The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  The shining face turned.

  “Do you know what this means, Oinaral Oirûnarig?”

  A pause.

  “Yes.”

  The Nonman King now stared at Sorweel frankly, though without directly meeting his return gaze. “Do you think this is why the Anasûrimbor sent him to us? He knows that Fertility moves against him, does he not? Perhaps he suspects Her interest in this one.”

  An apprehension struck the Horse King, one both spear-sharp and inchoate. Was that what he was? Something wielded like axe or hoe? A dumb instrument?

  Narindar, Zsoronga had called him. Holy assassin.

  “The youth has been under the Aspect-Emperor’s thrall for months,” Oinaral explained, his tone rigid in a way that revealed the extent of his animosity for not mellowing. “Why exile a threat that is more easily killed?”

  The Nonman King gazed upon the Lastborn with alarm and scowling indecision. How strange it was to witness human passion on the face of a Sranc. How natural and obscene.

  “So Her track runs through us …” Nin’ciljiras said.

  Sorweel heard the legendary assembly stir behind him, the murmuring clamour of souls too ancient to be astonished, yet astonished all the same.

  “We are now bound to this one,” Oinaral called through the clamour. “Irrevocably.”

  The Nonman King turned to the basin once again, doused himself while the uproar of the Ishroi waxed and faded across the Iron Oratorium. “Lord Cilcûliccas!” he finally called over Sorweel’s head. “What say the Quya?”

  The Lord of Swans stepped from his fellows. The bolt of Injori silk he wore affixed to his shoulder and wrapped crosswise about his torso was so fine as to become crimson paint where it flattened against his nimil gown.

  “Oinaral Oirûnarig speaks true, Tsonos,” he said.

  The Nonman King pondered the legendary Quya with open distaste, then returned his gaze to Sorweel’s keeper. “And what of the brother and sister?”

  Sorweel suffered another swell of apprehension, like pins pricking just deeper than ice-numbed skin.

  “The son knows nothing,” Oinaral said. “Tsonos.”

  “And the daughter?”

  The son of famed Oirûnas paused. “Surely Harapior has told you …”

  An oily smile.

  “I would hear your thoughts, Lastborn.”

  Oinaral shrugged. “What your allies told yo—”

  “You mean our allies!” Nin’ciljiras snapped.

  The Nonman tested his sovereign with three heartbeats of silence. “Nothing sorcerous can compel her,” he finally replied. “Nothing. Even more, she has proven entirely indifferent to Harapior’s … other inducements. Indeed, if anything, she torments him.”

  “That is a lie!” Harapior cried from his station beside the Black Iron Seat.

  “It must trouble you,” Oinaral said, “the way the Goddess so effortlessly followed this boy into the Thresholds, into the place where your tresspasses cannot be seen. Do you tremble, Lord Torturer, knowing your infernal room has hidden nothing from their eyes—that all your crimes have been counted?”

  Harapior stood sputtering—and obviously terrified.

  Oinaral turned from him in disgust, shouting, “She is proof!” to the assembled Lords of Ishterebinth. “Proof of her father’s blood! Proof tha—!”

  “Enough!” Nin’ciljiras screeched.

  Murmuring alarm hung as a cloud about the platform. Sorweel could do naught but roil in animal terror … Other inducements? Weeks? What was happening here?

  How could he know all these ghouls?

  “We are one Mansion!” Nin’ciljiras keened, glaring wildly, then turning to his oil for respite once again. “One!” He raised his face to better savour the looping chill, then paused to regard the brown-eyed Emwama child, who promptly tried to huddle into invisibility.

  “What do you advise?” Lord Cilcûliccas called from the assembly.

  “That we honour the Niom,” Oinaral began, “as we have across each and every Age befo—”

  “And what?” the Nonman King grated. “Ally ourselves with Men! The beasts that burned Holy Siöl, scattered her Sons! That cut Gin’yursis’ throat! What? You would have us cling to mere words, when all of us, Erratic and Intact”—he looked about in triumph—“can be saved from Hell?”

  Oinaral Lastborn said nothing.

  The Son of Ninar grimaced as if at some discomfort of the bowel. “I tire of this, Oinaral Oirûnarig. I tire of perpetually treating for your soul, always sparing you horror … as you care to define it …”

  He had raised his gaze to the assembled Ishroi as he spoke—his true audience, Sorweel realized. A bead of oil hung from either hairless brow, each gleaming with a miniature replica of the assembly.

  “I weary of pandering to your delicacies while we—we!—dwell in such fear of Hell as to become Hell unto ourselves, husks—husks!—about a roaming madness. We! We are the bulwark! That is why we crumble! While you are cosseted? Relieved of the martial obligations of your Kinning? Your Race? Spared so you might be spared our curse?”

  A heartbeat of silence, fraught with inhuman intimations.

  “I am spared your glory and your respect,” Oinaral Lastborn replied, his manner mild. “That much is true. But no one is spared the treachery of your blood, Son of Viri.”

  Something sharp crept into the gaze of Nin’ciljiras then, and Sorweel understood, not simply the brute meaning of the words, but the circumstantial intricacies as well. The ghoul who was King was the grandson of Nin’janjin …

  Nil’giccas was no more. What remained of Ishterebinth had been cloven in two.

  “Such words meant death not so long ago,” Nin’ciljiras said in a voice like a wire.

  Oinaral snorted in amusement.

  “We age better than our meanings, it se—”

  “You shall accord me as you accorded my cousin!” Nin’ciljiras screamed wroth. “You! Shall! Accord! You shall reckon my holy station, for it flows from the blood of the Kinning Most High-and-Deep, the Kinning of Kings! I! I am the last Son of Tsonos in this House, and only Tsonoi may rule!” He threw down his arm in a gesture that was both alien and familiar, sending a spatter of oil across the black grillwork. “I alone can claim the blood of Imimorûl!”

  “Then perhaps,” Oinaral said mildly, “the Canons of the Dead serve only the dead.”

  “Sacrilege! ” the Nonman King raved. “Sacrilege!” His voice scraped across the near curves of the Concavity, hung as reeds upon the high air. At first Sorweel assumed the outburst meant doom for the ghoul called Oinaral Lastborn, but the bewildered, hunted expression of the Nonman King assured him otherwise. His overseer did not so much risk as provoke, Sorweel realized. He did not so much dare as demonstrate …

  The fact that Nin’ciljiras was being eaten by the Dolour before their very eyes.

  “None here contest your right, Tsonos,” Lord Cilcûliccas declared, stepping forward to intervene, scowling at Oinaral as he did so—but not in fury. He towered over Sorweel to stand before the Lastborn, his nimil hauberk a lucid contrast to the sordid gold worn by Nin’ciljiras—a soggomant hauberk, the youth dimly realized. A great deal was shared in their momentary, mutual look. The Quya clapped a white hand upon Oinaral’s shoulder, fairly wrenched the Nonman to his knees before turning to join him.

  All those across the Iron Oratorium joined in their obeisance, knelt with their fingers clasped across the small of their backs.

  “Y-yes,” Nin’ciljiras said, scowling for confusion. “We are one Mansion! What better sentiment with which to conclude?”

  “But the matter of this mortal and Fertility remains unresolved,” Cilcûliccas said to the Nonman King.

  Nin’ciljiras squinted at the Lord of Swans, scowled as if the matter were inconsequential. He angrily waved away Harapior’s attempt to intervene.

  “Yes-yes-yes …” he said with an air of phony impatience.

  And Sorweel realized that the Nonman King could not rem
ember … that he attempted to disguise this fact in a more general contempt for details.

  “So we are agreed then?” Cilcûliccas said.

  “Yes … Of course.”

  The resplendent Quya stood, nodding as if in acquiescence as he did so. “O’ Tsonos, your wisdom is ever our beacon. If war has overthrown the Niom, how are we to treat this Son of Men? How should we protect our Mountain from the wrath of the Hundred?”

  Oinaral kept his eyes fixed upon the floor throughout this exchange. Sorweel could not help but notice the way Cilcûliccas continued squeezing his shoulder in reassurance with his large, pale hand.

  “Yes! Yes! He is a Blessed Ward of Ishterebinth,” Nin’ciljiras declared.

  “A King of Men, and a God-entangled enemy of our enemy … He is not to be obstructed.”

  Sorweel fairly snorted aloud, given that his arms remained bound about a pole wedged behind his back.

  The Lord of Swans stood, his silk bolt wrapped as blood around him, beaming with insincere admiration. The peerings glinted across his nimil gown, shattered by thousands of miniature swans.

  “You are most wise, Tsonos. He will, of course, require a Siqu …”

  Why did he feel that somewhere unseen and unknown, he burned?

  What had these creatures done to him?

  Sorweel watched the alabaster lips of Harapior hanging at Nin’ciljiras’ ear, snipping off one inaudible—and sinister, he could not but think—fact after another. The Concavity, he realized, was not so different from any Mannish court, riven with subterranean conflict and intrigue, games of influence and power. Oinaral had played not so much to preserve an overwrought dignity as to lay his King’s incompetence bare—and for stakes greater than the single coin that was his life. The confederacy of Lord Cilcûliccas proved that some kind of conspiracy was afoot.

  Any hope of saving Serwa, the youth realized, lay with these two ghouls.

  They cut his bounds while the Nonman King sat fungal upon the Black Iron Seat, watching bloodless. Sorweel stood plagued with the same disorientation as earlier, testing his joints, swinging sensation back into his hands. The congregated Ishroi and Quya stared without the least scruple, their black eyes glittering, their obscene gowns scintillant in the sorcerous light. The sameness of their faces lent insanity to the spectacle. And yet Sorweel found he could recognize others: Vippol the Elder, another Siölan refugee and most gifted of the surviving Quya. Moimoriccas, long-called Earth-Eater for his ensorcelled cudgel, Gimimra, the famed “Graver”, which struck the very ground from beneath his foe’s feet. He recognized others as well, somehow distinct even though their pallor and beauty rendered them identical—and to more than just one another. Even as a fraction of his soul recognized individuals, another fraction insisted they were just another breed of Sranc—one framed, not as apes or dogs, but as strapping, catamite Men.

  For a Son of Sakarpus—a true child of the Pale no less—they could be nothing else.

  Without warning, the shining assembly fell as one to one knee …

  “Our House embraces thee, Sorweel, Son of Harweel,” the chorus intoned.

  The youth found he simply knew the ritual reply … somehow.

  “Let all … grace …”

  He fairly coughed for the alien workings of his mouth and throat—for abusing the apparatus of speech, he numbly realized, speaking their blasphemous tongue … Horror clenched the moment in a suffocating fist.

  “Find all … all honour …”

  What was happening here?

  He turned to Oinaral, his Siqu, frantically seeking guidance now that bondage and coercion had retired from the mad field. But the Lord of Swans had already secured the man’s attention, holding hands to his womanish cheeks, as a man might a beloved child. Even as the condescension repelled the youth, a deeper inkling approved, knowing how such intimacies of rank conserved the sacred hierarchies.

  “Recall what happened …” Cilcûliccas murmured to his ward.

  Oinaral acknowledged the High Quya with a lingering look, then, clasping Sorweel’s arm, he quickly drew the youth from the ghoulish regard of the Nonman King and his underworld court. A thin barrage of entreaties followed in their wake, some strident, others pathetic for being so tremulous.

  “Cu’cirrurn!”

  “Gangini—!”

  “Aurili—!”

  Names, he realized. They called out names as invitations.

  “Say nothing …” Oinaral muttered as he hustled him into the murk of the exit. “It will only inflame them.” What had been a cavernous immensity was suddenly low and looming, ceilings pitted with images of love and outrage.

  “Inflame?” the youth managed.

  “Aye,” Oinaral said, his eyes fixed forward, his stride brisk, yet unalarmed. “Those who teeter upon the Dolour, especially. You must avoid speaking to my brothers.”

  “Why? ”

  “Because they would love you, if they could.”

  Sorweel thought of the pathetic Emwama child cringing at the foot of the Black Iron Seat.

  “Love me?”

  Oinaral Lastborn walked three paces before turning to him, looking down without quite matching his gaze—much as the Nonman King had. “You are not safe here, Son of Harweel. You will find only madness in the embrace of Ishterebinth.”

  A numbness confounded his frown.

  “So the oath of Ishterebinth means nothing?” he asked.

  Oinaral Lastborn did not answer. They passed beneath the mirror sheen of the Concavity Gate, and Sorweel hunched for the intimation of hanging stone immensities. The peerings etched no more than pockets of graven image in either direction, transforming the underworld road into a necklace beaded by twilight worlds and primordial times. The Inner Luminal, it was called, the Hall that would become a euphemism for their King, Nil’giccas, after the construction of the Concavity.

  “I know things …” Sorweel said, only to be perplexed by the sound of his own voice.

  Oinaral led him opposite the way they had originally came, deeper, he somehow knew, into the Weeping Mountain.

  “How do I know these things?”

  Oinaral strode at a brisk pace, said nothing.

  Sorweel hastened after him, marvelling at the panels passing overhead, triumphs and tragedies, stacked one upon the other to the ceiling vaults above, the rising layers of a doomed race. Before, the scenes had been intelligible insofar as they offended, wholly debauched. Now they all but exploded for recognition, each glimpse a peering into times and worlds. Lovers reclined in forbidden liaison (for her breasts were bared) at a banquet for the Feast of the Mere. The annual Embassy between Nil’giccas and Gin’yursis, the great assembly of Injori Ishroi in the High Halls of Mûrminil …

  How he had hated the sullen, ashen halls of Cil-Aujas!

  For the first time, Sorweel understood the sage-stumping miracle that was knowledge, the condensed opacity that was its substance. He knew these things, and aside from its rank impossibility, this knowing was indistinguishable from any other, so obscure were the machinations of the soul. These memories were his, rising from the very point of him, even though they could belong only to this underworld.

  What was happening?

  These walls were interwoven with minutiae, roped with power, glory blotting glory, and lust and tenderness and contemplation populating all. He could read them as surely as he could read the murals of his ancestral home.

  “You did this by hand …” he blurted to Oinaral—his Siqu—who had drawn paces ahead.

  He received scant regard from the Nonman, less than a glance. “I fail to understand.”

  “You spent thousands of years doing this! These engravings …”

  The wonder of such a task. It seemed he could even see it in his soul’s eye, something both more and less than images, the chisel, the mallet, and the toiling thousands, the compulsion leaping as contagion through the surviving Mansions, the demand to unearth some fragment of themselves from dead stone.

  “
Aye,” Oinaral admitted. “An entire Age. We are not so fractious as Men. We live our lives as tribute … not prizes.”

  “Such a toil,” Sorweel said, boggled by the enormity of such a task.

  “To secure such life we had left,” Oinaral replied. “If a fortress be raised of stone, then we would make a fortress of our Memory, of all that we had lost. We succumbed to the imperial urge, the brute certainty that what is large is unassailable.”

  “Madness!” Sorweel cried—once again with a passion he could not recognize.

  Oinaral had stopped, and now loomed before him, his breastbone even with Sorweel’s forehead, his black-silk gown open to reveal the nimil mail he wore beneath.

  “All mighty endeavours beg contradiction,” he said, frowning. He turned to the very line of panels Sorweel had made the object of his gesture. “Look … Look between the moments of glory, and you find moments of a far different sort … Look, husbands dandling children … wooing lovers … appeasing wives …”

  He spoke true. Scenes of the small had been hewn into the sublime procession, but it seemed the eye had to look to find them, not for lack of prominence, but because they were not historical, things recognizable in form merely. Tokens of what was ineluctable.

  “We were losing it all,” the Nonman continued. “All the delights that grace hard life, be they carnal or paternal or anything that cobbles life with joy were drifting into oblivion. Do not be so quick judge, Son of Harweel. Madness is often the only sanity left, when hope alone serves the living.”

  Sorweel’s hands no longer tingled, though they shook for rage and incredulity …

  “You squandered it!” he barked stamping. “Squandered the last age remaining!”

  Oinaral appraised him without expression, a Sranc with a wise man’s soul. The light of the nearest peering daubed his eyes with points of white.

  “This is not you speaking.”

  “You fools! You set aside sword and scroll for this? How could you do such a thing?”

  The Siqu flinched for the violence of his expostulation, resumed his haunting regard.

  “Raise your hands, Son of Harweel … Touch your face.”

  A tickle, like that of a feather, caught the youth’s throat. He coughed, once again without the least sense of face and mouth.