The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Then how did you learn of Shimeh?”

  “I once sold ermine to a man from the caravans. A dark-skinned man. A Ketyai. Never saw a dark-skinned man before.”

  “Caravans?” Kellhus had never heard the word before, but he spoke it as though he wanted to know which caravan the trapper referred to.

  “Every year a caravan from the south arrives in Atrithau—if it survives the Sranc, that is. It travels from a land called Galeoth by way of Sakarpus, bringing spices, silks—wondrous things, Kellhus! Have you ever tasted pepper?”

  “What did this dark-skinned man tell you of Shimeh?”

  “Not much, really. He spoke mostly about his religion. Said he was Inrithi, a follower of the Latter Prophet, Inri”—his brows knotted for a moment—“something or another. Can you imagine? A latter prophet?” Leweth paused, eyes unfocused, struggling to render the episode in words. “He kept saying that I was damned unless I submit to his prophet and open my heart to the Thousand Temples—I’ll never forget that name.”

  “So Shimeh was holy to this man?”

  “The holiest of holies. It was the city of his prophet long ago. But there was some kind of problem, I think. Something about wars and about heathens having taken it from the Inrithi—” Leweth halted, as though struck by something of peculiar significance. “In the Three Seas Men war with Men, Kellhus, and care nothing for the Sranc. Can you imagine?”

  “So Shimeh is a holy city in the hands of a heathen people?”

  “All for the best, I think,” Leweth replied, abruptly bitter. “The dog kept calling me a heathen as well.”

  They continued talking of distant lands far into the night. The wind howled and battered the sturdy walls of their cabin. And in the gloom of a faltering fire, Anasûrimbor Kellhus slowly drew Leweth into his own descending rhythms—slower breath, drowsy eyes. When the trapper was fully entranced, he peeled away his last secrets, hunted him until no refuge remained.

  Alone, Kellhus snowshoed through frigid stands of spruce and toward the nearest of the heights that surrounded the trapper’s cabin. Snowdrifts scrawled around the dark trunks. The air smelled of winter silence.

  Kellhus had refashioned himself over the past several weeks. The forest was no longer the stupefying cacophony it had once been. Sobel was a land of winter caribou, sable, beaver, and marten. Amber slumbered in her ground. Bare stone lay clean beneath her sky, and her lakes were silver with fish. There was nothing more, nothing worthy of awe or dread.

  Before him, the snow fell away from a shallow cliff. Kellhus stared up, searching for the path that would see the heights yield to him most readily. He climbed.

  Except for a few stunted and leafless hawthorns, the summit was clear. At its centre stood an ancient stele—a stone shaft leaning against the distance. Runes and small graven figures pitted all four sides. What drew Kellhus here, time and again, was not merely the language of the graven text—aside from the idiom, it was indistinguishable from his own—but the name of its author.

  It began,And I, Anasûrimbor Celmomas II, look from this place and witness the glory worked by my hand . . .

  and continued to catalogue a great battle between long-dead kings. According to Leweth, this land had once been the frontier of two nations: Kûniüri and Eämnor, both lost millennia ago in mythical wars against what Leweth called “the No-God.” As with many of Leweth’s stories, Kellhus dismissed his tales of the Apocalypse outright. But the name Anasûrimbor engraved in ancient diorite was something he could not dismiss. The world, he now understood, was far older than the Dûnyain. And if his bloodline extended as far as this dead High King, then so was he.

  But such thoughts were irrelevant to his mission. His study of Leweth was drawing to conclusion. Soon he would have to continue south to Atrithau, where Leweth had insisted he could secure further means of travelling to Shimeh.

  From the heights, Kellhus looked south across the winter forests. Ishuäl lay somewhere behind him, hidden in the glacial mountains. Before him lay a pilgrimage through a world of men bound by arbitrary custom, by the endless repetition of tribal lies. He would come to them as one awake. He would shelter in the hollows of their ignorance, and through truth he would make them his instruments. He was Dûnyain, one of the Conditioned, and he would possess all peoples, all circumstances. He would come before.

  But another Dûnyain awaited him, one who had studied the wilderness far longer: Moënghus.

  How great is your power, Father?

  Turning from the panorama, he noticed something odd. On the far side of the stele he saw tracks in the snow. He studied them momentarily before resolving to ask the trapper about them. Their author had walked upright but had not been quite human.

  “They look like this,” Kellhus said. With a bare finger he quickly pressed a replica of the track in the snow.

  Leweth watched him, his manner stern. Kellhus needed only to glance at him to see the horror he tried to hide. In the background, the dogs yelped, trotted circles at the ends of their leather leashes.

  “Where?” Leweth asked, staring intently at the strange track.

  “The old Kûniüric stele. They move at a tangent to the cabin, to the northwest.”

  The bearded face turned to him. “And you don’t know what these tracks are?”

  The significance of the question was plain. You’re from the north, and you don’t know these? Then Kellhus understood.

  “Sranc,” he said.

  The trapper looked beyond him, sifting through the surrounding wall of trees. The monk registered the flutter in the man’s bowels, his quickening heartbeat and the litany of his thoughts, too quick to be a question: What-do-we-do-what-do-we-do . . .

  “We should follow the tracks,” Kellhus said. “Make sure they don’t cross your runs. If they do . . .”

  “It’s been a hard winter for them,” Leweth said. He needed to wring some significance from his terror. “They’ve come south for food . . . They hunt food. Yes, food.”

  “And if not?”

  Leweth glanced at him, eyes wild. “For Sranc, Men are a sustenance of a different sort. They hunt us to calm the madness of their hearts.” He stepped among his dogs, was distracted by their accumulation around his legs. “Quiet, shh, quiet.” He slapped their ribs, pressed their chins to the snow by vigorously rubbing the backs of their heads. His arms swung wide and randomly, dispensing his affection among them equally.

  “Could you bring me the muzzles, Kellhus?”

  The trail was thin and grey through the drifts. The sky darkened. Winter evenings brought a strange hush to the interior of the forest, the sense that something greater than daylight was drawing to conclusion. They had run far in their snowshoes, and now they stopped.

  They stood beneath the desolate limbs of an oak.

  “We shouldn’t return,” Kellhus said.

  “But we can’t leave the dogs.”

  The monk watched Leweth for several breaths. Their exhalations fell on hard air. He could easily dissuade the trapper, he knew, from returning for anything. Whatever it was they followed knew of the runs, and perhaps even of the cabin itself. But tracks in the snow—empty marks—were far too little for him to use. For Kellhus the threat existed only in the fear manifested by the trapper. The forest was still his.

  Kellhus turned and together they made for the cabin, running with the shambling grace of snowshoes. But after a short distance, Kellhus halted the man with a firm hand on his shoulder.

  “What—” the trapper began to ask, but he was silenced by the sounds.

  A chorus of muffled howls and shrieks perforated the quiet. A single yelp pierced the hollows, followed by dread, wintry silence.

  Leweth stood as still as the dark trees. “Why, Kellhus?” His voice cracked.

  “There’s no time for why. We must flee.”

  Kellhus sat in ashen gloom, watching the dawn’s rosy fingers poke through thickets of branch and dark pine. Leweth still slept.

  We’ve run hard, Fat
her, but have we run hard enough?

  He saw something. A movement quickly obscured by the forest depths.

  “Leweth,” he said.

  The trapper stirred. “What?” the man said, coughing. “It’s still dark.”

  Another figure. Farther to the left. Closing.

  Kellhus remained still, his eyes lost in explorations of the wooded recesses. “They come,” he said.

  Leweth bent forward from his frozen blankets. His face was ashen. Bewildered, he followed Kellhus’s gaze into the surrounding gloom. “I see nothing.”

  “They move with stealth.”

  Leweth began shivering.

  “Run,” Kellhus said.

  Leweth stared at him in astonishment. “Run? The Sranc run down everything, Kellhus. You don’t flee them. They’re too fast!”

  “I know,” Kellhus replied. “I’ll remain here. Slow them.”

  Leweth could only stare at him. He could not move. The trees thundered about him. The sky tugged with its emptiness. Then an arrow jutted through his shoulder and he fell to his knees, stared at the red tip protruding from his breast. “Kellllhuuss!” he gasped.

  But Kellhus was gone. Leweth rolled in the snow, searching for him, found him sprinting through the near trees, a sword in his hand. The first of the Sranc was beheaded, and the monk moved, moved like a pale wraith through the drifts. Another died, its knife sketching uselessly through open air. The others closed upon Kellhus like leathery shadows.

  “Kellhus!” Leweth cried, perhaps out of anguish, perhaps hoping to draw them away, toward one who was already dead. I would die for you.

  But the forms fell, clutching themselves in the snow, and a weird, inhuman howl rifled through the trees. More fell, until only the tall monk was left.

  Far away, the trapper thought he heard his dogs barking.

  Kellhus pulled him along. Points of snow winked in the rising sun as they crashed through the thickets. Leweth felt cramped around the agony in his shoulder, but the monk was relentless, yanked him to a pace he could scarcely have managed uninjured. They blundered through drifts, around trees, half tumbled into ravines and clawed their way out again. The monk and his arms were always there, a thin rack of iron that propped him again and again.

  He still thought he could hear dogs.

  My dogs . . .

  At last he was thrown against a tree. The tree behind him felt a pillar of stone, a prop to die against. He could scarcely distinguish Kellhus, his beard and hood clotted with ice, from the canopy of bare branches.

  “Leweth,” Kellhus was saying, “you must think!”

  Cruel words! They grasped him to clarity, thrust him against his anguish. “My dogs,” he sobbed. “I hear . . . them.”

  The blue eyes acknowledged nothing.

  “More Sranc come,” Kellhus said between laboured breaths. “We need shelter. A place to hide.”

  Leweth rolled his head back, swallowed at the spike of pain in the back of his throat, tried to gather himself. “What . . . what direction have w-we c-come?”

  “South. Always south.”

  Leweth pushed himself from the tree, hugged the monk’s shoulders. He was seized by uncontrollable shivers. He coughed and peered through the trees. “How many st-streams”—he sucked air—“streams have we cr-crossed?”

  He felt the heat of Kellhus’s breath.

  “Five.”

  “Wessst!” he gasped. He leaned back to look into the monk’s face, still clutching him. He did not feel shame. There was no shame with this man. “W-we must g-go west,” he continued, putting his forehead to the monk’s lips. “Ruins. Ruins. N-Nonmen ruins. Many places to h-h-hide.” He groaned. The world wheeled. “You c-can see it a sh-short distance fr-from here.”

  Leweth felt snowy ground slam into his body. Stunned, all he could do was curl into his knees. Through the trees he saw Kellhus’s figure, distorted by tears, recede amidst the trees.

  No-no-no.

  He sobbed. “Kellhus? Kelllhuuss!”

  What’s happening?

  “Nooo!” he shrieked.

  The tall figure vanished.

  The slope was treacherous. Kellhus hauled himself up by grasping limbs and securing his step in the deadfalls beneath the snow. The conifers begrudged any clear path across the pitched ground. Radial scaffolds of branches tore at him. A gloom unlike the pale of winter thatched his surroundings.

  When he at last climbed free of the forest, the monk scowled at the sky and found himself stilled by the vista above him. Snow-covered, the ground rose with the hungry contours of a dog. The ruins of a gate and a wall towered over the nearer slopes. Beyond it, a dead oak of immense proportions bent against the sky.

  Rain fell from dark clouds scrolling over the summit, froze against his coats.

  Kellhus was astonished by the great stones of the gate. Many had a girth as huge as the oak they obscured. An uplifted face had been hewn from the lintel—blank eyes, as patient as sky. He passed beneath. The ground levelled somewhat. Behind him, the expanses of forest grew dim in the gathering rain. But the noise grew louder.

  The tree had been long dead. Its colossal tendons were husked of their bark, and its limbs extended into the air like winding tusks. Stripped of its detail, the wind and rain sluiced through it with ease.

  He turned as the Sranc broke from the bush, howling as they loped across the snow.

  So clear, this place. Arrows hissed by him. He picked one from the air and studied it. Warm, as though it had been pressed against skin. Then his sword was in his hand, and it glittered through the space around him, seizing it like the branches of a tree. They came—a dark rush—and he was there before them, poised in the one moment they could not foresee. A calligraphy of cries. The thud of astonished flesh. He speared the ecstasy from their inhuman faces, stepped among them and snuffed out their beating hearts.

  They could not see that circumstance was holy. They only hungered. He, on the other hand, was one of the Conditioned, Dûnyain, and all events yielded to him.

  They fell back, and the howling subsided. They thronged for a moment around him—narrow shoulders and dog-shaped chests, stinking leather and necklaces of human teeth. He stood patient before their menace. Tranquil.

  They fled.

  He bent to one that still squirmed at his feet, lifting it by its throat. The beautiful face contorted with fury.

  “Kuz’inirishka dazu daka gurankas. . .”

  It spat at him. He nailed it to the tree with his sword. He stepped back. It shrieked, flailed.

  What are these creatures?

  A horse snorted behind him, stamped at the snow and ice. Kellhus retrieved his sword and whirled.

  Through the sleet, the horse and rider were mere grey shapes. Kellhus watched their slow approach, standing his ground, his shaggy hair frozen into little tusks that clicked in the wind. The horse was large, some eighteen hands, and black. Its rider was draped in a long grey cloak stitched with faint patterns—abstracts of faces. He wore an uncrested helm that obscured his countenance. A powerful voice rang out, in Kûniüric:

  “I can see that you’re not to be killed.”

  Kellhus was silent. Watchful. The sound of rain like blowing sand.

  The figure dismounted but maintained a wary distance. He studied the inert forms sprawled around them.

  “Extraordinary,” the stranger said, then looked to him. Kellhus could see the glitter of his eyes beneath the brow of his helm. “You must be a name.”

  “Anasûrimbor Kellhus,” the monk replied.

  Silence. Kellhus thought he could sense confusion, strange confusion.

  “It speaks the language,” the man muttered at length. He stepped closer, peering at Kellhus. “Yes,” he said. “Yes . . . You do not merely mock me. I can see his blood in your face.”

  Kellhus again was silent.

  “You have the patience of an Anasûrimbor as well.”

  Kellhus studied him, noting that his cloak was not stitched with stylized rep
resentations of faces but with actual faces, their features distorted by being stretched flat. Beneath the cloak, the man was powerfully built, heavily armoured, and from the way he comported himself, entirely unafraid.

  “I see that you are a student. Knowledge is power, eh?”

  This one was not like Leweth. Not at all.

  Still the sound of sleet, patiently drawing the dead into the cold snow.

  “Should you not fear me, mortal, knowing what I am? Fear too is power. The power to survive.” The figure began to circle him, carefully stepping between Sranc limbs. “This is what separates your kind from mine. Fear. The clawing, grubbing, impulse to survive. For us life is always a . . . decision. For you . . . Well, let us just say it decides.”

  At last, Kellhus spoke. “The decision, then, would seem to be yours.”

  The figure paused. “Ah, mockery,” he said sorrowfully. “That is one thing we share.”

  Kellhus’s provocation had been deliberate but had yielded little—or so it seemed at first. The stranger abruptly lowered his obscured face, rolled his head back and forth on the pivot of his chin, muttering, “It baits me! The mortal baits me . . . It reminds me, reminds . . .” He began fumbling with his cloak, seized upon a misshapen face. “Of this one! Oh, impertinent—what a joy this one was! Yes, I remember . . .” He looked up at Kellhus and hissed, “I remember!”

  And Kellhus grasped the first principles of this encounter. A Nonman. Another of Leweth’s myths come true.

  With solemn deliberation the figure drew his broadsword. It shined unnaturally in the gloom, as though reflecting some otherworldly sun. But he turned to one of the dead Sranc, rolled it onto its back with the flat of the blade. Its white skin was beginning to darken.

  “This Sranc here—you could not pronounce its name—was our elju . . . our ‘book,’ you would say in your tongue. A most devoted animal. I’ll be wrecked without it—for a time, anyway.” He surveyed the other dead. “Nasty, vicious creatures, really.” He looked back up to Kellhus. “But most . . . memorable.”