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

by R. Scott Bakker

  How Ishterebinth would one day awaken a fief of Golgotterath …

  Sorweel had fairly swooned for incredulity, listening as he did with a composite soul. What disaster? What catastrophe could warrant degradation so outrageous as this? To beg scraps from the palm of the Vile! Lick the hands that had tortured and murdered their wives! Their daughters! To fall as cannibals upon honour and glory!

  “Outrage!” he barked from hunched shoulders. “They are the Vile!”

  Oinaral seized his shoulder, drew him to a halt. “Name yourself, Son of Harweel … Take possession of what you think.”

  “They are the Vile,” the Horse-King cried. “How? How could any forgetting be so profound?”

  “All forgetting is so profound,” the Siqu replied.

  They passed from the Observances into the Pith proper, where the corridors were expansive and the ceilings oppressive. The peerings were few and far between, but for some reason the gloom embalmed more than it exposed. Guttural hymns floated from the galleries about them, a solemn chorus singing from the Holy Juürl. The stone seemed dulcet, as bright as teeth for the polish of trailing hands. Bestiaries adorned the walls, ancient totems from days even the Great Pit of Years could not reckon. The engravings were more shallow, the figures rendered as large as the surfaces that bore them—a welcome reprieve from the incessant assault of detail. Sorweel could recognize the creatures easily enough—bear, mastodon, eagle, lion—but each had been rendered as if occupying all positions at once—crouching, leaping, running—so that they seemed curious kinds of suns, their torsos become discs, their many limbs the emanations of light.

  “Serwa … Moënghus … What will happen to them?”

  It frightened him, the way her name pinched his throat for speaking.

  “They will be Apportioned.”

  Somehow he knew what this meant. “Divided as spoils …”

  “Yes.”

  “To be loved …” the youth said, at once horrified and unsurprised. “Then murdered.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must do something!”

  “The Aged coddle me,” Oinaral said, “make grand gesture of all the strife I am spared. At least some ember of them, they proclaim, shall glow long into the black. But for all their fatuous celebration, I am despised just the same. Thus the bitter irony of my curse, Son of Harweel. I am the greatest shame my Kinning has known, a reclusive Scribe among grasping Heroes, and yet only I recall the distinction between honour and corruption …”

  The Injori Ishroi rolled his head about his chin as if facts could seize throats.

  “Only I can remember what shame is!”

  And it amazed Sorweel that this underworld could be so similar to his own. Men forever ornamented their words with more words, claiming to be moved by compassion, eloquence, and reason, when in sooth the station of the speaker was their only care. If anything rendered the Nonmen “false,” he decided, it was their nobility, their solidarity, their steadfast refusal to contravene the claims of their fathers …

  Their utter contempt for things convenient.

  “This is why you need me to overthrow Nin’ciljiras?” the young Believer-King asked. “The bigotry of the Aged?”

  Oinaral stared forward, his marmoreal profile expressionless. “Yes.”

  “But if your word counts for nothing, what could the word of Men do?”

  “I do not need you to speak, Son of Harweel.”

  “Then what do you need me for?”

  The Siqu refused to meet his gaze, gesturing instead to a great stair that plummeted into blackness and living rock to their right—the Inward Stair, Sorweel realized. Light flared at the terminus below, but nowhere along the passage.

  “To survive,” Oinaral replied.

  “I don’t understand,” Sorweel said as they descended into the gloom. The wondrous bestiary ornamenting the halls above had yielded to the same crammed welter of history. But where the miniature dioramas stood a fair cubit and were stacked parallel to the floors elsewhere, these issued at an angle upon every step, ribbing the ceiling with epic scenes of strife and glory.

  “You are God-entangled.”

  Sorweel could scarcely feel his own frown. “I fear my doom lies in a different direction, Oinaral.”

  “Doom has no direction, Son of Harweel. The time and place of your death has been assigned, no matter when or where you find yourself.”

  The thought unnerved the youth, despite all the months he’d squandered mulling it.

  “So?” he asked on a thin voice.

  “To be doomed is also to be an oracle …”

  “A way to read the future?”

  The dark eyes appraised him.

  “In a manner, yes … I know only that you cannot die within the Weeping Mountain.”

  The youth scowled. Was this what he had meant about Fate before?

  “You want to use me as your charm!” he cried. “As proof against your own death!”

  The tall Siqu descended some ten steps before answering. His elaborate coat and gown shimmered in the nearing light. His shadow climbed the steps behind him.

  “Where we go …” he began, only to pause as if caught upon some obscure scruple.

  “I cannot survive where we go,” he resumed, “unless I stalk your shadow—your Fate.”

  “And where do we go?” Sorweel asked, raising a hand against the breaching light, for though the stair continued, its cloistered, subterranean passage had come to an end. The oppressive ceilings fell away …

  If evasion had been his design, then the Siqu had timed his confession perfectly. Even with the knowledge afforded by the Amiolas, the spectacle struck him speechless. Hundreds of peerings burned as a constellation of little suns, so bright as to dazzle the eyes, shedding light across the whole of what was called the Ilculcû Rift, a vast, diagonal wedge of emptiness struck into the Mountain’s heart. The Inward Stair flared outward across the lower slope, broadening into something truly monumental, and descending to the lowest trough of the Ilculcû. But the wonder lay above, stamped deep into the opposite face of the Rift: the famed Hanging Citadels of Ishterebinth.

  “We dwindle,” Oinaral said, “but our works remain …”

  Sorweel found himself gawking for awe, even though Immiriccas had despised the ostentation. The opposite depths of the Mountain, Sorweel knew, were riddled with the palatial complexes of the Injori Ishroi, a maze of underworld manors, all opening onto the hanging face of the Ilculcû, forming a great and eclectic ceiling, one possessing numberless embrasures, dozens of colonnades and terraces—a veritable scarp of gilded and graven structure! A labyrinth of iron platforms subtended it all, hanging like nets pinned to a fisherman’s ceiling, descending in stages, conjoining all of the strongholds. Some sported balustrades, but most hung as plates in air, lavishly furnished in places, sparsely in others, all of it bound into a surreal commons. The Believer-King could see dozens of figures through and across the haze of grilled floors, some congregated, some paired as lovers, and a great number solitary.

  Discourse hung as a thin mutter upon the air. Periodic shouts of grief pealed across the gulf.

  “Behold,” Oinaral said, his tone bitter and bent, “Mi’punial’s Famed Hidden Heaven …”

  “The Sky-Beneath-the-Mountain,” Sorweel replied in awe. “I remember …”

  He looked to his Siqu, not quite credulous of his certainty. “I remember singing …” he said, fumbling between thoughts and images not his own. “I remember the peerings ablaze, the horns pealing morning bright—and the whole Rift booming with sacred song!”

  “Aye,” Oinaral said, turning his head away.

  “The Ishroi and the Indentured would congregate across the Sky-Beneath,” Sorweel continued, “and they would sing … from the Hipinna, mostly … Yes … for that was the favourite of the wives and the children …” And it seemed he could hear it, the holy chorus, at once thunderous and sweet, magical for the seamless compounding of hearts and voices, passion struck
from the mire of the flesh, raised to the mystic purity of the Ecstasis. He found himself looking from side to side across the expanse of the Inward Stair, noticing for the first time the small mounds of debris scattered across its entirety. “We would vanish into our songs,” he said, glimpsing things some other soul had seen, “and the Emwama … they would assemble on these very steps, and weep for the beauty of their masters!”

  Sorweel turned to the ancient Siqu. “They worshipped us then … Adored the hand that whipped them.”

  “As they do now,” Oinaral said darkly. “As they are bred.”

  “And the singing?” the soul that had once been Sorweel asked. “Has song fled the Mountain, my Brother?”

  The Siqu paused upon one of the strange, small piles of debris. He chipped his boot against the fibrous mass, expelling something that clattered down the steps at an angle before and below Sorweel …

  The bowl of a human skull.

  “Song has fled the Mountain,” the ghoul said.

  The gloom was such that only forms could be discerned at any distance. Anasûrimbor Serwa knew him by the wary scruple of his passage, how he never followed quite the same path to where she hung. The Thresholds had been wrought to baffle the Gods, a place where the Nonmen might escape as a thief into a crowd, and Harapior, more than any of the others, lived in terror of what sins might find him. Just as he, more than any other, found terror and torment in her singing.

  Glory was a drug to them, her father had said. She never need fear them so long as she remained extraordinary.

  She sang as she always sang … another ancient Cûnuroi hymn.

  “My wife, Mirinqû, would sing thus,” the Lord Torturer said, “as she prepared my kit before battle.” He had paused just outside the penultimate threshold; now he grimaced for crossing, stood riven in her presence. “That very song, that very way …”

  He raised and lowered his left hand, blinked two tears from his eyes.

  “In her voice …”

  Wrath clawed his expression.

  “But your singing was not so exact in the beginning … No … Not at all.”

  He lowered his wax-white face in contemplation.

  “I know what you do, Anasûrimbor witch. I know that you sing to torment your tormentors. To heap yet more turmoil upon our blasted hearts.”

  He stood impassive, absolutely still, and yet wild violence emanated from him.

  “But how you do it—that is the question that consumes my brothers.” He drew his black eyes up. “How does a mortal girl, a captive hidden from sun, sky—even the Gods!—become the terror of the Ishroi, throw all Ishterebinth into uproar?”

  He bared fused teeth.

  “But I know. I know what you are—the secret of your obscene line.”

  He knew of the Dûnyain, she realized.

  “You sing Mirinqû’s songs because of what I have said. You sing with her-her … her voice because of what I remember! You are the captive, yet it is I who confesses—who betrays!”

  There could be no more doubt as to who ruled in Ishterebinth.

  Again he reached out; again his will fell short her skin. He balled the hand into a shaking fist, raised it to her temple. Monstrous passion deformed his face.

  “I would draw my blade now!” he screeched. “You would sing then, I assure you!”

  And he warred with himself, Lord Harapior, swayed and moaned for tides of disordered passion. He lowered his face once again, stood gasping, clenching and unclenching his fists, listening to the dulcet call of long-dead daughters and wives.

  “But your rumour has spread too far,” he grated in a broken voice. “They speak only of you throughout the Mountain … the daughter of Men who has tortured the Torturer.”

  He stood breathing, folded a final tremor into the serenity of immortal hatred.

  His manner became that of a thumb testing a vicious edge.

  “You will have no voice left, Anasûrimbor, ere you find peace in the Weeping Mountain.”

  The peerings faltered, then became no more than husks surfacing in the gelid light of Holol, which Oinaral held point-out as they descended into the Chthonic Manse, the riddled heart of the Weeping Mountain. They passed great veins of quartz, and the sword dazzled the shelves of lucent statuary, visions that awed the youth, but left him no less boggled. The empire of the ghouls was nothing if not time, the stacking of Ages in the mist. But what could walls sheathed in miraculous simulacra provide eyes that could not see?

  The ghouls had chiselled their souls into their walls for naught. They had remade the Mountain in their image for naught. They had presumed they could render the spirit material, make of it something hard as stone, all for naught. The deeper Oinaral Lastborn led Sorweel, the more the pageants heaped upon the walls shouted tragic vanity.

  If his human portion was baffled, the inhuman portion was appalled: the thought of his brothers huddled as aggrieved misers over their dwindling hoard of memories. It was the penance of the besotted, souls bent upon the vindication of suffering, the proof of persecution that would seal their claim against Fate. They had been condemned by a folly that was theirs and theirs alone, and so they had committed the most human of humanity’s numberless sins …

  They had blamed Heaven.

  Sorweel need only prick his ear to the black to sound the wages of their folly. For where Nonmen had once toiled singing, they now wailed as bewildered beasts in the dark. Oinaral had spoken true: song had fled these halls long, long ago. Only paeans and dirges graced the Mountain now.

  Thousands had once populated these levels, the bulk of the Injori. Below the Hanging Citadels of the Ishroi and far greater in extent, the Chthonic Manse had housed the Indentured, those born into the Sworn Kinnings. This had been the unheralded but no less vital heart of Ishterebinth. Throngs had streamed beneath the peerings, packed the concourses of the Lesser Rifts. Sorweel could remember the perpetual sound of rain, not for any actual rainfall, but for the noise of endless industry broken across adorned walls, filtered until nothing but vapour reached the ear.

  Now only dark and derelict passages remained, turn after turn, the walls belted with meaningless, miniature parades, the floor strewn with debris—bones among them. Gone was the light—Oinaral actually took care to avoid corridors housing the glow of isolate peerings. Gone was the swarm of regimented activity. And gone was the sound of cleansing rain …

  For it was here that the Weeping Mountain took its name.

  Sakarpus had wept the night and day following the triumph of the Aspect-Emperor, and though the chorus had immersed him, Sorweel had heard nothing save his own lamentations writ wide. No matter how distant, the wail on the wind could only be his own because the loss it declared was also his own. The losses of the Nonmen, however, lay far beyond his ken. His skin pimpled for the unnatural tenor. His ear recoiled for the lunacy of the screech. He could hear it in each tormented aria, the punishments of millennia whittled to the point of now, vast life concentrated into anguished slurry—horrors reverberating in a drum a thousand years dead. A dead wife. A treacherous lover. A disastrous rout. Sorweel could own none of these losses—and who could, given the mad individuality of each? Time itself had flown apart in the bowel of the Weeping Mountain. And so he heard fragments, a choir of crazed overreactions, torment, heartbreak, floating devoid of sense or origin. “The left leg is broken!” one voice bobbed across the turbulence. “The knee is not the knee!”

  “Don’t look!” another voice erupted. “Turn aside thine eyes!”

  The cacophony gathered density the deeper they fathomed, becoming an all-permeating roar, a wash of thousands thrashing as a snake caught upon a pitchfork. Neither Sorweel nor Oinaral ventured to speak. The Siqu led. Sorweel followed rigid with apprehension, starting at each new howl that issued raw from the black beyond Holol’s white light. The wailing grew louder, and with it, the madness thickened as cream, until he found himself reeling for a melancholy all his own, as if the multiplication of laments heard from w
ithout rendered them indistinguishable from sorrow within.

  Sorweel clutched his hands against tremors, clenched his voice into a burning ball.

  “An endless funeral …” he found himself gasping. “A blasted tomb! How could anyone dwell in such a place?”

  “Gird your loins, Son of Harweel. The tempest is yet to come …”

  Sorweel stopped, watched Oinaral and his point of light draw ahead of him.

  “Enough!” he cried. “No more games! Tell me! Where are you taking me? What is your design?”

  The Nonman turned to study him for a long moment—too long.

  “I’m not a fool,” Sorweel continued. “I’ve survived months among the Anasûrimbor bearing murder in my heart! You refuse to lie—this is how I know you possess honour … and because these … memories I have assure as much. I knew you as a boy!” He paused to glare at the Nonman. “You cannot lie, Oinaral Lastborn, so you defer, evade … Why? If not to lure me too deep, past some point of return.”

  A dark, glittering look. “This is what you think?”

  “I think this is as far as I go. I think our time of reckoning has come!”

  A shy, even anguished, edge crept into the porcelain expression. “Even if it costs the lives of the girl an—?”

  “Enough!” the Believer-King erupted. “Enough! What is it you so fear to tell me? What awaits us in the dark?”

  Oinaral cast an apprehensive look about them.

  “We search for my father,” he said, bereft of expression, hope.

  This caught Sorweel by surprise. The inhuman lament reverberated in the interval. The Cauldron lay numb as void, as if the bone of his skull had been knitted into it.

  “Oirûnas?” he asked, knowing this name as surely as that of Niehirren Halfhand or Orsuleese the Faster, or any other Heroic Lord of the Plains. Oirûnas Oirasig, Survivor of the First Watch, and Master of the Second. With his twin brother, Oirinas, among the most renowned of the Siölan Ishroi.