The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Precisely. As it stands the Emperor holds the Holy War hostage. He refuses to provision us beyond our daily needs unless we condescend to sign his Indenture. Of course, Maithanet can command him to provision the Holy War on pain of Shrial Censure, but now it seems that even he hesitates. The destruction of the Vulgar Holy War has convinced him that we’re doomed unless we march with Ikurei Conphas. The Kianene have bared their teeth, and faith alone, it seems, won’t be enough to overcome them. Who better to pilot us through those shoals than the great Exalt-General who has crushed the Scylvendi? But not even a Shriah as powerful as Maithanet can force an Emperor to send his only heir against the heathen. And of course, once again, the Emperor will not send Conphas unless the Great Names sign his Indenture.”

  “Remind me,” Achamian said wryly, “never to cross paths with the Emperor.”

  “He’s a fiend,” Xinemus spat. “A cunning fiend. And unless Proyas is able to outmanoeuvre him, all of us will be spilling blood for Ikurei Xerius III rather than Inri Sejenus.”

  For some reason, the Latter Prophet’s name reminded Achamian of the chill. He stared numbly at the silver-and-onyx geometries of the benjuka plate. He leaned forward, clutched the small sea-rounded stone he’d used to replace the missing piece, then tossed it across the glaring dust beyond their canopy. The game suddenly seemed childish.

  “So you concede?” Xinemus asked. He sounded disappointed; he still thought he would win.

  “I’ve no hope,” Achamian replied, thinking not of benjuka but of Proyas. The Prince would arrive a man besieged, and Achamian had to further harass him, tell him even his gilded Shriah played some dark game.

  Despite the winter gloom, it was warm in the pavilion. Esmenet sat up, hugging her knees in her arms. Who would have thought riding could make legs so sore?

  “You think of someone else,” Sarcellus said.

  His voice was so different, she thought. So confident.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “The Mandate Schoolman, I suppose.”

  Shock. But then she remembered telling him . . .

  “What of it?” she asked.

  He smiled, and as always she found herself at once thrilled and unsettled. Something about his teeth maybe? Or his lips?

  “Exactly,” he said. “Mandate Schoolmen are fools. Everyone in the Three Seas knows this . . . Do you know what the Nilnameshi say of women who love fools?”

  She turned her face to him, fixed him with a languid look. “No. What do the Nilnameshi say?”

  “That when they sleep, they do not dream.”

  He pressed her gently to his pillow.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MOMEMN

  Reason, Ajencis writes, is the capacity to overcome unprecedented obstacles in the gratification of desire. What distinguishes man from beasts is man’s capacity to overcome infinite obstacles through reason.

  But Ajencis has confused the accidental for the essential. Prior to the capacity to overcome infinite obstacles is the capacity to confront them. What defines man is not that he reasons, but that he prays.

  —EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES

  Late Winter, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Momemn

  Prince Nersei Proyas of Conriya stumbled then steadied himself as his men rowed the boat through the breakers. He’d resolved to come to the beaches of Nansurium standing, but the Meneanor, which had resolved to pound the coasts until all the world was sea, was making things difficult. Twice now, frothing walls of surf had almost tossed him overboard, and he found himself debating the wisdom of his resolution. He scanned the sand-barren shoreline, saw that only the standard of Attrempus occupied the immediate beach, and decided that arriving dry and sitting was far better than arriving half-drowned.

  The Holy War at last!

  But as profoundly as this thought moved him, it was accompanied by a certain apprehension. He’d been the first to kiss Maithanet’s knee at Sumna, and now, he was certain, he would be the last of the Great Names to join the Holy War.

  Politics, he thought sourly. It was not, as the philosopher Ajencis had written, the negotiation of advantage within communities of men; it was more an absurd auction than an exercise in oratory. One bartered principle and piety to accomplish what principle and piety demanded. One sullied himself in order to be cleansed.

  Proyas had kissed Maithanet’s knee, had committed himself to the course that faith and principle demanded of him. The God himself had sanctioned this course! But from the outset it had been mired in politics: the endless wrangling with the King, his father; the infuriating delays involved in assembling the fleet; the innumerable concessions, contracts, pre-emptive strikes, retaliatory strikes, flatteries, and threats. A soul sold, it seemed, in order to be saved.

  Has this been your test? Have you found me wanting?

  Even the voyage at sea had been a trial. Always fickle, the Meneanor was especially tempestuous in winter. Struck by a storm off the coasts of Cironj and driven out of the Meneanor altogether. Forced by unfavourable winds to venture dangerously close to heathen coasts—at one point they had been mere days from Shimeh itself, or so his fool navigator had told him, as though the irony would thrill rather than gall him. Then the second storm as they laboriously tacked north, the one that had scattered the fleet and robbed more than five hundred men of their lives. At every turn it seemed something must conspire against him. If not men then the elements, and if not the elements then men. Even his dreams had tormented him: that the Holy War had already marched; that he would arrive, share a bowl of wine with the Emperor, then be told to go home.

  Perhaps he should have expected this. Perhaps meeting Achamian in Sumna—while kneeling before Maithanet, no less!—had been more than an outrageous coincidence. Perhaps it had been an omen, a reminder that the gods often laughed where men gnashed their teeth.

  Just then an immense roller tipped the boat forward and doused its occupants with foaming, sun-flashing water. Like an acorn across silk, the keel slid sideways along the back of a wave. Several of the rowers cried out. For a moment it seemed certain they would founder. One of the oars was lost. Then the boat scraped up and across immovable sand, and they found themselves stranded in the midst of several tidal pools. Proyas leapt out with his men and against their protests, helped them drag the launch farther up onto the bone-white beach. He glimpsed his fleet scattered across the bright sea. It seemed impossible. They were here. They had arrived.

  As the others began retrieving the gear, Proyas walked several paces inland and fell to his knees. The sand burned his skin. The wind rifled his short, jet hair. The air smelled of salt, fish, and burning stone—not so different, he thought, from the smell of Conriya’s distant coast.

  It’s begun, sweet Prophet . . . The Holy War has begun. Let me be the font of your righteous fury. Let my hand be the hand that delivers your hearth from wickedness. Let me be your hammer!

  Sheltered by the ambient thunder of the breakers, it seemed safe to weep. He blinked tears from his eyes.

  In his periphery, he could see the men who had awaited him approach across the white slopes. He cleared his throat, stood as they neared, absently brushing the sand from his tunic. Beneath the flapping standard of Attrempus, they fell to their knees and, with their hands turned inward upon their thighs, bowed their heads before him. A low escarpment framed them, and beyond that a great grey smear across the sky—Momemn, Proyas supposed, and her innumerable fires.

  “I actually missed you, Xinemus,” Proyas said. “What do you make of that?”

  The burly, thick-bearded man at the forefront stood. Not for the first time, Proyas was struck by how much he resembled Achamian.

  “I’m afraid, my Lord Prince,” Xinemus replied, “that your kind sentiment will be short-lived . . .” He hesitated. “That is, once you hear the news I bear you.”

  Already it begins.

  Months ago, before he’d returned to Conriya to raise his army, Maithanet had warned him that House Ikurei would likely cause the Holy
War grief. But Xinemus’s demeanour told him that something far more dramatic than mere politicking had transpired in his absence.

  “I’ve never been one to begrudge the messenger, Xinemus. You know that.” He momentarily studied the faces of the Marshal’s retinue. “Where’s that ass Calmemunis?”

  The dread in Xinemus’s eyes could scarcely be concealed. “Dead, my Lord Prince.”

  “Dead?” he asked sharply. Please don’t let it begin like this! He pursed his lips and asked more evenly, “What has happened?”

  “Calmemunis marched—”

  “Marched? But the last I heard, he lacked the provisions. I sent a letter to the Emperor himself, asking him to deny Calmemunis anything he might need to march.”

  Please! Not like this!

  “When the Emperor denied him provisions, Calmemunis and the others rioted, even sacked several villages. They hoped to march against the heathen on their own so they might garner all the glory. I very nearly came to blows with the damned—”

  “Calmemunis marched?” Proyas felt numb. “The Emperor provisioned him?”

  “As I see it, my Lord Prince, Calmemunis gave the Emperor precious little choice. He’s always known how to incite men, Calmemunis. It was either provision and be rid of him or risk open war.”

  “The Holy Shriah would have interceded before then,” Proyas snapped, unwilling to acquit anyone of this crime. “Calmemunis marched, and now he’s dead? Do you mean to say—”

  “Yes, my Lord Prince,” Xinemus said solemnly. He’d already digested these facts. “The first battle of the Holy War has ended in catastrophe. They’re all dead—Istratmenni, Gedapharus—all the pilgrim barons of Kanampurea, along with countless thousands of others, have been destroyed by the heathen at a place called the Plains of Mengedda. As far as I know, only some thirty or so Galeoth from Tharschilka’s contingent survived.”

  But how could this be? The Holy War overcome in battle?

  “Only thirty? How many marched?”

  “More than a hundred thousand—the first of the Galeoth to arrive and the first Ainoni, along with the hosts of rabble that descended on Momemn shortly after the Shriah’s call.”

  The rumbling crash and hiss of surf filled the silence. The Holy War, or a sizable fraction of it, had been slaughtered. Are we doomed? Can the heathen be that strong?

  “What does the Shriah say?” he asked, hoping to silence these dread premonitions.

  “The Shriah has fallen silent. Gotian says that he’s gone into mourning for the souls lost at Mengedda. But there’s rumour that he’s become frightened the Holy War will be unable to overcome the heathen, that he waits for a sign from the God and the sign does not come.”

  “And the Emperor? What does he say?”

  “The Emperor has claimed all along that the Men of the Tusk underestimate the ferocity of the heathen. He mourns the loss of the Vulgar Holy War—”

  “Of the what?”

  “That’s what it’s come to be called . . . Because of the rabble.”

  A shameful relief accompanied this explanation. When it became evident that the dregs—old men, women, even orphaned children—would answer the Shriah’s call, Proyas had actually worried that the campaign would be more a migration than an army.

  “The Emperor publicly mourns,” Xinemus continued, “but privately insists that no war against the heathen, holy or otherwise, can succeed without the leadership of his nephew, Conphas. Emperor or not, the man is a mercenary dog.”

  Proyas nodded, finally grasping the outline of the events confronting him. “And I suppose the price he demands for the great Ikurei Conphas is nothing other than his Indenture, hmm? That wretch Calmemunis has sold us all.”

  “I tried, my Lord . . . I tried to restrain the Palatine. But I’d neither the rank nor the wit to stay him!”

  “No man has wit enough to reason with a fool, Zin. And you’re not to blame for your rank. Calmemunis was an arrogant, impetuous man. In the absence of his betters, he no doubt became drunk with conceit. He doomed himself, Zin. It’s as simple as that.”

  But it was not, Proyas knew, quite that simple. The Emperor had a hand in this. Of that much he was certain.

  “But still,” Xinemus said, “I cannot help feeling there’s more I could’ve done.”

  Proyas shrugged. “Saying ‘I could have done more,’ Zin, is what marks a man as a man and not a God.” He snorted ruefully. “Actually, it was Achamian who told me that.”

  Xinemus smiled wanly. “And me as well . . . A most wise fool, that Achamian.”

  And wicked . . . a blasphemer. How I wish you’d remember that, Zin.

  “A wise fool, indeed.”

  Seeing their prince safely arrived, the rest of the Conriyan host had begun to disembark from the fleet. Looking out to the Meneanor, Proyas saw more launches swept ashore by the rough surf. Soon these beaches would be choked with men, his men, and they could very well be doomed. Why, God? Why beleaguer us when it’s Your will we seek to accomplish?

  He spent some time grilling Xinemus on the particulars of Calmemunis’s defeat. Yes, Calmemunis was most certainly dead: the Fanim had sent his severed head as a message. No, no one knew for sure how the heathens had destroyed them. The survivors, Xinemus said, had reported that the heathen were beyond numbering, that they possessed at least two men for every Inrithi. But the survivors of a great defeat, Proyas knew, were prone to say such things. Proyas felt afflicted by endless questions, each so desperate to be uttered that he often interrupted Xinemus mid-reply. And he felt afflicted, moreover, with a curious sense of having been deceived, as though his time in Conriya and at sea had been the result of another’s machinations.

  He was unaware of the approaching imperial retinue until it was nearly upon him.

  “Conphas himself,” Xinemus said grimly, nodding across the beach, “has come to woo you, my Prince.”

  Though he’d never met him, Proyas recognized Ikurei Conphas immediately. The man’s bearing conveyed a palpable sense of the Nansur imperial tradition: the godlike equanimity of his expression, the martial familiarity of the way he held his silvered helmet under his right arm. The man was even able to walk through sand with catlike grace.

  Conphas smiled when their eyes met: the smile of heroes who’d hitherto encountered each other only in rumour and reputation. Then he stood before him, the near mythic man who had mastered the Scylvendi. Proyas found it difficult not to be impressed, even faintly awed, by his presence.

  Bowing slightly at the waist and holding out his hand for a soldier’s shake, Conphas said, “In the name of Ikurei Xerius III, the Emperor of Nansur, I welcome you, Prince Nersei Proyas, to our shores, and to the Holy War.”

  Your shores . . . Would that it were your Holy War as well.

  Proyas neither bowed nor took the proffered hand.

  Rather than displaying shock or insult, Conphas’s eyes became at once ironic and appraising.

  “I fear,” he continued easily, “that recent events have made it difficult for us to trust each other.”

  “Where is Gotian?” Proyas asked.

  “The Grandmaster of the Shrial Knights awaits you on the escarpment. He does not like sand in his boots.”

  “And you?”

  “I was wise enough to wear sandals.”

  There was laughter at this—enough to make Proyas grind his teeth.

  When Proyas said nothing, Conphas continued: “Calmemunis, I understand, was your man. It isn’t surprising that you should seek to blame others rather than your own. But let me assure you, the Palatine of Kanampurea perished of his own folly.”

  “Of that, Exalt-General, I have no doubt.”

  “Then you will accept the Emperor’s invitation to join him on the Andiamine Heights?”

  “To speak of his Indenture, no doubt.”

  “Among other matters.”

  “I would speak with Gotian first.”

  “So be it, my Prince. But perhaps I might save you some wasted breath
and tell you what the Grandmaster will say. Gotian will tell you that the Most Holy Shriah holds your man, Calmemunis, solely responsible for the disaster on the Plains of Mengedda. And he’ll tell you that the Shriah has been deeply moved by this disaster, and that he now seriously ponders the Emperor’s single, and eminently justified, demand. And it is, I assure you, justified. On the ancestor lists of every family of means in the Empire, you’ll find the names of dozens who have died warring for the very lands that the Holy War would reconquer.”

  “That may be, Ikurei, but it is we who lay down our lives this time.”

  “The Emperor understands and appreciates this, which is why he has offered to grant title to the lost provinces—under the auspices of the Empire, of course.”

  “It is not enough.”

  “No, I suppose it’s never enough, is it? I admit, my Prince, that we find ourselves in a most curious predicament. Unlike you, the House Ikurei is not known for its piety, and now that we’re at last defending a just cause, we find ourselves impugned for our past deeds. But the scandal of the arguer has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of his arguments. Is this not what Ajencis himself tells us? I urge you, Prince, to see past our flaws and scrutinize our demand in the sweet light of reason.”

  “And if reason tells me otherwise?”

  “Why then you have the example of Calmemunis to live by, don’t you? As much as it might pain you to admit, the Holy War needs us.”

  Once again, Proyas made no reply.

  Conphas continued with a heavy-lidded smile: “So you see, Nersei Proyas, both reason and circumstance are on our side.”

  When Proyas still refused to reply, the Exalt-General bowed, then turned with casual disdain. Followed by his shimmering retinue, he receded across the beach. The breakers clamoured with renewed fury, and the wind whipped a fine spray across Proyas and his men. It was chill.

  Proyas did his best to conceal his shaking hands. In the battle for the Holy War, a skirmish had just been fought, and Ikurei Conphas had bested him before his own—with ease, no less! All his troubles so far, Proyas knew, would be but gnats compared with the Exalt-General and his thrice-damned uncle.