The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  “There is no speaking on the Mere,” Oinaral said, still reckoning what he had done. “If you speak on the Mere, Morimhira will kill you.”

  A final crack of metal. The deck dropped from beneath Sorweel’s feet, then punched both his heels. They landed upon an airy whoosh. Sorweel tripped back onto the swine carcasses. The Haul rocked from side to side, buoyant.

  The meat was cold, flabby about an unyielding core. He scrambled back to bare deck, found himself staring out appalled …

  For all its intensity, the peering could reveal no more than a slick of water some few hundred cubits wide. A corpse lay no more than a length from the starboard gunwale, floating just beneath the water, its pallor testifying to the rust-foulness of the water—water that had once been lucid as mountain air! Debris clotted the surface elsewhere, ropes and braids of putrefaction still undulating for the Haul’s intrusion. He glimpsed another corpse farther to the stern, bloated as a dead steer, its face a murky scribble.

  The part of him that had once been Immiriccas lay numb … or dead.

  The Mere become a cesspit! The Deep was holy no more.

  When he looked to Oinaral, the Siqu raised three fingers to his lips beneath a stern glare: the Nonman gesture for silence.

  The Boatman had moved to the prow, where he drew a beaten oar from beyond the carcasses forward. Bracing himself with a foot on the rail and one knee to his chest, he swung the oar out and down, then heaved back and about on the oar. Almost immediately the chain clattered free of the mechanism above. The Haul barged forward. Sorweel was forced to duck the kicking tip as the vessel slipped beneath. He glanced up, watched the chain needle the upper void as they drew away.

  Then he looked to the ruined water, as black as pitch save where gagged with scum. He stepped to the rail.

  He leaned over to stare into the brackish water.

  They moved slowly enough that the reflection was bowed without real distortion. The brilliance of the peering rendered him in silhouette: he saw the Amiolas rise as a tapered square from his shoulders, its interior blessedly black. But a glimmer wavered in the void, one that kindled as he leaned closer. He watched stupefied as it waxed moon-bright, then terrified as it wobbled into the charnel visage he had only glimpsed before …

  A white face indistinguishable for Oinaral’s—or a Sranc’s—staring back up at what looked down.

  And it horrified, for nowhere could the King of Sakarpus perceive himself—who he was!—in that unholy circuit of reflected and reflecting. What was human in him whimpered, begged for this mad nightmare to end. What was Immiriccas, however, recoiled in disgust and monolithic contempt—

  The peering flickered out.

  No one spoke.

  The silence was that of breathing beneath blankets, punctuated by the brittle string of droplets falling from the Boatman’s oar. The blackness was absolute, as indifferent to eyes as to water or rock. At first he tried to see, to force some concession from what was impervious, but that stoked the intimation of blindness—terror. So he looked without straining to look, stared without the bigotry of focus. The beads upon the oar ceased dripping. The silence was of a stone deeper than mountains. And in that darkness he saw the Darkness that is the fundament of all things, the shadow within the light, the Darkness that doffs and dons Men as masks, that always claws outward and never in.

  Oblivion.

  An urge to kick or to scream seized him … to prove the existence of echoes. But he remembered his Siqu’s warning, leaned riven against the gunwale.

  The peering fluttered back to fierce life, and the sewer that was the Mere lay revealed about them once again, the glitter of greasy, swollen things. His hood heaped about his shoulders, Morimhira stood gazing and scowling at the brilliance, aglow like an angel against the black mire beyond, his eyes sparking as a sorcerer’s might.

  He too had been surprised.

  The ancient Nonman resumed paddling the Haul forward, his back pulling into a broad V with every alternating stroke. Sorweel found himself returning to the mirroring waters, drawn by some strange will to gratify horror—not simply to regard the horrid aspect, but to see through its eyes …

  But the armoured Siqu clapped a long hand upon his shoulder, drew him around. Whatever rebuke his gaze held faltered the instant he looked into the Cauldron.

  The Boatman toiled just over his shoulder, and, glancing at him, Sorweel saw a band of grey resolve from the far-forward limit of the peering’s light—a strand. Stagnant beach climbed from the blackness, the sand white and grey, the waterline black with viscous coagulum. He followed the light’s expanding margin, watched the tracts of sand unfurl, shadows shrinking into countless dimples. He spied a heap of some kind coming into murky materiality just as he realized the Haul was about to strike. He reached out to the Siqu’s sleeve, seized a fistful of nimil links …

  Held him as the Haul lurched to a halt on the underworld beach.

  Rather than thank him, Oinaral averted his eyes and turned to the prow, gesturing for him to follow. The Boatman barged past them on his way aft, and Sorweel found himself shocked by his density as much if not more than by his creased face. It was as if an engine of war lay primed within him, torsions as mighty as he was old. The youth glanced backward one last time before leaping from the Haul in pursuit of the Siqu.

  Sorweel landed on the prow’s furthest shadow, just beyond the fouled waters. The sand was neither warm nor cold, as fine as silk. He watched his shadow stand as he stood, only elongated across the trampled strand. The brightness of the peering was enough to render the filth of the surrounding waters translucent, and to reveal the mire of floating bodies clotted about the shore. Here and there some had been rolled out of the water, beached—most likely by the Haul itself, given the septic stillness of the Mere. Though intact within the water, their bodies had been rotted to sodden bone and leather once exposed to air.

  He turned to Oinaral, who stood several paces inland, gazing out into the black.

  The Boatman shocked him scraping about on the prow above and behind. He watched the Most Ancient Warrior launch a carcass to land with a dusty thump mere paces from Sorweel on the sand. The youth hastened to join his Siqu where he stood.

  Oinaral turned to his approach, murmured, “Listen.”

  Sorweel paused, his ears pricked. “I hear nothing.”

  “Indeed,” the Nonman replied. “That is what makes the Deep our only Temple. Silence is what we count as most holy.”

  He knew this, but it stood among the many things that bewildered for knowing.

  “Silence … Why?”

  Oinaral’s face tightened.

  “Oblivion,” he said. “It is where we would hide, if we could.”

  Serwa hung limp from the pole wedged between her arms and back, her covered head slung low, her breath hot on the fabric. The peerings passed as a succession of luminous bruises through the silk hood as her captors bore her through the mazed ways of Ishterebinth.

  She pondered, not without care, the brief tragedy of her life, how circumstances could blunt, fracture, and obliterate even the most painstaking designs. She contemplated how the number-sticks ruled all …

  Everything save the Shortest Path.

  The Niom had been a ruse for her father as much as for what remained of the Nonmen—she realized that now. It was merely a vessel, a thing possessing no significance aside from the terrible cargo it bore. Sorweel and Moëngus had been sent to vouchsafe her father’s artifice, nothing more. They were little more than dupes in the end, witless tokens of a far more daring ambit …

  She. She was the masterstroke … the monstrous cargo.

  Anasûrimbor Serwa, Grandmistress of the Swayali, the greatest Witch to ever walk the Three Seas.

  Lord Harapior called the Nonman company to heel from someplace near. The sack was whisked from her head; she found herself blinking against raw brilliance. They were still in a corridor, she noted, with no little alarm—a grand one to be sure, but a corridor nonetheless
. The Upper Luminal, she reckoned.

  The Lord Torturer crouched before her, his waxen features close enough to nip. Wrath splashed as agony across his face. In a single motion, he raised his right fist and struck the left side of her face.

  “From the King-under-the-Summit,” he growled. “He asked that I drive down your price.”

  She glared at him, left eye fluttering for tears.

  He raised a hand to her throat, scratched the ensorcelled metal about her neck instead. Her Agonic Collar.

  “Emilidis himself wrought this,” he said. “No one who has tested it has survived.” His glittering black look faded for a heartbeat, straying into thoughts both awful and inscrutable. “You would die were you to shed the least light of Meaning … Certainly! To suppose otherwise would be to blaspheme the Artisan.”

  He swallowed, his gaze roaming down to the points of her breasts and beyond.

  The great pupils once again locked upon her own.

  “But then I know that you are Dûnyain … I know that every blunted edge you bare conceals a poison pin.”

  He sighed in mockery.

  “I was a fool for thinking that knowledge would make me your master … So now I’m suspicious beyond all reason. I obsess, wondering where I might find the poisoned pin. And I ask, What will my King do when he at last lays eyes on you? What would any soul do when presented a famed songbird as a gift?”

  He sneered.

  “Of course, he would bid it sing.”

  He seized the back of her head, jammed the silken sack deep into her mouth and throat. She gagged and convulsed as someone human might. His eyes gleamed for satisfaction.

  “No voice,” he said. “No poison pin.”

  The Gods were wolves baying beyond the ageless gates of death, gluttonous and all-powerful. The Nonmen, the progeny of Imimorûl, would deny them the leathery meat of their souls, such was their pride. So where Men asked how they might live so as to become prized pets in Heaven, they asked how they might live so as to die invisible, to plummet beyond the Outside and vanish into the Deepest Deep.

  “That is why your father came down here,” the youth asked, “to find Oblivion?”

  They followed the black path of their shadows into regions of dwindling light, toward the heap Sorweel had spied earlier.

  “All seek it,” Oinaral replied softly. “He came here because he is Tall, and all the Tall come to the Mere when they Succumb.”

  “Why?”

  “The Dolour affects them differently: their confusion is less profound, but their violent humours rule them more completely. They come here because only the Tall can hope to survive the mad humours of the Tall.”

  They crossed into a debris field on the verge of the Haul’s failing light, an accumulation of thousands upon thousands of bones strewn and piled across the sands. Sorweel initially assumed they all belonged to pigs, but the sight of two black sockets staring up from the sand informed him otherwise. A skull the size of his torso …

  “Then how do you know your father yet lives?” he murmured to his Siqu.

  For the first time the youth noticed the pale luminance upon the ground before him and him alone. The Amiolas, he realized.

  “Because only Ciogli the Mountain could throw him from his feet.”

  The Nonman strode ahead to scrutinize the heap. The great skull Sorweel had noticed earlier sparked a second bolt of terror as the Lastborn stepped around it: the pate climbed as high as his nimil-gowned knee!

  Sorweel shrugged against rising hackles, threw glances across what little he could see.

  The Nonman stepped around the heap the way one might a corpse found in a field. Obscurities resolved into crisp features as Sorweel hastened to follow. The Cauldron’s funereal light waxed more horrific with every step. A great hauberk comprised the body of the heap, laying folded across the curve of a shield immense enough to deck half the Haul. A helm large as a Saglander barrel crowned the bulk, intricacies dimpling a hide of dust. A sword as long as he was tall—a full Siölan cubit—jutted from the sand immediately behind it, as though it were a cairn or grave. The youth gave the whole a wide berth, thinking this was how a hero’s discarded armour might seem to a toddler or a cat.

  He glanced back to the Haul beneath the radiant peering, saw the Boatman casting swine, his existence a tireless sliver in the angle he occupied relative to the light. He watched a carcass slap onto the heap, glimpsed the snout jiggle in the bright. He noted the parallel bird tracks he and Oinaral had inked walking from the shore … Suddenly the monstrous gait that had trampled the strand surrounding became plain. Everywhere, pits had been stamped like fuzzy memories in the sand, elephantine impressions.

  The blackness about them throbbed with hazard.

  “What now?” he asked Oinaral on a tremulous voice.

  He knew what awaited them. With his own eyes he had witnessed Oirûnas at Pir Minginnial, bellowing shouts that swatted the ear, casting ruined Sranc above the mobs with each colossal blow—crushing the throat of a Bashrag with a single hand!

  The Lord of the Watch—he had seen him thus! With his own feet he had followed his rampage beneath the golden enormity of the Horns!

  “He is here,” the Siqu said, still scanning the black. “Those are his arms.”

  Many were out there, the youth realized. Monstrous souls in the dark, watching, waiting. This was where the Boatman came—where he delivered his ministry of swine and sustenance.

  So this was where Oirûnas had carved his empire.

  “So what now?” the youth repeated.

  Oinaral stood rigid in the manner of those who cling to standing.

  “Tell me, Manling …” he said, his voice curious. “Tell me … if you were you to find your father’s shade rotting in this desolate place, what passion would own you? If you found Harweel lingering here, would terror squeeze away your breath? Numb your limbs to lead?”

  Sorweel gazed upon the Nonman’s profile.

  “The very same.”

  “And what,” the darkling figure asked, “would be your reason?”

  It seemed he could taste something sour and despairing.

  “For shame,” the youth replied. “For failing to be what his glory demanded.”

  Oinaral pondered these words for what seemed a very long time.

  Deep, my sons, delve deep,

  Fortify the very bones,

  Wed hope to what is solid,

  Trust to space made,

  Not emptiness stolen …

  The Nonman drew Holol at last, waved it as a glowing revelation across the bleak regions before them. Pins of light carved the strand sterile white, uncovered bones and more bones, cracked and splintered, tossed through the pale sand.

  Holding the arcane blade before him, the Nonman set off into the black. Silver shimmered along his chain-mail rim as he dwindled.

  Sorweel hastened to follow on legs that seemed braided from straw. What would he do, were it his father hidden in the black before them? Would he rush forward, cast himself sobbing at his feet, beg for an undeserved forgiveness? Or would he flee as fast as his legs could carry, flee the truth of the Holy Deep?

  Would he even still love Harweel, the wise and strong King of the Lonely City? Or would he hate him for having suffered so long the curse of his example? For abandoning his little boy to days so hard, a Fate so perverse and cruel.

  Could Harweel still love him?

  These questions precluded breathing.

  Man and Nonman wandered across the wrack of bone and sand, into zones where the sand shallowed, pooled in great scallops of arid rock. Holol’s light whisked without sound over increasingly mangled terrain: gravel skirts heaped and bowled, stone shelves terraced the deepening darkness, climbing as a stair might. The visible limit brushed what seemed some kind of vast pier hanging above, detached from any other visible stone.

  Oinaral Lastborn halted him with a restraining hand. After a moment of peering hesitation, the Siqu continued forward alone, his pace
ginger, stalking the ascending clutter with the reverence of desperate souls at Temple. Just what he stalked eluded the youth for thirty heartbeats or more. A joint of stone reared from the foot of the shelves, angled so as to conceal the line dividing what breathed from what did not. Thus did the famed Lord of the Second Watch seem to be an extension of these, the deepest roots of the Weeping Mountain.

  The ancient Hero lay naked with his head bowed to his chest. He seemed to slumber, but his posture—reclined with his wain-wide shoulders bent upright against unseen rock—warned otherwise.

  Oinaral came about a mound of gravel, then followed a low rock defilade toward the hulking form. Ten thousand shadows swung on the whim of Holol’s pinpoint light, some as small as palms, others as long as night. The sum of existence swung upon his every step.

  The stony string of the Boatman’s voice fell silent.

  Oinaral paused just beyond the defilade, a scintillant beacon amid the dreck and gnawed desolation. Silence smothered all inkling of distance. His father lay some thirty paces before him on the second of the scalloped shelves, wreathed in shadow, his enormous frame motionless against his horn of rock, his face inscrutable.

  Fear scorched Sorweel’s breast.

  The Siqu dared call out: “Mighty Oirûnas, Lord of the Watch …”

  The massive outline did not move. For the first time Sorweel noticed stacked skulls—walls of them, arrayed like macabre fortifications along each of the ascending shelves of stone. Pig skulls in their thousands, snouts drawn out ragged, as if belonging to a creature far more fearsome.

  When had fathers become Dragons?

  “It is me, Oinaral Lastborn … Your son by fair Ûliqara.”

  He swayed Holol back and forth, causing the surrounding horde of shadows to kneel and stand and then kneel once again. Sorweel fairly lost his balance, feared he might swoon.

  “I know …” the hulking form rumbled. “I know who you are.”

  Oinaral stood rigid.

  “You are lucid?”

  Silence, so utter as to make wet skin of souls and razors of the least sound.