The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  “I …” he said helplessly. His face?

  Oinaral either nodded or simply lowered the white oval of his chin. “Touching your face has not occurred to you because It does not want you to. The Union happens faster when the Donning Soul remains ignora—”

  “It?” Sorweel interrupted on welling panic. “It … doesn’t want me to?”

  “Touch your face, Son of Harweel.”

  Had they all gone mad in his absence?

  “What has happened here, Cousin?” he cried. “What has become of the Holy Kinnings? How can you speak of these things without shame?”

  “I will explain everything …” Oinaral said, smiling reassurance. “You need only touch your face.”

  Sorweel at last raised his hands, frowning, perplexed …

  And found his face missing.

  Not missing … replaced.

  A stunned heartbeat. His fingertips recognized the silken polish of nimil, which always seemed warmer than the air. He swept frantic hands across curves and swales of metal, all of it stamped in intricate symbols …

  A faceless helm of some kind?

  Mammalian panic. Suffocation. He seized the thing, wrenched at it in futility. It seemed continuous with his skull!

  “Get it off!” Sorweel cried to the watching ghoul. “Get it! Off!”

  “Calm,” Oinaral said with what seemed the supreme assurance. The graven walls bobbed about him.

  “Get it off!”

  With one hand, he wrenched a fistful of nimil-mail from Oinaral’s breast, while the panicked other skittered across the helm, thumbing every crease, every crevice, searching for some kind of seam or latch or strap—something!

  “Take it off now!” he cried. “Honour your Embrace!”

  Oinaral clasped his wrist, held his hand fixed between them.

  “Calm,” he repeated. “Recall yourself, Sorweel, Son of Harweel.”

  “I can’t breathe!”

  He began thrashing as one drowning. The Nonman grinned for effort, revealed a wetted expanse of fused teeth. Glare and grip—something irresistible lay in the combination, an inhuman resolve.

  “I will honour my Mountain’s Embrace,” he said through a grill of exertion. “None are more true than the False Men, so long as they are Intact. But if I do take the helm from you …”

  Even in his panic, the youth saw a shadow float through the ghoul’s gaze.

  “What? What?”

  “Anasûrimbor Serwa is dead.”

  Words that slapped, that cracked his knees as twigs.

  He slumped kneeling.

  And it gave way. What was real began turning about the peerings, the vignettes on the walls, and the engravings within, the childish antics, the mortal sorrows, all pulled apart, strewn as wreckage amid a life far more terrible, images of degenerate glory, epic savagery, golden horns goring the sky, all spinning into a great gyre …

  But the black-gowned Nonman had hauled him back to his feet, crying, “Walk! Walk, Son of Harweel!”

  And he was reeling down the pillared processional, glimpsing swatches of floor passing between his battered boots.

  “Jealousy and vigilance …” Oinaral said, pacing him in the gloom between great lanterns. “These will save you. Jealousy of the life that is yours, vigilance for the life that is not.”

  Sorweel pawed the ensorcelled helm once again, drawing his fingers across the intricate filigree stamped into the metal … His head was entombed, and yet he could see! It was as if he traced the surface of perfectly transparent glass, but distorted somehow, like his soul simply could not admit to seeing through, so that it seemed he reached out behind what existed, grasped what was near from about the back of distance.

  “The Sons of Trysë called it the Cauldron,” the Siqu explained. “The Sons of Ûmerau, the Embalming-Skull …”

  Sorweel lowered his hands and saw what appeared to be the terminus of the Inner Luminal ahead, some three lanterns ahead.

  “We have always called it the Amiolas,” the gaunt Nonman continued. “Many have worn it, but I fear too many years have passed since last it suckled life …”

  “It contains a soul!” the youth gasped in renewed panic.

  “A shade, a soul shriven of depth, one that slumbers until it dreams.”

  “You mean-mean … planted within someone living!”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’m possessed? My soul isn’t my own?”

  Oinaral walked three, meditative paces before replying.

  “Possession is an imprecise metaphor. One and one make one, with the Amiolas. You are no longer the soul you once were. You are something new.”

  The Horse-King staggered alongside his Siqu, groping, fending. He had to be who he was. Was he not dead otherwise? He had to be who he was! But how? How could a soul sit in judgment of itself and say, I am this, and not that? Where lay the vantage? The point prior to all pointing? How did one catch the catching hand?

  “To parlay one must understand,” the Nonman was explaining. “To understand one must be. So the Amiolas weds the soul of its wearer to the ancient shade of the Ishroi trapped within it …”

  He was not who he was!

  “This is how you speak my tongue, know my Mansion and my Race …”

  Perhaps it was the exhaustion. Perhaps it was the simple sum of his loss. Regardless, a child within kicked at his lungs, his heart. A sob welled up, a battering grief … and caught somewhere short of expression—somewhere short of the lips he could not feel. He convulsed about the absence of air.

  Suffocation. The story-braided walls curled into blackness. He was dimly aware of falling to his knees once again …

  Oinaral Lastborn was kneeling before him, darkling eyes bright with concern.

  “You must never weep, Son of Harweel. The Amiolas would sooner die than weep.”

  But … but …

  “You wear a prisonhouse upon your head, Manling, an arcane dungeon for one of the proudest, most reckless souls in the history of my Race. Immiriccas Cinialrig, the Goad, the Malcontent, great among the Injori Ishroi. He was sentenced to death by Cu’jara Cinmoi during our feud with the Vile—a sentence commuted by Nil’giccas. His was our most ruthless soul, Son of Harweel. And aside from the Inchoroi, he punished none with such cruelty as himself.”

  But the vertiginous gyre had returned, engulfing him in its dread turn. The youth looked up from the dragging blackness, saw Oinaral Lastborn drain as milk into spinning clamour.

  “I—!” Sorweel cried.

  I must—

  Harapior could not bear to gag her. She sang as his wife once sang from dishevelled pillows, contemplating love and sorrow, a voice like a breath clad in light, near enough to tickle, far enough to pretend to sleep.

  She sang to what was naked and weak.

  Anasûrimbor Serwa was too real to suffer such as him. His shadow laboured on the horizon of what she willed, toiled astounded, for he had thought her body his implement, the lever he would use to overturn her soul. But he could find no skin to break, no need to starve, no gaze to dim. He could find no strings! She was chained abject before him, yet she was nowhere to be found.

  Her words fell as a patter of acid upon his heart.

  Lilting was her heart,

  turbulent was her soul,

  moon upon silk upon waters

  She sang not to him but to what made him. She sang to the darting eye, the trembling hand, the taut lip. She beckoned to them, and they heeded her song, twisted and yawned like lazy weeds.

  Bloomed.

  he raised her as fire,

  lowered her as snow,

  lay cheek against her cheek,

  lips not quite

  touching,

  For even the stoniest of Nonman had long been broken into sand and loam.

  drawing two breaths,

  She poured her voice in pitchers, sang to what was sodden.

  exhaling one.

  She laid her hoe to his ground, and set her seed deep.
/>   CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ishuäl

  No matter the insanity, tomorrow always has a hand.

  —NILNAMESHI SAYING

  Better blind in Hell than speechless in Heaven.

  —ZARATHINIUS, A Defence of the Arcane Arts

  Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the ruins of Ishuäl

  Another dream drawn from the sheath.

  The sea rises up, chokes us into oblivion. The earth cracks, crushes our bones. The forests burn, suck the screams from our throats. Men are bred for the small, so when great things happen, transcendent things, they have naught but stupor and awe to keep them—which is to say, nothing at all. Even the will to pray fails them, and they can only gawk at the murderous immensity—gape.

  No-no-no-no-no …

  Drusus Achamian stood rapt, staring with eyes that burned for the lack of blinking. Shame had rooted him, horror without compare. He stood pinned to what he was, to treacheries committed and obligations failed. The Fields of Eleneöt reached out beneath black skies, churning with threshing limbs, the flash of bronze arms and armour. The Sohonc, who were to be their grace, their salvation, fended the hooking flight of dragons. Gnostic lights limned and parsed the heights below the pall of clouds. Wracu fell screaming from the black, disgorging geysers of shining fire. Sranc teemed and thronged, assailed the Kûniüri shield-walls, not according to their former nature, but with a new and devious cunning, sacrificing themselves with insect incomprehension, building ramps and promontories with the piling of their own carcasses, and racing over these to spear deep into the fracturing ranks of Men. Bashrag tossed bodies like so many rags.

  Everywhere he looked, disaster stung the old Wizard’s eyes. Men falling, curling about entrails. Men shrinking into howling, battling clots. Men running in panicked waves, knocked face-first to the turf, hacked and speared by the white-skinned rush behind them. Standards dragged down, gonfanons that mapped clans within tribes, tribes within nations. The Knights-Chieftain overrun. Proud Lord Amakûnir. Clever Prince Weodwa. The might and glory of the High Norsirai, the arrogant panoply, everywhere broken, everywhere collapsing, fleeing.

  And roping fat and black across the horizon, roaring, the Whirlwind …

  Mog-Pharau. Tsuramah.

  Speaking, roaring through a thousand thousand throats, innumerable screams bound to a singular will, a chorus all the more obscene for its inexplicability.

  TELL ME …

  A sob kicked its way between the High-King’s teeth. It was happening …

  WHAT DO YOU SEE?

  Exactly as Seswatha had said.

  Anasûrimbor Celmomas II, the White-Lord of Trysë, the Last High-King of Kûniüri, staggered as though struck by some great blow.

  Achamian fell to his knees …

  WHAT AM I?

  Through the din, he could hear the consternation behind him, the cries of incredulity, the calls to withdraw, abscond with their High-King. “The fields are lost!” a voice bellowed from behind him. “Lost! All is lost!” Someone seized his shoulder, tried to haul him back, away from his dread wages. He threw off the hand, ran toward the massacre instead …

  There was nothing to do but die.

  His had always been a heroic soul. Many times had he rushed ahead of his royal household, to buttress some failing point in the lines, to shatter a wavering foe.

  But this was no act of heroism.

  The flurries of Men running toward him could not be rallied, so profound was their panic. They were but the human crest of an inhuman wave, an onrush of innumerable, fish-skinned beasts, their faces crushed into expressions of exaltation and fury. The first of his kinsmen flew past the High-King bereft of shield or weapons, tearing at the harnesses of their scale hauberks. The runners behind them vanished beneath the hacking onslaught.

  Still sprinting, Anasûrimbor Celmomas cast his first javelin into the vicious flood, loosed his great, ensorcelled blade, Glimir, and leapt into the slavering rush alone …

  Where he delivered scything death, his famed blade’s edge not so much hewing as passing through, parting flesh and lacquered hides as if they were smoke. Again and again he shouted his beloved son’s name. Again and again he threw his heartbreak into Glimir’s great swing. The Sranc fell as his harvest, collapsed into slop and twitching portions. The ground wheezed and twitched about him. And for a moment, it seemed he had stemmed the inhuman rush, that he had rallied Fate, if not his men. Sranc skidding, falling, flying apart like rotted fruit. The Last High-King grinned for the simplicity, for the purity and the futility.

  This was how he died. This! This! A pious Son of Gilgaöl to the last …

  It happened, as it always happened, too fast to be truly perceived. The glimpse of the Sranc chieftain vaulting from the backs of the fallen, over Glimir’s fatal arc, knees rising as its hammer descended …

  The helm was struck from his head. Anasûrimbor Celmomas dropped back into harems of dead, not so much senseless as heartbeats behind his awareness. He watched, with eyes hooked to the edge of oblivion, as lines of burning lights caught the Sranc chieftain’s second blow, transformed the beast into a wagging, squealing shadow. The High-King heard the mutter of Gnostic sorceries, and the resounding “Life and light!” war-cry of the Knights of Trysë …

  And the Whirlwind.

  WHAT …

  The play of line and blur, the shadows of Men, incandescences blooming out of the deep …

  AM …

  Hands hooking his armpits, and the sense of rising buoyant above the grit and intricacy.

  I …

  The taste of blood and char on his own lips.

  Seswatha’s face bounced across the sky’s corners, grave with horror, drawn with exertion.

  He was being drawn to safety—he knew as much, and he mourned.

  “Leave me,” Achamian gasped, and though his eyes peered up at his old friend, they somehow saw around and behind him.

  “No,” Seswatha replied. “If you die, Celmomas, everything is lost.”

  How strange it all looked, the last moments of the World. So trivial—so small … Even his friend, the famed Grandmaster of the Sohonc, his snub nose at odds with his long jaw, his beard adolescent-thin, hermit-white. He seemed an imposter, a Bardic fool, dressed to mock the might and gravity of his patrons …

  TELL ME.

  The peal of faraway horns scored the thunder of the Whirlwind.

  Celmomas smiled blood. “Do you see the sun? Do you see it flare, Seswatha?”

  “The sun sets,” the Grandmaster replied.

  “Yes! Yes. The darkness of the No-God is not all-encompassing. The Gods see us yet, dear friend. They are distant, but I can hear them galloping across the skies. I can hear them cry out to me. You cannot die, Celmomas! You must not die!”

  And Achamian heard the words without hearing, the breath-warble of unvoiced words.

  Brave King …

  “They call to me. They say that my end is not the world’s end. That burden, they say, is yours. Yours, Seswatha.”

  “No,” the Grandmaster whispered.

  And the crack in the heavens opened, the clouds blown down and away like smoke from an incense-bowl. Light showered the ground, whitening, gleaming, rimming the edges of the surrounding tumult.

  Light showered through …

  “The sun! Can you see the sun? Feel it upon your cheek? Such revelations are hidden in such simple things. I see! I see so clearly what a bitter, stubborn fool I have been …”

  For there it was, as obvious as vision, the catalogue of his folly, the thousand scorned insights, the revelations condemned as delusion. Celmomas reached through it, clutched the shadow of the Grandmaster’s hand.

  “And to you, you most of all, have I been unjust. Can you forgive an old man? Can you forgive a foolish old man?”

  Seswatha lowered his forehead to his royal rings, kissed his numb fingertips.

  “There’s nothing to forgive, Celmomas. You’ve lost much, suffered
much.”

  Tears spliced an illuminated world.

  “My son … Do you think he’ll be there, Seswatha? Do you think he’ll greet me as his father?”

  “Yes …” Seswatha replied roughly. “As his father, and as his king.”

  And there was such comfort in this lie, a swooning relief, a swell of ferocious, paternal pride. “Did I ever tell you,” Achamian said, “that my son once stole into the deepest pits of Golgotterath?”

  “Yes,” the Sohonc Grandmaster replied blinking. “Many times, old friend.”

  “How I miss him, Seswatha!” Achamian cried, his eyes hooking back, rolling. “How I yearn to stand at his side once again.”

  A silhouette resolved from the high-hanging brilliance … a figure, riding in majesty and divine glory.

  “I see him so clearly,” the High-King gasped. “He’s taken the sun as his charger, and he rides among us. I see him! Galloping through the hearts of my people, stirring them to wonder and fury!”

  Gilgaöl, War, come to claim him … Come to save, despite everything.

  “Shush … Conserve your strength, my King. The surgeons are coming.”

  The vision’s eyes were fury, his hair the tangle of warring nations, and his teeth were as whetted blades. A crown gleamed above his brow, four golden horns, clutched in the arms of four nubile virgins—the Spoils. Bones and bodies clotted the ravines of his grim expression. And his cloak smoked with the burning of fields.

  Gilgaöl, the Dread Father of Death, the All-Taker.

  Brave, broken King …

  He did not so much fly toward the High King as grow, bigger and bigger, bloating until he blotted the Whirlwind, crowded the very sky. Fire sheathed and pulsed across his four horns, streams that plummeted in skyward oblivion. He opened his hands, and lo! Another stood within the curved palms, another man, bright as a ceremonial knife. A Norsirai, though his beard was squared and plaited in the fashion of Shir and Kyraneas. His dress was strange, and his arms and armour bore the glint of Nonmen metals. Two decapitated heads swung from his girdle …