The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  It even occurred to him that he was meant to catch them making love …

  The day was all but exhausted when they finally crested a ridge that afforded a view. Sorweel had climbed a clutch of gargantuan boulders, their northern shelves chapped with lichens. It almost seemed another arcane leap, so sudden was the view.

  Ishterebinth … at last. Ishterebinth … mountainous upon the ramping of lesser hills, its bulk obscuring the sky before them. The sun hung low on the horizon to the south, a blooded orb. The Mansion reared into its waning brilliance, so that its ascending scarps and slopes were stamped with the contrast of ink on cream vellum. The scale was such that his heart refused to credit it at first.

  A mountain … skinned and hewn, its every surface shorn into planes and pitted … with apertures, terraces, and graven images—graven images most of all. Such detail that it pained the eye to probe it.

  Sorweel crawled forward on all fours.

  “How could such a thing be?” he asked, his voice glutinous for disuse.

  “Endless life,” Serwa said, “is endless ambition.”

  The forest knotted the terrain immediately below them, climbed several of the mountain’s foundational phalanges before ending in what appeared to be whole tracts of dead trees. The posture of the mountain was that of a penitent, a kneeler whose thighs were outstretched. A road parsed the centre, paved with white stone and curiously ribbed with columns and roofless vaults, though most of the latter (and even some of the former) had collapsed at some point. Even from this distance, Sorweel could see figures labouring up its length, a file of mites that reached all the way to the Mansion’s shadowed groin, where masses seemed to congregate beneath cliffs of stacked imagery. Two massive figures flanked the maw of the entrance, the face of the latter rising above the line of shadow, staring out to the southern horizon, orange and crimson and impassive.

  “Sorcery …” Serwa remarked to her brother. “The whole is sopped in the Mark.”

  “What do we do?” Moënghus asked, his gaze rapt upon the Mansion.

  The Swayali witch spared the man a grim look, said nothing. She sat upon the lip of the ridge-line, swung her feet over the edge.

  And then Sorweel heard it blooming like a sheet hung in the wind, low and fluting, yet bearing the gravel of misery nonetheless.

  “What’s that?” he called. “That sound …”

  Now that his soul had fastened upon it, it gripped the throat of all sound, a profound wrongness on fine summer air.

  “The Mountain weeps,” Serwa replied, already upon the ground. “It’s the Weeping Mountain.”

  They spent watches labouring through the dwindling light, ascending wooded slopes and gravelled spines. There was no talk of stopping. The forest did not so much end as die, the trees stripped of greenery, the ground pestled barren. Only the Nail of Heaven illuminated their way across the ruin. They teetered across dead-falls, stumbled over mats of unearthed roots. Branches ragged the starry arches of the night.

  Despite the diurnal heat, the quiet of winter stole over the world.

  Ishterebinth loomed to their right, slowly drawing to their fore as Serwa led them over the back of its eastern thigh. Sorweel’s mother had shown him an ancient heirloom once, a seal carved out of ivory, a relic of some Southron potentate, she had said. She had pulled him into the bowl of her crossed legs, laughing as she explained its peculiarities with her chin on his shoulder. She called it a “ziggurat”, a miniature of the false mountains that certain pickish Kings, loathe to surrender their bodies to the pyre, constructed for their tombs. What had fascinated him were the hundreds of miniature figures that had been etched into its terraced sides: it scarcely seemed possible that any artisan could render images so small. For some reason, the detail hooked his soul like a burr, and he was sure he had tested his mother’s patience, considering each of the figures—some no larger than a babe’s nail clippings—and speculating, “Look-look! Another warrior, Mama! This one with spear and shield!”

  Ishterebinth was no false mountain, and aside from its flat summit, it possessed none of the ziggurat’s geometric simplicity. There was a lurid wildness to the size and arrangement of its imagery, an unkempt intensity to its detail, that utterly contradicted the tidy and sane parade of figures about the ivory terraces, the slaves toiling about the base, the kingly court promenading about the pinnacle. Even still, he felt a mote, crawling toward something too immense to be wrought. Each time he scaled Ishterebinth with his gaze, some past premonition of that boy—still drowsy with the certainty that his mother and father would live forever—sparked within him. He would even smell the attar-of-spruce wafting from the censor, hear the evening orisons …

  And he would wonder whether it were simply some mad nightmare …

  Wake up … Sorwa, my sweet …

  Life.

  His eyes burned and his blinks had become wilful by the time they gained the great road they had spied from afar—the Halarinis, the Grandmistress called it, the Summer Stair. Sorweel and Moënghus both shrank to a crouch, glimpsing a torchless procession of figures along its length. Serwa, however, continued trudging forward the same as before.

  “They’re Emwama,” she said turning in a pirouette that added no interval to her pace. With that she resumed her forward stride, utterly feckless. Moënghus followed, a heavy hand now upon the pommel of his broadsword. Sorweel lingered for a moment, glancing up at the granitic immensity of their destination, then resumed the place the Anasûrimbor had reserved him, the station of shame and hate.

  Serwa called out a brief string of arcane syllables, and an eye of piercing brilliance opened a mere span above her, chasing shadows from the objects of its glare.

  The Emwama sickened him.

  Sorweel knew what they were, or at least what they were supposed to be: the Mannish servitors of the Nonmen—slaves. But whatever they were, they had long since ceased being Men. Deer-eyed and round-faced. Stunted both in form—the tallest scarcely reached his elbows—and intellect. They were clad as rustics for the most part, though a few wore gowns that bespoke some kind of rank or function. Those travelling up the mountain bore astonishing loads, everything from wood to game to stacked rounds of unleavened bread. Short of breasts there was scarcely any way to distinguish the males from the females, save that a number of the latter carried sleeping infants in slings braided out of their remarkably voluminous hair.

  From the outset, they crowded about the three travellers, great eyes wide and glistening, gaping like astounded children, and chattering in an insensible tongue, their lilting voices as deformed as their stature. Despite the uproar, they managed to keep their distance—at least at first. Their native shyness quickly waned, and the boldest jostled closer and closer. Eventually several dared to reach out wondering fingers, as if intent on touching what they could not quite believe. Serwa, especially, seemed to be the object of their adoring curiosity. Finally she barked at them in a tongue reminiscent of the one she used canting, but utterly unlike that of the Emwama.

  They understood nonetheless. Several moments of screeching turmoil ensued as the misbegotten creatures fought to grant them what seemed some ritually prescribed space. Afterward, it almost seemed a miracle, the way the mob accumulated more and more misshapen souls and yet somehow managed to respect the invisible perimeter Serwa had imposed about them. Within a watch the mob they had gathered extended far beyond the outermost ring of Serwa’s sorcerous light. For those confined to the dark, there was no way they could be anything more than illuminated glimpses of sharper, more sacred archetypes, and yet somehow they managed not to crowd their stunted brethren.

  But it was the stink, more than anything, that fondled Sorweel’s gut, for it was human through and through, no different than the stink of Men of the Ordeal gathering for march: at times earthen and almost benign, with various corners acrid and sweet, at times tar-like with the musk of unwashed armpits, thick enough to taste. Had they smelled any other way, be it forest moss or moulting sn
akes or unmucked stalls, he could have looked upon all their myriad differences as features proper to their form, things belonging to an essence distinct from his own. But their smell, like a carpenter’s plumb, revealed them for what they were: inbred grotesqueries. Their eyes were bulbous, their spines crooked, their skulls simian. His horror, in some small measure, was the horror of the husband who is presented a deformed son.

  There was no concealing such disgust. “Think of the difference between your cattle,” Serwa called to him at one point, “and the elk who rule the plain.” He understood instantly what she meant, for there was something at once bovine and doughty about the Emwama, the incurious hardiness of those bred to serve ruthless masters.

  “More like dogs to wolves,” Moënghus shouted in reply. He brandished a fist in mock fury, laughed at the scrambling panic its shadow caused among the halflings.

  Sorweel glanced to the breathless spectacle of Ishterebinth above and before and was shocked by his ire. The old Girgallic Priests were always railing about the wickedness of the World in Temple, not as something to lament, but as something to celebrate. “Clean hands cannot be cleansed!” they would cry, reading from the Sacred Higarata. An unpolluted world was a world without martial honour, a world without sacrifice or compensation. The glory lay in the adulteration of the waters.

  But this … this was a pollution that begged no glory, an evil that could beget only tragedy—travesty. The evils of the World, he was beginning to realize, were more complicated than the goods by far. To the debauchery of the Anasûrimbor, he could now add the deformity of the Emwama. Perhaps pious fools confused simplicity for pious truth for good reason.

  The World was not so elementary as Sakarpus, where there were Sranc and there were Men and nothing but dumb beasts in between.

  Are you such a fool, Sorwa?

  No.

  No, Father.

  Sorweel did his best to ignore the diminutive throngs. The three travellers climbed, leaning into the incline, though it seemed they were borne as flotsam on the stream of heads and shoulders and packs that Serwa’s light carved from the mobbed darkness. They laboured past the pillars that flanked the road. It was as if they had been carved of soap, so indistinct were the figures engraved upon them. The only feature they shared, aside from dimension, was a visage beneath the capitals, each one of them worn fish-like by the ages, and facing what Sorweel assumed was south, regardless of the turns in the road’s direction.

  “Where Men hold places holy, the Nonmen extol passages …” Serwa explained, spying his wondering gaze. “The Summer Stair was a temple to them once …”

  The Believer-King glanced at her, only to have his eyes yanked to the peak of the column rising behind her as she paced him in the crush—to the stork standing pale and gracile against the infinite vacancy of the night. Fear did not suffer his gaze to linger.

  “To walk this road was to be purified,” she continued, her own eyes probing the mountainous heights before them, “cleansed of anything that might pollute the Deep.”

  He shuddered for the meaty deformity of the Emwama.

  So they gained the Cirrû-nol, the legendary High Floor of Ishterebinth, accompanied by the children of a degenerate race. The mountain had swallowed the Nail of Heaven as they approached. Even raising a hand to block the glare of Serwa’s light, Sorweel could discern little more than the bruising black. He could make out monstrous faces, each hanging high enough to cramp his neck and staring out at a diagonal to the south, the same as those gracing the processional pillars. He did not so much see as assume the cyclopean bodies beneath. A hush, at once anxious and reverent, fell across the Emwama. They began looking about the gloomy expanse, casting hectic glances into what he guessed was the maw of the gate. The disrepair of the Summer Stair had prepared him for the wreckage they found. But not even the plodding, drawn-out nature of their approach, nor the obscuring darkness, could deaden him to the scale, the lunatic enormity …

  Such a place.

  The shiver began as a tickle, more in his breath than his body, but within heartbeats, it owned him to his bones. He clutched his shoulders, clamped his teeth against any chatter.

  “Imagine our ancient forefathers,” Serwa said to him, her face strange with sharp lines of light and shadow. “Imagine them storming such a place with shields of leather and swords of brittle bronze.”

  He looked to her uncomprehending.

  “Many think the ghouls did not so much fall to the Tribes of Men,” she explained, gazing across the surrounding heights, raising her face to the clarity of her arcane light, “as bare their throats to them.”

  He felt all the more at sea learning facts such as these. His ignorance was smaller without them.

  “May our tribe be so lucky,” Moënghus muttered. Towering over the Emwama, he resembled some wild-maned warrior of yore, one of the “restive multitudes” so often referenced in the Holy Tusk.

  A silence seized the ensuing moments, remarkable for the hundreds of Emwama crowded about them. There was noise, of course, the shrill of nocturnal insects, the dull of coughs and sniffs, but the soul has a way of hearing past these mundane things, of listening for what should be heard. Sorweel even looked up, convinced the Surillic Point hissed. He glimpse white wings kiting across the light’s upper limit, vanishing … A shiver fell through him.

  He glanced to the siblings, as if fearful of discovery.

  The Prince-Imperial stared at his sister, who had advanced several paces ahead, scanning the black. Though Sorweel had never thought otherwise, the Swayali Grandmistress’s command now seemed absolute.

  “What are you thinking?” Moënghus asked.

  “These Emwama are a good sign …” she replied without returning his look. “But the ruin is worrisome … Much has changed since Seswatha stood in this place.”

  “Ruin?”

  She turned to him, her face as inscrutable as ever. Her mouth opened. Her eyes sparked like twin Nails with the first impossible syllable. “Teirol—”

  She snapped her head back to face the Mansion, extending her arms as if to seize its immensity in proxy. The Emwama before her wailed and scattered …

  The Surillic Point winked out.

  A line took its place, brilliant enough to parse the violet blackness, an incision of light, appearing instantly at all stages, from the floor below her arms to the very summit of the void, and broadening, as if a door as tall as creation slipped open …

  A Bar of Heaven. Like that raised by Eskeles on the desolate tracts of the Istyuli; only, where his had illuminated leagues of bestial Sranc, hers revealed a far different host, one hung as if from hooks of stone.

  Moënghus cursed, barked at his sister in the same unknown tongue.

  “We are the children of the Aspect-Emperor …” she said tonelessly. “Light is our birthright.”

  Strange hoots broke out among the Emwama, and a chest-thumping not unlike applause.

  Sorweel simply blinked and gaped.

  “Once it was called Ishoriöl, the Exalted Hall,” Serwa was saying, her voice pitched above the babbling murmur of the Emwama. “Of all the Great Mansions, only Siöl could claim more glory …”

  So near to the Weeping Mountain it seemed the light had inked a cavern across the sky. Only the great faces were as he imagined. The warlike bodies he had imagined beneath were in fact priestly, limbs like cliffs clothed in monkish robes, hands clasped low as if to assist someone climbing, outermost knees jutting as opposing turrets. Trees mobbed the crooks of their arms, some bent into claws, others upright. Scrub and grasses thronged anywhere the graven cloth was hooked into gullies, so that the twin immensities seemed draped in gardens. The faces themselves were plainly Nonmen, though they seemed uncanny for staring to the south rather than out and over the processional. Growth clotted eyes like skiffs.

  “For an Age it bequeathed its wisdom to our race, dispatching its immortal sons, the Siqu, to advise our kings, train our artisans, teach our scholars … Nil’giccas for
esaw the doom of his race, and knew that we would outlive them …”

  The main entrance lay between the titanic figures, famed Minror the Unholy—the Soggomantic Gate. But two other portals flanked it, each half the size, each set beneath scarps of engraved riot. Their nimil doors lay askew, dazzling the dingy stone and wrack about them, but their mouths remained black for shadow. Wicked Minror also lay askew, a wall as savage as broken glass stacked and fused, only consisting of plates of soggomant—thousands of golden fragments looted from the Ark. But where the Bar of Heaven could scarcely plumb the depths of the lesser gates, here it beamed like a candle held to the socket of an eyeless man, revealing a monumental hall gagged with ruin. The legendary gate that had sealed the Mountain against the Great Ruiner had been destroyed from within …

  “Then Mog-Pharau came,” she continued, “and all the nations of the North were swept away. Nil’giccas withdrew, and these very gates were sealed shut. Ishoriöl became Ishterebinth, the Exalted Stronghold. All surviving knowledge of the Tutelage passed to the South with Seswatha.”

  Ishterebinth, he realized, had not so much been stripped of its natural skin as clothed in the mad intricacies of its soul. History. Icon and Image. Faith. All the things the Anasûrimbor bandied about with a philosopher’s contempt for belief had been writ into living rock, panel after panel, line after line. The only difference was that it was not script, though his eye everywhere insisted on seeing it as such. Nor was it engraving …