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

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Whether they love.”

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  The woman, Mimara, stalked ahead of the old man, Achamian, leading the small party with a haste borne of fury. The Survivor paced him for a while, thinking the Wizard would eventually say something, offer some ingress …

  Silence, the Survivor had noted, weighed heavy against the old man.

  But he said nothing, though his motion and demeanour shouted with an awareness of the Survivor’s proximity, one that dwindled as the labourious watches wore on. The shadow of the mountains rose up around them, drawing veils across orange faces of stone.

  “She still wants you to destroy us …” the Survivor finally ventured. “Destroy us with your light.”

  “Yes … She does.”

  They were stunted—only a fraction of themselves. The legionary engines of speech lay in the darkness preceding their souls, he realized. They began the very instant they spoke and not before. And so their speaking seemed all that was required to be.

  “Will you execute her wishes?” he asked as a provocation, since he already knew the answer.

  The Wizard squinted at him. He knew he betrayed himself, that he stood before a being he could not quite conceive. He even understood the contingency of his soul, and yet he could not convince himself of his peril. And how could he, when blindness to that contingency comprised the very foundation of what it meant “to be.” What could it mean to begin before you begin?

  “Perhaps …”

  A faltering gaze. A face struggling to maintain a semblance of resolution. Knowing was what made the old man weak, his inkling of the vast disproportion between them.

  “My father stole something from you.”

  This was not so difficult to see.

  A quivering slackness about the eyes, fleeting. Welling tear ducts. And deeper, a knotting of thought and passion, a flexing that slipped into release.

  “Yes …” the Wizard said, looking to the scarped distance.

  The first true admission. The more of these he could prise from the man’s nebulous confusion, the Survivor realized, the more thoroughly he could possess him.

  Little truths. He must gather them … like one hundred stones.

  The old man coughed, more to provide time to think than to clear his throat.

  “Yes, he did.”

  The mother of the pregnant woman, Mimara. Kellhus had taken her.

  The Survivor’s ruminations had generated a variety of explanatory schema, each weighted according to the evidence at hand. With each Cause selected, the competitors were pitched into the dark, and new cycles of speculation were triggered, wheels within wheels within wheels …

  Why had Kellhus taken her? To coerce this man? To breed? To condition some other ground?

  There was only one possibility. Always only one. For this was the very structure of apprehension: appraisal, selection …

  Slaughter.

  That second night they camped upon a knoll that swelled from the long-wandering ridge-line they had followed for a better part of the afternoon. Balance seemed especially precarious. Dusk had thinned the already emaciated air, lending fingernails to the encircling soar and plummet. Void leered, tugged with the lurch of vertigo. Across the emptiness, the sun flared with geometric precision, slighting the chill wind, tanning the surrounding peaks with gold and spangled vermillion. The scuff of boots across stone and gravel pricked the ear.

  Since more than a watch remained before nightfall, the pregnant woman demanded—through Achamian—that the Survivor run down one of the mountain goats they had spied on the broken slopes below. This had already become a custom of hers, making demands of the two Dûnyain.

  He killed the animal with a single stone.

  When he returned he found the boy plying the old man with questions while Mimara watched uncomprehending. She was troubled, the Survivor could see, by the ease with which the boy had donned and doffed the terror he had feigned the previous day. When privacy afforded, he would remind him not to exchange his tools so quickly.

  They sat on the hunched spine of the World, watching the flames slick the carcass with grease and sizzle. The discomfort of the woman and the old man was palpable, such was the madness of sharing fire and dinner with those they would murder. Their quest had been long, fraught with death and deprivation, and they had yet to realize what their losses demanded of them, let alone the significance of their present situation. Possibilities besieged them. The Survivor could see them flinching from errant thoughts—misgivings, horrors. They lacked the insight to clearly distinguish between various courses of action, let alone the foresight to map them into the future. They lacked the discipline to resist seizing upon whatever fragments the darkness of their greater souls offered up to them. The Survivor realized that he could, given time, make these decisions for them.

  They were that frail.

  But his study was far from complete. He remained ignorant of all save the grossest details regarding their lives, let alone the world from which they hailed. What was more, the Logos that bound and articulated their thoughts yet eluded him. Associations, he had come to realize, determined the movements of their souls. Relations of resemblance in place of reasons. Until he learned the inner language that drove the outer—the grammar and the lexicon of their souls—he could do little more than shove their thoughts in brute directions.

  Perhaps that was all that he needed—at this juncture at least.

  He turned to the old man. “Have you discov—?”

  “Thiviso kou’pheri,” the pregnant woman interrupted. She often watched him with predatory distrust, so perhaps this was why he had overlooked the transformation that had crawled into her face.

  The old man turned to her, his frown of disapproval vanishing into anxious recognition—an expression he had come to know well. Achamian did not so much fear the woman, the Survivor realized, as he feared her knowledge …

  Or was it the source?

  The old Wizard turned back, his heart racing against the blankness of his face. “She says that she sees the Truth of you,” he said, licking his lips.

  He could hear sparrow-thrum of his old-man heart, smell the pinch of his sudden, old-man apprehension.

  “And what is that?”

  Numb, the Survivor realized. His lips were numb.

  “Evil.”

  “She is misled by my skin,” the Survivor replied, assuming that for souls so primitive, visual abomination would imply spiritual. But he saw his error even before the old man shook his head.

  The sorcerer turned to her, translated.

  The hilarity in her eyes was genuine but momentary. She did not even trust his ignorance, her suspicion of him and the boy ran so deep. But there was something else as well, crabbing her expression, throttling her thought … a visceral reaction to what she saw, what had fooled him into thinking she found his aspect revolting.

  “Spira,” she said. “Spira phagri’na.”

  He required no interpretation.

  Look. Look into my face.

  “She wants you to gaze into her face,” the old Wizard said, a sudden fascination hooking his voice. The Survivor regarded him for one heartbeat, two … and understood that for Drusas Achamian a great contest was about to waged, a pitting of principle against principle, horror against horror, trust against hope.

  The pregnant woman did not so much stare at as regard him, her expression now raw with inexplicability. Absence gutted the pitch and summit of the distance gloaming beyond her. Against such vacancy, she could only seem too near—so perilously close.

  “Spira phagri’na.”

  And the Survivor could see it all, the legionary welter that was the Cause-within. The fraction that spoke, uncomprehending. The fraction that heard this speaking and made it her own. The fractions that bring forth. The fractions that consume …

  Look into my face.

  And he could see it nowhere … the origin of her assurance … the Cause.

  Madn
ess, just as he had presumed.

  “Pilubra ka—”

  Can you see it? Reflected in my eyes—can you see it?

  The question bobbed through him. He caught it in the nets of his face.

  Her smile could have been Dûnyain so devoid was it of anything outside the ruthless fact of observation.

  “Tau ikruset.”

  Your damnation.

  She was defective—but in some profound and obscure way. Something buried deep, a fraction that feared, had seized the fractions that saw, producing hallucinations that seized the fractions that spoke and reasoned–undeniable visions. She would be far more difficult to solve than he had initially anticipated, the Survivor realized. So much so, he would have relegated the task … had she not possessed such a hold on Drusas Achamian.

  Wind braided the fire, combed sparks from its extremities. Her face pulsed orange. “Dihunu,” she said smiling, “varo sirmu’tamna al’abatu so kaman.”

  The old Wizard scowled.

  “She says that you gathered one hundred stones …”

  An involuntary blink. A catastrophic lapse.

  Impossibility … Only this time without the curious intimation of deformity that seemed to mar all things sorcerous. An absolute impossibility …

  “Yis’arapitri far—”

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  “She says you only think you survived the Thousand Thousand Halls,” the old Wizard said.

  The Survivor blinked … fell back and away, dissolving into the fractional multitudes he had always been, pieces glimpsing pieces, splinters of what would happen … each a living claim, yearning to be raised up from the multitudes—and to exult in the flesh of the real.

  He gazed at the pregnant woman, a new assemblage, clustered like winter bees about a new resolution. All the world fell to shadow and rags about the fixed point of her gaze.

  His grin was both easy and sad, the smile of one who understands the errors of the heart too well not to forgive the hatred of another.

  “Resirit manu cousa—”

  “She says,” the old Wizard said scowling, “that you just decided to murder her.”

  Cuts and cuts and cuts.

  He watched the couple through the dancing, windswept pulse of their fire. They sat one about the other facing the night. Mimara huddled armour and all in the old Wizard’s arms, though she was the stronger, clutching one of his hands to her golden belly. Achamian stared out, his bearded profile daubed in orange, his gaze baffled by the wonder beneath his palm. The awe that was the future.

  Wolves barked and bickered and crooned, yelping cacophonies that were pared into long solitary wails. Only predators dared call out to the void of night, beasts that were never eaten. Until this evening, he had not imagined the void could answer …

  That it harboured entities every bit as predatory … more.

  “How did she know?” the boy whispered in the dark.

  Only Cause could effect knowledge.

  “This World,” a fraction replied, “possesses directions the Dûnyain could not fathom.”

  He was known—he who had confounded his Elders with his gifts. She had looked upon him, and had sounded him to his dregs.

  “But how?”

  Shadows roiled in the darkness.

  The Survivor turned away from the wavering image of Mimara and Achamian, immured the boy within the vast apparatus of his scrutiny. He reached out, curved his palm about the arc of the boy’s cheek. A fraction peered at the scarred, puckered skin against smooth.

  “The Soul is Many,” another fraction said.

  “And the World is One,” the boy replied, perplexed, for this catechism had been among the first he had learned.

  The Survivor let slip his hand, turned to resume his scrutiny of the couple.

  “But I don’t understand,” the small voice pressed from his periphery.

  Always so open, the boy—so trusting.

  “Cause measures the distance between things …” one fraction said, while another continued scrutinizing the couple. “This is why the strength of the Dûnyain has always lain in grasping the Shortest Path …”

  “But for her to know about the stones …” the boy said. “What possible path could deliver that knowledge?”

  The fraction that listened nodded.

  “None,” whispered the fraction that spoke.

  The fraction that watched presided over the labour of yet others, whisking scenarios of act and consequence, all of them involving the death of the pregnant woman. By simply announcing his intent she had disastrously complicated its execution …

  “But what does that mean?” the boy asked.

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  “That the World …” a voice began, “is one in every respect.”

  Fractions mewled and screamed in the dark.

  “What are you saying?”

  Something, the desperation hidden in the fluting striations of the boy’s voice perhaps, suspended the numberless labours dividing his soul. Why? a fraction asked. Why begin plotting her death before comprehending the ground of what had transpired?

  The Survivor pinned the boy with his regard.

  “That all of this has somehow already happened.”

  The old man moaned in his sleep—cried out.

  The pregnant woman stirred from his side, yanked herself upright in bleary alarm. She made no move to rouse him, electing to hang at his side instead, her face drawn with exhaustion. She had grown accustomed to these momentary, nocturnal vigils, thoughts freighted with the sloth of unconsciousness.

  She laid a hand upon the old Wizard’s breast, a reflex borne of thoughtless intimacy. A palm like an ear held against his heart.

  The old man grew still.

  The fire had wheezed into oblivion. The encircling night howled with wind, altitude, and gaping emptiness. The Heavens illumined all …

  Nothing sensible cued the sudden look she shot in the Dûnyain’s direction. She was blind again—a fact made clear by the swarming indications of fear and indecision. Fully human.

  She locked eyes with the fraction watching.

  The World is One, a fraction recalled a fraction saying …

  The boy?

  She turned away from its scrutiny, resumed her position at the Wizard’s side. The fraction watched her eyes sort through the infinity yawing above. Seventeen heartbeats passed, then, with a kind of grim fury, she clutched her blanket to her chin and rolled to her side.

  This too, one fraction whispered to the others, has already happened.

  The wind thrummed and roiled, rushed in invisible cataracts about the hanging heights.

  The Survivor rolled onto his back. She says, a fraction whispered in the old man’s voice, that you gathered one hundred stones. How could such a thing be known? Sorcery, another fraction realized. Sorcery was the least among the Dûnyain’s many oversights. Long had he pondered the Singers and their cataclysmic song: none of the Brethren had risked so much as he in the futile attempt to capture one for interrogation. An errant fraction glimpsed lightning and thunder in the labyrinthine black. Why? Why would the worldborn founders of the Dûnyain deny their children knowledge of something so significant as sorcery? What could motivate dooming their progeny to millennial ignorance?

  Perhaps some paths were too short. Perhaps they had feared their descendants would forswear the more arduous harvest of Cause, when the fruits of sorcery hung so low.

  As profound as it was, sorcery did naught but complicate the metaphysics of Cause. But this … The knowledge that had apprehended him through the eyes of the pregnant woman.

  This changed everything.

  Even now, as he gazed without sight into the oceanic cavity of night, a fraction retrieved her image, and he relived the impossibility of her gaze, of a scrutiny utterly unconstrained by the incestuous caprice of the here and now. A look unbound by time and place. A look from everywhere …

  And nowhere.

  And he knew: ther
e existed a place without paths of any kind, without differences …

  An absolute place.

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  The four of them ascended ways slung across the face of the heavens. Falls, some sloped and tumbling, others abyssal, framed every glance they shared. Summits dizzied the sky about them, great cleavages of rocks thrust towering into the high blue. Thin air taxed their lungs and limbs.

  “It hunts us,” a fraction said to the old Wizard.

  An apprehensive squint.

  “The darkness that comes before thought and soul,” another fraction explained.

  The man’s face seemed of a piece with the mountains, a dark miniature.

  “I did plot her murder,” a fraction resumed.

  These words took the old man aback—according to their design. By beginning with a cryptic utterance, he had engaged the Wizard’s curiosity and attention, as well as provided a foil of obscurity for the clarity of his subsequent confession.

  “And now? Do you still wish her dead?”

  He needed Drusas Achamian to listen.

  “No matter what I answer, you will not believe me.”

  Trust was a habit for these people. If he spoke enough truth, his voice would become true.

  “Sounds like a dilemma,” the old Singer said.

  A luminous look. Smiles only called attention to the Survivor’s grotesquerie.

  “It need not be.”

  Achamian cast a worried glance at the pregnant woman several paces above. They toiled up the shoulder of a mountain, following a ravine of larger stones and boulders set into what were otherwise gravel slopes. Dislodged stones clacked down in their wake, gaining speed and kicking out onto the surrounding ramps, where they triggered small cascades of gravel, skirts woven of incalculable threads.

  The old man had just resolved to ignore him, the Survivor knew.

  “As much as you distrust me, you trust her sight more.”

  The shadow of some bird plummeted across the slopes.

  “So?”

  Truth.

  “Tell her,” the mutilated son of Anasûrimbor Kellhus said, “to gaze upon me while I speak.”