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

by R. Scott Bakker

  “They say one stalks these very halls, my Prince. Why not ask him?”

  “He refused to tell me,” the boy lied glumly.

  A squint of approval.

  “Yes, that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “He told me the ways of Gods do not answer the ways of Men …”

  Lips like oiled mahogany, pursing into a smile pained for inversion. Disgust never looked so happy.

  “Yes-yes …” Nikussis said with the sonorousness of wisdom correcting youth. “He spoke true.”

  “And I said the ways of my Father are the ways of the God.”

  Fright never looked so delicious.

  “And … ah …” A half-concealed swallow. “What did he say?”

  Terror, the boy had long since realized. Fear was his father’s true estate, not adoration or abjection or exaltation. Men did what he, little Anasûrimbor Kelmomas, bid them to do out of terror of his father. All the yammer about love and devotion was simply cotton to conceal the razor.

  The Librarian hung pale on his response.

  “The assassin said, Let your Father ask then.”

  The eyes of skinny people bulged when they were frightened, he realized watching Nikussis. Would Thelli’s eyes bulge? Was she even capable of fear?

  “So I cried out, ‘Sedition!’”

  He screeched this last word, and was gratified by how the old Librarian started—the fool almost kicked the sandals from his feet!

  “Wha-wha-what did he say then?” Nikussis stammered.

  The young Prince-Imperial shook his head in false incredulity.

  “He shrugged.”

  “Shrugged?”

  “Shrugged.”

  “Well-well it is good then that you came to see me, young Prince.”

  The famished idiot fairly babbled everything he knew of the Narindar after that. He spoke of great slums of envy and avarice, hatred and malice, how thieves and murderers marred every congregation of Men, souls as wicked as the soul of Anasûrimbor Kelmomas was noble, as polluted as his was pure. “The Tusk says the Gods answer to our every nature, manly or not. There is no Man saved for virtue, no Man damned for sin, save what dwelleth in the Eye of their God. And just as there are wicked healers, so too are there holy murderers …” He tittered in admiration of his eloquence—and Kelmomas understood instantly why Mother adored him.

  “And none are so wicked or so holy as the Narindar.”

  “And?” the Prince-Imperial asked.

  “And?”

  “I already know all this tripe!” the boy cried, openly wroth. What was wrong with the fool?

  “Wha-wha-what would you hav—?”

  “Their power, you fool! Their strength! How is it they can kill the way they kill?”

  Every man was a coward—this had been his great lesson hiding in the bones of the Andiamine Heights. Just as every man was a hero. Every sane man conceded something to fear—the only question was one of how much. Some Men begrudged crumbs, rampaged as lions over the merest trifle. But most—souls like Nikussis—one had to cut to draw out the thrashing hero. Most came by their courage far too late, when only shrieking and raving remained.

  “The-they say the Fo-Four-Horned Brother Himself picks them … orphans … alley urchins, younger than even you! They spend their lives traini—”

  “Every boy trains! All kjineta are born to war! What makes these boys special?”

  Men like Nikussis, bookish souls, had at best a shell of obstinate arrogance. All was pulp beneath. He could be bullied with impunity—so long as his skin remained intact.

  “I-I fear I-I don’t und—”

  “What lets a mere mortal …” He paused to swallow away the murderous quaver in his voice. “What lets a mere mortal walk into Xothei and stab Anasûrimbor Maithanet, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples, in the breast? How could such … a thing … be … possible?”

  The overstuffed scroll-racks blunted his voice, rendered it deeper and softer than it was. The Librarian gazed at him in false appreciation, nodding as if he at last understood … The Prince-Imperial was bereaved. The boy had loved his uncle—of course!

  Nikussis did not truly believe this of course, but the man needed some tale to balm the fact of his capitulation to such a child. Kelmomas chortled, realizing that henceforth the Librarian would like him—or at least tell himself as much—simply to save his dignity from himself.

  “You me-mean the Unerring Grace.”

  “The what?”

  The brown face blinked. “Th-the … uh … luck …”

  A measure of fury darkened the Prince-Imperial’s scowl.

  “You know the rumours …” Nikussis began, hesitating. “Fr-from before …” he nearly blurted. “The tales of the … of the-the … White-Luck Warrior hunting your father?”

  “What of it?”

  The Librarian’s eyelids bounced with his chin. “The greatest of the Narindar, those possessing the blackest hearts … those they say become their mission, indistinguishable from Death. They act not of will, but of necessity, never knowing, always doing that which must be done …”

  At last! At last the buffoon spoke of something interesting.

  “So you’re saying their luck is … is perfect?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Every throw of the sticks?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the man who murdered my uncle … he’s …”

  The Librarian’s eyes narrowed into their old selves. It was his turn to shrug.

  “A Vessel of Ajokli.”

  The Librarian need tell him nothing of Ajokli. The Thief. The Murderer.

  The Grinning God.

  Anasûrimbor Kelmomas slipped back into his murky interval, walked unseen, less than a shadow at the limit of all the golden spaces between, back to his Empress mother’s apartment. Breathing came easy.

  You remember.

  He shimmed and he crept, dashed down the hidden halls, and climbed and climbed. Never, it seemed, had he belonged more to this planar void between vital and stupid things. Never had he been more make-believe.

  Why do you refuse to remember?

  The boy paused in the black. Remember what?

  Your Whelming.

  He continued his ascent through the cracks of his hallow house.

  I remember.

  Then you remember that beetle …

  He had wandered from Mother, followed a beetle he had found clicking across the floor into the shadowy reaches of the Allosium forum. He could still see the dwindling gleam of the candlewheel tracking the creature’s carapace as it tipped across the tiles … leading him deeper.

  To the Four-Horned Brother rendered in polished diorite.

  What about it?

  He could see Him in his dark climb heavenward, squatting fat and evil in his socket Godhouse—and watching the beetle the same as he. Both of them had been grinning!

  That was an offering, the accursed voice said.

  He had spoken to the bulbous figure, then, crouching beneath it, he had used his fingernails to clip off two of the beetle’s legs. Together they had watched it chip round and round.

  That was a joke!

  His father was a vessel of the God of Gods! He could share jokes with the Grinning God if he pleased! He would pinch Yatwer’s teat if he pleased!

  And how He laughed.

  The boy froze in the dark—this time absolute—once again ….

  Evil Ajokli had laughed.

  They had laughed together, he and the Grinning God. He smiled at the recollection.

  So? The Gods court us …

  He had the Strength! He was every bit as divine!

  The Prince-Imperial resumed climbing, his smile a fading bruise upon his face. His twin had fallen silent, perhaps immersed in the self-same hum that made empty bladders of his limbs. Only when he slipped out of the maze and into his mother’s bedchamber did he recognize the extent of his horror.

  The stories they told about Ajokli in Temple were always
the same. He was the Trickster, the one who, unlike Gilgaöl, took without contest or honour. His escapades would enthrall the young, who loved nothing more than to dupe and prowl about the judgment of their fathers. Each exploit would always seem harmless, always seem comical, and so he and the other children would chortle, sometimes even cheer for the Grinning God.

  But this was the trap, the lesson, the moment when the horrific truth of the Four-Horned Brother would yaw bottomless, the moment when the death and damnation of beloved innocents would begin—and when the children realized they too had been seduced, tricked into celebrating the vile and the wicked. What was sleek, what was supple, what was so roguishly human would slip as garments to the floor, revealing a primordial and poisonous God, one grown mountainous for consuming endless ages of grief and hatred.

  And they would laugh, the boy and his bodiless twin, laugh at the terrified looks, the tearful remonstrations, the frantic prayers. They would laugh that it was always the same, that the halfwits would always be tricked by the exact same story, let alone similar ones. They would puzzle at the absurdity of cheering a thing one heartbeat and lamenting it the next—at the fact that souls could yearn for contrition, for the judgment of more elder fools. Who cared whether people died? If the stories were ancient, then everyone was dead in them anyway. Why wait huddled on your knees, when you could have fun?

  Ajokli, the boy had decided, was by far the most sensible of the Hundred. Perhaps He wasn’t so much evil as … misunderstood.

  Only now did the Prince-Imperial understand. Only now could he fathom their terror, the knifing breath of sudden, catastrophic realization. To be gulled in stories is to be armed in life.

  Kelmomas often thought of himself as a hero, as the one soul doomed to prevail. The death of his brothers and his uncle had simply confirmed the assumption. Everything spoke to his ascendancy! But stories, he knew, were as treacherous as sisters, luring thought into labyrinths of smoke, coercing it down this perfumed corridor and that, all the while sealing the unseen portals shut. For the sake of simple ignorance, every victim assumed themselves the hero, and without exception, death was their enlightenment, damnation their prize.

  The Gods always ate those who failed to feed.

  A different boy stood pining for his mother in the Empress’s sumptuous bedchamber, one whose ears had finally been pricked to the faraway rumble of more dreadful things, gale storms hanging upon horizons that parsed him to the yolk.

  A guttering lantern cast light as shredded gauze, shining across a bed that was empty save the shadows of snakes tangled through the sheets. Golden illumination filtered from the antechamber and sitting room beyond. Kelmomas found himself walking thoughtlessly toward the sound of his mother’s voice.

  “Any price …” she murmured to some unidentified soul. But whom? She only resorted to meetings in her chambers when she required utter secrecy …

  “So …” she continued, her voice urgent, bound as tight as a sacrificial goat, “what does the Four-Horned Brother say?”

  Kelmomas stopped.

  He had drawn past the marble post set into the scalloped corner. He could see her, dressed in her evening habitual, reclined backward on her gold-stitched, Invitic divan, bathed in the white of whale-oil, staring at a point toward the middle of the room. Her beauty fairly struck him breathless, the twinkle of Kutnarmi diamonds across her headdress, the brushed gleam etching her curls, the flawless caramel of her skin, the rose-silk folds of her gown, the dimpled gleam chasing the seams …

  So perfect.

  He stood as a wraith in the shadowy margin, his pallor more that of desolation than the blood of ancient northern kings. He had wandered into the house of Hate; he had maimed a beetle presuming to teach a lesson. And now Hate had wandered into his house presuming to teach in turn.

  He’s here … the voice murmured. We delivered Him to Mother.

  Issiral. The Four-Horned Brother stalked the halls of the Andiamine Heights.

  And in his soul’s eye he could see Him standing opposite, Immortal Malice, smoking with the density of Creation …

  Her face snapped toward him—the shock fairly knocked him from his skin. But she looked through him—for an instant it seemed the horror of his dream had been made real, that he hung as vision only, something incorporeal … Insubstantial. But she squinted, her eyes baffled by the lantern glare, and he realized that she saw nothing for limits that were all her own.

  Kelmomas shrank into the blackness, slipped about the corner.

  “Drafts,” Mother explained absently.

  The boy fled back into the frame of the palace. He hid in the deepest marrow, where he wept and wailed for the imagery that shrieked beneath his soul’s eye, the torrid glimpses of Mother penetrated, violated time and again, her beauty battered from her face, her skin perforated, bleeding like gills, maps of blood cast across her precious urban frescoes …

  What was he to do? He was just a little boy!

  But she’s the only one!

  Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up!

  Rocking in his own arms. Wheezing and snuffling.

  Only her! No one else!

  Nooooo!

  Clutching and clutching, grasping void …

  Who will love us now?

  But Mother lay on the bed slumbering as she always did when he finally returned, curled on her side, the knuckle of her index finger drawn to her lips. He stared at her for the better part of a watch, an eight-year-old wisp rendered smoke from murk, his gaze more fixed than was human.

  Then at last he rooted into the circuit of her embrace. She was so much more than warm.

  She exhaled and she smiled. “This isn’t right …” she murmured on the thick edge of slumber. “Letting you … run wild as a beast …”

  He clutched her left hand in both of his own, squeezed with the desperation of the real. He lay larval in her embrace. With every breath he hewed nearer oblivion, face numb, head thick with recent sobs, his eyes two scratches soothed. Gratitude held him …

  His own Unerring Grace.

  That night he dreamed the same dream of the Narindar. This time the man took two instant strides to stand immediately below the grill, leapt, and skewered his eye.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ishterebinth

  Lies are but clouds, giants that blow and rage only to pass, always to pass. But the Truth is the sky, everlasting and elusive, a shelter in the day, an abyss in the night.

  —The Limping Pilgrim, ASANSIUS

  Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Ishterebinth

  Anasûrimbor Serwa was no more than three when she realized that it all gave way, the World. She would find her eye drawn to the threads of white knotted across all things illuminated, and she would know, This is not real. And since her memories began at three, it had always been thus. The Unreality, as she called it, had forever sapped her surroundings. “See, Mama?” she would cry, “Look-look! None of it is real!” Sometimes she would even dance and traipse, singing, “Everything is False! Everything! Only! Seems!”

  Such displays had terrified her mother, who begrudged her children her husband’s rapacious gifts. The fact that her daughter could care so little for her fear meant that she possessed her husband’s heart as well.

  It had been unfathomable then, The Unreality, more an ethereal assemblage of inkling and intuition than anything explicable. A certainty of breakneck plummets across flat ground. An intimation of perspectives hidden in the creases of what could be perceived. A profound incompleteness in the warp and weft of whatness, making smoke of the ground, paper of the sky, lazy scarves of whole horizons. It would strike her in the gleam of things in particular, the wires of white that looped about everything illuminated: the pools of shining marble beneath the sun wells, the afternoon radiance that dazzled their dinners on the Postern Terrace throughout the summer. The glint of reflections while bathing.

  She was six when it began infecting people as well. Her mother had been the first to s
uccumb, but only because she was the nearest, the most damaged. The Empress’s periodic furies were famous among the siblings. Father terrified them, but like a God, his perpetual absence made that terror easy to ignore. Mother, on the other hand, had afflicted them. She would tolerate no “little Ikureis”, she continually said, her term for children spoiled for luxury and the fawning of others. And so she harried them for minutiae, small failures in expression or demeanour that she alone could perceive. “What child speaks thus?” became her refrain.

  And so they learned from a very young age to be the sons and daughters their mother perpetually demanded they be … to no avail, of course. It was enduring yet another one of these maternal sermons that Serwa suddenly found she understood. The giddy clarity of the insight made her laugh aloud—which in turn had earned her a horrified slap, one which would have sent her bawling before, but merely served as evidence on this occasion. The endless defects Mother enumerated were nothing but pretexts, the little girl realized, excuses to provoke and to punish. The Blessed Empress wanted them to feel as she felt—she needed them to be helpless because she needed them to need her. The weeping child clings with the most desperation, loves with immolating fierceness …

  Mother punished not to educate or to redress any of the innumerable wrongs alleged, but to uncover evidence of herself in her children, some portion that did not belong to her hated husband.

  Her mother, young Serwa had realized, was not real. She acted for reasons she knew not, spoke words she did not understand, pursuing ends that she could neither fathom nor bear. The mother she had loved (as far as she could love) quite simply did not exist. That mother, Serwa realized, was a puppet of something larger, darker, something that merely manufactured scruple to prosecute its base demands.

  The Empress did not change because she could not change: she had borne too many injuries to learn from any one of them. She chided and struck her children the way she always had. But never again would Serwa—or her siblings (for they shared everything)—suffer her affliction. They knew her the way an old miller might know an even older mill: as a mechanism grinding the same grains in the same ways. Understanding her particular Unreality had allowed them to rule her as profoundly as Father had ruled her—even more!