The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(183)

Only the blond woman could hope to catch him …

The one with fists for a face.



It seemed Achamian could feel the wind of their passing long after they had vanished outside.

“Call it back,” Mimara said dully, fixing the King-of-Tribes in a stunned gaze.

Cnaiür leaned back, casually snatched a crab-apple from a small hide sack behind him. He halved the thing with a single bite, then studied the exposed flesh, white bruised with lime.

“Call it back!” Mimara cried, this time with menace as much as urgency.

“That-that thing!” the old Wizard sputtered on the heels of her demand. “Scylvendi fool! That thing is deceit! As much inside as without! Lies stacked upon lies until it mocks a soul! Cnaiür! Cnaiür! You lie with Golgotterath! Don’t you see?”

The barbarian seized him by the windpipe, stood from a crouch, hoisting him on a swing. Achamian kicked, gripped the strapped forearm desperate to relieve his throat of his own weight, to gain distance from the Chorae bound to his navel.

“Enough!” Mimara shrieked.

And to the old Wizard’s floundering amazement, the mad Scylvendi heeded her, dumped him in a rancid sheaf upon the mats. Achamian scrambled to his feet, stood beside Mimara, who, like him, could only stare puzzled and aghast at the sight of Cnaiür urs Ski?tha, breaker-of-horses-and-men, laughing in a manner both grotesque and maniacal—laughing at him.

Nausea welled through the old Wizard. For the first time he truly believed he was going to die.

“She!” the King-of-Tribes barked. “She sees too much to see anything! But you, sorcerer, you are the fool—truly! So busy peering after what cannot be seen, you forever kick upon the ground at your own feet!”

Cnaiür towered over the two Ketyai, greased for sweat, surreal for the white grill of scars shining in firelight.

“Bah! My ends are my own, and my trust has long rotted to dust and bone. My prize belongs to me in ways you cannot know! But what of you? What of your prize, pick?” He even spat the slur with a Tydonni chirrup, an evil little memento of the First Holy War. “How can you seize what you cannot even see?”

“So you propose to outwit the Consult?” Achamian cried, appalled as much as alarmed. “Is that what yo—?”

“I outwitted a D?nyain!” the mad Scylvendi roared. “I murdered one! No soul is so devious with hate, so mazed with furies as me!”

The old Wizard and the pregnant woman shrank from his slicked aspect, the titanic sum of his rage and hulking frame.

“Twenty summers!” he boomed. “Twenty summers have passed since I stole into your tent, and told you, as I dandled your life between my thumb and finger, the Truth—the Truth of him! Twenty winters have thawed, and now you find yourself in my tent, sorcerer, every bit as lost, as baffled and dismayed!”

The mad Scylvendi’s voice cracked like flint, roared of a piece with the fire.

“Every bit as blind to the darkness that comes before!”



He ran, sketched impossible figures through the air, twisting like a snake thrown between swatting swords. More and more he heard the thrum of bows, the zip of archery criss-crossing the emptiness. The whole host seemed to descend upon the regions about him, until all was erratic torchlight and roiling commotion. But he could hear the nearing limit, the infinite well of the wilderness, plunging off in all directions, the promise of solitary flight …

A single turn was all it took.

He would have paused, so certain was he of this newfound invulnerability. He would have fashioned impenetrable armour out of their ignorance, returned to find his companions …

Were it not for the woman—the thing—flying like a silk scrap on a tempest behind him, gaining …

He resumed sprinting across the forest floor. The ground became cramped. Elms and walnuts thinning. Stone breaching. Still she gained, and he pressed harder, sacrificing endurance for flight. The canopy became leprous, scum across the crystalline deep. Beneath, the nocturnal terrain bobbed like chips of wood upon the flood, trees and ground rising, rushing, sweeping into the oblivion of what once was …

And still she gained.

He had fled like this before. Eleven times.

And though the blindness of the Thousand Thousand Halls had been absolute, his memories were of silver, screeching and grunting, silver twining like fish through the deep, dividing rather than deciding, and so halved by each and every forking passage, until they became a fog of pathetic individuals. He had clung to the Survivor’s back the first seven occasions, monkey-clinging, whooping to a glee he could never quite feel, buoyant, air whistling through his ears, snapping his robes, blood … exploding …

The fact of the Survivor’s power had been something unquestioned—unthought. Things lifted, dropped. The Survivor conquered—always and everything. He had never supposed they could be defeated, that they could succumb to the bestial frenzy. But then he had never supposed the Shriekers would dwindle and vanish, the last of their silver screams eaten by the labyrinthine black. He had never supposed there could be such a thing as sun.

The Survivor survived—always …

The Survivor protected. Made safe.

The madness worsens?

The forest whipped about his running, a weave of nocturnal complexities falling into oblivion.

She was faster, the blond-haired thing. Hers was the deeper wind. He need only attend to the blank behind him to know, to the chitinous cadence of her strides, the advancing tick …