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

and delegations of outraged envoys. But this war, Geshrunni assured him, was far more momentous than any skirmish.
    “Ten years ago,” Geshrunni said, “our former Grandmaster, Sasheoka, was assassinated.”
    “Sasheoka?” Achamian was not inclined to ask stupid questions, but the idea that a Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires could be assassinated was preposterous. How could such a thing happen? “Assassinated?”
    “In the inner sanctums of the Spires themselves.”
    In other words, in the midst of the most formidable system of Wards in the Three Seas. Not only would the Mandate never dare such an act, but there was no way, even with the glittering Abstractions of the Gnosis, they could succeed. Who could do such a thing?
    “By whom?” Achamian asked, almost breathless.
    Geshrunni’s eyes actually twinkled in the ruddy lamplight. “By the heathens,” he said. “The Cishaurim.”
    Achamian was at once baffled and gratified by this revelation. The Cishaurim—the only heathen School. At least this explained Sasheoka’s assassination.
    There was a saying common to the Three Seas: “Only the Few can see the Few.” Sorcery was violent. To speak it was to cut the world as surely as if with a knife. But only the Few—sorcerers—could see this mutilation, and only they could see, moreover, the blood on the hands of the mutilator—the “mark,” as it was called. Only the Few could see one another and one another’s crimes. And when they met, they recognized one another as surely as common men recognized criminals by their lack of a nose.
    Not so with the Cishaurim. No one knew why or how, but they worked events as grand and as devastating as any sorcery without marking the world or bearing the mark of their crime. Only once had Achamian witnessed Cishaurim sorcery, what they called the Psûkhe—on a night long ago in distant Shimeh. With the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, he’d destroyed his saffron-robed assailants, but as he sheltered behind his Wards, it had seemed as though he watched flashes of soundless lightning. No thunder. No mark.
    Only the Few could see the Few, but no one—no Schoolman, at least—could distinguish the Cishaurim or their works from common men or the common world. And it was this, Achamian surmised, that had allowed them to assassinate Sasheoka. The Scarlet Spires possessed Wards for sorcerers, slave-soldiers like Geshrunni for men bearing Chorae, but they had nothing to protect them against sorcerers indistinguishable from common men, or against sorcery indistinguishable from the God’s own world. Hounds, Geshrunni would tell him, now ran freely through the halls of the Scarlet Spires, trained to smell the saffron and henna the Cishaurim used to dye their robes.
    But why? What could induce the Cishaurim to wage open war against the Scarlet Spires? As alien as their metaphysics were, they could have no hope of winning such a war. The Scarlet Spires was simply too powerful.
    When Achamian had asked Geshrunni, the slave-soldier simply shrugged.
    “It’s been a decade, and still they don’t know.”
    This, at least, was grounds for petty comfort. There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.
    Drusas Achamian walked ever deeper into the Worm, toward the squalid tenement where he’d taken a room, still more afraid of himself than his future.

     
    Geshrunni grimaced as he stumbled out of the tavern. He steadied himself on the packed dust of the alley.
    “Done,” he muttered, then cackled in a way he never dared show others. He looked up at a narrow slot of sky hemmed and obscured by mud-brick walls and ragged canvas awnings. He could see few stars.
    Suddenly his betrayal struck him as a pathetic thing. He had told the only real secret he knew to an enemy of his masters. Now there was nothing left. No treason that might quiet the hatred in his heart.
    And a bitter hatred it was. More than anything else, Geshrunni was a proud man. That someone