The Great Ordeal: Book Three (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy) Read online

  R. SCOTT

  BAKKER

  THE GREAT ORDEAL

  THE ASPECT-EMPEROR, BOOK THREE

  With over 175,000 copies in print, the high fantasy novels of R. Scott Bakker, one of the godfathers of Grimdark, have dazzled fans around the world. With The Great Ordeal, Bakker presents the longanticipated third volume of The Aspect-Emperor, a series that stands with the finest in the genre for its grand scope, rich detail, and thrilling story.

  As Fanim war-drums beat just outside the city, the Empress Anasûrimbor Esmenet searches frantically throughout the palace for her missing son Kelmomas. Meanwhile untold leagues away, Esmenet’s husband’s Great Ordeal continues its epic crusade ever northward, where their first encounter of the Consult and their alien tekne has catastrophic effects. And deep in Ishuäl, the wizard Achamian discovers secrets that begin to unravel the mystery of the Dunyain.

  The Aspect-Emperor series follows Bakker’s Prince of Nothing saga, returning to the same world twenty years later. The Great Ordeal follows The Judging Eye and The White-Luck Warrior, and delivers the first half of the conclusion to this epic story.

  Also by R. Scott Bakker

  THE PRINCE OF NOTHING SERIES

  The Darkness That Comes Before, Book One

  The Warrior-Prophet, Book Two

  The Thousandfold Thought, Book Three

  THE ASPECT-EMPEROR SERIES

  The Judging Eye, Book One

  The White-Luck Warrior, Book Two

  WRITING AS SCOTT BAKKER

  Neuropath

  Disciple of the Dog

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2016 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected] or write to us at the above address.

  Copyright © 2016 by R. Scott Bakker

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-1351-2

  To Frank and Ken

  Contents

  Also by R. Scott Bakker

  Copyright

  Dedication

  What Has Come Before …

  Prologue: Momemn

  Chapter 1: Aörsi

  Chapter 2: Injor-Niyas

  Chapter 3: Momemn

  Chapter 4: Aörsi

  Chapter 5: Ishuäl

  Chapter 6: Momemn

  Chapter 7: Ishterebinth

  Chapter 8: Ishuäl

  Chapter 9: Ishterebinth

  Chapter 10: Dagliash

  Chapter 11: Momemn

  Chapter 12: Ishterebinth

  Chapter 13: Dagliash

  Chapter 14: The Demua Mountains

  Chapter 15: The River Sursa

  Chapter 16: Momemn

  Chapter 17: The Demua Mountains

  Appendices

  Character and Faction Glossary

  Map of the Tutelary Lands at the Time of the Great Ordeal

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  What Has Come Before …

  THE PRINCE OF NOTHING

  Wars, as a rule, fall within the compass of history. They mark the pitch of competing powers, the end of some and the ascendancy of others, the ebb and flow of dominance across the ages. But there is a war that Men have waged for so long they have forgotten the languages they first used to describe it. A war that makes mere skirmishes out of the destruction of tribes and nations.

  There is no name for this war; Men cannot reference what transcends the short interval of their comprehension. It began when they were little more than savages roaming the wilds, in an age before script or bronze. An Ark, vast and golden, toppled from the void, scorching the horizon, throwing up a ring of mountains with the violence of its descent. And from it crawled the dread and monstrous Inchoroi, a race who had come to seal the world against the Heavens, and so save the obscenities they called their souls.

  The Nonmen held sway in those ancient days, a long-lived people that surpassed Men not only in beauty and intellect, but in wrath and jealousy as well. With their Ishroi heroes and Quya mages, they fought titanic battles and stood vigilant during epochal truces. They endured the Inchoroi weapons of light. They survived the treachery of the Aporetics, who provided the Inchoroi with thousands of sorcery-killing Chorae. They overcame the horrors their enemy crafted: the Sranc, the Bashrag, and most fearsome of all, the Wracu. But their avarice at last betrayed them. After centuries of intermittent war, they made peace with the invaders in return for the gift of ageless immortality—a gift that was in fact a fell weapon, the Plague of Wombs.

  In the end, the Nonmen hunted the Inchoroi to the brink of annihilation. Exhausted, culled of their strength, they retired to their underworld mansions to mourn the loss of their wives and daughters, and the inevitable extinction of their glorious race. Their surviving mages sealed the Ark, which they had come to call Min-Uroikas, and hid it from the world with devious glamours. And from the eastern mountains, the first tribes of Men began claiming the lands they had abandoned—Men who had never known the yoke of slavery. Of the surviving Ishroi Kings, some fought, only to be dragged under by the tide of numbers, while others simply left their great gates unguarded, bared their necks to the licentious fury of a lesser race.

  And so human history was born, and perhaps the Nameless War would have ended with the fading of its principals. But the golden Ark still existed, and the lust for knowledge has ever been a cancer in the hearts of Men.

  Centuries passed, and the mantle of human civilization crept along the great river basins of Eärwa and outward, bringing bronze where there had been flint, cloth where there had been skins, and writing where there had been recital. Great cities rose to teeming life. The wilds gave way to cultivated horizons.

  Nowhere were Men more bold in their works, or more overweening in their pride, than in the North, where commerce with the Nonmen had allowed them to outstrip their more swarthy cousins to the South. In the legendary city of Sauglish, those who could discern the joints of existence founded the first sorcerous Schools. As their learning and power waxed, a reckless few turned to the rumours they had heard whispered by their Nonman teachers—rumours of the great golden Ark. The wise were quick to see the peril, and the Schoolmen of Mangaecca, who coveted secrets above all else, were censured, and finally outlawed.

  But it was too late. Min-Uroikas was found—occupied.

  The fools discovered and awakened the last two surviving Inchoroi, Aurax and Aurang, who had concealed themselves in the labyrinthine recesses of the Ark. And at their hoary knees the outlaw Schoolmen learned that damnation, the burden that all sorcerers bore, need not be inevitable. They learned that the world could be shut against the judgment of Heaven. So they forged a common purpose with the twin abominations, a Consult, and bent their cunning to the aborted designs of the Inchoroi.

  The Mangaecca relearned the principles of the material—the Tekne. They mastered the manipulations of the flesh. And after generations of study and searching, after filling the pits of Min-Uroikas with innumerable corpses, they realized the most catastrophic of the Inchoroi’s unt
old depravities: Mog-Pharau, the No-God.

  They made themselves slaves to better destroy the world.

  And so the Nameless War raged anew. What has come to be called the First Apocalypse destroyed the great Norsirai nations of the North, laying ruin to the greatest glories of Men. But for Seswatha, the Grandmaster of the Gnostic School of Sohonc, the entire world would have been lost. At his urging, Anasûrimbor Celmomas, the High King of the North’s mightiest nation, Kûniüri, called on his tributaries and allies to join him in a holy war against Min-Uroikas, which Men now called Golgotterath. But his Ordeal foundered, and the might of the Norsirai perished. Seswatha fled south to the Ketyai nations of the Three Seas, bearing the greatest of the legendary Inchoroi weapons, the Heron Spear. With Anaxophus, the High King of Kyraneas, he met the No-God on the Plains of Mengedda, and by dint of valor and providence, overcame the dread Whirlwind.

  The No-God was dead, but his slaves and his stronghold remained. Golgotterath had not fallen, and the Consult, blasted by ages of unnatural life, continued to plot their salvation.

  The years passed, and the Men of the Three Seas forgot, as Men inevitably do, the horrors endured by their fathers. Empires rose and empires fell. The Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus, reinterpreted the Tusk, the First Scripture, and within a few centuries, the faith of Inrithism, organized and administered by the Thousand Temples and its spiritual leader, the Shriah, came to dominate the entire Three Seas. The great Anagogic Schools arose in response to the Inrithi persecution of sorcery. Using Chorae, the Inrithi warred against them, attempting to purify the Three Seas.

  Then Fane, the self-proclaimed Prophet of the so-called Solitary God, united the Kianene, the desert peoples of the Great Carathay, and declared war against the Tusk and the Thousand Temples. After centuries of jihad, the Fanim and their eyeless sorcerer-priests, the Cishaurim, conquered nearly all the western Three Seas, including the holy city of Shimeh, the birthplace of Inri Sejenus. Only the moribund remnants of the Nansur Empire continued to resist them.

  War and strife ruled the South. The two great faiths of Inrithism and Fanimry skirmished, though trade and pilgrimage were tolerated when commercially convenient. The great families and nations vied for military and mercantile dominance. The minor and major Schools squabbled and plotted. And the Thousand Temples pursued earthly ambitions under the leadership of corrupt and ineffectual Shriahs.

  The First Apocalypse had become little more than legend. The Consult and the No-God had dwindled into myth, something old wives tell small children. After two thousand years, only the Schoolmen of the Mandate, who relived the Apocalypse each night through the eyes of Seswatha, could recall the horror of Mog-Pharau. Though the mighty and the learned considered them fools, the Mandate’s possession of the sorcery of the Ancient North, the Gnosis, commanded respect and mortal envy. Driven by nightmares, they wandered the labyrinths of power, scouring the Three Seas for signs of their ancient and implacable foe: the Consult.

  And as always, they found nothing.

  Some argued that the Consult had finally succumbed to the toll of ages. Others that they had turned inward, seeking less arduous means to forestall their damnation. But since the Sranc had multiplied across the northern wilds, no expedition could be sent to Golgotterath to settle the matter. The Mandate alone knew of the Nameless War. They alone stood guard, but they suffocated in a pall of ignorance.

  The Thousand Temples elected a new, enigmatic Shriah, a man called Maithanet, who demanded the Inrithi recapture Shimeh, the holy city of the Latter Prophet, from the Fanim. Word of his call spread across the Three Seas and beyond. Faithful from all the great Inrithi nations—Galeoth, Thunyerus, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, High Ainon and their tributaries—travelled to the city of Momemn, the capital of the Nansurium, to swear their swords and their lives to Inri Sejenus. To become Men of the Tusk.

  And so the First Holy War was born. Internal feuds plagued the campaign from the outset, for there was no shortage of those who would bend the holy war to their selfish ends. The Inrithi host marched victorious nonetheless, winning two great victories over the heretic Fanim at Mengedda and Anwurat. Only with the Second Siege of Caraskand and the Circumfixion of one of their own would the Men of the Tusk find common purpose. Only when the Men of the Tusk discovered in their midst a living prophet—a man who could see into the hearts of Men. A man like a god.

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

  Far to the north, in the very shadow of Golgotterath, a group of ascetics called the Dûnyain had concealed themselves in Ishuäl, the secret redoubt of the Kûniüric High Kings ere their destruction in the First Apocalypse. For two thousand years the Dûnyain had pursued their sacred study, breeding for reflex and intellect, training in the ways of limb, thought, and face—all for the sake of reason, the Logos. They had dedicated their entire existence to mastering the irrationalities of history, custom, and passion—all those things that determine human thought. In this way, they believed, they would eventually grasp what they called the Absolute, and so become true self-moving souls.

  But their millennial isolation was at an end. After thirty years of exile, one of their number, Anasûrimbor Moënghus, reappeared in their dreams, demanding they send to him his son Kellhus. Knowing only that Moënghus dwelt in a distant city called Shimeh, the Dûnyain dispatched Kellhus on an arduous journey through lands long abandoned by Men—to kill his apostate father.

  But Moënghus knew the world in ways his cloistered brethren could not. He knew well the revelations that awaited his son, for they had been his revelations thirty years previous. He knew that Kellhus would discover sorcery, whose existence the forefathers of the Dûnyain had suppressed. He knew that given his abilities, Men would be little more than children to him, that Kellhus would see their thoughts in the nuances of their expression, and that with mere words he would be able to exact any devotion, any sacrifice. He knew, moreover, that eventually Kellhus would encounter the Consult, who hid behind faces that only Dûnyain eyes could see—that he would come to see what Men with their blinkered souls could not: the Nameless War.

  The Consult had not been idle. For centuries they had eluded their old foe, the School of Mandate, using doppelgängers—spies who could take on any face, any voice, without resorting to sorcery and its telltale Mark. By capturing and torturing these abominations, Moënghus learned that the Consult had not abandoned their ancient plot to shut the world against Heaven, that within a score of years they would be able to resurrect the No-God and bring about a new war against Men, a Second Apocalypse. For years Moënghus walked the innumerable paths of the Probability Trance, plotting future after future, searching for the thread of act and consequence that would save the world. For years he crafted his Thousandfold Thought.

  Moënghus knew, and so prepared the way for his Dûnyain-born son, Kellhus. He sent out his world-born son, Maithanet, to seize the Thousand Temples from within, so that he might craft the First Holy War, the weapon Kellhus would need to seize absolute power, and so unite the Three Seas against the doom that was their future. What he did not know, could not know, was that Kellhus would see further than him, think beyond his Thousandfold Thought …

  That he would go mad.

  Little more than an impoverished wayfarer when he first joined the Holy War, Kellhus used his bearing, intellect, and insight to convince ever more Men of the Tusk that he was the Warrior-Prophet, come to save mankind from the Second Apocalypse. He understood that Men would render anything to him, so long as they believed he could save their souls. He also befriended the Schoolman the Mandate had dispatched to observe the Holy War, Drusas Achamian, knowing that the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, would provide him with inestimable power. And he seduced Achamian’s lover, Esmenet, knowing that her intellect made her the ideal vessel for his seed—for sons strong enough to bear the onerous burden of Dûnyain blood.

  By the time the battle-hardened remnants of the First Holy War laid siege to Shimeh, Kellhus had achieved absolute authority. T
he Men of the Tusk had become his Zaudunyani, his Tribe of Truth. While the Holy War assailed the city’s walls, he confronted his father, Moënghus, mortally wounding him, explaining that only his death could realize the Thousandfold Thought. Days later Anasûrimbor Kellhus was proclaimed Holy Aspect-Emperor, the first in a millennium, by none other than the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, his half-brother, Maithanet. Even the School of Mandate, who saw his coming as the fulfillment of their most hallowed prophecies, knelt and kissed his knee.

  But he had made a mistake. Before reaching the Three Seas and the Holy War, his passage across Eärwa had delivered him to the lands of the Utemot, a Scylvendi tribe renowned for warlike cruelty. Here he had struck a murderous compact with the tribe’s chieftain, Cnaiür urs Skiötha. Moënghus had also fallen into the hands of the Utemot some thirty years prior, and had used the then adolescent Cnaiür to murder his chieftain father and effect his escape. The youth had spent tormented decades pondering what had happened and had come to guess the inhuman truth of the Dûnyain. So it was that Cnaiür and Cnaiür alone knew the dark secret of Anasûrimbor Kellhus. Before his death, the barbarian revealed these truths to none other than Drusas Achamian, who had long harboured heartbreaking suspicions of his own. At the coronation, before the eyes of the entire Holy War, Achamian repudiated Kellhus, whom he had worshiped; Esmenet, whom he had loved; and the Mandate masters he had served. Then he fled into the wilderness, becoming the world’s only sorcerer without a school. A Wizard.

  Now, after twenty years of war, conversion, and butchery, Anasûrimbor Kellhus prepares to realize the penultimate stage of his father’s Thousand-fold Thought. His New Empire spans the entirety of the Three Seas, from the legendary fortress of Auvangshei on the frontiers of Zeum to the shrouded headwaters of the River Sayut, from the sweltering coasts of Kutnarmu to the wild rim of the Osthwai Mountains—all the lands that had once been Fanim or Inrithi. It was easily the equal of the old Ceneian Empire in terms of geographical extent, and far more populous. A hundred great cities, and almost as many languages. A dozen proud nations. Thousands of years of mangled history.