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

by R. Scott Bakker

  But he is not alone. He glances at her, and even though the bonfire’s white glare obscures his expression, she knows he begs forgiveness as much as permission.

  “Searching …” he says with exhausted boldness. “Searching for Ishuäl, the hidden refuge of the Dûnyain …”

  Maurax does not so much as blink. “You risk much,” he says through gravel, his eyes clicking to and from Mimara. “What does Ishuäl possess that warrants such a throw?”

  Achamian stands motionless. “The truth of the Holy Aspect-Empe—”

  “LIES!” one of the Nine booms.

  The man’s shadow erupts from the depression’s rim. The first of the Nine towers over the old Wizard, the details of his face and figure burned into blackness for the blistering white of the bonfire. But she does not need to see to know that he is the true power here, the true King-of-Tribes. But it is the menace of his frame, at once lean and thick, and the grating malice of his voice that name him …

  “You …” the old Wizard croaks.

  The shadow spits. She thinks she must smell his famished grin, because she cannot see it.

  Slicked in firelight, Achamian’s face has been struck of all defences, stripped to the wonder. “Th-they said you were dead,” he stammers.

  “Aye. Dead …” the figure grates.

  The fire of white burning Sranc blackens him. She feels more than sees his gaze slide across her face and belly … and then, as if on some mad whim, glide to the stars.

  “Dead, I walked across the desert.” His voice sounds of cracking timbers, crashing stone. “Dead, I drank deep the blood of vultures. Dead, I returned to the People …”

  She can actually feel his invisible gaze seize the old Wizard anew.

  “And dead, I conquered …”

  The other Scylvendi warriors have averted their gaze—even Blue-face peers at his boots. Only Maurax, it seems, dares look upon him directly.

  “I have not the skin,” the great shadow continues, “to bear the number I have taken. I have not the bones to carry the wickedness I have wrought. The sky gags for the bodies burned. The Hells grow fat on the back of my wrath—my judgment!”

  Posturing. Pious declarations of prowess, ferocity and might. Were this the Andiamine Heights, she would have sneered, even tittered aloud—to needle Mother if nothing else. But not here—not with this man, whose every word stabbed as a knife.

  “And you, sorcerer? Is Drusas Achamian dead as well?”

  Achamian peers at the silhouette, glances down as if cowed by some unseen fury. “And alive,” he says with a meekness that makes her cringe.

  And with that, the Eye opens …

  And she finds herself in the captivity of the damned.

  “What does this mean,” the King-of-Tribes asks. “Eh, sorcerer? What does our meeting portend?”

  All is illumined before the Eye. It knows no shadow—the same as It knows no past, no future. She sees him, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, the legend, and she cannot look away. She sees him for the soul he is.

  “I am a fool in this,” the old Wizard retorts. “No different than you.”

  The Scylvendi demon grins. It is like staring into a furnace, watching him. Heat pinches her cheeks. She squints against the blowing of unseen sparks. The sins of the Wizard—grievous though they may be—are but trifles compared to the atrocities wrought by this one man.

  A bark of laughter. “So our ends are one! You too have come to collect from our common debtor.”

  And she sees it, a flicker bound to the back of flickers, a myriad of criminal glimpses. Babes caught on sword-point. Mothers raped and strangled.

  “No,” Achamian replies. “To pass judgment, not-not … execute it.”

  She sees the hard ways of the People, the criminality of being Scylvendi, a nation born into damnation, and all the lunatic savagery that throngs between. She sees the hand drift between the shadow of opposing thighs …

  The demon snorts. “Still a philosopher! Still using your mouth to recover what your hands have given.”

  And hatred, unlike any she had ever witnessed, dwarfing even that of Lord Kosoter, who never heard the anguish of those he killed.

  “I know only,” Achamian said evenly, “that the World is about to end …”

  Cnaiür urs Skiötha was the murderer who cast himself into his victims, who choked and shrieked with them …

  “That the Second Apocalypse is upon us!”

  To better suckle upon the fact of his own dread power …

  The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes laughs and sneers. “And you fear the Anasûrimbor truly is your Saviour! That his Ordeal might save the World!”

  To make the World’s throat a surrogate for his own…

  “I have to know for certain … I cannot risk … risk …”

  “Liar! You would be his assassin! You lay breath upon the altar of your scrolls, but you stink of vengeance, sorcerer. You reek of it! You would put out his eyes—no different than I!”

  The old Wizard stands thunderstruck, alarm grappling with incredulity. The bonfire whirls and cackles, coals popping deep, like bones breaking, bone buried in meat.

  “So you have answered Golgotterath’s summons?” Achamian asks. “You march for the Consult?”

  The King-of-Tribes turns to the noisome flames, and Mimara at last sees his face as the mundane World would have her see it. High-cheeked, broad of jaw and heavy of brow, scars like coagulations of skin. He was as old as Achamian, but harder by far, as if too jealous of his strength, too indomitable of will to relinquish anything but the superfluities of youth—the weaknesses.

  He spits toward the bonfire, where his eyes linger as if upon a virgin’s thighs.

  “Let it all burn.”

  “And you actually believe you will survive?” Achamian cries at his profile. “Fool! You imagine the Consult will suffer the Scylven—?”

  The backhand is both abrupt and fluid. Achamian drops into the blackness like a crashing kite.

  “You think this a reunion?” Cnaiür urs Skiötha screams down at him. “A meeting of old friends?” Mimara feels more than sees the kick to Achamian’s face. Terror flushes through her. “This is not another favour from your Whore, Fortune! You are not of the People!”

  The King-of-Tribes yanks the old Wizard from the indigo black, and she sees them …

  The swazond.

  He suspends as much as holds the sorcerer upright, raises his opposite hand high. “Why? Why have you come, Drusas Achamian? Why have you dragged your bitch across a thousand screaming, rutting leagues? Tell me, what moves a man to cast number-sticks across his woman’s womb?”

  Scars—more than the Survivor—only ritual, cut with manic care, and in the Eye …

  “To learn the truth!” the bloodied Wizard shouts.

  Smoking.

  “Truth?” A sneering grin. “Truth? Which one? The one that makes toys out of Nations and Schools? The one that fucks your wife breathless?”

  “No!”

  Cnaiür cackles. “Even after so many lean years, he keeps you like a mouse in his pocket!”

  “No!”

  Smoking, the beaded tissue shining with orange-glowering coals …

  “Hatred … Aye … You cannot see this because you are weak. You cannot see this because you dwell”—he raised two thick fingers to his temple—“here … Your own eye escapes you, and so you weave excuses, plead ignorance, tell tales! You hide from your truth in the sound of your voice, foul the very spigot you would clear! But I see it plainly—as plainly as a Dûnyain. Hatred, Mandati! Hatred has brought you here!”

  Smoking … anguish and shrieks, the residue of innumerable battles, coiling into the blackness of the greater night, a mantle of stolen souls.

  “I do hate!” Achamian cries, his voice blood-raw. “I don’t deny this! Hatred of Kellhus, yes! But hatred of the Consult more!”

  The Barbarian King grimaces, releases the Wizard.

  “What of your grudge against them?” Achamian presses.
“What of Sarcellus? The skin-spy who murdered Serwë! Your concubine! Your prize!”

  These words seem to unnerve the barbarian, physically, like a stab in his throat.

  “Who’s the mouse in whose pocket?” Achamian continues with scathing fury. Blood runs freely from his nose, clotting the tangle of his beard. “Who’s the gull?”

  The great black figure regards him, horned and smoking, living and yet already a Prince of Hell.

  “How can I be the gull,” it grates, “when they do my bidding?”

  For a heartbeat she actually believes this could be the case, such is the majesty of the Scylvendi’s evil. Achamian cannot see as she sees; nevertheless it seems he knows, that in some obscurity of his heart he understands the Man before him is no mere splinter, but a mighty shard … possessed of what would have been a hero’s soul, were it not for Anasûrimbor Moënghus …

  For the Dûnyain.

  “But the World!” the old Wizard protests.

  “The World—pfah! Let it burn! Let babes hang like leaves from trees! Let the screams of your cities crack the Heavens!”

  “But how can you sa—?”

  “My will shall be done!” the barbarian screams. “Anasûrimbor Kellhus will choke upon my knife! I shall cut out the bowel he calls his heart!”

  “So that’s it?” Achamian cries. “Cnaiür urs Skiötha, Breaker-of-horses-and-Men! Consult slave!”

  The King-of-Tribes clubs as much as strikes the old Wizard to the shrouded ground.

  “I would have let you live, sorcerer!” he thunders, hauling the hapless man from the dark. She glimpses Achamian’s face, gasping as if tossed between ocean rollers—drowning …

  Panic, like a thousand little claws scratching a heart of plaster.

  “I would have spared your bitch!” the Barbarian King rages. “Your unborn chi—!”

  And she hears herself screech, “You!”

  Wonder arrests the dark and grease-burning World.

  “You are not of the People!”

  She cannot feel her face, but she can feel them with excruciating clarity, the Chorae, Tears-of-God no more, hanging in the dark, like lead pellets dimpling the sodden tissue of existence. A dozen little rips.

  Cnaiür urs Skiötha has turned from the fallen Wizard and now faces her, a granitic shadow before white gossamer flame. He stands before her, his flesh leather strapped about conflagration. The whole night roars and marvels.

  “Your entire life!” she cries. “Always thinking … thinking one thought too many!”

  The furnace apparition looms …

  “Your! Entire! Life!”

  The Eye closes, and a terror overwhelms her. Her gaze is bent from the hulking shadow toward the macabre horse and rider hooked on poles … at Maurax sitting beneath the carrion display. She is transfixed …

  “Yes,” the Scylvendi says on a bull murmur. “You do resemble her …”

  Maurax, she realizes, is no more. A woman sits in his place. Flaxen hair, long and lustrous, molten with firelight, pallid with shadow.

  “Esmenet … Yes. I remember …”

  The name seizes her attention as surely as a slap, but Cnaiür is already peering beyond her.

  “Look at me, boy.”

  Shock. She had forgotten the boy.

  The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes towers before the two of them, his shadow encompassing her whole. She can make out his savage mien, see the dim facts of his expression, the way he blinks, staring at the boy like an addict stepping from an opium pit.

  “Cnaiür!” she hears Achamian cry. “Scylvendi!”

  The Barbarian King extends a callous-horned hand to the boy’s cheek … The boy does not so much as flinch from the great thumb that dents his skin. Instead, he gazes up with a bland, slow-blinking curiosity that exposes everything.

  “Ishuäl …” she hears Cnaiür exhale on a shudder.

  The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes turns to confer with the thing that had been Maurax, but was now a beautiful Norsirai girl …

  Serwë, Mimara realizes. Her stepfather’s other wife.

  She has suffered untold absurdities since fleeing the Andiamine Heights. She has witnessed more rank impossibilities, more offenses to nature and scruple than she could hope to enumerate. She has huddled beneath raving abominations. But none of it bruised her quite so strangely as this … as Serwë …

  In Momemn, Serwë was more than just a staple of dynastic legend, a ghost for being so intimately embroiled in the mad circus of the Anasûrimbor. She was also a weapon, and a shameful one. Mimara regularly used her in arguments with her mother—and how could she not, when it was a name that exposed the Empress for a fraud? The dead were always more chaste, more pure of past and intention. As the living wife, Anasûrimbor Esmenet could not but be the fallen wife …

  “Did you exult, Mother, watching her rot upon the Circumfix? Did you celebrate for having survived?”

  Such cruel things we say, when we make rods of our wounds.

  Without a word of explanation, Cnaiür urs Skiötha strides into the darkness beyond the depression, abandons them to Maurax-become-Serwë.

  The World, the Zaudunyani poets called her. For as she died, so too had the innocence of Men. It seems a mockery unto sacrilege, that a skin-spy might wear her beauteous form.

  The three of them watch in a stupor as the counterfeit woman begins barking commands into the night. The Scylvendi tongue is curious, at once as harsh as chipped flint and as slippery as flayed skin. Warriors, arms grilled in swazond, set out across the deformities of the little plateau. The Chorae Bowmen are dismissed—a fact Mimara would have celebrated were it not for the malign presence of Serwë—and the Trinket bound against her counterfeit navel.

  With the boy in tow she draws Achamian into the firelight, does what she can to staunch the blood welling from his lower lip. Her head still spins for panic and confusion.

  “He’s not through with us,” he murmurs. “Let me speak.”

  “So you can get us killed?”

  The amiable old face scowls.

  “You don’t know him, Mimara.”

  “The legendary Cnaiür urs Skiötha …” she says on a gentle sneer. “I think I know him better than any …”

  “How—?” the old scold begins, only to catch a glimpse of the truth in her look. He is beginning to understand the Eye, to accept what it means. “Then your silence is all the more crucial,” he says, spitting blood in the blackness.

  She pauses in her ministrations, suddenly realizing Drusas Achamian will never entirely understand. And how can he, a Schoolman—worse, a Wizard—someone who works miracles of destruction with breath and intellect? He will always strive, always fight, and forever presume that events follow upon the acts of Men.

  She glimpses the boy watching.

  “I’ll keep my counsel,” she reassures the old Wizard. “What do you intend to do?”

  He grimaces. “What Protathis bids all Men do in the court of a mad king: lick feet.”

  Achamian wards away Mimara’s fussing, his eyes already fixed upon the thing-called-Serwë.

  The flaxen-haired abomination observes them from a position some paces distant, her waifish beauty compelling for liquid conspiracies of light and shadow.

  “So,” the old Wizard calls out to the creature, “are you his keeper?”

  The thing-called-Serwë smiles in the demure manner of a girl too timid to admit her lust.

  “Were I not his slave,” it coos, “I would love you, Chigra.”

  “And how do you serve him, Beast?”

  It raises a white hand, points beyond the glittering heap of fire, toward a yaksh set alone on the plateau’s eastern rim.

  “As all women serve heroes,” it said smiling.

  “Outrage!” the old Wizard spat. “Madness!” After glancing back to Mimara and the boy, he set out on a hobble toward the White Yaksh.

  “That is what they are! Do you not see? With every breath they war against circumstance, with every breath they
conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and we whimper when they raise their hands …

  “They make us love! They make us love!”

  She follows, hands upon her gold-scaled belly. The thing-called-Serwë concedes Achamian the lead, falls in beside her instead. Even though they are of a height, the skin-spy turns only to glance at her extended belly, nothing else. Mimara ponders the perversity of lolling caught in the jaws of events twenty-years dead.

  Such wonders, little one …

  The interior is more gloomy for the barbarism of its accoutrements than the absence of light. A fire crouches shining in the centre, set in a circle of blackened stones for want of a hearth. Where the tent of a Three Seas King would have exhibited a bare minimum of luxury, all-important signs of significance, nothing that Mimara can see serves this capacity in the tent of Cnaiür, breaker-of-horses-and-men. Only the cushions set across the mats ringing the fire—little more than bolts of felt folded and stitched—signify any concession to comfort. And aside from a horse-tail standard whose intricacies defeat her, everything complicating the spare hollow is devoid of ornament. Bundles have been arrayed like pastries against the southern walls. Wood has been heaped along the northern. A nimil hauberk, Kianene helm, round-shield, and bowcase hang from hemp ropes opposite the entrance. A high-backed saddle lies askew to the left of the threshold. The ground itself is sloped and broken, lending the sense of a capsized sea vessel.

  The old her, the embittered Princess-Imperial, would have seen only rubbish and banditry. But then the old her would have smelled of ambergis rather than the ripe of putrid fur and unwashed woman. Barbarism, she realizes with dark humour, had swallowed her life long ago.

  The King-of-Tribes is the only true ornament here. He sits cross-legged opposite the entrance on the far side of the fire. Stripped to the waist, he is at once lean and gigantic, sinister for the way the firelight illuminates his punishing physique from below. Swazond craze his arms and torso, lined plots of scar-tissue that resemble beaded wax.