The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  Which was what made them such useful slaves.

  “So to have your soul caught …” She trailed, frowning.

  “Is to be twice-damned …” he said, trailing at the behest of a queer reluctance. Few understood the monstrosity of sorcery better than he. “To have your hungers enslaved in the World, while your thoughts are tormented in the Outside.”

  This seemed to trouble her. She turned back to the vista, her brow furrowed. He followed her gaze, yet again felt his heart slump at the sight of Ishuäl’s cracked foundations rising above the black carpet of pine and spruce.

  “What does it mean?” she asked of the wind.

  “The Dream?”

  “No.” She glanced at him over her shoulder. “The timing.”

  Now it was his turn to fall silent.

  He thought, as he always did when he became agitated, of the Qirri. A querulous part of him groused, wondering why Mimara should bear the Nonman King’s pouch, when he was the leader of their piteous company—their Slog of slogs. But like an old dog caught in the rain yet one more time, he shook away these peevish thoughts. He had come to understand the narcotic ash over the months of his addiction, at least enough to distinguish its thoughts from his own.

  Mimara was right. To dream such a thing now …

  What could it mean?

  To suffer this Dream the very day he would at last set foot in Ishuäl. To not only see Shauriatas, but to learn the true fate of Nau-Cayûti—or something of it. What could it mean to learn the truth of one great Anasûrimbor’s death, just before discovering the truth of another, even greater Anasûrimbor’s birth?

  What was happening?

  He sat rigid, his breath pinched by the sense of things converging …

  Origin to ending.

  What came after to what came before.

  “Come,” Mimara called, standing, brushing grit from her ragged trousers. The sickle of her belly caught an errant lance of sunlight … The old Wizard momentarily forgot how to breathe.

  A chevron of geese soared above, barking southward.

  “We have bones to inspect,” she said with the weariness and resolve of a long-suffering mother.

  They pick their way down through the remains of an ancient moraine, climbing between boulders that chance had arrayed in descending barricades. Mimara follows the old Wizard, her eyes keen for any glimpse of the ruined fastness through the raggish trees. Ishuäl had been raised on the low hip of a mountain to the southwest, forcing them to descend into the very basement of the vale, before resuming their climbing approach. Periodically, she sees decapitated towers and sections of truncated wall rising between the dark crowns. The teetering stone looks ancient and wind-blasted, bleached sterile for countless ages of exposure. An eerie silence permeates the surrounding forest.

  “What will we do now?” she asks with a vague air of surprise. With the Qirri, it seems only the merest whim separates what is spoken from what is merely thought. More and more she finds herself verbalizing ill-considered things.

  “What we are doing!” the old Wizard snaps without so much as glancing at her.

  It’s okay, little one …

  She understands his dismay. For him, finding the map in the ruined Library had been a kind of irrefutable sign, divine indication that he had not acted in vain. But when he had finally crested the glacier, when he finally peered across the vale and found the destination he had hunted in his Dreams for twenty years ruined, his newfound conviction had tumbled from him, whipped away on the high mountain wind.

  Papa had a scary dream.

  Drusas Achamian knew the cruelty of Fate—perhaps more profoundly than she. Perhaps they had been lured here simply to be broken—a punishment for vanity perhaps, or for nothing at all. The Holy Sagas were literally filled with such stories of divine treachery. “The Whore,” she once read in Casidas, “will carry you through wars and famine in glory, only to drown you for tripping in a ditch.” She remembers smiling at the passage, taking heart in the laying low of the high and mighty, as if the punishment of the exalted was at once the vengeance of the weak.

  What if the Dûnyain were extinct? What if they had travelled all this way, ushered all those men—those scalpers—to their deaths for nothing at all?

  The thought almost makes her laugh, not out of any callousness, but out of exhaustion. Toil, harsh and relentless, has a way of twisting hope into self-consuming circles. Battle peril long enough, she has learned, and you will come to see salvation in your doom.

  The quiet seems to intensify as they near the broken sanctuary. A ringing seeps into her ears. Out of some reflex, they close the space between them, so that they continually bump and brush each other. They begin measuring their steps, leaning and ducking as much to remain hidden as to avoid dead branches. They begin creeping as though approaching an enemy camp, their footfalls inaudible save for the smothered pop of twigs beneath the matted pine needles. They peer through the branching gloom.

  After scaling cliffs, glaciers, and mountains, the slopes and defilades about the fortress should have seemed insignificant. They tower instead, pitched to angles that only their souls can perceive. Squinting up the broken incline, she glimpses dead stone in sunlight, wind she cannot feel combing through thronging weeds and sapling trees. It seems they climb a burial mound.

  She thinks of the Qirri, the pinch of bitter bliss, and her mouth begins watering.

  They come to the debris robed about the foundations. The trees yield to mountain sunlight … Dazzling sheets.

  And they find themselves in the wind, standing on the ruined perimeter, staring across a sight she can scarce believe.

  Ishuäl … She is breathless for thinking it.

  Ishuäl … An empty name spoken from the far side of the world.

  Ishuäl … Here. Now. About her eyes. Beneath her feet.

  The birthplace of the Aspect-Emperor …

  Of the Dûnyain.

  She turns to the old Wizard and sees Drusas Achamian, the hallowed Tutor, the infamous Exile, clad in rotting pelts, wild with the filth of endless escape. Sunlight flashes for glimpses of Nil’giccas’s nimil hauberk. Sunlight flashes from his wetted cheeks.

  Fear stabs her breast, he looks so frail and wretched.

  He is a prophet of the past. Mimara knows this now—and it terrifies her.

  When she had made this declaration so many months ago—impossible months—she had spoken with the insincerity of those who speak to appease. She had answered the unaccountable instinct, one that all Men share, to brace wavering souls with vainglorious pictures of what might be. She had spoken out of haste and expedient greed, and yet somehow, she had spoken true. Dreams had summoned him to Ishuäl. Dreams had sent him to Sauglish for the means to find it. Dreams of the past had driven him, not visions of the future …

  For the old Wizard knew nothing of the future, save that he feared.

  When she paused to recollect their long-suffering journey, it seemed she possessed two sets of memories: the one embodied, where she had thrown heart and limbs at the world, and the other disembodied, where everything happened, not out of desperation or heroic effort, but out of necessity. She wondered that the same thing could possess such contradictory appearances. And with a kind of dismay, she realized that between the two, her experience of striving and overcoming were the more false.

  Fate had her—had them. Anagkë, the Whore, would midwife her child …

  She fairly weeps for thinking it.

  No matter how fierce or cunning or deliberate her struggles, no matter how much it seems she cut trails of her own making, she follows tracks laid at the founding of the World … There can be no denying it.

  One can sooner climb free the air than escape Fate.

  And with this realization comes a peculiar kind of melancholy, a resignation that was at once a commission, a willingness to be used that troubled her with memories of the brothel. Everything, the prick at the bottom of her lungs, the mandible of mountains fencing t
he near distance, even the character of the light, carries the numb pinch of eternity. She would strive. She would spit and strain and fight … and she would know it was nothing more than a gratifying illusion. She would cast herself into the belly of her own inevitability.

  What else is there?

  Fight, little one, she whispers to the miracle that is her belly. Fight for me.

  Breathless, wordless, they pick their way over a destroyed segment of wall. They pause, winded by things more profound than mourning or exhaustion. The old Wizard slumps to his knees.

  The sanctuary had been all but razed. Berms of rubble are all that remain of the walls. Masonry ramps and carpets the interior, thrown like wrack by some surging sea. Even still, it seems she can see the place: the cyclopean scale in the width of the foundations, the craftsmanship in the polished faces, the design in the lay of the wreckage.

  Citadel. Assembly yard. Dormitories. Even a grove of some kind.

  The fractured stone is pale, almost white, throwing the black of soot and scorching into sharp relief. Pockets weeping ash. Surfaces scaled in charcoal. The itch of sorcerous residue stains everything in tones that cannot be seen—colours both impossible and foul.

  “How?” she finally dares ask. “Do you think—”

  She catches herself, suddenly hesitant to voice her wondering. She doesn’t so much distrust Achamian himself as his heartbreak.

  Your father is reckless …

  The wind whisks across the ruined expanses, pricks cheeks for grit.

  The old Wizard hauls himself to his feet, totters for a moment. “I’m a fool …” he croaks.

  He says that too often to mean it. You’ll learn.

  Achamian curses and wipes at his eyes, tugs on his beard—more in fury than reflection. “He’s been one step ahead of me all along!” he cries. “Kellhus!” He claps his head, wags his beard in incredulity. “He wanted me here … He wanted me to see this!”

  She scowls.

  “Think, ” he grates. “Kosoter. The Skin Eaters. He had to know, Mimara! He’s been leading me all along!”

  “Akka, come,” she says. “How could such a thing be possible?”

  For the first time she hears it in her voice, the tones of a mother—the mother she will soon be.

  “My notes!” he cries in dawning horror. “The tower! He came to my tower! He read my notes, discovered I was hunting Ishuäl in my Dreams!”

  She looks away, repelled by the violence of his self-pity, and resumes wandering between the mounds. She ponders the growth thronging from the ruin’s every seam: weeds drying with the season, scrub like wicker, even small twisted pines. How many years since ruin had come and gone? she wonders. Three? More?

  “Are you saying he came here?” she called to the watching Wizard. “Destroyed his birthpla—?”

  “Of course he did!” he snaps. “Of-course-of-course-of-course! To cover his tracks. To prevent me from discovering his origin—perhaps … But think. How could he rule in utter security so long as the Dûnyain still lived? He had to destroy Ishuäl, girl. He had to kick away the ladder that had raised him so high!”

  She isn’t so sure. But then she never is.

  “So Kellhus did this?”

  The old Wizard spouts curses rather than reply—speaking some language she cannot fathom, and sounding all the more foul-humoured for it. He begins waving his arms and pacing as he shouts.

  She spins on her heel to consider the ruined fortress in a single look …

  Everything Achamian said bore the ring of truth, so why does she disagree?

  She turns to encircling mountains, imagines what it would look like, seeing her stepfather stride across the bleached heavens, bearing light and fury. She can almost hear his voice crack across the firmament, calling on his Dûnyain brothers …

  She looks back to the razed foundations—to Ishuäl.

  Spite, she realizes. Brute hatred destroyed this place.

  The old Wizard has fallen silent behind her. She turns, sees him sitting with his back against a great block of stone, staring at nothing, clutching at his forehead, combing his scalp with his fingers. And somehow she knows: Anasûrimbor Kellhus has long ceased being a man for Drusas Achamian—or even a devil for that matter. He has become a labyrinth, something that misleads every breath, mazes every direction. Something that can never be escaped.

  But there are other powers. Spiteful powers.

  She smells it first … the ghost of rot. A waist-high section of wall conceals it, though she realizes she has seen it all along in the wandering arc of ruin heaped about its rim. A strange kind of astonishment trills through her, like finding a horrible scar on a new lover.

  “Akka …” she calls weakly.

  The old Wizard glances up in alarm. She expects him to either ignore or rebuke her, but something in her tone, perhaps, hooks his concern.

  “What is it?”

  “Come … Look …”

  He is quick in trotting to her side—almost too quick. She has never grown accustomed to the nimble alacrity that the Qirri has lent his old bones. All such reminders trouble her … in a vague way.

  So reckless with his heart, little one.

  They stand side-by-side, gazing into the maw of a great pit.

  The hole falls at a steep angle rather than straight down, with the ruin piled like a cowl about its ceiling edge, and the floor descending like a tongue opposite. It resembles a gigantic burrow, not unlike the one leading to the Coffers in the Library. Blackness fills its throat, almost tangible for the surrounding brightness, viscous with threat.

  Achamian stands stupefied. She is not sure what draws her to climb the far side. Perhaps she has lost her stomach for deep and dark places. Regardless, she picks her way to the crest, which overlooks the far limit of the fortress, and finds herself staring down a vast incline of branches—only they are not branches …

  Bones, she realizes.

  Sranc bones.

  Innumerable. So many that their sum has eclipsed the scale of manufactured things and become one with the mountain’s foundations. An enormous ramp, broad and shallow enough to bear a wain near the peak, dropping scores of feet, flaring out like a skirt, spilling into the forests.

  She turns voiceless to the old Wizard, who scrambles to join her on the summit of the pitch.

  He stares as she stares, trying to comprehend …

  The mountain wind tousles his beard and hair, twisting and wagging its iron-grey tails.

  “The Consult,” he murmurs from her side, his voice thin with dread. “The Consult did this.”

  What was going on?

  “This was where they pitched the fallen …” he continues.

  In her soul’s eye she sees Ishuäl as it must have been: cold walls climbing from vast heaps of dead. But even as the image rises, she dismisses it as impossible. They found no bones among the ruined fortifications, which suggests the walls were destroyed before any mass assault.

  She looks at him sharply. “And the battle?” Even as she speaks, her fingers are working to release the pouch from her belt …

  Qirri … Yes-yes.

  The Wizard glances toward the great pit, shrugs without sincerity.

  “Beneath our feet.”

  She has the premonition of rotted ground, and a dread fills her. The ruined fortress merely barks the surface, she realizes. The tracts buried beneath are riddled with far-flung veins and hollows, like termite-infested wood.

  The hole runs deep, she realizes. Cil-Aujas deep.

  A shudder rocks her balance from her. She stumbles, catches herself.

  “Ishuäl …” she begins, only to trail in indecision.

  “Is but the gate,” the old Wizard says, his eagerness outrunning his apprehension.

  She turns to him with a beseeching look, but he is already clambering back the way he came, his eyes bright with rekindled hope.

  “Of course …” he mutters. “Of course! This is a Dûnyain stronghold!”

  “So
?” she calls down, standing welded upon the heaped rubble.

  “So nothing is what it appears to be! Nothing!”

  Of course.

  Within heartbeats he has rounded the wreckage and found his way back to the pit’s black maw. He pauses, looks up to her both frowning and squinting. The ruins radiate out about them, buzzing in the sunlight. They gaze at each other across the interval, exchanging unasked questions.

  At last his eyes click to her waist, where her right hand pensively fingers the pouch.

  “Yes-yes,” he says roughly. “Of course.”

  Renewed, they creep into the darkness together.

  She can still feel the panic, cold enough to prick, but her thoughts have become woolen with relief, as if she has found leisure at the end of some arduous task. The Qirri is forever dredging up inappropriate passions, it seems, moving her soul at angles to her circumstances. The tunnels they plumb are entirely unlike the ancient obsidian marvels they explored in Cil-Aujas, but they are the same nonetheless. Halls that flee the sun. Chutes into blackness. Graves.

  And despite her terror, she finds that she does not care.

  Blessed be the Nonman King … his residue …

  They descend at a shallow angle. The old Wizard’s Surillic Point bleaches their surroundings with white detail. Detritus and scabbed ruin clot the floor. The walls are so scored she cannot but glimpse the shrieking legions of Sranc that had once trod them. Otherwise, the stonework is both meticulous and devoid of ornamentation.

  They slip deeper into the earth, a bead of white in dungeon blackness. The air remains rank, the odour of dead things mouldering, rot drained to the dregs. Neither of them speak. The same questions move their souls, ones that only the black depths can answer. To speculate aloud, it seems, would be to waste precious wind. Who knew what air dwelt below? What foulness?

  The light soundlessly shoulders away the dark, revealing a pocked and blasted region a cavity where everything tingles with sorcerous residue. Some kind of gate, she realizes, glimpsing the mangle that had once been an iron portal. They had happened upon an underworld bastion of some kind.

  “They brought the ceilings down …” the old Wizard says, his eyes probing the cragged hollows above them. “All this has been excavated.”