The Darkness that Comes Before (72 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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“To better understand him?”
“No,” the man replied with an eye-twinkling shrug. “Because then you’re a day away and you have his horse . . .”
Achamian ruefully shook his head and grinned, and after a moment, all three of them burst out laughing.
I like this man. What if he is who he claims to be?
As their laughter trailed, Kellhus introduced him to the woman, Serwë, and bid him welcome. Achamian sat cross-legged on the far side of the fire.
Achamian rarely entered situations like this with a definite plan. He usually came with a handful of curiosities and little more. In the process of giving breath to these curiosities he would ask questions, and in the answers he received he would find himself looking for certain cues, certain telltale signs of word and expression. He would never know exactly what he was looking for, only that he was looking. When he found whatever it was, he trusted that he would know. A good spy always knew.
The inadequacy of this method, however, became apparent from the outset. Never before had he met a man quite like Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
There was his voice, which always seemed pitched to the timbre of a promise. At times, Achamian actually found himself straining to listen, not because the man murmured, or because his accent was prohibitive—he displayed a remarkable fluency given his recent arrival—but because his voice had dimension. It seemed to whisper:
There’s more that I’m telling you . . . Only listen and see.
And there was his face, the frank drama of its expression. There was an innocence about it, a brevity of display possessed only by the young—though in no way did it strike Achamian as naive. The man appeared wise, amused, and sorrowful by guileless turns, as though he experienced his passions and the passions of others with a startling immediacy.
And then there were his eyes, shining soft in the firelight, blue like water that makes one thirst. They were eyes that followed Achamian’s every word, as though no amount of attentiveness could do justice to the importance of what he said. And yet, at the same time they were haunted by a strange reserve—not the reserve of men who make judgements they dare not speak, like Proyas, but the reserve of a man who dwells in the certainty that it’s not his place to judge.
More than anything, though, it was what the man said that stirred Achamian to awe.
“And why have you joined the Holy War?” Achamian asked, trying to convince himself he still thought the man’s answer to Proyas fraudulent.
“You’re referring to the dreams,” Kellhus replied.
“I suppose I am.”
For a brief moment, the Prince of Atrithau regarded him paternally, almost sorrowfully, as though Achamian had yet to understand the rules of this encounter.
“Life had been an endless reverie for me before the dreams,” he explained. “Itself a dream, perhaps . . . The dream you ask about—the dream of the Holy War—was a dream that
awakens
. A dream that
makes
a dream of one’s prior life. What does one do when he has such dreams?” he asked. “Go back to sleep?”
Achamian shared his smile. “Could you?”
“Go back to sleep? No. Never. Not even if I wanted to. Sleep is never had through wanting. It can’t be grasped like an apple to sate one’s hunger. Sleep is like ignorance or forgetfulness . . . The harder one strives for such things, the further they recede from one’s grasp.”
“Like love,” Achamian added.
“Yes, like love,” Kellhus said softly, glancing at Serwë for a brief instant. “And why have you, a sorcerer, joined the Holy War?”
This question caught Achamian off guard. He found himself answering more openly than he’d intended.
“I don’t know why . . . Because I’ve been directed by my School, I suppose.”
Kellhus smiled gently, as though recognizing a shared pain. “But what’s your purpose here?”
Achamian bit his lip but did not flinch from the humiliating truth otherwise. “We search for an ancient and implacable evil,” he said slowly, with the resentment of men who are often ridiculed. “An evil that we haven’t been able to find for more than three hundred years. And yet night after night we’re afflicted by dreams of the horrors that evil once wrought.”
Kellhus nodded, as though even this mad admission found some precedent in his own life. “It’s difficult, is it not, to search for those things we cannot see?”
These words filled Achamian with an unaccountable sorrow.
“Yes . . . Very difficult.”
“Perhaps, Achamian, we’re not so different, you and I.”
“How do you mean?”
But Kellhus did not answer. He did not need to. The man had sensed his earlier incredulity, Achamian realized, and had answered it by showing him the irony of one man anguished by dreams denying another man the rapture of his. Suddenly, Achamian found himself believing the man’s story. How could he believe in himself otherwise?
Despite these moments of subtle instruction, Achamian realized the man’s discourse and manner knew absolutely nothing of edict. Their conversation was devoid of the intangible rivalries that hung like an odour, sometimes sweet but mostly sour, about the exchanges of other men. Because of this, their talk possessed the character of a voyage. At times they laughed, and other times they fell silent, stilled by the gravity of their themes. And these moments were like waystations, small shrines by which to orient a greater pilgrimage.
This man, Achamian realized, was not interested in convincing him of anything. Certainly, there were things he wished to show him, things he hoped to share, but each was offered within the frame of a common understanding:
Let us be moved, you and I, by the things themselves. Let us discover each other.
Before coming to their fire, Achamian had been prepared to be very suspicious, even bitterly critical, of anything the man might say. The Ancient North was now home to countless tribes of Sranc, its great cities—Trysë, Sauglish, Myclai, Kelmeöl, and the others—all gutted ruin, two thousand years dead. And where Sranc ranged, no Men could go. The Ancient North was dark to the Mandate. Inscrutable. And Atrithau was a lone beacon in that darkness, frail before the long, hoary shadow of Golgotterath. A single light held against the black heart of the Consult.
Centuries past, when the Consult still skirmished openly with the Mandate, Atyersus had maintained a mission in Atrithau. But the mission had gone silent centuries ago, shortly before the Consult itself withdrew into obscurity. Periodically, they’d sent expeditions north to investigate, but they invariably failed, either turned back by the Galeoth, who were exceedingly jealous of the northern caravan route, or vanishing into the vast Istyuli Plains, never to be seen again.
As a result, the Mandate knew very little of Atrithau, only what could be gleaned from the traders who managed to survive the great circuit from Atrithau to Galeoth. And hence Achamian knew he would be utterly captive to the facts as Kellhus portrayed them. He would have no way of knowing whether he spoke truthfully—no way of knowing whether he was a prince of anything at all.
And yet, Anasûrimbor Kellhus was a man who moved the souls of those around him. Speaking with him, Achamian found himself arriving at insights he would scarcely have had otherwise, finding answers to curiosities he’d never before dared admit—as though his very soul had been at once quickened and opened. According to the commentaries, the philosopher Ajencis had been such a man. And how could a man like Ajencis lie? It was as though Kellhus were himself a living revelation. An exemplar of Truth.
Achamian found himself trusting him—trusting, despite a thousand years of suspicion.
The night waxed, and the fire burned perilously low. Serwë, who had said very little, lay asleep with her head upon Kellhus’s lap. Her sleeping face stirred a wan loneliness within Achamian.
“Do you love her?” Achamian asked.
Kellhus smiled ruefully. “Yes . . . I need her.”
“She worships you, you know. I can tell by the way she watches you.”
But this seemed to sadden Kellhus. His face darkened. “I know,” he said at length. “For some reason, she makes more of me than I am . . . Others do this as well.”
“Perhaps,” Achamian said with a smile that felt curiously false, “they know something you don’t.”
Kellhus shrugged. “Perhaps.” He looked at Achamian earnestly. Then, with a pained voice, he added, “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“And what’s that?”
“Here you possess privileged knowledge, and yet no one believes you, while I possess nothing, and everyone insists that I have privileged knowledge.”
And Achamian could only think,
But do you believe me?
“How do you mean?” he asked.
Kellhus looked at him pensively. “This afternoon a man fell to his knees before me and
kissed
the hem of my robe.” He laughed then, as though still astonished by the sad absurdity of the act.
“Your dream,” Achamian said matter-of-factly. “He thinks that the Gods move you.”
“I assure you, they haven’t moved me otherwise.”
Achamian doubted this and for a moment found himself frightened.
Who is this man?
They sat silently for a while. Distant shouts sounded from somewhere in the surrounding encampment. Drunks.
“Dog!” someone bellowed.
“Dog!”
“I do believe you, you know,” Kellhus said at last.
Achamian’s heart fluttered, but he said nothing.
“I believe in your School’s mission.”
It was Achamian’s turn to shrug. “That makes two of you.”
Kellhus chuckled. “And who, may I ask, is my gullible companion?”
“A woman. Esmenet. A prostitute whom I’ve known from time to time.” Achamian could not help glancing at Serwë as he said this.
Not as beautiful as this woman, but beautiful nonetheless.
Kellhus had been watching him closely. “She’s a beautiful woman, I imagine.”
“She’s a prostitute,” Achamian replied, yet again unnerved by his ability to speak his thoughts.
Achamian blamed the silence that followed on these sour words. He repented them but could not take them back. He looked to Kellhus, his eyes apologetic.
But the matter had already been forgiven and forgotten. The silences between men are always fraught with uncomfortable significance—accusations, hesitations, judgements of who is weak and who is strong—but silences with this man undid rather than sealed these things. The silence of Anasûrimbor Kellhus said,
Let us move on, you and I, and recall these things at a better time.
“There’s something,” Kellhus said at length, “I would ask of you, Achamian, but I fear that our acquaintance is too slight.”
Such honesty. If only I could follow.
“All one can do, Kellhus, is ask.”
The man smiled and nodded. “You’re a teacher, and I’m an ignorant stranger in a bewildering land . . . Would you consent to teach me?”
With these words, a hundred questions assailed Achamian, but he found himself saying, “I would consider myself fortunate, Kellhus, to count an Anasûrimbor among my students.”
Kellhus grinned. “It’s agreed, then. I count you, Drusas Achamian, my first friend amid this wonder.”
These words aroused an odd shyness in Achamian, and he found himself relieved when Kellhus stirred Serwë and told her they were about to retire.
Afterward, negotiating the dark canvas alleys leading to his own tent, Achamian experienced a strange euphoria. Though the increments of such things have no measure, he felt subtly transformed by his encounter with Kellhus, as though he’d been shown a much-needed example of something profoundly human. An example of life’s own proper pose.
Lying awake in his humble tent, he dreaded sleep. The prospect of suffering the nightmares yet again seemed unbearable. Insight, he knew, was as often snuffed as kindled by trauma.
When slumber at last overcame him, he dreamed anew of the disaster on the Fields of Eleneöt, of the death of Anasûrimbor Celmomas II beneath Sranc hammers. And when he awoke gasping for sober air, the voice of the dying High King—so similar to Kellhus’s own!—resounded through his soul, overwhelmed his heart’s rhythm with its prophetic cadences.
One of my seed will return, Seswatha—an Anasûrimbor will return . . .
. . . at the end of the world.
But what did this mean? Was Anasûrimbor Kellhus in fact a
sign,
as Proyas hoped? A sign not of the God’s divine sanction of the Holy War, as Proyas assumed, but of the No-God’s imminent return?
. . . the end of the world.
Achamian began trembling, shaking with a horror he’d never before experienced while awake.
The No-God returning? Please, sweet Sejenus, let me die before—
It was unthinkable! He hugged his shoulders and rocked in the blackness of his tent, whispering, “No!” Over and over again,
“No!”

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