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

by R. Scott Bakker

  A Frame.

  But everything was quick and everything was small and only distance or delusion made it seem otherwise. What was the Horde if not the manifestation of this, the way obscenities could be piled upon obscenities and still be desired, even craved?

  Proof that one can eat and shit one’s frame.

  Unlike Proyas, Saubon had always expected as much of the World. In a perverse sense, his Lord-and-Prophet’s confessions had not so much overthrown as confirmed his faith. That Kellhus was small and that Kellhus was quick in no way altered the fact that he was so much the stronger. The haloed man soaring backward into the gnawed monstrosity of Antareg had conquered the Three Seas. No matter what he was, he was greater than any martial soul to have trod good green earth. No matter what he was, he was Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The more Saubon had pondered it, the more it seemed that he had not so much believed the words as the power—the thing that could not be denied. The conquests of Anasûrimbor Kellhus were the only revelations that mattered, the only truths posterity could examine. As he had said to Proyas, who else should hew their future?

  The hand of Triamis. The heart of Sejenus. The intellect of Ajencis. Kellhus dwarfed all other souls. It was that simple.

  So why did he harbour this horror within him … the sense of hands too frail to fist?

  The World abruptly dipped and rolled, taking his purloined stomach with it.

  And there it was, floating up around the poised form of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, before sinking below the line of the Raft.

  Dagliash …. another dead corner of a dead civilization.

  The cliffs of Antareg loomed black over the booming surf, only to whisk beneath the timber deck. The Swayali about the perimeter began singing, and it was peculiar to be surrounded by feminine voices possessing no place. Like tiles in tipping succession, the Nuns stepped from the Raft onto the echo of the ground, where they wricked their billows open, and uncoiled into something greater for the beaming sun.

  Saubon gawked with the others for the way the demented vista transformed their beauty into something rare and lapidary. The Urokkas had cut a region of vast clarity from the Shroud. Reeking sheets pinned every limit, strata of dust that craned and twined like film in water, decohered. And the distances beneath shook for agitation, like sand in the box of a racing wain. Sranc … everywhere they raged in scabrous mats that disintegrated and reformed about cloven ramps, clenched heights, and sprawling meadows alike. The mountain slopes burned as if slagged in bitumen, yet still the creatures could be glimpsed, in clots if not individually, scraping their way upward. Fishhook brilliance winked about the crown of mount Ingol adjacent, the razor-white so characteristic of Gnostic slaughter.

  This … This was their Frame, a World of poisonous pins, as small and vicious in substance as in extent.

  Kellhus stood with his back to the enormities, still facing the direction they had come, his hands yet extended to either side, as if welded to the golden discs that darkened them. He steered and slowed the Raft to better trail the expanding chevron of witches. The rotted bastions of Dagliash loomed ever more near. Saubon could clearly see the defenders brimming upon the walls, Sranc of a different breed clotted about battlements reduced to gumlines. Ensconced within serpentine coils of gold, the Nuns advanced on the decrepit fortifications, more than eighty gilded wildflowers thrown wide. Their keening, high and feminine, perforated the suffocating thunder. Sorcery glittered across the interval, lines like incandescent hairs. Blinking against the glare, Saubon saw walls and turrets ignite as torches, shedding sparks that flailed and screamed.

  Even Sranc perished clawing for something …

  Reaching.

  Viri lay dead an age ere the Mangaecca—the most grasping of the ancient Gnostic Schools—came to its derelict halls. Using debris as their quarry, they raised a citadel about the legendary Well of Viri, the enormous shaft that plumbed the Mansion to its dregs. Nogaral, they dubbed their new stronghold, the “High Round”.

  Their fellow Schoolmen had scoffed and sneered, called them “grave-robbers”, an affront without compare among the Cond, let alone the Ûmeri they strove to emulate. Despite their demonstrations of outrage, the Mangaecca secretly celebrated the appellation, for it concealed their far darker ambition. In sooth, Viri was nothing more than a brilliant misdirection, a false grave to obscure the true, a cover for the Mangaecca’s evacuation of Sauglish, not to mention the endless northward trickle of chattel and supplies. For all its immensity, Nogaral was nothing but artifice, a way to plunder the Incû-Holoinas, the Ark itself, under the guise of ransacking Viri.

  With the destruction of Nogaral, the ruse came to an end, and the cancer that had replaced the Mangaecca, the Unholy Consult of Shaeönanra, Cet’ingira, and Aurang, declared itself to those they would exterminate. And so Viri faded into shadow and scholarship once again, a grave marking the loss of a second innocence—the innocence of Men—and the rebirth of an original terror, Min-Uroikas, or as the High Norsirai would come to call it, Golgotterath.

  Where greed for the Ark had moved Men to reclaim Viri as a sham the first time, then fear and hatred of the Ark would move them to reclaim the dead Mansion as a bulwark the second. After centuries of intermittent war between Golgotterath and the High Norsirai, Anasûrimbor Nanor-Mikhus, High-King of Aörsi, laid the foundations of Dagliash, or “Shieldhold”, the fortress whose fame would all but blot Viri from the fickle histories of Men.

  As the nameless poet of the Kelmariad writes,

  Set upon woe, hewn from deceit, garrisoned by hope,

  Our Shield against the Legions of the Dying Sun,

  Pray to her, our fortress, our House of Thousands,

  Implore her as you would any other sacred idol!

  For her miracles are numbered by our children.

  But no God was ever so generous or so reliable as Dagliash. For centuries she would be the very bastion of Men, a lone beacon raised against the nightmarish gloom of Golgotterath. The ancient Norsirai called her by many names: the Obstinate, the Unconquerable—even “the Lilac” for the violet that perpetually stained her walls. The shores below mount Antareg were beached in splintered bones instead of sand, such were the numbers cast down the cliffs. Time and time again the Consult threw their inhuman legions at the fortress. Time and time again they were thrown back reeling. As Viri dwindled in human memory, Dagliash became the very emblem of Mannish ferocity and resolve, a name traded in rice paddies and mountain vales, in temple processions and booming harbours throughout Eärwa.

  And so word of her overthrow reverberated as far as the courts of Mehtsonc, Iothiah, and Shir. Swart Kings cried for silence and bent their ear. And somehow they knew, those hard and archaic Men, knew what they should not know given the way conceit trivializes faraway foes. Somehow they understood that the long-besieged Gate, not of Aörsi, but of humanity itself, had finally fallen. And though they as yet knew nothing of the No-God, their skin pimpled for brushing its absolute shadow.

  The Exalt-General salivated for the smell of burning lamb.

  Kellhus beached the Raft on lichen-pitted stone, and with a lurch, Saubon’s householders leapt from the timber platform incredulous, disbelieving … much as Saubon did himself. The Witches had assaulted the fortifications in a manner too methodical to be described as furious, and yet all the more furious for it. After spreading wide, they had rushed the eroded stoneworks, closed the interval with fifty cubit strides, laving the ramparts with blistering arcs and amputating lines. Nothing had survived to slow them, so they had simply stepped over the smoking walls and bastions to prosecute their scintillant extermination within.

  Now Saubon stood gawking up with his fellows at the scorched walls soaring about them. A bare hand seized his plated shoulder and he saw his Lord-and-Prophet grinning as he pressed by, walking out among the smoking carcasses that matted the courtyard. Dagliash had fallen in mere heartbeats, thanks to the Swayali, but the clamour of the Horde grew more swollen with each heartbeat following.
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br />   Saubon waved his war-party to take positions flanking the Holy Aspect-Emperor. They were here, Saubon knew, but for a single purpose: to protect their Lord-and-Prophet and the Nuns from Chorae. The Knights of the Desert Lion numbered some forty-eight in all, some hulking, others reed thin, and a few (like his unlikely Scylvendi scout, Skunxa) comically rotund. Saubon had spent more than fifteen years assembling them, plucking only the most ferocious souls from those serving him through the Unification Wars. Soldiers of the rank need only see his entourage to know that merit, as opposed to bloodline, could raise them. Give a life to the right sort of man, Saubon had learned, and that man would wager that life no matter what the throw.

  They had set ground in the Ribbaral, an area that had once housed the fortress’s famed workshops, but had been reduced to mounds of debris and gravel. The ruins of the Ciworal, the great redoubt of Dagliash, soared dark above the glowing form of the Aspect-Emperor. As with the outermost ramparts, the cyclopean works lay hunched as though beneath sheets, summits and heights sucked round by the ages. Saubon kicked over one of the inhuman defenders—the Ursranc so oft mentioned in the Holy Sagas. The thing seemed identical to any other Sranc, save its stature and the uniform nature of its weapon and armour. He peered at the Twin Horns branded into the thing’s cheek—the mark of its wicked masters. He wondered what the scarred tissue would taste like, braised over a low fire …

  He shook the thought away, kicked his Amoti Swordbearer, Mepiro, for crouching to scoop grease he might lick from his fingers. He waved the rest of his Household forward, and despite his earlier misapprehensions, found himself grinning an almost forgotten grin, savouring the anxious tingle of old. It had been too long since he had commanded from the thick of peril rather than the hazy limit. Death was a beast he had known well in his youth, a wolfish possibility that had taken innumerable forms, exploiting every moment of weakness, every hasty oversight, striking down soul after unfortunate soul, but somehow always coming to heel for him …

  Yes … This was where he belonged. This was his Temple.

  His groin thick for the promise of mayhem, he trotted to where his Lord-and-Prophet stood among the smoking dead. The most senior of the Swayali cohort, a sturdy Cepaloran woman named Gwanwë, stepped down from the heights to join them, hastily gathering her billows into an aureate bundle before her. Soot greased her temple and cheek.

  “No Chorae!” Gwanwë cried over the rising clamour of the Horde. She gazed at her Holy Aspect-Emperor’s profile with an odd mixture of adoration and worry.

  Saubon grasped the significance immediately: If you lacked the resources to hold a strong place, you crippled or destroyed it, lest it serve your enemy …

  The fact that Dagliash still stood meant that it still served.

  “The Chorae are below us,” Kellhus said, drawing his gaze up across the enormous walls of the citadel.

  Saubon noticed the Decapitants askew against his white-felt thigh, black mouths working.

  Gwanwë looked to the ground between the gnarled infantry boots shodding her feet. She could not feel the trinkets, the Exalt-General realized. “So they’ve reopened Viri?” she called.

  “A trap!” Saubon snapped in dawning worry. “You need to flee this place, God-of-Men!”

  The Aspect-Emperor turned in what seemed an aimless scrutiny. He reached out to either side, fingers held wide, as if flattened across the discs of phantom gold. Beyond the walls, across the slopes, the Sranc were coalescing about their intrusion. The roar piled ever louder, stunning the ear, and prodding the heart with the assurance of something titanic and impending. Sorcerous singing fluted through the air, unintelligible yet filled with dread import, like a secret whispered in unwilling ears. The Nuns had begun shoring the decrepit fortifications …

  The Horde was coming.

  Unconcerned, Kellhus lowered his gaze to the ground. Saubon had long since learned to follow his Lord-and-Prophet’s lead when it came to guessing threats. Gwanwë, however, could not stow her alarm. She called out to her Swayali sisters on the parapets immediately above—repeated the cry in more screeching tones when it failed to breach the waxing roar.

  “A legion …” Kellhus interrupted, his tone miraculously peeling aside the obstructing din. “Thousands lie concealed in the wrecked Viritic halls beneath our feet. Bashrag, Sranc. Sequestered here for days—weeks. Their stench rises through Dagliash as a soiled cloth.”

  Gwanwë, Saubon, everyone in the war-party, cast dumb looks at the ground.

  “Perhaps they anticipated our gambit,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor surmised. “Perhaps they hoped to catch us unawares after overcoming the Horde …”

  “Either way,” Saubon cried, “we are outwitted!”

  Lightning cracked from elsewhere in the fortress. It seemed all the witches were singing now.

  “We need only bar their exit,” Kellhus said.

  Gwanwë hollered something, but her reply did not so much as dimple the hellish chorus. But Saubon knew her question for his own: How does one barricade the ground?

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas smiled in grim reassurance. “We set plow to the field,” he said in reply to her unheard question. The din had swallowed all mundane voices save his own.

  “We make the ground anew.”

  They wheezed and croaked in the dark, stamped and shuffled.

  They had been fashioned from the muck of life, the filth and the offal. In an age when Men were nothing more than savages or slaves, they had been coaxed from machines that were too intricate to be called dead. Their architects began with a wicked craving, a soulless pit. About this they spun grotesqueries of flesh and bone, elephantine limbs and cauldron-skulls. They exulted in their revulsion, for they alone could see the beauty in all things. And they understood the power that was flesh, how it need only be loosed like a fish in a foreign stream to bring all prior life crashing to its knees.

  Wheezing. Mucous snapping like lute strings. The stench of countless defecations.

  They hid where such monstrosities always hid, in the deeper cracks of the World, waiting for the inevitable moment of horror, the one that swallows us all, ere the end.

  The Bashrag waited with the impatience of the soulless. Little more than dim cunning glittered from their eyes …

  Bottomless hunger.

  Vaka, the Ordealmen began calling the Lord-Chieftain of the Cepalorae. Sibawûl Vaka.

  The cavalrymen of the Kidruhil dubbed him thus, after a form of archaic Ceneian shield that took its name in turn from scraped oyster shells. Other skirmishers quickly followed suit, until all those who dared the septic hem of the Shroud referred to him as such. One need only witness Sibawûl and his horse-thanes ride against the skinnies to understand the aptness of the moniker. The infantrymen had heard the name and the attendant tales, of course, and to a man they believed the stories, but they could not understand, not truly …

  Not yet.

  Even as the Schools secured their eyries across the Urokkas, the Great Ordeal had assembled into a massive column along the north shore of the Misty Sea. They began marching before dawn the day following, a procession city-broad and nation-deep hugging the northern shore, tilting ever more as the land ramped between the Urokkas and the Neleöst. The sun boiled from the misty rim of the Sea, dazzled the massed formations, transformed them into a river of silvered flotsam, great rafts of armour and arms flashing so bright as to pale the arcane diadems the Schools had slung about the mountains. Horns clawed what sky they could beneath the ascending roar of the Horde. To a man, they broke into a brisk trot, more than 150,000 righteous and violent souls.

  They laughed for the vigour of their pace, raised their hearts in the fist of their voices, and thundered. Fields twinkled for shaking weapons.

  Their inhuman foe shrank from their approach, yielded the boards of mount Yawreg, the first of the Urokkas. The Shroud thinned above, and the great cleft of clarity wrought by the mountains became visible. The Host of Hosts cried out in triumph once a
gain, knowing the Horde had been halved, that the greater portion lay to the north of the Urokkas, trapped by lethal weirs of the Schoolmen, and that the lesser lay before them, backed against Dagliash and the Sea. And they laughed, playing monsters who had cornered children. The foremost among them could clearly spy their inhuman foe: seething, scabrous sheets of white from the shoulders of Mantigol, reeling from threads of arterial light, to the mountain’s hip, spitting and stamping in bestial indecision, to the drowning strand.

  The Ordealmen continued their surge, encompassing the flanged hinter of Yawreg. The Scarlet Magi who had held the orbitals above the cliffs joined their brothers defending the mountain’s northern faces. More horns scratched the sky, scarcely audible. The Horde’s collective shriek now tapped a nail in every ear. Not one of the trotting Zaudunyani heeded the cry—indeed their pace quickened if anything. Men panted, but more for exhilaration than for want of wind. They coughed and cackled. They followed the mailed backs bouncing before them, tramped across the polluted swamps that had once been brooks, skidded into gullies, then hauled themselves out. The soil had been shallow enough to be torn away as flesh from deeper stone. Here, more than anywhere else, the Ordealmen could see the ground as a carcass, as the remains of something eaten.

  Again and again the horns raked trowels across the high din, but the Men of the Circumfix would suffer no impediment to their rush. Instead, the Cepalorae, the solitary horsemen in their midst, galloped out in advance of their glittering, land-spanning flood, following none other than Sibawûl Vaka.

  It seemed ceremonial at first, more a suicidal demonstration of conviction than a stratagem. Less than a thousand of the blond horsemen had survived Wreoleth. They floated as loose strands across the intervening wastes, threads too fine to be bound into anything formidable. Beyond them, the cancerous enormity of the Horde infested the whole of the land from the mountains to the Sea, every glimpse churning, fizzing with homicidal fury. An unseemly glee animated the souls of the watching Ordealmen. The mad horsemen would be hacked into oblivion, and the masses cheered, bawled in tens of thousands, celebrating not the destruction, but the sacrifice of their haunted brothers.