The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(185)

“Invit—what invitation? You mean to snort the Qi—”

“The invitation to leap!”

Now it was Achamian’s turn to stare speechless.

“To join the Absolute,” she spat before stalking off.

He stood upon the saddle of level ground they had taken as their stage, motionless for the horror plunging through him, the one he had borne since first fleeing the White Yaksh and kept afloat by refusing to stop, refusing to think.

His skin prickled, flushed where exposed to the chill. Cnaiür urs Ski?tha boiled as a vapour before him.

“And now you find yourself in my tent, sorcerer …”



The Dreams fell hard upon what little opportunity he had to sleep, dreams drawn from the sheath. One moment the ground beneath him was slowly revolving, pricking like thistles and humming, so much he despaired of ever falling asleep. Then he was lurching, thinking blood-clotted thoughts, climbing the throat of a moaning horn. Golden walls leaned upon warring angles, surfaces betraying different sigils on different angles, elongated etchings, each as fine as an infant’s hair.

Wretches … human wretches. A shambling line, nude, white where not soiled or scabbed or welted. The chain was drawn and he swam forward, one in a necklace of thousands.

Toothless. The shadow of fists and hammers fell upon his face.

Their captors floated as tyrannical shadows, beasts that were terrors, that reduced him and the others to automatic cringes and whimpers, hapless reflexes. Those that faltered were pried from their shackles, dragged aside, beaten, raped. He could know of others likewise taken ahead of them by the gaps in the chain, how he was sometimes hauled forward four steps instead of two. No one spoke, though some managed to scream, to hack and grunt, noises reflected raw across the unearthly gold. He more started at sounds than heard them. To flee degradation one had to flee the World entire, to become a flame that burned no fuel. The fact that he yet lived meant his body—the merest meat of him—had learned as much.

He glimpsed ciphers webbed into planes of mirror soggomant.

He was missing his teeth.

A lolling gaze revealed a skewed vacancy above, scarps of metallic babble vanishing into blackness. He swayed for cresting the final step, so deep did the blackness gape about him. The sound of the great hammer cracking chains erupted through the hollow, disintegrated into surf-like echoes. With each clap, there was a pause … then the chain yanked him forward with the rest, men jointed in milk and lard. The wretched file extended before him, bare feet greasing a polished black floor, shoulders shining orange and crimson …

And the nameless captive peered out from the refuge of his misery, blinked for the sight of a ceiling hanging suspended above them—a ceiling of flame.

And though he knew it not at all, the old Wizard groaned in his sleep.

Unchained figures stood transfixed beneath it, Nonmen in various states of undress, gazing up … Tears enamelled their cheeks with furnace reflections, silken wings of saffron and crimson, damnation signed in passerine lights. They paid no heed to the mortals chained in their midst, for they were every bit as enslaved.

The hammer resounded and the brutalized captive blinked and the chain heaved the battered souls ahead of him forward with him, the same two besotted steps. Inexorably, stroke by cracking stroke, he was drawn beneath the ceiling, witless, oppressed by its lurid silence. A single glance exhausted his daring, a peek into fires burning upon fires, a bottomless regression. Otherwise, he looked only at the tumult reflected across the floor as the chain dragged him beneath its onerous canopy. For all the light it appeared to shed approaching, it formed no more than a wreath about the black pool of his face, fire pale as blowing snow. With the every haul on the chain, the mirrored lights would seem to grow as hair behind his shoulders.

He dragged his tongue about the sockets of his gums, pressing the tip into every sour pit.

And he found he knew the fire … realized that his empty reflection wore Hell as a wig.

Then the hammer cracked, he stumbled forward in lurching unison, and the ceiling was behind him, and he walked glass over void once again. He dared peer ahead, out across the broken souls preceding …

And he saw it, a harder black staining the gloom, a confluence of gleaming edge and surface, the oiled phantom of something black looming in blackness …

A mighty sarcophag—

The old Wizard blinked, coughed terror, squinted as though night were daybreak. A flood of spinning relief seized him. Teeth! He had his teeth! He seized the slight arms that had roused him, peered at Mimara kneeling over him, her eyes welling with tears.

Achamian gasped aloud, wrung by passions indecipherable and plain.

He pressed a palm across the woman’s swollen womb.

And he hung upon his terror as a smile breaking, understanding at last that fatherhood, more than anything else, was mummery, the will to be a father needed, not the father you happened to be.

It was happening. The Second Apocalypse had begun.

“All-all will be well …” he croaked, trusting she would see that he lied for the right reasons, if she could see at all. “You ne-need only believe.”





Character and Faction Glossary


House Anas?rimbor

Kellhus - the Aspect-Emperor.

Maithanet - Shriah of the Thousand Temples, half-brother to Kellhus.

Esmenet - Empress of the Three Seas.