The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  The immensity of the valley below struck Kellhus breathless. Beyond the fire’s desolation, where the forest was still dark and crowded, ancient fortifications loomed above the trees, forming a great ring across the autumnal distances. He watched birds wheel over and around the nearer ramparts, flash across stretches of mottled stone before dipping into the canopy. Ruined walls. So cold, and so forlorn, in a way the forest could never be.

  The ruins were far too old to contradict the forest outright. They had been submerged, worn and unbalanced by ages of its weight. Sheltered in mossy hollows, walls breached earthen mounds, only to suddenly end, as though restrained by vines that wrapped them like great veins over bone.

  But there was something in them, something not now, that bent Kellhus toward unfamiliar passions. When he brushed his hands across the stone, he knew he touched the breath and toil of Men—the mark of a destroyed people.

  The ground wheeled. He leaned forward and pressed his cheek against the stone. Grit, and the cold of uncovered earth. Above, the sunlight was broken by a span of knotted branches. Men . . . here in the stone. Old and untouched by the rigour of the Dûnyain. Somehow they had resisted the sleep, had raised the work of hands against the wilderness.

  Who built this place?

  Kellhus wandered over the mounds, sensing the ruins buried beneath. He ate sparingly from his forgotten satchel—dried wafers and acorns. He peeled leaves from the surface of a small pool of rainwater, drank, then stared curiously at the dark reflection of his own face, at the growth of blond hair across his scalp and jaw.

  Is this me?

  He studied squirrels and those birds he could pick from the dim confusion of the trees. Once he glimpsed a fox slipping through the brush.

  I am not one more animal.

  His intellect flailed, found purchase, and grasped. He could sense wild cause sweep around him in statistical tides. Touch him and leave him untouched.

  I am a man. I stand apart from these things.

  As evening waxed, it began to rain. Through branches he watched the clouds build chill and grey. For the first time in weeks, he sought shelter.

  He picked his way into a small gully where erosion had caused a sheaf of earth to fall away, revealing the stone facade of some structure. He climbed over the leafy clay into an opening, dark and deep. Inside he broke the neck of the wild dog that attacked him.

  He was familiar with darkness. Light had been forbidden in the depths of the Labyrinth. But there was no mathematical insight in the cramped blackness he found, only a random jumble of earth-pinched walls. Anasûrimbor Kellhus stretched out and slept.

  When he awoke the forest was quiet with snow.

  The Dûnyain had no real knowledge of just how far Shimeh lay. They had merely provided him with as many provisions as he could efficiently carry. His satchel grew flimsier with the days. Kellhus could only passively observe as hunger and exposure wracked his body.

  If the wilderness could not possess him, it would kill him.

  His food ran out, and he continued to walk. Everything—experience, analysis—became mysteriously sharp. More snow came, and cold, harsh winds. He walked until he could no longer.

  The way is too narrow, Father. Shimeh is too far.

  The trapper’s sled dogs yelped and nosed through the snow. He pulled them away and fastened their harness to the base of a stunted pine. Astonished, he brushed the snow away from the limbs curling beneath. His first thought was to feed the dead man to his dogs. The wolves would have him otherwise, and meat was scarce in the abandoned north.

  He removed his mittens and placed his fingertips against the bearded cheek. The skin was grey, and he was certain the face would be as cold as the snow that half buried it. It was not. He cried out, and his dogs responded with a chorus of howls. He cursed, then countered with the sign of Husyelt, the Dark Hunter. The limbs were slack when he lifted the man from the snow. His wool and hair were stiff in the wind.

  The world had always been strange with significance to the trapper, but now it had become terrifying. Running as the dogs pulled the sled, he fled before the wrath of the encroaching blizzard.

  “Leweth,” the man had said, placing a hand to his naked chest. His cropped hair was silver with a hint of bronze and far too fine to adequately frame his thick features. His eyebrows seemed perpetually arched in surprise, and his restless eyes were given to excuses, always feigning interest in trivial details to avoid his ward’s watchful gaze.

  Only later, after learning the rudiments of Leweth’s language, did Kellhus discover how he’d come to be in the trapper’s care. His first memories were of sweaty furs and smouldering fires. Animal pelts hung in sheaves from a low ceiling. Sacks and casks heaped the corners of a single room. The smell of smoke, grease, and rot crowded what little open space remained. As Kellhus would later learn, the chaotic interior of the cabin was actually an expression, and a painstaking one at that, of the trapper’s many superstitious fears. Each thing had its place, he would tell Kellhus, and those things out of place portended disaster.

  The hearth was large enough to hug all the interior, including Kellhus himself, in golden warmth. Beyond the walls, winter whistled through trackless leagues of forest, ignoring them for the most part, but periodically shaking the cabin hard enough to rock the furs on their hooks. The land was called Sobel, Leweth would tell him, the northernmost province of the ancient city of Atrithau—although it had been abandoned for generations. He preferred, he would say, to live far from the troubles of other men.

  Though Leweth was a sturdy man of middle years, for Kellhus he was little more than a child. The fine musculature of his face was utterly untrained, bound as though by strings to his passions. Whatever moved Leweth’s soul moved his expression as well, and after a short time Kellhus needed only to glance at his face to know his thoughts. The ability to anticipate his thoughts, to re-enact the movements of Leweth’s soul as though they were his own, would come later.

  In the meantime a routine developed. At dawn Leweth harnessed his dogs and left to check his runs. On the days he returned early, he enlisted Kellhus to mend snares, prepare skins, draw up a new pot of cony stew—to “earn his keep,” as he put it. At night Kellhus worked, as the trapper had taught him, on stitching his own coat and leggings. Leweth would watch from across the fire, his hands living an arcane life of their own, carving, stitching, or simply straining against each other—small labours that paradoxically gifted him with patience, even grace.

  Kellhus saw Leweth’s hands at rest only when he slept or was extraordinarily drunk. Drink, more than anything else, defined the trapper.

  Through the morning, Leweth never looked Kellhus in the eye, acknowledging him only at nervous angles. A curious halfness deadened the man, as though his thought lacked the momentum to become speech. If he spoke at all, his voice was tight, constricted by an ambient dread. By afternoon, a flush would have crept into his expression. His eyes would flare with brittle sunshine. He would smile, laugh. But by dark, his manner would be bloated, a distorted parody of what it had been just hours earlier. He would bludgeon his way through conversation, would be overcome by squalls of rage and bitter humour.

  Kellhus learned much from Leweth’s drink-exaggerated passions, but the time came when he could no longer allow his study to trade in caricatures. One night he rolled the casks of whisky out into the forest and drained them across the frozen ground. During the suffering that followed, he carried on with the chores.

  They sat facing each other across the hearth, their backs against cozy heaps of animal pelts. His expression etched by firelight, Leweth talked, animated by the honest vanity of sharing his life with someone who was captive to the facts as he described them. Old pains returned in the telling.

  “I had no choice but to leave Atrithau,” Leweth admitted, speaking yet again of his dead wife.

  Kellhus smiled sorrowfully. He gauged the subtle interplay of muscles beneath the man’s expression. He pretends to mourn in order
to secure my pity.

  “Atrithau reminded you of her absence?” This is the lie he tells himself.

  Leweth nodded, his eyes at once tear-filled and expectant. “Atrithau seemed a tomb after she died. One morning they called the muster for the militia to man the walls, and I remember staring off to the north. The forests seemed to . . . beckon me somehow. The terror of my childhood had become a sanctuary! Everyone in the city, even my brothers and my compatriots in the district cohort, seemed to secretly exult in her death—in my misery! I had to . . . I was forced to . . .”

  Avenge yourself.

  Leweth looked down to the fire. “Flee,” he said.

  Why does he deceive himself in this way?

  “No soul moves alone through the world, Leweth. Our every thought stems from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of words spoken before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another soul to carry our own.” He paused, cutting short his reply in order to bewilder the man. Insight struck with so much more force when it clarified confusion. “This is truly why you fled to Sobel, Leweth.”

  For an instant Leweth’s eyes slackened in horror. “But I don’t understand . . .”

  Of everything I might say, he fears most the truths he already knows and yet denies. Are all world-born men this weak?

  “But you do understand. Think, Leweth. If we’re nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us. Who you once were, Leweth, ceased to exist the moment your wife died.”

  “And that’s why I fled!” Leweth cried, his eyes both beseeching and provoked. “I couldn’t bear it. I fled to forget!”

  Flare in his pulse rate. Hesitation in the flex of delicate muscles about his eyes. He knows this is a lie.

  “No, Leweth. You fled to remember. You fled to conserve all the ways your wife had moved you, to shield the ache of her loss from the momentum of others. You fled to make a bulwark of your misery.”

  Tears spilled across the trapper’s sagging cheeks. “Ah, cruel words, Kellhus! Why would you say such things?”

  To better possess you.

  “Because you’ve suffered long enough. You’ve spent years alone by this fire, wallowing in your loss, asking your dogs over and over whether they love you. You hoard your pain because the more you suffer, the more the world becomes an outrage. You weep because weeping has become evidence. ‘See what you’ve done to me!’ you cry. And you hold court night after night, condemning the circumstances that have condemned you by reliving your anguish. You torment yourself, Leweth, in order to hold the world accountable for your torment.”

  Again he’ll deny me—

  “And what if I do? The world is an outrage, Kellhus. An outrage!”

  “Perhaps it is,” Kellhus replied, his tone one of pity and regret, “but the world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish. How many times have you cried out these very words? And each time they’ve been cramped by the same desperation, the desperation of one who needs to believe something he knows to be false. Only pause, Leweth, refuse to follow the grooves these thoughts have worn into you. Pause, and you’ll see.”

  His thoughts forced inward, Leweth hesitated, his face stunned and slack.

  He understands but lacks the courage to admit.

  “Ask yourself,” Kellhus pressed, “why this desperation?”

  “There’s no desperation,” Leweth replied numbly.

  He sees the place I’ve opened for him, realizes the futility of all lies in my presence, even those he tells himself.

  “Why do you continue to lie?”

  “Because . . . because . . .”

  Through the wheeze of the fire, Kellhus could hear the pounding of Leweth’s heart, fevered like that of a trapped animal. Sobs shuddered through the man. He raised his hands to bury his face but then paused. He looked up to Kellhus and wept the way a child might before his mother. It hurts! his expression cried. It hurts so much!

  “I know it hurts, Leweth. Release from anguish can be purchased only through more anguish.” So much like a child . . .

  “W-what should I do?” the trapper wept. “Kellhus . . . Please tell me!”

  Thirty years, Father. What power you must wield over men such as this.

  And Kellhus, his bearded face warm with firelight and compassion, answered: “No one’s soul moves alone, Leweth. When one love dies, one must learn to love another.”

  After a time the hearth fire burned low, and the two of them sat silently, listening to the gathering fury of yet another storm. The wind sounded like mighty blankets flapping against the walls. Outside the forest groaned and whistled beneath the dark belly of the blizzard.

  “Weeping may muddy the face,” Leweth said, broaching their silence with an old proverb, “but it does cleanse the heart.”

  Kellhus smiled in reply, his expression one of bemused recognition. Why, the ancient Dûnyain had asked, confine the passions to words when they spoke first in expression? A legion of faces lived within him, and he could slip through them with the same ease with which he crafted his words. At the heart of his jubilant smile, his compassionate laugh, flexed the cold of scrutiny.

  “But you distrust it,” Kellhus said.

  Leweth shrugged. “Why, Kellhus? Why would the Gods send you to me?”

  For Leweth, Kellhus knew, the world was fraught with gods, ghosts, even demons. It was steeped in their conspiracies, crowded with omens and portents of their capricious humours. Like a second horizon, their designs encompassed the struggles of men—shrouded, cruel, and in the end, always fatal.

  For Leweth, discovering him beneath the snowdrifts of Sobel was no accident.

  “You wish to know why I’ve come?”

  “Why have you come?”

  So far Kellhus had avoided any talk of his mission, and Leweth, terrified by the speed with which he had recovered and learned his language, had not asked. But the study had progressed.

  “I search for my father, Moënghus,” Kellhus said. “Anasûrimbor Moënghus.”

  “Is he lost?” Leweth asked, gratified beyond measure by this admission.

  “No. He left my people long ago, while I was still a child.”

  “Then why do you search for him?”

  “Because he sent for me. He asked that I journey to see him.”

  Leweth nodded, as though all sons must return to their fathers at some point. “Where is he?”

  Kellhus paused for a heartbeat, his eyes apparently fixed upon Leweth, but actually focused on an empty point before him. As a cold man might curl into a ball, gather as much skin as possible into his arms and away from the world, Kellhus withdrew his surfaces from the room and sheltered within his intellect, unmoved by the press of outer events. The legions within were yoked, the variables isolated and extended, and the welter of possible consequences that might follow upon a truthful answer to Leweth’s question bloomed through his soul. The probability trance.

  He rose, blinked against the firelight. As with so many questions regarding his mission, the answer was incalculable.

  “Shimeh,” Kellhus said at length. “A city far to the south called Shimeh.”

  “He sent for you from Shimeh? But how’s that possible?”

  Kellhus adopted a faintly bewildered look that was not far from true. “Through dreams. He sent for me through dreams.”

  “Sorcery . . .”

  Always the curious intermingling of awe and dread when Leweth uttered this word. There were witches, Leweth had told him, whose urgings could harness the wild agencies asleep in earth, animal, and tree. There were priests whose pleas could sound the Outside, move the Gods who moved the world to give men respite. And there were sorcerers whose assertions were decrees, whose words dictated rather than described how the world had to be.

  Superstition. Everywhere and in everything, Leweth had confused that which came after with that which came befo
re, confused the effect for the cause. Men came after, so he placed them before and called them “gods” or “demons.” Words came after, so he placed them before and called them “scriptures” or “incantations.” Confined to the aftermath of events and blind to the causes that preceded him, he merely fastened upon the ruin itself, men and the acts of men, as the model of what came before.

  But what came before, the Dûnyain had learned, was inhuman.

  There must be some other explanation. There is no sorcery.

  “What do you know of Shimeh?” Kellhus asked.

  The walls shivered beneath a fierce succession of gusts, and the flame twirled with abrupt incandescence. The hanging pelts lightly rocked to and fro. Leweth looked about, his brow furrowed, as though he strained to hear someone.

  “It’s a long way off, Kellhus, through dangerous lands.”

  “Shimeh is not . . . holy for you?”

  Leweth smiled. Like places too near, places too far could never be holy. “I’ve heard the name only a few times before,” he said.

  “The Sranc own the North. The few Men who remain are endlessly besieged, bound to the cities of Atrithau and Sakarpus. We know little of the Three Seas.”

  “The Three Seas?”

  “The nations of the South,” Leweth replied, his eyes rounded in wonder. He found his ignorance, Kellhus knew, godlike. “You mean you’ve never heard of the Three Seas?”

  “As isolated as your people are, mine are far more so.”

  Leweth nodded sagely. Finally, it was his turn to speak of profound things. “The Three Seas were young when the North was destroyed by the No-God and his Consult. Now that we’re but a shadow, they’re the seat of power for Men.” He paused, disheartened by how quickly his knowledge had failed him. “I know little more than that—save a handful of names.”