The Darkness that Comes Before (65 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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Cnaiür turned to her, and though his expression was lost in the darkness, she could sense his outrage. Scylvendi tribesmen did not brook shrewish women.
“The only way we could use this to our advantage,” he replied, his fury scarcely bridled, “is by striking through the forest. They would continue ahead, perhaps lose our trail altogether, but by sunrise they would realize their mistake. Then they would be forced to backtrack—but not
all of them
would do so. They know we are bent on travelling east, and they would know they were now ahead of us. They would send word ahead of our coming, and we would be doomed. Our only hope is to outrun them, understand?”
“She understands, plainsman,” Kellhus replied.
Leading their horses on foot, they continued. Kellhus guided them now, unerringly taking advantage of every stretch of open ground, so that at times Serwë found herself running. Several times she fell, tripping over something unseen, yet she always managed to recover herself before the Scylvendi could upbraid her. She was perpetually winded, her lungs burning, a cramp periodically knifing into her side. She was bruised, scraped, and so exhausted that her legs wobbled whenever she stood still. But there was no question of stopping, not so long as the string of torches prickled in the distance.
Eventually the river turned, cascading over a series of stone shelves. Under the starlight, Serwë glimpsed a great body of water ahead of them.
“The River Phayus,” Cnaiür said. “Very soon, we will ride, Serwë.”
Rather than follow the tributary to the Phayus, they veered to the right and plunged into the blackness of the forest interior. For the first while, Serwë could see almost nothing, and she felt as though she followed a train of sounds through a nightmarish tunnel of blackness jostling with blackness. Cracking twigs. Snorting horses. The periodic stamping of hoofs. But gradually, a pallid twilight began etching details from the gloom: slender trunks, deadfalls, the mosaic of leaves across the forest floor. The Scylvendi had spoken true, she realized. The wood was growing thinner.
As dawn gathered on the eastern horizon, Cnaiür called them to a halt. Clutched in the roots of an upturned tree, a great disc of earth reared above him. “Now we ride,” he said. “We ride hard.”
At last she was off her feet, but her relief was short-lived. With Cnaiür ahead and Kellhus in the rear, they barrelled through the brush. As the forest thinned, the latticed confusion of the canopy descended, until it seemed they raced through it, lashed by innumerable branches. Through the staccato thud of hoofs, she heard the swell of morning birdsong.
They broke from the oppressive brush and across the pastures at a gallop. Serwë cried out and laughed aloud, exhilarated by the sudden rush over open ground. Cool air numbed her stinging face and combed her hair into streaming tails. Before them, the red orb of the sun crested the horizon, burnishing the purple distance with orange and magenta.
The pastures gradually gave way to cultivated land, until the distances were thatched with young wheat, barley, and millet fields. They skirted small agrarian villages and the vast plantations that belonged to the Houses of the Congregate. As a concubine indentured to House Gaunum, Serwë had been sequestered in similar villas, and as she stared at the rambling compounds, the roofs tiled in red clay, and the rows of spearlike junipers, she was troubled that something once so familiar could become so threatening and strange.
The slaves lifted their heads from the fields and watched them gallop along the dusty byways. Teamsters cursed them as they thundered past. Women dropped their burdens and yanked astonished children out of harm’s way. What did these people think? Serwë wondered, her thoughts drunk with fatigue. What did they see?
Daring fugitives, she decided. A man whose harsh face reminded them of Scylvendi terror. Another man, whose blue eyes plumbed them in the haste of a single glance. And a beautiful woman, her long blonde hair askew—the prize these men would deny their unseen pursuers.
By late afternoon, they urged their lathered horses to the summit of a stony hill, where the Scylvendi at last allowed them a momentary respite. Serwë nearly toppled from her saddle. She fell to the turf and stretched through the grasses, her ears ringing, the ground slowly wheeling beneath her. For a time, all she could do was breathe. Then she heard the Scylvendi curse.
“Tenacious bastards,” he spat. “Whoever leads those men is as canny as he is stubborn.”
“What should we do?” Kellhus asked, and the question somehow disappointed her.
You know. You always know. Why do you cater to him?
She struggled to her feet, amazed that her limbs could so quickly stiffen, and then followed their gazes to the horizon. Beneath the rose sun she glimpsed a small veil of dust trailing toward the river, but little more.
“How many?” Cnaiür asked Kellhus.
“The same as before . . . sixty-eight. Although they now ride different horses.”
“Different horses,” Cnaiür repeated dryly, as though as disgusted by what this meant as by Kellhus’s ability to draw such conclusions. “They must have seized them somewhere on the way.”
“You failed to anticipate this?”
“Sixty-eight,” Cnaiür said, ignoring his question. “Too many?” he asked, staring hard at Kellhus.
“Too many.”
“Even if we attack at night?”
Kellhus nodded, his eyes strangely unfocused. “Perhaps,” he replied at length, “but only if all other alternatives have been exhausted.”
“What alternatives?” Cnaiür asked. “What . . . should we do?”
Serwë glimpsed a curious anguish in his expression.
Why does it trouble him so? Can’t he see we’re meant to follow?
“We’ve gained some ground on them,” Kellhus said firmly. “We continue riding.”
With Kellhus in the lead, they wound into the shadow of the hill, slowly gathering speed. They scattered a small herd of sheep, then pressed their long-suffering horses harder than ever before.
Hurtling across the pasture, Serwë felt the ache seep from her jerking limbs. They outran the hill’s shadow, and the evening sun fell warm upon her back. She urged her horse faster and pulled even with Kellhus, flashing him a fierce grin. He made her laugh with a funny face: eyes shocked at her audacity, brows pinched in indignant outrage. With the Scylvendi behind them, they galloped side by side, laughing at their hapless pursuers, until the evening passed into twilight and the distant fields were rinsed of all colour save grey. They had, she thought, outdistanced the very sun.
Abruptly her horse—her prize for having killed the scarred man—faltered mid-stride, throwing its head back with a grunting shriek. She could almost feel its heart burst . . . Then exploding ground, grass and dirt between her teeth, and throbbing silence.
The sound of approaching hoofs.
“Leave her!” she heard the Scylvendi bark. “They want us, not her. She’s stolen property to them, a pretty bauble.”
“I will not.”
“This is not like you, Dûnyain . . . Not like you at all.”
“Perhaps,” she heard Kellhus say, his voice now very close and very gentle. Hands cupped her cheeks.
Kellhus . . . No blue babies.
No blue babies, Serwë. Our child will be pink and alive.
“But she’ll be safer—”
Darkness, and dreams of a great, shadowy race across heathen lands.
 
Floating.
Where’s the knife?
Serwë awoke gasping for breath, the whole world rushing and bucking beneath her. Hair whisked and fluttered in her face, stinging her eyes. She smelled vomit.
“This way!” she heard the Scylvendi shout over chopping hoofs, his voice impatient, even urgent. “The crest of that hill!”
A man’s strong back and shoulders were crushed against her breasts and cheek. Her arms were wrapped impossibly tight around his torso, and her hands . . . She couldn’t feel her hands! But she could feel rope chafing at her wrists. She was tied! Trussed to the back of a man. To Kellhus.
What was happening?
She lifted her head, felt knives probe the back of her eyes. Headless pillars flashed by, and the dancing line of an amputated wall. Ruins of some kind, and beyond, the dark avenues of an olive grove. Olive groves? Had they come so far already?
She looked back and was surprised by the absence of their riderless horses. Then, through thin skirts of dust, she saw a large cohort of horsemen darkening the near distance. The Kidruhil, hard faces intent on the chase, longswords waving and flashing beneath the sun.
They spilled around and through the ruined temple.
She felt a giddy sense of weightlessness, then slammed into Kellhus’s back. The horse began kicking upward across a steep incline. She glimpsed the chalky remnants of a wall behind them.
“Fuck!” she heard the Scylvendi roar. Then: “Kellhus! You see them?”
Kellhus said nothing, but his back arched and his right arm jerked up as he heaved the horse in a different direction. She glimpsed his bearded profile as he glanced to his left.
“Who are they?” he called.
And Serwë saw another surge of horsemen, more distant but sweeping toward them across the same slope. Kellhus’s horse yanked them at a tangent up the incline, kicking up gravel and dust.
She looked back to the Kidruhil below and watched them leap the ruined wall in staggered ranks. Then she saw another party, three horsemen, erupt from a stand of trees then veer to intercept them on their way up the hill.
“Kellllhuuss!” she cried, struggling against the ropes to secure his attention.
“Still, Serwë! Sit still!”
One of the Kidruhil toppled from his mount, clutching an arrow shaft in his chest. The Scylvendi, Serwë realized, remembering the doe he’d killed. Without pause, however, the other two galloped passed their fallen comrade.
The first reined parallel to them, raised a javelin. The slope levelled and the horses gathered speed. The Kidruhil hurled the shaft across the mottled blur of ground and grasses.
Serwë winced.
But somehow Kellhus reached out and seized it from the air—as though it were a plum hanging from a tree. In a single motion, he twirled the javelin and flung it back, where it punctured the man’s astonished face. For a grisly moment Serwë watched the man teeter in his saddle, then slump to the rushing ground.
The other simply took his place, reining closer as though intending to ram them, his longsword raised to strike. For an instant, Serwë met his eyes, bright against his dusty face, mad with murderous determination. Baring clenched teeth, he struck—
Kellhus’s blow snapped through his body like the bowstring of some great siege engine. His sword flickered across the intervening space. Dropping his weapon, the Kidruhil glanced down. Bowel and bloody slop gushed across his pommel and thighs. His horse shied away and cantered to a halt.
Then they were pounding down the far side of the summit, and the ground disappeared.
Their horse shrieked and stumbled to a gravelly stop behind Cnaiür’s mount. Before them yawned a steep drop, nearly three times the height of the trees that crowded its base. Not sheer, but far too steep for horses. A patchwork of dark groves and fields stretched into the hazy distance beyond.
“Along the crest,” the Scylvendi spat, yanking his horse about. But he paused when Kellhus’s mount screamed once again. Before Serwë knew what was happening, her arms had been cut free and Kellhus had vaulted to the ground. He hoisted her from the saddle and steadied her as she struggled to find her legs. “We’re going to slide down, Serwë. Can you do that?”
She thought she would vomit. “But I can’t feel my han—”
Just then the first of the Kidruhil leapt over the summit.
“Go!” Kellhus shouted, almost shoving her over the rounded edge. The dusty earth broke beneath her feet and she began skidding down, but her screams were drowned by shrieks. A horse tumbled and thrashed in an avalanche of dust beside her. Clawing, scraping with fingers she could barely feel, she brought herself to a stop. The horse continued falling.

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