The Darkness that Comes Before (62 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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If you loved me.
“Do you believe me?” he demanded of the Scylvendi.
The Scylvendi stared at him with dull shock, as though bewildered by the absence of his wrath. He pushed himself to unsteady feet.
“Shut up,” he said to Serwë, though he could not look away from Kellhus.
Serwë continued wailing, crying out to Kellhus.
Cnaiür’s eyes clicked from Kellhus to his prize. He strode toward her, struck her silent with an open palm. “I said
shut up!
”
“Do you believe me?” Kellhus asked again.
Serwë whimpered, struggled to swallow her sobs.
So much sorrow.
“I believe you,” Cnaiür said, momentarily unable to match his gaze. He stared at Serwë instead.
Kellhus had already known this would be his answer, but there was a great difference between knowing an admission and exacting it.
Yet when the Scylvendi at last looked at him, the old fury animated his eyes, burning with almost carnal intensity. If Kellhus had assumed as much earlier, he now knew with utter certainty: the Scylvendi was insane.
“I believe you
think
you need me, Dûnyain. For now.”
“What do you mean?” Kellhus asked, genuinely perplexed.
He’s becoming more erratic
.
“You plan on joining this Holy War. On using it to travel to Shimeh.”
“I see no other way.”
“But for all your talk of needing, you forget I’m a heathen to the Inrithi,” Cnaiür said, “little removed from the Fanim they hope to slaughter.”
“Then you’re a heathen no more.”
“A convert?” Cnaiür snorted incredulously.
“No. A man who’s awakened from his barbarity. A survivor of Kiyuth who’s lost faith in the ways of his kinsmen. Remember, like all peoples, the Inrithi think
they
are the chosen ones, the pinnacle of what it means to be upright men. Lies that flatter are rarely disbelieved.”
The extent of his knowledge, Kellhus could see, alarmed the Scylvendi. The man had tried to secure his position by keeping him ignorant of the Three Seas. Kellhus tracked the inferences that animated his scowl, watched him glance at Serwë . . . But there were more pressing matters.
“The Nansur will care nothing for such stories,” Cnaiür said. “They’ll see only the scars upon my arms.”
The sources of this resistance eluded Kellhus. Did the man
not
want to find and kill Moënghus?
How can he still be a mystery to me?
Kellhus nodded, but in a shrugging manner that dismissed even as it acknowledged objections. “Serwë says peoples from across the Three Seas gather in the Empire. We’ll join them and avoid the Nansur.”
“Perhaps . . .” Cnaiür said slowly. “If we can make it to Momemn without being challenged.” But then he shook his head. “No. Scylvendi don’t wander. The sight of me will provoke too many questions, too much outrage. You have no inkling of how much they despise us, Dûnyain.”
There was no mistaking the despair. Some part of the man, Kellhus realized, had abandoned hope of finding Moënghus. How could he have missed this?
But the more important question was whether the Scylvendi spoke true. Would it be impossible to cross the Empire with Cnaiür? If so, he would have to—
No. Everything depended on the domination of circumstance. He would not join the Holy War, he would seize it, wield it as his instrument. But as with any new weapon, he needed instruction, training. And the chances of finding another with as much experience and insight as Cnaiür urs Skiötha were negligible.
They call him the most violent of all men.
If the man knew too much, Kellhus did not know enough—at least not yet. Whatever the dangers of crossing the Empire, it was worth the attempt. If the difficulties proved insurmountable, then he would reassess.
“When they ask,” Kellhus replied, “the disaster at Kiyuth will be your explanation. Those few Utemot who survived Ikurei Conphas were overcome by their neighbours. You’ll be the last of your tribe. A dispossessed man, driven from his country by woe and misfortune.”
“And who will you be, Dûnyain?”
Kellhus had spent many hours wrestling with this question.
“I’ll be your reason for joining the Holy War. I’ll be a prince you encountered travelling south over your lost lands. A prince who’s dreamed of Shimeh from the far side of the world. The men of the Three Seas know little of Atrithau, save that it survived their mythic Apocalypse. We shall come to them out of the darkness, Scylvendi. We’ll be whoever we say we are.”
“A prince . . .” Cnaiür repeated dubiously. “From where?”
“A prince of Atrithau, whom you found travelling the northern wastes.”
Though Cnaiür now understood, even appreciated, the path laid for him, Kellhus knew that the debate raged within him still. How much would the man bear to see his father’s death avenged?
The Utemot chieftain wiped a bare forearm across his mouth and nose. He spat blood. “A prince of nothing,” he said.
 
In the morning light, Kellhus watched the Scylvendi ride up to the pole. Perched high on it was a skull, still leathered by skin and framed by a shock of dark, woolly hair. Scylvendi hair. Some distance away to either side rose further poles—further Scylvendi heads, planted the distance prescribed by Conphas’s mathematicians. So many miles, so many Scylvendi heads.
Kellhus turned in his saddle to Serwë, who stared at him searchingly.
“They will kill him if we’re found,” she said. “Doesn’t he know this?” Her tone said:
We don’t need him, my love. You can kill him
. Kellhus could see the scenarios brimming behind her eyes. The shrill cry she had crafted over the days, poised for their first encounter with Nansur pickets.
“You mustn’t betray us, Serwë,” Kellhus replied sternly, like a Nymbricani father to his daughter.
The beautiful face slackened, shocked. “I would never betray
you,
Kellhus,” she blurted. “You must know—”
“I know that you wonder what binds me to this Scylvendi, Serwë. This isn’t for you to understand. Know only that if you betray him, you betray
me
.”
“Kellhus, I . . .” The shock had transformed to hurt, to tears.
“You
must
suffer him, Serwë.”
She turned away from his terrible eyes, began weeping. “For
you?
” she spat bitterly.
“I am only the promise.”
“Promise?” she cried. “
Whose
promise?”
But Cnaiür had returned, riding around them to their small train of horses. He smiled wryly when he noticed Serwë crying.
“Hold tight this moment, woman,” he said in Sheyic. “It will be your only measure of this man.” His laughter was harsh.
He leaned from his pony and began rooting through one of the packs. He withdrew a stained woollen shirt and stripped to the waist. The shirt did little to conceal his brutal heritage, but at least it covered the scars. The Nansur would not take kindly to such records.
The plainsman gestured to the thin file of poles. They followed the contour of the land, some leaning, others straight, lowering into the horizon and leading away from the Hethantas. Their grim burdens were turned away from them, toward the distant sea. The endless scrutiny of the dead.
“This is the way to Momemn,” he said and spat across trampled grasses.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 
THE KYRANAE PLAIN
 
Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say
they perpetually flee. What are the works of men if not a momentary
respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe?
Life is endless flight before the hunter we call the world.
—EKYANNUS VIII,
111 APHORISMS
 
Spring, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, the Nansur Empire
 
The warbling of a lone woodlark, like an aria against the rush of wind through the forest canopy.
Afternoon,
she thought.
The birds always snooze in the afternoon
.
Serwë’s eyes fluttered open, and for the first time in a long while, she felt at peace.
Beneath her cheek, Kellhus’s chest rose and fell to the rhythm of his sleep. She had tried to join him on his mat before, but he’d always resisted—to appease the Scylvendi, she had thought. But this morning, after a dark night of travel, he had relented. And now she savoured the press of his strong body against hers, the drowsy sense of sanctuary afforded by his sheltering arm.
Kellhus, do you know how much I love you?
Never had she known such a man. A man who
knew
her, and yet still loved.
For an idle moment, her eyes followed the rafters of the immense willow they slept beneath. Limbs arched against the depths of further limbs, parted like a woman’s legs, and then parted again, winding away into great skirts of leaves that bobbed and dipped beneath the sunlit wind. She could feel the soul of the great tree, brooding, sorrowful, and infinitely wise, the rooted witness of innumerable suns.
Serwë heard splashing.
Shirtless, the Scylvendi squatted at the river’s edge, cupping water in his left hand and gingerly rinsing the wound on his forearm. She watched him through the blur of lashes, feigning sleep. Scars hooked and creased his broad back, a second record to match the scars banding his arms.
As though aware of her scrutiny, the forest grew hushed, its silence coloured by the stern grandeur of trees. Even the solitary bird fell quiet, yielding to the slurp and trickle of Cnaiür’s bathing.
For perhaps the first time, she felt no fear of the Scylvendi. He looked lonely, she thought, even gentle. He lowered his head to the water and began rinsing his long black hair. The filmy surface of the river slowly passed before him, bearing twigs and bits of fluff. Near the far bank, she glimpsed the ripples of a water-bug skimming across the river’s glassy back.
Then she saw the boy on the far side.
At first she glimpsed only his face, half-hidden in the crook of a mossy deadfall. Then she saw slender limbs, as still as the branches screening them.
Do you have a mother?
she thought, but when she realized he watched the Scylvendi, a sudden terror struck her.
Go away! Run!
“Plainsman,” Kellhus said softly. Startled, the Scylvendi turned to him.
“Tus’afaro to gringmut t’yagga,”
Kellhus said. Serwë felt his nod brush the top of her head.
The Scylvendi followed his gaze and peered into the shadowy recesses of the far bank. For a breathless moment, the boy stared back at the plainsman.
“Come here, child,” Cnaiür said over the hushed water. “I’ve something to show you.”
The boy hesitated, both wary and curious.
No! You must run . . . Run!
“Come,” Cnaiür said, lifting his hand and motioning with his fingers. “You’re safe.”
The boy stood from behind his shield of fallen branches, tense, uncertain—
“Run!” Serwë cried.
The boy flickered into the wood, flashing between white sun and deep green shadow.
“Fucking wench!” Cnaiür snarled. He exploded across the waters, knife drawn. At the same instant, Kellhus was gone as well, rolling to his feet and ploughing through the Scylvendi’s wake.
“Kellhus!” she cried, watching him sprint beneath the far canopy. “Don’t let him kill him!”
But a sudden horror struck her breathless, an unaccountable certainty that Kellhus
also
meant the child harm.
You must suffer him, Serwë.
Her body still groggy, she stumbled to her feet and plunged into the dark water. Her bare feet skidded across the slick rocks, but she hurled herself forward, falling just short of the far bank. Then she was up, soaked in cold, running across gravel, lunging through brush into the sun-dappled gloom.

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