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

not S in mirror.
     
    A curious discrepancy. What could it mean? For a moment, he pondered the sour futility of the question. Then he remembered awakening in the heart of night. After a pause, he added:
    Death and Prophecy of Anasûrimbor Celmomas. Same.
     
    But was it the same? In detail, certainly, but there had been a disturbing immediacy to the dream—enough to wake him. After scratching out “Same,” he wrote:
    Different. More powerful.
     
    As he waited for the ink to dry, he reviewed his previous entries, following them up to the curl of the scroll. A cascade of image and passion accompanied each, transforming mute ink into fragmentary worlds. Bodies tumbling through the knotted waters of a river cataract. A lover grunting blood through clenched teeth. Fire wrapped like a wanton dancer about stone towers.
    He pressed thumb and forefinger against his eyes. Why was he so fixated on this record? Other men, far greater than he, had gone mad trying to decipher the deranged sequence and permutations of Seswatha’s Dreams. He knew well enough to realize he’d never find an answer. Was it some kind of perverse game, then? One like that his mother used to play when his father returned drunk from the boats, pecking and nettling, demanding reason where none was to be found, flinching each time his father raised his hand, shrieking when he inevitably struck?
    Why peck and nettle when reliving Seswatha’s life was battery enough?
    Something cold reached through his breastbone and seized his heart. The old tremor rattled his hands, and the scroll rolled shut, wet ink and all. Stop . . . He clutched his hands together, but the shuddering simply migrated to his arms and shoulders. Stop! The howl of Sranc horns rifled through his window. He cringed beneath the concussion of dragon’s wings. He rocked on the stool, his entire body shaking.
    “Stop!”
    For several moments, he struggled to breathe. He heard the distant ping of a coppersmith’s hammer, the squabbling of crows on the rooftops.
    Is this what you wanted, Seswatha? Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
    But like so many questions he asked himself, he already knew the answer.
    Seswatha had survived the No-God and the Apocalypse, but he’d known the conflict was not over. The Scylvendi had returned to their pastures, the Sranc had scattered to feud over the spoils of a ruined world, but Golgotterath remained intact. From its black ramparts, the No-God’s servants, the Consult, still kept watch, possessed of a patience that dwarfed the perseverance of Men, a patience no cycle of epic verses or scriptural admonition could match. Ink might be immortal, but meaning was not. With the passing of every generation, Seswatha had known, the neck of his memory would be further broken—even the Apocalypse would be forgotten. So he passed not from but into his followers. By reincarnating his harrowing life in their dreams, he had made his legacy a never-ending call to arms.
    I was meant to suffer, Achamian thought.
    Forcing himself to confront the day ahead, he oiled his hair and brushed the flecks of muck from the white embroidery trimming his blue tunic. Standing at the window, he calmed his stomach with cheese and stale bread while watching sunlight burn the fog from the black back of the River Sayut. Then he prepared the Cants of Calling and informed his handlers in Atyersus, the citadel of the School of Mandate, of everything Geshrunni had told him the previous night.
    He was not surprised by their relative disinterest. The secret war between the Scarlet Spires and the Cishaurim was, after all, not their war. But the summons to return home did surprise him. When he asked why, they said only that it involved the Thousand Temples—another faction, another war that was not their own.
    Gathering his few possessions, he thought, One more meaningless mission.
    How could he not be cynical?
    In the Three Seas, all the Great Factions warred with tangible foes for tangible ends,