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

by R. Scott Bakker

  But to ask such questions now in the living presence of the Dûnyain made them seem more than mortal.

  Because they were, he realized. More than lives depended on how he answered …

  He forced himself to regard the two, boy and man, against the grain of the sudden aversion that welled within him. It was always better, a fraction of him had decided, to look around those you might kill.

  The shadows were retreating, shrinking toward the very sun that routed them. Given the higher perch of the Dûnyain, the old Wizard could see the line of bright and gloom draw down across the two. Where they once seemed a piece with the ruined tower’s foundations, now they seemed quite apart. The boy sat hugging his knees, a posture too careless to be anything other than premeditated. The Survivor sat in the manner of teamsters long on the wagon, leaning forward, elbows on knees. His woolen smock seemed to absorb the sunlight without remainder. His skin was striped and hooked for the random play of scars, the result of some artist’s disordered folly.

  Both matched his gaze with the selflessness of dogs pricked to the possibility of scraps. They seemed forlorn, pathetic, a scarred monstrosity and a crippled boy stranded on the wilder limits of the World … Enough to stir a sense of shuffling compassion.

  He says … says such sweet things to give me comfort …

  This was deliberate, the old Wizard knew. Their posture and demeanour could be nothing other than deliberate ploys, chosen to maximize their chances for survival—and domination.

  He says that one of my seed will return, Seswatha—an Anasûrimbor will return …

  Could it be mere coincidence? To dream of the Prophecy on the eve of coming to Ishuäl would have been significant enough, but to do so from the High-King’s eyes? And on the morn where he must decide the fate of an Anasûrimbor—the full-blooded Dûnyain son of Kellhus no less!

  “What does it matter?” Mimara cried in impatience. “When the very World is at stake, what does it matter, two—two!—meagre heartbeats? What does it matter if you send them to their damnation?”

  The old Wizard snapped his attention back, glared at her …

  He had heard these words before. He lowered his gaze, pinched the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. It seemed he could see Nautzera, stern and frail and scathing in the gloom of Atyersus, saying, “I guess, then, you would say that a possibility, that we’re witnessing the first signs of the No-God’s return, is outweighed by an actuality, the life of a defector—that rolling the dice of apocalypse is worth the pulse of a fool!”

  That was how it all began, it now seemed. All those years ago, with the Mandate’s mission to spy on Maithanet—another Anasûrimbor. Ever since, he had lived in a world of ciphers, as cryptic as they were fatal, charting the doom of civilizations with rank guesses …

  Small wonder so many augurs went mad!

  “Mimara—relent … Please, I beg you! I-I cannot … just … murder …”

  “Murder?” she cried with mock hilarity. Everything about her radiated disapproval. There had been something about her ever since he had awoken, something as grim as it was relentless and remote.

  Something very nearly Dûnyain.

  Despite the harshness of her humours, he had never thought of her as cruel—until now. Was it the Eye, as she said? Was it the safety of the World, or the child she bore in her womb?

  “All are murdered in the end!” she said. “How many have you killed to come this far, hmm, Wizard? Dozens? Hundreds? Where was your compunction then? The Nangaels who found us on the plain, the ones you pursued, why did you murder them?”

  A glimpse of panicked horsemen, whipping their mounts across shelves of dust.

  “To …” he began, only to falter.

  “To safeguard our mission?”

  “Yes,” he admitted, glaring into his palms, thinking of all the lives …

  “And did you hesitate?”

  “No.”

  He had never tallied them, he realized. He had never bothered estimating, let alone counting all those he had killed. Could the World be so violent? Could he?

  “Akka …” she said, calling more to his gaze than to him. “Akka …”

  He looked into her face, shuddered for a sudden premonition of Esmenet. And in the mad way of so many small revelations he understood that she was the reason he had accepted Nautzera’s mission all those years ago. Esmenet. She was the reason he had gambled Inrau’s life and soul—and lost.

  “This …” Mimara was saying, “this life … is naught but a detour. Deliver them to their destination!”

  Those lips. He could never have imagined that those lips could argue murder.

  Qirri. He needed his Qirri.

  He wiped his face and beard with an unsteady palm. “It is not-not my … my place.”

  “They are already damned!” she cried. “Irrevocably!”

  His temper cracked—finally. He found himself on his feet, roaring down at her.

  “As! Am! I!”

  For an instant, he thought this would catch her short, thrust her cheek to jowl with the consequences of what she was asking. But if she hesitated, her reasons were her own.

  “So then,” she said on a ruthless shrug, “you have nothing to lose.”

  And only a world to save.

  A child.

  “Empitiri asca!” the pregnant woman began crying, glancing at the Survivor and boy with varying measures of horror and fury. “Empitiru pallos asca!”

  The argument, which had been animated since the beginning, became increasingly shrill. The gulf of tongues defeated the Survivor, but the sentiment did not. She was bidding the old man to recall his mission. They had suffered much, these two travellers, both in the sum and fraction of their lives. Enough to demand some kind of accounting—or, at the very least, fidelity to the motives that had driven them to such extremes.

  Murdering them, she was saying, was the only way to keep faith with what they had sacrificed …

  With those they had killed on the way.

  The old man began cursing and stomping. Accelerated heart rate. Tears clotting eyes. At last he turned to where the Survivor and the boy sat on the humped debris, mustering the will to murder …

  “Should you not intervene?” the boy asked.

  “No.”

  “But you said yourself: She is stronger.”

  “Yes. But for all she has suffered, mercy remains her primary instinct.”

  The old sorcerer, his skin blackened for filth, his beard wire-white, stood braced beneath his cloak of ragged pelts, gazing at them in turbulent indecision.

  “So she is weak after all.”

  “She is worldborn.”

  Something swelled within the old man, a crippled ferocity …

  After the Brethren had thrown back the Shriekers’ first assault, they had pried opened the creature’s skulls. They had been careful to take captives, both for the purposes of interrogation and study. The Neuropuncturists quickly realized the Shriekers weren’t natural. Like the Dûnyain, their neuroanatomy bore all the hallmarks of artifice, with various lobes swollen at the expense of others, the myriad articulations of Cause branching into configurations alien to all other earthly beasts. Structures that triggered anguish in everything from lizards to wolves elicited lust in the Shriekers. They possessed no compassion, no remorse or shame or communal ambition …

  Again, like the Dûnyain.

  But there were differences as well, every bit as dramatic as the similarities, only more difficult to detect for their structural subtleties. Of all the regions known to Neuropuncture, none was so difficult to chart or probe as the Outer Sheath, especially those portions crowded behind the forehead. After centuries spent mapping Defectives, the Brethren had discovered that this structure was naught but the outer expression of a far larger mechanism, a great net cast across deeper, more primitive tracts. Cause. Cause soaked the skull through the senses, ran in cataracts that were unwound into tributaries, only to be knotted and unravelled again
. At turns superficial and profound, it was siphoned and tapped into a tangle that could only be likened to a marsh, Cause splintered into imperceptible eddies and swirls, currents wrapped across the inner circumference of the skull, before draining back into the cataracts once again.

  The first Neuropuncturists called it the Confluence. It was—for them—their primary resource and their greatest challenge, for it was nothing other than the soul, the light they coaxed into ever more brilliance with each passing generation. The Confluence was the structure that distinguished even the most malformed of the Defectives from beasts. And the Shriekers possessed none. Cause coursed through them in rills and tributaries and rivers without so much as touching the light of the soul.

  They were creatures of darkness, the Brethren realized. Utter darkness. Not one sky dwelt within their skulls. Not one thought.

  As much as they resembled the Dûnyain, the Shriekers were actually their antithesis, a race honed to give perfect expression to the darkness that comes before. Where the Dûnyain reached for infinity, the Shriekers embodied zero.

  This old man who would kill them, the Survivor knew, dwelt somewhere in the shadowy in-between. The woman had poured her Cause into the cup of his skull, where it had rushed and swirled, before soaking into the dim swamp of his soul. And now it was about to drain into action.

  The old man dropped his chin to his breast, crushing his wild, white beard. He began speaking the way the Singers had spoken, words that sparked light, a voice that rose not from the mouth, but from the limit of everything surrounding. He had pinched shut his eyes against tears. Now open, they flashed like twin Nails of Heaven.

  “ … irsuirrima tasi cilliju phir …”

  “Cling to me,” the Survivor commanded the child. “Simulate love and terror.”

  The boy did as he was told.

  Thus they stood, a scarred monstrosity and a crab-handed child, stranded and helpless. The old man hesitated, anarchic and unkempt, little more than a rind wrapped about shining power.

  The Survivor wondered that light could throw shadows in full sun. The boy feigned an involuntary cry.

  The pregnant woman watched, her right hand clutched about her belly. The Survivor need only glance at her to hear the thrumming heartbeats, born and unborn …

  Finally, she called out.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ishterebinth

  But what could be more essential than the belly and the whip? Where I dwell, these are the blatant movers of our souls; words are little more than garlands. So I say Men must suffer in ways that words can retrieve lest they die. That is the simpler truth.

  —AJENCIS, Letter to Nikkyûmenes

  Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4123, Year-of-the-Tusk), Ishterebinth

  He could not feel the pillow.

  Sorweel lay in bed—a grand one, hewn from image-pitted stone—and yet he could not feel the pillow.

  But there was sunlight, pale for being filtered so deep … and the inconstant flux of chill and astringent air.

  They were in the Apiary, he realized, the highest halls of Ishterebinth. He threw aside sheets thin as web, hoisted himself to the bed’s edge. He raised his hands to the faceless helm he already knew was there—the body entertains hopes all its own. The Amiolas held him as absolutely as before.

  Eyes imprisoned, he nevertheless peered into the chamber’s dimmer recesses, blinded by the brightness of the shaft above him. The bed sat upon a raised corner, some three steps above what appeared a cramped library otherwise, teetering shelves of codices, and iron scroll-racks crude enough to speak of human manufacture, heaped with scrolls of endless variety, some no more than rolled rags, others winking with the glister of nimil, silver, or gold.

  He discerned the Nonman last, and fairly leapt in his skin when he did so, for Oinaral had been nearest all along, obscured by the bed’s draperies. He stood as motionless as the marble that he so resembled in hue and density, holding a long nimil blade to the light, turning it as though to follow the luminous bead pulsing along its edge.

  Holol, Sorweel realized. The sword was named Holol—“Breathtaker”.

  “What do you do?”

  “Gird for war,” the Nonman replied without so much as a glance.

  And Sorweel saw that he wore a second, heavier hauberk over the gown of nimil chain he had worn before. He noted the oval shield leaning against what appeared a workbench just beyond the Ghoul, almost absurd for the density of signification stamped into it.

  “War?”

  With a quickness that was nothing short of surreal, the Nonman leapt to stand before him, his blade extended, pressing the Amiolas at a point that would have blinded him, had his face been uncovered. And yet, Sorweel sat absolutely still, curiously unalarmed—possessed of a bravery, he realized, that was not his own.

  “I fear you have come to us at an inopportune time, Son of Harweel,” Oinaral Lastborn said, his voice deadly and even.

  “And why is that?”

  “Our time is over. Even I, the Lastborn … even I can feel it begin …”

  The dark gaze dulled for turning inward.

  “You mean the Dolour.”

  Oinaral scowled; the faintest of tremors passed through his arm. Light decanted the length of the arcane Cûnuroi blade.

  “The Intact huddle,” he said in a voice more wrung of passion than calm, “drip with the years into the very confusion they so fear. But the Wayward … they set out, paddle until they lose sight of all compassionate shores … seeking to recover themselves in shame and horror.”

  Oinaral did not so much as move, and yet his manner sagged somehow. “Many …” he said on a breath nearly human. “Many find their way to Min-Uroikas …”

  Incredulity stomped the breath from the youth, an outrage not his own.

  “What are you saying?”

  Oinaral lowered his gaze. The wicked white length of Holol dipped not at all.

  “Cousin!” Sorweel cried, his voice not his own. “Tell me you jest!”

  Dismay. Outrage. And shame—shame before all.

  Flee to Min-Uroikas?

  Then fury. He had assumed his own hatred peerless: a father dead, an honour and a nation trammelled. But what he felt now crackled as a live bonfire within him, a fury that could pop bones and crack teeth, pulp fists for punishing insensate stone!

  Flee to Min-Uroikas? For what? To treat with the Hated? The Vile? How could such a thing be possible?

  “You lie! Such a thing cou—!”

  “Listen to me!” Oinaral shouted down the length of the sword. “Thousands have found their way to Min-Uroikas! Thousands!” He grimaced for something approximating wrath and became, for a fleet instant, truly Sranc-faced. “And one of them has found his way back!”

  Nin’ciljiras … Sorweel realized. And upon this ringing fact, the fury was sucked away.

  Ishterebinth has fallen to Golgotterath!

  He had known this, but …

  A sudden cold washed through him then, a resolve both fathomless and grim. Rather than grope in the vain hope of throwing off the yoke of another, more vital soul, rather than sort himself from himself, he had to find someway to master the new soul he had become. Serwa and Moënghus were doomed, otherwise.

  “Then why raise Holol against me?”

  Oinaral glared. “Cilcûliccas demands that I slay you.”

  “The Lord of Swans? Why?”

  “Because you are for Min-Uroikas, Son of Harweel, though you know it not.”

  Sorweel leaned forward, pressed the Amiolas hard against the point of Holol.

  “Then why hesitate?”

  Oinaral gazed down upon him in drawn horror. It both unnerved and thrilled the youth, the sword’s gleaming taper, the luminous tip grinding, nimil-scored and nimil-blunted, a mere thumb’s breadth from his brow.

  The arid slap of wings. They both started. The Holol chipped across the wrought face as Sorweel yanked his head to squint into the shaft above them. The white was so bright as to be l
iquid, but Sorweel saw the terrifying silhouette nonetheless, unmistakable for the knifing beak and swan-long neck.

  A stork battled in the chute’s throat, then was gone.

  “Because only Fate,” Oinaral Lastborn said, “can redeem the piteous soul of my Race.”

  “But Father … Sorweel is one of your Believer-Kings. Will they not interrogate him?”

  “Yes,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor had conceded.

  “So they will discover the Niom has been betrayed, and all our lives will be forfeit.”

  “That is why you must teach him to hate the Anasûrimbor.”

  “How?”

  “I murdered his father. And you, little Witch, have conquered his heart.”

  “I have conquered nothing.”

  Scrutiny, so piercing as to make the night moan.

  “And yet, hate will come easy to him.”

  “I am not for Golgotterath!”

  Sorweel raced after Oinaral into the baroque chill of the Apiary. He as yet had no idea what the Nonman intended—the ghoul had hustled him out of his chambers without explanation.

  “Then who are you for?” the Nonman asked.

  “My line … My nation!”

  Oinaral cut an imposing figure: his shield slung across his back, a hauberk over his chain gown, and a padded harness—fur pounded into felt—about his shoulders and chest. Holol hung in its scabbard from his hip, its haft propping the palm of his right hand. He appeared both fearsome for his resemblance to Sranc, and proper—for reasons Sorweel could only attribute to the Amiolas. An Injori Ishroi of yore.

  “Then you are for the Anasûrimbor,” he declared.

  “No! I am destined to be his assassin!”

  “Then you would doom your line, your nation.”

  “How? How could you know this?”

  This earned a scowling glance. “How could I not know this, Manling? I was there. I was Siqu ere the heartbreak of Eleneöt. I saw the Whirlwind walk with mine own eyes—the Sranc move of one dread will! I saw the smoke of Sauglish on the horizon, watched the fires of mighty Trysë reflected in the waters of Aumris. I saw it all … the thousands shrieking upon the piers, the raving onslaught, the mothers casting their babes against stone …”