The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  Some secrets are too vast to be hoisted. A space must be cleared.

  “Did he—?”

  Madness. This couldn’t be happening …

  Saubon scowled. “Did he what?” A barking laugh. “Bugger me?”

  All the air … All the air had been breathed.

  A gaze that had been anxious and incredulous was now simply stupefied. The Galeoth Believer-King exploded in a fit of coughing. Water dribbled from his nose.

  “No …” he gasped.

  Proyas had thought he had been looking at his counterpart, but when Saubon moved, paced to the threshold hands to his head, he found his gaze fixed on the vacant space the man had occupied.

  “He says he’s mad, Saubon.”

  “He-he told you this?”

  Their rivalry, such as it was, suddenly seemed the most profound of their many bonds. In an inkling, they had become brothers in a perilous land. And it occurred to Proyas that perhaps this was what their Lord-and-Prophet desired: that they finally set aside their meagre differences.

  “He buggered you?” Saubon cried out.

  It was a crime among the Galeoth, using a man as a woman. It was a shame like no other. Among all the buzzing terrors, Proyas realized that he would forever bear this taint in Coithus Saubon’s eyes. That he would, in some measure, be a woman. Weak. Unreliable in the ways of manhood and war …

  A strangeness had seized Saubon’s expression, the bundling of some crazed fury. “You lie!” he exploded. “He told you to say this!”

  Proyas simply matched his gaze, observed more than watched the man’s rage crack and crumble against his blank constancy. And he realized that even though he had been the one to suffer their Aspect-Emperor’s violent embrace, it was Saubon who would be the most grievously tested …

  The one most pitted against the bigotries of his soul.

  The statuesque Norsirai paced, his every tendon pulled taut, a thousand strings grooving his pale skin. He glanced about, frowning in the manner of addled drunks or senile old men, as if things obvious had been misplaced. “It’s the Meat,” he muttered on a sob. Without warning he leapt, batted the platter and its morsels across the gloomy interior. “This accursed Meat!”

  The violence of the act startled both of them.

  “The more you consume …” Saubon said, staring at clawed hands. “The more you … you hunger.”

  Confession has its own calm, its own strength. Only ignorance is so immovable as resignation. Proyas had thought this strength his, especially given the bewildered frailty that had preceded it. But grief welled through him as he made to speak, and the desperation that cramped his expression seized his voice.

  “Saubon … What’s happening?”

  Speechless horror. One of the lanterns sputtered; light wavered over the ochre continents and archipelagos stained across the canvas walls.

  “Tell no one of this,” Coithus Saubon commanded.

  “You think I don’t know as much!” Proyas cried in sudden fury. “I’m asking you what we’re supposed to do?”

  The man nodded, as much wilderness as wisdom flashing in his gaze. It almost seemed they took turns, each tethering the fraught excesses of the other, like two snarled kites trying to find some kind of crippled equipoise.

  “What we have always done.”

  “But he’s telling us to … to … not to believe!”

  Out of everything, this was the most unbelievable … unforgivable.

  “That is the test,” Saubon said. “The trial … It has to be!”

  “Test? Trial?”

  A look too beseeching to be convincing.

  “To see if we continue to act when …” Saubon said, “when we have ceased to believe …”

  They traded exhalations.

  “But …”

  They both could feel it, the taint of the meat, a cruel and vicious spring coiled within their every thought and breath. The meat. The Meat.

  Yesss.

  “Think, Brother …” Saubon said. “What else could it be?”

  They had no choice but to believe. Faith is inescapable … and nowhere more so than in the commission of some mighty sin.

  “We stand so close …” Proyas murmured.

  Only its object varies … the in what.

  “Lean into the oar, Brother,” Saubon said, his voice rent between dread and ferocity. “Golgotterath will decide.”

  Be it God … Man.

  “Yes …” Proyas said on a shudder. “Golgotterath.”

  Or nothing.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ishuäl

  The father who does not lie is no father at all.

  —CONRIYAN PROVERB

  Between the truth that aims uncertainly, and the deceit that aims true, scholars no less than kings cling to the latter. Only madmen and sorcerers have truck with Truth.

  —The Cirric (or ‘Fourth’) Economy, OLEKAROS

  Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Demua Mountains

  “Nau-Cayûti …” one of the wretches croaked.

  “Nau-Cayûti …” another rasped, rocking like a worm.

  “Such a prizsse …”

  Achamian rolled to his knees, coughed. Manacles clamped his neck, wrists, ankles. A circle of figures leaned close about him, black with confusion. Beyond, the world lurched with shadow and gold. A reeking breeze laved his naked back, pinched his gut and pulled vomit to his throat.

  He convulsed with a different body, gagged about a string of burning spittle. Memories of a darkling flight crowded his eyes, claws hooked about his limbs, wings shearing hard air, a blasted landscape reeling out to the horizon.

  “Such-such a prizsse …”

  “He-he-heeee …”

  More memories came, like ice packed about his heart and lungs. His wife, Iëva, plundering his loins with wanton abandon. The Inchoroi, Aurang, cracking him from his sarcophagus, hauling him into the heavens. Golden bulkheads rearing from bastions of cruel stone, their surfaces stamped in endless, alien filigree …

  Golgotterath, the Great Prince realized. He was in Min-Uroikas, the dread Ark-of-the-skies …

  Which meant he was worse than dead.

  “My father!” he cried, staring about witless. “My father will yield nothing for my return!”

  “Return …” one of the wretches gasped.

  “There is no return …” another added.

  “No escape …”

  The Wizard gazed wildly about. Ten ancient men encircled him, their skin sucked tight about their ligaments, their eyes bleary with mucous and misery. They wagged their heads—some bald, some wisped with snow-white strands—as if trapped nodding at the surface of a long, nightmarish slumber. One chewed his own bottom lip, so that blood sheeted his chin.

  At first he thought they sat huddled—but he quickly realized they possessed no limbs, that they had been bound like larva to cradle-like sconces of stone. And he understood that these ten men were Men no longer, but wheels in some kind of contrivance, arcane and abominable.

  At once, the Great Prince realized who it was who truly scrutinized him—as well as who had betrayed him.

  “My wife,” he groaned, testing the mettle of his chains for the first time. “Iëva!”

  “Has committed …” one of the ancient mouths warbled.

  “Such crimes …”

  “What was her price …” he coughed. “Tell me!”

  “She sheeks only …” the bloody one bubbled.

  “To save her soul …”

  Laughter, thin and eerie, passed through the wretches, like the lash through the whip, one rising from the trailing of another.

  The Great Prince cast his gaze beyond them, toward the gold-girdered walls. He saw hooded light rising across faraway structures, surfaces gleaming through darkness, stamped with infinite detail, packed into inexplicable forms. A sudden awareness of distance and dimension struck him …

  Dizzy, gaping spaces.

  He fell to his right elbow
, so sudden was the vertigo. They floated, he realized. The ancient amputees had been arrayed across a platform of some kind—one rendered of the same unearthly metal as the Ark. Soggomant, foul and impenetrable. He saw golden reliefs through the scuffs in the offal beneath him, warring figures, leering and inhuman. And the form, opposing S’s hooked about the arms of a V …

  A shape no Son of the House Anasûrimbor could fail to recognize: the Shield of Sil.

  They floated upward through some kind of shaft, one impossibly vast, a gullet broad enough to house the King-Temple whole. The Horns, Nau-Cayûti realized …

  “A marvel …” one of the wretches croaked, a momentary light flaring and fading in his eyes.

  “Is it not?”

  They ascended what Siqu called the Abskinis, the Groundless Grave … “The Iyiskû …”

  “They made this …”

  “To be their …”

  “Sssshurrogate world …”

  The vast well that plumbed Golgotterath’s Upright Horn.

  “Now … now …”

  “It belongs to me …”

  They climbed to the world’s most wicked summit, where none but the dead and the damned descended.

  “The very …”

  “Stronghold …”

  “Of ssssalvation!”

  Rage, delirious and titanic, seized the old Wizard’s limbs and voice. He howled. He cast his naked body whole, wrenched and heaved with the strength that had made him unconquerable on so many fields of battle.

  But the Wretches only drooled and laughed, one after the other.

  “Nau-Cayûti …”

  He drew his feet beneath him, squatted, strained roaring, until his limbs flushed and quivered. He hurled all his being …

  “Thief …”

  The iron links creaked, but did not yield.

  “You hath returned …”

  “To the house …”

  “From which you hath stolen …”

  He slumped in dismay, gazed sneering at the wretches. Different faces worn into the same face by decrepitude. Different voices throttled into the same voice by senescence and age-old hatred. Ten Wretches, one ancient and malevolent soul.

  “Damnation awaits you!” the Great Prince roared. “Eternal torment!”

  “Your pride …”

  “Your strength …”

  “Are naught but kindling …”

  “For the Lust …”

  “Of the Derived …”

  The Great Prince’s thoughts raced through the old Wizard’s soul.

  “They shall glory …”

  “In your misery …”

  Rising … rising through stench and darkness. A vast throat, ribbed in gold, descending. “Damnation!” Nau-Cayûti bellowed. “How long can you cling, wicked old fool?”

  “Your eyes …”

  “Shall be put out …”

  “Your manhood …”

  “Shall be cut from you …”

  “And I shall give you over …”

  “To my children …”

  “To their rutting fervour …”

  And Nau-Cayûti laughed, for fear was all but unknown to him. “How long before Hell has its say?”

  “You will be shattered …”

  “Beaten and degraded …”

  “Your wounds will bleed …”

  “The black of my children’s seed …”

  “Your honour will be cast …”

  “As ash …”

  “To the high winds …”

  “Where the Gods shall gather it!” the Great Prince boomed. “The very Gods you flee!”

  “And you will weep …”

  “At the last …”

  The Shield of Sil climbed high into the dark, toward a gold-shining aperture. Chained within a mightier frame, the old Wizard screamed with lunatic defiance, roared with a strength not his own.

  “And when all is done …”

  “You will tell me …”

  “Where your accurshed tutor …”

  “Has concealed …”

  “The Heron Spe—”

  Then brightness, blinking and chill.

  The cough of too-cold air too sharply drawn.

  Night had fallen quickly once they had descended the far side of the glacier, forcing them to camp just below the frosted heights. They had settled upon a ledge that was lifeless save for the tattooing of lichens across the sunward faces. They had fallen asleep clutching each other—for hope as much as for warmth.

  Now, rubbing his eyes, the old Wizard saw Mimara hugging her knees on the mounded lip, staring out across the distance, toward the ruined talisman of Ishuäl. She was draped in rotted furs, the same as he, but where he had elected to wear his looted nimil corselet beneath his pelts, she wore the gold-scaled hauberk she had retrieved from the Coffers over hers. She spared him a curious glance, nothing more. She looked boyish for her hair, he thought.

  “I dr-dreamed …” he said, hugging his arms against a shiver. “Dreamed of him.”

  “Him?”

  “Shauriatas.”

  He had no need of explanations. Shauriatas was the curse-name of Shaeönanra, the cunning Grandmaster of the Mangaecca, the intellect who discovered the last surviving Inchoroi and resurrected their World-breaking design.

  Shauriatas. The Lord of the Unholy Consult.

  The surprise in her eyes was fleeting. “How’s he doing?”

  The old Wizard screwed his face into a scowl, then coughed in laughter.

  “Not quite himself.”

  The vale plummeted and piled across the morning distance, gullies and ravines pinned one to the other on tumbling angles, ramps matted with conifers, shouldering scarps that climbed to the clouds.

  Ishuäl perched over the lowland creases, its towers and walls overthrown, little more than a socket where a jewel was supposed to be.

  Ishuäl … The ancient sanctuary of the Kûniüric High Kings, hidden from the world for an entire age.

  He had not known what to expect when he and Mimara had crested the glacier the previous day. He had some understanding of time, of the mad way the past formed an invisible rind about the present. When life was monotonous—safe—what happened and what had happened formed a kind of slurry, and the paradoxes of time seemed little more than a philosopher’s fancy. But when life became momentous … nothing seemed more absurd, more precarious, than the now. One ate, as one always ate, one loved and hoped and hated the same as before—and it all seemed impossible.

  For twenty years he had cloistered himself with his Dreams, marking progress in the slow accumulation of nocturnal variance and permutation. The growth of his slave’s children became his only calendar. His old pains evaporated, to be sure, and yet everyday had seemed to be that day, the day he cursed Anasûrimbor Kellhus and began his bloody-footed trek into exile, so little had happened since.

  Then Mimara, bearing long-dead torment and news of the Great Ordeal …

  Then the Skin Eaters with their evil and blood-crazed Captain …

  Then Cil-Aujas and the first Sranc, who had driven them into the precincts of Hell …

  Then the madness of the Mop and the long, manic trail across the Istyuli Plains …

  Then the Library of Sauglish and the Father of Dragons …

  Then Nil’giccas, the death of the Last Nonman King …

  So he had wheezed and huffed to the glacier’s summit in the calamitous shadow of these things, not knowing what to think, too numb and bewildered to rejoice. For so long the very World had been the mountain between them, and his limbs and heart trembled for climbing …

  Then, there it lay: Ishuäl, the sum of labourious years and how many lives; Ishuäl, the birthplace of the Holy Aspect-Emperor …

  Blasted to its foundations.

  For a time he simply blinked and blinked. The air was too chill, his eyes too old. The sun was too bright, dazzling the icy heights. No matter how hard he squinted, he could not see …

  Then he felt Mim
ara’s smaller, warmer hands enclose his own. She was standing before him, gazing up into his face.

  “There’s no cause to weep,” she had said.

  But there was.

  More than enough.

  His laughter forgotten, he now gazed at the wrecked fortress, his eyes clicking from detail to detail. The great blocks, scorched and fractured, spilling down the encircling slopes. The heaped debris …

  Dawn silence thundered in his ears. He found himself swallowing against a hollow pinned to the back of his throat. So much … was all he could think, but whether he meant toil or suffering or sacrifice, he could not say.

  The despair, when it came, crashed through him, bubbled through his bowel. He looked away in an effort to master his eyes. Fool! he cursed himself, worried that he had outgrown his old weaknesses only to inherit the frailties of old age. How could he falter at such a time?

  “I know,” he croaked, hoping to recover himself by speaking of his Dream.

  “What do you know?”

  “How Shauriatas survived all these years. How he managed to cheat Death …”

  And damnation.

  He explained how the Consult sorcerer had been ancient even in Far Antique days, little more than a dread legend to Seswatha and the School of Sohonc. He described a hate-rotted soul, forever falling into hell, forever deflected by ancient and arcane magicks, caught in the sack-cloth of souls too near death to resist his clutching tumble, too devoid of animating passion.

  A pit bent into a circle, the most perfect of the Conserving Forms …

  “But isn’t trapping souls an ancient art?” she asked.

  “It is …” Achamian replied. He thought of the Wathi doll he once owned—and used to save himself from the Scarlet Spires when everyone, including Esmenet, had thought him dead. He had been reluctant, then, to think of the proxy that had been trapped within it. Had it suffered? Was it yet another of his multitudinous sins?

  One more blemish for Mimara to glimpse with her Judging Eye?

  “But souls are exceedingly complicated,” he continued. “Far more so than the crude sorceries used to trap them. The intricacies of identity are always sheared away. Memory. Faculty. Character. These are cast into the pit … Only the most base urges survive in proxies.”