The Darkness that Comes Before (75 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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With characteristic brusqueness, Xinemus swatted a path through his men to Achamian’s side.
“Are you sure they’re coming for you?” he shouted over the growing roar.
“Why else would they strike their Mark? By making this public, they guarantee witnesses. As strange as it sounds, I think they do this to reassure me.”
Xinemus nodded thoughtfully. “They forget how much they’re hated.”
“Who doesn’t?”
The Marshal glanced at him strangely, then looked to the nearing mob, scratching his beard. “I’m going to set up a perimeter. Or try to, anyway. You stay here. Stay visible. When whoever the fool is meets with you, you tell him to lower his Mark and skulk away immediately.
Immediately
. Do you understand?”
The words stung. In all the years Achamian had known Krijates Xinemus, the man had never barked commands at him. The ever-amiable Xinemus had abruptly become the Marshal of Attrempus, a man with a task and numerous men at his disposal. But this, Achamian realized, wasn’t what hurt. The situation, after all, called for decisiveness. What stung was the undertone of anger, the sense that his friend somehow blamed him.
Achamian watched as Xinemus harassed his men into a line, then, with the help of Dinchases, positioned them in a thin semicircle through the surrounding camps, using the stagnant canal that curled behind them to protect their flanks. There was a bustling moment as the slaves hastened to put out the fire they had been poking just moments earlier. Others rushed off into the slots between tents to smother whatever open flame they could find.
The mob, and the Scarlet Spires, was nearly upon them.
Xinemus’s soldiers had linked arms, and the first of the rioters began gathering before them, flushed and in no mood for constraint. At first they simply milled in confusion, hollering insults in a variety of different tongues. But as the procession neared, their numbers grew. They became bolder. Achamian saw a wild-haired Thunyeri throwing punches, only to be dragged down by his own comrades. Other bands linked arms as well and tried to force their way through the line. Xinemus threw what few spare men he had into these shoving matches and, for the time being at least, managed to forestall any breaks.
The standard of the Scarlet Spires trundled nearer, pausing, then advancing, then pausing again. Over heads, Achamian glimpsed polished black staffs rising and falling as though a great centipede had been upended. Then he glimpsed the Javreh, the slave-soldiers of the Scarlet Spires, beating their way forward with grim determination. The enigmatic palanquin moved forward with them.
Who could it be? Who would be fool enough—
Suddenly a wedge of Javreh broke clear and came face to face with Xinemus’s men. There was a moment of confusion. Xinemus rushed to clarify matters, coming within reaching distance as he did so. Beyond, the palanquin swayed as its bearers struggled against the heave of massed bodies. The Three-Headed Serpent tipped in the breeze but otherwise stood still. Then exhausted Javreh were spilling through the line, bruised, bloody. Some even needed to be carried bodily. The palanquin followed, like a boat popping through a broken dyke. Xinemus watched as though thunderstruck.
Then everything, it seemed, came raining down upon them: looted plates, wine bowls, chicken bones, stones, and even the corpse of a cat, which Achamian was forced to duck.
Apparently unaffected, the slaves gently lowered their burden by kneeling until their foreheads touched dust and the palanquin rested across their tanned backs.
The downpour ceased, and the shouts grew more and more sporadic. Achamian found himself holding his breath. A Javreh Captain drew aside a wicker screen, then immediately fell to his knees. A crimson-slippered foot appeared, followed by the embroidered folds of a magnificent gown.
There was an instant of utter silence.
It was Eleäzaras himself. The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires and de facto ruler of High Ainon.
Achamian found himself struck dumb by disbelief. The Grandmaster? Here?
Some few among the mob, it seemed, knew what he looked like. A great murmur passed through them, swelling for several moments, then fading as the import of what they witnessed struck them. They stood in the presence of one of the most powerful men in the Three Seas. Only the Shriah or the Padirajah could claim more power than the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires. Blasphemer or not, a man of such power commanded respect, and respect commanded silence.
Eleäzaras raked his onlookers with amused eyes, then turned to Achamian. He was tall, statuesque in the manner of thin, gracile men. He walked as though along a balance, one foot before another. He kept his hands folded in his sleeves, as was the formal custom of eastern magi. Halting at the distance prescribed by jnan, he graced Achamian with a shallow bow. Achamian glimpsed tanned scalp beneath thinning grey hair, which was braided into an elaborate bun at the back of his neck.
“You must excuse the company I happen to be keeping,” he said, waving a dismissive, long-fingered hand at the gawking throngs. “Spectacle is ever the narcotic, I’m afraid.”
“As are contradictions,” Achamian replied blandly. As astonishing as this impromptu audience might be, the Scarlet Spires was no friend of Mandate Schoolmen. He saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
“Indeed. I was told you were a student of Ajencis’s logic. You make quite irresistible morsels, you Mandate Schoolmen, did you know?”
Ainoni,
Achamian thought sourly.
“We’re always fighting off the scavengers, if that’s what you mean.”
Eleäzaras shook his head. “Don’t flatter yourself. Conceit does not sit well with martyrdom. Never has. Never will.”
“I always thought them the same.” The surrounding mob had grown more unruly, forcing him to raise his voice.
The Grandmaster’s lips tightened into a sour line. “Clever man. Clever little man. Tell me, Drusas Achamian, how is it that after all these years you still find yourself in the field, hmm? Did you offend someone? Nautzera, perhaps? Or did you bugger Proyas as a boy? Is that why House Nersei sent you packing those years ago?”
Achamian was speechless. They had researched him, armed themselves with as many painful facts and innuendoes as they could find. And here he’d thought he was watching them!
“Ah . . .” Eleäzaras said. “You didn’t expect me to be quite so tactless, did you? The blunt knife, I assure you, has its—”
“Unclean wretches!”
someone howled with alarming ferocity. More shouts followed. Achamian glanced around, saw that Xinemus’s men were once again scuffling to hold their position. Many Inrithi leaned over their linked arms, screaming obscenities.
“Perhaps we should retire to the Marshal’s pavilion,” Eleäzaras said.
Achamian glimpsed Xinemus’s furious face behind the Grandmaster.
“That’s not possible.”
“I see.”
“What do you want, Eleäzaras?” Xinemus had bid Achamian to end this meeting before it started, but this he could not do. Not only did he speak to Eleäzaras, the mightiest Anagogic Sorcerer in the Three Seas, he also spoke to the man who had negotiated his School’s treaty with Maithanet. Perhaps Eleäzaras knew how Maithanet had learned of their war with the Cishaurim. Perhaps he would trade that knowledge for whatever it was he wanted.
“Want?” the Grandmaster repeated. “Why, merely to make your acquaintance. The Few, if you haven’t already noticed, are somewhat”—his eyes darted to and from the rumbling mass of Inrithi—“
out of place
here . . . Jnan demands our affiliation.”
“As well as tedious obscurity, it seems.”
The Grandmaster smiled. “But not mockery. Never mockery. That is a mistake only half-tutored prigs make. The true practitioner of jnan never laughs at another more than he laughs at himself.”
Fucking Ainoni.
“What do you want, Eleäzaras?”
“To make your acquaintance, as I said. I needed to meet the man who has utterly overturned my impression of the Mandate . . . To think that I once thought yours the gentlest of Schools!”
Now Achamian was genuinely perplexed. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m told you were recently a resident of Carythusal.”
Geshrunni. They had discovered Geshrunni.
Did I kill you too?
Achamian shrugged. “So your secret is out. You war against the Cishaurim.” How could they begrudge him this when they had made it plain to all by joining the Holy War? There had to be more.
The Gnosis? Did Eleäzaras merely distract him while others probed his Wards? Was this simply a bold prelude to abduction? It had happened before.
“Our secret is out,” Eleäzaras agreed. “But then so is yours.”
Achamian fixed him with quizzical look. The man spoke as though to goad him with knowledge of some obscene secret, one so shameful that any allusion, no matter how indirect, simply could not
not
be understood. And yet he had no idea what the man was talking about.
“It was sheer coincidence,” Eleäzaras continued, “that we found his body. It was brought to us by a fisherman who works the mouth of the River Sayut. But it wasn’t so much the fact that you killed him that troubled us. After all, in the greater game of benjuka, one often gains pieces by disposing of them. No, what troubled us was the
manner
.”
“Me?” He laughed incredulously. “You think I killed Geshrunni?”
The shock had been so total he’d simply blurted these words. Now it was Eleäzaras who was startled.
“You do have a facility for lies,” the Grandmaster said after a moment.
“And you for delusion! Geshrunni was the best-placed informant the Mandate has had in a generation. Why would we kill him?”
The clamour had swelled. Riotous figures heaved in Achamian’s periphery, shaking fists, bellowing insults and accusations. But they seemed curiously trivial, as though rendered smoke by the absurdity of this, his first meeting with the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires.
Eleäzaras studied him for a pensive moment, then shook his head ruefully, as though saddened the persistence of hardened liars.
“Why is any informant murdered, hmm? In so many ways so many men are more useful dead. But as I mentioned, it was the manner that sparked my admittedly morbid curiosity.”
Scowling, Achamian hunched his shoulders in disbelief. “Someone plays you for a fool, Grandmaster.”
Someone plays both of us . . . But who?
Eleäzaras glared, pursing his lips as though holding a bitter segment of lime against his teeth. “My Master of Spies warned me of this,” he said tightly. “I’d assumed you had some obscure reason for what you did, something belonging to your accursed Gnosis. But he insisted that you were simply mad. And he told me I’d know by the way you lied. Only madmen and historians, he said, believe their lies.”
“First I’m a murderer, and now I’m a madman?”
“Indeed,” Eleäzaras spat in a tone of condemnation and disgust. “Who else collects human faces?”
Just then, more stones sailed over their heads.
 
Suppressing the urge to wring his hands, Eleäzaras blinked away images of his near disastrous encounter with the Mandate Schoolman the previous day. The face of one nameless man haunted him in particular: a strapping Tydonni thane, his left eye snow blue in the wake of an old scar. Some faces were more suited to expressions of malice than others, certainly. But this man . . . At the time he’d seemed the very incarnation of hatred, an infernal deity in the guise of callused flesh and fevered blood.
They despise us so. And well they should.
Rather than bear the indignity of camping outside Momemn’s walls, the Scarlet Spires had leased, at an exorbitant price, a nearby villa from one of the Nansur Houses. By Ainoni standards it was rather severe, more of a fortress than a villa, but then, Eleäzaras supposed, the Ainoni never had to build with the Scylvendi in mind. And at least it allowed him a certain measure of tranquil luxury. The encamped Holy War had become an intolerable slum, as his recent expedition to meet that thrice-damned Mandate Schoolman had reminded him.

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