The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  She bundled the hair about the back of his neck, squeezed, then began working her way forward, this time along the sides of his head, moving toward his temples.

  “Inrilatas could make you cry,” Kelmomas recalled.

  Her fingers paused. A spasm of some kind plucked at the slack muscles of her face.

  “I’m surprised you remember.”

  She ceased ministering to his hair, turned back to Mother’s accoutrements.

  “I remember.”

  She raised and wetted a small, rose-coloured sponge, then, using the soap congealed across his scalp, she began washing his face with gentle, even tender strokes.

  “Inrilatas was-was the strongest of all of us,” she said upon a spastic blink. “The most-most cruel.”

  “Stronger than me?”

  “Far stronger.”

  Lying bitch!

  “How so?”

  “He saw too deeply.”

  “Too deeply,” the boy repeated. “What kind of answer is that?”

  Theliopa shrugged. “The more you know a soul-soul, the less of a soul-soul it becomes. For Inrilatas, we-we were little more-more than beetles, scuttling around and about-about, blind-blind. So long as we remain blind to those blindnesses, our souls and our worlds remain whole-whole. As soon as we see-see them, we see that we are nothing more-more than beetles.”

  Kelmomas looked at her uncomprehendingly. “The more you know a thing,” he said, frowning, “the more real it becomes.”

  “Only if it was real to begin with.”

  “Pfah,” he sneered.

  “And yet you do the very thing he did.”

  “Which is?”

  “Make-make toys of the souls about you.”

  The boy caught his breath, such was the force of his insight.

  “So that was what Inrilatas did? Made you his toy?”

  “Even now-now,” she said on her damned stammer, “this is what youyou attempt to do.”

  “So I’m a beetle too!”

  She paused to draw the sponge across his chin. The water was becoming tepid.

  “A beetle that eats beetles.”

  He mulled these words while she laboured to cleanse his throat and neck, particularly about the divot between his collarbones. It struck him as an epic and beautiful thing, that brother and sister could discuss the grounds that would see one murder the other … like a tale from the Chronicle of the Tusk.

  “Why did he call you Sranc?” he asked without warning.

  Another facial seizure.

  Kelmomas smirked when she said nothing. There was only one beetle here.

  “No tracks in the snow, eh?”

  “Because I was-was always so skinny.”

  She lies … the voice said.

  Yes, brother, I know …

  The young Prince-Imperial pressed aside her wrist to peer at her. It seemed a miracle to be so close to a face so hated, to see the spatter of freckles, the pink rim of her lids, the cant of her teeth. All this time he had assumed that she had been found, only to discover that she had been made, that his brother had bent her—broken her. It seemed he could remember it so much more clearly now …

  Her weeping.

  “How many times?” he asked her.

  A lethargic blink. “Until Father locked him up.”

  A deadness had crept into her voice.

  “And Mother?”

  “What of Mother?”

  “Did she ever find out?”

  The chirp of dripping water.

  “She overheard him once-once. She was-was furious …”

  She raised the sponge, but he recoiled in annoyance.

  “She-she was the only one-one who never-never feared Inrilatas,” Theliopa said.

  He could see it all so clearly now.

  “She never found out,” Kelmomas said.

  Her head rocked as if at a silent hiccough, only three times in rapid succession.

  “Inrilatas …” he continued, watching the name bleach her expression.

  “What-what?”

  “Did he seduce you?” He grinned. He had seen what the grown do when their blood rose. “Or did he rape?”

  Now she was truly blank.

  “We are Dûnyain,” she murmured.

  The young Prince-Imperial chortled, shivered for the glamour of elation. He leaned forward, placed his wet cheek against her sunken one, whispered in her ear in the same grunting manner he knew his older brother had, not so many years ago …

  “Sranky …”

  She smelled like sour milk.

  “Sranky …”

  Suddenly he was sputtering soap and water, rubbing eyes that burned so fiercely he could scarcely see Theliopa fleeing, just shadows and hooped shimmering. He made no attempt to call her back …

  She had left plenty of tracks in the snow.

  Kelmomas dunked his head in the embalming warmth, swatted the soap from his face and hair. He had almost certainly doomed himself, he knew, but he whooped in silent triumph all the same.

  Terror had always been his soul’s laggard, where his will was most weak, his heart most strong.

  And it was no small feat making an Anasûrimbor cry.

  Issiral was not in his chamber.

  His jubilation had been short-lived. Seized by a monstrous panic, he had leapt from the tub and dressed without so much as towelling down, stealing sodden and dripping into the arterial depths of the shadow palace. Never, it seemed, had he suffered such paroxysms of dread—such vicious recriminations!

  Fool! You’ve killed us! Killed us!

  You played too! You shared in the fun!

  But finding the Narindar’s chamber empty had fairly stopped his small heart. For a long while he simply lay prone at the iron grilled vent, sapped of all strength, gouged of all thought, just peering at the shadowy corner where the Narindar should be … breathing. For those first moments, the thought of the Grinning God moving in the blackness, acting outside his observation, simply exceeded his grasp.

  What were the chances? Was it simply happenstance that he would find the Narindar missing immediately after goading Thelli—the woman who clasped his doom in her long-fingered hands? Did the man merely roam the halls on another of his inexplicable errands? Or … or had all this already happened?

  And yet again it defeated him, how he could be freer than free, and yet damned to repeat the memories of the Blasted God! Solving was doing, pulling the threads that unravelled the whole—driving skewers into tear ducts! But his every thought, his soul’s merest movement, had already happened, which meant he had never solved anything! Ever! Which meant …

  He gagged for the impossibility. The hopelessness of the riddle became the hopelessness of his straits.

  He wept for a time. Anyone hidden in Issiral’s chamber would have heard no more than a faraway keening punctuated by sniffles, delicate and near.

  He lay like a sack.

  How? his twin wailed. How could you be such an idiot?

  It was her fault!

  There has to be somethi—

  There’s nothing! Don’t you get it?

  The Prince of Hate! Ajokli hunts us!

  A moment of roiling horror.

  Then let him find us! Kelmomas resolved with rekindled savagery.

  And he was racing through the shadow palace once again, his face burning, his tunic slick as flayed skin. A fury unlike any he had ever known animated him, sent his limbs slapping into the darkness. Images of wild violence exploded beneath his soul’s eye.

  This was his House …

  This was his House!

  He would sooner die than cower within it.

  He flew through the narrow slots, high wells, and crooked tunnels, scrambling like a monkey from the Apparatory back to the ingrown summit of the Upper Palace. He was nearly upon his bedchamber before the manic inkling that drove him faded into sober insight. He need only ask himself where a young Prince-Imperial would be found dead to begin guessing where his murder was going to
take place. And in so many lays and histories, or so it seemed, the babes of Kings and Emperors were found strangled in their beds.

  And like an axe swung, this realization struck him in two. The bull of outrage within him continued lunging forward, but the little boy had already begun snivelling and shrinking back in renewed terror. The throat of the tunnel closed as he neared, forcing him to his hands and knees. His passage forward, which had already possessed the ethereal character of dreams, became nightmarish, an ordeal of palms. He could see the luminous print of the bronze grill across the brickwork ahead of him, and it seemed both strange and appropriate that his room be both empty and bright. His throat and chest burned. Fear compelled him to crawl forward on his belly. He began mumbling voiceless prayers to no God in particular as he shimmed forward …

  Please, his twin whispered.

  Please …

  Life rarely affords us the luxury of spying on our terrors. Typically they come upon us unawares, bat us about bewildered before leaving us wrecked or intact according to our doom. His breath a convulsive knife held fast in his breast, Anasûrimbor Kelmomas crept to the shining grill … peered around its edge the way a less divine child might peek above their covers. So certain was he that he would see the Narindar in his room that he had become equally certain that he would not, that this entire misadventure would simply show him up for the foolish child he was. All the familiar features swivelled into soundless view, the marmoreal walls, white with shadowy veins of blue, the pinkish marble of the trim and corbelling, the sumptuous bed, the tigers prancing across the crimson carpet, the scattered furnishings, the unshuttered balcony …

  No.

  The Prince-Imperial gaped breathless, utterly insensate for horror …

  His eyes rolled for impossibility. Issiral stood near the heart of his room, as motionless as always, atavistic for his near nakedness, peering through the broad threshold into the antechamber where the door lay obscured. His earlobes seemed drops of blood, they were so red. The very World shuddered, rumbled like distant thunder.

  No-no-no-no! his twin gibbered.

  The Four-Horned Brother. The Grinning God. The Prince of Hate.

  Ajokli stood in his room, awaiting his return …

  Except that he now watched Him.

  Confusion crimped his horror.

  All he need do was … was … slink away … never return to his room …

  Or better yet, alert the Pillarians or the Inchausti, tell them the Narindar had invaded his chambers without permission, insinuate … insinuate …

  But how could it be so easy? What of the Unerring Grace?

  How could a child dispose of an invading God?

  No. This was a trick of some kind …

  It had to be!

  But … but …

  He heard the latch of his door clink, the whistle of the bottommost hinge as the portal swung open. The sound fairly plucked his heart from his chest whole.

  The Narindar continued staring as before, his eyes happening upon the newcomer the way his hand had happened upon the rolling apple. The boy need only hear the whisk of battling lace to know who had arrived.

  Theliopa.

  She appeared silk-luminous beneath the threshold, a scintillant vision compared to the watching assassin. She regarded him without the least fear, and would have owned the space had not the man buzzed with such monstrous horror. Save the archipelago of sodden fabric across her waist, she betrayed no sign of her weeping flight a mere watch prior. She merely gazed in open curiosity …

  And seemed so perilously human for it.

  The young Prince-Imperial gazed transfixed.

  “Am I supposed to know-know that you await me?” she asked, her tone familiar.

  “Yes,” the Narindar replied.

  His voice was at once mundane and preternatural … like Father’s.

  “So you-you will trust your skills against an Anasûrimbor?”

  The near-naked man shook his head. “There is no skill in what I do.”

  A pause, brief but more than interval enough. The boy saw Theliopa’s point of focus dull and sharpen as she slipped in and out of the Probability Trance.

  “Because there is no skill in anything,” she said.

  The blue light of the outdoors limned his profile, made his sandstone immobility even more impervious.

  “And my death?” Thelli asked.

  “Even now I see it.”

  The gesture he made was curious, reminiscent of ancient Shigeki engravings, almost as though he placed the space he indicated.

  His sister hitched back her skirts, glanced to her feet—to where the assassin pointed. The boy’s heart hammered. Thelli!

  “So I am already dead?”

  Move!

  “What else would you be?”

  Move, Thelli! Move!

  “And you-you? Who are you?”

  “Someone who was there when it happened.”

  Afterward, the boy would decide that it had started heartbeats before, while they talked, like a bubble of some kind growing … a shudder riding the knife’s edge of an explosion.

  A primordial hammer struck all points underneath at once. The boy bucked, curled like a tossed serpent. All was roaring motion. Issiral crouched into the quake’s bosom, curtains of masonry crashing about him. Theliopa stumbled, looked up in pallid alarm, then vanished in slumping shadows of stone brick debris.

  Kelmomas threw his arms about his head, heard the pop of great joists cracking.

  Then the ground was still.

  He kept his face buried until the roar vanished into hiss and clatter.

  All was dun obscurity when he finally dared peer—he could see only that the grill and a section of the wall that had concealed it had collapsed. He coughed and waved his hands, realized that he lay upon the edge of a collapse that had carried his bed to the floor below. The Narindar was nowhere to be seen, even though the portion of floor where he had stood remained intact. He could hear a man shouting, over and over, a paean of some kind. He could hear deeper, more distant calls, the throats of those attempting to restore order.

  A woman’s hitching cry filtered from somewhere across the Sacral Enclosure.

  Anasûrimbor Kelmomas clambered down the debris to the strewn floor of his room. He turned and stared at the broken remains of his elder sister. She lay face forward where her head had recoiled, one lifeless arm cast out, propped as though in drunken gesture, her hair a scatter of wiry flaxen, chalked white and slicked black. Kelmomas approached, blinking new tears from his eyes with every step. He peered breathless, saw no sign of the Worshipper he had glimpsed in the eyes of the others. How much more a doll she seemed dead. A sob kicked through him on his final step, and he leaned to scoop a slate brick, which he hoisted high upon a child’s grip, then cast down upon her head. The blood gratified him.

  He could tell by looking that she was still hot to the touch.

  “She’s deeead!” he wailed on the open wind. “Thelli’s dead, Momma! Momma!”

  He cradled his sister’s ruined head on his lap, gazed at the collapsed wineskin of her face. He ducked his chin and indulged a gloating smile.

  Do you believe? his twin whispered.

  Oh, I believe.

  The Four-Horned Brother was his friend.

  “Mommaaaaa!”

  The Mbimayu Schoolman thought the day ill-omened since awakening. Nightmares had taxed what seemed every watch of the night, brawling dreams, the kind that kick away blankets—dreams he should have remembered, but had shrunken instantly into fuzzy, inexplicable horror. He even retrieved his Kizzi Bones in an attempt to divine them, so cramped and irksome was the shadow they cast across his waking. But of course the Whore had already thrown them Her way: no sooner had he found the fetishes than a grim Kianene Grandee, Saranjehoi, arrived with Fanayal’s invitation to break fast with him and his Concubine.

  Malowebi’s subsequent (and quite indecorous) haste was simply a reflection of how profoundly the mood of the
Bandit Padirajah had soured over the weeks since Meppa had very nearly died. Time was the enemy, and Fanayal ab Kascamandri knew it. The endless stream of ships entering and leaving the Imperial Capital were plainly visible—the Imperials had even begun hosting feasts on the walls as a goad! The Nansur countryside, meanwhile, had become increasingly hostile—scarcely a day passed without word of another foraging band lost to ambush. Where they had rode the miles surrounding Momemn solitary and shirtless in the early days of the siege, the Fanim now moved only in numbers and according to necessity. And it was this more than anything that galled their legendary Padirajah (unto near-madness, thanks to the Yatwerian witch), the fact that the idolaters refused to acknowledge their defeat, that the Zaudunyani, for all their wickedness, consistently displayed a heroism that made his desert-warriors marvel and fear. The Fanim spoke of it about their fires, the mad resolve of their foe, the impossibility of subduing souls that welcomed death and degradation.

  “What kind of land is this,” Malowebi once overheard a chipped, old Carathay chieftain complain, “where women throw themselves as shields for men? Where ten throats are counted as a bargain for one!”

  The measure of morale, Memgowa had famously written, lay in the proportion of ends to souls. The more the ends diverged and multiplied among the ranks, the less an army could remain an army. The desert horsemen had arrived here possessing a single goal—to lop the head from the Imperial Dragon. But as the passage of the days gnawed on their numbers, so their ends had gradually multiplied. The thought of alternatives lie on all of their faces now—as surely as it did on the Malowebi’s own. The premonition of doom had taken root in every heart—none more than that of their Padirajah. And as abused menials were want to beat their wives and children, so Fanayal had begun to evidence his potency in acts of capricious will. Corpses now hung over most all the main avenues of the encampment—Fanim executed for trifles worth only the lash weeks previous.

  Desperation glares in all Men, but it burns as a beacon when it takes a King for tinder.

  A votive to the dread Mother of Birth.

  Curse Likaro! Curse him!

  The Harem, the desert warriors now called their Padirajah’s pavilion, and to Malowebi and his alchemist’s nose, it reeked of one, the air close—even sodden—with too many exhalations, too much sweat and seed. Psatma Nannaferi was in attendance, of course: Royal Concubines were confined by Fanim law and Kianene custom. She sat both too near and too distant, as always, wearing far too much and nowhere near enough—as always. Her mood, which ordinarily swung between stony and labile, was every bit as exultant as his was troubled. For the first time she wore her voluminous hair bound back, lending a severe air to her otherwise pouting fertility.