The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  “What do you think happened?”

  “The Dûnyain,” he says, speaking in the airy way of someone describing images drawn from the Soul’s eye. “They fled the walls above when they realized they were overmatched. They sealed themselves in the tunnels below. I’m guessing they brought the ceilings down when the Consult assaulted this gate.”

  Her eyes roam the pitted surfaces, confirming.

  “To no avail,” she says.

  A grim, beard-crushing nod. “To no avail.”

  The tunnels complicate beyond the destroyed gate, chambers like nodes, opening onto further corridors. Mimara finds her earlier presentiment of immensity confirmed. Somehow she just knows that the tunnels go on and on, forking and twining, veining the mountain foundations with complexity and confusion. Somehow she knows they have been designed to defeat comprehension as much as courage …

  That they stand at the threshold of a labyrinth.

  “We must mark our way,” she tells the old Wizard.

  He glances at her, frowning.

  “This place is Dûnyain,” she explains.

  They wander across littered floors, a bead of illumination bumping and shuffling through the black. An aging Wizard and a pregnant woman.

  Cil-Aujas howls from some deep pit in her memory, rendering the silence that much more palpable, enough to squeeze her chest, freight her limbs. And it strikes her that she never truly surfaced, that the long mad flight through the Mop and across the Istyuli were but a different underworld, the endless skies a different ground, as crushing as any mountain. She tries guessing at the function of the chambers they pass through, recess after recess, walls scorched, floors chapped with desiccated gore. The spaces yield to the relentless light, lines firm and straight, reaching out with geometric perfection. Most are blasted, their contents stamped to ruin, kicked into corners. But one possesses iron racks, some kind of restraints for human forms, arranged in a radial arc. Another appears to be some kind of kitchen.

  The Wizard marks every room with the charcoal nub of an abandoned torch. Crude chevrons tipped on their side, always pointing to the obscurity before them.

  They pass through several more chambers, breathing cobweb-air. They clamber down a half-ruined stairwell, enter the throat of what seems a long corridor. Fragments of bone and debris gravel the floors.

  She tries to imagine the Dûnyain. She has heard tales of her stepfather’s martial skill, how it dwarfed even that of the skin-spies, so she sees Soma in her soul’s eye, only in Dûnyain guise, battling through Sranc and blackness, his sword sketching impossible figures in the screeching dark. When the images fade she falls to pondering Koll, the final face worn by the thing called Soma, and the madness of Sauglish.

  She wonders that a Consult abomination would save her.

  “Nothing …” the old Wizard murmurs beside her.

  She turns to him with a curiosity she feels only with her face.

  “No ornament,” he explains, running a knobbed hand across the wall nearest to him. “No symbol. Nothing …”

  She looks to the walls and ceiling, feels the surprise of considering things noticed but not pondered. The sorcerous light is crowded and bright about them, darkening in stages as her eyes stray into the near distance. Everything is bare and … perfect. Only the random marks of conflict score them—the mad quill of discord.

  The contrast unnerves her. The descent into Cil-Aujas had been a descent into chaotic meaning, as if strife and loss and story had composed the heart of the mountain.

  There is no story here. No reminders. No hopes or regrets or vain declarations.

  Only blank assertion. The penetration of density by mazed space.

  And she realizes …

  They explore the bowel of a far different mansion. One less human.

  Ishuäl.

  Even before they enter, it seems that she knows this room. She—a child of the brothel.

  It lies waiting, a square of pure black at the end of the corridor. The absence of resistance surprises her as she steps across the threshold, as if the hairs on her arms and cheeks had warned her of some invisible membrane.

  The point of light slides effortlessly before them, gouging deep hollows from the blackness. They both stand breathing and staring. The ceiling is so low and broad as to seem a different floor. What seem to be lidless sarcophagi line the arc of the walls, dozens of large pedestals hewn from living rock, receding into the deeper gloom. But where the buried dead are typically lain with ankles bound, foot-to-foot, these sarcophagi flare outward: pinning their occupants spread-eagled, providing a space between …

  A place.

  She swallows against a nail in the back of her throat. Stepping across a shattered sword, she approaches the nearest pedestal to her right. Bones and dust, dimpled and ragged like sheets of rotted skin, crowd the interior. Jawless skulls tipped on their sides. Ribs like halved hoops, implying torsos far broader than her embrace. Femurs like clubs, still threading the iron straps that had once restrained them. Pelvises, rising like antlers from the detritus …

  Whale bones she finds herself thinking …

  Once, during her second year in the brothel, an Ainoni caste-noble named Mipharses had fallen in love with her—at least as much as any man could fall in love with a child-whore. He would lease her for days at a time, long enough for her to dare dream—despite the suffocating misery of his bed—of escaping the brothel and becoming a wife. Once he took her down the River Sayut on his pleasure barge, through the idyllic channels of the delta, to a cove filled with what he called Narwhales, fish that were not fish, white and ghostly beneath the lucid distortions of the surface. She had been frightened and enthralled in equal measure: the beasts periodically blasted from the surface, where they would seem to hang in an armless twist before crashing back into the window blue.

  “This is where they come to mate,” Mipharses said, pressing as much as holding her to his lap. “And die …” he added, pointing to a swale of beach beneath the overgrown shore.

  And there she saw the carcasses, some bloated and blackened like sausages, others little more than bones cast up like flotsam in a storm.

  Bones like these bones.

  “Does the Sea pitch them up after?” she had asked. She never fails to cringe when she recalls the tenderness of her look and manner during these years. She never fails to curse her mother.

  “The Sea?” Mipharses had replied, smiling the way some men are prone when sharing vicious truths with coddled women. She would never forget the way his yellow teeth contradicted the ludicrous perfection of his oiled and pleated beard. “No. They swim here to die … Beasts can sense their ending, little dear. That is what makes them nobler than Men.”

  And looking at him she had agreed. Far nobler.

  She hears the Wizard’s boots scuff the floor behind her.

  “What is this place?” he calls with a kind of querulous wonder.

  A tingling horror stops her reply.

  “These bones …” he continues. “Other than the skulls, they aren’t … human.”

  The very air sparks. It seems that she sways, even though she stands as rigid as a shriving pole.

  “Yes,” she hears herself say. “They are …”

  As human as the Dûnyain could be.

  In the war of light and shadow that is her periphery, she glimpses the old Wizard gazing at her in numb alarm.

  She turns her back to him, cradles her abdomen in her hands.

  The Eye opens …

  A dizzying moment. Vision wars against vision, one world crisp with edge and grit, the other milky with warring angles, the budding of things long hidden …

  And she sees it, Judgment, implacable and absolute, bleeding like dye through the sack-cloth of the mundane. She sees it, the world become a jurist’s scroll, and she cannot but read …

  Damnation.

  The shattered sword near the entrance: she sees the progression of hands that once clasped the pommel, the parting flesh
, the plunging point, the mewling screams of its soulless victims, the glittering perfection of the lines it once sketched through pockets of subterranean gloom.

  An invisible palm presses her cheek, forces her gaze across what she does not want to see …

  The torment of the Whale-mothers.

  Between women and men, women possess the lesser soul. Whenever the Eye opens, she glimpses the fact of this, the demand that women yield to the requirements of men, so long as those demands be righteous. To bear sons. To lower her gaze. To provide succor. The place of the woman is to give. So it has always been, since Omrain first climbed nude from the dust and bathed in the wind. Since Esmenet made herself a crutch for stern Angeshraël.

  But the horror the Eye reveals before her …

  The insect obscenity of their innocent forms. Bulbous, their flesh little more than quivering cages. Women bred into monstrous instruments of procreation, until they had become little more than pouches slung about their wombs.

  The misery. The huffing and moaning. The mewling screams. The inhuman men filing to their assignations, utterly heartless and insensate. The slapping of hip and genitalia. The animality of coupling stripped to its essential germ, to the milking pitch of insemination …

  Sadism without desire. Cruelty—unimaginable cruelty—absent the least will to inflict suffering.

  An evil that only the Inchoroi could surpass.

  And when her gaze flinches, she sees that this crime is no aberration, but rather an inevitable and extreme implication of what rules the whole. Everywhere she looks she sees it with heart-scratching clarity, rising like bruises beneath the world’s tender skin. Craft. Cunning. The devious pitch of intellect, domineering, devoid of compassion or humility …

  And the will—the blasphemous will most of all. The deranged hunger to become God.

  She begins trembling. “Akka …” she hears herself gasp. “You-y-you …” She trails to recover her voice and her spit. Tears flood her cheeks.

  “You were right.”

  Even as she says this a part of her balks—the part that knows how desperately he has yearned to hear these words …

  The Holy cares nothing for the designs of Men. And their appetites, it denies outright. The Holy, at all turns, demand the sacrifice of mortal projects, the carrying of burdens that slow, even kill. The Holy was the path of detours, even dead ends. The road that punished for following.

  “What are you saying?” the old Wizard croaks.

  She blinks, then blinks again, but the Eye refuses to close. She sees rolling heads, masticating mouths. The Whale-mothers, tongueless and screaming … The lean men arched like shitting dogs.

  She sees the unspeakable evil that is the Shortest Path.

  “This place … The Dûnyain … Th-they … They are evil …”

  She turns to him, glimpses the horror rising behind his charred face.

  “You-you …” he begins in a thin voice. “You see this wi—?”

  A roaring crashes through her, a thunder beyond the reach of her ears. Her edges blacken, pursue her inward. Sensation shrinks … then blooms in proportions titanic and absurd. Suddenly she sees Him, her stepfather, Anasûrimbor Kellhus I, the Holy Aspect-Emperor, high on his throne, wreathed in darkness and fury, a malignant cancer cast across the far corners of the world …

  Doom incarnate.

  Suddenly she sees the Truth of the old Wizard’s terror. A Dûnyain ruled the World—a Dûnyain!

  She reels as if struck, so sudden, so absolute is the inversion of her understanding. Her Sheära corselet, which has always amazed her for its arcane weightlessness, suddenly drags as iron upon her shoulders.

  For so long Momemn has been the luminous summit, the hub that ferried light to the more shadowy extremities of the Empire. Despite her hatred, it has always seemed both the source and the rule—for it is ever the want of the heart to make home its measure of measures. But now it pulsed with dread implication, glutinous with foul blackness, a leprous counterpoint to Golgotterath, another stain blotting the world’s mapped places.

  “My mother!” she cries, seeing her flicker like a candle flame beneath the rising night. “Akka! We have to find her! Warn her!”

  The old Wizard stands gaping, astounded—as well as blasted with the wages of his damnation in the Eye. Everywhere, all around them, torment and perdition, radiating like stones kicked from the Fire. Has the entire world been consigned to Hell?

  She tries to blink away the Eye—to no avail. She finds herself fumbling with her own urgency, so long has it been since anything abstract has pierced the Qirri’s numbing swaddle.

  The Wizard was right. The very World … The World already hangs from the gibbet …

  One final swing and its neck is broken.

  “Wha-what?” the damned soul before her stammers. “What are you saying?”

  Then the Eye closes, and the judgment of things is rinsed into the outlines of vision, into nonexistence. The facts of Drusas Achamian blot the value, and she sees him bewildered, bent with age, cracked by a life of sorcerous insurrection. He holds her by the shoulders, close despite the proximity of her Chorae to his breast. Tears glaze his rutted cheeks.

  “The Eye …” she gasps.

  “Yes? Yes?”

  Then she glimpses it over his frayed shoulder.

  A shadow flitting between stacked debris. Pale. Small.

  A Sranc?

  She hisses in alarm. The old Wizard looks about frowning, his eyebrows pulled into a shaggy stoop above his gaze.

  “There …” she whispers, pointing toward a slot between the bone-laden sarcophagi.

  The old Wizard peers into the anxious gloom. With a flourish of his fingers he throws his Surillic Point into the chamber’s deeper regions. She leans against the vertigo of sweeping shadows.

  They both glimpse the figure, their hearts pounding to the same terror. They see the eyes glitter, the face squint with blank wonder.

  Not a Sranc.

  A boy … A boy with his head shaved in mockery of Nil’giccas.

  “Hiera?” he calls, as if utterly unperturbed by his discovery. “Slaus ta heira’as?”

  It torqued the old Wizard’s ears, so long had it been since he last heard the tongue outside his Dreams.

  “Where?” the boy had asked. “Where is your lantern?”

  Achamian even recognized the peculiar intonation—though from twenty, as opposed to two thousand, years past. The child spoke Kûniüric … but not in the ancient way, the way Anasûrimbor Kellhus had spoken it so long ago.

  The child was Dûnyain.

  Achamian swallowed. “C-come out,” he called, straining to speak about the bolt of horror and confusion in his throat. “You have nothing to fear from us.”

  The child stood from his feckless crouch, stepped from behind the sarcophagus that obscured him. He wore a man’s woolen tunic, the grey fabric belted and cinched to fit. He was slender, and from the look of him, tall beyond his years. He gazed avidly at the Surillic Point above, held out his hands as though testing the light for raindrops. Three fingers had been lopped from his right hand, making a crab’s claw of his thumb and forefinger.

  He turned to appraise the two interlopers.

  “You speak our tongue,” he said mildly.

  Achamian stood rigid, unblinking.

  “No, child. You speak my tongue.”

  Sit. This is the imperative of old men when the World besieges them. Retire from the confusion, consider it in dribs and drabs rather than grapple with it whole. Sit. Recover your wind while pondering.

  Mimara had found his dread answer. In the space of heartbeats she had confirmed a lifetime of fears. But witless incomprehension seemed the most he could summon by way of reply. Stammering indecision where horror and dismay should have ruled.

  This boy represented a different kind of confirmation—and conundrum.

  So while Mimara remained rooted to where she stood, Achamian took a seat on a block of ruin, a perch that set hi
s face a hand’s span below that of the standing child.

  “You are Dûnyain?”

  The boy seemed to search his gaze. “Yes.”

  “How many of you remain?”

  “Just me and one other. The Survivor.”

  “And where is he?”

  “Somewhere in the Halls beneath us.”

  The floor now tingled beneath the old Wizard’s boots.

  “Tell me … What happened here?”

  Achamian asked this even though he knew what had happened here, even though he could reconstruct its stages in his soul’s eye. But for the nonce he was old and he was terrified, and there was courage in the asking of questions—or at least the semblance of it.

  “The Shriekers came,” the boy replied, his manner mild unto blank. “I was too young to remember … much …”

  “So how do you know?”

  “The Survivor told me.”

  The old Wizard pursed his lips. “Tell us what he told you.”

  There is always a dare in the eye of bold children, an arrogance that comes with lacking the weakness of more worried elders. The crab-handed boy’s fearlessness, however, was devoid of demonstration.

  “They came and they came, until the whole valley seethed. The Shriekers threw themselves at our walls, and the slaughter was great. We heaped their corpses to the battlements. We threw them back!”

  Mimara watched from his periphery, not comprehending, but from the keen cast of her gaze, understanding all the same. So little separates tales of woe.

  “Then the Singers came,” the boy continued, “walking across empty air, shouting in voices that made lanterns of their mouths. They pulled down the walls and the bastions, and the surviving brethren withdrew into the Thousand Thousand Halls … They could not contend with the Singers.”

  The “Shriekers” were obviously Sranc. The “Singers,” Achamian realized, had to be Nonmen Quya, Erratics who had turned to the Consult in the pursuit of murder and memory. He could see the battle unfold as the boy spoke: mad Quya, screaming light and fury as they walked over the high pines, endless mobs of Sranc surging below. It seemed mad and strange and tragic, that such a war could be waged so far from the knowledge of Men. It did not seem possible that so many unknown souls could die unknown deaths.