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

by R. Scott Bakker

  “He still lives?”

  Solemn hesitation. “Yes.”

  “But surely he’s …” Sorweel began, only to pause on a sudden scruple.

  He knew the pain of lost fathers. The ache.

  But the Nonman seemed unmoved. “The Dolour has claimed him entirely,” he said. “Yes.”

  They stared at each other across the desolate hall, Man and Nonman.

  “This is why you need me?” Sorweel said. “To survive your … your father?”

  “Yes,” the ancient Siqu replied, averting his darkling gaze. “To beg of him one last legendary deed.”

  So they walked, Man and Nonman.

  Buried. Wandering the entombed heart of Ishterebinth, the Weeping Mountain. Encased. Enveloped by graven lattices of glory and orgiastic excess. Trampled by bootless meaning, otiose hope. The brute reality was dismaying enough, but the immateriality of the underworld trek was by far the worse. The losses.

  How? How had we been laid so low?

  The Nonman Siqu explained everything, how they travelled through the Chthonic to reach the Vast Ingressus, the massive well that sank through the greater part of the Weeping Mountain. Oinaral had not seen his father since the Hero had forsaken the Citadels a millennium previous, but he had heard rumour enough to know that he lived, and to believe that he wandered the Mere—the Holy Deep. For all the disorder of their souls, the Erratics remain shackled to animal necessity. This was why Sorweel and Oinaral had so far only heard them, why the lamentations had remained before them. Save for a few, the Wayward congregated about the Ingressus, where they scavenged what food they could.

  The caterwaul waxed. Oinaral flinched at first sound of the clacking, stone hammering stone. He paused, stood white and rigid in Holol’s light, listening to the noise repeat as relentlessly as a wheel …

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  “Time is short,” he finally called. “We must run!” He seized Sorweel by the arm, drew him into the black passage before them—into the immured cacophony.

  “What?” the Believer-King cried, stumbling after him. “What is it?”

  “The Boatman comes!” Oinaral replied, breaking into a trot while holding the luminous point of Holol out before them.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Graven surfaces unspooled in the light. They crossed a reception hall of some kind, one reduced to scorched wrack for fire or sorcery. In the sweep of shadows, Sorweel glimpsed a nude figure huddled amid the debris.

  “So we take the Haul?” he asked, not quite fathoming.

  Another nude figure in the black, this one standing, pounding its face into the doll-sized imagery before him. Sorweel saw a whole panel roll beneath the light, the figures smashed like teeth from jaws, the remaining roots smeared with blood.

  “Run!” the Nonman cried over his shoulder.

  A hair-raising screech. The light struck two filth-smeared figures locked upon the soiled floor, strangling, each striving to rape or murder the other. Sorweel’s boot cracked through a rib cage, and he pitched forward to the ground—realized that what he had assumed ash and dust was in fact excrement. He glimpsed movement in the blackness, the shine of Sranc scalps. The gloom howled.

  Oinaral stooped to assist him. His light seemed to pick out random images of horror.

  “Cousin!” Sorweel shouted—a cry punched from him by horror and incredulity. “This cannot be!”

  But wailing had conquered all heights of sound. They stood in the Wormery, he realized, where the famed silks of Injor-Niyas were manufactured for the Kings of lands as distant as Shir and Kyraneas. The Ingressus was close … Very close!

  A wretch stepped out of the howling blackness and fell upon Oinaral’s nimil-armoured knee, his ribs inked in shadow, so famished as to resemble a Sranc in body as well as mien. The Siqu turned in revulsion and horror, struck the piteous soul upon the brow with Holol.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Figures tossed in the greater gloom about them.

  They ran about a great mound of ruin—some bricked structure toppled. A portcullis jutted from the shattered blocks, nine black-iron teeth pointed as pitchfork over a shoulder, each adorned in severed Nonman heads in varying stages of decay.

  Oinaral cast his gaze about, then gestured for Sorweel to climb. He followed the Siqu to the ruin’s summit, the Horde’s screech resonating within the unholy Cauldron. Holol’s radiant point shed a chiaroscuro of shadows across the floors beneath them. Pallid figures leapt into existence in the interstices of light, ghouls become larval with grief, wailing, rocking, slapping offal across their cheeks and skulls. Gesticulating hands. Fused teeth about howling maws. Skin blackened for filth and feces. Rictus after anguished rictus, hundreds of them, all hairless and fungal white, bobbing like buoys across the murky expanse. And the spectacle brought the youth to his knees, struck him to the root. Rot had become his marrow, cinders his heart …

  These! These were their wages! The fruit of their mad conceit, their blasphemous folly!

  The unthinkable had come to pass. The People of Morning were truly dead.

  The Nonman’s light flew out across space, revealing the hulks of columns and piers, stations gutted and gigantic, heights of graven glory hanging cadaverous over writhing floors.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  His bearing apparently secured, Oinaral dropped down the mound’s side, then led him across ground heaped with centuries of midden and crawling with famished Erratics. Sorweel danced about them as one might lepers, stumbled over a famished ghoul leaning over a violet corpse, tearing at the black nipple with canine abandon. Many were oblivious to their passage, rapt with some long extinct horror. Sorweel saw one cradling void like an infant, another caressing stone like a lover. But many others noticed, some with the dull mien of those peering about immovable grief, others caught upon the Holol’s light as fish upon a lure, black eyes glittering …

  Many of these began standing.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Sorweel gawked about, stumbling after the Siqu, who turned to him while still trotting. His shout need not be inaudible.

  Run!

  A sorcerous mutter somehow steamed through the mad Lament …

  And Sorweel was running hard upon the heels of the glittering Nonman warrior, pitching over midden slopes. Once again he glimpsed the Amiolas reflected in Oinaral’s oval shield. Once again he glimpsed the spectral horror of Immiriccas gazing back upon him. And the Believer-King stopped amid a clutch of grovelling wretches, astonished and appalled.

  Was he dead?

  What—what? What was happening here?

  Oinaral receded into the deeps, his light slouching across the countless aggrieved. A wall of ascending arches reared before Nonman Siqu, curved about void. His mail coats glittered like something out of legend …

  Shadow fell across the young Believer-King.

  What happened?

  A bloodred light sparked behind him—and he whirled about, recalling the sorcerous singing. He saw dozens of Erratics, naked and rag-bound, staggering over and through their brothers while bounding as wild apes toward him. He saw a figure gowned in rags a fair distance behind, his mouth and eyes flaring white, a piercing, crimson bolus scribbling between his upraised hands. There was a crack like thunder. Something happened he could not quite fathom, let alone describe—something like light blowing the blood from all the intervening bodies. A warble passed through the screaming chorus.

  Hot fluid slapped across him.

  Somehow Oinaral had him in an iron clasp and was drawing him backward.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  “Hell!” he screamed at the Siqu. “I’m in Hell!”

  But the ghoul could not hear him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dagliash

  The song of Truth is the cracking of Desire. Only when Men weep do they know.

  —CANTICLES, 6:6, The Chronicle of the Tusk

  Give them dirt, and they wi
ll multiply.

  —AÖRSI PROVERB

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

  Harsunc. The Fish Knife.

  This was what the Aörsic Knights-Chieftain called the River Sursa, for this was what the waterway resembled, especially when glimpsed from the rampart heights of Dagliash in the glare of evening: a long thin blade of silver cutting the lifeless wastes of Agongorea from the spare Erengaw Plains, the eastern bank nearly straight; and the western bank, the one prone to flooding, curved as though from years of whetting.

  Fish was also the belittling cognomen the ancient Aörsi had used for the Sranc—their version of skinnies. “The Fish,” the war-bitten would say, “must first jump the Knife.” They spoke the way all warlike Men speak, filled with bluff and hatred, saying only what was injurious to their foe, deriding (as they should) all that was lethal and true. In their simple and dangerous hearts, the River Sursa was always theirs, always the instrument of Men.

  But in truth the Harsunc possessed two deadly edges. Since the days of Nanor-Ukkerja, the blood of innumerable Men had mucked her banks, souls lost in battles whose names were carved on cracked and buried stone. Chronicles told of bloated bodies jamming the river’s throat, of great rotting sheets that skinned the waters for days, even weeks, before decay and the relentless current finally delivered them to the gullet of the Misty Sea.

  The Harsunc was as apt to be defended as crossed—to run red as purple. “If it is our Knife,” Nau-Cayûti asks his cocksure generals in the Kayûtiad, “then why have we raised Dagliash to watch over it?”

  Indeed, it would be the wrong edge that would prove the most keen in the end. The No-God would end the millennial dispute. Dagliash would be wrecked. All the Bardic metaphors, the generational meanings, the midnight tales of dread and glory would burn with the cities of the High Norsirai. The River Sursa, to the extent it was referred to at all, became the “Chogiaz”, what the Sranc had named it in their obscene tongue. Two thousand years would pass ere Men breathed meaning into its spare aspect once again. Two thousand years would the Knife wait for the Great Ordeal to dare its ancient and murderous edges.

  The Ordealman trudged onward, crossing the vast swamp the Horde had made of the River Migmarsa, so passing from High Illawor into Yinwaul—from a land scarcely mentioned in the Holy Sagas, to one mentioned as much as any other. The Horde continued its withdrawal, gathering and retreating before the shining hosts. The great smoke that had concealed it, the dust of a million stamping feet, thinned as the ground became stonier, so that it seemed the horizon steamed more than billowed before the pursuing horsemen. At times they could even glimpse the beasts, pale masses seething, multiplied until they matted the contours of the land. Hillocks and knolls overrun, vales choked, distances plumbed, encompassed. Everywhere great masses shifting and sloughing, as if the very world moulted. Men gazed stupefied, neither fearing nor wondering, for most lacked the means to truly comprehend what they witnessed. They knew only that they were dwarfed, little more than insignificant specks in the thrall of jealous enormities. Their lives, they understood, mattered only in their sum. And since this is the grim truth of all human life, the insight possessed the character of revelation.

  And it came to seem holy, eating Sranc. To consume them was to partake of the Horde.

  To eat meaning.

  And so they rode, day in and day out, crossing the trampled, lifeless miles, pacing and pondering their innumerable foe. They watched the Schoolmen stride the low sky, a necklace of brilliant lights strung across the horizon. Their gazes danced from flash to flicker, point to burning point. Some took to watching the way the lights steeped and burnished the pluming veils above. Some watched the obscene thousands perishing below, mites engulfed in sweeping fire. Periodically, they turned in their saddles to study the columns of the Great Ordeal, the assemblies glittering in the high sunlight. The visions made fanatics of them all.

  They had come to the ends of the earth. They did war to save the very World.

  There could be no doubting in the penumbra of such mad spectacle …

  The justness of their cause. The divinity of the Holy Aspect-Emperor.

  Only their strength remained in question.

  Gradually, so slow as to defeat the discrimination of many, a different pitch had crept into the Horde’s thundering howl, a plaintive edge, more panicked than crazed, almost as though the Sranc knew they were being eaten. The Schoolmen who strode the low skies in the Culling found they could now glimpse the seething fields they scoured, parsed, and blasted. Where for weeks and months the beasts had seemed to elude and frustrate the pursuing horsemen, now they seemed to genuinely flee.

  “They fear us!” a joyous Siroyon declared in Council.

  “No,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, ever quick to dispatch assumptions that might lead his men to dismiss their foe. “They scream according to their hunger and exertion and nothing more. Now that our bellies are full, our advance has quickened. We have merely twisted the lute-strings tight.”

  But for many, there could be no denying the growing desperation of their Adversary. Time and again, the Holy Aspect-Emperor cautioned his Believer-Kings, reminding them that Sranc were not Men, that straits hardened them, that starvation fuelled their ferocity. Even still, a new daring took root among the more feckless skirmishers. They believed they knew their foe as well as any ancient Knight-Chieftain: his ebb, his flow, his more treacherous vicissitudes. And as always, the assumption of knowledge licensed a growing sense of impunity.

  What was more, a dark and destructive will had impregnated their thoughts—all their thoughts—a need, a hunger, to visit catastrophic destruction upon their foe, to reap him as wheat, to gather him into infinite sheaves, and gorge upon him in ecstasy. “Think!” they would cry to one another in private. “Think of the feast!”

  Seeing these dark inklings, the Holy Aspect-Emperor harangued them in council, upbraiding them for their recklessness. On several occasions he even went so far as to invoke the Martial Prohibitions, and condemned several caste-nobles to the lash. Time and again he called their attention to how far they had come. “Who?” he would cry, his voice booming through the Eleven Pole Chamber. “Who among you will be the first to have come so far only to perish in rank folly? Who among you shall earn the honour of that song?”

  And then, when the Ordeal had reached the eastern frontier of Illawor, he stabbed his finger on the great, illuminated map his Believer-Kings so often bickered over, and drew his haloed finger down the Fish Knife, the fabled Harsunc, inked in bold black. It was too deep to be forded, too broad for Sranc to swim; even those not privy to the reports of the Imperial Trackers knew as much.

  Soon, the Horde would be caught before them.

  It would defend Dagliash no matter what.

  “What feast,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor asked his Believer-Kings, “will be served up then?”

  The timbers pitched. Proyas’s stomach climbed his ribs, then dropped.

  Two days previous the Ordeal had come upon a forest of poplars—or the remnants of one—in the wake of the Horde. Given the mists enveloping the shoreline, the apparition of savaged trees had seemed more an omen than a boon. But come nightfall the blessing they represented had become plain. The carpenters set to repairing innumerable wains and other accoutrements. Their idle brothers, meanwhile, cavorted about genuine bonfires, whooping into the void. Agmundrmen and others fashioned great spits, which they used to roast Sranc whole. Flames climbed the height of Momemn’s walls for the whoosh of grease. The encampment, long condemned to chill and gloom for the lack of fuel, blazed for the light of innumerable fires, and Men ambled as though drunk, their beards shining for gluttony, their gazes bright for something too vicious to be called jubilation.

  Only the Schoolmen and the Shrial Knights refrained from partaking in the bacchanal. But while the former remained within their enclaves as always, the latter set about cutting and appropriating the best timber they
could find. Under the watchful gaze of Lord Ussiliar, they toiled through the night, dressing and dowelling and binding, fashioning a platform large enough to deck a Cironji war-galley.

  The Raft, they called it.

  Now Proyas stood upon it with his fellow Believer-Kings, swinging over emptiness on a mummer’s stage, gazing stupefied across the teeming leagues, for the day possessed the arid clarity of summer’s abdication. For all the miracles he had witnessed over the years, this seemed the most preposterous. Even the Grandmasters among them appeared visibly awestruck. Many present had seen the now legendary Throwing-of-the-Hulls, when Kellhus emptied Invishi’s harbour by raising and casting burning ships whole at Prince Akirapita’s Chorae-equipped bowmen. Although that episode was the greater spectacle, they had spied it from afar. This, however, this had the intimacy of a father’s embrace, and the profundity of unhinged ground, vaulting not simply as a person, but as a place. Proyas watched others exchange small looks of wonder, heard the murmur of astonishment and glee.

  Couras Nantilla, who stood next to him, clutched his arm as if to say, See! See!

  But Nersei Proyas saw only the power and nothing of the proof. Small commiserations like Nantilla’s grasp simply recalled the consolation lost and the rank turmoil gained: the knowledge that he was no longer Zaudunyani, even though he belonged to them all the same. These Men who had been his brothers were now gulls … fools bent on suffering for their delusions!

  And so his heart was broken even as it bounced on a string of giddy drops and steep, aerial turns.

  Out of instinct, he aspired to the blank mien and manner that is the refuge of all lost souls in public. But melancholy possesses a spite all its own, and seeks to reveal itself regardless of what the soul wills. Kellhus brought the Raft about, Yinwaul fell away, and the Neleöst bobbed across the whole of the horizon. The angle of the sunlight also changed, and Proyas turned, startled to find himself standing in another’s shadow. It was Saubon. His hand upon the rail, the Galeoth loomed before him, standing so as to shield him from the others.