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

by R. Scott Bakker

  “I … I don’t understand.”

  He could sense it even now, the head on the pole behind him.

  “There are many I have failed to save.”

  There was no denying the indulgence of the exercise. Once Kellhus had mastered the multitudes, once the polity derived its might from him, he had no longer required manipulations so fine as this. Years had passed since he had undertaken a Study so immediate as the soul of a single man.

  And for all the implacable serenity of his Dûnyain soul, it stirred memories of the First Holy War, the turbulent span when such scrutiny had comprised the sum of his Mission. Since the Fall of Shimeh, no soul (not even Esmenet) had warranted such attention.

  The instinct to bigotry that had nearly killed him in Caraskand had quickly come to heel, to serve, compelling acquiescence, silencing critics, even murdering enemies. For years, he had grappled the great beast that was the Three Seas, pinned it to earth, and with gifts and brutalities he had trained it, until his name only need be uttered—until his tyranny had become indistinguishable from his being. This allowed him to move from nations to truths, to turn his intellect full upon the maddening abstracta of the Daimos, the Metagnosis, and the Thousandfold Thought.

  He had pierced the obscurantist veils, grasped the metaphysics of Creation, transformed meaning into miracles. He had walked the ways of Hell, returned bedecked in trophies. No one, not even the legendary Hero-Mage of ancient Ûmerau, Titirga, could rival his arcane might.

  He had learned of the head on the pole.

  Domination. Over lives and nations. Over history and ignorance. Over existence itself, down through the leaves of reality’s countless skins. No mortal had possessed such might. His was a power and potency that not even the Gods, who must ration themselves across all times, could hope to counter, short of scooping themselves hollow and forever dwelling as phantoms …

  No soul had so owned Circumstance. He, and he alone, was the Place, the point of maximal convergence. Nations hung from his whim. Reality grovelled before his song. The Outside itself railed against him.

  And yet for all of it darkness still encircled him, the obscurity of before, the blackness of after.

  For those who worshipped him as a god, he remained a mortal man, possessing but one intellect and two hands—great, perhaps, in proportion to his innumerable slaves, but scarcely a mote on the surface of something inconceivable. He was no more a prophet than an architect or any other who wrenches his conception into labourious reality. All the futures he had raised had been the issue of his toil …

  He suffered visions, certainly, but he had long ceased to trust them.

  “I was there, Master …” Proyas said. “I saw. No one could have saved Serwë!”

  Kellhus held him in the clasp of endless engines.

  “Do you mean her life, or her soul?”

  The nets of muscle sheathing him flexed into the sigil of horror.

  “Does it trouble you, Proyas?”

  And he was shadow-play, his disciple, the light of cosmic enormities bent small across the surface of a tear. He was an oak leaf, riding the yaw and twizzle of drafts, hanging above the rumour of whirlwinds …

  A glimpse through the aperture we confuse for life …

  “D-does what … what trouble me?”

  He was anything but a Man.

  “To know that Serwë burns in Hell.”

  Slaves brought them their repast: small medallions of sizzling Sranc meat, seasoned with blueberries and wild scallions rooted from the seashore. The meat was improbably tender and sweet. The Place called Anasûrimbor Kellhus told his heartbroken disciple a tale of prophets as they ate, the way the bottleneck of their mortality invariably distorted visions they thought took the compass of the Heavens. The infinite could only be experienced in butchered approximation, he said, and communicated with rank fraudulence. “Men are bent on clarity and proportion, even when there is none to be found,” he explained. “They offer up broken visions, Proyas, and call them perfect and whole.” A grandfather’s rueful smile, canny and adoring. “What else can Men see, when their eyes are so small?”

  The challenges come as squalls of bewildered anger. “But then-then how is the God to tell us … tell us anything?”

  A forgiving frown on a long-drawn sigh, the kind that speaks of wars not quite survived.

  “That is the conceit, is it not? The assumption that prophets deliver word of the God to Men.”

  Proyas sat motionless for three heartbeats.

  “Then what is their purpose?”

  “Is it not plain? To deliver word of Men to the God.”

  Men are made, and Men are born, and ever do the proportions escape them. They can only guess at themselves, never see, only infer the lines they inhabit from the crooks they glimpse in others. Proyas had been cursed by the fact of his birth, then doomed all the more by what life would make of him. His was a wondering soul, philosophical in the Near Antique sense. But it was also an exacting one, a soul that demanded clarity and resolution. As a babe he had slept in his mother’s arms no matter what the court or domestic furor. The clamour meant nothing to him, so long as beloved arms held him tight, so long as the beloved face smiled down.

  The living shall not haunt the dead …

  For twenty years this had been what Kellhus had given him: the drowsy slumber of certainty.

  “But why?” Proyas cried.

  The time had come to rouse him, deliver him to the horror of the Real.

  “Your question is your answer.”

  Golgotterath suffered none to slumber.

  “No!” the man barked. “No more riddles! Please! I beg you!”

  Kellhus smiled with wry and mortal reassurance, the way a gentle and fearless father might to fortify his sons against his passing. He turned from the paroxysm of shame that had seized his disciple, grasped the decanter at his side to pour the man anpoi.

  “You ask this because you seek reasons,” he said, passing the chanv-laced drink to the Believer-King. “You seek reasons because you are incomplete …”

  Proyas glared as a wounded child over the edge of the bowl as he drank. Kellhus felt the concoction bloom warm and sweet over his own tongue and throat.

  “Reason is naught but the twine of thought,” he continued, “the way we bind fragments into larger fragments, moor the inhaling now to what is breathless and eternal. The God has no need of it …”

  Logos.

  Proyas still did not understand, but he had been mollified by the tone of consolation, if nothing else. An anger yet animated him, one belonging to boys who are hectored beyond fearing their older brothers. But despite everything, his hope—the long-abused ache to know—yet occupied the bricked heights of his soul …

  Waiting to be overthrown.

  “To be all things, Prosha, the God must be at once greater than itself, and less.”

  “Less? Less?”

  “Finite. A man. Like Inri Sejenus. Like me … To be all things, It must know ignorance, suffer suffering, fear and confus—”

  “And love?” the Exalt-General fairly cried. “What of love?”

  And for the first time that evening, Anasûrimbor Kellhus was surprised. Love was the logic that conserved Life as opposed to Truth … the twine that bound hosts and nations from the myriad moments of Men.

  “Yes … Most of all.”

  Love, far more than reason, was his principle tool.

  “Most of all …” Proyas repeated dully, his voice digging through the sand of torpor, the exhaustion of a clinging intellect, staggered heart. “Why?”

  He does not want to know.

  The Place called Anasûrimbor Kellhus snuffed all extraneous considerations, aimed its every articulation at the soul drowning in the air before him.

  “Because of all the passions, nothing is so alien to the God as love.”

  There was a head on a pole behind him.

  What would Nersei Proyas, first among the Believer-Kings, make of the Truth?
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  This was the object of the Study.

  The carpeted earth did not so much reel as wrench, Kellhus knew, wringing things too fundamental too bleed. Confusions. Questions eating questions, cannibalizing the very possibility of asking. And inversions, blasphemous in and of themselves, but utterly ruinous in their implication.

  Upside-down prophets who deliver word of Men to the Heavens?

  An inside-out God?

  Calamitous insights never arrive whole. They are like the wires that the Ainoni forced into the gullets of captured runaway slaves, things that twist and pierce, that become ever more entangled with the motions of normal digestion—things that strangle from the inside, and so kill, organ by anguished organ.

  Twenty years of abject devotion overturned, spilled. Twenty years of certitude, so deep, so profound, as to make murder holy.

  How? How would the Zaudunyani respond to the overthrow of their most cherished beliefs?

  The man’s eyes fluttered about welling heat. “B-but … but what you say … H-how is a man to worship?”

  Kellhus said nothing at first, awaited the inevitable questioning look.

  “Doubt,” he said, seizing his disciple’s gaze within the iron fist of his own. “Query, not as Collegians or Advocates query, but as the bewildered query, as those who genuinely seek the limits of what they know. To ask is to kneel, to say, ‘I end here …’ And how could it be otherwise? The infinite is impossible, Proyas, which is why Men are so prone to hide it behind reflections of themselves—to give the God beards and desires! To call It ‘Him’!”

  He raised a gold-haloed hand to his brow, feigning weariness. “No. Terror. Hatred of self. Suffering, ignorance, and confusion. These are the only honest ways to approach the God.”

  The Believer-King dropped his face, hitched about a low sob.

  “This place … where you are now, Prosha. This is the revelation. The God is not comfort. The God is not law or love or reason, nor any other instrument of our crippled finitude. The God has no voice, no design, no heart or intellect …”

  The man wept as if coughing.

  “It is it … Unconditioned and absolute.”

  A soft keening, a sound that was both question and accusation.

  How?

  The Place called Kellhus watched the Believer-King vanish into what he was, observed the very order of the man dissolve as a clot of sand in quick waters. Deviations were noted. Assumptions were revised. Possibility bloomed across the whole, the branching of branches, new multiplicities for the hard knife of actuality to cull …

  Origins were isolated.

  “And the wages?” the man barked through lips stringed with snot and spittle.

  Yes, my friend. What of salvation?

  “There is no recompense,” the Place said, “save knowing …”

  “Knowing that we know nothing!”

  “Exactly.”

  “So—?”

  Sorrow and scrutiny.

  “You see it. After all these years you finally understand.”

  A moment of stunned gazing, swollen face swaying as though staring from the deck of a foundering vessel. The man did not need to speak for the Place to hear the name.

  Achamian.

  The Place smiled, as if things catastrophic could be gentle ironies all the same.

  “The teacher you renounced …”

  A grimace seized the man’s expression of wronged incredulity. Jaw pulled down. Lips cramped about a soundless cry. Spittle strung like spider’s silk across the void of his mouth …

  “He is the prophet you sought all along.”

  The Place held its weeping slave, rocked him in its arms. The smell of burnt lamb wicked through the closed confines of the chamber.

  “Then what are you.”

  Spoken with lament, without the intonation of a question. Spoken the way beloved dead are removed from the place of mourning.

  “A deceiver,” the Place said. “False …”

  “No—”

  “I am Dûnyain, a Son of Ishuäl. I am the product of a monstrous decision made two thousand years ago, a decision to breed Men as Men breed cattle and dogs, to remake them in the image of intellect …”

  He pulled the man to the side, and down, so that his bearded face lay like a plate on his lap.

  “I was sent forth to hunt down and kill my father,” the Place said, “who had been sent out before me …” He paused to brush a greying lock from the man’s brow. “When I discovered the weakness of Men, I understood that my father would command enormous power … that I would need the strength of nations to overcome him.”

  Warring patterns. Everything turned upon the way patterns owned the souls of Men. Truth, as surely as Luck, simply sorted the conquered from the dead.

  “So I began acting a prophet, even as I denied being one, knowing that my intellect would astound you and your brothers, that eventually you would make me your prophet …”

  “No! Tha—”

  “Thus I seized my nation, the First Holy War …”

  The Place drew a long-fingered hand across the side of the Believer-King’s face, temple to jaw. They seemed unreal to the man, it knew, those fierce and unruly days. The residue dwelt within him, the imprint of bearing witness, sparked to life from time to time in dreams and reveries. Pebbles from an ocean, but nothing else. Like all other survivors, he was perpetually stranded, forever thrown.

  “My father had anticipated this, had known that the trial of my journey would transform me, that the assassin who had departed Ishuäl would arrive his disciple.”

  Petulant fury. Toddler defiance. “No! This canno—!”

  “But there was something he failed to realize …”

  Swollen indecision. Hope reaching out through anguish and asphyxiation, clutching for the reversal that would return everything to what had been. “What? What?”

  “That my trial would drive me mad.”

  “But you are my Lord! M-my salvation!”

  “Caraskand … The Circumfix …”

  “No—cease! Stop this! I’m-I’m begging you! Pleas—”

  “I began seeing … phantasms, hearing voices … Something began speaking to me.”

  “Please … I-I …”

  “And in my disorder, I listened … I did what it commanded.”

  Sobs wracked the man, the convulsions of a bereaved child. But these words yanked something through Proyas, as if he had been wound by a windlass and released. The Place relaxed its grip, lowered him back to its lap. The man’s bloodshot eyes fixed him heedless of any shame or fury.

  “I killed my own father,” the Place said.

  “The God! It has to be the God! The God spe—”

  “No, Proyas. Gird yourself. Peer into the horror!”

  I tend the fields …

  A glutinous breath. The squint of a soul attempting to squint away its own misgivings. “You think th-this voice is … is your own?”

  And burn them.

  The Place smiled the negligent smile of those who could have no stake in feuds so minor.

  “The truth of a thing lies in its origins, Proyas. I know not from whence this voice comes.”

  Hope, beaming with a hand-seizing urgency. “Heaven! It comes from Heaven! Can’t you see?”

  The Place gazed down at its most beautiful slave.

  “Then Heaven is not sane.”

  The Place bid the man strip and he stripped.

  Even after so many years of hardship, the man’s frame remained upright and unbroken. He was lean, the way all Ordealmen were lean; shadow inked the overlay and anchoring of his every muscle. Black hair matted the olive-pale skin of his chest. It thinned to a line as it descended the hollow of his belly, then bloomed about his groin and thighs. His phallus lay grey and inert.

  The disciple hung his head, crushing his beard. His gaze was swollen and uncomprehending.

  The Place drew its robe up and aside, welcomed the kiss of unencumbered air. It approached the man from be
hind, reached out to clutch the pulse racing in his throat.

  The truth of a thing … it whispered.

  It drew its member across the man’s buttocks …

  Savoured the flutter beneath its fingertips …

  Then the insertion. The stench of feces and sizzling lamb. The cough that was really a sob …

  Deep … until all that remained was one place, the congress of Greater Souls.

  It seized the man, lifted him from his feet. It used him as he had never been used before.

  There was a head upon a pole behind him.

  All souls wander. No matter what track they follow, it is never their own.

  Faith is thrust upon us all. Even the suicide, who makes a fetish of refusal and a conceit of lamentations, has faith. Even the ironist, who would mock all creation to better sun his thistles. Even he believes …

  Faith is as inescapable as Men are small. They are borne breath by breath, a bubble in oily oblivion. No compass is so puny as the now, and yet it is the estate of man, his ephemeral empire. Faith. Faith alone binds him to what was and what will be—to what transcends. Faith alone clasps hands with what is other and holds firm. It is as inevitable as suffering, as compulsory as breath.

  Only its object varies …

  The in what.

  Proyas had believed in Anasûrimbor Kellhus, had assumed he dwelt within a World without horizons, where all the hidden things had been counted and enslaved. He was here and he was now, as meagre as any Man, but he was everywhere and eternal as well—so long as he believed. What horror could the World hold for him, standing at the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s right hand? No matter where he travelled, no matter what atrocities he committed, the God was for him.

  But no longer.

  The ground had pitched, and all things now fell to the horizon. Proyas did not so much flee as plummet from the Umbilicus, did not so much walk as drop through the canvas-sheeted ways of the encampment, so steep had his world become … the scarp it had always been.

  The God had never been for him. It was a spider … Infinite and inhuman.

  Kellhus was not His Prophet.

  Faith was deception, the mean and the base groping for the epic and the glorious—proof against idiot insignificance, against truth.