The Darkness that Comes Before (76 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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Eleäzaras had dismissed his slaves and now sat alone in a shaded portico overlooking the villa’s single courtyard. He studied Iyokus, his Master of Spies and closest adviser, as he made his pale way through the sunlit gardens. The man hurried, as though chased by the surrounding brilliance. Watching him move from sun to shadow was like witnessing dust blink into stone. Iyokus nodded as he approached his chair. His very presence often touched Eleäzaras with menace—something like glimpsing the first flush of plague in a man’s face. The smell of his old-fashioned perfumes, however, carried a strange sense of comfort.
“I have news from Sumna,” Iyokus said, pouring himself a silver bowl of wine from the table, “about Kutigha.”
Until recently, Kutigha had been their last surviving spy in the Thousand Temples—all the others had been executed. His handler had not heard from him in weeks.
“So you think he’s dead?” Eleäzaras asked sourly.
“Yes,” Iyokus replied.
After all these years, Eleäzaras had grown accustomed to Iyokus, but somewhere in his own body lurked a small memory of his initial revulsion. Iyokus was addicted to
chanv,
the drug that held a greater part of the Ainoni ruling castes within its clasp—except, and this thought often surprised Eleäzaras, for Chepheramunni, the latest puppet they had installed on the Ainoni throne. For those who could afford her sweet bite, chanv sharpened the mind and extended one’s life for periods greater than a hundred years, but it also sapped the body of its pigment and, some said, the soul of its will. Iyokus looked the same now as the day Eleäzaras had joined the School as a boy many, many years before. Unlike other addicts, Iyokus refused to use cosmetics to compensate for the deficits of his skin, which was more translucent than the greased linen that the poor used in their windows. Like dark, arthritic worms, veins branched across his features. One could even see the dark in the centre of his red eyes when he closed his lids. His fingernails were waxy black from bruising.
As Iyokus drew his chair to the table, a tiny sweat touched Eleäzaras, and he found himself glancing at the length of his own tanned arms. As thin as they were, they possessed wiry strength, vitality. Despite the disturbing aesthetics of addiction, Eleäzaras himself might have succumbed to the drug’s lure, particularly because of the way it reputedly sharpened the intellect. Perhaps the only aspect of chanv that had prevented him from slipping into that wan and strangely narcissistic love affair—addicts rarely married or produced live children—was the unsettling fact that no one knew its source. For Eleäzaras, this was intolerable. Throughout his vicious, steep climb to the pinnacle he’d now reached, he had always refused to act in ignorance of crucial facts.
Until this day.
“So we have no more sources in the Thousand Temples?” Eleäzaras asked, though he already knew the answer.
“None worth listening to . . . A shroud has fallen across Sumna.”
Eleäzaras glanced across the bright grounds—cobbled paths lined by spearlike junipers, a gigantic willow draped about a pool of glassy green, guards with falcon faces.
“What does this mean, Iyokus?” he asked.
I’ve delivered the greatest School in the Three Seas to its greatest peril.
“It means we must have
faith,
” Iyokus said with an air of shoulder-shrugging fatalism. “Faith in this Maithanet.”
“Faith? In someone we know nothing of?”
“That’s why it’s faith.”
The decision to join the Holy War had been the most difficult of Eleäzaras’s life. At first, upon receiving Maithanet’s invitation, he had wanted to laugh. The Scarlet Spires? Joining a Holy War? The prospect was too absurd to warrant even momentary consideration. Perhaps this is why Maithanet had included a gift of six Trinkets with his invitation. Trinkets were the one thing that a sorcerer could not laugh away.
This offer,
the Trinkets said,
demands serious consideration.
Then Eleäzaras had realized what it was that Maithanet truly offered them.
Vengeance.
“Then we must double our expenditures in Sumna, Iyokus. This is intolerable.”
“I agree. Faith
is
intolerable.”
A ten-year-old image of the man assailed Eleäzaras, sent faint tremors through his fingertips: Iyokus falling against him in the aftermath of the assassination, his skin blistered, streaked by blood, his mouth croaking the very words that had lashed through Eleäzaras’s soul ever since:
“How could they do this?”
It was uncanny the way certain days defied the passage of years, became virulent, and plagued the present as an undying yesterday. Even here, far from the Scarlet Spires and ten years on, Eleäzaras could still smell sweet roasted flesh—so much like swine left overlong on the spit. How long had it been since he’d last been able to stomach pork? How many times had he dreamt of that day?
Sasheoka had been Grandmaster then. They’d been meeting in the council chambers deep in the galleries beneath the Scarlet Spires, discussing the possible defection of one of their number to the Mysunsai School. The most sacrosanct chambers of the Scarlet Spires were nested in Wards. One could not step or lean against bare stone without feeling the indent of inscription or the aura of incantations. And yet the assassins had simply flickered into existence.
A strange noise, like the humming flutter of netted birds, and a light, as though a door had been thrown open across the surface of the sun, framing three figures. Three hellish silhouettes.
Shock, chilling bone and paralyzing thought, and then furniture and bodies were blown against the walls. Blinding ribbons of the purest white lashed across the corners of the room. Shrieks. Terror clawing through his bowels.
Sheltered by a hollow between the wall and an overturned table, Eleäzaras had crawled through his own blood to die—or so he thought. Some of his peers still survived. He glimpsed the instant that Sasheoka, his predecessor and teacher, crumpled beneath the blinding touch of the assassins. And Iyokus, on his knees, his pale head blackened by blood, swaying behind the shimmering of his Wards, struggling to reinforce them. Cataracts of light obscured him, and Eleäzaras, somehow unnoticed by the intruders, felt the words boil to his lips. He could see
them
—three men in saffron robes, two crouching, one erect, bathed in the incandescence of their exertions. He saw serene faces with the deep sockets of the blind, and energies wheeling from their foreheads as though through a window to the Outside. A golden phantom reared from Eleäzaras’s outstretched hands—a scaled neck, a mighty crest, jaws scissoring open. With a queen’s deliberate grace, the dragon’s head dipped and scourged the Cishaurim with fire. Eleäzaras had wept with rage. Their Wards collapsed. Stone cracked. The flesh was swept from their bones. Their agony had been too brief.
Then quiet. Strewn bodies. Sasheoka a sizzling ruin. Iyokus gasping on the floor. Nothing. They had sensed nothing. The onta had only been bruised by their own sorceries. It was as if the Cishaurim had never been. Iyokus stumbling toward him . . .
How could they do this?
The Cishaurim had started their long and secret war. Eleäzaras would end it.
Vengeance. This was the gift the Shriah of the Thousand Temples had offered them. The gift of their ancient enemy. A Holy War.
A perilous gift. It had occurred to Eleäzaras that the Holy War was in fact what the six Trinkets were symbolically. To give Chorae to a sorcerer was to give something that could not be taken, to make a gift of his death and impotence. By taking the vengeance proffered by Maithanet, Eleäzaras and the Scarlet Spires had given themselves to the Holy War. By seizing, Eleäzaras realized, he had surrendered. And now the Scarlet Spires, for the first time in its glorious history, found itself dependent upon the whims of other men.
“And what of our spies in the Imperial Precincts?” Eleäzaras asked. He loathed fear, so he would avoid discussing Maithanet if he could. “Have they discovered anything more of the Emperor’s plan?”
“Nothing . . . so far,” Iyokus replied dryly. “There’s a rumour, however, that Ikurei Conphas received a message from the Fanim shortly after the destruction of the Vulgar Holy War.”
“A message? Regarding what?”
“The Vulgar Holy War, presumably.”
“But what was its import? Was it an acknowledgement, a receipt for an agreed-upon transaction? Was it an admonition, a warning against any further action by the Holy War? Or a premature peace overture?
What was it?
”
“Any of those things,” Iyokus replied, “or perhaps all. We’ve no way of knowing.”
“Why send it to Ikurei Conphas?”
“For any number of reasons . . . He was, recall, the Sapatishah’s hostage for a time.”
“That boy, Conphas, he’s the one we must worry about.” Ikurei Conphas was intelligent, excessively so, which inevitably meant that he was unscrupulous as well. Another frightening thought:
He will be our general.
Holding the silver bowl in steepled fingers, Iyokus seemed to gaze at the small coin of wine in its bottom. “May I speak frankly, Grandmaster?” he asked at length.
“By all means.”
Emotion pooled in Iyokus’s face as readily as water in a sackcloth, but his apprehension was now plain. “The Scarlet Spires is degraded by all this . . .” he began uncomfortably. “We’ve become subordinates when our destiny is to rule. Abandon this Holy War, Eli. There’s too much uncertainty. Too many unknowns. We play number-sticks with our very lives.”
You too, Iyokus?
Eleäzaras felt coils of rage flex about his heart. The Cishaurim had planted a serpent within him those ten years ago, and it had grown fat on fear. He could feel it writhe within him, animate his hands with the womanish desire to scratch out Iyokus’s disconcerting eyes.
But he said only: “Patience, Iyokus. Knowing is always a matter of patience.”
“Yesterday, Grandmaster, you were almost killed by the very men we’re to march with . . . If that doesn’t demonstrate the absurdity of our position, then nothing does.”
He referred to the riot. What a fool he’d been to corner Drusas Achamian in such a place! All of it could have ended there—hundreds of pilgrims dead at the hands of a Grandmaster, the Scarlet Spires at open war with the Men of the Tusk—if it hadn’t been for the level head of the Mandate Schoolman. “Don’t do it, Eleäzaras!” the man had cried as the mobs surged toward them. “Think of your war against the Cishaurim!”
But there had been a threat in the slovenly man’s voice as well:
I won’t let you do it. I’ll stop you, and you know I can . . .
What perverse irony! For the threat—not the reason—had stayed his hand. The threat of the Gnosis! His designs had been saved by the lack of the very thing his School had coveted for generations.
How he despised the Mandate! All the Schools, even the Imperial Saik, recognized the ascendancy of the Scarlet Spires—save for the Mandate. And why should they when a mere field spy could cow their Grandmaster?
“The incident,” Eleäzaras replied, “merely demonstrates something we’ve always known, Iyokus. Our position in the Holy War is precarious, true, but all great designs require great sacrifices. When all this comes to fruition, when Shimeh is smoking ruin and the Cishaurim are extinct, the Mandate will be the only School left that can humble us.” An arcane empire—that would be the wages of his desperate labour.
“Which reminds me,” Iyokus said, “I received a missive from the Minister of Records in Carythusal. He went through all reports of the dead, as you directed. There
was
another, from years back.”
Another faceless corpse.
“Do we know who he was? What were the circumstances?”
“Half-rotted. Found in the delta. The man was unknown. Because five years have passed, we have little hope of determining his identity.”
The Mandate. Who would have guessed that they played such dark games? But what game? Yet another unknown.
“Perhaps,” Iyokus continued, “the Mandate has at long last put aside all that tripe about the Consult and the No-God.”
Eleäzaras nodded. “I agree. The Mandate now plays as we play, Iyokus. That man, Drusas Achamian, left little doubt of that . . .” Such a gifted liar! Eleäzaras had almost believed he knew nothing of Geshrunni’s death.
“If the Mandate is part of the game,” Iyokus said, “everything changes. Do you realize that? We can no longer count ourselves the first School of the Three Seas.”
“First we crush the Cishaurim, Iyokus. In the meantime, make certain that Drusas Achamian is watched.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
 
THE ANDIAMINE HEIGHTS
 
The event itself was unprecedented: not since the fall of Cenei to
the Scylvendi hordes had so many potentates gathered in one
place. But few knew Mankind itself lay upon the balance. And
who could guess that a brief exchange of glances, not the Shriah’s
edict, would tip that balance?

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