The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  Perhaps no event demonstrated this creeping transformation more dramatically than the matter of Sibawûl te Nurwul. With the reunification of the Great Ordeal, the Cepaloran Chieftain-Prince found himself ever more irked by the bombast of his rival, Halas Siroyon, General of the Famiri auxiliaries. The Famiri had accumulated a fearsome reputation over the previous weeks. Their disdain for armour easily rendered them the swiftest of the Ordeal’s horsemen, and with Siroyon riding the legendary Phiolos at their fore, they had proven themselves peerless suppliers of Meat. Lord Sibawûl begrudged even this modest glory. On occasion he could be heard complaining that the very thing that made them such effective “cattlemen”—their lack of armour—was also what made them useless in actual battle.

  Hearing word of these complaints, Siroyon confronted his Norsirai counterpart, wagered that he could lead his Famiri deeper into the shadow of the Horde than the blond Cepaloran would ever dare. Sibawûl agreed to the wager, even though it was not his nature to hazard the lives of his men over such obvious points of honour. He accepted because he and his cousins had spied the beginning of an interval opening in the circuit of the Horde the day previous, and he saw a means of redeeming himself in Siroyon’s petulance. His back had since healed, but his flogging several weeks previous had all but crippled his pride.

  And indeed, the Whore smiled on him. The following dawn revealed a great cleft in the Horde’s horizon-engulfing line, a point where the gaseous ochre-and-black had been smeared into vacancy. For those who daily ranged the raucous margins of the Horde, the break was as plain as the morning sun, but Sibawûl and his Cepalorae had set out before sunrise. By the time Siroyon grasped what his rival was doing, Sibawûl was already flying into the bower of the Shroud, a distant point leading a distant rake of thousands. Bellowing, the General led his Famiri in pursuit, riding so hard that dozens were killed for being thrown. The land was dishevelled, scalloped by streams and humped with knolls of bared stone, some with the remains of ancient cairns teetering on their summits. The Horde had stamped the scrub into never-ending carpets of dust and twigs. Siroyon only managed to spy Sibawûl and his Cepalorae from a few rare heights—enough to know he had lost his rash wager. He should have relented, but pride drove him forth, the kind indistinguishable from terror of shame. Even if he conceded the glory to Sibawûl, he could at least outshine the man with descriptions of what they had seen. Sibawûl had never been one to expound on his glories. As a student of jnan, Siroyon suffered no such scruple.

  Lord Sibawûl led his whooping Cepalorae into the very maw of the Horde, and it seemed a thing of madness to venture where hitherto only Schoolmen had dared tread. The howl deafened. The billowing heights of the Shroud encompassed them. The stampeded earth yielded to more and more desiccate grasses and scrub. Dead Sranc peppered the less-battered ground, limbs jutting about gaping mouths. This in itself was a shock, given that the creatures generally devoured their fallen. The horsemen almost instantly spied ruins draped ahead of them in the ochre gloom, structures like jaws snapped open across the earth, one inside another. They passed over the remnants of ancient walls, and a new dread claimed their hearts. The thanes rose their voices in futile query, even protest, understanding that the Horde had parted about a place that Sranc would sooner die than tread, a place famed in the Holy Sagas …

  Wreoleth … the fabled Larder-of-Men.

  But Lord Sibawûl could not hear his champions, and rode ahead with the bearing of one who presumes the absolute loyalty of his beloved. So the horse-thanes of Cepalor followed their Lord-Chieftain into the accursed city, between the rotted black teeth of her walls, beneath the gutted skulls of her towers. Scrub webbed the ground, forcing their ponies to barge through bird-bone lattices. A kind black moss encrusted what stone and structure that survived, transforming the ruins into a sinister procession. The city seemed a pillaged necropolis, the many-chambered monument of a people who had not so much lived as dwelt.

  The blond-braided horsemen filed through the ruin in columns, glancing about in numb incredulity. The Shroud climbed the neck-straining heights about them, plumes through mists, spilling like ink in water across the vault of heaven. Their lips tingled for the Horde’s yammering roar. Many held their cheeks to their horse’s neck, spitting or vomiting, so vile was the stench on the wind. A few hid their faces for weeping.

  Without explanation, Sibawûl veered southward and led his Cepalorans back to the molar line of the city’s southern fortifications. He led them to a section that had been swamped by some millennial tide of earth, and the horsemen formed a long line across the summit, the way they would mustering for a charge …

  The riders gazed out over thronging, twisted miles, countless figures packed in orgiastic proximity, worm-pale and screeching. To the sweeping eye it shivered for lunatic motion and detail, a world of depraved maggots, at once larval and frantic, trowelled across the contours of a dead and blasted plain. To the eye that darted, it horrified for images of licentious fury, Sranc like hairless cats spitting and wailing, nude figures kicking across the ground, rutting, scratching and scratching at earth plowed into fecal desolation.

  They felt iron-girt children, the hard Sons of Cepalor. They had all witnessed the onslaught of the Horde—witnessed and survived. They had all gazed across nightmare miles, screaming regions illumined in the glare of sorcerous lights. But never had they seen the Horde as it was. For months they had ridden like mites into the shadow of an unseen beast, thinking first they pursued, then hunted, what lay concealed behind the pluming cliffs. Now they fathomed the deranged vanity of their Lord, and the doom he had delivered them. This was why Sibawûl te Nurwul, for all his celebrated restraint and cunning, had ridden to Wreoleth’s southern bourne. This was what he had wanted to brandish to his peers, to the Holy Aspect-Emperor …

  Testimony of the Beast.

  To a man they understood. They pursued no more than they hunted. They simply followed the way starving children follow perilously loaded wains, waiting for fortune to feed them. And even as they watched the Sranc spied them. They could see it, passing like a gust across distant fields of wheat, the awareness of Men, the temptation. The thunderous caterwaul, the screeching fore of it at least, waned and warbled, and was then redoubled as the innumerable creatures lunged toward the Cepalorae.

  The horsemen battled with panicking mounts. Their mouths opened in cries that could not be heard. Alarums. Pleas. Some even cursed the callow arrogance of their illustrious Lord. But Sibawûl, who could see if not hear their consternation, ignored them. He stared at the surging Horde, his face blank—the look of one testing the validity of dreams.

  The Sranc seemed a singular thing, a millipede skin, celled with howling mouths, haired with crude arms, chapped and scaled with black armour. As one they charged, their numbers so vast as to make the twenty-three hundred Cepalorae seem a twig before the flood. They unmoored the very ground beneath the Ordealmen, so that Wreoleth, far from a rock awaiting the tide, seemed a raft floating toward doom. Sibawûl watched without word or expression. Several horse-thanes screamed at him. Dozens of Vindaugamen—a shameful handful—fled. Others wheeled their balking ponies in preparation. The Nymbricani braced themselves against their cantles, lowered their lances. Even as they watched, the Sranc flying at the fore of the rush faltered, drawn up by some inexplicable terror. Many of the Cepalorae even glanced at the sky behind them, thinking that perhaps the Holy Aspect-Emperor had come. More and more of the creatures began screaming, scrambling backward, as if an invisible line had been scrawled about the circuit of the dead city. But all the world behind them was hunger in near infinite repetition, the obscene desire to savage and couple with their ancient foe. The horrified ones were shoved and trampled—some were even cut down, such was the frenzy. Sranc climbed their brothers, some to rush the horsemen on the mound, others to escape them, and countless abominations died in the crush. Abject madness consumed the frontal masses, forming a rind of cannibalistic fury. Only when it reached the very foot of
the ancient fortifications did the surge stall …

  The Holy Sagas had spoken true. Wreoleth had been carved into the very being of the Sranc, a terror mightier than any of their prodigious lusts. They would sooner die, sooner fall upon their crazed kin, than set foot upon its ground. Here the last of the High Norsirai had huddled safe and yet not safe, their numbers dwindling as the Consult raided them for fresh captives time and again. Here they had eked out a wretched, waiting existence, livestock for the wicked hungers and whims of the Unholy Consult.

  The horrified Cepalorae gazed across the thrashing spectacle, the countless white faces, inhuman beauty clenching into puckered outrage, packed and receding, on and on, becoming watercolour impressions for the fog of fecal dust. Full-grown men wept, wondered that Fate would dangle them so near the end of all things. Others laughed, emboldened, despite their dread, to stand with such impunity before the geologic extent of their foe.

  Those on the eastern flank cried out soundlessly, pointed to the glower of lights through the ochre sheers. The Culling, they realized—the Schoolmen had come! And they realized they looked upon what their sorcerous brother-in-arms always saw with the grinding of the days. The keen-sighted glimpsed a triune of dark-skinned sorcerers robed in billows striding the low skies in echelon, each wielding a phantom dragon. They were white and violet garbed Vokalati, those Sun-wailers, as they were called, who had survived Irsûlor and the madness of their Grandmaster, Carindûsû.

  According to legend, this was when the Chieftain-Prince first glimpsed the Sranc masses surging to their southeast and grasped the shape of their new peril.

  The arcane mutter of sorcery wormed through the gut of the Horde’s thunder. Even as the Cepalorae cheered, the Horde roiled, and dust erupted from the rabid tracts. The horsemen could even see the Sranc scooping dirt and gravel into the sky, creating a fog that obscured all but the brilliance of jetting and blooming fire. Silhouettes burned and flailed. Many among the horsemen raised a ragged cheer thinking the Vokalati had come to save them.

  But Sibawûl knew better, knew the Schoolmen had possibly sealed their doom. The Sranc instinctively spread out when afflicted from above, the way skirmishers might beneath a hail of archery. But where human formations counted the extra area taken in yards, the Horde encompassed miles. It ballooned and billowed across the desolate dimensions whenever the Schoolmen rained ruin down upon them. Many were the times he and his riders had retreated watching the Culling vanish into the Shroud.

  The Horde was about to reclaim Wreoleth.

  Sibawûl galloped behind his warriors, slapping the rumps of their ponies with the flat of his blade, crying out words that could not be heard with an urgency that was easily seen. And so the Cepalorae fled, each man crouched low on his saddle, flaxen war-braids lashing his back and shoulder. They galloped down slots of ruin, blundered through copses of thistle, chalk juniper, and plains bracken. With horror, they watched the vast palms of dust close in prayer across the sky before them, the sun fade into a pale disc. Caterwauling thousands flooded into the passage the Men had followed not more than a watch before. Gloom fell across Wreoleth, at once septic and chill, and the proud horsemen of Cepalor called out for terror and despair.

  Halas Siroyon, who had gained the interval’s mouth only to see its throat close, would glimpse Sibawûl and his Cepalorae from afar, and it would seem that he gazed across worlds, from a terrain crabbed for density to one blurred for gaseous obscurity—a glimpse from a dream. He was driven back, and his bare-chested riders suffered grievously for the javelins and arrows of the loping Sranc. The chroniclers would write that Phiolos, the greatest of all horses, caught one shaft in the shoulder and another in the rump, while his less-renowned master flaunted one in his left thigh.

  The Shroud closed about all knowledge of Lord Sibawûl and his kinsmen. Wreoleth lay as an abscess in the viscera of the Horde.

  A day and night passed before the Horde relinquished the accursed Larder. Accusations were traded in the Eleven Pole Chamber. The Believer-Kings petitioned their Holy Aspect-Emperor, who admonished them, saying, “Sibawûl may be the fiercest among you, but the temper of the soul matters little when the peril is unnatural. The weak are spared, while the bravest are unmanned. Pray to the God of Gods, my brothers. Only fell Wreoleth can show what it has wrought.”

  Grief-stricken, Siroyon would be the first to dare the second opening of the interval the following morning. He would find his rival—and the nine-hundred and twenty-three Cepalorae who survived with him—bereft of wit or calculation. Of the missing, nothing was ever learned, for the survivors refused to speak on any matter, let alone what they had endured. If they responded to hails at all, it would be to look through their interrogator, into whatever deeps and distances that had made slack rope of their souls.

  The Ordeal had drawn near to legendary ruins by this time, so that word of Sibawûl’s survival passed as lightning through the Holy Host of Hosts. A booming cheer seized the masses, one that pained the throats of those who caught any glimpse of the harrowed Cepalorae. Expressions are ever the measure of weal and woe. A simple look is often enough to fathom the scale, if not the specifics, of what some other soul has suffered, to know whether they have triumphed or merely persevered, wavered or capitulated outright. The look of the Cepalorae communicated something more horrible than suffering, something incommunicable.

  That night, when Sibawûl answered the summons of his Holy Aspect-Emperor in Council, the gathered Believer-Kings found themselves appalled by the man’s transformation. Proyas embraced him, only to recoil as if at some whispered rebuke. At the behest of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, Saccarees related the legend of Wreoleth according to Mandate lore. The Grandmaster spoke of how Mog-Pharau had stamped his chattel with a terror of the place so that its inhabitants might be spared, “as grain is spared the millstone.” Wreoleth, he explained to the anxious assembly, had been the granary of the Consult, and its Sons suffered as no other Son of Men had suffered.

  “What say you?” Siroyon finally cried to his rival.

  Sibawûl levelled a gaze that could only be called dead.

  “Hell …” he replied, his voice dropping from his mouth like sodden gravel from a spade. “Hell kept us safe.”

  Silence fell across the Umbilicus. Framed by the sorcerous twining of the Ekkinû, the Holy Aspect-Emperor peered at Sibawûl for five long heartbeats. He alone seemed untroubled by the vacancy that now dominated his manner.

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus nodded in cryptic affirmation, as if understanding rather than affirming what he had glimpsed. “Henceforth,” he said, “you shall do as you will in matters of war, Lord Sibawûl.”

  And so the Chieftain-Prince of Cepalor did, leading his tribal cohorts out before the tolling of the Interval every day, returning with sacks of white skin, which he and his kinsmen consumed raw in the dark. They stoked no fire, and seemed to avoid those fires belonging to their neighbours. They no longer slept, or so the rumours charged. Word of their unnatural ferocity on the fields spread, how the Sranc fled from them no matter what their numbers. Wherever Sibawûl and his pallid horsemen congregated, the Ordealmen shunned them. The more superstitious fingered charms upon spying them—some even threw arms over their own faces, convinced that dead eyes saw only dead men.

  All came to fear the Sons of Cepalor.

  There was a head upon the pole behind him.

  To remake Men, Kellhus had come understand, one had to recover what was most simple in them—what was basic. The greatest poets eulogized childhood, extolled those who found innocence untrammelled within. But without exception they seized only on the simplicities that flattered and consoled, ignoring all the ways children resemble beasts. Animals were by far the better metaphor. Men did not so much remain children at heart, as they remained brutes, a collection of reflexes, violent, direct, blind to all the nuances that made men Men.

  To remake Men, one had to tear down their trust in complication, force them to shelter in instinct and reflex, redu
ce them to what was animal.

  Proyas had good reason to look hunted.

  “You’re saying that … that …”

  Kellhus exhaled, and so reminded his Exalt-General to do the same. This time, he had bid Proyas to sit at his side rather than opposite the hearth: to better exploit bodily proximity. “Damnation has claimed Sibawûl and his countrymen.”

  “But they live!”

  “Do they? Or do they dwell somewhere between?”

  Proyas gazed appalled. “But h-how … how could such a thing happen?”

  “Because fear pries open the heart. They suffered too much terror upon ground too steeped in suffering. Hell forever gropes, forever pokes at the limits of the living. In Wreoleth, it found and seized them.”

  There was a head upon the pole behind him. If he could not turn to see it, it was because it lay behind his seeing … Behind all seeing.

  “But-but … surely you …”

  He held his disciple in the palm of his intellect.

  “Surely I could save them?” A pause to let the import roil. “The way I saved Serwë?”

  Something between anguish and exasperation cramped his Exalt-General’s face. To strip a soul to its essentials, one had to show the complication of the complicated—this was the great irony of such studies. Nothing is more simple than complication become habit. What was effortless, thoughtless, had to become fraught with doubt and toil.

  As it should.

  “I … I don’t understand.”

  He could sense it even now, the head on the pole behind him.

  “There are many I have failed to save.”