The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  After apprehending the Unreality in her mother, Serwa began glimpsing it in other souls as well—all souls, in fact. Slaves or potentates, it did not matter. Soon everyone had become a motley of loose things, scraps bound in uncertainties, like the rag bundles that beggars scrounged and bartered for drink. Mimara most of all. Moënghus certainly. Thelli. Even Kayûtas when he was taxed. Their words, their resolutions, their hatreds and their loyalties, were all things she could draw out as she pleased, scrutinize, knot to some other scrap or throw away.

  Soon the Unreality had come to possess everything and everyone … except, of course, Inrilatas (who had never been real in the first place). And Father.

  In all the World only Father was real.

  The episode with Mother had occurred while he was away campaigning in Ce Tydonn, but he would see it instantly upon his return two months later. “Ho, now, little Witch,” he had said, bidding her to leap into his arms. “How is it you’ve grown so much taller than your brothers?”

  “But I have Mother’s bones!” she had protested.

  “No, Serwa. You do not.”

  And so she learned that hers was a greater eye watching from a mightier angle. She could see around the things that outran the limits of lesser souls. And to see a thing was to possess power over it—this was the truth behind the Unreality. The World was Real only to the degree it resisted Desire, and she, like her Dûnyain father, could crush the resistance of the Real. More importantly, she desired what she willed—and nothing more.

  “You have outgrown the Andiamine Heights, little Witch.”

  “But where can I go?”

  “To Orovelai, so that you might outgrow the Swayali as well.”

  “And then, Papa?”

  “Then you will find your own place, dwell where none can touch you.”

  “Where?”

  “Why, here,” Father said, grinning—for her benefit she now knew. He had placed the pad of his index finger between her brows—to this very day she could feel the boring pressure of that touch. “Only for Real.”

  So it was the ghouls looked and looked and could not find her.

  So it was that she sang to them in the murk—mundane songs, for the Agonic clasped about her throat, but no less sorcerous in effect. Songs conceived in Nonman souls, spoken in Nonman tongues, recalling Nonman sins, Nonman losses. The more monstrous the indignity, the more frantic, the more gentle, the more loving her song.

  And it appalled as much as terrified her tormentors, the fact that a mere mortal, a frail daughter of Man, could so transcend their age-old cunning and art.

  That she could forgive them their crimes, let alone their ancient hatred of Men.

  Sorweel had lost the numbers of the days.

  There had been much screaming and animal terror at first, passages through tunnels, tunnels upon tunnels, some slung through ruin, some utterly black, and leering, ghoulish faces, a carnival of anguished passion. He remembered dreaming of suffocation.

  How long had it been? Watches? Months?

  Then, abruptly, something like wakefulness came to him—something almost conscious.

  Eerie, singsong incantations mobbed the air, palpable for their chill. Murk blotted the indeterminate spaces, hollows fatted only by the echo of shouts and anguish. Breathing was difficult. Something … iron, had been strapped about his cheeks. His arms had been bound behind his back, each wrist to each elbow, tight enough for his shoulders to ache. He could hear Serwa singing… Somewhere. Posts perhaps a span taller than a man populated the dark, each black with the gloss of obsidian. Lintels joined them, forming a grid of empty squares across the void above, and making thresholds of every other step taken across the cracked floors. All the space he could see had been carved into ritual crossings, creating a chamber that was always entered, always exited … and as he would find out afterward, never truly occupied.

  “The Niom has been betrayed,” a voice accused from nowhere.

  The Thresholds, the ghouls called it, a place that was no place, where the Nonmen of Ishterebinth sought to conceal their most appalling crimes from the Hundred …

  The youth had not the least inkling how he knew this.

  “You are no enemy of the Aspect-Emperor.”

  A Sranc face hung against the blackness immediately before him, watching with glistening intensity. The white lips opened, and he glimpsed the merest gleam of fused Sranc teeth before light dazzled him. The watching eyes became incisions upon the sun. A third strand of sorcerous singing seized Sorweel’s ears from the inside.

  “You love his Issue,” his accuser continued. The Asker, as he would come to call him. “You yearn for the Witch, Anasûrimbor Serwa.”

  He was taller than the rest, gracile as a woman, save that his hips were narrow and his shoulders were broad. He alone stood as was proper (though why Sorweel should know as much escaped him), hands clasped in the small of his back. He alone was Ishroi.

  I hate them, the youth replied, somehow, for he had no awareness of breath or lips.

  He could hear Moënghus weeping … Somewhere near. He heard only what he was meant to hear, he realized.

  “And yet you fear for them.”

  Yes …

  And there was bliss, answering as he did. For the first time he could remember, he felt unfettered—free! The Sranc regarded him, and for all the wonder of its light, Sorweel had never known anything so reasonable. What it wanted to take was simply identical to what he needed to give—what could be more reasonable?

  “Because you love them?”

  No.

  “Then why?”

  Because the Dread Mother has cursed them.

  There were pauses like this, when the Asker fell silent, and the Sranc-faced Singer simply watched, its eyes shining like sunlight.

  “The one Men call Yatwer?”

  Take care, he chastised the ghoul, puzzled that he could speak something so dire whilst so profoundly at ease. She does not count you among Her children.

  The Sranc Singer turned momentarily to the Asker, then swivelled back to him. Its neck was human, and obscene for it.

  “The Dread Mother speaks to you?”

  As I speak to myself.

  The Asker’s face appeared above the Singer’s shoulder. What looked like tears brimmed from its black eyes, spilled upon a single blink, and it seemed more wickedness, that such beasts should weep.

  “And what does She say?”

  The sorcerous voice swelled upon a wailing phrase; Sorweel suffered a torsion of the eyes, as if a second, peering soul saw what he saw falling. The voice that answered had the sound of bare feet scuffing, old women wheezing …

  That you are False.

  The two white faces leaned closer.

  “And the Aspect-Emperor … What does she say of him?”

  That She hath poured for him two portions—a soul filled, and a soul anointed.

  There was as much curiosity as horror in the Asker’s aquiline face.

  Oinaral … the youth somehow remembered or realized or … he was not quite sure. He knew only that his interrogator was named Oinaral …

  That he recognized him.

  “And you … Are you Filled or Annointed?”

  I am the one Anointed.

  “Anointed to kill the Aspect-Emperor?”

  And something rebelled within him. A sudden reluctance cramped his shining will.

  The Sranc face wailed about a bolus of light, as if labouring to pry away the obstruction, but it was immovable, immune.

  An opening leaned before him, obscured all that was dark and dying. And he saw her, his beloved mother sitting at the westward window of the Lookery, lost in some faraway thought. The dusk made a scarlet plate of the Plain beyond her, burnishing the very earth the Great Ordeal would pock with latrines years later.

  Sorweel stood arrested on the threshold. Her distance belonged to one of those adult reveries that children are apt to ignore, but her kerchief lay slack in her hand across her skirted lap,
the one she used to catch her coughing, the one she always kept bundled in an angular fist. It almost seemed sinful, seeing the linen of its pinched knees pried apart. He glimpsed what he thought were rose petals.

  She started at the sight of him. The kerchief vanished beneath clenched hands. He met the terror in her gaze, matched it, understanding at that instant the truth of the rose petals.

  Her horror melted into concern, then beamed into adoring reassurance—mothers sacrifice nothing so much as their sorrow and fear. Her hands wrung the kerchief into a horseshoe.

  “Tell the abomination …” she croaked through bulbous earth. “To give what has been given.”

  Words he did not remember.

  He blinked between worlds. The Sranc face toiled now, twisted about unheard exhortations, brilliant exhalations.

  “Tell us!” the Asker bawled.

  For the first time Sorweel saw the inconsistency between what it mouthed and what he heard.

  Serwa was singing something soft, reassuring … Somewhere.

  “You need not Compel me,” the young King of Sakarpus gasped. “The Niom has been observed.”

  “I am Harapior,” the Nonman had said.

  Serwa knew him, both from the High Floor beneath the Soggomantic Gate and from her Dreams. All had heard of the Lord Torturer in Seswatha’s day.

  “They said I would be among the first to Succumb …” he continued, “back when this Age was young. They thought what was horror for them was horror for all. They could not see how honour, the pride that throws souls upon the anvil, was what fed the Dolour.” The shadow had laughed in whispers. “Their honour had blinded them.”

  He had dragged her face up by the maul of her hair.

  “So they dwindle, mortal whore, and … I … remain …”

  He grasped her jaw in a hot hand. He did not think she could see him, such was the gloom. He thought he terrorized her, an entity in the black … a malice in the deep.

  He did not understand her Father.

  He crouched, brought his lips to hers, close enough that she could feel their inhuman heat. He cooed into her mouth as if it were an ear—or the entrance to the place where she lay hidden.

  “I remain, child … Now we shall see what song you sing for me.”

  Cries filtered through the honeycombed dark, myriad and deep, choruses cracked into countless strands of lament, rising raw with outrage and incredulity, fading hoarse into misery and exhaustion. Souls most ancient … reliving … and reliving … forever caught upon the shoals that had wrecked them.

  Ishterebinth, Sorweel realized in dim, rolling horror. Ishterebinth had them.

  They were lost among the Lost.

  Four ghouls bore him through the riddled deep, two holding the pole to which his arms were bound, and two walking before. They loomed as cruel and evasive shadows for the most part, smoke to the glimpse, stone to the touch. Their pace remained constant whether he lurched with them or hung limp, his booted toes scrawling across the floors. Lights rose like beads on a string from the linear gloom—peerings, he realized, the sorcerous lanterns of the Nonmen. Halls and galleries, all squeezing his breast for the inkling of monstrous depth. Graven images rebuked his every bobbing glance, pageant upon dead pageant, figures stiff with ancient manner, faces leering and passionless.

  Something was amiss. His legs seemed incidental, things too slick to be held fast. His eyes no longer blinked. He spent what seemed the better part of a watch trying to determine if he even breathed.

  Did he breathe?

  There was much that he seemed to know, even though he could not reason without spinning into confusion. He knew the sun had finally set upon the Nonmen as Serwa had feared, that they had outlived their allotment of sanity. He knew they had cast their lots against the House of Anasûrimbor …

  That they tortured Serwa and Moënghus in the deep.

  A great and broken voice welled from the blackness of a portal passing to his right.

  “W-wake … Please wake up!”

  They turned down an enormous processional, a pillared gallery that was an underworld road. For the first time he realized the utter absence of scent. A portal loomed before them, a monumental gate framed by a graven bestiary. A guard stood at the foot of the nearest column. He was draped in an elaborate gown of nimil chain like all the others, motionless save for his head, which he rolled with his chin against his breast, muttering. The ensconced lights bobbed across his scalp.

  “How, my love … How could you think that a flower could …could …”

  They passed through the murk of a narrow, defensive passageway. The shadow of the mountain fell away, and they found themselves on a balcony wrought from black iron, set on the waist of an enormous, globular hollow, a chamber great enough to house the Blackwall Citadel entire.

  He stood upon the Oratorium, he realized, in the legendary audience chamber called the Concavity, the bastion that Nil’giccas had raised against madness and forgetting. A dozen peerings flared from points about the interior equator, anchoring ethereal and overlapping spheres of illumination. The iron platform hung over the curved plummet, as long and broad as a warship’s deck. Dozens of Ishroi watched his entrance from points across its grilled expanse, pale and hairless as marble, nude beneath gowns of resplendent nimil chain. But the approach of the Exalted Bark, the famed floating dais of the Nonman King, had seized the youth’s dazzled attention.

  As he watched, it levitated across the vacant heart of the Concavity, rotating as though on a gentle breeze. It was about the size of a river scow, a gilded counterpart to the Oratorium platform. The sacred Aeviternal Seal, the Shield-of-the-Mountain, bisected it, a great coin fraught with icon and imagery rising about the Black Iron Seat, the legendary throne of Ishterebinth.

  The Exalted Bark descended as if turning upon an ethereal screw, revealing the figure ensconced within the eruption of horns and quills comprising the Black Iron Seat. The young king of the Lonely City set eyes upon Nil’giccas, the Great King-upon-the-Summit, gowned in scales of gold, dripping as if pulled from some pool, and regarding him with marmoreal inscrutability.

  The youth returned his scrutiny, numbed by a dawning realization …

  The Bark slowed as it closed the interval between it and the Oratorium. The sound of hidden linkages scraped the air. The grilled floor shuddered beneath his feet.

  The ghoul upon the Black Seat … Somehow he knew it was not Nil’giccas.

  But how could that be when they were entirely indistinguishable from one another—or Sranc for that matter?

  The Ishroi surrounding him and his keepers crouched in unison, pressed their faces against their knees. Left to stand on his own, Sorweel wobbled, found that he also recognized many of the illustrious court about him. The radiant Cilcûliccas, named the Lord of Swans for his preposterous luck. The crimson armoured Sûjara-nin, the Farthrown, a Dispossessed Son of Siöl. Cu’mimiral Dragon-gored, who was called Lord Limper …

  How? How could he know souls—inhuman souls—he had never seen before?

  He turned to peer at the Nonman King, who now stood before the Seal-and-Seat, doused and gold-gleaming before all … and found that he knew him as well.

  Nin’ciljiras, Son of Ninar, Son of Nin’janjin.

  How could he know this Nonman at all?

  Let alone hate him.

  “We are the dwindling light …” the Nonman King called in ritual invocation. “The darkling soul …”

  Unnerved by the passions Nin’ciljiras provoked, Sorweel cast his look to the text and imagery hewn from the Concavity’s walls … and was stunned. He could read the text … recognize the images …

  “Walkers of the Ways Beneath.”

  Nin’ciljiras turned to a black basin set upon a pedestal just to the right of the Black Iron Seat. He raised a bowl that trailed threads too viscous to be water. Facing the crouched assembly, he doused himself in shining oil. The liquid pulsed in a sheet across his face, cracking into rivulets about the seams of his
golden hauberk.

  “Beseechers of Wisdom.”

  For the first time Sorweel noticed the naked little Emwama child at the foot of the lunatic throne, gazing out with the same too-wide eyes that had repulsed the youth at the Gates of Ishterebinth, cringing beneath the wicked profusion of iron spines.

  “Haters of Heaven …”

  His voice hung but for a heartbeat, then the congregated Ishroi spake,

  “SONS OF FIRST MORNING …”

  in reverberating unison.

  “ORPHANS OF LAST LIGHT.”

  The Nonman King made an absent gesture, then, trailing a skirt of droplets, returned to the Black Iron Seat, where he became surreal for the contrast. The ghouls who had born Sorweel through the Mountain now hoisted him upright, dragged him beneath the gold-glistening aspect. The Emwama child retreated like an oft-struck cat, crouched shivering no more than a length away.

  The Nonman King gazed upon him with what seemed bewildered contempt. A ghoul dressed in a welter of black silks knelt to the right of the Seat, began whispering into his ear. It was Harapior, the youth realized in dismay, his necklace of human scalps bunched as feathers about his cheeks. Listening to him, Nin’ciljiras raised his gaze to the similarly dressed ghoul standing on Sorweel’s immediate right: the Asker, his interrogator from the Thresholds …

  Oinaral Lastborn.

  “The Assay has been completed?” Nin’ciljiras asked Oinaral in a brass voice.

  The Nonman lowered his face. “The Niom has been honoured, Tsonos. The manling has sworn to murder the Aspect-Emperor.”

  The King’s gleaming brow furrowed.

  “Harapior says he is more. More than an Enemy.”

  A pause that seemed to lean against all hearts.

  “Yes … One of the Hundred acts through him.”

  This loosed a susurrus of exclamation among the gathered Ishroi.

  The Nonman King affected indifference, turned to ladle more oil upon his scalp. “The Fertility Principle,” he said tilting his profile to strings of pulsing translucence.

  “Yes, ” Oinaral replied. “The one the Tusk names Yatwer.”