The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(144)

So they thought words were the sole avenue of conquering souls, that they could, through vigilance and a wilful refusal to believe, guard this gate and so keep their souls safe. They could not see what they could not see, and so were blind to the way they became mere moments in a greater mechanism in the presence of the D?nyain. Like chips of ice in warm water, their secrets would melt, their principles would dissolve, and they would become continuous with the whole, all but indistinguishable.

They would succumb.

“How can you know this?” the boy asked the first night of their exodus. They had camped on the shoulder of a giant, high enough to dare the teeth of the cold. The old man and his woman lay curled one about the other on a higher tier, finding solace of sorts, the Survivor knew, in their greater elevation.

“Because they are less,” something within him replied, “and we are more.”

“But what of sorcery?” the boy asked. “You said the Singers had changed everything.”

“True,” the Cause-within said. As cause, it was also effect, selected from a chattering cacophony of causes. As it passed, another was selected to be voiced, a lone survivor of inner savagery. The soul was nothing more than congeries of brutalized survivors …

“The Doctrine is incomplete.”

“So how can you know?” the Cause-nearby pressed.

“Because the Doctrine yet rules the meat of the World,” yet another survivor said. “And because,” the one following added, “they succumbed to my father …”

Yet another Cause monitored this process of selection, the sorting of the living and spoken from the dead and unvoiced, ever alert for evidence of madness …

Nothing.

“So what will you do?”

When they succumb … a survivor added.

“That depends on the manner of their capitulation,” the Cause-within replied.

“How do you mean?” the Cause-nearby asked.

And the monitor happened upon a wane flare of solace, a mad survivor, rooted in murk. They had always been a single engine, this place and the boy, from the day they had fled into the Thousand Thousand Halls.

“Whether they love.”



Cuts and cuts and cuts …

The woman, Mimara, stalked ahead of the old man, Achamian, leading the small party with a haste borne of fury. The Survivor paced him for a while, thinking the Wizard would eventually say something, offer some ingress …

Silence, the Survivor had noted, weighed heavy against the old man.

But he said nothing, though his motion and demeanour shouted with an awareness of the Survivor’s proximity, one that dwindled as the labourious watches wore on. The shadow of the mountains rose up around them, drawing veils across orange faces of stone.

“She still wants you to destroy us …” the Survivor finally ventured. “Destroy us with your light.”

“Yes … She does.”

They were stunted—only a fraction of themselves. The legionary engines of speech lay in the darkness preceding their souls, he realized. They began the very instant they spoke and not before. And so their speaking seemed all that was required to be.

“Will you execute her wishes?” he asked as a provocation, since he already knew the answer.

The Wizard squinted at him. He knew he betrayed himself, that he stood before a being he could not quite conceive. He even understood the contingency of his soul, and yet he could not convince himself of his peril. And how could he, when blindness to that contingency comprised the very foundation of what it meant “to be.” What could it mean to begin before you begin?

“Perhaps …”

A faltering gaze. A face struggling to maintain a semblance of resolution. Knowing was what made the old man weak, his inkling of the vast disproportion between them.

“My father stole something from you.”

This was not so difficult to see.

A quivering slackness about the eyes, fleeting. Welling tear ducts. And deeper, a knotting of thought and passion, a flexing that slipped into release.

“Yes …” the Wizard said, looking to the scarped distance.

The first true admission. The more of these he could prise from the man’s nebulous confusion, the Survivor realized, the more thoroughly he could possess him.

Little truths. He must gather them … like one hundred stones.

The old man coughed, more to provide time to think than to clear his throat.

“Yes, he did.”

The mother of the pregnant woman, Mimara. Kellhus had taken her.

The Survivor’s ruminations had generated a variety of explanatory schema, each weighted according to the evidence at hand. With each Cause selected, the competitors were pitched into the dark, and new cycles of speculation were triggered, wheels within wheels within wheels …

Why had Kellhus taken her? To coerce this man? To breed? To condition some other ground?

There was only one possibility. Always only one. For this was the very structure of apprehension: appraisal, selection …

Slaughter.



That second night they camped upon a knoll that swelled from the long-wandering ridge-line they had followed for a better part of the afternoon. Balance seemed especially precarious. Dusk had thinned the already emaciated air, lending fingernails to the encircling soar and plummet. Void leered, tugged with the lurch of vertigo. Across the emptiness, the sun flared with geometric precision, slighting the chill wind, tanning the surrounding peaks with gold and spangled vermillion. The scuff of boots across stone and gravel pricked the ear.