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

spy, Achamian had crisscrossed the Three Seas, had seen many of those things that had once made his stomach flutter with supernatural dread, and he knew now that childhood stories were always better. Since being identified as one of the Few as a youth and taken to Atyersus to be trained by the School of Mandate, he had educated princes, insulted grandmasters, and infuriated Shrial priests. And he now knew with certainty that the world was hollowed of its wonder by knowledge and travel, that when one stripped away the mysteries, its dimensions collapsed rather than bloomed. Of course, the world was a much more sophisticated place to him now than it had been when he was a child, but it was also far simpler. Everywhere men grasped and grasped, as though the titles “king,” “shriah,” and “grandmaster” were simply masks worn by the same hungry animal. Avarice, it seemed to him, was the world’s only dimension.
    Achamian was a middle-aged sorcerer and spy, and he had grown weary of both vocations. And though he would be loath to admit it, he was heartsick. As the old fish-wives might say, he had dragged one empty net too many.
    Perplexed and dismayed, Achamian left Geshrunni at the Holy Leper and hurried home—if it could be called that—through the shadowy ways of the Worm. Extending from the northern banks of the River Sayut to the famed Surmantic Gates, the Worm was a labyrinth of crumbling tenements, brothels, and impoverished Cultic temples. The place was aptly named, Achamian had always thought. Humid, riddled by cramped alleys, the Worm indeed resembled something found beneath a rock.
    Given his mission, Achamian had no reason to be dismayed. Quite the opposite, if anything. After the mad moment with the Chorae, Geshrunni had told him secrets—potent secrets. Geshrunni, it turned out, was not a happy slave. He hated the Scarlet Magi with an intensity that was almost frightening once revealed.
    “I didn’t befriend you for the promise of your gold,” the Javreh Captain had said. “For what? To buy my freedom from my masters? The Scarlet Spires relinquish nothing of value. No, I befriended you because I knew you would be useful.”
    “Useful? But for what end?”
    “Vengeance. I would humble the Scarlet Spires.”
    “So you knew . . . All along you knew I was no merchant.”
    Sneering laughter. “Of course. You were too free with your ensolariis. Sit with a merchant or sit with a beggar, and it’ll always be the beggar who buys your first drink.”
    What kind of spy are you?
    Achamian had scowled at this, scowled at his own transparency. But as much as Geshrunni’s penetration troubled him, he was terrified by the degree to which he’d misjudged the man. Geshrunni was a warrior and a slave—what surer formula could there be for stupidity? But slaves, Achamian supposed, had good reason to conceal their intelligence. A wise slave was something to be prized perhaps, like the slave-scholars of the old Ceneian Empire. A cunning slave, however, was something to be feared, to be eliminated.
    But this thought held little consolation. If he could fool me so easily . . .
    Achamian had plucked a great secret out of the obscurity of Carythusal and the Scarlet Spires—the greatest, perhaps, in many years. But he did not have his ability, which he’d rarely questioned over the years, to thank—only his incompetence. As a result, he’d learned two secrets—one dreadful enough, he supposed, in the greater scheme of the Three Seas; the other dreadful within the frame of his life.
    I’m not, he realized, the man I once was.
    Geshrunni’s story had been alarming in its own right, if only because it demonstrated the ability of the Scarlet Spires to harbour secrets. The Scarlet Spires, Geshrunni said, was at war, had been for more than ten years, in fact. Achamian had been unimpressed—at first. The sorcerous Schools, like all the Great Factions, ceaselessly skirmished with spies, assassinations, trade sanctions,