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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The Darkness that Comes Before (73 page)

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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Please . . . This can’t be happening—not to me! I’m too weak. I’m just a fool . . .
Beyond the canvas of his tent, all seemed airy silence. Innumerable men slumbered, dreaming of terror and glory against the heathen, and they knew nothing of what Achamian feared. They were innocents, like Proyas, filled by the heedless momentum of their faith, thinking that a place, a city called Shimeh, was the very nail about which the fate of the world spun. But the nail, Achamian knew, was to be found in a far darker place, a place far to the north where the earth wept pitch. A place called Golgotterath.
For the first time in many, many years, Achamian prayed.
Reason returned afterward, and he felt slightly foolish. As extraordinary as Kellhus had been, there was really nothing other than the dreams of Celmomas and the coincidence of a name to warrant such a terrifying conclusion. Achamian was a sceptic, and he prided himself on the fact. He was a student of the ancients, of Ajencis, and a practitioner of logic. The Second Apocalypse was but the most dramatic of a hundred banal conclusions. And if anything defined his waking life, it was banality.
Nevertheless, he lit his candle with a sorcerous word and rummaged through his pouch, retrieving the map he had made shortly before joining the Holy War. He glanced at the names scattered across the parchment, pausing at
MAITHANET
 
So long as the old antagonism between him and Proyas persisted, he realized, he would have little hope of learning more about Maithanet or of forwarding his investigation of Inrau’s death.
I’m sorry, Inrau,
he thought, forcing his eyes away from his beloved student.
Then he studied
THE CONSULT
 
scratched—far more hastily, it now seemed to him—all alone in the top right corner, and still isolated from the thin web of connections that joined the others. In the candlelight, it seemed to waver against the pale, mottled sheet, as though it were something too deranged to be captured in ink.
He dipped his quill in the horn, then carefully scrawled
ANASÛRIMBOR KELLHUS
 
below the hated name.
 
With the reluctant gait of a man unsure of his destination, Cnaiür walked through the encampment. The lane he followed wound between a jumble of slumbering camps. Here and there, a fire still burned, tended by muttering men, mostly drunk. Odours assailed him, bearing the sharpness of foul smells in cool dry air: livestock, rancid meat, and oily smoke—some fool was burning wet wood.
Memories of his recent meeting with Proyas dominated his thoughts. To cement his plan to outmanoeuvre the Emperor, the Conriyan Prince had sought counsel from the five Conriyan Palatines who had taken up the Tusk. Proud men wagging proud tongues. Even the more bellicose Palatines, such as Gaidekki or Ingiaban, spoke more to score than to solve. Watching them, Cnaiür had realized they all played an infantile version of the same game the Dûnyain played. Words, Moënghus and Kellhus had taught him, could be used hand open or fist closed—as a way to embrace or a way to enslave. For some reason these Inrithi, who had nothing tangible to gain or to lose from one another, all spoke with their fists closed—fatuous claims, false concessions, mocking praise, flattering insults, and an endless train of satiric innuendoes.
Jnan, they called it. A mark of caste and cultivation.
Cnaiür had weathered the farce as best he could, but—inevitably, it now seemed—they soon cast their nets about him as well.
“Tell me, Scylvendi,” Lord Gaidekki had asked, flushed with drink and daring, “those scars of yours, do they reflect the man or the man’s measure?”
“How do you mean?”
The Palatine of Anplei grinned. “Well, I should think that if you, say, killed Lord Ganyama here, he would deserve two scars at the most. But if you were to kill
me?
” He looked to the others, his eyebrows raised and his lips drawn down, as though speaking in deference to their learned opinions. “What? Twenty scars? Thirty?”
“I suspect,” Proyas said, “that Scylvendi swords are great levellers.”
Lord Imrotha laughed too hard at this.
“Swazond,” Cnaiür said to Gaidekki, “measure foes, not fools.” He stared impassively at the startled Palatine, then spat into the fire.
But Gaidekki was not easily intimidated. “So what am I?” he asked dangerously. “Fool or foe?”
In that moment, Cnaiür recognized yet another hardship he would have to suffer in the months to come. The perils and deprivations of war were nothing; he had shouldered them his entire life. The disgrace of consorting with Kellhus was a hardship of a different order, but something he could endure in the name of hate. But the degradation of participating day after day in the peevish unmanly ways of the Inrithi was something he had not considered. How much must he suffer to see vengeance done?
Thankfully, Proyas deftly pre-empted his reply to Gaidekki, declaring the council at an end. Too disgusted to bear their farewell fencing, Cnaiür had simply marched from the pavilion into the night.
He let his gaze wander as he walked. The moon was full and bright, smudging silver across the back of charging clouds. Moved by a peculiar melancholy, he looked to the stars. Scylvendi children were told that the sky was a yaksh, impossibly vast and pricked by innumerable holes. He remembered his father pointing skyward once. “See, Nayu?” he had said, “see the thousand thousand lights peeking through the leather of night? This is how we know that a greater sun burns beyond this world. This is how we know that when it’s night, it is truly day, and that when it’s day, it is truly night. This is how we know, Nayu, that the World is a lie.”
For Scylvendi, the stars were a reminder: only the People were true.
Cnaiür paused. The dust beneath his sandals still shed the sun’s heat. Throughout the immediate darkness, the silence seemed to hiss.
What was he doing here? Among Inrithi dogs. Among men who scratched breath upon parchment and sustenance from dirt. Among men who had sold their souls into bondage.
Among the cattle.
What was he doing?
He raised his hands to his brows, drew his thumbs across his eyes. Squeezed.
Then he heard the Dûnyain’s voice drifting through the dark.
With his eyes pinched shut, he felt a youth once again, standing in the heart of the Utemot encampment, overhearing Moënghus talk to his mother.
He saw Bannut’s bloodied face, grinning rather than grimacing as he strangled him.
Weeper.
Running fingernails across his scalp, he continued walking. Through a screen of dark camps, he glimpsed the Dûnyain’s firelight. He saw the bearded Schoolman, Drusas Achamian, sitting, leaning forward as though straining to listen. Then he saw Kellhus and Serwë, fire-bright against the surrounding murk. Serwë slept, her head upon the Dûnyain’s lap.
He found a place beside a wain where he could watch. He crouched.
Cnaiür had intended to scrutinize what the Dûnyain said, hoping to confirm any one of his innumerable suspicions. But he quickly realized that Kellhus was playing this sorcerer the way he played all the others, battering him with closed fists, beating his soul down paths of his manufacture. Certainly it did not sound like this. Compared with the banter of Proyas and his Palatines, what Kellhus said to the Schoolman possessed a heartbreaking gravity. But it was all a game, one where truths had become chits, where every open hand concealed a fist.
How could one determine the true intent of such a man?
The thought struck Cnaiür that Dûnyain monks might be even more inhuman than he had thought. What if things such as truth and meaning had no meaning for them? What if all they did was move and move, like something reptilian, snaking through circumstance after circumstance, consuming soul after soul for the sake of consumption alone? The thought made his scalp prickle.
They called themselves students of the Logos, the Shortest Way. But the shortest way to what?
Cnaiür cared nothing for the Schoolman, but the sight of Serwë asleep with her head upon Kellhus’s thighs filled him with uncharacteristic fear, as though she lay within the coils of some malevolent serpent. Scenarios flashed through his soul: of stealing away with her in the dead of night; of grabbing her, peering so hard into her eyes that her centre would be touched, then telling her the truth of Kellhus . . .
But these glimpses gave way to fury.
What kind of fawn-hearted thoughts were these? Always straying, always wandering across the trackless and the weak. Always betraying!
Serwë frowned and fidgeted, as though troubled by a dream. Kellhus absently stroked her cheek. Unable to look away, Cnaiür beat his fists against the dust.
She is nothing.
The Schoolman departed a short time after. Cnaiür watched Kellhus steer Serwë to their pavilion. She was so like a little girl when roused from sleep: body swaying, head bowed, watching her feet through pouting lashes. So innocent.
And pregnant, Cnaiür now suspected.
Several moments passed before the Dûnyain reappeared. He walked to the fire, began dousing it by prodding the pit with a stick. The last licks of flame winked out, and Kellhus became an eerie apparition etched by the orange pool of coals at his feet. Without warning, he looked up.
“How long were you intending to wait?” he asked in Scylvendi.
Cnaiür pulled himself to his feet, beat the dust from his breeches. “Until the sorcerer was gone.”
Kellhus nodded. “Yes. The People despise witches.”
Despite the Dûnyain’s proximity, Cnaiür stood near enough the coals to feel their arid heat. Ever since Kellhus had swung him over the precipice that day in the mountains, he’d found himself battling a strange bodily shyness whenever the man loomed next to him.
No man cows me.
“What do you want from the man?” he asked, spitting into the coals.
“You heard. Instruction.”
“I heard. What do you want from him?”
Kellhus shrugged. “Have you even asked yourself why my father has summoned me to Shimeh?”
“You said you didn’t know.”
So you said.
“But to
Shimeh
. . .” Kellhus looked at him sharply. “Why Shimeh?”
“Because that’s where he dwells.”
The Dûnyain nodded. “Indeed.”
Cnaiür could only stare. There was something Proyas had said to him earlier this night . . . He had asked the man about the Scarlet Spires, about the School’s reasons for joining the Holy War, and Proyas had replied as though startled by his ignorance. Shimeh, he had said, was the home of the Cishaurim.
The words were pasty in his mouth. “You think Moënghus is Cishaurim?”
“He summoned me by sending dreams . . .”
Of course. Moënghus had summoned him using sorcery. Sorcery! He’d said as much himself when Kellhus first mentioned the dreams. But then why had the connection escaped him? Only the Cishaurim practised sorcery among the Fanim. Moënghus simply
had
to be Cishaurim. He knew this, but—
Cnaiür scowled. “You said nothing to me! Why?”
“You didn’t want to know.”
Was that it? Had he hidden from this knowledge? All this time Moënghus had been little more than a shadowy destination, at once elusive and compelling, like the object of some obscene carnal urge. And yet he had never truly asked Kellhus anything about him. Why?
I need know only the place.
But such thoughts were foolishness. Juvenile. Great hunger yielded no feasts. So the memorialists admonished headstrong Scylvendi youths. So Cnaiür himself had admonished Xunnurit and the other chieftains before Kiyuth. And yet here, on the deadliest pilgrimage of his entire life . . .
The Dûnyain watched him, his expression expectant, even sorrowful. But Cnaiür knew better, knew something not quite human studied him from behind his all-too-human face.
Scrutiny, so utter, so exacting, it was palpable.
BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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