The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(147)

This too, one fraction whispered to the others, has already happened.

The wind thrummed and roiled, rushed in invisible cataracts about the hanging heights.

The Survivor rolled onto his back. She says, a fraction whispered in the old man’s voice, that you gathered one hundred stones. How could such a thing be known? Sorcery, another fraction realized. Sorcery was the least among the D?nyain’s many oversights. Long had he pondered the Singers and their cataclysmic song: none of the Brethren had risked so much as he in the futile attempt to capture one for interrogation. An errant fraction glimpsed lightning and thunder in the labyrinthine black. Why? Why would the worldborn founders of the D?nyain deny their children knowledge of something so significant as sorcery? What could motivate dooming their progeny to millennial ignorance?

Perhaps some paths were too short. Perhaps they had feared their descendants would forswear the more arduous harvest of Cause, when the fruits of sorcery hung so low.

As profound as it was, sorcery did naught but complicate the metaphysics of Cause. But this … The knowledge that had apprehended him through the eyes of the pregnant woman.

This changed everything.

Even now, as he gazed without sight into the oceanic cavity of night, a fraction retrieved her image, and he relived the impossibility of her gaze, of a scrutiny utterly unconstrained by the incestuous caprice of the here and now. A look unbound by time and place. A look from everywhere …

And nowhere.

And he knew: there existed a place without paths of any kind, without differences …

An absolute place.



Cuts and cuts and cuts …

The four of them ascended ways slung across the face of the heavens. Falls, some sloped and tumbling, others abyssal, framed every glance they shared. Summits dizzied the sky about them, great cleavages of rocks thrust towering into the high blue. Thin air taxed their lungs and limbs.

“It hunts us,” a fraction said to the old Wizard.

An apprehensive squint.

“The darkness that comes before thought and soul,” another fraction explained.

The man’s face seemed of a piece with the mountains, a dark miniature.

“I did plot her murder,” a fraction resumed.

These words took the old man aback—according to their design. By beginning with a cryptic utterance, he had engaged the Wizard’s curiosity and attention, as well as provided a foil of obscurity for the clarity of his subsequent confession.

“And now? Do you still wish her dead?”

He needed Drusas Achamian to listen.

“No matter what I answer, you will not believe me.”

Trust was a habit for these people. If he spoke enough truth, his voice would become true.

“Sounds like a dilemma,” the old Singer said.

A luminous look. Smiles only called attention to the Survivor’s grotesquerie.

“It need not be.”

Achamian cast a worried glance at the pregnant woman several paces above. They toiled up the shoulder of a mountain, following a ravine of larger stones and boulders set into what were otherwise gravel slopes. Dislodged stones clacked down in their wake, gaining speed and kicking out onto the surrounding ramps, where they triggered small cascades of gravel, skirts woven of incalculable threads.

The old man had just resolved to ignore him, the Survivor knew.

“As much as you distrust me, you trust her sight more.”

The shadow of some bird plummeted across the slopes.

“So?”

Truth.

“Tell her,” the mutilated son of Anas?rimbor Kellhus said, “to gaze upon me while I speak.”

Honesty was the way in.

“And why would I do that?”

The Shortest Path.

“Because my father stole your wife.”



Cause …

Cause was but the skin.

The skein.

A scab on the knuckle of the boy’s left index finger, already ancient for three days healing.

The small mole to the left of the pregnant woman’s chin, the one that vanished those rare times she smiled.

The swelling joints in the old Wizard’s hands, and the ache that he tested without awareness, again and again, flexing and relaxing his fingers …

Flexing and relaxing.

Each of these things had origins and destinations. Each of these things caused and had been caused. They were points that knotted the shag of the past and fanned into a hollow future. But he knew them only insofar as they were his origin, his past. He knew not the scrape that had wounded the boy’s finger, the defect that marred the woman’s skin, or the malady that afflicted the old Wizard’s hands.

He was bound to the skin of these things—the skein.

All else was Darkness.

After generations of training and breeding for Logos, the D?nyain could do no more than pierce this skin, cut and cut and cut. They could only lick the blood of knowledge. They could never hope to drink so deep as the woman had the evening previous. They could not so much as raise the cup, let alone drain it.

The D?nyain, seeing only the skin of Cause, the pulsing webs, had assumed that Cause was everything, that it occupied the whole of darkness. But they had been fools, thinking that Darkness, even in this meagre respect, could be seen. For all their penetration they were every bit as abject before their ignorances as beasts, let alone worldborn Men.