In R Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse series, there’re these monks called the Dûnyain and these goblins called the Sranc.
Sranc
Sranc. Sranc had killed this man. He studied the barrows once again, searching the grasses.
The dead man was unmutilated. The Sranc had not finished.
Shortly, he found himself among the barrows…
Where he found the second dead man. This one had died facing his foe. A broken arrow protruded from the back of his left thigh. Wounded, forced to abandon the flight, then murdered in a manner common to the Sranc: gutted, then strangled with his own bowel. But aside from his gaping belly, Cnaiür could see no other wounds. He knelt and grabbed one of the corpse’s cold hands. He pinched the calluses. Too soft. Not raiders after all. At least not all of them. Who were these men? What outland fools—and from some city, no less—would risk the Sranc to travel to Scylvendi land?
Halfway to the summit, he came across the first of the Sranc bodies, its neck partially severed. It lay curled like a dog, still clutching its bone bow. From its position and the bruised grasses, Cnaiür knew it had been struck on the summit of the barrow, hard enough to very nearly roll to the bottom. He found the weapon that had killed it a short distance above. An iron axe, black, with a ring of human teeth set into a handle of leathered human skin. A Sranc killed by a Sranc weapon …
What had happened here?
Cnaiür suddenly found himself keenly aware that he crouched on the side of a barrow, in the midst of his dead forefathers.
Their scavenge matted the ground: the corpses of Sranc sprawled or huddled against one another, matting the circumference of the barrow, heaped in places, heads lolling from broken necks, faces nestled in the crotches of inert arms and legs. So many! Only the barrow’s apex was bald.
The last stand of a single man. An impossible stand.
The survivor sat cross-legged on the barrow summit, his forearms resting against his knees
No animal possesses senses as keen as those of vultures; within moments they began croaking in alarm, scooping the wind in great ragged wings. The survivor lifted his head, watching them take flight. Then, as though his senses were every bit as keen as a vulture’s, he turned to Cnaiür.
Yet with horror Cnaiür thought, I know this man …
He stood, walked toward the carnage, his limbs buoyant with disbelief. The figure regarded him impassively.
I know this man!
He picked his way through the dead Sranc, numbly realized that each of them had perished as a result of a single, unerring strike.
The pitch of the ground seemed far steeper than it was. The Sranc at his feet seemed to howl soundlessly, warning him, beseeching him, as though the horror of the man on the summit above was enough to transcend the abyss between their races.
“You are Dûnyain,” he said, his voice deep and cold.
The bright eyes regarded him, but there was absolutely nothing in the expression—no fear, no relief, neither recognition nor the lack of it.
The Abyss Between Their Races
They came, flickering across bands of sunlight and shadow. Running with rutting fury, howling with rutting fury, through the lashing undergrowth, into the tabernacle deep. They swarmed over pitched slopes, kicking up leaves and humus. They parted about the trunks, chopping at the bark with rust-pitted blades. They sniffed the sky with slender noses. When they grimaced, their blank and beautiful faces were clenched like crumpled silk, becoming the expressions of ancient and inbred men.
Sranc. Bearing shields of lacquered human leather. Wearing corselets scaled with human fingernails and necklaces of human teeth.
The distant horn sounded again, and they paused, a vicious milling rabble. Words were barked among them. A number melted into the undergrowth, loping with the swiftness of wolves. The others jerked at their groins in anticipation. Blood. They could smell mannish blood.
Seed jetted black across the forest floor. They stamped it into the muck. They exulted in the stink of it.
The scouts returned, and at their jabbering the others shuddered and convulsed. It had been so long since they had last glutted their rapacious hunger. So long since they knelt at the altar of jerking limbs and mewling flesh. They could see the panicked faces. They could see the gushing blood, the knife-made orifices.
They ran, weeping for joy.
“They come in winter, mostly, especially when the ground freezes too hard for them to scrounge the grubs that are their staple. Sometimes in single clans. Sometimes in shrieking hordes. The Towers of the Pale are strong for this reason, and the Horselords have become reavers beyond compare. But every year at least one Tower is overcome. At least one. The Men are slaughtered, mostly. But the women—and the children particularly—are taken for sport. Sometimes we find their severed heads nailed to doors and walls. Little girls. Little boys… Infants. We never find them whole. And their blood is always… thrust from them. Instead of crimson the dead are smeared black… black”—and his voice broke upon this word—”with… seed…”
Still Worse
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.
Pragma Meigon stared through young Kellhus’s face, saw his fear. “They’re harmless,” he said.
“What are they, Pragma?”
“Exemplary defectives … Specimens. We retain them for purposes of education.” The Pragma simulated a smile. “For students such as you, Kellhus.”
They stood deep beneath Ishuäl, in a hexagonal room within the mighty galleries of the Thousand Thousand Halls. Save for the entrance, staggered racks of knobbed and runnelled candles covered the surrounding walls, shedding a light without shadows and as bright and clear as the noonday sun’s. This alone made the room extraordinary—light was otherwise forbidden in the Labyrinth—but what made the room astonishing were the many men shackled in its sunken centre.
Each of them was naked, linen pale, and bound with greening copper straps to boards that leaned gently backward. The boards themselves had been arranged in a broad circle, with each man lying fixed within arm’s reach of his comrades and positioned at the edge of the floor’s central depression, so that a boy Kellhus’s height could stand at the lip of the surrounding floor and look the specimens directly in the face …
Had they possessed faces.
Their heads were drawn forward into open iron frames, where they were held motionless by bracketing bars. Behind their heads, wires had been fixed to the base of each frame. These swept forward in a radial fashion, ending in tiny silver hooks that anchored the obscuring skin. Slick muscle gleamed in the light. To Kellhus, it looked as though each man had thrust his head into a spider web that had peeled away his face.
Pragma Meigon had called it the Unmasking Room.
“To begin,” the old man said, “you’ll study and memorize each of their faces. Then you’ll reproduce what you’ve seen on parchment.” He nodded to a battery of worn scrivening tables along the southern walls.
His limbs as light as autumn leaves, Kellhus stepped forward. He heard the masticating of pasty mouths, a chorus of voiceless grunts and gaspings.
“Their larynxes have been removed,” Pragma Meigon explained. “To assist concentration.”
Kellhus paused before the first specimen.
Despite the absence of skin, Kellhus immediately recognized horror in the flayed face of the specimen strapped before him. Like warring flatworms, the fine muscles about his eyes strained outward and inward at the same time. The larger, rat-sized muscles about his lower face yanked his mouth into a perpetual fear-grin. Lidless eyes stared. Rapid breaths hissed …
“The face possesses forty-four muscles,” the Pragma continued. “Operating in concert, they are capable of signifying every permutation of passion. All those permutations, young Kellhus, derive from the fifty-seven base and base-remove types found here in this room.”
“You’re wondering how he can maintain that particular expressive configuration,” the Pragma said. “Centuries ago we found we could limit the range of behaviours by probing the brain with needles—with what we now call neuropuncture.”
Kellhus stood transfixed. Without warning, an attendant loomed over him, holding a narrow reed between his teeth. He dipped the reed into the bowl of fluid he carried, then blowing, sprayed the specimen with a fine orangish mist. He then continued on to the next.
“Neuropuncture,” the Pragma continued, “made possible the rehabilitation of defectives for instructional purposes. The specimen before you, for instance, always displays fear at a base-remove of two.”
“Horror?” Kellhus asked.
“Precisely.”
Kellhus felt the childishness of his own horror fade in understanding. He looked to either side, saw the specimens curving out of sight, rows of white eyes set in shining red musculatures. They were only defectives—nothing more. He returned his gaze to the man before him, to fear base-remove two, and committed what he saw to memory. Then he moved on to the next gasping skein of muscles.
Tears spilled across the trapper’s sagging cheeks. “Ah, cruel words, Kellhus! Why would you say such things?”
To better possess you.
Kellhus examined the two squares of oak. The child and woman nailed across them—tools his father had used either to fan or to sate the creatures’ lusts—hadn’t been dead long. Their blood gleamed like wax.
Cnaiür had intended to scrutinize what the Dûnyain said, hoping to confirm any one of his innumerable suspicions. But he quickly realized that Kellhus was playing this sorcerer the way he played all the others, battering him with closed fists, beating his soul down paths of his manufacture. Certainly it did not sound like this. Compared with the banter of Proyas and his Palatines, what Kellhus said to the Schoolman possessed a heartbreaking gravity. But it was all a game, one where truths had become chits, where every open hand concealed a fist.
The thought struck Cnaiür that Dûnyain monks might be even more inhuman than he had thought. What if things such as truth and meaning had no meaning for them? What if all they did was move and move, like something reptilian, snaking through circumstance after circumstance, consuming soul after soul for the sake of consumption alone? The thought made his scalp prickle.
They called themselves students of the Logos, the Shortest Way. But the shortest way to what?
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.
“She’s your prize,” Kellhus said. “She bears your child.”
Cnaiür had seen the way Kellhus used her, the way he dressed her. He’d heard the words he bid her speak. No tool was too small for a Dûnyain, no word too plain, no blink too brief. He’d utilized the chisel of her beauty, the hammer of her peach … Cnaiür had seen this!
Cnaiür had watched the Dûnyain’s influence grow. He’d watched as he gradually bridled all those about Xinemus’s fire, working their hearts the way saddle makers worked leather, tanning, gouging, shaping. He’d watched as he lured more and more Men of the Tusk with the grain of his deceit. He’d watched him yoke thousands—thousands!—with simple words and bottomless looks. He’d watched him minister to Serwë.
He’d watched until he could bear watching no more.
Cnaiür had always known Kellhus’s capabilities, had always known the Holy War would yield to him. But knowing and witnessing were two different things. He cared nothing for the Inrithi. And yet, watching Kellhus’s lies spread like cancer across an old woman’s skin, he found himself fearing for them… So how could he contemplate…
The Dûnyain Women
“Over the centuries, the sexes were transformed,” he said, “each according to their share of our burden.”
The insect obscenity of their innocent forms. Bulbous, their flesh little more than quivering cages. Dûnyain women bred into monstrous instruments of procreation, until they had become little more than pouches slung about their wombs.
The misery. The huffing and moaning. The mewling screams. The inhuman men filing to their assignations, utterly heartless and insensate. The slapping of hip and genitalia. The animality of coupling stripped to its essential germ, to the milking pitch of insemination …
Sadism without desire. Cruelty—unimaginable cruelty—absent the least will to inflict suffering.
She sees that this crime is no aberration, but rather an inevitable and extreme implication of what rules the whole. Everywhere she looks she sees it with heart-scratching clarity, rising like bruises beneath the world’s tender skin. Craft. Cunning. The devious pitch of intellect, domineering, devoid of compassion or humility …
And the will—the blasphemous will most of all. The deranged hunger to become God.