The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(143)

And he knew the way all the Dead knew, with the certainty of timeless recollection.

Hell … rising on a bubbling rush. Agony and wickedness chattering with famished glee …

Demons, come to pull his outside through his inside, to invert and expose, to bare his every tenderness to fire and gnashing teeth …

Damnation … in spite of everything.

There was no describing the horror.

He tried to clutch with dead fingers … to hold on …

Don’t! he tried to call across the space of a dead man’s reach. But his ribs were a breathless cage, his lips cold soil. Don’t let go …

Please! he screamed at his younger self, trying to communicate the whole of his life with sightless eyes … Fool! Ingrate!

Don’t trust Hi—



Flash of light.

So bright, so blinding, that it seemed nothing more than a peripheral flicker.

The image of Dagliash hung, a shadow wrapped about radiance, curtain walls blown to gaseous oblivion.

Air sucked to dizzying altitudes.

Ears shut to all sound.

Radiating concussions, blowing souls in their thousands from the crests and summits, puncturing the very clouds, blasting them outward, dilating the iris of the sky.

A moment of paradoxical sunlight.

Vast and luminous and golden. Lancing across emptiness, painting the back of the erupting earth, a pillar of particulate and ejecta—a mountain flying upward and out. Plumes like octopus arms, black about brilliance, surging into Heaven’s vacant arch. The cooling tendrils bowed outward, fanning, descending, while an inferno scaled the obscured heights within.

Circles and rings of obliteration. The swirling ash. The charcoal slopes, all the smoking forms thrown outward. The croaking regions, fingerless hands pawing. Burning Schoolmen, stumbling from the sky.

Then the fields of screaming, Men and Sranc, raising blistered faces, melted eyes, shaking skin from their arms, so that it seemed they warred with rags.

The smell of smoke and burnt lamb and cooking pig.

Mouths round with lamentation.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


The Demua Mountains


To be a Man is to take the frame of Man as firmament, to be immovable unto oneself. And to know Man as a Man is to be blind to this common frame, to be without knowing. Thus is knowing the corruption of being. And so to learn what it is to be a Man is to cease to be a Man.

—Treatise on Diremption, ANONYMOUS





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

Ishu?l destroyed. His father rediscovered. The Doctrine utterly overthrown.

This was a Study like no other.

The mountain wind fluted through as much as across the Survivor’s skin. Slices. Incisions. Sickle-shaped and puckered. Intersecting. Even his scarring bore scars. Had his memory not been perfect he could have used his body as a map, a cipher. Every desperate stand. Every vicious encounter. His trial had been carved into the very meat of him, the residue of a thousand thousand shortest paths. Decisions without number.

He had become a hieroglyph, a living indication of things both invisible and profound. No matter how bright the sun burned, darkness surrounded him. No matter how deep the distance, slavering beasts encircled him. No matter how peaceful the birdsong, how quiet the jackpine and high stone, cutting edges whistled in the black, points gutted the near-emptiness.

Cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts …

He had become a walking word. The only one that mattered now that Ishu?l was gone …

Survival.

He and the boy followed the old man and the woman, their ears pricked to the brief exchanges between them. Lexicons were expanded. Grammars were considered and revised. They correlated tones and expressions, and began milking ever more meaning from the raw sounds.

They ascended slopes, followed switchback paths, labouring through high-altitude shadows.

By some fluke of their approach, the sun breached the mountain along the line of the glacier, so that all the world seem dazzled. They climbed toward the fields of hanging shimmer.

Shriekers bubbled up through the black. The Survivor blinked—flinched.

The boy observed.

Cuts and cuts and cuts …

Despite their apparent infirmity, the worldborn couple scarcely paused for respite. They climbed with alacrity, trotted with relentless wind—so much so that the boy was taxed on occasion. It was the substance, the Survivor realized, the drug they administered with an exchange of fingertips: it deepened their lungs as much as it quickened their wits and their limbs.

Another mystery …

More promising than the others.



The ink of knowledge blots the page. The couple understood what they were, but only in rough approximation. Their concepts could only touch, never grasp, the principles of the D?nyain. They lacked the required precision.

But as partial and incomplete as their understanding was, they nevertheless assumed that they knew everything they needed to know—and so were safe, or at least shielded from the refugees. They could no more fathom their straits than a crow could read.

They would succumb. The Survivor need only aim his soul and they would succumb—eventually. The woman’s madness was naught but a complication. The old man’s hatred and knowledge were even less so.

They would succumb, he quickly realized, the way the World had succumbed to his father. They dwelt in worlds pocked and limned and partitioned with darknesses they could not see. The unity of things, they thought, was something hidden beneath, a vast analogue to the false unity of their souls. And so they assumed they, at least, stood apart, believing that it belonged to souls to hang themselves by their own hair. They did not understand how Cause nested within Cause, how all that was real—and mundane—transpired across a singular plane, the after forever following upon the before.