The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  But Oinaral was up, seizing his shoulder, even as the Haul’s motion rounded into a pendulous swing, one heaved slower and slower by the torsion of the Fathoming chain. He stared in horror at the pulverized pit where the wretch had landed upon the pigs. A hand lay miraculously intact on the floor at his feet, laying palm up as though holding a stylus.

  All this time the Boatman had simply grasped the length of chain hanging beside him, swinging so as to seem motionless while the deck rolled and bucked beneath his shod feet. And for all the dangling violence of his bark, he did not once falter in his song …

  Thence to the cruel House they fled,

  the bastion that turns aside seasons—

  “What happens?” Sorweel cried out. “Are they leaping?”

  “No,” Oinaral replied, keen on the void above them once again. “They were not suicides.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they were Nonmen.”

  “What? Nonmen can surrender dignity, but not life?”

  “All dignity and more!” the ghoul cried, his face twisted into something nearly frantic with grief. “We would all be dead—Ishterebinth would be naught but a mouldering tomb!—were suicide something our nature permitted!”

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Sorweel stood glaring, his limbs stuffed with straw, his heart still hammering. To think he had bemoaned the madness of his quest with Serwa and Moënghus!

  “So if they didn’t leap—then what?” He paused, realizing the dread alternative. “Were they thrown?”

  Oinaral glanced at him sharply, then resumed staring upward, the swales of his face shining for the radiance of the peering.

  “Were they thrown?” Sorweel pressed. “Could Nin’ciljiras somehow know what we attempt?”

  Oinaral remained silent, avoiding his gaze as ever.

  “We have reached the Qûlnimil,” he finally said in semblance of resolution. “The great Mine of Ishoriöl …” A grimace marred his chiselled mien. “We shall reach the Mere soon.”

  The false Believer-King turned from him in dismay. Grace, the Siqu had said. He would save himself by stalking his blessed shadow, by following the path that Yatwer had marked for the Son of Harweel, the boy doomed to murder the Aspect-Emperor. But what grace could be found in a pit so deep, amid horrors so sordid and appalling? If anything, he owed his life to Oinaral—not otherwise!

  The Haul-hammer resounded through the black, its crack ragged for echoing across the fractured surfaces now soaring about them, counting out the unrelenting beat of the Boatman’s ancient song.

  And far from the Starving,

  in the deepest of the Deep,

  they brought forth their accursed spear.

  Cu’jara Cinmoi, a soul ever aimed

  at this, our desolation,

  for they had lain together, brother and sister,

  in mockery of Tsonos and Olissis.

  The Incest Song of Linqiru, Sorweel realized. A version he—or the soul he had become—had never heard, one bearing the warp of the future … of doom come true.

  The Nonman Apocalypse. A whole race locked in the lightless depths, wailing for losses, raging against bargains sealed in bygone ages, souls drifting from defeat to folly to tragedy, ever more at sea, ever more removed from the shores of the now. Soon the last of the Intact would Succumb to the Dolour, the Emwama would abandon them, the last of the peerings would wink out, and silence and blackness would rule the vacant heart of Ishterebinth.

  The Mountain would cease weeping.

  And Sorweel understood, seized the fact that outran most all Men until ruin at last ran them down. The End will have out. The Nonmen, for all their staggering age, were no more immortal than their engravings. Despite all their pious might and ingenuity, the ages had laid waste to their dominion, had made smoke of their breathtaking splendour. They were the stronger race, the wiser, and yet doom and degradation had claimed them. The wolves had fallen. What hope was there for mongrel dogs such as Men?

  And upon a single forgotten breath, the ancient grudges of the Amiolas and the perplexing facts of the Great Ordeal came together. He had a sense of being taken up, of being aimed anew, turned toward a reality as gritty and as grim as truth. There was no deception here. Oinaral did not dissemble. Ishterebinth was not some absurd pantomime. The End was not some daring fancy, a way to pass impiety off as courage.

  It was simply inevitable.

  And so it came to pass that the Son of Harweel apprehended the horizon of a new and terrifying world from the very bowel of the Mansion, one where the Unholy Consult was real, the extinction of Men was nigh, and Anasûrimbor Kellhus was the only hope—the one true Saviour of Men! A world where the fraction that the Dread Mother could see had blinded Her to the fraction She could not …

  A world where he could love Anasûrimbor Serwa.

  He need only survive and escape this mad and vicious place … Flee!

  For all hope had fled the Weeping Mountain.

  Other than Lord Harapior, she did not know any of the nimil-armoured Nonmen who came for her. But she knew from their looks that they had heard of her, who she was, and what she had done. There was lust in their darkling gazes, but curiosity and apprehension too.

  They placed a sack over her head, one woven of Injori silk as soft as rose petals across her cheeks and forehead. Her body they left uncovered, save for shackles of iron about her ankles and wrists—and the Quyan variant of the Agonic Collar welded about her neck.

  They did not speak, and she did not resist.

  But the hatred she had incited in the Lord Torturer was too profound to be ruled.

  “Sing for us!” Harapior growled. “Sing for us, witch! Score our hearts with your foul impersonations!”

  She did not oblige him—but not out of spite, for she cared nothing for the ghoul. She did not sing simply because the watch she had sung for had come and gone.

  Her next song would command fire and ruin.

  The Nonmen threaded a pole between the crotch of her elbows and her spine and bore her thus from the Thresholds.

  “Noooooooo!” she heard her eldest brother, long broken, snuffle and cry. “Leave her!” he roared with sudden, bestial ferocity. “Let her be! Let! Her! Beeeeeeee!”

  And it cut her far more than any indignity she had so far suffered that he might yet cry out his devotion thus, despite all the degradations, all the mutilations. Finding her body useless, the Lord Torturer had sought to make Moënghus an implement of her torture. And she had sang songs of blessing in Ihrimsû as they cut him … as they brutalized the dark boy who had worshipped her for as long as she could remember.

  She had sung in celebration while watching him sob and shriek for torture …

  And still he loved—the same as Sorweel.

  Anasûrimbor Serwa pondered this as the company of ghouls bore her blind into the heights of the Weeping Mountain … the love of troubled brothers and orphaned kings.

  And the cruelty demanded by the future.

  Sorweel watched as the Boatman, still singing, began gripping the carcasses about the ankles, then whirled about on quick steps to pitch them out over the gunwale.

  The clacking drew them like larva from holes in the rotted walls. They groused and gesticulated, perched upon precarious ledges or iron gang-stages, rooting the air like blind pups. As wretched as those above had been, these were far worse: emaciated, ulcerated, adorned with scabs, clad in nothing but raiments of filth, their knees and palms as black as Zsoronga’s shoulders, their scalps as jaundiced as human bone. The pallor of each had been scuffed from blackened skin in a manner peculiar to each, lending ornamental distinction to what misery had ground to meal otherwise. For eccentricities in motion aside, they all leaned out to the Haul with the same compulsive sway, and they all ate with identical frenzy.

  These Mines had been the glory of Ishterebinth, what brought embassies from all other Mansions to reside within their mountain. For nimil—the famed silver of the Nonmen
, more doughty than steel, as soft and warm as cotton against the skin—had ever been the great obsession of their Race. Once the Vast Ingressus had thronged with Hauls laden with ore bound for the furnaces and smithies of the Chthonic above. Peerings had burned. Emwama had teemed about iron walks and platforms, cringing beneath the harsh cries and cracking whips of their immortal overseers.

  And now this … this …

  Perversity.

  “These are the Reduced,” Oinaral said. “In a thousand years hence, this is what will become of those who yet survive in the Chthonic above.”

  The youth bit back on abhorrence, said only, “They do not weep.”

  “What we call the Gloom has fallen upon them. Centuries of reliving memories wear them to dust. The clarity of the horror endured is leached, until nothing but a dark fog remains—an obscurity that is their souls …” He paused as though struck by some novel implication.

  “Yet another living Hell!” Sorweel cried in incredulous retort. “Your Boatman performs no mercy, casting swine to them. It-it’s obscene allowing such misery to persist! A Man would just let them die!”

  The Siqu stiffened at the rail. He turned from the congregation wagging across the pitched stone to regard the apparition where Sorweel’s face should lie.

  “And what of the Hells?” he asked.

  The question surprised the youth. “What of them?”

  Oinaral shrugged. “We have spurned your infernal Gods … and we have sinned.”

  “Pfah!” the youth spat. “What do we care for Gods?”

  “But the Hells—we do care for them. The paths to Oblivion are few—as tight as the arrow’s notch, Emilidis would say. Tell me, Son of Harweel, who is to decide when these wretches should hazard damnation?”

  Sorweel stood dumbstruck.

  Oinaral looked away, glanced about the limits of the peering’s light, from the ghastly forms level to them to those rending and gorging above. “The most wasted souls are the eldest,” he continued, “the most tragic—the friends and rivals of the one who feeds them. The Boatman knows, mortal: Even the Gloom is a blessed interval compared to what awaits.”

  Understanding cracked the youth’s heart, knowing this World could countenance such misery at all, let alone as a lesser evil. It deadened him, hammered blunt yet another inner edge.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Their descent did not slow, nor did the Boatman relent in his grisly toil. To preserve the balance of the vessel, he drew from the forward and rear spates equally, forcing the Siqu and his ward to retreat to the blood-greased stern. In unending succession, the Most Ancient Warrior hurled the wooden bodies out on what seemed impossible arcs given their bulk. His accuracy was likewise miraculous: time and again Sorweel thought a carcass would spin short, only to watch it skid into sudden, bloodless immobility upon the very lip.

  Both watched mesmerized, the throwing and the feeding, listening to the Boatman’s effort lunge and release through his voice as he sang:

  Let this song as unguent flow,

  fly as sunlight upon virginal snow,

  Sing breath sing! Declare our dissolution,

  at the horned hands of Men,

  how we raised one thousand sticks of light

  against them,

  how our heroes waded into their clamour,

  until our dying buzzed as flies in our ears.

  Sing! Declare golden Siöl’s smashing

  the Breaking of the Mountain Most-Holy

  and our long exile beneath the Starving,

  and how our brothers embraced us

  upon the iron shoulder of Injor.

  Flow! Make such perfume as might be made,

  from ruin and an hour …

  And Sorweel found himself gazing at Oinaral—the last of the Siqu—and pondering the will that might make peace with a Race so artless and so rapacious as Man. The Boatman sang the Lay of Little Teeth, the recounting of Siöl’s fall in the first of the great migrations of Men from Eänna. The Amiolas knew well the bitter toll of those years, how darkness had crawled across the great, vacant empire of the Mansions, how the Men multiplied and multiplied, forever encroaching and invading, sacking Mansion after Mansion, hunting the False Men to extinction … through all the World save here, the last refuge remaining.

  Ishterebinth.

  And there was no end to them,

  for endless were the Eännites, endless and accursed

  Strong was their hatred, reckless were their heroes—

  mad to prove a trifle of life!

  And cunning was their claim,

  for as their teeth, so too were their thoughts both little,

  and sharp.

  The Haul continued clacking relentlessly downward. The Reduced dwindled in number, until no more forms puled from the tunnel-pocked walls. The Boatman resumed his station beneath the peering, his eyes lost to the shadow of his brows, his forehead and cheeks white and scrotal, his mouth working about the intonations of another ancient old song. The Haul seemed transformed for the dispensation of so many swine carcasses. The spates now piled no higher than the knee, so that the whole of the bark could be assayed from stern to prow in a single glance, at once battered and bright, lacquer peeling, wood bruised with violet, crimson, and watery pink, the whole endlessly sinking into the Stygian blackness below.

  Of the three captive waterfalls that had rifled the walls of the Great Entresol above, two had vanished, redirected to different underworld regions, leaving only a third, immured in a chimney that serviced communal water grottos, recesses set along the entirety of the Mines, possessing walls as pocked with graven imagery as any of the galleries above. Some kind of cataclysm had shattered the chimney mere fathoms below the last of the Reduced, exposing the white cataract, which became ever more hairy and diffuse as it plummeted. Everyone was quickly sodden. Moisture clung as a mucous. Oinaral gleamed as a fish in his nimil hauberk and gown. Soon a scintillant haze was all that remained, a mist that the peering transformed into a prismatic infinity, pinprick colours conjured from gaping space. Sorweel seized upon the spectacle as an excuse to avoid the roiling that was his heart, extended his fingers to comb the infinitesimal lights. It seemed at once proper and criminal that beauty could only be found in things so small, so deep. The haze thinned and thinned until it was no more than a luminous fog, and then nothing at all …

  Sorweel clutched the gunwale for vertigo, cast his gaze from side to side.

  But the wraparound cliffs of the Ingressus were nowhere to be found.

  “We have come to the Holy Deep,” Oinaral Lastborn said.

  Like spiders riding silk from the mouth of a mountainous spout, they dropped into a perfect void. Looking up, Sorweel saw the rim of the Ingressus recede into a ceiling that made him hunch for scarped enormity. The clacking expanded into an echoic gas.

  “Our pilgrimage is almost done?”

  The Siqu nodded, his eyes likewise searching the dark.

  “Aye. Pray to your Goddess, mortal, for peril is nearly upon us.”

  “I am done praying,” he said, more vacant than alarmed. “The blind yield no favour.”

  Oinaral regarded him, concerned rather than relieved. The Nonman had known he would capitulate all along, Sorweel realized, that the Weal would blot Harweel’s murder. Was it the degree that worried him?

  “It is the Amiolas,” Oinaral said in explanation. “The soul you have become is resolving contradictions between your commingled beliefs.”

  That word … contradiction … caught as ice in Sorweel’s breast.

  “But if I no longer believe,” he exclaimed, “then what of Her Grace?

  Oinaral made no reply.

  “You said your only hope was to walk in my shadow,” Sorweel pressed, “to find shelter in Yatwer’s Grace! But if I no longer … believe …”

  Oinaral hesitated, stared, the youth knew, upon the face of an imprisoned soul, a ghastly shred of the criminal his beloved King had so cruelly judged in days of yore. />
  “Fear not,” the Nonman said. “You need only remember why it is we are here.”

  The youth scowled.

  “So the Dolour renders one glib as well?”

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Where the stone had snapped as raw and immediate as a clamp about his nape in the Ingressus, it now sounded the void, each strike falling into the great cavern of the former. Their descent suddenly seemed a preposterous invasion, a deliverance that was at once anathema. They were naught but a speck in the aphotic black, a spark thrown by the sky, and yet they came promising conflagration.

  Oinaral Lastborn had seized his throat and by the time the youth realized his fury, had already slammed him across the swine.

  “Say it!” the Ishroi barked above his vicious grip. “Tell me why we are here!”

  “Wha-what?”

  “What outrage have we come to redress?”

  “N-Nin’ciljiras,” the youth stammered on swelling ire. “He-he has allied the Mountain with Golgott—”

  “With the Vile,” the Lastborn snapped. “He has surrendered Ishterebinth to the Vile. You must remember this!”

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Sorweel glared speechless.

  Clack … Clack … Clack …

  Oinaral released him, staggered back a step, horrified. Suddenly—almost madly—the Boatman ceased singing. The hammer cracked once more, and the Haul abruptly jerked short. Sorweel looked up, saw Morimhira clamber astride the peering’s blaze, his arms reaching to the wheels above …