The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  What did it mean?

  Balait had joined his meditation. “He’s doomed,” the man said, shaking his head. “Not even his Gods can save him!”

  Then Cnaiür understood. His breath grew chill in his breast. The hot fury of bloodletting abandoned his limbs; he could feel only the ache of his injuries and the unspeakable hollow opened by Bannut’s words.

  “We must flee.”

  Balait stared at him in stunned contempt. “We must what?”

  “The Chorae Bowmen—Conphas knows we position them behind the centre. Either they’re destroyed or he’s chased them from the field. Either way we—”

  Then he glimpsed the first flashes of unholy light. Too late.

  “A School, Bala! Conphas has brought a School!”

  Near the heart of the valley, from infantry phalanxes hastily arrayed to meet Oknai One-Eye and his Munuäti, at least two dozen black-robed figures slowly climbed over the field and into the sky. Schoolmen. The sorcerers of the Imperial Saik. Several dispersed over the valley. Those remaining already sang their unearthly song, scorching earth and Scylvendi with shimmering flame. The Munuäti charge crumbled into an avalanche of burning horses and men.

  For a long moment Cnaiür could not move. He watched mounted silhouettes topple in the heart of golden bonfires. He saw men thrown like chaff by incandescent blooms. He saw suns fall short of the horizon and come crashing to fiery earth. The air resounded with the concussions of sorcerous thunder.

  “A trap,” he murmured. “The entire battle was a bid to deny us our Chorae!”

  But Cnaiür possessed his own Chorae—an inheritance from his dead father. Fingers numb, arms giddy with exhaustion, he pulled the iron sphere from beneath his brigandine and clutched it tight.

  As though walking across the back of roiling smoke and dust, a Schoolman drifted toward them. He slowed, floating the height of a tree-top above them. His black silk robe boiled in the mountain wind, its gold trim undulating like snakes in water. White light flashed from his eyes and mouth. A barrage of arrows winked into cinders against his spherical Wards. The ghost of a dragon’s head ponderously ascended from his hands. Cnaiür saw glassy scales and eyes like globes of bloody water.

  The majestic head bowed.

  He turned to Balait, crying, “Run!”

  The horned maw opened and spewed blinding flame.

  Teeth snapped. Skin blistered and sloughed. But Cnaiür felt nothing, only the warmth thrown by Balait’s burning shadow. There was a momentary shriek, the sound of bones and bowels exploding.

  Then the froth of sun-bright fire was gone. Bewildered, Cnaiür found himself in the centre of burnt ruin. Balait and the other Utemot still burned, sizzling like swine on the spit. The air smelt of ash and pork.

  All dead . . .

  A mighty shout braced the cacophony, and through screens of smoke and fleeing Scylvendi, he saw a bloodied tide of Nansur infantrymen rushing toward him across the slopes.

  A stranger’s voice whispered, “Measure is unceasing . . .”

  Cnaiür fled, leaping over the slain, bounding like the others for the dark line of the river. He tripped over an arrow shaft embedded in the turf and slammed headlong into a dead horse. Bracing himself against sun-warmed flanks, he stumbled to his feet and lurched into a sprint. He swept past a young warrior limping with an arrow in his thigh, then another kneeling in the grasses, spitting blood. Then a band of his Utemot rumbled by on horses, led by Yursalka. Cnaiür cried out his name, and though the man momentarily looked at him, they continued riding. Cursing, he pressed harder. His ears roared. He blew spit after every sucking breath. Ahead he saw hundreds massed along the banks, some frantically tearing at their armour so they could swim, others dashing south toward a rapids that promised shallows. Yursalka and his Utemot cohort barrelled through the would-be swimmers and crashed into the waters. Many of their horses foundered in the swift current, but a few managed to drag their riders to the far banks. The ground steepened, and Cnaiür swallowed the distance with long loping strides. He leapt another dead horse, then crashed through a copse of goldenrods wagging in the wind. To his right he glimpsed a company of Imperial Kidruhil fanning across the slopes and galloping hard toward the fugitives. He staggered across the narrow floodplain, then finally blundered into the panicked midst of his countrymen. He yanked men aside, swatting his way to the muck and trampled brush of the riverbank.

  He saw Yursalka press through the rushes and urge his sopping mount up the far side. A dozen other Utemot awaited him, their horses half-panicked and stamping.

  “Utemot!” he roared, and somehow they heard him through the clamour. Two of them pointed in his direction.

  But Yursalka was shouting at them, beating the air with an open hand. Their expressions blank, they jerked their horses about and hounded by Yursalka, galloped to the southwest.

  Cnaiür spat at their retreating forms. He grabbed his knife and began sawing at his brigandine. Twice he was almost jostled into the water. Shouts of alarm rifled the air, made urgent by the swelling thunder of hoofs. He heard lances crack and horses shriek. He began stabbing at his brigandine’s gut lacings. Bodies heaved against him, and he stumbled. He glimpsed a Kidruhil rider, towering black across the flare of the sun. He tore off his brigandine, whirled to the Kiyuth. Something exploded against his scalp. Hot blood choked his eyes. He fell to his knees. The rutted ground struck his face.

  Screams, wails, and the sound of bodies plunging into rushing mountain water.

  So like my father, he thought, then darkness came swirling down.

  Hoarse, exhausted voices, framed by a more distant and more drunken chorus of singers. Pain, as though his head were nailed to the earth. His body leaden, as immovable as the river mud. Hard to think.

  “What, do they bloat right after they die?”

  Lurching horror. The voice had come from behind, very close. Looters?

  “Another ring?” a second voice exclaimed. “Just saw off the fucking finger!”

  Cnaiür heard approaching footsteps, sandalled feet barging through grasses. Slowly, because fast movements drew the eye, he tested his fingers and his wrist. They moved. He gently probed beneath his girdle, closed tingling fingers on his Chorae, withdrew it, then pressed it into the mud.

  “He’s squeamish,” a third voice observed. “Always has been.”

  “Am not! It’s just . . . just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “Sacrilege, that’s all. Robbing the dead is one thing. Desecrating them is quite another.”

  “Need I remind you,” the third voice said, “that these here are what you call dead Scylvendi. Pretty hard to desecrate what’s accursed in the first—Heyya! Another live one here.”

  The sound of a gritty blade scraping free of its scabbard, a thud, then a choking gasp. Despite his pounding head, Cnaiür smeared his face in the muck, scooped as much of it as he could bear into his mouth.

  “Still can’t get this blasted ring . . .”

  “Just chop off the fucking finger, would you?” cried the second voice, now so close that it raised the hair on Cnaiür’s neck. “By the Latter-fucking-Prophet! The only one lucky enough to find gold on these stinking savages, and he’s paralyzed by scruples! Hello. What do we have here? Big brute. Sweet Sejenus, look at the scars on him!”

  “They say Conphas wants us to collect all their heads anyway,” the third voice said. “What does a finger matter?”

  “There. A little spit. Do you think these could be rubies?”

  A rough hand clasped Cnaiür’s shoulder, peeled him from the muck. Eyes half-open to the setting sun. Limbs tensed in semblance of rigor. Soil-choked mouth drawn back in the sardonic grin. No breath.

  “I’m serious,” a looming shadow said. “Look at the scars on this bastard! He’s killed hundreds!”

  “They should offer bounties for ones like him. Imagine, one of our countrymen for every scar.”

  Hands rifled his body, patting, poking. No breath. Stiff motion
lessness.

  “Maybe we should take him to Gavarus,” the first voice ventured. “They might want to string him up or something.”

  “Grand idea, that one,” the shadow said scathingly. “How about you carry him?”

  A laugh. “Not so grand any more, is it?” the second voice said. “Any luck there, Naff?”

  “Not a single fucking thing,” the shadow said, tossing Cnaiür back to the ground. “Next ring you find is mine, you little bastard. Otherwise I saw off your fingers!”

  A kick from the blackness. Pain unlike any he’d ever experienced. The world roared. He struggled not to vomit.

  “Sure,” the first voice said amiably. “Who needs gold after a day like this? Imagine the triumph when we return! Imagine the songs! The Scylvendi destroyed on their own land. The Scylvendi! When we’re old, we need only say that we served with Conphas at Kiyuth, and everyone will regard us with reverence and awe.”

  “Glory doesn’t get you the good bird, boy. Glitter. It’s all in the glitter.”

  Morning. Cnaiür awoke shivering. He heard only the deep-running wash of the River Kiyuth.

  A great iron ache radiated from the back of his head, and for a time he lay still, crushed by its weight. Convulsions wracked him, and he heaved bile into the footprints before his face. He coughed. With his tongue he probed a soft, salty gap between his teeth.

  For some reason, the first clear thought to arise from his misery was of his Chorae. He scraped his fingers through vomit and gritty muck, found it quickly. He tucked it beneath his iron-plated girdle.

  Mine. My prize.

  The pain pressed like a shod hoof against the back of his skull, but he managed to push himself to his hands and knees. The grass was whitewashed with mud and sharp like small knives between his fingers. He dragged himself away from the rush of the river.

  The turf of the embankment had been trampled into mud, now hardened into the brittle record of the earlier slaughter. The corpses seemed cemented to the ground, their flesh leathery beneath flies, their blood clotted like crushed cherries. He felt as though he crawled across one of those dizzying stone reliefs that panelled the temples of Nansur, where struggling men were frozen in unholy representation. But this was no representation.

  Cresting the slope before him, a dead horse rose like a rounded mountain range, its belly in shadow, the bright point of the sun rising on the far side. Dead horses always looked the same, ridiculously stiff, as though they were carvings of wood simply tipped on their sides. He pushed himself onto it, rolled painfully over. Against his cheek, it was as cold as the river clay.

  Save for jackdaws, vultures, and the dead, the battlefield was abandoned. He gazed across the gradual incline over which he’d fled.

  Fled . . . He clamped shut his eyes. Again and again he was running, the blue sky shrunken by the roar behind him.

  We were routed.

  Defeated. Humiliated by their ancestral enemy.

  For a long time he felt nothing. He remembered those mornings in his youth when, for whatever reason, he would awaken before dawn. He would creep from the yaksh and steal through the camp, searching for the higher ground where he could watch the sun embrace the land. The wind would hiss through the grasses. The squatting sun would rise, climb. And he would think, I am the last. I am the only one.

  Like now.

  For an absurd moment, he felt the queer exultation of one who’d prophesied his own destruction. He’d told Xunnurit, the eight-fingered fool. They’d thought him an old woman, a spinner of preposterous fears. Where was their laughter now?

  Dead, he realized. All of them were dead. All of them! The horde had plumbed the horizon with its numbers, had shaken the Vault of Heaven with the thunder of its advance, and now it was gone, routed, dead. From where he lay, he could see great swaths of burned grassland, the burned husks of what had been arrogant thousands. More than routed—massacred.

  And by the Nansur! Cnaiür had fought too many borderland skirmishes not to respect them as warriors, but in the end he despised the Nansur the way all Scylvendi despised them: as a mongrel race, a kind of human vermin, to be hunted to extinction if possible. For the Scylvendi, the mention of the Empire-behind-the-Mountains summoned innumerable images of degradation: leering priests grovelling before their unholy Tusk; sorcerers trussed in whorish gowns, uttering unearthly obscenities while painted courtiers, their soft bodies powdered and perfumed, committed earthly ones. These were the men who had conquered them. Tillers of earth and writers of words. Men who made sport with men.

  His breath caught on a pain in the back of his throat.

  He thought of Bannut, of the treachery of his kinsmen. He clutched the grass with aching hands—anchors—as though he were so weak, so empty, that he might be blown in an instant into the hollow sky. A forlorn cry uncoiled in his breast but was choked into a hiss by clenched teeth. He gasped air, moaned, rolled his head from side to side despite the agony. No!

  Then he sobbed. Wept.

  Weeper . . .

  Bannut cackling, spitting up milky blood.

  “I saw the way you looked at him! I know you were lovers!”

  “No!” Cnaiür cried, but his hatred failed him.

  All these years—pondering their silence, obsessing over the unspoken rebuke in their eyes, thinking himself mad for his suspicions, maligning himself for his fears, and still always pondering their hidden thoughts. How many slanders murmured in his absence? How many times, drawn by the sound of laughter, had he entered a yaksh only to find tight lips and insolent eyes? All this time they’d . . . He clutched his chest.

  No!

  He squeezed tears from his eyes, beat a scabbed fist against the turf harder and harder, as though he stoked a furnace. The face from thirty years ago floated before his soul’s eye, possessed of a demonic calm.

  “You task me!” he hissed under his breath. “Heap burden upon burd—”

  A flare of sudden terror silenced him. The sound of voices, carried on the wind.

  Lying still, with his eyes open only to where his lashes blurred his vision, he listened. They spoke Sheyic, but what they said was indecipherable.

  Did looters still range the battlefield?

  Fawn-hearted wretch! Get up and die!

  The wind lulled and the sounds swelled. He could hear the step of horses and the periodic rustle of gear. At least two men, mounted. The aristocratic inflection in their speech suggested they were officers. They approached, but from what direction? He smothered the mad urge to sit up and look around.

  “Since the days of Kyraneas, the Scylvendi have been here,” the more refined voice was saying, “as relentless and as patient as the ocean. And unchanged! Peoples rise and peoples fall, whole races and nations are blotted out, yet the Scylvendi remain. And I’ve studied them, Martemus! I’ve plodded through every report of them I could find, ancient and recent. I even had my agents break into the Library of the Sareots! Yes, in Iothiah!—though they found nothing. The Fanim have let it crumble to ruin. But here’s the thing: every account of the Scylvendi I read, no matter how ancient, could have been written yesterday. Thousands of years, Martemus, and the Scylvendi have remained unchanged. Take away their stirrups and their iron, and they would be indistinguishable from those who destroyed Mehtsonc two thousand years ago or those who sacked Cenei a thousand years later! The Scylvendi are just as the philosopher Ajencis claimed: a people without history.”

  “But so are all illiterate peoples, are they not?” the other man, Martemus, replied.

  “Even illiterate peoples change over the centuries, Martemus. They migrate. They forget old gods and discover new ones. Even their tongues change. But not the Scylvendi. They’re obsessed with custom. Where we raise vast edifices of stone to conquer the passage of years, they make monuments of their actions, temples of their wars.”

  The description made Cnaiür’s heart itch. Who were these men? The one was definitely of the Houses.

  “Interesting, I suppose,” Martemu
s said, “but it doesn’t explain how you knew you would defeat them.”

  “Don’t be tedious. I despise tedium in my officers. First you ask impertinent questions, then you refuse to acknowledge my answers as answers.”

  “I apologize, Lord Exalt-General. I meant no offence. You yourself praise and castigate me for my forthright—”

  “Ah, Martemus . . . always the same charade. The demure general from the provinces, without any ambition other than to serve. But I know you better than you think. I’ve seen your interest quicken when I mention matters of state. Just as I see the greed for glory in your eyes now.”

  It was as though a great stone had been dropped upon Cnaiür’s chest. He could not breathe. It was him. Him! Ikurei Conphas!

  “I’ll not deny it. But I swear I didn’t mean to question you. It’s just that . . . that . . .”

  These words brought the two men to a stop. Cnaiür could see them now, mounted shadows through the blur of eyelashes. He breathed shallow breaths.

  “Just what, Martemus?”

  “Through the entirety of this campaign, I’ve held my tongue. What we did seemed lunacy to me, so much so that . . .”

  “That what?”

  “That for a time my faith in you faltered.”

  “And yet you said nothing, asked nothing . . . Why?”

  Cnaiür tried wrenching himself from the ground, but he could not. In his ears the disembodied voices had become mocking thunder. Murder him. He must!

  “Fear, Lord Exalt-General. One does not rise from the bottom as I have without learning the lethality of questioning one’s betters . . . especially when they’re desperate.”

  Laughter. “So now, surrounded by this”—Conphas’s shadow gestured to the fields of ruined dead—“you assume I’m no longer desperate; you think it’s safe to ask these festering questions of yours.”

  A sudden awareness of himself and his environment struck Cnaiür. It was as though he saw himself from far away, a cringing man huddled next to the body of a horse, surrounded by ever-widening circles of dead. Even these images triggered recriminations. What kind of thoughts were these? Why must he always think one thought too many? Why must he always think?