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

by R. Scott Bakker

Through the wash, he could hear the supplicants wail. Arched into shapes of pain and sorrow, their song rang across the wet stone and cupped his thoughts in stretched notes. Hymns of suffering. Two voices: one pitched high and plaintive, asking why we must suffer, always why; the other low, filled with the brooding grandeur of the Thousand Temples and bearing the gravity of truth—that Men were at one with suffering and ruin, that tears were the only holy waters.

Compare to gnostic cants, sung in the literal and held in the conceptual realm

He lowered his head, rubbed the back of his neck, rehearsing the litany of self-recriminations that always consummated such shameful thoughts. In his soul’s eye, he saw his father, Skiötha, his face blackening as he suffocated in the muck. When he looked up, his thoughts were as vacant as his expression. Conphas. Ikurei Conphas was the focus of what was about to unfold, not Cnaiür urs Skiötha.

First reread: this is an organic approach to Conditioning. First, the chant, then the reduction, then oblivion, then locus

Another officer rushed him, a young noble with the motif of House Biaxi across his shield. Cnaiür could see the terror in his eyes, the realization

A note later in the book tells us Biaxi are the ancestral rivals of the Ikurei. Whoops, looks like whoever planned this battleground stuck the Biaxi squires in the way of where the Utemot charge would be. I'm sure Conphas didn't mean anything by it.

His uncle was like those uncommon drunks who slurred and staggered day after day yet became lethally alert when confronted by danger.

Surprisingly reinforces from a second perspective the emperor's belief in his ability to detect danger. We may otherwise have assumed this to be an unreliable narrator, a drunk believing himself more sober than apparent, a blind spot in paranoia.

Tremors spilled into Xerius’s hands. He clasped them together. Attempted to gather his thoughts. Looked away from their wolfish faces. All those years ago! Fumbling with a small black vial the size of a child’s finger, pouring the poison into his father’s ear. His father! And his mother’s . . . no, Istriya’s voice thundering in his thoughts: The dynasty, Xerius! The dynasty!

Again, the hands are Xerius's tic. The ear poison calls King Hamlet's death at Claudius's hands to mind; is a son to revenge his ancestor on an uncle soon?

divine. Skeaös alone has submitted . . . ’ And all the while he dripped poison in my ear. Whetted my appetite with his tongue.

Figure of speech and callback to Xerius' own patricide

The official criteria for such rank were clear, more or less—nearness to the Emperor, which was easily measured by the hierarchy of stations within his labyrinthine ministries, or, at the opposite pole, affiliation with House Biaxi, the traditional rival of House Ikurei.

At Kiyuth, the Biaxi squires are placed to receive the Utemot charge - Cnaiur mentally marks a device worn by a young challenger.