The Darkness That Comes Before Read online

  An opening. Kellhus would explore. He said: “So reduced. You’ve become so pitiful.”

  “You pity me? A dog dares pity?” The Nonman laughed harshly. “The Anasûrimbor pities me! And so he should . . . Ka’cûnuroi souk ki’elju, souk hus’jihla.” He spat, then gestured with his sword to the surrounding dead. “These . . . these Sranc are our children now. But before! Before, you were our children. Our heart had been cut out and so we cradled yours. Companions to the ‘great’ Norsirai kings.”

  The Nonman stepped nearer.

  “But no longer,” he continued. “As the ages waxed, some of us needed more than your childish squabbles to remember. Some of us needed a more exquisite brutality than any of your feuds could render. The great curse of our kind—do you know it? Of course you know it! What slave fails to exult in his master’s degradation, hmm?”

  The wind wrapped his hoary cloak about him. He took another step.

  “But I make excuses like a Man. Loss is written into the very earth. We are only its most dramatic reminder.”

  The Nonman had raised the point of his sword to Kellhus, who had fallen into stance, his own curved sword poised above his head.

  Again silence, deadly this time.

  “I am a warrior of ages, Anasûrimbor . . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury.”

  “Then why,” Kellhus asked, “raise arms now, against a lone man?”

  Laughter. The free hand gestured to the dead Sranc. “A pittance, I agree, but still you would be memorable.”

  Kellhus struck first, but his blade recoiled from the mail beneath the Nonman’s cloak. He crouched, deflected the powerful counter-stroke, swept the figure’s legs out from beneath him. The Nonman toppled backward but managed to roll effortlessly back to his feet. Laughter rang from the helmed face.

  “Most memorable!” he cried, falling upon the monk.

  And Kellhus felt himself pressed. A rain of mighty blows, forcing him back, away from the dead tree. The ring of Dûnyain steel and Nonman nimil pealed across the windswept heights. But Kellhus could sense the moment—although it was far, far thinner than it had been with the Sranc.

  He climbed into that narrow instant, and the unearthly blade fell farther and farther from its mark, bit deeper into empty air. Then Kellhus’s own sword was scoring the dark figure, clipping and prodding the armour, tattering the grim cloak. But he could draw no blood.

  “What are you?” the Nonman cried in fury.

  There was one space between them, but the crossings were infinite . . .

  Kellhus opened the Nonman’s exposed chin. Blood, black in the gloom, spilled across his breast. A second stroke sent the uncanny blade skittering across snow and ice.

  As Kellhus leapt, the Nonman scrambled backward, fell. The point of Kellhus’s sword, poised above the opening of his helm, stilled him.

  In the freezing rain, the monk breathed evenly, staring down at the fallen figure. Several instants passed. Now the interrogation could begin.

  “You will answer my questions,” Kellhus instructed, his tone devoid of passion.

  The Nonman laughed darkly.

  “But it is you, Anasûrimbor, who are the question.”

  And then came the word, the word that, on hearing, wrenched the intellect somehow.

  A furious incandescence. Like a petal blown from a palm, Kellhus was thrown backward. He rolled through the snow and, stunned, struggled to his feet. He watched numbly as the Nonman was drawn upright as though by a wire. Pale watery light formed a sphere around him. The ice rain sputtered and hissed against it. Behind him rose the great tree.

  Sorcery? But how could it be?

  Kellhus fled, sprinted over the dead structures breaking the snow. He slipped on ice and skidded over the far side of the heights, toppled through the wicked branches of trees. He recovered his feet and tore himself through the harsh underbrush. Something like a thunderclap shivered through the air, and great, blinding fires rifled through the spruces behind him. The heat washed over him, and he ran harder, until the slopes were leaps and the dark forest a rush of confusion.

  “ANASÛRIMBOR!” an unearthly voice called, cracking the winter silence.

  “RUN, ANASÛRIMBOR!” it boomed. “I WILL REMEMBER!”

  Laughter, like a storm, and the forest behind him was harrowed by more fierce lights. They fractured the surrounding gloom, and Kellhus could see his own fleeing shadow flickering before him.

  The cold air wracked his lungs, but he ran—far harder than the Sranc had made him run.

  Sorcery? Is this among the lessons I’m to learn, Father?

  Cold night fell. Somewhere in the dark, wolves howled. Shimeh, they seemed to say, was too far.

  PART I:

  The Sorcerer

  CHAPTER ONE

  CARYTHUSAL

  There are three, and only three, kinds of men in the world: cynics, fanatics, and Mandate Schoolmen.

  —ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN

  The author has often observed that in the genesis of great events, men generally possess no inkling of what their actions portend. This problem is not, as one might suppose, a result of men’s blindness to the consequences of their actions. Rather it is a result of the mad way the dreadful turns on the trivial when the ends of one man cross the ends of another. The Schoolmen of the Scarlet Spires have an old saying: “When one man chases a hare, he finds a hare. But when many men chase a hare, they find a dragon.” In the prosecution of competing human interests, the result is always unknown, and all too often terrifying.

  —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

  Midwinter, 4110 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal

  All spies obsessed over their informants. It was a game they played in the moments before sleep or even during nervous gaps in conversation. A spy would look at his informant, as Achamian looked at Geshrunni now, and ask himself, How much does he know?

  Like many taverns found near the edge of the Worm, the great slums of Carythusal, the Holy Leper was at once luxurious and impoverished. The floor was tiled with ceramics as fine as any found in the palace of a Palatine-Governor, but the walls were of painted mud brick, and the ceiling was so low that taller men had to duck beneath the brass lamps, which were authentic imitations, Achamian had once heard the owner boast, of those found in the Temple of Exorietta. The place was invariably crowded, filled with shadowy, sometimes dangerous men, but the wine and hashish were just expensive enough to prevent those who could not afford to bathe from rubbing shoulders with those who could.

  Until coming to the Holy Leper, Achamian had never liked the Ainoni—especially those from Carythusal. Like most in the Three Seas, he thought them vain and effeminate: too much oil in their beards, too fond of irony and cosmetics, too reckless in their sexual habits. But this estimation had changed after the endless hours he’d spent waiting for Geshrunni to arrive. The subtlety of character and taste that afflicted only the highest castes of other nations, he realized, was a rampant fever among these people, infecting even low-caste freemen and slaves. He had always thought High Ainon a nation of libertines and petty conspirators; that this made them a nation of kindred spirits was something he never had imagined.

  Perhaps this was why he failed to immediately recognize his peril when Geshrunni said, “I know you.”

  Dark even in the lamplight, Geshrunni lowered his arms, which had been folded across his white silk vest, and leaned forward in his seat. He was an imposing figure, possessing a hawkish soldier’s face, a beard pleated into what looked like black leather straps, and thick arms so deeply tanned that one could see, but never quite decipher, the line of Ainoni pictograms tattooed from shoulder to wrist.

  Achamian tried to grin affably. “You and my wives,” he said, tossing back yet another bowl of wine. He gasped and smacked his l
ips. Geshrunni had always been, or so Achamian had assumed, a narrow man, one for whom the grooves of thought and word were few and deep. Most warriors were such, particularly when they were slaves.

  But there had been nothing narrow about his claim.

  Geshrunni watched him carefully, the suspicion in his eyes rounded by a faint wonder. He shook his head in disgust. “I should’ve said, ‘I know who you are.’”

  The man leaned back in a contemplative way so foreign to a soldier’s manner that Achamian’s skin pimpled with dread. The rumbling tavern receded, became a frame of shadowy figures and points of golden lantern-light.

  “Then write it down,” Achamian replied, as though growing bored, “and give it to me when I’m sober.” He looked away, as bored men often do, and noted that the entrance to the tavern was empty.

  “I know you have no wives.”

  “You don’t say. And how’s that?” Achamian glanced quickly behind him, glimpsed a whore laughing as she pressed a shiny silver ensolarii onto her sweaty breasts. The vulgar crowd about her roared, “One!”

  “She’s quite good at that, you know. She uses honey.”

  Geshrunni was not distracted. “Your kind aren’t allowed to have wives.”

  “My kind, eh? And just what is my kind?” Another glance at the entrance.

  “You’re a sorcerer. A Schoolman.”

  Achamian laughed, knowing his momentary hesitation had betrayed him. But there was motive enough to continue this pantomime. At the very least, it might buy him several more moments. Time to stay alive.

  “By the Latter-fucking-Prophet, my friend,” Achamian cried, glancing once again at the entrance, “I swear I could measure your accusations by the bowl. What was it you accused me of being last night? A whoreson?”

  Amid chortling voices, a thunderous shout: “Two!”

  The fact that Geshrunni grimaced told Achamian little—the man’s every expression seemed some version of a grimace, particularly his smile. The hand that flashed out and clamped his wrist, however, told Achamian all he needed to know.

  I’m doomed. They know.

  Few things were more terrifying than “they,” especially in Carythusal. “They” were the Scarlet Spires, the most powerful School in the Three Seas, and the hidden masters of High Ainon. Geshrunni was a Captain of the Javreh, the warrior-slaves of the Scarlet Spires, which is why Achamian had courted him over the past few weeks. This is what spies do: woo the slaves of their competitors.

  Geshrunni stared fiercely into his eyes, twisted his hand palm outward. “There’s a way for us to satisfy my suspicion,” the man said softly.

  “Three!” reverberated across mud brick and scuffed mahogany.

  Achamian winced, both because of the man’s powerful grip and because he knew the “way” Geshrunni referred to. Not like this.

  “Geshrunni, please. You’re drunk, my friend. What School would hazard the wrath of the Scarlet Spires?”

  Geshrunni shrugged. “The Mysunsai, maybe. Or the Imperial Saik. The Cishaurim. There are so many of your accursed kind. But if I had to wager, I would say the Mandate. I would say you’re a Mandate Schoolman.”

  Canny slave! How long had he known?

  The impossible words were there, poised in Achamian’s thought, words that could blind eyes and blister flesh. He leaves me no choice. There would be an uproar. Men would bellow, clutch their swords, but they would do nothing but scramble from his path. More than any people in the Three Seas, the Ainoni feared sorcery.

  No choice.

  But Geshrunni had already reached beneath his embroidered vest. His fist bunched beneath the fabric. He grimaced like a grinning jackal.

  Too late . . .

  “You look,” Geshrunni said with menacing ease, “like you have something to say.”

  The man withdrew his hand and produced the Chorae. He winked, then with terrifying abruptness, snapped the golden chain holding it about his neck. Achamian had sensed it from their first encounter, had actually used its unnerving murmur to identify Geshrunni’s vocation. Now Geshrunni would use it to identify him.

  “What’s this, now?” Achamian asked. A shudder of animal terror passed through his pinned arm.

  “I think you know, Akka. I think you know far better than I.”

  Chorae. Schoolmen called them Trinkets. Small names are often given to horrifying things. But for other men, those who followed the Thousand Temples in condemning sorcery as blasphemy, they were called Tears of God. But the God had no hand in their manufacture. Chorae were relics of the Ancient North, so valuable that only the marriage of heirs, murder, or the tribute of entire nations could purchase them. They were worth the price: Chorae rendered their bearers immune to sorcery and killed any sorcerer unfortunate enough to touch them.

  Effortlessly holding Achamian’s hand immobile, Geshrunni raised the Chorae between thumb and forefinger. It looked plain enough: a small sphere of iron, about the size of an olive but encased in the cursive script of the Nonmen. Achamian could feel it tug at his bowels, as though Geshrunni held an absence rather than a thing, a small pit in the very fabric of the world. His heart hammered in his ears. He thought of the knife sheathed beneath his tunic.

  “Four!” Raucous laughter.

  He struggled to free his captive hand. Futile.

  “Geshrunni . . .”

  “Every Captain of the Javreh is given one of these,” Geshrunni said, his tone at once reflective and proud. “But then, you already know this.”

  All this time, he’s been playing me for a fool! How could I’ve missed it?

  “Your masters are kind,” Achamian said, rivetted by the horror suspended above his palm.

  “Kind?” Geshrunni spat. “The Scarlet Spires are not kind. They’re ruthless. Cruel to those who oppose them.”

  And for the first time, Achamian glimpsed the torment animating the man, the anguish in his bright eyes. What’s happening here? He hazarded a question: “And to those who serve them?”

  “They do not discriminate.”

  They don’t know! Only Geshrunni . . .

  “Five!” pealed beneath the low ceilings.

  Achamian licked his lips. “What do you want, Geshrunni?”

  The warrior-slave looked down at Achamian’s trembling palm, then lowered the Trinket as though he were a child curious of what might happen. Simply staring at it made Achamian dizzy, jerked bile to the back of his throat. Chorae. A tear drawn from the God’s own cheek. Death. Death to all blasphemers.

  “What do you want?” Achamian hissed.

  “What all men want, Akka. Truth.”

  All the things Achamian had seen, all the trials he’d survived, lay pinched in that narrow space between his shining palm and the oiled iron. Trinket. Death poised between the callused fingers of a slave. But Achamian was a Schoolman, and for Schoolmen nothing, not even life itself, was as precious as the Truth. They were its miserly keepers, and they warred for its possession across all the shadowy grottoes of the Three Seas. Better to die than to yield Mandate truth to the Scarlet Spires.

  But there was more here. Geshrunni was alone—Achamian was certain of this. Sorcerers could see sorcerers, see the bruise of their crimes, and the Holy Leper hosted no sorcerers, no Scarlet Schoolmen, only drunks making wagers with whores. Geshrunni played this game on his own.

  But for what mad reason?

  Tell him what he wants. He already knows.

  “I’m a Mandate Schoolman,” Achamian whispered quickly. Then he added, “A spy.”

  Dangerous words. But what choice did he have?

  Geshrunni studied him for a breathless moment, then slowly gathered the Chorae into his fist. He released Achamian’s hand.

  There was an odd moment of silence, interrupted only by the clatter of a silver ensolarii against wood. A roar of laughter, and a hoarse voice bellowed, “You lose, whore!”

  But this, Achamian knew, was not so. Somehow he had won this night, and he had won the way whores always win—without
understanding.

  After all, spies were little different from whores. Sorcerers less so.

  Though he had dreamt of being a sorcerer as a child, the possibility of being a spy had never occurred to Drusas Achamian. “Spy” simply wasn’t part of the vocabulary of children raised in Nroni fishing villages. For him the Three Seas had possessed only two dimensions in his childhood: there were places far and near and there were people high and low. He would listen to the old fish-wives tell their tales while he and the other children helped shuck oysters, and he learned very quickly that he was among the low, and that mighty people dwelt far away. Name after mysterious name would fall from those old lips—the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, the malevolent heathens of Kian, the all-conquering Scylvendi, the scheming sorcerers of the Scarlet Spires, and so on—names that sketched the dimensions of his world, infused it with terrifying majesty, transformed it into an arena of impossibly tragic and heroic deeds. He would fall asleep feeling very small.

  One might think becoming a spy would add dimension to the simple world of a child, but precisely the opposite was the case. Certainly, as he matured, Achamian’s world became more complicated. He learned that there were things holy and unholy, that the Gods and the Outside possessed their own dimensions, rather than being people very high and a place very far. He also learned that there were times recent and ancient, that “a long time ago” was not like another place but rather a queer kind of ghost that haunted every place.

  But when one became a spy, the world had the curious habit of collapsing into a single dimension. High-born men, even Emperors and Kings, had the habit of seeming as base and as petty as the most vulgar fisherman. Far-away nations like Conriya, High Ainon, Ce Tydonn, or Kian no longer seemed exotic or enchanted but were as grubby and as weathered as a Nroni fishing village. Things holy, like the Tusk, the Thousand Temples, or even the Latter Prophet, became mere versions of things unholy, like the Fanim, the Cishaurim, or the sorcerous Schools, as though the words “holy” and “unholy” were as easily exchanged as seats at a gaming table. And the recent simply became a more tawdry repetition of the ancient.