The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(87)

“Us …” the Survivor had replied. “As we once were.”

Though he understood nothing of what the strangers said, the Survivor easily discerned the outlines of their mission. Ishu?l had been their destination. They had come seeking the D?nyain, and had found only desolation.

The old man had been stunned and heartbroken, but not the pregnant woman. She had come, the Survivor decided, for reasons she did not understand. And she fretted not for the destruction of Ishu?l, but for the ruin of the old man.

The father of the child within her.

These insights had anchored the scenarios that flashed beneath his soul’s eye, the possibilities. When he and the boy revealed themselves, she would be the one to intercede, to domesticate the old man’s fear and suspicion.

For the Survivor had glimpsed relief in the old man, as well. The loitering blinks, the slacking gaze, the slowing heart of a terror averted …

Terror of the D?nyain.

She would be the one to throw open the gates of their trust—that much, at least, had been obvious.

Then they entered the Fathering.

The Survivor had watched her from the blackness, too distant to absorb more than the shape of her demeanour. He saw her stumble as though suddenly struck blind, then gaze witless across the stone beds, the bones of the D?nyain women. Incomprehension … Horror …

Hatred.

A passion as profound as any he had witnessed, seizing her from … nowhere.

She too was mad.

But the old man did not know this. The old man had come to believe in her madness, to take her assessment as his own. Even as she spoke, the Survivor realized that the time for observation had come to an end. They had no choice but to intervene if they were to master this extraordinary turn of circumstance.

She was passing a judgment that the old man did not share—yet.

So he sent the boy out to them.



It belonged to his madness to second-guess decisions regarding the boy. A kind of clamour had swelled within the Survivor, watching him approach the two strangers. The child seemed more frail than he was, more desolate. And out of some darkness came a cold assurance of murder, the wayward conviction that he had sent the boy to his doom …

But these were not Shriekers. They were humans, the clotted canvas the D?nyain had scraped clean. They hungered for understanding, not blood and anguish. They sought knowledge of what had happened to this place … to Ishu?l.

When the boy called out, they listened, stood pricked with hooded apprehension.

And when the old man responded in their tongue, the Survivor realized that something deep connected these travellers to the D?nyain. Something ancient. Something that came before.

When the boy had told the old man his name, Anas?rimbor, he realized that something living connected them as well. Something that inspired endless terror.

It could only be his father.



“Mimara …” the old Wizard croaks. “What … What you ask …”

She understands the threshold she has crossed. She feels the irony. For so many years she mocked the Zaudunyani, for their interminable bowing and scraping, for their adulation, and for their round-eyed sincerity above all. Only now does she understand the truth that their delusions aspire to.

She has pondered the Judging Eye obsessively over the months, probed it like a tongue counting missing teeth. Was it a curse? A gift? Would it break her? Would it exalt? For so long she has sought to understand it, not realizing that it was itself understanding. She had lost herself in the labyrinth of hints and implications, asking things that no soul so slight, so mortal, could every hope to comprehend.

These questions, she now knew, were simply that, questions, words thrown across the face of human ignorance. The mere appearance of honesty …

But now—now she understands: Fanaticism is indistinguishable from knowledge of good and evil.

To possess the Eye is to know who should live and who should die—as certainly as a man knows his own hand! And to know is to stand without worry or constraint, to be in the obstinate, inexhaustible way of inanimate things. To be immovable, unconquerable … even in death.

“You have no choice, Akka,” she says, her voice steeped in murk and compassion. “They are D?nyain …”

She grips his paralytic hand, and it seems necessary and inevitable, the horror and indecision that numbs his expression, slackens his gaze.

“You know the peril they represent. Better than any man living.”



The Survivor watched, impassive and immobile upon the warming slope of masonry. He spoke only to respond to the inquiries of the boy, who continued to struggle with the thoughts beneath the cacophonous flare of human passion.

“His suspicion of us is old …” the boy noted.

“Yes. Decades old.”

“Because of your father.”

“Yes, because of my father.”

“But her suspicion is new.”

“Yes. But it is more than suspicion.”

“She despises us … Because of something she witnessed?”

“Yes. In the Upper Galleries.”

“In the Fathering?”

An image of her standing limned in marine light, dishevelled and forlorn, fury and condemnation boiling over the pots of her eyes.

“She thinks us obscene.”

“But why?”