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

by R. Scott Bakker

  And then Malowebi suddenly sensed it … the true Evil.

  It stepped into their presence from nowhere … the stain of a soul damned by its own hand, the Mark of a sorcerer …

  One more powerful, more damned, than any he had sensed before.

  “She’s right!” the Mbimayu Schoolman cried out to his tormented host. “My Lord! Your Chorae! Qui—!”

  A word was spoken from inside his ear canals …

  And the back quarter of the pavilion—where Malowebi could feel the Chorae in its chest—exploded. Plunder blew outward as trash. The whump knocked both Fanayal and Nannaferi to their knees—the woman rolled in paroxysms of joyous laughter. The pavilion wagged and clattered. The presence continued keening its impossible song, concealed from mundane eyes.

  Malowebi thoughtlessly seized the iron cup fetish in his Erzû gown. Cold terror clawed his innards.

  “Fanayal!” he cried out. “Run to me!”

  Then his thoughts convolved and he was chanting and thinking against his chanting, the sacred-and-accursed Song of Iswa. He saw the Padirajah dash toward him, only to trip as Nannaferi scissored her legs across his line of flight. He fell hard across orchards stitched gold against crimson. Malowebi was too well-trained to hesitate: the Muzzû Chalice fell as a luminous bastion about him, a spectral Analogy of the fetish clenched in his left hand …

  For he had guessed who had come upon them!

  Nannaferi had leapt to her feet and began kicking the prone Padirajah’s head, screeching, “Pig! Pig!” even as the sorcerous voice began tearing the pavilion on an arc, slow at first, but spinning like a chariot-wheel within heartbeats, until they stood within a whirlwind swinging with debris—a shield against Chorae, Malowebi dimly realized. The sky keened. The felt-panelled ceiling whipped into the cyclone, and daylight flooded the crazed tableaux, spattered it with darting shadows …

  And Malowebi finally saw him …

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas.

  His Mark wrenched, sickened. The nimil links of his hauberk seethed white and silver in the chaotic light. Otherwise his appearance bore the signs of arduous travel, the tangled mane of gold, the untended beard, the mudded boots and soil-blackened fingers. He wore a sable cloak that lashed and flapped from his arms, his shoulders. And from his war-girdle hung the famed Decapitants, miens like floating nightmares swinging about his left thigh.

  Showing no concern for Malowebi, Anasûrimbor Kellhus strode toward the Padirajah and the Mother-Supreme, a vision out of the most severe of the Sagas, his eyes reflecting wind-scoured ice. And as they said, haloes framed his head and hands, the ghosts of golden plates … markless.

  The Mbimayu Schoolman stood, thoughts and innards roiling.

  Curse Likaro!

  The Aspect-Emperor swatted Psatma Nannaferi to the ground, hoisted the ailing Padirajah by his throat—held him as if he were no more than a child!

  The two old foes regarded each other thus, seeming to fall forward for the sheets of detritus whipping behind. The air howled, a sound like sheets tearing, or wildcats screaming. Smaller gyres of dust had nested within the greater, transforming what had been the Harem into a dun bowl, one kicked into clouds by the phantom shell of the Muzzû Chalice. Fanayal lolled semi-conscious in the fluttering sunlight.

  The Aspect-Emperor peered at him, as though willing the man to recognize who had conquered him.

  Such a breathtaking demonstration of power! To stand in the heart of his enemy’s host and dictate life and death with impunity …

  The Padirajah became conscious on a seizure, an unmanly paroxysm of terror.

  “Who conceived this!” the Aspect-Emperor thundered.

  Malowebi saw the Padirajah move his lips—

  Then drop like rope to the earth. Malowebi swayed for the absolute finality of it, caught himself on a step. Fanayal ab Kascamandri was dead …

  Dead!

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas had turned to the laughing Mother-Supreme, who lay limbs lolling upon the embroidered earth. He yanked her to feet, spared her the indignity he had extended Fanayal.

  She stood uncowed, cackled in the shadow of his looming, wind-whipped aspect.

  “Mother!” she cried to the skies over his shoulder. The gale tore her costume like dogs growling on towels. “Prepare for me my place! For I come as one who gives—gives without memory! One who dies for tending what is Yours!”

  “My sister,” Anasûrimbor Kellhus said, “can no longer save you.”

  “And yet you have come!” she cried in exaltation. “Come to collect your doom!”

  “The Hundred are blind to the No-God. None more than the Mother of Birth.”

  “Then why,” she shrieked laughing, “do I remember this? The White-Luck will eat you ere this day is dead!”

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas betrayed nothing more than wind-lashed curiosity.

  “You can be Everywhere and still be blind,” he said. “You can be Eternal and remember nothing.”

  “So says the loosed Demon! So says filth and horror made manifest! Abyssal hunger!”

  “Even the Infinite can be surprised.”

  The Anasûrimbor seized her and spoke in a single motion, his right hand clamped about her forehead, his voice cracking Reality to the joist. Brilliance consumed the Yatwerian witch. Malowebi raised a hand to shield his eyes, but too late, and so he stood blinking as the tall shadow that was the Aspect-Emperor turned from the whipping mayhem to confront him.

  One of the Decapitants upon his thigh mouthed fungal warnings. Psatma Nannaferi was nowhere to be seen.

  “What do you think, Mbimayu?” the Aspect-Emperor called, his voice eerie for slipping through the roar. He spoke as if about a dinner table. “Do you think Yatwer allowed her to see this?”

  The Mbimayu Schoolman stood paralytic in a manner he had never before known.

  “Wh-wh-what?” he stammered.

  Then he heard it as an eerie intrusion upon the ripping of winds. “Motherrrrrrrr!”

  A faraway call … Nearing?

  Malowebi frowned, looked skyward in a panic, saw Psatma Nannaferi pitching and kicking for the merest instant before her image exploded into pulp across the arch of his Muzzû Chalice.

  “Her plummet,” the Thought-dancer said.

  The Zeumi Emissary coughed, for something he knew not what, then staggered to his knees.

  Esmenet had to pet the girl’s hair lightly, lest she make contact with the lack of substance beneath.

  “No-no-no-no-no,” she blubbered and sobbed, rocking her daughter’s ruined head.

  Her body trembled of its own accord, muscles dancing like coins across porcelain. She could no longer hear her beloved Capital. Her lament for had become wailing with.

  “Mommaaaa!” Kelmomas bawled into her side.

  The Gods wrought this.

  “Mommaaaa!” Kelmomas keened …

  Kelmomas. The one that yet lived …

  Out of all those who had mattered.

  She felt herself divide then, divide as she had cradling the final convulsive breath of Samarmas, broken about the fault line that fissures all mothers, the instinct to bury what was mad for loss beneath what was mad for making safe. She stared at the creviced ceiling, tried to ignore the sheeting heat of her tears. She rallied about her numb core—there was no time for this!

  “Sh-sh-shhh …” she managed to coo to her shuddering boy. She had to get him to safety—away from all this horror. Saxillas! What was it Saxillas had said? She leaned from her rump, wiped a furious sleeve across her face. The ships! She must get him to the harbour! She must be strong!

  But the image Theliopa so … ruined yanked her back to the shattered bricks.

  “Noooooo,” she moaned as though only now happening upon her daughter. “This isn’t …”

  She lowered her eye to the heel of her palm, rubbed at the grit that afflicted her.

  “This-this isn’t …”

  She shook her head in t
he groggy manner of drunks.

  Kelmomas detached himself, swatted his cheeks and eyes while watching her.

  “M-momma—?”

  “There’s so many monsters!” Esmenet shrieked with her bones, her hair and her skin. “Wh-hy Th-Thelli?” she gasped on hitching breaths. “When-when there are so many monsters?”

  Kelmomas moved to embrace her, but she was already exploding to her feet …

  “He doesn’t even care!” she roared into emptiness, her fists balled to either side. “He has no heart to break! No will to weaken! No fury to provoke! Don’t you see? You take nothing from him when you take his children! Nothing!” She fell to her knees gagging, raised a wrist to her mouth.

  “You only take … take … from me …”

  The palace swung as if upon hooks about her axis, a revolving motley of gleaming splendour and chalk destruction. She thrummed as a string breaking, from skin to pit and beyond. All spears! All spears were aimed at her. A spite that dwarfed the Ages!

  The Gods! The Gods hunted her and her children! Leering, coiling, burning, shaming, murdering, watching and watching and sometimes touching too, ever since she was a terrified little girl, sobbing into her terrified mother’s arms, saying, “I saw eyes, Momma! Eyes!” and her mother saying, “Shush … I did too …”

  “Tomorrow we will kill a bird.”

  Sundry glories lay crashed into ruin all about her. Her gaze roamed the wreckage, fell to the simple, idiot enumeration of what exists. Her little boy had lived in this room once—her youngest. She picked items from the dreck: the leather rocking horse that had sparked so many brawls with Sammi; the Cheribi cherry wardrobe stoved in the collapse that had killed Thelli; the five porcelain Kidruhil figurines given to him by Kayûtus, miraculously intact; and there, his silver Whelming Seal tipped against a ramp of bricked debris, reflecting the image of Kelmomas himself standing behind her to the right, his face framed in a flaxen maul. A dimple in the metal collapsed one cheek into his eyebrow—otherwise his expression one of malice and … joy?

  Her eyes simply hung upon the image, awaiting the arrival of her teetering soul.

  “Kel!”

  The reflection’s eyes fastened on her gaze—jubilation slumped into grief.

  Her heart cramped about the jagged stone of that transformation. She whirled to confront him, floating for the heat flushing through her limbs, once again crying, “Kel!” She reached out to seize him, possessed by a savagery she could not feel. But he leapt backward, into the air, and landed crouching on the far side of his dead sister’s body. She stumbled hard onto her knees, skinned her right palm.

  No-no-no-no-no …

  “Kel …” she called sobbing. “No … please.”

  I can pretend!

  But the Prince-Imperial turned and fled.

  Remnants of Psatma Nannaferi oiled the curve of the Muzzû Chalice in smoking blood.

  “Declare!” the Aspect-Emperor boomed.

  The Mbimayu Schoolman pressed himself to his feet, confronted the soul that had roused the Gods. Anasûrimbor Kellhus—the great and terrible Aspect-Emperor.

  But what was he forsooth? Prophetic redeemer or demonic tyrant?

  Or was he the inhuman Thought-dancer described by Drusus Achamian?

  “Declare yourself, Zeumi!”

  The Dûnyain paused tall and savage before the Mbimayu Schoolman, his edges fluttering like wildfire for the sorcerous whirlwind. Golden discs shimmered about a head and hands noxious for their Mark. He stood glaring just beyond the circuit of the Chalice, near enough that Malowebi had to lean into the virulent aura to remain upright.

  “Un-under …” the Second Negotiant croaked, coughed at the panic crowding his lungs. “Under th-the provisions of the Blue Lotus Treaty struck between y-you and the Great Satakhan of High Holy Zeum …”

  There was no thought of surviving a contest with this man. The Anagogic fetish sorcery of the Iswazi was no match for the Gnosis, let alone the Metagnosis. Even still, across the limit of his arcane sensitivity, Malowebi could feel the Fanim amassing Chorae beyond the whisking cyclone. Delaying was his only hope …

  “Fanayal was no nation,” the dread figure snapped, the judgment in his voice as absolute as geometry. “You stand in contempt of the very Treaty you invoke.”

  Time! He just needed more ti—

  The Aspect-Emperor barked laughing, stepped so as to place Malowebi between himself and two of the dozen or so Chorae now surrounding the whirlwind. Even the husked demon-heads upon his hip seemed to howl.

  Malowebi stood, mouth hanging, bowel churning, knowing he was doomed, and it cut him, pierced him through, thinking how Likaro would laugh. Curse his miscre—!

  Words, incomprehensible, skittered chitinous across surfaces beyond the Real. The Aspect-Emperor’s skull became a furnace of alien meaning—

  A deafening crack. A piercing turquoise brilliance that blackened, blotted all that could be seen—one striking the Aspect-Emperor, not his Iswazi Ward!

  Malowebi pulled, the omba stitched into his Erzû across his face. The black gauze filtered the glare, revealing the Aspect-Emperor gazing bleached for the incandescent violence that engulfed his Wards. Burning light sheared without Mark through the cyclone, a lance that began parallel to the earth, but angled upward as its unseen point-of-origin climbed skyward …

  Water, Malowebi realized … Psûkhe.

  Meppa!

  The last of the Indara-Kishauri surmounted the whirling chaos, a shadow for his cataclysmic light. Boiling brilliance, blinding even through the omba, swallowed all that remained of the Aspect-Emperor’s image, a blue-white inferno that was at once a hammer, a torrential burning that stole breath for sucking air, a frenzied pounding that rent ears, sending cracks down to the bone of the earth …

  And then it was gone … as was Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

  Malowebi saw the Last Cishaurim hanging exposed in the arid sunlight, still garbed in the white silks of his convalescence, his feet bare, his face twisted for raging heartbreak. Sunlight slipped and flashed from the silver band obscuring his eyes. The black asp peered downward, swaying as a dowser’s stick from side to side.

  “Fanayaaaaaal!” the man screamed. “Nooooo!”

  “Such power …” Malowebi heard a deep voice murmur—from behind him.

  The Iswazi sorcerer turned on a panicked spasm, glimpsed the looming horror of the Aspect-Emperor inside his Chalice. The man clubbed him to the ground. The reality of what happened stammered about the shadows.

  “Deceitful!” Meppa howled in wrath from above. The gleaming curl of the asp had craned toward his Ward: the Primary had realized what happened. “Craven!”

  It was as if the sun itself crashed upon the Muzzû Chalice. Malowebi could hear nothing, but through the black gauze of his omba he could see him standing, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, more curious than alarmed, craning his head about to inspect the Ward that preserved him. Malowebi could have released the fetish at that moment, he knew. He need only expose his palm, let slip the miniature iron cup, and they would both be washed away …

  But he did not. Could not …

  Besides … the Aspect-Emperor was no longer there.

  The Chalice cracked.

  Kelmomas ran, fleeing the long wire of his mother’s call. He traced a line through hooped cavities of what had been his home, puckering the billows of smoke, drawing its residue through the wailing air.

  Something burns somewhere, he thought.

  He found himself in his mother’s chambers with no memory of doubling back. He could smell her warm, earthen smell, the residue of the jasmine she had worn in his room. He knew the quake had destroyed her bedchamber before so much as setting foot upon the threshold. A turret from above had sheared through the ceiling and plummeted through the floor, leaving a ruinous pit. A hand waved like a frond in water from the heaped debris below. A great fragment of the far wall had been torn down its own slope, taking the mythic marbles of the secret entrance with it. At first he simp
ly gaped, gazed across the void senseless to the horror.

  His shadow palace lay cracked open, the mazed hollows utterly exposed.

  Inrilatas crouched naked in what shadow remained, smeared with his own feces.

  “You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother—Little Knife!”

  Comprehension was slow in coming.

  “You think you murder in her name …”

  The eight-year-old swallowed. Nothing secret. Nothing fun. The Andiamine Heights had been boned as a bird. Laying broken, all the covert passages, all the chutes and tunnels and wells, stood revealed in countless places, a great lung drawing in every scream, every moan or wail, a soaking of all the rampant misery, siphoning, commingling, transmogrifying, creating a singular and most monstrous voice, a sound inhuman for the surfeit of humanity.

  He stood transfixed.

  Ruined! his twin shrieked from nowhere. You’ve ruined everything!

  He was the panic-stricken one, as always, the helpless baby. Kelmomas suffered only a peculiar numbness, a curious sense of having outgrown not so much his mother or his old life as existence altogether.

  It was a stupid game anyway.

  This is the only game there is, you fool!

  And he began shaking then, teetering over the pit, small in the vast croak issuing from the Andiamine Heights, the hideous roar that was humanity in sum. And when he regarded his abjection, he was puzzled, for he shook upon facts that he both knew and could not speak, an unbearable emptiness … loss … theft!

  Something! Something had been taken!

  He glimpsed the dust-chalked hand waving from the crotch of two great stones below. Horns creased the ragged air with alarm—battlehorns …

  And he was running once again, his feet flying upon a ground that was a drum, dashing through rings of glory and ruin. Smoke hung as thick as the cries in the air. Some halls were wrecked, the marble facings cracked, or shed altogether, the floors buckled or buried under shattered masonry. The Ministerial Gallery was impassable, receiving, as it had, a good portion of the Sea Beacon, which had imploded upon its foundations. Others ran, but they were as irrelevant to him as he was to them. Some milled in a stupor, blooded, or chalked colourless. Some shouted for help as they heaved at rubble, others rocked, wailing over inert bodies. Only the dead possessed decorum.