The Darkness that Comes Before (9 page)

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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

BOOK: The Darkness that Comes Before
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Not a sorcerer!
Geshrunni had seen a Chorae touch a sorcerer once, the incandescent unravelling of flesh and bone. But then what was this man?
“Who are you?” Geshrunni asked.
“Nothing you could understand, slave.”
The Javreh Captain smiled.
Maybe he’s just a fool
. A dangerous, drunken amiability seized his manner. He walked up to the man, placed a callused hand on his padded shoulder. He could smell jasmine. The cowlike eyes looked up at him.
“Oh my,” the stranger whispered, “you are a daring fool, aren’t you?”
Why isn’t he afraid?
Remembering the ease with which the man had snatched the Chorae, Geshrunni suddenly felt horribly exposed. But he was committed.
“Who are you?” Geshrunni grated. “How long have you been watching me?”
“Watching you?”
The fat man almost giggled. “Such conceit is unbecoming of slaves.”
He watches Achamian? What is this?
Geshrunni was an officer, accustomed to cowing men in the menacing intimacy of a face-to-face confrontation. Not this man. Soft or not, he was at utter ease. Geshrunni could feel it. And if it weren’t for the unwatered wine, he would have been terrified.
He dug his fingers deep into the fat of the man’s shoulder.
“I said tell me, fat fool,” he hissed between clenched teeth, “or I’ll muck up the dust with your bowel.” With his free hand, he brandished his knife. “Who are you?”
Unperturbed, the fat man grinned with sudden ferocity. “Few things are as distressing as a slave who refuses to acknowledge his place.”
Stunned, Geshrunni looked down at his senseless hand, watched his knife flop onto the dust. All he’d heard was the snap of the stranger’s sleeve.
“Heel, slave,” the fat man said.
“What did you say?”
The slap stung him, brought tears to his eyes.
“I said
heel
.”
Another slap, hard enough to loosen teeth. Geshrunni stumbled back several steps, raising a clumsy hand. How could this be?
“What a task we’ve set for ourselves,” the stranger said ruefully, following him, “when even their slaves possess such pride.”
Panicked, Geshrunni fumbled for the hilt of his sword.
The fat man paused, his eyes flashing to the pommel.
“Draw it,” he said, his voice impossibly cold—inhuman.
Wide-eyed, Geshrunni froze, transfixed by the silhouette that loomed before him.
“I said draw it!”
Geshrunni hesitated.
The next slap knocked him to his knees.
“What are you?” Geshrunni cried through bloodied lips.
As the shadow of the fat man encompassed him, Geshrunni watched his round face loosen, then flex as tight as a beggar’s hand about copper.
Sorcery! But how could it be? He holds a Chorae—
“Something impossibly ancient,” the abomination said softly. “Inconceivably beautiful.”
 
One man, a man long dead, looked out from behind the many eyes of Mandate Schoolmen: Seswatha, the great adversary of the No-God and founder of the last Gnostic School—their School. In daylight, he was vague, as uncertain as a childhood memory, but at night he possessed them, and the tragedy of his life tyrannized their dreams.
Smoky dreams. Dreams drawn from the sheath.
Achamian watched Anasûrimbor Celmomas, the last High King of Kûniüri, fall beneath the hammer of a baying Sranc chieftain. Even though Achamian cried out, he knew with the curious half-awareness belonging to dreams that the greatest king of the Anasûrimbor Dynasty was already dead—had been dead for more than two thousand years. And he knew, moreover, that it was not he himself who wailed, but a far greater man. Seswatha.
The words boiled to his lips. The Sranc chieftain flailed through blistering fire, collapsed into a bundle of rags and ash. More Sranc swept the summit of the hill and more died, struck down by the unearthly lights summoned by his song. Beyond, he glimpsed a distant dragon, like a figure of bronze in the setting sun, hanging above warring fields of Sranc and Men, and he thought:
The last Anasûrimbor King has fallen. Kûniüri is lost
.
Crying out the name of their king, the tall knights of Trysë surged about him, sprinting over the Sranc he had burned and falling like madmen upon the masses beyond. With a knight whom he did not know, Achamian dragged Anasûrimbor Celmomas through the frantic cries of his vassals and kinsmen, through the smell of blood, bowel, and charred flesh. In a small clearing, he pulled the King’s broken body across his lap.
Celmomas’s blue eyes, ordinarily so cold, beseeched him. “Leave me,” the grey-bearded king gasped.
“No,” Achamian replied. “If you die, Celmomas, all is lost.” The High King smiled despite his ruined lips. “Do you see the sun? Do you see it flare, Seswatha?”
“The sun sets,” Achamian replied.
“Yes! Yes. The darkness of the No-God is not all-encompassing. The Gods see us yet, dear friend. They are distant, but I can hear them galloping across the skies. I can hear them cry out to me.”
“You cannot die, Celmomas! You must not die!”
The High King shook his head, stilled him with tender eyes. “They call to me. They say that my end is not the world’s end. That burden, they say, is
yours
. Yours, Seswatha.”
“No,” Achamian whispered.
“The sun! Can you see the sun? Feel it upon your cheek? Such revelations are hidden in such simple things. I see! I see so clearly what a bitter, stubborn fool I have been . . . And to you, you most of all, have I been unjust. Can you forgive an old man? Can you forgive a foolish old man?”
“There’s nothing to forgive, Celmomas. You’ve lost much, suffered much.”
“My son . . . Do you think he’ll be there, Seswatha? Do you think he’ll greet me as his father?”
“Yes . . . As his father, and as his king.”
“Did I ever tell you,” Celmomas said, his voice cracking with futile pride, “that my son once stole into the deepest pits of Golgotterath?”
“Yes.” Achamian smiled through his tears. “Many times, old friend.”
“How I miss him, Seswatha! How I yearn to stand at his side once again.”
The old king wept for a moment. Then his eyes grew wide. “I see him so clearly. He’s taken the sun as his charger, and he rides among us. I see him! Galloping through the hearts of my people, stirring them to wonder and fury!”
“Shush . . . Conserve your strength, my King. The surgeons are coming.”
“He says . . . says such sweet things to give me comfort. He says that one of my seed will return, Seswatha—an Anasûrimbor
will return
. . .” A shudder wracked the old man, forcing breath and spittle through his teeth.
“At the end of the world.”
The bright eyes of Anasûrimbor Celmomas II, White Lord of Trysë, High King of Kûniüri, went blank. And with them, the evening sun faltered, plunging the bronze-armoured glory of the Norsirai into twilight.
“Our King!” Achamian cried to the stricken men encircling him. “Our King is dead!”
But everything was darkness. No one stood around him, and no king lay propped against his thighs. Only sweaty blankets and a great buzzing absence where the clamour of war had once been. His room. He lay alone in his miserable room.
Achamian hugged his arms tight. Another dream drawn from the sheath.
He drew his hands to his face and wept, a short time for a long-dead Kûniüric King and longer for other, less certain things.
In the distance, he thought he heard howling. A dog or a man.
 
Geshrunni was dragged through putrid alleys. He saw pitted wallscapes reel against black sky. His limbs thrashed of their own volition; his fingers clutched at greasy brick. Through bubbling blood, he could smell the river.
My face . . .
“What ’ore?” he tried to cry, but speaking was almost impossible without lips.
I’ve told you everything!
The sound of boots tramping through watery muck. A giggle from somewhere above him.
“If the eye of your enemy offends you, slave, you pluck it out, no?”
“’lease . . . ’ercy. I ’eg you . . . ’erceeeee.”
“Mercy?” the thing laughed. “Mercy is a luxury of the idle, fool. The Mandate has many eyes, and we have much plucking to do.”
Where’s my face?
Weightlessness, then the crash of cold, drowning water.
 
Achamian awoke in pre-dawn light, his head buzzing with the memory of drink and of more nightmarish dreams. More dreams of the Apocalypse.
Coughing, he lurched from the straw bed to the room’s only window. He drew the lacquered shutter aside, his hands trembling. Cool air. Grey light. The palaces and temples of Carythusal sprawled amid thickets of lesser structures. A dense fog covered the River Sayut, coursing through the alleys and avenues of the lower city like water through trenches. Isolated and as small as a fingernail, the Scarlet Spires loomed from the ethereal expanse, jutting like dead towers from white desert dunes.
Achamian’s throat thickened. He blinked tears from his eyes. No fire. No chorus of wails. Everything still. Even the Spires affected a breathless, monumental repose.
This world,
he thought,
must not end.
He turned from the view to the room’s single table and dropped onto the stool, or what passed for one—it looked like something salvaged from a wrecked ship. He wet his quill and unrolling a small scroll across scattered sheets of parchment, wrote:
Fords of Tywanrae. Same.
Burning of the Library of Sauglish. Different. See my face and
not S in mirror.
 
A curious discrepancy. What could it mean? For a moment, he pondered the sour futility of the question. Then he remembered awakening in the heart of night. After a pause, he added:
Death and Prophecy of Anasûrimbor Celmomas. Same.
 

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