The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  Saubon, meanwhile, concentrated on scaling the parapets to assess their straits. He hauled himself up wreckage heaped by Kellhus himself, stood upright upon a gantry wall enclosing the Ribbaral, surveyed the absurd proportions of their doom.

  The Urokkas piled before him, bereft their diadems of ephemeral sorcerous light. The last of the Swayali blew as golden flakes across the raving multitudes. Even as he reeled for its preposterous extent, for the gnashing miles it encompassed, the Horde resumed its titanic wail, trammelled any hope of human sound. North. South. East. West. The land itself had been stippled in howling white faces.

  He will come back, a fraction of him insisted.

  You need only survive long enough.

  He required no voice to direct his householders. The Knights of the Desert Lion had sought him out as soon as the last Nun had vanished over the walls. Even now they looked to him, grasped the doom reflected in his blue eyes. He pointed at Kurwachal. And so, from points scattered across the gutted heart of Dagliash, they mustered upon her last, truly mighty tower.

  Hold on.

  Saubon, who had to teeter picking his way along the interior wall, would be the last to gain the blunted summit. They set about securing the toothless parapets. Ingol heaved skyward to the east, as if the World were naught but a hide drawn over a mammoth tree stump. Oloreg was all but obscured, but Mantigol loomed in oceanic silhouette beyond, its flanks swagged with fire. The plate of the Neleöst extended southward, wind-scuffed and gleaming. To the north the Erengaw Plain flared out into the obscurity of the Shroud. Sranc smothered all the World between, from those screaming and raving directly below, to those clotting the distances, mutilated sheaves cast over bare stone and breathing earth. Maggot-teeming, worm-twisting …

  He is coming.

  They found themselves standing upon a different raft in far more perilous seas—one that was sinking. Riven with the others along the parapet, Saubon watched the leaping, scrabbling flood. His breath had become a rope of frayed hemp drawn to and fro, something that sawed at his heart. Swinging and bounding, the creatures swamped the outermost defences, bloomed in the baileys, gushed through the ruined inner gates. Saubon suffered the peculiar, dislocated sense of horror that comes with watching doom unfold at a distance—a cavernous knowledge … A recognition like a hole.

  He will return!

  They could see the Witches recede over the screeching tracts, like golden wildflowers for their billows. They could see Him sparking into existence upon the peaks, or at points above the sun-scaled coast. They could hear His dread exhortations …

  Dagliash was engulfed in scribbling activity. Everywhere he looked he spied Sranc scaling the rotted mortices as quick and limber as adolescent boys. He watched the inhuman masses fan loping across the Ribbaral, saw Gwanwë’s salt effigy vanish into a fist of rutting fingers. He even glimpsed Bashrag lurching from the gutted pit where Ciworal had stood—the Well of Viri. The surge all but swallowed the unearthly golden glint of the receptacle.

  The very ground was rotted, infested …

  Please … How could I not believe you?

  Saubon turned to see Bogyar leaning perilously out on the ledge, screaming inaudible outrage, hammering his chest—his face nearly as crimson as his beard. Spittle winked in the sunlight.

  You knew my heart better than I.

  Like an apple core tossed upon an ant nest, Dagliash crawled. Sranc filing, mobbing, thronging, closing upon Kurwachal from all squares of the compass. Black arrows already pelted them. Several of his men wrested blocks from the battlements to send clacking down upon those climbing the tower’s thighs …

  The Holca made a show of rubbing a large stone against his mail-clad rump, then hurling it viciously at the skinnies flying atop the very wall Saubon had used to reach Kurwachal. Three were felled—and instantly, the whole company cheered as if at number-sticks. And the Exalt-General saw, with a profundity that fairly throttled him. Death. He understood. Death! He fathomed the enormity of the gift he had been given.

  “Praise Him!” he cried laughing to Men who could not hear him—only believe. “Hail our Holy Aspect-Emperor!”

  Death comes. Death always comes. But it is meted in so many ways …

  Few as glorious as this.

  And his Company, the Company of the Raft, saw with him. The impossible light of their Lord-and-Prophet leapt from look to look, heart to heart. They laughed and cheered, even though all the World bristled and screamed—even as the first of their number slumped to his knees, an arrow in his eye …

  “Praise! Praise to Him!”

  The Sranc came scratching up, throwing themselves over the parapets.

  “Hail Anasûrimbor Kellhus!”

  Death came swirling down.

  Saubon hacked against the onslaught, shattered wagging cleavers, cracked black helms. For a brief time, it seemed easy, hewing and chopping the snarling faces as they crested the battlements. They seemed invulnerable upon their bastion, casting Sranc like screaming cats from the heights. The rain of black arrows killed as many if not more the obscenities. Thirty-eight souls remained to the Company. They arrayed themselves about the Altar’s circuit according to necessity, a line that was drawn thinner as increasing numbers of Sranc shinnied various quarters of the tower. Kurwachal was soon engulfed in crawling skirts of Sranc, and it became little more than an octagonal shaft jutting from the seething assemblage. The creatures surmounted the parapets from all directions. The defenders were forced to close their line into a besieged circle, each man separated by paces from his gasping brother. Saubon continued crying out the name of his Lord-and-Prophet, but whether to rally or beseech he did not know. None could hear him, not in the rotted throat of the Horde. The name had become something empty, a reflex borne of outrage and horror and all the other darknesses that came before. There was his Company, little more than shadows that stood battling shadows that crawled or leapt. The World had imploded otherwise, become a bladder sucked tight about the points of life and murder. The tip of his nimil broadsword plunged and plummeted, slicing fish-belly skin, puncturing cheeks, shattering teeth. Arrows tinked from his helm, clattered from his ancient Cunûroi hauberk. He kicked the decayed masonry before him, sent a section tipping out, locked gazes with one of the clinging obscenities. Eyes like black marbles in sockets of oil, an expression like silk crushed in a fist, a sneering, spitting frenzy, leaning out and out, into the scabrous distances, then dropping on a sheer, slipping, vanishing … Fate begrudged him any respite or momentary exultation. More obscenities clambered over the lip—like human-faced lice they teemed. His blade swooped and struck, notching pitted iron, loosing strings and sheets of violet from maiden-pale skin. Kellhus! he bellowed. Kellhus! Kellhus! Kellhus! But his breath became more and more difficult, something he had to yank burning from the bottom of his lungs. Clutching agony seized his left arm. He faltered. Mepiro grovelled on his belly nearby, a javelin staking his back. Something resounded through his bones—a blow to the head. The ground swung vertical, slapped his cheek for his presumption …

  Kellhus!

  He pushed himself to his knees, despite the mountain across his shoulders.

  He saw Bogyar, a red-skinned fury upon the parapet, one foot upon the battlements, his mouth watering blood, a javelin jutting from his mail-armoured shoulder. The Holca held his left arm extended to the heavens, a nude Sranc impaled through the jaw upon a broken sword, shaking over the abyss, erect even in its instant of death. His right arm carried his great battleaxe down, delivering gore and ruin to the pale beasts thronging about him. From nowhere, it seemed, a Sranc leapt onto his back, and hacking and shrieking carried the red-haired warrior over the plummet.

  In the vacant place remaining, he saw a Sranc cresting the battlements, its face passive and porcelain, as beautiful as anything graven—until hatred crushed it into something inhuman.

  A concussion sent him rolling. A crawling, encrusted World, thrown in sheets.

  A sense of inner things le
aking.

  Kellhus …

  Across a landscape of stamping legs and unshod, horned feet, he saw Mepiro’s face, blank beneath wild shadows, jerking to rhythmic thrusts.

  No.

  Something happened. Something …

  Too loud to be sound. Too bright to be light …

  So quick, so absolute as to circumvent perception.

  Dagliash was gone—along with his breath, his heartbeat.

  He suffered an absence of sensation that could only be called falling. Void was a spinning place, or so he learned, for he did not move, and it spun about him.

  Then a mad, existential jarring, as if he had slipped from a precipice to be swatted motionless caught upon a ledge …

  He opened eyes within already opened eyes … Cheek against the turf, shadows thrashing about and above, a scissoring forest of horse-legs … Men battling Men? Yes. Galeoth knights vying with golden-armoured Coyauri.

  Mengedda?

  By the God, his fury felt so empty, so frail against the earth …

  He was already gazing across trampled turf. Motionless, he saw a young man fallen the same as he, heavily armoured in the old style, sandy-blond hair jutting from his mail hood. He watched him reach out in horror and confusion and grasp his own hand, squeeze the leathery fingers, the glass nails. He felt nothing …

  A nightmarish moment of recognition, too surreal to be terrifying.

  It was his face! His own hand had clasped him!

  He tried to scream.

  Nothing.

  He tried to move, to twitch …

  Absolute immobility encapsulated him. He felt only void across his exterior skin, but within … It seemed a door had swung or swollen open.

  And he knew the way all the Dead knew, with the certainty of timeless recollection.

  Hell … rising on a bubbling rush. Agony and wickedness chattering with famished glee …

  Demons, come to pull his outside through his inside, to invert and expose, to bare his every tenderness to fire and gnashing teeth …

  Damnation … in spite of everything.

  There was no describing the horror.

  He tried to clutch with dead fingers … to hold on …

  Don’t! he tried to call across the space of a dead man’s reach. But his ribs were a breathless cage, his lips cold soil. Don’t let go …

  Please! he screamed at his younger self, trying to communicate the whole of his life with sightless eyes … Fool! Ingrate!

  Don’t trust Hi—

  Flash of light.

  So bright, so blinding, that it seemed nothing more than a peripheral flicker.

  The image of Dagliash hung, a shadow wrapped about radiance, curtain walls blown to gaseous oblivion.

  Air sucked to dizzying altitudes.

  Ears shut to all sound.

  Radiating concussions, blowing souls in their thousands from the crests and summits, puncturing the very clouds, blasting them outward, dilating the iris of the sky.

  A moment of paradoxical sunlight.

  Vast and luminous and golden. Lancing across emptiness, painting the back of the erupting earth, a pillar of particulate and ejecta—a mountain flying upward and out. Plumes like octopus arms, black about brilliance, surging into Heaven’s vacant arch. The cooling tendrils bowed outward, fanning, descending, while an inferno scaled the obscured heights within.

  Circles and rings of obliteration. The swirling ash. The charcoal slopes, all the smoking forms thrown outward. The croaking regions, fingerless hands pawing. Burning Schoolmen, stumbling from the sky.

  Then the fields of screaming, Men and Sranc, raising blistered faces, melted eyes, shaking skin from their arms, so that it seemed they warred with rags.

  The smell of smoke and burnt lamb and cooking pig.

  Mouths round with lamentation.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Demua Mountains

  To be a Man is to take the frame of Man as firmament, to be immovable unto oneself. And to know Man as a Man is to be blind to this common frame, to be without knowing. Thus is knowing the corruption of being. And so to learn what it is to be a Man is to cease to be a Man.

  —Treatise on Diremption, ANONYMOUS

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

  Ishuäl destroyed. His father rediscovered. The Doctrine utterly overthrown.

  This was a Study like no other.

  The mountain wind fluted through as much as across the Survivor’s skin. Slices. Incisions. Sickle-shaped and puckered. Intersecting. Even his scarring bore scars. Had his memory not been perfect he could have used his body as a map, a cipher. Every desperate stand. Every vicious encounter. His trial had been carved into the very meat of him, the residue of a thousand thousand shortest paths. Decisions without number.

  He had become a hieroglyph, a living indication of things both invisible and profound. No matter how bright the sun burned, darkness surrounded him. No matter how deep the distance, slavering beasts encircled him. No matter how peaceful the birdsong, how quiet the jackpine and high stone, cutting edges whistled in the black, points gutted the near-emptiness.

  Cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts …

  He had become a walking word. The only one that mattered now that Ishuäl was gone …

  Survival.

  He and the boy followed the old man and the woman, their ears pricked to the brief exchanges between them. Lexicons were expanded. Grammars were considered and revised. They correlated tones and expressions, and began milking ever more meaning from the raw sounds.

  They ascended slopes, followed switchback paths, labouring through high-altitude shadows.

  By some fluke of their approach, the sun breached the mountain along the line of the glacier, so that all the world seem dazzled. They climbed toward the fields of hanging shimmer.

  Shriekers bubbled up through the black. The Survivor blinked—flinched.

  The boy observed.

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  Despite their apparent infirmity, the worldborn couple scarcely paused for respite. They climbed with alacrity, trotted with relentless wind—so much so that the boy was taxed on occasion. It was the substance, the Survivor realized, the drug they administered with an exchange of fingertips: it deepened their lungs as much as it quickened their wits and their limbs.

  Another mystery …

  More promising than the others.

  The ink of knowledge blots the page. The couple understood what they were, but only in rough approximation. Their concepts could only touch, never grasp, the principles of the Dûnyain. They lacked the required precision.

  But as partial and incomplete as their understanding was, they nevertheless assumed that they knew everything they needed to know—and so were safe, or at least shielded from the refugees. They could no more fathom their straits than a crow could read.

  They would succumb. The Survivor need only aim his soul and they would succumb—eventually. The woman’s madness was naught but a complication. The old man’s hatred and knowledge were even less so.

  They would succumb, he quickly realized, the way the World had succumbed to his father. They dwelt in worlds pocked and limned and partitioned with darknesses they could not see. The unity of things, they thought, was something hidden beneath, a vast analogue to the false unity of their souls. And so they assumed they, at least, stood apart, believing that it belonged to souls to hang themselves by their own hair. They did not understand how Cause nested within Cause, how all that was real—and mundane—transpired across a singular plane, the after forever following upon the before.

  So they thought words were the sole avenue of conquering souls, that they could, through vigilance and a wilful refusal to believe, guard this gate and so keep their souls safe. They could not see what they could not see, and so were blind to the way they became mere moments in a greater mechanism in the presence of the Dûnyain. Like chips of ice in warm water, their secrets would
melt, their principles would dissolve, and they would become continuous with the whole, all but indistinguishable.

  They would succumb.

  “How can you know this?” the boy asked the first night of their exodus. They had camped on the shoulder of a giant, high enough to dare the teeth of the cold. The old man and his woman lay curled one about the other on a higher tier, finding solace of sorts, the Survivor knew, in their greater elevation.

  “Because they are less,” something within him replied, “and we are more.”

  “But what of sorcery?” the boy asked. “You said the Singers had changed everything.”

  “True,” the Cause-within said. As cause, it was also effect, selected from a chattering cacophony of causes. As it passed, another was selected to be voiced, a lone survivor of inner savagery. The soul was nothing more than congeries of brutalized survivors …

  “The Doctrine is incomplete.”

  “So how can you know?” the Cause-nearby pressed.

  “Because the Doctrine yet rules the meat of the World,” yet another survivor said. “And because,” the one following added, “they succumbed to my father …”

  Yet another Cause monitored this process of selection, the sorting of the living and spoken from the dead and unvoiced, ever alert for evidence of madness …

  Nothing.

  “So what will you do?”

  When they succumb … a survivor added.

  “That depends on the manner of their capitulation,” the Cause-within replied.

  “How do you mean?” the Cause-nearby asked.

  And the monitor happened upon a wane flare of solace, a mad survivor, rooted in murk. They had always been a single engine, this place and the boy, from the day they had fled into the Thousand Thousand Halls.