The most famous landmark of Sudica was the ruined fortress-temple of Batathent. It required some time negotiating hillsides and crossing scrubland before Achamian could ride up into its shadow. The immense truncated walls spilled into gravel. Obviously the site had been raided over the years for its granite and bright limestone. All that remained of the temple within were rows of massive columns, far too imposing, Achamian supposed, to be pulled down and dragged to the coast. Batathent had been one of the few strongholds to survive the collapse of Kyraneas during the First Apocalypse, a sanctuary for those fleeing the hunting parties of Scylvendi and Sranc. A protective hand cupped about the frail light of civilization.
Achamian wandered across the site, awed by the conjunction of old stone and his own learning. He returned to his mule only when the growing dark made him worry of finding his way.
That night he laid out his mat and slept beneath the pillars, finding sad comfort in the way the sun’s heat lingered in the winter-cold stone.
In his sleep, he dreamed of that day when every child was stillborn, that day when the Consult, beaten back to the black ramparts of Golgotterath by the Nonmen and the ancient Norsirai, brought emptiness, absolute and terrible, into the world: Mog-Pharau, the No-God. In his sleep, Achamian watched glory after glory flicker out through Seswatha’s anguished eyes. And he awoke, as he always awoke, a witness to the end of the world.
He washed his hair and beard in a nearby stream, oiled them, and then returned to his humble camp. He mourned, he realized, not only for Inrau but for the loss of his old confidence. Numerous inquiries had led him through the labyrinthine offices of the Thousand Temples—nowhere. His discussions with various Shrial Apparati often loomed large in his thoughts, and in those memories the priests seemed even taller and wicker-thin. Many of the men had been disconcertingly sharp as well as stubbornly committed to the official explanation of Inrau’s death: suicide. His own final foolishness, Achamian knew, had been offering them gold for truth. What had he been thinking? There had been more gold in the bowls from which they sipped anpoi than he could possibly muster. He was a beggar before the wealth of the Thousand Temples. Before the power of Maithanet.
Since learning of Inrau’s death, Achamian had moved as though in a fog, possessed of that same inner shrinking he’d felt as a child when his father had bidden him to find the old rope he used for whippings. “Find the rope,” the voice would grate, and the ceremony would begin: lips trembling, hands shaking as they clasped the cruel hemp . . .
If Inrau had in fact committed suicide, then Achamian would be his murderer.
Find the rope, Akka. Find it now.
He was relieved when the Mandate instructed him to travel to Momemn and join the Holy War. With the loss of Inrau, Nautzera and other members of the Quorum had abandoned their obscure hopes of penetrating the Thousand Temples. Now they wanted him to watch the Scarlet Spires—again. As much as the irony of this stung him, he had not argued. The time had come to move on. Sumna merely confirmed a conclusion he could not bear. Even Esmenet began to irritate him. Mocking eyes and cheap cosmetics. The endless wait while she pleasured other men. As easily as it stirred his flesh, her tongue left his thoughts cold with uncertain spit. And yet he ached at the thought of her—the taste of her skin, bitter with perfume.
Sorcerers were not accustomed to women. Their mysteries were of a lesser kind, to be held in contempt by men of learning. But the mystery of this one woman, this Sumni harlot, stirred fear rather than disdain within him. Fear and longing. But why? After Inrau’s death, distraction was what he had needed most of all, and she had stubbornly refused to be that distraction. Quite the opposite. She pried him for the nuances of his day, debating—more with herself than with him—the meanings of each meaningless thing he learned. Her conspiracies were as impertinent as they were absurd.
One night he told her as much, hoping only to silence her for a short time. She had paused, but when she spoke, it was with a weariness that far surpassed his own, the tone of one injured to honesty by the pettiness of another. “This is only a game I play, Achamian . . . There is truth inside a game.” He’d lain in the darkness, consumed by inner turmoil, feeling that if he could unravel his hurts the way she could, he would crumble, collapse into dust. This isn’t a game. Inrau is dead. Dead!
Why couldn’t she . . . be what he needed her to be? Why couldn’t she stop lying with other men? Didn’t he have gold enough to keep her?
“Not you too, Drusas Achamian,” she had once cried when he’d offered her money. “I’ll not play whore with you!” Words that had at once elated and devastated him.
One time, when he’d returned to the tenement and hadn’t found her sitting in her window, he had dared come up to her door, moved by some shameful curiosity. What’s she like with the others? Is she the same as she’s with me? He could hear her gasp beneath some grunting body, hear her bed creak to the rhythm of thrusting groins. And it seemed his heart stopped. Clammy skin and ringing ears.
He’d placed numb fingertips against the door. There, on the other side . . . There she was, his Esmi, her legs wrapped around another man, her breasts shining with his sweat. He remembered flinching when she climaxed and thinking: That cry is mine! Mine!
But he owned nothing of her. Perhaps for the first time he had understood that. And yet he thought: Inrau is dead, Esmi. You’re all I have left.
He heard the man crawl off her. “Mmmmmm,” Esmi moaned. “Ah, Callustras, you’re dreadfully gifted for an old soldier. What would I do without that thick cock of yours, hmm?”
A masculine voice replied, “I’m sure you find plenty to feed your cunny, dear.”
“Morsels only. You, you’re my banquet.”
“Tell me, Esmi, who’s that man who was here the last time I came? Another morsel?”
Achamian placed a wet cheek against the door. Cold, breathless anguish.
She laughed. “Here when you came? By the Gods, I hope not.”
Achamian could almost hear the man smile and shake his head.
“Silly whore,” he said. “I’m serious. The look he gave me as he passed through the door . . . I half expected he’d ambush me on the way back to the barracks.”
“I’ll speak to him about that. He gets . . . jealous.”
“Jealous of a whore?”
“Callustras, that purse of yours is so full . . . Are you sure you don’t want to spend more?”
“I’m afraid I’ve spent everything otherwise . . . But perhaps if you rattle my purse a little something’ll fall out.”
A moment of breathless silence. The faint sound of slapping.
Esmi whispered something barely audible, but Achamian was sure he heard: “Don’t worry about your purse, Callustras. Just do that to me again . . .”
He had fled into the street then, her empty window oppressing him from above, his thoughts buzzing with images of sorcerous murder, of Esmi writhing in rapture beneath a soldier’s chest. “Do that to me again . . .” He felt polluted, as though witnessing something obscene had made him obscene.
She’s just playing the whore, he had tried to remind himself, just like I play the spy. The only difference was that she was far better at it. Coy humour, venal honesty, naked appetite—all those things that deadened a man’s shame at spilling seed for coin. She was gifted.
“I couple with them in every way,” she had once admitted. “I’m growing old, Akka, and there’s nothing as pathetic as an old, starving whore.” There had been real dread in her voice.
Achamian had lain with many whores in many cities through the years, so why was Esmenet so different? He’d first come to her because of her beautiful boyish thighs and seal-smooth skin. He’d returned because she was so good, because she joked and lusted the way she had with Callustras—whoever he was. But at some point, he’d come to know the woman apart from her spread legs. What was it he’d learned? With whom had he fallen in love?
Esmenet, the Whore of Sumna.
Often, in h
is soul’s eye, she was inexplicably thin and wild, buffeted by rain and winds, obscured by the swaying of forest branches. This woman who had once lifted her hand to the sun, holding it so that for him its light lay cupped in her palm, and telling him that truth was air, was sky, and could only be claimed, never touched by the limbs and fingers of a man. He couldn’t tell her how profoundly her musings affected him, that they thrashed like living things in the wells of his soul and gathered stones about them.
Sparrows erupted from an old oak in the nearby ravine, startling him.
Regret, he thought, remembering an old Shiradi proverb, makes a leper of the heart.
With a sorcerous word he ignited his fire and prepared water for his morning tea. While waiting for the water to boil, he studied his surroundings: the nearby pillars of Batathent soaring into the morning sky; the lonely trees, dark above rambling scrub and dead grasses. He listened to the muffled hiss and pop of his small fire. When he reached out to retrieve the boiling water, he noticed that his hands were shaking as though palsied. Was it because of the cold?
What’s happened to me?
Circumstances, he told himself. He had been overwhelmed by circumstances. With sudden resolution, he set the water aside and began rooting through his meagre baggage. He withdrew his ink, his quill, and a single sheet of parchment. Sitting cross-legged on his mat, he wet his quill.
In the centre of the left margin, he scratched,
MAITHANET
Without a doubt, the heart of the mystery. The Shriah who could see the Few. Inrau’s murderer—perhaps. To the right of this, he wrote,
HOLY WAR
Maithanet’s hammer, and Achamian’s next destination. Below this, near the bottom of the sheet, he wrote,
SHIMEH
The object of Maithanet’s Holy War. Could it be as simple as this? Free the city of the Latter Prophet from the yoke of the Fanim? The aims declared by cunning men were rarely their true aims.
He drew a line from “Shimeh” to the right, and wrote,
THE CISHAURIM
Hapless victims of Maithanet’s Holy War? Or were they complicit somehow?
He scratched another line from this toward “Holy War” in the centre, stopping short to write,
THE SCARLET SPIRES
At least the School’s motive was clear: the destruction of the Cishaurim. But as Esmenet had pointed out, how did Maithanet know of its secret war against the Cishaurim?
He pondered his handwriting for a moment, watching the ink flatten as it dried. For good measure, he added,
THE EMPEROR
adjacent to “Holy War.” In Sumna, the air was rife with rumours of the Emperor’s bid to compromise the Holy War, to transform it into an instrument of imperial reconquest. Although Achamian cared little whether the Ikurei Dynasty succeeded or failed, it would doubtless be an important variable in the algebra of these events.
And then, alone in the top right corner, he scratched,
THE CONSULT
A name like a pinch of salt in pure water. It meant so many things: the Apocalypse, the hilarity and contempt with which the Great Factions regarded the Mandate. Where were they? Did they even have a place on this page?
He studied the map for a moment, testing his tea through rolling steam. It felt warm in his stomach, braced him against the morning chill. He was missing something, he realized. Forgetting . . .
His hand trembled as he wrote,
INRAU
below “Maithanet.” Did he kill you, dear boy? Or did I?
Achamian shook away these thoughts. He paid Inrau no respect by grieving for him, and even less by wallowing in self-pity. He avenged nothing. If any redress were to be found, it lay somewhere here, on this page. I’m not his father. I must be what I am: a spy.
Achamian often made such maps—not because he worried he might forget something, but because he worried he might overlook something. Visualizing the connections, he found, always suggested further possible connections. Moreover, this simple exercise had often proved a valuable guide for his inquiries in the past. The crucial difference this time, however, was that instead of naming individuals and their connections to some petty agenda, this map named Great Factions and their connections to a Holy War. The scale of this mystery, the stakes, far exceeded anything he had encountered before . . . aside from his dreams.
His breath caught.
A prelude to the Second Apocalypse? Could it be?
Achamian’s eyes returned to “The Consult” isolated in its corner, realizing his map had already yielded its first dividend. If the Consult still plied the Three Seas, then they had to be connected somehow. There was no way they could remain aloof in such epic times. Where, then, would they hide?
Inexorably, his eyes were drawn back to
MAITHANET
Achamian took another sip of his tea. Who are you, my friend? How can I discover who you are?
Perhaps he should return to Sumna. Perhaps he could mend things with Esmenet, see if she’d absolve a fool of his frail pride. At the very least he could make sure she—
Achamian hastily set down his beaten cup, clutched his quill, and scribbled,
PROYAS
between “Maithanet” and “Holy War.” Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner?
After encountering Proyas on the steps beneath the Shriah, Achamian had learned the Prince had become one of Maithanet’s few confidants. This didn’t surprise him. In the years following Achamian’s tutelage, Proyas had become obstinate with piety. Unlike Inrau, who’d committed himself to the Thousand Temples so that he might better serve, Proyas had embraced the Tusk and the Latter Prophet so that he might better judge—or so Achamian thought. The memory of Proyas’s last letter, the one that had thrown even their terse correspondence on the pyre, still stung.
“Do you know what pains me most when I look upon you, old teacher? Not the fact that you’re a blasphemer, but the thought I once loved a blasphemer.”
How does one work his way back from such harsh words? But he had to, Achamian knew, and for reasons that were at once the best and the worst. He had to bridge the gulf between them, not because he loved Proyas still—remarkable men often compelled such love—but because he needed some path to Maithanet. He needed answers, both to quiet his heart and, perhaps, to save the world.
How Proyas would laugh if he told him that . . . No wonder the Three Seas thought the Mandate mad!
Achamian stood and poured the remainder of his tea upon the hissing fire. He looked at his map of connections one last time and considered the broad, blank spaces across the parchment, idly wondering how they might be filled.
He broke camp, packed his mule, and continued his lonely journey. Sudica passed without demarcation—more hills, more stony earth.
Esmenet walked through the gloom with the others, her heart thundering. She could feel the teetering immensity of the Gate of Pelts above her, as though it were a hammer Fate had held poised for a thousand years in anticipation of her escape. She glanced at the surrounding faces but saw only weariness and boredom. For them, passage from the city seemed uneventful. These people, she imagined, escaped Sumna every day.
For an absurd moment, she found herself fearing for her fear. If escaping Sumna meant nothing, did that mean the whole world was a prison?
Then suddenly she found herself blinking tears in the sunlight. She paused, glancing at the tan towers hulking above. Then she looked around, breathing deeply, ignoring the curses of those behind her. Soldiers lounged on either side of the gate’s dark maw, eyeing those who entered the city but asking no questions. People on foot, on wains, and on horseback bustled about her. To either side of the road, a thin colonnade of mongers hawked their wares, hoping to profit from vagrant hungers.
Then she saw what before had been only a hazy band on the horizon, surfacing here and there from the crowded circuit of Sumna’s walls: the countryside, winter pale and piling endlessly away into the distance. And she saw the sun, late-afternoon s
un, spread across the land as though it were water.
A teamster cracked his whip next to her ear, and she scrambled to the side. A wain groaned by her, pulled by flabby oxen. Its driver flashed her a toothless grin.
She glanced at the greening tattoo across the back of her left hand. The mark of her tribe. The Sign of Gierra, though she was no priestess. The Shrial Apparati insisted all harlots be tattooed with parodies of the sacred tattoos borne by the temple-prostitutes. No one knew why. To better fool themselves into thinking the Gods were fooled, Esmenet supposed. It seemed a different thing here, without walls, without the threat of Shrial Law.
She considered calling after the teamster, but as he trundled away her eyes were drawn to the road, which struck a perfect line across the broken landscape, like mortar between chapped bricks.
Sweet Gierra, what am I doing?
The Darkness That Comes Before Page 27