The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  “You cannot maintain this silence forever,” he said.

  Cnaiür studied the man. His blond-bearded face was grey against the overcast distances. He wore the sleeveless harness common to the Scylvendi, and his pale forearms extended from the pelt cloak draping from his shoulders. The marmot tails trimming the cloak swayed with his horse’s gait. He might have been Scylvendi were it not for his pale hair and unscarred arms—both of which made him look a woman.

  “What do you want to know?” Cnaiür asked with suspicious reluctance. He thought it a good thing he was disturbed by the northerner’s flawless Scylvendi. It was his reminder. As soon as the northerner no longer disturbed him, he knew, he would be lost. This was why he so often refused to speak to the abomination, why they’d ridden these past days in silence. Habit was the peril here as much as the cunning of the man. As soon as the presence of the man failed to sting, as soon as he fell flush with circumstance, he would, Cnaiür knew, somehow stand before him in the passage of events, would steer him in ways that could not be seen.

  Back at the camp Cnaiür had used his wives as intermediaries in order to insulate himself from Kellhus. This was but one of many precautions he’d taken. He’d even slept with a knife in hand, knowing the man need not break his chains to visit him. He could come as another—even as Anissi—the way Moënghus had come to Cnaiür’s father those many years ago, wearing the face of his eldest son.

  But now Cnaiür had no brokers to preserve him. He could not even depend upon silence, as he’d initially hoped. As they neared the Nansurium, they would be forced to discuss plans. Even wolves needed plots to preserve them in a land of dogs.

  Now he was alone with a Dûnyain, and he could imagine no greater peril.

  “Those men,” Kellhus said. “Why did they grant you passage?”

  Cnaiür shot him a wary glance. He begins with small things so that he may slip unnoticed into my heart.

  “It’s our custom. All the tribes make seasonal raids on the Empire.”

  “Why?”

  “For many reasons. For slaves. For plunder. But for worship, most of all.”

  “For worship?”

  “We are the People of War. Our God is dead, murdered by the peoples of the Three Seas. It’s our place to avenge him.” Cnaiür found himself regretting this reply. On the surface it seemed innocuous enough, but for the first time he realized just how much this fact said about the People, and by extension, about him. There are no small things for this man. Every detail, every word, was a knife in the hands of this outlander.

  “But how,” the Dûnyain pressed, “can one worship what is dead?”

  Say nothing, he thought, but he was already speaking.

  “Death is greater than man. It should be worshipped.”

  “But death is—”

  “I’ll ask the questions,” Cnaiür snapped. “Why were you sent to murder your father?”

  “This,” Kellhus said wryly, “is something you should’ve asked before accepting my bargain.”

  Cnaiür quashed the impulse to smile, knowing that this was the reaction the Dûnyain sought.

  “Why so?” he countered. “Without me there’s no way you could cross the Steppe alive. Until the Hethanta Mountains, you’re mine. I have until then to make my judgement.”

  “But if it’s impossible for outlanders to cross the Steppe alone, how did my father make his escape?”

  The hairs raised along Cnaiür’s arms, but he thought: Good question. One that reminds me of your kind’s treachery.

  “Moënghus was cunning. In secret he’d scarred his arms and concealed them. After he’d murdered my father and the Utemot were bound by honour not to molest him, he shaved his face and dyed his hair black. Since he could speak as though he were one of the People, he simply crossed the land as we do, as an Utemot riding to worship. His eyes were nearly pale enough . . .” Then Cnaiür added, “Why do you think I forbade you clothing in your captivity?”

  “Who gave him the dye?”

  Cnaiür’s heart almost stopped. “I did.”

  The Dûnyain merely nodded and looked away to the dreary horizon. Cnaiür found himself following his eyes.

  “I was possessed!” he snarled. “Possessed by a demon!”

  “Indeed,” Kellhus replied, turning back to him. There was compassion in his eyes, but his voice was stern, like that of a Scylvendi. “My father inhabited you.”

  And Cnaiür found himself wanting to hear what the man would say. You can help me. You are wise . . .

  Again! The witch was doing it again! Redirecting his discourse. Conquering the movements of his soul. He was like a snake probing for opening after opening. Weakness after weakness. Begone from my heart!

  “Why were you sent to murder your father?” Cnaiür demanded, seizing on this unanswered question as evidence of the inhuman depths of this contest. And it was a contest, Cnaiür realized. He did not speak with this man; he warred against him. I will trade knives.

  The Dûnyain looked at him curiously, as though wearied by his senseless suspicion. Another ploy.

  “Because my father summoned me,” he replied cryptically.

  “And this is grounds for murder?”

  “The Dûnyain have hidden from the world for two millennia, and they would remain hidden, if they could, for all eternity. Yet thirty-one years ago, while I was still but a child, we were discovered by a band of Sranc. The Sranc were easily destroyed, but as a precaution, my father was sent into the wilderness to ascertain the extent of our exposure. When he returned some months later, it was decided that he must be exiled. He’d been contaminated, had become a threat to our mission. Three decades passed, and it was assumed he’d perished.”

  The Dûnyain frowned. “But then he returned to us, returned in a way that was unprecedented. He sent us dreams.”

  “Sorcery,” Cnaiür said.

  The Dûnyain nodded. “Yes. Although we didn’t know this at the time. We knew only that the purity of our isolation had been polluted, that its source had to be found and eliminated.”

  Cnaiür studied the man’s profile, which gently rocked to his horse’s canter. “So you’re an assassin.”

  “Yes.”

  When Cnaiür was silent, Kellhus continued, “You don’t believe me.”

  How could he? How could he believe one who never truly spoke but steered and manoeuvred, manoeuvred and steered, endlessly?

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Kellhus turned to the surrounding expanses of grey-green plain. They had passed beyond the rolling pastures of the Kuöti and now crossed the great tablelands of the Jiünati interior. Aside from a small stream ahead and the thin palisade of brush and poplars along its sunken banks, the distances were as bland as an ocean’s. Only the sky, filled with clouds like sailing mountains, possessed depth.

  “The Dûnyain,” Kellhus said after a time, “have surrendered themselves to the Logos, to what you would call reason and intellect. We seek absolute awareness, the self-moving thought. The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before? Only the Logos allows one to mitigate that slavery. Only knowing the sources of thought and action allows us to own our thoughts and our actions, to throw off the yoke of circumstance. And only the Dûnyain possess this knowledge, plainsman. The world slumbers, enslaved by its ignorance. Only the Dûnyain are awake. Moënghus, my father, threatens this.”

  Thoughts arising from darkness? Perhaps more than most, Cnaiür knew this to be true. He was plagued by thoughts that could not be his own. How many times, after striking one of his wives, had he looked to his stinging palm and thought: Who moved me to do this? Who?

  But this was irrelevant.

  “That isn’t why I don’t believe you,” Cnaiür said, thinking, He already knows this. The Dûnyain could read him, he knew, as eas
ily as a tribesman could read the temper of his herds.

  As though he could see this thought, Kellhus said, “You don’t believe that a son could be his father’s assassin.”

  “Yes.”

  The man nodded. “Sentiments, like a son’s love for his father, simply deliver us to the darkness, make us slaves of custom and appetite . . .” The shining blue eyes held Cnaiür’s own, impossibly calm. “I don’t love my father, plainsman. I do not love. If his murder will allow my brethren to pursue their mission, then I will murder him.”

  Cnaiür stared at the man, his head buzzing with exhaustion. Could he believe this? What the man said made undeniable sense, but then Cnaiür suspected that he could make anything sound believable.

  “Besides,” Anasûrimbor Kellhus continued, “certainly you know something of these matters.”

  “What matters?”

  “Sons murdering fathers.”

  Rather than reply, the Scylvendi shot him a momentary, damaged glare, then spat.

  Maintaining an expression of bland expectancy, Kellhus cupped him in the palm of his senses. The Steppe, the nearing stream, everything in his periphery receded. Cnaiür urs Skiötha became all. The quick rhythm of his breath. The pose of muscle around his eyes. His pulse, like an earthworm twitching between the sinews of his neck. He became a chorus of signs, a living text, and Kellhus would read him. If these circumstances were to be owned, then everything had to be measured.

  Since abandoning the trapper and fleeing south through the northern wastes, Kellhus had encountered many men, especially in the city of Atrithau. There he discovered that Leweth, the trapper who had saved him, was not an exception. World-born men were every bit as simple-minded and as deluded as the trapper had been. Kellhus needed only to utter a few rudimentary truths and they would be moved to wonder. He needed only to assemble these truths into coarse sermons, and they would surrender possessions, lovers, even children. Forty-seven men had accompanied him when he rode from Atrithau’s southern gates, calling themselves the adûnyani, the “little Dûnyain.” Not one survived the trek across Suskara. Out of love they had sacrificed everything, asking only for words in return. For the semblance of meaning.

  But this Scylvendi was different.

  Kellhus had confronted suspicion and distrust before, and he’d discovered that it could be turned to his advantage. Suspicious men, he’d found, yielded more than most when they finally gave their trust. Believing nothing at first, they suddenly believed everything, either to do penance for their initial misgivings or simply to avoid making the same “mistake.” Many of his most fanatical followers had been doubters—in the beginning.

  But the distrust harboured by Cnaiür urs Skiötha differed from anything he’d so far encountered, both in proportion and in kind. Unlike the others, this man knew him.

  When the Scylvendi, his expression at once slack with shock and tight with hatred, had found him atop the barrow, Kellhus had thought, Father . . . at last I’ve found you . . . Each of them had seen Anasûrimbor Moënghus in the face of the other. They had never met, yet they knew each other with intimacy.

  At first this bond had proven remarkably advantageous to Kellhus’s mission. It had preserved his life, and it promised safe passage across the Steppe. But it had also rendered his circumstances incalculable.

  The Scylvendi continued to deny his every attempt to possess him. He was not awed by the insights Kellhus offered. He was neither soothed by his rationalizations nor flattered by his oblique praise. And when his thoughts quickened in interest at what Kellhus said, he immediately recanted, remembering events decades dead. So far the man had yielded only grudging words and spit.

  Somehow, after thirty years of obsessing over Moënghus, the man had happened upon several key truths regarding the Dûnyain. He knew of their ability to read thoughts through faces. He knew of their intellect. He knew of their absolute commitment to mission. And he knew they spoke not to share perspectives or to communicate truths but to come before—to dominate souls and circumstances.

  He knew too much.

  Kellhus studied him from his periphery, watched him lean back as the ground dipped toward the stream, his scarred shoulders immobile, his hips swaying to his horse’s gait.

  Was this what you intended, Father? Is he an obstacle you’ve placed in my path? Or is he an accident?

  Likely the latter, Kellhus decided. Despite the crude lore of his people, the man was uncommonly intelligent. The thoughts of the truly intelligent rarely followed the same paths. They forked, and the thoughts of Cnaiür urs Skiötha had branched far, tracking Moënghus into places no world-born man had ventured.

  Somehow he saw through you, Father, and now he sees through me. What was your mistake? Can it be undone?

  Kellhus blinked and, in that instant, plunged away from slopes, sky, and wind, and dreamed a hundred parallel dreams of act and consequence, chasing threads of probability. Then he saw.

  So far he’d tried to circumvent the Scylvendi’s suspicion, when what he needed was to make it work for him. He looked at the plainsman anew, immediately saw the grief and fury fuelling his relentless distrust, then grasped the path of word, tone, and expression that would press the man to a place where he could not escape, where his suspicion would force dawning trust upon him.

  Kellhus saw the Shortest Way. The Logos.

  “I apologize,” he said hesitantly. “What I said was inappropriate.”

  The Scylvendi snorted.

  He knows that I speak false . . . Good.

  Cnaiür looked him full in the face, his deep-set eyes wild with defiance.

  “Tell me, Dûnyain, how does one steer thoughts the way others steer horses?”

  “What do you mean?” Kellhus asked sharply, as though he were deciding whether to be offended. The tonal cues of the Scylvendi tongue were numerous, subtle, and differed drastically between men and women. Though the plainsman did not realize it, he’d denied Kellhus important tools by restricting him to his wives.

  “Even now,” Cnaiür barked, “you seek to steer the movements of my soul!”

  The faint thrum of his heartbeat. The density of blood in his weathered skin. He’s still uncertain.

  “You think this is what my father did to you.”

  “That is what your father—” Cnaiür paused, his eyes dilating in alarm. “But you say this to misdirect me! To avoid my question!”

  So far Kellhus had successfully anticipated each fork of the Scylvendi’s thought. Cnaiür’s responses followed a clear pattern: he would lunge down the tracks Kellhus opened for him then recoil. So long as their discourse approximated this pattern, Kellhus knew, the Scylvendi would think himself secure.

  But how to proceed?

  Nothing deceived so well as the truth.

  “Every man I’ve met,” he finally said, “I understand better than he understands himself.”

  The flinching look of a fear confirmed. “But how is that possible?”

  “Because I have been bred. Because I have been trained. Because I am one of the Conditioned. I am Dûnyain.”

  Their horses romped through and across the shallow stream. Cnaiür leaned sideways and spat into the water. “Another answer that’s not an answer,” he snapped.

  Could he tell him the truth? Not all of it, certainly.

  Kellhus began with the semblance of hesitation: “All of you—your kinsmen, your wives, your children, even your foes beyond the mountains—cannot see the true sources of their thoughts and deeds. Either they assume they’re the origin or they think it lies somewhere beyond the world—in the Outside, as I’ve heard it called. What comes before you, what truly determines your thoughts and deeds, is either missed altogether or attributed to demons and gods.”

  The flat eyes and tight teeth of unwanted recollections. My father has already told him this . . .

  “What comes before determines what comes after,” Kellhus continued. “For the Dûnyain, there’s no higher principle.”

  �
��And just what comes before?” Cnaiür asked, trying to force a sneer.

  “For Men? History. Language. Passion. Custom. All these things determine what men say, think, and do. These are the hidden puppet-strings from which all men hang.”

  Shallow breath. A face freighted by unwanted insights. “And when the strings are seen . . .”

  “They may be seized.”

  In isolation this admission was harmless: in some respect all men sought mastery over their fellows. Only when combined with knowledge of his abilities could it prove threatening.

  If he knew how deep I see . . .

  How it would terrify them, world-born men, to see themselves through Dûnyain eyes. The delusions and the follies. The deformities.

  Kellhus did not see faces, he saw forty-four muscles across bone and the thousands of expressive permutations that might leap from them—a second mouth as raucous as the first, and far more truthful. He did not hear men speaking, he heard the howl of the animal within, the whimper of the beaten child, the chorus of preceding generations. He did not see men, he saw example and effect, the deluded issue of fathers, tribes, and civilizations.

  He did not see what came after. He saw what came before.

  They rode through the saplings on the stream’s far bank, ducking branches hazed by early spring green.

  “Madness,” Cnaiür said. “I don’t believe you . . .”

  Kellhus said nothing, steered his horse between trees and slapping limbs. He knew the paths of the Scylvendi’s thoughts, the inferences he would make—if he could forget his fury.

  “If all men are ignorant of the origins of their thoughts . . .” Cnaiür said.

  Anxious to clear the brush, their horses galloped the last few lengths to open, endless ground.

  “Then all men are deceived.”

  Kellhus secured his gaze for a crucial instant. “They act for reasons that are not their own.”

  Will he see?

  “Like slaves . . .” Cnaiür began, a stunned scowl on his face. Then he recalled at whom he looked. “But you say this simply to exonerate yourself! What does it matter enslaving slaves, eh, Dûnyain?”