The Prince of Nothing 01 – Bakker, Scott

The Darkness that Comes Before

(Book One of The Prince of Nothing)

PROLOGUE

The Wastes of Kûniüri

It is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.

—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

2147 Year-of-the-Tusk, the Mountains of Demua

One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.

The citadel of Ishuäl succumbed during the height of the Apocalypse. But no army of inhuman Sranc had scaled its ramparts. No furnace-hearted dragon had pulled down its mighty gates. Ishuäl was the secret refuge of the Kûniüric High Kings, and no one, not even the No-God, could besiege a secret.

Months earlier, Anasûrimbor Ganrelka II, High King of Kûniüri, had fled to Ishuäl with the remnants of his household. From the walls, his sentries stared pensively across the dark forests below, their thoughts stricken by memories of burning cities and wailing multitudes. When the wind moaned, they gripped Ishuäl’s uncaring stone, reminded of Sranc horns. They traded breathless reassurances. Had they not eluded their pursuers? Were not the walls of Ishuäl strong? Where else might a man survive the end of the world?

The plague claimed the High King first, as was perhaps fitting: Ganrelka had only wept at Ishuäl, raged the way only an Emperor of nothing could rage. The following night the members of his household carried his bier down into the forests. They glimpsed the eyes of wolves reflected in the light of his pyre. They sang no dirges, intoned only a few numb prayers.

Before the morning winds could sweep his ashes skyward, the plague had struck two others: Ganrelka’s concubine and her daughter. As though pursuing his bloodline to its thinnest tincture, it assailed more and more members of his household. The sentries upon the walls became fewer, and though they still watched the mountainous horizon, they saw little. The cries of the dying crowded their thoughts with too much horror.

Soon even the sentries were no more. The five Knights of Trysë who’d rescued Ganrelka after the catastrophe on the Fields of Eleneöt lay motionless in their beds. The Grandvizier, his golden robes stained bloody by his bowel, lay sprawled across his sorcerous texts. Ganrelka’s uncle, who’d led the heartbreaking assault on Golgotterath’s gates in the early days of the Apocalypse, hung from a rope in his chambers, slowly twisting in a draft. The Queen stared endlessly across festering sheets.

Of all those who had fled to Ishuäl, only Ganrelka’s bastard son and the Bardic Priest survived.

Terrified by the Bard’s strange manner and one white eye, the young boy hid, venturing out only when his hunger became unbearable. The old Bard continually searched for him, singing ancient songs of love and battle, but slurring the words in blasphemous ways. “Why won’t you show yourself, child?” he would cry as he reeled through the galleries. “Let me sing to you. Woo you with secret songs. Let me share the glory of what once was!”

One night the Bard caught the boy. He caressed first his cheek and then his thigh. “Forgive me,” he muttered over and over, but tears fell only from his blind eye. “There are no crimes,” he mumbled afterward, “when no one is left alive.”

But the boy lived. Five nights later, he lured the Bardic Priest onto Ishuäl’s towering walls. When the man shambled by in a drunken stupor, he pushed him from the heights. He crouched for a long while at the fall’s edge, staring down through the gloom at the Bard’s broken corpse. It differed from the others, he decided, only in that it was still wet. Was it murder when no one was left alive?

Winter added its cold to the emptiness of Ishuäl. Propped on the battlements, the child would listen to the wolves sing and feud through the dark forests. He would pull his arms from his sleeves and hug his body against the chill, murmuring his dead mother’s songs and savouring the wind’s bite on his cheek. He would fly through the courtyards, answering the wolves with Kûniüric war-cries, brandishing weapons that staggered him with their weight. And once in a while, his eyes wide with hope and superstitious dread, he would poke the dead with his father’s sword.

When the snows broke, shouts brought him to Ishuäl’s forward gate. Peering through dark embrasures, he saw a group of cadaverous men and women—refugees of the Apocalypse. Glimpsing his shadow, they cried out for food, shelter, anything, but the boy was too terrified to reply. Hardship had made them look fearsome—feral, like a wolf people.

When they began scaling the walls, he fled to the galleries. Like the Bardic Priest, they searched for him, calling out guarantees of his safety. Eventually, one of them found him cringing behind a barrel of sardines. With a voice neither tender nor harsh, he said: “We are Dûnyain, child. What reason could you have to fear us?”

But the boy clutched his father’s sword, crying, “So long as men live, there are crimes!”

The man’s eyes filled with wonder. “No, child,” he said. “Only so long as men are deceived.”

For a moment, the young Anasûrimbor could only stare at him. Then solemnly, he set aside his father’s sword and took the stranger’s hand. “I was a prince,” he mumbled.

The stranger brought him to the others, and together they celebrated their strange fortune. They cried out—not to the Gods they had repudiated but to one another—that here was evident a great correspondence of cause. Here awareness most holy could be tended. In Ishuäl, they had found shelter against the end of the world.

Still emaciated but wearing the furs of kings, the Dûnyain chiselled the sorcerous runes from the walls and burned the Grandvizier’s books. The jewels, the chalcedony, the silk and cloth-of-gold, they buried with the corpses of a dynasty.

And the world forgot them for two thousand years.

Nonmen, Sranc, and Men:

The first forgets,

The third regrets,

And the second has all of the fun.

—ANCIENT KÛNIÜRIC NURSERY RHYME

This is a history of a great and tragic holy war, of the mighty factions that sought to possess and pervert it, and of a son searching for his father. And as with all histories, it is we, the survivors, who will write its conclusion.

—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Late Autumn, 4109 Year-of-the-Tusk, the Mountains of Demua

Again the dreams had come.

Vast landscapes, histories, contests of faith and culture, all glimpsed in cataracts of detail. Horses skidding to earth. Fists clenching mud. Dead strewn on the shore of a warm sea. And as always, an ancient city, chalk-dry in the sun, rising against dun hills. A holy city . . . Shimeh.

And then the voice, thin as though spoken through the reed throat of a serpent, saying, “Send to me my son.”

The dreamers awoke as one, gasping, struggling to wrest sense from impossibility. Following the protocol established after the first dreams, they found each other in the unlit depths of the Thousand Thousand Halls.

Such desecration, they determined, could no longer be tolerated.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

Climbing pitted mountain trails, Anasûrimbor Kellhus leaned on his knee and turned to look at the monastic citadel. Ishuäl’s ramparts towered above a screen of spruce and larches, only to be dwarfed by the rutted mountain slopes beyond.

Did you see it thus, Father? Did you turn and look for one last time?

Distant figures filed between the battlements before disappearing behind stone—the elder Dûnyain abandoning their vigil. They would wind down the mighty staircases, Kellhus knew, and one by one enter the darkness of the Thousand Thousand Halls, the great Labyrinth that wheeled through the depths beneath Ishuäl. There they would die, as had been decided. All those his father had polluted.

I’m alone. My mission is all that remains.

He turned from Ishuäl and continued climbing through the forest. The mountain breeze was bitter with the smell of bruised pine.

By late afternoon he passed the timberline, and after two days of scaling glacial slopes he crested the roof of the Demua Mountains. On the far side of the range, the forests of what once had been called Kûniüri extended beneath scudding clouds. How many vistas such as this, he wondered, must he cross before he found his father? How many ravine-creased horizons must he exchange before he arrived at Shimeh?

Shimeh will be my home. I shall dwell in my father’s house.

Descending granite escarpments, he entered the wilderness.

He wandered through the gloom of the forest interior, through galleries pillared by mighty redwoods and hushed by the overlong absence of men. He tugged his cloak through thickets and negotiated the fierce rush of mountain streams.

Though the forests below Ishuäl had been much the same, Kellhus found himself unsettled for some reason. He paused in an attempt to regain his composure, using ancient techniques to impose discipline on his intellect. The forest was quiet, gentle with birdsong. And yet he could hear thunder . . .

Something is happening to me. Is this the first trial, Father?

He found a stream marbled by brilliant sunlight and knelt at its edge. The water he drew to his lips was more replenishing, more sweet, than any water he had tasted before. But how could water taste sweet? How could sunlight, broken across the back of rushing waters, be so beautiful?

What comes before determines what comes after. Dûnyain monks spent their lives immersed in the study of this principle, illuminating the intangible mesh of cause and effect that determined every happenstance and minimizing all that was wild and unpredictable. Because of this, events always unfolded with granitic certainty in Ishuäl. More often than not, one knew the skittering course a leaf would take through the terrace groves. More often than not, one knew what another would say before he spoke. To grasp what came before was to know what would come after. And to know what would come after was the beauty that stilled, the hallowed communion of intellect and circumstance—the gift of the Logos.

Kellhus’s first true surprise, apart from the formative days of his childhood, had been this mission. Until then, his life had been a premeditated ritual of study, conditioning, and comprehension. Everything was grasped. Everything was understood. But now, walking through the forests of lost Kûniüri, it seemed that the world plunged and he stood still. Like earth in rushing waters, he was battered by an endless succession of surprises: the thin warble of an unknown bird; burrs in his cloak from an unknown weed; a snake winding through a sunlit clearing, searching for unknown prey.

The dry slap of wings would pass overhead and he would pause, taking a different step. A mosquito would land on his cheek, and he would slap at it, only to have his eyes drawn to a different configuration of tree. His surroundings inhabited him, possessed him, until he was moved by all things at once—the creak of limbs, the endless permutations of water over stones. These things wracked him with the strength of tides.

On the afternoon of the seventeenth day, a twig lodged itself between his sandal and his foot. He held it against storm-piled clouds and studied it, became lost in its shape, in the path it travelled through the open air—the thin, muscular branchings that seized so much emptiness from the sky. Had it simply fallen into this shape, or had it been cast, a mould drained of its wax? He looked up and saw one sky plied by the infinite forking of branches. Was there not one way to grasp one sky? He was unaware of how long he stood there, but it was dark before the twig slipped from his fingers.

On the morning of the twenty-ninth day, he crouched on rocks green with moss and watched salmon leap and pitch against a rushing river. The sun rose and set three times before his thoughts escaped this inexplicable war of fish and waters.

In the worst moments his arms would be vague as shadow against shadow, and the rhythm of his walk would climb far ahead of him. His mission became the last remnant of what he had once been. Otherwise he was devoid of intellect, oblivious to the principles of the Dûnyain. Like a sheet of parchment exposed to the elements, each day saw more words stolen from him—until only one imperative remained: Shimeh . . . I must find my father in Shimeh.

He continued wandering south, through the foothills of the Demua. His dispossession deepened, until he no longer oiled his sword after being wetted by the rain, until he no longer slept or ate. There was only wilderness, the walk, and the passing days. At night he would take animal comfort in the dark and cold.

Shimeh. Please, Father.

On the forty-third day, he waded across a shallow river and clambered onto banks black with ash. Weeds crowded the char blanketing the ground, but nothing else. Like blackened spears, dead trees spiked the sky. He picked his way through the debris, stung by weeds where they brushed his bare skin. Finally he gained the summit of a ridge.

The immensity of the valley below struck Kellhus breathless. Beyond the fire’s desolation, where the forest was still dark and crowded, ancient fortifications loomed above the trees, forming a great ring across the autumnal distances. He watched birds wheel over and around the nearer ramparts, flash across stretches of mottled stone before dipping into the canopy. Ruined walls. So cold, and so forlorn, in a way the forest could never be.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

The ruins were far too old to contradict the forest outright. They had been submerged, worn and unbalanced by ages of its weight. Sheltered in mossy hollows, walls breached earthen mounds, only to suddenly end, as though restrained by vines that wrapped them like great veins over bone.

But there was something in them, something not now, that bent Kellhus toward unfamiliar passions. When he brushed his hands across the stone, he knew he touched the breath and toil of Men—the mark of a destroyed people.

The ground wheeled. He leaned forward and pressed his cheek against the stone. Grit, and the cold of uncovered earth. Above, the sunlight was broken by a span of knotted branches. Men . . . here in the stone. Old and untouched by the rigor of the Dûnyain. Somehow they had resisted the sleep, had raised the work of hands against the wilderness.

Who built this place?

Kellhus wandered over the mounds, sensing the ruins buried beneath. He ate sparingly from his forgotten satchel—dried wafers and acorns. He peeled leaves from the surface of a small pool of rainwater, drank, then stared curiously at the dark reflection of his own face, at the growth of blond hair across his scalp and jaw.

Is this me?

He studied squirrels and those birds he could pick from the dim confusion of the trees. Once he glimpsed a fox slipping through the brush.

I am not one more animal.

His intellect flailed, found purchase, and grasped. He could sense wild cause sweep around him in statistical tides. Touch him and leave him untouched.

I am a man. I stand apart from these things.

As evening waxed, it began to rain. Through branches he watched the clouds build chill and grey. For the first time in weeks, he sought shelter.

He picked his way into a small gully where erosion had caused a sheaf of earth to fall away, revealing the stone facade of some structure. He climbed over the leafy clay into an opening, dark and deep. Inside he broke the neck of the wild dog that attacked him.

He was familiar with darkness. Light had been forbidden in the depths of the Labyrinth. But there was no mathematical insight in the cramped blackness he found, only a random jumble of earth-pinched walls. Anasûrimbor Kellhus stretched out and slept.

When he awoke the forest was quiet with snow.

The Dûnyain had no real knowledge of just how far Shimeh lay. They had merely provided him with as many provisions as he could efficiently carry. His satchel grew flimsier with the days. Kellhus could only passively observe as hunger and exposure wracked his body.

If the wilderness could not possess him, it would kill him.

His food ran out, and he continued to walk. Everything—experience, analysis—became mysteriously sharp. More snow came, and cold, harsh winds. He walked until he could no longer.

The way is too narrow, Father. Shimeh is too far.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

The trapper’s sled dogs yelped and nosed through the snow. He pulled them away and fastened their harness to the base of a stunted pine. Astonished, he brushed the snow away from the limbs curling beneath. His first thought was to feed the dead man to his dogs. The wolves would have him otherwise, and meat was scarce in the abandoned north.

He removed his mittens and placed his fingertips against the bearded cheek. The skin was grey, and he was certain the face would be as cold as the snow that half buried it. It was not. He cried out, and his dogs responded with a chorus of howls. He cursed, then countered with the sign of Husyelt, the Dark Hunter. The limbs were slack when he lifted the man from the snow. His wool and hair were stiff in the wind.

The world had always been strange with significance to the trapper, but now it had become terrifying. Running as the dogs pulled the sled, he fled before the wrath of the encroaching blizzard.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

“Leweth,” the man had said, placing a hand to his naked chest. His cropped hair was silver with a hint of bronze and far too fine to adequately frame his thick features. His eyebrows seemed perpetually arched in surprise, and his restless eyes were given to excuses, always feigning interest in trivial details to avoid his ward’s watchful gaze.

Only later, after learning the rudiments of Leweth’s language, did Kellhus discover how he’d come to be in the trapper’s care. His first memories were of sweaty furs and smouldering fires. Animal pelts hung in sheaves from a low ceiling. Sacks and casks heaped the corners of a single room. The smell of smoke, grease, and rot crowded what little open space remained. As Kellhus would later learn, the chaotic interior of the cabin was actually an expression, and a painstaking one at that, of the trapper’s many superstitious fears. Each thing had its place, he would tell Kellhus, and those things out of place portended disaster.

The hearth was large enough to hug all the interior, including Kellhus himself, in golden warmth. Beyond the walls, winter whistled through trackless leagues of forest, ignoring them for the most part, but periodically shaking the cabin hard enough to rock the furs on their hooks. The land was called Sobel, Leweth would tell him, the northernmost province of the ancient city of Atrithau—although it had been abandoned for generations. He preferred, he would say, to live far from the troubles of other men.

Though Leweth was a sturdy man of middle years, for Kellhus he was little more than a child. The fine musculature of his face was utterly untrained, bound as though by strings to his passions. Whatever moved Leweth’s soul moved his expression as well, and after a short time Kellhus needed only to glance at his face to know his thoughts. The ability to anticipate his thoughts, to re-enact the movements of Leweth’s soul as though they were his own, would come later.

In the meantime a routine developed. At dawn Leweth harnessed his dogs and left to check his runs. On the days he returned early, he enlisted Kellhus to mend snares, prepare skins, draw up a new pot of cony stew—to “earn his keep,” as he put it. At night Kellhus worked, as the trapper had taught him, on stitching his own coat and leggings. Leweth would watch from across the fire, his hands living an arcane life of their own, carving, stitching, or simply straining against each other—small labours that paradoxically gifted him with patience, even grace.

Kellhus saw Leweth’s hands at rest only when he slept or was extraordinarily drunk. Drink, more than anything else, defined the trapper.

Through the morning, Leweth never looked Kellhus in the eye, acknowledging him only at nervous angles. A curious halfness deadened the man, as though his thought lacked the momentum to become speech. If he spoke at all, his voice was tight, constricted by an ambient dread. By afternoon, a flush would have crept into his expression. His eyes would flare with brittle sunshine. He would smile, laugh. But by dark, his manner would be bloated, a distorted parody of what it had been just hours earlier. He would bludgeon his way through conversation, would be overcome by squalls of rage and bitter humour.

Kellhus learned much from Leweth’s drink-exaggerated passions, but the time came when he could no longer allow his study to trade in caricatures. One night he rolled the casks of whisky out into the forest and drained them across the frozen ground. During the suffering that followed, he carried on with the chores.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

They sat facing each other across the hearth, their backs against cozy heaps of animal pelts. His expression etched by firelight, Leweth talked, animated by the honest vanity of sharing his life with someone who was captive to the facts as he described them. Old pains returned in the telling.

“I had no choice but to leave Atrithau,” Leweth admitted, speaking yet again of his dead wife.

Kellhus smiled sorrowfully. He gauged the subtle interplay of muscles beneath the man’s expression. He pretends to mourn in order to secure my pity.

“Atrithau reminded you of her absence?” This is the lie he tells himself.

Leweth nodded, his eyes at once tear-filled and expectant. “Atrithau seemed a tomb after she died. One morning they called the muster for the militia to man the walls, and I remember staring off to the north. The forests seemed to . . . beckon me somehow. The terror of my childhood had become a sanctuary! Everyone in the city, even my brothers and my compatriots in the district cohort, seemed to secretly exult in her death—in my misery! I had to . . . I was forced to . . .”

Avenge yourself.

Leweth looked down to the fire. “Flee,” he said.

Why does he deceive himself in this way?

“No soul moves alone through the world, Leweth. Our every thought stems from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of words spoken before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another soul to carry our own.” He paused, cutting short his reply in order to bewilder the man. Insight struck with so much more force when it clarified confusion. “This is truly why you fled to Sobel, Leweth.”

For an instant Leweth’s eyes slackened in horror. “But I don’t understand . . .”

Of everything I might say, he fears most the truths he already knows and yet denies. Are all world-born men this weak?

“But you do understand. Think, Leweth. If we’re nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us. Who you once were, Leweth, ceased to exist the moment your wife died.”

“And that’s why I fled!” Leweth cried, his eyes both beseeching and provoked. “I couldn’t bear it. I fled to forget!”

Flare in his pulse rate. Hesitation in the flex of delicate muscles about his eyes. He knows this is a lie.

“No, Leweth. You fled to remember. You fled to conserve all the ways your wife had moved you, to shield the ache of her loss from the momentum of others. You fled to make a bulwark of your misery.”

Tears spilled across the trapper’s sagging cheeks. “Ah, cruel words, Kellhus! Why would you say such things?”

To better possess you.

“Because you’ve suffered long enough. You’ve spent years alone by this fire, wallowing in your loss, asking your dogs over and over whether they love you. You hoard your pain because the more you suffer, the more the world becomes an outrage. You weep because weeping has become evidence. ‘See what you’ve done to me!’ you cry. And you hold court night after night, condemning the circumstances that have condemned you by reliving your anguish. You torment yourself, Leweth, in order to hold the world accountable for your torment.”

Again he’ll deny me—

“And what if I do? The world is an outrage, Kellhus. An outrage!”

“Perhaps it is,” Kellhus replied, his tone one of pity and regret, “but the world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish. How many times have you cried out these very words? And each time they’ve been cramped by the same desperation, the desperation of one who needs to believe something he knows to be false. Only pause, Leweth, refuse to follow the grooves these thoughts have worn into you. Pause, and you’ll see.”

His thoughts forced inward, Leweth hesitated, his face stunned and slack.

He understands but lacks the courage to admit.

“Ask yourself,” Kellhus pressed, “why this desperation?”

“There’s no desperation,” Leweth replied numbly.

He sees the place I’ve opened for him, realizes the futility of all lies in my presence, even those he tells himself.

“Why do you continue to lie?”

“Because . . . because . . .”

Through the wheeze of the fire, Kellhus could hear the pounding of Leweth’s heart, fevered like that of a trapped animal. Sobs shuddered through the man. He raised his hands to bury his face but then paused. He looked up to Kellhus and wept the way a child might before his mother. It hurts! his expression cried. It hurts so much!

“I know it hurts, Leweth. Release from anguish can be purchased only through more anguish.” So much like a child . . .

“W-what should I do?” the trapper wept. “Kellhus . . . Please tell me!”

Thirty years, Father. What power you must wield over men such as this.

And Kellhus, his bearded face warm with firelight and compassion, answered: “No one’s soul moves alone, Leweth. When one love dies, one must learn to love another.”

———«»——————«»——————«»———

After a time the hearth fire burned low, and the two of them sat silently, listening to the gathering fury of yet another storm. The wind sounded like mighty blankets flapping against the walls. Outside the forest groaned and whistled beneath the dark belly of the blizzard.

“Weeping may muddy the face,” Leweth said, broaching their silence with an old proverb, “but it does cleanse the heart.”

Kellhus smiled in reply, his expression one of bemused recognition. Why, the ancient Dûnyain had asked, confine the passions to words when they spoke first in expression? A legion of faces lived within him, and he could slip through them with the same ease with which he crafted his words. At the heart of his jubilant smile, his compassionate laugh, flexed the cold of scrutiny.

“But you distrust it,” Kellhus said.

Leweth shrugged. “Why, Kellhus? Why would the Gods send you to me?”

For Leweth, Kellhus knew, the world was fraught with gods, ghosts, even demons. It was steeped in their conspiracies, crowded with omens and portents of their capricious humours. Like a second horizon, their designs encompassed the struggles of men—shrouded, cruel, and in the end, always fatal.

For Leweth, discovering him beneath the snowdrifts of Sobel was no accident.

“You wish to know why I’ve come?”

“Why have you come?”

So far Kellhus had avoided any talk of his mission, and Leweth, terrified by the speed with which he had recovered and learned his language, had not asked. But the study had progressed.

“I search for my father, Moënghus,” Kellhus said. “Anasûrimbor Moënghus.”

“Is he lost?” Leweth asked, gratified beyond measure by this admission.

“No. He left my people long ago, while I was still a child.”

“Then why do you search for him?”

“Because he sent for me. He asked that I journey to see him.”

Leweth nodded, as though all sons must return to their fathers at some point. “Where is he?”

Kellhus paused for a heartbeat, his eyes apparently fixed upon Leweth, but actually focused on an empty point before him. As a cold man might curl into a ball, gather as much skin as possible into his arms and away from the world, Kellhus withdrew his surfaces from the room and sheltered within his intellect, unmoved by the press of outer events. The legions within were yoked, the variables isolated and extended, and the welter of possible consequences that might follow upon a truthful answer to Leweth’s question bloomed through his soul. The probability trance.

He rose, blinked against the firelight. As with so many questions regarding his mission, the answer was incalculable.

“Shimeh,” Kellhus said at length. “A city far to the south called Shimeh.”

“He sent for you from Shimeh? But how’s that possible?”

Kellhus adopted a faintly bewildered look that was not far from true. “Through dreams. He sent for me through dreams.”

“Sorcery . . .”

Always the curious intermingling of awe and dread when Leweth uttered this word. There were witches, Leweth had told him, whose urgings could harness the wild agencies asleep in earth, animal, and tree. There were priests whose pleas could sound the Outside, move the Gods who moved the world to give men respite. And there were sorcerers whose assertions were decrees, whose words dictated rather than described how the world had to be.

Superstition. Everywhere and in everything, Leweth had confused that which came after with that which came before, confused the effect for the cause. Men came after, so he placed them before and called them “gods” or “demons.” Words came after, so he placed them before and called them “scriptures” or “incantations.” Confined to the aftermath of events and blind to the causes that preceded him, he merely fastened upon the ruin itself, men and the acts of men, as the model of what came before.

But what came before, the Dûnyain had learned, was inhuman.

There must be some other explanation. There is no sorcery.

“What do you know of Shimeh?” Kellhus asked.

The walls shivered beneath a fierce succession of gusts, and the flame twirled with abrupt incandescence. The hanging pelts lightly rocked to and fro. Leweth looked about, his brow furrowed, as though he strained to hear someone.

“It’s a long way off, Kellhus, through dangerous lands.”

“Shimeh is not . . . holy for you?”

Leweth smiled. Like places too near, places too far could never be holy. “I’ve heard the name only a few times before,” he said. “The Sranc own the North. The few Men who remain are endlessly besieged, bound to the cities of Atrithau and Sakarpus. We know little of the Three Seas.”

“The Three Seas?”

“The nations of the South,” Leweth replied, his eyes rounded in wonder. He found his ignorance, Kellhus knew, godlike. “You mean you’ve never heard of the Three Seas?”

“As isolated as your people are, mine are far more so.”

Leweth nodded sagely. Finally, it was his turn to speak of profound things. “The Three Seas were young when the North was destroyed by the No-God and his Consult. Now that we’re but a shadow, they’re the seat of power for Men.” He paused, disheartened by how quickly his knowledge had failed him. “I know little more than that—save a handful of names.”

“Then how did you learn of Shimeh?”

“I once sold ermine to a man from the caravans. A dark-skinned man. A Ketyai. Never saw a dark-skinned man before.”

“Caravans?” Kellhus had never heard the word before, but he spoke it as though he wanted to know which caravan the trapper referred to.

“Every year a caravan from the south arrives in Atrithau—if it survives the Sranc, that is. It travels from a land called Galeoth by way of Sakarpus, bringing spices, silks—wondrous things, Kellhus! Have you ever tasted pepper?”

“What did this dark-skinned man tell you of Shimeh?”

“Not much, really. He spoke mostly about his religion. Said he was Inrithi, a follower of the Latter Prophet, Inri”—his brows knotted for a moment—“something or another. Can you imagine? A latter prophet?” Leweth paused, eyes unfocused, struggling to render the episode in words. “He kept saying that I was damned unless I submit to his prophet and open my heart to the Thousand Temples—I’ll never forget that name.”

“So Shimeh was holy to this man?”

“The holiest of holies. It was the city of his prophet long ago. But there was some kind of problem, I think. Something about wars and about heathens having taken it from the Inrithi—” Leweth halted, as though struck by something of peculiar significance. “In the Three Seas Men war with Men, Kellhus, and care nothing for the Sranc. Can you imagine?”

“So Shimeh is a holy city in the hands of a heathen people?”

“All for the best, I think,” Leweth replied, abruptly bitter. “The dog kept calling me a heathen as well.”

They continued talking of distant lands far into the night. The wind howled and battered the sturdy walls of their cabin. And in the gloom of a faltering fire, Anasûrimbor Kellhus slowly drew Leweth into his own descending rhythms—slower breath, drowsy eyes. When the trapper was fully entranced, he peeled away his last secrets, hunted him until no refuge remained.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

Alone, Kellhus snow-shoed through frigid stands of spruce and toward the nearest of the heights that surrounded the trapper’s cabin. Snowdrifts scrawled around the dark trunks. The air smelled of winter silence.

Kellhus had refashioned himself over the past several weeks. The forest was no longer the stupefying cacophony it had once been. Sobel was a land of winter caribou, sable, beaver, and marten. Amber slumbered in her ground. Bare stone lay clean beneath her sky, and her lakes were silver with fish. There was nothing more, nothing worthy of awe or dread.

Before him, the snow fell away from a shallow cliff. Kellhus stared up, searching for the path that would see the heights yield to him most readily. He climbed.

Except for a few stunted and leafless hawthorns, the summit was clear. At its centre stood an ancient stele—a stone shaft leaning against the distance. Runes and small graven figures pitted all four sides. What drew Kellhus here, time and again, was not merely the language of the graven text—aside from the idiom, it was indistinguishable from his own—but the name of its author.

It began,

And I, Anasûrimbor Celmomas II, look from this place and witness the glory worked by my hand . . .

and continued to catalogue a great battle between long-dead kings. According to Leweth, this land had once been the frontier of two nations: Kûniüri and Eämnor, both lost millennia ago in mythical wars against what Leweth called “the No-God.” As with many of Leweth’s stories, Kellhus dismissed his tales of the Apocalypse outright. But the name Anasûrimbor engraved in ancient diorite was something he could not dismiss. The world, he now understood, was far older than the Dûnyain. And if his bloodline extended as far as this dead High King, then so was he.

But such thoughts were irrelevant to his mission. His study of Leweth was drawing to conclusion. Soon he would have to continue south to Atrithau, where Leweth had insisted he could secure further means of travelling to Shimeh.

From the heights, Kellhus looked south across the winter forests. Ishuäl lay somewhere behind him, hidden in the glacial mountains. Before him lay a pilgrimage through a world of men bound by arbitrary custom, by the endless repetition of tribal lies. He would come to them as one awake. He would shelter in the hollows of their ignorance, and through truth he would make them his instruments. He was Dûnyain, one of the Conditioned, and he would possess all peoples, all circumstances. He would come before.

But another Dûnyain awaited him, one who had studied the wilderness far longer: Moënghus.

How great is your power, Father?

Turning from the panorama, he noticed something odd. On the far side of the stele he saw tracks in the snow. He studied them momentarily before resolving to ask the trapper about them. Their author had walked upright but had not been quite human.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

“They look like this,” Kellhus said. With a bare finger he quickly pressed a replica of the track in the snow.

Leweth watched him, his manner stern. Kellhus needed only to glance at him to see the horror he tried to hide. In the background, the dogs yelped, trotted circles at the ends of their leather leashes.

“Where?” Leweth asked, staring intently at the strange track.

“The old Kûniüric stele. They move at a tangent to the cabin, to the northwest.”

The bearded face turned to him. “And you don’t know what these tracks are?”

The significance of the question was plain. You’re from the north, and you don’t know these? Then Kellhus understood.

“Sranc,” he said.

The trapper looked beyond him, sifting through the surrounding wall of trees. The monk registered the flutter in the man’s bowels, his quickening heartbeat and the litany of his thoughts, too quick to be a question: What-do-we-do-what-do-we-do . . .

“We should follow the tracks,” Kellhus said. “Make sure they don’t cross your runs. If they do . . .”

“It’s been a hard winter for them,” Leweth said. He needed to wring some significance from his terror. “They’ve come south for food . . . They hunt food. Yes, food.”

“And if not?”

Leweth glanced at him, eyes wild. “For Sranc, Men are a sustenance of a different sort. They hunt us to calm the madness of their hearts.” He stepped among his dogs, was distracted by their accumulation around his legs. “Quiet, shh, quiet.” He slapped their ribs, pressed their chins to the snow by vigorously rubbing the backs of their heads. His arms swung wide and randomly, dispensing his affection among them equally.

“Could you bring me the muzzles, Kellhus?”

———«»——————«»——————«»———

The trail was thin and grey through the drifts. The sky darkened. Winter evenings brought a strange hush to the interior of the forest, the sense that something greater than daylight was drawing to conclusion. They had run far in their snowshoes, and now they stopped.

They stood beneath the desolate limbs of an oak.

“We shouldn’t return,” Kellhus said.

“But we can’t leave the dogs.”

The monk watched Leweth for several breaths. Their exhalations fell on hard air. He could easily dissuade the trapper, he knew, from returning for anything. Whatever it was they followed knew of the runs, and perhaps even of the cabin itself. But tracks in the snow—empty marks—were far too little for him to use. For Kellhus the threat existed only in the fear manifested by the trapper. The forest was still his.

Kellhus turned and together they made for the cabin, running with the shambling grace of snowshoes. But after a short distance, Kellhus halted the man with a firm hand on his shoulder.

“What—” the trapper began to ask, but he was silenced by the sounds.

A chorus of muffled howls and shrieks perforated the quiet. A single yelp pierced the hollows, followed by dread, wintry silence.

Leweth stood as still as the dark trees. “Why, Kellhus?” His voice cracked.

“There’s no time for why. We must flee.”

———«»——————«»——————«»———

Kellhus sat in ashen gloom, watching the dawn’s rosy fingers poke through thickets of branch and dark pine. Leweth still slept.

We’ve run hard, Father, but have we run hard enough?

He saw something. A movement quickly obscured by the forest depths.

“Leweth,” he said.

The trapper stirred. “What?” the man said, coughing. “It’s still dark.”

Another figure. Farther to the left. Closing.

Kellhus remained still, his eyes lost in explorations of the wooded recesses. “They come,” he said.

Leweth bent forward from his frozen blankets. His face was ashen. Bewildered, he followed Kellhus’s gaze into the surrounding gloom. “I see nothing.”

“They move with stealth.”

Leweth began shivering.

“Run,” Kellhus said.

Leweth stared at him in astonishment. “Run? The Sranc run down everything, Kellhus. You don’t flee them. They’re too fast!”

“I know,” Kellhus replied. “I’ll remain here. Slow them.”

———«»——————«»——————«»———

Leweth could only stare at him. He could not move. The trees thundered about him. The sky tugged with its emptiness. Then an arrow jutted through his shoulder and he fell to his knees, stared at the red tip protruding from his breast. “Kellllhuuss!” he gasped.

But Kellhus was gone. Leweth rolled in the snow, searching for him, found him sprinting through the near trees, a sword in his hand. The first of the Sranc was beheaded, and the monk moved, moved like a pale wraith through the drifts. Another died, its knife sketching uselessly through open air. The others closed upon Kellhus like leathery shadows.

“Kellhus!” Leweth cried, perhaps out of anguish, perhaps hoping to draw them away, toward one who was already dead. I would die for you.

But the forms fell, clutching themselves in the snow, and a weird, inhuman howl rifled through the trees. More fell, until only the tall monk was left.

Far away, the trapper thought he heard his dogs barking.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

Kellhus pulled him along. Points of snow winked in the rising sun as they crashed through the thickets. Leweth felt cramped around the agony in his shoulder, but the monk was relentless, yanked him to a pace he could scarcely have managed uninjured. They blundered through drifts, around trees, half-tumbled into ravines and clawed their way out again. The monk and his arms were always there, a thin rack of iron that propped him again and again.

He still thought he could hear dogs.

My dogs . . .

At last he was thrown against a tree. The tree behind him felt a pillar of stone, a prop to die against. He could scarcely distinguish Kellhus, his beard and hood clotted with ice, from the canopy of bare branches.

“Leweth,” Kellhus was saying, “you must think!”

Cruel words! They grasped him to clarity, thrust him against his anguish. “My dogs,” he sobbed. “I hear . . . them.”

The blue eyes acknowledged nothing.

“More Sranc come,” Kellhus said between laboured breaths. “We need shelter. A place to hide.”

Leweth rolled his head back, swallowed at the spike of pain in the back of his throat, tried to gather himself. “What . . . what direction have w-we c-come?”

“South. Always south.”

Leweth pushed himself from the tree, hugged the monk’s shoulders. He was seized by uncontrollable shivers. He coughed and peered through the trees. “How many st-streams”—he sucked air—“streams have we cr-crossed?”

He felt the heat of Kellhus’s breath.

“Five.”

“Wessst!” he gasped. He leaned back to look into the monk’s face, still clutching him. He did not feel shame. There was no shame with this man. “W-we must g-go west,” he continued, putting his forehead to the monk’s lips. “Ruins. Ruins. N-Nonmen ruins. Many places to h-h-hide.” He groaned. The world wheeled. “You c-can see it a sh-short distance fr-from here.”

Leweth felt snowy ground slam into his body. Stunned, all he could do was curl into his knees. Through the trees he saw Kellhus’s figure, distorted by tears, recede amidst the trees.

He sobbed. “Kellhus? Kelllhuuss!” What’s happening? “Nooo!” he shrieked. The tall figure vanished.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

The slope was treacherous. Kellhus hauled himself up by grasping limbs and securing his step in the deadfalls beneath the snow. The conifers begrudged any clear path across the pitched ground. Radial scaffolds of branches tore at him. A gloom unlike the pale of winter thatched his surroundings.

When he at last climbed free of the forest, the monk scowled at the sky and found himself stilled by the vista above him. Snow-covered, the ground rose with the hungry contours of a dog. The ruins of a gate and a wall towered over the nearer slopes. Beyond it, a dead oak of immense proportions bent against the sky.

Rain fell from dark clouds scrolling over the summit, froze against his coats.

Kellhus was astonished by the great stones of the gate. Many had a girth as huge as the oak they obscured. An uplifted face had been hewn from the lintel—blank eyes, as patient as sky. He passed beneath. The ground levelled somewhat. Behind him, the expanses of forest grew dim in the gathering rain. But the noise grew louder.

The tree had been long dead. Its colossal tendons were husked of their bark, and its limbs extended into the air like winding tusks. Stripped of its detail, the wind and rain sluiced through it with ease.

He turned as the Sranc broke from the bush, howling as they loped across the snow.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

So clear, this place. Arrows hissed by him. He picked one from the air and studied it. Warm, as though it had been pressed against skin. Then his sword was in his hand, and it glittered through the space around him, seizing it like the branches of a tree. They came—a dark rush—and he was there before them, poised in the one moment they could not foresee. A calligraphy of cries. The thud of astonished flesh. He speared the ecstasy from their inhuman faces, stepped among them and snuffed out their beating hearts.

They could not see that circumstance was holy. They only hungered. He, on the other hand, was one of the Conditioned, Dûnyain, and all events yielded to him.

They fell back, and the howling subsided. They thronged for a moment around him—narrow shoulders and dog-shaped chests, stinking leather and necklaces of human teeth. He stood patient before their menace. Tranquil.

They fled.

He bent to one that still squirmed at his feet, lifting it by its throat. The beautiful face contorted with fury.

“Kuz’inirishka dazu daka gurankas . . .”

It spat at him. He nailed it to the tree with his sword. He stepped back. It shrieked, flailed.

What are these creatures?

A horse snorted behind him, stamped at the snow and ice. Kellhus retrieved his sword and whirled.

Through the sleet, the horse and rider were mere grey shapes. Kellhus watched their slow approach, standing his ground, his shaggy hair frozen into little tusks that clicked in the wind. The horse was large, some eighteen hands, and black. Its rider was draped in a long grey cloak stitched with faint patterns—abstracts of faces. He wore an uncrested helm that obscured his countenance. A powerful voice rang out, in Kûniüric:

“I can see that you’re not to be killed.”

Kellhus was silent. Watchful. The sound of rain like blowing sand.

The figure dismounted but maintained a wary distance. He studied the inert forms sprawled around them.

“Extraordinary,” the stranger said, then looked to him. Kellhus could see the glitter of his eyes beneath the brow of his helm. “You must be a name.”

“Anasûrimbor Kellhus,” the monk replied.

Silence. Kellhus thought he could sense confusion, strange confusion.

“It speaks the language,” the man muttered at length. He stepped closer, peering at Kellhus. “Yes,” he said. “Yes . . . You do not merely mock me. I can see his blood in your face.”

Kellhus again was silent.

“You have the patience of an Anasûrimbor as well.”

Kellhus studied him, noting that his cloak was not stitched with stylized representations of faces but with actual faces, their features distorted by being stretched flat. Beneath the cloak, the man was powerfully built, heavily armoured, and from the way he comported himself, entirely unafraid.

“I see that you are a student. Knowledge is power, eh?”

This one was not like Leweth. Not at all.

Still the sound of sleet, patiently drawing the dead into the cold snow.

“Should you not fear me, mortal, knowing what I am? Fear too is power. The power to survive.” The figure began to circle him, carefully stepping between Sranc limbs. “This is what separates your kind from mine. Fear. The clawing, grubbing, impulse to survive. For us life is always a . . . decision. For you . . . Well, let us just say it decides.”

At last, Kellhus spoke. “The decision, then, would seem to be yours.”

The figure paused. “Ah, mockery,” he said sorrowfully. “That is one thing we share.”

Kellhus’s provocation had been deliberate but had yielded little—or so it seemed at first. The stranger abruptly lowered his obscured face, rolled his head back and forth on the pivot of his chin, muttering, “It baits me! The mortal baits me . . . It reminds me, reminds . . .” He began fumbling with his cloak, seized upon a misshapen face. “Of this one! Oh, impertinent—what a joy this one was! Yes, I remember . . .” He looked up at Kellhus and hissed, “I remember!”

And Kellhus grasped the first principles of this encounter. A Nonman. Another of Leweth’s myths come true.

With solemn deliberation the figure drew his broadsword. It shined unnaturally in the gloom, as though reflecting some otherworldly sun. But he turned to one of the dead Sranc, rolled it onto its back with the flat of the blade. Its white skin was beginning to darken.

“This Sranc here—you could not pronounce its name—was our elju . . . our ‘book,’ you would say in your tongue. A most devoted animal. I’ll be wrecked without it—for a time, anyway.” He surveyed the other dead. “Nasty, vicious creatures, really.” He looked back up to Kellhus. “But most . . . memorable.”

An opening. Kellhus would explore. He said: “So reduced. You’ve become so pitiful.”

“You pity me? A dog dares pity?” The Nonman laughed harshly. “The Anasûrimbor pities me! And so he should . . . Ka’cûnuroi souk ki’elju, souk hus’jihla.” He spat, then gestured with his sword to the surrounding dead. “These . . . these Sranc are our children now. But before! Before, you were our children. Our heart had been cut out and so we cradled yours. Companions to the ‘great’ Norsirai kings.”

The Nonman stepped nearer.

“But no longer,” he continued. “As the ages waxed, some of us needed more than your childish squabbles to remember. Some of us needed a more exquisite brutality than any of your feuds could render. The great curse of our kind—do you know it? Of course you know it! What slave fails to exult in his master’s degradation, hmm?”

The wind wrapped his hoary cloak about him. He took another step.

“But I make excuses like a Man. Loss is written into the very earth. We are only its most dramatic reminder.”

The Nonman had raised the point of his sword to Kellhus, who had fallen into stance, his own curved sword poised above his head.

Again silence, deadly this time.

“I am a warrior of ages, Anasûrimbor . . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury.”

“Then why,” Kellhus asked, “raise arms now, against a lone man?”

Laughter. The free hand gestured to the dead Sranc. “A pittance, I agree, but still you would be memorable.”

Kellhus struck first, but his blade recoiled from the mail beneath the Nonman’s cloak. He crouched, deflected the powerful counterstroke, swept the figure’s legs out from beneath him. The Nonman toppled backward but managed to roll effortlessly back to his feet. Laughter rang from the helmed face.

“Most memorable!” he cried, falling upon the monk.

And Kellhus felt himself pressed. A rain of mighty blows, forcing him back, away from the dead tree. The ring of Dûnyain steel and Nonman nimil pealed across the windswept heights. But Kellhus could sense the moment—although it was far, far thinner than it had been with the Sranc.

He climbed into that narrow instant, and the unearthly blade fell farther and farther from its mark, bit deeper into empty air. Then Kellhus’s own sword was scoring the dark figure, clipping and prodding the armour, tattering the grim cloak. But he could draw no blood.

“What are you?” the Nonman cried in fury.

There was one space between them, but the crossings were infinite . . .

Kellhus opened the Nonman’s exposed chin. Blood, black in the gloom, spilled across his breast. A second stroke sent the uncanny blade skittering across snow and ice.

As Kellhus leapt, the Nonman scrambled backward, fell. The point of Kellhus’s sword, poised above the opening of his helm, stilled him.

In the freezing rain, the monk breathed evenly, staring down at the fallen figure. Several instants passed. Now the interrogation could begin.

“You will answer my questions,” Kellhus instructed, his tone devoid of passion.

The Nonman laughed darkly.

“But it is you, Anasûrimbor, who are the question.”

And then came the word, the word that, on hearing, wrenched the intellect somehow.

A furious incandescence. Like a petal blown from a palm, Kellhus was thrown backward. He rolled through the snow and, stunned, struggled to his feet. He watched numbly as the Nonman was drawn upright as though by a wire. Pale watery light formed a sphere around him. The ice rain sputtered and hissed against it. Behind him rose the great tree.

Sorcery? But how could it be?

Kellhus fled, sprinted over the dead structures breaking the snow. He slipped on ice and skidded over the far side of the heights, toppled through the wicked branches of trees. He recovered his feet and tore himself through the harsh underbrush. Something like a thunderclap shivered through the air, and great, blinding fires rifled through the spruces behind him. The heat washed over him, and he ran harder, until the slopes were leaps and the dark forest a rush of confusion.

“ANASÛRIMBOR!” an unearthly voice called, cracking the winter silence.

“RUN, ANASÛRIMBOR!” it boomed. “I WILL REMEMBER.”

Laughter, like a storm, and the forest behind him was harrowed by more fierce lights. They fractured the surrounding gloom, and Kellhus could see his own fleeing shadow flickering before him.

The cold air wracked his lungs, but he ran—far harder than the Sranc had made him run.

Sorcery? Is this among the lessons I’m to learn, Father?

Cold night fell. Somewhere in the dark, wolves howled. Shimeh, they seemed to say, was too far.