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

by R. Scott Bakker

  A bird blasted up out of the blackness, its great white wings thrashing, the yellow knife of its beak aimed at heaven. The peering etched it in clean light above, a stork, a miraculous vision of life—

  Sorweel seized Oinaral’s wrist—out of brute reflex more than resolution. He swung wide and kicking over the void. The Great Entresol resonated with bottled screams.

  The iron band of the Nonman’s grip vanished. He toppled, flew into the peering as though into the sun, missed it by the breadth of an arm, crashed into the stacked carcasses. He rolled to planks of sodden wood, looked about wildly.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Every surface seemed aglow for the brilliance of the peering. Oinaral lay riven on his back upon a bed of butchered animals, convulsing arms and legs out, mouth wide and gasping. His nimil coats blazed as water beneath morning sunlight. His eyes fluttered.

  Immiriccas pondered killing him for what he had done.

  You wear a prisonhouse upon your head, mortal …

  But Sorweel found his gaze drawn to the other, the night-cloaked figure that stood directly beneath the peering—for the mouth of the hood now regarded them. The Boatman regarded them, his mouth working as though reciting words—to a song.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  An emaciated hand drew back the cowl, and the Son of Harweel was amazed. The peering flashed across bare white scalp, and the eyes watched from the shadow of hairless brows … The Boatman was a Nonman—the fact of this emanated from him. And yet he was ancient, his cheeks creased, his sockets pouched as infirm breasts. Mortality pursed the whole of his hard, cruel mien.

  He stared as one who searches for the relatives of those he hates.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  And the Haul went down.

  The Boatman, his blasted skin luminous in the light, had not ceased staring at them—singing all the while. The Lament subsided in imperceptible degrees, became less and less distinct from the endless boom of falling waters, more and more haunting, an appalling backdrop for the growl of Boatman’s song:

  O’ Siöl! Dark is the harbour of your womb,

  A lion has arisen, and your children hide.

  A dragon has descended, and your children flee.

  O’ Siöl! O’ barren House Primordial!

  So we squatted upon our haunches,

  Bathed our arms in the black water,

  We swore oaths of hatred against them.

  We spurned our prayers,

  And the emptiness that ate them.

  It was an ancient song, and obscure. It sawed on the ears, the heart, bearing more the stain of melancholy than the substance, and yet possessed of unnerving passion all the same.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  What was near was all too bright, enough to make a scowl of the merest inward glance. Halos hung about every surface, be it bitten wood, links of iron, or porcine swales. The Boatman seemed even more a horror, given how deeply the light inked his senescence in shadow. So Sorweel and Oinaral found their eyes driven outward, to the walls of the Ingressus, where distance and graven image had declawed the peering light. The walls climbed about them, hoop after hoop of reliefs carved at least a forearm deep, slowly climbing into oblivion above and resolving from oblivion below. They remained silent long after the dwindling of the Lament above had permitted easy speech. Each stared out from their portion of the bark’s stern, disbelieving what had just happened. Sorweel leaned blank against the gunwale, listening to the clatter of machinery, the creak of links and joists about the grisly load.

  The Haul descended on a great nimil chain. Two great iron wheels revolved at its heart, purchasing length from above by consuming slack from below. Gears locked into the wheels released a mighty hammer against an iron anvil, generating the rhythmic crack that had punctured the Lament above. The noise itself was difficult to describe, save that it was sharp enough to wince ears, and somehow left the taste of metal upon the tongue. Given the dread nature of their descent it seemed alarming and horrifying, a drawing of attention in a place where only those as soundless as shadows could hope to survive.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Iron bars jutted from points short the prow and stern, converging upon a black-iron collar that pinched the chain between two smaller wheels above—a stabilizing device of some kind. The peering hung from this, a radiance too bright to possess detail.

  And directly beneath it, the hale yet withered Nonman stared and sang:

  O’ Siöl! What love hath thou remaining?

  What fury hath thou loosed? What destruction?

  We who know the ground, plot in its bones,

  Prepare to grapple the endless, Eating Sky!

  “The Boatman …” Sorweel at last ventured to Oinaral. He had no wish to speak of what had happened, but neither did he wish to be alone with thoughts that were not his own. “I don’t remember him.”

  “The Amiolas knows him,” the Siqu replied without turning. A violet stain lay upon his cheek, a swatch of dried blood curved like a flower petal. The youth recoiled from thoughts of Mu’miorn, the violence of a grief that was not his own. “We were always a long-lived race,” the Siqu continued, “and he was ancient ere Nin’janjin returned, a wonder even, ere Sil first tempted his nephew, the Tyrant of Siöl. The Inoculation did not work for any of the aged save him …”

  “Morimhira …” Sorweel gasped in a realization that confounded him. The legendary Father-of-Orphans—as famed as any among the Exalted. Morimhira, the violent uncle of Cu’jara Cinmoi, who had cut short the Verse of innumerable lives back in the luxurious days before the Ark, when Mansion yet warred against Mansion.

  “Yes,” Oinaral said. “The Most Ancient Warrior.”

  So decrepit.

  “How has he come to look like this?”

  So human.

  “The Inoculation worked, but not entirely. Since no disease can claim him, he is deathless …”

  “But not ageless.”

  The Siqu glanced to the darkness below. “Aye.”

  “But how could he …” The youth trailed in confusion. His knowledge seemed a book whose spine had unravelled—or worse, two books. All he had were sheaves scattered and heaped, facts and episodes. With his every knowing, it seemed, he became more disordered, not less, as if every page pulled open was another page torn.

  “How has he escaped the Dolour?” Oinaral said, guessing his question. He shrugged his great shoulders. “None know. Some think he was the first to suffer it, that his acts had been so violent and his life so long that he was already Erratic ere the Second Watch was abandoned, and that this … natural derangement … has rendered him immune to the violence of what the others suffer. He does not speak, though he understands much of what is said. He does not grieve or weep—at least not outwardly.”

  “And he cares for them now? The others? Feeds them?”

  The bald head shook in negation beneath the motionless white point of the peering gleaming upon it.

  “No. The Emwama tend to the Chthonic. The Boatman goes where they cannot. He ministers to those who wander the Holy Deep.”

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  “Like your father, Oirûnas.”

  Oinaral was several heartbeats in replying.

  “He completes a Fathoming each day, every day …” he said. “What was once a holy pilgrimage before the Chthonic was abandoned. Some say he does penance for all those he killed before the coming of the Vile.”

  “What do you say?”

  The Siqu turned to him—daring the ethereal visage of Immiriccas, Sorweel now knew.

  His visage.

  “That a wild labyrinth lays about him,” the Lastborn said, glancing as if in gesture to the blackness, but in truth out of aversion to his aspect. “And he cleaves to the only path that recognizes his feet.”

  The Haul descended to the cracking of hammers and the Boatman’s rust-iron voice.

  Facing the sun, there Imimorûl
dug a great well,

  And bid his children enter.

  In the bone of the world, there he conjured song and light,

  And his children feared no more the starving Sky.

  Here! Here Imimorûl drew down the face of the mountain,

  Bid us seize the halls of the House Primordial—here!

  Here lies a home that cleaves the tempest asunder,

  A home that breaks the shining beak of the dawn.

  So the Most Ancient Warrior sang. And Sorweel learned that the earth was mazed, the ground riddled with cavernous hollows. It seemed horrific somehow, that intervals should haunt the foundation of foundations. This was the ground, he realized in numb disbelief—the ground!—and they travelled through it, cranked into its black maw. The changes in the engravings seemed instant when he finally noticed them, but he somehow understood they had come about gradually, figure by sculpted figure. At some point in the descent, when the Lament yet resounded perhaps, the stone populace of the walls had begun to notice them. One by one the fist-sized faces turned, and the cubit-tall figures began to form ranks against the observing void. By the time Sorweel observed the change, the little sculptures had already barricaded the panels, standing, watching, face after indistinguishable face.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  The soul divided between Sorweel and Immiriccas gaped in horror.

  “None know how or why the stone-eaters responsible carved them thus,” Oinaral said from his periphery, perhaps sensing his unease, perhaps not. “The stone-eaters themselves said they did it to honour the Fathoming, as a goad to self-examination and an accounting of sins. To apprehend memorials without, they said, was to neglect the testimony of what lies within.”

  Sorweel shuddered, such was the effect of the thousands of motionless faces.

  “And you do not believe them?”

  “Their expressions …” the Siqu said, his voice as searching as his gaze. “There is too much hatred in them.”

  But the youth could see no expression in any of them at all. They simply watched, great rings of miniature faces, band stacked upon murky band, their eyes so indifferent as to be dead, so numerous as to be one. The Lament yet lay clear upon the air, a morass of shouts and wails, a racket barbed so as to hook as burrs upon more lucid souls. And the contradiction raised his hackles, the sight of judgment given and the sound of judgment received …

  And he realized the Fathoming had always been a thing of dread for Immiriccas, whose aversion to reflection approached loathing. Action should be enough!

  But for him to stand in judgment of Immiriccas was at once for Immiriccas to stand in judgment of him. Who he had been the dismal months preceding came in a cringing flood, images churning as foam. Mewling when blood should have been spilled. Bemoaning what should have been avenged. Questions like sparrows battling in his breast, leaving him winded. Sorweel shrank from the ancient and inflamed gaze, the immovable eye of the Ishroi, even as he bowed before the thousands stacked in great rings about the walls of the Ingressus …

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  The Haul descended, and Sorweel fell a second time, into deeps no less irrevocable. Humanity had been his ground, his implicit ordering frame, and like so very many things human, it could only command so long as it remained unseen. Thus are pride and courage so eager to example witless faith: only not knowing allows Men to be what they need to be. So long as Sorweel had remained ignorant of his countless mortal frailties, they could secure him thoughtless foundation. But now that he had fathomed himself from a greater vantage, a far mightier and more noble frame, he could only see himself as anxious and deceitful, craven and imbecilic, crooked and grotesque, an ape that lurched in mockery of the true rule.

  The Nonmen.

  The lions fled, and there they rested content,

  And they placed yokes upon the groaning Emwama,

  Who placed yokes upon the braying beasts,

  And brought forth abundance for the Sons of Siöl

  Judgment ever belongs to the greater. He saw himself the way the Injori Ishroi saw Men in days of ancient old, as strutting beasts, by turns devious and absurd, rotting even as they lived, shouting boasts from atop their barrow-graves. Weed or flower, it did not matter, for their time was too short to count anything but the dregs of glory. Henceforth, his would always be a miscreant life.

  And so the last of the boy left to the Son of Harweel died in the Weeping Mountain.

  The walls of the Umbilicus had been dyed black to make stark the gilded halos about his head and hands. Perhaps no soul in the Empire aside from herself and her elder brothers knew this.

  “And if I should fail? What then, Father?”

  His presence had dwarfed for intensity more than dimension. His look passed through her the way it always had, twin cables strung taut across the interval that was her soul.

  “Spend your final breath on prayer.”

  She became real, kneeling before him like this, just as she had as a little girl. Always.

  “For me?”

  “For everything.”

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  The Lament gradually faded into the boom of waters. They continued sinking, a vacant bulb of illumination dropping into viscous black. Sorweel abandoned his position, sat upon the deck opposite the stacked carcasses, his head—or the Cauldron, rather—bent against the glare. If Oinaral wondered at his silence, he made no sign. The Nonman stood leaning from the stern as before, a pale shadow decked in armour lurid with scintillant light. Perhaps he too grappled with misgiving and unwelcome insight. Perhaps he too sounded waters the intellect could only muddy.

  The youth lay slack, hung in incredulity. An image of Serwa floated beneath his soul’s eye, and his blood ran cold.

  The Boatman began a different dirge, another song the Amiolas remembered, an epic lay of love in the shadow of extinction. Sorweel turned to him. He was scarcely more than a silhouette for the radiance above, an apparition of smoke rising into sunlight.

  She stripped and she clothed him,

  but she fed him not,

  and with her brother,

  they became runners beneath the Starving,

  fleeing into the wilds of Ti,

  where the rivers vanish,

  in the cruel shadow of the House Primordial.

  Sorweel lay drowsing as he listened, his body a thing forgotten, at once bound upon the rack and entombed in clay. Watching the Boatman, he saw a scuttling of shadows about his feet … He thought it a cat, at first, for he had seen innumerable cats upon the river barges of his home. Then the first of the figures strode from the Boatman’s shadow and into horrific reality.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  There, less than two lengths from where he lay against the deck, a living stone statue stood no more than a cubit in height …

  It was one of the countless Ishroi chiselled from the walls, dressed much as Oinaral, rendered in exquisite detail, save where scabbed by ancient happenstance. The little face held him in its chipped regard.

  Sorweel could not call out, could not move, whether for the want of limbs or volition he would never know.

  A second graven doll joined the first, this one naked and missing the top third of its head.

  And then a third joined them. And more, appearing along the summit of the pig carcasses immediately before him, miniature stone ghouls glaring down eyeless. He could hear even more, their march like a thousand little hammers tapping across the deck.

  The peering flared soundless and white, cast a garland of crisp little shadows from their stone feet.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  He could not scream out any warning.

  But someone had seized his shoulders—someone was shouting his father’s name! The Siqu—Oinaral …

  “Awaken! On your feet, Son of Harweel!”

  Sorweel clawed his way up, casting wildly about for any sign of the stone effigies. He looked to the Lastborn in confusion, gl
impsed a pale, naked figure drop wheeling and kicking into the abyss a mere toss from the Haul. He turned to the Siqu in astonishment, to confirm that he had seen what he had seen. But Oinaral was already squinting upward, his hand held so as to cast a shadow across his eyes. Sorweel joined him, found himself dazzled by the peering. Another pallid figure materialized, plummeting from visibility into obscurity within a heartbeat—close enough for the youth to start. It seemed he had locked gazes with the hurtling wretch, glimpsed the mien of someone awakening …

  He stood blinking against his own disordered soul.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  “What happens?” he gulped as much as called.

  “I do not kno—”

  Another flash of battling white. Sorweel glimpsed a form streak toward the far side of the Haul, catch it with its face, then carom, flipping. The entire bark kicked and swayed upon the chain. Oinaral fell to one knee. Sorweel clasped at the swine carcasses, caught one of the legs above the cloven feet; it was stiff as wood for rigour. The Boatman merely swayed counter to his vessel the way an ancient mariner might, and continued singing.

  And he heard her say unto her brother,

  “Lay with me, tend to my fallow plot,

  make my barrens bloom, sweet Cet’moiol!

  Let our Line suffer no iniquity, no alien earth or seed.

  Let us aim our children as spears!”

  Sorweel and Oinaral each stood on the rear portion of the deck gazing upward, hands against the peering light. The youth saw the last ring of engravings climb into the murk, a band consisting entirely of heads massed upon hairless heads, all of them watching. Raw stone ruled beneath, scarps jumbled and hanging. He glimpsed an iron catwalk rising from the obscurity below, a brace of scaffold across the wall, a pillared recess—

  A nude figure flickered past the prow.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Oinaral cried out. Sorweel looked up, saw at least seven forms plummet from shadow into stark light, limbs flailing, bodies somersaulting, eyes glittering for the peering light, incredulous. The nearest slammed into the stern directly behind the Siqu. The Haul kicked up, tossed Sorweel against the stacked carcasses. He glimpsed a flashing miss, then another ghoul sheared across one of the iron braces, torso exploding into violet haze behind the Boatman. Another hurtled into the stacked pigs almost immediately before Sorweel. The impact slapped him backward. The Haul rocked and danced, swung on a ragged arc. Others slipped past without sound. Sorweel teetered on the gunwale as the bark wagged about, felt his stomach pitch. Any instant, it seemed, the lacquered bark would snap the chain and they would drop into the black.