The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  When he awoke, he found his index and forefinger stained cherry red.

  He was no fool. As little as he knew about the Dread Mother of Birth, he knew well enough what perils lay ahead. He was what his people called “wairo”, snared by the Gods. According to the Kûburû, the most ancient lore of his people, the calamity of wairo lay in the caprice of the Hundred. But the Mbimayu had a more nuanced and therefore more frightening explanation. Where Men had to forever toil, forever accumulate the wages of their labour to hope for their descendant’s prayers, the Gods stood outside the very possibility of individual acts. The substance of their limbs was nothing other than the passage of events themselves. They gripped and steered the World through bounty, yes, but through catastrophe far more. Wars. Famines. Earthquakes. Floods.

  These were their Hands, both holy and terrible.

  Which was why those judged wairo were often driven into the wild. When he was but nine, Malowebi had found a dead woman curled about the base of a great cypress on his grandfather’s estate. Her rot had dried—the Parch had been hard that year—but her ligaments yet held and this, with her clothing, lent her a horrific substance. Weeds surged about her edges, as well as places in-between. His grandfather refused to have her moved when he showed him. “No animal has touched her,” he had said, his eyes wide with urgent wisdom. “She is wairo.”

  And now he himself was wairo … accursed.

  So if he returned uninvited to the Padirajah’s grand pavilion, it was because he had never left …

  Days had passed. Meppa was on the mend. Fanayal had emerged unscathed from that monstrous night—at least as much as he. Malowebi had all but hidden in his tent, wracking his soul for some kind of solution, cursing both the Whore of Fate and Likaro—the latter far, far more than the former. Likaro’s posturing, Likaro’s fawning, and most of all Likaro’s deceit—these had brought this calamity down upon him!

  But such wounds could be picked for only so long before bandages had to be sought. He was a Disciple of Memgowa; he knew any hope of remedy required the very thing he was missing: knowledge. And as the Whore would have it, the only source of that knowledge was the very source of his peril: Psatma Nannaferi. Only she could tell him what happened. Only she could tell him what he needed to give …

  Gaining access to Fanayal’s pavilion was easy enough: no one guarded it anymore.

  And she lay within it always, like some kind of holy spider.

  Malowebi had always been of the boldest of his brothers, the first to leap into cold or uncertain waters. The way he reckoned, he could die witless like that wairo he found as a boy, or he could die knowing what ensnared him, and most importantly, whether there were any terms of escape. And so on a diver’s breath he struck from his tent and made toward the Padirajic standard, the Twin Scimitars on Black, hanging motionless above the intervening pavilions. “Die knowing,” he muttered to himself, as if still not entirely convinced. He paused on a start, waited out a flurry of some fifty dusty riders. The hillside obscured Momemn, though the toil and incomplete siege towers strung along the heights made the Imperial Capital’s oppressive presence plain. A part of him could scarce believe his embassy had taken him this far—within sight of the Andiamine Heights! It seemed mad to think that the Harlot Empress slumbered mere leagues away.

  He imagined delivering Anasûrimbor Esmenet to Nganka’kull in chains, not because he believed it could happen, but because he would much rather imagine Likaro gnashing his teeth than what presently awaited him in the gloom of Fanayal’s pavilion. It almost seemed miraculous, the brevity of his trek. Flapping his arms against the dust in the wake of the riders, marching resolutely through the immobility his sudden appearance occasioned in the dozens who glimpsed him, bearing toward the scrolled awning and gold-embroidered flaps … and then, impossibly, there he was, standing precisely where he had stood that night the accursed Waterbearer should have died.

  The air was stuffy, ripe for the smell of a chamber pot. Sunlight gilded the network of bellied seams above, shedding grey light across the thickets of furniture and baggage. Malowebi spent several heart-pounding moments searching the confusion. Where the great oak bed had commanded the interior that night, it was simply more clutter now. Save for misplaced pillows and twisted sheets, the mattress was empty … as was the settee next to it …

  Malowebi cursed himself for a fool. Why did Men assume things froze in place when they denied them the grace of their observation?

  Then he saw her.

  So close that he gasped audibly.

  “What do you want, blasphemer?”

  She sat no more than four paces to his left, staring into the mirror of a cosmetics table, her back turned against him. He had no clue why he stepped toward her. She could hear him just as well from where he stood.

  “How old are you?” he blurted.

  A smile creased the delicate brown face in the mirror.

  “Men do not sow seed in autumn,” she said.

  Her black hair toppled sumptuous about her shoulders. As always, she dressed to whet rather than blunt desire, naked save gauze wrapped about her hips and a hookless turquoise jacket. To simply lay eyes upon her was to be fondled.

  “But …”

  “I loathed the covetous eyes of Men as a child,” she said, perhaps watching him through the mirror, perhaps not. “I had learned, you see, learned what it was they would take. I would see girls like the one staring at me now, and I would think them nothing more than whipped dogs, creatures beaten until they craved the rod …” She raised a cheek to a waiting pinky, smeared what looked like gold-dust across the outskirts of her plump gaze. “But there’s knowing, and there’s knowing, like all things living. Now I understand how the earth rises to the seed. Now I fathom what is given when Men take …”

  Her smoky image puckered purple-stained lips.

  “And I am grateful.”

  “B-but …” Malowebi fairly sputtered. “She … I mean, She …” He paused upon a bolt of terror, recalling his glimpse of veins flung sodden across all the visible spaces the night the Last Cishaurim should have died. “The Dread Mother … Yatwer has wrought all this!”

  Psatma Nannaferi ceased her ministrations, watched him carefully through the reflection.

  “And yet none of you fall to your knees,” she said on a coquettish shrug.

  She played him the way a dancing girl might, but one who cared nothing for the heft of purses. A bead of sweat slipped from his kinked hair down his temple.

  “She has given you the Sight,” the Mbimayu sorcerer pressed. “You know what will happen …” He licked his lips, trying hard not to look as terrified as he was. “Before it happens.”

  The Mother-Supreme continued daubing lamp-black across her lids.

  “So you believe.”

  Malowebi nodded warily. “Zeum respects the ancient ways. We alone worship the Gods as they are.”

  A grin that could only belong to an old and wicked heart.

  “And now you wish to know your part in this?”

  His heart rapped his breastbone for racing.

  “Yes!”

  The lamp-black, combined with the ancient age of the mirror, made empty sockets of her eyes. A brown skull watched him now, one graced with a maiden’s lips.

  “Your doom,” the hollow said, “is to bear witness.”

  “B-bear? Witness? You mean this? What happens?”

  A girlish shrug. “Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  She swivelled about on one buttock to face him, and despite the pace between them, her near nudity pressed sweaty and flat against his yearning, her sable lines became cliffs for the extent of his desire. Never had he so yearned to fall!

  The Yatwerian Priestess smiled coyly.

  “He will kill you, you know.”

  Horror and compulsion. She emanated the heat of plowed earth in hot sun.

  Malowebi fairly sputtered. “Kill-kill me? Why?”

  “For taking,” she said as
if cradling candy on her tongue, “what was given.”

  He stumbled backward, fought her allure as though caught in laundered veils …

  The Emissary of High Holy Zeum fled.

  Laughter, like sand scoured against sunburned skin. It nipped all his edges as he bounced hip and shin against the intervening clutter.

  “Witness!” an old crone shrieked. “Witnessss!”

  His pulse slowed until beaten by a different heart. His breath deepened until drawn by different lungs. Watching with the constancy of the dead, Anasûrimbor Kelmomas settled into the grooves of another soul …

  If it could be called such.

  The man his mother called Issiral stood in the heart of his unlit chamber, watch upon watch, motionless, dark eyes lost in some bleak nowhere. The Prince-Imperial, meanwhile, kept secret vigil above, staring down through the louvres. He lowered his avian vitality to the same deep rung, made his every twitch a noon shadow.

  And he waited.

  Kelmomas had watched many people through the spyholes of the Apparatory, and their comic diversity had never ceased to surprise him. The lovers, the tedious loners, the weepers, the insufferable grinners: it seemed an endless parade of newfound deformities. Watching them step from their doors to consort with the Imperial Court had been like watching slaves bind brambles into sheaves. Only now could he see how wrong he had been—that this diversity had been apparent only, an illusion of his ignorance. How could he not think Men various and strange when Men were his only measure?

  Now the boy knew better. Now he knew that every human excess, every bloom of manner or passion, radiated from a single, blind stem. For this man—the assassin that had somehow surprised Uncle Holy—had paced out the true beam of possible and impossible acts.

  And it was not human …

  Not at all.

  The spying had started as a game—a mischievous trifle. Mother’s guilt and preoccupation assured that Kelmomas had his run of the palace. The vagrant suspicions that darkened her look from time to time meant he could no longer risk tormenting any of the slaves or menials. So what else was he supposed to do? Play with dirt and dolls in the Sacral Enclosure? Spying on the Narindar would be his hobby, the boy had decided, a diverting way to squander watches while plotting the murder of his older sister.

  The first afternoon had alone convinced him something was amiss with the man—something more than the fact of his red-stained earlobes, trim beard, or short-cropped hair. By the second day it had become a game within a game, proving he could match the man’s preternatural feats of immobility.

  After the third day there was no question of not spying.

  The matter of his sister had become an open sore by this time. If Theliopa told Mother then …

  Neither of them could bear think what might happen!

  Anasûrimbor Theliopa was the threat he simply could not ignore. The Narindar, on the other hand, was nothing less than his saviour, the man who had rescued him from his uncle. And yet, day after day, every time opportunity afforded, he found himself prowling the hollow bones of the Andiamine Heights searching for the man, spinning rationale after rationale.

  She had not fully fathomed the extent of his intellect, Thelli. She had been witless of her peril, yes. And so long as that remained the case, she had no cause to carry through on her evil threat. Like all idiots, she preferred her cobble deeply grooved. Momemn needed a strong Empress, especially now that the Exalt-Cow, Anthirul, was dead. So long as the siege continued, he and his brother should be secure enough …

  Besides, saviour or not, something was wrong about this man.

  His reasons marshalled, bright before his soul’s eye, his hackles would settle, and he would hang as a hidden moon about the planet of this impossible man.

  Time would pass, perhaps a watch or so, then some itinerant terror would shout, Thelli knows!

  He would blink away images of those he had eaten.

  Crazed cunt!

  He had initially approached the challenge she represented with calm, even elation, like a boy set to climb a dangerous yet well-known and beloved tree. He certainly knew the bough and branch of Imperial intrigue well enough. Two of his brothers and his uncle lay dead by his hand—two Princes-Imperial and the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples! How much difficulty could a stuttering skinny like Anasûrimbor Theliopa pose?

  Sranky, Inrilatas used to call her. Inri was the only one who had ever made her cry.

  But that elation soon faded into frustration, for Thelli proved no normal tree. She never left Mother’s side during daylight—never!—which meant the Inchaustic cloud protecting the Empress protected her as well. And she spent every night without exception barricaded in her apartment … Awake as far he could tell.

  But before anything, he had begun to worry about his Strength. The more Kelmomas mulled the events of the previous months, the less he seemed to own them, the more glaring his impotence became. He cringed at the lazy way Inrilatas had toyed with him, humoured him for boredom’s sake, or how Uncle Holy had plumbed him to the pith once alerted. The fact was it had been his uncle who had killed Inrilatas, not Kelmomas. And how could he claim credit for his uncle’s assassination when the actual assassin hung stationary upon the shadows just below?

  For all his gifts, the young Prince-Imperial had yet to learn the disease that was contemplation, how more often than not it was ignorance of alternatives that made bold action bold. He spied upon the Narindar, matching him immobility for immobility, pulling every corner of his being into the straight line that was the assassin’s soul—every corner, that is, save his intellect, which asked again and again, How can I end her? with the relentlessness of an insect. He lay unblinking, the taste of dust upon his tongue, scarcely breathing, peering between interleaved fronds of iron, raging at his twin, ranting, and even, on occasion, weeping for the unbearable injustice. And so he spun within a motionless frame, pondering, until pondering so polluted his pondering he could bear ponder no more!

  He would marvel at it afterward, how the mere act of plotting Thelli’s murder had all but assured her survival. How all the scenarios, all the spitting disputes and aggrandizing declamations, had been a mere pretext for this eerie war of immobility he had undertaken against the Narindar … Issiral.

  He was all that mattered here, Fanim siege or no Fanim siege. The boy just knew this somehow.

  After endless watches of blank reverie, utter inactivity, the man would simply … do something. Piss. Eat. Take ablution, or on occasion, his leave. Kelmomas would lay watching, his body senseless for being so long inert, suddenly the man would … move. It was as shocking as stone leaping to life, for nothing betrayed any prior will or resolution to move, no restlessness, no impatience borne of anticipation … nothing. The Narindar would just be moving, exiting the door, stalking the frescoed corridors, and Kelmomas would scramble, cursing his prickling limbs. He would fly after him through the very walls …

  And then, for no apparent reason, the assassin would simply … stop.

  It was narcotic for simply being so strange. Several days passed before Kelmomas realized that no one … no one … ever witnessed the man acting this way. In the presence of others he would be remote, taciturn, act the way a terrifying assassin should, always careful to assure the others of his humanity, if nothing more. Several times it was Mother who encountered him, coming about a corner, through a door. And no matter what she said, if she said anything at all (for in certain company she would rather not encounter the man at all), he would simply nod wordlessly, then return to his room, and stand …

  Motionless.

  Issiral ate. He slept. He shat. His shit stank. The general terror of the slaves was to be expected, as was the hatred of Uncle Holy’s many intimates at the Imperial Court. But what was more remarkable still was the degree to which the man went unnoticed, how he would sometimes tarry in one spot, unseen, only to inexplicably pace five steps to his left, or his right, where he would stand unseen as a gaggle of sculle
ry slaves passed teasing and whispering.

  The enigma soon began to tyrannize the Prince-Imperial’s thoughts. He started dreaming of his vigils, reliving the stark discipline that occupied his days, except that when his body turned about to slip back in the labyrinthine tunnels, his soul would somehow remain fixed by the louvres, and he would simultaneously watch and crawl away, riven by a horror that plucked him to his very vein, the World shrieking as the face in the flint turned and ever so slowly swivelled up to match his incorporeal look—

  As the game continued, this became one more thing to fret and dispute in the academy of his skull. Were his dreams warning him of something? Did the Narindar somehow know of his observation? If he did, he betrayed absolutely no discernible sign. But then the man betrayed no sign of anything.

  Watching the man simply whetted the edge of this concern, especially as Kelmomas came to fathom just how much the assassin knew. How? How was the man able to so unerringly intercept his mother, to know, not simply where she was going without any communication whatsoever, but the precise path she would take?

  How could such a thing be possible?

  He was Narindar, the boy reasoned. A famed Missionary of the evil Four-Horned Brother. Perhaps his knowledge was divine. Perhaps that was how he had managed to overcome Uncle Holy!

  This sent him to his mother’s Librarian, an eccentric Ainoni slave named Nikussis.

  Nikussis was a slight, dark-skinned man—every bit as skinny as Theliopa, in fact. Possessed of some murky ability to spy insincerity, he was one of very few worldborn souls who could somehow see past the boy’s capering glamour. The man had always treated him with an air of reserved suspicion. During one fit of despair, Kelmomas had actually considered murdering the man for this very reason, and he had never quite relinquished the idea of using him to test various poisons.

  “They say one stalks these very halls, my Prince. Why not ask him?”