The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(5)
A Mandate sorcerer named Eskeles is assigned to tutor Sorweel in Sheyic, the common tongue of the Three Seas, and through him the young King learns the reasons why so many worship the Aspect-Emperor so fervently. For the first time he begins to doubt his father … What if the Aspect-Emperor spoke true? What if the world was about to end?
Why else would someone so cunning march so many Men to their doom?
Sorweel is also provided a slave named Porsparian to attend to his needs, a wizened old man who is anything but the submissive thrall he pretends to be. One night Sorweel watches him tear away the turf and mold the face of the Goddess Yatwer from the dirt. Before his eyes, mud bubbles up as spit from her earthen lips. The slave palms this mud and smears it across the incredulous King’s cheeks.
The following morning Sorweel attends a Council of Potentates with Zsoronga and Eskeles. His dread waxes as he watches the Holy Aspect-Emperor move from lord to lord, declaring the truths they think hidden in their souls. He fears what will happen when the man sees the hatred and treachery smoldering in his own. But when Anas?rimbor Kellhus comes to him, he congratulates Sorweel for grasping the truth, and before all those assembled declares him one of the Believer-Kings.
The all-seeing Aspect-Emperor, Sorweel realizes, is blind to the truth of his soul.
Esmenet
Far to the south in Momemn, the capital of the New Empire, Esmenet struggles to rule in her husband’s absence. With Kellhus and the bulk of his armed might faraway, the embers of insurrection have begun to ignite across the Three Seas. The Imperial Court regards her with condescension. Fanayal ab Kascamandri, the Padirajah of what had been the heathen Kianene Empire before the First Holy War, grows ever more bold on the fringes of the Great Carathay Desert. Psatma Nannaferi, the outlawed Mother-Supreme of the Cult of Yatwer, prophecies the coming of the White-Luck Warrior, the godsent assassin who will murder the Aspect-Emperor and his progeny. Even the Gods, it seems, plot against the Anas?rimbor Dynasty. Esmenet turns to her brother-in-law, Maithanet, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, for his strength and clarity of vision, yet she wonders why her husband would leave the Mantle in her incapable hands, when his brother is D?nyain like himself.
She also has the travails of her own family to contend with. All her eldest children have gone. Mimara has fled—to Achamian, she hopes and prays. Kay?tas, Serwa, and her stepson, Mo?nghus, ride with their father in the Great Ordeal. Theliopa remains with her as an advisor, but the girl is scarcely human, she is so narrow and analytical. The next youngest, the mad and murderous Inrilatas, Esmenet keeps imprisoned atop the Andiamine Heights. Only her very youngest, the twins Samarmas and Kelmomas, provide her with any comfort. She clings to them as if they were flotsam in a shipwreck, not realizing that Kelmomas, like his brother Inrilatas, has inherited too many of his father’s gifts. The boy has already driven away Mimara with the cunning of his insinuations. Now he plots deeper ways to secure sole possession of his mother’s heart.
He will tolerate no rivals.
In the city of Iothiah, meanwhile, the White-Luck Warrior reveals himself to Psatma Nannaferi, who summons all her High Priestesses to plot the destruction of the Anas?rimbor. None other than Yatwer, the monstrous Mother of Birth, moves against the Aspect-Emperor. As the Goddess most favoured by slaves and caste-menials, she commands tremendous temporal power. Unrest spreads among the servile poor throughout the Empire.
Even as the first rumours of this sedition reach his mother in Momemn, young Kelmomas continues his own devious insurrection. Where before he had driven Mimara away, now he engineers the death of his idiot twin, Samarmas, knowing that grief for his loss will make his mother even more desperate for his love.
Agonized by the death of Samarmas, Esmenet turns to her brother-in-law, Maithanet, frantic for the thought of a God hunting her family. He reminds her that the Gods can see neither the No-God nor the coming Apocalypse, and so perceive her husband as a threat instead of the Saviour.
At his bidding, Esmenet summons Sharacinth, the officially sanctioned Matriarch of the Yatwerians, to the Andiamine Heights with the intention of setting the Cult against itself. When they fail to cow the woman, Kellhus himself arrives, and breaks her will to resist with the sheer force of his presence. The blubbering Matriarch yields, promising to wrest her Cult from Psatma Nannaferi. The Aspect-Emperor returns to the Great Ordeal, dismaying his Empress with his lack of grief for the death of Samarmas, his son.
Kelmomas sets out that very night and, using his D?nyain gifts, murders Sharacinth and her retinue. Rumours of her assassination travel quickly, igniting the embers of sedition among the slaves and caste-menials. Riots erupt across the Three Seas.
Esmenet does turn to Kelmomas for comfort. At night, she takes to embracing him in her bed while the smell of smoke and the sound of screaming waft through windows. Intoxicated with success, the young Prince-Imperial begins plotting against his uncle, Maithanet, who alone possesses the ability to see through his deception.
THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR
Achamian
The horror of Cil-Aujas lies as much within them as behind. Achamian, Mimara, and the Skin Eaters descend the heights into the vast forests the scalpers call the Mop. The old Wizard presses Mimara, desperate to discover how she had overcome the evil shade of the Nonman King, but she demurs, resenting him for his refusal to explain the Judging Eye. Achamian attempts to make amends a short time after, but a second scalper company, the Stone Hags, ambushes them, and the matter is forgotten. The Skin Eaters have scarce travelled a fraction of the way to the Coffers, and they are decimated. The men take to mutinous muttering, and Achamian finds himself advocating for their Captain, as much as he despises the man’s homicidal understanding of “discipline.”