The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(88)

“Because the Brethren make tools of all things, even wombs.”

The boy turned to him. Sunlight picked random filaments from the stubble dusting his scalp. “You have never spoken of this before.”

“Because our women are dead.”

The Survivor explained how, in the First Great Analysis, the ancient D?nyain had jettisoned all the customs that bound them so they might contemplate the Shortest Path without prejudice or constraint. Because of the differences in intellect between them, they recognized the onerous obstacle posed by paternity and physiognomy. Training was not enough. The assumption that the Absolute could be grasped through mere thinking, that Men were born with the native ability to grasp the Infinite, was little more than vain conceit. The flesh, they realized. Their souls turned on their flesh, and their flesh was not capable of bearing the Absolute. They had realized that breeding was the only sure route, so it was decided that men and women would be bred according to the fitness of their progeny.

“Over the centuries, the sexes were transformed,” he said, “each according to their share of our burden.”

The boy gazed at him, so open, so weak compared to what he should have been, and yet as impenetrable as a stone compared to the worldborn couple.

“So she resembles the First Mothers?”

A single, slow blink. An image of branches. The sound of the dying masticating in the dark.

“Yes.”

The Shriekers had chewed their own limbs in the end, suckled on the teat of their own leaking life, dying as they did in the blind deeps of the Thousand Thousand Halls.



Mimara fumes. From whence does the will to argue—to contradict—arise?

Over the years she had argued not so much with her fists as from them. No matter how slight the confrontation, she always held them balled so tight as to score her palms with indentations of her fingernails. She had scoffed from her neck and upper chest, the one stiff with indignation and the other tight with anxiousness. She had sneered from her jaw, her eyes slack with the threat of tears.

Never had she contended, as she did now, from her belly …

From the very root of all that mattered.

“The Scylvendi …” the old Wizard says with an air of seizing upon some jewel in his thought. “Cnaiür urs Ski?tha … Mo?nghus’s true father. He travelled half E?rwa without succumbing to Kellhus. We don’t need to do this! We don’t need to do this precisely because we know that they are D?nyain!”

“The Scylvendi,” she snorts. Pity jostles to the fore of her battling passions. “And where is he now, Cnaiür urs Ski?tha?”

A look of shock. Achamian has grown accustomed to her alacrity, the swiftness of her tongue and intellect. How could he not, fending her barbs as he has across the very breadth of E?rwa? But for all her cleverness, she has never possessed genuine strength, let alone the potency of conviction—only anger.

“Dead,” the former Schoolman admits.

“So knowing is no surety against them?”

She is using his own arguments now—from their first meeting in H?noreal, when he tried to convince her that she was an agent of her stepfather, whether witting or not.

“No,” the old man concedes.

“Then we have no choice!”

Damnable woman!

“No, Mimara … No!”

She finds herself squeezing her abdomen, such is her fury.

“But I have seen them! With the Eye, Akka!” The contempt, the outrage and righteous indignation—none of these are here own. Truth owns everything now.

Her belly.

“I have seen them with the Eye!”



Such a carp! Relentless. As clever as she was cruel. And now, bloodthirsty. She even seemed a remorseless warrior-maiden, her hair cropped, the scales of her She?ra corselet glinting in the sun.

A part of him scoffed and marvelled, asked what had so bent her sense of right and wrong. But these thoughts were less than sincere, ways to shroud the understanding that hulked beneath …

The fact that she was right.

They were D?nyain. If they left them behind, what religion would they manufacture? What nation would they seize? If they took them along—as prisoners or companions—how could he and Mimara not be enslaved?

Only now, it seemed, could he appreciate the peril of dwelling within the circuit of such a dwarfing intellect. How could one be free in the presence of such beings? How could one be anything other than a child, manipulated at every turn?

These were questions he had pondered long watches over the years. Even in abstraction and retrospect, they had seemed onerous. And how could they not? when they always watered at the well of Esmenet …

He was a man who had surrendered his wife!

But to ask such questions now in the living presence of the D?nyain made them seem more than mortal.

Because they were, he realized. More than lives depended on how he answered …

He forced himself to regard the two, boy and man, against the grain of the sudden aversion that welled within him. It was always better, a fraction of him had decided, to look around those you might kill.

The shadows were retreating, shrinking toward the very sun that routed them. Given the higher perch of the D?nyain, the old Wizard could see the line of bright and gloom draw down across the two. Where they once seemed a piece with the ruined tower’s foundations, now they seemed quite apart. The boy sat hugging his knees, a posture too careless to be anything other than premeditated. The Survivor sat in the manner of teamsters long on the wagon, leaning forward, elbows on knees. His woolen smock seemed to absorb the sunlight without remainder. His skin was striped and hooked for the random play of scars, the result of some artist’s disordered folly.