The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

The Singers approached their hallowed bastions, their voices thundering in white unison, rising with impossible resonances, echoing across spaces and surfaces that simply did not exist. And the Brethren had stared without breath or comprehension.

  This, the Survivor would later realize. This was the moment of their destruction. The instant before the looms of glittering light had crowned Ishuäl’s heights with fire and destruction. The lull preceding … when each of the Brethren realized they had been deceived, that the compass of their lives let alone their assumption had been little more than errant fancy …

  The towers of Ishuäl burned. And they fled through the groves and gardens, withdrew into the bosom of the Thousand Thousand Halls.

  Took shelter in the very judge that had so utterly failed them.

  The Siege and Fall of Ishuäl …

  The loss: a mere place. What was this compared to the revelation that accompanied it?

  That which comes after could determine that which comes before … The impossible made manifest. The world was an arrow with one and only one direction, or so they had believed. Only the Logos, only reason and reflection could bend the world’s inexorable course. Thus the Dûnyain and their hallowed mission: to perfect the Logos, to grasp the origins of thought, bend the arrow into a perfect circle, and so attain the Absolute …

  Become a self-moving soul.

  Free.

  But the Shriekers and their Singers cared nothing for their doctrine—only for their extinction.

  “Why do they hate us?” the boy asked, not for the first time. “Why do so many wish to destroy us?”

  “Because in our deception,” the Survivor replied, “we became a truth, one too terrifying for the World to countenance …”

  For years the Brethren had battled through the Thousand Thousand Halls, entombed in blackness and butchery, living by touch and sound, disguising their scent by wearing the skins of their enemy. Killing. Slaughtering …

  “What truth?” the boy pressed.

  “That freedom is the measure of the darkness that comes before.”

  He had fallen like fangs upon them, sent them gushing to the dust. Limbs like chains tearing the seams of his unseen enemy. Hands like vindictive teeth. He stepped between their frenzied exertions, cut and cutting. Their blood was thinner than that of the Brethren, but it clotted faster. It tasted more of tin than copper.

  “They think themselves free?”

  The reek. The mewling screams. The thrashing. For years, he had battled through the bowels of the earth. The innumerable cuts as the lines he pursued had become wanton with desperation.

  “Only so long as we are dead.”

  He had been broken—the Survivor understood this.

  He had gone mad for enduring.

  The Thousand Thousand Halls had swallowed the Brethren whole, delivering them one by one to the homicidal ardour of their enemy. Every one of them had fought, using all the skill and cunning two thousand years could muster. But not one of them doubted the conclusion of their fell battle.

  The Dûnyain were doomed.

  The old and the young fell first—one miscalculation was all it took, so capricious were the margins. Some were killed outright, vanishing into rutting heaps. More died of sepsis from their wounds. A few even became lost, despite having survived the labyrinth in their youth. The cataclysmic sorceries of the Singers, in particular, threw whole galleries from their mathematical hinges. These wandered out of light and life.

  Sealed in.

  And so the Dûnyain dwindled.

  But somehow the Survivor had persevered. No matter how sopped with blood, his strength had never failed him. No matter how ruinous the destruction, he never lost his way—and more importantly, never found himself shut in. He always prevailed, always emerged, and always tended to the babe he had stolen into the depths with him.

  Feeding him. Teaching him. Hiding him. Snuffing thousands to keep him safe. He had risked speaking, lest the boy’s ears forget how to listen and comprehend. He had even dared lantern light, lest the boy’s eyes forget how to see.

  He, the one most burdened, would be the only one to survive.

  For a time the Shriekers had seemed inexhaustible, a never-ending infusion of lives both crazed and disposable. More, always more, released in numbers so tidal they became incalculable, overwhelming even the most elegant of traps: concealed pits, rigged ceilings, abyssal chasms.

  But then, as inexplicably as every other turn in the war, their numbers abated. The final dregs were abandoned altogether, left to wander howling until thirst and hunger claimed them. Fewer and fewer, until those he found simply gasped across the floors.

  The last cry had been piteous, a screech so wretched as to sound human.

  Then the Thousand Thousand Halls fell silent.

  Perfectly silent.

  The Survivor and the boy wandered the black with impunity after that. But they never dared the surface, even via those chutes they thought undiscovered. Too many had died that way. They wandered and the boy grew, hale despite his underworld pallor.

  Only when the last of their stores failed them did they dare the long climb to the surface. They abandoned their underworld temple, their hallowed prison.

  The Survivor had emerged in the obliteration of everything he had known, Ishuäl, his brow furrowed against an alien sun. For the first time in his life, he stood naked, utterly exposed to the indeterminacy of the future. He scarcely knew who he was, let alone what he should do.

  The boy had gawked at a world he could not remember, stumbled and swayed for vertigo, such was the pull of empty space. “Is that the ceiling?” he had cried, squinting up at the sky.

  “No,” the Survivor replied, beginning to realize that the obvious was the greatest enemy of the Dûnyain. “The World has no ceiling …”

  And he looked to his sandalled feet, stooped to pick a seed from a crotch in the debris. The nut of some tree he did not recognize.

  “Only floors … more and more ground.”

  Earth for roots. Skies for endless branching, reaching …

  Grasping.

  Using a black iron cleaver, he felled a tree that had been a sapling ere the Shriekers had come, so he might count the years of their entombment …

  And so know the age of his son.

  He was not who he was, the Survivor. Too much had been taken.

  “What do we do now?” the boy had asked that first day in the sun.

  “Tarry …” he said.

  That which comes after, he now knew, determined that which comes before. Purpose was no illusion. Meaning was real.

  “Tarry?”

  “The World has not finished with Ishuäl …”

  And the boy nodded in belief and understanding. He never doubted the Survivor, though he remained wary of the madness within him. He could not do otherwise, such was the screaming, the indiscriminate slaughter.

  There was the day he told the boy to stop breathing, lest the clouds alert their enemy. There was the day he gathered a hundred stones, then wandered through the forest, killing ninety-nine birds.

  There were many such days—for he could not stop saving … killing …

  He was not who he was.

  He was a seed.

  And now these people …

  They looked like Dûnyain, but they were not.

  The boy had fled to him immediately after spying the old man and the pregnant woman descend into the valley. Together they had followed the couple’s progress toward Ishuäl, tracking the bubble of silence their presence opened in the forest. They watched them wander forlorn through the ruins. When the two descended into the Upper Galleries, they closed the distance, hanging at the very limit of their inexplicable light. Soundless, they shadowed them, stealing what glimpses coincidence afforded.

  “Who are they?” the boy had whispered.

  “Us …” the Survivor had replied. “As we once were.”

  Though he understood nothing of what the strangers said, the Sur
vivor easily discerned the outlines of their mission. Ishuäl had been their destination. They had come seeking the Dûnyain, and had found only desolation.

  The old man had been stunned and heartbroken, but not the pregnant woman. She had come, the Survivor decided, for reasons she did not understand. And she fretted not for the destruction of Ishuäl, but for the ruin of the old man.

  The father of the child within her.

  These insights had anchored the scenarios that flashed beneath his soul’s eye, the possibilities. When he and the boy revealed themselves, she would be the one to intercede, to domesticate the old man’s fear and suspicion.

  For the Survivor had glimpsed relief in the old man, as well. The loitering blinks, the slacking gaze, the slowing heart of a terror averted …

  Terror of the Dûnyain.

  She would be the one to throw open the gates of their trust—that much, at least, had been obvious.

  Then they entered the Fathering.

  The Survivor had watched her from the blackness, too distant to absorb more than the shape of her demeanour. He saw her stumble as though suddenly struck blind, then gaze witless across the stone beds, the bones of the Dûnyain women. Incomprehension … Horror …

  Hatred.

  A passion as profound as any he had witnessed, seizing her from … nowhere.

  She too was mad.

  But the old man did not know this. The old man had come to believe in her madness, to take her assessment as his own. Even as she spoke, the Survivor realized that the time for observation had come to an end. They had no choice but to intervene if they were to master this extraordinary turn of circumstance.

  She was passing a judgment that the old man did not share—yet.

  So he sent the boy out to them.

  It belonged to his madness to second-guess decisions regarding the boy. A kind of clamour had swelled within the Survivor, watching him approach the two strangers. The child seemed more frail than he was, more desolate. And out of some darkness came a cold assurance of murder, the wayward conviction that he had sent the boy to his doom …

  But these were not Shriekers. They were humans, the clotted canvas the Dûnyain had scraped clean. They hungered for understanding, not blood and anguish. They sought knowledge of what had happened to this place … to Ishuäl.

  When the boy called out, they listened, stood pricked with hooded apprehension.

  And when the old man responded in their tongue, the Survivor realized that something deep connected these travellers to the Dûnyain. Something ancient. Something that came before.

  When the boy had told the old man his name, Anasûrimbor, he realized that something living connected them as well. Something that inspired endless terror.

  It could only be his father.

  “Mimara …” the old Wizard croaks. “What … What you ask …”

  She understands the threshold she has crossed. She feels the irony. For so many years she mocked the Zaudunyani, for their interminable bowing and scraping, for their adulation, and for their round-eyed sincerity above all. Only now does she understand the truth that their delusions aspire to.

  She has pondered the Judging Eye obsessively over the months, probed it like a tongue counting missing teeth. Was it a curse? A gift? Would it break her? Would it exalt? For so long she has sought to understand it, not realizing that it was itself understanding. She had lost herself in the labyrinth of hints and implications, asking things that no soul so slight, so mortal, could every hope to comprehend.

  These questions, she now knew, were simply that, questions, words thrown across the face of human ignorance. The mere appearance of honesty …

  But now—now she understands: Fanaticism is indistinguishable from knowledge of good and evil.

  To possess the Eye is to know who should live and who should die—as certainly as a man knows his own hand! And to know is to stand without worry or constraint, to be in the obstinate, inexhaustible way of inanimate things. To be immovable, unconquerable … even in death.

  “You have no choice, Akka,” she says, her voice steeped in murk and compassion. “They are Dûnyain …”

  She grips his paralytic hand, and it seems necessary and inevitable, the horror and indecision that numbs his expression, slackens his gaze.

  “You know the peril they represent. Better than any man living.”

  The Survivor watched, impassive and immobile upon the warming slope of masonry. He spoke only to respond to the inquiries of the boy, who continued to struggle with the thoughts beneath the cacophonous flare of human passion.

  “His suspicion of us is old …” the boy noted.

  “Yes. Decades old.”

  “Because of your father.”

  “Yes, because of my father.”

  “But her suspicion is new.”

  “Yes. But it is more than suspicion.”

  “She despises us … Because of something she witnessed?”

  “Yes. In the Upper Galleries.”

  “In the Fathering?”

  An image of her standing limned in marine light, dishevelled and forlorn, fury and condemnation boiling over the pots of her eyes.

  “She thinks us obscene.”

  “But why?”

  “Because the Brethren make tools of all things, even wombs.”

  The boy turned to him. Sunlight picked random filaments from the stubble dusting his scalp. “You have never spoken of this before.”

  “Because our women are dead.”

  The Survivor explained how, in the First Great Analysis, the ancient Dûnyain had jettisoned all the customs that bound them so they might contemplate the Shortest Path without prejudice or constraint. Because of the differences in intellect between them, they recognized the onerous obstacle posed by paternity and physiognomy. Training was not enough. The assumption that the Absolute could be grasped through mere thinking, that Men were born with the native ability to grasp the Infinite, was little more than vain conceit. The flesh, they realized. Their souls turned on their flesh, and their flesh was not capable of bearing the Absolute. They had realized that breeding was the only sure route, so it was decided that men and women would be bred according to the fitness of their progeny.

  “Over the centuries, the sexes were transformed,” he said, “each according to their share of our burden.”

  The boy gazed at him, so open, so weak compared to what he should have been, and yet as impenetrable as a stone compared to the worldborn couple.

  “So she resembles the First Mothers?”

  A single, slow blink. An image of branches. The sound of the dying masticating in the dark.

  “Yes.”

  The Shriekers had chewed their own limbs in the end, suckled on the teat of their own leaking life, dying as they did in the blind deeps of the Thousand Thousand Halls.

  Mimara fumes. From whence does the will to argue—to contradict—arise?

  Over the years she had argued not so much with her fists as from them. No matter how slight the confrontation, she always held them balled so tight as to score her palms with indentations of her fingernails. She had scoffed from her neck and upper chest, the one stiff with indignation and the other tight with anxiousness. She had sneered from her jaw, her eyes slack with the threat of tears.

  Never had she contended, as she did now, from her belly …

  From the very root of all that mattered.

  “The Scylvendi …” the old Wizard says with an air of seizing upon some jewel in his thought. “Cnaiür urs Skiötha … Moënghus’s true father. He travelled half Eärwa without succumbing to Kellhus. We don’t need to do this! We don’t need to do this precisely because we know that they are Dûnyain!”

  “The Scylvendi,” she snorts. Pity jostles to the fore of her battling passions. “And where is he now, Cnaiür urs Skiötha?”

  A look of shock. Achamian has grown accustomed to her alacrity, the swiftness of her tongue and intellect. How could he not, fending her barbs as he has across
the very breadth of Eärwa? But for all her cleverness, she has never possessed genuine strength, let alone the potency of conviction—only anger.

  “Dead,” the former Schoolman admits.

  “So knowing is no surety against them?”

  She is using his own arguments now—from their first meeting in Hûnoreal, when he tried to convince her that she was an agent of her stepfather, whether witting or not.

  “No,” the old man concedes.

  “Then we have no choice!”

  Damnable woman!

  “No, Mimara … No!”

  She finds herself squeezing her abdomen, such is her fury.

  “But I have seen them! With the Eye, Akka!” The contempt, the outrage and righteous indignation—none of these are here own. Truth owns everything now.

  Her belly.

  “I have seen them with the Eye!”

  Such a carp! Relentless. As clever as she was cruel. And now, bloodthirsty. She even seemed a remorseless warrior-maiden, her hair cropped, the scales of her Sheära corselet glinting in the sun.

  A part of him scoffed and marvelled, asked what had so bent her sense of right and wrong. But these thoughts were less than sincere, ways to shroud the understanding that hulked beneath …

  The fact that she was right.

  They were Dûnyain. If they left them behind, what religion would they manufacture? What nation would they seize? If they took them along—as prisoners or companions—how could he and Mimara not be enslaved?

  Only now, it seemed, could he appreciate the peril of dwelling within the circuit of such a dwarfing intellect. How could one be free in the presence of such beings? How could one be anything other than a child, manipulated at every turn?

  These were questions he had pondered long watches over the years. Even in abstraction and retrospect, they had seemed onerous. And how could they not? when they always watered at the well of Esmenet …

  He was a man who had surrendered his wife!

  But to ask such questions now in the living presence of the Dûnyain made them seem more than mortal.

  Because they were, he realized. More than lives depended on how he answered …