The Great Ordeal: Book Three (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy)

by R. Scott Bakker

  The drums throbbed … recounted the horrors of Caraskand.

  “Then retrieve my assassin from Xothei.”

  Uncle Holy is dead! Dead-dead-dead, tucked into bed!

  On and on his thoughts capered, but the Voice was in no mood. It disapproved of his humour.

  I could smell it in her look … He told her something!

  But not enough! the boy chortled within. Not! Even! Close! Ooh, bad throw, Uncle Holy! Such a pity!Bad, bad throw! Now the number-sticks are mine!

  To all outward appearances, Anasûrimbor Kelmomas was an ailing ten-year-old boy, a divine son of the Holy Aspect-Emperor driven to heartbreaking extremis by the wickedness of his once-beloved uncle. The insipid ingrate, Larsippus, drew him through the corridors to the palace lazaret, alternately snarling instructions to the menials he had commandeered, and murmuring dulcet reassurances to his divine ward.

  “And He has soooo very many Hands,” the gaunt man was saying. The Prince-Imperial’s failure to register anything did not surprise the man. They did not hear all that much, little boys who had survived what this poor child had survived. They spoke even less. “He is as cunning as he is cruel. We just need to cleanse you, search for signs of His touch. But not to fear …”

  Perhaps Disease had fondled the boy’s soul as well.

  And how was Mother able to kill him? the Voice asked. She has no Strength!

  What does it matter?

  There’s more happening here! More than we know!

  So? You’re forgetting they’re all dead now, Sammi! All of those who could see!

  And it seemed miraculous, the prospect of untainted impunity—glorious invisibility! To cuddle snuggle-warm in Mother’s arms, to whisper knives hot in her ear, to roam unhindered, unrestrained, through the darkling halls, the blind streets. He could play and play and play—

  Father can still see.

  Father was forever the pall across his jubilation.

  “Shush …” Larsippus was saying, his braying voice huffing for the effort of sounding gentle. “Nothing to fear at all …”

  So? He’s as good as dead.

  How so?

  Because dead is just someplace else, someplace too far away to ever come back from …

  Golgotterath is not so far. Father will come back …

  This lent his false sobs the pang of reality. And how could you know? What makes you so smart?

  Because He came back from Hell.

  Stories! Rumours!

  Mother believes them.

  The wraith floated in from the gloom of the Imperial Audience Hall and stepped into shimmering, sunlit materiality: her daughter, Anasûrimbor Theliopa, garbed in a blue, pearl-spangled gown hooped into the shape of an overturned fuller’s basin. Esmenet laughed at the sight of her, not so much for the absurdity of her dress as for the absurdity of finding it so beautiful—so true. She hugged the sallow blond girl tight, breathed deep her earthen scent—Thelli had never ceased smelling like a little girl. Esmenet even savoured the way the woman went rigid rather than reciprocate the embrace.

  She cupped Theliopa’s cheeks, blinked tears hot enough for the two of them. “We have much to speak about,” she sighed. “I need you now more than ever.”

  And even though Esmenet had expected as much, it stung, the lack of any answering passion in the girl’s angular expression. Theliopa could only miss her the way a geometer would miss his compass, such was the girl’s share of her father’s spoils.

  “Mother …”

  She had no time for this, for he had caught her eye. Esmenet pressed her daughter aside to consider the second soul the Inchausti had delivered …

  Her impossible assassin.

  What was it he had called himself? Issiral … the Shigeki word for “fate”. It was easily the most unlucky name she had ever heard … and yet Maithanet was dead. Her boy was avenged.

  The Narindar strode into the angular sunlight and halted, stood upon the terrace threshold the way he had stood between the idols of War and Birth in Xothei. He had a strange mauled-beyond-his-years look, perhaps because his trim beard belonged to a younger generation. He was naked save for the grey cloth bound about his loins, and remote in the way of violent and imperturbable men. The short hair that had raised her hackles when she had first contracted the man—priests of Ajokli were forbidden to cut their hair—now occasioned relief. She had no wish for the world to know she harboured a devotee of the Four-Horned Brother. In fact, he would have looked a slave were it not for an unnerving air of relentlessness about him, the sense that absolutely nothing outside his cryptic ends mattered, be it scruple, let alone comfort or security. She thought of what Lord Sankas had said, the way Narindar saw events as wholes. She wondered whether the Consul had managed to flee to Biaxi lands.

  Issiral’s right hand was bloodied, a token of the calamity he had wrought mere watches ago.

  The calamity she had authored through him.

  “You may cleanse your hands in the basin,” she said, nodding at the graven pedestal to his left.

  The man wordlessly complied.

  “Mother …” Theliopa said from her periphery.

  “Join Phinersa and the others,” Esmenet directed the girl, watching the Narindar’s hands vanish beneath shimmering water. “He will tell you what little we know.”

  All was bustling activity about the mother and daughter, urgent and yet all the more muted for it. She had chosen the Postern Terrace behind the Imperial Audience Hall to establish her command, not simply for the view it afforded of her besieged city, but because it forced everyone she summoned to contemplate her husband’s Holy Chair, the Circumfix Throne, before coming to kneel before her. A small multitude now milled about the balustrade—merchants, officers, spies and advisors—peering out to the surrounding hills, pointing, exchanging questions and observations. A steady stream of messengers passed back and forth from the murk and glister of the Imperial Audience Hall. Harried looks were exchanged with sharp words. Three Kidruhil signallers stood at the ready with their bronze longhorns, one missing his horsehair helm, the other with his arm in a crimson sling. Porters had arrived with the first of the drink and food mere moments before.

  The Whore had favoured her—at least so far. They knew very little as of yet, save that Momemn remained inviolate. The streets yet surged, but the campuses of the Cmiral and the Kamposea Agora appeared all but deserted. Smoke rose from the Lesser Ancilline Gate, but she had been told the fire was due to a mishap.

  Fanayal, it seemed, had known nothing of the internecine turmoil that engulfed the city. Maithanet had fairly stripped the ramparts to better bully the mob, anticipating that her capture would provoke riots. Had Fanayal stormed Momemn directly, the mat of street and structure below would already be a ruinous battleground. But the Bandit Padirajah had chosen to take Jarûtha as his base and secure the countryside surrounding the Imperial Capital instead—affording her time she desperately needed. As surreal, as horrific, as it was watching bands of wild enemy horsemen scour the distance, the sight flushed her with an almost delirious sense of relief. So long as the heathen filth remained out there, Thelli and Kelmomas were safe.

  She watched the Narindar stare at his cleansed hands, then lower his ear as if listening … for some further portent? He was every bit as eerie and unsettling as he had been that fateful day she had contracted him … the day of Maithanet’s coup.

  The man finally turned to meet her gaze.

  “What you did …” she began, only to trail.

  His look was bold in the manner of children.

  “What you did,” he repeated, but not as if he were confused by her meaning. His voice was as unremarkable as his appearance, and yet …

  “How?” she asked. “How could it be possible?”

  How could a mere man murder a Dûnyain?

  He pursed his lips in lieu of shrugging.

  “I am but a vessel.”

  And it pimpled her skin, this answer. Were she a caste-noble, she would
have been oblivious. Only a soul reared in slums and gutters, a caste-menial or a slave, could understand the dread import of what he meant, for only such souls understood the horror of the Four-Horned Brother … Ajokli.

  Only the most desperate turned to the Prince of Hate.

  The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas signed a charm that only Sumni harlots would know. By happenstance a slave scurried between them bearing a shallow basket stacked with peaches. She plucked one from the man’s passage, whether to allay or to conceal her anxiety she did not know. “Catch,” she called, tossing it to the Narindar.

  The man picked it from the sky. Then, closing both of his hands about it, he raised it above his open mouth and violently squeezed, so that he might drink its nectar directly, in the uncouth Shigeki manner.

  Esmenet watched with a kind of appalled fascination.

  “I want you to remain here in the palace,” she said as he lowered the pulped fruit. Sunlight limned the runnels of juice across his shaved chin.

  At first she thought he looked at her, but then she realized that he looked beyond, as if spying something on the distant hills …

  “With me,” the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas said, biting a pensive lower lip.

  The man continued staring around her edges. Shouting rose up through the Imperial Audience Hall, fractured for the accumulation of echoes. At last they had found him, Caxes Anthirul, her Home Exalt-General, the man who had capitulated to Maithanet—who would have assured her doom, had the Whore been less generous.

  The Narindar, Issiral, lowered his head in cryptic obeisance.

  “I will consult my God,” he said.

  Kelmomas breathed like a child asleep, lay motionless like one, his limbs akimbo above tangled sheets, his eyes shut in the slack manner of dreaming souls, but his ears were pricked to the mazed darkness, and his skin tingled, alive to the promise of her touch.

  She stalked the apartments beyond, exhausted, he knew, yet restless with the alarums of her day. He heard her clasp the decanter on the Seolian side-board, the one stamped with the serpentine dragons that so fascinated him from time to time. He heard her sigh in gratitude—gratitude!—that the thing had been filled.

  He heard the silken gurgle of a bowl deeply filled. The gasp between compulsive swallows.

  He heard her staring out into vertigo, the wine-bowl clink to the floor.

  Inwardly, he clucked for glee, imagining her acrid smell and her embrace, at first timid, then growing more fierce with the waxing of her desperation. He was clean, his skin scrubbed pink with cinnamon-scented soaps, then rinsed in dilute tinctures of myrrh and lavender. She would hold him, tighter and tighter, and then she would weep, for fear, for loss, but for gratitude far, far more. She would clutch him and sob, her lips pursed against any audible wail, and she would exult in the beatific glory of her living son … she would tremble and she would gloat and she would think, So long as I have him …

  So long as I have him.

  She would rejoice as she has never rejoiced, marvel at the miraculous deformity of her Fate. And as the excesses of her passion dwindled, she would hang numb and awake, listening to the enemy’s drums on the night air. She would comb his hair with absent fingers, assuming the solitary authority of all mothers abandoned by their husbands. She would muster the countless injustices she had suffered and she would lash them into a semblance of order. And she would plot ways to keep him safe, never knowing, never dreaming …

  She would think herself heroic, not so much to reward efforts made as to goad efforts required. She would torture anyone who needed to be tortured. She would kill anyone who needed to be killed. She would be whatever her sweet little boy needed her to be …

  Protector. Provider. Comforter.

  Slave.

  And he would lay besotted, breathe and breathe and breathe …

  Pretend to sleep.

  The Andiamine Heights clattered and hummed with subterranean industry, alive once again—resurrected. The Blessed Empress sauntered to the bedroom, drawing the long pins from her hair.

  A fraction of her will be watching, his accursed brother whispered.

  Silence!

  Uncle Holy told her something.

  Five golden kellics flashing in Naree’s dark palm.

  Imhailas vanishing with the heat of his blood.

  The Collegian sneering at the girl, saying, “And here’s a silver to remember her by …”

  Esmenet could not blink without seeing these and other desperate things as she made her way up the marble stair. It made her dizzy thinking of the darkness of those days, mourning Inrilatas, fretting for Kelmomas and Thelli, fearing her brother, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples. The soldiers had fled upon her appearance, leaving the wrought-iron camp lanterns they had placed for her benefit swaying like dowser sticks. Her shadows bobbed, angles splitting and combining as she climbed the steps. Hooves rained as hail across the street outside. Officers bawled at their formations. No one expected problems, but with the tumult of the days, she had decided to err on the side of precaution. Almost dying in one riot was enough.

  Besides, it was important that she arrive as she was, Anasûrimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas. She savoured the joy of the triumphant return, the petty jubilation of returning as master to a place where she had been a slave. The Empire climbed these stairs as much as she!

  She paused at the top of the stair, amazed that she recognized so little of the place. But then Imhailas had taken her here at night and in a panic, and she had not stepped foot outside Naree’s apartment until the Shrial Knights had dragged her out screaming and weeping weeks later. She looked about, realizing that she had never been on this stair, or in this hall, not really. The camp lanterns made a grotesquerie of the uneven plastering. The emerald paint had begun peeling back in a singular direction, so that it resembled something reptilian.

  She saw her daughter waiting by the apartment door, her face pale even for this gloom. Theliopa’s gown (yet another one of her own manufacture) consisted of black and white lace pleats, packed so dense as to resemble closed codices in places, and everywhere strung with tiny black pearls. Her flaxen hair had been pinned high into a matching headdress. Esmenet smiled for the simple relief of seeing someone she truly trusted. This was the way it was with tyrants, she knew, how their trust was whittled down until only blood remained.

  “You’ve done very well, Thelli. Thank you.”

  The girl blinked in her odd way.

  “Mother. I can see what you-you are about to do.”

  Esmenet swallowed. She hadn’t expected honesty. Not here.

  “And what of it?”

  She wasn’t sure she could stomach it.

  “I would beg you to reconsider,” Theliopa said. “Don’t do it, Mother.” Esmenet approached her daughter.

  “What do you think your father would say?”

  The shadow of a scowl marred the blank fixity of Theliopa’s gaze.

  “I hesitate to say, Mother.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know it will harden you-you against what must-must be done.”

  Esmenet laughed in mock wonder.

  “Such is the grudge I hold against my husband?”

  Theliopa blinked, paused in calculation.

  “Yes, Mother. Such is the grudge.”

  It suddenly seemed that she dangled from a hook.

  “Y-you have no inkling of what I suffered here, Thelli.”

  “I see a great deal in your face, Mother.”

  “Then what would you have me do? What your father would do?”

  “Yes!” the girl cried with surprising vehemence. “You must kill her, Mother.”

  Esmenet gazed at her beloved daughter in reproach, if not disbelief. She was past being surprised by her extraordinary children.

  “Kill her? And for what? For doing the very thing I would have done? You see only the consequence of the life I have lived, daughter. You know nothing of the blood and
bitumen that fills a bowl so cracked as your mother! You know nothing of the terror! Grasping and grasping for life, for bread, for medicine, for the gold needed to secure these things with dignity. Killing her would be killing myself!”

  “But why would you-you confuse yourself with this woman? Sharing the same-same weal does nothing to change the fact that you are the Empress, and she-she is the whore who betrayed you, that had-had Imhailas murd—”

  “Shut up!”

  “No, Mother. Momemn is besieged. You are Father’s vessel, the one anointed to rule-rule in his absence. All eyes are upon-upon you, Mother. You must-must gratify them, show them the strength they need to see. You must-must be ferocious.”

  Esmenet gazed at her daughter, stupefied by that word, “ferocious.”

  “Think of Kelmomas, Mother. Imagine if he had died because of that woman.”

  The fury had always been there, of course, the will to make suffer, to gloat and glory in vengeance. Her soul’s eye had witnessed Naree die countless ways for what she had done—enough to make a habit of bloody imagery. The girl had betrayed her, had sold her life and the lives of all those she loved for silver. It all came rushing back, a cringing, noxious tide, the girl’s petty cruelties, her peevish need to humiliate a deposed queen, a mourning mother …

  Esmenet looked to her beloved and inhuman daughter, watched the girl read and approve the savage turn in her thought, saw the clenched jaw where slack eyes had been.

  “If you wish, I will do it for you, Mother.”

  Esmenet shook her head, caught each hand in the other to prevent either from floating away. She could taste the words she had spoken months ago, the oath they had contained.

  “It means that your life—your life, Naree—belongs to me …”

  “She’s my burden. You said so yourself.”

  Theliopa raised the pommel of a knife she produced as if by magic from the intricacies of her gown.

  Esmenet could taste the thing when she inhaled, or at least so it seemed. She clutched the handle, felt a cloud of gas for the heft of it, the lethal solidity. Her husband’s eyes watched her from her daughter’s angular face. She flinched from them, looked down out of some unnameable instinct. She turned to the door, numb, barged through on a deep breath.