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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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“I don’t know. I know precious little any more.”
“How can you say that, Akka? I sometimes wonder if there’s anything you don’t know.”
She had always been the consummate whore, nursing first his loins and then his heart.
I don’t know if I could bear this again.
“I’ve spent my entire life among people who think me mad, Esmi.”
She laughed at this. Though born a caste menial and never educated—formally anyway—Esmenet had always possessed a keen appreciation of irony. It was one of many things that so distinguished her from the other women, the other prostitutes.
“I’ve spent my entire life among people who think me a harlot, Akka.”
Achamian smiled in the darkness. “But it’s not the same. You
are
a harlot.”
“So you’re not mad, then?” She giggled at this, and Achamian felt himself sour. This girlishness was a charade—or so he’d always thought—something concocted for her men. It reminded him that he was a customer, that they weren’t lovers after all.
“But that’s just it, Esmi. Whether I’m mad or no depends on whether my enemy exists.” He hesitated, as though these words had delivered him to a breathless precipice. “Esmenet . . .
You
believe me, don’t you?”
“Believe an inveterate liar like you? Please don’t insult me.”
Flare of irritation, immediately regretted. “No. Seriously . . .”
She paused before answering. “Do I believe the Consult exists?”
She doesn’t
. People who repeated questions, Achamian knew, feared answering them.
Her beautiful brown eyes studied him in the gloom. “Let’s just say, Akka, that I believe the
question
of the Consult exists.”
There was something beseeching in her look. He felt more chills.
“Isn’t that enough?” she asked.
Even for him, the Consult had withdrawn from the terror of fact to the rootless anxiety of questions. Had he, by mourning the absence of an answer, forgotten the importance of the question?
“I must find Inrau tomorrow,” he said.
Her fingers burrowed through his beard, across his chin. He raised his head like a cat.
“We make a sad couple,” she said, as though making a casual observation.
“Why would you say that?”
“A sorcerer and a harlot . . . There’s something sad about that.”
He grasped her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers.
“There’s something sad about all couples,” he said.
 
In his dream, Inrau walked through canyons of burnt brick, through faces and figures illuminated by rags of torchlight. And he heard a voice from nowhere, crying through his bones, across every finger’s-breadth of his skin, speaking words like the shadows of fists striking just beyond the corner of his eyes. Words that battered whatever will remained to him. Words that walked with his limbs.
He glimpsed the sagging facade of a tavern, then a low, golden-dim enclosure of smoke, tables, and overhead beams. The entrance enveloped him. The rising ground tipped forward, directed him toward a malevolent blackness in the far corner of the room. It too enveloped him—another entrance. Everything rushed into the bearded man, his head slack against the chapped stucco, his face on a lazy, upward angle, but tight with some forbidden ecstasy—light spilling from his working mouth. Flakes of sun in his eyes.
Achamian . . .
Then the impossible mutter trailed into the rumble of patrons. The murky interior of the tavern became sturdy and mundane. The nightmarish angles squared. The play of light and shadow became crisp.
“What are you doing here?” Inrau sputtered, struggling to clear his thoughts. “Do you realize what’s happening?” He scanned the interior of the tavern and through beams and haze saw a table of Shrial Knights in a far corner. So far they hadn’t noticed him.
Achamian watched him sourly. “It’s good to see you too, boy.”
Inrau scowled. “Don’t call me ‘boy.’”
Achamian grinned. “But what else”—he winked—“is a beloved uncle supposed to call his nephew? Hmm, boy?”
Inrau exhaled a long breath and leaned back into his chair. “It is good to see you . . . Uncle Akka.” No lie there. Despite the hurtful circumstances, it
was
good to see him. For some time he’d regretted leaving his old teacher’s side. Sumna and the Thousand Temples were not the places, the sanctuaries, he’d imagined them to be—at least not until Maithanet had been elected to the Seat.
“I
have
missed you,” Inrau continued, “but Sumna—”
“Is not such a good place for someone like me—I know.”
“Then why have you come? Surely you’ve heard the rumours.”
“I didn’t simply ‘come,’ Inrau . . .” Achamian paused, his face abruptly troubled. “I was sent.”
Inrau’s scalp prickled. “Oh no, Achamian. Please tell me . . .”
“We need to know about this Maithanet,” Achamian said in a forced tone. “About his Holy War. Surely you can see this.”
Achamian downed his bowl of wine. For an instant, he looked broken. But the sudden pity Inrau felt for the man, the man who in so many ways had become his father, was dwarfed by a giddy sense of groundlessness. “But you promised, Akka. You
promised
.”
Tears glittered in the Schoolman’s eyes. Wise tears, but filled with regret nonetheless.
“The world has had the habit,” Achamian said, “of breaking the back of my promises.”
 
Though Achamian had hoped to present Inrau the front of a teacher at last acknowledging a former student as his peer, an unvoiced question continued to rattle him:
What am I doing?
Studying the young man, he felt a pang of affection. His face looked strangely aquiline, shaven as it was in the Nansur fashion. But the voice was familiar—the way it grew more and more tangled in competing ideas. And his eyes as well: exuberant, wide, and glassy brown, perpetually hinged on the cusp of honest self-doubt. Inrau had been cursed more than others, Achamian reflected, to be given the gift of the Few. In temperament, he was ideally suited to be a priest of the Thousand Temples. The touch of selfless candour, of forward passion—these were things the Mandate would have stripped from him.
“But Maithanet is more than you can understand,” Inrau was saying. The young man’s entire body seemed to flinch from the round-rushing air of the tavern. “Some almost worship him, though this angers him. He’s to be obeyed, not worshipped. That’s why he took his name—”
“His name?” It hadn’t occurred to Achamian that his name might mean something. This in itself disturbed him. It was a Shrial tradition to take a new name. How could such simple things slip past him?
“Yes,” Inrau replied. “From
mai’tathana
.”
Achamian was unfamiliar with the word. But before he could ask, lnrau continued his explanation, his tone defiant, as though the former student could only now, finally beyond the reach of the Mandate, vent old resentments.
“Its meaning would be unknown to you.
Mai’tathana
is Thoti-Eännorean, the language of the Tusk. It means ‘instruction.’”
So what’s the lesson?
“And none of it troubles you?” Achamian asked.
“None of what troubles me?”
“The fact that Maithanet so effortlessly secured the Seat. That he was able, in a matter of
weeks,
to purge the Shrial Apparati of all the Emperor’s spies.”
“
Trouble
me?” Inrau cried incredulously. “My heart
exults
at these things. You have no inkling how deeply I despaired when I first came to Sumna. When I first realized how sordid and corrupt the Thousand Temples had become—realized that the
Shriah himself
was simply another of the Emperor’s dogs. And then Maithanet arrived. Like a storm! One of those rare summer storms that sweep the earth clean. Troubled by the ease with which he cleansed Sumna? Akka, I
rejoiced
.”
“Then what of this Holy War? Does your heart also rejoice at the thought of this? The thought of another Scholastic War?”
Inrau hesitated, as though shocked his earlier momentum had so quickly stalled.
“No one knows the object of his Holy War,” he said numbly. As much as Inrau despised the Mandate, Achamian knew the thought of its destruction horrified him.
Part of him dwells with us still
.
“And if Maithanet does declare against the Schools, what will you think of him then?”
“He won’t, Akka. I’m certain of this.”
“But that wasn’t my question, was it?” Achamian inwardly winced at the ruthlessness of his tone. “If Maithanet declares against the Schools,
what then?
”
Inrau drew his hands—delicate hands for a man, Achamian had always thought—across his face. “I don’t know, Akka. I’ve asked this same question a thousand times, and still I don’t know.”
“But why is that? You’re a Shrial Priest now, Inrau, an apostle of the God as revealed by the Latter Prophet and the Tusk. Doesn’t the Tusk demand that all sorcerers be burned?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“But the Mandate is different? An exception?”
“Yes. It
is
different.”
“Why? Because an old fool whom you once loved is one of them?”
“Keep your voice down,” Inrau hissed, glancing apprehensively at the table of Shrial Knights. “You know full well why, Akka. Because I love you as a father and a friend, certainly, but because I also . . . respect the Mandate mission.”
“So if Maithanet declares against the Schools, what would you think?”
“I would grieve.”
“Grieve? I don’t think so, Inrau. You’d think he’s
mistaken
. As brilliant and as holy as Maithanet may be, you’d think, ‘He hasn’t seen what I’ve seen!’ ”
Inrau nodded vacantly.
“The Thousand Temples,” Achamian continued, his tone more gentle, “has always been the most powerful of the Great Factions, but that power has often been blunted, if not broken, by corruption. Maithanet is the first Shriah in centuries to reclaim its pre-eminence. And now in the secret councils of every Faction, ruthless men ask, What will Maithanet do with this power? Who will he instruct with his Holy War? The Fanim and their Cishaurim priests? Or will he instruct those condemned by the Tusk, the Schools? Never has Sumna been filled with as many spies as now. They circle the Holy Precincts like vultures about the promise of a corpse. House Ikurei and the Scarlet Spires will try to devise ways to yoke Maithanet’s agenda to their own. The Kianene and the Cishaurim will keep a wary eye on his every move, fearing that his lesson is for them. Minimize or exploit, Inrau—all of them are here for one of these two reasons. Only the Mandate stands outside this sordid circle.”
An old tactic, made effective by desperate wit. When recruiting a spy one had to open a safe place with words, make it appear that what was at stake wasn’t betrayal but a further, more demanding fidelity. Frames—give them greater frames with which to interpret the treachery out of their actions. Before all, a spy who recruits spies must be a master storyteller.

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