The Darkness That Comes Before Read online

  My face . . .

  “What ’ore?” he tried to cry, but speaking was almost impossible without lips. I’ve told you everything!

  The sound of boots tramping through watery muck. A giggle from somewhere above him.

  “If the eye of your enemy offends you, slave, you pluck it out, no?”

  “’lease . . . ’ercy. I ’eg you . . . ’erceeeee.”

  “Mercy?” the thing laughed. “Mercy is a luxury of the idle, fool. The Mandate has many eyes, and we have much plucking to do.”

  Where’s my face?

  Weightlessness, then the crash of cold, drowning water.

  Achamian awoke in pre-dawn light, his head buzzing with the memory of drink and of more nightmarish dreams. More dreams of the Apocalypse.

  Coughing, he lurched from the straw bed to the room’s only window. He drew the lacquered shutter aside, his hands trembling. Cool air. Grey light. The palaces and temples of Carythusal sprawled amid thickets of lesser structures. A dense fog covered the River Sayut, coursing through the alleys and avenues of the lower city like water through trenches. Isolated and as small as a fingernail, the Scarlet Spires loomed from the ethereal expanse, jutting like dead towers from white desert dunes.

  Achamian’s throat thickened. He blinked tears from his eyes. No fire. No chorus of wails. Everything still. Even the Spires affected a breathless, monumental repose.

  This world, he thought, must not end.

  He turned from the view to the room’s single table and dropped onto the stool, or what passed for one—it looked like something salvaged from a wrecked ship. He wet his quill and unrolling a small scroll across scattered sheets of parchment, wrote:Fords of Tywanrae. Same.

  Burning of the Library of Sauglish. Different. See my face and

  not S in mirror.

  A curious discrepancy. What could it mean? For a moment, he pondered the sour futility of the question. Then he remembered awakening in the heart of night. After a pause, he added:Death and Prophecy of Anasûrimbor Celmomas. Same.

  But was it the same? In detail, certainly, but there had been a disturbing immediacy to the dream—enough to wake him. After scratching out “Same,” he wrote:Different. More powerful.

  As he waited for the ink to dry, he reviewed his previous entries, following them up to the curl of the scroll. A cascade of image and passion accompanied each, transforming mute ink into fragmentary worlds. Bodies tumbling through the knotted waters of a river cataract. A lover grunting blood through clenched teeth. Fire wrapped like a wanton dancer about stone towers.

  He pressed thumb and forefinger against his eyes. Why was he so fixated on this record? Other men, far greater than he, had gone mad trying to decipher the deranged sequence and permutations of Seswatha’s Dreams. He knew well enough to realize he’d never find an answer. Was it some kind of perverse game, then? One like that his mother used to play when his father returned drunk from the boats, pecking and nettling, demanding reason where none was to be found, flinching each time his father raised his hand, shrieking when he inevitably struck?

  Why peck and nettle when reliving Seswatha’s life was battery enough?

  Something cold reached through his breastbone and seized his heart. The old tremor rattled his hands, and the scroll rolled shut, wet ink and all. Stop . . . He clutched his hands together, but the shuddering simply migrated to his arms and shoulders. Stop! The howl of Sranc horns rifled through his window. He cringed beneath the concussion of dragon’s wings. He rocked on the stool, his entire body shaking.

  “Stop!”

  For several moments, he struggled to breathe. He heard the distant ping of a coppersmith’s hammer, the squabbling of crows on the rooftops.

  Is this what you wanted, Seswatha? Is this the way it’s supposed to be?

  But like so many questions he asked himself, he already knew the answer.

  Seswatha had survived the No-God and the Apocalypse, but he’d known the conflict was not over. The Scylvendi had returned to their pastures, the Sranc had scattered to feud over the spoils of a ruined world, but Golgotterath remained intact. From its black ramparts, the No-God’s servants, the Consult, still kept watch, possessed of a patience that dwarfed the perseverance of Men, a patience no cycle of epic verses or scriptural admonition could match. Ink might be immortal, but meaning was not. With the passing of every generation, Seswatha had known, the neck of his memory would be further broken—even the Apocalypse would be forgotten. So he passed not from but into his followers. By reincarnating his harrowing life in their dreams, he had made his legacy a never-ending call to arms.

  I was meant to suffer, Achamian thought.

  Forcing himself to confront the day ahead, he oiled his hair and brushed the flecks of muck from the white embroidery trimming his blue tunic. Standing at the window, he calmed his stomach with cheese and stale bread while watching sunlight burn the fog from the black back of the River Sayut. Then he prepared the Cants of Calling and informed his handlers in Atyersus, the citadel of the School of Mandate, of everything Geshrunni had told him the previous night.

  He was not surprised by their relative disinterest. The secret war between the Scarlet Spires and the Cishaurim was, after all, not their war. But the summons to return home did surprise him. When he asked why, they said only that it involved the Thousand Temples—another faction, another war that was not their own.

  Gathering his few possessions, he thought, One more meaningless mission.

  How could he not be cynical?

  In the Three Seas, all the Great Factions warred with tangible foes for tangible ends, while the Mandate warred against a foe no one could see for an end no one believed in. This made Mandate Schoolmen outcasts not only in the way of sorcerers, but also in the way of fools. Of course, the potentates of the Three Seas, Ketyai and Norsirai alike, knew of the Consult and the threat of the Second Apocalypse—how could they not, after centuries of harping Mandate emissaries?—but they did not believe.

  After centuries of skirmishing with the Mandate, the Consult had simply disappeared. Vanished. No one knew why or how, though there had been endless speculation. Had they been destroyed by forces unknown? Had they annihilated themselves from within? Or had they simply found a way to elude the eyes of the Mandate? It had been three centuries since the Mandate had last encountered the Consult. For three centuries they had waged a war without a foe.

  Mandate Schoolmen traversed the Three Seas hunting for an enemy they could not find and no one believed in. As much as they were envied their possession of the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, they were a laughingstock, the charlatan in the courts of all the Great Factions. And yet every night Seswatha revisited them. Every morning they awoke from the horror and thought, The Consult is among us.

  Had there ever been a time, Achamian wondered, when he hadn’t felt this horror within him? The giddy hollow in the pit of his gut, as though catastrophe hinged upon something he’d forgotten? It came as a breathless whisper, You must do something . . . But no one in the Mandate knew what it was they should do, and until they did know, all their actions would be as empty as a mummer’s play.

  They would be sent to Carythusal to seduce high-placed slaves like Geshrunni. Or to the Thousand Temples, to do who knew what.

  The Thousand Temples. What could the Mandate want with the Thousand Temples? Whatever it was, it warranted abandoning Geshrunni—their first real informant within the Scarlet Spires in a generation. The more Achamian pondered this, the more extraordinary it became.

  Perhaps this mission will be different.

  The thought of Geshrunni made him suddenly anxious. As mercenary as the man was, he had risked far more than his life to give the Mandate a great secret. Besides, he was at once intelligent and filled with hate—an ideal informant. It would not do to lose him.

  After unpacking his ink and parchment, Achamian bent over the table and scratched a quick message:I must leave. But know that your favours have not been forgotten, and
that you have found friends who share your purpose. Speak to no one, and we will see you safe. A.

  Achamian settled his room with the poxed keeper, then began rooting through the streets. He found Chiki, the orphan he’d employed to run errands, asleep in a nearby alley. The boy was curled in a hemp sack behind a buzzing heap of offal. Aside from the pomegranate-shaped birthmark that marred his face, he looked beautiful, his olive skin dolphin-smooth despite the filth, and his features as fine as any Palatine’s daughter. Achamian shuddered to think how the boy made his living outside their paltry transactions. A week previous, Achamian had been accosted by a drunk, the aristocratic paint half smeared from his face, tugging on his crotch and asking if he’d seen his sweet “Pomegranate.”

  Achamian roused the sleeping child with the toe of his merchant’s slipper. The boy fairly leapt to his feet.

  “Do you remember what I taught you, Chiki?”

  The boy stared at him with the shammed alertness of the just awakened. “Yes, Lord. I’m your runner.”

  “And what is it that runners do?”

  “They deliver messages, Lord. Secret messages.”

  “Good,” Achamian said, holding the folded parchment out to the boy. “I need you to deliver this to a man called Geshrunni. Remember that: Geshrunni. You can’t miss him. He’s a Captain of the Javreh, and he frequents the Holy Leper. Do you know where to find the Holy Leper?”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  Achamian fetched a silver ensolarii from his purse, and could not help smiling at the boy’s awestruck expression. Chiki snatched the coin from his palms as though from a trap. For some reason, the touch of his small hand moved the sorceror to melancholy.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ATYERSUS

  I write to inform you that during my most recent audience, the Nansur Emperor, quite without provocation, publicly addressed me as “fool.” You are, no doubt, unmoved by this. It has become a common occurrence. The Consult eludes us now more than ever. We hear them only in the secrets of others. We glimpse them only through the eyes of those who deny their very existence. Why should we not be called fools? The deeper the Consult secretes itself among the Great Factions, the madder our rantings sound to their ears. We are, as the damned Nansur would say, “a hunter in the thicket”—one who, by the very act of hunting, extinguishes all hope of running down his prey.

  —ANONYMOUS MANDATE SCHOOLMAN, LETTER TO ATYERSUS

  Late Winter, 4110 Year-of-the-Tusk, Atyersus

  Summoned back home, Achamian thought, bruised by the irony of that word, “home.” He could think of few places in the world—Golgotterath, certainly, the Scarlet Spires, maybe—more heartless than Atyersus.

  Small and alone in the centre of the audience hall, Achamian struggled with his composure. The members of the Quorum, the ruling council of the School of Mandate, stood in small knots dispersed throughout the shadows, scrutinizing him. They saw, he knew, a stocky man dressed in a plain brown travel smock, his square-cut beard streaked by fingers of silver. He would convey the sturdy sense of one who’d spent years on the road: the wide stance, the tanned leathery skin of a low-caste labourer. He would look nothing like a sorcerer.

  But then no spy should.

  Annoyed by their scrutiny, Achamian suppressed the urge to ask if they wanted, like any scrupulous slaver, to check his teeth.

  Home at last.

  Atyersus, the citadel of the School of Mandate, was home to him, would always be home, but the place dwarfed him in inexplicable ways. It was more than the ponderous architecture: Atyersus had been built in the manner of the Ancient North, whose architects had known nothing of arches or domes. Her inner galleries were forests of thick columns, their ceilings obscured by canopies of darkness and smoke. Stylized reliefs sheathed every pillar, providing the shining braziers with too much detail, or so Achamian thought. With every flicker the very ground seemed to shift.

  Finally one of the Quorum addressed him: “The Thousand Temples is no longer to be ignored, Achamian, at least since this Maithanet has seized the Seat and declared himself Shriah.” Inevitably, it had been Nautzera who’d broached the silence. The last man Achamian wanted to hear speak was always the first.

  “I’ve only heard rumours,” he replied in a measured tone—the tone one always took when addressed by Nautzera.

  “Believe me,” Nautzera said sourly, “the rumours scarce do the man justice.”

  “But how long can he survive?” A natural question. Many Shriahs had heaved at the rudder of the Thousand Temples, only to find that like any immense ship, it refused to turn.

  “Oh, he survives,” Nautzera said. “Flourishes, in fact. All the Cults have come to him in Sumna. All have kissed his knee. And with none of the political manoeuvring obligatory to such transitions of power. No petty boycotts. Not even a single abstention.” He paused to allow Achamian time to appreciate the significance of this. “He has stirred something”—the grand old sorcerer pursed his lips, as though leashing his next word like a dangerous dog—“something novel . . . And not merely within the Thousand Temples.”

  “But surely we’ve seen his kind before,” Achamian ventured. “Zealots holding out redemption in one hand to draw attention away from the whip in the other. Sooner or later, everyone sees the whip.”

  “No. We’ve not seen this ‘kind’ before. None has moved this fast, or with such cunning. Maithanet is no mere enthusiast. Within the first three weeks of his tenure two plots to poison him were uncovered—and here’s the thing—by Maithanet himself. No fewer than seven of the Emperor’s agents were exposed and executed in Sumna. This man is more than simply shrewd. Far more.”

  Achamian nodded and narrowed his eyes. Now he understood the urgency of his summons. Above all the mighty detest change. The Great Factions had prepared a place for the Thousand Temples and its Shriah. But this Maithanet, as the Nroni would say, had pissed in the whisky. More unsettling still, he had done so with intelligence.

  “There is to be a Holy War, Achamian.”

  Stunned, Achamian searched the dark silhouettes of the other Quorum members for confirmation. “Surely you jest.”

  Nautzera strode from the shadows, pausing only when he stood close enough to tower over him. Achamian resisted the urge to step back. The ancient sorcerer had always possessed a disconcerting presence: intimidating because of his height and yet pathetic because of his great age. His skin seemed an insult to the silks that draped him.

  “This is no jest, I assure you.”

  “Against whom, then? The Fanim?” Throughout its history, the Three Seas had witnessed only two prior Holy Wars, both waged against the Schools rather than the heathens. The last, the so-called Scholastic Wars, had been disastrous for both sides. Atyersus itself had been besieged for seven years.

  “We don’t know. So far Maithanet has declared only that there will be a Holy War. He has not deigned to tell anyone against whom. As I said, he’s a fiendishly cunning man.”

  “So you fear another Scholastic War.” Achamian could scarcely believe he was having this conversation. The possibility of another Scholastic War, he knew, should horrify him, but instead his heart pounded with exhilaration. Had it come to this? Had he grown so tired of the Mandate’s futile mission that he now greeted the prospect of war against the Inrithi as a disfigured species of relief?

  “This is precisely what we fear. Once again the Cultic Priests openly denounce us, refer to us as Unclean.”

  Unclean. The Chronicle of the Tusk, held by the Thousand Temples to be the very word of the God, had named them thus—those Few with the learning and the innate ability to work sorcery. “Cut from them their tongues,” the holy words said, “for their blasphemy is an abomination like no other . . .” Achamian’s father—who, like many Nroni, had despised the tyranny exercised by Atyersus over Nron—had beaten this belief into him. Faith may die, but her sentiments remain eternal.

  “But I’ve heard nothing of this.”

  The old man leaned forward. H
is dyed beard was cut square like Achamian’s own but meticulously braided in the fashion of the eastern Ketyai. Achamian was struck by the incongruity of old faces and dark hair.

  “But you wouldn’t have, would you now, Achamian? You’ve been in High Ainon. What priest would denounce sorcery in a nation ruled by the Scarlet Spires, hmm?”

  Achamian glared at the old sorcerer.

  “But this is to be expected, is it not?” He suddenly found the whole idea preposterous. Things like this happen to other men, at other times. “You say that this Maithanet is cunning. What better way to secure his power than by inciting hatred against those condemned by the Tusk?”

  “You’re right, of course.” Nautzera had the most infuriating way of owning one’s objections. “But there’s a far more disturbing reason to believe that he’ll declare against us rather than the Fanim . . .”

  “And what reason is that?”

  “Because, Achamian,” a voice other than Nautzera’s replied, “there’s no way that a Holy War against the Fanim could succeed.”

  Achamian peered into the darkness between columns. It was Simas, a wry smile splitting his snow white beard. He wore a grey vestment over his blue silk gown. Even in appearance he was water to Nautzera’s fire.

  “How was your journey?” Simas asked.

  “The Dreams were particularly bad,” Achamian replied, somewhat bewildered by the shift between hard speculation and light pleasantries. In what now seemed a different lifetime, Simas had been his teacher, the one to bury the innocence of a Nroni fisherman’s son in the mad revelations of the Mandate. They hadn’t spoken directly in years—Achamian had been abroad for a long time—but the ease of manner, the ability to speak without the detours of jnan, remained. “What do you mean, Simas? Why couldn’t a Holy War succeed against the Fanim?”