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

  The Men of the Ordeal feasted. They slept with sated bellies, with the assurance that their most primitive needs had been secured. They awoke drowsy, without the dull and alarming hollow of starvation.

  And a wild vitality crept through their veins.

  There was a grove of oaks that became sacred with the passage of summer in Ishuäl. As green sickened into orange and dun, the Dûnyain made ready, not as yeoman preparing for winter, but as old priests welcoming even older Gods. They sat among the trees according to their station, knees out, their feet pressed sole to sole, the skin of their shaved skulls alive to the merest air, and they gazed into the boughs with a fixity that was not human. They cleared all thought from their soul, laid awareness bare to its myriad engines, and they watched the oak leaves fall …

  Each of them possessed gold coins—remnants of a long-forgotten hoard—very nearly worn smooth of image and insignia, but yet possessing the ghosts of long-dead Kings. Sometimes the leaves dropped of their own volition, rocked like paper cradles across motionless air. But usually high-mountain gusts unmoored them, and they battled like bats, danced like flies, as they rode the turbulence to the ground. The Dûnyain, their eyes dead with the absence of focus, let their coins fly—a flurry of sparks traced the raw sun. Without fail, some fraction of the leaves would be caught and pinned to the flagstones, lobed edges curled like fingers about the gold.

  They called it the Tracery, the rite that determined who among them would sire children and so sculpt the future of their terrible race.

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus breathed as Proyas breathed, tossing coinage of a different sort.

  The Exalt-General sat before him, legs crossed, hands clutching knees through the pleats of his war-skirt. He looked at once alert and serene, the General of a host that had yet to be truly tested, but beyond this appearance, gusts raked him as surely as they had raked the Tracery Grove. Blood flushed heat through the man’s veins, steeped his extremities with alarmed life. His lungs drew shallow air.

  Horror wafted from his skin.

  Kellhus watched, cold and impervious behind indulgent, smiling eyes. He sat cross-legged also, his arms hanging loose from his shoulders, his hands open across his thighs. The Seeing Hearth lay between them, flames rushing into a luminous braid. Despite his manifest repose, he leaned forward imperceptibly, held his chin at the angle appropriate to expectation, as if awaiting some pleasant diversion …

  Nersei Proyas was but a rind in his eyes, a depth as thin as a heartbeat was long. Kellhus could have reached out and behind him, manipulated the dark places of his soul. He could have summoned any sentiment, any sacrifice …

  But he hung motionless instead, a spider with its legs pinched close. Few things were so mercurial, so erratic, as Thought filtering through a human soul. The twist and skitter, the tug and chatter, sketching forms across inner oblivion. Too many variables remained unexamined.

  He began as he always began, with a shocking question.

  “Why do you think the God comes to Men?”

  Proyas swallowed. Panic momentarily frosted his eyes, his manner. The bandages on his right arm betrayed archipelagos of crimson.

  “I-I don’t understand.”

  The anticipated response. Questions that begged explanation opened the soul.

  The Exalt-General had changed in the weeks following his first visit to Anasûrimbor Kellhus’ spare quarters. His gaze had become equine with uncertainty. Fear now twitched through his every gesture. The tribulation of these sessions, Kellhus knew, had eclipsed any trial the Great Ordeal could offer. Gone was the pious resolve, the air of overtaxed compassion. Gone was the weary stalwart, the truest of all his Believer-Kings.

  All Men possess their share of suffering, and those bearing the most are bent as with any great load. But it had been words, not wounds, that had robbed the Exalt-General of his old, upright demeanour, possibilities, as opposed to any atrocity of the real.

  “The God is Infinite,” Kellhus said, pausing before the crucial substitution. “Is It not?”

  Apprehension crimped the clarity of Proyas’s gaze.

  “Of-of course …”

  He is beginning to dread his own affirmations.

  The Greater Proyas, at least, understood where they must lead.

  “Then how could you hope to conceive Him?”

  Instruction could be a joint undertaking, a pursuit, not just of thoughts and claims, but of the insights that motivated them; or it could be a forced concession, like those cruel tutors exacted beneath raised canes. Kellhus had been forced to rely on the latter more and more as the years had passed, for the accumulation of power was at once the accumulation of complexity. Only now, relieved of the burdens of his Empire, could he resume the former.

  Only now could he witness a faithful soul, an adoring soul, thrash in mortal crisis.

  “I-I suppose I cannot … But …”

  Soon, he would lift his coin from Proyas … Very soon, only the wind could take him where he needed to go.

  “But what?”

  “I can conceive you!”

  Kellhus reached into his beard to scratch a false itch, reclined so that he sat propped on his elbow. These simple gestures of discomfort, openly displayed, immediately summoned a corresponding ease in the Exalt-General, one that utterly eluded the man’s awareness. Bodies spoke to bodies, and short of flinching from raised fists, the worldborn were utterly deaf to what was said.

  “And I, the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor, can conceive God. Is that it?”

  The man leaned according to the angle of his desperation. “How else could it be? This is why Men lavish such attention on idols, is it not? Why they pray to their ancestors! They make … make tokens of what lies near … Use what they know to grasp what they cannot.”

  Kellhus sipped his bowl of anpoi, watching the man.

  “So this is how you conceive me?”

  “This is how all Zaudunyani conceive you! You are our Prophet!”

  Behave like one.

  “So you think that I conceive what you cannot.”

  “Not think, know. We’re but squabbling children absent you and your word. I was there! I partook in the conceit that ruled the Holy War before your revelation! The ruinous folly!”

  “And what was my revelation?”

  “That the God of Gods spoke to you!”

  Eyes losing focus. Imagery boiling up out of oblivion. Probabilities like crabs scuttling on the shores of what was unknown.

  “And what did It tell me?”

  And again it dimpled his depths the way a chill stone might the surface of a warm pool, saying It rather than He.

  “The God of Gods?”

  Such preposterous care was required. Action and belief turned each upon the other in ways so intimate as to be inextricable. Proyas did not simply believe, he had killed thousands for his Faith. To concede, to recant, was to transform all those executions into murders—to become not simply a fool, but a monster. To believe fiercely is to do fierce things, and nothing fierce happens without suffering. Nersei Proyas, for all his regal demeanour, was the most ferocious of his countless believers.

  No one had so much to lose as him.

  “Yes. What did It tell me?”

  Thrumming heart. Wide, bewildered eyes. And the Aspect-Emperor could see comprehension brimming in the darkness that came before the man. Soon, the dread realization would come, and the coin would be lifted …

  New children would be sired.

  “I-I … I don’t understand …”

  “What was my revelation? What secret could It whisper into an ear so small as mine?”

  There is a head on a pole behind you.

  Brutalities spin and scrape, like leaves blasted in the wind.

  He is here … with you … not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.

  There is a head on a pole behind you.

  And he walks, though there is no ground. And he sees, though his eyes have rolled into his brow. Through and ove
r, around and within, he flees and he assails … For he is here.

  Here.

  They seize him from time to time, the Sons of this place, and he feels the seams tear, hears his scream. But he cannot come apart—for unlike the Countless Dead his heart beats still.

  His heart beats still.

  There is a head on a pole behind you.

  He comes to the shore that is here, always here, gazes without sight across waters that are fire, and sees the Sons swimming, lolling and bloated and bestial, raising babes as wineskins, and drinking deep their shrieks.

  There is a head on a pole behind you.

  And he sees that these things are meat, here. Love is meat. Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat—seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.

  There is a head on a pole.

  Taste, one of the Sons says to him. Drink.

  It draws down its bladed fingers, and combs the babe apart, plucking him into his infinite strings, laying bare his every inside, so that it might lick his wrack and wretchedness like honey from hair. Consume … And he sees them descending as locusts, the Sons, drawn by the lure of his meat.

  There is a head … and it cannot be moved.

  So he seizes the lake and the thousand babes and the void and the massing-descending Sons and the lamentations-that-are-honey, and he rips them about the pole, transforms here into here, this-place-inside-where-you-sitnow, where he has always hidden, always watched, where Other Sons, recline, drinking from bowls that are skies, savouring the moaning broth of the Countless, bloating for the sake of bloat, slaking hungers like chasms, pits that eternity had rendered Holy …

  We pondered you, says the most crocodilian of the Sons.

  “But I have never been here.”

  You said this very thing, it grates, seizing the line of the horizon, wrapping him like a fly. Legs click like machines of war. Yesss …

  And you refuse to succumb to their sucking mouths, ringed with one million pins of silver. You refuse to drip fear like honey—because you have no fear.

  Because you fear not damnation.

  Because there is a head on a pole behind you.

  “And what was your reply?”

  The living shall not haunt the dead.

  “What was your revelation?” Proyas cried, anger twisted into incredulity. “That the No-God would return! That the end of all things was nigh!”

  He was immovable in the eyes of his Exalt-General, Kellhus knew, the stake from which all strings were bound and all things were measured. Nothing could be so gratifying as his approval. Nothing could be so profound as his discourse. Nothing could be so dense, so real, as his image. Ever since Caraskand and the Circumfixion, Kellhus had ruled Proyas’s heart, become the author of his every belief, the count of his every kindness, his every cruelty. There was no judgment, no decision the Believer-King of Conriya could make without somehow consulting the impression Kellhus had left in his soul.

  In so many ways, Proyas was the most reliable of all those he had yoked to his will—the perfect instrument. And he was a cripple for it.

  “And you are certain of this?”

  To make him believe the first time had been labour enough. Now he must make him believe anew, cast him into a different shape, one that served a far different—and far more troubling—purpose.

  Revelation was never a simple matter of authority because Men were never so simple as sodden clay—something that could be rolled blank and imprinted anew. There was fire in deeds, and the world was nothing if not a kiln. To act upon a belief was to cook its contours into the very matter of the soul. The more extreme the act, the hotter the fire, the harder the brick of belief. How many thousands had Proyas condemned to die in his name?

  How many massacres had fired the beliefs Kellhus had pressed into his soul?

  “I’m certain of what you’ve told me!”

  It did not matter, so long as those tablets were smashed … irretrievably broken.

  Kellhus gazed not at a man so much as a heap of warring signals: distress and conviction; accusation and self-loathing. He smiled the smile that Proyas unwittingly begged him not to smile, shrugged as if they discussed nothing more than mildew and beans. The spider flicked open its legs.

  “Then you are certain of too much.”

  The very words that had caused the Greater Proyas to barricade the soul of the Lesser.

  Tears lacquered the man’s gaze. Bewildered incredulity slackened his face.

  “I … I-I … don’t …” He bit the words against his lower lip.

  Kellhus looked down into his bowl, spoke as though rehearsing an old meditation.

  “Think, Proyas. Men will so they can become one with the Future. Men want so they can become one with the World. Men love so they can become one with the Other …” A fractional pause. “Men are forever famished, Proyas, famished for what they are not …”

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor had leaned back so the fire rising white and scintillant between them would frame his aspect.

  “What …” Proyas asked on emptied lungs, “what are you saying?”

  Kellhus grimaced in a rueful, it-could-not-be-otherwise manner.

  “We are the antithesis of the God, not the reflection.”

  Confusion. Confusion was ever the herald of genuine insight. As the Greater Proyas churned, a chorus of discordant voices, the Lesser Proyas found himself that song, a clamour that he could only conceive as one. When those voices at last embraced one another—he would find himself remade.

  Rapid breath. Fluttering pulse. Hands clenched, fingernails scoring sweated palms.

  So close …

  “And this—” Proyas blurted, only to catch himself, as much for his terror as for the burning hook in his throat.

  “Speak. Please.”

  A single, treacherous tear fell into the folds of the Believer King’s luxurious beard.

  At last.

  “This is why you c-call the God-of-Gods …”

  He sees …

  “Call Him … ‘It’?”

  He understands.

  Admission was all that remained.

  It.

  The name of all things inhuman.

  When applied to the inanimate world, it meant nothing. No whinge of significance accompanied its utterance. But when applied to animate things, it became ever more peculiar, ever more fraught with moral intimation. And when used to single out apparently human things, it roared with a life all its own.

  It festered.

  Call a man “it” and you were saying that crime can no more be committed against him as against a stone. Ajencis had called Man “onraxia”, the being that judged beings. The Law, the Great Kyranean claimed, belonged to his very essence. To call a man “it” was to kill him with words, and so to oil the actions that would murder him in fact.

  And the God? What did it mean for the God of Gods to be called an “it”?

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor watched his most trusted disciple flounder in the wrack of these considerations. Few tasks were so onerous as to make a man believe the new, to think thoughts without precedent. It was an irony so mad as to be an absurdity, that so many would forfeit their lives sooner than their beliefs. It was ardour, of course. It was loyalty and the simple hunger for the security of the Same. But more than anything, it was ignorance that delivered conviction beyond the pale of disputation. Ignorance of questions. Ignorance of alternatives.

  No tyranny was so complete as blindness. So with each of these sessions Kellhus merely raised more questions and posed more contradictory answers, and watched the once solitary track he had cut into Proyas vanish into the trampled earth of possibility …

  He raised a hand into the dim air, gazed upon the nimbus of gold shining about them.

  Such a remarkable thing.

  So hard to explain.

  “It comes to me, Proyas. In my sleep … It comes ….”

  A statement pregnant with both meaning and horror. Kellhus often
did this, answered his disciples’ questions with observations that seemed relevant only because of their ornamental import and the odour of profundity. Most failed to even notice his evasion, and those few who glimpsed it assumed they were being misdirected for some divine reason, in accordance with some greater design.

  Nersei Proyas simply forgot how to breathe.

  A glance toward his trembling fingertips.

  Two more balled fists.

  “The God …” was the most the Exalt-General could say.

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor smiled in the manner of those more bereaved than undone by tragic ironies.

  “Is nothing human.”

  An empire of his soul …

  This was what his father’s Thousandfold Thought had made.

  “So the God—?”

  “Wants nothing … Loves nothing.”

  A pattern conquering patterns, reproducing on the scales of both insects and heavens; heartbeats and ages. All bound upon him, Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

  “The God doesn’t care!”

  “The God is beyond care.”

  He was as much a creature of the Thought as it was a creature of him. For it whispered as it danced, threading the stacked labyrinths of contingency, filing through the gates of his daylight apprehension, becoming him. He declared, and the patterns went forth, making wombs of souls, reproducing, taking on the cumbersome complexities of living life, transforming the dancing of the dance, begetting heresies and fanaticisms and mad delusions …

  Forcing more declarations.

  “So then why does He demand so much of us?” Proyas blurted. “Why entangle us with judgments? Why damn us!”

  Kellhus drew up his manner and expression to answer the bodily cacophony of his warlike disciple, becoming the perfect counterpoint: ease to rebuke his disorder, repose to shame his agitation, all the while reading, counting the cubits of his disciple’s pain.

  “Why is wheat sewn and harvested?”

  Proyas blinked.

  “Wheat?” He squinted as though ancient. “Wha-what are you saying?”