The Darkness that Comes Before (42 page)
Read The Darkness that Comes Before Online
Authors: R. Scott Bakker
How does one work his way back from such harsh words? But he had to, Achamian knew, and for reasons that were at once the best and the worst. He had to bridge the gulf between them, not because he loved Proyas still—remarkable men often compelled such love—but because he needed some path to Maithanet. He needed answers, both to quiet his heart and, perhaps, to save the world.
How Proyas would laugh if he told him that . . . No wonder the Three Seas thought the Mandate mad!
Achamian stood and poured the remainder of his tea upon the hissing fire. He looked at his map of connections one last time and considered the broad, blank spaces across the parchment, idly wondering how they might be filled.
He broke camp, packed his mule, and continued his lonely journey. Sudica passed without demarcation—more hills, more stony earth.
Esmenet walked through the gloom with the others, her heart thundering. She could feel the teetering immensity of the Gate of Pelts above her, as though it were a hammer Fate had held poised for a thousand years in anticipation of her escape. She glanced at the surrounding faces but saw only weariness and boredom. For them, passage from the city seemed uneventful. These people, she imagined, escaped Sumna every day.
For an absurd moment, she found herself fearing for her fear. If escaping Sumna meant nothing, did that mean the whole world was a prison?
Then suddenly she found herself blinking tears in the sunlight. She paused, glancing at the tan towers hulking above. Then she looked around, breathing deeply, ignoring the curses of those behind her. Soldiers lounged on either side of the gate’s dark maw, eyeing those who entered the city but asking no questions. People on foot, on wains, and on horseback bustled about her. To either side of the road, a thin colonnade of mongers hawked their wares, hoping to profit from vagrant hungers.
Then she saw what before had been only a hazy band on the horizon, surfacing here and there from the crowded circuit of Sumna’s walls: the countryside, winter pale and piling endlessly away into the distance. And she saw the sun, late-afternoon sun, spread across the land as though it were water.
A teamster cracked his whip next to her ear, and she scrambled to the side. A wain groaned by her, pulled by flabby oxen. Its driver flashed her a toothless grin.
She glanced at the greening tattoo across the back of her left hand. The mark of her tribe. The Sign of Gierra, though she was no priestess. The Shrial Apparati insisted all harlots be tattooed with parodies of the sacred tattoos borne by the temple-prostitutes. No one knew why. To better fool themselves into thinking the Gods were fooled, Esmenet supposed. It seemed a different thing here, without walls, without the threat of Shrial Law.
She considered calling after the teamster, but as he trundled away her eyes were drawn to the road, which struck a perfect line across the broken landscape, like mortar between chapped bricks.
Sweet Gierra, what am I doing?
The open road. Achamian had once told her it was like a string tied about his neck, choking him if he did not follow. She almost wished it felt that way now. She could understand being dragged to some destination. Instead, it felt like a long fall, and a sheer one at that. Simply staring down it made her feel dizzy.
Such a fool! It’s just a road!
She had rehearsed her plan a thousand times. Why fear now?
She was not a wife. Her purse she carried between her legs. She would, as the soldiers said, sell peaches on the way to Momemn. Men might stand midway between women and the Gods, but they hungered like beasts.
The road would be kind. Eventually, she would find the Holy War. And in the Holy War she would find Achamian. She would clutch his cheek and kiss him, at long last a fellow traveller.
Then she would tell him what had happened, of the danger.
Deep breath. She tasted dust and cold.
She began walking, her limbs so light they might have danced.
It would be dark soon.
CHAPTER TEN
SUMNA
How should one describe the terrible majesty of the Holy War?
Even then, still unblooded, it was both frightening and wondrous
to behold, a great beast whose limbs were composed of entire
nations—Galeoth, Thunyerus, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, High
Ainon, and the Nansurium—and with the Scarlet Spires as the
dragon’s maw, no less. Not since the days of the Ceneian Empire
or the Ancient North has the world witnessed such an assembly.
Even diseased by politics, it was a thing of awe.
—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN,
COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Even after night fell, Esmenet continued walking, intoxicated by the sheer impossibility of it. Several times she even raced into the dark fields, her feet whisking through frosted grass, her arms outstretched as she twirled beneath the Nail of Heaven.
The cold was iron hard, the spaces endless. The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter’s razor. So different from the humid murk of Sumna, where inky sensations stained everything. Here, in the cold and dark, the parchment of the world was blank. Here, it seemed, was where it all started.
She at once savoured and shuddered at the thought. The Consult, Achamian had once told her, believed much the same thing.
Eventually, as the night waxed, she sobered. She reminded herself of the arduous days ahead, of the dread purpose that drove her.
Achamian was being watched.
She could not think this without remembering that night with the stranger. Sometimes she felt nauseated, glimpsing the pitch that was his seed everytime she blinked. Other times she grew very cold, reviewing and assessing every spoken word, every stinging climax with the dispassion of a tax-farmer. She found it difficult to believe she had been that whorish woman, treacherous, adulterate . . .
But she had been.
It was not her betrayal that shamed her. Achamian, she knew, would not fault her. No, what shamed her was what she had
felt,
not what she had done.
felt,
not what she had done.
Some prostitutes so despised what they did they sought pain and punishment whenever they coupled. Esmenet, however, counted herself among those who could laugh, from time to time, about being paid for being pleasured. Her pleasure was her own, no matter who fondled her.
But not that night. The pleasure had been more intense than any she’d ever experienced. She had felt it. Gasped it. Shuddered it. But she had not owned it. Her body had been notched that night. And it shamed her to fury.
She often grew wet at the thought of his abdomen against her belly. Sometimes she flushed and tensed at the memory of her climaxes. Whoever he was, whatever he was, he had taken her body captive, had seized what was hers and remade it not in his own image, but in the image of what he needed her to be. Infinitely receptive. Infinitely docile. Infinitely gratified.
But where her body groped, her intellect grasped. She quickly realized that if the stranger knew about her, he knew about Inrau. And if he knew about Inrau, there was simply no way his death could have been a suicide. This was why she had to find Achamian. The possibility that Inrau had committed suicide had almost broken him.
“What if it’s true, Esmi? What if he did kill himself?”
“He didn’t. Enough, Akka. Please.”
“He did! . . . Oh, sweet Gods, I can feel it! I forced him into a position where all he could do was betray. Me or Maithanet. Don’t you see, Esmi? I forced him to pit love against love!”
“You’re drunk, Akka. Your fears always get the best of you when you’re drunk.”
“Sweet Gods . . . I killed him.”
How empty her reassurances had been: wooden recitations born of flagging patience born of the unaccountable suspicion that he punished himself simply to secure her pity. Why had she been so cold? So selfish? At one point, she had even caught herself resenting Inrau, blaming him for Achamian’s departure. How could she think such things?
But that was going to change. Many things were going to change.
Somehow, impossibly, she had a part in whatever it was that was happening. She would be its equal.
You did not kill him, my love. I know this!
And she also knew
who
the killer was. The stranger, she supposed, could have hailed from any of the Schools, but somehow she knew he did not. What she had suffered was beyond the Three Seas.
who
the killer was. The stranger, she supposed, could have hailed from any of the Schools, but somehow she knew he did not. What she had suffered was beyond the Three Seas.
The Consult. They had murdered Inrau, and they had ravished her.
The
Consult
.
Consult
.
As terrifying as this intuition was, it was also exhilarating. No one, not even Achamian, had seen the Consult in centuries. And yet she . . . But she did not ponder this overmuch, because when she did, she began to feel . . . fortunate. That she could not bear.
So she told herself she travelled for Achamian. And in unguarded moments, she styled herself a character from
The Sagas,
like Ginsil or Ysilka, a wife mortally ensnared in her husband’s machinations. The road before her, it seemed, would sing with a furtive glamour, as though hidden witnesses to her heroism watched her every step.
The Sagas,
like Ginsil or Ysilka, a wife mortally ensnared in her husband’s machinations. The road before her, it seemed, would sing with a furtive glamour, as though hidden witnesses to her heroism watched her every step.
She shivered in her cloak. Her breath piled before her. She walked, pondering the sense of chill expectancy that accompanied so many winter mornings. Dawn’s light was slow in coming.
By mid-morning, she came across a roadside hostel, where she loitered in hopes of joining the small group of wayfarers who assembled in its yards. Two old men, their backs stooped beneath great bushels of dried fruits, waited with her. From their scowls Esmenet supposed they had glimpsed the tattoo on the back of her left hand. Everyone, it seemed, knew that Sumna branded her whores.
When the group at last took to the road, she followed it as unobtrusively as possible. A small cadre of blue-skinned priests, devotees of Jukan, led them, singing soft hymns and clinking finger cymbals. A handful of the others joined them in singing, but most kept to themselves, trudging, muttering in low voices. Esmenet saw one of the old men speaking to the driver of a wain. The teamster turned and looked at her in the blank way she had seen so often: the look of one who yearns for what must be loathed. He glanced away when she smiled. Sooner or later, she knew, he would manufacture some accidental way to speak to her.
Then she would have to make a decision.
But then a band on her left sandal snapped. She was able to knot the ends back into usable shape, but they pinched and chafed the skin beneath her woollen socks. Blisters broke, and soon she was limping. She cursed the teamster for not hurrying. She heartily cursed the canon that made it illegal for women to wear boots in the Nansurium. Then the knot gave way, and try as she might, she could not repair it.
The group dwindled farther and farther down the road.
She thrust the sandal into her satchel and began walking without it. Her foot went almost immediately numb. After twenty steps, the first hole opened in her sock. A short time after, her sock was little more than a ragged skirt about her ankle. She hopped as much as she walked, frequently pausing to rub warmth into the sole of her foot. She could see no sign of the others. Behind her, she glimpsed a distant band of men. They seemed to be walking pack animals . . . or warhorses.
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