R Scott Bakker - The Prince of Nothing 01 - The Darkness that Comes Before

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R. Scott Bakker

The Darkness that Comes Before

(Book One of the Prince of Nothing)

PROLOGUE

The Wastes of Kuniüri

It is only after that we understand what has come before, then we

understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes

everything.

—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

Year-of-the-Tusk, the Mountains of Demua

One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.

The citadel of Ishual succumbed during the height of the Apocalypse. But no

army of inhuman Sranc had scaled its ramparts. No furnace-hearted dragon had

pulled down its mighty gates. Ishual was the secret refuge of the Kuniüric High

Kings, and no one, not even the No-God, could besiege a secret.

Months earlier, Anasurimbor Ganrelka II, High King of Kuniüri, had fled to

Ishual with the remnants of his household. From the walls, his sentries stared

pensively across the dark forests below, their thoughts stricken by memories of

burning cities and wailing multitudes. When the wind moaned, they gripped Ishual’s

uncaring stone, reminded of Sranc horns. They traded breathless reassurances. Had

they not eluded their pursuers? Were not the walls of Ishual strong? Where else

might a man survive the end of the world?

The plague claimed the High King first, as was perhaps fitting: Ganrelka had

only wept at Ishual, raged the way only an Emperor of nothing could rage. The

following night the members of his household carried his bier down into the forests.

They glimpsed the eyes of wolves reflected in the light of his pyre. They sang no

dirges, intoned only a few numb prayers.

Before the morning winds could sweep his ashes skyward, the plague had

struck two others: Ganrelka’s concubine and her daughter. As though pursuing his

bloodline to its thinnest tincture, it assailed more and more members of his

household. The sentries upon the walls became fewer, and though they still watched

the mountainous horizon, they saw little. The cries of the dying crowded their

thoughts with too much horror.

Soon even the sentries were no more. The five Knights of Tryse who’d

rescued Ganrelka after the catastrophe on the Fields of Eleneot lay motionless in

their beds. The Grand Vizier, his golden robes stained bloody by his bowel, lay

sprawled across his sorcerous texts. Ganrelka’s uncle, who’d led the heartbreaking

assault on Golgotterath’s gates in the early days of the Apocalypse, hung from a

rope in his chambers, slowly twisting in a draft. The Queen stared endlessly across

festering sheets.

Of all those who had fled to Ishual, only Ganrelka’s bastard son and the

Bardic Priest survived.

Terrified by the Bard’s strange manner and one white eye, the young boy hid,

venturing out only when his hunger became unbearable. The old Bard continually

searched for him, singing ancient songs of love and battle, but slurring the words in

blasphemous ways. “Why won’t you show yourself, child?” he would cry as he

reeled through the galleries. “Let me sing to you. Woo you with secret songs. Let me

share the glory of what once was!”

One night the Bard caught the boy. He caressed first his cheek and then his

thigh. “Forgive me,” he muttered over and over, but tears fell only from his blind

eye. “There are no crimes,” he mumbled afterward, “when no one is left alive.”

But the boy lived. Five nights later, he lured the Bardic Priest onto Ishual’s

towering walls. When the man shambled by in a drunken stupor, he pushed him from

the heights. He crouched for a long while at the fall’s edge, staring down through the

gloom at the Bard’s broken corpse. It differed from the others, he decided, only in

that it was still wet. Was it murder when no one was left alive?

Winter added its cold to the emptiness of Ishual. Propped on the battlements,

the child would listen to the wolves sing and feud through the dark forests. He would

pull his arms from his sleeves and hug his body against the chill, murmuring his dead

mother’s songs and savoring the wind’s bite on his cheek. He would fly through the

courtyards, answering the wolves with Kuniüric war cries, brandishing weapons that

staggered him with their weight. And once in a while, his eyes wide with hope and

superstitious dread, he would poke the dead with his father’s sword.

When the snows broke, shouts brought him to Ishual’s forward gate. Peering

through dark embrasures, he saw a group of cadaverous men and women—refugees

of the Apocalypse. Glimpsing his shadow, they cried out for food, shelter, anything,

but the boy was too terrified to reply. Hardship had made them look

fearsome—feral, like a wolf people.

When they began scaling the walls, he fled to the galleries. Like the Bardic

Priest, they searched for him, calling out guarantees of his safety. Eventually, one of

them found him cringing behind a barrel of sardines. With a voice neither tender nor

harsh, he said: “We are Dünyain, child. What reason could you have to fear us?”

But the boy clutched his father’s sword, crying, “So long as men live, there

are crimes!”

The man’s eyes filled with wonder. “No, child,” he said. “Only so long as

men are deceived.”

For a moment, the young Anasurimbor could only stare at him. Then

solemnly, he set aside his father’s sword and took the stranger’s hand. “I was a

prince,” he mumbled.

The stranger brought him to the others, and together they celebrated their

strange fortune. They cried out—not to the Gods they had repudiated but to one

another—that here was evident a great correspondence of cause. Here awareness

most holy could be tended. In Ishual, they had found shelter against the end of the

world.

Still emaciated but wearing the furs of kings, the Dünyain chiseled the

sorcerous runes from the walls and burned the Grand Vizier’s books. The jewels,

the chalcedony, the silk and cloth-of-gold, they buried with the corpses of a dynasty.

And the world forgot them for two thousand years.

Nonmen, Sranc, and Men:

The first forgets,

The third regrets,

And the second has all of the fun.

—ANCIENT KUNIÜRI NURSERY RHYME

This is a history of a great and tragic holy war, of the mighty factions that

sought to possess and pervert it, and of a son searching for his father. And as with

all histories, it is we, the survivors, who will write its conclusion.

—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Late Autumn, 4109 Year-of-the-Tusk, the Mountains of Demua

Again the dreams had come.

Vast landscapes, histories, contests of faith and culture, all glimpsed in

cataracts of detail. Horses skidding to earth. Fists clenching mud. Dead strewn on

the shore of a warm sea. And as always, an ancient city, chalk-dry in the sun, rising

against dun hills. A holy city . . . Shimeh.

And then the voice, thin as though spoken through the reed throat of a

serpent, saying, “Send to me my son.”

The dreamers awoke as one, gasping, struggling to wrest sense from

impossibility. Following the protocol established after the first dreams, they found

each other in the unlit depths of the Thousand Thousand Halls.

Such desecration, they determined, could no longer be tolerated.

———«»———«»———«»———

Climbing pitted mountain trails, Anasurimbor Kellhus leaned on his knee and

turned to look at the monastic citadel. Ishual’s ramparts towered above a screen of

spruce and larches, only to be dwarfed by the rutted mountain slopes beyond.

Did you see it thus, Father? Did you turn and look for one last time?

Distant figures filed between the battlements before disappearing behind

stone—the elder Dünyain abandoning their vigil. They would wind down the mighty

staircases, Kellhus knew, and one by one enter the darkness of the Thousand

Thousand Halls, the great Labyrinth that wheeled through the depths beneath Ishual.

There they would die, as had been decided. All those his father had polluted.

I’m alone. My mission is all that remains.

He turned from Ishual and continued climbing through the forest. The

mountain breeze was bitter with the smell of bruised pine.

By late afternoon he passed the timberline, and after two days of scaling

glacial slopes he crested the roof of the Demua Mountains. On the far side of the

range, the forests of what once had been called Kuniüri extended beneath scudding

clouds. How many vistas such as this, he wondered, must he cross before he found

his father? How many ravine-creased horizons must he exchange before he arrived at

Shimeh?

Shimeh will be my home. I shall dwell in my father’s house.

Descending granite escarpments, he entered the wilderness.

He wandered through the gloom of the forest interior, through galleries pillared

by mighty redwoods and hushed by the overlong absence of men. He tugged his

cloak through thickets and negotiated the fierce rush of mountain streams.

Though the forests below Ishual had been much the same, Kellhus found

himself unsettled for some reason. He paused in an attempt to regain his composure,

using ancient techniques to impose discipline on his intellect. The forest was quiet,

gentle with birdsong. And yet he could hear thunder . . .

Something is happening to me. Is this the first trial, Father?

He found a stream marbled by brilliant sunlight and knelt at its edge. The water

he drew to his lips was more replenishing, more sweet, than any water he had tasted

before. But how could water taste sweet? How could sunlight, broken across the

back of rushing waters, be so beautiful?

What comes before determines what comes after. Dünyain monks spent their

lives immersed in the study of this principle, illuminating the intangible mesh of cause

and effect that determined every happenstance and minimizing all that was wild and

unpredictable. Because of this, events always unfolded with granitic certainty in

Ishual. More often than not, one knew the skittering course a leaf would take through

the terrace groves. More often than not, one knew what another would say before he

spoke. To grasp what came before was to know what would come after. And to

know what would come after was the beauty that stilled, the hallowed communion of

intellect and circumstance—the gift of the Logos.

Kellhus’s first true surprise, apart from the formative days of his childhood,

had been this mission. Until then, his life had been a premeditated ritual of study,

conditioning, and comprehension. Everything was grasped. Everything was

understood. But now, walking through the forests of lost Kuniüri, it seemed that the

world plunged and he stood still. Like earth in rushing waters, he was battered by an

endless succession of surprises: the thin warble of an unknown bird; burrs in his

cloak from an unknown weed; a snake winding through a sunlit clearing, searching

for unknown prey.

The dry slap of wings would pass overhead and he would pause, taking a

different step. A mosquito would land on his cheek, and he would slap at it, only to

have his eyes drawn to a different configuration of tree. His surroundings inhabited

him, possessed him, until he was moved by all things at once—the creak of limbs,

the endless permutations of water over stones. These things wracked him with the

strength of tides.

On the afternoon of the seventeenth day, a twig lodged itself between his

sandal and his foot. He held it against storm-piled clouds and studied it, became lost

in its shape, in the path it traveled through the open air—the thin, muscular

branchings that seized so much emptiness from the sky. Had it simply fallen into this

shape, or had it been cast, a mold drained of its wax? He looked up and saw one

sky plied by the infinite forking of branches. Was there not one way to grasp one

sky? He was unaware of how long he stood there, but it was dark before the twig

slipped from his fingers.

On the morning of the twenty-ninth day, he crouched on rocks green with

moss and watched salmon leap and pitch against a rushing river. The sun rose and

set three times before his thoughts escaped this inexplicable war of fish and waters.

In the worst moments his arms would be vague as shadow against shadow,

and the rhythm of his walk would climb far ahead of him. His mission became the

last remnant of what he had once been. Otherwise he was devoid of intellect,

oblivious to the principles of the Dünyain. Like a sheet of parchment exposed to the

elements, each day saw more words stolen from him—until only one imperative

remained: Shimeh . . . I must find my father in Shimeh.

He continued wandering south, through the foothills of the Demua. His

dispossession deepened, until he no longer oiled his sword after being wetted by the

rain, until he no longer slept or ate. There was only wilderness, the walk, and the

passing days. At night he would take animal comfort in the dark and cold.

Shimeh. Please, Father.

On the forty-third day, he waded across a shallow river and clambered onto

banks black with ash. Weeds crowded the char blanketing the ground, but nothing

else. Like blackened spears, dead trees spiked the sky. He picked his way through

the debris, stung by weeds where they brushed his bare skin. Finally he gained the

summit of a ridge.

The immensity of the valley below struck Kellhus breathless. Beyond the fire’s

desolation, where the forest was still dark and crowded, ancient fortifications

loomed above the trees, forming a great ring across the autumnal distances. He

watched birds wheel over and around the nearer ramparts, flash across stretches of

mottled stone before dipping into the canopy. Ruined walls. So cold, and so forlorn,

in a way the forest could never be.

The ruins were far too old to contradict the forest outright. They had been

submerged, worn and unbalanced by ages of its weight. Sheltered in mossy hollows,

walls breached earthen mounds, only to suddenly end, as though restrained by vines

that wrapped them like great veins over bone.

But there was something in them, something not now, that bent Kellhus

toward unfamiliar passions. When he brushed his hands across the stone, he knew

he touched the breath and toil of Men—the mark of a destroyed people.

The ground wheeled. He leaned forward and pressed his cheek against the

stone. Grit, and the cold of uncovered earth. Above, the sunlight was broken by a

span of knotted branches. Men . . . here in the stone. Old and untouched by the

rigor of the Dünyain. Somehow they had resisted the sleep, had raised the work of

hands against the wilderness.

Who built this place?

Kellhus wandered over the mounds, sensing the ruins buried beneath. He ate

sparingly from his forgotten satchel—dried wafers and acorns. He peeled leaves

from the surface of a small pool of rainwater, drank, then stared curiously at the dark

reflection of his own face, at the growth of blond hair across his scalp and jaw.

Is this me?

He studied squirrels and those birds he could pick from the dim confusion of

the trees. Once he glimpsed a fox slipping through the brush.

I am not one more animal.

His intellect flailed, found purchase, and grasped. He could sense wild cause

sweep around him in statistical tides. Touch him and leave him untouched.

I am a man. I stand apart from these things.

As evening waxed, it began to rain. Through branches he watched the clouds

build chill and grey. For the first time in weeks, he sought shelter.

He picked his way into a small gully where erosion had caused a sheaf of earth

to fall away, revealing the stone facade of some structure. He climbed over the leafy

clay into an opening, dark and deep. Inside he broke the neck of the wild dog that

attacked him.

He was familiar with darkness. Light had been forbidden in the depths of the

Labyrinth. But there was no mathematical insight in the cramped blackness he found,

only a random jumble of earth-pinched walls. Anasurimbor Kellhus stretched out and

slept.

When he awoke the forest was quiet with snow.

The Dünyain had no real knowledge of just how far Shimeh lay. They had

merely provided him with as many provisions as he could efficiently carry. His

satchel grew flimsier with the days. Kellhus could only passively observe as hunger

and exposure wracked his body.

If the wilderness could not possess him, it would kill him.

His food ran out, and he continued to walk. Everything—experience,

analysis—became mysteriously sharp. More snow came, and cold, harsh winds. He

walked until he could no longer.

The way is too narrow, Father. Shimeh is too far.

———«»———«»———«»———

The trapper’s sled dogs yelped and nosed through the snow. He pulled them

away and fastened their harness to the base of a stunted pine. Astonished, he

brushed the snow away from the limbs curling beneath. His first thought was to feed

the dead man to his dogs. The wolves would have him otherwise, and meat was

scarce in the abandoned north.

He removed his mittens and placed his fingertips against the bearded cheek.

The skin was grey, and he was certain the face would be as cold as the snow that

half buried it. It was not. He cried out, and his dogs responded with a chorus of

howls. He cursed, then countered with the sign of Husyelt, the Dark Hunter. The

limbs were slack when he lifted the man from the snow. His wool and hair were stiff

in the wind.

The world had always been strange with significance to the trapper, but now it

had become terrifying. Running as the dogs pulled the sled, he fled before the wrath

of the encroaching blizzard.

“Leweth,” the man had said, placing a hand to his naked chest. His cropped

hair was silver with a hint of bronze and far too fine to adequately frame his thick

features. His eyebrows seemed perpetually arched in surprise, and his restless eyes

were given to excuses, always feigning interest in trivial details to avoid his ward’s

watchful gaze.

Only later, after learning the rudiments of Leweth’s language, did Kellhus

discover how he’d come to be in the trapper’s care. His first memories were of

sweaty furs and smoldering fires. Animal pelts hung in sheaves from a low ceiling.

Sacks and casks heaped the corners of a single room. The smell of smoke, grease,

and rot crowded what little open space remained. As Kellhus would later learn, the

chaotic interior of the cabin was actually an expression, and a painstaking one at that,

of the trapper’s many superstitious fears. Each thing had its place, he would tell

Kellhus, and those things out of place portended disaster.

The hearth was large enough to hug all the interior, including Kellhus himself,

in golden warmth. Beyond the walls, winter whistled through trackless leagues of

forest, ignoring them for the most part, but periodically shaking the cabin hard

enough to rock the furs on their hooks. The land was called Sobel, Leweth would

tell him, the northernmost province of the ancient city of Atrithau—although it had

been abandoned for generations. He preferred, he would say, to live far from the

troubles of other men.

Though Leweth was a sturdy man of middle years, for Kellhus he was little

more than a child. The fine musculature of his face was utterly untrained, bound as

though by strings to his passions. Whatever moved Leweth’s soul moved his

expression as well, and after a short time Kellhus needed only to glance at his face to

know his thoughts. The ability to anticipate his thoughts, to reenact the movements

of Leweth’s soul as though they were his own, would come later.

In the meantime a routine developed. At dawn Leweth harnessed his dogs and

left to check his runs. On the days he returned early, he enlisted Kellhus to mend

snares, prepare skins, draw up a new pot of cony stew—to “earn his keep,” as he

put it. At night Kellhus worked, as the trapper had taught him, on stitching his own

coat and leggings. Leweth would watch from across the fire, his hands living an

arcane life of their own, carving, stitching, or simply straining against each

other—small labors that paradoxically gifted him with patience, even grace.

Kellhus saw Leweth’s hands at rest only when he slept or was extraordinarily

drunk. Drink, more than anything else, defined the trapper.

Through the morning, Leweth never looked Kellhus in the eye, acknowledging

him only at nervous angles. A curious halfness deadened the man, as though his

thought lacked the momentum to become speech. If he spoke at all, his voice was

tight, constricted by an ambient dread. By afternoon, a flush would have crept into

his expression. His eyes would flare with brittle sunshine. He would smile, laugh. But

by dark, his manner would be bloated, a distorted parody of what it had been just

hours earlier. He would bludgeon his way through conversation, would be overcome

by squalls of rage and bitter humor.

Kellhus learned much from Leweth’s drink-exaggerated passions, but the time

came when he could no longer allow his study to trade in caricatures. One night he

rolled the casks of whisky out into the forest and drained them across the frozen

ground. During the suffering that followed, he carried on with the chores.

They sat facing each other across the hearth, their backs against cozy heaps

of animal pelts. His expression etched by firelight, Leweth talked, animated by the

honest vanity of sharing his life with someone who was captive to the facts as he

described them. Old pains returned in the telling.

“I had no choice but to leave Atrithau,” Leweth admitted, speaking yet again

of his dead wife.

Kellhus smiled sorrowfully. He gauged the subtle interplay of muscles beneath

the man’s expression. He pretends to mourn in order to secure my pity.

“Atrithau reminded you of her absence?” This is the lie he tells himself.

Leweth nodded, his eyes at once tear-filled and expectant. “Atrithau seemed a

tomb after she died. One morning they called the muster for the militia to man the

walls, and I remember staring off to the north. The forests seemed to . . . beckon me

somehow. The terror of my childhood had become a sanctuary! Everyone in the

city, even my brothers and my compatriots in the district cohort, seemed to secretly

exult in her death—in my misery! I had to . . . I was forced to . . .”

Avenge yourself.

Leweth looked down to the fire. “Flee,” he said.

Why does he deceive himself in this way?

“No soul moves alone through the world, Leweth. Our every thought stems

from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of words spoken

before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another soul to carry our

own.” He paused, cutting short his reply in order to bewilder the man. Insight struck

with so much more force when it clarified confusion. “This is truly why you fled to

Sobel, Leweth.”

For an instant Leweth’s eyes slackened in horror. “But I don’t understand . .

.”

Of everything I might say, he fears most the truths he already knows and

yet denies. Are all world-born men this weak?

“But you do understand. Think, Leweth. If we’re nothing more than our

thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than

movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us. Who

you once were, Leweth, ceased to exist the moment your wife died.”

R Scott Bakker - The Prince of Nothing 01 - The Darkness that Comes Before

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