The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(148)

A different blood throbbed through the infinite black, one that bled from all points equally.

He need only look at the pregnant woman to see it now, scarcely perceptible, like the stain of dawn on the longest watch of the night, or the first flutter of sickness.

They descended a broad pasture, their heads bobbing as the headlong fall pulled their steps downward. She walked below, wild for the pelts draped about her shoulders, boyish for the shortness of her hair. Unlike the old Wizard or even the boy, whose paths wandered like bumblebees, she walked with the assurance of one who followed a track both ancient and habitual …

Her every step trod Conditioned Ground.

She did not know this knowing, of course, which was what made it so much more remarkable … even miraculous. She bore an assurance that was not her own—and how could it be? How could anything bottomless be owned, let alone fathomed, by a soul so finite, so frail?

She says, a fraction whispered from the dark, that you intend to murder her.

Tell her, another answered, to gaze upon me while I speak.

The boy drew his crabbed hand across a throng of goldenrod … and the Survivor felt the tickle of embroidered petals across his own palm …

As did something greater. Incomprehensibly greater.

Absolute.



Pick any point in space—it does not matter which.

The only way to make that point the measure of the surrounding space, the D?nyain had realized, was to call it zero, the absence of quantity that anchored the enumeration of all quantities. Zero … Zero was the source and centre of every infinity.

And it was everywhere.

Because zero was everywhere, measure was everywhere—as was arithmetic. Submit to the rule of another and you will measure as he measures. Zero was not simply nothing; it was also identity, for nothing is nothing but the absence of difference, and the absence of difference is nothing but the same.

Thus the Survivor had begun calling this new principle Zero, for he distrusted the name the old Wizard had given it …

God.

The great error of the D?nyain, he could see now, was to conceive the Absolute as something passive, to think it a vacancy, dumb and insensate, awaiting their generational arrival. The great error of the worldborn, he could see, was to conceive it as something active, to think it just another soul, a flattering caricature of their own souls. Thus the utility of Zero, something that was not, something that pinched all existence, every origin and destination, into a singular point, into One. Something that commanded all measure, not through arbitrary dispensations of force, but by virtue of structure … system …

Logos.

The God that was Nature. The God that every soul could be, if only for the span of a single insight …

The Zero-God. The absence that was the cubit of all creation. The Principle that watched through Mimara’s eyes …

And had found his own measure wanting.



Cuts and cuts and cuts …

A mountain lay between them and the setting sun, brute ground lunging into the sky. White water blasted through a gorge below, a snaking of ravines and crevasses that made a hoof of the mountain’s roots. The boy sat tending to their fire, his eyes reflecting twin miniatures of the flame, his face flushing orange as night wicked the colour from the distances beyond his shoulders. The old Wizard and the pregnant woman stood bickering above, perched on a flange of granite that curled like a great, slumbering cat about their camp.

“Pit-pit arama s’arumnat!” her voice fluted shrill across the stone.

“Why do they argue now?” the boy asked, raising his pupils from the reflected fires.

The Survivor had made no pretense of discretion or disinterest. He stood opposite the boy, his back to the coniferous gloom of the valley below, gazing up with cold fixity.

“I offered to submit to her gaze,” a fraction replied to the boy. “And its judgment.”

Another fraction tracked the serpentine interplay of outrage and incredulity flexing across her expression, warbling through her voice, twitching through her stance and gesture. Her Gaze, she was explaining to the old Wizard, had already passed judgment, had already found them wanting …

“And she balks?” the boy asked.

“They have suffered too much to trust anything we offer them. Even our capitulation.”

“Mrama kapu!” the woman cried, sweeping wide the blade of her right hand. Once again stumped by the violence of her ingenuity, the old Wizard stammered in reply.

He was losing this contest …

“I can hear them!” the Survivor cried, his tone modulated to provoke communal alarm.

The worldborn couple stared down at him, rimmed in the violet of incipient night. The burning scrub popped, to his right, coughed points of light, constellations drawn out on the wind.

“I can hear them in your womb,” the Survivor repeated—this time in the woman’s tongue. Though he was far from mastering the language, he knew enough to say at least this much.

She gawked at him, too shocked to be dismayed—to be anything other than disarmed.

“Taw mirqui pal—”

What do you mean … them?

One fraction registered the success of his stratagem. Others reaped the signs blaring from her form and face. And still others enacted the remaining articulations of this ploy …

The Survivor smiled the old Wizard’s most endearing smile.