The Darkness That Comes Before Read online

  Inrau’s decision to abandon the Mandate for the Thousand Temples had at once dismayed and relieved Achamian. He’d been dismayed because he knew he’d lost Inrau and the reprieve of his company. But he’d been relieved because he knew the Mandate would obliterate Inrau’s innocence if the boy stayed. Achamian could never forget the night when he himself had first touched Seswatha’s Heart. The fisherman’s son had died that moment; his eyes had been doubled, and the world itself had been transformed, rendered cavernous by tragic history. Inrau would have likewise died. Touching Seswatha’s Heart would have charred his own. How could such innocence, any innocence, survive the terror of Seswatha’s Dreams? How could one find solace in mere sunlight, when the threat of the No-God loomed across every horizon? Beauty was denied victims of the Apocalypse.

  But the Mandate did not tolerate defections. The Gnosis was far too precious to be trusted with malcontents. This had been Nautzera’s unspoken threat throughout their exchange: “The boy is a defector, Achamian. Either way, he should die.” How long had the Quorum known that his story of Inrau’s drowning was a sham? From the very beginning? Or had Simas truly betrayed him?

  Of the innumerable acts Achamian had committed in his lifetime, securing Inrau’s escape was the one he considered a genuine accomplishment, the one act good in and of itself, even if he’d forsaken his School in order to achieve it. Achamian had protected innocence, had allowed it to flee to a safer place. How could anyone condemn such a thing?

  But every act could be condemned. The same as all bloodlines could be traced to some long-dead king, all deeds could be chased to some potential catastrophe. One need only follow the forks far enough. If Inrau were seized by another of the Schools and forced to yield those few secrets he knew, then the Gnosis would be eventually lost, and the Mandate would be condemned to the impotent obscurity of a Minor School. Perhaps even destroyed.

  Had he done the right thing? Or had he simply made a wager?

  Was the pulse of a good man worth rolling the dice of Apocalypse?

  Nautzera had argued no, and Achamian had agreed.

  The Dreams. What had happened could not happen again. This world must not die. A thousand innocents—a thousand thousand! —were not worth the possibility of a Second Apocalypse. Achamian had agreed with Nautzera. He would betray Inrau for the reason innocents are always betrayed: fear.

  He leaned against the stone and stared down and across the churning straits, struggling to remember what it had looked like that sunny day with Inrau. He could not.

  Maithanet and holy war. Soon Achamian would leave Atyersus for the Nansur city of Sumna, the holiest of cities for the Inrithi, home of the Thousand Temples and the Tusk. Only Shimeh, the birthplace of the Latter Prophet, was as holy.

  How many years had passed since he’d last visited Sumna? Five? Seven? He idly wondered if he would find Esmenet there, whether she still lived. She had always been able to ease his heart somehow.

  And it would be good to see Inrau as well, despite the circumstances. At the very least the boy had to be warned. They know, dear boy. I’ve failed you.

  So little comfort in the sea. Filled by a wan loneliness, Achamian looked beyond the straits in the direction of far-away Sumna. He yearned to once again see these two people, one whom he’d loved only to lose to the Thousand Temples, the other whom he thought he might love . . .

  Were he a man and not a sorcerer and a spy.

  After watching Achamian’s lonely figure wind down into the cedar forests beneath Atyersus, Nautzera lingered on the parapets, savouring the odd flash of sunlight and studying the storm-heaped clouds that fissured the northern sky. This time of year, Achamian’s voyage to Sumna was certain to be fraught with inclement weather. He would survive the voyage, Nautzera knew—through the Gnosis, if he had to—but would he survive the far greater storm that awaited him? Would he survive Maithanet?

  Our task is so great, he thought, and our tools so frail.

  Shaking himself from his reverie—a bad habit that had only worsened with age—he hastened into the ponderous galleries, ignoring the passage of peers and subordinates alike. After a time he found himself in the papyrus gloom of the library, his old bones aching from exertion. As expected, he found Simas hunched over an ancient manuscript. Lantern light glistened across a thin line of spilt ink, which Nautzera momentarily confused for blood. He watched the oblivious man for a moment, troubled by a flare of resentment. Why did he begrudge Simas so? Was it because the man’s eyes had yet to fail, while Nautzera, like so many others, had to rely on his students to read to him?

  “The light’s better in the scriptorium,” Nautzera said, startling the old sorcerer.

  The friendly face jerked up, peered into the murk. “Is it, now? But not the company, I imagine.”

  Always some wry quip. Simas, in the end, was a predictable man. Or was that also part of the sham, like the faint air of doddering gentility he used to disarm his students?

  “We should have told him, Simas.”

  The old man frowned and absently scratched his beard. “Told him what? That Maithanet has already called the faithful to declare the object of his Holy War? That half of his mission is mere pretext? Achamian will find out soon enough.”

  “No.” They had needed that omission, at least, to make the prospect of betraying his student more palatable for the man.

  Simas nodded and sighed deeply. “You’re worried about the other thing, then. If there’s one lesson we’ve learned from the Consult, old friend, it’s that ignorance is a potent tool.”

  “As is knowledge. Would we deny him the tools he needs? What if he’s careless? Men often grow careless in the absence of any real threat.”

  Simas shook his head with dismissive vigour. “But he travels to Sumna, Nautzera. Or have you forgotten? He’ll take care. What sorcerer wouldn’t in the den of the Thousand Temples, hmm? Especially in times such as these.”

  Nautzera pursed his lips and remained silent.

  Simas leaned back from his manuscript, as if uncluttering his concentration. He studied Nautzera keenly. “You’ve heard new reports,” he said at length. “Someone else is dead.”

  Simas had always possessed the uncanny ability to guess the cause of his many humours.

  “Worse,” Nautzera said. “Missing. This morning, Parthelsus reported that his primary informant in the Tydonni court has vanished without a trace. Our agents are being hunted, Simas.”

  “It must be them.”

  Them. Nautzera shrugged. “Or the Scarlet Spires. Or even the Thousand Temples. The Emperor’s spies, remember, seem to be suffering a similar fate in Sumna . . . Either way, Achamian should have been told.”

  “Always so puritanical, Nautzera. No. Whoever assails us is either too timid or too canny to do so directly. Rather than strike at our sorcerers-of-rank, they strike at our informants, at our eyes and ears in the Three Seas. For whatever reason, they hope to render us deaf and dumb.”

  Though he appreciated the dreadful implications of this, Nautzera failed to see the connection. “So?”

  “So Drusas Achamian was my student for many years. I know him. He uses men, as a spy must, but he’s never acquired a taste for it—the way a spy must. By nature, he’s an uncharacteristically . . . open man. Weak.”

  Achamian was weak, or so Nautzera had always thought, but what bearing could this have on their obligations to him? “I’m too weary for your riddles, Simas. Speak plain.”

  Simas’s eyes flashed in annoyance. “Riddles? I thought I was being quite clear.”

  At last we see the real you, “old friend.”

  “It comes to this,” Simas continued. “Achamian befriends the people he uses, Nautzera. If he knew his contacts might be hunted, he would hesitate. And perhaps more important, if he knew that Atyersus itself had been infiltrated, he might censor the information he gave us in order to protect his contacts. Remember that he lied, Nautzera, risked the Gnosis itself, to protect that treacherous student of his.”r />
  Nautzera graced the man with a rare smile, and though it felt wicked upon his face, it seemed eminently justified. “I agree. Such a thing would be intolerable. But for a long time, Simas, our success has depended on granting autonomy to our agents in the field. We’ve always trusted those who know the situation best to make the best decisions. And now, at your insistence, we deny one of our brothers the knowledge he needs. Knowledge that could save his life.”

  Simas abruptly stood and approached him in the shadows. Despite the man’s small stature and grandfatherly mien, Nautzera’s skin prickled as he drew near.

  “But it’s never quite so simple, is it now, old friend? It’s the concert of knowledge and ignorance that underwrites our decisions. Trust me when I tell you we’ve struck the proper proportion with Achamian. Was I wrong when I told you Inrau’s defection would prove useful someday?”

  “No,” Nautzera admitted, remembering their heated arguments of two years past. He had worried that Simas was merely protecting a beloved student—then. But if the years had taught Nautzera one thing about Polchias Simas, it was that the man was as shrewd as he was devoid of sentiment.

  “Then trust me in this,” Simas urged, raising a friendly ink-stained hand to his shoulder. “Come, old friend. We have arduous tasks of our own.”

  Satisfied, Nautzera nodded. Arduous tasks, indeed. Whoever hunted their informants did so with galling ease, and that could mean only one thing: despite reliving Seswatha’s anguish night after night, a Mandate Schoolman had turned traitor.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SUMNA

  If the world is a game whose rules are written by the God, and sorcerers are those who cheat and cheat, then who has written the rules of sorcery?

  —ZARATHINIUS, A DEFENCE OF THE ARCANE ARTS

  Early Spring, 4110 Year-of-the-Tusk, En Route to Sumna

  On the Sea of Meneanor, a storm touched them.

  Achamian awoke from another of the dreams, hugging himself. The ancient wars of his sleep seemed tangled with the blackness of his cabin, the pitching floor, and the chorus of thundering water. He lay huddled, shivering as he fumbled to sort out the real from the dream. Faces haunted the blackness, cramped in astonishment and horror. Bronze-armoured forms struggled across the distance. Smoke smeared the horizon, and rising, knotted like branches of black iron, was a dragon. Skafra . . .

  A thunderclap.

  On the deck, braced against the sheets of rain, the Nroni sailors wailed, supplicated themselves to Momas, Aspect of storm and sea. And God of dice.

  The Nroni merchantman weighed anchor outside the harbour of Sumna, the ancient centre of the Inrithi faith. Leaning against a weathered rail, Achamian watched the pilot’s boat row toward them through the swells. The great city was indistinct in the background, but he could discern the structures of the Hagerna, the vast compound of temples, granaries, and barracks that formed the administrative heart of the Thousand Temples. In its centre rose the legendary bastions of the Junriüma, the holy sanctum of the Tusk.

  He could feel the tug of what should have been their grandeur, but they seemed mute in the distance, dumb. Just more stone. For the Inrithi, this was the place where the heavens inhabited the earth. Sumna, the Hagerna, and the Junriüma were far more than geographical sites; they were bound up in the very purpose of history. They were the hinges of destiny.

  But they were eggshells of stone to Achamian. The Hagerna called to men unlike himself, men who could not, he supposed, escape the weight of their time. Men like his former student Inrau.

  Whenever Inrau had discussed the Hagerna, he would speak as though the God himself had laid the keel of his words. Achamian had felt more than faintly alienated by this talk, as so often happened when confronted by another’s excessive enthusiasm. There would be a momentum to Inrau’s tone, a mad certainty that could put cities, even nations, to the sword, as though his righteous joy could be attached to any act of madness. Here again was reason why Maithanet should be so deeply feared: to possess this momentum was disease enough, but to be a carrier . . . There was pause for thought.

  Maithanet carried a plague whose primary symptom was certainty. How the God could be equated with the absence of hesitation was something Achamian had never understood. After all, what was the God but the mystery that burdened them all? What was hesitation but a dwelling-within this mystery?

  Perhaps, then, I am among the most pious of men, he thought, smiling inwardly. He was a man who lavished himself with false flattery. Too much brooding.

  “Maithanet,” he muttered under his breath, but the name was also empty. It could neither tether the grandiose rumours that fluttered about it nor provide motive enough for the crimes he was about to commit.

  As though drawn by some half-understood sense of obligation to his sole passenger, the captain of the merchantman joined his meditative silence, standing somewhat nearer than prescribed by the dictates of jnan—a common low-caste error. He was a sturdy man, constructed, it seemed, of the same wood as his ship. Salt and sun on his forearms, the sea in his unkempt hair and beard.

  “This city,” he finally said, “is not such a good place for someone like you.”

  Someone like me . . . A sorcerer in a holy city. There was no indictment in the man’s words or his tone. The Nroni had grown used to the Mandate, to Mandate gifts and Mandate demands. But they were still Inrithi, the faithful. A certain blankness of expression was their solution to this contradiction. They always spoke around the fact of their heresy, perhaps hoping that if they didn’t touch it with words, they might somehow carry away their faith intact.

  “They never know what we are,” Achamian said. “That’s the horrible fact of sinners. We’re indistinguishable from the righteous.”

  “So I’ve been told,” the man replied, avoiding his eyes. “The Few can see only each other.” There was something disturbing about his tone, as though he probed for the details of some illicit sexual act.

  Why speak of this? Was the fool trying to ingratiate himself?

  An image struck Achamian: himself as a boy, climbing on the big rocks, the ones his father had used to dry the nets, pausing every few breathless instants simply to look around him. Something had happened. It was as though he’d opened different eyelids, ones beneath those he normally opened each morning. Everything was so agonizingly tight, as though the flesh of the world had been dried taut across the gaps between bone: the net against stone, the grid of shadows cast over the hollows, the watery beads cupped between the flex of tendons on his hands—so clear! And within this tightness, the sensation of inner blooming, of the collapse of seeing into being, as though his eyes had been wrung into the very heart of things. From the surface of the stone, he could see himself, a dark child towering across the disc of the sun.

  The very fabric of existence. The onta. He had—and he could still never adequately express this—“experienced” it. Unlike most others, he’d known immediately he was one of the Few, known with a child’s stubborn certainty. “Atyersus!” he could remember crying, feeling the vertigo of a life no longer to be determined by his caste, by his father, or by the past.

  Those times when the Mandate had passed through his fishing village had profoundly marked him as a boy. First the clash of cymbals and then the cloaked figures, shielded by parasols and borne by slaves, steeped in the erotic aura of mystery. So remote! Faces impassive, touched only by the finest cosmetics, and by the proper jnanic contempt for low-caste fishermen and their sons. Only men of mythic stature could reside behind such faces—this he knew. Men braced by the glory of The Sagas. Dragon-slayers and assassins of kings. Prophets and abominations.

  Mere months of training at Atyersus had seen that childishness wane. Jaded, pompous, and self-deceived—Atyersus differed only in scale.

  Am I so different from this man? Achamian asked himself, watching the captain in his periphery. Not really, he thought, but he ignored the man nonetheless and turned back to stare at Sumna, hazy against the dark hills
.

  And yet he was different. So many cares, and the wages so slight. Different in that his tantrums could sweep away city gates, pulverize flesh, and snap bone. Such power, and yet the same vanities, the same fears, and far darker whims. He had expected the mythic to raise him up, to exalt his every act, and instead he was set adrift . . . Detachment enlightened no one. He could turn this ship into a shining inferno, then walk unscathed across the surface of the water, and yet he could never be . . . certain.

  He had almost whispered this aloud.

  The captain left momentarily, visibly relieved to be called away by his crew. The pilot had drawn up to the rolling ship.

  Why are they so distant to me? Stung by this thought, he lowered his head, stared into the wine-dark depths. Whom do I despise?

  To ask this question was to answer it. How could one not feel isolated, detached, when existence itself answered to their tongue? Where was the hard ground on which one might stand when mere words could sweep everything away? It had become a truism among scholars in the Three Seas to compare sorcerers to poets, a comparison Achamian had always thought absurd. He could scarcely imagine two vocations so tragically at odds. Save fear or political machination, no sorcerer had ever created with his words. The power, the brilliant flurries of light, possessed an irresistible direction, and it was the wrong one: the direction of destruction. It was as though men could only ape the language of God, could only debase and brutalize his song. When sorcerers sing, the saying went, men die.

  When sorcerers sing. And yet even among his own, he was anathema. The other Schools could never forgive the Mandate their heritage, their possession of the Gnosis, the knowledge of the Ancient North. Before their extinction, the great Schools of the North had possessed benefactors, pilots to navigate them through shoals no human mind could conceive of. The Gnosis of the Nonmen Magi, the Quya, refined through another thousand years of human cunning.