The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(48)

“So I began acting a prophet, even as I denied being one, knowing that my intellect would astound you and your brothers, that eventually you would make me your prophet …”

“No! Tha—”

“Thus I seized my nation, the First Holy War …”

The Place drew a long-fingered hand across the side of the Believer-King’s face, temple to jaw. They seemed unreal to the man, it knew, those fierce and unruly days. The residue dwelt within him, the imprint of bearing witness, sparked to life from time to time in dreams and reveries. Pebbles from an ocean, but nothing else. Like all other survivors, he was perpetually stranded, forever thrown.

“My father had anticipated this, had known that the trial of my journey would transform me, that the assassin who had departed Ishu?l would arrive his disciple.”

Petulant fury. Toddler defiance. “No! This canno—!”

“But there was something he failed to realize …”

Swollen indecision. Hope reaching out through anguish and asphyxiation, clutching for the reversal that would return everything to what had been. “What? What?”

“That my trial would drive me mad.”



“But you are my Lord! M-my salvation!”

“Caraskand … The Circumfix …”

“No—cease! Stop this! I’m-I’m begging you! Pleas—”

“I began seeing … phantasms, hearing voices … Something began speaking to me.”

“Please … I-I …”

“And in my disorder, I listened … I did what it commanded.”

Sobs wracked the man, the convulsions of a bereaved child. But these words yanked something through Proyas, as if he had been wound by a windlass and released. The Place relaxed its grip, lowered him back to its lap. The man’s bloodshot eyes fixed him heedless of any shame or fury.

“I killed my own father,” the Place said.

“The God! It has to be the God! The God spe—”

“No, Proyas. Gird yourself. Peer into the horror!”

I tend the fields …

A glutinous breath. The squint of a soul attempting to squint away its own misgivings. “You think th-this voice is … is your own?”

And burn them.

The Place smiled the negligent smile of those who could have no stake in feuds so minor.

“The truth of a thing lies in its origins, Proyas. I know not from whence this voice comes.”

Hope, beaming with a hand-seizing urgency. “Heaven! It comes from Heaven! Can’t you see?”

The Place gazed down at its most beautiful slave.

“Then Heaven is not sane.”



The Place bid the man strip and he stripped.

Even after so many years of hardship, the man’s frame remained upright and unbroken. He was lean, the way all Ordealmen were lean; shadow inked the overlay and anchoring of his every muscle. Black hair matted the olive-pale skin of his chest. It thinned to a line as it descended the hollow of his belly, then bloomed about his groin and thighs. His phallus lay grey and inert.

The disciple hung his head, crushing his beard. His gaze was swollen and uncomprehending.

The Place drew its robe up and aside, welcomed the kiss of unencumbered air. It approached the man from behind, reached out to clutch the pulse racing in his throat.

The truth of a thing … it whispered.

It drew its member across the man’s buttocks …

Savoured the flutter beneath its fingertips …

Then the insertion. The stench of feces and sizzling lamb. The cough that was really a sob …

Deep … until all that remained was one place, the congress of Greater Souls.

It seized the man, lifted him from his feet. It used him as he had never been used before.

There was a head upon a pole behind him.



All souls wander. No matter what track they follow, it is never their own.

Faith is thrust upon us all. Even the suicide, who makes a fetish of refusal and a conceit of lamentations, has faith. Even the ironist, who would mock all creation to better sun his thistles. Even he believes …

Faith is as inescapable as Men are small. They are borne breath by breath, a bubble in oily oblivion. No compass is so puny as the now, and yet it is the estate of man, his ephemeral empire. Faith. Faith alone binds him to what was and what will be—to what transcends. Faith alone clasps hands with what is other and holds firm. It is as inevitable as suffering, as compulsory as breath.

Only its object varies …

The in what.

Proyas had believed in Anas?rimbor Kellhus, had assumed he dwelt within a World without horizons, where all the hidden things had been counted and enslaved. He was here and he was now, as meagre as any Man, but he was everywhere and eternal as well—so long as he believed. What horror could the World hold for him, standing at the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s right hand? No matter where he travelled, no matter what atrocities he committed, the God was for him.

But no longer.

The ground had pitched, and all things now fell to the horizon. Proyas did not so much flee as plummet from the Umbilicus, did not so much walk as drop through the canvas-sheeted ways of the encampment, so steep had his world become … the scarp it had always been.

The God had never been for him. It was a spider … Infinite and inhuman.