The Darkness that Comes Before (29 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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As though walking across the back of roiling smoke and dust, a Schoolman drifted toward them. He slowed, floating the height of a tree-top above them. His black silk robe boiled in the mountain wind, its gold trim undulating like snakes in water. White light flashed from his eyes and mouth. A barrage of arrows winked into cinders against his spherical Wards. The ghost of a dragon’s head ponderously ascended from his hands. Cnaiür saw glassy scales and eyes like globes of bloody water.
The majestic head bowed.
He turned to Balait, crying, “Run!”
The horned maw opened and spewed blinding flame.
Teeth snapped. Skin blistered and sloughed. But Cnaiür felt nothing, only the warmth thrown by Balait’s burning shadow. There was a momentary shriek, the sound of bones and bowels exploding.
Then the froth of sun-bright fire was gone. Bewildered, Cnaiür found himself in the centre of burnt ruin. Balait and the other Utemot still burned, sizzling like swine on the spit. The air smelt of ash and pork.
All dead . . .
A mighty shout braced the cacophony, and through screens of smoke and fleeing Scylvendi, he saw a bloodied tide of Nansur infantrymen rushing toward him across the slopes.
A stranger’s voice whispered,
“Measure is unceasing . . .”
Cnaiür fled, leaping over the slain, bounding like the others for the dark line of the river. He tripped over an arrow shaft embedded in the turf and slammed headlong into a dead horse. Bracing himself against sun-warmed flanks, he stumbled to his feet and lurched into a sprint. He swept past a young warrior limping with an arrow in his thigh, then another kneeling in the grasses, spitting blood. Then a band of his Utemot rumbled by on horses, led by Yursalka. Cnaiür cried out his name, and though the man momentarily looked at him, they continued riding. Cursing, he pressed harder. His ears roared. He blew spit after every sucking breath. Ahead he saw hundreds massed along the banks, some frantically tearing at their armour so they could swim, others dashing south toward a rapids that promised shallows. Yursalka and his Utemot cohort barrelled through the would-be swimmers and crashed into the waters. Many of their horses foundered in the swift current, but a few managed to drag their riders to the far banks. The ground steepened, and Cnaiür swallowed the distance with long loping strides. He leapt another dead horse, then crashed through a copse of goldenrods wagging in the wind. To his right he glimpsed a company of Imperial Kidruhil fanning across the slopes and galloping hard toward the fugitives. He staggered across the narrow floodplain, then finally blundered into the panicked midst of his countrymen. He yanked men aside, swatting his way to the muck and trampled brush of the riverbank.
He saw Yursalka press through the rushes and urge his sopping mount up the far side. A dozen other Utemot awaited him, their horses half-panicked and stamping.
“Utemot!” he roared, and somehow they heard him through the clamour. Two of them pointed in his direction.
But Yursalka was shouting at them, beating the air with an open hand. Their expressions blank, they jerked their horses about and hounded by Yursalka, galloped to the southwest.
Cnaiür spat at their retreating forms. He grabbed his knife and began sawing at his brigandine. Twice he was almost jostled into the water. Shouts of alarm rifled the air, made urgent by the swelling thunder of hoofs. He heard lances crack and horses shriek. He began stabbing at his brigandine’s gut lacings. Bodies heaved against him, and he stumbled. He glimpsed a Kidruhil rider, towering black across the flare of the sun. He tore off his brigandine, whirled to the Kiyuth. Something exploded against his scalp. Hot blood choked his eyes. He fell to his knees. The rutted ground struck his face.
Screams, wails, and the sound of bodies plunging into rushing mountain water.
So like my father,
he thought, then darkness came swirling down.
 
Hoarse, exhausted voices, framed by a more distant and more drunken chorus of singers. Pain, as though his head were nailed to the earth. His body leaden, as immovable as the river mud. Hard to think.
“What, do they bloat right after they die?”
Lurching horror. The voice had come from behind, very close. Looters?
“Another ring?” a second voice exclaimed. “Just saw off the fucking finger!”
Cnaiür heard approaching footsteps, sandalled feet barging through grasses. Slowly, because fast movements drew the eye, he tested his fingers and his wrist. They moved. He gently probed beneath his girdle, closed tingling fingers on his Chorae, withdrew it, then pressed it into the mud.
“He’s squeamish,” a third voice observed. “Always has been.”
“Am not! It’s just . . . just . . .”
“Just what?”
“Sacrilege, that’s all. Robbing the dead is one thing. Desecrating them is quite another.”
“Need I remind you,” the third voice said, “that these here are what you call dead
Scylvendi
. Pretty hard to desecrate what’s accursed in the first—Heyya! Another live one here.”
The sound of a gritty blade scraping free of its scabbard, a thud, then a choking gasp. Despite his pounding head, Cnaiür smeared his face in the muck, scooped as much of it as he could bear into his mouth.
“Still can’t get this blasted ring . . .”
“Just chop off the fucking finger, would you?” cried the second voice, now so close that it raised the hair on Cnaiür’s neck. “By the Latter-fucking-Prophet! The only one lucky enough to find gold on these stinking savages, and he’s paralyzed by scruples! Hello. What do we have here? Big brute. Sweet Sejenus, look at the scars on him!”
“They say Conphas wants us to collect all their heads anyway,” the third voice said. “What does a finger matter?”
“There. A little spit. Do you think these could be rubies?”
A rough hand clasped Cnaiür’s shoulder, peeled him from the muck. Eyes half-open to the setting sun. Limbs tensed in semblance of rigor. Soil-choked mouth drawn back in the sardonic grin. No breath.
“I’m serious,” a looming shadow said. “Look at the scars on this bastard! He’s killed hundreds!”
“They should offer bounties for ones like him. Imagine, one of our countrymen for every scar.”
Hands rifled his body, patting, poking. No breath. Stiff motionlessness.
“Maybe we should take him to Gavarus,” the first voice ventured. “They might want to string him up or something.”
“Grand idea, that one,” the shadow said scathingly. “How about you carry him?”
A laugh. “Not so grand any more, is it?” the second voice said. “Any luck there, Naff?”
“Not a single fucking thing,” the shadow said, tossing Cnaiür back to the ground. “Next ring you find is mine, you little bastard. Otherwise I saw off
your
fingers!”
A kick from the blackness. Pain unlike any he’d ever experienced. The world roared. He struggled not to vomit.
“Sure,” the first voice said amiably. “Who needs gold after a day like this? Imagine the triumph when we return! Imagine the songs! The Scylvendi destroyed on their own land. The
Scylvendi!
When we’re old, we need only say that we served with Conphas at Kiyuth, and everyone will regard us with reverence and awe.”
“Glory doesn’t get you the good bird, boy. Glitter. It’s all in the glitter.”
 
Morning. Cnaiür awoke shivering. He heard only the deep-running wash of the River Kiyuth.
A great iron ache radiated from the back of his head, and for a time he lay still, crushed by its weight. Convulsions wracked him, and he heaved bile into the footprints before his face. He coughed. With his tongue he probed a soft, salty gap between his teeth.
For some reason, the first clear thought to arise from his misery was of his Chorae. He scraped his fingers through vomit and gritty muck, found it quickly. He tucked it beneath his iron-plated girdle.
Mine. My prize.
The pain pressed like a shod hoof against the back of his skull, but he managed to push himself to his hands and knees. The grass was whitewashed with mud and sharp like small knives between his fingers. He dragged himself away from the rush of the river.
The turf of the embankment had been trampled into mud, now hardened into the brittle record of the earlier slaughter. The corpses seemed cemented to the ground, their flesh leathery beneath flies, their blood clotted like crushed cherries. He felt as though he crawled across one of those dizzying stone reliefs that panelled the temples of Nansur, where struggling men were frozen in unholy representation. But this was no representation.
Cresting the slope before him, a dead horse rose like a rounded mountain range, its belly in shadow, the bright point of the sun rising on the far side. Dead horses always looked the same, ridiculously stiff, as though they were carvings of wood simply tipped on their sides. He pushed himself onto it, rolled painfully over. Against his cheek, it was as cold as the river clay.
Save for jackdaws, vultures, and the dead, the battlefield was abandoned. He gazed across the gradual incline over which he’d fled.
Fled . . . He clamped shut his eyes. Again and again he was running, the blue sky shrunken by the roar behind him.
We were routed.
Defeated. Humiliated by their ancestral enemy.
For a long time he felt nothing. He remembered those mornings in his youth when, for whatever reason, he would awaken before dawn. He would creep from the yaksh and steal through the camp, searching for the higher ground where he could watch the sun embrace the land. The wind would hiss through the grasses. The squatting sun would rise, climb. And he would think,
I am the last. I am the only one.
Like now.
For an absurd moment, he felt the queer exultation of one who’d prophesied his own destruction. He’d told Xunnurit, the eight-fingered fool. They’d thought him an old woman, a spinner of preposterous fears. Where was their laughter now?
Dead, he realized. All of them were dead.
All
of them! The horde had plumbed the horizon with its numbers, had shaken the Vault of Heaven with the thunder of its advance, and now it was gone, routed, dead. From where he lay, he could see great swaths of burned grassland, the burned husks of what had been arrogant thousands. More than routed—massacred.
And by the
Nansur!
Cnaiür had fought too many borderland skirmishes not to respect them as warriors, but in the end he despised the Nansur the way all Scylvendi despised them: as a mongrel race, a kind of human vermin, to be hunted to extinction if possible. For the Scylvendi, the mention of the Empire-behind-the-Mountains summoned innumerable images of degradation: leering priests grovelling before their unholy Tusk; sorcerers trussed in whorish gowns, uttering unearthly obscenities while painted courtiers, their soft bodies powdered and perfumed, committed earthly ones. These were the men who had conquered them. Tillers of earth and writers of words. Men who made sport with men.
His breath caught on a pain in the back of his throat.
He thought of Bannut, of the treachery of his kinsmen. He clutched the grass with aching hands—anchors—as though he were so weak, so empty, that he might be blown in an instant into the hollow sky. A forlorn cry uncoiled in his breast but was choked into a hiss by clenched teeth. He gasped air, moaned, rolled his head from side to side despite the agony.
No!

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