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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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Her ears ringing, Esmenet scrambled on all fours and threw her back against the wall.
The man sat on the end of her crude bed and began pulling off his leather gloves finger by finger. “As a matter of etiquette, one should never begin a relationship with lies, whore. It sets a unfortunate precedent.”
“We have a relationship?” she asked breathlessly. The entire left side of her face was numb.
“Through a mutual acquaintance, yes.” His eyes lingered on her breasts for a moment before flickering between her thighs. Esmenet allowed her knees to part a bit more, as though an accident of exhaustion.
“And who would that be?” she asked, heart hammering in her chest.
The man gazed below her navel with the shamelessness of a slave-owner. “A certain Mandate Schoolman”—he drew his eyes up as though from a reverie—“named Drusas Achamian.”
Akka. You knew this would happen.
“I know him,” she said cautiously, resisting the urge to once again ask the man who he was.
Don’t ask questions. Ignorance is life.
Instead she said, “What do you want to know?” She let her knees drift farther apart.
Be the whore . . .
“Everything,” the man replied with a heavy-lidded smirk. “I want to know everything, and everyone, he has known.”
“It’ll cost,” she said, trying to steady her voice. “
Both
will cost.”
You must sell him.
“Why am I not surprised? Ah, business. It makes everything so straightforward, does it not?” He hummed under his breath as he rooted through his purse. “Here . . .
Eleven
copper talents. Six to betray your body, and five to betray the Schoolman.” A savage grin. “A fair estimation of their relative worth, don’t you think?”
“A half-silver, at least,” she said. “For each.”
Barter . . . Be the whore.
“Such conceit!” he replied, nevertheless dipping two pale fingers back into his purse. “How about one of
these?
”
She looked at the shining gold with frank hunger.
“It’ll do,” she said, her mouth dry.
The man grinned. “I imagined as much.”
The coin disappeared and he began undressing, watching her with feral honesty as she hastened to light candles against the evening gloom.
When the time came, there was something animal in his proximity, a smell or heat that spoke directly to her body. He cupped her left breast in a heavy, callused hand, and any illusion she had had of using his lust as a weapon evaporated. His presence was overwhelming. As he lowered her to the bed, she feared she might swoon.
Be compliant . . .
He knelt before her and effortlessly pulled her raised hips and spread legs across his thighs. And she found herself aching for the moment she had feared. Then he was inside. She cried out.
What’s he doing to me? What’s he doing—
He began moving. His mastery of her body was inhuman. Soon one gasping moment slurred into another. When he caressed her, her skin was like water, alive with shivers that rippled across her, through her. She began writhing, grinding against him with desperation, moaning through clenched teeth, drunk with nightmarish ecstasy. Through her pained eyes he seemed her burning centre, blurring into her, flooding her with rapture after rapture, thrust after thrust. Time and again, he would bring her to the ringing brink of climax, only to pause, and ask questions, endless questions . . .
“And what precisely did Inrau say about Maithanet?”
“Don’t stop . . .
Pleaase
.”
“What did he say?”
Tell the truth.
She remembered trying to pull his face down to her own, gasping,
“Kiss me . . . Kiss me.”
She remembered his thick chest pressing against her breasts, and shuddering, crumbling beneath him as though made of sand.
She remembered lying still and sweaty with him, panting for air, feeling the thick throb of his heart through his member, his slightest movement like lightning between her thighs, an agonizing bliss that made her weep and groan with wild abandon.
And she remembered answering his questions with the urgency of pounding hips.
Anything! I would give you anything!
When she climaxed for the final time, she felt as though she’d been pitched from a precipice, and she heard her own husky shrieks as though from afar, shrill against the thunder of his dragon roar.
Then he withdrew and she felt ransacked, her limbs trembling, her skin numb and cold with sweat. Two of the candles were gutted, but the room was illuminated in grey light.
How long?
He was standing above her, his godlike frame shining in the glow of the remaining candle. “Morning comes,” he said.
The golden coin fluttered in his hand, bewitching her with its glitter. He held it above her and let it slip between his fingers. It plopped onto the sticky pools across her belly. She glanced down and gasped in horror.
His seed was black.
“Shush,” he said, gathering his finery. “Say a word of this to no one. Do you understand, whore?”
“I understand,” she managed, tears now streaming.
What have I done?
She stared at the coin and the Emperor’s profile across it, remote and golden against downy pubic hair and slopes of bare skin—skin threaded and smeared by glistening pitch. Bile flooded the back of her throat. The room became brighter.
He’s opening the shutters
. But when she looked up, he was gone. She heard the arid slap of wings receding into the dawn.
Cool morning air rushed through the room, rinsing away the stench of inhuman rutting.
But he smelled of myrrh.
Esmenet rolled over and vomited across the floor.
 
Some time passed before she managed to wash, dress, and leave her room. When she stumbled into the street, she knew she could never return. She weathered the pungent crush of others—the custom district was adjacent to the ever-packed Ecosium Market—feeling curiously alive to the sights and sounds of her city: coppersmiths hammering; the cry of a one-eyed man proclaiming the curative power of his sulphur products; barking dogs; the insistent begging of a man without legs; another man calling out the names of his meats; the harsh shouts of mule drivers beating their teams until they screamed. Unending sounds. And a welter of smells: dry summer stone, incense, the tug of roasting meat, feces, and smoke—everywhere the smell of smoke.
A brisk morning vigour animated the market, and she passed through the crowds like a weary shadow. To its pith, her body ached, and she found walking painful. She clutched the gold coin tightly, periodically exchanging hands to wipe her palms of sweat. She stared numbly at things and people: at a cracked amphora bleeding oil across a vendor’s mat; at young Galeoth slave girls negotiating the masses with downcast eyes and woven baskets of grain perched upon their heads; at a haggard dog, alert and peering through thickets of scissoring legs; at the hazy profile of the Junriüma rising in the distance. She stared and she thought,
Sumna
.
She loved her city, but she had to escape.
Achamian had told her that this might happen, that if Inrau had in fact been murdered, then men might come to her, looking for him.
“If that happens, Esmi, then whatever you do, don’t ask questions. You don’t want to know anything about them, understand? Ignorance is life . . . Be compliant. Be the whore all the way down. Barter, as a whore barters. And above all, you must sell me, Esmi. You must tell them everything you know. And tell them the truth, for they likely know much of it already. Do these things, and you’ll survive.”
“But why?”
“Because spies prize a weak and mercantile soul above all other things, Esmi. They’ll spare you on the chance you might prove valuable. Hide your strength, and you will survive.”
“But what about you, Akka? What if they learn something they can use to injure you?”
“I’m a Schoolman, Esmi,” he had replied. “A Mandate Schoolman.”
At last, through a screen of passing people, she saw a little girl standing barefoot in dusty sunlight. She would do. With large brown eyes the girl watched Esmenet approach, too wary to return her smile. She clutched a stick to the breast of her threadbare shift.
I survived, Akka. And I did not survive.
Esmenet stooped before the child and astounded her with the gold talent.
“Here,” she said, pressing it into small palms.
So like my daughter.
 
Alone and on muleback, Achamian descended into the valley of Sudica. He had taken this route south from Sumna to Momemn on a whim, or so he had thought, hoping only to avoid the heavily cultivated lands nearer the coast. Sudica had not been peopled for a very long time. It was home only to shepherds, their flocks of sheep, and ruins.
The day was clear and surprisingly warm. Nansur was not a dry country, but its character was such that it always reminded Achamian of one. Its people were densely clustered around the rivers and the coasts, leaving large expanses of land that were inhospitable only because of their vulnerability to the Scylvendi.
Sudica was such a place. In the days of Kyraneas, Achamian had read, it had been one of the great provinces, the birthplace of generals and of ruling dynasties. Now there were only sheep and half-buried stone. Whatever country Achamian found himself in, it seemed he would search out places like these, places that slumbered, that dreamed of ancient times. This was a habit shared by a great many of the Mandate, a deep obsession with blasted monuments of word or stone—so deep they would often find themselves walking through ruined temples or wandering into the library of a learned host without recalling why. It had made them the chroniclers of the Three Seas. For them to wander among half-walls and fallen pillars, or through the words of an ancient treatise, was in a way to travel in peace with their other memories, to be one man instead of two.
The most famous landmark of Sudica was the ruined fortress-temple of Batathent. It required some time negotiating hillsides and crossing scrubland before Achamian could ride up into its shadow. The immense truncated walls spilled into gravel. Obviously the site had been raided over the years for its granite and bright limestone. All that remained of the temple within were rows of massive columns, far too imposing, Achamian supposed, to be pulled down and dragged to the coast. Batathent had been one of the few strongholds to survive the collapse of Kyraneas during the First Apocalypse, a sanctuary for those fleeing the hunting parties of Scylvendi and Sranc. A protective hand cupped about the frail light of civilization.
Achamian wandered across the site, awed by the conjunction of old stone and his own learning. He returned to his mule only when the growing dark made him worry of finding his way.
That night he laid out his mat and slept beneath the pillars, finding sad comfort in the way the sun’s heat lingered in the winter-cold stone.
In his sleep, he dreamed of that day when every child was stillborn, that day when the Consult, beaten back to the black ramparts of Golgotterath by the Nonmen and the ancient Norsirai, brought emptiness, absolute and terrible, into the world: Mog-Pharau, the No-God. In his sleep, Achamian watched glory after glory flicker out through Seswatha’s anguished eyes. And he awoke, as he always awoke, a witness to the end of the world.

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