The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(85)
The Shriekers descended upon Ishu?l in violence and fury. The valley was evacuated, the gates barred, and for the first time confusion and discord ruled the D?nyain. To dwell as they dwelt in a world groomed to its barest essentials, where the course of leaves could provoke scandal, had weakened them in ways they could never imagine. They could feel it, watching the savage cohorts stream down the mountains, their vulnerability to things wild and disordered. To live lives within the circuit of expectation, without any real comprehension of surprise, the way it breaches, throws the soul back in wincing disarray. They realized they had become something delicate in their millennial pursuit of the Unconditioned.
Some, a few, simply walked into the swords of their enemy, such was their soul’s disorder. But the others rallied—discovered that the assaulting world was, in its way, more delicate still.
The sun bright. The air gusting between the gaping heights. The battlements choked with motion and fury. The catwalks slicked in blood. The slopes matted with the miscreant fallen …
The Survivor had stepped between arrows and javelins, running down the miraculous course between flying points and edges, and he had struck the life out of hundreds. Tendons severed. Throats cut. Limbs lopped. Horns cawed low and sonorous over the screaming yammer, while he and his brothers battled in exquisite silence, striking and leaping and dipping across the heights, almost tireless, almost invulnerable, almost …
Almost.
The World was wild with Cause, true, but it could be overcome. How could so few exact such a toll otherwise? The ferocity of the inexplicable attack waned, then faded. The Shriekers relented, slunk howling back into the forests. And despite everything, the Survivor had thought the D?nyain confirmed: in their discipline, in their training and their doctrine—even in their fanatical solitude …
Then the Singers had come, shouting in voices of light and fire, and the extent of their delusion had been made clear.
That which comes before determines that which comes after … This had been the sacred rule of rules, the all-embracing dictum, the foundation upon which the whole of their society—their flesh as much as their doctrine—had been raised.
Demolished in the space of a heartbeat.
The Survivor had watched, not so much stupefied as numbed. Unlike the Shriekers, who had descended the eastern glacier, the Singers had appeared out of the west, mail-armoured figures filing across empty air. Each bore a lozenge of light within their mouths—one so bright it seemed they chewed miniature suns. They sang, their voices like a waterfall boom, hanging indecipherable, the sound falling inward from all directions, as if they called from beyond the very frame of the World.
No miracle could be more violent. Words—words had called forth death and energy from emptiness. He had watched that which comes after determine what comes before. He had witnessed the rank impossibility that the Manuscripts called sorcery, the overthrow of his every assumption. And what was more, it seemed that he could see its residue, as if its exercise stained somehow, cast shadows across the light of the mundane world.
The Singers approached their hallowed bastions, their voices thundering in white unison, rising with impossible resonances, echoing across spaces and surfaces that simply did not exist. And the Brethren had stared without breath or comprehension.
This, the Survivor would later realize. This was the moment of their destruction. The instant before the looms of glittering light had crowned Ishu?l’s heights with fire and destruction. The lull preceding … when each of the Brethren realized they had been deceived, that the compass of their lives let alone their assumption had been little more than errant fancy …
The towers of Ishu?l burned. And they fled through the groves and gardens, withdrew into the bosom of the Thousand Thousand Halls.
Took shelter in the very judge that had so utterly failed them.
The Siege and Fall of Ishu?l …
The loss: a mere place. What was this compared to the revelation that accompanied it?
That which comes after could determine that which comes before … The impossible made manifest. The world was an arrow with one and only one direction, or so they had believed. Only the Logos, only reason and reflection could bend the world’s inexorable course. Thus the D?nyain and their hallowed mission: to perfect the Logos, to grasp the origins of thought, bend the arrow into a perfect circle, and so attain the Absolute …
Become a self-moving soul.
Free.
But the Shriekers and their Singers cared nothing for their doctrine—only for their extinction.
“Why do they hate us?” the boy asked, not for the first time. “Why do so many wish to destroy us?”
“Because in our deception,” the Survivor replied, “we became a truth, one too terrifying for the World to countenance …”
For years the Brethren had battled through the Thousand Thousand Halls, entombed in blackness and butchery, living by touch and sound, disguising their scent by wearing the skins of their enemy. Killing. Slaughtering …
“What truth?” the boy pressed.
“That freedom is the measure of the darkness that comes before.”
He had fallen like fangs upon them, sent them gushing to the dust. Limbs like chains tearing the seams of his unseen enemy. Hands like vindictive teeth. He stepped between their frenzied exertions, cut and cutting. Their blood was thinner than that of the Brethren, but it clotted faster. It tasted more of tin than copper.