Fall of Light

by Steven Erikson

  ‘It is his manner to mock our aspirations. A poet who ran out of words. An awakener of sorcery with nothing to say.’

  ‘How did he come by this power? To awaken the darkness?’

  Endest snorted, and then said, ‘Forgive me, milord. He found the power in his words. In the rhythms, the cadences. Unmindful, he discovered that he was capable of uttering … holiness. Needless to say,’ Endest added, attention returning once more to his cupped hands, ‘the discovery offended him.’

  ‘Offended?’ Silchas prepared to say more, but then, with a helpless gesture, he swung round and walked to a sideboard where stood a large clay jar of wine. He poured full a goblet, and, without turning to face the others, he said, ‘And you, Cedorpul? How did you come by it?’

  ‘Could I answer you thus, I would be a relieved man.’

  ‘Thus?’

  ‘By prayer, milord, as befits a priest serving a goddess.’

  Silchas drank down a mouthful, and then said, ‘If not born of the sacred, Cedorpul, then describe to me what mundane gesture enlivened the magic?’

  ‘Curiosity, milord, but not mine. The sorcery itself.’

  Silchas spun round. ‘Then it lives? It possesses a will of its own? Darkness as sorcery, now manifest in our realm. What does it want of us?’

  ‘Milord,’ said Cedorpul, ‘none can say. There is no precedent.’

  Silchas faced Rise Herat. ‘Historian? Have you perused the most ancient tomes, the mouldy scrolls and clay tablets and whatnot? Is there or is there not, here in the Citadel, the gathered literature of our people? Are we indeed in a time without precedent?’

  A time without precedent? Oh, surely we are in such a time. ‘Milord, there are many myths recorded in our library, mostly musing on origins of various things. They seek to map an unknown realm, and where memory does not survive, then imagination serves.’ He shook his head. ‘I would not put much trust in the veracity of such efforts.’

  ‘Use what you will of them nonetheless,’ Silchas commanded, ‘and speculate.’

  Rise Herat hesitated. ‘Imagine a world without sorcery—’

  ‘Historian, we are in the midst of its burgeoning, not its extinction.’

  ‘Then, in principle, magic is not in question. It exists. It has, perhaps, always existed. What, then, has changed? A burgeoning, you say. But consider our own creation myths, our tales of the Eleint, the dragons born of sorcery, and indeed the guardians of the same. In the distant past, if we give such tales any credence at all, there was magic in the world, beyond even what we see now. As a force of creation, perhaps, an ordering of chaotic powers and, possibly, emerging with the necessity of a will behind that ordering. Shall we call this a faceless god?’

  ‘And there,’ interjected Cedorpul in a weary tone, ‘is where you stumble, historian. Who created the creator? Whence the divine will that engendered divine will? The argument devours its own tail.’

  ‘And in that myth,’ Rise Herat said, ignoring Cedorpul, ‘many are made as one, and one as many. Tiamatha, the dragon of a thousand eyes, a thousand fanged jaws. Tiamatha, who makes from her subjects her own flesh.’ He paused, and then shrugged. ‘Too many of these oldest of stories invoke the same notions. The Dog-Runners will sing of the Witch of Fires, from whose womb every child is delivered, even as she dwells in each flicker of flame. Again, one who is many.’

  Cedorpul made a disgusted sound. ‘Dog-Runners. Abyss take us, historian. They also tell of a sleeping world, earth as flesh, water as blood, and every creature but a conjuration of the sleeper’s dreaming.’

  ‘Troubled dreaming,’ Endest muttered.

  ‘What remains without precedent,’ Cedorpul insisted, ‘and what must therefore be examined as the source of this newfound sorcery in our realm, is the Terondai carved upon the floor of the Citadel. The gift given by Lord Draconus to Mother Dark.’

  Rise Herat studied the rotund priest, noting the sheen of sweat upon the man’s brow and cheeks. If magic was indeed a gift, it did not sit well with Cedorpul. ‘The High Priestess believes that the gift was both unexpected and unwelcome.’

  Shrugging, Cedorpul looked away.

  After a moment, the historian turned back to Silchas. ‘Milord. For answers, we must look to Draconus.’

  Silchas scowled. ‘Then send her back in there.’

  ‘The High Priestess has not been granted leave to enter the chamber, and her entreaties yield only silence.’

  ‘This avails us nothing!’

  At Silchas’s shout, the others flinched. Barring Endest Silann, who simply looked up, frowning at the lord. ‘Faith and magic,’ he said, ‘are easily conflated. It comes from our need for belief, and for the efficacy of that belief. But so too is it a failure of imagination to, in turning to face one, set the back to the other.’

  Silchas seemed to snarl without sound before saying, ‘Elaborate … with clarity, priest.’

  ‘There is an Azathanai statue,’ Endest said, ‘found at the north end of Suruth Common. Do you know it, milord?’

  Struggling with his temper, Silchas managed a sharp nod.

  ‘A figure made up of faces. Upon the entire body, a multitude of faces, all staring outward with stubborn, fierce expressions. Gallan has told me the name of that work.’

  ‘Gallan cannot read Azathanai,’ growled Cedorpul. ‘He but invents his own knowledge, to better stroke his sense of superiority.’

  ‘What is the name of that sculpture, historian?’

  ‘Milord, it is named Denial.’

  ‘Very well. Continue.’

  To Rise Herat, Endest Silann looked already ancient beyond his years, as if ill and nearing death. But when he spoke, his voice was soft, calm, preternaturally sure. ‘Faith is the state of not knowing, and yet, by choice, knowing. Every construct of reason propping it up plays a game, but the rules of that game are left, quite deliberately, incomplete. Thus, the argument has, to be crass, holes. But those “holes” are not synonymous with failure. If anything, they become a source of strength, as they are the places of knowing what cannot be known. To know what cannot be known is to find yourself in an unassailable position, proof against all argument, all dissuasion.’

  ‘And sorcery?’

  Endest smiled. ‘Does it require faith to see magic? Well, perhaps, the faith that one can believe what one sees with one’s own eyes. If, however, one chooses not to believe what one can oneself see, or feel, or taste, then in that direction waits madness.’

  ‘This sorcery,’ said Cedorpul, leaning forward, ‘comes from darkness. From the Terondai. From the power of our goddess!’

  ‘Power she now uses, yes,’ said Endest Silann, ‘but it did not come from her. It is not derived from her.’

  ‘How can you know that?’ Cedorpul demanded.

  Endest raised his hands, revealing the blood now dripping from them, from deep wounds piercing through the palm of each. ‘She is using it now,’ he said, ‘to attend this gathering, in spirit, if not in flesh.’

  At that, Silchas moved to kneel before Endest Silann. ‘Mother,’ he said, head bowed, ‘help us.’

  Endest shook his head. ‘She’ll not speak through me, Silchas. She but watches. It is,’ he added with sudden bitterness, ‘what she does.’

  Straightening, Silchas made fists with both hands, as if about to strike the young priest seated before him. He struggled to keep his voice under control. ‘Then what does she want of us?’

  ‘I have no answer, milord, because I feel nothing from her. I am but her eyes and ears, whilst the blood flows, whilst the power bleeds.’ He twisted round to smile across at Cedorpul. ‘My friend, this power simply exists now. It is among us, for good or ill. Gallan, our would-be seneschal, rejects it, and for that I am relieved.’

  ‘Relieved? Why?’

  ‘Because, once tasted, it seduces.’

  ‘Endest,’ asked Rise Herat, with a sudden chill rippling through him, ‘does she taste it now, then?’

  The priest looked down, as if faltering u
pon the cusp of his reply, but then nodded.

  ‘And … has it … seduced her?’

  He needed no other answer, the historian realized, than the blood draining down from Endest’s hands.

  * * *

  There had been a desire, possessed of value, to assemble a cadre of mages. A court, to be more specific, of Tiste Andii practitioners. Whether it was talent or something else, many hands were now able to reach into that power, and to shape it, although the notion of control was, it turned out, dubious. There was something wayward, untamable, in this sorcery. Rise Herat understood Gallan’s warning, its bitter nuances, and, like the poet, the historian feared the magic now among them.

  ‘Name it for the realm,’ Gallan had said, earlier, when he stood in the centre of the chamber and the sorcery rose up to entwine his form, its serpent tendrils questing and probing like blunt-headed worms. ‘We become synonymous with this flavour, and the darkness from which it emerges.’

  ‘It is not the name that interests me,’ Cedorpul had retorted. ‘We would proclaim you seneschal. If words are your power in this new art, then lead us. We will all find our own paths, Gallan. The point is, there is need. You must see that. Neret Sorr now blazes with light. Syntara organizes against us, and would see a path burned into the heart of Kharkanas.’ He had stepped closer to Gallan then, his eyes fierce. ‘I have dreamed it, that golden road of fire.’

  ‘Dreamed it, did you?’ Gallan had laughed. ‘Oh, I do not doubt you, priest. Against the waking world, the mind finds its own realm, and fills it with myriad fears and dreads. Where else would one play so freely with dire possibility?’ He had raised a hand, and the tongues of smoky darkness had wreathed his arm. ‘But this? It has no answer to Liosan. Light is revelation. Dark is mystery. What marches upon us cannot be defeated. We – and the world – must ever yield. Imagine, my friends, what we are about to witness. The death of mystery, and such a bright world will come, blinding us with truths, humbling us with answers, scouring us clean of that which we cannot know.’

  In some ways, the new world Gallan described well suited Rise Herat, who was by nature frustrated with things he could not know, with meanings at which he could only guess, and where his every effort to surmise trembled at the roots with doubt. Was this new future not an historian’s paradise? Everything explicable, everything understandable.

  A world made mundane.

  And yet, a part of him recoiled at the notion, for when he looked closely, he saw a future made stale, lifeless. The death of mystery, he realized, was the death of life itself.

  Gallan had dropped his arm, watched as the magic drained away from his body. ‘Revelation shall surely bless us. Doubt lies bloody upon the altar. Into the channels it drains, drip by drip, and then ebbs. We shall make a thousand thrones. Ten thousand. One for every fool. But the altar remains singular. It will take any and every sacrifice, and thirst yet for more.’ He had then smiled at the historian. ‘Prepare to recount the future, Herat, and describe well the long lines, the glint of row on row of knives in waiting hands. And upon the other hand – why, I shall tell this to Kadaspala, so that he may paint it – place a tether, and upon the end of its modest length, name some private beast.

  ‘Praise the light! We march to slaughter!’ He grinned mockingly at Cedorpul. ‘Name it for the realm. The sorcery of Kurald Galain.’

  And so, laughing, he had stridden from the chamber.

  * * *

  Rise Herat made his way to the private chambers of High Priestess Emral Lanear. He was thinking on the nature of conspiracy, which, among those who both feared and named it, seemed to always possess at its core a misguided belief in the competence of others, as weighed against the incapacities – real or imagined – of the believer. Therefore, he concluded, the belief in conspiracy was in truth an announcement of the believer’s own sense of utter helplessness, in the face of forces both mysterious and fatally efficient.

  If he looked to his own role, now, as a conspirator against both Anomander and Draconus, he felt nothing of the competence and confidence that should have come to him, settling upon his shoulders like a vestment in some secret ceremony of the capable. The world might move to hidden players, to well-disguised schemes and venal cabals, but it did not move smoothly. Rather, in the confused and raucous clash of muddled plans and desires, the world but lurched, and often in the wrong direction.

  History mocked the pretensions of those who believed themselves in charge – of anything, least of all themselves. There was no doubt, in Herat’s mind, that conspiracies arose, like poisonous flowers, in every age, snaring those moments of terrible consequence that, more often than not, ended in violence and chaos. If civilization was a garden, it was poorly tended, with every hand at odds with the next. Private desires fed the wrong plants, and made for all a bitter harvest.

  At the very least, the paranoid were well fed, though by nature their ability to discriminate between diabolical genius and woeful incompetence was non-existent. It was grist, after all, offering sweet sustenance to a soul panicked by its own helplessness.

  He shared with the High Priestess an assembly of sound justifications. They sought to save the realm, and to end the civil war. They sought, beyond the singular moment of violent betrayal, a peaceful future. Kurald Galain must survive, they told each other, and lives would have to be sacrificed in order to assure that survival.

  But not mine. And not yours, Emral Lanear. Where, then, is our sacrifice? Nothing but the carcasses of our honour. Conspiracy will devour its own truths, and even should we succeed, we are left as nothing but husks, mortal forms to house ruined souls. Is that not a sacrifice? Will we not find victory a bleak realm of sour satisfaction, with ourselves haunted by the truth behind every lie?

  Crowd me in the comforts of what we win … I see a man drunk upon the divan, eager to waste the years left to him.

  And you, my dear? How will faith taste to your bloodied tongue?

  The corridors of the Citadel held a kind of promise, in that there was light in the darkness. His eyes could see, although now even the torches had been dispensed with. Cedorpul asserted that the talent with which the Mother’s children could pierce the darkness was her gift to them for their faith in her. The notion pleased Herat in too many ways, and should he list them he would see plain his own desperation, as a man making a banquet of a morsel.

  He paused in one passageway as a trio of young priestesses hurried past him, their hoods over their heads and eyes down. They swirled in their silks, almost shapeless, but the scents of their perfumes made for a heady wake as the historian continued on. A goddess of love would be welcome in these times, but the pleasures of sex could not be her only gift. Lust spoke a base language, and its role in the course of history, Herat well knew, was fraught with tragedy and war.

  But we are cold in our desires, the High Priestess and I. There is no heat in our plans, and the poses we will create invite no caress. She takes no men to her bed, not any more. The gate, as Cedorpul might say, has closed.

  Yet her priestesses still swim the deep carnal seas, and call it worship.

  But Mother Dark is no goddess of love. We were mistaken in that, and now lust boils unabated. We rush forward, with no time to temper our deeds with thought. The reins have been plucked from our hands, and this road we descend is steep.

  Let us hold on a while longer, to this delusion of control.

  Reaching the door to Emral Lanear’s chamber, Herat gave a single tug on the silk cord hanging in its vertical niche in the wall. Hearing her muffled invitation, he opened the heavy door and stepped into the room beyond.

  Until recently, there had been a full-length mirror of polished silver set against the wall opposite the door that had commanded the entire chamber with its play of motion and seemingly sourceless light. Rise Herat had found it disquieting, as the polish was far from perfect, and indeed there were strange dips and exaggerations in the reflection the mirror offered, making it an enemy to vanity. Of late, however,
a thick tapestry had covered the mirror, as it did now. Initially, Herat had wondered at the gesture, but not for long. This was not the time, he understood, for catching glimpses of oneself, like flitting thoughts or hints of something that might be guilt.

  The tapestry covering the mirror was an old one, depicting a scene from an unfamiliar court, a crowded throne room in which figures bedecked in barbaric furs were arrayed in a half-circle, their backs to the viewer, all facing a vaguely female form seated on a throne. This woman was either asleep or dead. The splendour of the throne room offered a stark contrast to the savages gathered there, displaying such riches as to make the chamber more like a royal vault than a court. For all Rise Herat’s knowledge of history, he could place neither the artist nor the scene.

  But nothing of the past held any relevance, not any more. It had become a realm made perfect by virtue of being unreachable. For all that, its lure remained, as seductive as ever. Entire revolutions, he knew, could be unleashed in the name of some impossible, mostly imagined past. A creation fashioned as much from ignorance as from knowledge. Such dreamers invariably ended up wallowing in blood, and should they ever win their desire, their world proved to be one filled with repression and terror. There was too much anger, when the dream was revealed as being impossible, and when others failed to match the ideal, and before long many were made to kneel, broken by either fear or despair, while the bodies of those who refused to kneel made heaps in hastily dug pits.

  Simple observations, my friends. I am not one for judgement, but one might whisper, now and then, to those dreamers, and say: dream not of the impossible past, but of the possible future. They are not one and the same. They cannot ever be the same. Know this. Understand this. Make peace with this. Else you fight a war you can never win.

  Emral Lanear emerged from her bedroom beyond the reception chamber. She wore plain silks, of a hue of deep grey, its sheen like dull pewter. Her hair was drawn up, but roughly so – by her own hand rather than that of a handmaid. There were shadows under her eyes, the smudge of exhaustion that was as much spiritual as physical.