The Darkness that Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker

whose primary symptom was certainty. How the God could be equated with the absence of hesitation was something Achamian had never understood. After all, what was the God but the mystery that burdened them all? What was hesitation but a dwelling-within this mystery?
    Perhaps, then, I am among the most pious of men, he thought, smiling inwardly. He was a man who lavished himself with false flattery. Too much brooding.
    “Maithanet,” he muttered under his breath, but the name was also empty. It could neither tether the grandiose rumours that fluttered about it nor provide motive enough for the crimes he was about to commit.
    As though drawn by some half-understood sense of obligation to his sole passenger, the captain of the merchantman joined his meditative silence, standing somewhat nearer than prescribed by the dictates of jnan—a common low-caste error. He was a sturdy man, constructed, it seemed, of the same wood as his ship. Salt and sun on his forearms, the sea in his unkempt hair and beard.
    “This city,” he finally said, “is not such a good place for someone like you.”
    Someone like me . . . A sorcerer in a holy city . There was no indictment in the man’s words or his tone. The Nroni had grown used to the Mandate, to Mandate gifts and Mandate demands. But they were still Inrithi, the faithful. A certain blankness of expression was their solution to this contradiction. They always spoke around the fact of their heresy, perhaps hoping that if they didn’t touch it with words, they might somehow carry away their faith intact.
    “They never know what we are,” Achamian said. “That’s the horrible fact of sinners. We’re indistinguishable from the righteous.”
    “So I’ve been told,” the man replied, avoiding his eyes. “The Few can see only each other.” There was something disturbing about his tone, as though he probed for the details of some illicit sexual act.
    Why speak of this? Was the fool trying to ingratiate himself?
    An image struck Achamian: himself as a boy, climbing on the big rocks, the ones his father had used to dry the nets, pausing every few breathless instants simply to look around him. Something had happened. It was as though he’d opened different eyelids, ones beneath those he normally opened each morning. Everything was so agonizingly tight, as though the flesh of the world had been dried taut across the gaps between bone: the net against stone, the grid of shadows cast over the hollows, the watery beads cupped between the flex of tendons on his hands—so clear! And within this tightness, the sensation of inner blooming, of the collapse of seeing into being, as though his eyes had been wrung into the very heart of things. From the surface of the stone, he could see himself, a dark child towering across the disc of the sun.
    The very fabric of existence. The onta. He had—and he could still never adequately express this—“experienced” it. Unlike most others, he’d known immediately he was one of the Few, known with a child’s stubborn certainty. “Atyersus!” he could remember crying, feeling the vertigo of a life no longer to be determined by his caste, by his father, or by the past.
    Those times when the Mandate had passed through his fishing village had profoundly marked him as a boy. First the clash of cymbals and then the cloaked figures, shielded by parasols and borne by slaves, steeped in the erotic aura of mystery. So remote! Faces impassive, touched only by the finest cosmetics, and by the proper jnanic contempt for low-caste fishermen and their sons. Only men of mythic stature could reside behind such faces—this he knew. Men braced by the glory of The Sagas. Dragon-slayers and assassins of kings. Prophets and abominations.
    Mere months of training at Atyersus had seen that childishness wane. Jaded, pompous, and self-deceived—Atyersus differed only in scale.
    Am I so different from this man? Achamian asked himself, watching the captain in his periphery.