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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

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BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before

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“You will sit here in posture,” the Pragma said, neither stern nor gentle, “and repeat this proposition: ‘The Logos is without beginning or end.’ You will repeat this without cessation, until you are directed otherwise. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Pragma,” Kellhus replied.

He lowered himself onto a small mat of woven reeds in the centre of the shrine. The Pragma sat opposite him on a similar mat, his back to the sunlit poplars and the scowling precipices of the mountains beyond.

“Begin,” the Pragma said, becoming motionless.

“The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without . . .”

At first he puzzled over the ease of the exercise. But the words quickly lost their meaning and became a repetitive string of unfamiliar sounds, more a pasty exercise of tongue, teeth, and lips than speaking.

“Cease saying this aloud,” the Pragma said. “Speak it only within.”

The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without . . .

This was far different and, as he quickly discovered, far more difficult. Speaking the proposition aloud had braced the repetition somehow, as though propping thought against his organs of speech. Now it stood alone, suspended in the nowhere of his soul, repeated and repeated and repeated, contrary to all the habits of inference and drifting association.

The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without . . .

The first thing he noted was the curious slackness of his face, as though the exercise had somehow severed the links shackling expression to passion. His body grew very still, far more so than he’d ever experienced before. At the same time, however, curious waves of tension assailed him from within, as though something deep balked, refusing inner breath to his inner voice. And the repetition was muted to a whisper, became a thin thread undulating through violent eddies of inarticulate, unformed thought.

The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without . . .

The sun waxed across the dishevelled mountainsides, mottling his periphery with the contrast of dark plummets and bright bald faces. Kellhus found himself at war. Inchoate urges reared from nothingness, demanding thought. Unuttered voices untwined from darkness, demanding thought. Hissing images railed, pleaded, threatened—all demanding thought. And through it all:

The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without beginning or end. The Logos is without . . .

Long afterward, he would realize this exercise had demarcated his soul. The incessant repetition of the Pragma’s proposition had pitted him against himself, had shown him the extent to which he was other to himself. For the first time he could truly see the darkness that had preceded him, and he knew that before this day, he had never truly been awake.

When the sun at last set, the Pragma broke his fast of silence.

“You have completed your first day, young Kellhus, and now you will continue through the night. When the dawn sun broaches the eastern glacier, you will cease repeating the
last
word of the proposition but otherwise continue. Each time the sun breaks from the glacier, you will cease repeating the last word. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Pragma.” Words spoken, it seemed, by someone else.

“Then continue.”

As darkness entombed the shrine, the struggle intensified. By turns, his body became remote to the point of giddiness and near to the point of suffocation. One moment he would be an apparition, an accident of coiling smoke, so insubstantial it seemed the night breeze might smear him into nothingness. In another, he would be a bundle of cramped flesh, every sensation sharpened until even the night chill chattered like knives across his skin. And the proposition became something drunken, something that stumbled and staggered through a nightmarish chorus of agitations, distractions, and frenzied passions. They howled within him—like something dying.

Then the sun broke from the glacier, and he was dumbstruck by its beauty. Smouldering orange cresting cold planes of shining snow and ice. And for a heartbeat the proposition escaped him, and he thought only of the way the glacier reared, curved like the back of a beautiful woman . . .

The Pragma leapt forward and struck him, his face a rictus of counterfeit rage. “Repeat the proposition!” he screamed.

For Kellhus, each of the Great Names represented a question, a juncture of innumerable permutations. In their faces, he saw fragments of other faces surfacing as though all men were but moments of one man. An instant of Leweth passing like a squall through Athjeäri’s scowl as he argued with Saubon. A glimpse of Serwë in the way Gothyelk looked upon his youngest son. The same passions, but each cast in a drastically different balance. Any one of these people, he concluded, might be as easily possessed as Leweth had been—despite their fierce pride. But in their sum, they were incalculable.

They were a labyrinth, a thousand thousand halls, and he had to pass through them. He had to own them.

What if this Holy War exceeds my abilities? What then, Father?

“Do you feast, Dûnyain?” Cnaiür asked in bitter Scylvendi. “Grow fat on faces?” Proyas had left them to confer with Gotian, and for the moment, the two of them were alone.

“We share the same mission, Scylvendi.”

So far, events had exceeded his most optimistic forecasts. His claim to royal blood had secured him, almost effortlessly, a position among the Inrithi ruling castes. Not only had Proyas supplied him with the “necessities of his princely rank,” he had accorded him a place of honour at his council fire. So long as one possessed the bearing of a prince, Kellhus discovered, one was treated as a prince. Acting became being.

His other claim, however—his claim to have dreamt of Shimeh and the Holy War—had secured him a far different position, one more fraught with peril and possibility. Some openly scoffed at the claim. Others, like Proyas and Achamian, viewed it as a possible warning, like the first flush of disease. Many, searching for whatever scrap of divine sanction they could find, simply accepted it. But all of them conceded Kellhus the same position.

For the peoples of the Three Seas, dreams, no matter how trivial, were a serious matter. Dreams were not, as the Dûnyain had thought before Moënghus’s summons, mere rehearsals, ways for the soul to train itself for different eventualities. Dreams were the portal, the place where the Outside infiltrated the World, where what transcended men—be it the future, the distant, the demonic, or the divine—found imperfect expression in the here and now.

But it was not enough to simply assert that one had dreamed. If dreams were powerful, they were also cheap. Everyone dreamed. After patiently listening to descriptions of his visions, Proyas had explained to Kellhus that literally thousands claimed to dream of the Holy War, some of its triumph, others of its destruction. One could not walk ten yards along the Phayus, he said, without seeing some hermit screech and gesticulate about his dreams.

“Why,” he asked with characteristic honesty, “should I regard your dreams as any different?”

Dreams were a serious matter, and serious matters demanded hard questions.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” Kellhus had replied. “I’m not sure I do.”

And it was this, his reluctance to believe his own prophetic claims, that had secured his perilous position. When anonymous Inrithi, having heard rumours of him, fell to their knees before him, he would be cross the way a compassionate father would be cross. When they begged to be touched, as though grace could be communicated across skin, he would touch them, but only to raise them up, to chide them for abasing themselves before another. By claiming to be less than what he seemed to be, he moved men, even learned men such as Proyas and Achamian, to hope or fear that he might be
more
.

He would never utter it, never claim it, but he would manufacture the circumstances that would make it seem true. Then all those who counted themselves secret watchers, all those who breathlessly asked
“Who is this man?”
would be gratified like never before. He would be
their
insight.

They would be unable to doubt him then. To doubt him would be to think their own insights empty. To disown him would be to disown themselves.

Kellhus would step onto conditioned ground.

So many permutations . . . But I see the path, Father.

Laughter pealed across the garden. Some young Galeoth thane, weary of standing, had thought the Emperor’s stool a good place to rest. He sat for several moments, oblivious to the surrounding mirth, alternately studying the glazed pork
jumyan
he’d pilfered from a slave and the naked man chained at his feet. When he finally realized that everyone laughed at him, he decided he rather liked the attention and began striking a series of mock imperial poses. The Men of the Tusk roared. Eventually, Saubon collected the youth and led him back to his applauding kinsmen.

Moments afterward, a file of Imperial Apparati, all dressed in the voluminous robes of their station, announced the arrival of the Emperor. With Conphas at his side, Ikurei Xerius III appeared just as the hilarity subsided, his expression a mixture of benevolence and distaste. He sat upon his stool and rekindled his guests’ mirth when he adopted the very pose—his left palm facing up upon his lap, his right curled down before him—that the young Galeoth had aped just moments before. Kellhus watched his face grow pale with rage as one of his eunuchs explained the laughter. There was murder in his eyes when he dismissed the man, and he struggled with his posture for a moment. To be premeditated, he knew, was the most galling of insults. In this way even an Emperor might be made a slave—though, Kellhus realized, he did not know why. Finally Xerius settled on the Norsirai posture: hands braced on his knees.

Several long moments of silence passed as he mastered his rage. During this time, Kellhus studied the faces of the imperial retinue: the seamless arrogance of the Emperor’s nephew, Conphas; the panic of the slaves, so attuned to their master’s tumultuous passions; the tight-lipped disapproval of the Imperial Counsels, arrayed in a semicircle behind their Emperor—their centre. And . . .

A
different
face, among the Counsels . . . a troubling face.

It was the subtlest of incongruities, a vague wrongness, that drew his attention at first. An old man dressed in fine charcoal silk robes, a man obviously deferred to and respected by the others. One of his companions leaned to him and muttered something inaudible through the rumble of voices. But Kellhus could see his lips:

Skeaös . . .

The Counsel’s name.

Drawing a deep breath, Kellhus allowed the momentum of his own thought to slow and still. Who he was in his everyday concourse with other men ceased to exist, peeled away like petals in bloom. The tempo of events slowed. He became a
place,
a blank field for a single figure: the weathered landscape of an old man’s face.

No perceptible blush reflex. Disconnect between heart rate and apparent expression—

But the drone of surrounding voices trailed into silence, and he withdrew, reassembled. The Emperor was about to speak. Words that could seal the fate of the Holy War.

Five heartbeats had passed.

What could this mean? A single, indecipherable face among a welter of transparent expressions.

Skeaös . . . Are you my father’s work?