The Darkness that Comes Before (18 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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Before Proyas could ask him what he meant, the colonnaded hallway came to an end and opened onto a vast chamber flanked by colossal pillars . . . or what he had thought was a chamber, for he quickly realized that he stood within a courtyard. Sunlight poured through the distant ceiling, piercing the gloom with slanted beams and stretching fingers of light between the western columns. Proyas blinked and stared across the courtyard’s sunken, mosaic floor—
Could it be?
He fell to his knees.
The Tusk.
A great winding horn of ivory, half in sunlight and half in shadow, suspended by chains that soared upward and were lost in the contrast of bright sky and pillared gloom.
The Tusk. Holiest of holies.
Shining with oils and ribbed by inscriptions, like the tattooed limbs of a Priestess of Gierra.
The first verses of the Gods. The first scripture.
Here,
before his eyes!
Here.
After several breathless moments, Proyas felt Gotian’s consoling hand fall upon his shoulder. Blinking tears, he looked up at the Grandmaster.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice hushed by the immensities that surrounded him. “Thank you for bringing me to this place.”
Gotian nodded, then left him to his prayers.
Triumphs and regrets alike wheeled through his thoughts: his victory over the Tydonni at the Battle of Paremti; the words of hatred he’d uttered to his older brother the week before he died. It seemed that
here
the hidden nets were drawn to the surface at last, so that all these events could be gathered onto the deck of this moment. Even the years he’d spent under Achamian as a boy, chafing through drill after drill, laughing at his gentle jokes, had a place in preparation for this moment. Now. Before the Tusk.
I submit to your Word, God. I commend my soul to the fierce task that you have laid before me. I shall make a temple of the field of war.
The sound of birds frolicking among the high eaves. The smell of sandalwood rinsed by sky-clean air. Bands of streaming sunlight. And the Tusk, poised against the shadows of mighty Kyranean pillars. Motionless. Soundless.
“It’s heartbreaking, is it not,” a powerful voice said behind him, “to see the Tusk for the first time?”
Proyas turned, and though he’d long thought himself beyond adulation, he could not help staring at the man with adoring eyes. Maithanet. The new, incorruptible Shriah of the Thousand Temples. The man who would bring peace to the nations of the Three Seas by offering them Holy War.
A new teacher.
“Since the beginning, it’s been with us,” Maithanet continued, staring reverently at the Tusk, “our guide, our counsel, and our judge. It is the one thing that
witnesses
us, even as we behold it.”
“Yes,” Proyas said. “I can feel it.”
“Cherish that feeling, Proyas. Grasp it tight to your breast and never forget. For in the days that follow, you will be besieged by many men who have forgotten.”
“Your Grace?”
Maithanet walked to his side. He had exchanged his elaborate gold-chased robes for a plain white frock. His every movement, every pose, it seemed to Proyas, conveyed a sense of inevitability, as though the scripture of his acts had already been written.
“I speak of the Holy War, Proyas, the great hammer of the Latter Prophet. Many men will seek to pervert it.”
“I have already heard rumours that the Emperor—”
“And there will be others as well,” Maithanet said, his tone both sad and sharp. “Men from the Schools . . .”
Proyas felt chastened. Only his father, the King, ever dared interrupt him, and only when he’d uttered something foolish. “The Schools, your Grace?”
The Shriah turned his strong bearded profile to him, and Proyas was struck by the crisp blue of his eyes. “Tell me, Nersei Proyas,” Maithanet said with the voice of edict. “Who was that man, that
sorcerer,
who dared pollute my presence?”
CHAPTER FOUR
 
SUMNA
 
To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?
—AJENCIS,
THE EPISTEMOLOGIES
 
 
But despite stories of Fanim atrocities, the fact of the matter is that the Kianene, heathen or no, were surprisingly tolerant of Inrithi pilgrimages to Shimeh—before the Holy War, that is. Why would a people devoted to the destruction of the Tusk extend this courtesy to “idolaters”? Perhaps they were partially motivated by the prospect of trade, as others have suggested. But the fundamental motive lies in their desert heritage. The Kianene word for a holy place is
si’ihkhalis,
which means, literally, “great oasis.” On the open desert it is their strict custom to never begrudge travellers water, even if they be enemies.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN,
COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
 
 
 
The Holy War of the Inrithi against the Fanim was declared by Maithanet, the 116th Shriah of the Thousand Temples, on the Morn of Ascension in 4110 Year-of-the-Tusk. The day had been unseasonably hot, as though the God himself had blessed the Holy War with a premonition of summer. Indeed, the Three Seas buzzed with rumours of omens and visions, all of which attested to the sanctity of the task that lay before the Inrithi.
Word spread. In every nation, priests in the Shrial and Cultic temples railed against the atrocities and iniquities of the Fanim. How, they asked, could the Inrithi call themselves faithful when the city of the Latter Prophet had been enslaved? Through invective and passionate harangue, the abstract sins of a distant exotic people were brought close to the congregations of the Inrithi and transformed into their own. To tolerate iniquity, they were told, was to cultivate wickedness. When a man failed to weed his garden, did he not grow weeds? And it seemed to the Inrithi that they had been stirred from a mercantile inertia, that they had suffered from an unaccountable sloth of spirit. How long would the Gods endure a people who had made harlots of their hearts, who had allowed themselves to be numbed by venal ease? How long before the Gods abandoned them, or worse yet, turned against them in bright wrath?
In the streets of the great cities, vendors plied customers with rumours of this or that potentate declaring for the Tusk. And in the taverns, veterans argued over the comparative pieties of their lords. Called to the hearth, children listened wide-eyed, rapt with awe and dread, as their fathers described how the Fanim, a foul and wretched people, had despoiled the purity of an impossibly wondrous place, Shimeh. They would awaken shrieking in the middle of the night, blubbering about eyeless Cishaurim who saw through the heads of snakes. During the day, as they romped through the streets or the fields, little brothers would be forced to play the heathen so that their older siblings might trounce them with sword-like sticks. And in the dark, husbands would tell wives the latest news of the Holy War, and speak in solemn whispers about the glory of the task the Shriah had set before them. And the wives would weep—quietly, because faith made strong—knowing that very soon their husbands would leave them.
Shimeh. Men gnashed their teeth at the thought of this hallowed name. And it seemed to them that Shimeh had to be a hushed place, a ground that had held its breath for anguished centuries, waiting for the drowsy followers of the Latter Prophet at last to stir from their slumber and put right an ancient and heinous crime. They would come with sword and knife and cleanse that ground. And when the Fanim were dead, they would kneel and kiss the sweet earth that had begat the Latter Prophet.
They would join the Holy War.
The Thousand Temples issued edicts stating that those who profited from the absence of any great lord who had taken up the Tusk would be tried for heresy in the ecclesiastical courts and summarily executed. Thus assured of their birthrights, princes, earls, palatines, and lords of every nation declared themselves Men of the Tusk. Trivial wars were forgotten. Lands were mortgaged. Client knights were summoned by their thanes and barons. Indentured servants were provisioned with arms and housed in makeshift barracks. Great fleets of ships were contracted to make the journey by sea to Momemn, where the Shriah had announced the Holy War must gather.
Maithanet had called, and the entire Three Seas had answered. The back of the heathen would be broken. Holy Shimeh would be cleansed.
Mid-Spring, 4110 Year-of-the-Tusk, Sumna
 
Esmenet’s daughter was never far from her thoughts. It was strange the way anything, even the most trivial happenstance, could summon memories of her. This time it was Achamian and his curious habit of sniffing each prune before taking it between his teeth.
Once her daughter had sniffed an apple at the market. It was a breathless memory, wan, as though rinsed of colour by the horrific fact of her death. An adorable little girl, bright beneath the shadows of passersby, with straight black hair, a chubby-tender face, and eyes like perpetual hope.
“Mama, it smells like . . .” she had said, hooking her voice as insight failed her, “it smells like
water and flowers.
” She flashed her mother a triumphant smile.
Esmenet looked up at the sour vendor, who nodded at the entwined serpents tattooed on the back of her left hand. The message was clear:
I don’t sell to your kind.
“That’s funny, my sweet. It smells overpriced to me.”
“But,
Mama
. . .” her darling had said.
Esmenet blinked the tears from her eyes. Achamian was speaking to her.
“I find this difficult,” he said with an air of confession.
I should’ve bought an apple somewhere else.
They both sat on low stools in her room, next to her beaten knee-high table. The shutters were open, and the chill spring air seemed to exaggerate the sounds of the street below. Achamian had draped a wool blanket over his shoulders, but Esmenet was content to shiver.
How long had Achamian stayed with her now? Long enough for them to feel safely bored with each other, she supposed. Almost as though they were married. A spy like Achamian, she had realized, one who recruited and directed those who actually had access to knowledge, spent most of his time simply waiting for something to happen. And Achamian had waited here, in her impoverished room in an ancient tenement that housed dozens of other whores such as herself.
It had been so strange at first. Many mornings she would lie awake, listening to the hideous sounds of him making mud in her pot. She would bury her head beneath sheets, insisting that he see a physician or a priest—only half joking, because it really was
hideous
. He started calling it his “morning apocalypse” after she once cried, more in exasperation than in good humour, “Just because you relive the Apocalypse every night, Akka, doesn’t mean that you have to share it with me in the morning!” Achamian would chuckle ruefully while he cleaned himself, mutter something about the merits of heavy drinking and clean bowels. And Esmenet would find as much comfort as hilarity in the sight of a sorcerer splashing water on his ass.
She would get up, open the shutters, and sit half-naked on the sill as she always did, alternately gazing across the smoky clamour of Sumna and scanning the street below for possible custom. The two of them would eat a frugal breakfast of unleavened bread, sour cheese, and the like, while talking about any number of things: the latest rumours regarding Maithanet, the venal hypocrisy of priests, the way teamsters could make even soldiers blush with their curses, and so on. And it would seem to Esmenet that they were happy, that in some strange way they belonged in this place at this time.
Sooner or later, however, either someone would call up to her from the street or one of her regular patrons would knock at the door, and things would sour. Achamian would become grim, grab his cloak and satchel, and invariably go get drunk at some dingy tavern. Usually she would spy him from the sill when he returned, walking alone through the endless press of people, an aging, slightly rounded man who looked as though he’d lost his purse gambling. Every time, without exception, he would already be watching her when she saw him. He would wave hesitantly, try to smile, and a pang of sorrow would strike her, sometimes so hard she would gasp aloud.
What was it she felt? Many things, it seemed. Pity for him, certainly. In the midst of strangers, Achamian always looked so lonely, so misunderstood.
No one,
she would often think,
knows him the way I do
. There was also relief that he’d returned—returned to her, even though he had gold enough to buy far younger whores. A selfish sorrow, that one. And shame. Shame because she knew that he loved her, and that every time she took custom it bruised his heart.

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