The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  Unerringly, it seems, his look settles upon their little pit.

  No one so much as blinks. The Princess-Imperial’s heart drops the length of her spine.

  He is one of the Few.

  Daylight dwindles, draining at a pace that matches their anxious, arboreal flight. She leads despite the late stage of her term. Just behind her, the old Wizard tramps in his anarchic way, looking for all the world like an old hermit, nimble and mad. The boy trots effortlessly in the rear, alternately peering from side to side, probing the greenery that screens their flanks.

  They do not talk. The barking of distant Sranc is all they can hear above their breathing. Suddenly it has become all too familiar, fleeing from wilderness into wilderness. The premonition of disaster about the neck and shoulders. The prick in every swallow. The way the birches close the curtains on the environs surrounding, allowing fear to populate them.

  They continue huffing and trotting until dusk and darkness reduces all distances to ink and wool. The decision to break for the night comes as a knuckle in the landscape: a balding dome rising to the waist of the encircling trees.

  Achamian leans gasping against his knees upon the summit. “He saw us,” he says, peering into nocturnal confusion. She cannot imagine what he hopes to see: the forest is little more than tangled hair and smeared charcoal to her eyes.

  She lies against the mossy back of a log, her eyes fluttering, her hands across her distended abdomen. Her every breath pinches her throat at the clavicle. An acidic heat creeps between her ribs.

  “What would you have us do,” she pants. “Run through the night?”

  The old Wizard turns to her. The sky is overcast. The moon is little more than a lantern in the fog, so she can see nothing of his eyes beneath the coarse line of his brow. He is inscrutable and frightening for it.

  Suddenly she has difficulty seeing past the blasted ache of his Mark.

  “If we took more Qirri …” he says.

  What is it in his tone? Elation. Appeal. Dread …

  The craving fills her.

  “No …” she gasps.

  Yes-yes-yes …

  “No?” Achamian repeats.

  “I will not risk our child,” she explains, leaning her head back once again.

  “But this is exactly what you do!”

  And so he continues cajoling. The Scylvendi were a race like no other, he insists in wary tones. Godless. Worshippers of violence. As vicious as Sranc and far more cunning. “They are not the artless savages you think!” he cries on the back of worry and obstinance. “Their traditions are ancient, but not hidebound. Their customs are ruthless, but not blind. Trickery and deception are their most prized weapons!”

  She lies with one hand hooked like a swing beneath her belly and another held to her forehead. Tiresome pendant!

  “Mimara! We must keep running!”

  She understands their peril. The Scylvendi were no small matter of concern upon the Andiamine Heights, but less so than in the days of the Ikurei. The Battle of Kiyuth had consumed an entire generation of their manhood—and more. The People of War had always depended on the Chorae their ancestors had accumulated as spoils through the millennia. Shorn of these, they simply could not cope with the sorceries of the Three Seas.

  “Back to the mountains …” he says, gazing out toward the Demua. “They’ll be loathe to risk their ponies in the dark. By morning we could use bare rock to obscure all trace of our passage!”

  There is a vacancy in his manner, one that repels her. She is suddenly sure that the Qirri, and not the Scylvendi, motivate his exhortations. He does not want to taste to run so much as run to taste.

  A cannibal yearning for the ash clasps her as a lover might.

  Even still, she will not be swayed. A sudden wave of heat afflicts her, and to the old Wizard’s disgust, she pulls her Sheära corselet over her head, dumps it and begins shedding her pelts. Her skin pimples in the chill air. She strips to her tunic, which clings like sodden leather for the accumulation of filth. Within heartbeats, it feels as cold as lizard skin about the dome of her maternity. Her eyes flutter shut, and she sees tumbling purple. The lost forests of Kûniüri wobble like a top second-guessing its spin. She concentrates on breathing around her myriad discomforts.

  “Are … Are you well?” Achamian asks from the oblivion above her, suddenly penitent.

  “Now he asks,” she mutters to the boy, whom she cannot see. She undoes her belt, throws aside her scabbard, as much to infuriate the old Wizard as to relieve her belly.

  Achamian eases himself to his rump, glaring, then, relying on his pelts for comfort, he rolls away from her. By some miracle, he manages to hold his tongue.

  The sight of his back comforts her for some reason.

  Do you see, little one? I bear you …

  She lays back into her exhaustion, cooling, drifting.

  And he bears me …

  She sways and topples through something like a dream, a tempest flashing on some nocturnal horizon …

  “What are you doing?”

  Achamian’s voice, sharp enough to crack through the suffocating felt. She starts. Mere months ago she would have simply popped upright, but her belly forbids it, so she flails like an upturned beetle.

  “Kirila meirwat dagru—” the boy is saying.

  Night has claimed all the world as its spoil. She sees the old Wizard, but more as shape than substance. His ragged silhouette stands at a cautious distance, four paces or so from her feet. She whirls to the boy, who sits cross-legged on her immediate right. His eyes are luminous, searching. He holds “Chipmunk”—the bronze knife she plundered from the Library of Sauglish—flat across his left thigh. And in his crabbed hand he holds …

  “It … makes … light,” the boy says in careful Sheyic.

  As she watches, the boy scrapes the Chorae he holds in his right hand along the length of the sorcerous blade. Lightning whitens the hunched grotto of his fascination, engraving the grotesquerie of his maimed hand as vividly as the innocence of his face.

  She strikes him out of some reflex, the way one might a child frolicking too near open flame. The boy catches her wrist without the least effort or worry. His look, as always, betrays nothing more than curiosity. She yanks her arm clear, fairly barges into his lap, scooping up Chipmunk and her Chorae both. She spares the boy a furious heartbeat, both glaring and grating.

  “No,” she says, as if instructing a puppy. “No!”

  “The knife,” Achamian says, still keeping his distance—because of the Chorae, she realizes. “Let me see it.”

  She tosses it to him with a snort. She suddenly realizes the old Wizard has been right all along, that they should have continued fleeing into the night. Shivers crash across her, and she fumbles the exposed Chorae trying to slip it back into the pouch. She curses, squats, and begins pawing through the leaves scaling the ground.

  “Emilidis …” the old Wizard says on a contemplative rasp.

  “What?” she asks, retrieving and stowing the Trinket with its sibling. Her teeth are chattering. She bunches the back of her golden hauberk, draws the silken weight over her head. Qirri … a voice whispers.

  Qirri will allow them to flee through the night. Yes.

  “Your knife was locked in the Coffers for a reason …” the old Wizard says, still peering.

  The boy, who has not moved, peers into the surrounding blackness. Perhaps he can feel shame. She begins slinging her pelts about her shoulders, winces for the reek.

  “The greatest of the ancient Artificers made this,” Achamian explains.

  “What?” she asks, tugging the knife from his grasp. “Chipmunk?”

  The Dûnyain boy pops effortlessly to his feet, his attention pricked to something in the dark. Both she and Akka follow his gaze into the wooded blackness, searching in vain.

  “Travellers!” a voice booms across the clearing, one harsh with barbaric intonation.

  She fairly swoons, so profound is her shock.


  Voices, human voices, begin baying from the encircling blackness, tones of barbaric outrage and triumph, each as sharp and porcelain as teeth. Suddenly she can feel them, a necklace of needling absences identical to those against her breast, closing upon them from all angles. Chorae Bowmen. Scylvendi Chorae Bowmen.

  “Three Seas scum!”

  Bars of moonlight wink through the woolen sky, baring all in bloodless illumination.

  She sees Achamian, a mad hermit sorcerer standing every bit as transfixed as she, only with his face held down as if in dread contemplation. She sees the figure addressing them, the blue-faced, bearded Scylvendi from before. The hard-faced tongue-walker …

  “Attend me or die!” the barbarian shouts on a curious, lupine roll of his head.

  The old Wizard raises his face. “Who—?”

  “Maurax urs Cagnûralka calls on you! The Childstrangler. The Great and Holy Throatcutter. Our mighty King-of-Tribes would scry your fate with his own cruel eyes!”

  To think they had feared the Sranc.

  Blue-face had bid Achamian to light their way. Now midges and mosquitoes form a scribbling halo about his Surillic Point. They follow it across bleached confusion, wading through sheaved scrub and weeds rising stark from absolute black. The surrounding trees are scabbed in white. A welter of glimpses surface from the gloom beyond them. Brutal profiles. Forearms roped in sinew and striped with scars. Figures floating on saddles. Pinpricks of oblivion swim in the greater black—she can feel them, hanging above the bottom, little fish wandering in loose schools. Sranc periodically screech and yelp from tracts unknown.

  Blue-face had punched Achamian full in the mouth when he dared voice a question. So they spend watch after watch trudging in silence, a pocket of sorcerous light creeping through the tangled black, an avalanche of wild horsemen as their escort. Mimara holds her belly, squinting away the waves of dozing nausea. The unborn infant is restless, kicks continually. Twice the boy catches her stumbling. She knows it well, the slurry of dread and exhaustion, and the movements of her soul seem all the more mad for it. Solace in the Eye—the unfaltering fire of a conviction she had never known. Terror in the thought, the knowledge that these were Scylvendi. And so it seemed that she was assured—both of the miracle that would save them, and of the torment that would see them doomed.

  It occurs to her to pray. She hugs her abdomen instead.

  Fear not, little one. Shush.

  Blue-face smells rancid with urine—to ward against insects, she decides, after slapping her own cheek. The shrouded sky becomes threadbare. The first stars wink through rags of supernal gauze. The ground becomes more pitched, treacherous with humped stone and crabbed earth. The canopy thins then falls away, and they find themselves on the rounded edge of a scarp, staring out across a broad floodplain, one pillared with gigantic carbuncles of stone. The fires of the encamped host are not numerous, but then the night is old.

  The Nail of Heaven pierces the northern skies.

  Blue-face leads them down a ramp, between cyclopean stones shagged in growth. The air smells of smoke and latrines. They loiter while Blue-face consults one of their escorts, a chieftain, by the look of him, grey-maned and sporting an antique Kianene helm. Mimara notices Achamian, how his lips work in the manner of addled old men rehearsing defeats. The weariness melts away, forms a crust about a renewed sense of alarm.

  Grey-mane heels his pony, spurs galloping into the darkness before them. Blue-face signals the resumption of their march.

  They filter as much as pass through the slumbering host. Few yaksh populate the murk: the plainsmen slumber in the open with their ponies, larval beneath blankets of felt. There are no paths or alleys between them, so everywhere the war-party treads they are greeted with curses and scowling looks. She is unnerved by the white-blue of their irises, how they gleam in the blanched light of the Surillic Point. For all the world, they look like the eyes of one man staring from the cheek and brow of many.

  They all reek of piss, like Blue-face.

  One of the rock towers that peg the plain rears before them, a misshapen silhouette against the infinite arch of night. She glimpses the dancing crown of a fire upon its summit. Numerous yaksh crowd the scarped base, arranged in fungal clutches through the dark. Grey-mane awaits them on foot. Blue-face whistles, and the Chorae war-party dismounts. She can feel them in groups of two or three congregating with their bearers, accursed Trinkets … Tears of the God.

  She finds herself clasping the old Wizard’s arm, squeezing against his tremors. He spares her a wild sidelong look, one belonging to horses encircled by fire. The boy merely observes with the same impervious curiosity with which he observes everything. The Surillic Point brings out the boy’s resemblance to his grandfather, she thinks, as does his thickening hair …

  For the first time she realizes that he is her nephew.

  Blue-face begins picking his way up a ramp of tossed stone, following Grey-mane. When they hesitate, one of the Scylvendi shoves Achamian forward, hard enough to swing his beard to his shoulders. There is something ominous about the way the old Wizard collects himself from the ground. Suddenly she fears the vacant expression on his face as much their captors. The soul that is perpetually beset often loses patience with life …

  She knows this fact too well.

  More yaksh crowd the uneven heights, devoid of dyed colour or the least ornamentation. The air reeks of charred lamb.

  Blue-face leads them toward the lone pillar of smoke rising into chill oblivion. Embers twirl and luminesce before fading into moth wings. A reluctance creeps into her step. The escorting Scylvendi have to bully her into the presence of the bonfire. It wheezes and spits, roars like tattered sails in the wind. Through the consuming brilliance, she discerns the earthworm tangle of torsos and limbs. They burn Sranc, she realizes.

  Achamian allows his Surillic Point to wink into nothingness.

  They stand upon ruins, she decides—something more than ancient old, something beaten into the crabbed semblance of nature. A line too long uninterrupted. A cylindrical curve. A stone bent at the elbow.

  Blue-face directs them past the macabre bonfire into a depression that is a rectangular pool of ink for the brightness of the flame. Men await them. Nine sit along the depression’s rim, their backs to the heap of burning grease and skin, their faces bent toward oblivion. One sits alone at the far end, narrow of shoulder, large of hand. The bonfire is his sculptor, scoring his arms with tiger stripes, etching the wend of veins. Dignity is his stone.

  A series of poles rise from the mound of mossed debris behind him. A pony hangs skewered upon them, punctured and weeping, a ghastly apparition in the firelight. A Scylvendi warrior lolls dead upon its saddle, propped with sticks like a scarecrow.

  Following Blue-face, they wade into the blackness, peering to assure their footing. She stands where he directs: with the boy opposite the Nine. Achamian he thrusts tripping toward the centre. The old Wizard topples, vanishes as if over a precipice. Mimara cries out, thinking a pit concealed in the shadow. But she sees the rolling glint of nimil and the shag of rotted pelt. He regains his footing with surprising decorum, like that of a holy man beset by rascals. It seems the blackness should fall from him in draining sheets, it is so complete.

  The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes observes without word or expression. He is younger than she had expected, as hard as the ruin about him. His mane is jet-black, wild in the manner of autumn weeds. His face is too rustic to be handsome, yeoman simple, yet harbouring an intelligence too nimble not to be vicious. His eyes are keen, the irises almost white, but quick, she senses, to become bored—and all the more ruthless for it.

  Mimara stands breathing into the onerous weight of her womb. The bonfire twists and whooshes, the Nine little more than silhouettes beneath its white-glaring contortions. In her periphery, the Chorae Bowmen assemble along the depression’s unoccupied rim, their shafts knocked and drawn.

  No one moves, other than two warriors tossing another carcass upo
n the fire. The Nail of Heaven squints and glowers above them, marking the direction of Golgotterath.

  Her eyes adjust. Achamian, she can see, alternately clenches and releases the nimil hauberk he drew from the ashes of Nil’giccas …

  Fat hisses in flame.

  “Be done with it!” the old Wizard finally cries.

  The barbaric scrutiny continues.

  “Kill us and be done with it!” Achamian cries, his disgust so profound it verges on hilarity.

  “The woman,” Maurax says in a deep, scarcely-accented voice. “She is yours?”

  The fact that he had not so much as glanced at her makes the question all the more terrifying.

  Achamian glares in horror.

  “Wha-what?” he stammers, then stops on a swallow, licks his lips, breathes deep. A kind of resignation seems to calm him. “What do you want?”

  The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes leans forward, elbows out, hands on knees. He has the air of a man dispensing advice to a half-wit.

  “Migagurit says you wear your stain deep, Three Seas … That you are a sorcerer-of-rank.”

  Achamian glances at Blue-face. The bonfire makes a wiry halo of his beard and hair as he does so. “Yes.”

  An appraising look, one both possessing the lettered arrogance of kings and the ignorant conceit of barbarians.

  “And what brings a sorcerer-of-rank and his pregnant woman to the High Wild?”

  An incredulous smirk creases the old Wizard’s face. He raises a hand to the back of his neck, shakes his lowered face in disbelief. He is done with madness, Mimara can tell. He would quit his ancient contest with the Whore, even at the cost of his life. Were he alone, she knows, this would all end in salt and incineration.