The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(149)

“You bear twins … Sister.”



You are right to be terrified.

The D?nyain exceed any rule that you possess … We outrun your measure.

You are the neck of a bottle. The World but drips into your soul.

We dwell in the deluge.

You come to us as a cataract. You assume you are unitary and alone, when in sooth you are a mob of blind men, crying out words you cannot comprehend in voices you cannot hear. For the truth is that you are many—this is the secret of your innumerable contradictions.

This … This is where the D?nyain labour, in the darkness that comes before your souls. To converse with us is to submit to us—there is no other way for you to dwell in our presence. Given our respective natures, we are your slavers.

You were right to want to kill us …

Especially me, one who was broken in the deepest Deep.

Even this confession, this speaking of plain truth, is woven from knowledge that would terrify you, such is its penetration. My very voice has been fashioned into a key, using manner and intonation as teeth to unlock the tumblers of your soul. You are rapt because you have been so instructed.

Despite the brief span of our acquaintance, despite your will to conceal, I know so very much about you. I can name the Mission you call your mission, and I can name the Mission you know not at all. I know the twists of circumstance that shape and bind you; that for much of your life abuse was the only sincere rule; that you hide the tender beneath the bitter; that you carry your mother’s children …

But I need not enumerate what I know, for I see also that you know.

I see that you wonder what is to be done, for in speaking the truth, I also make the case for my destruction.

And so are my own limits made plain. Though the night ranges infinite above us, a fraction of me still wanders the Thousand Thousand Halls, a dark fragment, as obscure as it is elusive, one that argues death … death as the Shortest Path to the Absolute.

And I wonder, Is this what you call sorrow?

Thus are the limits of the D?nyain made visible … also. For the desire that burns so bright within you has been stamped into the merest embers within us, bred into insignificance with the passing of generations, leaving but one hunger, one flame, one mover to yoke the Legion-within …

A single Mission.

This, Sister … This is why I bare my throat to the blade of your judgment. This is why I would make myself your slave. For short of death, you, Anas?rimbor Mimara, wife-daughter of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, who is also my father … you, Sister, are the Shortest Path.

The Absolute dwells within your Gaze. You … a frail, worldborn slip, heavy with child, chased across the throw of kings and nations, you are the Nail of the World, the hook from which all things hang.

Thus do I kneel before it, awaiting, accepting, death or illumination—it does not matter which …

So long as I am at last known.



Cuts and cuts and cuts …

A fraction kneels before her, Anas?rimbor Mimara. And a fraction, one of a hundred stones, could see it … as if it were rising up, like lead pouring into the husk and tatter of a mortal frame, an immobility as profound as oblivion.

Zero.

Sranc squealing in the black, the air rancid with sweat and exhalation, cleavers whooshing, felling brothers for lunatic fear. Feet slapping stone.

Zero … Opening as an Eye.

The blackness, savage and greased. A point passes through it, plunging down lines and sweeping across curves. The shrieks are contagion, like fire upon the back of an arid hill.

Beauty … not of flowers or animal form, but of stillness, of vast mechanisms, the threshing, pounding, scraping, dwindling into the patter of mice.

Cuts and cuts and cuts …

Beauty … the effortlessness of freefall, the reduction of all riddles to a single, far-falling line.

The point is sentient. It speaks, spinning tales of hewn ribs and deflected cleavers, punctured bowels and broken teeth, extremities sent spinning into the void of irrelevance.

The Survivor gazes into the Gaze, sees the lie that is sight.

Cuts and cuts and cuts …

Judge us, a fraction whispers.

Raise us up.

Strike us down.

Anas?rimbor Mimara stands above him, little more than a halo, a smear of meat and hair about the Judging Eye. An excuse. An occasion …

Holding, a fraction notices, a sorcerous knife.

Thronging, mewling blackness. A path picked—pursued. A calligraphy too murderous to be real. Threats isolated, plucked from the deluge, pinched like candle wicks—snuffed.

So many cuts.

Zero, trembling with feminine mortality.

Too many.

“You are broken,” she sobs. “The same as me …”

A fraction reaches out, makes a pommel of the slender hand about the pommel of the knife. Judge, a fraction murmurs. End our ingrown war …

But she is weeping—openly now. Why does she weep?

The Gaze knows no sorrow.

“But I do,” she whispers.

Cuts and cuts and cuts …

The knife clatters against stone. And somehow she is kneeling with him, embracing him, so that he can feel the sphere of her belly enter the cavity of his own. A fraction counts four heartbeats: one ponderous and masculine, another fleet and feminine, and two prenatal. She exhales into his neck, and a fraction tracks the creeping bloom of heat and humidity. She shudders.