The Darkness That Comes Before Read online

  In so many ways he was a god to these fools. He needed always to remember this—not merely because it was flattering, but because it was they who could not forget. They who feared, and thus they who inevitably hated—so much that they would risk all in a Holy War against the Schools. A sorcerer who forgot this hatred forgot how to stay alive.

  Standing before the blurred immensity of Sumna, Achamian listened to the seamen bicker in the background, and to the ship groan in rhythm with the swells. He thought of the burning of the White Ships in Neleost, thousands of years ago. He could still taste the musty smoke, see the glitter of doom across the evening waters, feel his other body shivering in the cold.

  And Achamian wondered where it all went, the past, and why, if it were gone, it made his heart ache so.

  In the choked streets beyond the quays, Achamian, who often became contemplative in the press of men, was once again struck by the absurdity of his presence here. It was a minor miracle that the Thousand Temples had ever allowed the Schools to maintain missions in Sumna. For the Inrithi, there was a sense that Sumna was not merely the heart of their faith and their priesthood, but the very heart of God. Literally.

  The Chronicle of the Tusk was the most ancient and therefore the most thunderous voice of the past, so ancient that it was itself without any clear history—“innocent,” as the great Ceneian commentator Gaeterius had written. Ribboned by characters, the Tusk recorded the great migratory invasions that marked the ascendancy of Men in Eärwa. For whatever reason, the Tusk had always been in the possession of one tribe, the Ketyai, and since the earliest days of Shigek, before even the rise of Kyraneas, it had been installed in Sumna—or so the surviving records suggested. As a result, Sumna and the Tusk had become inseparable in the thoughts of Men; pilgrimages to Sumna and to the Tusk were one and the same, as though the place had become an artifact and the artifact a place. To walk in Sumna was to walk through scripture.

  Small wonder he felt out of place.

  He found himself being jostled behind a small train of mules. Arms and shoulders, scowling faces and shouts. Movement through the small street came to a halt. Never had he seen the city so maddeningly crowded. He turned to one of the men pressing him, a Conriyan by appearance—solemn, broad-shouldered, with a heavy beard, a member of the warrior caste.

  “Tell me,” Achamian asked in Sheyic, “what’s happening here?” He’d dispensed with jnan in his impatience: they were, after all, sharing sweat.

  The man appraised him with dark eyes, a curious look on his face.

  “You mean you don’t know?” he asked, raising his voice above the din.

  “Know what?” Achamian replied, feeling a small tickle in his spine.

  “Maithanet has called the faithful to Sumna,” he said, suspicious of Achamian’s ignorance. “He’s to reveal the object of the Holy War.”

  Achamian was stunned. He glanced at the faces packed around them, abruptly realizing how many of them had the hard-bitten look of war. Nearly all of them were openly armed. The first half of his mission, to discover the object of Maithanet’s Holy War, was about to be accomplished for him.

  Nautzera and the others must have known. But why didn’t they tell me?

  Because they needed him to come to Sumna. They knew he would resist recruiting Inrau, so they’d assembled everything they could to convince him that he must. A lie of omission—perhaps not so great a sin—but it had rendered him pliant to their purposes nonetheless.

  Manipulation upon manipulation. Even the Quorum played games with their own pieces. It was an old outrage, but it never failed to sting.

  The man had continued speaking, his eyes bright with sudden fervour: “Pray that it’s the Schools we war against, my friend, rather than the Fanim. Sorcery is ever the greater cancer.”

  Achamian almost agreed.

  Achamian reached out, planning to draw a finger through the groove down the centre of Esmenet’s back, but he hesitated, clasping a handful of stained coverings instead. The room was dark, thick with the heat of their coupling. Through the shadows, he could see the scatter of crumbs and refuse across the floor. A blinding white crack in the shutters was the only source of light. The thunder of the street beyond had the rattle of thin walls.

  “Nothing else?” he said, feeling remotely shocked by the unsteadiness in his own voice.

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing else?’” Her voice was marked by an old and patient bruise.

  She had misunderstood, but before he could explain, a sudden sense of nausea and suffocating heat struck him. He pushed himself from the bed to his feet and immediately felt as though he might fall to his knees. His legs buckled, and he drunkenly braced himself against the sideboards. Chills skittered through his arm hairs and across his scalp and back.

  “Akka?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he replied. “The heat.” He drew himself up and rolled back onto the wheeling mattress. Her body felt like burning eels against his own. Such heat so early in spring! It was as though the very world had grown feverish at the prospect of Maithanet’s Holy War.

  “You’ve suffered the Fevers before,” she said, her voice apprehensive. The Fevers were not contagious—everyone knew this.

  “Yes,” he said thickly, holding his forehead. You’re safe. “They possessed me six years ago, while on mission in Cingulat . . . I almost died.”

  “Six years ago,” she repeated. “My daughter died the same year.” Bitterness.

  He found himself resenting the ease with which his pain had become hers. An image of what her daughter might look like came to him: sturdy but fine-boned, dark languid hair chopped low-caste short, a cheek perfectly curved to the cup of a palm. But it was Esmi he actually envisaged. Her as a child.

  They were silent a long time. His thoughts settled. The heat became embalming, lost the acrid edge of their exertions. She had mistaken what he’d said earlier, he realized, remembering the strange bruise in her tone. He had merely wanted to know if there was anything more to the rumours.

  In a way, he’d always known he would return here, not only to Sumna, but to this place between the arms and legs of this tired woman. Esmenet. A strange, old-fashioned name for a woman of her character, but at the same time oddly appropriate for a prostitute.

  Esmenet. How could a name affect him so?

  She had dwindled in the four years since he had last come to Sumna. More haggard, her humour gouged by the accumulation of small wounds. Without hesitation, he’d searched for her after struggling through the packed harbour, struck by his own eagerness. Seeing her sitting in her window had been strange, an intermingling of loss and vanity, as though he’d recognized a childhood rival behind the bitten face of a leper or a beggar.

  “Still fetching sticks, I see,” she’d said, her eyes remarkably untouched by surprise.

  The child-fat had also disappeared from her wit.

  Gradually, she’d gathered him from his worries into her intricate world of anecdote and satire. Inexorably, the moments had led to this room, and Achamian had made love to her with an urgency that shocked him, as though he’d found an impossible reprieve in the animality of the act—a reprieve from the turmoil of his mission.

  Achamian had come to Sumna for two reasons: to determine whether this new Shriah planned to wage his Holy War against the Schools, and to learn whether the Consult had any hand in these remarkable events. The first had been a tangible goal, something he could use to rationalize his betrayal of Inrau. The second . . . ghostly, possessing the feverish anemia of excuses that fall far short of absolution. How could he use the Mandate’s war against the Consult to rationalize betrayal when the war itself had come to seem so irrational?

  How else could one describe a war without a foe?

  “Tomorrow I must find Inrau,” he said, more to the darkness than to Esmenet.

  “Do you still intend to . . . turn him?”

  “I don’t know. I know precious little any more.”

  “How can you say tha
t, Akka? I sometimes wonder if there’s anything you don’t know.”

  She had always been the consummate whore, nursing first his loins and then his heart. I don’t know if I could bear this again.

  “I’ve spent my entire life among people who think me mad, Esmi.”

  She laughed at this. Though born a caste menial and never educated—formally anyway—Esmenet had always possessed a keen appreciation of irony. It was one of many things that so distinguished her from the other women, the other prostitutes.

  “I’ve spent my entire life among people who think me a harlot, Akka.”

  Achamian smiled in the darkness. “But it’s not the same. You are a harlot.”

  “So you’re not mad, then?” She giggled at this, and Achamian felt himself sour. This girlishness was a charade—or so he’d always thought—something concocted for her men. It reminded him that he was a customer, that they weren’t lovers after all.

  “But that’s just it, Esmi. Whether I’m mad or no depends on whether my enemy exists.” He hesitated, as though these words had delivered him to a breathless precipice. “Esmenet . . . You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Believe an inveterate liar like you? Please don’t insult me.”

  Flare of irritation, immediately regretted. “No. Seriously . . .”

  She paused before answering. “Do I believe the Consult exists?”

  She doesn’t. People who repeated questions, Achamian knew, feared answering them.

  Her beautiful brown eyes studied him in the gloom. “Let’s just say, Akka, that I believe the question of the Consult exists.”

  There was something beseeching in her look. He felt more chills.

  “Isn’t that enough?” she asked.

  Even for him, the Consult had withdrawn from the terror of fact to the rootless anxiety of questions. Had he, by mourning the absence of an answer, forgotten the importance of the question?

  “I must find Inrau tomorrow,” he said.

  Her fingers burrowed through his beard, across his chin. He raised his head like a cat.

  “We make a sad couple,” she said, as though making a casual observation.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “A sorcerer and a harlot . . . There’s something sad about that.”

  He grasped her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers.

  “There’s something sad about all couples,” he said.

  In his dream, Inrau walked through canyons of burnt brick, through faces and figures illuminated by rags of torchlight. And he heard a voice from nowhere, crying through his bones, across every finger’s-breadth of his skin, speaking words like the shadows of fists striking just beyond the corner of his eyes. Words that battered whatever will remained to him. Words that walked with his limbs.

  He glimpsed the sagging facade of a tavern, then a low, golden-dim enclosure of smoke, tables, and overhead beams. The entrance enveloped him. The rising ground tipped forward, directed him toward a malevolent blackness in the far corner of the room. It too enveloped him—another entrance. Everything rushed into the bearded man, his head slack against the chapped stucco, his face on a lazy, upward angle, but tight with some forbidden ecstasy—light spilling from his working mouth. Flakes of sun in his eyes.

  Achamian . . .

  Then the impossible mutter trailed into the rumble of patrons. The murky interior of the tavern became sturdy and mundane. The nightmarish angles squared. The play of light and shadow became crisp.

  “What are you doing here?” Inrau sputtered, struggling to clear his thoughts. “Do you realize what’s happening?” He scanned the interior of the tavern and through beams and haze saw a table of Shrial Knights in a far corner. So far they hadn’t noticed him.

  Achamian watched him sourly. “It’s good to see you too, boy.”

  Inrau scowled. “Don’t call me ‘boy.’”

  Achamian grinned. “But what else”—he winked—“is a beloved uncle supposed to call his nephew? Hmm, boy?”

  Inrau exhaled a long breath and leaned back into his chair. “It is good to see you . . . Uncle Akka.” No lie there. Despite the hurtful circumstances, it was good to see him. For some time he’d regretted leaving his old teacher’s side. Sumna and the Thousand Temples were not the places, the sanctuaries, he’d imagined them to be—at least not until Maithanet had been elected to the Seat.

  “I have missed you,” Inrau continued, “but Sumna—”

  “Is not such a good place for someone like me—I know.”

  “Then why have you come? Surely you’ve heard the rumours.”

  “I didn’t simply ‘come,’ Inrau . . .” Achamian paused, his face abruptly troubled. “I was sent.”

  Inrau’s scalp prickled. “Oh no, Achamian. Please tell me . . .”

  “We need to know about this Maithanet,” Achamian said in a forced tone. “About his Holy War. Surely you can see this.”

  Achamian downed his bowl of wine. For an instant, he looked broken. But the sudden pity Inrau felt for the man, the man who in so many ways had become his father, was dwarfed by a giddy sense of groundlessness. “But you promised, Akka. You promised.”

  Tears glittered in the Schoolman’s eyes. Wise tears, but filled with regret nonetheless.

  “The world has had the habit,” Achamian said, “of breaking the back of my promises.”

  Though Achamian had hoped to present Inrau the front of a teacher at last acknowledging a former student as his peer, an unvoiced question continued to rattle him: What am I doing?

  Studying the young man, he felt a pang of affection. His face looked strangely aquiline, shaven as it was in the Nansur fashion. But the voice was familiar—the way it grew more and more tangled in competing ideas. And his eyes as well: exuberant, wide, and glassy brown, perpetually hinged on the cusp of honest self-doubt. Inrau had been cursed more than others, Achamian reflected, to be given the gift of the Few. In temperament, he was ideally suited to be a priest of the Thousand Temples. The touch of selfless candour, of forward passion—these were things the Mandate would have stripped from him.

  “But Maithanet is more than you can understand,” Inrau was saying. The young man’s entire body seemed to flinch from the round-rushing air of the tavern. “Some almost worship him, though this angers him. He’s to be obeyed, not worshipped. That’s why he took his name—”

  “His name?” It hadn’t occurred to Achamian that his name might mean something. This in itself disturbed him. It was a Shrial tradition to take a new name. How could such simple things slip past him?

  “Yes,” Inrau replied. “From mai’tathana.”

  Achamian was unfamiliar with the word. But before he could ask, lnrau continued his explanation, his tone defiant, as though the former student could only now, finally beyond the reach of the Mandate, vent old resentments.

  “Its meaning would be unknown to you. Mai’tathana is Thoti-Eännorean, the language of the Tusk. It means ‘instruction.’”

  So what’s the lesson?

  “And none of it troubles you?” Achamian asked.

  “None of what troubles me?”

  “The fact that Maithanet so effortlessly secured the Seat. That he was able, in a matter of weeks, to purge the Shrial Apparati of all the Emperor’s spies.”

  “Trouble me?” Inrau cried incredulously. “My heart exults at these things. You have no inkling how deeply I despaired when I first came to Sumna. When I first realized how sordid and corrupt the Thousand Temples had become—realized that the Shriah himself was simply another of the Emperor’s dogs. And then Maithanet arrived. Like a storm! One of those rare summer storms that sweep the earth clean. Troubled by the ease with which he cleansed Sumna? Akka, I rejoiced.”

  “Then what of this Holy War? Does your heart also rejoice at the thought of this? The thought of another Scholastic War?”

  Inrau hesitated, as though shocked his earlier momentum had so quickly stalled.

  “No one knows the object of his Holy War,” he sai
d numbly. As much as Inrau despised the Mandate, Achamian knew the thought of its destruction horrified him. Part of him dwells with us still.

  “And if Maithanet does declare against the Schools, what will you think of him then?”

  “He won’t, Akka. I’m certain of this.”

  “But that wasn’t my question, was it?” Achamian inwardly winced at the ruthlessness of his tone. “If Maithanet declares against the Schools, what then?”

  Inrau drew his hands—delicate hands for a man, Achamian had always thought—across his face. “I don’t know, Akka. I’ve asked this same question a thousand times, and still I don’t know.”

  “But why is that? You’re a Shrial Priest now, Inrau, an apostle of the God as revealed by the Latter Prophet and the Tusk. Doesn’t the Tusk demand that all sorcerers be burned?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “But the Mandate is different? An exception?”

  “Yes. It is different.”

  “Why? Because an old fool whom you once loved is one of them?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Inrau hissed, glancing apprehensively at the table of Shrial Knights. “You know full well why, Akka. Because I love you as a father and a friend, certainly, but because I also . . . respect the Mandate mission.”

  “So if Maithanet declares against the Schools, what would you think?”

  “I would grieve.”

  “Grieve? I don’t think so, Inrau. You’d think he’s mistaken. As brilliant and as holy as Maithanet may be, you’d think, ‘He hasn’t seen what I’ve seen!’ ”

  Inrau nodded vacantly.

  “The Thousand Temples,” Achamian continued, his tone more gentle, “has always been the most powerful of the Great Factions, but that power has often been blunted, if not broken, by corruption. Maithanet is the first Shriah in centuries to reclaim its pre-eminence. And now in the secret councils of every Faction, ruthless men ask, What will Maithanet do with this power? Who will he instruct with his Holy War? The Fanim and their Cishaurim priests? Or will he instruct those condemned by the Tusk, the Schools? Never has Sumna been filled with as many spies as now. They circle the Holy Precincts like vultures about the promise of a corpse. House Ikurei and the Scarlet Spires will try to devise ways to yoke Maithanet’s agenda to their own. The Kianene and the Cishaurim will keep a wary eye on his every move, fearing that his lesson is for them. Minimize or exploit, Inrau—all of them are here for one of these two reasons. Only the Mandate stands outside this sordid circle.”