She was faster, the blond-haired thing. Hers was the deeper wind. He need only attend to the blank behind him to know, to the chitinous cadence of her strides, the advancing tick …
He was not sure when the weeping began. He never was. He was not sure what the feeling was, though he had seen it innumerable times on the faces of the old man and his pregnant woman.
Never on that of the Survivor.
“I hear your blubbering!” it screeched in the tongue of the Dûnyain, baiting a pride he did not possess.
The rushing of things near, ground like flying moss; the ominous creep of scarps along his flank. The thing commanded Phusis—there could be no question. Logos was his only refuge …
The Logos was his now.
Things were simple … or could be.
“I smell your terror!”
The boy struck for the cliffs. Terror? a fraction asked.
No. Not terror.
Fury?
The thing-called-Serwë limped back to the White Yaksh, which remained standing despite the white brilliance of dawn.
Cnaiür urs Skiötha, King-of-Tribes, most violent of all Men, awaited within.
They regarded each other for a time, the Man and his monstrous lover.
“You let them go free,” the thing-called-Serwë said, dripping blood.
The aging Scylvendi warrior stood, revealed the strapped and scarred glory of his near-naked form.
It licked swollen lips. “What did the Wizard say?”
He advanced on the thing, reached out and seized it by the hair, bent its face back beneath his wrath.
“That I must fathom your loyalties …”
His crazed visage floated above white-rolling eyes. It began trembling.
“What happened to the Anasûrimbor?” the King-of-Tribes asked.
It went limp against his cruel grip. “He cast a stone”—tongue testing teeth—“struck me from the cliffs.”
“How …” A sneer that was a sob twisted his expression. “How can I trust you?”
It hooked a lithe leg about his thigh, pressed the arch of its lust against him.
Cnaiür urs Skiötha groaned, raised a great hand to her throat.
“Drink from my cup,” it cooed. “Taste … Fathom …”
The hand closed upon its windpipe. The White Yaksh creaked about the force of his rage and anguish.
“Ishuäl has fallen!” the King-of-Tribes screamed, heaving his slack-limbed lover from its feet, shaking it against the light.
“Fallen!”
He tossed it to earth …
Tugged loose the cloth about his inflamed loins.
The caw, rumble, and holler of the barbarian host receded behind accumulating tracts of night and forest. Achamian and Mimara fled without pause, trotting as much as striding across the heaved and cracked forest floors. Their expression, when they weren’t grimacing, was one of winded incredulity—disbelief.
“But the boy!” Mimara at last dared cry.
“Is better off …” the old Wizard huffed without breaking stride, “without us!” He subsequently cursed, realizing she had jogged to a halt behind him—out of concern for the boy, he knew, and not for being quick.
They had snorted enough Qirri to assure that neither wind nor weariness would impede them.
“But—”
“But we go to Golgotterath, girl!”
His skin prickled for how well he could see in the dark, how impossibly untouched and utterly ravaged she looked, her expression finally falling abreast her lesser years. The Prophetess had vanished, and she stood blinking tears, a runaway Princess-Imperial once more.
Achamian raised a scuffed and blackened hand, squinted against the swelling that was inexorably closing his right eye. “Come …” he said, knowing the very name of their destination blotted any need for further reasons. They spared the boy nothing, lashing him to a doom so mad as Golgotterath.
She clasped his fingers, not so much smiling as setting her jaw. Revulsion flicked through her like a lash through the whip—because of his Mark, he knew.
“But the boy—”
“Is Dûnyain, Mimara.”
They stood thus in the dark, panting. Scylvendi horns rolled like otters at the surface of hearing—to the south.
Mimara licked her lips.
“So then what?” she asked lamely. “After everything that’s happened, we-we just flee into the night!”
“Pray-tell … what else does one do after everything that’s happened?”
She looked at him, imploring, he realized, for what she did not know. The old Wizard stamped his feet, overcome by a sudden, wild frustration. He knew full well what such looks portended.
“Sweet Seju, girl!” he erupted. “How could you be so consistent! When I need the prophetess, I get the runaway, and when I need the runaway I get the prophetess—every blasted time!”
Anger hardened her teary eyes, hostility flashing through sorrow. “What? Because I-I care?”
He blundered on, determined to see his stupidity through.
“You cared nothing about sending his father over a cliff!”
She flinched at that, blinked tears. Her eyes fell to the empty ground between them.
“That was not my invitation,” she said in a low, even voice.
“I watched you give him the Qirri … and I know you knew what was going to happen. You made it pretty clear that you want—”
“He jumped the cliff!” she cried. “He accepted the invitation!”
“Invit—what invitation? You mean to snort the Qi—”
“The invitation to leap!”
Now it was Achamian’s turn to stare speechless.
“To join the Absolute,” she spat before stalking off.
He stood upon the saddle of level ground they had taken as their stage, motionless for the horror plunging through him, the one he had borne since first fleeing the White Yaksh and kept afloat by refusing to stop, refusing to think.
His skin prickled, flushed where exposed to the chill. Cnaiür urs Skiötha boiled as a vapour before him.
“And now you find yourself in my tent, sorcerer …”
The Dreams fell hard upon what little opportunity he had to sleep, dreams drawn from the sheath. One moment the ground beneath him was slowly revolving, pricking like thistles and humming, so much he despaired of ever falling asleep. Then he was lurching, thinking blood-clotted thoughts, climbing the throat of a moaning horn. Golden walls leaned upon warring angles, surfaces betraying different sigils on different angles, elongated etchings, each as fine as an infant’s hair.
Wretches … human wretches. A shambling line, nude, white where not soiled or scabbed or welted. The chain was drawn and he swam forward, one in a necklace of thousands.
Toothless. The shadow of fists and hammers fell upon his face.
Their captors floated as tyrannical shadows, beasts that were terrors, that reduced him and the others to automatic cringes and whimpers, hapless reflexes. Those that faltered were pried from their shackles, dragged aside, beaten, raped. He could know of others likewise taken ahead of them by the gaps in the chain, how he was sometimes hauled forward four steps instead of two. No one spoke, though some managed to scream, to hack and grunt, noises reflected raw across the unearthly gold. He more started at sounds than heard them. To flee degradation one had to flee the World entire, to become a flame that burned no fuel. The fact that he yet lived meant his body—the merest meat of him—had learned as much.
He glimpsed ciphers webbed into planes of mirror soggomant.
He was missing his teeth.
A lolling gaze revealed a skewed vacancy above, scarps of metallic babble vanishing into blackness. He swayed for cresting the final step, so deep did the blackness gape about him. The sound of the great hammer cracking chains erupted through the hollow, disintegrated into surf-like echoes. With each clap, there was a pause … then the chain yanked him forward with the rest, men jointed in milk and lard. The wretched file extended before him,
bare feet greasing a polished black floor, shoulders shining orange and crimson …
And the nameless captive peered out from the refuge of his misery, blinked for the sight of a ceiling hanging suspended above them—a ceiling of flame.
And though he knew it not at all, the old Wizard groaned in his sleep.
Unchained figures stood transfixed beneath it, Nonmen in various states of undress, gazing up … Tears enamelled their cheeks with furnace reflections, silken wings of saffron and crimson, damnation signed in passerine lights. They paid no heed to the mortals chained in their midst, for they were every bit as enslaved.
The hammer resounded and the brutalized captive blinked and the chain heaved the battered souls ahead of him forward with him, the same two besotted steps. Inexorably, stroke by cracking stroke, he was drawn beneath the ceiling, witless, oppressed by its lurid silence. A single glance exhausted his daring, a peek into fires burning upon fires, a bottomless regression. Otherwise, he looked only at the tumult reflected across the floor as the chain dragged him beneath its onerous canopy. For all the light it appeared to shed approaching, it formed no more than a wreath about the black pool of his face, fire pale as blowing snow. With the every haul on the chain, the mirrored lights would seem to grow as hair behind his shoulders.
He dragged his tongue about the sockets of his gums, pressing the tip into every sour pit.
And he found he knew the fire … realized that his empty reflection wore Hell as a wig.
Then the hammer cracked, he stumbled forward in lurching unison, and the ceiling was behind him, and he walked glass over void once again. He dared peer ahead, out across the broken souls preceding …
And he saw it, a harder black staining the gloom, a confluence of gleaming edge and surface, the oiled phantom of something black looming in blackness …
A mighty sarcophag—
The old Wizard blinked, coughed terror, squinted as though night were daybreak. A flood of spinning relief seized him. Teeth! He had his teeth! He seized the slight arms that had roused him, peered at Mimara kneeling over him, her eyes welling with tears.
Achamian gasped aloud, wrung by passions indecipherable and plain.
He pressed a palm across the woman’s swollen womb.
And he hung upon his terror as a smile breaking, understanding at last that fatherhood, more than anything else, was mummery, the will to be a father needed, not the father you happened to be.
It was happening. The Second Apocalypse had begun.
“All-all will be well …” he croaked, trusting she would see that he lied for the right reasons, if she could see at all. “You ne-need only believe.”
Character and Faction Glossary
House Anasûrimbor
Kellhus - the Aspect-Emperor.
Maithanet - Shriah of the Thousand Temples, half-brother to Kellhus.
Esmenet - Empress of the Three Seas.
Mimara - Esmenet’s estranged daughter from her days as a prostitute.
Moënghus - son of Kellhus and his first wife, Serwë, eldest of the Prince-Imperials.
Kayûtas - eldest son of Kellhus and Esmenet, General of the Kidruhil.
Theliopa - eldest daughter of Kellhus and Esmenet.
Serwa - second daughter of Kellhus and Esmenet, Grandmistress of the Swayal Sisterhood.
Inrilatas - second son of Kellhus and Esmenet, insane and imprisoned on the Andiamine Heights.
Kelmomas - third son of Kellhus and Esmenet, twin of Samarmas.
Samarmas - fourth son of Kellhus and Esmenet, the idiot twin of Kelmomas.
Drusus Achamian - former Mandate Schoolman, lover of the Empress, teacher of the Aspect-Emperor, now the only Wizard in the Three Seas.
The Cult of Yatwer
The traditional Cult of the slave and menial castes, taking as its primary scriptures The Chronicle of the Tusk, the Higarata, and the Sinyatwa. Yatwer is the Goddess of the earth and fertility.
Psatma Nannaferi - Mother-Supreme of the Cult, a position long outlawed by the Thousand Temples.
Hanamem Sharacinth - Matriarch of the Cult.
Momemn
Biaxi Sankas - Patridomos of House Biaxi, and an important member of the New Congregate.
Caxes Anthirul - Exalt-General of the Three Seas.
Imhailas - Exalt-Captain of the Eothic Guard.
Issiral - The Narindar contracted by Esmenet.
Naree - A Nilnameshi prostitute.
Ngarau - eunuch Grand Seneschal from the days of the Ikurei Dynasty.
Phinersa - Holy Master of Spies.
Powtha Iskaul — General of the Twenty-ninth Column.
Thopsis - eunuch Master of Imperial Protocol.
Vem-Mithriti - Grandmaster of the Imperial Saik and Vizier-in-Proxy.
Werjau - Prime-Nascenti, and Judge-Absolute of the Ministrate.
The Great Ordeal
Varalt Sorweel - Only son of Harweel.
Varalt Harweel - King of Sakarpus.
Captain Harnilias - Commanding officer of the Scions.
Zsoronga ut Nganka’kull - Successor-Prince of Zeum, and hostage of the Aspect-Emperor.
Obetegwa - Senior Obligate of Zsoronga.
Porsparian - Shigeki slave given to Sorweel.
Thanteus Eskeles - Mandate Schoolman, and tutor to Varalt Sorweel.
Nersei Proyas - King of Conriya, and Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal.
Coithus Saubon - King of Caraskand, and Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal.
Gwanwë - Swayali witch promoted Grandmistress in Serwa’s absence.
Sibawûl - Leader of the Cepaloran contingent of the Great Ordeal.
Siroyon - Leader of the Famiri contingent of the Great Ordeal.
Ishterebinth
Oinaral Lastborn - Son of Oirûnas, youngest of the Nonman, last of the Siqu.
Nil’giccas (Cleric) - The Nonman King of Ishterebinth, lost to the Dolour.
Immiriccas - Son of Cinial, imprisoned in the Amiolas for sedition.
Harapior - The Lord Torturer of Ishterebinth.
Nin’ciljiras - Son of Ninar, Son of Nin-janjin, last surviving heir of Tsonos.
Oirûnas - Hero of the Cûno-Inchoroi Wars, lost to the Dolour.
Cilcûliccas - The Lord of Swans, Master of the Injori Quya.
Cu’mimiral - The Dragon-gored, prominent among the Injori Ishroi.
Sûjara-nin - Dispossessed Son of Siöl, prominent among the Siölan Ishroi.
The Boatman - The Master of the Great Ingressus.
Ancient Kûniüri
Anasûrimbor Celmomas II (2089-2146) - High-King of Kûniüri, and tragic principal of the First Apocalypse.
Anasûrimbor Nau-Cayûti (2119-2140) - youngest son of Celmomas, and tragic hero of the First Apocalypse.
Seswatha (2089-2168) - Grandmaster of the Sohonc, lifelong friend of Celmomas, founder of the Mandate, and determined foe of the No-God.
The Dûnyain
A monastic sect whose members have repudiated history and animal appetite in the hope of finding absolute enlightenment through the control of all desire and circumstance. For two thousand years they have hidden in the ancient fortress of Ishuäl, breeding their members for motor reflexes and intellectual acuity.
The Consult
The cabal of magi and generals that survived the death of the No-God in 2155 and has laboured ever since to bring about his return in the so-called Second Apocalypse.
The Thousand Temples
The institution that provides the ecclesiastical framework of Zaudunyani Inrithism.
The Ministrate
The institution that oversees the Judges, the New Imperium’s religious secret police.
The Schools
The collective name given to the various academies of sorcerers. The first Schools, both in the Ancient North and the Three Seas, arose as a response to the Tusk’s condemnation of sorcery. The so-called Major Schools are: the Swayal Sisterhood, the Scarlet Spires, the Mysunsai, the Imperial Saik, the Vokalati, and the Man
date (see below).
The Mandate
Gnostic School founded by Seswatha in 2156 to continue the war against the Consult and to protect the Three Seas from the return of the No-God, Mog-Pharau. Incorporated into the New Imperium in 4112. All Mandate Schoolmen relive Seswatha’s experience of the First Apocalypse in their dreams.
Acknowledgments
Kellhus I am not.
I’m the kind of guy who would starve for forgetting to eat. I sometimes think I’m only half a person, given the way my projects consume me and my attention. I depend on others to lend me the semblance of being whole, more than most, I think. There’s my wife and my daughter, of course. My agent, Chris Lotts, and my brother, Bryan.
My other conditions of possibility include Mike Hillcoat, Zach Rice, Andy Tressler, and everyone else at the Second Apocalypse forum. Thank you all not simply for believing in the series, but for assuring it walks Conditioned Ground. If these books are remembered, it will be due to you.
I need to thank everyone at Three Pound Brain: though my philosophical writing may seem miles away from my fiction, they are intimately intertwined.
I need to thank Jason Deem for making my vision so brilliantly visible. I also need to thank my beta readers, Todd Springer, Ken Thorpe, Roger Eichorn, Michael Mah, and John Griffiths. The inimitable Mike Hillcoat deserves an encore mention here.
R. SCOTT BAKKER is a scholar of literature, history, philosophy, and ancient languages. His previous books include the Prince of Nothing trilogy: The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior Prophet, and The Thousandfold Thought. The Aspect-Emperor series is a sequel series that began with The Judging Eye and The White-Luck Warrior. He lives in London, Ontario.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM OVERLOOK:
THE PRINCE OF NOTHING TRILOGY
THE ASPECT-EMPEROR SERIES
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AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY WESTERN ALUMNI GAZETTE
JACKET ART BY SHUTTERSTOCK
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The Great Ordeal: Book Three (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy) Page 57