The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(56)

Mimara was right. To dream such a thing now …

What could it mean?

To suffer this Dream the very day he would at last set foot in Ishu?l. To not only see Shauriatas, but to learn the true fate of Nau-Cay?ti—or something of it. What could it mean to learn the truth of one great Anas?rimbor’s death, just before discovering the truth of another, even greater Anas?rimbor’s birth?

What was happening?

He sat rigid, his breath pinched by the sense of things converging …

Origin to ending.

What came after to what came before.

“Come,” Mimara called, standing, brushing grit from her ragged trousers. The sickle of her belly caught an errant lance of sunlight … The old Wizard momentarily forgot how to breathe.

A chevron of geese soared above, barking southward.

“We have bones to inspect,” she said with the weariness and resolve of a long-suffering mother.



They pick their way down through the remains of an ancient moraine, climbing between boulders that chance had arrayed in descending barricades. Mimara follows the old Wizard, her eyes keen for any glimpse of the ruined fastness through the raggish trees. Ishu?l had been raised on the low hip of a mountain to the southwest, forcing them to descend into the very basement of the vale, before resuming their climbing approach. Periodically, she sees decapitated towers and sections of truncated wall rising between the dark crowns. The teetering stone looks ancient and wind-blasted, bleached sterile for countless ages of exposure. An eerie silence permeates the surrounding forest.

“What will we do now?” she asks with a vague air of surprise. With the Qirri, it seems only the merest whim separates what is spoken from what is merely thought. More and more she finds herself verbalizing ill-considered things.

“What we are doing!” the old Wizard snaps without so much as glancing at her.

It’s okay, little one …

She understands his dismay. For him, finding the map in the ruined Library had been a kind of irrefutable sign, divine indication that he had not acted in vain. But when he had finally crested the glacier, when he finally peered across the vale and found the destination he had hunted in his Dreams for twenty years ruined, his newfound conviction had tumbled from him, whipped away on the high mountain wind.

Papa had a scary dream.

Drusas Achamian knew the cruelty of Fate—perhaps more profoundly than she. Perhaps they had been lured here simply to be broken—a punishment for vanity perhaps, or for nothing at all. The Holy Sagas were literally filled with such stories of divine treachery. “The Whore,” she once read in Casidas, “will carry you through wars and famine in glory, only to drown you for tripping in a ditch.” She remembers smiling at the passage, taking heart in the laying low of the high and mighty, as if the punishment of the exalted was at once the vengeance of the weak.

What if the D?nyain were extinct? What if they had travelled all this way, ushered all those men—those scalpers—to their deaths for nothing at all?

The thought almost makes her laugh, not out of any callousness, but out of exhaustion. Toil, harsh and relentless, has a way of twisting hope into self-consuming circles. Battle peril long enough, she has learned, and you will come to see salvation in your doom.

The quiet seems to intensify as they near the broken sanctuary. A ringing seeps into her ears. Out of some reflex, they close the space between them, so that they continually bump and brush each other. They begin measuring their steps, leaning and ducking as much to remain hidden as to avoid dead branches. They begin creeping as though approaching an enemy camp, their footfalls inaudible save for the smothered pop of twigs beneath the matted pine needles. They peer through the branching gloom.

After scaling cliffs, glaciers, and mountains, the slopes and defilades about the fortress should have seemed insignificant. They tower instead, pitched to angles that only their souls can perceive. Squinting up the broken incline, she glimpses dead stone in sunlight, wind she cannot feel combing through thronging weeds and sapling trees. It seems they climb a burial mound.

She thinks of the Qirri, the pinch of bitter bliss, and her mouth begins watering.

They come to the debris robed about the foundations. The trees yield to mountain sunlight … Dazzling sheets.

And they find themselves in the wind, standing on the ruined perimeter, staring across a sight she can scarce believe.



Ishu?l … She is breathless for thinking it.

Ishu?l … An empty name spoken from the far side of the world.

Ishu?l … Here. Now. About her eyes. Beneath her feet.

The birthplace of the Aspect-Emperor …

Of the D?nyain.

She turns to the old Wizard and sees Drusas Achamian, the hallowed Tutor, the infamous Exile, clad in rotting pelts, wild with the filth of endless escape. Sunlight flashes for glimpses of Nil’giccas’s nimil hauberk. Sunlight flashes from his wetted cheeks.

Fear stabs her breast, he looks so frail and wretched.

He is a prophet of the past. Mimara knows this now—and it terrifies her.

When she had made this declaration so many months ago—impossible months—she had spoken with the insincerity of those who speak to appease. She had answered the unaccountable instinct, one that all Men share, to brace wavering souls with vainglorious pictures of what might be. She had spoken out of haste and expedient greed, and yet somehow, she had spoken true. Dreams had summoned him to Ishu?l. Dreams had sent him to Sauglish for the means to find it. Dreams of the past had driven him, not visions of the future …