The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  The chipped, yellow-painted walls. The tawdry simulation of opulence. The tincture of too many bodies and too little bedding.

  The Inchausti had been no more gentle this visit than the Shrial Knights had been the previous. The girl’s shelves had been ransacked, her furnishing smashed and thrown as wrack in the corners.

  Esmenet had returned, this time steeped in the very power she had fled from before. It seemed mad that the floorboards did not creak, the walls did not groan, for the presence of one who could burn everything down.

  Naree lay crouched in the corner to the right and opposite, naked save for a rag she clutched beneath her chin. The girl immediately began keening in terror, but not for recognizing her Blessed Empress—that would come later—but for understanding that once the rapists left, the executioner always followed.

  One of Ngarau’s runners found his body at daybreak of the seventh day of the siege, at the bottom of an ancillary stair. The victim had chosen anonymous attire, but he was too well known on the Andiamine Heights not to be immediately recognized: Lord Sankas, Consul of Nansur, Patridomos of House Biaxi, and confidante of the Blessed Empress.

  Esmenet had hoped the Patridomos would simply reappear, drawn like the others by word of her restoration. And now here he was sprawled across a blackening sheet of blood below the Reverse Gallery of the Apparatory—the path she had directed him to take what seemed a lifetime ago.

  “Perhaps-haps he merely tripped,” Theliopa offered, wearing nothing but a smock—scandalous attire for any Princess-Imperial other than her. She looked like those mad Cultic ascetics who confused mortification of flesh for cultivation of spirit, angular with bones, strung with veins.

  “And what of his broadsword?” Phinersa asked mildly. “Did it simply fly loose its scabbard?”

  The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas could only gawk at the inert form.

  Sankas …

  He had dressed to travel incognito, bereft of any insignia, wearing a simple white-linen tunic beneath a blue-felt robe that had slipped loose one arm in the fall, and now lay bundled to one side of him. The tunic had wicked the blood, clotting violet and black like bandages about his edges, so that he seemed inked in place, as much an artistic conceit as a corpse …

  Sankas was dead!

  She had tasked Phinersa with finding him on the day of her restoration. She needed the Patridomos, not simply because of his prestige and prodigious clout within the Congregate, but because he was one of the few independent power brokers she could trust. Sankas had secured the Narindar for her, which meant he had wagered his very soul against the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples—for her!

  She would find Phinersa’s subsequent report less than satisfactory. Like so many others, Lord Sankas had gone into hiding following the coup. But where most had been forced to shelter within the city, he had escaped the city altogether, commandeering one of his House’s many grain ships and sailing no one knew where—anywhere across the Three Seas, given the enormous extent of his holdings (not to mention how well he had married off his seven daughters).

  She looked to her Exalt-Captain, Saxillas, who continued wearing his Inchaustic accoutrements despite her explicit request. What was it with these men?

  “How could something like this happen?”

  The Shrial Knight dared meet her gaze, more dismayed than alarmed, more baffled than furious.

  Was he going to be a problem?

  “Errors, lapses …” she said. “These things are inevitable, Saxillas. This is why I need men who know how to fail, men who know how to cope with mishaps and disasters, and most importantly of all, how to make them right.”

  “Forgiveness, my Glory,” he said, falling immediately to his knees.

  She rolled furious eyes at Theliopa and Phinersa.

  It’s beginning all over again, a treacherous fraction of her soul whispered.

  “Oh, get up!” she snapped at the man. She gazed to the top of the stair, squinted at the morning glare. For a long moment she could scarcely breathe. She could feel it kindle in her bowel once again, the cloying terror of intrigue and conspiracy. The conviction that Sankas was coming to see her, that he bore mortal tidings, floated like smoke through a body that seemed nothing but a shell of clothing and skin.

  An imperial emptiness.

  “Find who did this, Saxillas,” she said. “Regain your honour. Redeem your Lord-and-Prophet’s faith.”

  The Nansur caste-noble stood dumbfounded, either realizing he had just been threatened with damnation, or simply witless as to how he should proceed. He was incompetent, Esmenet realized, as so many honourable men were. She squelched the urge to scratch and scream. Why? Why was trust ever the cost of cunning?

  “Mother?” Theliopa asked.

  As always, the Fanim drums throbbed eternal. Heathens were ever on the horizon, she realized, whetting their knives, plotting her destruction. Heathens were always watching around the corner.

  “Dress yourself,” she said to her beloved, misbegotten daughter. “You look a common whore.”

  “Wha—?” Vem-Mithriti, her ancient Grand Vizier, coughed out as he hurried down the hallway toward them. His hobbling gait seemed to strike them dry with pity.

  “What’s this …” he gasped, “I hear about … murder …”

  “Come, old grandfather,” Esmenet said, stepping out to usher him back the way he had come. “We’re finished here.”

  Without warning, the sound of distant horns filtered down with the light … Horns of assembly …

  Horns of war.

  Theliopa made toward Kelmomas the instant she set foot in the Sacral Enclosure, striding from brilliance to cool shadow as she passed beneath the various garden bowers. She paused several paces away, as if at an imaginary threshold of an imaginary room he occupied. The young Prince-Imperial turned to her with a questioning smile, regarded the spectacle of her appearance. Fins—lacquered felt, trimmed with virginal pearls, three to a shoulder. Bodice embroidered in cloth of silver, cinched viciously about her waist. Skirt like a yaksh, turquoise silk stretched across hoops and ribs.

  An old madwoman, he thought. Theliopa dressed like an old madwoman.

  He stood, brushed the dirt from his knees. A gust swished through the hibiscus tree above them. An autumn insect buzzed between.

  Something has gone wrong, the Voice whispered.

  He nodded to the sky, to the rhythmic, almost sub-audible boom pulsating across the sky. “The Fanim can’t really get us, can they?”

  She strode forward, as if taking this comment as permission to enter his imaginary room. She came to a pause just to the left of where he had buried the third guardsmen he had killed …

  And eaten.

  “They-they build siege engines,” she said. “When they are done, we shall see.”

  She was watching him closely—far more intently than he could ever remember, in fact.

  Perhaps she can smell them rotting in the dirt …

  She doesn’t have that Strength!

  “Who is that man, Thelli, the one dressed in a slave’s cloth?”

  She all but peered, her suspicion now so obvious as to be comical.

  “That is the Narindar Mother contracted to assassinate our uncle.”

  “I knew it!” he cried, surprised at the honesty of his elation. “Narindar … He’s the one!

  He’s the one that saved us!”

  Anasûrimbor Theliopa continued to gawk.

  “What’s wrong, Thelli?” he finally said, throwing up his arms the way Mother often did when confounded by her daughter’s strange ways.

  She answered in a rush, as if his question had opened the very door she leaned against. “You think-think I can’t see, that-that Father’s blood runs too-too thin in my veins.”

  The Prince-Imperial scowled and laughed—the way a daft eight-year-old should. “What are yo—?”

  “Uncle Holy told me, Kel.”

  Enemy drums pounded across the skies.

  “T
old you what?”

  She looked like a thing graven, the goddess of some lesser race. “I know what happened with Inrilatas, with Sharacinth and-and—” She halted on a sharp intake of breath, as if a razor tumbled in her wind.

  “With Samar-marmas.”

  Fear. He would have liked to have seen fear on her face, some inkling of peril, anything that might reflect his power, but he saw what he needed instead—thoughtless confidence.

  Say nothing. Appear weak.

  She amazed the boy by managing to kneel stiffly at his feet, despite the apparatus of her skirt. For the first time he realized the cunning she put into their manufacture, the myriad springs and folding armatures. Her manly scent enclosed him.

  “Tell me, Kel,” she said.

  He could stab her now if he wanted.

  She looked a pale monstrosity, her eyes slightly bulbous, their lids rimmed pink, her angles slightly cadaverous—everything about her wandered the verge of disgust. And her skin seemed so thin for its pallor, a tissue he could rip away with his fingernails … if he so wished.

  “I need-need to know …”

  The bottomless indifference of her gaze was the only thing that terrified.

  “Was it you who killed Lord Sankas?”

  He was genuinely stupefied.

  She gazed at him with piscine relentlessness, her pale blue eyes dead, void of passion. And for the first time he felt it … the menace of her inhuman intellect.

  Let her watch … his twin murmured.

  “Did you wander last night?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Let her see …

  “You slept?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you had no idea that Lord Sankas was returning?”

  “None!”

  She maintained her implacable gaze, her manner as stilted and as relentless as an automata, her face as blank as a sunflower opened to receive the sun.

  “What?” he cried.

  Theliopa popped to her feet without reply, turned away with a swish of her ridiculous gown.

  “And if I had murdered him?” he called after her.

  She paused on the hook of his voice, turned to regard him once more.

  “I would have informed Mother,” she said plainly.

  He was careful to look down to his thumbs. Dirt had inked the whorls across the pads, the ruts about the knuckles. How long would it take, he wondered, to bury her out here? How long would he have?

  “Why haven’t you told her already?”

  He could feel her scrutiny now—and he was amazed to think how he had utterly ignored it all these years. As long as he could remember, she had always been too focussed to not be oblivious, and now …

  Now she had become the next eye to pluck.

  Pale skin was always more intense, somehow, bleeding …

  “Because the Capital needs its Empress,” she said, her voice falling from the shadow of his bangs, “and you, little brother, have made her too weak … too heartbroken to bear knowing your crimes.”

  For all the anxious contrition he had slathered across his manner and expression, Anasûrimbor Kelmomas cackled within. His twin brother fairly screamed.

  Truth.

  Always such a burden …

  A small table draped in white silk stood unattended in the centre of the road some thirty paces from where Esmenet stood upon the Maumurine Gate. A swan-necked decanter had been placed upon it, blue glass caught in a cage of wrought gold, set with seventeen sapphires. A golden bowl sat empty beside it.

  The Fanim had delivered their demand to parlay shortly after daybreak. The embassy had been led by no less than Surxacer, the youngest son of Pilaskanda, who had ridden fearlessly within bowshot and cast a spear bearing the missive upon the spot where the table now stood. The message had been terse and to-the-point: the fourth watch past the sun’s summit, the Padirajah of the Kianene Empire would meet with the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas at the Maumurine Gate to discuss the terms of “mutual peace.”

  It was a ruse, of course—or so everyone on her warcouncil had assumed. They thought her decision to treat the offer as if it were earnest mad, she knew, more for the incredulous burr in their voices than any seditious comment. No soul dared test her authority anymore, even when they perhaps should.

  So she found herself crowded upon the breastwork above the gate and between Maumurine’s towers, dwarfed by sheer faces of stone.

  “So what is your stratagem?” her Exalt-General, Caxes Anthirul, murmured at her side.

  “Listen to what he has to say …” she replied, wincing at the loudness of her voice. The war-drums were louder, more raw and less surreal beyond the baffles of the city. “Take his measure.”

  “And if he’s merely trying to draw you out?”

  She had hated Caxes Anthirul while a fugitive in hiding, cursed him for casting his sticks with her brother-in-law. At the time, his defection to the Thousand Temples had broken the back of any hope she might have had of overcoming Maithanet and saving her children. She had even rehearsed all the torments she would visit upon him, once her husband returned to set things aright. It spoke to the perversity of circumstance, so maudlin was the comfort she found in his presence, now. Fate was not so much a whore as a whore-maker, snapping the pious like twigs, warming Herself in the fires that had been honour.

  Even festooned in regalia, Caxes Anthirul looked nothing like the champion painted by reputation. He was deceptively dull-eyed, one of those men prone to conceal their cunning in a bleary gaze, and the combination of his girth and clean-shaven jowls made him look more palace eunuch than famed hero of the Unification. Nevertheless, he belonged to that reassuring breed of soldiers who wholly understood their role as instruments of power. House Caxes was a southern Nansur family, with extensive interests in and around Gielgath. And like many bloodlines lacking any commercial or ancestral stake in the Capital, the Caxes were notoriously loyal—to whomever happened to be in power.

  “I’ve been told my Imperial duty is to run,” Esmenet finally replied.

  Perhaps she simply preferred the company of whores. After all, she had married one.

  “In war, the only duty is to prevail, Blessed Empress … All else is calculation.”

  “My husband told you that, didn’t he?”

  The man shook with silent laughter, shivered with mirrored light.

  “Aye,” he replied with a sidelong wink. “More than once.”

  “Lord Anthirul? Are you saying you actually approve?”

  “It’s good to share in the risks of your men,” Anthirul said. “Their commitment will only reflect as much of your commitment as they can see, Blessed Empress. Your courage is nothing to them barricaded in the palace, but here …” He glanced to the hundreds of Columnaries massed about and above them. “Word will spread.”

  She frowned up at the man.

  “You said as much yourself in Xothei …” he continued, his tone matched by a peculiar seriousness in his gaze. “He picked you.”

  It surprised her always, the assumption that Kellhus could not err …

  “The stories of this,” he said, casting his bleary gaze back out toward their enemy, “will serve to remind them.”

  Or deceive.

  Thick-hewn boards had been lain across the murderholes for her safety, but even still, she had to keep herself raised on her toes to gaze between the battlements with any dignity. To a soul their gazes followed a band of Fanim horsemen wending across the adjacent fields and hacked-down orchards. Thousands more of the heretics stood scattered as mites across the surrounding hilltops, where they had been labouring shirtless on the engines they would use to throw down Momemn’s dark walls. As Esmenet watched, more and more set aside their saws and hammers so they too might observe.

  The sun burned bright, but the air possessed the hurried chill belonging to a later season. From the Andiamine Heights, she could almost pretend that everything yet shambled along the same ruts as before. Not so here. She had f
orgotten what it was like to gaze across perilous regions, to stand upon the verge of her power’s dissolution. Here, within the walls, one was executed for taking her family’s name in vain; and just there, one was murdered for speaking her family’s name in any other way.

  Estimates of the size of Fanayal’s host varied. Phinersa insisted that no more than twenty to twenty-five thousand Kianene proper rode with the Bandit Padirajah, as well as a mutinous motley of some fifteen thousand others, ranging from non-Kianene Fanim faithful driven into exile, to bandit desert tribesmen—many of them Khirgwi, bent on little more than plunder. Had Momemn lain on the seaward edge of a plain, their numbers could have been guessed quite handily, but as it stood, the combination of the surrounding hills and their astonishing mobility allowed them to conduct their siege without revealing much about their size or disposition. The Imperial Mathematicians only had rumour and the smoke of obscured fires to go on. Using the ancient method of continually averaging their most recent estimates against the sum of their former counts, they had come to circle a number approaching thirty-thousand … a good deal less than the forty-five thousand her Master-of-Spies insisted.

  Given that she scarcely possessed eight thousand trained souls with which to defend the Home City, she found neither number reassuring—even less so given the rumours of Cishaurim pulling down the walls of Iothiah. Her Vizier-in-Proxy, Vem-Mithriti, who stood withered in his voluminous black-silk robes mere paces away, had sputtered for fury claiming she had nothing to fear. The flecks of his spittle, however, had argued otherwise. Excess passion was the perennial vice of gulls, and war, much like gambling, fed upon gulls.

  The image of the advancing Fanim war-party hooked her like yarn, and then she saw it, the White Horse on gold hanging below the Twin Scimitars of Faminry … The fabled standard of the Coyauri.

  “Such reckless courage,” the Exalt-General said.

  And their Lord, Fanayal ab Kascamandri.

  “The Padirajah himself comes!” a voice cried from the tower parapets above.

  This changed everything.

  “So he really means to parlay?” Esmenet asked.

  Phinersa replied from her left. “The God has granted us a miraculous opportunity either way, my Glory.”