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

  “That our damnation is the Gods’ harvest.”

  For twenty years now, he had dwelt in the circuit of his father’s Thought, scrutinizing, refining, enacting and being enacted. He had known it would crash into ruin after his departure …

  Known that his wife and children would die.

  “What? What?”

  “Men and all their generations—”

  “No!”

  “—all their aspirations—”

  The Exalt-General bolted to his feet, flung his bowl across the chamber. “Enough!”

  No flesh could be sundered from its heart and survive. All of his empire was doomed—was disposable. Kellhus had known this and he had prepared. No …

  It was the hazard of the converse that had eluded him …

  “The World is a granary, Proyas …

  The fact that his heart would also crash into ruin.

  “And we are the bread.”

  Proyas fled his beloved Prophet, flew from the mad, glaring presence. The Umbilicus had become a labyrinth, turns and leather portals, each more disorienting than the last. Out—he needed out! But like a beetle in the husk of a beehive, he could only throw himself this direction and that, chasing forks squeezed into extinction. He reeled like a drunk, dimly aware of the tears stinging his cheeks, the ridiculous need to feel shame. He barged between startled servants and functionaries, bowled over a slave. If he had paused to think, he could have found his way with ease. But the desperation to move ruled all because it blotted all.

  Proyas fairly toppled clear the entrance. He shrugged away the hands of the Pillarian who rushed to assist him, fled into the greater labyrinth that was the Ordeal.

  We are the bread …

  He needed time. Away from the tasks of his station, all the insufferable details of command and administration. Away from the stacked carcasses of Sranc. Away from the hymns, the embroidered walls, the faces, the shield-pounding ranks …

  He needed to ride out alone, to find some lifeless place where he could ponder without interruption …

  Think.

  He needed to—

  Hands seized his shoulders. He found himself standing face-to-face with Coithus Saubon … The “Desert Lion” in the flesh, blinking at him as he had when they stood in the glare of the Carathay so very long ago.

  His counterpart …

  “Proyas …”

  Even his nemesis in certain respects.

  The man regarded him—and his state—with the amused incredulity of someone finding evidence that confirmed low opinions. He still possessed the broad-shouldered vigour of his youth, still cropped his hair short, though it was now white and silver. He still wore the Red Lion of his father’s House on his surcoat, though a Circumfix now framed its fiery contours. He still lived in his hauberk, though the chain was now fashioned of nimil.

  For a moment, Proyas could almost believe that nothing of the past twenty years had actually happened, that the First Holy War still besieged Caraskand on the Carathay’s cruel limit. Or perhaps that was what he wanted to believe—a kinder, more naive reality.

  Proyas drew a hand across his face, winced for the wet of his tears. “What … what are you doing here?”

  A narrow look. “The same as you, I suspect.”

  The Believer-King of Conriya nodded, found no words to speak.

  Saubon frowned in an affable, grinning way. “The same as you … Yes.”

  A chill air swept across them, and Proyas’s nostrils flared for the taint of meat, both cooking and rotting.

  Sranc meat.

  “He summons me for private counsel as well …” Saubon explained. “He has for months now.”

  Proyas swallowed, understanding full well, but not comprehending at all.

  “Months now?”

  The World is a granary …

  “More rarely when the Ordeal was still broken, of course.”

  Proyas stood blinking. Astonishment had furrowed his brow and forehead as a gardener’s claw.

  “You have been speaking with-with … Him?”

  The Norsirai King stiffened in obvious affront. “I am Exalt-General, same as you. I raise my voice in relentless honesty, as do you. I have sacrificed as much of my life! More! Why should he set you apart?”

  Proyas stared like an idiot. He shook his head with more violence than he intended, the way a madman might, or a sane man plagued by hornets or bees. “No … No … You are right, Saubon …”

  The Believer-King of Caraskand laughed, though a bitterness sharpened his humour into a scowl.

  “I apologize,” Proyas said inclining his chin. Their animosity had always imposed a formality between them.

  “And yet it dismays you to see me here.”

  “No … I—”

  “Would you declare as much to our Lord-and-Prophet? Pfah! You have always been too quick to flatter yourself with the fact of his attention.”

  Proyas felt like a child for the red-rimmed sting of his glare.

  “I … I don’t understand.”

  How does one sum their impression of complicated others? Proyas had always thought Saubon headstrong, mercurial, even curiously fragile, given to bouts of near-criminal recklessness. Saubon was a man who could never quite outrun his need to prove, even in the all-seeing gaze of Anasûrimbor Kellhus …

  And yet here the man stood, so obviously the stronger of the two.

  The tall Norsirai raised his chin in the boasting, Galeoth way. “You have always been weak. Why else would he draw you under his wing?”

  “Weak? Me?”

  A faint smile. “You were tutored by a sorcerer, were you not?”

  “What are you saying?”

  Saubon began backing toward the mountainous silhouette of the Umbilicus. “Perhaps he doesn’t instruct you …” he called before turning to stride away.

  “Perhaps he draws the poison from your soul.”

  He and Saubon had clashed innumerable times over the years, disputed points both inane and catastrophically consequential. The breaches in jnan were beyond counting: the bellicose Galeoth had even called him coward in the Imperial Synod once, shamed him in the eyes of all those assembled. And the same could be said of the field, where his counterpart seemed to make sport of violating the terms he negotiated in their Lord-and-Prophet’s name. In a pique of rage, Proyas had gone so far as to draw on the fool after he seized Aparvishi in Nilnamesh. There had been a similar incident in Ainon after Saubon sacked the estates of dozens of caste-nobles Proyas had already sworn to the Zaudunyani! He had gone to Kellhus after this last, thinking that surely the “Mad Galeoth” had gone too far. But he found only rebuke.

  “You think I overlook your frustration?” Kellhus had said. “That I fail to see? If I do not speak of it, Proyas, it is because I have no need. All the ways Saubon falls short on your string are the ways he mobilizes those he leads. What most irks you most, best serves me.”

  Proyas had trembled for hearing this, physically shook! “But my Lor—!”

  “I’m not shaping warlords to rule my Holy Empire,” Kellhus had snapped. “I’m fashioning generals to conquer Golgotterath … to overthrow wicked heights, not treat honourably with heretics.”

  Proyas had laboured to foster a greater spirit of generosity between Saubon and himself after this incident. They had even become comrades in some respects. But if the weeds of grievance had been torn up, the roots still remained. A wariness. A skepticism. An inclination to begin shaking his head in negation.

  Saubon, after all, remained Saubon.

  Now Proyas watched the man recede and vanish into the blackness of the Imperial Pavilion and found that he could not move. So he stood in the mazed ways just beyond the precincts of the Umbilicus, at first staring, then at last hiding, sitting crouched between stained canvas panels, sitting anchored. Reflecting upon it afterward, Proyas would realize the purity of his vigil, one that belied the carnival of thoughts and apprehensions that tormented his soul. Afterward, he would reali
ze the man called Proyas had not waited at all …

  The Greater Proyas had.

  For the space of two watches he sat in the dust, gazing, his every blink pricking his eyes.

  The Umbilicus formed the radial hub of the Great Ordeal, the point of intersection for all the avenues that twined and forked like arteries across the desolate plains. He watched the files of Men dwindle into broken threads, then ambling particles, warriors who seemed to have no errand, only a vagabond restlessness. Very many glimpsed him in the shadows, and no matter what their reaction, be it a glance or a leering grin, a curious viciousness seemed to haunt their manner. So Proyas watched the light shed by the Nail of Heaven glow across the worn and weathered tent-tops instead, averting his gaze so that the passersby seemed little more than shades—rumours of Men.

  He recognized Saubon before properly seeing him, so distinct was his leaning, broad-shouldered gait. Starlight dusted the summits of his hair and beard, moonlight complicated the chain-mail draped about his far shoulder. Torchlight painted the substance of him orange and brown.

  Proyas made as though to call out, but his breath became as a stone, something too heavy to move. All he could do was watch, sitting like a child or dog in the dust.

  The Believer-King of Caraskand walked with blank purpose, like a man reviewing some bland yet loathsome chore standing between him and his slumber. Proyas could feel himself shrink with the man’s every step—what kind of shameful madness was this? Cringing like a beggar, fearful of a thrashing when starvation threatened him more. What had delivered him to such a low place?

  Who?

  Saubon walked obliviously until the obtuse angle between them became square. Then, as though his senses were canine, he turned to Proyas.

  “You waited all this time … here … for me?”

  Proyas peered into his face, searching for some sign of his own wax-kneed uncertainty. He saw none.

  “There’s discord between us,” Proyas called out, dismayed by the weakness of his voice. “We must speak.”

  The Norsirai studied him. “There’s discord, yes … but not between you and I.” He took two steps and crouched before him, close enough to touch with outstretched fingers.

  “What ails you, Brother?”

  Proyas fought the anguish scaling his face. He ran a hand across his cheek and jaw, as if to catch any treacherous ticks. “Ails me?” He had the impression of profound misunderstanding, of running afoul assumptions so mistaken as to be comic.

  Saubon regarded him with a kind of gloating pity.

  “The things he tells you,” Proyas finally said, his voice conspiratorial. “Does it not … trouble … what you once believed?”

  Saubon pursed his lower lip, nodded. A torch staked nearby flared in a spasm of wind. Curlicues of gold swam and flickered across the Believer-King of Caraskand.

  “I am troubled, aye. But not so much as you.”

  “So he has told you!” Proyas hissed, finally grasping the reason behind his mad vigil.

  A grave nod. “Yes.”

  “He told you about the God of Gods!”

  King Coithus Saubon scowled; bird-footed shadows rutted his temples.

  “He told me you would be waiting here … for me.”

  Proyas blinked. “What? You mean he … he …”

  The Norsirai Exalt-General reached out a bare hand, clenched him firmly on the shoulder.

  “He told me to be kind.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Injor-Niyas

  One cannot console those who pretend to weep.

  —Conriyan Proverb

  Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4123, Year-of-the-Tusk), the northern Demua Mountains

  “Come …” Serwa said, her brother already wind-whipped and towering at her side.

  Sorweel hesitated as always. It seemed an insult clutching her, feeling the slim body that his heart had never ceased to ponder, even when fury made his jaw ache and his ears roar. For no matter how hard he hated, his lust refused to leave him.

  It was always the same. No sooner would a realization come to him than the warring dogs of his soul would tear it into something bewildering. He had thought his path clear. He was Narindar, as Zsoronga had said, an assassin of the Hundred. The Mother of Birth herself had anointed him, hiding him from the unnatural scrutiny of the Anasûrimbor, provisioning him with the weapons he needed, even raising him to the exalted station he required. Accursed or no, his Fate had drawn relentlessly nearer. Then the Nonmen embassy had arrived bearing the terms of their alliance with the Great Ordeal, and the dogs set their grinning teeth to his heart once again. She had told him herself: he was to be a Hostage of Ishterebinth, held captive with Serwa and her eldest brother, Moënghus.

  Sorweel found himself thrown—sorcerous leap after sorcerous leap—across the ruins of ancient Kûniüri with the daughter of his father’s murderer, somehow more infatuated after every stone cast. And he had thought that he might love her, dared imagine a different future, one that assassinated him instead of her father …

  Only to discover her shuddering in the arms of her brooding, warrior brother.

  “Horse-King … It is time to go.”

  Sorweel hesitated for his hatred, but he yielded for want of recourse as much as for want of her. So he slung his right-arm about her waist, felt the heat of her body as an iron drawn from the fire. Thoughts chattering, he listened as her voice made a pipe of the World. Lights spun as they always spun, glittered like glass wrack tossed into the white heights of the sun, and he unravelled as he always unravelled, from the pith outward, his very existence flashing like the light of a mirror between horizons.

  They had crossed the Demua Mountains this way. Sorweel, the false Believer-King, and the insane children of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, leaping from slope to precipice, skin and nerves alive to the cold, lungs burning for some unfathomable sharpness in the air—peak to gasping peak, always perched on the edge of the void. The whole world seemed tossed, the ground hooked and hanging, barked of everything save rims and ravines of snow. He huddled with them, his numb fingers latched about his shoulders, hugging what heat his breast and gut could muster, pulling against the shivers that would shake him into more snow. And he found he could not distinguish between his terrors, the vertigo of the scarps soaring about and below them, and the plummet of his heart.

  He gazed across the stark, his hatred spinning like a tossed coin, and he watched winds scour the nearby summits, endlessly inhaling snow to the east. He felt their incestuous presences pressed close, Serwa small and Moënghus great, both hot with blood and life, huddling against all the thin and empty edges the same as he … and he wished them dead.

  All he need do is push, he thought. One push and he could die here at his ease, the heat of him emanating outward, drawn on as a drink by the voids surrounding. A brief clash of panic and limbs. A sharp intake of breath.

  And no one ever need know.

  And then, one sorcerous step and it was gone, this world of stone and ice and gaping plummets. They were back into the forests, the ground steep to be sure, but terraced and overgrown, a place where no one need fear standing.

  The trees were cramped for altitude, and the grasses and bracken were thinned for gravel. Streams roped the rutted heights above, shooting with waters cold enough to pinch fingertips and crack teeth. The three of them sat wordless for some time, savouring the warm and easy air. Serwa dozed against the crook of her arm. Moënghus switched his glower between the vista and his thumbs. Sorweel stared out, watching the scrawl of ridges flatten into a less troubled horizon.

  “What do your people know of Injor-Niyas?” Serwa eventually asked.

  Her voice, he realized, always descended upon him. It never reached out.

  He said nothing, turned to the west to spare himself the cruel hilarity of her gaze. He hated her more, he decided, in the sunlight.

  “Father,” she continued, “says that it is our lesson, that the ghouls are a cipher for the extinction of Men.
”

  Staring away was his only reprieve. He could not look at them without cringing for shame, just as he could not sleep without dreaming of their congress. Only by turning his back to them could he think those thoughts that let him breathe. How he was Narindar, an instrument of the dread Mother of Birth. How he was the knife that would kill their demonic father and deliver them to their ruin. The very knife!

  He had even begun praying to Her in the knotted watches before sleep.

  Deliver them, Mother …

  What he had seen was a crime—of that he had no doubt. Incest was anathema in all nations, all households—even the Anasûrimbor, who more than any other had to appease the mob. They were afraid, Sorweel had come to realize. They feared their father would see their crime in his face …

  But they also feared, he had decided, what their father might see in their faces. This, Sorweel realized, was the only thing keeping him alive. He had no idea how much they could or could not hide, but he knew that murder was no small thing, not even for the likes of them. Perhaps they only had so much faith in their ability to deceive their accursed father. To murder a man—such an act left hard tracks in any soul. So they had elected to sin in sand, to drive him away, let the wild accomplish what they dare not, and let their wandering blow the spoor of guilt from their soul.

  So they baited him, laughed and tormented. They played games—endless games!—all of them meant to shame, to infuriate! Over the Demua and now upon the bourne of fabled Ishterebinth, last of the great Nonmen Mansions.

  They were running out of time.

  “This World once belonged to the Nonmen,” she was saying, “the way it now belongs to Men—to you, Sorweel.” He could feel her remorseless gaze upon him. “What Fate will you seize?”

  Wind whisked sharp through the grasses.

  “That one is easy,” Moënghus said, standing on a grunt. He leaned to swat pine needles from his leggings. He clasped Sorweel’s shoulders in two embattled hands, shook him with mock camaraderie. “The purple one.”

  Sorweel twisted out of the man’s grip, swung at his face—missed. The Prince-Imperial lunged and shoved him—hard enough for his legs to tangle like thrown rope. Sorweel crashed backward across the ground, scuffed an elbow against a stump of granite. Lightning deadened his hand.