The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(86)

“They think themselves free?”

The reek. The mewling screams. The thrashing. For years, he had battled through the bowels of the earth. The innumerable cuts as the lines he pursued had become wanton with desperation.

“Only so long as we are dead.”

He had been broken—the Survivor understood this.

He had gone mad for enduring.



The Thousand Thousand Halls had swallowed the Brethren whole, delivering them one by one to the homicidal ardour of their enemy. Every one of them had fought, using all the skill and cunning two thousand years could muster. But not one of them doubted the conclusion of their fell battle.

The D?nyain were doomed.

The old and the young fell first—one miscalculation was all it took, so capricious were the margins. Some were killed outright, vanishing into rutting heaps. More died of sepsis from their wounds. A few even became lost, despite having survived the labyrinth in their youth. The cataclysmic sorceries of the Singers, in particular, threw whole galleries from their mathematical hinges. These wandered out of light and life.

Sealed in.

And so the D?nyain dwindled.

But somehow the Survivor had persevered. No matter how sopped with blood, his strength had never failed him. No matter how ruinous the destruction, he never lost his way—and more importantly, never found himself shut in. He always prevailed, always emerged, and always tended to the babe he had stolen into the depths with him.

Feeding him. Teaching him. Hiding him. Snuffing thousands to keep him safe. He had risked speaking, lest the boy’s ears forget how to listen and comprehend. He had even dared lantern light, lest the boy’s eyes forget how to see.

He, the one most burdened, would be the only one to survive.

For a time the Shriekers had seemed inexhaustible, a never-ending infusion of lives both crazed and disposable. More, always more, released in numbers so tidal they became incalculable, overwhelming even the most elegant of traps: concealed pits, rigged ceilings, abyssal chasms.

But then, as inexplicably as every other turn in the war, their numbers abated. The final dregs were abandoned altogether, left to wander howling until thirst and hunger claimed them. Fewer and fewer, until those he found simply gasped across the floors.

The last cry had been piteous, a screech so wretched as to sound human.

Then the Thousand Thousand Halls fell silent.

Perfectly silent.

The Survivor and the boy wandered the black with impunity after that. But they never dared the surface, even via those chutes they thought undiscovered. Too many had died that way. They wandered and the boy grew, hale despite his underworld pallor.

Only when the last of their stores failed them did they dare the long climb to the surface. They abandoned their underworld temple, their hallowed prison.

The Survivor had emerged in the obliteration of everything he had known, Ishu?l, his brow furrowed against an alien sun. For the first time in his life, he stood naked, utterly exposed to the indeterminacy of the future. He scarcely knew who he was, let alone what he should do.

The boy had gawked at a world he could not remember, stumbled and swayed for vertigo, such was the pull of empty space. “Is that the ceiling?” he had cried, squinting up at the sky.

“No,” the Survivor replied, beginning to realize that the obvious was the greatest enemy of the D?nyain. “The World has no ceiling …”

And he looked to his sandalled feet, stooped to pick a seed from a crotch in the debris. The nut of some tree he did not recognize.

“Only floors … more and more ground.”

Earth for roots. Skies for endless branching, reaching …

Grasping.

Using a black iron cleaver, he felled a tree that had been a sapling ere the Shriekers had come, so he might count the years of their entombment …

And so know the age of his son.



He was not who he was, the Survivor. Too much had been taken.

“What do we do now?” the boy had asked that first day in the sun.

“Tarry …” he said.

That which comes after, he now knew, determined that which comes before. Purpose was no illusion. Meaning was real.

“Tarry?”

“The World has not finished with Ishu?l …”

And the boy nodded in belief and understanding. He never doubted the Survivor, though he remained wary of the madness within him. He could not do otherwise, such was the screaming, the indiscriminate slaughter.

There was the day he told the boy to stop breathing, lest the clouds alert their enemy. There was the day he gathered a hundred stones, then wandered through the forest, killing ninety-nine birds.

There were many such days—for he could not stop saving … killing …

He was not who he was.

He was a seed.



And now these people …

They looked like D?nyain, but they were not.

The boy had fled to him immediately after spying the old man and the pregnant woman descend into the valley. Together they had followed the couple’s progress toward Ishu?l, tracking the bubble of silence their presence opened in the forest. They watched them wander forlorn through the ruins. When the two descended into the Upper Galleries, they closed the distance, hanging at the very limit of their inexplicable light. Soundless, they shadowed them, stealing what glimpses coincidence afforded.

“Who are they?” the boy had whispered.