The Darkness That Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing, #1)

by R. Scott Bakker

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.”

What comes before determines what comes after.

“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.”

“No one’s soul moves alone, Leweth. When one love dies, one must learn to love another.”

But slaves, Achamian supposed, had good reason to conceal their intelligence. A wise slave was something to be prized perhaps, like the slave-scholars of the old Ceneian Empire. A cunning slave, however, was something to be feared, to be eliminated.

There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.

Now he understood the urgency of his summons. Above all the mighty detest change.

Our task is so great, he thought, and our tools so frail.

“You’re worried about the other thing, then. If there’s one lesson we’ve learned from the Consult, old friend, it’s that ignorance is a potent tool.” “As is knowledge. Would we deny him the tools he needs? What if he’s careless? Men often grow careless in the absence of any real threat.”

“But it’s never quite so simple, is it now, old friend? It’s the concert of knowledge and ignorance that underwrites our decisions.

People who repeated questions, Achamian knew, feared answering them.

To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?

When a man failed to weed his garden, did he not grow weeds?

“God has a thousand thousand faces,” Sejenus had said, “but men only one heart.”

The difference between the strong emperor and the weak is simply this: the former makes the world his arena, while the latter makes it his harem.

When two civilized peoples find themselves at war for centuries, any number of common interests will arise in the midst of their greater antagonism. Ancestral foes share many things: mutual respect, a common history, triumph in stalemate, and a plethora of unspoken truces.

“I speak only of what truth demands, Lord Palatine. If truth serves my ends, then it’s because I serve the ends of truth.”

It is said: a man is born of his mother and is fed of his mother. Then he is fed of the land, and the land passes through him, taking and giving a pinch of dust each time, until man is no longer of his mother, but of the land.

Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.”

Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence. They are moments that rankle at becoming past, and so remain contemporaries of our beating hearts. Some events are not remembered—they are relived.

Skiötha gropes through this absurdity and finally laughs. Laughter makes small, and this outrage must be made small. Fury would acknowledge the depth of this contest, would make one a contestant. And yet the slave knows this.

“Give them spectacle,” she was fond of saying, “and they will give you power.”

When we truly apprehend the Gods, the Nilnameshi sages say, we recognize them not as kings but as thieves. This is among the wisest of blasphemies, for we always see the king who cheats us, never the thief.

The young can never see life for what it is: a knife’s edge, as thin as the breaths that measure it. What gives it depth isn’t memory. I’ve memories enough for ten men, and yet my days are as thin and as shadowy as the greased linen the poor stretch over their windows. No, what gives life depth is the future. Without a future, without a horizon of promise or threat, our lives have no meaning.

Of course it had never occurred to Proyas that this comparison might offend his old teacher. Like many arrogant men, Proyas thought his insults an extension of his honesty.

Like life, games were governed by rules. But unlike life, games were utterly defined by those rules. The rules were the game, and if one played by different rules, then one simply played a different game. Since a fixed framework of rules determined the meaning of every move as a move, games possessed a clarity that made life seem a drunken brawl by comparison. The proprieties were indubitable, the permutations secure; only the outcome was shrouded.

‘That I’ve forgotten how to learn. That life is the God’s lesson, and that even if we undertake to teach impious men, we must be ready to learn from them as well.’”

Great catastrophes were often wrought by such small things. The intolerance of a prince and the stupidity of an arrogant lord.

Reason, Ajencis writes, is the capacity to overcome unprecedented obstacles in the gratification of desire. What distinguishes man from beasts is man’s capacity to overcome infinite obstacles through reason. But Ajencis has confused the accidental for the essential. Prior to the capacity to overcome infinite obstacles is the capacity to confront them. What defines man is not that he reasons, but that he prays.

Politics, he thought sourly. It was not, as the philosopher Ajencis had written, the negotiation of advantage within communities of men; it was more an absurd auction than an exercise in oratory. One bartered principle and piety to accomplish what principle and piety demanded. One sullied himself in order to be cleansed.

A soul sold, it seemed, in order to be saved.

“Saying ‘I could have done more,’ Zin, is what marks a man as a man and not a God.”

But over the years he’d found that circumstances were unkind to elaborate plans, and that most everything deteriorated into such rash acts anyway.

“Men are dogs. The only difference is they sniff asses with their eyes.”

Sheltered by his caste, Sarcellus had not, as the impoverished must, made fear the pivot of his passions. As a result he possessed an immovable self-assurance. He felt. He acted. He judged. The fear of being wrong that so characterized Achamian simply did not exist for Cutias Sarcellus. Where Achamian was ignorant of the answers, Sarcellus was ignorant of the questions. No certitude, she thought, could be greater.

Of course, she found many things about him intolerable. His dismissiveness. His capacity for cruelty. Despite his gallantry, he often spoke to her the way a herdsman would use his crook, continually correcting her when her thoughts strayed. But once she understood the origin of these tendencies, she began to see them more as traits belonging to his kind than as failings. What lions kill, she had thought, they do not murder. And what nobles take, they do not steal.

She found herself feeling something she could not describe—at least not at first. Something she had never felt before. And she felt it more in his arms than anywhere else. Days passed before she understood. She felt safe.

For a Dûnyain, even degradation was a potent tool—perhaps the most potent.

Violence between men fostered an unaccountable intimacy—Cnaiür had survived enough battlefields to understand that.

More capturing words. What young man does not chafe in the shadow of his elders? What young man does not harbour secret resentments, pompous hopes?

For some reason, this question thrilled Cnaiür. The words were so audacious he felt bold for simply hearing them, and so compelling he felt at once exhilarated and aghast, as though they had touched a place that ached to be touched all the more because it was forbidden.

“Where no paths exist,” Moënghus had continued, “a man strays only when he misses his destination. There is no crime, no transgression, no sin save foolishness or incompetence, and no obscenity save the tyranny of custom.

Habit was the peril here as much as the cunning of the man.

Even wolves needed plots to preserve them in a land of dogs.

There are no small things for this man. Every detail, every word, was a knife in the hands of this outlander.

When Cnaiür was silent, Kellhus continued, “You don’t believe me.” How could he? How could he believe one who never truly spoke but steered and manoeuvred, manoeuvred and steered, endlessly?

Only knowing the sources of thought and action allows us to own our thoughts and our actions, to throw off the yoke of circumstance.

How it would terrify them, world-born men, to see themselves through Dûnyain eyes. The delusions and the follies. The deformities.

The scrutiny begins, Cnaiür thought, but then he realized the scrutiny had begun long before, with his wives in the yaksh, and it had never ended. Measure is unceasing.

Even the hard-hearted avoid the heat of desperate men. For the bonfires of the weak crack the most stone.