The Darkness that Comes Before (80 page)

Read The Darkness that Comes Before Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
2.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
The Logos is without beginning or. The Logos is without beginning or. The Logos is without beginning or. The Logos is without . . .
For a moment, he could taste blood on his split lips, but the sensation was slowly rinsed away by the ruthless litany. The inner cacophony faltered, trailed into deathlike silence. His body became an utter stranger, a disposable frame. And the movement of time itself, the pace of the before and after, transformed.
The shadows of the shrine’s pillars swept across the bare floor. Sunlight fell upon, then flickered from, his face. He wet and soiled himself, but there was no discomfort, no smell. And when the old Pragma stood and poured water across his lips, he was merely a smooth rock embedded in moss and gravel beneath a waterfall.
The sun skirted the pillars before him then lowered behind him, drawing his shadow across the lap of the Pragma and then amid the burnished trees, where it congregated with its kinsmen and bloated into night. Again and again, he witnessed the sun rise and topple, the momentary respite of night, and with each dawning the proposition was further dismembered. While the world quickened, the movement of his soul slowed.
Until he whispered only:
The Logos. The Logos. The Logos . . .
He was a hollow filled by echoes bereft of any authoring voice, each phrase a flawless reiteration of the preceding. He was a wayfarer through the abyssal gallery of mirror set against mirror, his every step as illusory as the last. Only sun and night marked his passage, and only then by narrowing the gap between mirrors to the impossible place where vanishing point threatened to kiss vanishing point—to the place where the soul fell utterly still.
When the sun reared yet again, his thoughts receded to a single word:
The. The. The. The . . .
And it seemed at once an absurd stutter and the most profound of thoughts, as though only in the absence of “Logos” could it settle into the rhythm of his heart muscling through moment after moment. Thought thinned and daylight swept through, over, and behind the shrine, until night pierced the shroud of the sky, until the heavens revolved like an infinite chariot wheel.
The. The . . .
A moving soul chained to the brink, to the exquisite moment before
something,
anything.
The
tree,
the
heart,
the
everything transformed into nothing by repetition, by the endless accumulation of the same refusal to
name
.
A corona of gold across the high slopes of the glacier.
. . . and then nothing.
No thought.
 
“The Empire welcomes you,” Xerius announced, his voice straining to be mild. He drew his gaze across the Great Names of the Men of the Tusk, lingering for a moment on the Scylvendi at Kellhus’s side. He smiled.
“Ah, yes,” he said, “our most extraordinary addition. The Scylvendi. They tell me that you’re a Chieftain of the Utemot. Is this so, Scylvendi?”
“It is so,” Cnaiür answered.
The Emperor measured this reply. He was in no mood, Kellhus could see, for the niceties of jnan. “I, too, have a Scylvendi,” he said. He bared his forearm from intricate sleeves and grasped the chain between his feet. He yanked it savagely, and the huddled Xunnurit raised his blinded, broken face to the onlookers. His naked body was skeletal, malnourished, and his limbs seemed to hang from different hinges, hinges that all turned in, away from the world. The long strips of swazond along his arms now seemed a measure more of the bones beneath than of his bloody past.
“Tell me,” the Emperor said, finding comfort in this petty brutality. “Of what tribe is this one?”
Cnaiür seemed unaffected. “This one was of the Akkunihor.”
“‘Was,’ you say? He’s dead to you, I suppose.”
“No. Not dead. He is nothing to me.”
The Emperor smiled as though warming to a small mystery, a suitable distraction from weightier matters. But Kellhus could see the machinations beneath, the confidence that he would show this savage to be an ignorant fool. The need.
“Because we’ve broken him? Hmm?” the Emperor pressed.
“Broken whom?”
Ikurei Xerius paused. “This dog
here
. Xunnurit, King-of-Tribes.
Your
King . . .”
Cnaiür shrugged, as though puzzled by a child’s petty caprice. “You have broken nothing.”
There was some laughter at this.
The Emperor soured. Kellhus could see an appreciation of Cnaiür’s intellect stumble to the forefront of his thoughts. There was reassessment, a revision of strategies.
He’s accustomed,
Kellhus thought,
to recovering from blunders.
“Yes,” Xerius said. “To break one man is to break nothing, I suppose. It’s too easy to break a man. But to break a
people
. . . Surely this is
something,
no?”
The imperial expression became jubilant when Cnaiür failed to reply.
The Emperor continued: “My nephew here, Conphas, has broken a people. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. The People of War.”
Again, Cnaiür refused to answer. His look, however, was murderous.
“
Your
people, Scylvendi. Broken at Kiyuth. Were you at Kiyuth, I wonder?”
“I was at Kiyuth,” Cnaiür grated.
“Were you broken?”
Silence.
“Were you
broken?
”
All eyes were now on the Scylvendi.
“I was”—he searched for the proper Sheyic term—“
schooled
at Kiyuth.”
“Were you now!” the Emperor cried. “I should imagine. Conphas is a most demanding instructor. So tell me, what lesson did you learn?”
“Conphas was my lesson.”
“Conphas?” the Emperor repeated. “You must forgive me, Scylvendi, but I’m puzzled.”
Cnaiür continued, his tone deliberate. “At Kiyuth, I learned what Conphas has learned. He is a general bred on many battlefields. From the Galeoth he learned the effectiveness of disciplined pike formations against mounted charges. From the Kianene he learned the effectiveness of channelling his opponent, of the false flight, and of the wisdom of hoarding his horsemen in reserve. And from the Scylvendi he learned the importance of the
gobokzoy
, the ‘moment’—that one must read his enemy from afar and strike at the instant of their unbalance.
“At Kiyuth, I learned,” he continued, turning his hard eyes upon Conphas, “that war is
intellect
.”
The shock was plain on the Imperial Nephew’s face, and Kellhus wondered at the force of these words. But too much happened for him to focus on this problem. The air was taut with this contest of Emperor and barbarian.
Now it was the Emperor’s turn to remain silent.
Kellhus understood the stakes of this exchange. The Emperor needed to show the incompetence of the Scylvendi. Xerius had made his Indenture the price of Ikurei Conphas. Like any merchant, Xerius could justify this price only by maligning the wares of his competitors.
“Enough of this prattle!” Coithus Saubon cried. “The Great Names have heard enough—”
“But it is not for the Great Names to decide!” the Emperor snapped.
“Nor is it for Ikurei Xerius to decide,” Proyas added, his eyes bright with zeal.
Grizzled Gothyelk cried: “Gotian! What says the Shriah? What says
Maithanet
of our Emperor’s Indenture?”
“But it’s
too soon!
” the Emperor sputtered. “We haven’t sounded this man—this
heathen!
”
But others clamoured, “Gotian!”
“Then what say
you,
Gotian?” the Emperor cried. “Would you have a
heathen
lead you against the heathen? Would you be punished as the Vulgar Holy War was punished on the Plains of Mengedda? How many dead? How many enslaved by Calmemunis’s rash humour?”
“The
Great Names
lead!” Proyas shouted. “The Scylvendi will be our adviser—”
“An outrage still!”
the Emperor roared. “An army with ten generals? When you founder, and you will, for you know not the cunning of the Kianene, then to
whom
will you turn? A Scylvendi? In your moment of crisis? Of all the absurdities! It
will
be a heathen’s Holy War then! Sweet Sejenus, this man’s a
Scylvendi,
” he cried plaintively, as though to a loved one gone mad. “Does this mean nothing to you fools? He is a blight upon the very earth! His very name is blasphemy! An abomination before the God!”
“You’d speak of
outrage
to us?” Proyas cried in reply. “You’d school in piety those who’d sacrifice their very lives for the Tusk? What of your iniquities, Ikurei? What of you, who’d make a tool of the Holy War?”
“I would
preserve
the Holy War, Proyas! Save the God’s instrument from your ignorance!”
“But we’re ignorant no longer, Ikurei,” Saubon answered. “You’ve heard the Scylvendi speak.
We’ve
heard him speak.”
“But this man would sell you! He’s
Scylvendi!
Haven’t you
heard
me?”
“How could we not?” Saubon spat. “You screech louder than my wife.”
Rumbling laughter.
“My uncle speaks the truth,” Conphas called out, and a hush fell across the noblemen. The great Conphas had finally spoken. He would be the more sober voice.
“You know nothing of the Scylvendi,” he continued matter-of-factly. “They’re not heathens like the Fanim. Their wickedness isn’t one of distortion, of twisting the true faith into an abomination. They’re a people
without
gods.”
Conphas strode down to the King-of-Tribes at the Emperor’s feet, yanked the blinded face back for all to see. He grabbed one of the emaciated arms.
“They call these scars swazond,” he said, as though a patient tutor, “a word that means ‘dyings.’ To us, they are little more than savage trophies, not unlike the shrunken Sranc heads that the Thunyeri stitch onto their shields. But they’re far more to the Scylvendi. Those dyings are their
only purpose
. The very meaning of their lives is written into those scars.
Our
dyings . . . Do you understand this?”
He looked into the faces of the assembled Inrithi, was satisfied by the apprehension he saw there. It was one thing to admit a heathen into their midst; it was quite another to have the details of his wickedness enumerated.
“What the savage said earlier is not true,” Conphas resumed. “This man isn’t ‘nothing.’ He’s far, far more. He’s a token of their humiliation. The humiliation of the Scylvendi.” He stared hard at Xunnurit’s impassive face, the sunken, weeping sockets. Then he looked to Cnaiür where he stood at Proyas’s side.
“Look at him,” he said casually. “Look at the one you’d make your general. Don’t you think he thirsts for vengeance? Don’t you think that even now he struggles to beat down the fury in his heart? Are you so naive as to believe that he doesn’t plot our destruction? That his soul does not twist, as men’s souls do, with scenarios, with images—his vengeance glutted and our ruin complete?”
Conphas looked to Proyas.
“Ask him, Proyas. Ask him what moves his soul.”
There was a pause filled by the ambient murmur of muttering noblemen. Kellhus turned to the enigmatic face hovering above the Emperor.
As a child, he’d seen expressions in the same manner as world-born men, as something understood without understanding. But now he could see the joists beneath the planks of a man’s expression, and because of this, he could calculate, with terrifying exactitude, the distribution of forces down to a man’s foundation.
But this Skeaös baffled him. Where he saw through others, he saw only the mimicry of depth in the old man’s face. The nuanced musculature that produced his expression was unrecognizable—as though moored to different bones.

Other books

Zoobreak by Gordon Korman
Unicorns by Lucille Recht Penner
Mary Pope Osborne - Magic Tree House 46 by Dogs in the Dead of Night
Theater of Cruelty by Ian Buruma