The Darkness that Comes Before (45 page)

Read The Darkness that Comes Before Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
11.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Well enough, I suppose,” Achamian said breezily, tugging on the ropes. “It’ll keep the rain off me at least.”
Xinemus studied him for a wordless moment. Thankfully, he did not press the issue.
They joined the other three men about Xinemus’s fire. Two were captains of the Attrempus garrison, leather-faced contemporaries of their Marshal. The senior officer, Dinchases—or Bloody Dench, as he was called—had been with Xinemus for as long as Achamian had known the Marshal. The junior, Zenkappa, was a Nilnameshi slave Xinemus had inherited from his father and later freed for valour on the field. Both, as far as Achamian could tell, were good men. The third man, Iryssas, was the youngest son of Xinemus’s only surviving uncle and, if Achamian remembered correctly, Majordomo of House Krijates.
But none of the men acknowledged their arrival. They were either too drunk or too engrossed in discussion. Dinchases, it seemed, was telling a story.
“. . . then the big one, the Thunyeri—”
“Do you blasted idiots even remember Achamian?” Xinemus cried. “Drusas Achamian?”
Wiping eyes and stifling laughs, the three men turned to appraise him. Zenkappa smiled and raised his bowl. Dinchases, however, regarded him narrowly, and Iryssas with outright hostility.
Dinchases glanced at Xinemus’s scowl, then reluctantly raised his bowl as well. Both he and Zenkappa inclined their heads, then poured a libation. “Well met, Achamian,” Zenkappa said with genuine warmth. As a freed slave, Achamian imagined, he perhaps had less difficulty with pariahs. Dinchases and Iryssas, on the other hand, were caste nobles—Iryssas one of true rank.
“I see you pitched your tent,” Iryssas remarked casually. He possessed the guarded, probing look of a dangerous drunk.
Achamian said nothing.
“So I suppose I should resign myself to your presence then, eh, Achamian?”
Achamian met his gaze directly, cursed himself for swallowing. “I suppose you should.”
Xinemus glared at his young cousin. “The Scarlet Spires are actually part of this Holy War, Iryssas. You should welcome Achamian’s presence. I know I do.”
Achamian had witnessed countless exchanges such as these. The faithful trying to rationalize their fraternization with sorcerers. The rationale was always the same:
They are useful . . .
“Perhaps you’re right, Cousin. Enemies of our enemies, eh?” Conriyans were jealous of their hatreds. After centuries of skirmishing with High Ainon and the Scarlet Spires, they had come, however grudgingly, to appreciate the Mandate. Overmuch, the priests would say. But of all the Schools only the Mandate, steeped in the Gnosis of the Ancient North, was a match for the Scarlet Spires.
Iryssas raised his cup, then emptied it across the dust at his feet. “May the gods drink deep, Drusas Achamian. May they celebrate one who is damned—”
Cursing, Xinemus kicked the fire. A cloud of sparks and ash engulfed Iryssas. He fell backward, crying out, instinctively beating at his hair and beard. Xinemus leapt after him, roaring:
“What did you say? What did you say?”
Though of slighter build than Iryssas, Xinemus pulled him to his knees as if he were a child, berating him with curses and open-handed cuffs. Dinchases looked to Achamian apologetically. “We’re not with him,” he said slyly. “We’re just piss drunk.” Zenkappa found this too hilarious to remain seated. He rolled on the ground in the shadows beyond his log, howling with laughter.
Even Iryssas was laughing, though in the hounded way of a henpecked spouse. “Enough!” he cried to Xinemus. “I’ll apologize!
I’ll apologize!
”
Shocked both by Iryssas’s insolence and by the violence of Xinemus’s response, Achamian watched, his mouth agape. Then he realized he’d never really seen Xinemus in the company of his soldiers before.
Iryssas scrambled back to his seat, his hair askew and his black beard streaked with ash. At once smiling and frowning, he leaned forward on his camp stool toward Achamian. He was bowing, Achamian realized, but was too lazy to lift his ass from his seat. “I
do
apologize,” he said, looking to Achamian with bemused sincerity. “And I do like you, Achamian, even though you
are
”—he shot a ducking look at his lord and cousin—“a damned sorcerer.”
Zenkappa began howling anew. Despite himself, Achamian smiled and bowed in return. Iryssas, he realized, was one of those men whose hatreds were far too whimsical to become the fixed point of an obsession. He could despise and embrace by guileless turns. Such men, Achamian had learned, inevitably mirrored the integrity or depravity of their lords.
“Besotted fool!” Xinemus cried at Iryssas. “Look at your eyes! More squint than a monkey’s asshole!”
Further paroxysms of laughter followed. This time Achamian found their hilarity irresistible.
But he laughed far longer than the others, wailing as though possessed by some demon. Tears of relief creased his cheeks. How long had it been?
The others grew quiet, watched as he struggled with his composure.
“It’s been too long,” Achamian at last managed. His breath shuddered as he exhaled. His tears suddenly stung.
“Far too long, Akka,” Xinemus said, placing a friendly hand on his shoulder. “But you’re back and for a time free from the wiles of conniving men. Tonight, you can drink in peace.”
 
He slept fitfully that night. For whatever reason, heavy drinking at once intensified and deadened the Dreams. The way they slurred into one another made them seem less immediate, more dreamlike, but the passions that accompanied them . . . They were unbearable at the best of times. With drink they became lunatic with misery.
He already lay awake by time Paäta, one of Xinemus’s body-slaves, arrived with a basin of fresh water. While he washed, Xinemus pressed his grinning face through the flaps and challenged him to a game of benjuka.
Soon afterward, Achamian found himself sitting cross-legged on a thatched mat opposite Xinemus, studying the gilded benjuka plate between them. A sagging canopy sheltered them from the sun, which burned so bright that the surrounding encampment seemed a desert bazaar despite the chill. All that was missing, Achamian mused, were camels. Though most of the passersby were Conriyans from Xinemus’s own household, he saw all manner of Inrithi: Galeoth, stripped to the waist and painted for some festival that apparently confused winter for summer; Thunyeri, sporting the black-iron hauberks they never seemed to shed; and even an Ainoni nobleman, whose elaborate gowns looked positively ludicrous amid the welter of larded canvas, wains, and haphazard stalls.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Xinemus said, apparently referring to the sheer numbers of Inrithi.
Achamian shrugged. “Yes and no . . . I was at the Hagerna when Maithanet declared the Holy War. Sometimes I wonder whether Maithanet called the Three Seas or the Three Seas called Maithanet.”
“You were at the
Hagerna?
” Xinemus asked. His expression had darkened.
“Yes.”
I even met your Shriah . . .
Xinemus snorted in the bullish way he often used to express disapproval. “Your move, Akka.”
Achamian searched Xinemus’s face, but the Marshal seemed thoroughly absorbed by the geometries of piece and possibility across the plate. Achamian had agreed to the game knowing it would drive the others away, and so allow him to tell Xinemus about what had happened in Sumna. But he’d forgotten how benjuka tended to bring out the worst in them. Every time they played benjuka, they bickered like harem eunuchs.
Benjuka was a relic, a survivor of the end of the world. It had been played in the courts of Trysë, Atrithau, and Mehtsonc before the Apocalypse, much as it was studied in the gardens of Carythusal, Nenciphon, and Momemn now. But what distinguished benjuka was not its age. In general, there was a troubling affinity between games and life, and nowhere was this affinity more striking, or more disturbing, than in benjuka.
Like life, games were governed by rules. But unlike life, games were utterly defined by those rules. The rules
were
the game, and if one played by different rules, then one simply played a different game. Since a fixed framework of rules determined the meaning of every move as a move, games possessed a clarity that made life seem a drunken brawl by comparison. The proprieties were indubitable, the permutations secure; only the outcome was shrouded.
The cunning of benjuka lay in the absence of this fixed framework. Rather than providing an immutable ground, the rules of benjuka were yet another move
within
the game, yet another piece to be played. And this made benjuka the very image of life, a game of baffling complexities and near poetic subtleties. Other games could be chronicled as shifting patterns of pieces and number-stick results, but benjuka gave rise to
histories,
and whatever possessed history possessed the very structure of the world. Some, it was said, had bent themselves to the benjuka plate and lifted their heads as prophets.
Achamian was not among them.
He pondered the plate, rubbing his hands together for warmth. Xinemus taunted him with a nasty chuckle.
“Always so dour when you play benjuka.”
“It’s a wretched game.”
“You say that only because you try too hard.”
“No. I say that because I lose.”
But Xinemus was right. The
Abenjukala,
a classic text on benjuka from Ceneian times, began, “Where games measure the limits of intellect, benjuka measures the limits of soul.” The complexities of benjuka were such that a player could never intellectually master the plate and so
force
another to yield. Benjuka, as the anonymous author put it, was like love. One could never force another to love. The more one grasped for it, the more elusive it became. Benjuka likewise punished a grasping heart. Where other games required industrious cunning, benjuka demanded something more. Wisdom, perhaps.
With an air of chagrin, Achamian moved the only stone among his silver pieces—a replacement for a piece stolen, or so Xinemus claimed, by one of his slaves. Another aggravation. Though pieces were nothing more than how they were used, the stone impoverished his play somehow, broke the miserly spell of a complete set.
Why do I get the stone?
“If you were drunk,” Xinemus said, answering his move decisively, “I might understand why you did that.”
How could he make jokes? Achamian stared at the patterns across the plate, realizing that the rules had shifted yet again—this time disastrously. He searched for options but saw none.
Xinemus smiled winningly and began paring his nails with a knife. “Proyas will feel the same way,” he said, “when he finally arrives.” Something in his tone made Achamian look up.
“Why’s that?”
“You’ve heard of the recent disaster.”
“What disaster?”
“The Vulgar Holy War has been destroyed.”
“What?” Achamian had heard talk of the Vulgar Holy War before leaving Sumna. Weeks ago, before the arrival of the bulk of the Holy War, a number of great lords from Galeoth, Conriya, and High Ainon had decided to march against the heathen on their own. The moniker “vulgar” had been given to them because of the hosts of lordless rabble that followed. It had never occurred to Achamian to ask how it fared.
It’s started. The bloodshed has started.
“On the Plains of Mengedda,” Xinemus continued. “The heathen Sapatishah, Skaurus, sent the tarred heads of Tharschilka, Kumrezzer, and Calmemunis to the Emperor as a warning.”
“Calmemunis? You mean Proyas’s cousin?”
“Arrogant, headstrong fool! I begged him not to march, Akka. I reasoned, I shouted, I even grovelled—
abased
myself like a fool!—but the dog wouldn’t listen.”
Achamian had met Calmemunis once, in the court of Proyas’s father. Outrageous conceit coupled with stupidity—enough to make Achamian wince. “Aside from thinking the God Himself stirred him, why do you think he marched?”
“Because he knew once Proyas arrived, he’d be little more than a fawning lapdog. He’s never forgiven Proyas for the incident at Paremti.”
“The Battle of Paremti? What happened?”

Other books

The Stolen Da Vinci Manuscripts by Joshua Elliot James
Realm of the Goddess by Sabina Khan
The Syme Papers by Benjamin Markovits
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
La sanguijuela de mi niña by Christopher Moore
Darkness In The Flames by Kelly, Sahara
Adella's Enemy by Nelson, Jacqui