The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(152)

Zero. The difference that is not a difference. Zero made One.

He had survived. He, the one burdened, the one tasked, the one who refused to illuminate the interval between him and his son. The fractions of the D?nyain had been sorted, and he, the least able, the most encumbered, had been the one Selected … the Survivor.

He who had refused to know … who had embraced the darkness that comes before.

The boy clutches his tunic with both hands, hale and halved. He cannot help himself. He is defective.

And so it was with the Absolute. Surrender. Forfeiture. Loss … At last he understood what made these things holy. Loss was advantage. Blindness was insight, revelation. At last he could see it—the sideways step that gave lie to Logos.

Zero. Zero made One.



The Eye watches. Approves.

He gestures to the boy, who obediently comes to him.

He does not speak for a time, electing instead to gaze across the crumpled condensations of earth, dark beneath the silvering arch of the sky. They have finally come to the end of the mountainous throw and steep, the terminus of tyrannical ground. The trackless forests below were just that, trackless, demanding judgment, decision, for being so permissive. Only one scarp remains, one last perilous descent.

The wind is warm with the dank rot that promises life, with the taste of surging green.

It will be better there.

“What is it?”

“Things …” he murmurs to the panorama, “are simple.”

“The madness worsens?”

He looks back to the boy. “Yes.”

He draws the hundredth stone from the waist of his tunic.

“This is yours now.”

The boy, the most blessed fraction, looks to him in alarm. He would deny the interval between them, if he could.

He cannot.

The Survivors stands, begins sprinting. He marvels at the magic that joins will to flexing limbs.

A cry, spoken in a tongue that even animals know.

The Survivor does not so much move as the ground runs out. But the leap … Yes. That is his.

That is his …

As is the yawning plummet, the drop …

Into the most empty arms.



So quickly …

The events that transform us slip …

So quickly.

The face, cut into all expressions, all faces.

Eyes gazing wet from mutilation.

Fixed upon something that runs as he runs, a place he can only pursue, never reach …

Unless he leaps.

The Eye understood, even if the woman did not.



Achamian could see the D?nyain’s body about thirty cubits below, a motionless swatch of skin and fabric draining crimson across fractured stone. He struggled to breathe. It seemed impossible … that a being so formidable … so unnerving … could break so easily.

“Sweet Seju!” he cried, retreating from the dizzy edge. “I told you! I told you not to give any to him!”

Mimara knelt beside the crab-clawed boy, held his blank face against her breast, a hand splayed across his scalp. “Told who?” she snapped, glaring. It belonged to her infuriating genius, the ability to condemn one instant then console the next.

The old Wizard grabbed his beard in frustration and fury. What was happening? When had this damaged girl, this waif, become a Prophet of the Tusk?

She began rocking the boy, who continued gazing at nothing from nowhere—witless.

Achamian cursed under his breath, turned from her glare, understanding, in a turbulent, horrified way, that the futility of arguing with her had become the futility of arguing with the God. He wanted nothing more than to call her on the rank contradiction of mourning a death she had clamoured for mere days previous. But all he could do was fume instead …

And shake.

The wisdom, as always, came after. And with it the wonder.

The Eye had always been a source of worry, ever since learning of it. But now …

Now it had become a terror.

There was her knowledge, for one. He could scarcely look at her without seeing the fact of his damnation in her look, the sluggish blank of someone wracked with guilt and pity for another. Between a woman’s scorn and her truth, the look of the latter was by far the most unmanning.

There was the monolithic immobility of her judgment, for another, the bottomless certitude that he had once attributed to impending motherhood. It was pondering this that he gained some purchase on his newfound fear. Before coming to Ishu?l, he had lacked any measure external to his exasperation, and so had the luxury of attributing her rigidity to obstinance or some other defect of character. But what he had witnessed these past few days … The madness of making—once again—a travelling companion of a D?nyain, only to watch him shatter like pottery against the iron of the Judging Eye … A D?nyain! A son of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, no less!

“The eye,” he had told her in the chill aftermath of Cil-Aujas, “that watches from the God’s own vantage.” But he had spoken without understanding.

Now he had no choice. He could no longer feign ignorance of the fact that in some mad, unfathomable manner, he walked—quite literally—with the God … with the very Judgment that would see him damned. Henceforth, he realized, his every step would be haunted by the shadow of his sacrifice.

“Do you know why?” he asked Mimara when they resumed their descent, the mute boy in stumbling tow.