The Darkness that Comes Before (87 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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I mean something?
“More than you can imagine,” he whispered.
She collapsed into his chest, and he held her as she soundlessly screamed. Then she howled her anguish, bawled as she had as a child, her body shuddering, her hands crushed between them. He rocked her in his arms. Rolled his cheek against her scalp.
After a time, he pressed her back, and she lowered her face for shame. So weak! So pathetic!
With soft strokes he dabbed the tears from her eyes, watched her for a long while. She didn’t entirely calm until she saw the tears streaming from his own eyes.
He cries for me . . . for me . . .
“You belong to him,” he said at last. “You are his prize.”
“No,” she croaked defiantly. “My body’s his prize. My
heart
belongs to you.”
How had this happened? How had she been pried in two? She had endured much. Why this agony now? Now that she loved? But for a moment she almost felt whole, speaking their secret language, saying tender things . . .
I mean something.
His tears slowed in his trim beard, gathered and then plummeted onto the open book—stained the ancient ink.
“Your
book!
” she gasped, finding relief in a sense of guilt for an object of his concern. She leaned from her blanket, naked and ivory in the light, and ran her fingers across the open pages. “Is it ruined?”
“Many others have wept over this text,” Kellhus replied softly.
The distance between their faces was close, humid—suddenly tense.
She grasped his right hand, guided it to her perfect breasts.
“Kellhus,” she whispered tremulously, “I would have you come in . . . into me.”
And at last, he relented.
Gasping beneath him, she looked into the dark corner where the Scylvendi lay, knowing that he could see the rapture on her face . . . on
their
faces.
And she cried out as she climaxed—a cry of hatred.
 
Cnaiür lay still, his breath hissing between clenched teeth. The image of her perfect face, turning to him in anguished rapture, crowded the light wavering across the canvas slopes above.
Serwë giggled girlishly, and Kellhus murmured several things to her in that accursed tongue of hers. Linen and wool whisked over smooth skin, then the candle was snuffed. Pitch black. They pressed through the flap and the scent of fresh air wound through the pavilion’s interior.
“Jiruschi dan klepet sa gesauba dana,”
she said, her voice thinned by open space and dulled by canvas.
The rasp of charcoal as someone threw wood onto the fire.
“Ejiruschina? Baussa kalwë,”
Kellhus replied.
Serwë laughed some more, but in a husky, oddly mature way he’d never heard before.
Something more the bitch hides from me . . .
He groped in the darkness; his fingertips found the leather of his pommel. It was both cool and warm, like human skin bare to the chill of night.
He lay still for several more moments, listening to the hushed counterpoint of their voices through the pop and rush of building flames. He could see the firelight now, a faint orange smear through the black canvas. A lithe shadow passed across it. Serwë.
He raised the broadsword. It rasped from its sheath. A dull orange glimmer.
Dressed only in his loincloth, he rolled from his blankets and padded across the mats to the pavilion entrance. He breathed heavily.
Images from the previous afternoon flitted through his thoughts: the Dûnyain and his bottomless scrutiny of the Inrithi nobles.
The thought of leading the Men of the Tusk into battle stirred something within him—pride, perhaps—but he was under no illusion as to his true station. He was a heathen to these men, even to Nersei Proyas. And as time passed, that fact would come home to them. He would be no general. An adviser on the cunning ways of the Kianene, perhaps, but nothing more.
Holy War. The thought still yanked a snort of breath from his nose. As though all war were not holy.
But the question, he now knew, was not what he would be but what the
Dûnyain
would be. What terror had he delivered to these outland princes?
What will he make of the Holy War?
Would he make it his whore? Like Serwë?
But this was the plan. “Thirty years,” Kellhus had said shortly after their arrival. “Moënghus has dwelt among these men for thirty years. He will have great power. More than either of us could hope to overcome. I need more than sorcery, Cnaiür. I need a nation. A nation.” Somehow they would exploit circumstance, knot the harness about the Holy War, and use it to destroy Anasûrimbor Moënghus. How could he fear for these Inrithi, repent bringing the Dûnyain to them, when this was their plan?
But was this the plan? Or was it simply another Dûnyain lie, another way to pacify, to gull, to enslave?
What if Kellhus was not an assassin sent to murder his father, as he claimed, but a spy sent to do his father’s bidding? Was it simply a coincidence that Kellhus travelled to Shimeh just as the Holy War embarked on a campaign to conquer it?
Cnaiür was no fool. If Moënghus was Cishaurim, he would fear the Holy War, and he would seek ways to destroy it. Could this be why he had summoned his son? Kellhus’s obscure origins would allow him to infiltrate it, as he already had, while his breeding or training or witchery or whatever it was would allow him to seize it, capsize it, perhaps even turn it against its maker. Against Maithanet.
But if Kellhus served rather than hunted his father, then why had he spared him in the mountains? Cnaiür could still feel the impossible iron hand about his throat, the pitching depths beneath his feet.
“But I spoke true, Cnaiür. I do need you.”
Could he have known, even then, of Proyas’s contest with the Emperor? Or did it just so happen that the Inrithi needed a Scylvendi?
Unlikely, to say the least. But then how could Kellhus have known? Cnaiür swallowed, tasted Serwë.
Could it be that Moënghus
still
communicated with him?
The thought sucked all air from his lungs. He saw Xunnurit, blinded, chained beneath the Emperor’s heel . . .
Am I the same?
Still speaking that accursed tongue, Kellhus teased Serwë some more. Cnaiür could tell because of Serwë’s laugh, a sound like water rushing among the Dûnyain’s smooth stone words.
In the blackness Cnaiür extended his broadsword, pressed its tip through the flap, which he drew aside the width of a palm. He watched breathlessly.
Their faces firelight orange, their backs in shadow, the two of them reclined side by side on the barked olive trunk they used for a seat. Like lovers. Cnaiür studied their reflections across the smeared polish of his sword.
By the Dead-God, she was beautiful. So like—
The Dûnyain turned and looked at him, his eyes shining. He blinked.
Cnaiür felt his lips curl involuntarily, a pounding rush in his chest, throat, and ears.
She’s my prize!
he cried voicelessly.
Kellhus looked to the fire. He had heard. Somehow.
Cnaiür let the flap fall shut, pinch golden light into blackness. Desolate blackness.
My prize . . .
 
Achamian would never remember what he’d thought or the route he’d taken on his long walk from the Imperial Precincts to the encamped Holy War. He suddenly found himself sitting in the dust amid the litter of celebration. He saw his tent, small and alone, mottled and weathered by many seasons, many journeys, and cast in the silent shadow of Xinemus’s pavilion. The Holy War swept beyond it, a great canvas city, matting the distances with the confusion of flaps, guy ropes, pennants, and awnings.
He saw Xinemus slumbering next to the gutted fire, his thick frame curled against the chill. The Marshal had been concerned by the Emperor’s peremptory summons, he supposed, and had waited all night by the fire—waited for Achamian to come home.
Home.
Tears brimmed at that thought. He’d never had a home, a place that he could call “mine.” There was no refuge, no sanctuary, for a man such as he. Only friends, scattered here and there, who for some unaccountable reason loved him and worried about him.
He left Xinemus to his slumber—today would be a demanding day. The great encampment of the Holy War would disassemble itself from within, the tents felled and rolled tight about poles, the baggage trains drawn up and heaped with gear and supplies, then it would begin the arduous yet exultant march south, toward the land of the heathen, toward desperation and bloodshed—and perhaps even truth.
In the gloom of his tent, he once again withdrew his parchment map, ignoring the tears that tapped against the sheet. He stared at
THE CONSULT
 
for some time, as though struggling to remember what the name meant, what it portended. Then, wetting his quill, he drew an unsteady diagonal line from it to
THE EMPEROR
 
Connected at last. For so long it had simply floated in its corner, more the wreckage of ink than a name, touching nothing, meaning nothing, like the threats muttered by a coward after his tormentor had gone. No longer. The bitter apparition had bared its knuckled flesh, and the horror of what was and what might be had become the horror of
now
.
This horror. His horror.
Why? Why would Fate inflict this revelation upon him? Was she a fool? Didn’t she know how weak, how hollow, he’d become?
Why me?
A selfish question. Perhaps the most selfish of questions. All burdens, even those as demented as the Apocalypse, must fall upon the shoulders of someone. Why
not
him?
Because I’m a broken man. Because I long for a love I cannot have. Because . . .
But that road was far too easy. To be frail, to be afflicted with unrequited longing, was simply what it meant to be man. When had he acquired this penchant to wallow in self-pity? Where in life’s slow accumulation had he come to see himself as the world’s victim? How had he become such a fool?
After three hundred years, he,
Drusas Achamian,
had rediscovered the Consult. After two thousand years, he,
Drusas Achamian,
had witnessed the return of an Anasûrimbor. Anagkë, the Whore of Fate, had chosen
him
for these burdens! It wasn’t his place to ask why. Nor could such questions relieve him of his burden.
He had to
act,
choose his moment and overcome—
overwhelm.
He was Drusas Achamian! His song could char legions, tear the earth asunder, pull dragons shrieking from the sky.
But even as he returned his scrutiny to the parchment, a great hollow opened in the heart of his momentary resolution, like the stillness that chased ripples across the surface of a pool, drawing them thinner and thinner. And in the wake of this hollow, voices from his dreams, nagging half-remembered fears, the fog of inarticulate regret . . .

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