Read The Darkness that Comes Before Online
Authors: R. Scott Bakker
The Darkness that Comes Before (8 page)
Though he had dreamt of being a sorcerer as a child, the possibility of being a spy had never occurred to Drusas Achamian. “Spy” simply wasn’t part of the vocabulary of children raised in Nroni fishing villages. For him the Three Seas had possessed only two dimensions in his childhood: there were places far and near and there were people high and low. He would listen to the old fish-wives tell their tales while he and the other children helped shuck oysters, and he learned very quickly that he was among the low, and that mighty people dwelt far away. Name after mysterious name would fall from those old lips—the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, the malevolent heathens of Kian, the all-conquering Scylvendi, the scheming sorcerers of the Scarlet Spires, and so on—names that sketched the dimensions of his world, infused it with terrifying majesty, transformed it into an arena of impossibly tragic and heroic deeds. He would fall asleep feeling very small.
One might think becoming a spy would add dimension to the simple world of a child, but precisely the opposite was the case. Certainly, as he matured, Achamian’s world became more complicated. He learned that there were things holy and unholy, that the Gods and the Outside possessed their own dimensions, rather than being people very high and a place very far. He also learned that there were times recent and ancient, that “a long time ago” was not like another place but rather a queer kind of ghost that haunted every place.
But when one became a spy, the world had the curious habit of collapsing into a single dimension. High-born men, even Emperors and Kings, had the habit of seeming as base and as petty as the most vulgar fisherman. Far-away nations like Conriya, High Ainon, Ce Tydonn, or Kian no longer seemed exotic or enchanted but were as grubby and as weathered as a Nroni fishing village. Things holy, like the Tusk, the Thousand Temples, or even the Latter Prophet, became mere versions of things unholy, like the Fanim, the Cishaurim, or the sorcerous Schools, as though the words “holy” and “unholy” were as easily exchanged as seats at a gaming table. And the recent simply became a more tawdry repetition of the ancient.
As both a Schoolman and a spy, Achamian had crisscrossed the Three Seas, had seen many of those things that had once made his stomach flutter with supernatural dread, and he knew now that childhood stories were always better. Since being identified as one of the Few as a youth and taken to Atyersus to be trained by the School of Mandate, he had educated princes, insulted grandmasters, and infuriated Shrial priests. And he now knew with certainty that the world was hollowed of its wonder by knowledge and travel, that when one stripped away the mysteries, its dimensions collapsed rather than bloomed. Of course, the world was a much more sophisticated place to him now than it had been when he was a child, but it was also far simpler. Everywhere men grasped and grasped, as though the titles “king,” “shriah,” and “grandmaster” were simply masks worn by the same hungry animal. Avarice, it seemed to him, was the world’s only dimension.
Achamian was a middle-aged sorcerer and spy, and he had grown weary of both vocations. And though he would be loath to admit it, he was heartsick. As the old fish-wives might say, he had dragged one empty net too many.
Perplexed and dismayed, Achamian left Geshrunni at the Holy Leper and hurried home—if it could be called that—through the shadowy ways of the Worm. Extending from the northern banks of the River Sayut to the famed Surmantic Gates, the Worm was a labyrinth of crumbling tenements, brothels, and impoverished Cultic temples. The place was aptly named, Achamian had always thought. Humid, riddled by cramped alleys, the Worm indeed resembled something found beneath a rock.
Given his mission, Achamian had no reason to be dismayed. Quite the opposite, if anything. After the mad moment with the Chorae, Geshrunni had told him secrets—potent secrets. Geshrunni, it turned out, was not a happy slave. He hated the Scarlet Magi with an intensity that was almost frightening once revealed.
“I didn’t befriend you for the promise of your gold,” the Javreh Captain had said. “For what? To buy my freedom from my masters? The Scarlet Spires relinquish nothing of value. No, I befriended you because I knew you would be useful.”
“Useful? But for what end?”
“Vengeance. I would humble the Scarlet Spires.”
“So you knew . . . All along you knew I was no merchant.”
Sneering laughter. “Of course. You were too free with your ensolariis. Sit with a merchant or sit with a beggar, and it’ll always be the beggar who buys your first drink.”
What kind of spy are you?
Achamian had scowled at this, scowled at his own transparency. But as much as Geshrunni’s penetration troubled him, he was terrified by the degree to which he’d misjudged the man. Geshrunni was a warrior and a slave—what surer formula could there be for stupidity? But slaves, Achamian supposed, had good reason to conceal their intelligence. A wise slave was something to be prized perhaps, like the slave-scholars of the old Ceneian Empire. A cunning slave, however, was something to be feared, to be eliminated.
But this thought held little consolation.
If he could fool me so easily . . .
If he could fool me so easily . . .
Achamian had plucked a great secret out of the obscurity of Carythusal and the Scarlet Spires—the greatest, perhaps, in many years. But he did not have his ability, which he’d rarely questioned over the years, to thank—only his incompetence. As a result, he’d learned
two
secrets—one dreadful enough, he supposed, in the greater scheme of the Three Seas; the other dreadful within the frame of his life.
two
secrets—one dreadful enough, he supposed, in the greater scheme of the Three Seas; the other dreadful within the frame of his life.
I’m not,
he realized,
the man I once was.
he realized,
the man I once was.
Geshrunni’s story had been alarming in its own right, if only because it demonstrated the ability of the Scarlet Spires to harbour secrets. The Scarlet Spires, Geshrunni said, was at war, had been for more than ten years, in fact. Achamian had been unimpressed—at first. The sorcerous Schools, like all the Great Factions, ceaselessly skirmished with spies, assassinations, trade sanctions, and delegations of outraged envoys. But this war, Geshrunni assured him, was far more momentous than any skirmish.
“Ten years ago,” Geshrunni said, “our former Grandmaster, Sasheoka, was assassinated.”
“Sasheoka?” Achamian was not inclined to ask stupid questions, but the idea that a Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires could be assassinated was preposterous. How could such a thing happen? “Assassinated?”
“In the inner sanctums of the Spires themselves.”
In other words, in the midst of the most formidable system of Wards in the Three Seas. Not only would the Mandate never dare such an act, but there was no way, even with the glittering Abstractions of the Gnosis, they could succeed. Who could do such a thing?
“By whom?” Achamian asked, almost breathless.
Geshrunni’s eyes actually twinkled in the ruddy lamplight. “By the heathens,” he said. “The Cishaurim.”
Achamian was at once baffled and gratified by this revelation. The Cishaurim—the only heathen School. At least this explained Sasheoka’s assassination.
There was a saying common to the Three Seas: “Only the Few can see the Few.” Sorcery was violent. To speak it was to cut the world as surely as if with a knife. But only the Few—sorcerers—could see this mutilation, and only they could see, moreover, the blood on the hands of the mutilator—the “mark,” as it was called. Only the Few could see one another and one another’s crimes. And when they met, they recognized one another as surely as common men recognized criminals by their lack of a nose.
Not so with the Cishaurim. No one knew why or how, but they worked events as grand and as devastating as any sorcery without marking the world or bearing the mark of their crime. Only once had Achamian witnessed Cishaurim sorcery, what they called the Psûkhe—on a night long ago in distant Shimeh. With the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, he’d destroyed his saffron-robed assailants, but as he sheltered behind his Wards, it had seemed as though he watched flashes of soundless lightning. No thunder. No mark.
Only the Few could see the Few, but no one—no Schoolman, at least—could distinguish the Cishaurim or their works from common men or the common world. And it was this, Achamian surmised, that had allowed them to assassinate Sasheoka. The Scarlet Spires possessed Wards for sorcerers, slave-soldiers like Geshrunni for men bearing Chorae, but they had nothing to protect them against sorcerers indistinguishable from common men, or against sorcery indistinguishable from the God’s own world. Hounds, Geshrunni would tell him, now ran freely through the halls of the Scarlet Spires, trained to smell the saffron and henna the Cishaurim used to dye their robes.
But why? What could induce the Cishaurim to wage open war against the Scarlet Spires? As alien as their metaphysics were, they could have no hope of winning such a war. The Scarlet Spires was simply too powerful.
When Achamian had asked Geshrunni, the slave-soldier simply shrugged.
“It’s been a decade, and still they don’t know.”
This, at least, was grounds for petty comfort. There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.
Drusas Achamian walked ever deeper into the Worm, toward the squalid tenement where he’d taken a room, still more afraid of himself than his future.
Geshrunni grimaced as he stumbled out of the tavern. He steadied himself on the packed dust of the alley.
“Done,” he muttered, then cackled in a way he never dared show others. He looked up at a narrow slot of sky hemmed and obscured by mud-brick walls and ragged canvas awnings. He could see few stars.
Suddenly his betrayal struck him as a pathetic thing. He had told the only real secret he knew to an enemy of his masters. Now there was nothing left. No treason that might quiet the hatred in his heart.
And a bitter hatred it was. More than anything else, Geshrunni was a proud man. That someone such as he might be born a slave, be dogged by the desires of weak-hearted, womanish men . . . By sorcerers! In another life, he knew, he would have been a conqueror. He would have broken enemy after enemy with the might of his hand. But in this accursed life, all he could do was skulk about with other womanish men and gossip.
Where was the vengeance in gossip?
He’d staggered some way down the alley before realizing that someone followed him. The possibility that his masters had discovered his small treachery struck him momentarily, but he thought it unlikely. The Worm was filled with wolves, desperate men who followed mark after mark searching for those drunk enough to be safely plundered. Geshrunni had actually killed one once, several years before: some poor fool who had risked murder rather than sell himself, as Geshrunni’s nameless father had, into slavery. He continued walking, his senses as keen as the wine would allow, his drunken thoughts reeling through scenario after bloody scenario. This would be a good night, he thought, to kill.
Only when he passed beneath the looming facade of the temple the Carythusali called the Mouth of the Worm did Geshrunni become alarmed. Men were quite often followed into the Worm, but rarely were they followed out. Above the welter of rooftops, Geshrunni could even glimpse the highest of the Spires, crimson against a field of stars. Who would dare follow him this far? If not . . .
He whirled and saw a balding, rotund man dressed, despite the heat, in an ornate silk overcoat that might have been any combination of colours but looked blue and black in the darkness.
“You were one of the fools with the whore,” Geshrunni said, trying to shake away the confusion of drink.
“Yes,” the man replied, his jowls grinning with his lips. “She was most . . . enticing. But truth be told, I was far more interested in what you had to say to the Mandate Schoolman.”
Geshrunni squinted in drunken astonishment.
So they know.
So they know.
Danger always sobered him. Instinctively, he reached into his pocket, closed his fingers about his Chorae. He flung it violently at the Schoolman . . .
Or at who he thought was a Scarlet Schoolman. The stranger picked the Trinket from the air as though it had been tossed for his friendly perusal. He studied it momentarily, a dubious money-changer with a leaden coin. He looked up and smiled again, blinking his large bovine eyes. “A most precious gift,” he said. “I thank you, but I’m afraid it’s not quite a fair exchange for what I want.”
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