The Great Ordeal: Book Three (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy)

by R. Scott Bakker

  None could imagine a more fitting way to begin a scripture—or feast.

  The lines galloped across the ragged contours. High to the right, Sibawûl and his doomed riders could see the great gorge where Yawreg’s shattered mandible rose from Mantigol’s chalk waist, the points of dipping light upon the rim, and the incendiary blossoms they vomited into the slots surging below. But they had eyes only for the obscenities raving before them …

  There is a point in all battle where gazes meet, where “them” becomes you, and lives are honed to an edge. Some say it is the most decisive, that it is here, before a single blow has landed, that adversaries deem who lives and who dies. Some even think it a temple, the last interval before the terrible clamour of Gilgaöl, the mad racket of War. From the high-sprawling slopes to the long blade of the strand, the Men of the Circumfix fell silent for recognizing that point from afar, and they peered after the Cepalorae and their glorious charge, knowing that in a heartbeat they would vanish as dust drifting from light to darkness …

  Except that they did not.

  Those who had spied Sibawûl Vaka watched as the inhuman masses first dimpled, then opened about him, dozens, if not hundreds of the creatures clawing in frenzied terror from his aspect, leaping, climbing, crawling over their putrid fellows in the delirium to escape. The same happened for his horse-thanes, lancer after lancer, riding unscathed, untouched, striking down stragglers, but otherwise encircled by scrambling terror, each pitting the mob with panic-rimmed cavities.

  And for several remarkable instants, the Horde—or its southern portions at least—fell silent.

  The Cepalorae plowed forward, a long necklace of gaps in the roiling mass, each clearing possessing a spearing, hacking rider in its pith, killing many forsooth, but not so many that the mobs did not reform behind them, and make it seem they waded into a screaming, threshing sea. The Ordeal-men raced after them, continued closing the interval, their breath ragged as much for wonder as for taxed limbs. Grutha Pirag, an Ingraul swordsman from the High Wernma, crested a broken ridge, and saw the swirl and simmer of discord that had engulfed the forward ranks of their foe. Mimicking his beloved mother’s call, he bellowed, in a high and plaintive voice, “Dinnertime!” to his kin. Scarcely a dozen souls understood, let alone heard, his call, and yet gales of laughter romped through the ranks, a mirth that trampled all scruple, all restraint—that left nations roaring with crazed fury.

  It began the way it always begins, with an unruly few breaking ranks, running wild and raging ahead of the others. One Galeoth even cut loose his armour and clothing as he ran, until he leapt, phallus curved against his belly, across the desolation wearing naught but his boots.

  Others joined them, like moths drawn to the light of glory. More followed, and more after them, some running to rescue their reckless brothers, others answering to the sudden hunger that gaped within them, an ancient hole uncovered …

  Kill. Few souls thought the word, but every soul pursued its dread and simple course. Kill. Kill! The forward ranks thinned, then dissolved altogether. Bawling officers scrambled to retrieve their companies.

  Shrugging aside any vestigial discipline, the Men of the Great Ordeal surged as one glittering sheet toward their foe, their mouths watering.

  Saubon followed his Holy Aspect-Emperor into the mammoth shadow of Ciworal, his ears ringing.

  “Long have they prepared for my coming,” Kellhus explained, his voice slipping between the din. The sorcerous paean of the Nuns echoed from over the horizon. Otherwise only His voice could be heard, tunnelling through a sound so great as to become ground, an impact without conclusion, bludgeoning, rattling tooth and bone, always.

  “Absent the No-God,” Kellhus continued, “they have no hope of overcoming me directly …”

  The entrance leered vacant, smashed into a breach long, long ago. Lichens scabbed the northward faces, while grasses ringed and limned the whole, clinging to every joist. No mortar had been used, simply great, fitted blocks. Walls rose concentrically, three shells, each hunching higher on thinner foundations, each battered into a more profound anonymity, bastions enclosing a husk enclosing a heap.

  Kellhus placed a hand on his shoulder. It was strange, as always, to be reminded of his greater height. Strange and gratifying.

  “Fear not for my safety, old friend.”

  Saubon craned his neck to spy the citadel’s rugged peak, black against the bright plate of the sky. The brunt of morning was already upon them.

  “Here …” Kellhus said, casting his look about the structure. “The greater Mansion riddles the whole of the mountain, but its axle, the Great Well of Viri, lies here, beneath this pla—”

  The Aspect-Emperor snapped his gaze toward Ciworal’s smashed gate. Sranc erupted from the maw, bolted toward them, blades convulsing, silken faces crushed by frenzy.

  Saubon’s bones fairly jumped from his limbs, such was his shock. But Kellhus strode without the least hesitation to meet the inhuman rush, muttering in voices that chewed nerves and illumined the ground at his feet. The creatures leapt toward him, their skin fish-white and their rag-armour curiously dark in the gloom. Even as their cleavers swung high, geysers exploded from their chests, puffs of violet mist. Dozens toppled in near unison, hearts spit gasping across the ground.

  Saubon stood dumbstruck, as did Gwanwë at his side.

  “Gird yourself!” Kellhus called to the entire company. “I have yet to kick the hornet’s nest …”

  He spake light and miraculously stepped into the glare gaping high above the ancient stronghold.

  Saubon stood blinking and wondering. Though he loathed worship, despised kneeling as violently as he demanded it of others, he fairly shook for the gratitude welling through his veins, for the miracle of being here, at this moment. Here he stood, the Believer-King of Caraskand, within a fortress laurelled in ancient legends, raised upon an underworld city more ancient still, watching a living God set foot upon the sky …

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the Holy Aspect-Emperor.

  It struck him then, the beauty of his life—the sheer significance. And a low and vicious pocket of his soul cackled, hunched over the moment with a miser’s unbecoming glee. What did falsehood matter, when this was true? In the light of such power …

  In the light of such power!

  He turned, saw that Mepiro, Bogyar, Scraul and the others were laughing—laughing because he was laughing, Saubon realized. The wail of the Horde blotted all, of course, but no sound was required to hear the joy and the savagery of their amusement. They could see it, the mania of recognition, not only of fortunes shared, but of hungers, atrocities committed in fact and desire. Never, it seemed, had the World been so ferocious with communal portent. Bogyar’s face even flushed crimson, a sign that would have alarmed Saubon mere moments before, but simply piled another hilarity onto the heap now.

  The Exalt-General howled into the miracle of his own silence. The Shroud hung like plague above the stumped walls. Charred Sranc sweetened the air. His ardour strained against his breeches, and his eyes strayed to Gwanwë, who also laughed, her manner as leering as any man’s.

  The Meat …

  A sorcerous crack—producing echoes like boulders tumbling down iron chutes. It should have knocked the mirth from the Company of the Raft, but instead they squinted up in grinning wonder, hooted and cheered soundlessly, watched dark monoliths thrown tumbling upward, into the sky …

  There was so much more than proof in miracles; there was might.

  Numbers. Mad numbers.

  Mad lights.

  Gazing out from above the summit of mount Ingol, the Exalt-Magus, Saccarees, could almost see it whole: an oceanic mass twining and involuting like a living thing, a leviathan as vast and terrible as anything out of his Dreams of the First Apocalypse, lashing entire mountains with tentacular fury.

  The Horde.

  When the Great Ordeal had marched divided across the vacant heart of the Istyuli, the inclination of the Sranc had been to
envelop, to spill about the prow of the Holy Host of Hosts and harry its flanks. Ever since marching from Swaranûl, however, the creatures had not so much parted about the prow as turned aside. Their advance, as the mathematician Tusullian had put it, was causing the Horde to roll along the Neleöst coast, a vast gyre of screaming millions, armatures ponderously cycling north and then west before catching on the coast and drawing southward once again. One could even see the mechanism in the Shroud when one knew how to look. Some thought this dramatic change simply expressed the dramatic change in the land. Where those on the coast could only back into their raving kin, those inland simply had more latitude to flee. Others attributed the change to the knowledge they were now being eaten. If room for elbows determined where the Sranc fled, then the Host’s flank offered the most room of all. Depraved as they were, the beasts could still speak. Perhaps rumour drove them back—terror of larding the gullets of Men!

  Though this transformation had rendered the Great Ordeal’s advance far less perilous, it served to remind all that the simplicity of the Sranc in no way made them predictable—any more than intellect made Men unpredictable. “The Horde must lay its belly upon your fire,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor had told him two nights previous. “If it chases any other danger, if it begins moving east, the day will go hard for the Ordeal.”

  So the Exalt-Magus had studied more than battled, standing upon the highest echo Ingol offered. Age had yet to dull his eyes, so he peered for the most part, conjuring distance-bloating Lenses only to resolve ambiguities. He watched the Horde swarm and coalesce as far as the sepulchral curtains of the Shroud allowed. And given the time he had spent Culling, he could even reckon the migratory immensities that lay beyond. With guesses and glimpses, he tracked the far northern horn curling back upon the River Sursa like a slow-twisting nail. More importantly, he saw the masses to the east fall inward, then fold into the great black bolus that blotted the Erengaw Plain immediately below the mountains.

  And he rejoiced in the knowledge that the Sranc, at least, had followed his Saviour’s bidding.

  Unlike the Men.

  They were as reapers in the field, the blond-braided Sons of Cepalor. The masses shrank from them, exposing those skinnies too weak or too unlucky, those the horsemen speared like fish as they waded forward. Mobs heaved between, before, and now even behind them, Sranc screaming, shrinking in the simulacrum of terror, clawing kin to flee the vacant gaze of the Cepalorae.

  Vaka himself was the first to lose his pony to the treacherous ground. He went down with his mount, slapped as a palm from a slack wrist, and for an instant the pocket about him lost its rind of inhuman panic. Slicked in violet, the Lord-Chieftain pulled himself from the ground, his head down and helmless, his flaxen hair swaying in tangled sheets. Wrack lay about his feet. His lamed pony kicked and bucked across the ground behind. His nimil corselet shimmered pristine in the sunlight. His eyes, when he revealed them, did not so much pinpoint the near as absorb the distance. Tails of hair formed a cage about his brow, scribbled nonsense against his beard. Without expression, he drew his father’s broadsword and sprinted into the pale-skinned surge to escape his terrible aspect.

  The Shadow of Wreoleth.

  To the Mysunsai ensconced above, the horsemen seemed unnerving violations, effects that floated without causes—magic—only without expense or consequence. Their impossible charge seemed as much a warning as a triumph. But to the Ordealmen bounding breathless in their wake, the Cepalorae were nothing less than instruments of the God, and the ruin they worked the wages so long awaited. Their miraculous charge could be nothing but the booming shout of Heaven!

  The God Himself delivered the skinnies to their wrath.

  The cloven ramps grew more steep about mount Mantigol, which, in addition to looming taller, crowded closer to the Misty Sea. Whether one stood on high or below, everything could be seen: the Horde shivering across the diminishing coasts to the west, the summits smoking above, sparking with hundreds of sorcerous dispensations, and the Great Ordeal spilling like a dragon’s hoard from the east. The delirium of the rush was such that some Men of the Circumfix far outpaced their brothers and barrelled swinging into the Sranc entirely alone. Most of these souls were cut down in moments—for Sranc do not tarry between terror and fury as Men. To a man they died astonished, panting about some cut or puncture, before being hacked and bludgeoned into darkness.

  Death came swirling down.

  The Sons of Men fell upon the pale obscenities, first in bellowing flurries, then en masse, faces red with exertion and fury, loins swollen. The Sranc answered fury with fury, but the Shining Men bayed and raged and hammered like souls possessed, spittle flying from ranting mouths. Melee engulfed the beam of the coast, a great twining ribbon that was more butchery than battle. A grunting, roaring, clatter. Shields cracked. Blades shattered. Warding hands rolled like spiders. The Ordealmen speared slots in crude armour, stamped heads, shouldered Sranc screaming to the ground. They bellowed in exultation, cast looping violet into clean morning blue.

  The Southron Men fell into threshing lines. What resolve the Sranc possessed evaporated before them. Oiled eyes rolled. Fused teeth gnashed. Vicious to kill became vicious to flee. Clan heaved against clan, and witless panic embroiled those regions caught between the Cepalorae and the invincible thousands that followed. Men hollered for triumph, hacked their way into the frenzied mobs, lopping, stabbing, pulping what was wicked and soulless. Tempests of sorcerous light consumed the skinnies that bolted for the heights of Mantigol. Surf bowled those fleeing into the Sea, drowned the creatures in mats, threw them broken upon the rocks, rolled them onto the strand.

  Vaka and his Cepalorae continued striding into the screaming tracts, sowing the disarray that would be reaped as millet and wheat behind them.

  Here and there, in pockets scattered across the fray, the most base plundered their twitching foe, gorged on raw meat, lapped violet blood as dogs in the gutters of some massacre.

  The Judges would execute only those they found coupling with the carcasses.

  The Schoolmen defended the very sky, or so it seemed. Never had the World witnessed such a battle: a string of a thousand Men—the Once-Accursed Few—defending mountain ramparts against the lunatic assault of a thousand thousand Sranc. As the creatures buckled beneath the Ordealmen on the coasts, the multitudes that blackened the Erengaw Plain assailed the ramparts of the Urokkas with fury and numbers that dwarfed anything the Schoolmen had hitherto seen. It was as if the creatures somehow knew the straits of their inhuman brothers to the south, understood the destruction they could wreak falling upon the unsuspecting Ordealmen from above.

  Triunes hung singing above the passes, on ledges overlooking skewed slopes and high mountain trails. The most daring took positions endlessly pelted with black arrows; with their billows unfurled they seemed flowers set upon high-heaved stone. Others orchestrated their butchery from more remote vantages, their billows bound. And on and on, the leprous mobs surged beneath, shrieking outrage as they leapt and clambered, clawed and slavered.

  Up to this point, the Southron Magi had left the steepest cliffs and precipices undefended. Now they discovered the obscenities scaling them, clinging to the plummets like swarms of frigid bees. One neck and two backs were broken in the rush to plug these precarious breaches; other stations were left undermanned. Two more arcane souls were lost for brute vertigo, missteps made for the illusion of grounds moving.

  Sranc stormed the gorges and the crevasses, crept through the fractures, scrabbled over bulbous slopes. Conflagration enveloped it all, skeins of lightning, cords of decapitating light. Clan after clan surged up, through, and between the stacked heights only to vanish, consumed in squalls of radiance.

  The Exalt-Magus suffered no illusions. The Ordealman’s rank disorder on the coasts below meant the consequences of failure were absolute. Saccarees had been at Irsûlor—survived the heartbreak. He knew what would happen should the Sranc win through.

  He had ga
rrisoned each of the mountains according to estimations of a peril that refused to remain fixed. He initially held fast on Ingol, dispatching what Mandate Schoolmen he could spare according to necessity. Oloreg, which was more the ruins of a mountain than a mountain, proved the greatest trial. He even removed his eyrie to Mantigol, so he might attend to the perpetually threatened mountain from a better vantage. With his own eyes he saw the blind cunning of the Horde, how it shrank westward across the Erengaw, funnelling vigorous thousands into the smashed mouth of Oloreg—their greatest point of vulnerability. Soon, fully half of the Mandate found itself positioned across the broken summit with Enhorû and his Imperial Saik. Crimson billows hung next to black. The glitter of Gnostic Abstractions threaded the baleful incandescence of the Anagogis. Dragon-heads vomited fire between the sweep of Cirroi Looms. Clouds of arrows—ineffectual against Wards—chipped and clattered across bare stone or quilled gravel inclines. Entire scarps teetered out into the void, crumbled into blood-slicked avalanches. Light greeted the ascending tide, sliced and consumed, pierced and exploded. Whole fields of gibbering obscenities perished, each figure a shining combustion.

  The Schoolmen of the Three Seas cried out between their exertions, laughing, cackling. Weariness had addled them. They were at once children burning insects with lenses, stomping them in chortling fury, and old men coughing sorcerous words, hunched like lechers about illicit visions of destruction. Something crazed and ragged climbed into their cacophonous singing, a licentious barbarity that contradicted their exhaustion.

  Those most taxed would be relieved, allowed to recline for a time upon one of the eyries, where they found water for their throats and salve for their burns. They found themselves gazing across the hanging voids at their brothers, fire-spitting motes suspended about neighbouring summits. They breathed deep the tainted air, closed their eyes, saw the sparking of mad afterimages. They listened to Cants they knew through the shrieking din, the whoosh and crack of sorceries both ancient and deadly. They gawked, despite the profundity of their erudition, that mountains could be skirted in living sheets of light, that the carcasses of their enemy could be heaped so high as to be visible across the convex curve of the Urokkas, like the blackened gums of scorched teeth …