The Darkness that Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker Page B

As a result, Sumna and the Tusk had become inseparable in the thoughts of Men; pilgrimages to Sumna and to the Tusk were one and the same, as though the place had become an artifact and the artifact a place. To walk in Sumna was to walk through scripture.
    Small wonder he felt out of place.
    He found himself being jostled behind a small train of mules. Arms and shoulders, scowling faces and shouts. Movement through the small street came to a halt. Never had he seen the city so maddeningly crowded. He turned to one of the men pressing him, a Conriyan by appearance—solemn, broad-shouldered, with a heavy beard, a member of the warrior caste.
    “Tell me,” Achamian asked in Sheyic, “what’s happening here?” He’d dispensed with jnan in his impatience: they were, after all, sharing sweat.
    The man appraised him with dark eyes, a curious look on his face.
    “You mean you don’t know?” he asked, raising his voice above the din.
    “Know what?” Achamian replied, feeling a small tickle in his spine.
    “Maithanet has called the faithful to Sumna,” he said, suspicious of Achamian’s ignorance. “He’s to reveal the object of the Holy War.”
    Achamian was stunned. He glanced at the faces packed around them, abruptly realizing how many of them had the hard-bitten look of war. Nearly all of them were openly armed. The first half of his mission, to discover the object of Maithanet’s Holy War, was about to be accomplished for him.
    Nautzera and the others must have known. But why didn’t they tell me?
    Because they needed him to come to Sumna. They knew he would resist recruiting Inrau, so they’d assembled everything they could to convince him that he must. A lie of omission—perhaps not so great a sin—but it had rendered him pliant to their purposes nonetheless.
    Manipulation upon manipulation. Even the Quorum played games with their own pieces. It was an old outrage, but it never failed to sting.
    The man had continued speaking, his eyes bright with sudden fervour: “Pray that it’s the Schools we war against, my friend, rather than the Fanim. Sorcery is ever the greater cancer.”
    Achamian almost agreed.

     
    Achamian reached out, planning to draw a finger through the groove down the centre of Esmenet’s back, but he hesitated, clasping a handful of stained coverings instead. The room was dark, thick with the heat of their coupling. Through the shadows, he could see the scatter of crumbs and refuse across the floor. A blinding white crack in the shutters was the only source of light. The thunder of the street beyond had the rattle of thin walls.
    “Nothing else?” he said, feeling remotely shocked by the unsteadiness in his own voice.
    “What do you mean, ‘nothing else?’” Her voice was marked by an old and patient bruise.
    She had misunderstood, but before he could explain, a sudden sense of nausea and suffocating heat struck him. He pushed himself from the bed to his feet and immediately felt as though he might fall to his knees. His legs buckled, and he drunkenly braced himself against the sideboards. Chills skittered through his arm hairs and across his scalp and back.
    “Akka?” she asked.
    “Fine,” he replied. “The heat.” He drew himself up and rolled back onto the wheeling mattress. Her body felt like burning eels against his own. Such heat so early in spring! It was as though the very world had grown feverish at the prospect of Maithanet’s Holy War.
    “You’ve suffered the Fevers before,” she said, her voice apprehensive. The Fevers were not contagious—everyone knew this.
    “Yes,” he said thickly, holding his forehead. You’re safe . “They possessed me six years ago, while on mission in Cingulat . . . I almost died.”
    “Six years ago,” she repeated. “My daughter died the same year.” Bitterness.
    He found himself resenting the ease with which his pain had become hers. An image of what her daughter might look like came to him: sturdy but fine-boned, dark