The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  The Shortest Path.

  “Because my father stole your wife.”

  Cause …

  Cause was but the skin.

  The skein.

  A scab on the knuckle of the boy’s left index finger, already ancient for three days healing.

  The small mole to the left of the pregnant woman’s chin, the one that vanished those rare times she smiled.

  The swelling joints in the old Wizard’s hands, and the ache that he tested without awareness, again and again, flexing and relaxing his fingers …

  Flexing and relaxing.

  Each of these things had origins and destinations. Each of these things caused and had been caused. They were points that knotted the shag of the past and fanned into a hollow future. But he knew them only insofar as they were his origin, his past. He knew not the scrape that had wounded the boy’s finger, the defect that marred the woman’s skin, or the malady that afflicted the old Wizard’s hands.

  He was bound to the skin of these things—the skein.

  All else was Darkness.

  After generations of training and breeding for Logos, the Dûnyain could do no more than pierce this skin, cut and cut and cut. They could only lick the blood of knowledge. They could never hope to drink so deep as the woman had the evening previous. They could not so much as raise the cup, let alone drain it.

  The Dûnyain, seeing only the skin of Cause, the pulsing webs, had assumed that Cause was everything, that it occupied the whole of darkness. But they had been fools, thinking that Darkness, even in this meagre respect, could be seen. For all their penetration they were every bit as abject before their ignorances as beasts, let alone worldborn Men.

  A different blood throbbed through the infinite black, one that bled from all points equally.

  He need only look at the pregnant woman to see it now, scarcely perceptible, like the stain of dawn on the longest watch of the night, or the first flutter of sickness.

  They descended a broad pasture, their heads bobbing as the headlong fall pulled their steps downward. She walked below, wild for the pelts draped about her shoulders, boyish for the shortness of her hair. Unlike the old Wizard or even the boy, whose paths wandered like bumblebees, she walked with the assurance of one who followed a track both ancient and habitual …

  Her every step trod Conditioned Ground.

  She did not know this knowing, of course, which was what made it so much more remarkable … even miraculous. She bore an assurance that was not her own—and how could it be? How could anything bottomless be owned, let alone fathomed, by a soul so finite, so frail?

  She says, a fraction whispered from the dark, that you intend to murder her.

  Tell her, another answered, to gaze upon me while I speak.

  The boy drew his crabbed hand across a throng of goldenrod … and the Survivor felt the tickle of embroidered petals across his own palm …

  As did something greater. Incomprehensibly greater.

  Absolute.

  Pick any point in space—it does not matter which.

  The only way to make that point the measure of the surrounding space, the Dûnyain had realized, was to call it zero, the absence of quantity that anchored the enumeration of all quantities. Zero … Zero was the source and centre of every infinity.

  And it was everywhere.

  Because zero was everywhere, measure was everywhere—as was arithmetic. Submit to the rule of another and you will measure as he measures. Zero was not simply nothing; it was also identity, for nothing is nothing but the absence of difference, and the absence of difference is nothing but the same.

  Thus the Survivor had begun calling this new principle Zero, for he distrusted the name the old Wizard had given it …

  God.

  The great error of the Dûnyain, he could see now, was to conceive the Absolute as something passive, to think it a vacancy, dumb and insensate, awaiting their generational arrival. The great error of the worldborn, he could see, was to conceive it as something active, to think it just another soul, a flattering caricature of their own souls. Thus the utility of Zero, something that was not, something that pinched all existence, every origin and destination, into a singular point, into One. Something that commanded all measure, not through arbitrary dispensations of force, but by virtue of structure … system …

  Logos.

  The God that was Nature. The God that every soul could be, if only for the span of a single insight …

  The Zero-God. The absence that was the cubit of all creation. The Principle that watched through Mimara’s eyes …

  And had found his own measure wanting.

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  A mountain lay between them and the setting sun, brute ground lunging into the sky. White water blasted through a gorge below, a snaking of ravines and crevasses that made a hoof of the mountain’s roots. The boy sat tending to their fire, his eyes reflecting twin miniatures of the flame, his face flushing orange as night wicked the colour from the distances beyond his shoulders. The old Wizard and the pregnant woman stood bickering above, perched on a flange of granite that curled like a great, slumbering cat about their camp.

  “Pit-pit arama s’arumnat!” her voice fluted shrill across the stone.

  “Why do they argue now?” the boy asked, raising his pupils from the reflected fires.

  The Survivor had made no pretense of discretion or disinterest. He stood opposite the boy, his back to the coniferous gloom of the valley below, gazing up with cold fixity.

  “I offered to submit to her gaze,” a fraction replied to the boy. “And its judgment.”

  Another fraction tracked the serpentine interplay of outrage and incredulity flexing across her expression, warbling through her voice, twitching through her stance and gesture. Her Gaze, she was explaining to the old Wizard, had already passed judgment, had already found them wanting …

  “And she balks?” the boy asked.

  “They have suffered too much to trust anything we offer them. Even our capitulation.”

  “Mrama kapu!” the woman cried, sweeping wide the blade of her right hand. Once again stumped by the violence of her ingenuity, the old Wizard stammered in reply.

  He was losing this contest …

  “I can hear them!” the Survivor cried, his tone modulated to provoke communal alarm.

  The worldborn couple stared down at him, rimmed in the violet of incipient night. The burning scrub popped, to his right, coughed points of light, constellations drawn out on the wind.

  “I can hear them in your womb,” the Survivor repeated—this time in the woman’s tongue. Though he was far from mastering the language, he knew enough to say at least this much.

  She gawked at him, too shocked to be dismayed—to be anything other than disarmed.

  “Taw mirqui pal—”

  What do you mean … them?

  One fraction registered the success of his stratagem. Others reaped the signs blaring from her form and face. And still others enacted the remaining articulations of this ploy …

  The Survivor smiled the old Wizard’s most endearing smile.

  “You bear twins … Sister.”

  You are right to be terrified.

  The Dûnyain exceed any rule that you possess … We outrun your measure.

  You are the neck of a bottle. The World but drips into your soul.

  We dwell in the deluge.

  You come to us as a cataract. You assume you are unitary and alone, when in sooth you are a mob of blind men, crying out words you cannot comprehend in voices you cannot hear. For the truth is that you are many—this is the secret of your innumerable contradictions.

  This … This is where the Dûnyain labour, in the darkness that comes before your souls. To converse with us is to submit to us—there is no other way for you to dwell in our presence. Given our respective natures, we are your slavers.

  You were right to want to kill us …

  Especially me, one who was broken in the
deepest Deep.

  Even this confession, this speaking of plain truth, is woven from knowledge that would terrify you, such is its penetration. My very voice has been fashioned into a key, using manner and intonation as teeth to unlock the tumblers of your soul. You are rapt because you have been so instructed.

  Despite the brief span of our acquaintance, despite your will to conceal, I know so very much about you. I can name the Mission you call your mission, and I can name the Mission you know not at all. I know the twists of circumstance that shape and bind you; that for much of your life abuse was the only sincere rule; that you hide the tender beneath the bitter; that you carry your mother’s children …

  But I need not enumerate what I know, for I see also that you know.

  I see that you wonder what is to be done, for in speaking the truth, I also make the case for my destruction.

  And so are my own limits made plain. Though the night ranges infinite above us, a fraction of me still wanders the Thousand Thousand Halls, a dark fragment, as obscure as it is elusive, one that argues death … death as the Shortest Path to the Absolute.

  And I wonder, Is this what you call sorrow?

  Thus are the limits of the Dûnyain made visible … also. For the desire that burns so bright within you has been stamped into the merest embers within us, bred into insignificance with the passing of generations, leaving but one hunger, one flame, one mover to yoke the Legion-within …

  A single Mission.

  This, Sister … This is why I bare my throat to the blade of your judgment. This is why I would make myself your slave. For short of death, you, Anasûrimbor Mimara, wife-daughter of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, who is also my father … you, Sister, are the Shortest Path.

  The Absolute dwells within your Gaze. You … a frail, worldborn slip, heavy with child, chased across the throw of kings and nations, you are the Nail of the World, the hook from which all things hang.

  Thus do I kneel before it, awaiting, accepting, death or illumination—it does not matter which …

  So long as I am at last known.

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  A fraction kneels before her, Anasûrimbor Mimara. And a fraction, one of a hundred stones, could see it … as if it were rising up, like lead pouring into the husk and tatter of a mortal frame, an immobility as profound as oblivion.

  Zero.

  Sranc squealing in the black, the air rancid with sweat and exhalation, cleavers whooshing, felling brothers for lunatic fear. Feet slapping stone.

  Zero … Opening as an Eye.

  The blackness, savage and greased. A point passes through it, plunging down lines and sweeping across curves. The shrieks are contagion, like fire upon the back of an arid hill.

  Beauty … not of flowers or animal form, but of stillness, of vast mechanisms, the threshing, pounding, scraping, dwindling into the patter of mice.

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  Beauty … the effortlessness of freefall, the reduction of all riddles to a single, far-falling line.

  The point is sentient. It speaks, spinning tales of hewn ribs and deflected cleavers, punctured bowels and broken teeth, extremities sent spinning into the void of irrelevance.

  The Survivor gazes into the Gaze, sees the lie that is sight.

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  Judge us, a fraction whispers.

  Raise us up.

  Strike us down.

  Anasûrimbor Mimara stands above him, little more than a halo, a smear of meat and hair about the Judging Eye. An excuse. An occasion …

  Holding, a fraction notices, a sorcerous knife.

  Thronging, mewling blackness. A path picked—pursued. A calligraphy too murderous to be real. Threats isolated, plucked from the deluge, pinched like candle wicks—snuffed.

  So many cuts.

  Zero, trembling with feminine mortality.

  Too many.

  “You are broken,” she sobs. “The same as me …”

  A fraction reaches out, makes a pommel of the slender hand about the pommel of the knife. Judge, a fraction murmurs. End our ingrown war …

  But she is weeping—openly now. Why does she weep?

  The Gaze knows no sorrow.

  “But I do,” she whispers.

  Cuts and cuts and cuts …

  The knife clatters against stone. And somehow she is kneeling with him, embracing him, so that he can feel the sphere of her belly enter the cavity of his own. A fraction counts four heartbeats: one ponderous and masculine, another fleet and feminine, and two prenatal. She exhales into his neck, and a fraction tracks the creeping bloom of heat and humidity. She shudders.

  I am lost, a fraction whispers …

  Though her face is buried in his shoulder below his jaw, the Gaze has not moved. It watches as before, infinite scrutiny hanging from the memory of where her eyes had been.

  “Yes …” she says. “As are we.”

  Zero, glaring from nowhere, showing him his measure … and how disastrously far the Dûnyain had wandered.

  The rank folly of the Shortest Path.

  I am damned.

  Her small fists twist knots into his tunic, make rope of a portion. The boy watches, for once immaculate and inscrutable. “I forgive you,” she cries into his shoulder.

  I forgive.

  Awareness has no skin.

  No fists or fingers.

  No arms.

  So much must be ignored.

  The boy watches him stare into the bowl of night—watches him float. “So you have succeeded?” he whispers.

  A fraction hears. A fraction responds.

  “Everything I have taught you is a lie.”

  All that you know … another murmurs without voice. All that you are.

  And another …

  And another …

  They deferred to the old Wizard’s reckoning, following the northward wend of a great valley rather than pass out of the mountains.

  “Beyond lies Kûniüri,” he explained, “and Sranc without number.”

  The meaning was plain …

  And invisible.

  Crime, a fraction postulated. Crime divides the innocent from the ignorant.

  The four of them sat cross-legged, knees touching knees, upon a promontory overlooking the black velvet folds of yet another valley. Jackpine clung to the outcrop’s lip, leaning out like ravaged antlers. The chill made fog of their mingling breath. The old Wizard, who had not yet grasped let alone accepted what had happened, hefted the pouch he guarded so jealously in his left palm. A fraction sorted through the varieties of alarm that muttered through his look and gesture, plucked the one belonging, almost in its entirety, to the substance in the pouch. A puling spark, a greed almost infant in extent, poised to set the horizon aflame …

  But there was veneration as well, the wince of hard memories … unwanted lessons.

  The great project of the Dûnyain was conceived by Men, worldborn souls bent on pursuing an inkling of their own finitude. Their impulse was imperial. They had seen the encroaching darkness, the oblivion from which their every thought and passion had sprung; they had reckoned the servile fact of their dependency, and they would undo it if they could.

  Thus had they transformed the Absolute into a prize.

  “Qirri,” the pregnant woman said, her voice a bolt of silk, a banner for her mongrel fortitude. “Pa thero, Qirri …”

  She touched the tip of her index finger to the bulb of her tongue, then reached into the interior of the pouch.

  The boy watched witless—and trusting.

  Ignorance, a fraction resolved. Ignorance was the foundation. The First Principle.

  Proof of this lay in the very meat of the Dûnyain, for they had been bred in pursuit of deception. No intellect is orphaned, despite all the foundling hearts. All sons are born stranded because all fathers are sons. Every child is told, even those suckled on the teats of wolves. Even Dûnyain children. To be born is to be born upon a path. To be born upon a path is to foll
ow that path—for what man could step over mountains? And to follow a path is to follow a rule …

  To find all other paths wanting.

  She pulled her fingertip from the pouch’s throat, held it in the light of the Nail. A woolen smudge of powder—ash, so fine as to dissolve in the least wind …

  But the sky had forgotten how to breathe.

  Not even an entire World of madmen could chart the infinite vagaries of belief and action. Thoughts, like legs, were joined at the hip. No matter how innumerable the tracks, no matter how crazed or inventive the soul, only what could be conceived could be seen. Logos, they had called it, the principle that bound step to step, that yoked what would be aimless to the scruple of some determinate destination. And this had been the greatest of the Dûnyain’s follies, the slavish compliance to reason, for this was what had shackled them to the abject ignorance of their forefathers …

  Logos.

  “What is it?” the boy asked.

  “Not for you,” the old Wizard snapped—with more vehemence than he intended, a fraction noted.

  Reason was a skulking beggar, too timid to wander, to leap, and so doomed to scavenge the midden-heap of what had come before. Logos … They had called it light, only to find themselves blinded. They had made it their ancient, generational toil, confusing its infirmities for their own …

  Thinking the human was the obscuring shroud.

  She reached toward him, her palm down and her finger out so that he might take the tip of her finger between his lips. A fraction surprised her by clasping her wrist and guiding the powder to his nostril …

  The inhalation was quick, sharp enough to make the old Wizard flinch. Anasûrimbor Mimara pulled her finger back, frowned in marvelling surprise.

  “Ingestion delays onset,” a fraction explained. “This way …”

  A lesser fraction blinked.

  The Legion-within groaned, reeled, fumbled the World they bore as burdens upon their backs.

  “This … This way …”

  This way, boy … Follow me!

  Cuts and cuts and cuts. Teeth cracking in the black, gnashing, chewing. A demonic chorus bubbles down through the corridors, filters through the descending levels, viscous with lust and fury—savage with desperation. What the darkness obscures, the darkness welds together as one. So they seemed a singular thing, the Shriekers, more insect than human.