The Darkness that Comes Before (81 page)

Read The Darkness that Comes Before Online

Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
8.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
This man had not been trained in the manner of the Dûnyain. Rather, his face was not a face.
Moments passed, incongruities accumulated, were classified, cobbled into hypothetical alternatives . . .
Limbs. Slender limbs folded and pressed into the simulacrum of a face.
Kellhus blinked, and his senses leapt back into their proper proportion. How was this possible? Sorcery? If so, it possessed nothing of the strange torsion he’d experienced with the Nonman he’d battled so long ago. Sorcery, Kellhus had realized, was inexplicably grotesque—like the scribblings of a child across a work of art—though he did not know why. All he knew was that he could distinguish sorcery from the world and sorcerers from common men. This was among the many mysteries that had motivated his study of Drusas Achamian.
This face, he was relatively certain, had nothing to do with sorcery. But then how?
What is this man?
Abruptly, Skeaös’s eyes flashed to his own. The rutted brow clenched into a false frown.
Kellhus nodded in the amicable and embarrassed way of one caught staring at another. But in his periphery he glimpsed the Emperor looking toward him in alarm, then whirling to scrutinize his Counsel.
Ikurei Xerius had not known this face differed, Kellhus realized. None of them knew.
The study deepens, Father. Always it deepens.
“As a youth,” Proyas was saying, “I was tutored by a Mandate Schoolman, Conphas. He’d say you’re rather optimistic about the Scylvendi.”
Several laughed openly at this—relieved.
“Mandate stories,” Conphas said evenly, “are worthless.”
“Perhaps,” Proyas replied, “but of a par with
Nansur
stories.”
“But that’s not the question, Proyas,” old Gothyelk said, his accent so thick that his Sheyic was barely comprehensible. “The question is, how can we trust this heathen?”
Proyas turned to the Scylvendi at his side, suddenly hesitant.
“Then what of it, Cnaiür?” he asked.
Throughout the exchange, Cnaiür had remained silent, doing little to conceal his contempt. Now he spat in Conphas’s direction.
 
No thought.
The boy extinguished. Only a
place
.
This
place.
Motionless, the Pragma sat facing him, the bare soles of his feet flat against each other, his dark frock scored by the shadows of deep folds, his eyes as empty as the child they watched.
A place without breath or sound. A place of sight alone. A place without before or after . . . almost.
For the first lances of sunlight careered over the glacier, as ponderous as great tree limbs in the wind. Shadows hardened and light gleamed across the Pragma’s ancient skull.
The old man’s left hand forsook his right sleeve, bearing a watery knife. And like a rope in water, his arm pitched outward, fingertips trailing across the blade as the knife swung languidly into the air, the sun skating and the dark shrine plunging across its mirror back . . .
And the place where Kellhus had once existed extended an open hand—the blond hairs like luminous filaments against tanned skin—and grasped the knife from stunned space.
The slap of pommel against palm triggered the collapse of place into little boy. The pale stench of his body. Breath, sound, and lurching thoughts.
I have been legion . . .
In his periphery, he could see the spike of the sun ease from the mountain. He felt drunk with exhaustion. In the recoil of his trance, it seemed all he could hear were the twigs arching and bobbing in the wind, pulled by leaves like a million sails no bigger than his hand. Cause everywhere, but amid countless minute happenings—diffuse, useless.
Now I understand.
 
“You would sound me,” Cnaiür said at length. “Make clear the riddle of the Scylvendi heart. But you use your own hearts to map mine. You see a man abased before you, Xunnurit. A man bound to me by kinship of blood. What an offence this must be, you say. His heart
must
cry for vengeance. And you say this because
your
heart would so cry. But my heart is not your heart. This is why it is a riddle to you.
“Xunnurit is not a name of shame to the People. It is not even a name. He who does not ride among us is not us. He is other. But you, who mistake your heart for mine—who see only two Scylvendi, one broken, one erect—think he must still belong to me. You think his degradation is my own, and that I would avenge this. Conphas would have you think this. Why else would Xunnurit be among us? What better way to discredit the strong man than by making a broken man his double? Perhaps it is the Nansur heart that should be sounded.”
“But
our
heart is Inrithi,” Conphas said scathingly. “It’s already known.”
“Yes it is,” Saubon said fiercely. “It would seize the Holy War from the God and make it its own.”
“No!” Conphas spat. “My heart would save the Holy War
for
the God. Save it from this abominable dog, and save you from your folly. The Scylvendi are anathema!”
“As are the Scarlet Spires!” Saubon retorted, advancing toward Conphas. “Would you have us cast
them
out as well?”
“That’s different,” Conphas snapped. “The Men of the Tusk need the Scarlet Spires . . . Without them, the Cishaurim would destroy us.”
Saubon paused a few paces away from the High General. He looked lean, wolfish. “The Inrithi
need
this Scylvendi as well. This is what you tell us, Conphas. We must be saved from our own folly on the field of battle.”
“
Calmemunis
and your kinsman Tharschilka have told you that, fool. With their death on the Plains of Mengedda.”
“Calmemunis,” Saubon spat. “Tharschilka . . . Rabble marching with rabble.”
“Tell me, Conphas,” Proyas asked. “Did you not know that Calmemunis was doomed beforehand? If so, why did the Emperor provision him?”
“None of this is to the point!” Conphas cried.
He lies,
Kellhus realized.
They knew the Vulgar Holy War would be destroyed. They wanted it to be destroyed . . .
Suddenly Kellhus understood that the outcome of this debate was in fact paramount to his mission. The Ikureis had sacrificed an entire host in order to strengthen their claim over the Holy War. What further disaster would they manufacture once it became an inconvenience?
“The question,” Conphas ardently continued, “is whether you can trust a
Scylvendi
to lead you against the Kianene!”
“But that isn’t the question,” Proyas countered. “The question is whether we can trust a Scylvendi over
you
.”
“But how could this even be an issue?” Conphas implored. “Trust a Scylvendi over
me?
” He laughed harshly. “This is madness!”
“
Your
madness, Conphas,” Saubon grated, “and your uncle’s . . . If it weren’t for your fucking forecasts of doom and your thrice-damned Indenture, none of this would be an issue!”
“But it’s
our
land you would seize! The blood of
our
ancestors smeared across every plain, every hillock, and you would
begrudge
us our claim?”
“It’s the
God’s
land, Ikurei,” Proyas said cuttingly. “The very land of the Latter Prophet. Or would you put the pathetic annals of Nansur before the
Tractate?
Before our Lord, Inri Sejenus?”
Conphas remained silent for a moment, gauging these words. One did not, Kellhus realized, lightly enter a contest of piety with Nersei Proyas.
“And who are
you,
Proyas, to ask this question?” Conphas returned, rallying his earlier calm. “Hmm? You who would put a heathen—a Scylvendi, no less!—before Sejenus.”
“We are all instruments of the Gods, Ikurei. Even a heathen—a Scylvendi, no less—can be an instrument, if such is the God’s will.”
“Would we guess at God’s will, then? Eh, Proyas?”
“That, Ikurei, is Maithanet’s task.” Proyas turned to Gotian, who had been watching them keenly all this time. “What does Maithanet say, Gotian? Tell us. What says the Shriah?”
The Grandmaster’s hands were clenched about the ivory canister. He held the answer, everyone knew, within his straining hands. His expression was hesitant.
He remains undecided. He despises the Emperor, distrusts him, but he fears that Proyas’s solution is too radical.
Very soon, Kellhus realized, he would be forced to intercede.
“I would ask the Scylvendi,” Gotian said, clearing his voice, “why he has come.”
Cnaiür looked hard at the Shrial Knight, at the Tusk embroidered in gold across his white vestment.
The words are in you, Scylvendi. Speak them.
“I have come,” Cnaiür said at length, “for the promise of war.”
“But this is something that Scylvendi simply don’t do,” Gotian responded, his suspicion tempered by hope. “There are no Scylvendi mercenaries. At least none I’ve ever heard of.”
“I do not
sell
myself, if that is what you mean. The People do not sell—anything. What we need, we seize.”
“Yes. He would
seize
us,” Conphas interjected.
“Let the man speak!” Gothyelk cried, his patience waning.
“After Kiyuth,” Cnaiür continued, “the Utemot were undone. The Steppe is not how you think. The People war always, if not against the Sranc, Nansur, or Kianene, then against themselves. Our pastures were overrun by our competitors of old. Our herds slaughtered. Our camps burned. I became a chieftain of nothing.”
Cnaiür looked over their intent faces. Stories, if fitting, Kellhus had learned, commanded respect.
“From this man,” he continued, gesturing to Kellhus, “I learned that outlanders could have honour. As a slave he fought at our side against the Kuöti. Through him, through his God-sent dreams, I learned of your war. I was without my tribe, so I accepted his wager.”
Many eyes, Kellhus noted, were now fixed upon him. Should he seize this moment? Or allow the Scylvendi to continue?
“Wager?” Gotian asked, both puzzled and slightly awed.
“That this war would be unlike any other. That it would be a revelation . . .”
“I see,” Gotian replied, his eyes suddenly bright with faith remembered.
“Do you?” Cnaiür asked. “I do not think so. I
remain
a Scylvendi.” The plainsman looked to Proyas, then swept his eyes across the illustrious assembly. “Do not mistake me, Inrithi. In this much Conphas is right. You are
all
staggering drunks to me. Boys who would play at war when you should kennel with your mothers. You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, not the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.
“You have offered me war, and I have accepted. Nothing more. I will not regret your losses. I will not bow my head before your funeral pyres. I will not rejoice at your triumphs. But I
have
taken the wager. I
will
suffer with you. I will put Fanim to the sword, and drive their wives and children to the slaughter. And when I sleep, I will dream of their lamentations and be glad of heart.”

Other books

Delaney's Desert Sheikh by Brenda Jackson
Checkmate by Malorie Blackman
Jonah Havensby by Bob Bannon
Mounting Fears by Stuart Woods
Daughter of Deceit by Victoria Holt
Hotel For Dogs by Lois Duncan
Shadow of a Tiger by Michael Collins
Fanning the Flame by Kat Martin
Due or Die by Jenn McKinlay