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

by R. Scott Bakker

  He paused for a train of slaves and functionaries bearing an enormous body grey for dust, black for bleeding. As they passed he recognized the bulk as Ngarau, strings of blood swinging from his slack lips. The little Prince-Imperial stood agog, ignoring the bearers and their concern. A slave boy no older than he trailed in their wake, staring at him with wide, questioning eyes. Glimpsing movement past his bloodied cheek, Kelmomas saw Issiral crossing the next juncture down the hall—a form shadowy not for garb or speed, but for unnatural intent …

  He stood motionless, tingling, staring at the now vacant intersection. Several heartbeats passed before he could dare think what was manifest—the Truth that pricked for being so plain …

  So laden with dread portent.

  The Four-Horned Brother wasn’t finished with the Anasûrimbor.

  Strange, the ways of the Soul.

  How it kicks when it should be still.

  How it resigns when it should roar and spit and grapple.

  The Chalice crumbled beneath the luminous ferocity of the Water. Malowebi spat blood, his face numb for the Aspect-Emperor’s blow. The fetish kicked and burned like saltpetre in his fist, but he did not release it. The great strength of the Iswazi was the way it drew on the will that bound the fetish. Rather, he raised himself to his knees, held out his fire-spitting fist, swayed against the calamitous demonstration of the Psûkhe.

  He thought he could hear Meppa screaming … somewhere.

  Or maybe it was him.

  Metagnostic singing clambered up out of the being of things once again, and the brilliant cataract winked into nothingness. Psûkhic thunder trailed into roaring Metagnostic winds. Malowebi pitched forward, cradled the agony of his ruined hand. Grit lashed him as the remnants of the Muzzû Chalice melted away. He huddled wincing against the root of the sorcerous cyclone. Furnishings whooshed overhead, whipping around, as did sections of the pavilion itself, flapping as rapid as bat-wings across the sun. He could no longer sense the Chorae floating about the whirlwind’s circuit: it seemed the desert warriors had fled with the arrival of Meppa …

  And word that Fanayal ab Kascamandri was truly dead.

  The black gauze had made shadows of what was flesh and flesh of what was light. Hunched against the tempest, the Mbimayu Schoolman watched mouth agape. Meppa hung on high as before, releasing cascades of scalding light. The Aspect-Emperor stood painted lightning-white below, Fanayal’s chalk corpse not more than two paces distant. A mosaic of angular planes sheared into the Waterbearer’s deluge mere cubits above them, refracting the concussive glare across an arc that impaled the heights.

  “You shall bear me, Demon!” the Last Cishaurim raged from on high. “For I am drawn from your accursed wheel! Your oven!”

  Malowebi tore his omba away—gazed upon the Water with his naked eye.

  “An outcast Son of Shimeh!”

  The man’s cheeks glowed beneath the spiralling radiance, wetted with tears beneath his silver visor. The asp coiled about his neck seemed to hang him as a noose from the sky. His power was its own ground.

  “The Cant that murdered my family, I took as my name!”

  And as his rage waxed, so too did the brilliance of his Water …

  “And I swore I would come upon thee! Come upon thee as a flood!”

  And the hanging Abstractions cast his light upon an ever more profound convexity, a scythe that could surmount mountains.

  “That I would deliver such Water!” Meppa screamed.

  All existence hissed as if it were sand and some kind of surf heaved through it.

  “As to strike thee to ash!”

  Meppa howled, maddened unto berserker frenzy. The world was darkened for the sun brilliance of his Expression. Jetting light dazzled his silhouette.

  All this while the Aspect-Emperor continued singing, so bleached for the glare as to appear something sketched in char. The Metagnostic planes above him had long since vanished into the roiling glare … but they miraculously cast back the Water nonetheless. And for a heartbeat, the Mbimayu Schoolman understood that this was his moment to seize. The future came to him as a crushing encumbrance, for he saw that he was the balance, the very grain that could tip the balance of empires and civilizations. All he need do was sing with Meppa …

  Strike the Aspect-Emperor!

  He hung from this momentous breath.

  All he need do …

  Indara’s Waterbearer wailed for outrage and incredulity.

  And it was too late, for Anasûrimbor Kellhus had thrown out his arms upon his Cant’s completion. Malowebi gasped for wonder at the unfolding of Metagnostic Abstractions, the intricate extent, the searing power, geometries begetting geometries, each twining upward on an antler’s curve, a dozen, all flaring out and closing upon Meppa, wracking him with volcanic lights. The man’s shadow jerked.

  Malowebi blinked for the Water’s abrupt absence, the arid gloom of mere sunlight. He glimpsed the Last Cishaurim slump from the low heights, trailing smoke, the black asp wagging as a tassel. And he reeled, thinking how all of it—everything!—had run aground upon the fact of this Man before him—this one impossible Man! The aspirations of a dispossessed race. The final and most brilliant flame of the Psûkhe. The machinations of High Holy Zeum—even the dread Mother of Birth!

  Then the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas was upon him, hauling him like a thief from market. Malowebi’s gaze caught upon the visage of a Decapitant, then Meppa sprawled semi-conscious across the wine-dark crimson of carpet. The man hoisted him by the breast of his robes, lifted him bodily. Black veils roped hypnotic beneath the sky …

  And all he could see was the haloed mien of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the glacial scrutiny in his gaze, a doom that no mortal could fathom …

  A doom that was his.

  “What?” the Mbimayu Schoolman gasped. “What … are … you?”

  The man reached for the pommel jutting above his shoulder. Enshoiya flashed in the embattled light …

  “Weary,” the grim visage replied.

  The famed sword fell.

  It was different now that he could not pass between the walls unseen, but it was the same outrageous game nonetheless: a boy chasing a God through the halls of his House.

  The lamentations had dwindled, and battlehorns now cawed from regions not so distant. Kelmomas felt a mouse for the way he darted from blind to blind, never closing on the Narindar, never losing him either, always lingering on some glimpse of his back or shoulders. Always murmuring, Got you … then flitting forward. The man’s route through the half-ruin was too circuitous to be anything but premeditated, and yet it possessed no logic the boy could fathom, and seemed mad for the contradiction of the man’s grim intent and rudderless passage.

  Did the Four-Horned Brother play in turn? he began wondering. Could all this be for his sake? Had Hell sent him a teacher … a playmate … a champion?

  The question terrified as much as elated him.

  So he crept and he sprinted from place to damaged place, through halls both wrecked and intact, mooning upon the thought of the Grinning God’s favour—the chance that he was Hate’s darling! He followed the breadcrumb glimpses around and about, impervious to any ruin or misery, ignoring even the sudden panic that sent so many running from the Andiamine Heights screaming, “Fanim! Fanim!” He cared not because he cared for nothing other than the play before his eyes, beneath his bare feet and naked hands. The silence of his mercurial brother meant that even he understood, even he agreed. Nothing mattered anymore …

  Might just as well have one last bit of fun.

  Momemn was destroyed. The Fanim were about to stack the survivors with the dead. And Mother …

  Mother, she—

  Ruined! Samarmas screamed, assailed him, biting deep into his neck before vanishing into his own shadow palace, the hollow bones of the boy’s own thought. Kelmomas scrunched the collar of his tunic—the one he had donned after his altercation with Theliopa—under his jaw and chin to staunch the blood.<
br />
  He liked to remind him from time to time, his twin.

  Remind him what it had been like before.

  At last Issiral climbed back into the Upper Palace, this time using the Processional, the grand stair meant to wind dignitaries from fat lands and to overawe dignitaries from lean ones—or so Inrilatas had once told him. Two great silvered mirrors, the finest ever crafted, had hung at angles above the stair so that those climbing could see themselves against the gilded splendour surrounding and understand full well the base and mean truth of their origins. One of the mirrors had shattered, but the other hung intact as before. Kelmomas saw the near-naked man halt on the landing, stand as if arrested by his image hanging above. The Prince-Imperial ducked behind an overturned stone vase some two junctures back. He raised a cheek to gaze over the bevelled rim with a single eye.

  The man continued standing with the same immobility that had so taxed the boy’s patience before. Kelmomas cursed, loathe to believe that the Grinning God could be caught by something so crude—so thin!—as reflection. This was part of the game, somehow. It had to be!

  Without warning, the man resumed motion as if he had never broken stride. On Issiral’s third step, Kelmomas stood from behind the bulk of the vase. On Issiral’s fourth step his mother appeared from the intersecting halls ahead of him—behind the Narindar. She paused upon a skidding slipper, almost immediately glimpsing Him, the Four-Horned Brother, climbing the Processional ahead. Her grand lavender gowns swung upon her turn to the monumental stair, freighted for soaking so much of her daughter’s blood. Her image burned as a chip of ice in his breast, so delicate, so soft, so … so … dark and beautiful. She made as to call out to the Narindar, but decided against it, and her little boy dropped to a crouch, knowing how she would cast a glance over her shoulder—she was forever glancing over her shoulder—before sprinting after what she thought was her assassin …

  Grab her! his brother suddenly erupted. Flee this place!

  Or what?

  A crazed growl. You remember fu—!

  And I don’t care!

  Samarmas faded, not so much into darkness as beyond the possibility of sense. He was frightened, Kelmomas knew … weak. The burden was his to shoulder … if not the blame.

  So the little boy darted in his Empress mother’s wake, devoid of all thought save cunning, for at long last he understood the game in all its particulars. And there was no way he could reckon that understanding and still play this … whatever it was he played with Ajokli, God of the Gutter.

  Mother had always been his stake. The only thing that mattered.

  The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas slowed as she climbed the stair beneath the surviving Grand Mirror, unable to believe she at all resembled the girl who had first marvelled at her reflection in a crude copper sheen in a Sumni slum decades since. How many indignities had she survived in the interval?

  How many losses?

  And yet there it was, that face … the face other whores had raged for …

  The eyes just as dark, each perpetually reflecting some pinprick of distant brilliance. The cheeks more severe perhaps, the brow more scored by care, but the lips just as fulsome, the neck as slender, the whole untouched …

  Untouched?

  Untouched! What kind of madness was this? What kind of World would paint such beauty upon a thing so accursed, so besmirched and polluted as herself! She watched her expression wince inward upon all angles, break upon spasms of shame and grief. She fled the hanging apparition, leapt the stair, her eyes downcast. She chased Issiral to the summit of her cracked and teetering empire, pursued without knowing why, to release him, perhaps, even though he had yet to accept her absurd charge. Or to ask him, perhaps, given the wisdom implicit in the way he spoke and moved—unlike any soul she had known, the way he seemed to … to … stand outside passion, beyond the animal prods of mortal nature. Perhaps he could …

  Perhaps he could.

  Her city and palace wailed. She crested the Processional just as the Narindar vanished between the great bronze portals of the Imperial Audience Hall. She followed him, uncertain whether she breathed. She was aware of wondering at the man, why he would steal here at such a time, but all was snow otherwise, numb obscurity. She trailed her fingertips across the line of Kyranean Lions stamped into the portal door barricaded by masonry, then stole quietly through the door ajar.

  The gloom was disorienting. She peered about the vast, polished hollow, searching for some sign of the Narindar, her eyes tracing gleaming lines about the roots of pillars great and small.

  He was nowhere to be seen.

  She strode into the Hall’s mighty aisle, making no attempt to conceal herself. She could smell the Meneanor, the sky, even the scented dregs of her morning council …

  Her son’s bathwater.

  Her daughter’s bowel.

  The missing wall shone white before her, a great silver halo about the silhouette of her husband’s Circumfix Throne. She paused in its monochromatic light, unafraid even though she suddenly understood why the Narindar had lured her here.

  For that was the Fate the Whore had allotted her … to forever attempt to rule.

  To be the plaything of forces … other.

  To be the leprous wretch gowned in gold—carrion in the guise of beauty!

  She stood, so small upon the expansive floor, dwarfed beneath the great pillars raised by her husband. She even closed her eyes and willed her end to happen. In her soul’s eye she could see the man, Issiral, her Narindar, her Holy Assassin, walking without the least urgency or apprehension, a being beyond effort, his knife floating white and watery before him. And she stood awaiting the plunge, braced both for and against, somehow knowing the ways her body would convulse about the intrusion, the shameful way she would flop upon her own unyielding floor.

  But the assault never came. The high-hanging spaces were silent save for a single sparrow battling the nets that hung from the vaults of the absent wall. Her throat burned.

  She fixed her gaze upon the silver-white opening, then carried her reflection across floors counted so sacred that Men had been slain for failing to embrace them. The sound of the sparrow’s travail began to scratch and buffet her breast from the inside. She paused on the lowermost step of the grand dais, winded by simple being.

  The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas saw him then, a silhouette standing just inside the verge of the missing wall, as though sheltering his skin from the harsh autumn sunlight. She knew him instantly, but a more stubborn fraction of her soul elected to believe he was Issiral. His every step proved an insult to this pretense, the discs of gold about his hands and face, the Decapitants bound to his girdle, the flaxen beard and mane, the looming stature …

  “Wha …” Esmenet coughed about sudden horror. “Wha-what are you doing here?”

  Her husband held her in his expressionless regard.

  “I have come to save you,” he said, “and to salvage what I might.”

  “S-save me?”

  “Fanayal is dead. His vultures scatter to the fou—”

  The belly of her vision blackened, and she collapsed at his knees—as perhaps a dutiful wife should.

  “Esmi?” Anasûrimbor Kellhus asked, kneeling to catch her. He held her cupped in the bottomless bowl of his scrutiny. She watched the scowl darken his face. He released her arms, towered over her dismay.

  “What have you done?”

  She winced at blows that did not come. She clawed at his wool leggings, hooked fingers into the rim of his right boot.

  “I …” she began on the urge to vomit.

  Let it … a seditious fragment whispered.

  “I-I …”

  Happen.

  And the Gift-of-Yatwer sees himself seeing, as he steps out from where he has always awaited, the column’s marmoreal bulk drawing aside as a curtain, revealing the Demon Emperor standing as he has always stood, forever awaiting. He sees the White-Luck Warrior throw his broken sword …

  Moth
er claps the Rug of the World …

  He climbs a stairs in a hall so great that a galley could be dragged through it, oars drawn. He looks up, sees himself standing before the great bronze doors of the Imperial Audience Hall, the one blockaded shut by ruin, the other jarred open on cracked hinges. He watches himself gaze into the stone-girded gloom, the marmoreal heights gleaming, the floor reflecting all in darkling tones. He sees the sky hang white beyond the chamber’s vaulted frame, the ground behind the Mantle where light and dark wars, where the Accursed Aspect-Emperor stands before his shrinking wife. She had hidden her will from herself, but still the Demon can see.

  As he has always seen.

  The Gift-of-Yatwer sees himself pressed soundless to a great column, hearing, “What have you done?” echo across the polished gloom.

  Mother stamps her foot upon the earth.

  All of Life stumbles. The ceilings unhitch and come shrugging down.

  His sword twirls broken through curtains of debris.

  The Tear wells in Mother’s eye. The ground hammers all things terrestrial as a mallet.

  The Demon dances clear the ceilings, miraculously stands to regard his teetering wife.

  “Esmi?”

  His broken sword pitches, end over end, following a miraculous chute through the curtains of debris.

  Mother blinks the Tear. The vast ceiling slumps, then crashes, fragments of marmoreal splendour.

  “Catch,” the Empress calls.

  He crushes the flesh in his hands, drinks deep his Mother’s gift.

  “Esmi?”

  The Tear misses, leaving a rind of salt along his throat and left cheek.

  Mother stamps her foot upon the earth. Seleukaran steel pitches through sheets of ruin, following the miraculous chute it has always followed, plunges into his throat. The wicked abomination gasps, as it has always gasped … the Whore of Momemn cries out for some passion beyond woe or joy.