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

That he would go mad.

Little more than an impoverished wayfarer when he first joined the Holy War, Kellhus used his bearing, intellect, and insight to convince ever more Men of the Tusk that he was the Warrior-Prophet, come to save mankind from the Second Apocalypse. He understood that Men would render anything to him, so long as they believed he could save their souls. He also befriended the Schoolman the Mandate had dispatched to observe the Holy War, Drusas Achamian, knowing that the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, would provide him with inestimable power. And he seduced Achamian’s lover, Esmenet, knowing that her intellect made her the ideal vessel for his seed—for sons strong enough to bear the onerous burden of D?nyain blood.

By the time the battle-hardened remnants of the First Holy War laid siege to Shimeh, Kellhus had achieved absolute authority. The Men of the Tusk had become his Zaudunyani, his Tribe of Truth. While the Holy War assailed the city’s walls, he confronted his father, Mo?nghus, mortally wounding him, explaining that only his death could realize the Thousandfold Thought. Days later Anas?rimbor Kellhus was proclaimed Holy Aspect-Emperor, the first in a millennium, by none other than the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, his half-brother, Maithanet. Even the School of Mandate, who saw his coming as the fulfillment of their most hallowed prophecies, knelt and kissed his knee.

But he had made a mistake. Before reaching the Three Seas and the Holy War, his passage across E?rwa had delivered him to the lands of the Utemot, a Scylvendi tribe renowned for warlike cruelty. Here he had struck a murderous compact with the tribe’s chieftain, Cnaiür urs Ski?tha. Mo?nghus had also fallen into the hands of the Utemot some thirty years prior, and had used the then adolescent Cnaiür to murder his chieftain father and effect his escape. The youth had spent tormented decades pondering what had happened and had come to guess the inhuman truth of the D?nyain. So it was that Cnaiür and Cnaiür alone knew the dark secret of Anas?rimbor Kellhus. Before his death, the barbarian revealed these truths to none other than Drusas Achamian, who had long harboured heartbreaking suspicions of his own. At the coronation, before the eyes of the entire Holy War, Achamian repudiated Kellhus, whom he had worshiped; Esmenet, whom he had loved; and the Mandate masters he had served. Then he fled into the wilderness, becoming the world’s only sorcerer without a school. A Wizard.

Now, after twenty years of war, conversion, and butchery, Anas?rimbor Kellhus prepares to realize the penultimate stage of his father’s Thousandfold Thought. His New Empire spans the entirety of the Three Seas, from the legendary fortress of Auvangshei on the frontiers of Zeum to the shrouded headwaters of the River Sayut, from the sweltering coasts of Kutnarmu to the wild rim of the Osthwai Mountains—all the lands that had once been Fanim or Inrithi. It was easily the equal of the old Ceneian Empire in terms of geographical extent, and far more populous. A hundred great cities, and almost as many languages. A dozen proud nations. Thousands of years of mangled history.

And the Nameless War is nameless no longer. Men call it the Great Ordeal.

THE JUDGING EYE

Achamian

For twenty years Drusas Achamian has kept a painstaking record of his Dreams of the First Apocalypse.

He lives as an exile, the world’s only Wizard, on the savage northeastern frontier of the empire Anas?rimbor Kellhus has raised about his supposed divinity. The Sranc once besieged his half-ruined tower with regularity, but the scalpers have driven the inhuman creatures over the mountains, chasing the Holy Bounty. For years now Achamian has lived in peace, hunting his sleep for hints and rumours of Ishu?l, the hidden fastness of the D?nyain. If he can find Ishu?l, he believes, he can answer the question that burns so bright in so many learned souls …

Who is the Aspect-Emperor?

This peace is shattered when Anas?rimbor Mimara, the daughter of his former wife, arrives demanding he teach her sorcery. Her resemblance to her mother, Esmenet—the harlot who has become Empress of the Three Seas—returns the old Wizard to all the pains he sought to escape. He refuses her demand, bids her to leave time and again, but she defies him and takes up a vigil outside his tower.

Mimara, who has never forgiven her mother for selling her into slavery as a child, has fled the Imperial Court with no intention of returning. She possesses the ability to see the fabric of existence and so the power to learn sorcery—and this, she has decided, is the one thing that will lift her from the mire of shame and recrimination that is her life. She tells herself she has nothing else …

But she also possesses a different kind of sight, one both more precious and more significant: on rare occasions, she can see the morality of things, the goodness and the evil inherent to them. She has what the ancients called the Judging Eye.

Day and night she howls at his tower, demanding that he teach her. The first time he comes down, he strikes her. The second time he tries to reason with her. He explains his lifelong quest to discover the truth of her stepfather Anas?rimbor Kellhus, how he seeks the location of Ishu?l because it is the Aspect-Emperor’s birthplace, and the truth of a man, Achamian insists, always lies in his origins. He tells her how his Dreams have slowly transformed, abandoning the epic atrocities of the First Apocalypse, and focusing more and more upon the mundane details of Seswatha’s ancient life. Because of this, Achamian now knows how to find Ishu?l: he must recover a map that lies hidden in the ruins of ancient Sauglish, far to the north.

“You have become a prophet,” Mimara tells him. “A prophet of the past.”