The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  The gold stitching shimmered in the sun.

  “Why would they fly their standard like that?” Xinemus asked.

  Good question. For many Men of the Tusk, all that separated sorcerers from heathens was that sorcerers were even more fit to burn. Striking their mark in the heart of the encampment was nothing short of foolhardy.

  Unless . . .

  “Do you have your Chorae?” Achamian asked.

  “You know I don’t wear it when—”

  “Do you have it?”

  “With my things.”

  “Fetch it . . . Quickly!”

  They flew their standard, Achamian realized, for his benefit. They had a choice: either risk inciting a mob or risk startling a Mandate Schoolman. The fact that they thought the latter a greater threat testified to the wretched relations between their two Schools.

  Obviously the Scarlet Spires wanted to make his acquaintance. But why?

  Sure enough, the riotous throngs grew closer as the procession stubbornly battled its way forward. Achamian saw clods of dirt explode into dust against the palanquin. Cries of “Gurwikka!”, a common pejorative for “sorcerer” among the Norsirai, soon rifled the sky.

  Xinemus hastened from his pavilion, bawling orders to his slaves as he did so. His brigandine swung from his shoulders, unfastened, and he clutched his scabbard in his left hand. Many of his men were already gathering about him. Achamian saw dozens of others scrambling from all corners of their immediate vicinity, but their numbers seemed no match for the brawling hundreds, perhaps even thousands, who approached.

  With characteristic brusqueness, Xinemus swatted a path through his men to Achamian’s side.

  “Are you sure they’re coming for you?” he shouted over the growing roar.

  “Why else would they strike their Mark? By making this public, they guarantee witnesses. As strange as it sounds, I think they do this to reassure me.”

  Xinemus nodded thoughtfully. “They forget how much they’re hated.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  The Marshal glanced at him strangely, then looked to the nearing mob, scratching his beard. “I’m going to set up a perimeter. Or try to, anyway. You stay here. Stay visible. When whoever the fool is meets with you, you tell him to lower his Mark and skulk away immediately. Immediately. Do you understand?”

  The words stung. In all the years Achamian had known Krijates Xinemus, the man had never barked commands at him. The ever-amiable Xinemus had abruptly become the Marshal of Attrempus, a man with a task and numerous men at his disposal. But this, Achamian realized, wasn’t what hurt. The situation, after all, called for decisiveness. What stung was the undertone of anger, the sense that his friend somehow blamed him.

  Achamian watched as Xinemus harassed his men into a line, then, with the help of Dinchases, positioned them in a thin semicircle through the surrounding camps, using the stagnant canal that curled behind them to protect their flanks. There was a bustling moment as the slaves hastened to put out the fire they had been poking just moments earlier. Others rushed off into the slots between tents to smother whatever open flame they could find.

  The mob, and the Scarlet Spires, was nearly upon them.

  Xinemus’s soldiers had linked arms, and the first of the rioters began gathering before them, flushed and in no mood for constraint. At first they simply milled in confusion, hollering insults in a variety of different tongues. But as the procession neared, their numbers grew. They became bolder. Achamian saw a wild-haired Thunyeri throwing punches, only to be dragged down by his own comrades. Other bands linked arms as well and tried to force their way through the line. Xinemus threw what few spare men he had into these shoving matches and, for the time being at least, managed to forestall any breaks.

  The standard of the Scarlet Spires trundled nearer, pausing, then advancing, then pausing again. Over heads, Achamian glimpsed polished black staffs rising and falling as though a great centipede had been upended. Then he glimpsed the Javreh, the slave-soldiers of the Scarlet Spires, beating their way forward with grim determination. The enigmatic palanquin moved forward with them.

  Who could it be? Who would be fool enough—

  Suddenly a wedge of Javreh broke clear and came face to face with Xinemus’s men. There was a moment of confusion. Xinemus rushed to clarify matters, coming within reaching distance as he did so. Beyond, the palanquin swayed as its bearers struggled against the heave of massed bodies. The Three-Headed Serpent tipped in the breeze but otherwise stood still. Then exhausted Javreh were spilling through the line, bruised, bloody. Some even needed to be carried bodily. The palanquin followed, like a boat popping through a broken dyke. Xinemus watched as though thunderstruck.

  Then everything, it seemed, came raining down upon them: looted plates, wine bowls, chicken bones, stones, and even the corpse of a cat, which Achamian was forced to duck.

  Apparently unaffected, the slaves gently lowered their burden by kneeling until their foreheads touched dust and the palanquin rested across their tanned backs.

  The downpour ceased, and the shouts grew more and more sporadic. Achamian found himself holding his breath. A Javreh Captain drew aside a wicker screen, then immediately fell to his knees. A crimson-slippered foot appeared, followed by the embroidered folds of a magnificent gown.

  There was an instant of utter silence.

  It was Eleäzaras himself. The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires and de facto ruler of High Ainon.

  Achamian found himself struck dumb by disbelief. The Grandmaster? Here?

  Some few among the mob, it seemed, knew what he looked like. A great murmur passed through them, swelling for several moments, then fading as the import of what they witnessed struck them. They stood in the presence of one of the most powerful men in the Three Seas. Only the Shriah or the Padirajah could claim more power than the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires. Blasphemer or not, a man of such power commanded respect, and respect commanded silence.

  Eleäzaras raked his onlookers with amused eyes, then turned to Achamian. He was tall, statuesque in the manner of thin, gracile men. He walked as though along a balance, one foot before another. He kept his hands folded in his sleeves, as was the formal custom of eastern magi. Halting at the distance prescribed by jnan, he graced Achamian with a shallow bow. Achamian glimpsed tanned scalp beneath thinning grey hair, which was braided into an elaborate bun at the back of his neck.

  “You must excuse the company I happen to be keeping,” he said, waving a dismissive, long-fingered hand at the gawking throngs. “Spectacle is ever the narcotic, I’m afraid.”

  “As are contradictions,” Achamian replied blandly. As astonishing as this impromptu audience might be, the Scarlet Spires was no friend of Mandate Schoolmen. He saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

  “Indeed. I was told you were a student of Ajencis’s logic. You make quite irresistible morsels, you Mandate Schoolmen, did you know?”

  Ainoni, Achamian thought sourly.

  “We’re always fighting off the scavengers, if that’s what you mean.”

  Eleäzaras shook his head. “Don’t flatter yourself. Conceit does not sit well with martyrdom. Never has. Never will.”

  “I always thought them the same.” The surrounding mob had grown more unruly, forcing him to raise his voice.

  The Grandmaster’s lips tightened into a sour line. “Clever man. Clever little man. Tell me, Drusas Achamian, how is it that after all these years you still find yourself in the field, hmm? Did you offend someone? Nautzera, perhaps? Or did you bugger Proyas as a boy? Is that why House Nersei sent you packing those years ago?”

  Achamian was speechless. They had researched him, armed themselves with as many painful facts and innuendoes as they could find. And here he’d thought he was watching them!

  “Ah . . .” Eleäzaras said. “You didn’t expect me to be quite so tactless, did you? The blunt knife, I assure you, has its—”

  “Unclean wretches!” someone howled with alarming ferocity. Mo
re shouts followed. Achamian glanced around, saw that Xinemus’s men were once again scuffling to hold their position. Many Inrithi leaned over their linked arms, screaming obscenities.

  “Perhaps we should retire to the Marshal’s pavilion,” Eleäzaras said.

  Achamian glimpsed Xinemus’s furious face behind the Grandmaster.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you want, Eleäzaras?” Xinemus had bid Achamian to end this meeting before it started, but this he could not do. Not only did he speak to Eleäzaras, the mightiest Anagogic Sorcerer in the Three Seas, he also spoke to the man who had negotiated his School’s treaty with Maithanet. Perhaps Eleäzaras knew how Maithanet had learned of their war with the Cishaurim. Perhaps he would trade that knowledge for whatever it was he wanted.

  “Want?” the Grandmaster repeated. “Why, merely to make your acquaintance. The Few, if you haven’t already noticed, are somewhat”—his eyes darted to and from the rumbling mass of Inrithi—“out of place here . . . Jnan demands our affiliation.”

  “As well as tedious obscurity, it seems.”

  The Grandmaster smiled. “But not mockery. Never mockery. That is a mistake only half-tutored prigs make. The true practitioner of jnan never laughs at another more than he laughs at himself.”

  Fucking Ainoni.

  “What do you want, Eleäzaras?”

  “To make your acquaintance, as I said. I needed to meet the man who has utterly overturned my impression of the Mandate . . . To think that I once thought yours the gentlest of Schools!”

  Now Achamian was genuinely perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m told you were recently a resident of Carythusal.”

  Geshrunni. They had discovered Geshrunni.

  Did I kill you too?

  Achamian shrugged. “So your secret is out. You war against the Cishaurim.” How could they begrudge him this when they had made it plain to all by joining the Holy War? There had to be more.

  The Gnosis? Did Eleäzaras merely distract him while others probed his Wards? Was this simply a bold prelude to abduction? It had happened before.

  “Our secret is out,” Eleäzaras agreed. “But then so is yours.”

  Achamian fixed him with quizzical look. The man spoke as though to goad him with knowledge of some obscene secret, one so shameful that any allusion, no matter how indirect, simply could not not be understood. And yet he had no idea what the man was talking about.

  “It was sheer coincidence,” Eleäzaras continued, “that we found his body. It was brought to us by a fisherman who works the mouth of the River Sayut. But it wasn’t so much the fact that you killed him that troubled us. After all, in the greater game of benjuka, one often gains pieces by disposing of them. No, what troubled us was the manner.”

  “Me?” He laughed incredulously. “You think I killed Geshrunni?”

  The shock had been so total he’d simply blurted these words. Now it was Eleäzaras who was startled.

  “You do have a facility for lies,” the Grandmaster said after a moment.

  “And you for delusion! Geshrunni was the best-placed informant the Mandate has had in a generation. Why would we kill him?”

  The clamour had swelled. Riotous figures heaved in Achamian’s periphery, shaking fists, bellowing insults and accusations. But they seemed curiously trivial, as though rendered smoke by the absurdity of this, his first meeting with the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires.

  Eleäzaras studied him for a pensive moment, then shook his head ruefully, as though saddened the persistence of hardened liars.

  “Why is any informant murdered, hmm? In so many ways so many men are more useful dead. But as I mentioned, it was the manner that sparked my admittedly morbid curiosity.”

  Scowling, Achamian hunched his shoulders in disbelief. “Someone plays you for a fool, Grandmaster.”

  Someone plays both of us . . . But who?

  Eleäzaras glared, pursing his lips as though holding a bitter segment of lime against his teeth. “My Master of Spies warned me of this,” he said tightly. “I’d assumed you had some obscure reason for what you did, something belonging to your accursed Gnosis. But he insisted that you were simply mad. And he told me I’d know by the way you lied. Only madmen and historians, he said, believe their lies.”

  “First I’m a murderer, and now I’m a madman?”

  “Indeed,” Eleäzaras spat in a tone of condemnation and disgust. “Who else collects human faces?”

  Just then, more stones sailed over their heads.

  Suppressing the urge to wring his hands, Eleäzaras blinked away images of his near disastrous encounter with the Mandate Schoolman the previous day. The face of one nameless man haunted him in particular: a strapping Tydonni thane, his left eye snow blue in the wake of an old scar. Some faces were more suited to expressions of malice than others, certainly. But this man . . . At the time he’d seemed the very incarnation of hatred, an infernal deity in the guise of callused flesh and fevered blood.

  They despise us so. And well they should.

  Rather than bear the indignity of camping outside Momemn’s walls, the Scarlet Spires had leased, at an exorbitant price, a nearby villa from one of the Nansur Houses. By Ainoni standards it was rather severe, more of a fortress than a villa, but then, Eleäzaras supposed, the Ainoni never had to build with the Scylvendi in mind. And at least it allowed him a certain measure of tranquil luxury. The encamped Holy War had become an intolerable slum, as his recent expedition to meet that thrice-damned Mandate Schoolman had reminded him.

  Eleäzaras had dismissed his slaves and now sat alone in a shaded portico overlooking the villa’s single courtyard. He studied Iyokus, his Master of Spies and closest adviser, as he made his pale way through the sunlit gardens. The man hurried, as though chased by the surrounding brilliance. Watching him move from sun to shadow was like witnessing dust blink into stone. Iyokus nodded as he approached his chair. His very presence often touched Eleäzaras with menace—something like glimpsing the first flush of plague in a man’s face. The smell of his old-fashioned perfumes, however, carried a strange sense of comfort.

  “I have news from Sumna,” Iyokus said, pouring himself a silver bowl of wine from the table, “about Kutigha.”

  Until recently, Kutigha had been their last surviving spy in the Thousand Temples—all the others had been executed. His handler had not heard from him in weeks.

  “So you think he’s dead?” Eleäzaras asked sourly.

  “Yes,” Iyokus replied.

  After all these years, Eleäzaras had grown accustomed to Iyokus, but somewhere in his own body lurked a small memory of his initial revulsion. Iyokus was addicted to chanv, the drug that held a greater part of the Ainoni ruling castes within its clasp—except, and this thought often surprised Eleäzaras, for Chepheramunni, the latest puppet they had installed on the Ainoni throne. For those who could afford her sweet bite, chanv sharpened the mind and extended one’s life for periods greater than a hundred years, but it also sapped the body of its pigment and, some said, the soul of its will. Iyokus looked the same now as the day Eleäzaras had joined the School as a boy many, many years before. Unlike other addicts, Iyokus refused to use cosmetics to compensate for the deficits of his skin, which was more translucent than the greased linen that the poor used in their windows. Like dark, arthritic worms, veins branched across his features. One could even see the dark in the centre of his red eyes when he closed his lids. His fingernails were waxy black from bruising.

  As Iyokus drew his chair to the table, a tiny sweat touched Eleäzaras, and he found himself glancing at the length of his own tanned arms. As thin as they were, they possessed wiry strength, vitality. Despite the disturbing aesthetics of addiction, Eleäzaras himself might have succumbed to the drug’s lure, particularly because of the way it reputedly sharpened the intellect. Perhaps the only aspect of chanv that had prevented him from slipping into that wan and strangely narcissistic
love affair—addicts rarely married or produced live children—was the unsettling fact that no one knew its source. For Eleäzaras, this was intolerable. Throughout his vicious, steep climb to the pinnacle he’d now reached, he had always refused to act in ignorance of crucial facts.

  Until this day.

  “So we have no more sources in the Thousand Temples?” Eleäzaras asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “None worth listening to . . . A shroud has fallen across Sumna.”

  Eleäzaras glanced across the bright grounds—cobbled paths lined by spearlike junipers, a gigantic willow draped about a pool of glassy green, guards with falcon faces.

  “What does this mean, Iyokus?” he asked. I’ve delivered the greatest School in the Three Seas to its greatest peril.

  “It means we must have faith,” Iyokus said with an air of shoulder-shrugging fatalism. “Faith in this Maithanet.”

  “Faith? In someone we know nothing of?”

  “That’s why it’s faith.”

  The decision to join the Holy War had been the most difficult of Eleäzaras’s life. At first, upon receiving Maithanet’s invitation, he had wanted to laugh. The Scarlet Spires? Joining a Holy War? The prospect was too absurd to warrant even momentary consideration. Perhaps this is why Maithanet had included a gift of six Trinkets with his invitation. Trinkets were the one thing that a sorcerer could not laugh away. This offer, the Trinkets said, demands serious consideration.

  Then Eleäzaras had realized what it was that Maithanet truly offered them.

  Vengeance.

  “Then we must double our expenditures in Sumna, Iyokus. This is intolerable.”

  “I agree. Faith is intolerable.”

  A ten-year-old image of the man assailed Eleäzaras, sent faint tremors through his fingertips: Iyokus falling against him in the aftermath of the assassination, his skin blistered, streaked by blood, his mouth croaking the very words that had lashed through Eleäzaras’s soul ever since: “How could they do this?”