The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(84)

A ship creaks on the wine-dark sea, a slaver ship …

Mummy … the little girl sobs, listening to the shuffle of boots across the timber floors.

“Anas?rimbor Kellhus is D?nyain,” the woman says to the old Wizard, speaking to silence the riot that is her heart.

Mummeeee please!

“As much as these two.”

Please make them stop.

The old Wizard has seen through her anger, glimpsed the hope-cracking turmoil beneath. She can tell by his hesitation.

“What are you saying?” he finally asks.

Her voice shocks her, it sounds so measured and cool. “That you must kill them.”

He knew. He knew all along that this was what she demanded. She could tell—like a D?nyain.

“Murder.”

She turns to the two onlookers, knowing they could see her dark intent, and not caring in the least. She barks with laughter, a sound that earns a look of scowling alarm from the old Wizard.

She smiles at the man, husband and father, and feels at once vicious and victorious.

“There’s no murdering a D?nyain.”



They sat side-by-side on the rump of what had been the northwest tower, observing the old man and his pregnant woman arguing below. The sun glared from between eastern peaks, cool for the emptiness and the wind, climbing inexorably from the pockets of night. The spruce breathed. Rising light etched the ridge-lines and branching ravines, drawing angles steep with the contrast of encroaching shadow.

“What do they say?” the boy asked.

The Survivor replied without interrupting his study. Their language defeated him, yet the other, nonverbal tongues of their souls spoke with an almost painful clarity—like the Shriekers, only more complicated. The pounding hearts and wringing hands. The rictus of muscle about their eyes their lips. The frequency of blinks …

“The woman argues our destruction.”

The boy was unsurprised. “Because she fears us.”

“They both fear us—the man more than the woman. But she hates us in a way the old man is not capable.”

“She is stronger?”

The Survivor need only look to nod. “She is stronger.”

The implication was plain. If she were stronger, then she would carry the dispute.

“Should we flee?” the boy asked.

The Survivor closed his eyes, glimpsed bodies convulsing in holes—memories, not possibilities.

“No.”

“Should we kill them?”

For all the complexities of this extraordinary turn, the Survivor had no need of the Probability Trance to dismiss this course of action.

“The old man is a Singer. We are overmatched.”

He had been among those on the battlements when the invaders had floated from the forest galleries, advanced across empty space, their mouths and eyes afire. He need not blink to see his brethren tossed from the walls, pinioned by lines of scorching white.

“Then we should flee,” the boy concluded.

“No.”

Ignorance. This had been the cornerstone of the Brethren, the great rampart they had raised against what comes before. They had raised darkness against darkness, and it had proven a catastrophic miscalculation. Only so long as the World remained ignorant of them, could they remain secure against it, let alone isolate and pure.

History. History had come in the form of inhuman legions, creatures as bound to their crazed passions as the Brethren were free. History had come as death and destruction.

Ishu?l had fallen long before her walls had been pulled down, the Survivor knew. The D?nyain had been destroyed long before they had sheltered in the deepest deeps of the Thousand Thousand Halls. The World had learned of them, somehow, and had counted them a mortal threat.

The time had come to discover why.

“Then what?”

“We must accompany them. We must leave Ishu?l.”

The boy lacked all but the most rudimentary instruction, such had been their straits over the years. He could track the passions of the woman and the old man easily enough, but the thoughts and significances utterly eluded him. He could scarcely attain the Divestiture, the first stage of the Probability Trance. He was D?nyain by virtue of his blood, not his training.

It would have to be enough.

“Why?” the child asked.

“We must seek my Father.”

“But why?”

The Survivor resumed his implacable scrutiny of the old man and his pregnant woman.

“The Absolute has fled this place.”



The Thousand Thousand Halls plumbed the earth to the bowel, rising high into the encircling mountains, innumerable miles of passage hewn from the living rock. For two thousand years the D?nyain had toiled, reaching forever deeper, etching mathematical conundrums into the earth’s very fundament. They used the labour to condition the body, to teach the soul how to ponder independent of menial tasks. They used the labyrinth to sort those who would live from those who would die, and those who would work from those who would train and father. It refashioned the strong, and it buried the weak. The Thousand Thousand Halls had been their first and most cruel judge, the great sieve through which the generations spilled, collected and discarded.

How could they know it would be their salvation?

The Shriekers had come without the least warning. There had been anomalies the previous years, members of the Brethren sent out never to be seen, others found dead in their cells—suicides. An absence had moved among them, the shadow of contaminants not quite disposed. Their isolation had been compromised—they knew this much and nothing more. They did not trouble themselves with the implications, understanding the dead had taken their lives for purity’s sake. To interrogate the circumstances of their deaths would simply undo their sacrifice—and perhaps necessitate another. To embrace ignorance, even one so hallow as their own, was to embrace risk. A garden was not a garden absent the possibility of things going to seed.