The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(150)

I am lost, a fraction whispers …

Though her face is buried in his shoulder below his jaw, the Gaze has not moved. It watches as before, infinite scrutiny hanging from the memory of where her eyes had been.

“Yes …” she says. “As are we.”

Zero, glaring from nowhere, showing him his measure … and how disastrously far the D?nyain had wandered.

The rank folly of the Shortest Path.

I am damned.

Her small fists twist knots into his tunic, make rope of a portion. The boy watches, for once immaculate and inscrutable. “I forgive you,” she cries into his shoulder.

I forgive.



Awareness has no skin.

No fists or fingers.

No arms.

So much must be ignored.

The boy watches him stare into the bowl of night—watches him float. “So you have succeeded?” he whispers.

A fraction hears. A fraction responds.

“Everything I have taught you is a lie.”

All that you know … another murmurs without voice. All that you are.

And another …

And another …



They deferred to the old Wizard’s reckoning, following the northward wend of a great valley rather than pass out of the mountains.

“Beyond lies K?niüri,” he explained, “and Sranc without number.”

The meaning was plain …

And invisible.



Crime, a fraction postulated. Crime divides the innocent from the ignorant.

The four of them sat cross-legged, knees touching knees, upon a promontory overlooking the black velvet folds of yet another valley. Jackpine clung to the outcrop’s lip, leaning out like ravaged antlers. The chill made fog of their mingling breath. The old Wizard, who had not yet grasped let alone accepted what had happened, hefted the pouch he guarded so jealously in his left palm. A fraction sorted through the varieties of alarm that muttered through his look and gesture, plucked the one belonging, almost in its entirety, to the substance in the pouch. A puling spark, a greed almost infant in extent, poised to set the horizon aflame …

But there was veneration as well, the wince of hard memories … unwanted lessons.

The great project of the D?nyain was conceived by Men, worldborn souls bent on pursuing an inkling of their own finitude. Their impulse was imperial. They had seen the encroaching darkness, the oblivion from which their every thought and passion had sprung; they had reckoned the servile fact of their dependency, and they would undo it if they could.

Thus had they transformed the Absolute into a prize.

“Qirri,” the pregnant woman said, her voice a bolt of silk, a banner for her mongrel fortitude. “Pa thero, Qirri …”

She touched the tip of her index finger to the bulb of her tongue, then reached into the interior of the pouch.

The boy watched witless—and trusting.

Ignorance, a fraction resolved. Ignorance was the foundation. The First Principle.

Proof of this lay in the very meat of the D?nyain, for they had been bred in pursuit of deception. No intellect is orphaned, despite all the foundling hearts. All sons are born stranded because all fathers are sons. Every child is told, even those suckled on the teats of wolves. Even D?nyain children. To be born is to be born upon a path. To be born upon a path is to follow that path—for what man could step over mountains? And to follow a path is to follow a rule …

To find all other paths wanting.

She pulled her fingertip from the pouch’s throat, held it in the light of the Nail. A woolen smudge of powder—ash, so fine as to dissolve in the least wind …

But the sky had forgotten how to breathe.

Not even an entire World of madmen could chart the infinite vagaries of belief and action. Thoughts, like legs, were joined at the hip. No matter how innumerable the tracks, no matter how crazed or inventive the soul, only what could be conceived could be seen. Logos, they had called it, the principle that bound step to step, that yoked what would be aimless to the scruple of some determinate destination. And this had been the greatest of the D?nyain’s follies, the slavish compliance to reason, for this was what had shackled them to the abject ignorance of their forefathers …

Logos.

“What is it?” the boy asked.

“Not for you,” the old Wizard snapped—with more vehemence than he intended, a fraction noted.

Reason was a skulking beggar, too timid to wander, to leap, and so doomed to scavenge the midden-heap of what had come before. Logos … They had called it light, only to find themselves blinded. They had made it their ancient, generational toil, confusing its infirmities for their own …

Thinking the human was the obscuring shroud.

She reached toward him, her palm down and her finger out so that he might take the tip of her finger between his lips. A fraction surprised her by clasping her wrist and guiding the powder to his nostril …

The inhalation was quick, sharp enough to make the old Wizard flinch. Anas?rimbor Mimara pulled her finger back, frowned in marvelling surprise.

“Ingestion delays onset,” a fraction explained. “This way …”

A lesser fraction blinked.

The Legion-within groaned, reeled, fumbled the World they bore as burdens upon their backs.

“This … This way …”

This way, boy … Follow me!