The Darkness That Comes Before

by R. Scott Bakker

  The Pragma leapt forward and struck him, his face a rictus of counterfeit rage. “Repeat the proposition!” he screamed.

  For Kellhus, each of the Great Names represented a question, a juncture of innumerable permutations. In their faces, he saw fragments of other faces surfacing as though all men were but moments of one man. An instant of Leweth passing like a squall through Athjeäri’s scowl as he argued with Saubon. A glimpse of Serwë in the way Gothyelk looked upon his youngest son. The same passions, but each cast in a drastically different balance. Any one of these people, he concluded, might be as easily possessed as Leweth had been—despite their fierce pride. But in their sum, they were incalculable.

  They were a labyrinth, a thousand thousand halls, and he had to pass through them. He had to own them.

  What if this Holy War exceeds my abilities? What then, Father?

  “Do you feast, Dûnyain?” Cnaiür asked in bitter Scylvendi. “Grow fat on faces?” Proyas had left them to confer with Gotian, and for the moment, the two of them were alone.

  “We share the same mission, Scylvendi.”

  So far, events had exceeded his most optimistic forecasts. His claim to royal blood had secured him, almost effortlessly, a position among the Inrithi ruling castes. Not only had Proyas supplied him with the “necessities of his princely rank,” he had accorded him a place of honour at his council fire. So long as one possessed the bearing of a prince, Kellhus discovered, one was treated as a prince. Acting became being.

  His other claim, however—his claim to have dreamt of Shimeh and the Holy War—had secured him a far different position, one more fraught with peril and possibility. Some openly scoffed at the claim. Others, like Proyas and Achamian, viewed it as a possible warning, like the first flush of disease. Many, searching for whatever scrap of divine sanction they could find, simply accepted it. But all of them conceded Kellhus the same position.

  For the peoples of the Three Seas, dreams, no matter how trivial, were a serious matter. Dreams were not, as the Dûnyain had thought before Moënghus’s summons, mere rehearsals, ways for the soul to train itself for different eventualities. Dreams were the portal, the place where the Outside infiltrated the World, where what transcended men—be it the future, the distant, the demonic, or the divine—found imperfect expression in the here and now.

  But it was not enough to simply assert that one had dreamed. If dreams were powerful, they were also cheap. Everyone dreamed. After patiently listening to descriptions of his visions, Proyas had explained to Kellhus that literally thousands claimed to dream of the Holy War, some of its triumph, others of its destruction. One could not walk ten yards along the Phayus, he said, without seeing some hermit screech and gesticulate about his dreams.

  “Why,” he asked with characteristic honesty, “should I regard your dreams as any different?”

  Dreams were a serious matter, and serious matters demanded hard questions.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t,” Kellhus had replied. “I’m not sure I do.”

  And it was this, his reluctance to believe his own prophetic claims, that had secured his perilous position. When anonymous Inrithi, having heard rumours of him, fell to their knees before him, he would be cross the way a compassionate father would be cross. When they begged to be touched, as though grace could be communicated across skin, he would touch them, but only to raise them up, to chide them for abasing themselves before another. By claiming to be less than what he seemed to be, he moved men, even learned men such as Proyas and Achamian, to hope or fear that he might be more.

  He would never utter it, never claim it, but he would manufacture the circumstances that would make it seem true. Then all those who counted themselves secret watchers, all those who breathlessly asked “Who is this man?” would be gratified like never before. He would be their insight.

  They would be unable to doubt him then. To doubt him would be to think their own insights empty. To disown him would be to disown themselves.

  Kellhus would step onto conditioned ground.

  So many permutations . . . But I see the path, Father.

  Laughter pealed across the garden. Some young Galeoth thane, weary of standing, had thought the Emperor’s stool a good place to rest. He sat for several moments, oblivious to the surrounding mirth, alternately studying the glazed pork jumyan he’d pilfered from a slave and the naked man chained at his feet. When he finally realized that everyone laughed at him, he decided he rather liked the attention and began striking a series of mock imperial poses. The Men of the Tusk roared. Eventually, Saubon collected the youth and led him back to his applauding kinsmen.

  Moments afterward, a file of Imperial Apparati, all dressed in the voluminous robes of their station, announced the arrival of the Emperor. With Conphas at his side, Ikurei Xerius III appeared just as the hilarity subsided, his expression a mixture of benevolence and distaste. He sat upon his stool and rekindled his guests’ mirth when he adopted the very pose—his left palm facing up upon his lap, his right curled down before him—that the young Galeoth had aped just moments before. Kellhus watched his face grow pale with rage as one of his eunuchs explained the laughter. There was murder in his eyes when he dismissed the man, and he struggled with his posture for a moment. To be premeditated, he knew, was the most galling of insults. In this way even an Emperor might be made a slave—though, Kellhus realized, he did not know why. Finally Xerius settled on the Norsirai posture: hands braced on his knees.

  Several long moments of silence passed as he mastered his rage. During this time, Kellhus studied the faces of the imperial retinue: the seamless arrogance of the Emperor’s nephew, Conphas; the panic of the slaves, so attuned to their master’s tumultuous passions; the tight-lipped disapproval of the Imperial Counsels, arrayed in a semicircle behind their Emperor—their centre. And . . .

  A different face, among the Counsels . . . a troubling face.

  It was the subtlest of incongruities, a vague wrongness, that drew his attention at first. An old man dressed in fine charcoal silk robes, a man obviously deferred to and respected by the others. One of his companions leaned to him and muttered something inaudible through the rumble of voices. But Kellhus could see his lips:

  Skeaös . . .

  The Counsel’s name.

  Drawing a deep breath, Kellhus allowed the momentum of his own thought to slow and still. Who he was in his everyday concourse with other men ceased to exist, peeled away like petals in bloom. The tempo of events slowed. He became a place, a blank field for a single figure: the weathered landscape of an old man’s face.

  No perceptible blush reflex. Disconnect between heart rate and apparent expression—

  But the drone of surrounding voices trailed into silence, and he withdrew, reassembled. The Emperor was about to speak. Words that could seal the fate of the Holy War.

  Five heartbeats had passed.

  What could this mean? A single, indecipherable face among a welter of transparent expressions.

  Skeaös . . . Are you my father’s work?

  The Logos is without beginning or. The Logos is without beginning or. The Logos is without beginning or. The Logos is without . . .

  For a moment, he could taste blood on his split lips, but the sensation was slowly rinsed away by the ruthless litany. The inner cacophony faltered, trailed into deathlike silence. His body became an utter stranger, a disposable frame. And the movement of time itself, the pace of the before and after, transformed.

  The shadows of the shrine’s pillars swept across the bare floor. Sunlight fell upon, then flickered from, his face. He wet and soiled himself, but there was no discomfort, no smell. And when the old Pragma stood and poured water across his lips, he was merely a smooth rock embedded in moss and gravel beneath a waterfall.

  The sun skirted the pillars before him then lowered behind him, drawing his shadow across the lap of the Pragma and then amid the burnished trees, where it congregated with its kinsmen and bloated into night. Again and again, he witness
ed the sun rise and topple, the momentary respite of night, and with each dawning the proposition was further dismembered. While the world quickened, the movement of his soul slowed.

  Until he whispered only:

  The Logos. The Logos. The Logos . . .

  He was a hollow filled by echoes bereft of any authoring voice, each phrase a flawless reiteration of the preceding. He was a wayfarer through the abyssal gallery of mirror set against mirror, his every step as illusory as the last. Only sun and night marked his passage, and only then by narrowing the gap between mirrors to the impossible place where vanishing point threatened to kiss vanishing point—to the place where the soul fell utterly still.

  When the sun reared yet again, his thoughts receded to a single word:

  The. The. The. The . . .

  And it seemed at once an absurd stutter and the most profound of thoughts, as though only in the absence of “Logos” could it settle into the rhythm of his heart muscling through moment after moment. Thought thinned and daylight swept through, over, and behind the shrine, until night pierced the shroud of the sky, until the heavens revolved like an infinite chariot wheel.

  The. The . . .

  A moving soul chained to the brink, to the exquisite moment before something, anything. The tree, the heart, the everything transformed into nothing by repetition, by the endless accumulation of the same refusal to name.

  A corona of gold across the high slopes of the glacier.

  . . . and then nothing.

  No thought.

  “The Empire welcomes you,” Xerius announced, his voice straining to be mild. He drew his gaze across the Great Names of the Men of the Tusk, lingering for a moment on the Scylvendi at Kellhus’s side. He smiled.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, “our most extraordinary addition. The Scylvendi. They tell me that you’re a Chieftain of the Utemot. Is this so, Scylvendi?”

  “It is so,” Cnaiür answered.

  The Emperor measured this reply. He was in no mood, Kellhus could see, for the niceties of jnan. “I, too, have a Scylvendi,” he said. He bared his forearm from intricate sleeves and grasped the chain between his feet. He yanked it savagely, and the huddled Xunnurit raised his blinded, broken face to the onlookers. His naked body was skeletal, malnourished, and his limbs seemed to hang from different hinges, hinges that all turned in, away from the world. The long strips of swazond along his arms now seemed a measure more of the bones beneath than of his bloody past.

  “Tell me,” the Emperor said, finding comfort in this petty brutality. “Of what tribe is this one?”

  Cnaiür seemed unaffected. “This one was of the Akkunihor.”

  “‘Was,’ you say? He’s dead to you, I suppose.”

  “No. Not dead. He is nothing to me.”

  The Emperor smiled as though warming to a small mystery, a suitable distraction from weightier matters. But Kellhus could see the machinations beneath, the confidence that he would show this savage to be an ignorant fool. The need.

  “Because we’ve broken him? Hmm?” the Emperor pressed.

  “Broken whom?”

  Ikurei Xerius paused. “This dog here. Xunnurit, King-of-Tribes. Your King . . .”

  Cnaiür shrugged, as though puzzled by a child’s petty caprice. “You have broken nothing.”

  There was some laughter at this.

  The Emperor soured. Kellhus could see an appreciation of Cnaiür’s intellect stumble to the forefront of his thoughts. There was reassessment, a revision of strategies.

  He’s accustomed, Kellhus thought, to recovering from blunders.

  “Yes,” Xerius said. “To break one man is to break nothing, I suppose. It’s too easy to break a man. But to break a people . . . Surely this is something, no?”

  The imperial expression became jubilant when Cnaiür failed to reply.

  The Emperor continued: “My nephew here, Conphas, has broken a people. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. The People of War.”

  Again, Cnaiür refused to answer. His look, however, was murderous.

  “Your people, Scylvendi. Broken at Kiyuth. Were you at Kiyuth, I wonder?”

  “I was at Kiyuth,” Cnaiür grated.

  “Were you broken?”

  Silence.

  “Were you broken?”

  All eyes were now on the Scylvendi.

  “I was”—he searched for the proper Sheyic term—“schooled at Kiyuth.”

  “Were you now!” the Emperor cried. “I should imagine. Conphas is a most demanding instructor. So tell me, what lesson did you learn?”

  “Conphas was my lesson.”

  “Conphas?” the Emperor repeated. “You must forgive me, Scylvendi, but I’m puzzled.”

  Cnaiür continued, his tone deliberate. “At Kiyuth, I learned what Conphas has learned. He is a general bred on many battlefields. From the Galeoth he learned the effectiveness of disciplined pike formations against mounted charges. From the Kianene he learned the effectiveness of channelling his opponent, of the false flight, and of the wisdom of hoarding his horsemen in reserve. And from the Scylvendi he learned the importance of the gobokzoy, the ‘moment’—that one must read his enemy from afar and strike at the instant of their unbalance.

  “At Kiyuth, I learned,” he continued, turning his hard eyes upon Conphas, “that war is intellect.”

  The shock was plain on the Imperial Nephew’s face, and Kellhus wondered at the force of these words. But too much happened for him to focus on this problem. The air was taut with this contest of Emperor and barbarian.

  Now it was the Emperor’s turn to remain silent.

  Kellhus understood the stakes of this exchange. The Emperor needed to show the incompetence of the Scylvendi. Xerius had made his Indenture the price of Ikurei Conphas. Like any merchant, Xerius could justify this price only by maligning the wares of his competitors.

  “Enough of this prattle!” Coithus Saubon cried. “The Great Names have heard enough—”

  “But it is not for the Great Names to decide!” the Emperor snapped.

  “Nor is it for Ikurei Xerius to decide,” Proyas added, his eyes bright with zeal.

  Grizzled Gothyelk cried: “Gotian! What says the Shriah? What says Maithanet of our Emperor’s Indenture?”

  “But it’s too soon!” the Emperor sputtered. “We haven’t sounded this man—this heathen!”

  But others clamoured, “Gotian!”

  “Then what say you, Gotian?” the Emperor cried. “Would you have a heathen lead you against the heathen? Would you be punished as the Vulgar Holy War was punished on the Plains of Mengedda? How many dead? How many enslaved by Calmemunis’s rash humour?”

  “The Great Names lead!” Proyas shouted. “The Scylvendi will be our adviser—”

  “An outrage still!” the Emperor roared. “An army with ten generals? When you founder, and you will, for you know not the cunning of the Kianene, then to whom will you turn? A Scylvendi? In your moment of crisis? Of all the absurdities! It will be a heathen’s Holy War then! Sweet Sejenus, this man’s a Scylvendi,” he cried plaintively, as though to a loved one gone mad. “Does this mean nothing to you fools? He is a blight upon the very earth! His very name is blasphemy! An abomination before the God!”

  “You’d speak of outrage to us?” Proyas cried in reply. “You’d school in piety those who’d sacrifice their very lives for the Tusk? What of your iniquities, Ikurei? What of you, who’d make a tool of the Holy War?”

  “I would preserve the Holy War, Proyas! Save the God’s instrument from your ignorance!”

  “But we’re ignorant no longer, Ikurei,” Saubon answered. “You’ve heard the Scylvendi speak. We’ve heard him speak.”

  “But this man would sell you! He’s Scylvendi! Haven’t you heard me?”

  “How could we not?” Saubon spat. “You screech louder than my wife.”

  Rumbling laughter.

  “My uncle speaks the truth,” Conphas called out, and a hush fell across the noblemen. The great Conphas had finally sp
oken. He would be the more sober voice.

  “You know nothing of the Scylvendi,” he continued matter-of-factly. “They’re not heathens like the Fanim. Their wickedness isn’t one of distortion, of twisting the true faith into an abomination. They’re a people without gods.”

  Conphas strode down to the King-of-Tribes at the Emperor’s feet, yanked the blinded face back for all to see. He grabbed one of the emaciated arms.

  “They call these scars swazond,” he said, as though a patient tutor, “a word that means ‘dyings.’ To us, they are little more than savage trophies, not unlike the shrunken Sranc heads that the Thunyeri stitch onto their shields. But they’re far more to the Scylvendi. Those dyings are their only purpose. The very meaning of their lives is written into those scars. Our dyings . . . Do you understand this?”

  He looked into the faces of the assembled Inrithi, was satisfied by the apprehension he saw there. It was one thing to admit a heathen into their midst; it was quite another to have the details of his wickedness enumerated.

  “What the savage said earlier is not true,” Conphas resumed. “This man isn’t ‘nothing.’ He’s far, far more. He’s a token of their humiliation. The humiliation of the Scylvendi.” He stared hard at Xunnurit’s impassive face, the sunken, weeping sockets. Then he looked to Cnaiür where he stood at Proyas’s side.

  “Look at him,” he said casually. “Look at the one you’d make your general. Don’t you think he thirsts for vengeance? Don’t you think that even now he struggles to beat down the fury in his heart? Are you so naive as to believe that he doesn’t plot our destruction? That his soul does not twist, as men’s souls do, with scenarios, with images—his vengeance glutted and our ruin complete?”

  Conphas looked to Proyas.

  “Ask him, Proyas. Ask him what moves his soul.”

  There was a pause filled by the ambient murmur of muttering noblemen. Kellhus turned to the enigmatic face hovering above the Emperor.

  As a child, he’d seen expressions in the same manner as world-born men, as something understood without understanding. But now he could see the joists beneath the planks of a man’s expression, and because of this, he could calculate, with terrifying exactitude, the distribution of forces down to a man’s foundation.