The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  It mattered not at all how her fortune had come about, only that it had come about.

  The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas dared gaze against the evening glare, peer from point to point across the intricate urban vista, at Momemn, the famed Child of dark Osbeus, seat of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the mightiest conqueror since Triamis the Great. The River Phayus parsed the northern limit on her right, a vast brown snake scaled in evening brilliance. The Girgallic Gate marked the western limit in the distance before her, squat towers scorched black for proximity to the sinking sun. The Maumurine Gate towered equally conspicuous on the southern limit, if only for the hood of wooden hoardings that had been raised about it following her encounter with the Cishaurim.

  The air already possessed the arid evening absence of haze that seemed to strip the sense of distance from otherwise dim landmarks. But even as the sun blinded her to the western core of the city, it inked the regions surrounding with ever-greater clarity. The shadows of the distant siege towers joined the thatched black marking the spine of the hills. The once-dreaded Tower of Ziek cast the boroughs to the east of its square bulk into premature night. So too did the three gilded domes of mighty Xothei enclose more and more of the Cmiral’s campus in shadow.

  Leaping from place to place with her look somehow made the dwindling of the light plain. And Esmenet realized that she could see it happen, the coming of night. She saw those final squares and lanes of sun-bright ground we all see, only scattered in countless thousands across her city. Looking about, she could see them dwindle according to the flattening sunlight. And as the edges retreated up the walls, the darkness became as liquid, a flood welling from all points already in shadow, submerging lesser structures and streets, then greater, climbing in counterpoint to the slow plummet of the sun.

  Night was the foundation, she realized, the deathless state. The soul had no more than its tongue pressed against the complexity of Creation. She thought of her assassin, her Narindar, and how he had to dwell in the darkest night of all. This was why killing Maithanet had seemed so miraculous, so easy: because it had been no different than any other assassination—because being Dûnyain didn’t matter. Being her husband didn’t matter.

  Breathing becomes bright when we cease thinking.

  As often happens, the hot glare of evening winked into the chill glow of dusk in a heartbeat. What was warm pressure fled into the cool vacancy of night. Esmenet shivered for the cold and the horror … for being a flea upon the back of calamity. She was a reader of Casidas. The ruins of ancient Cenei lay upriver, fields upon fields of fallow stone, the debris of a capital easily as great as her own. The ruins of Mehtsonc lay farther inland still, little more than a network of forested mounds, the legendary glory that was Kyraneas, indistinguishable from the earth … more gravel in the ground.

  Momemn lay at the mouth of the Phayus, against the dark immensity of the Meneanor Sea. The Empires of the West had, the scholars said, run out of river.

  Esmenet peered out over Momemn, watched the torches and candles and plates ignite across the indigo leagues, each conjuring a small golden world, most within windows, but some on street-corners and rooftops. Lives scattered as coins, she thought, thousands of jewels. A treasury of souls.

  She had no idea who would write the history of her and her family. She prayed that it would not be anyone so clear-eyed as Casidas.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ishterebinth

  To lose is to cease to exist for the Game; to be as dead. Since the Game is always the same Game, rebirth belongs to the survivor. The dead return as strangers.

  —Fifth Canto of the Abenjukala

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

  Ishoriöl. O’ Exalted Hall!

  How glorious she had been! Famed for her silks, her chain, her song, and for the way her Ishroi rode horses rather than chariots into war. Sons from all the Mansions of Eärwa travelled to its fabled gates to beg knowledge of her craft. Only Cil-Aujas could boast a greater population, and only Siöl, the House Primordial, could boast more sublime learning or warlike glory.

  How bright the peerings had blazed! How the concourses had thronged! How the air had rumbled with discourse and play! And here, within the Great Entresol, the cavernous chamber where the Ingressus served the great belly of the Chthonic, here more than anywhere. All had been enamelled in white—a gloss that banished all shadows, delivered clarity to every corner. The black painted Hauls hung from their nimil chains, some moored to black-iron gangways, others rising and falling, each the size of a river barge, the sorcerous Heavers muttering their incessant song upon the stern. The sky was nothing but a pinprick at the terminus of the Ingressus so very far above, twinkling like a second Nail of Heaven, a sublime measure of holy depth. Activity everywhere. Crowds milling across the Pier Floor. Overseers sipping liqueurs upon their balconies. Trains of Emwama bearers crisscrossing the gang-stages, loading and unloading the holds of the hanging ships. The sound of cracking whips, careless voices laughing. The bumblebee hum of the Injori lutes …

  Women and children … laughing.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Widowed fathers screaming.

  How? The Believer-King’s eyes rolled up and across the vacancy of the Great Entresol, the walls once smooth and draped with garlands now pitted with insufferable images. This was Ishterebinth! Oinaral held him fast beneath his left arm and chest, dragged him among the threshing of fungal shadows. How could this nightmare be true? He rolled his head about to see masses more stark in Holol’s constant light, nested like plucked birds up and down the midden swales that choked the Pier Floor. About them, the Great Entresol somehow bundled the Lament into a vast and horrific resonance, one that probed his ears with hot fingers.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  What had Nil’giccas done to him?

  A pursuing shadow seized his attention. Sorweel turned and saw a lurching figure … saw him …

  Mu’miorn.

  Walking naught more than a pace from his dragging heels. Naked. Emaciated. The youth had no clue how these ghouls could tell one from the other, and yet the face hanging above him was more familiar—more known—than his own. Tender lips, now savaged with ulcers. Hard brow now scored with filth. But the always-injured eyes were the same, as were the tears silvering his cheeks. Mu’miorn! ruined, wrung to the last embers of his life, scarcely more than an anguished cloud. Mu’miorn, reeling after him, a dark intensity in his eyes … a recognition.

  And horror delivered the Believer-King to what was soundless in the caterwauling air, a place where shriek defeated shriek, and the sepulchral quiet of the Deep could be heard. Something cut him from the inside, peeled away some inner rind …

  For he had loved this wretched apparition, lain within his hot-skinned embrace night upon night. He had teased. He had played. He had shouted within him, even as his shout looped opalescent across his skin. He had cursed him for jealousy’s sake, struck him for his betrayals, and knelt weeping at his knees, begging forgiveness. Though stranded upon the mere threshold of manhood, the long-suffering Son of Harweel knew the love of turbulent centuries, the epochal cycles of addiction and exhaustion, outrage and ecstasy …

  “Mu’miorn!” he cried out in futility.

  Disgust, for making as a woman with a man. Revulsion. And heartbreak. And horror.

  Horror and more horror.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Mu’miorn staggered and wept, spittle hanging from his gagging mouth. He could not believe, Sorweel realized. He could not believe!

  “It’s me!” the youth cried, arching against Oinaral’s ruthless pull, tugging at the ghoul’s mailed arm. But all at once Mu’miorn stumbled, crumpled about the lewd filth of his groin, then folded as a rug beneath the ghoulish figures vying behind him, vanished underfoot …

  Sorweel howled, wrenched himself clear the Lastborn’s grasp, found himself scrambling upon his rump, helpless before the woe
begone figures lurching toward him. Mouths working. Pallid skin blackened by filth. Eyes seizing upon different memories of degradation and hatred and sorrow—an inhuman will to avenge! Oinaral was not senseless to his plight. Holol appeared above the Believer-King, a wick of silver bearing a point of blazing radiance. And the cadaverous throng recoiled before it, raised arms in warding, blinked against the points of white pricking their eyes. An assembly of shrieking dead.

  “Mu’miorn!”

  Oinaral Lastborn stepped about him, drove the wretches stumbling back with his light. Sorweel crawled back as a crab over the offal, frantically peering between pallid and battered shins for sign of his lover. His left hand dropped into emptiness. He fell back, nearly pitched into the abyss for pursuing his arm. He rolled about instead, ribs bruising upon the drop, found himself gazing into the voided bowel of the Mountain, into the ink obscurity of the Holy Deep.

  They had come to the ends of the Pier Floor.

  Holol had waxed, becoming bright unto blinding, or so it seemed, for Sorweel could see the pale contours of the Great Entresol, the vast arches leaning out like slabs of sky, the chains hanging dead, the derelict gangways and stages, some twisted like twigs in cobwebs. Skeletal gantries cast shadows across the curve of the image-pitted walls. Innumerable figures huddled keening across the heaped quarters of the Pier Floor, along the raised balconies and colonnades and down the steps of the Helical, wending into abyssal blackness.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  His eye caught upon the Displacement, the fracture that formed a ragged hoop about the entirety of the Entresol, a rupture in the very bone of the World. Where the Ark had all but wrecked Viri, it had struck but a single, gargantuan break through the entirety of Ishoriöl, a disfigurement that was at once a monument forever memorializing the fiends who had wrought such ruin and misery …

  The horrid Gaspers … The Inchoroi …

  Wrath. Ever had wrath been his fame and foundation. And ever had it been his weakness and his strength, the goad that rendered him reckless and heroic in equal measure, an imperial hatred, wild and unrestrained, a rapacious will to visit woe and destruction upon his foes. The Despiser, his Kinning had named him, Immiriccas the Malcontent, and it spoke to the darkness and violence of the Age that such could be a name of pride and glory.

  They were the object of his fury—the Vile! They had done this. Everything that had been stolen had been stolen by them!

  Fury, wild and blind, the kind that battered bones to gravel, swelled through the Believer-King, crashed molten through his limbs. And it renewed him. It made him whole. For hatred, as much as love, blessed souls with meaning, a more terrible grace.

  He pressed himself about, saw Oinaral Lastborn standing mere cubits from the edge, sweeping Holol from side to side, his nimil coats shimmering, his porcelain scalp and mien white as snow. His ashen kinsmen lurched and thronged about him, each sullied face reflecting antique horrors. They hemmed the brilliant arc of the sword, at once dazzled and bullied. Several already lay dead or bleeding at their stamping feet.

  And dismay stamped the youth’s fury to mud, for it seemed perverse that any glory should remain. The mail-draped Siqu seemed a figure out of legend, a glittering remnant of the past fending a bestial and desolate future—proof of doom fulfilled.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  The youth glanced up, realizing that the Great Entresol housed a second light, one descending from on high, more luminous than that belonging to the arcane sword. Gazing up, he saw a broad-bellied Haul, black-hulled as in days of old, the light of its peering breaching the rim of the Ingressus. He made to alert Oinaral, only to glimpse Mu’miorn once again, breaking from the piteous congregation, leaping toward him, only to catch his cheek upon the Siqu’s holy sword.

  The brilliance dimmed, and in the abrupt gloom Sorweel saw his beloved’s head glowing as a bulb of violet and crimson. Mu’miorn fell away, relinquished Holol’s glaring light, slumped pallid upon the midden ground …

  The Son of Harweel reeled on the edge …

  Embraced the Lament as his own.

  O’ Ishoriöl, your Sons alone had made a fetish of Summer, loathing the endless Winter that was upon them. They had walked as Angels among the stink and hair of mortal Men. “Turn to the Children of the Day,” they had been the first to cry. “Minister to the People of Summer, for the Night is upon us. Imimorûl is dead! The Moon no longer hears our paeans!”

  O’ Ishterebinth, your Sons alone had believed in Men, for Cil-Aujas had thought them beasts of burden, and Siöl, akin to Sranc, degenerate forgeries of themselves, polluted and debased. “Kill them,” they had cried, “for their seed is quick, and they teem as vermin across the hide of the World!”

  But your Sons had known—your Sons had seen. If not Men, what other vessel might bear the nectar of their learning, the Song of their doomed race?

  “Teach them,” the Blessed Siqu called.

  “Or consign our Sum to Oblivion.”

  “Mu’miorn!” the in-between soul that had once been Sorweel cried.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Gloom hooded the Great Entresol, and Mu’miorn vanished among tangled shadows. Holol had been sheathed. Luminance filtered down from above. Pallid bodies roiled in the black.

  Oinaral lunged toward him, resplendent before the horrid surge. He leapt into him, tackled him about the breast … The youth glimpsed the Haul, bulbous black framed by ceilings stark with illumination. They sailed past the floor, and emptiness pulled them down and away.

  They plummeted, weightless.

  Oinaral’s arm yanked him gallows-hard, held him dangling as they somehow swung out over the cavernous void.

  The Holy Deep.

  He choked for want of wind. He made to cry out, but for which madness he did not know. Oinaral had somehow managed to wrap his free arm about one of the fallow nimil chains. Now they swung on a giddy ellipse.

  The lunatic depths of the Great Entresol howled about them.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Mu’miorn …

  O’ Ishoriöl, would a different doom have followed? Would the World have turned otherwise had the Mansions of your kin listened?

  For the Vile had come unto Men in the wilds of Eänna, delivered the very ministry your Sons had so urgently argued. The Vile had sat upon the earth to carve joints with the absurd Prophets of Men, whispered deceit in the guise of secrets, wove the thread of their wicked design into the fabric of their custom and belief. The Vile, not the Exalted, had shown them how to make inscription of speech, and so had chiselled alien malice upon the heart of an entire Race.

  The Vile had armed them with the Apories that were so wasted upon Sranc.

  What had they thought, the remaining Sons of Siöl, as the Mannish vermin rampaged through the glorious halls of the House Primordial? What had they thought, the remaining Sons of Cil-Aujas, when they retired from the fields of Mir’joril, and barred the Gates of their Mansion?

  What had they thought of this last great insult, this final atrocity inflicted by their conquered foe?

  Had they seen error … or just more injustice?

  And so the Lust to Teach was rekindled among your Sons—O’ Ishoriöl, a second folly! “A Tutelage of the Bright to undo the Tutelage of the Vile!” the first Siqu declared to your great King. And Cet’ingira Deepseer more than any other made glister of his treachery, saying unto Nil’giccas, “Let me make a ministry of the wisdom we have purchased with our doom. For among them are souls as wise as our own.”

  Aye. As foolish.

  And as terrified of damnation.

  Oblivion on a swing.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Sorweel hung limp, the rim of the Cauldron biting his breastbone, shuddering only to weep for his lover and his Race. All was black below. The Haul lowered in surreal stages above, a shadow that took the illuminated depths of the Great Entresol as its halo. It floated down to the shrieking rim of the Pier F
loor then below. Without warning, Oinaral’s frame flexed against his own, and they began to sway as a pendulum, Man and Nonman.

  Vertigo clawed his gut, scratched a greater awareness from the mud of his grief. The light emerged from obscurity, chased the Haul’s shade down their forms, and Sorweel glimpsed his own shadow crisp and confounded across the walls of the Ingressus, swinging coupled across sewage-clotted imagery. The peering affixed above the vessel was an explosion of radiant hair for tears he could not feel. He glimpsed only battered gunwales, soiled decks, the heaped carcasses of pigs …

  And a hooded figure, standing immobile directly beneath the light.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  The Haul sank. Oinaral’s exertions became more violent, savage even, and their gyrations pulled them out on a fatter arc. He could feel the Nonman’s strength failing; he knew that if all else were silent, he would hear the ghoul heaving and spitting air like a bull. He sagged to Oinaral’s abdomen, and he knew that he need only do nothing, and the Siqu’s arm would yield him to the gaping below, make of him a gift to the Holy Deep …

  And the knowing suffused him with far more hope than horror.

  Release me …

  His breast slipped from Oinaral’s clasp.

  Return me to your bosom, Mother.

  But the Siqu managed to catch his left arm. He swung out limp on the chain’s arc.

  The way is too hard.

  He felt, rather than heard the Nonman scream above him.

  Your son is too weak.

  And he could feel what was about to happen, feel himself cartwheeling through blackness, clipping the sides as a doll cast down a well. He could feel the fatal plummet that was release—

  A bird blasted up out of the blackness, its great white wings thrashing, the yellow knife of its beak aimed at heaven. The peering etched it in clean light above, a stork, a miraculous vision of life—