The Darkness that Comes Before (69 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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She rolled her shoulder against the mud brick, looked to the bright agora. She dropped the coppers.
She pinched shut her eyes, saw black seed smeared across her belly.
Then she fled, truly alone.
 
Hansa, Esmenet realized, had been crying. Her left eye looked as though it might soon swell shut. Eritga looked up from tending the fire. A red welt marred her face—from the spice-monger, Esmenet imagined—but she seemed unscathed otherwise. She grinned like a freckled jackal, lifting her invisible eyebrows and looking to the pavilion.
Sarcellus was waiting for her inside, sitting in the gloom.
“I missed you,” Sarcellus said.
Despite his strange tone, Esmenet smiled. “And I you.”
“Where have you been?”
“Walking.”
“Walking . . .” He snorted air through his nostrils. “Walking where?”
“In the city. In the markets. What’s it to you?”
He looked at her curiously. He seemed to be . . . smelling her.
He jumped up, seized her wrist, and yanked her close—so fast that Esmenet gasped aloud.
Staring at her, he reached down and grabbed the hem of her gown, began pulling it up. She stopped him just above her knee.
“What are you doing, Sarcellus?”
“I missed you. As I said.”
“No. Not now. I have the stink of—”
“Yes,” he said, prying her hands away.
“Now.”
He raised the linen folds, making an awning. He crouched, knees out like an ape.
A shudder passed through her, but from terror or fury, she did not know. He lowered her hasas. Stood. Stared at her without expression. Then he smiled.
Something about him reminded her of a scythe, as though his smile could cut wheat.
“Who?” he asked.
“Who what?”
He slapped her. Not hard, but it seemed to sting all the more for it.
“Who?”
She said nothing, turned to the bedchamber.
He grabbed her arm, yanked her violently around, raised his hand for another strike . . .
Hesitated.
“Was it Achamian?” he asked.
Never, it seemed to Esmenet, had she hated a face more. She felt the spit gather between her lips and teeth.
“Yes!”
she hissed.
Sarcellus lowered his hand, released her. For a moment he looked broken.
“Forgive me, Esmi,” he said thickly.
But for what, Sarcellus? For what?
He embraced her—desperately. At first she remained stiff, but when he began sobbing, something within her broke. She relented, relaxed against the press of his arms, breathed deep his smell—myrrh, sweat, and leather. How could this man, so stern, more self-assured than any she had known, weep at striking someone like her? Treacherous. Adulterate. How could he—
“I know you love him,” she heard him whisper. “I know . . .”
But Esmenet was not so sure.
 
The sorcerer joined Proyas at the appointed hour on a knoll overlooking the vast, squalid expanse of the Holy War. To the east, cupped within the far-flung walls and turrets of Momemn, the sun smouldered like a great coal, rising.
Proyas closed his eyes, savoured the sun’s faint morning heat.
On this day,
he at once thought and prayed,
everything changes
. If the reports were true, then at long last the interminable debate of dogs and crows, crows and dogs, would be over. He would have his lion.
He turned to Achamian. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”
“What? The Holy War? Or this summons?”
Proyas felt chastised by his tone and annoyed by his lack of deference. He had realized he needed Achamian while tossing on his cot hours earlier. At first, his pride had argued against it: his words of the previous week had been as final as words could be—
“I do not want to see you again. Ever.”
To repent them now that he needed the man seemed base, mercenary. But must he repent his words in order to break them?
“Why the Holy War, of course,” he replied nonchalantly. “My scribes tell me that more than—”
“I have an army of rumours to chase, Proyas,” the Schoolman said. “So please, dispense with the jnanic pleasantries and just tell me what you want.”
Achamian was typically curt in the mornings. An effect of the Dreams, Proyas had always supposed. But there was something more in his tone, something too close to hatred.
“The bitterness I can understand, Akka, but you
will
defer to my station. A covenant binds the School of Mandate to House Nersei, and if need be, I will invoke it.”
Achamian looked at him searchingly. “Why, Prosha?” he asked, using the diminutive form of his name, as he had as his tutor. “Why are you doing this?”
What could he tell him that he did not already know or could bear to hear? “It’s not your place to question me, Schoolman.”
“All men, even princes, must answer to reason. One night you ban me from your presence forever, then scarcely a week afterward, you summon me, and I’m not to ask questions?”
“I didn’t summon
you!
” Proyas cried. “I summoned a Mandate Schoolman under the auspices of the treaty my father signed with your handlers. Either you abide by that treaty or you breach it. The choice is yours, Drusas Achamian.”
Not today. He would not be drawn into the morass today! Not when everything was about to change . . . Maybe.
But obviously Achamian had his own agenda. “You know,” he said, “I’ve thought over what you said that night. I’ve done little else.”
“What of it?”
Please, old tutor, leave this for another day!
“There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence . . .”
Proyas scowled. Why wouldn’t he relent? “And it begets, I imagine, students who repudiate their old teachers, hmm, Achamian?”
The sorcerer nodded. “And Holy Wars . . .”
Something in this reply unsettled Proyas, threatened to foment already restless fears. Only his years of study saved him from speechlessness.
“Dwell in me,” he quoted, “and thou shalt find reprieve from uncertainty.” He fixed Achamian with a scornful look. “Submit, as the child submits to his father, and all doubts shall be conquered.”
The Schoolman stared back for a sour moment. Then he nodded with the wry disgust of one who’d known all along the mawkish manner of his undoing. Even Proyas could feel it: the sense that by quoting scripture, he’d resorted to little more than a shoddy trick. But why? How could the Latter Prophet’s own voice, the First and Final Word, sound so . . . so . . .
He found the pity he saw in his old teacher’s eyes unbearable.
“Do not dare judge me,” Proyas grated.
“Why have you summoned me, Proyas?” Achamian asked wearily. “What do you want?”
The Conriyan Prince gathered his thoughts with a deep breath. Despite his efforts to the contrary, he’d allowed Achamian to distract him with the muck of petty matters. No more.
Today would be the day. It had to be.
“Last night I received word from Zin’s nephew, Iryssas. He’s found someone of interest.”
“Who?”
“A Scylvendi.”
Now there was a name that gnawed children’s hearts.
Achamian looked at him narrowly but otherwise seemed unimpressed. “Iryssas left only a week or so ago. How could he find a Scylvendi so near Momemn?”
“It seems this Scylvendi was on his way to join the Holy War.”
Achamian looked perplexed. Proyas remembered the first time he ever saw that look: as a youth, playing benjuka with him beneath the temple elms in his father’s garden. How he had exulted.
This time the expression was fleeting. “Some kind of hoax?” Achamian asked.
“I don’t know what to think, old tutor, which is why I’ve summoned you.”
“It must be a lie,” Achamian declared. “Scylvendi don’t join Inrithi Holy Wars. We’re little more than—” He halted. “But why would you summon me
here?
” he asked with an air of pondering aloud. “Unless . . .”
Proyas smiled. “I expect Iryssas shortly. His courier thought he could be at most only a few hours ahead of the Majordomo’s party. I sent Xinemus out to bring them here.”
The Schoolman glanced at the dawn in their periphery—a great crimson sclera about a golden iris. “He travels through the night?”
“When they found the man and his companions, they were being pursued by the Emperor’s Kidruhil. Apparently Iryssas thought it prudent to return as quickly as possible. It seems the Scylvendi has made some rather provocative claims.”
Achamian held out his hand, as though to ward away excessive details. “Companions?”
“A man and a woman. I know nothing more, save that neither is Scylvendi and the man says he’s a prince.”
“And just what claims has this Scylvendi made?”
Proyas paused to swallow away the tremors that threatened his voice. “He claims to know the Fanim manner of war. He claims to have defeated them on the field of battle. And he offers his wisdom to the Holy War.”
 
At last Achamian understood. The agitation. The impatience for his own concerns. Proyas had seen what benjuka players called the
kut’ma,
or the “hidden move.” He hoped to use this Scylvendi, whoever he was, both to gall and to defeat the Emperor. Despite himself, Achamian smiled. Even after so many hard words, he could not help sharing something of his old student’s excitement.
“So he claims to be your kut’ma,” he said.
“Is what he says possible, Akka? Have the Scylvendi warred against the Fanim?”

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