The Darkness That Comes Before Page 5

  As both a Schoolman and a spy, Achamian had crisscrossed the Three Seas, had seen many of those things that had once made his stomach flutter with supernatural dread, and he knew now that childhood stories were always better. Since being identified as one of the Few as a youth and taken to Atyersus to be trained by the School of Mandate, he had educated princes, insulted grandmasters, and infuriated Shrial priests. And he now knew with certainty that the world was hollowed of its wonder by knowledge and travel, that when one stripped away the mysteries, its dimensions collapsed rather than bloomed. Of course, the world was a much more sophisticated place to him now than it had been when he was a child, but it was also far simpler. Everywhere men grasped and grasped, as though the titles “king,” “shriah,” and “grandmaster” were simply masks worn by the same hungry animal. Avarice, it seemed to him, was the world’s only dimension.

  Achamian was a middle-aged sorcerer and spy, and he had grown weary of both vocations. And though he would be loath to admit it, he was heartsick. As the old fish-wives might say, he had dragged one empty net too many.

  Perplexed and dismayed, Achamian left Geshrunni at the Holy Leper and hurried home—if it could be called that—through the shadowy ways of the Worm. Extending from the northern banks of the River Sayut to the famed Surmantic Gates, the Worm was a labyrinth of crumbling tenements, brothels, and impoverished Cultic temples. The place was aptly named, Achamian had always thought. Humid, riddled by cramped alleys, the Worm indeed resembled something found beneath a rock.

  Given his mission, Achamian had no reason to be dismayed. Quite the opposite, if anything. After the mad moment with the Chorae, Geshrunni had told him secrets—potent secrets. Geshrunni, it turned out, was not a happy slave. He hated the Scarlet Magi with an intensity that was almost frightening once revealed.

  “I didn’t befriend you for the promise of your gold,” the Javreh Captain had said. “For what? To buy my freedom from my masters? The Scarlet Spires relinquish nothing of value. No, I befriended you because I knew you would be useful.”

  “Useful? But for what end?”

  “Vengeance. I would humble the Scarlet Spires.”

  “So you knew . . . All along you knew I was no merchant.”

  Sneering laughter. “Of course. You were too free with your ensolariis. Sit with a merchant or sit with a beggar, and it’ll always be the beggar who buys your first drink.”

  What kind of spy are you?

  Achamian had scowled at this, scowled at his own transparency. But as much as Geshrunni’s penetration troubled him, he was terrified by the degree to which he’d misjudged the man. Geshrunni was a warrior and a slave—what surer formula could there be for stupidity? But slaves, Achamian supposed, had good reason to conceal their intelligence. A wise slave was something to be prized perhaps, like the slave-scholars of the old Ceneian Empire. A cunning slave, however, was something to be feared, to be eliminated.

  But this thought held little consolation. If he could fool me so easily . . .

  Achamian had plucked a great secret out of the obscurity of Carythusal and the Scarlet Spires—the greatest, perhaps, in many years. But he did not have his ability, which he’d rarely questioned over the years, to thank—only his incompetence. As a result, he’d learned two secrets—one dreadful enough, he supposed, in the greater scheme of the Three Seas; the other dreadful within the frame of his life.

  I’m not, he realized, the man I once was.

  Geshrunni’s story had been alarming in its own right, if only because it demonstrated the ability of the Scarlet Spires to harbour secrets. The Scarlet Spires, Geshrunni said, was at war, had been for more than ten years, in fact. Achamian had been unimpressed—at first. The sorcerous Schools, like all the Great Factions, ceaselessly skirmished with spies, assassinations, trade sanctions, and delegations of outraged envoys. But this war, Geshrunni assured him, was far more momentous than any skirmish.

  “Ten years ago,” Geshrunni said, “our former Grandmaster, Sasheoka, was assassinated.”

  “Sasheoka?” Achamian was not inclined to ask stupid questions, but the idea that a Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires could be assassinated was preposterous. How could such a thing happen? “Assassinated?”

  “In the inner sanctums of the Spires themselves.”

  In other words, in the midst of the most formidable system of Wards in the Three Seas. Not only would the Mandate never dare such an act, but there was no way, even with the glittering Abstractions of the Gnosis, they could succeed. Who could do such a thing?

  “By whom?” Achamian asked, almost breathless.

  Geshrunni’s eyes actually twinkled in the ruddy lamplight. “By the heathens,” he said. “The Cishaurim.”

  Achamian was at once baffled and gratified by this revelation. The Cishaurim—the only heathen School. At least this explained Sasheoka’s assassination.

  There was a saying common to the Three Seas: “Only the Few can see the Few.” Sorcery was violent. To speak it was to cut the world as surely as if with a knife. But only the Few—sorcerers—could see this mutilation, and only they could see, moreover, the blood on the hands of the mutilator—the “mark,” as it was called. Only the Few could see one another and one another’s crimes. And when they met, they recognized one another as surely as common men recognized criminals by their lack of a nose.

  Not so with the Cishaurim. No one knew why or how, but they worked events as grand and as devastating as any sorcery without marking the world or bearing the mark of their crime. Only once had Achamian witnessed Cishaurim sorcery, what they called the Psûkhe—on a night long ago in distant Shimeh. With the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, he’d destroyed his saffron-robed assailants, but as he sheltered behind his Wards, it had seemed as though he watched flashes of soundless lightning. No thunder. No mark.

  Only the Few could see the Few, but no one—no Schoolman, at least—could distinguish the Cishaurim or their works from common men or the common world. And it was this, Achamian surmised, that had allowed them to assassinate Sasheoka. The Scarlet Spires possessed Wards for sorcerers, slave-soldiers like Geshrunni for men bearing Chorae, but they had nothing to protect them against sorcerers indistinguishable from common men, or against sorcery indistinguishable from the God’s own world. Hounds, Geshrunni would tell him, now ran freely through the halls of the Scarlet Spires, trained to smell the saffron and henna the Cishaurim used to dye their robes.

  But why? What could induce the Cishaurim to wage open war against the Scarlet Spires? As alien as their metaphysics were, they could have no hope of winning such a war. The Scarlet Spires was simply too powerful.

  When Achamian had asked Geshrunni, the slave-soldier simply shrugged.

  “It’s been a decade, and still they don’t know.”

  This, at least, was grounds for petty comfort. There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.

  Drusas Achamian walked ever deeper into the Worm, toward the squalid tenement where he’d taken a room, still more afraid of himself than his future.

  Geshrunni grimaced as he stumbled out of the tavern. He steadied himself on the packed dust of the alley.

  “Done,” he muttered, then cackled in a way he never dared show others. He looked up at a narrow slot of sky hemmed and obscured by mud-brick walls and ragged canvas awnings. He could see few stars.

  Suddenly his betrayal struck him as a pathetic thing. He had told the only real secret he knew to an enemy of his masters. Now there was nothing left. No treason that might quiet the hatred in his heart.

  And a bitter hatred it was. More than anything else, Geshrunni was a proud man. That someone such as he might be born a slave, be dogged by the desires of weak-hearted, womanish men . . . By sorcerers! In another life, he knew, he would have been a conqueror. He would have broken enemy after enemy with the might of his hand. But in this accursed life, all he could do was skulk about with other womanish men and gossip.

  Where was the veng
eance in gossip?

  He’d staggered some way down the alley before realizing that someone followed him. The possibility that his masters had discovered his small treachery struck him momentarily, but he thought it unlikely. The Worm was filled with wolves, desperate men who followed mark after mark searching for those drunk enough to be safely plundered. Geshrunni had actually killed one once, several years before: some poor fool who had risked murder rather than sell himself, as Geshrunni’s nameless father had, into slavery. He continued walking, his senses as keen as the wine would allow, his drunken thoughts reeling through scenario after bloody scenario. This would be a good night, he thought, to kill.

  Only when he passed beneath the looming facade of the temple the Carythusali called the Mouth of the Worm did Geshrunni become alarmed. Men were quite often followed into the Worm, but rarely were they followed out. Above the welter of rooftops, Geshrunni could even glimpse the highest of the Spires, crimson against a field of stars. Who would dare follow him this far? If not . . .

  He whirled and saw a balding, rotund man dressed, despite the heat, in an ornate silk overcoat that might have been any combination of colours but looked blue and black in the darkness.

  “You were one of the fools with the whore,” Geshrunni said, trying to shake away the confusion of drink.

  “Yes,” the man replied, his jowls grinning with his lips. “She was most . . . enticing. But truth be told, I was far more interested in what you had to say to the Mandate Schoolman.”

  Geshrunni squinted in drunken astonishment. So they know.

  Danger always sobered him. Instinctively, he reached into his pocket, closed his fingers about his Chorae. He flung it violently at the Schoolman . . .

  Or at who he thought was a Scarlet Schoolman. The stranger picked the Trinket from the air as though it had been tossed for his friendly perusal. He studied it momentarily, a dubious money-changer with a leaden coin. He looked up and smiled again, blinking his large bovine eyes. “A most precious gift,” he said. “I thank you, but I’m afraid it’s not quite a fair exchange for what I want.”

  Not a sorcerer! Geshrunni had seen a Chorae touch a sorcerer once, the incandescent unravelling of flesh and bone. But then what was this man?

  “Who are you?” Geshrunni asked.

  “Nothing you could understand, slave.”

  The Javreh Captain smiled. Maybe he’s just a fool. A dangerous, drunken amiability seized his manner. He walked up to the man, placed a callused hand on his padded shoulder. He could smell jasmine. The cowlike eyes looked up at him.

  “Oh my,” the stranger whispered, “you are a daring fool, aren’t you?”

  Why isn’t he afraid? Remembering the ease with which the man had snatched the Chorae, Geshrunni suddenly felt horribly exposed. But he was committed.

  “Who are you?” Geshrunni grated. “How long have you been watching me?”

  “Watching you?” The fat man almost giggled. “Such conceit is unbecoming of slaves.”

  He watches Achamian? What is this? Geshrunni was an officer, accustomed to cowing men in the menacing intimacy of a face-to-face confrontation. Not this man. Soft or not, he was at utter ease. Geshrunni could feel it. And if it weren’t for the unwatered wine, he would have been terrified.

  He dug his fingers deep into the fat of the man’s shoulder.

  “I said tell me, fat fool,” he hissed between clenched teeth, “or I’ll muck up the dust with your bowel.” With his free hand, he brandished his knife. “Who are you?”

  Unperturbed, the fat man grinned with sudden ferocity. “Few things are as distressing as a slave who refuses to acknowledge his place.”

  Stunned, Geshrunni looked down at his senseless hand, watched his knife flop onto the dust. All he’d heard was the snap of the stranger’s sleeve.

  “Heel, slave,” the fat man said.

  “What did you say?”

  The slap stung him, brought tears to his eyes.

  “I said heel.”

  Another slap, hard enough to loosen teeth. Geshrunni stumbled back several steps, raising a clumsy hand. How could this be?

  “What a task we’ve set for ourselves,” the stranger said ruefully, following him, “when even their slaves possess such pride.”

  Panicked, Geshrunni fumbled for the hilt of his sword.

  The fat man paused, his eyes flashing to the pommel.

  “Draw it,” he said, his voice impossibly cold—inhuman.

  Wide-eyed, Geshrunni froze, transfixed by the silhouette that loomed before him.

  “I said draw it!”

  Geshrunni hesitated.

  The next slap knocked him to his knees.

  “What are you?” Geshrunni cried through bloodied lips.

  As the shadow of the fat man encompassed him, Geshrunni watched his round face loosen, then flex as tight as a beggar’s hand about copper. Sorcery! But how could it be? He holds a Chorae—

  “Something impossibly ancient,” the abomination said softly. “Inconceivably beautiful.”

  One man, a man long dead, looked out from behind the many eyes of Mandate Schoolmen: Seswatha, the great adversary of the No-God and founder of the last Gnostic School—their School. In daylight, he was vague, as uncertain as a childhood memory, but at night he possessed them, and the tragedy of his life tyrannized their dreams.

  Smoky dreams. Dreams drawn from the sheath.

  Achamian watched Anasûrimbor Celmomas, the last High King of Kûniüri, fall beneath the hammer of a baying Sranc chieftain. Even though Achamian cried out, he knew with the curious half-awareness belonging to dreams that the greatest king of the Anasûrimbor Dynasty was already dead—had been dead for more than two thousand years. And he knew, moreover, that it was not he himself who wailed, but a far greater man. Seswatha.

  The words boiled to his lips. The Sranc chieftain flailed through blistering fire, collapsed into a bundle of rags and ash. More Sranc swept the summit of the hill and more died, struck down by the unearthly lights summoned by his song. Beyond, he glimpsed a distant dragon, like a figure of bronze in the setting sun, hanging above warring fields of Sranc and Men, and he thought: The last Anasûrimbor King has fallen. Kûniüri is lost.

  Crying out the name of their king, the tall knights of Trysë surged about him, sprinting over the Sranc he had burned and falling like madmen upon the masses beyond. With a knight whom he did not know, Achamian dragged Anasûrimbor Celmomas through the frantic cries of his vassals and kinsmen, through the smell of blood, bowel, and charred flesh. In a small clearing, he pulled the King’s broken body across his lap.

  Celmomas’s blue eyes, ordinarily so cold, beseeched him. “Leave me,” the grey-bearded king gasped.

  “No,” Achamian replied. “If you die, Celmomas, all is lost.” The High King smiled despite his ruined lips. “Do you see the sun? Do you see it flare, Seswatha?”

  “The sun sets,” Achamian replied.

  “Yes! Yes. The darkness of the No-God is not all-encompassing. The Gods see us yet, dear friend. They are distant, but I can hear them galloping across the skies. I can hear them cry out to me.”

  “You cannot die, Celmomas! You must not die!”

  The High King shook his head, stilled him with tender eyes. “They call to me. They say that my end is not the world’s end. That burden, they say, is yours. Yours, Seswatha.”

  “No,” Achamian whispered.

  “The sun! Can you see the sun? Feel it upon your cheek? Such revelations are hidden in such simple things. I see! I see so clearly what a bitter, stubborn fool I have been . . . And to you, you most of all, have I been unjust. Can you forgive an old man? Can you forgive a foolish old man?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, Celmomas. You’ve lost much, suffered much.”

  “My son . . . Do you think he’ll be there, Seswatha? Do you think he’ll greet me as his father?”

  “Yes . . . As his father, and as his king.”

  “Did I ever tell you,” Celmomas said, his voic
e cracking with futile pride, “that my son once stole into the deepest pits of Golgotterath?”

  “Yes.” Achamian smiled through his tears. “Many times, old friend.”

  “How I miss him, Seswatha! How I yearn to stand at his side once again.”

  The old king wept for a moment. Then his eyes grew wide. “I see him so clearly. He’s taken the sun as his charger, and he rides among us. I see him! Galloping through the hearts of my people, stirring them to wonder and fury!”

  “Shush . . . Conserve your strength, my King. The surgeons are coming.”

  “He says . . . says such sweet things to give me comfort. He says that one of my seed will return, Seswatha—an Anasûrimbor will return . . .” A shudder wracked the old man, forcing breath and spittle through his teeth.

  “At the end of the world.”

  The bright eyes of Anasûrimbor Celmomas II, White Lord of Trysë, High King of Kûniüri, went blank. And with them, the evening sun faltered, plunging the bronze-armoured glory of the Norsirai into twilight.

  “Our King!” Achamian cried to the stricken men encircling him. “Our King is dead!”

  But everything was darkness. No one stood around him, and no king lay propped against his thighs. Only sweaty blankets and a great buzzing absence where the clamour of war had once been. His room. He lay alone in his miserable room.

  Achamian hugged his arms tight. Another dream drawn from the sheath.

  He drew his hands to his face and wept, a short time for a long-dead Kûniüric King and longer for other, less certain things.

  In the distance, he thought he heard howling. A dog or a man.

  Geshrunni was dragged through putrid alleys. He saw pitted wallscapes reel against black sky. His limbs thrashed of their own volition; his fingers clutched at greasy brick. Through bubbling blood, he could smell the river.