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

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Dour befits our terrible station,” the man muttered under his breath, “but not tears …”

  Proyas averted his face, pawed away the wetness. His eyes had felt muddy, but then they always felt muddy of late. For a heartbeat he stood as one broken, utterly abject in Saubon’s alarmed gaze. Then he found it, the old arrogant posture, the mien and stance of a great man possessing warrant both temporal and divine—the most profound assurance known to Men. He communicated his gratitude to Saubon with a lingering look.

  What was happening?

  The encampment blurred as cobbles underneath a carriage. Thousands clotted the battered land, all of them crying out, creating a roar that was scooped by the velocity of their passage overhead. To a soul they shouted out, bellowed in praise and adulation of their False Prophet. Dark and pale and sunburned faces. Mouths pitting beards. Thickets of axes and spears and swords threshing into oblivion.

  And then, in a heartbeat, it was all gone, a commotion fading to vapour behind them. The racing ground snapped asunder, and the Raft hurtled out over the turbulent plate of the Neleöst Sea …

  At the fore of the Raft, Kellhus stood facing backwards, facing them, his eyes sparking brilliance even in the direct sun. He held his arms out low to his side, as if balancing upon a beam. He alone neither swayed nor stumbled, but rather leaned and straightened as one with the timber deck. The golden discs about his hands could only be glimpsed intermittently; the halo about his head not at all. The wind whisked his hair into a golden snarl, tugged his silk robes into ancient skin, innumerable creases and lobes fluttering across the white gleam of the sun.

  Who? Who was this man who had conquered so wide, so deep?

  Timbers groaned as they tilted toward the west. A new distance rose up and around his godlike silhouette: the dishevelled bulk of the Urokkas—or what they could see of the mountains through the tailings of the Shroud. The Raft lurched toward them, toward Dagliash.

  Who was Anasûrimbor Kellhus?

  Had Achamian been right about him all along?

  Hanging no higher than a carrack’s mast, they could feel the Neleöst on their skin, taste the ghost of brine and spray. The Sea swept out, and for all its torment below, receded into the featureless perfection of a geometer’s rule. The coastline lay on their right …

  As did the Horde.

  Dragged south by the prevailing winds, the Shroud extended miles out to Sea. It seemed a thing painted, immense strokes of ochre and dun daubed across the northern horizon. The shores in advance of the Ordeal were barren. They saw nothing save land that had been stamped and rooted and denuded, that is, aside from a lone company of Kidruhil, who cheered in miniature, brandishing lances and shields at their miraculous passage. The Shroud loomed ever higher, stacking hazes and plumes that cricked the neck for gazing. For a time their Holy Aspect-Emperor stood lucid and shining in the rising sun, framed by the gloom of caliginous, sky-spanning veils.

  The million-throated howl breached the rush of wind and the boom of surf. Proyas noticed Siroyon pulling a kerchief to his mouth and nose. The Shroud swallowed them. Coughing obscurity. The barks and screams of innumerable throats, braided into a pitch that siphoned burning liquid into ears. The stench was intolerable, base and glutinous with rot, acrid with feces. Despite the foulness, the Lords of the Ordeal peered toward the shoreline to a man. Even Proyas could feel it, the sense of peeking behind curtains both monumental and forbidden, a clamour to glimpse the catastrophic fact of their foe …

  The soul-numbing numbers.

  His eyes watering, Proyas glimpsed the crawling tracts, disjointed visions of a thousand thousand caterwauling shadows. The land itself seemed to smoke, though nothing burned beyond the throats and stomachs of the onlookers.

  Aside from Kellhus, only Kayûtas and Sibawûl seemed unaffected. The latter actually turned to regard Proyas the instant of his glimpse, and it seemed mad that eyes could be so dead in a fume that pricked everything living. Most all present pawed at the corners of their eyes. Teeth ached for the loudness of the inhuman chorus. Skin tingled. King Hogrim hacked convulsively. Temus Enhorû, Grandmaster of the Saik, fell to his knees retching. Lord Soter did a comic jig to avoid the spatter, cried something in Ainoni about understanding sorcerers with no stomach for the sea.

  The Shroud gradually thinned and parted, as did the feverish crescendo of the Horde’s roar. Armour that had flashed in the sun was now flat and pale. Grey soiled their plaited beards. Black wedged the corner of their mouths.

  Men spat into the rushing Sea. The Urokkas leapt into clarity about their holy steersman, more squat and sullen than majestic.

  “Hark!” Kellhus called through glaring light. “Witness the undoing of the Horde!”

  His plan was every bit as simple as the cumbersome size of the Ordeal demanded. Inexorably retreating toward the River Sursa, the Horde had withdrawn about the Urokkas rather than into them. The idea was for the Schools to strike out across the low peaks, where they would defend the slopes against the bulk of the Horde to the north, drowning the passes and ravines in arcane fire. The Men of the Ordeal, meanwhile, would advance along the broken shores to the south, their flank secure. At some decisive instant, the Holy Aspect-Emperor would use the Raft to deliver a cohort of warriors into Dagliash, where, with the Swayali, he would transform the mountain the Nonmen called Iros, and the Norsirai, Antareg, into a beacon of death. “When the Fish collapse upon Dagliash as their final refuge,” their Lord-and-Prophet said, “they will find only iron and fire!”

  They saw the sedimentary bloom of the Sursa before they saw the river itself, a vast bruise blackening the aquamarine plate of the Sea. The granitic immensity of Antareg reared into their line of sight, cliffs stacked upon cliffs rising from the surf. Dagliash dominated its summit, a fist brandished against the Sea: cyclopean walls devoid of battlements but otherwise intact, their sheer bulk betraying the naivete of their ancient makers; great square hollows that had been towers and bastions. More than any ruin he had seen, it showed how time was itself a caustic solution, something that consumed edges, made sediment of complexity.

  It was hard not to be astonished by the elegant genius of the plan: As the Ordealmen cleared the shoreline, the Horde to the north would shovel itself into the furnaces stoked by the Schools. The proud horsemen of the Ordeal, so long confined to skirmishing with their foe, would be loosed in pitched battle at long last. Slaughter and terror would herd them toward the drowning waters of the Sursa.

  “Our Lord-and-Prophet has become our butcher!” Prince Nurbanu Ze cackled, his humour too familiar, his elation too avid.

  The Meat owned some more than others. At some point following their departure, their hunger to close with their foe had become more unseemly than noble. Proyas himself could feel it thickening his voice and stoking his fury: the throb of carnal lust, a coital tremor passing through all things anxious and hateful. No one need speak it to know—not anymore. Coupling and killing had been kicked from the places once allotted in their souls, as if, in eating their foe, they were becoming him.

  He could see it in their hooded, leaning looks, the shadow of something eager and indecent. Coithus Narnol, Saubon’s older brother and King of Galeoth, scanned the heights, his mouth open like a witless dog. The Mysunsai Grandmaster, Obwë Gûswuran, peered out to the Shroud beyond the humped and broken line of the Urokkas, his back not so much turned as canted away from the assembly. Their Holy Aspect-Emperor, Proyas realized, had not so much charged them with an onerous task as laid out a wicked banquet.

  Disbursing glory was all that remained.

  “Lord-and-Prophet!” Proyas cried, shocked by the near sob that cracked his voice. “I beg of you! Yield the glory of Dagliash to me!”

  The assembled Lords and Grandmasters made no secret of their surprise. In all their years vying for their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s favour, not once had Proyas thrown his lot in with theirs. Saubon scowled openly.

  Kellhus, however, continued hurtling backward into the v
ista without acknowledging him. The Raft slowed as it approached the ancient fortress, climbing in stages to match the height of the cliffs. Surf crashed and hissed below. The scarps framed him, details dropping as the Raft ascended. The halos about his hands were clearly visible against the watercolour darks, like the ghosts of gold-foil.

  “Thus far our foe has naught but nettled us,” Kellhus declared to his Believer-Kings, his eyes blind for luminous meaning, light gazing into infinity. “Even Irsûlor was but a gambit for them, a trifle wagered with little expectation. Were it not for our arrogance, our dissension, Umrapathur would be here with us now …”

  “Lord-and-Prophet!” Proyas cried. “I beg you please!”

  This earned him curious looks from Kayûtas and Apperens Saccarees, not to mention an elbow from Saubon. Others, like Nurbanû Soter and Hringa Vûkyelt, merely acknowledged his infraction with frowns.

  “Dagliash is where they will fight,” Kellhus continued, ignoring his infe-licity, “where the Unholy Consult will try to gore rather than bleed our Great Ordeal …”

  It’s peculiar, the way the truancy of an act can command the soul that wills it, the way Men sometimes throw more effort behind their errors rather than retreat from them. If wrong cannot be made right, at least it can be made real.

  What did it matter, the honour of Dagliash, if disgrace was the toll of attaining it? And yet, never in his life had Proyas so needed a thing—or so it seemed, hanging above the hulking ruins.

  “Here it was,” Kellhus said, “the Nonmen first saw the Incu-Holoinas cut open the sky. Here it was the Inchoroi committed the first of their ghastly and numberless crimes …”

  The Raft now circled the fortress, wafting sideways so that the gutted bastions remained square to the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s back. Clots of black armoured Sranc streamed from various orifices, mobbing the walls.

  “Viri … Great among the Nonmen Mansions, lies dead beneath the foundations of these walls, the underworld fastness of Nin’janjin. The very ground is chambered, riddled as an infested stump …”

  “Please!” the Believer-King of Conriya heard himself cry, hoarse and plaintive. “After all I have given!”

  You owe me this!

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas finally turned to regard him, chips of sun glaring from his eyes.

  “Hitherto, the Consult could not move in force against us,” he said. “They could only wait, use the Horde and their cunning to bleed us. Now the Great Ordeal stands upon their very threshold. Agongorea lies yonder, the Field Appalling, and beyond that, Golgotterath itself …”

  “Grant me the honour!” Saubon cried out after sparing Proyas an outraged look.

  “No!” Proyas shouted. “No!”

  But others had begun calling out as well, a greedy cacophony. What had been pity, distaste, had become umbrage, a determination to outdo. Suddenly it seemed he could taste the grease of the place, the pumice sear …

  Dagliash was larded with Meat.

  “If our Foe hopes to keep us from their foul Gate!” Kellhus boomed over all. “They will strike here!”

  Now it was the fortress that seemed the one floating.

  Proyas threw himself to his knees before Anasûrimbor Kellhus’s feet, the first among his surging, shouting peers. It was not devotion that impelled him, nor even the will to prove oneself fanatical, for these things had been stripped from him. Only the hunger …

  The necessity.

  “Pleeease! I beg you!”

  The need for something simple.

  Zeal, it was often said, dwelt in the deeds and not the words of Men.

  But Proyas knew this was not true, knew that one could never sort the words from the deeds, if only because words were deeds, acts committed, possessing consequences as mortal as any fist or knife. But knowing a thing and understanding it were never quite the same. To know the power of words was one thing, but to witness that power, to first hear the words spoken and to then see the souls dance … Words land as hammers.

  And yet, to observe a thing always is to observe a thing not at all. Proyas had seen Anasûrimbor Kellhus harangue countless souls across the breadth of the Three Seas—thousands of exhortations across dozens of years, battles, and nations—without understanding the least of what happened. And how could he when he stood among those exhorted? When it was his heart caught upon the hook of that beloved voice, carried from glory to hope to outrage? Far from the surest way to fathom their power, being moved by words was to lose all awareness of motion, to think oneself immovable.

  So he witnessed what he had seen countless times for the first time: Anasûrimbor Kellhus addressing the Host of Hosts, not as Warrior-Prophet or even Aspect-Emperor, but as Dûnyain, the most astonishing fraud the World had ever known, whetting souls already too keen to be called sane …

  For they were in the thrall of the Meat, the Ordealmen. They heaved as mobs, leapt and howled and gesticulated as individuals. Some even had to be restrained by their brothers, such was the intensity of their fury and adulation. To watch was to be at once frightened, heartened—and even aroused.

  The Raft had been raised upon posts and fashioned into a podium. The Lords of the Ordeal stood assembled upon it, decked in whatever regalia that remained to them. Their myriad nations swallowed all visible creation about them—heads become beads become grains of sand, all crying out in lust. Closing his eyes, Proyas could scarcely distinguish their howl from that of the Sranc, save that it boomed more than screeched across the Vaults of Heaven.

  The Horde of Men, hailing an inhuman beacon …

  A Dûnyain.

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus dangled high above the Raft, crisp and brilliant in a play of vague and watery lights. When he spoke, his voice was somehow portioned between all souls, so that each man heard him as a friend making observations over their shoulder.

  “When a man is abandoned …”

  Proyas stood at Saubon’s side at the Raft’s forward edge, gazing out across the mobbed tracts. He had often wondered at the contradiction of these sermons, the way the humility they preached never failed to provoke displays of wild and vicious pride …

  “When he bleeds for cutting, weeps for loss …”

  He had even dared ask Kellhus about it once, in the dark hours following the defeat at Irsûlor. The Holy Aspect-Emperor had explained how suffering pays different wages to different Men: wisdom, for souls such as his own, the resignation belonging to philosophers and lepers; and for souls such as theirs, righteousness, the knowledge that they could exact from others what had been taken from them.

  But even this, Proyas now knew, had been another flattering lie, another conceit, another provocation to savagery.

  “When a man is fearful, witless for confusion …”

  Righteousness had been what he wanted all along. Kellhus had said as much himself. If wisdom had truly been what he wanted, he would have never turned out Achamian.

  “When he is MOST SMALL … only THEN can he fathom the proportion of the God!”

  Proyas watched the mottled landscape surge, strain, and roar. Nangael thanes, red-faced and screaming. Eumarnans wagging crescent swords across the beam of the morning sun. Agmundrmen clapping their ash bows. He could remember the swelling joy he had once felt witnessing such sights, the besotted gratitude, the bloodthirsty certainty, ferocious and predatory, as if death could be brought about by mere willing …

  Now bile leapt to the back of his throat.

  “Why?” he spat at Saubon without looking.

  The man’s face turned in his high periphery.

  “Because I am a mighty warrior.”

  “No! Why you—you!—over me?”

  Mere weeks ago the possibility of bickering like this would have been unthinkable. But somehow, somewhere, a twist had complicated the line of what had been thoughtless and unquestioned.

  The Meat had climbed into all things.

  “Because,” his fellow Exalt-General grated, “Men are reckless with things they h
ate.”

  “And what, pray-tell, is it I hate, brother?”

  A grinning sneer.

  “Living.”

  “Luxury blots it!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor cried from on high, his voice parsing across the thundering tracts, at once booming and cooing.

  “Comforts conceal!”

  Pinpoint lights shone across whatever polish yet existed in the arms and armour of the Ordealmen. The shouting warbled and faltered, then trailed into miraculous silence. The Southron Men gaped in astonishment, for their Holy Aspect-Emperor both exhorted them from above, and regarded them from each and every mirrored surface, as though he in fact stood everywhere, hidden at right angles to what could be seen. Be it the dimpled plane of the shield covering the back of the man before them, a helm’s mercurial sheen, or a sword’s shaking length, there it was, apprehending each, their beloved Warrior-Prophet’s bearded face, a thousand thousand aspects, exclaiming …

  “GIFTS ONLY DECEIVE!”

  The Host of Hosts erupted.

  “You think I seek death?” Proyas cried to Saubon.

  “I think you seek excuses to die.”

  These words fairly winded the Believer-King of Conriya.

  “And why would that be?”

  “Because you are weak.”

  “Weak, is it? And you are strong?”

  “Stronger. Yes.”

  They fairly faced each other now, enough to draw the attention of their fellow Believer-Kings. “And why is that?”

  “Because I never needed to believe in him to serve him …” A Galeoth snort, the one that so marked him as a barbarian in high company. “Because I’ve been throwing the number-sticks all along!”

  And with that, all fight slipped from Proyas—as did any other species of will. He turned from the tall Norsirai. A numb detachment tugged his gaze from point to point across the mob, face to rapturous face, some vicious, others pained—their teeth bared in the manner of the Saved. The light of their Prophet’s face gleamed blue across beards and wet-cheeks. Many wept, while others ranted, bellowed declarations, their brows scored with the common hatred that was the wage of their devotion.