The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  Behold the son of a hundred fathers …

  Behold the end of the World …

  “He says … says such sweet things to give me comfort. He says that one of my seed will return, Seswatha—an Anasûrimbor will return …”

  A cough that was a convulsion wracked the High-King and the old Wizard could feel clotted things float loose within. Blood foamed against the back of his throat. He pulled his next breath as through a burning reed. Then the darkness at last came out of hiding, spilled from all quarters into his life and vision.

  “At the end of th—”

  Drusas Achamian awoke screaming.

  Drusas Achamian is tender. As much as Mimara loves him for this, she recoils whenever he awakes crying out. Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to the pinch of fire and coals, insensible to burning things.

  “I saw so—” he begins, only to be throttled by waking phlegm. He gazes at her with idiot need.

  She looks away, expressionless. She knows the cruelty of his Dreams—as well as anyone who’s not a Mandate Schoolman, she knows. Even still she cannot bring herself to ask after the matter, let alone comfort him.

  A part of her has forgotten how. The judging portion.

  So she gazes across the mountain slopes as he collects himself, staring with sham curiosity at the high-climbing flanges of stone. The Dûnyain watch from perches in the nearby ruin, two faces in her periphery, unnerving for their blank vigilance.

  She finally believes what Achamian has always insisted. She knows they see the souls behind human expression the way architects see behind the facades of great buildings. She knows that they see her hatred, her murderous intent—she knows that every word she speaks brings them infinitesimally closer to mastering her …

  She does not care, let alone worry. What was cunning was wicked also: they could do naught but bare their souls to the Judging Eye. And even if the Eye failed, she had swooned for the evil visited upon the Whale Mothers. There could be no undoing the foul umbrage stamped into her heart. If she could not see, she would hate.

  The question was Achamian. What would that blank vigilance make of him? Had his heart been likewise hardened?

  Or had the long toll finally emptied his purses?

  Am I too harsh with him, little one?

  The eastern sky is a luminous silver plate behind the mountains, but the world in the interval remains gloomy and cool. The old Wizard sits for a time, his head slung from his shoulders, his hair a ragged curtain about his lap. He snuffles from time to time—evidence of weeping. As much as it shames her, some inner miscreant scoffs. Never has it taken so long for him to recover.

  She waits, trying to smooth the irritation and impatience from her expression. Unknowingly, her hands clutch the globe of her lower belly—rest where they belong.

  How, she wonders. How can she compel him to be as hard as he has to be? As strong as she needs him to be.

  “I-I dreamed …” he finally offers in a voice strung with phlegm. He flinches as if she has thrown something sharp with her gaze, falls silent. He does not so much as glance at the Dûnyain. “I dreamed in-in the … old way,” he continues with greater resolution …” His look turns inward, becomes even more haggard, more put upon. “I had almost forgotten. The visions, the smell and sound … Everything vanishes upon awakening …” He licked his lips, gazed at the gnarled back of his left hand. This is another of his weaknesses: his need to explain his weakness. “Everything save the passions …”

  At last she replies. “You mean you dreamed of the First Apocalypse?”

  “Aye,” he said, his voice fading to a murmur.

  “You were Seswatha once again?”

  This yanked his chin upward. “No … No … I was Celmomas! I dreamed his … his Prophecy.”

  She stares at him with flat, expectant eyes.

  No. Your father isn’t mad. He just sounds that way—even to himself!

  “I know …” he begins, pausing to rub his eyes despite the filth of his fingers. “I know. I know what it is we must do …”

  “And what is that?”

  He purses his lips. “The Eye …”

  For some reason this fails to alarm her. “What about it?”

  He studies her for a careful moment, far more himself, now.

  “We must continue north, intercept the Great Ordeal …” He pauses to gather wind. “You must … You must gaze upon Kellhus with the Eye.”

  He speaks with the air of entreaty, as if convincing her to undertake yet another mad gambit. But there is finality in his voice also, a weary sense of coming, despite stubbornness and stupidity, to an obvious conclusion.

  “And for what?” she asks, her tone more clipped than she wishes. “To see what I already know?”

  He frowns about popping eyes. “Know?”

  The perversity is not lost on her. To doubt his words, his mission, for so long, then to suddenly see it with a clarity that he could never hope to attain—only to discover that she does not believe in him.

  She sighs. “That the Aspect-Emperor is evil.”

  The words hang on idylls of mountain breeze. The old Wizard fairly gapes.

  “But how could you … how could you know such a thing?”

  She turns to the Dûnyain where they sit above them, gazes in a bold manner. The two merely return her regard with a kind of absolute immobility.

  “Because he is Dûnyain.”

  She can see the old Wizard glaring in her margins, baffled and alarmed.

  “No, Mimara,” he says after what seems a long moment. “No. He was Dûnyain.”

  This sparks a surprising fury in her. Why? Why must he always—always!—give away the coin of his doubt? He would make the world rich and himself a pauper, if he could.

  She turns back to him with a kind of sly anger.

  “There’s no outrunning what they are, Akka.”

  “Mimara …” he says, as if she were her tutor. “You’re confusing acts for essences.”

  “It’s a sin to use!”

  They are truly arguing now. He parses his words with careful condescension.

  “Remember Ajencis. ‘Use’ is simply a way to read … Everybody ‘uses’ everybody, Mimara—always. You need only look with certain eyes.”

  Certain eyes.

  “You cite Ajencis?” she scoffs. “You make arguments? Old fool! You dragged us all the way out here. You! The truth of man lies in his origins, you said. And now, when I have gazed upon those origins—with the very Eye of God, no less!—you argue that they mean nothing?”

  Silence.

  “You were right about him all along!” she presses, at once upbraiding and beseeching. “You, Akka! You turned to your heart in your pain, in your outrage, and your heart spoke true!”

  The Aspect-Emperor is evil.

  “But—?”

  “Can’t you see? That room—the bones of the Whale Mothers!—that is the truth of what Kellhus has done to my mother—to your wife! He has made a tool of her womb, a bauble of her heart! What greater crime, greater monstrosity, could there be?”

  And for the first time she glimpses the deeper tracts of her own outrage, the stab and twinge of her own sins against her mother. Esmenet, undone by her own astrologer mother, ruined by the famine that forced her to sell her daughter, undone by the masculine cruelty of the Imperial Court, and ruined by her false husband most of all …

  Her false God.

  And Mimara had sought only to punish her—her only blood!

  Something—a horror—seized her breath at that moment, a sudden, cavernous accounting of all the harms she had authored. The time her mother had tried to teach her the rudiments of sowing, and Mimara had intentionally pricked her finger. How she used stories of her molestation to batter her mother with heartbreak and shame. The way she called out her mother’s fears and misapprehensions, accu
sed her of being too weak, too polluted, to aspire to the glory of her Imperial station. “Empress? Empress? You can scarce rule your face, let alone an empire!”

  The way she had laughed as her mother fled sobbing …

  You can scarce rule your face …

  She can see her mother weeping in her soul’s eye, curling about silk pillows in lieu of trust and love. Rebuffed, rebuked, shamed time and again. And alone, always alone, no matter whom she clung to …

  Only this man, Drusas Achamian, had truly loved her, truly sacrificed for her. Only he had extended the dignity that was her due, and she had been tricked into betraying him …

  Turned into another Whale Mother.

  Mimara cannot swallow, cannot breathe, so overwhelming is the sense of commission, the weight of things tragic and irrevocable. She has seen it herself with the Eye, the inexplicable vision in the Mop, so she knows that she is saved. But that knowledge has become indistinguishable from skin-scratching, hair-rending shame. She should be damned, cast into everlasting fire …

  A ship creaks on the wine-dark sea, a slaver ship …

  Mummy … the little girl sobs, listening to the shuffle of boots across the timber floors.

  “Anasûrimbor Kellhus is Dûnyain,” the woman says to the old Wizard, speaking to silence the riot that is her heart.

  Mummeeee please!

  “As much as these two.”

  Please make them stop.

  The old Wizard has seen through her anger, glimpsed the hope-cracking turmoil beneath. She can tell by his hesitation.

  “What are you saying?” he finally asks.

  Her voice shocks her, it sounds so measured and cool. “That you must kill them.”

  He knew. He knew all along that this was what she demanded. She could tell—like a Dûnyain.

  “Murder.”

  She turns to the two onlookers, knowing they could see her dark intent, and not caring in the least. She barks with laughter, a sound that earns a look of scowling alarm from the old Wizard.

  She smiles at the man, husband and father, and feels at once vicious and victorious.

  “There’s no murdering a Dûnyain.”

  They sat side-by-side on the rump of what had been the northwest tower, observing the old man and his pregnant woman arguing below. The sun glared from between eastern peaks, cool for the emptiness and the wind, climbing inexorably from the pockets of night. The spruce breathed. Rising light etched the ridge-lines and branching ravines, drawing angles steep with the contrast of encroaching shadow.

  “What do they say?” the boy asked.

  The Survivor replied without interrupting his study. Their language defeated him, yet the other, nonverbal tongues of their souls spoke with an almost painful clarity—like the Shriekers, only more complicated. The pounding hearts and wringing hands. The rictus of muscle about their eyes their lips. The frequency of blinks …

  “The woman argues our destruction.”

  The boy was unsurprised. “Because she fears us.”

  “They both fear us—the man more than the woman. But she hates us in a way the old man is not capable.”

  “She is stronger?”

  The Survivor need only look to nod. “She is stronger.”

  The implication was plain. If she were stronger, then she would carry the dispute.

  “Should we flee?” the boy asked.

  The Survivor closed his eyes, glimpsed bodies convulsing in holes—memories, not possibilities.

  “No.”

  “Should we kill them?”

  For all the complexities of this extraordinary turn, the Survivor had no need of the Probability Trance to dismiss this course of action.

  “The old man is a Singer. We are overmatched.”

  He had been among those on the battlements when the invaders had floated from the forest galleries, advanced across empty space, their mouths and eyes afire. He need not blink to see his brethren tossed from the walls, pinioned by lines of scorching white.

  “Then we should flee,” the boy concluded.

  “No.”

  Ignorance. This had been the cornerstone of the Brethren, the great rampart they had raised against what comes before. They had raised darkness against darkness, and it had proven a catastrophic miscalculation. Only so long as the World remained ignorant of them, could they remain secure against it, let alone isolate and pure.

  History. History had come in the form of inhuman legions, creatures as bound to their crazed passions as the Brethren were free. History had come as death and destruction.

  Ishuäl had fallen long before her walls had been pulled down, the Survivor knew. The Dûnyain had been destroyed long before they had sheltered in the deepest deeps of the Thousand Thousand Halls. The World had learned of them, somehow, and had counted them a mortal threat.

  The time had come to discover why.

  “Then what?”

  “We must accompany them. We must leave Ishuäl.”

  The boy lacked all but the most rudimentary instruction, such had been their straits over the years. He could track the passions of the woman and the old man easily enough, but the thoughts and significances utterly eluded him. He could scarcely attain the Divestiture, the first stage of the Probability Trance. He was Dûnyain by virtue of his blood, not his training.

  It would have to be enough.

  “Why?” the child asked.

  “We must seek my Father.”

  “But why?”

  The Survivor resumed his implacable scrutiny of the old man and his pregnant woman.

  “The Absolute has fled this place.”

  The Thousand Thousand Halls plumbed the earth to the bowel, rising high into the encircling mountains, innumerable miles of passage hewn from the living rock. For two thousand years the Dûnyain had toiled, reaching forever deeper, etching mathematical conundrums into the earth’s very fundament. They used the labour to condition the body, to teach the soul how to ponder independent of menial tasks. They used the labyrinth to sort those who would live from those who would die, and those who would work from those who would train and father. It refashioned the strong, and it buried the weak. The Thousand Thousand Halls had been their first and most cruel judge, the great sieve through which the generations spilled, collected and discarded.

  How could they know it would be their salvation?

  The Shriekers had come without the least warning. There had been anomalies the previous years, members of the Brethren sent out never to be seen, others found dead in their cells—suicides. An absence had moved among them, the shadow of contaminants not quite disposed. Their isolation had been compromised—they knew this much and nothing more. They did not trouble themselves with the implications, understanding the dead had taken their lives for purity’s sake. To interrogate the circumstances of their deaths would simply undo their sacrifice—and perhaps necessitate another. To embrace ignorance, even one so hallow as their own, was to embrace risk. A garden was not a garden absent the possibility of things going to seed.

  The Shriekers descended upon Ishuäl in violence and fury. The valley was evacuated, the gates barred, and for the first time confusion and discord ruled the Dûnyain. To dwell as they dwelt in a world groomed to its barest essentials, where the course of leaves could provoke scandal, had weakened them in ways they could never imagine. They could feel it, watching the savage cohorts stream down the mountains, their vulnerability to things wild and disordered. To live lives within the circuit of expectation, without any real comprehension of surprise, the way it breaches, throws the soul back in wincing disarray. They realized they had become something delicate in their millennial pursuit of the Unconditioned.

  Some, a few, simply walked into the swords of their enemy, such was their soul’s disorder. But the others rallied—discovered that the assaulting world was, in its way, more delicate still.

  The sun bright. The air gusting between the gaping heights. The battlements choked with motion and fury. The catwalks slicked
in blood. The slopes matted with the miscreant fallen …

  The Survivor had stepped between arrows and javelins, running down the miraculous course between flying points and edges, and he had struck the life out of hundreds. Tendons severed. Throats cut. Limbs lopped. Horns cawed low and sonorous over the screaming yammer, while he and his brothers battled in exquisite silence, striking and leaping and dipping across the heights, almost tireless, almost invulnerable, almost …

  Almost.

  The World was wild with Cause, true, but it could be overcome. How could so few exact such a toll otherwise? The ferocity of the inexplicable attack waned, then faded. The Shriekers relented, slunk howling back into the forests. And despite everything, the Survivor had thought the Dûnyain confirmed: in their discipline, in their training and their doctrine—even in their fanatical solitude …

  Then the Singers had come, shouting in voices of light and fire, and the extent of their delusion had been made clear.

  That which comes before determines that which comes after … This had been the sacred rule of rules, the all-embracing dictum, the foundation upon which the whole of their society—their flesh as much as their doctrine—had been raised.

  Demolished in the space of a heartbeat.

  The Survivor had watched, not so much stupefied as numbed. Unlike the Shriekers, who had descended the eastern glacier, the Singers had appeared out of the west, mail-armoured figures filing across empty air. Each bore a lozenge of light within their mouths—one so bright it seemed they chewed miniature suns. They sang, their voices like a waterfall boom, hanging indecipherable, the sound falling inward from all directions, as if they called from beyond the very frame of the World.

  No miracle could be more violent. Words—words had called forth death and energy from emptiness. He had watched that which comes after determine what comes before. He had witnessed the rank impossibility that the Manuscripts called sorcery, the overthrow of his every assumption. And what was more, it seemed that he could see its residue, as if its exercise stained somehow, cast shadows across the light of the mundane world.