The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(151)

Cuts and cuts and cuts. Teeth cracking in the black, gnashing, chewing. A demonic chorus bubbles down through the corridors, filters through the descending levels, viscous with lust and fury—savage with desperation. What the darkness obscures, the darkness welds together as one. So they seemed a singular thing, the Shriekers, more insect than human.

Don’t leave me.

The child was defective, as the Assessor had predicted. A fraction gloated for the fact of Ishu?l’s undoing, knowing that the child had been saved … for … for …

For what?

Bestial and inhuman, grunting as they loped through the black, lost and starving, endless thousands of them, snorting the air, shrieking for the scent of vulnerability. In the early days, the surviving Brethren had set out pots of their own blood and excrement as lures, and the creatures swarmed to their own destruction—though the toll proved too high: one D?nyain for a thousand Shriekers. Scent hooked one, perhaps two, and the caterwauling seized the rest, the legions scattered through the chambered deep …

So it was always easy at first, fending them off, raising barricades of carcasses. Easy at first, impossible after. The Brethren abandoned the strategy, elected to flee, following the parse of fork and junction, using their intellect as their eyes, dividing their pursuers again and again—until the beasts were fractured into meagre bands. The boy had been suckled on such sounds, hearing his kind hunted to extinction beneath the very roots of the earth.

They would have cracked open his skull, had Ishu?l not fallen. The boy would have been pinned as all other Defectives were pinned to the subtlety of some forbidden affect, strapped for the scrutiny of others, nailed as if a drying hide to the outer expression of some inner frailty.

It was always easy at first.

I cannot breathe …

He danced through pitch blindness, climbed through the threshing of cleavers, climbed until he could climb no more.

Is this fear?

Sometimes he would pause and make a place, raise twitching ramparts. And sometimes he would run … not so much from as with the creatures, for he had learned to mimic them, the cadence of their galloping stride, the labial quaver of their snorts, their peeling screeches—everything save their stench. And it would drive them to the very pitch of frenzy, the scent of something almost human in their roiling midst, set them hacking the vacant black, killing one another …

Yes. Tell me what you feel.

Even then he had understood.

I shake. I cannot breathe.

Even then he had known that Cause had never been the D?nyain’s First Principle.

And what else?

And Logos even less.

My eyes weep … weep for want of light!

They had settled upon these things simply because they could be seen. Even then he had understood this.

Yes … This is fear.

Darkness was their ground, their foe and foundation.

What is it?

The shrieking black.

The most simple rule.



Cuts …

And cuts …

And cuts …

There was a place high on the shoulder of a mountain where a boy, an old man, and a pregnant woman knelt and observed as another man, a scarred grotesquerie, convulsed and voided his bowel.

Perhaps it was real—a real place—but the fractions, who were legion, who rutted and rampaged through the black, did not care, could not.

Too many cuts. Too many divisions of skin.

Run was a rule.

Hide was a rule.

Know was a rule.

Desire was a following.

Existence was a heap.

One hundred stones, too round to lock one into the other. Rounded like thumbs. Those on top warm for sunlight, like lobes or lozenges of living meat between the fingers. Those below chill, like the lips of the dead. Eyes scanning the coniferous gloom, isolating the ink of avian shadows. One hundred throws, arm snapping, sleeve popping, hand flicking … A buzzing line, comprehended more in after-image than seen, spearing through the seams between branches.

Ninety-nine birds struck dead. Numerous sparrows, doves, and more crows than anything else. Two falcons, a stork, and three vultures.

“Killing,” a fraction explains to the wondering boy. “Killing connects me to what I am.”

And what are you?

“The Survivor,” another fraction replies, and yet another registers the network of scar tissue across his face, the tug and tension of unnatural compromises.

“The Heaper of the Dead.”



There was more horror than concern in their faces when his eyes fluttered open. The boy especially.

The Survivor drew a sleeve across his hideousness, looked to him, his son. The Legion-within howled and clamoured, stamped and spit. Only now did he understand …

Ignorance. Only ignorance had sealed the interval between them. Only blindness, the wilful idiocy that was worldborn love. A fraction relives the flight of the Brethren before the thunderous onslaught of the Singers. D?nyain leaping before billowing geometries of light, fleeing into the mazed gut of the World, hunted by stone-cracking words, utterances, the violation of everything they held to be true. D?nyain do not panic. D?nyain do not reel, broken and bewildered. And he yet he had found himself in the nursery without thought, scooping up this very babe without thought, the one that smelled of him, of Anas?rimbor, the most promising of the Twelve Germs. He clutched this wailing burden to his breast, this impediment, without thought, as if it were no less a fraction of his own soul, a part that had wandered …