The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Come, Xinemus,” he said absently, “we must ensure the fleet disembarks in good order.”

  “There’s one other thing, my Prince . . . Something I forgot to mention.”

  Proyas sighed deeply, was troubled by the audible tremor that passed through it. “What is it now, Zin?”

  “Drusas Achamian is here.”

  Achamian sat alone by the fire, waiting for Xinemus’s return. Save for a handful of slaves and passing Men of the Tusk, the camp about him was abandoned. The Marshal’s men were still on the beaches, Achamian knew, helping their Prince and their kinsmen disembark. The sense of surrounding canvas hollows troubled him. Dark and empty tents. Cold firepits.

  This was what it would be like, he realized, if the Marshal and his men were destroyed on the battlefield. Abandoned belongings. Places where words and looks had once warmed the air. Absence.

  Achamian shuddered.

  The first few days after joining Xinemus and the Holy War, Achamian had busied himself with matters concerning the Scarlet Spires. He placed a series of Wards about his tent, discreetly, so as not to offend Inrithi sensibilities. He found a local man to show him the way to the villa where the Scarlet Schoolmen were sequestered. He made maps, lists of names. He even hired three adolescent brothers, the children of a non-hereditary Shigeki slave owned by a Tydonni thane, to watch the track leading to the villa to report on significant comings and goings. There was little else for him to do. His single attempt to ingratiate himself with the local magnate the Spires had contracted to provision them had been a disaster. When Achamian persisted, the man had literally tried to stab him with a spoon—not out of any sense of loyalty to the Spires, but out of terror.

  The Nansur, it seemed, were learning quickly: for the Scarlet Schoolmen, any cause for suspicion, be it a bead of sweat or familiarity with a stranger, was tantamount to betrayal. And no one betrayed the Scarlet Spires.

  But all these tasks were little more than routine. The entire time, Achamian would think, After this, Inrau. I’ll tend to you after this . . .

  Then “after” came. There was no one to question. No one to watch. No one, save Maithanet, to even suspect.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  Of course, according to the reports he sent his Mandate handlers in Atyersus, he was aggressively pursuing this hint or that innuendo. But that was simply part of the pantomime all of them, even zealots like Nautzera, played. They were like starving men dining on grass. When one starved, why not cultivate the illusion of digestion?

  But this time the illusion sickened rather than soothed. The reason seemed obvious enough: Inrau. By falling into the hole that was the Consult, Inrau had made it too deep to be papered over.

  So Achamian began hunting for ways to deaden his heart or at the very least to crowd some of the recriminations from his thoughts. When Proyas comes, he would tell his dead student. I’ll tend to you when Proyas comes.

  He took to heavy drink: unwatered wine mostly; some anpoi when Xinemus was in a particularly good mood; and yursa, a dreadful liquor the Galeoth made from rotten potatoes. He smoked poppy oil and hashish, but he abandoned the former after the boundary between the trances and the Dreams collapsed.

  He began rereading the few classics Xinemus had brought with him. He laughed over Ajencis’s Third and Fourth Analytics, realizing for the first time the subtlety of the philosopher’s sense of humour. He frowned at the lyrics of Protathis, finding them overwrought even though they had seemed to speak his soul’s own tongue twenty years earlier. And he started, as he had many times, The Sagas, only to set them aside after a few hours. Either their florid inaccuracies made him furious to the point of huffing breath and shaking hands, or their truths made him weep. It was a lesson, it seemed, that he must relearn every few years: seeing the Apocalypse made it impossible to read accounts of it.

  Some days, when he was too restless to read, he ranged through the encampment, into warrens and down byways so segregated from the greater Holy War that Norsirai openly called him a “pick” because of his skin. Once five Tydonni chased him from their petty fief with knives, hollering slurs and accusations. Other days he wandered through Momemn’s mud-brick canyons, to different agoras, to the ancient temple-complex of Cmiral, and once, to the gates of the Imperial Precincts. Inevitably he found himself in the company of whores, even though he never remembered setting out to find them. He forgot faces, ignored names. He revelled in the heave of grunting bodies, in the greasiness of skin wiping unwashed skin. Then he wandered home, emptied of everything but his seed.

  He would try very hard not to think of Esmi.

  Ordinarily, Xinemus returned in the evening, and they made time for a few moves in their running game of benjuka. Then they sat by the Marshal’s fire, passed a sharp bowl of a drink that the Conriyans called perrapta and insisted cleansed the palate for dinner, but that Achamian thought made everything taste like fish. Then they dined on whatever Xinemus’s slaves could scrounge. Some nights they would be joined by the Marshal’s officers, usually Dinchases, Zenkappa, and Iryssas, and their time would consist of ribald jokes and irreverent gossip. Other nights, it would be just the two of them, and they would speak of deeper and more painful things. Occasionally, like this night, Achamian found himself alone.

  Word of the Conriyan fleet had arrived before dawn. Xinemus had left shortly after to prepare for the Crown Prince’s arrival. His temper had been short because he dreaded, Achamian had no doubt, informing Proyas of Calmemunis and the Vulgar Holy War. When Achamian had suggested the possibility of accompanying him to meet Proyas, Xinemus had simply stared at him incredulously and barked, “He’s going to hang me as it is!”

  Before departing, however, he rode up to the morning fire and promised Achamian he would let Proyas know of his presence and of his need.

  The day had been long with hope and dread.

  Proyas was Maithanet’s friend and confidant. If anyone could coax information from the Holy Shriah, it would be him. And why shouldn’t he? So much of what he was, of what made others refer to him as the Sun Prince, was due to his old tutor—to Drusas Achamian.

  Don’t worry, Inrau . . . He owes me.

  Then the sun fell without word from Xinemus. Doubt took hold, as did drink. Fear hollowed his unspoken declarations, so he filled them with anger and spite.

  I made him! Made him what he is! He wouldn’t dare!

  He repented these harsh thoughts and began to reminisce. He remembered Proyas as a boy, weeping, cradling his arm, running through the gloom of the walnut grove, through lances of sunlight. “Climb into books, you fool!” he had shouted. “Their branches never break.” He remembered coming upon Inrau unawares in the scriptorium, watching him draw, in the bored fashion of juvenile boys, a row of phalluses across an unspoiled sheet. “Practising your letters, hmm?”

  “My sons,” he muttered to the fire. “My beautiful sons.”

  Finally he heard horsemen filing down the dark lanes. He saw Xinemus heading a small party of Conriyan knights. The Marshal dismounted in the shadows then strode to the firelight, rubbing the back of his neck. His eyes had the weary look of a man with one last difficult task.

  “He’ll not see you.”

  “He must be incredibly busy,” Achamian blurted, “and exhausted! What a fool I was. Perhaps tomorrow . . .”

  Xinemus sighed heavily. “No, Akka. He will not see you.”

  Near the heart of Momemn’s famed Kamposea Agora, Achamian paused at a stall of bronze wares. Ignoring the proprietor’s scowl, he lifted a large polished plate, pretended to look for imperfections. He turned it from side to side, peering into the smeared reflection of the throngs passing behind him. Then he saw the man again, apparently haggling with a sausage-seller. Clean-shaven. Black hair chopped in the haphazard way of slaves. Wearing a blue linen tunic beneath a robe striped in the Nilnameshi fashion. Achamian glimpsed an exchange of coppers in the stall’s shadow. The man’s reflection turned into sunlight, holding a sausa
ge pinched in bread. His bored eyes sifted through the teeming market, settling on this or that. He took a small bite, then glanced at Achamian’s back.

  Who are you?

  “What’s this?” the bronze-peddler cried. “You checking teeth for pepper?”

  “For pox,” Achamian said darkly. “I fear I might have the pox.” He did not need to look at the man to know the horror those words would evoke. A woman lingering over the wine bowls quickly scuttled into the crowd.

  Achamian watched the reflected figure saunter from the stall. Though he doubted he was in any immediate danger, being followed was not something to be ignored. Odds were the man belonged to the Scarlet Spires, which would be interested in him for the obvious reasons, or perhaps even the Emperor, who spied on everyone for the sake of spying on everyone. But there was always the chance the man belonged to the College of Luthymae. If the Thousand Temples had killed Inrau, then they probably knew he was here. And if this was the case, Achamian needed to know what this man knew.

  Smiling, Achamian offered the plate to the bronze-peddler, who flinched as though it were a burning coal. Achamian tossed it onto the gleaming stacks instead, drawing passing stares with the racket. Let him think I argue.

  But if he were to confront the man, the question was more one of where than of how. The Kamposea was definitely not the place.

  Some alley, perhaps.

  Beyond the agora, Achamian saw a cohort of birds wheeling above the great domes of the Temple Xothei, whose silhouette loomed above the tenements hedging the north end of the market. East of the temple stood a towering scaffold strung by a web of ropes to a leaning obelisk—the Emperor’s latest gift to the temple-complex of Cmiral. It was somewhat smaller, Achamian noted, than the obelisks rising in the smoke beyond.

  He jostled his way north through rumbling crowds and shouting vendors, looking for breaks between the buildings that might mark some rarely used exit from the market. The man, he trusted, still followed. He almost stumbled across a peacock, its broad fan of angry red eyes in full display. The Nansur thought the bird holy and allowed them to roam free in their cities. Then he glimpsed a woman sitting in the window of one of the nearer tenements and was momentarily reminded of Esmenet.

  If they know about me, then they know about her . . .

  All the more reason to seize the fool who followed him.

  At the north end of the market, he passed among paddocks cramped with sheep and pigs. He even saw an immense snorting bull. Sacrificial victims to sell to the Cultic priests of Cmiral, Achamian supposed. Then he found his alley: a narrow slot between mud-brick walls. He passed a blind man sitting before a trinket-cluttered mat and hastened into the humid dark.

  The whine of flies filled his ears. He saw piles of ash and greasy entrails amid dried bones and dead fish. The stench was guttural with rot, but he retreated to a point where he was sure the man would not immediately see him.

  And waited.

  The smell extorted a cough from him.

  He struggled to concentrate, rehearsing the contorted words of the Cant he would use to snare his hunter. The difficulty of the thoughts behind them unnerved him, as they often did. He was always faintly incredulous of his ability to work sorcery, more so when days would pass without his uttering a significant Cant—as in this case. But in his thirty-nine years with the Mandate, his abilities—at least in this regard—had never failed him.

  I’m a Schoolman.

  He watched sun-bright figures flit to and fro across the opening. Still no man.

  The muck had crept above the lip of his sandals and now slithered between his toes. The fish between his feet, he noted, trembled. He saw a maggot roll from an empty eye socket.

  This is madness! No fool is fool enough to follow someone here.

  He rushed from the alley, held his hand against the bleary sun in order to scan his corner of the market.

  The man was nowhere to be seen.

  I’m the fool . . . Was he even following me?

  Fuming, Achamian abandoned his search and hastened to purchase those things that had brought him into Momemn in the first place.

  He had learned nothing of the Scarlet Spires, even less of Maithanet and the Thousand Temples, and Proyas still refused to meet with him. Since he could find no new books to read, and Xinemus had taken to upbraiding him for his drunkenness, Achamian had decided to revisit an old passion of his. He would cook. All sorcerers had studied alchemy to some extent, and all alchemists, at least those worth their salt, knew how to cook.

  Xinemus thought that he degraded himself, that cooking was for women and slaves, but Achamian knew different. Xinemus and his officers would scoff until they tasted, and then they would accord him a quiet honour, as they would any other skilled practitioner of an ancient art. Finally Achamian would be more than the blasphemous beggar at their table. Their souls might be imperilled, but at least their appetites would be gratified.

  But the duck, the leeks, curry, and chives were all forgotten when he glimpsed the man again, this time beneath the ramparts of the Gilgallic Gate in the crush to leave the city. He caught only a momentary glimpse of his profile, but it was the same man. Same ragged hair. Same threadbare robe.

  Without thinking, Achamian dropped his purchases.

  Now it’s my turn to follow.

  He thought of Esmi. Did they know he’d stayed with her in Sumna?

  I can’t risk losing him, witnesses or no witnesses.

  This was the kind of hasty action that Achamian ordinarily despised. But over the years he’d found that circumstances were unkind to elaborate plans, and that most everything deteriorated into such rash acts anyway.

  “You!” he shouted over the roar, then once again cursed himself for his stupidity. What if he fled? Obviously he knew that Achamian had spotted him. Otherwise why wouldn’t he have followed him into the alley?

  But luckily the man hadn’t heard. Achamian doggedly worked his way toward him, glaring all the while at the back of his head. He was cursed, even viciously elbowed a couple of times, as he shoved through the sweaty slots between people. But he remained intent on the man. The back of his head grew nearer.

  “Sweet Sejenus, man!” a perfumed Ainoni cried in Achamian’s periphery. “Do that again and I’ll fucking knife you!”

  Nearer. The Cants of Compulsion boiled through his thoughts. The others would hear, he knew. They would know. Blasphemy.

  What happens, happens. I need to take this man!

  Closer. Close enough . . .

  He reached out, grabbed his shoulder, and yanked him around. For a heartbeat, he could only stare at him speechlessly. The stranger scowled, shrugged Achamian’s hand away.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he spat.

  “I-I apologize,” Achamian said hastily, unable to look away from his face. “I thought you were someone else.” But it was him, wasn’t it?

  Had he seen the bruise of sorcery, he would have thought it a trick, but there was nothing, only a quarrelsome face. He had simply made a mistake.

  But how?

  The man appraised him for a contemptuous moment, then shook his head. “Drunken fool.”

  For a nightmarish moment Achamian could only stumble along with the crowd. He cursed himself for dropping his food.

  No matter. Cooking was for slaves anyway.

  Esmenet sat alone by Sarcellus’s fire, shivering.

  Once again she felt as though she’d been thrown beyond the circuit of what was possible. She had journeyed to find a sorcerer, only to be rescued by a knight. And now she found herself staring across the innumerable campfires of a holy war. When she squinted, peered over Momemn, she could even see the Emperor’s palace, the Andiamine Heights, rising against the murky sea. The sight made her cry, not only because she finally witnessed the world she had yearned to see for so long, but also because it reminded her of the tales she used to tell her daughter, the ones Esmenet would continue telling long after she had fallen asleep.

&n
bsp; She had always been a bad one for that. Giving selfish gifts.

  The camp of the Shrial Knights occupied the heights to the north of Momemn and above the Holy War, along terraced slopes that had once been cultivated. Because Sarcellus was First Knight-Commander, second only to Incheiri Gotian, his pavilion dwarfed those of his men. It had been pitched, as per his order, at the edge of the terrace so that Esmenet might marvel over the sights to which he’d delivered her.

  Two blonde slave girls sat on a reed mat nearby, quietly eating rice and muttering to one another in their mother tongue. Esmenet had already caught them nervously glancing in her direction, as though fearful she concealed some hunger they had not gratified. They had bathed her, rubbed fine oils into her skin, and dressed her in blue muslin and silk gowns.

  She found herself hating them for fearing her, and yet loving them too.

  She could still taste the peppered pheasant they had prepared for her dinner.

  Do I dream?

  She felt a fraud, a whore who was also a mummer, and so twice damned, twice degraded, but she felt an overweening pride as well, terrifying because of its deranged conceit. This is me! something within her cried. Me as I truly am!

  Sarcellus had told her it would be like this. How many times had he apologized for the discomforts of the road? He travelled frugally, bearing crucial correspondence for Incheiri Gotian, the Grandmaster of the Shrial Knights. But he insisted this would change when they reached the Holy War, where he promised to keep her in a fashion befitting her beauty and her wit.

  “It’ll be like the light after a long darkness,” he had said. “It will illuminate, and it will blind.”

  She ran a trembling palm along the brocaded silk that spilled across her lap. In the firelight, she could not see the tattoo on the back of her left hand.