The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  And the Nameless War is nameless no longer. Men call it the Great Ordeal.

  THE JUDGING EYE

  Achamian

  For twenty years Drusas Achamian has kept a painstaking record of his Dreams of the First Apocalypse.

  He lives as an exile, the world’s only Wizard, on the savage northeastern frontier of the empire Anasûrimbor Kellhus has raised about his supposed divinity. The Sranc once besieged his half-ruined tower with regularity, but the scalpers have driven the inhuman creatures over the mountains, chasing the Holy Bounty. For years now Achamian has lived in peace, hunting his sleep for hints and rumours of Ishuäl, the hidden fastness of the Dûnyain. If he can find Ishuäl, he believes, he can answer the question that burns so bright in so many learned souls …

  Who is the Aspect-Emperor?

  This peace is shattered when Anasûrimbor Mimara, the daughter of his former wife, arrives demanding he teach her sorcery. Her resemblance to her mother, Esmenet—the harlot who has become Empress of the Three Seas—returns the old Wizard to all the pains he sought to escape. He refuses her demand, bids her to leave time and again, but she defies him and takes up a vigil outside his tower.

  Mimara, who has never forgiven her mother for selling her into slavery as a child, has fled the Imperial Court with no intention of returning. She possesses the ability to see the fabric of existence and so the power to learn sorcery—and this, she has decided, is the one thing that will lift her from the mire of shame and recrimination that is her life. She tells herself she has nothing else …

  But she also possesses a different kind of sight, one both more precious and more significant: on rare occasions, she can see the morality of things, the goodness and the evil inherent to them. She has what the ancients called the Judging Eye.

  Day and night she howls at his tower, demanding that he teach her. The first time he comes down, he strikes her. The second time he tries to reason with her. He explains his lifelong quest to discover the truth of her stepfather Anasûrimbor Kellhus, how he seeks the location of Ishuäl because it is the Aspect-Emperor’s birthplace, and the truth of a man, Achamian insists, always lies in his origins. He tells her how his Dreams have slowly transformed, abandoning the epic atrocities of the First Apocalypse, and focusing more and more upon the mundane details of Seswatha’s ancient life. Because of this, Achamian now knows how to find Ishuäl: he must recover a map that lies hidden in the ruins of ancient Sauglish, far to the north.

  “You have become a prophet,” Mimara tells him. “A prophet of the past.”

  And then, desperate to win his tutelage, she seduces him.

  Only in the shameful aftermath does she tell the old Wizard that he has dwelt upon his suspicions for too long. The Aspect-Emperor has already embarked on his quest to destroy the Consult and so save the world from a Second Apocalypse. The Great Ordeal marches.

  Achamian abandons Mimara at his tower and strikes out for Marrow, the nearest scalper outpost. Here he contracts a company called the Skin Eaters to join his quest, deceiving them with promises of the Coffers, the ancient Library’s famed treasury. The Captain of the company, a veteran of the First Holy War named Lord Kosoter, troubles him, as does Cleric, his mysterious Nonman companion. But time is short, and he can think of no one else who would accompany him on such a mad trek. He must somehow reach the Library of Sauglish, and thence Ishuäl, before the Great Ordeal reaches the gates of Golgotterath. The scalper company departs shortly thereafter, planning to cross the Osthwai Mountains into the Sranc-infested North.

  Mimara, however, is not so easily dissuaded. She shadows the scalpers without appreciating the cunning of their forest craft. She is discovered, and Achamian is forced to save her, saying that she is his wilful daughter. Fearing she will reveal his true purposes, the old Wizard at last relents. He allows her to accompany him on his quest and agrees to teach her sorcery.

  Shortly afterward they learn that a spring blizzard has closed the passes through the Osthwai Mountains, perhaps delaying them for weeks—for too long. Only one path remains open to them: the accursed halls of Cil-Aujas.

  The company camps before the entrance to the derelict Nonman Mansion, plagued with apprehensions. Then, with the coming of dawn, they descend into the heart of the mountain. For days they wander the wrecked halls, led by Cleric and his ancient memories. Deep in the Mansion, Mimara finally confesses her sporadic ability to see the morality of things, and Achamian, obviously troubled, tells her that she possesses the Judging Eye. She presses him to tell her more, but the old Wizard refuses. Before she can berate him properly, the company discovers that the Mansion is far from abandoned.

  Sranc assail them with fury and countless numbers. Despite the sorcerous toll exacted by Cleric and Achamian, the company is overcome, and the survivors are forced to flee down into the bowels of Cil-Aujas. Achamian is knocked unconscious by a Chorae-bearing Sranc. Mimara kills the creature and pockets the sorcery-killing artifact. They flee through the mines that riddle the foundations of the mountain, and find themselves on the scorched rim of a burning lake. The Sranc pour after them, a howling tide. They flee along a stair, and would certainly perish, were it not for Cleric and his sorcerous might. Their route sealed behind them, they find themselves in an ancient slave pit, huddling among the bones of a dead dragon. Only a handful survive.

  While they recover themselves, Cleric dispenses Qirri, an ancient Nonman remedy. Mimara finds herself staring at her Chorae. It is void and terror to her sorcerous eyes, yet she persists gazing. The Judging Eye opens, and the thing is miraculously transformed. Suddenly she sees the Chorae for a true, white-burning Tear of God. She turns to Somandutta, the scalper who has become her protector with the Wizard incapacitated. But he sees nothing …

  Then she notices the stranger sitting in their midst.

  Cleric recognizes the figure as the shade of Gin’yursis, the ancient Nonman King of Cil-Aujas. The wraith dons the Nonman as if he were clothing, possesses him. While the company stands watching in dread, the Qirri finally revives the old Wizard. Recognizing their peril, he begins screaming at them to flee.

  Again they race into the black, while something dark and nebulous and godlike pursues them. In desperation, Achamian brings the ceiling crashing down, sealing the company even deeper within the dread Mansion.

  They find themselves at the bottom of a vast well, what Achamian remembers as the Great Medial Screw from his ancient Dreams, a stair that plumbs the whole mountain. The sky is little more than a prick of light above them. The battered Skin Eaters rejoice. All they need do is climb …

  But Gin’yursis rises from the deeps to claim them, dragging hell itself as his mantle.

  Mimara’s Judging Eye opens, and she raises high her Tear of God, somehow knowing …

  The Great Ordeal

  Far to the north, young Varalt Sorweel finds himself staring down upon the boggling might of the Southron Believer-Kings. He is the only son of Varalt Harweel, the King of Sakarpus, who has resisted the Aspect-Emperor’s demand to yield his ancient city and its famed Chorae Hoard. Standing with his father on the high curtain walls, the adolescent realizes that he and his people are doomed. Then, miraculously, a stork—a bird that is holy to the Sakarpi—appears on the battlements above his father. After a moment of uncanny communion, King Harweel turns and commands that Sorweel be taken to safety. “See that no harm comes to him!” he cries. “He will be our final swordstroke! Our vengeance!” Dragged away screaming, the young prince watches sorcerous flames engulf the parapets and his father upon them. A desperate flight ensues, and it seems that the Aspect-Emperor himself pursues them through the chaotic streets.

  The pursuit ends in the apparent safety of the citadel. Blasting through walls, Anasûrimbor Kellhus effortlessly kills Sorweel’s protectors. He approaches the adolescent Prince, but rather than seizing or striking him, he embraces him. Tells him that he is forgiven.

  The city secure, the Great Ordeal prepares for the long march across the trackless w
ilds. Sorweel finds himself desolate for the loss of his father and the shame of his new circumstances. As the new King of Sakarpus, he is naught but a tool of the New Empire, a way for the Aspect-Emperor to legitimize his tyranny. Before the host departs, none other than Moënghus and his eldest son Kayûtas visit him in his palace. They tell him he is to join the Ordeal as the symbol of his nation’s commitment to their holy cause. The following day Sorweel finds himself part of the Scions, a horse company composed of princely hostages from across the rim of the New Empire. This is how he meets and befriends Zsoronga ut Nganka’kull, the Successor Prince of Zeum.

  A Mandate sorcerer named Eskeles is assigned to tutor Sorweel in Sheyic, the common tongue of the Three Seas, and through him the young King learns the reasons why so many worship the Aspect-Emperor so fervently. For the first time he begins to doubt his father … What if the Aspect-Emperor spoke true? What if the world was about to end?

  Why else would someone so cunning march so many Men to their doom?

  Sorweel is also provided a slave named Porsparian to attend to his needs, a wizened old man who is anything but the submissive thrall he pretends to be. One night Sorweel watches him tear away the turf and mold the face of the Goddess Yatwer from the dirt. Before his eyes, mud bubbles up as spit from her earthen lips. The slave palms this mud and smears it across the incredulous King’s cheeks.

  The following morning Sorweel attends a Council of Potentates with Zsoronga and Eskeles. His dread waxes as he watches the Holy Aspect-Emperor move from lord to lord, declaring the truths they think hidden in their souls. He fears what will happen when the man sees the hatred and treachery smoldering in his own. But when Anasûrimbor Kellhus comes to him, he congratulates Sorweel for grasping the truth, and before all those assembled declares him one of the Believer-Kings.

  The all-seeing Aspect-Emperor, Sorweel realizes, is blind to the truth of his soul.

  Esmenet

  Far to the south in Momemn, the capital of the New Empire, Esmenet struggles to rule in her husband’s absence. With Kellhus and the bulk of his armed might faraway, the embers of insurrection have begun to ignite across the Three Seas. The Imperial Court regards her with condescension. Fanayal ab Kascamandri, the Padirajah of what had been the heathen Kianene Empire before the First Holy War, grows ever more bold on the fringes of the Great Carathay Desert. Psatma Nannaferi, the outlawed Mother-Supreme of the Cult of Yatwer, prophecies the coming of the White-Luck Warrior, the godsent assassin who will murder the Aspect-Emperor and his progeny. Even the Gods, it seems, plot against the Anasûrimbor Dynasty. Esmenet turns to her brother-in-law, Maithanet, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, for his strength and clarity of vision, yet she wonders why her husband would leave the Mantle in her incapable hands, when his brother is Dûnyain like himself.

  She also has the travails of her own family to contend with. All her eldest children have gone. Mimara has fled—to Achamian, she hopes and prays. Kayûtas, Serwa, and her stepson, Moënghus, ride with their father in the Great Ordeal. Theliopa remains with her as an advisor, but the girl is scarcely human, she is so narrow and analytical. The next youngest, the mad and murderous Inrilatas, Esmenet keeps imprisoned atop the Andiamine Heights. Only her very youngest, the twins Samarmas and Kelmomas, provide her with any comfort. She clings to them as if they were flotsam in a shipwreck, not realizing that Kelmomas, like his brother Inrilatas, has inherited too many of his father’s gifts. The boy has already driven away Mimara with the cunning of his insinuations. Now he plots deeper ways to secure sole possession of his mother’s heart.

  He will tolerate no rivals.

  In the city of Iothiah, meanwhile, the White-Luck Warrior reveals himself to Psatma Nannaferi, who summons all her High Priestesses to plot the destruction of the Anasûrimbor. None other than Yatwer, the monstrous Mother of Birth, moves against the Aspect-Emperor. As the Goddess most favoured by slaves and caste-menials, she commands tremendous temporal power. Unrest spreads among the servile poor throughout the Empire.

  Even as the first rumours of this sedition reach his mother in Momemn, young Kelmomas continues his own devious insurrection. Where before he had driven Mimara away, now he engineers the death of his idiot twin, Samarmas, knowing that grief for his loss will make his mother even more desperate for his love.

  Agonized by the death of Samarmas, Esmenet turns to her brother-in-law, Maithanet, frantic for the thought of a God hunting her family. He reminds her that the Gods can see neither the No-God nor the coming Apocalypse, and so perceive her husband as a threat instead of the Saviour.

  At his bidding, Esmenet summons Sharacinth, the officially sanctioned Matriarch of the Yatwerians, to the Andiamine Heights with the intention of setting the Cult against itself. When they fail to cow the woman, Kellhus himself arrives, and breaks her will to resist with the sheer force of his presence. The blubbering Matriarch yields, promising to wrest her Cult from Psatma Nannaferi. The Aspect-Emperor returns to the Great Ordeal, dismaying his Empress with his lack of grief for the death of Samarmas, his son.

  Kelmomas sets out that very night and, using his Dûnyain gifts, murders Sharacinth and her retinue. Rumours of her assassination travel quickly, igniting the embers of sedition among the slaves and caste-menials. Riots erupt across the Three Seas.

  Esmenet does turn to Kelmomas for comfort. At night, she takes to embracing him in her bed while the smell of smoke and the sound of screaming waft through windows. Intoxicated with success, the young Prince-Imperial begins plotting against his uncle, Maithanet, who alone possesses the ability to see through his deception.

  THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR

  Achamian

  The horror of Cil-Aujas lies as much within them as behind. Achamian, Mimara, and the Skin Eaters descend the heights into the vast forests the scalpers call the Mop. The old Wizard presses Mimara, desperate to discover how she had overcome the evil shade of the Nonman King, but she demurs, resenting him for his refusal to explain the Judging Eye. Achamian attempts to make amends a short time after, but a second scalper company, the Stone Hags, ambushes them, and the matter is forgotten. The Skin Eaters have scarce travelled a fraction of the way to the Coffers, and they are decimated. The men take to mutinous muttering, and Achamian finds himself advocating for their Captain, as much as he despises the man’s homicidal understanding of “discipline.”

  Days later, they hear cries filtering through the forest gloom, and Achamian spies the Stone Hags caught upon a distant ridge battling more Sranc than they can hope to overcome. Later that night, the survivors come upon the Skin Eaters. Chaos and conflict rule, then the skinnies come shrieking out of the forest blackness. Mimara finds herself apart from the others, almost certainly doomed, but Somandutta appears before her, and in an inhuman display of skill, handily slays the Sranc assailing her. Soma is a skin-spy, she realizes, but their straits are such that she waits until they reach the relative safety of Fatwall, an Imperial outpost they find abandoned and burning, before telling Achamian. The old Wizard confronts the Nilnameshi caste-noble, who flees the ruined fortress rather than parlay. Vast numbers of Sranc descend upon the ruined tower they take as their citadel, and the Skin Eaters endure a night of gibbering slaughter.

  The subsequent days see them travel fast through the foliated underworld of the Mop, thanks to the way the Qirri quickens their limbs—fast enough to break the body and spirit of those surviving Stone Hags who have joined them. Mimara shares stories of her life upon the Andiamine Heights with Achamian, and the two outcasts come to an unspoken accord, an affection borne of trial and shared affliction. But Mimara is not long in violating this trust. The thing called Soma has been tracking them all along. It surprises her alone in the gloom, tells her she must murder the Captain to prevent Cleric from killing them. It also tells her that she is pregnant. Overlooking the ruins of ancient Kelmeol, the thing encounters its Consult master, who bids it to continue tracking the scalper company, and to continue protecting Mimara—all the way to Golgotterath if ne
ed be. “All the prophecies must be respected,” the Synthese says, “the false as much as the true.”

  The Mop behind them, the scalpers begin the long, arid trek across the Istyuli Plains. The days become more feverish, the nights more crazed, and it seems to Mimara that she alone is aware of the madness slowly consuming them. Cleric’s ritual dispensation of the Qirri has become a raucous, even rapturous affair, far more religious than medicinal. The Nonman’s sermons have become both more ominous and profound. Despite her reluctance, Mimara presses Achamian on the issue, begs him to abandon the Skin Eaters, to flee as far from Cleric and his Qirri as they can, only to sob with relief when he argues why they must stay. They march into the very wake of the Great Ordeal, encounter a supply company—Men they murder to pass undetected.

  Not long afterward, Mimara meets with the thing called Soma once again, though now it has taken her own form. She demands that it tell her what is happening; it presses her to ask Cleric about the Qirri, to discover what it is. Before she can ask the thing why, Achamian appears, and the skin-spy flees leaping into the night, pursued by the Wizard and his sorcerous might. Achamian is furious, convinced the creature meant to replace her. She lies to him, tells him nothing about her previous encounters with the thing.

  More and more she can feel the unborn child within her, and its presence seems to fortify her against whatever consumes the others. She dares question the company’s Sergeant, Sarl, whose sanity was snapped in twain in the depths of Cil-Aujas. He tells her nothing of Cleric, but he does reveal that the Captain somehow knows her true identity. There can no longer be any doubt: the Skin Eaters are an instrument of the Holy Aspect-Emperor.

  When the scalpers congregate to receive their Qirri the following night, she astounds them all by refusing her portion. Nothing is made of it, but in the pitch of night she awakens to find Cleric gazing down at her. She asks what the Qirri is, and he tells her that it’s the ashes of some long-dead Nonman hero. When she asks who, he bids her taste to see. And so she succumbs to the drug once again—and in doing so discovers what they have been consuming for the length of their mad and onerous quest …