The Great Ordeal

  Without sorcery or Chorae, the Dûnyain, for all their preternatural ability, were helpless before the Erratics. So they fled into the labyrinth they had spent one hundred generations preparing, made a citadel of what the boy called the “Thousand Thousand Halls.” The Quya pursued them, he said, crashing through barricades, flooding the corridors with killing lights. But the brethren simply fell back and back, retreating ever deeper into the complexities of the maze.

  “For all their might,” the boy continued in his monotone drawl, “the Singers were easily confused. They lost their way, wandered howling. Some perished for thirst. Others went mad, and brought the ceilings down upon themselves in their desperation to escape …”

  It seemed Achamian could feel them, ancient lives ending in blindness and suffocation …

  Explosions in the deep.

  His diction flawless, the boy explained how the invaders mustered legion after legion of Sranc, poured them into the labyrinth, crazed and screaming, the way yeomen might try to drown rodents in their burrows.

  “We lured them deep,” he said, his voice utterly devoid of the passions and hesitations that belong to childhood. “Left them to starve and thirst. We killed and we killed, but it was never enough. There was always more of them. Shrieking. Snarling …”

  “We fought them for years.”

  The Consult had made a screaming cistern of the Thousand Thousand Halls, filled the labyrinth until it could hold no more, and death spilled over. The boy could actually remember the latter stages of the underworld siege; corridors packed with listless and dying Sranc, where the brethren need only step and spear to move on; chutes and stairwells choked with carcasses; the flights and the assaults, wave after endless wave, ferocious and unrelenting, so much so that brother after brother would finally falter and succumb.

  “And so we perished one by one.”

  The old Wizard nodded in sympathy he knew the boy did not need.

  “Everyone except you and the Survivor …”

  The boy nodded.

  “The Survivor carried me in,” he said. “The Survivor walked me out. The Logos has always burned brightest within him. None among the brethren stood so close to the Absolute as he.”

  Mimara had stood rooted this whole time, her face blank, alternately studying the boy and peering out into the surrounding gloom.

  “Akka …” she finally murmured, staring into the dark.

  “And what is his name?” Achamian asked, ignoring her. The boy’s description of the Survivor troubled him for some reason.

  “Anasûrimbor,” the boy replied. “Anasûrimbor Koringhus.”

  This name seized Mimara’s attention as violently as it seized the old Wizard’s heart.

  “Akka!” she fairly shouted.

  “What is it?” he asked dully, his wits addled by stacking implications. Ishuäl destroyed. The Dûnyain evil. And now … another Anasûrimbor?

  “He distracts you!” she cried in a strangely hooded voice.

  “What?” he asked, leaping to his feet. “What are you saying?”

  Her eyes pinned wide with fear, she pointed into the blackness draping the depths of the chamber before them. “Someone watches us!”

  The old Wizard squinted, but could see nothing.

  “Yes,” the boy said at his elbow, though there was no way he could have understood Mimara’s Sheyic. How had he let the child come so close?

  Close enough to strike …

  “The Survivor has come.”

  Hope dwindles.

  Yesterday, Achamian had been but a son cringing beneath his father’s angry shadow. Yesterday, he had been a child sobbing in a mother’s anxious arms, looking into her eyes and seeing love—and helplessness. To be a weak child—cursed with an eye for the impractical, for the profound and the beautiful. To continually remind your father of what he despised in himself. To be a surrogate for paternal self-loathing.

  Yesterday, he had been a Schoolman, begging and conniving, awakening to find himself strangled, his eyes clotted with two thousand years of grief. Yesterday, he had been the husband of a whore, loving against the pitch of circumstance and fanatical horror. To be a weak man, cursed with convictions that others could scarcely conceive, let alone consider. To be a laughingstock, a cuckold, counted treacherous among your brothers.

  Yesterday, he had been a Wizard, measuring days with his resentments and ruminations, scrawling errant messages that not even fools would read. Yesterday, he had been a mad hermit, a prophet in the wilderness, lacking the heart to act on his own mad declarations. To have a question that was at once a hatred… To have a love that was at once a loss … and a cry for vengeance.

  Yesterday, he had beheld Ishuäl.

  The intruder’s shadow strode toward them, gathering substance and detail with every step.

  Never had he felt so defeated … so old.

  Too much …

  The crab-handed boy lingered close enough to murder.

  Too much …

  His own wind rattled the cage of his lungs, bolted for escape.

  The light seemed to seize the figure, hoist his terrifying visage from the gloom of the Thousand Thousand Halls. But he did not surface as he should according to swales of smooth skin and muscle. Illumination tripped across ridges of braided tissue, edged the crater of a missing cheek, gleamed across exposed gums and the remnants of teeth. Shadow inked innumerable hooks and gouges, the knotted scribble of children who had more time than papyrus.

  The spoor of a thousand mortal battles, of a Dûnyain in extremis, pursuing the intangible lines of survival and triumph through countless threshing swords, playing the margins of his own flesh, ignoring all but the most lethal incisions, so that he might kill and kill and overcome … Endure.

  They are evil… So said the Eye.

  The Survivor was a grotesquery. Even still Achamian could see through the skein of hideous scarring: the lineage, the bones and blood of antique Kings.

  “You know my father,” the Dûnyain said, his voice as deep and melodious as Truth. “Anasûrimbor Kellhus …”

  Drusas Achamian retreated, his limbs moving without his volition. He stumbled, literally crashed onto his rump.

  “Tell me …” the grotesquerie said.

  Yesterday, the old Wizard had sought to deliver the World from destruction.

  “Has he grasped the Absolute?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Momemn

  And there did a Narindar find him and kill him, pricking him with a poison needle behind the ear. Word passed throughout the Empire, and the multitudes were filled with wonder that an Aspect-Emperor could be sorted in his own garden. Within a fortnight, foul assassination had become manifest prophecy, and no action was taken against the Cult of the Four-Horned Brother. All the World wished the matter forgotten.

  —The Annals of Cenei, CASIDAS

  It is said of the Nansur that they fear their fathers, love their mothers, and trust their siblings, but only so far as they fear their fathers.

  The Ten Thousand Day Dynasty, HOMIRRAS

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

  “Noooo …” the Padirajah howled.

  Malowebi stood staring across the cluttered gloom of the grand pavilion, stranded three steps inside its threshold by protocol. Fanayal stood at his own bedside, staring down at the death throes of his Cishaurim, Meppa—or as his people knew him, Stonebreaker. The Padirajah, who had always seemed lean and youthful, now seemed fatted with his fifty-plus years. Psatma Nannaferi lounged upon a brocaded settee nearby, her dark eyes glittering like quicksilver on the gloom’s phantom verge. Her gaze never left the ailing Padirajah, who held his face turned from her—deliberately it seemed. She watched and watched, her expression one of genuine expectancy and sly contempt, as though she awaited an adored part of a well-rehearsed tale, one featuring the villain she most despised. It almost made her seem as youthful as she should seem.

  Gleaming edges and surfaces clut
tered the encircling shadows, glimpses of plunder, the Padirajah’s share of Iothiah. Fired pottery. Heaps of clothing. Brocaded furnishings. From where the Mbimayu Schoolman stood, the scene almost seemed cobbled from these fragments, debris bricked into Creation …

  The stage where the fabled Fanayal ab Kascamandri reckoned his doom.

  “Nooo!” he cried to the prostrate form. The Twin Scimitars of Fanimry, the gold-on-black banner of his nation and faith, had been kicked across the floor, and now lay neglected beneath his feet, one more looted carpet. The White Horse on Gold, the famed Coyauri flag that Fanayal used as his personal standard yet hung, but scorched and tattered for the very battle that had laid Meppa low …

  Malowebi had already overheard Fanayal’s wild desert warriors murmuring and arguing amongst themselves. The Whore Empress had done this, they said. Kucifra’s woman had struck the Last Cishaurim down …

  “What will they say?” the Yatwerian witch cooed, still watching him from her settee. “How far can you trust them?”

  “Bridle your tongue,” Fanayal murmured. He leaned as if hung from hooks, peering at his fallen Cishaurim. The Padirajah had wagered everything on the man that lay dying on his silk sheets below—every favour his God had afforded him.

  The only real question now was what happened next.

  Malowebi had known men like Fanayal in Zeum, souls that leaned more on things unseen than seen, that made idols of their ignorance so they might better strut and proclaim whatever court trifle they happened to covet unto obsession. From the very beginning of the man’s insurrection—for more than twenty years!—Fanayal ab Kascamandri had cast himself opposite Anasûrimbor Kellhus. Men cannot but measure themselves against their enemies, and the Aspect-Emperor was nothing if not … formidable. So Fanayal had styled himself the holy antagonist, the Chosen Hero, fated to slay dread Kucifra, the-Light-that-Blinds, the Demon who had broken the back of his faith and his race. He had set himself a task that only the alarming power of his Waterbearer could complete.

  Despite his vanity, the eldest son of Kascamandri truly was an inspired leader—of that Malowebi had no doubt. But it was Meppa who had been the miracle, the Second Negotiant realized. The Last Cishaurim. Short of him, Fanayal and his desert horsemen could scarcely do more than hurl insults at the cyclopean walls of their Imperial Zaudunyani foes. Meppa had been the one to conquer Iothiah, not Fanayal. The bellicose son of Kascamandri had sacked a defenceless city, no more.

  Without Meppa, Fanayal had no hope of overcoming the Imperial Capital. And so he found himself trapped in a contradiction of fact and ambition. Momemn’s monstrous black walls were all but impregnable. He could tarry, but there was no way to starve a coastal city into submission. Meanwhile, the countryside became ever more resolved against him. For all their grievances, the Nansur had not forgotten their generational hatred of the Kianene. Simply feeding his motley army was becoming ever more difficult, ever more bloody. Desertions, especially among the Khirgwi, were all but inevitable. Even as the Empress mustered and redeployed Columns, the Fanim army was sure to dwindle. Perhaps Fanayal could prevail in an open contest with an Imperial Zaudunyani army. Meppa’s sacrifice had killed the formidable Caxes Anthirul, at least; perhaps some fool would lead the Imperials in the Home Exalt-General’s stead. Perhaps the Bandit Padirajah could, with the dregs of his long-hunted desert people, conjure one of those miraculous victories that had been the glory of his ancestors …

  But to what end, if the great cities of the Nansurium remained closed to him?

  The circumstances could not be more dire, and yet Malowebi fairly cackled for pondering them. The usefulness of the Fanim only extended as far as their ability to challenge the Empire. Short of Meppa, then, High Holy Zeum had no use for Fanayal ab Kascamandri.

  Short of Meppa, Malowebi could go home.

  He was free. He had waited upon this growing cancer long enough. Time to forget these pompous and pathetic sausages—to begin plotting his revenge on Likaro!

  “Your Grandees think you daring …” Psatma Nannaferi crooned. She reclined with opiate indifference across the settee, wearing a silk shift that clothed her alluring nethers in shadow, nothing more. “But now they see.”

  Fanayal wiped a callused hand across the mud of his expression.

  “Shut up!”

  A screech that blooded throats, pimpled skin … and promised mayhem.

  The Yatwerian witch growled in laughter.

  Yes … Malowebi silently resolved. Time to leave.

  The Dread Mother was here!

  But he stood transfixed. The pavilion threshold lay no more than three paces behind him—he was fairly certain he could slip out without notice. Men like Fanayal rarely forgave those insolent enough to witness their weakness and hypocrisy. But they were also prone to punish the merest slights as mortal transgressions. As the son of a cruel father, Malowebi knew well how to be at once present and invisible.

  “Yesss …” the Yatwerian witch cooed with lolling contempt. “The White-Luck conceals so very many things … so many frailties …”

  She was right. Now that the number-sticks had finally betrayed him, what had seemed inspired audacity, even providence, stood revealed as recklessness. But why would she say such a thing? Why speak any truth at all, when it could only be provocation?

  But this was the problem with all matters entangled in the machinations of the Hundred: the advantage was never to be seen.

  Only madness.

  Yes! Time to leave.

  He could use his Cants to fold himself into the night, begin the long trek ho—

  “Idolatrous whore!” Fanayal screamed, showering Meppa’s inert form with spittle. It betrayed the profundity of his horror, Malowebi realized, the way he chose to rage at the empty space before him rather than face the malevolent temptress. “This is your doing! Witch! The Solitary God rebukes me! Punishes me for taking you into my bed!”

  Malowebi started for the contradiction of seething fertility and stringy, old crone laughter. Even in the shadowy confines of Fanayal’s pavilion, she seemed illuminated, a thing drawn out of chill waters, raw, tasteless for being … so clean.

  “Then burn me!” she cried. “The Fanim share that custom with the Inrithi at least! Forever burning those who Give!”

  Padirajah finally whirled, his face twisted. “Fire is merely how it ends, witch! First I cast you as a rag to my warriors, let them rut and stamp your sex into mud! Then I hoist you high above the bramble flame, watch you writhe and shriek! burst into a beacon warning of all that is foul and wicked!”

  The old woman’s laugh became silent.

  “Yes!” she croaked. “Give … me … all … their … seed! All their fury bound to the Mother’s pitiless womb! Let your entire nation lean hard upon me! Groan as grinning dogs! Let them know me as you have known me!”

  The Padirajah lunged toward her, only to be hung from his wrists, held as if leashed to opposite corners of the pavilion. He craned his head about, crying out, groaning. At long last his wide, palpating eyes found Malowebi where he stood riven between shadows. For a moment, the Padirajah seemed to implore him—but for things too great for any man to bodily yield.

  The look slipped into oblivion. Fanayal collapsed to his knees before the vile seductress.

  Psatma Nannaferi wailed her amusement. The nails of her darkling look scratched the Mbimayu Schoolman’s image—for the merest instant only, but it was enough, enough for him to glimpse the crimson filigree of veins, the uterine webs she had sunk as roots into the Reality surrounding.

  Flee! Run you old idiot!

  But he already understood that it was too late.

  “Share me!” she shrieked. “Burn meeee! Do it!” A sound like a dog’s growl, close enough to send the Zeumi’s skin crawling against his foul robes. “Do it! And watch your precious Snakehead die!”

  Ice ached in the craw of his bones. Malowebi understood the truth of her infernal hilarity—and the truth of everything that had transpired w
ith it. The Dread Mother had been among them all along. That fateful day in Iothiah, they had been delivered to Psatma Nannaferi, not vice versa.

  The time to flee had itself fled long ago.

  “What are you saying?” Fanayal asked, his face bereft of dignity, his knees wide across the carpets.

  “The black blasphemer knows!” she chortled, throwing her chin in Malowebi’s direction.

  Curse Likaro!

  “Tell me!” the Padirajah cried, all the more pathetic for attempting to sound imperious.

  A black-hearted smirk.

  “Yeeeessss. Your every ambition, the whole pathetic empire of your conceit, is bound to me, Son of Kascamandri. What you take from me, you cut from yourself. What you gift to me, you gift to yourself …” Her eyes roamed the shadowy spaces about them. “And,” she said, her voice dropping to a croak, “to your Mother …”

  “But can you save him?” Fanayal cried.

  A teasing laugh, as though from a girl smitten by a lover’s foibles.

  “Of course,” she said, leaning forward to caress his swollen cheek. “My God exists …”

  Malowebi had fled that night—eventually.

  He watched her bid Fanayal reach two fingers between her thighs. His breath abandoned him. His very heartbeat became entangled on the rapturous violence of her reaction …

  He watched the Padirajah withdraw his fingers, stare in abject horror at the blood clotted upon them. Psatma Nannaferi curled as a pampered cat upon the settee, her eyes drowsy.

  “Press it into his wound …” she said on a languorous breath. Her eyes were already closed.

  Give.

  Fanayal stood as a man precarious upon a mountain’s summit, unsteady, astounded, then he turned to the Last Cishaurim.

  And Malowebi fled, his gown stained about the thighs. He fairly flew across the encampment, slinking through shadows, cringing from all for shame. In the safety of his tent he tore off all his elaborate accoutrements, stood shivering and naked in his own stink. He would not remember falling asleep.