The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  “You are one with the God only when you suffer!” the voice from over their shoulders cried.

  Proyas glimpsed the numberless chips of luminous blue—the reflection of Anasûrimbor Kellhus in their eyes. Man after man, rank after rank, formation after formation, the same shining blue dots …

  Fading as the false reflections faded before them.

  “WHEN! YOU! SACRIFICE!”

  Booming waves of adulation.

  “You could never understand!” Saubon cried in his ear.

  “Understand what?”

  So much of the issue between Men turns on who is weary and who is in need.

  “Why he made me your equal!”

  There was honesty in this, enough to seize his attention entire.

  Saubon wagged his hand in a contemptuous gesture, at once indicating and dismissing the crazed spectacle about them. “All this time you thought he warred to bring about Righteousness! Only now do you see how wrong you were.” The Norsirai Exalt-General spat, darkening an archipelago of timber between Proyas’s booted feet. “Piety? Zeal? Bah! These are simply his tools!”

  Incredulity, too raw to be hooded. “Tools for wha …?”

  Proyas trailed, his voice caught out high and angry against a sudden silence. He looked up, his eyes drawn by the peripheral presentiment that all the World did the same. The breath was yanked from his breast …

  “You despair,” Saubon grated in his ear, “because like a child you thought that Truth alone could save the World …”

  For in fact, he alone looked up.

  “But it is strength that saves, Brother, not Truth …”

  He alone could see their Lord-and-Prophet hanging above them.

  “And strength burns brightest upon Lies!”

  To a man the Ordealmen had been captured by the blue-and-golden images shimmering from all but the most meagre polish, the tackiest gloss about them. Their Holy Aspect-Emperor hung in plain sight and yet unseen, head thrown back, the light of meaning pulsing from his mouth, singing words that no soul could comprehend …

  And yet they heard, “THIS, YOUR SACRIFICE—YOUR OR-DEAL!”

  They leapt in rapture, cowered in worship.

  Every reflection glimpsed exhorted, boomed, “THE GOD KNOWS YOUR MEASURE!”

  The Men of the Three Seas screamed, jubilant, deranged.

  The Meat … Proyas thought, too cold to betray his gagging horror.

  The Meat had taken Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

  They wheezed in the dark, misbegotten lungs drawing foul, misbegotten air. Hulking, lurid thoughts heaved in their hulking, tripartite skulls. Lice teemed. They peered and peered through glutinous eyes, but saw nothing save the dark. They bristled, clacked teeth, barked warnings in their crude tongue. Like old dogs nursing old pains, they periodically snapped and roared, clawed the blackness of innumerable others …

  On and on, forking through the deeps, wheezing in the dark, shaking matted, black-bison manes …

  Waiting.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Momemn

  I. The Game enacts the form of Creation. To be is to be for the Game.

  II. The parts of the Game are the whole of the Game, given the rules that compel them. The parts and the rules comprise the Elements of the Game.

  III. There are no moves [acts] in the Game, only the changing permutations of Elements.

  —Opening Cantos of the Abenjukala

  Bonfires shed no daylight.

  —SCYLVENDI PROVERB

  Mid-Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

  So long as he watched, the little boy reasoned. So long as he continued spying on the Narindar, he would be safe.

  Anasûrimbor Kelmomas had become a solitary sentinel, charged with a vigil he dare not explain to anyone, and which only he could keep. What had begun as a mere diversion, a distraction from far more pressing concerns like his sister, had now become a mortal mission. The Four-Horned Brother walked the palatial corridors, bent on some dark design the boy could not fathom—save that it somehow involved him.

  So he continued, even expanded his campaign of secret observation. Day after day, he lay motionless, peering at the man standing motionless in his dark chamber, or, those rare times the assassin elected to roam the palace, he scurried after him through the mazed bones of the Andiamine Heights. And when exhaustion finally forced him back to his mother’s bed, he curled riven with terror, convinced the Narindar somehow watched him. Day after day, he did this, matching the man in his every particular, a step to shadow his every step, a breath to shadow his every breath, until they came to seem a tandem soul, a singular thing divided between light and shadow, evil and good.

  Just why watching the assassin should keep him safe, Kelmomas could not say. He had boggled himself innumerable times trying to reckon his circumstances, particularly what it meant to always and only do what had already been done—what the Librarian had called the “Unerring Grace.” Since he belonged to what happened as much as anything else, what difference did it make whether he watched the man hidden or not? Kelmomas possessed a keen appreciation of the impunity intrinsic to acts committed outside the knowledge of others. To spy as he spied was, in some strange and elusive sense, to own the one spied upon. It sometimes seemed they were bugs, the people he watched, clicking through routines so blind they could be mechanical. He had often thought that watching the inhabitants of the palace as he did was like watching the great gears and armatures of the Emaunum Mill, a vast contraption that endlessly groaned and clacked onward, chasing tooth and socket and groove, utterly blind to the mischief dwelling within it. A rock was all that he needed, or perhaps a pocket filled with sand, to bring the entirety to a cracking halt.

  This was what it meant to spy, these were the wages. The power of life and death and all the plunder that lay between. Were the Narindar a man like any other he would have been hapless, vulnerable to whatever stratagem the Prince-Imperial might concoct. To spy on another was to seize what was blind from the unseen margins, to lure and to dupe, to rule …

  The way he ruled Mother.

  But the Narindar was not a man like any other. In fact he was scarcely a man at all. The recognition would descend upon the boy from time to time, tease goose-pimples from his skin, bully his breath into a cringe: the Four-Horned Brother stood in the shadows immediately below him, the wicked Father of Hate.

  The puzzles fairly drove him mad: What were the wages of spying on a God?

  The assassin possessed the Unerring Grace. How else explain the string of impossibilities he had observed? The boy wanted to believe he possessed a Grace all his own, but the secret voice was always quick to remind him that he possessed the Strength and that this was a far different thing than Grace. They endlessly bickered points such as these in the carapace of his skull …

  But if there’s no hiding from Him, why doesn’t He simply kill me?

  Because He plays you!

  But how could a God play at anything?

  Because that is what he feeds upon ‘ere you die, the grain of your experience.

  Fool! I asked how, not why!

  Who can say how the Gods do what they do?

  Maybe because they can’t!

  And when the ground shakes, when mountains explode, or the seas rise up?

  Pfah. The Gods do these things? Or do they simply know they will happen before they happen?

  Perhaps there’s no difference.

  And this was the rub, he came to realize. What did it mean to act without willing? What could it mean? When Kelmomas reflected on his own actions, he always found himself steered to the incontrovertible fact of his soul. He fathered his actions. He was the primal source, the indisputable origin …

  The problem was that everyone thought as much, to varying degrees. Even slaves …

  Even Mother.

  One afternoon the Narindar abruptly turned his head as if to look at someone standing before his chamber door—which he never bolted. Then he was
at the door, pausing, looking back to where he had stood moments before. Then he was striding out into the corridor beyond, forcing the young Prince-Imperial to scramble the way he always did, scampering through the black slots, shimming up to the next iron grating to spy his enigmatic quarry. For all his diabolic implication, the assassin was by far the easiest to track of the souls the boy had pursued through the palace. He walked with the measure of a lifelong soldier, his pace welded to some constant and transcendent tempo. No one dared accost him. And he passed through points of congestion with the smoky ease of a phantom.

  On this occasion he left the regimented grid of the Apparatory and passed into the chaos of the Lower Palace, into the stores, one of the few places where the network of secret tunnels did not go. The panicked Prince-Imperial found himself stranded at an intersection of hallways, watching the Narindar recede into obscurity, becoming no more than a dimming succession of glimpses in the intermittent lantern-light.

  Then, as he strode upon the very limit of visibility, Kelmomas thought he saw him step sideways, vanish into an alcove of some kind. The boy lay at the grill for some time, peering to no avail and debating what he should do. After weeks of shadowing the man with no problem, what did it mean to lose him here and now?

  Was this how it happened?

  He’s known all along! Samarmas cried. I told you!

  Was this how Grinning Ajokli would avenge his sacrilege?

  I told you!

  Was this how everything had already happened?

  He lay shaking in terror, all but immobilized when the great train of bearers—caste-menials by the look of them—began filing immediately below him, talking in hushed murmurs, huffing for the great baskets of apples they bore upon their shoulders. The smell filled the deep halls, crisp and sour. Nothing shouted the impotence of the Fanim and their siege more loudly than the streams of soldiers and provisions arriving by sea. They laboured past, dim, dark Men, bearing apples as swollen as Mother’s lips, crimson unto purple and green. The gossamer hairs across the boy’s body fixed him as surely as nails. He lay watching the head of the train climb the hallway toward the alcove where the assassin lay hidden. But the flotilla of intervening baskets obscured the lead bearer, leaving only the absence of turmoil to indicate that the Narindar merely observed the same as he. The passage of so many bodies had whipped the lanterns into momentary brilliance, and so Kelmomas clearly saw the last man pass the point where he thought the assassin lay concealed. The bearer toiled on unaware and unmolested, save that he stumbled, and sent an apple from his basket. The fruit hung waxen red and green for a moment, before spinning to the floor and kicking back down the corridor, gleaming as it bounced.

  A hand reached out and snatched it.

  And the Narindar was striding back the way he came, glowering into emptiness, taking vacant bites of the apple as he approached. The white of the apple’s flesh bobbed overbright in the murk. Kelmomas lay as stiff as a dead cat. He did not breathe for the entirety of the assassin’s transit.

  Only at that moment did he truly understand the dread proportion of his circumstance.

  Everything has already happened …

  The young Prince-Imperial took to hand-wringing in his mother’s chambers that night. Even Mother, for all her preoccupation, glimpsed his agitation through the veneer he typically wore to court her adoration.

  “There’s no cause to fear,” she said, sitting next to him on the bed, cupping his cheek and pulling his head to her bosom. “I told you, remember? I killed their Waterbearer. Me!”

  Hands on either shoulder, she pressed him back to display her marvelling smile.

  “Your mother killed the Last Cishaurim!”

  She had wanted him to clap his hands and cheer, and perhaps he would have, were it not for the swollen urge to chew out her tongue …

  There was so much he had to teach her!

  “Now they have no hope of overcoming our walls, Sweetling. We grow fat, fed by the sea, while the whole Empire rallies across the Three Seas! Fanayal. Was. A. Great. Fool. He thought he would reveal our weakness, but in sooth he has only shown the savages who would rule in our stead!”

  Kelmomas had heard it all before of course, how Father, for all the demands he made of the provinces, “smashed no idols.” But the boy had never considered the Fanim an actual threat. If anything he had come to see them as allies in his war against his sister—and imbecilic ones at that. The only fear they instilled was the fear they would simply melt away, for the day they decamped was also the day his hag-cunt-sister would betray him—Thelli! Even if Mother refused to believe her at first, sooner or later she would. Despite her peculiarities, despite her inability to emote, let alone love, Theliopa was the one soul Mother trusted above all others.

  Kelmomas could feel his body retreat into a weeping cage for pondering the consequences. It was too much … too much …

  Necessity impaled him. Necessity piled upon mad necessity.

  Never, it seemed, not even in the darkest of the dark cannibal days following Uncle Holy’s coup, had he been so oppressed, so maliciously and monstrously abused. Even Mother had become an affliction! Taking Thelli’s word over his! Over his!

  There was so much Father had failed to teach her. There was so much she had yet to learn.

  The Postern Terrace deserted, Esmenet leaned against the balustrade, her eyes closed to the evening glare, her face alive to the mellow heat. The last of her Exalt-Ministers and their Apparati had dissolved into the solution of the city. Ngarau, perhaps sensing her humour, had withdrawn with all the slaves in tow. She had even kicked off her slippers so she might savour the dwindling of day through the soles of her bare feet. Only her Inchausti remained, discrete and motionless sentinels, men who would die, as Caxes Anthirul had died, to keep her safe.

  And it seemed miraculous what she had accomplished …

  Would that she understood any of it.

  Rehearsing events, she had found, simply made them more baffling. But word of these atrocities and miracles—overthrowing Maithanet, killing the Last Cishaurim—had spread, sparking an even more profound wonder. The minstrels were singing of her, the caste-menials had shrugged away the Yatwerian foment and were claiming her as their own. Zaudunyani across the Three Seas now made her their example, testimony of the divinity of their cause. Pamphlets were distributed. Numberless bless-tablets were stamped and fired with her name. She became Esmenet’arumot, Esmenet-unbroken … Mother of the Empire.

  “‘The dogs besiege our mother!’” Phinersa had told her the other morning. “This is what they cry in the streets. ‘Our mother is in peril! Our mother!’ They pull their hair and beat their breasts for you!” The Water, it seemed, had burned away whatever reserve of arrogance Phinersa had possessed with his arm. Her Master-of-Spies, she had come to realize, was the kind of man who gave in proportion to his sacrifice—this was likely why Kellhus had chosen him to serve her. The more Phinersa lost in her name, the more he would commit to her next throw. That same night she discovered that he had sent an array of palm-sized tablets—different blessings—to her apartments. Years ago, seeing her face upon what the faithful called “silver empresses” and the apostates “shiny harlots” had left her numb, devoid of shame or pride. But she wept for seeing these crude plates, for seeing her name wedged as something prized, something holy …

  Something unconquerable.

  And how could she not, when she was a harlot in a land that held them accursed? A Sumni whore, no less, a bright beacon of Thousand Temples hypocrisy …

  How could she be anything but broken?

  In the histories she had read, the authors always attributed events to will, if not that belonging to the principles, then to the Hundred. The stories were stories of power: caprice was something she always had to read into accounts. The great Casidas, of course, was the sole exception. As a onetime galley slave, he understood both sides of power, and so possessed a keen eye for the conceits of the powerful. His Annals of Cenei had
knotted her innards night after night for this very reason: Casidas understood the truth of power in times of strife, how history was a blind thresher. He himself described it as, “a perpetual battle fought in the pitch of an eternal night, shadowy Men hacking at hints in the gloom and all too often”—she would never forget the phrase—“reaping their beloved.”

  Esmenet also understood the sordid tangle of immunity and vulnerability that comes with power—well enough to be interminably stranded upon their divide. She was no fool. She had lost too much to trust to any consequence, let alone her ability to command the hearts of Men. The name the mob called may now be hers but the woman they invoked simply did not exist. She had made this reversal possible, it was true, but more as a wheel makes a chariot possible, and not as a charioteer. She had provided her Empire with a name to focus their belief, and scarce more.

  She hadn’t even killed the Last Cishaurim … not in sooth.

  Perhaps this explained her addiction to the verandah behind her husband’s throne—to standing, as she stood now, in this very place. Lingering here, she could almost believe the legend she had become, this mad myth of herself. Looking out over her city, she could indulge the fancy, the grandest of all the grand conceits, the tale of the hero, the soul that somehow wricks free the thousand hooks of circumstance, that somehow hangs above the fray, ruling without being ruled …

  She closed her eyes, greeted the mellow warmth of the sun across her face … the feeling of orange.

  With every passing day more and more Columnaries disembarked, swelling the garrison. General Powtha Iskaul had already struck sail with the battle-hardened Twenty-ninth. The three Arcong Columns she and Anthirul had sent to retake Shigek had been recalled, and had travelled at least as far as Asgilioch. Without his Waterbearer, Fanayal hesitated, if not wavered outright, even as his men clotted the southern hilltops with ever more siege engines. To simply eke out his existence, he had no choice but to endlessly provoke the surrounding countryside: thousands of retired Zaudunyani warriors were mustering in the neighbouring provinces, and tens of thousands more across the Three Seas …