The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  They marvelled that they had come so far.

  A Mandate Schoolman called Nume would be the first to see it, gazing out from the eyrie Saccarees had abandoned upon Ingol. Even as a boy Nume had taken pride in the sharpness of his eyes: he had dreamed of becoming an archer, ere the Mandate had spirited him away. He waved to his fellows for confirmation, pointed out over the festering distance, but they could only see that something rode the skies high above the roiling plate of the Horde.

  A sorcerous Lens would claw all of them to their feet.

  The slaughter beggared his heart as much as the intellect, but for proportion, not pity. Even lives that are meaningless can stab the conscience when heaped into mountains.

  These were Sranc. Why should he not feel the joy—nay, rapture—that so unmanned all the others?

  Because he knew the truth?

  Proyas and Kayûtas had led their troupe of officers and messengers high on the southward slopes, where they could see the glittering bulk of the Ordeal carpet the knuckled tracts below, Men marching shoulder to shoulder, bound one to the other like knots on a rope by their training. “The Line!” the Imperial Drillmasters hollered endlessly. “The Square!” These were the only sacred things in battle, the only things worth absolute sacrifice. Hold the Line, Preserve the Square, and all the sundry things they prized beyond battle would be saved: wife or king, son or prophet.

  Die for the Line, and you shall be Saved, for Gilgaöl is as generous as He is ruthless.

  Abandon it at damnation’s peril.

  In each of their contests with the Horde, the Men of the Ordeal had kept faith with that training, even at Irsûlor, where, according to Saccarees, the foe had been forced to engulf their obstinate formations, digest them like morsels of bellicose meat. In all the planning sessions in all the years prior to this expedition, resolve had been the paramount question, the concern that dwarfed all others save supply. They had read and reread The Holy Sagas, poured through what fragments of ancient chronicle that survived, even studied the Mandate accounts of Seswatha’s Dreams, trying to understand how it was nation after Far Antique nation had succumbed to Mog-Pharau.

  Resolve. Not cunning. Not arcane might. Apart from the whorish caprice of happenstance, luck, only resolve—discipline—had sorted those who had survived from those who had perished.

  The very thing that had vanished before Proyas’s horrified eyes.

  It had been like watching a painting made of wax cast into some fire: a great canvas of formations, phalanxes perfect save for the terrain beneath, sagging, weeping, then sloughing into oily disarray. Time and again he had gestured—for no human shout could be heard—for the horns to be sounded, for the advance to be halted. He was gesticulating like a madman ere Kayûtas had clasped his left forearm. And it stung, the degree to which he saw Kellhus in the Prince-Imperial’s admonishing look … The reminder that nothing blinds a man to the future more than outrage at what is past. The realization that he had become one of those requiring such reminders.

  Now they found themselves picking their way across one of Mantigol’s many shoulders, their haste impeded by the mangled sheets of Sranc dead. Brine pinched the air, though the Sea remained a distant, if steep, tumble. The waist of the great column shivered and pulsed below them, advancing devoid of rank or formation, a vast bolus of peoples. The battleground extended before them, ramps hoofed with ravines, curving toward the horizon. Dead Sranc spackled all but the steepest inclines. Sorcerous lights dazzled the heights below the summits, glimpses of miniature figures hanging precarious above fields of light and thrashing shadows. Ahead of them, on the cracked stoop of Oloreg, the battle raged as if upon a tipped table, great surging masses, steaming with dust. Men, amorphous with lawless numbers, singular with bloodlust.

  Greater beasts come to put an end to their lessers.

  The pang that Proyas had confused for his heart climbed into his throat.

  Kayûtas seized his shoulder, threw a long finger out toward the vista’s hazy extremes. The Exalt-General saw it, Dagliash, squatting like a dead spider upon Antareg’s headless shoulders. He saw the glitter of faraway sorcery, and a long plume of ash or dust blown like opiate smoke from the lips of the earth.

  Kellhus, he realized.

  He blinked away the fingers about his throat, the anguished bolt of his unmanning …

  He was no stranger to this moment, Proyas, for he had encountered it on almost every field of battle. The moment which winds every general for racing to prevent it …

  Helplessness. Events outrun every voice ere the end.

  Debris showered the ancient fortress. The Company of the Raft stood agog outside the Ciworal, the great citadel of Dagliash, their necks craned to watch their Saviour. Kellhus hung upon emptiness high above, singing thoughts no mortal could fathom, his brow, cheeks and beard bleached for meaning, his arms out as if to catch a lover’s leap. Together they watched the bastion, ancient and black, crumble into a vortex of meticulous lights. They watched the debris ride arcs across the sky, fall like preposterous rain wherever their omnipotent Lord-and-Prophet so willed.

  After years campaigning at his side, Saubon knew well the sound of his arcane voice: at once deep and queerly fluted, as if two throats called through one mouth, a strange war of vocalities, as sourceless as any other arcane singing, but sounding even more distant—as well as more near. He need only glance at Gwanwë to see the religious awe it sparked in the Few, to know that Kellhus, despite all his demurrals, was more, a Shaman of Old, like those so violently condemned in the Tusk. At once Prophet and Sorcerer …

  Gratitude and exultation beat like wings within him. Power. Such glorious power. To uproot one of the mighty places of the earth, to sing away a legendary stronghold. Pride throbbed through him, a savage conceit, held him turgid and immobile, aching …

  For this more than anything was the sum of belonging, a submission that empowered, a grovelling that put flight to kings.

  Kellhus did not sing alone. The Nuns had taken up stations all about the toothless parapets, hanging like gold-foil anemones in the sea. Saubon could see only a handful of them, so high were the walls fencing the Ribbaral. But he could hear their number in the piping chorus, and the carnage they wreaked in the Horde’s roar. Kellhus boomed, a chant as deep as earth, in tones like distant dragons battling, and the Swayali spun weird arias about him, fluting through the thunder of corruption …

  These were the true hymns, the Believer-King of Caraskand realized …

  Just as Dagliash was the one temple.

  He would seize Proyas when he saw him. He would make the man wince, so tight would he clamp his arms! He would hold him, and he would explain what he witnessed this very moment—now—and more importantly, what he understood. He would make the fool see the womanish cast of his heart, how yearning for the simple and the pure was its own pollution …

  Yes! The God was a spider!

  But so too were Men—spiders unto themselves.

  “Everything!” he would cry. “Everything eats!”

  Ciworal, the famed Gauntleted Heart, stronghold of strongholds, crumbled skyward before his very eyes. It was like watching an edge devour the bastion, a plummet sideways to the real, blocks and fragments falling up and out before raining in a silent deluge across the baileys. He watched his Lord-and-Prophet eat, until even the monstrous foundation stones let go like rootless teeth, fell toppling into the Heavens—until great Ciworal was no more. Gwanwë seized his mailed forearm in her hands, but he could make no sense of her expression, let alone hear a word she said …

  Looking back he could see it, a great circle sunk into the granite, the legendary Well of Viri. Ciworal, for all its cyclopean immensity, had been no more than a scab on a deeper wound—the same as Men, perhaps. The Holy Aspect-Emperor did not cease his labour; no seam marred his embalming song. The sideways plummet simply continued once it reached the ground, so that the ancient mouth seemed to spew the ruin that choked it, vomit a dark and mountainous
geyser of wreckage into the sky. Exhilaration scooped the breath from Saubon’s chest, the sense of dangling above a torrential river flood.

  Vertigo. The ground dipped beneath their feet in sensation, then shivered for clacking impacts in reality. And King Coithus Saubon found himself laughing in the teeth-baring manner of hyenas. It was the Meat, he knew, but it was the kind of careless knowing that belongs to drunks and disaster. Gwanwë still held one hand upon his forearm. A sudden longing to fuck the witch loped to the fore of his scrambled passions. He preferred slips to strong women, but the colour of her hair was so rare …

  Together they watched the great, broken bones of Nogaral tumble skyward, little more than shadows between streamers of dust and lesser debris. The Aspect-Emperor floated above in the morning sun. Conviction fairly pulsed through the Believer-King.

  What God worth worshipping was weak?

  Power. Power was the Mark of transcendence. What did it matter if it was diabolical or divine or even mortal?

  So long as it was greater.

  One tomb plundered to fashion another. Shivers through oceanic stone.

  The slip of fractures as old as old. The spit of dust from the ceilings.

  Some halls collapsed, be they humble or majestic, rooves clapping down, pounding wails and velvet dust through all the forking, subterranean hollows. And the beasts beat their cheeks for the stinging of slovenly eyes. The mulish barks of the dying set them baying in their thousands, strung and clotted through the veined deep. Anguish and outrage popping through sputum. The bellowing of elephantine lungs.

  Where were the Old Fathers?

  It sailed across the ochre glow, tracing circles over the violent pitch of the Erengaw.

  A vision that crippled thought, exhaled numbness as smoke through gut and limbs …

  Saccarees stood riven before his sorcerous Lens, incredulous despite all that he had seen and horrified for everything he had Dreamed. The image dipped and dwindled, swung around to slowly bloat into clarity once again, dark and ragged, claws slack and twitching, scabrous wings hooked about unseen winds …

  A sight that made old scars itch and sting. An Inchoroi. The bone of the greater skull plain through intestinal skin, the lesser skull nested within its flared mandible …

  Evil Aurang, the Horde-General of old.

  It could be none other.

  Like any vulture, he wallowed in the sky, kiting upon gusts. He was more than abhorrent; his mere appearance panicked, somehow, did not so much set skin as bones crawling. There was something—a corruption in its pallor, perhaps, or an uncanniness of movement, manner—something that sickened for witnessing, unnerved for eluding clean human sensibility. The monstrosity peered down upon the gruesome multitudes when gliding northward, appraising the inscrutable, but as he swung to the south, he turned to the ramparts of the Urokkas—to the corpses belching black smoke, to the wink of murderous lights, and to Saccarees high upon Mantigol.

  The Inchoroi even mouthed words in derision.

  The Exalt-Magus should have signalled his Lord-and-Prophet. He and the other Lords of the Ordeal had spent watches discussing this very contingency. The Great Ordeal’s gravest peril, they had decided, lay in the deployment of the Schools. Once scattered across the Urokkas, there they must remain, lest the Horde descend upon the Ordeal’s nude flank and drive it into the Sea. This meant the Consult, who could never hope to match the sorcerous might of the Schools otherwise, could ignore them outright, throw their cunning or their might at some other weakness. And as Saccarees himself had seen at Irsûlor, a single breach was all that utter ruin required.

  “They will come,” Kellhus had warned. “They will not abandon such might as the Horde manifests to our design. The Unholy Consult will intervene. At long last, my brothers, you will vie with our foe in the flesh, grapple with the Cause that moves you.”

  Words that had balled hearts as fists!

  At least it had then. Now Saccarees needed only turn on his heel to see Dagliash, to see his Lord-and-Prophet shining white from an exhaust of black ruin. He could have informed him, or any of his peers for that matter, in multiple ways … but he did not.

  For all his power and erudition, he was a Man of the Circumfix the same as any other. And like other Men he had the sense of regions, the passage of places and powers. Home had dwindled in his intellect, becoming little more than a muffled spark, ink spilled upon a page. For the longest time they had marched across the interval between, twilight regions that recognized no power save brutality. But now … Now they had passed into the bower of their ancient and implacable enemy. And here … Here the earth answered to a will more wicked, more monstrously horrific, than any the World had known. The Great Ordeal stood upon the very threshold of Golgotterath … the outermost gate.

  And like other Men of the Circumfix, a wildness had been kindled within Saccarees, a darkening of what was awake.

  For he too had partaken of the Meat.

  High upon Mantigol, gazing out over raving plains, Apperens Saccarees laughed heedless of his staring fellows, laughed in a voice the World had not heard for two thousand years …

  Aurang … Aurang! Foul beast. Old foe.

  At last.

  Proyas had chosen the heights to station his command, where he could observe the Holy Host in a glance, but that had proven to be a mistake, particularly as the slopes reared ever more fractured and steep. The disaster Proyas had feared never came to pass. Even exhausted for running, pressed into blind mobs, the Ordealmen proved unstoppable, a hacking tide that swept into the roiling masses of Sranc and over, leaving fields of trampled violet in its wake. As individuals they roared and they cut and they hammered, but as a host they consumed, did not so much throw into flight as trammel. Proyas had lost three in his entourage in his attempts to pace the advance—for he could do nothing more, he had come to realize, than be where he needed to be when this headlong rush finally, inevitably sagged to its knees. And so he had struck for the beaches, driving his pony down the still-crowded slopes.

  At last reaching the clotted beaches, he spurred his pony westward, trusting Kayûtas and the others would match his pace. He fairly cried out for relief, so clean was the sea breeze. But the sea itself was as soiled as could be, the breakers flapping with shining limbs, the retreating waters glinting black in silver sunlight, revealing its violet tincture in tidal pools. Sranc bobbed and bumped, knotted the waters like coagulum. The surf heaved carcasses into crashing gyres of slicked skin and fatted foam. The sight was almost narcotic, drowned faces rising from the blur, breaching the gleam, the waves rolling and dumping, dragging and engulfing, rolling and dumping …

  Narrow lozenges of beach had been cleared by the shrugging waters, allowing Proyas’s sturdy little steed to chop unhindered across the sand flats, leaping the embroidery of dead along the line of the tide.

  Fingers of wind combed his beard, and something began galloping within him.

  Rising about him as though upon a vast bowl, the Sons of Men butchered the Sons of Ninjanjin across the cracked shoulders of the Urokkas. Anasûrimbor Kellhus was no more than a spark in the distance, immobile as a navigator’s star, a knife too thin to be seen, piercing the jetting deep.

  The Exalt-Magus stepped from one height to another, felt his belly swing from his throat for the way the ground dropped into churning leagues before him. He descended the stairs of the mountain, following Mantigol’s many echoes. He ignored his floating brothers, threaded their ministries of light and death. Then he was striding beyond them, a dozen cubits in a step, over the heaps and mats of smoking dead, around gorges choked with flesh and char.

  So did the Grandmaster of the Mandate come down from his mountain, a marble of solitary light treading over dark and ravenous tracts—pearl scalps, gesticulating limbs, masticating rage. They scratched at his image, screamed their outrage, disgorged numberless arrows and javelins, so that for those watching horrified from the mountains, he seemed a lodestone sucking up filings in black, bristlin
g clouds.

  But Saccarees felt no alarm. Nor did he enjoy the glee that comes with impunity, the wonder of passing uncut through an assembly of hated foes. A kind of solace hummed through his bones instead, the easy breathing of those who awake with no cares outstanding. Someday it would be thus, a dwindling fraction of his soul realized. Someday one Man, one Survivor, would wander out alone into a world of smoke and soulless fury.

  And so he dwindled into the pestilential expanse. So he walked into the threshing depths of the Horde.

  A lonely figure. A beacon of precious light.

  Be they sons of cruel old Eryeat or his fellow Believer-Kings, Saubon had always stood apart from his brothers. For as long as he could remember, he had never been capable of … belonging … At least not the way other men—such as Proyas—seemed capable. His curse was not the curse of the awkward or fearful, who shied from camaraderie for the way others punished lack of grace. Nor was it the curse of the learned, who knew too much to allow ignorance to close the interval between disparate hearts. Even less was it the curse of the desperate, who reached and reached only to find backs turned against them.

  No. His was the curse of the proud, the overweening.

  He was no bombast. He did not, as that wretch Ikurei Conphas had done, gloat between his every breath. No. He had been born with a calling, a desire that unmoored all others, that anchored his very being. What he sought cast no reflection in polished silver. Greatness, for him, had always been something he would conquer …

  He had wept when Kellhus had told him as much on the Plains of Secharib. “I have raised you above others,” his Lord-and-Prophet said, “because of what you are …”