The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(61)

She blinks, then blinks again, but the Eye refuses to close. She sees rolling heads, masticating mouths. The Whale-mothers, tongueless and screaming … The lean men arched like shitting dogs.

She sees the unspeakable evil that is the Shortest Path.

“This place … The D?nyain … Th-they … They are evil …”

She turns to him, glimpses the horror rising behind his charred face.

“You-you …” he begins in a thin voice. “You see this wi—?”

A roaring crashes through her, a thunder beyond the reach of her ears. Her edges blacken, pursue her inward. Sensation shrinks … then blooms in proportions titanic and absurd. Suddenly she sees Him, her stepfather, Anas?rimbor Kellhus I, the Holy Aspect-Emperor, high on his throne, wreathed in darkness and fury, a malignant cancer cast across the far corners of the world …

Doom incarnate.

Suddenly she sees the Truth of the old Wizard’s terror. A D?nyain ruled the World—a D?nyain!

She reels as if struck, so sudden, so absolute is the inversion of her understanding. Her She?ra corselet, which has always amazed her for its arcane weightlessness, suddenly drags as iron upon her shoulders.

For so long Momemn has been the luminous summit, the hub that ferried light to the more shadowy extremities of the Empire. Despite her hatred, it has always seemed both the source and the rule—for it is ever the want of the heart to make home its measure of measures. But now it pulsed with dread implication, glutinous with foul blackness, a leprous counterpoint to Golgotterath, another stain blotting the world’s mapped places.

“My mother!” she cries, seeing her flicker like a candle flame beneath the rising night. “Akka! We have to find her! Warn her!”

The old Wizard stands gaping, astounded—as well as blasted with the wages of his damnation in the Eye. Everywhere, all around them, torment and perdition, radiating like stones kicked from the Fire. Has the entire world been consigned to Hell?

She tries to blink away the Eye—to no avail. She finds herself fumbling with her own urgency, so long has it been since anything abstract has pierced the Qirri’s numbing swaddle.

The Wizard was right. The very World … The World already hangs from the gibbet …

One final swing and its neck is broken.

“Wha-what?” the damned soul before her stammers. “What are you saying?”

Then the Eye closes, and the judgment of things is rinsed into the outlines of vision, into nonexistence. The facts of Drusas Achamian blot the value, and she sees him bewildered, bent with age, cracked by a life of sorcerous insurrection. He holds her by the shoulders, close despite the proximity of her Chorae to his breast. Tears glaze his rutted cheeks.

“The Eye …” she gasps.

“Yes? Yes?”

Then she glimpses it over his frayed shoulder.

A shadow flitting between stacked debris. Pale. Small.

A Sranc?

She hisses in alarm. The old Wizard looks about frowning, his eyebrows pulled into a shaggy stoop above his gaze.

“There …” she whispers, pointing toward a slot between the bone-laden sarcophagi.

The old Wizard peers into the anxious gloom. With a flourish of his fingers he throws his Surillic Point into the chamber’s deeper regions. She leans against the vertigo of sweeping shadows.

They both glimpse the figure, their hearts pounding to the same terror. They see the eyes glitter, the face squint with blank wonder.

Not a Sranc.

A boy … A boy with his head shaved in mockery of Nil’giccas.

“Hiera?” he calls, as if utterly unperturbed by his discovery. “Slaus ta heira’as?”



It torqued the old Wizard’s ears, so long had it been since he last heard the tongue outside his Dreams.

“Where?” the boy had asked. “Where is your lantern?”

Achamian even recognized the peculiar intonation—though from twenty, as opposed to two thousand, years past. The child spoke K?niüric … but not in the ancient way, the way Anas?rimbor Kellhus had spoken it so long ago.

The child was D?nyain.

Achamian swallowed. “C-come out,” he called, straining to speak about the bolt of horror and confusion in his throat. “You have nothing to fear from us.”

The child stood from his feckless crouch, stepped from behind the sarcophagus that obscured him. He wore a man’s woolen tunic, the grey fabric belted and cinched to fit. He was slender, and from the look of him, tall beyond his years. He gazed avidly at the Surillic Point above, held out his hands as though testing the light for raindrops. Three fingers had been lopped from his right hand, making a crab’s claw of his thumb and forefinger.

He turned to appraise the two interlopers.

“You speak our tongue,” he said mildly.

Achamian stood rigid, unblinking.

“No, child. You speak my tongue.”



Sit. This is the imperative of old men when the World besieges them. Retire from the confusion, consider it in dribs and drabs rather than grapple with it whole. Sit. Recover your wind while pondering.

Mimara had found his dread answer. In the space of heartbeats she had confirmed a lifetime of fears. But witless incomprehension seemed the most he could summon by way of reply. Stammering indecision where horror and dismay should have ruled.

This boy represented a different kind of confirmation—and conundrum.