The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  Kill him!

  “Exactly,” Martemus replied.

  Rush them. String their horses. Cut their throats in the confusion!

  “Should I indulge you?” Conphas continued. “Should I allow you one more step toward the summit, Martemus?”

  “My loyalty and discretion, Lord Exalt-General, are yours without reservation.”

  “I’d already assumed as much, but I thank you for the reassurance . . . What you would say if I told you the battle we’ve just fought, the glorious victory we’ve just won, is nothing more than the first engagement of the Holy War?”

  “The Holy War? The Shriah’s Holy War?”

  “Whether the Holy War is the Shriah’s or no is the very point at issue.”

  Move! Avenge yourself! Your people!

  “But what about—”

  “I’m afraid it would be irresponsible for me to disclose more, Martemus. Soon, perhaps, but not now. My triumph here, as magnificent, as divine as it is, will be sackcloth and ashes compared with what follows. Soon, all the Three Seas will celebrate my name, and then . . . Well, you’re more soldier than officer. You understand that oftentimes commanders require their subordinates’ ignorance as much as their knowledge.”

  “I see. I suppose I should have expected this.”

  “Expected what?”

  “That your answers would stoke rather than sate my curiosity!”

  Laughter. “Alas, Martemus, if I were to tell you all I know, you’d still suffer the same deficit. Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.”

  “At the very least, you might explain to me—dullard that I am—how you could have known we’d win.”

  “As I said, the Scylvendi are obsessed with custom. That means they repeat, Martemus. They follow the same formula time and again. Do you see? They worship war, but they have no understanding of what it truly is.”

  “And what, then, is war truly?”

  “Intellect, Martemus. War is intellect.”

  Conphas spurred his horse ahead, leaving his subordinate to wrestle with the import of what he’d just uttered. Cnaiür watched Martemus remove his plumed helmet, run a hand through his cropped hair. For a breathless moment he seemed to stare directly at him, as though he could hear the thrum of Cnaiür’s hammering heart. Then he abruptly spurred after his Exalt-General.

  As Martemus closed on him, Conphas called out: “This afternoon, when our men have recovered from their revels, we start collecting Scylvendi heads. I’m going to build a road of trophies, Martemus, from here to our great diseased capital of Momemn. Think of the glory!”

  Their voices faded, leaving only the rush of cold waters against buzzing silence and the pale smell of chopped turf.

  So cold. The ground was so cold. Where should he go?

  He had fled his childhood and had crawled into the honour of his father’s name, Skiötha, Chieftain of the Utemot. With his father’s shameful death, he’d fled and crawled into the name of his people, the Scylvendi, who were the wrath of Lokung, more vengeance than bone or flesh. Now they too had died shamefully. There was no ground left to him.

  He lay nowhere, among the dead.

  Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence. They are moments that rankle at becoming past, and so remain contemporaries of our beating hearts. Some events are not remembered—they are relived.

  The death of Cnaiür’s father, Skiötha, was such an event.

  Cnaiür sits in the gloom of the Chieftain’s great yaksh as it stood twenty-nine years ago. A fire waxes in its centre, bright to look at but illuminating little. Draped in furs, his father speaks to the other ranking tribesmen about the insolence of their Kuöti kinsmen to the south. In the shadows thrown by the hard men, slaves loiter nervously, bearing skins of gishrut, fermented mare’s milk. When a horn is raised by a scarred arm, they refill it. The enclosure reeks of smoke and sour liquor.

  The White Yaksh has seen many such scenes, but this time, one of the slaves, a Norsirai man, abandons the shadows and steps into firelight. He lifts his face and addresses the astonished tribesmen in perfect Scylvendi—as though he himself were of the land.

  “I would make you a wager, Chieftain of the Utemot.”

  Cnaiür’s father is dumbstruck, both by such insolence and by such a transformation. A man hitherto broken has become as august as any King. Only Cnaiür is not surprised.

  The other men, who hedge the dark, fall silent.

  From across the fire, his father replies: “You have already made your gambit, slave. And you have lost.”

  The slave smiles derisively, as though a sovereign among a callow people.

  “But I would wager my life with you, Skiötha.”

  A slave speaking a name. How it overturns the ancient ways, upends the fundamental order!

  Skiötha gropes through this absurdity and finally laughs. Laughter makes small, and this outrage must be made small. Fury would acknowledge the depth of this contest, would make one a contestant. And yet the slave knows this.

  So the slave continues: “I have watched you, Skiötha, and I have wondered at the measure of your strength. Many here so wonder . . . Did you know this?”

  His father’s laughter trails. The fire wheezes softly.

  Then Skiötha, fearing to look into the faces of his kinsmen, says, “I have been measured, slave.”

  As though fuelled by these words, the fire flutters bright, and presses farther into the pockets of darkness between the assembled men. Its renewed heat bites at Cnaiür’s skin.

  “But measure,” the slave replies, “is not something accomplished and then forgotten, Skiötha. Old measure is merely grounds for the new. Measure is unceasing.”

  Complicity makes unforgettable, carves scenes with unbearable clarity, as though the extent of condemnation is to be found in the precision of detail. The fire so hot that it might be cradled in his lap. The cold of the earth beneath his thighs and buttocks. His teeth clenched, as though grinding sand. And the Norsirai slave’s pale face turning to him, the blue eyes bright, more encompassing than any sky. Summoning eyes! Eyes that yoke, that speak:

  Do you remember your part?

  Cnaiür has been given a script for this moment.

  From among the seated men, he says, “Are you afraid, Father?” Mad words! Treacherous and mad!

  A stinging look from his father. Cnaiür lowers his eyes. Skiötha turns to the slave and asks with contrived indifference, “What, then, is your wager?”

  And Cnaiür is gripped by the terror that he might die.

  Fear that the slave, Anasûrimbor Moënghus, might die!

  Not his father—Moënghus . . .

  Afterward, when his father lay dead, he had wept before the eyes of his tribe. Wept with relief.

  At last, Moënghus, the one who had called himself Dûnyain, was free.

  Some names mark us so deeply. Thirty years, one hundred and twenty seasons—a long time in the life of one man.

  And it meant nothing.

  Some events mark us so deeply.

  Cnaiür fled. After darkness fell, he skulked between the shining fires of the Nansur patrols. The vast, hollow bowl of night seemed something he might plummet into, so great was the land’s rebuke.

  With his own feet, the dead chased him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MOMEMN

  The world is a circle that possesses as many centres as it does men.

  —AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

  Early Autumn, 4110 Year-of-the-Tusk, Momemn

  All of Momemn had thundered.

  Chilled by the shade, Ikurei Conphas dismounted beneath the immensity of the Xatantian Arch. His eyes lingered on its graven images for a moment, following panel after panel of captives and spoils. He turned to General Martemus, about to remind him that not even Xatantius had pacified the Scylvendi tribes. I’ve wrought what no man has wrought
. Doesn’t that make me more than a man?

  Conphas could no longer count how many times this breathless thought had beset him, and though he was loath to admit it, he yearned to hear it echoed by others—especially Martemus. If only he could coax the words from him! Martemus possessed the unstudied candour of a lifelong field officer. Flattery was beneath his contempt. If the man said something, Conphas knew, it was true.

  But now was not the time. Martemus stood dumbstruck, staring across the Scuäri Campus, the parade grounds of the Imperial Precincts. Arrayed under the standards of every column in the Imperial Army, phalanxes of infantrymen in ceremonial dress filled the Scuäri’s expanse. Hundreds of red-and-black streamers undulated in the breeze above the formations, painted with golden prayers. Between the phalanxes, a broad avenue ran toward the towering facade of the Allosian Forum. The gardens, compounds, and colonnades of the Andiamine Heights climbed high into the haze beyond.

  Conphas saw his uncle awaiting them, a distant figure framed by the Forum’s mighty columns. Despite the imperial pageantry, he looked small, like a hermit squinting from the entrance of his cave.

  “Is this your first Imperial Audience-of-State?” Conphas asked Martemus.

  The General nodded, turned to him with a faintly doddering air. “My first time in the Imperial Precincts.”

  Conphas grinned. “Welcome to the brothel.”

  Grooms took their horses. In accordance with custom, the hereditary priests of Gilgaöl brought basins of water. As Conphas expected, they smeared lion’s blood on his limbs and, muttering prayers, cleansed his symbolic wounds. The Shrial Priests who arrived in their wake, however, surprised him. They anointed him with oils and murmurs, then finished by dipping their fingers in palm wine and tracing the Tusk across his forehead. Only when they closed the rite by crying out his new title, Shield-of-the-Tusk, did he understand why his uncle had incorporated them into the ceremony. The Scylvendi were as much heathen as the Kianene, so why not tap into the all-pervasive fervour of Holy War?

  It was actually, Conphas realized with some distaste, a brilliant ploy, which probably meant that Skeaös was behind it. As far as Conphas could tell, his uncle had exhausted whatever brilliance he possessed—especially when it came to the Holy War.

  The Holy War . . . The mere thought of it made Conphas want to spit like a Scylvendi, and he’d arrived at Momemn only the previous day.

  Never in his life had Conphas felt anything approaching the elation he’d experienced at the Battle of Kiyuth. Surrounded by his half-panicked staff, he had looked across the undecided battlefield and somehow, unaccountably, had known—known with a certainly that had made his bones feel like iron. I own this place. I am more . . . The feeling had been akin to rapture or religious ecstasy. It had been, he later realized, a revelation, a moment of divine insight into the immeasurable might of his hand.

  There could be no other explanation.

  But who would have thought that revelations, like meat, could be poisoned by the passage of days?

  At first things had gone exceedingly well. After the battle, the surviving Scylvendi had withdrawn into the deep Steppe. Some scattered bands continued to shadow the army, but they could do little more than maul the odd patrol. Unable to resist a final twist of the knife, Conphas arranged for a dozen captives to “overhear” his officers lauding those tribes who’d betrayed the horde—captives who, through daring and ingenuity not their own, later managed a miraculous escape. Not only would the Scylvendi, Conphas knew, believe their allegations of treachery, they would be gratified. Far better that the People defeat the People than the Nansur. Ah, sweet dissension. It would be a long time before the Scylvendi took to the field with one will.

  If only dissension were as easily undone. Months earlier Conphas had promised his uncle he would mark his return march from the frontier with piked Scylvendi heads. To this end, he’d ordered the heads of every Scylvendi slain at Kiyuth collected, tarred, and heaped in wains. But as soon as the Imperial Army crossed the frontier, the cartographers and mathematicians began feuding over the proper spacing of their grisly trophies. When the dispute persisted, the sorcerers of the Imperial Saik, who like all sorcerers fancied themselves better cartographers than cartographers and better mathematicians than mathematicians, intervened. What followed was a bureaucratic war worthy of his uncle’s court, one that somehow, following the mad alchemy of injured pride and spite, led to the murder of Erathius, the most outspoken of the imperial cartographers.

  When the subsequent military inquest failed to resolve either the murder or the feud, Conphas summarily seized the most vocal partisan of each faction and, exploiting poorly worded articles of the Martial Code, had them publicly flayed. Not surprisingly, all differences were settled the following day.

  But if this vexing affair had tainted his rapture, his return to Momemn had nearly spoiled it altogether. He found the capital encircled by the encamped Holy War, which had become a vast slum of tents and huts about the city’s landward walls. As troubling as the sight was, Conphas still expected adoring masses to greet him. Instead, unkempt mobs of Inrithi howled insults, threw stones, and even, on one occasion, tossed burning sacks of human excrement. When he sent his Kidruhil ahead to clear a path, what could only be described as a pitched battle ensued. “They see only the Emperor’s nephew,” an officer sent by his uncle explained, “not the man who conquered the Scylvendi.”

  “They hate my uncle so much?”

  The officer shrugged. “Until their lords acquiesce to his Indenture, he provides them only enough grain to survive.”

  The Holy War, the man told him, was growing by hundreds daily, even though, as rumour had it, the main contingents from Galeoth, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, and High Ainon were still months away. So far only three great lords had joined the Men of the Tusk: Calmemunis, the Palatine of the Conriyan province of Kanampurea; Tharschilka, an Earl from some obscure Galeoth march; and Kumrezzer, the Palatine-Governor of the Ainoni district of Kutapileth. Each of them had violently rebuffed the Emperor’s demand to sign his Indenture. The negotiations had since deteriorated into a bitter contest of wills, with the Inrithi lords wreaking what havoc they could, short of incurring the Shriah’s wrath, and with Ikurei Xerius III issuing proclamation after proclamation in an attempt to constrain and further coerce them.

  “The Emperor,” the officer concluded, “is most heartened by your arrival, Lord Exalt-General.”

  Conphas had nearly cackled aloud at that. The return of a rival heartened no emperor, but every emperor was heartened by the return of his army, particularly when he was besieged. Which was essentially the case. Conphas had been forced to enter Momemn by boat.

  And now, the great triumph he’d so anticipated, the all-important recognition of what he’d wrought, had been overshadowed by greater events. The Holy War had dimmed his glory, had dwarfed even the destruction of the Scylvendi. Men would celebrate him, yes, but the way they celebrated religious festivals in times of famine: listlessly, too preoccupied by the press of events to truly understand what or whom they celebrated.

  How could he not hate the Holy War?

  Cymbals crashed. Horns sounded. Completing the ceremony, the Shrial Priests bowed and withdrew, leaving him doused in the pungent odour of palm wine. Ushers dressed in gold-chased kilts appeared, and Conphas, with Martemus at his side and with his retinue in tow, followed them at a slow march across the crowded silence of the Scuäri. Whole fields of red-skirted infantrymen fell to their knees as they passed, so that, like wind across wheat, they trailed a wake across the far reaches of the Campus. Conphas felt a momentary thrill. Had this not been his revelation? The source of his rapture on the banks of the River Kiyuth?

  As far as my eye can see, they answer to me, to my hand. As far as my eye, and beyond . . .

  Beyond. A breathless thought. Wanton.

  A glance over his shoulder assured him that his earlier instructions were being observed. Two of his personal bodyguards followed close behind, dr
agging the captive between them, while a dozen more were busily marking their passage with the last of the severed Scylvendi heads. Unlike past Exalt-Generals, he had no parade of slaves and plunder for his emperor, but the sight of tarred Scylvendi heads raised above the Campus, he thought, possessed a singular effect. Though he could not see his grandmother among the crowds flanking his uncle beneath the Forum, he knew she was there, and that she approved. “Give them spectacle,” she was fond of saying, “and they will give you power.”

  Where power was perceived, power was given. For his entire life Conphas had been surrounded by tutors. But it had been his grandmother, fierce Istriya, who had done the most to prepare him for his birthright. Contrary to his father’s wishes, she had insisted he spend his early childhood surrounded by the pomp and circumstance of the Imperial Court. And there she had reared him as if he were her own, teaching him the history of their dynasty and through it, all the unwritten secrets of statecraft. Conphas even suspected she had had a hand in the trumped-up charges that led to his father’s execution, simply to guarantee the man would not interfere with the succession should her other son, Ikurei Xerius III, unexpectedly find himself upon the bier. But more than anything, she had ensured, even enforced, the perception that he, and he alone, was heir apparent. Even when he was a young boy, she had crafted him into a spectacle, as though his every breath were a triumph for the Empire. Now not even his uncle would dare contravene that perception, even if he did manage to produce a son who did not drool or require diapers into adulthood.

  She had done so much that he could almost love her.

  Conphas studied his uncle once again. He was nearer now, so much so that Conphas could make out details of his dress. The horn of white felt rising from his golden diadem surprised the Exalt-General. No Nansur Emperor had worn the crown of Shigek since the province’s loss to the Fanim three centuries earlier. The presumption was outrageous! What could move him to such excess? Did he think heaping himself with empty ornaments could safeguard his glory?