the powerful counter-stroke, swept the figure’s legs out from beneath him. The Nonman toppled backward but managed to roll effortlessly back to his feet. Laughter rang from the helmed face.
“Most memorable!” he cried, falling upon the monk.
And Kellhus felt himself pressed. A rain of mighty blows, forcing him back, away from the dead tree. The ring of Dûnyain steel and Nonman
nimil
pealed across the windswept heights. But Kellhus could sense the moment—although it was far, far thinner than it had been with the Sranc.
He climbed into that narrow instant, and the unearthly blade fell farther and farther from its mark, bit deeper into empty air. Then Kellhus’s own sword was scoring the dark figure, clipping and prodding the armour, tattering the grim cloak. But he could draw no blood.
“What are you?” the Nonman cried in fury.
There was one space between them, but the crossings were infinite . . .
Kellhus opened the Nonman’s exposed chin. Blood, black in the gloom, spilled across his breast. A second stroke sent the uncanny blade skittering across snow and ice.
As Kellhus leapt, the Nonman scrambled backward, fell. The point of Kellhus’s sword, poised above the opening of his helm, stilled him.
In the freezing rain, the monk breathed evenly, staring down at the fallen figure. Several instants passed. Now the interrogation could begin.
“You will answer my questions,” Kellhus instructed, his tone devoid of passion.
The Nonman laughed darkly.
“But it is
you,
Anasûrimbor, who are the question.”
And then came the
word,
the word that, on hearing, wrenched the intellect somehow.
A furious incandescence. Like a petal blown from a palm, Kellhus was thrown backward. He rolled through the snow and, stunned, struggled to his feet. He watched numbly as the Nonman was drawn upright as though by a wire. Pale watery light formed a sphere around him. The ice rain sputtered and hissed against it. Behind him rose the great tree.
Sorcery? But how could it be?
Kellhus fled, sprinted over the dead structures breaking the snow. He slipped on ice and skidded over the far side of the heights, toppled through the wicked branches of trees. He recovered his feet and tore himself through the harsh underbrush. Something like a thunderclap shivered through the air, and great, blinding fires rifled through the spruces behind him. The heat washed over him, and he ran harder, until the slopes were leaps and the dark forest a rush of confusion.
“ANASÛRIMBOR!” an unearthly voice called, cracking the winter silence.
“RUN, ANASÛRIMBOR!” it boomed. “I WILL
REMEMBER!
”
Laughter, like a storm, and the forest behind him was harrowed by more fierce lights. They fractured the surrounding gloom, and Kellhus could see his own fleeing shadow flickering before him.
The cold air wracked his lungs, but he ran—far harder than the Sranc had made him run.
BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
13.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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