The Darkness that Comes Before (59 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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He dropped the broken man to the ground.
A shameful death. A fitting death. Panteruth urs Mutkius would not return to the land.
 
From a distance, Kellhus watched Cnaiür retrieve his sword. The plainsman walked toward him, picking his way with strange care among the bodies. His eyes were wild, bright beneath an overcast sky.
He’s mad.
“There are others,” Kellhus said. “Chained together on the path below. Women.”
“Our prize,” Cnaiür said, avoiding the monk’s scrutiny. He walked past Kellhus toward the sound of wailing.
 
Standing with her chained wrists before her, Serwë cried out as the figure neared them.
“Pleease!”
The others shrieked when they realized it was a Scylvendi who walked toward them, a
different
Scylvendi—more brutal, dark through tear-lashed eyes. They huddled behind Serwë, as far away as the chains would allow them.
“Pleeaase!”
Serwë cried again as the great towering figure approached, drenched in the blood of his kinsmen.
“You must save us!”
But then she glimpsed the man’s merciless eyes.
The Scylvendi slapped her to the ground.
 
“What will you do with her?” Kellhus asked, staring at the woman who huddled across the fire.
“Keep her,” Cnaiür said, tearing off another mouthful of horse flesh from the rib he held in his hands. “We’ve done bloody work,” he continued, chewing. “Now she’s my prize.”
There’s more. He fears . . . Fears to travel alone with me.
Abruptly, the plainsman stood, tossed the shining rib into the fire, then came to a crouch next to the woman. “Such a beauty,” he said almost absently. The woman shrank from his outstretched hand. Her chains rattled. He caught her, smearing grease on her cheek.
She reminds him of someone. One of his wives . . .
Anissi, the only one he dares love.
Kellhus watched while the Scylvendi took her again. With her whimpers, her suffocated cries, it seemed the ground beneath slowly spun, as though stars had stopped their cycle and the earth had begun to wheel instead. There was something . . . something
here,
he could sense. Something outraged.
From what darkness had this come?
Something is happening to me, Father.
Afterward, the Scylvendi pulled her to her knees before him. He cupped her lovely face in his palm, turned it in the firelight. He ran thick fingers through her golden hair. He muttered to her in an incomprehensible language. Kellhus watched the swollen eyes lift to the Scylvendi, terrified that she had comprehended. He growled something else, and she winced beneath the hand that held her.
“Kufa . . . Kufa,”
she gasped. She began to cry again.
More harsh questions, to which she replied with the shyness of the beaten, glancing up to the cruel face and down again. Kellhus looked through her expression and into her soul.
She had suffered much, he realized, so much that she’d long ago learned to hide hatred and resolution beneath abject terror. Her eyes found his, momentarily, then flashed to the darkness around him.
She wants to be certain we are only two
.
The Scylvendi clamped her head between two scarred hands. More incomprehensible words in a guttural voice thick with threat. He let her go, and she nodded. Her blue eyes glittered in the shining fire. The Scylvendi withdrew a small knife from his leggings and began prying at the soft iron of her manacles. After several moments, the chains clattered to the earth. She rubbed her bruised wrists. Glanced at Kellhus again.
Does she have the courage?
The Scylvendi left her and returned to his place before the fire—next to Kellhus. He’d stopped sitting across from him some time ago: to prevent him, Kellhus knew, from reading his face.
“You’ve freed her, then?” Kellhus asked, knowing this was not the case.
“No. She bears different chains now.” After a moment he added, “Women are easy to break.”
He does not believe this.
“What language did you speak?” A genuine question.
“Sheyic. The language of the Empire. She was a Nansur concubine until the Munuäti took her.”
“What did you ask her?”
The Scylvendi looked at him sharply. Kellhus watched the small drama of his expression—a squall of significances. Remembered hatred, but a previous resolution remembered as well. Cnaiür had already decided how to handle this moment.
“I asked her about the Nansurium,” he said finally. “There’s a great movement in the Empire—in the whole Three Seas. A new Shriah rules the Thousand Temples. There’s to be a Holy War.”
She did not tell him this; she confirmed it. He knew this before.
“A Holy War . . . Waged against whom?”
The Scylvendi attempted to gauge him, to sound the quizzical mask he wore as a face. Kellhus had grown increasingly troubled by the shrewdness of the Scylvendi’s unspoken guesses. The man even knew he intended to kill him . . .
Then something strange came across Cnaiür’s expression. A realization of some sort, followed by a look of supernatural dread, the sources of which eluded Kellhus.
“The Inrithi gather to punish the Fanim,” Cnaiür said. “To retake their lost holy lands.” Faint disgust coloured his tone. As though a
place
could be holy. “To retake Shimeh.”
Shimeh . . . My father’s house.
Another groove. Another correspondence of cause. The implications for the mission bloomed through his intellect.
Is this why you’ve summoned me, Father? For holy war?
The Scylvendi had turned, turned to look at the woman across the fire.
“What’s her name?” Kellhus asked.
“I didn’t ask,” Cnaiür replied, reaching for more horsemeat.
 
Her limbs sketched by a glowing bed of coals, Serwë clasped the knife the men had used to butcher the horse. Quietly, she clambered over to the sleeping form of the Scylvendi. The man slumbered, breathing evenly. She raised the knife to the moon, her fists shaking. She hesitated . . . remembering his grip, his look.
Those insane eyes had stared through her as though she were glass, transparent to his hunger.
And his voice! Grating, elemental words:
“If you leave, I will
hunt
you, girl. As sure as the earth, I will
find
you . . . Hurt you as you have never been hurt.”
Serwë clamped shut her eyes.
Strike-strike-strike-strike!
The steel dipped . . .
Was stilled by a callused hand.
A second hand clamped across her mouth, stifled the scream.
Through her tears she saw the silhouette of the second, bearded man. The Norsirai. The head slowly shook from side to side.
There was a pinch, and the knife fell from her senseless fingers, was caught before it fell upon the Scylvendi. She felt herself lifted, pulled back to the far side of the smouldering firepit.
In the light, she could discern his features. Sad, tender even. He shook his head once again, his dark eyes brimming with concern . . . even vulnerability. He lifted his hand from her lips slowly, then brought it to his chest.
“Kellhus,”
he whispered, then nodded.
She gathered her hands, stared at him wordlessly.
“Serwë,”
she replied at last, in a tone as hushed as his own. Burning tears streamed down her cheeks.
“Serwë,”
he repeated—gently. He reached out a hand to touch her but hesitated, drew it back to his lap. For a moment he fumbled in the dark behind him, eventually producing a blanket of wool still warm from the fire.
Dumbstruck, she took it from him, held by the faint glitter of the moon in his eyes. He turned away and stretched back out across his mat.
In the midst of quiet, anguished sobs, she fell asleep.
 
Dread.
Tyrannizing her days. Stalking her sleep. Dread that made her thoughts skitter, flit from terror to terror, that made her bowels quail, her hands perpetually shake, her face utterly slack for fear that one crimped muscle might cause the whole to collapse.
First with the Munuäti and now with this far darker, far more threatening Scylvendi, with limbs like roots cramped about stone, with words like rolling thunder, with eyes like glacial murder. Instant obedience, even to those whims he did not speak. Stinging retribution, even for those things she did not do. Punishment for her breathing, for her blood, for her beauty, for nothing.

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