The Darkness that Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker Read Free Book Online

staring at it made Achamian dizzy, jerked bile to the back of his throat. Chorae. A tear drawn from the God’s own cheek. Death. Death to all blasphemers.
    “What do you want?” Achamian hissed.
    “What all men want, Akka. Truth.”
    All the things Achamian had seen, all the trials he’d survived, lay pinched in that narrow space between his shining palm and the oiled iron. Trinket. Death poised between the callused fingers of a slave. But Achamian was a Schoolman, and for Schoolmen nothing, not even life itself, was as precious as the Truth. They were its miserly keepers, and they warred for its possession across all the shadowy grottoes of the Three Seas. Better to die than to yield Mandate truth to the Scarlet Spires.
    But there was more here. Geshrunni was alone—Achamian was certain of this. Sorcerers could see sorcerers, see the bruise of their crimes, and the Holy Leper hosted no sorcerers, no Scarlet Schoolmen, only drunks making wagers with whores. Geshrunni played this game on his own.
    But for what mad reason?
    Tell him what he wants. He already knows.
    “I’m a Mandate Schoolman,” Achamian whispered quickly. Then he added, “A spy.”
    Dangerous words. But what choice did he have?
    Geshrunni studied him for a breathless moment, then slowly gathered the Chorae into his fist. He released Achamian’s hand.
    There was an odd moment of silence, interrupted only by the clatter of a silver ensolarii against wood. A roar of laughter, and a hoarse voice bellowed, “You lose, whore!”
    But this, Achamian knew, was not so. Somehow he had won this night, and he had won the way whores always win—without understanding.
    After all, spies were little different from whores. Sorcerers less so.

     
    Though he had dreamt of being a sorcerer as a child, the possibility of being a spy had never occurred to Drusas Achamian. “Spy” simply wasn’t part of the vocabulary of children raised in Nroni fishing villages. For him the Three Seas had possessed only two dimensions in his childhood: there were places far and near and there were people high and low. He would listen to the old fish-wives tell their tales while he and the other children helped shuck oysters, and he learned very quickly that he was among the low, and that mighty people dwelt far away. Name after mysterious name would fall from those old lips—the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, the malevolent heathens of Kian, the all-conquering Scylvendi, the scheming sorcerers of the Scarlet Spires, and so on—names that sketched the dimensions of his world, infused it with terrifying majesty, transformed it into an arena of impossibly tragic and heroic deeds. He would fall asleep feeling very small.
    One might think becoming a spy would add dimension to the simple world of a child, but precisely the opposite was the case. Certainly, as he matured, Achamian’s world became more complicated. He learned that there were things holy and unholy, that the Gods and the Outside possessed their own dimensions, rather than being people very high and a place very far. He also learned that there were times recent and ancient, that “a long time ago” was not like another place but rather a queer kind of ghost that haunted every place.
    But when one became a spy, the world had the curious habit of collapsing into a single dimension. High-born men, even Emperors and Kings, had the habit of seeming as base and as petty as the most vulgar fisherman. Far-away nations like Conriya, High Ainon, Ce Tydonn, or Kian no longer seemed exotic or enchanted but were as grubby and as weathered as a Nroni fishing village. Things holy, like the Tusk, the Thousand Temples, or even the Latter Prophet, became mere versions of things unholy, like the Fanim, the Cishaurim, or the sorcerous Schools, as though the words “holy” and “unholy” were as easily exchanged as seats at a gaming table. And the recent simply became a more tawdry repetition of the ancient.
    As both a Schoolman and a