The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  “My disorder,” the profile growled in a tone so deep as to knock heartbeats, “springs from but a single question …” The silhouette shifted. Stone cracked in unseen sockets. A face as broad as shoulders bobbed into Holol’s light, its lines twisted like ship’s rigging for wrath.

  “Why do you soil my gaze now!”

  Sorweel retreated a step, then another as the Hero leapt onto the stone stage below. His countenance was wroth, broad in the manner of the Holca. Gore made a pit of his mouth, so that he looked a creature whose jaws lay outside its flesh. His musculature was clawed in veins, striate for hunger. His stature was so great as to make a statuette of his son.

  “Nil’giccas!” Oinaral Lastborn cried beneath the looming presence. “Nil’giccas ha—!”

  The blow was swift, the force absurd. Oinaral was swatted more than ten cubits, his body bouncing like a withered tuber from the rock face back across the slope of the gravel mound. Somehow, impossible as it seemed, he had managed to hold onto Holol, the famed Breathtaker. Sorweel could see its radiant point bobbing just over the Siqu’s right thigh, blackening his twitching profile.

  The light etched the nude white colossus that was his father, raving above him.

  “Weeeak!” thundered across the Mere.

  The Son of Harweel stood transfixed.

  “How could I not love something as weak and beautiful!”

  The luminous tip of Holol had slipped behind the Siqu’s leg; its first warble pinned his heart nonetheless.

  “How could a father not love such a son as should be slain!”

  It flickered in a series of low pulses, each outlining the Siqu with the wrack of deeper regions, each depicting the Lord of the Watch, hairless and pendulous, across stages of murderous outrage.

  “Such a son—!”

  Sudden blackness always surprised, whether anticipated or not. Distant obscurity became near, blackness leapt, and the white-skinned furor of Oirûnas raging over his dying son died with his son.

  Holol had not slipped Oinaral’s grasp—he had slipped from it. Somehow the Son of Harweel knew this with granitic certainty.

  The Haul’s fierce peering yet burned behind, but he stood upon its extinction, in a twilight underworld heaped with the skulls of pig. A greater portion of him, everything human, gibbered for terror, clamoured to flee, but some other fraction had resolved he would stand his ground.

  He would not leave Oinaral Lastborn to moulder with swine. This he knew with an assurance as deep as life.

  He would not abandon his Siqu.

  The groan of a monstrous elk huffed from the black before him, followed by a voice like cracking timbers.

  “My-my … My son …”

  Silence.

  Sorweel strained for some glimpse, anything, but all he could see was the luminance that fell from his false face, a spectral pool of surfaces braised with faint detail.

  A sob burst upon the dark, raw, plucked with mucous, so near as to make the youth retreat a step.

  “My sonnnn!” the great lungs screamed.

  The peering flickered as before, and in a moment of madness it seemed the entirety of existence hung upon the black as lights upon smoke. Then he found himself nowhere … stranded in a vast nothing.

  The World had shrunk to that swatch illuminated by his accursed face.

  The silence rumbled as a tempest, one that could blow through ground.

  The youth found himself whirling about, searching for the direction of the Haul. A heartbeat merely, and he was completely disoriented. The prospect of being marooned down here, lost in the Holy Deep, came as a chattering panic. He fell to his knees scanning for footprints by the light of his arcane communion, but the sand was too trampled, the porcine debris too copious.

  A titanic howl sent him skittering backward across the sand on all fours.

  “Aiaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

  He was lost down here, he realized. He had come to the one place the Mother of Birth could not follow. For that was why Imimorûl had hidden his children in rock and mountains: to conceal them from the Gods!

  The ground whumped in the black—concussions so powerful that the grains shivered about him. He scrambled back from the sound, turned to stand and run. He was lost …

  He was lost!

  The obstruction loomed like a great black tortoise, knocked his shins and thighs—Oirûnas’s arms and armour. His momentum pitched him to the bones and grit.

  Another titanic yowl.

  “I … have … mur-murdered him, Brother … Murdered mine own son!”

  The blackness roared in its wake, thrummed with intimations of hovering, hanging doom. The light of the Amiolas, he realized, scrambling across dimpled sand to find refuge behind the Nonman Hero’s great, empty helm. The Amiolas was what would kill him! Across the Mere’s every shore, the ghastly visage of Immiriccas was the only thing visible! He was the lone silver lure in the deep—jigged and dandled by his own frantic efforts no less!

  Sorweel cringed behind the helm, found his eye drawn to the sullen hint of polish beneath the dust. In spite of himself he drew a sleeve across the obese curve … and saw the luminous apparition that was his own aspect staring from the shining frame of the Amiolas. He gawked at the reflection, dumbfounded.

  Mother. He saw his mother, the wane beauty she possessed in his most sunlit memories.

  He recoiled, scrambled back until blackness had obliterated it, and found himself marooned nowhere once again, his heart hammering, his thoughts grasping thoughts grasping thoughts, like a children’s finger game.

  “What happens, Brother?” boomed hoarse from the dark.

  From across the desolate, underworld strand, the Boatman’s voice scrawled the guttural intonations of a new song:

  They did hoist Anarlû’s head high,

  and poured down its blood as fire.

  And the ground gave forth many sons,

  Ninety-nine who were as Gods,

  and so bid their fathers

  be as sons …

  Sorweel dared stand. He whirled about, aching to hear, to locate the direction, but the Amiolas baffled the sound the way it baffled his other senses …

  Great Oirûnas, Lord of the Watch, leaned from blackness into materiality immediately before him. Sorweel tripped backward to the sand and bones—and the gargantuan form followed. Massive fists pummelled the strand to either side of his head, elephantine arms pumping, pounding. “Nooo!” cracked the smothered deep. The colossal face blotted the blackness, a pallid aspect as broad as a Columnary shield, wrought with anguish, nostrils flaring, alien teeth clenched as a shipwright’s vice, eyes thick with what seemed dreamlike exhaustion, the pulping dismay of knowing it could not be undone. The horror he had just authored, the crime, the unthinkable …

  “Nooo!”

  It could not be undone.

  Sorweel cringed, arms crossed before his face. Anvil fists struck smoke from the ground. The Cauldron’s harrowing visage gleamed as foil in the ink of each appalling eye. “Why?” the hole of its mouth boomed.

  “Why!”

  The sand whumped.

  “Why!”

  The voice beat as wings across his tripping heart.

  “Why!”

  And then the mammoth fury was gone … swallowed by the blackness.

  The void hummed for absence of echoes.

  Somewhere in the black the Boatman sang, his voice sawing yet more ancient wood, another song of Imimorûl and the oldest of the old.

  “Nil’giccas has abandoned th-the Mountain!” Sorweel coughed into the dark.

  Oinaral lay sprawled as clothing over bones, the only kind of suicide a Nonman could be.

  “Nin’ciljiras! Nin’janjin’s accursed seed, he rules …”

  He was never a charm for Oinaral! He was surety that truth would be heard, so that terrible consequences might follow.

  “He has surrendered Ishterebinth to Min-Uroikas—to the Vile!”

  The Vile—only now could he taste the viol
ation that name tokened.

  He looked down to the spectral illumination his face cast upon his hands. Dust and grit bearded both palms. The left one bled black in the light.

  “All hope and honour have fled the Mountain!”

  The giant swooped into the small light, clapped him in monstrous digits. The Lord of the Watch, who had ceded all sanity to the Dolour so long ago, hoisted the Son of Harweel slack, and then wrenched him in two.

  The Sky-Beneath-the-Mountain.

  As Seswatha, she had supped with Nil’giccas upon this, the pinnacle stage. She had clutched his breast for terror at hearing the Nonman King’s dark tale.

  But Nil’giccas no longer ruled. At Harapior’s command they strapped her head to the iron-grille floor with a leather belt.

  She would not bow otherwise.

  The air nipped with the chill of malice. The gilded and graven facades of the Hanging Citadels sloped overhead and down across her right periphery, while to her left the tumbling void of the Ilculcû Rift pulled her against the pinching floor. Nin’ciljiras she recognized by his armour of golden scales—which glistered for being wetted. She could see him conversing with Harapior, casting avid glances in her direction. They had pinned her for display on an annex to the higher stage, so that she could see both the Nonman King’s chair and the broader, petitioning floor below, all of it miraculously hooked over the Rift’s dizzy plummet. Some hundred or more Ishroi and Quya stood congregated on the lower platform, each gowned in splendour, each an effete image of manly perfection.

  She felt rather than saw them bringing Moënghus out to join her. She had heard him bull-shouting what Ihrimsû curses he knew in the corridors earlier, so she wasn’t surprised to see him also gagged when they thrust him to his knees mere paces away, naked and bound as she was.

  What surprised—even appalled—was his condition … that he could still draw breath, let alone wrench and war against his restraints. The ravaged face turned to her, rising and falling on heaving breaths, black locks pasted to wounds. The glacial eyes seemed mad, overbright.

  Was this what had she had wagered on her mad throw? A brother?

  What Father had wagered.

  And it descended as lightning, the realization the she had failed.

  Harapior had guessed her gambit. Very soon, they would become the plaything of some decrepit and inhuman will, something to sin against and so purchase some brief term of sanity.

  His gored arms wrenched back, Moënghus swayed upon his great and macabre frame, staring as if she were something he should remember.

  It rose from the darkness, then, clawed her face from the inside. It kicked each of her lungs … shame for what was … terror of what would be …

  Her mother’s inheritance.

  For the first time in her brief life, Anasûrimbor Serwa grimaced for darkness, not artifice.

  A sob kicked through her. And it was as if she had spilled grain in times of famine. On a heartbeat, the sonorous thrum of Nonman voices fell silent, leaving her gagged cry stranded in the void of Ilculcû, a hitching note more profound than any she had yet to sing, if not more beautiful. The sound of feminine despair …

  And it seized their black hearts, compelled their senescent fascination.

  “The black-haired brother!” a crimson-armoured Siölan Ishroi cried, hooking her from her grief. Sûjara-nin, a detached fraction of her realized. “I would hear him weep as w—!”

  The hanging iron frame shuddered.

  To a soul the assembled ghouls whirled about. Nin’ciljiras bolted golden from his kingly seat …

  Serwa peered across the congregation, blinked for the hairs of light obscuring her gaze …

  And saw one the Tall stride from a crouch to his full, gargantuan height as the slope of image-pitted stone above permitted. His steps resounded through the iron platform, sent dust raining from the iron anchors above. The assembly shrank from his titanic approach. The giant should have gleamed with the same lustre as his fellows. He was decked in full battle armour, wearing a great slit-faced helm and a monstrous hauberk of stamped plates set in mail—accoutrements that had not seen the field ere Far Antiquity. But all of it was skinned in rotted pelts of dust …

  Not that it mattered, given the four points of perfect oblivion that had been affixed to it … Chorae, set upon either thigh and either shoulder.

  “Lord Oirûnas!” Nin’ciljiras cried with surprising alacrity. He spared Harapior an intent look before stepping to the edge of his penultimate platform. “You honour us!”

  Oirûnas …

  The twin of Oirinas. The Lord of the Watch. The legendary Hero of the first wars against the Inchoroi.

  “Honour,” the giant boomed from his helm, “is the sum of my purpose here.” The platform grille bit her cheek at the impact of his following step.

  Nin’ciljiras retreated an involuntary step. “The Dolo—” he began, only to slip on the oil that doused him.

  “What of it?” the Hero asked, pausing to tower over the Nonman King.

  “Are—?” the usurper asked, attempting to raise himself, only to slip into Harapior’s arms. “Are your thoughts … ordered?” he asked, regaining his feet.

  The giant loomed fearsome across the silence. The assembled Ishroi and Quya watched stunned; even the most Wayward among them blinked in awe, for Memory itself had risen from the grave that was the Mountain.

  “I suffer but one disorder …”

  For some reason, this seemed to occasion some kind of relief for Nin’ciljiras. For the first time, Serwa glimpsed the body laying slack in the Hero’s mighty left hand.

  “And what might that be?”

  “The armour you wear …”

  The Nonman King stared up, blank about a heartbeat of hesitation. “It … it is a gift.”

  “The gold … that sheen …” the ancient Hero crooned. “It is familiar to me …”

  Nin’ciljiras said nothing.

  “I revisit it in my thoughts … often.”

  A flaxen-haired Man lay slumped in his hand … Could it be?

  “It tyrannizes me,” the Lord of the Watch thundered.

  “The Age has been unkind since you retired from the Mountain,” Nin’ciljiras said, his voice brittle for breathlessness. “I am the last of the line of Tsonos, the la—”

  “Tell me, my brothers!” the voice clapped. The Hero whirled to those assembled. “What misfortune could excuse a disgrace so … so treacherous!”

  The Nonman of Ishterebinth could make no answer.

  “Tell one who has devoured ten thousand swine …”

  His shout churned with dark passion, intonations of revulsion, injury and betrayal. Many among those assembled dared raise hands to their pommels. Nin’ciljiras actually stepped behind a rigid Harapior. Serwa glimpsed Guardsmen jostling through the fragmenting crowd.

  “Tell one who has squandered centuries reliving the golden horror—the golden obscenity!”

  Without warning, the giant Hero stepped directly toward her, and with a deftness of someone far smaller, deposited the unconscious form he held between her and her brother. Then, even as the guardsmen converged, the Lord of the Watch raised an oak-branch arm to point at the grandson of Nin’janjin. Serwa did not need to see the helmed face to know the violence of its sneer.

  “Tell me,” Lord Oirûnas bellowed, “how the Vile have come to rule the Mountain!”

  The accusation boomed across the gaping Ilculcû, an interval the Hero used to draw his monstrous sword, Imirsiol. A gleaming array of weapons appeared across the platform. Harapior’s eyes flared with radiant meaning. But the giant swung his immense blade up across the ceiling, shattering a legion of graven figures, sending debris raining—and sparks tapping—across the oil-drenched Nonman King …

  The first flames were ghostly. Nin’ciljiras hooted and began slapping in panic regardless. The sheen across the golden scales, caught …

  The Nonman King burst as a torch, began screaming like a live-braised lamb. Harapior
rushed to assist him, but flame caught upon the scalps adorning his neck. He paused to beat at his neck and chest … and was cloven in twain by the legendary Hammer of Siöl.

  “So it ends!” the Lord of the Watch roared over the shouting clamour, and he laughed and wept both.

  Nin’ciljiras thrashed and screamed. The soggomantic gold blackened.

  And from regions unknown, a single point of nothingness swung on an arc—a Chorae cast at her, she realized. But she could not move! She could only track its nearing course against a field of heaving, scissoring motion. It bounced across the grill immediately before her, clattered through a wagging groove directly toward her face, oblivion promising oblivion. A concussion wracked the platform, and, somewhere, an anchor snapped, and the whole dropped, tilted to her left. The Chorae chipped to a halt a mere cubit from her face. She followed the fingers clasped about the emptiness of the thing, and saw Sorweel, his face blooded for flayed skin, his blue eyes fluttering as he strained to focus upon her …

  “This!” the Lord of the Watch boomed laughing. “This is our cannibal fate!”

  Suddenly the Horse-King smiled. Chaos ruled the Sky-Beneath-the-Mountain—death and screams, but her eyes were consumed by him … for he was real …

  As was the stained and blooded hand that he floated to her face.

  A warrior’s hand.

  “Sing,” he croaked through the uproar, yanking the black-silk gag clear her mouth and throat.

  She gasped, drew deep the taste of smoke and war. The air reeked of burned mutton.

  And she sang.

  Made demonstration of her father’s dread portion.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Dagliash

  Even the God must eat.

  —CONRIYAN PROVERB

  Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Urokkas

  Not in the Near Antique days of Imperial Cenei, nor in the Far Antique days of Holy Trysë, never had the World beheld such a congregation, such a concentration of arcane might. The Sranc had at last been backed into the final corner of Yinwaul, and the Schoolmen of the Three Seas advanced upon them. The very ground smoked before the Magi, seethed. They had wrapped their faces with cloth soaked in sage and horse urine, so they might blunt the septic fumes. Otherwise, their billows flared in material contradiction of their phantom Wards, bolts of hanging cursive, a calligraphy that wooed the dawning sun with poetic threads of light. The chorus of their singing maddened the ears, drew eyes to unseen quarters. As one they walked upon a neck-breaking fall, one thousand sorcerers-of-rank, each a floating wildflower dissolving into stages of obscurity, each setting sorcerous spade to obscene earth.