The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  She had suffered much, he realized, so much that she’d long ago learned to hide hatred and resolution beneath abject terror. Her eyes found his, momentarily, then flashed to the darkness around him. She wants to be certain we are only two.

  The Scylvendi clamped her head between two scarred hands. More incomprehensible words in a guttural voice thick with threat. He let her go, and she nodded. Her blue eyes glittered in the shining fire. The Scylvendi withdrew a small knife from his leggings and began prying at the soft iron of her manacles. After several moments, the chains clattered to the earth. She rubbed her bruised wrists. Glanced at Kellhus again.

  Does she have the courage?

  The Scylvendi left her and returned to his place before the fire—next to Kellhus. He’d stopped sitting across from him some time ago: to prevent him, Kellhus knew, from reading his face.

  “You’ve freed her, then?” Kellhus asked, knowing this was not the case.

  “No. She bears different chains now.” After a moment he added, “Women are easy to break.”

  He does not believe this.

  “What language did you speak?” A genuine question.

  “Sheyic. The language of the Empire. She was a Nansur concubine until the Munuäti took her.”

  “What did you ask her?”

  The Scylvendi looked at him sharply. Kellhus watched the small drama of his expression—a squall of significances. Remembered hatred, but a previous resolution remembered as well. Cnaiür had already decided how to handle this moment.

  “I asked her about the Nansurium,” he said finally. “There’s a great movement in the Empire—in the whole Three Seas. A new Shriah rules the Thousand Temples. There’s to be a Holy War.”

  She did not tell him this; she confirmed it. He knew this before.

  “A Holy War . . . Waged against whom?”

  The Scylvendi attempted to gauge him, to sound the quizzical mask he wore as a face. Kellhus had grown increasingly troubled by the shrewdness of the Scylvendi’s unspoken guesses. The man even knew he intended to kill him . . .

  Then something strange came across Cnaiür’s expression. A realization of some sort, followed by a look of supernatural dread, the sources of which eluded Kellhus.

  “The Inrithi gather to punish the Fanim,” Cnaiür said. “To retake their lost holy lands.” Faint disgust coloured his tone. As though a place could be holy. “To retake Shimeh.”

  Shimeh . . . My father’s house.

  Another groove. Another correspondence of cause. The implications for the mission bloomed through his intellect. Is this why you’ve summoned me, Father? For holy war?

  The Scylvendi had turned, turned to look at the woman across the fire.

  “What’s her name?” Kellhus asked.

  “I didn’t ask,” Cnaiür replied, reaching for more horsemeat.

  Her limbs sketched by a glowing bed of coals, Serwë clasped the knife the men had used to butcher the horse. Quietly, she clambered over to the sleeping form of the Scylvendi. The man slumbered, breathing evenly. She raised the knife to the moon, her fists shaking. She hesitated . . . remembering his grip, his look.

  Those insane eyes had stared through her as though she were glass, transparent to his hunger.

  And his voice! Grating, elemental words: “If you leave, I will hunt you, girl. As sure as the earth, I will find you . . . Hurt you as you have never been hurt.”

  Serwë clamped shut her eyes. Strike-strike-strike-strike!

  The steel dipped . . .

  Was stilled by a callused hand.

  A second hand clamped across her mouth, stifled the scream.

  Through her tears she saw the silhouette of the second, bearded man. The Norsirai. The head slowly shook from side to side.

  There was a pinch, and the knife fell from her senseless fingers, was caught before it fell upon the Scylvendi. She felt herself lifted, pulled back to the far side of the smouldering firepit.

  In the light, she could discern his features. Sad, tender even. He shook his head once again, his dark eyes brimming with concern . . . even vulnerability. He lifted his hand from her lips slowly, then brought it to his chest.

  “Kellhus,” he whispered, then nodded.

  She gathered her hands, stared at him wordlessly. “Serwë,” she replied at last, in a tone as hushed as his own. Burning tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “Serwë,” he repeated—gently. He reached out a hand to touch her but hesitated, drew it back to his lap. For a moment he fumbled in the dark behind him, eventually producing a blanket of wool still warm from the fire.

  Dumbstruck, she took it from him, held by the faint glitter of the moon in his eyes. He turned away and stretched back out across his mat.

  In the midst of quiet, anguished sobs, she fell asleep.

  Dread.

  Tyrannizing her days. Stalking her sleep. Dread that made her thoughts skitter, flit from terror to terror, that made her bowels quail, her hands perpetually shake, her face utterly slack for fear that one crimped muscle might cause the whole to collapse.

  First with the Munuäti and now with this far darker, far more threatening Scylvendi, with limbs like roots cramped about stone, with words like rolling thunder, with eyes like glacial murder. Instant obedience, even to those whims he did not speak. Stinging retribution, even for those things she did not do. Punishment for her breathing, for her blood, for her beauty, for nothing.

  Punishment for punishment.

  She was helpless. Utterly alone. Even the Gods had forsaken her.

  Dread.

  Serwë stood in the morning chill, numb, exhausted in ways she would never understand. The Scylvendi and his strange Norsirai companion had packed the last of the looted supplies on the surviving Munuäti horses. She watched the Scylvendi stride to where he had staked the other twelve captive women of the Gaunum household. They clutched their chains for comfort and huddled in abject terror. She saw them, knew them, but found them unrecognizable.

  There, the wife of Barastas, who had hated her almost as much as the wife of Peristus. And there, Ysanna, who had helped in the gardens until the Patridomos had deemed her too beautiful. Serwë knew all of them. But who were they?

  She could hear them weeping, pleading, not for mercy—they had crossed the mountains, and they knew they were far beyond mercy’s reach—but for sanity. What sane man destroys useful tools? This one could cook, that one could couple, and this one could fetch a thousand slaves in ransom, if he would just let her live . . .

  Young Ysanna, her left eye swollen shut from a Munuäti blow, was crying out to her.

  “Serwë, Serwë! Tell him I don’t look like this! Tell him I’m beautiful! Serwë, pleeease!”

  Serwë looked away. Pretended not to hear.

  Too much dread.

  She couldn’t remember when she’d ceased feeling her tears. Now, for some reason, she had to taste them before realizing she wept.

  Deaf to their cries, the Scylvendi stomped into their midst, clubbed those that clutched at him, and unlocked the two curved prongs of the ingenious stake the Scylvendi used to anchor their captives to the ground. He heaved first one stake then the other from the earth, dropped them with a clank. The women wailed and cringed around him. When he drew his knife, some of them began to shriek.

  He grabbed the chain of one shrieker, Orra, a plump scullery slave, and yanked her toward him. The shrieking stopped. But then, rather than killing her, he began prying at the soft iron of her manacles, as he had done for Serwë the previous night.

  Bewildered, Serwë glanced at the Norsirai—what was his name? Kellhus? He regarded her for a grave yet somehow heartening moment, then looked away.

  Orra was free, just sitting, rubbing her wrists, dumbfounded. The Scylvendi began freeing another.

  Suddenly Orra began running up the slope, absurd with pounding girth and desperation. When no one pursued her, she stopped, her face anguished. She crouched, wildly looking around, and Serwë was reminded of the Patridom
os’s cat, who was always too fearful to stray far from its dinner bowl no matter how the children tormented it. Eight others joined Orra in her wary vigil, including Ysanna and Barastas’s wife. Only four continued running.

  Something about this made it difficult to breathe.

  The Scylvendi left the chains and stakes where they lay, walked back to Serwë and Kellhus.

  The Norsirai asked him something unintelligible. The Scylvendi shrugged and looked at Serwë.

  “Others will find them, use them,” he said casually. He had said this to her, Serwë knew, because the one called Kellhus did not speak Sheyic. He leapt onto his horse and studied the eight remaining women. “Follow,” he shouted in a matter-of-fact tone, “and I will put out your eyes with arrows.”

  Then, madly, they began wailing again, begging him not to leave. Barastas’s wife even sobbed for her chains. But the Scylvendi seemed not to hear them. He bid Serwë to mount her horse.

  And she was glad. Glad of heart! And the others were envious. “Here, Serwë!” she heard Barastas’s wife shriek. “Come back here, you filthy, rutting sow! I own you! Own! Fucking peach! Come back here!”

  Each word both struck Serwë like a fist and passed right through her, leaving her untouched. She saw Barastas’s wife marching toward their train of horses, her hands sweeping in deranged gestures. The Scylvendi yanked his mount about, pulled his bow from its case. He nocked and loosed an arrow in one effortless motion.

  The shaft caught the noblewoman in the mouth, shattering teeth and embedding itself in the moist hollows of her throat. She fell forward like a doll, thrashed amid grasses and goldenrods. The Scylvendi grunted with approval, then continued leading them into the mountains.

  Serwë tasted tears.

  None of this is happening, she thought. No one suffered like this. Not really.

  She feared she might vomit for dread.

  The Hethantas massed above them. They negotiated steep granite slopes, picked their way through narrow ravines, beneath cliffs of sedimentary rock pocked with strange fossils. For the most part, the trail followed a thin river hedged by spruce and stunted screw pine. Always they climbed higher, into colder air, until even the mosses were left behind. Fuel for their fires grew scarce. The nights became viciously cold. Twice they awoke covered by snow.

  By day the Scylvendi walked ahead with his pony, alone, rarely speaking. Kellhus followed Serwë. She found herself talking to him, compelled by something in his demeanour. It was as if the man’s mere presence betokened intimacy, trust. His eyes encompassed her, as though his look somehow mended the broken ground beneath her feet. She told him about her life as a concubine in Nansur, about her father, a Nymbricani, who had sold her to House Gaunum when she turned fourteen. She described the jealousy of the Gaunum wives, how they had lied to her about her first child, saying that it had been stillborn when Griasa, an old Shigeki slave woman, had watched them strangle it in the kitchens. “Blue babies,” the old woman had whispered in her ear, her voice cracked by an outrage almost too weary to be spoken. “That’s all you’ll ever bear, child.” This, Serwë explained to Kellhus, became the morbid joke shared by all the members of the household, especially among those concubines or slaves proper fortunate enough to be visited by their masters. We bear them blue babies . . . Blue like the priests of Jukan.

  At first she spoke to him in the way she’d spoken to her father’s horses as a child—the thoughtless talk of one heard but not understood. But she soon discovered that he did understand. After three days, he began asking her questions in Sheyic—a difficult language, one that she had mastered only after years of captivity in Nansur. The questions thrilled her somehow, filled her with a longing to do them proper service. And his voice! Deep, wine-dark like the sea. And the way he spoke her name. As though jealous of its sound. Serwë—like an incantation. In mere days, her wary affection became awe.

  By night, however, she belonged to the Scylvendi.

  She could not fathom the relationship between these two men, though she pondered it often, understanding that her fate somehow lay between them. Initially, she’d assumed that Kellhus was the Scylvendi’s slave, but this was not the case. The Scylvendi, she eventually realized, hated the Norsirai, even feared him. He acted like someone trying to preserve himself from ritual pollution.

  At first this insight thrilled her. You fear! she would silently howl at the Scylvendi’s back. You’re no different from me! No more than I am!

  But then it began to trouble her—deeply. Feared by a Scylvendi? What kind of man is feared by a Scylvendi?

  She dared ask the man himself.

  “Because I’ve come,” Kellhus had replied, “to do dreadful work.”

  She believed him. How could she not believe such a man? But there were other, more painful questions. Questions she dare not speak, though she asked him with her eyes each night.

  Why don’t you take me? Make me your prize? He fears you!

  But she knew the answer. She was Serwë. She was nothing.

  The fact of her nothingness was a lesson hard learned. Her childhood had been happy—so happy that she now wept whenever she thought of it. Picking wildflowers on the prairies of Cepalor. Thrashing like an otter in the river with her brothers. Romping around the midnight fires. Her father had been indulgent, if not kind; her mother had showered her with adoration. “Serchaa, sweet Serchaa,” she would say, “you’re my beautiful charm, my bulwark against heartbreak.” Serwë had thought herself something then. Loved. Prized above her brothers. Happy in the immeasurable way of children who have no real suffering to throw upon the balance.

  She had heard many tales of suffering, to be sure, but then the hardships related had always been ennobling, encased in morals, and containing lessons she had already learned. Besides, even if fate did betray her, and she was certain it would not, she would be steadfast and heroic, a beacon of strength for the flagging souls about her.

  Then her father sold her to the Patridomos of House Gaunum.

  Her first night as the property of House Gaunum had seen much foolishness knocked from her. She understood quite quickly that there was nothing—no viciousness, no depravity—she would not commit to stay men and their heavy hands. As a Gaunum concubine, she lived in perpetual anxiety, pinned between the hatred of the Gaunum wives and the capricious appetites of the Gaunum men. She was nothing, they told her. Nothing. Just another worthless Norsirai peach. She almost believed them.

  Soon she began praying for this or that son of the Patridomos to come visit her—even those who were cruel. She flirted with them. Seduced them. She was the delight of their guests. Other than pride in their ardour, pleasure in their gratification, what else did she have?

  In the great villa of House Gaunum, there had been a shrine filled with small idols to the ancestors of the House. She had knelt and prayed in that shrine more times than she could count, and every time she had begged for mercy. She could feel the dead Gaunum in every corner of that place, whispering hateful things, moving her with dreadful premonitions. And she had begged and begged for mercy.

  Then, as though in answer to her prayers, the Patridomos himself, who had always seemed a distant, silver-haired god to her, accosted her in the gardens. He grasped her chin and exclaimed: “By the Gods! You’re worthy of the Emperor himself, girl . . . Tonight. Expect me tonight.” How her soul had danced that day! Worthy of the Emperor! How carefully she’d shaved herself and mingled the finest perfumes in anticipation of his visit. Worthy of the Emperor! How she had wept when he failed to arrive. “Don’t weep, Serchaa,” the other girls had said. “He prefers little boys.”

  For several days afterward, she had despised little boys.

  And she continued praying to the idols, even though their squat little faces now seemed to laugh at her. She, Serwë, had to mean something, hadn’t she? All she wanted was some sign, something, anything . . . She grovelled before them.

  Then one of the Patridomos’s sons, Peristus, took her to bed with
his wife. Serwë had pitied the wife at first, a girl with the face of a man who’d been married to Gaunum Peristus to secure an alliance between Houses. But as Peristus used her to build up the seed he would plant in his wife’s womb, Serwë could feel the woman’s hatred, as though they shared the bed with a small fire. Just to spite the prig, she had cried out, had fanned Peristus’s lust with whorish words and deeds, and had stolen his seed for herself.

  The ugly little wife had wept, ranted like a madwoman, and no matter how many times Peristus struck her, she would not stop. Though troubled by the glee this occasioned, Serwë had rushed to the shrine to thank the Gaunum ancestors. And shortly after, when she realized she carried Peristus’s child, she stole one of the hostler’s pigeons and sacrificed it to them.

  During the sixth month of her pregnancy, Peristus’s wife whispered, “Three months till the funeral, hmm, Serchaa.”

  Terrified, Serwë had gone to Peristus himself, only to be slapped and dismissed. She was nothing to him. So she returned to the Gaunum idols. She offered anything, everything. But her child was born blue, so they said. Blue like the priests of Jukan.

  Even still, Serwë continued to pray—this time for vengeance. She prayed to the Gaunum for the destruction of the Gaunum.

  A year later, the Patridomos rode from the villa with all his men. The gathering Holy War had grown unruly, and the Emperor had need of his generals. Then the Scylvendi arrived. Panteruth and his Munuäti.

  The barbarians found her in the shrine, shrieking, smashing stone idols against the floor.

  The villa burned, and almost all the ugly Gaunum wives and their ugly Gaunum children were put to the sword. Barastas’s wife, the younger concubines, and the more beautiful female slaves were herded through the gates. Serwë screamed like the others, wailed for her burning home. The home she had hated.

  Nightmarish misery. Brutality. Unlike anything she had hitherto suffered. Each of them was bound to the saddle of a Munuäti warrior who made them run and run, all the way to the Hethantas. At night they huddled and wept and screamed when the Munuäti came for them, their phalluses greased with animal fat. And Serwë thought of a word, a Sheyic word that did not exist in her native Nymbricani . . . A word of outrage.