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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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Sorcery? Is this among the lessons I’m to learn, Father?

Cold night fell. Somewhere in the dark, wolves howled. Shimeh, they seemed to say, was too far.

PART I:

The Sorcerer

CHAPTER ONE

CARYTHUSAL

There are three, and only three, kinds of men in the world: cynics, fanatics, and Mandate Schoolmen.

—ONTILLAS,
ON THE FOLLY OF MEN

The author has often observed that in the genesis of great events,
men generally possess no inkling of what their actions portend.
This problem is not, as one might suppose, a result of men’s
blindness to the consequences of their actions. Rather it is a result
of the mad way the dreadful turns on the trivial when the ends of
one man cross the ends of another. The Schoolmen of the Scarlet
Spires have an old saying: “When one man chases a hare, he
finds a hare. But when many men chase a hare, they find a
dragon.” In the prosecution of competing human interests, the
result is always unknown, and all too often terrifying.

—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN,
COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Midwinter, 4110 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal

All spies obsessed over their informants. It was a game they played in the moments before sleep or even during nervous gaps in conversation. A spy would look at his informant, as Achamian looked at Geshrunni now, and ask himself,
How much does he know?

Like many taverns found near the edge of the Worm, the great slums of Carythusal, the Holy Leper was at once luxurious and impoverished. The floor was tiled with ceramics as fine as any found in the palace of a Palatine-Governor, but the walls were of painted mud brick, and the ceiling was so low that taller men had to duck beneath the brass lamps, which were authentic imitations, Achamian had once heard the owner boast, of those found in the Temple of Exorietta. The place was invariably crowded, filled with shadowy, sometimes dangerous men, but the wine and hashish were just expensive enough to prevent those who could not afford to bathe from rubbing shoulders with those who could.

Until coming to the Holy Leper, Achamian had never liked the Ainoni—especially those from Carythusal. Like most in the Three Seas, he thought them vain and effeminate: too much oil in their beards, too fond of irony and cosmetics, too reckless in their sexual habits. But this estimation had changed after the endless hours he’d spent waiting for Geshrunni to arrive. The subtlety of character and taste that afflicted only the highest castes of other nations, he realized, was a rampant fever among these people, infecting even low-caste freemen and slaves. He had always thought High Ainon a nation of libertines and petty conspirators; that this made them a nation of kindred spirits was something he never had imagined.

Perhaps this was why he failed to immediately recognize his peril when Geshrunni said, “I know you.”

Dark even in the lamplight, Geshrunni lowered his arms, which had been folded across his white silk vest, and leaned forward in his seat. He was an imposing figure, possessing a hawkish soldier’s face, a beard pleated into what looked like black leather straps, and thick arms so deeply tanned that one could see, but never quite decipher, the line of Ainoni pictograms tattooed from shoulder to wrist.

Achamian tried to grin affably. “You and my wives,” he said, tossing back yet another bowl of wine. He gasped and smacked his lips. Geshrunni had always been, or so Achamian had assumed, a narrow man, one for whom the grooves of thought and word were few and deep. Most warriors were such, particularly when they were slaves.

But there had been nothing narrow about his claim.

Geshrunni watched him carefully, the suspicion in his eyes rounded by a faint wonder. He shook his head in disgust. “I should’ve said, ‘I know who you are.’”

The man leaned back in a contemplative way so foreign to a soldier’s manner that Achamian’s skin pimpled with dread. The rumbling tavern receded, became a frame of shadowy figures and points of golden lantern-light.

“Then write it down,” Achamian replied, as though growing bored, “and give it to me when I’m sober.” He looked away, as bored men often do, and noted that the entrance to the tavern was empty.

“I know you have no wives.”

“You don’t say. And how’s that?” Achamian glanced quickly behind him, glimpsed a whore laughing as she pressed a shiny silver ensolarii onto her sweaty breasts. The vulgar crowd about her roared,
“One!”

“She’s quite good at that, you know. She uses honey.”

Geshrunni was not distracted. “Your kind aren’t allowed to have wives.”

“My kind, eh? And just what is my kind?” Another glance at the entrance.

“You’re a sorcerer. A Schoolman.”

Achamian laughed, knowing his momentary hesitation had betrayed him. But there was motive enough to continue this pantomime. At the very least, it might buy him several more moments. Time to stay alive.

“By the Latter-fucking-Prophet, my friend,” Achamian cried, glancing once again at the entrance, “I swear I could measure your accusations by the bowl. What was it you accused me of being last night? A whoreson?”

Amid chortling voices, a thunderous shout:
“Two!”

The fact that Geshrunni grimaced told Achamian little—the man’s every expression seemed some version of a grimace, particularly his smile. The hand that flashed out and clamped his wrist, however, told Achamian all he needed to know.

I’m doomed. They know.

Few things were more terrifying than “they,” especially in Carythusal. “They” were the Scarlet Spires, the most powerful School in the Three Seas, and the hidden masters of High Ainon. Geshrunni was a Captain of the Javreh, the warrior-slaves of the Scarlet Spires, which is why Achamian had courted him over the past few weeks. This is what spies do: woo the slaves of their competitors.

Geshrunni stared fiercely into his eyes, twisted his hand palm outward. “There’s a way for us to satisfy my suspicion,” the man said softly.

“Three!”
reverberated across mud brick and scuffed mahogany.

Achamian winced, both because of the man’s powerful grip and because he knew the “way” Geshrunni referred to.
Not like this.

“Geshrunni, please. You’re drunk, my friend. What School would hazard the wrath of the Scarlet Spires?”

Geshrunni shrugged. “The Mysunsai, maybe. Or the Imperial Saik. The Cishaurim. There are so many of your accursed kind. But if I had to wager, I would say the
Mandate
. I would say you’re a Mandate Schoolman.”

Canny slave! How long had he known?

The impossible words were there, poised in Achamian’s thought, words that could blind eyes and blister flesh.
He leaves me no choice
. There would be an uproar. Men would bellow, clutch their swords, but they would do nothing but scramble from his path. More than any people in the Three Seas, the Ainoni feared sorcery.

No choice.

But Geshrunni had already reached beneath his embroidered vest. His fist bunched beneath the fabric. He grimaced like a grinning jackal.

Too late . . .

“You look,” Geshrunni said with menacing ease, “like you have something to say.”

The man withdrew his hand and produced the Chorae. He winked, then with terrifying abruptness, snapped the golden chain holding it about his neck. Achamian had sensed it from their first encounter, had actually used its unnerving murmur to identify Geshrunni’s vocation. Now Geshrunni would use it to identify him.

“What’s this, now?” Achamian asked. A shudder of animal terror passed through his pinned arm.

“I think you know, Akka. I think you know far better than I.”

Chorae. Schoolmen called them Trinkets. Small names are often given to horrifying things. But for other men, those who followed the Thousand Temples in condemning sorcery as blasphemy, they were called Tears of God. But the God had no hand in their manufacture. Chorae were relics of the Ancient North, so valuable that only the marriage of heirs, murder, or the tribute of entire nations could purchase them. They were worth the price: Chorae rendered their bearers immune to sorcery and killed any sorcerer unfortunate enough to touch them.

Effortlessly holding Achamian’s hand immobile, Geshrunni raised the Chorae between thumb and forefinger. It looked plain enough: a small sphere of iron, about the size of an olive but encased in the cursive script of the Nonmen. Achamian could feel it tug at his bowels, as though Geshrunni held an
absence
rather than a thing, a small pit in the very fabric of the world. His heart hammered in his ears. He thought of the knife sheathed beneath his tunic.

“Four!”
Raucous laughter.

He struggled to free his captive hand. Futile.

“Geshrunni . . .”

“Every Captain of the Javreh is given one of these,” Geshrunni said, his tone at once reflective and proud. “But then, you already know this.”

All this time, he’s been playing me for a fool! How could I’ve missed it?

“Your masters are kind,” Achamian said, rivetted by the horror suspended above his palm.

“Kind?” Geshrunni spat. “The Scarlet Spires are not
kind
. They’re ruthless. Cruel to those who oppose them.”

And for the first time, Achamian glimpsed the torment animating the man, the anguish in his bright eyes.
What’s happening here?
He hazarded a question: “And to those who serve them?”

“They do not discriminate.”

They don’t know! Only Geshrunni . . .

“Five!”
pealed beneath the low ceilings.

Achamian licked his lips. “What do you want, Geshrunni?”

The warrior-slave looked down at Achamian’s trembling palm, then lowered the Trinket as though he were a child curious of what might happen. Simply staring at it made Achamian dizzy, jerked bile to the back of his throat. Chorae. A tear drawn from the God’s own cheek. Death. Death to all blasphemers.

“What do you want?” Achamian hissed.

“What all men want, Akka. Truth.”

All the things Achamian had seen, all the trials he’d survived, lay pinched in that narrow space between his shining palm and the oiled iron. Trinket. Death poised between the callused fingers of a slave. But Achamian was a Schoolman, and for Schoolmen nothing, not even life itself, was as precious as the Truth. They were its miserly keepers, and they warred for its possession across all the shadowy grottoes of the Three Seas. Better to die than to yield Mandate truth to the Scarlet Spires.

But there was more here. Geshrunni was alone—Achamian was certain of this. Sorcerers could see sorcerers, see the bruise of their crimes, and the Holy Leper hosted no sorcerers, no Scarlet Schoolmen, only drunks making wagers with whores. Geshrunni played this game on his own.

But for what mad reason?

Tell him what he wants. He already knows.

“I’m a Mandate Schoolman,” Achamian whispered quickly. Then he added, “A spy.”

Dangerous words. But what choice did he have?

Geshrunni studied him for a breathless moment, then slowly gathered the Chorae into his fist. He released Achamian’s hand.

There was an odd moment of silence, interrupted only by the clatter of a silver ensolarii against wood. A roar of laughter, and a hoarse voice bellowed,
“You lose, whore!”

But this, Achamian knew, was not so. Somehow he had won this night, and he had won the way whores always win—without understanding.

After all, spies were little different from whores. Sorcerers less so.