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

by R. Scott Bakker

  He had wept when Kellhus had told him as much on the Plains of Secharib. “I have raised you above others,” his Lord-and-Prophet said, “because of what you are …”

  A man who could never quite worship another.

  All this time, bowing his head in prayers he could never speak, standing solemn for ceremonies he could scarcely bear, let alone celebrate—murdering hundreds, thousands in the name of a faith he found more expedient than compelling …

  Only to fall to his knees truly now? Here? Gnawed Dagliash as his Temple, the scraping Horde as his choir, worshipping, choking for brimming passions. What kind of perversity was this?

  Who discovered worship only after their prophet declared himself False?

  It was the Meat—almost certainly.

  But he did not care. He could not care, not with Anasûrimbor Kellhus standing astride the sky, brilliant for booming meaning, drawing out the entrails of the earth—eviscerating a mountain!

  The Maker of Grounds.

  The Well of Viri was now as deep as Ciworal had been high—deeper. Its mouth had been smashed and cratered, but below this rim, it became a cylindrical pit, its sides ornamented in totemic reliefs that seemed too spare and shallow to belong to the Nonmen. Arms out and head thrown back, the Holy Aspect-Emperor compelled the Pit, evacuated the deep. The ruins of Nogaral dropped skyward, tumbling to the plume’s summit, falling outward, riding chutes that no eye could see. Ruin crashed about the walls and towers of Dagliash, a cyclopean downpour that pelted and heaped. The debris seemed tossed like half-coppers to beggars, with only the merest concern where it landed, but such was not the case. A legion lay concealed in the consumptive depths, and their Holy Aspect-Emperor entombed them—shut them in! Made the ground anew!

  The Consult. What cunning could they hope to devise? What trickery or deceit?

  The urge to communicate his joy seized him, and he turned to his household. His Holca Spearbearer, Bogyar, was roaring soundlessly to the others, his face shining crimson—the fearsome colour of the Flush. The Company of the Raft stood scattered about the Ribbaral, exchanging looks and staring agog at their Lord-and-Prophet atop his tower of sky-tumbling ruin. His angular Shieldbearer, Ûster Scraul, was the lone defector. Ever odd, he stood with his shoulders square to the spectre of Ingol heaving over the northeastern wall, with only his face turned to the pluming ejecta. However incidental his pose, his look exposed a soul roundly stumped, not by what he witnessed—the eyes would have to be focussed—but by what he did not, by the crushing sum.

  The crimson-skinned Holca stood gesticulating before the upward torrent, his great fists balled and trembling, his shoulders as broad as the Swayali were tall. He bellowed, his face a crazed rictus, twisted with ferocity …

  Alarm seized Saubon as a bolt through delirium. He lurched into action for action’s sake, clapped a firm hand upon Bogyar’s left shoulder, not so much to calm the giant as to gain time to think. The red-bearded Holca whirled violently, throwing spittle. He stood for a breathing instant, monstrous and looming, eyes pinned too wide to see anything but murder.

  Only the Horde could be heard.

  “Master yourself!” Saubon roared at his Spearbearer, only to find himself crashing backward. The insane Holca loomed above him, hefting his massive battleaxe. Incredulous, Saubon realized he was about to die …

  Light flashed in his periphery—low and brilliant.

  Then the Bashrag were upon them.

  Rather than kill him, Bogyar saved him instead, leaping over his prostrate length into the misbegotten assault. The Holca swung his axe as a javelin thrown, leveraging his leap so that the blade snapped as a lash, chipped from iron, and lopped the goliath’s neck to the least tendon. The beasts stampeded into their midst. Great shags of hair. Lurching, shambling things, deformed in ways great and small. Their stench tinctured every breath with fish, rot, and feces. Saubon scrambled to his feet, saw Mepiro duck a crashing cudgel. The Exalt-General came about, broadsword drawn, saw the festering, lumbering rush, a wave of tottering, heaving obscenities, swinging crude axes and hammers, dead faces drooling from either cheek. He glimpsed Bogyar, a crimson dervish fending brackish limbs. He saw Gwanwë carved in miraculous white—realized the creatures bore Chorae. He saw fragments of stone, a crushing curtain, rain upon the obscenities lurching across the Ribbaral beyond. An abomination floated up out of the confusion, cudgel raised to twice his height, bull-snorting, rattling for its hauberk of iron-plates. Ulcerating moles pocking exposed skin. Furs so rotted as to grease its flesh. A senescence of motion declared the depravity of its composition. Saubon danced about the descending hammer, hacked the monstrosity high on the arm, a blow that would have amputated a human limb …

  But merely severed one of the Bashrag’s trinity of bones. The foetid goliath squealed, crouched in a roar, struck out wildly.

  Saubon ducked, heard the tink of pitted iron against his helm, and found himself laughing, shouting …

  “Good!”

  He thrust the point of his broadsword into its mangled knee, danced spinning from a second frenzied strike. He clove one of the mucoid faces upon its cheek, leaping forward as it staggered back, bearing the shrieking beast down, cleaving adulterine flesh.

  “I’m tired of eating chicken!”

  He whirled, roaring for the impiety of his wit. The Knights of the Desert Lion chopped at what seemed a copse of nightmarish trees about him. Saubon glimpsed Scraul turn too late to a dropping cudgel, vanish beneath it, even as Bogyar’s battleaxe struck the miscreant’s basin skull. The thing pedalled backward, tripped into the Well, only to be caught tumbling in the upward deluge.

  A glint caught Saubon’s eye.

  That was when he first saw it falling skyward from the gut of the Well, gleaming and intact in the helter of debris …

  A golden coffer.

  The Erengaw crawled with simmering multitudes, a foul pulver that matted all that could be seen. What had appeared a morass of indeterminate horrors now pricked with the glitter of eyes and teeth, fingers that could be counted. Mauls and cleavers shaking like epileptic sons.

  Above it all, Aurang hung black and ragged, a flake of ash hooked high on brown winds.

  Apperens Saccarees pulled the knot on his Menna sash, loosed his billows, which opened into a blood-red flower, curlicues for petals, bellied and hooked like the irises so prized in Shir. The Lord Librarian was free; Seswatha walked the ways of the present bearing ancient totems of doom. He gave voice to his heart-cracking fury, diagrammed the distance with sun-silver brilliance. The Ninth Merotic …

  His crimson billows glowed like coloured glass set before the sun. The Inchoroi’s Wards luminesced for the impact of the Abstraction, nothing more. The alien abomination laughed with the lungs of the Horde.

  “Aurang!” the Sohonc Grandmaster thundered. “I call upon thee! I demand a Disputation—as in days of old!”

  And at last the monstrosity dared swoop low.

  “The days are new Chigra …”

  His passage sparked rapture in the swarms of Sranc below, an ejaculatory wake.

  “And far shorter than the old.”

  The Horde-General banked on a tangent to the wind, turned north and west as if on the arc of a great, invisible wheel. The standards of the clans jerked and heaved above oceans of crushed white faces.

  “Aurang!” Saccarees cried out to the receding image, his face crimped in anguish, dreaming and not dreaming.

  The wretched multitudes screamed in derision, their limbs spitting like muck beneath torrential rain.

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor ceased singing. The soaring wreckage instantly slowed, then slumped crashing back into the throat of the Well, leaving only the smoky apparition of the geyser. The vibration of fracturing immensities faded. Veils of dust twisted across the Ribbaral, lending the air the taste of dust and rot.

  The Company of the Raft stood astonished and hard-breathing among the giant carcasses. Though several of their brothers floundered upon the ground, t
hey had eyes only for his Lord-and-Prophet, who floated above them at the height of flying gulls or geese …

  Holding the golden coffer suspended just beyond the reach of his haloed hands, he came to ground on the Well’s western limit. Saubon held out his arms to restrain his Knights, then moved to follow his Lord-and-Prophet alone. The salt statue that had been Gwanwë clubbed his heart as he sprinted near, but the sight of Kellhus setting the golden receptacle upon the back of a dead Bashrag filled him with far more apprehension.

  Never had Saubon seen him handle anything with such ghostly care.

  It was not made of gold—he could see that now. It had the exhumed look of something drawn from crushing depth—it was chalked in whorls of dust and grit—and yet had not been scuffed, let alone bent, nicked, or dented. It was no larger than a dollhouse, but seemed larger for the piping that enclosed it—a scaffold that somehow held the interior cube without touching it. Eye-squinting filigree had been etched into almost every surface, geometric impressions that somehow jarred scrutiny. But nothing was so remarkable as the plate of polished obsidian forming the top of the receptacle, and the luminous characters scrolling both within and across it—a kind of script inked in light.

  Kellhus paid him no regard whatsoever. The maw of the Well smoked to his left, mere paces distant. The noon sun conjured transparent gowns of shadow from high-climbing tatters. “What is it?” the Exalt-General asked, knowing he need only speak for the man to hear. His Lord-and-Prophet looked to him, his manner catastrophic for the utter absence of expression.

  Three heartbeats passed.

  “An Inchoroi object,” Kellhus said, his voice no less miraculous for how it punctured the bottomless din. “A Tekne artifact.”

  Saubon had to think to breathe, breathe to think. “The writing that glowers upon it … What does it say?”

  The Horde stole each and every one of these words.

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas stood, retreated a single pace as if to better appraise the thing. Though his eyes remained fixed on the receptacle, Saubon knew that he stared at nothing present before him.

  “That not everyone can be saved,” Kellhus said.

  Fear skittered as a many-legged chill across the Believer-King’s skin.

  “What do you say?” Saubon asked, too numb to be properly bewildered.

  The leonine profile lowered in contemplation, his gaze wet and rigid.

  The Nuns continued singing from points about the ancient perimeter, continued weaving meaning into patterns of murderous radiance. The ink of fat-fuelled fires now scribbled above the crest of every wall. Dagliash was their mountain—the most perilous eyrie of them all.

  His Saviour turned to him, smiled what might have counted as an apology had they played number-sticks.

  “That this is a good thing.”

  Kellhus glanced at the coffer and the intricate threads racing across it one final time. Light speared from his mouth. The hood was yanked from the lanterns in his eyes.

  His shout, when it came, concussed. Saubon fell back, threw up arms against the blazing aspect that spake it. The walls spat dust from every slot and seam.

  “Fleeee!”

  Saubon gawked in horror. Bogyar was already hauling him to his feet, screaming without sound. The Holy Aspect-Emperor stepped in the empty air above the Ribbaral, his mouth a pit of white brilliance in his beard, his voice booming from nowhere, or at least no place in Creation:

  “Sons of Men, hark!”

  Cracking the Horde’s wail …

  “Set aside your fury!”

  Silencing it.

  “Fleeeee!”

  There was no echo, for it had shouted into each soul as a sock. And it seemed that Saubon could only exhale, that the power to draw air had been wrested from his lungs.

  No, a thought called through him.

  Threads of light uncoiled about Anasûrimbor Kellhus as he ascended, hooked into a spider-leg cage, then cinched him into nothingness.

  No …

  “Then what does it matter, whether I sanction you or not? Truth is truth, regardless of who speaks it …”

  “I ask only for your counsel, for what you see … Nothing more.”

  “But I see many things …”

  “Then tell me!”

  “Only rarely do I glimpse the future. The hearts of men … that is what they … That is what I’m moved to see.”

  “Then tell me … What do you see in my heart?”

  Proyas had raced with Kayûtas and the others along the autumn-bright beaches. He would catch the foremost Ordealmen, he told himself, rally and reorganize them. But his soul only had eyes for the murderous fray. His manhood ached for the kneading grip of the gallop. To his right, the Zaudunyani clogging the beaches climbed in ascending thousands, skirting Oloreg’s tangled thighs in quicksilver. Flickering sorceries rimmed the blunt summits against the fume of the Shroud above. The first tracts of trampled gore lay exposed in the Host’s wake, smeared as a paste across the flanks of an entire mountain, black and purple, like overripe beets pulverized. Pitched melee braided the Column’s fore, lines of remorseless threshing, Men spearing and hacking their way into reeling mobs of Sranc. Of the voids Sibawûl and his Cepalorae had wrought in the crazed expanse, few remained that he could see.

  For a time Proyas could almost believe he looked down, so favourable was the bias of the land. Dagliash remained the armature, a canker of stone upon Antareg, whose pate extended beyond the shoulders of Ingol, equally overrun. He could see Kellhus pinned brilliant astride the black spew, and the Swayali triunes arrayed across the faraway ramparts, casting Abstractions like miniature sigils onto the ground. His heart leapt for the sight, and his imagination sparked as vivid as prophecy: how he would hew a path through the skinnies, how he would climb carcasses to gain the parapets, so he might call down to Saubon, crying, “See!”

  See!

  But for every cubit he gained, it seemed another obstacle plagued his advance. The black cliffs loomed nearer. The beaches grew more stony and steep, more prone to roll the carcasses directly back into the surf that deposited them. The waves battered him and his pony for attempting to circumvent the semi-submerged tangles. But as the coast narrowed, greater numbers of Ordealmen found themselves shouldered into the violet waters as well. He tried to force his way through the polyglot masses, a gambit that nearly cost him his life. His horse stumbled, broke his leg. Proyas was thrown—the lolling spear of a nearby Shigeki terrorized his eye as he toppled, but slit his cheek instead. Black water swallowed him. Brine pinched his lips, ignited the cut on his cheek. A profound weight slammed into his back, pestled him against the gravel bottom. Threads of air fluttered over his face. Maybe he screamed.

  Then arms hauled him gasping and sputtering to the surface. Sunlight stung his tears, cracked the World into filaments of brilliance and shadow. He saw Kellhus resolve from slurry, started for panic only to realize it was Kayûtas— Kayûtas looking away to the west—to Antareg. The waters churned with wading Ordealmen. In a glance, he saw countless bearded faces turning with the Prince-Imperial’s.

  He looked back to Kayûtas, realized he had never seen anything resembling fear or surprise in the Prince-Imperial’s expression—even in his childhood.

  Until now.

  Then he heard it, impossibly clear through the crazed din.

  The once-beloved voice.

  Antareg. The land strangely broken, slopes ravined against the ageless laws of erosion, heights heaped southwestward, as if an overthrown mountain had huddled against the shoreline to die. The Neleöst Sea. The aquamarine of placid tracts become white-backed shoals, become matted carcasses and the swirl of violet scum. Dagliash. The towers and turrets, hanging crisp against the slow-surging distances. The Horde. The moulting distances, vast and terrible, a leprous smear hardening into figures and faces pale as spider-bellies.

  Sibawûl Vaka picked a solitary path through the inhuman tumult, staring forward with ghoulish vacancy. Rank after
putrid rank peeled away before him, communally leapt and scratched and scurried from his approach. Paralysis seized those the crush delivered to his vicinity; they could do no more than twitch, blubber, and wheeze in his shadow. He speared them as he passed, piercing the joints in their crude armour, their necks and their faces … and continued onward.

  A mile behind, the heedless run of the Great Ordeal had bogged into melee along the cleft demarcating the torsos of Ingol and Oloreg. Archery formed spectral tangles over the fighting. Sensing vulnerability, Mandate Schoolmen began burning their way down the slopes of Ingol, each a floating point disgorging light and fire. The Sranc melted before them. Their flank relieved, the Men of the Circumfix surged forward anew, beat the caterwauling skinnies to the shadows beneath their feet. Some hollering, some sobbing, they cut and hammered their way onto the greased pitch of Ingol. Men clutched wounds in grimacing silence. Sranc twitched and kicked where they fell.

  A shout cracked Creation. Men and Sranc hesitated alike …

  Ears whined for abrupt silence. Eyes rolled skyward. And then, over it all, a light appeared, like something dropped from an indescribable direction. White brilliance glaring from blue …

  Becoming a man … the Holy Aspect-Emperor, hanging high and wind-blown beneath the blue vacancy of autumn, his edges smoking with otherworldly brilliance.

  “Flee Dagliash!” his voice boomed. Across the Erengaw and the root of the Urokkas, the combatants looked up and wondered.

  “Flee! Hide yourself from its sight!”

  The Schoolmen turned immediately, striding the heights, abandoning all terrestrial plight. The Men of the Ordeal hesitated, wavered as more and more of their kinsmen abandoned the mobs behind them. The hard-hearted stood their ground, knowing that retreat meant doom. They fell into battling circles and squares as the formations about them dissolved in racing slaughter.

  The Sranc hacked the earth, reconquered the sky with screeching ululation—and surged forward.