The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  An old tactic, made effective by desperate wit. When recruiting a spy one had to open a safe place with words, make it appear that what was at stake wasn’t betrayal but a further, more demanding fidelity. Frames—give them greater frames with which to interpret the treachery out of their actions. Before all, a spy who recruits spies must be a master storyteller.

  “I know this,” Inrau said, staring at the palm of his right hand. “I do know this.”

  “And if there’s anywhere,” Achamian said, “that a hidden faction might be found, it’s here. All the reasons you’ve given me for your devotion to Maithanet are reasons why the Mandate must have eyes in the Thousand Temples. If the Consult is to be found anywhere, Inrau, it will be found here.”

  In a sense, all Achamian had done was issue a string of non-contentious declarations, but the story he’d conjured for Inrau was clear, even if the young man could not recognize it as such. Of all the Shrial Priests in the Hagerna, Inrau alone would be the one who saw the greater frame, the one who acted on interests that were not provincial or self-deceived. The Thousand Temples was a good place, but it was hapless. It had to be protected from its own innocence.

  “But the Consult,” Inrau said, fixing Achamian with a pained look. “What if they have died out? If I do what you ask for nothing, Akka, then I’ll be damned.” As though fearing instant retribution, he anxiously peeked over his shoulder.

  “But the question, Inrau, is what if they—”

  Achamian paused, stilled by the young priest’s horrified expression. “What is it?”

  “They’ve seen me.” Rigid swallow. “The Shrial Knights behind me . . . to your left.”

  Achamian had noticed the Knights enter shortly after his arrival, but aside from ensuring they weren’t among the Few, he’d paid them scant attention. And why should he? With missions such as this, being conspicuous was typically an asset. Skulkers drew attention, not braggarts.

  He hazarded a glance at the small grotto of lamplight where the three Knights sat. The one, a stocky man with woolly hair, still wore his hauberk, but the other two were attired in the gold-trimmed white of the Thousand Temples, the same as Inrau, though their dress consisted of the queer blend of martial uniform and priestly vestment unique to the Shrial Knights. The armoured man sketched loops in the air with a chicken bone, avidly describing something—a woman or a battle, perhaps—to his comrade across the table. The man between them, his face slack with upper-caste arrogance, met Achamian’s eyes and nodded.

  Without a word to his companions, the knight stood and began striding toward their table.

  “One of them comes,” Achamian said, pouring himself another bowl of wine. “Be afraid, calm, whatever, but let me talk. Understood?”

  A breathless nod.

  The Shrial Knight negotiated the intervening tables and patrons in a brusque manner, pausing once to firmly press a stumbling teamster from his path. He was lean and patrician tall, clean-shaven with short jet-black hair. The white of his elaborate tunic seemed to shrug off every shadow, but for some reason his face did not. He arrived bearing the scent of jasmine and myrrh.

  Inrau looked up.

  “I thought I recognized you,” the Shrial Knight said. “Inrau, isn’t it?”

  “Y-yes, Lord Sarcellus.”

  Lord Sarcellus? The name was unfamiliar to Achamian, but Inrau’s shock could only mean he was someone powerful—too powerful to ordinarily trouble himself with petty temple functionaries. A Knight-Commander . . . Achamian glanced past his torso and saw the other two Knights watching. The armoured one leaned sideways and muttered something that made the other laugh. This is some kind of lark. Something to amuse his friends.

  “And who’s this, now?” Sarcellus asked, turning to Achamian. “Is he giving you any trouble?”

  Achamian quaffed his wine, and glared at a furious angle away from the Knight-Commander—a drunken elder who did not brook interruptions. “The boy is my sister-son,” he grated, “and he’s neck-deep in shit.” Then, as though an afterthought, he added, “Lord.”

  “Is he, now? For what, pray tell?”

  Groping through his pockets as though he looked for a misplaced coin, Achamian shook his head in mock disgust, still refusing to lay eyes on his inquisitor. “For acting a fool, what else? He may wear the gold-and-white, but he’s a priggish idiot all the same.”

  “And who are you to upbraid a Shrial Priest, hmm?”

  “What? Me chastise Inrau?” Achamian exclaimed, affecting a drunk’s sarcastic fright. “As far as I’m concerned, the boy’s a plum. I only bear my sister’s message.”

  “Ah, I see. And who would she be, then?”

  Achamian shrugged and grinned, momentarily regretting his full mouth of teeth. “My sister? My sister is a rutting sow.”

  Sarcellus blinked.

  “Hmm. And what does that make you?”

  “A sow’s brother!” Achamian cried, at last looking the man full in the face. “Small wonder the boy’s in shit, eh?”

  Sarcellus smiled, but his large brown eyes remained curiously dead. He turned back to Inrau.

  “The Shriah demands our industry, young apostle, more so now than any time previous. Soon he will declare the object of our Holy War. Are you sure that carousing with buffoons—even those bound to you by blood—is wise on the eve of something so momentous?”

  “And what about you?” Achamian muttered, reaching for more wine. “Heed your uncle, boy. Puffed-up pompous curs like—”

  Sarcellus’s back hand snapped his head sideways, threw his chair on two teetering legs, then sent him crashing to the cobbled floor.

  The tavern erupted in shouts and howls.

  Sarcellus kicked the chair aside and, with the routine air of a tracker examining a trail, crouched over him. Achamian shielded his face behind convulsive arms. Somehow the mummer within him managed to squall, “Murder!”

  An iron hand clamped about the nape of his neck and yanked him forward, lifting his ear to Sarcellus’s lips.

  “How I’ve longed to do that, pig,” the man whispered.

  Then he was gone. The bruising floor. A glimpse of his retreating back. Achamian tried pushing himself up. Fucking legs! Where were they? Head lolling back. A white teardrop of lantern light, shining across hanging brass, illuminating beams and ceiling, cobwebs and mummified flies. Then Inrau behind him, grunting as he pulled him to his feet, whispering something inaudible as he steered him to his seat.

  Propped in his chair, he waved away Inrau’s mothering hands. “I’m fine,” he croaked. “Just need a moment. Catch my breath.”

  Achamian sucked air through his nostrils, pressed a hand against the side of his face, and drew hooked fingers through his beard. Inrau resumed his seat and apprehensively watched him reach for the wine.

  “A b-bit more dramatic than I intended,” Achamian said in an airy semblance of good humour. When his faltering hands spilled the first of the wine, Inrau reached out and gently tugged the decanter from him.

  “Akka . . .”

  Fucking hands! Always shaking.

  Achamian watched him pour a bowl. Calm. How could the boy be so calm?

  “A bit too dramatic, b-but effective . . . Effective all the same. And that’s all that matters.”

  With thumb and forefinger he wiped the tears from his eyes. Where did they come from? The sting. That’s it, the sting.

  “I worked his levers, boy.” A snort that was intended as a laugh. “Did you see how I did that?”

  “I saw.”

  “Good,” he declared, gulping down his bowl and gasping. “Watch and learn. Watch and learn.”

  Inrau silently poured him another. Achamian’s cheek and jaw, once fiery and numb, began to ache.

  An unaccountable rage seized him. “The furies I could have unleashed!” he spat, low enough to ensure he couldn’t be overheard. What if he comes back? He glanced hurriedly over at Sarcellus and the other two Shrial Knights. They were laughing about something. Some joke or s
omething. Something.

  “The words I know!” he snarled. “I could have boiled his heart in his chest!”

  Another bowl quaffed, like burning oil in his frigid gut.

  “I’ve done it before.” Was that me?

  “Akka,” Inrau said, “I’m afraid.”

  Never had Achamian seen so many gathered in one place. Not even in Seswatha’s Dreams.

  The great central square of the Hagerna was a wilderness of humanity. In the distance, bathed in sunlight, the sloped walls of the Junriüma towered over the masses. Of the surrounding structures, it alone seemed immune to the multitudes. The other buildings, engineered in the later and more graceful days of the Ceneian Empire, were overwhelmed by squirming thickets of warriors, wives, slaves, and tradesmen. Hanging arms and indistinct faces congested the balconies and long colonnades of the administrative compounds. Scores of youths were perched like pigeons across the curved horns and haunches of the three Agoglian Bulls that ordinarily dominated the heart of the plaza. Even the broad processional avenues, which wound down into the haze of greater Sumna, were thick and sluggish with people—latecomers who still hoped to press closer, closer to Maithanet and his revelation.

  It hadn’t taken Achamian long to regret pressing so close to the Junriüma. Sweat stung his eyes. From all sides limbs and bodies lurched against him. At long last Maithanet was to announce the object of his Holy War, and like water to a basin, the faithful had come in floods.

  Achamian found himself periodically clamped by tides of movement. Standing still was impossible. The pressure behind him would swell, and he would find himself thrown against the backs of those before him. He could almost believe nothing moved at all save the ground at their feet, yanked by some hidden army of priests eager to see them suffocate.

  At some point he cursed everything: the punishing sun, the Thousand Temples, the forearm between his shoulders, Maithanet. But his most savage moments he reserved for Nautzera and for his own damned curiosity. It seemed a combination of these two had placed him in this position.

  Then he realized: If Maithanet declares against the Schools . . .

  Among so many, what were the chances that he would be recognized as a sorcerer, as a spy? Already he’d encountered several men bearing the giddy aura of a Trinket. It was customary for members of the ruling castes to wear their Chorae openly about their necks. The mobs were pocked by tiny points that whispered death.

  Me . . . the first casualty of the new Scholastic Wars.

  The irony of this thought was enough to make him grimace. Images flitted before his soul’s eye: of fanatics pointing at him and shrieking, “Blasphemer! Blasphemer!”; of his broken body tossed atop furious mobs.

  How could I be such a fool?

  Fear, heat, and stench buffeted him with nausea. His cheek and jaw throbbed anew. He’d seen others—their temples latticed by shining veins, their eyes drowsy with the confusion of near unconsciousness—lifted from the crowd and passed beneath the sun along a wave of uplifted hands. Watching them had stilled Achamian with both wonder and dismay, though he knew not why.

  He looked toward the immensity of the Junriüma, the Vault-of-the-Tusk, rearing in stony silence above the multitudes. Clots of priests and other functionaries milled on the heights, leaning between the battlements. He saw a figure pour a basket of what looked like white-and-yellow flower petals. They fluttered down the granite slopes before whisking out and across the ranks of Shrial Knights who barricaded the landings below. As much fortress as temple enclosure, the Junriüma possessed the monolithic cast of a structure devoted to repulsing armies—as it had so many times in the past. Its only concession to faith was the great vaulted recess of its forward gate. Flanked by two Kyranean pillars, its dimensions were such that it could only dwarf any man standing beneath. Achamian hoped Maithanet would prove the exception.

  Over the past days, especially after the unnerving encounter with the Knight-Commander, the new Shriah had burrowed a deep hole in his thoughts, a hole Achamian needed to fill with the force of the man’s presence.

  Is he worth your devotion, Inrau? Is Maithanet worth your life?

  The Summoning Horns, whose bottomless timbre so resembled the ancient war-horns of the Sranc, sounded from behind him. Hundreds of them, reverberating across the great hollows of sky above. Everywhere around Achamian, men began crying out in rapture, producing a roar that gradually filled then eclipsed the oceanic moan of the Summoning Horns. The Horns trailed away and the roar grew, until it seemed even the walls of the Junriüma would crack and topple.

  A parade of bald children dressed in scarlet spilled from the Vault’s gate, leaping barefoot down the monumental stairs and terraces, waving palm fronds in the air. The roar subsided enough to distinguish individual shouts above the wash of murmuring men. Fragments of hymns were picked up, only to falter and fade. The masses had become an impatient ground, slowly quieted in anticipation of the footfalls about to tread upon them.

  All of us for you, Maithanet. How that must feel . . .

  Despite what Inrau had said, Achamian knew the young man did, in his manner, worship this new Shriah—a realization that had wounded his vanity. Achamian had always cherished his students’ adoration, and none more so than Inrau’s. Now the old master had been supplanted. How could he rival a man who could command events such as this?

  But somehow he’d managed. Somehow he’d secured the Mandate eyes and ears in the heart of the Thousand Temples. Was it his cunning that had convinced Inrau, or was it his humiliation at the hands of Sarcellus? Was it pity?

  Had he once again prevailed by failing?

  An image of Geshrunni flashed through his thoughts.

  The fact that he’d succeeded without Cants balmed his sense of shame—somewhat. He would have used them if Inrau had refused. Achamian was under no illusions. If he had failed his mission, the Quorum would kill Inrau. For men like Nautzera, Inrau was a defector, and all defectors died—as simple as that. The Gnosis, even the few rudiments known by Inrau, was more valuable than any single life.

  But if he’d used the Cants of Compulsion, sooner or later the Luthymae, the College of monks and priests that managed the Thousand Temples’ own vast network of spies, would have identified the mark of sorcery upon Inrau. Not all of the Few became sorcerers. Many used the “gift” to war against the Schools. And the College of Luthymae, Achamian had no doubt, would kill Inrau for bearing sorcery’s mark. He had lost agents to them before.

  The most the Compulsion could do was purchase time—that, and break his heart.

  Perhaps this was why Inrau had agreed to become a spy. Perhaps he’d glimpsed the dimensions of the trap fate and Achamian had set for him. Perhaps what he’d feared was not the prospect of what would happen to him if he refused, but the prospect of what would happen to his old teacher. Achamian would have used the Cants, would have transformed Inrau into a sorcerous puppet, and he would have gone mad.

  Priests draped in robes of gold-trimmed white and bearing golden replicas of the Tusk filed four abreast between the Kyranean pillars. The tusks gleamed in the sun. Hoarse shouts broke from the low thunder of the crowd, a few cascading into many. Like wet palms, the crowd closed tighter about Achamian. His back arched with the forward heave of the masses. His feet stumbled with them. He rolled his head back and gasped. The air had taste. The corners of the sky began to drift. Blinking sweat from his eyes, he held his mouth out to the promise of cooler air, as though somewhere just above him there was a surface where the breath of thousands ended and the sky began. Voices were thunder. He looked down, and the Junriüma filled his eyes. Through fields of upraised arms, he watched the emerging form of Maithanet.

  The new Shriah was a powerful figure, as tall as any Norsirai, wearing a crisp white gown and sporting a thick black beard. He made the priests who flanked him seem womanish. Achamian had a sudden yearning to see his eyes, but from this distance, they were hidden in the shadow of his brows.

  Maithanet came fro
m the deep south, Inrau had told him, from Cingulat or Nilnamesh, where the hold of the Thousand Temples was uncertain. He had walked on foot, a lone Inrithi through the heathen lands of Kian. He had not so much come to Sumna as seized it. Among the jaded administrators of the Thousand Temples, his mysterious origins had been to his advantage. Simply to be an official of the Thousand Temples was to have the stink of corruption, a smell that no purity of conviction or greatness of spirit could ever scrub away.

  The Thousand Temples had called out to Maithanet, and Maithanet had come.

  Could the Consult have discovered this lack? Crafted you to fill it?

  Simply thinking that name, Consult, stilled Achamian. Innumerable nightmares had riddled it with so much hatred, so much dread, that it had become as much an anchor of his being as his own name.

  His thoughts were overwhelmed by the mouth-humid reverberations of the crowd. For several moments, the air shivered with their cries. He felt a blackening of his edges, a coldness in his chest and face. The noise of the crowd thinned and subsided. He heard something incoherent, but he was sure it was Maithanet’s voice. More thunder. People straining to touch his distant image with their fingers. He reeled against the wet grip of the men surrounding him, felt the back of his throat hitching, the stinging vomit.

  Fevers . . .

  Then hands were all over him, and he was lifted by strangers onto the surface of the crowd. Palms and fingers, their touch so many and so light, there a moment and then gone. He could feel the sun burn against the black of his beard, against the wet salt on his cheeks. He glimpsed fumbling crevices of soaked cloth, of hair and skin—a ground of faces watching his shadow pass. Across the inner sky of half-closed eyes, the sun was spliced by tears, and he heard a voice, as clear and as warm as an autumn afternoon.