To be a Man is to take the frame of Man as firmament, to be immovable unto oneself. And to know Man as a Man is to be blind to this common frame, to be without knowing. Thus is knowing the corruption of being. And so to learn what it is to be a Man is to cease to be a Man.
—Treatise on Diremption, ANONYMOUS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Demua Mountains
Ishuäl destroyed. His father rediscovered. The Doctrine utterly overthrown.
This was a Study like no other.
The mountain wind fluted through as much as across the Survivor’s skin. Slices. Incisions. Sickle-shaped and puckered. Intersecting. Even his scarring bore scars. Had his memory not been perfect he could have used his body as a map, a cipher. Every desperate stand. Every vicious encounter. His trial had been carved into the very meat of him, the residue of a thousand thousand shortest paths. Decisions without number.
He had become a hieroglyph, a living indication of things both invisible and profound. No matter how bright the sun burned, darkness surrounded him. No matter how deep the distance, slavering beasts encircled him. No matter how peaceful the birdsong, how quiet the jackpine and high stone, cutting edges whistled in the black, points gutted the near-emptiness.
Cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts …
He had become a walking word. The only one that mattered now that Ishuäl was gone …
Survival.
He and the boy followed the old man and the woman, their ears pricked to the brief exchanges between them. Lexicons were expanded. Grammars were considered and revised. They correlated tones and expressions, and began milking ever more meaning from the raw sounds.
They ascended slopes, followed switchback paths, labouring through high-altitude shadows.
By some fluke of their approach, the sun breached the mountain along the line of the glacier, so that all the world seem dazzled. They climbed toward the fields of hanging shimmer.
Shriekers bubbled up through the black. The Survivor blinked—flinched.
The boy observed.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
Despite their apparent infirmity, the worldborn couple scarcely paused for respite. They climbed with alacrity, trotted with relentless wind—so much so that the boy was taxed on occasion. It was the substance, the Survivor realized, the drug they administered with an exchange of fingertips: it deepened their lungs as much as it quickened their wits and their limbs.
Another mystery …
More promising than the others.
The ink of knowledge blots the page. The couple understood what they were, but only in rough approximation. Their concepts could only touch, never grasp, the principles of the Dûnyain. They lacked the required precision.
But as partial and incomplete as their understanding was, they nevertheless assumed that they knew everything they needed to know—and so were safe, or at least shielded from the refugees. They could no more fathom their straits than a crow could read.
They would succumb. The Survivor need only aim his soul and they would succumb—eventually. The woman’s madness was naught but a complication. The old man’s hatred and knowledge were even less so.
They would succumb, he quickly realized, the way the World had succumbed to his father. They dwelt in worlds pocked and limned and partitioned with darknesses they could not see. The unity of things, they thought, was something hidden beneath, a vast analogue to the false unity of their souls. And so they assumed they, at least, stood apart, believing that it belonged to souls to hang themselves by their own hair. They did not understand how Cause nested within Cause, how all that was real—and mundane—transpired across a singular plane, the after forever following upon the before.
So they thought words were the sole avenue of conquering souls, that they could, through vigilance and a wilful refusal to believe, guard this gate and so keep their souls safe. They could not see what they could not see, and so were blind to the way they became mere moments in a greater mechanism in the presence of the Dûnyain. Like chips of ice in warm water, their secrets would melt, their principles would dissolve, and they would become continuous with the whole, all but indistinguishable.
They would succumb.
“How can you know this?” the boy asked the first night of their exodus. They had camped on the shoulder of a giant, high enough to dare the teeth of the cold. The old man and his woman lay curled one about the other on a higher tier, finding solace of sorts, the Survivor knew, in their greater elevation.
“Because they are less,” something within him replied, “and we are more.”
“But what of sorcery?” the boy asked. “You said the Singers had changed everything.”
“True,” the Cause-within said. As cause, it was also effect, selected from a chattering cacophony of causes. As it passed, another was selected to be voiced, a lone survivor of inner savagery. The soul was nothing more than congeries of brutalized survivors …
“The Doctrine is incomplete.”
“So how can you know?” the Cause-nearby pressed.
“Because the Doctrine yet rules the meat of the World,” yet another survivor said. “And because,” the one following added, “they succumbed to my father …”
Yet another Cause monitored this process of selection, the sorting of the living and spoken from the dead and unvoiced, ever alert for evidence of madness …
Nothing.
“So what will you do?”
When they succumb … a survivor added.
“That depends on the manner of their capitulation,” the Cause-within replied.
“How do you mean?” the Cause-nearby asked.
And the monitor happened upon a wane flare of solace, a mad survivor, rooted in murk. They had always been a single engine, this place and the boy, from the day they had fled into the Thousand Thousand Halls.
“Whether they love.”
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
The woman, Mimara, stalked ahead of the old man, Achamian, leading the small party with a haste borne of fury. The Survivor paced him for a while, thinking the Wizard would eventually say something, offer some ingress …
Silence, the Survivor had noted, weighed heavy against the old man.
But he said nothing, though his motion and demeanour shouted with an awareness of the Survivor’s proximity, one that dwindled as the labourious watches wore on. The shadow of the mountains rose up around them, drawing veils across orange faces of stone.
“She still wants you to destroy us …” the Survivor finally ventured. “Destroy us with your light.”
“Yes … She does.”
They were stunted—only a fraction of themselves. The legionary engines of speech lay in the darkness preceding their souls, he realized. They began the very instant they spoke and not before. And so their speaking seemed all that was required to be.
“Will you execute her wishes?” he asked as a provocation, since he already knew the answer.
The Wizard squinted at him. He knew he betrayed himself, that he stood before a being he could not quite conceive. He even understood the contingency of his soul, and yet he could not convince himself of his peril. And how could he, when blindness to that contingency comprised the very foundation of what it meant “to be.” What could it mean to begin before you begin?
“Perhaps …”
A faltering gaze. A face struggling to maintain a semblance of resolution. Knowing was what made the old man weak, his inkling of the vast disproportion between them.
“My father stole something from you.”
This was not so difficult to see.
A quivering slackness about the eyes, fleeting. Welling tear ducts. And deeper, a knotting of thought and passion, a flexing that slipped into release.
“Yes …” the Wizard said, looking to the scarped distance.
The first true admission. The more of these he could prise from the man’s nebulous confusion, the Survivor realized, the more thoroughly he could possess him.
Little truths. He must gather them … like one hundred stones.
The old man coughed, more to provide time to think than to clear his throat.
“Yes, he did.”
The mother of the pregnant woman, Mimara. Kellhus had taken her.
The Survivor’s ruminations had generated a variety of explanatory schema, each weighted according to the evidence at hand. With each Cause selected, the competitors were pitched into the dark, and new cycles of speculation were triggered, wheels within wheels within wheels …
Why had Kellhus taken her? To coerce this man? To breed? To condition some other ground?
There was only one possibility. Always only one. For this was the very structure of apprehension: appraisal, selection …
Slaughter.
That second night they camped upon a knoll that swelled from the long-wandering ridge-line they had followed for a better part of the afternoon. Balance seemed especially precarious. Dusk had thinned the already emaciated air, lending fingernails to the encircling soar and plummet. Void leered, tugged with the lurch of vertigo. Across the emptiness, the sun flared with geometric precision, slighting the chill wind, tanning the surrounding peaks with gold and spangled vermillion. The scuff of boots across stone and gravel pricked the ear.
Since more than a watch remained before nightfall, the pregnant woman demanded—through Achamian—that the Survivor run down one of the mountain goats they had spied on the broken slopes below. This had already become a custom of hers, making demands of the two Dûnyain.
He killed the animal with a single stone.
When he returned he found the boy plying the old man with questions while Mimara watched uncomprehending. She was troubled, the Survivor could see, by the ease with which the boy had donned and doffed the terror he had feigned the previous day. When privacy afforded, he would remind him not to exchange his tools so quickly.
They sat on the hunched spine of the World, watching the flames slick the carcass with grease and sizzle. The discomfort of the woman and the old man was palpable, such was the madness of sharing fire and dinner with those they would murder. Their quest had been long, fraught with death and deprivation, and they had yet to realize what their losses demanded of them, let alone the significance of their present situation. Possibilities besieged them. The Survivor could see them flinching from errant thoughts—misgivings, horrors. They lacked the insight to clearly distinguish between various courses of action, let alone the foresight to map them into the future. They lacked the discipline to resist seizing upon whatever fragments the darkness of their greater souls offered up to them. The Survivor realized that he could, given time, make these decisions for them.
They were that frail.
But his study was far from complete. He remained ignorant of all save the grossest details regarding their lives, let alone the world from which they hailed. What was more, the Logos that bound and articulated their thoughts yet eluded him. Associations, he had come to realize, determined the movements of their souls. Relations of resemblance in place of reasons. Until he learned the inner language that drove the outer—the grammar and the lexicon of their souls—he could do little more than shove their thoughts in brute directions.
Perhaps that was all that he needed—at this juncture at least.
He turned to the old man. “Have you discov—?”
“Thiviso kou’pheri,” the pregnant woman interrupted. She often watched him with predatory distrust, so perhaps this was why he had overlooked the transformation that had crawled into her face.
The old man turned to her, his frown of disapproval vanishing into anxious recognition—an expression he had come to know well. Achamian did not so much fear the woman, the Survivor realized, as he feared her knowledge …
Or was it the source?
The old Wizard turned back, his heart racing against the blankness of his face. “She says that she sees the Truth of you,” he said, licking his lips.
He could hear sparrow-thrum of his old-man heart, smell the pinch of his sudden, old-man apprehension.
“And what is that?”
Numb, the Survivor realized. His lips were numb.
“Evil.”
“She is misled by my skin,” the Survivor replied, assuming that for souls so primitive, visual abomination would imply spiritual. But he saw his error even before the old man shook his head.
The sorcerer turned to her, translated.
The hilarity in her eyes was genuine but momentary. She did not even trust his ignorance, her suspicion of him and the boy ran so deep. But there was something else as well, crabbing her expression, throttling her thought … a visceral reaction to what she saw, what had fooled him into thinking she found his aspect revolting.
“Spira,” she said. “Spira phagri’na.”
He required no interpretation.
Look. Look into my face.
“She wants you to gaze into her face,” the old Wizard said, a sudden fascination hooking his voice. The Survivor regarded him for one heartbeat, two … and understood that for Drusas Achamian a great contest was about to waged, a pitting of principle against principle, horror against horror, trust against hope.
The pregnant woman did not so much stare at as regard him, her expression now raw with inexplicability. Absence gutted the pitch and summit of the distance gloaming beyond her. Against such vacancy, she could only seem too near—so perilously close.
“Spira phagri’na.”
And the Survivor could see it all, the legionary welter that was the Cause-within. The fraction that spoke, uncomprehending. The fraction that heard this speaking and made it her own. The fractions that bring forth. The fractions that consume …
Look into my face.
And he could see it nowhere … the origin of her assurance … the Cause.
Madness, just as he had presumed.
“Pilubra ka—”
Can you see it? Reflected in my eyes—can you see it?
The question bobbed through him. He caught it in the nets of his face.
Her smile could have been Dûnyain so devoid was it of anything outside the ruthless fact of observation.
“Tau ikruset.”
Your damnation.
She was defective—but in some profound and obscure way. Something buried deep, a fraction that feared, had seized the fractions that saw, producing hallucinations that seized the fractions that spoke and reasoned–undeniable visions. She would be far more difficult to solve than he had initially anticipated, the Survivor realized. So much so, he would have relegated the task … had she not possessed such a hold on Drusas Achamian.
Wind braided the fire, combed sparks from its extremities. Her face pulsed orange. “Dihunu,” she said smiling, “varo sirmu’tamna al’abatu so kaman.”
The old Wizard scowled.
“She says that you gathered one hundred stones …”
An involuntary blink. A catastrophic lapse.
Impossibility … Only this time without the curious intimation of deformity that seemed to mar all things sorcerous. An absolute impossibility …
“Yis’arapitri far—”
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
“She says you only think you survived the Thousand Thousand Halls,” the old Wizard said.
The Survivor blinked … fell back and away, dissolving into the fractional multitudes he had always been, pieces glimpsing pieces, splinters of what would happen … each a living claim, yearning to be raised up from the multitudes—and to exult in the flesh of the real.
He gazed at the pregnant woman, a new assemblage, clustered like winter bees about a new resolution. All the world fell to shadow and rags about the fixed point of her gaze.
His grin was both easy and sad, the smile of one who understands the errors of the heart too well not to forgive the hatred of another.
“Resirit manu cousa—”
“She says,” the old Wizard said scowling, “that you just decided to murder her.”
Cuts and cuts and cuts.
He watched the couple through the dancing, windswept pulse of their fire. They sat one about the other facing the night. Mimara huddled armour and all in the old Wizard’s arms, though she was the stronger, clutching one of his hands to her golden belly. Achamian stared out, his bearded profile daubed in orange, his gaze baffled by the wonder beneath his palm. The awe that was the future.
Wolves barked and bickered and crooned, yelping cacophonies that were pared into long solitary wails. Only predators dared call out to the void of night, beasts that were never eaten. Until this evening, he had not imagined the void could answer …
That it harboured entities every bit as predatory … more.
“How did she know?” the boy whispered in the dark.
Only Cause could effect knowledge.
“This World,” a fraction replied, “possesses directions the Dûnyain could not fathom.”
He was known—he who had confounded his Elders with his gifts. She had looked upon him, and had sounded him to his dregs.
“But how?”
Shadows roiled in the darkness.
The Survivor turned away from the wavering image of Mimara and Achamian, immured the boy within the vast apparatus of his scrutiny. He reached out, curved his palm about the arc of the boy’s cheek. A fraction peered at the scarred, puckered skin against smooth.
“The Soul is Many,” another fraction said.
“And the World is One,” the boy replied, perplexed, for this catechism had been among the first he had learned.
The Survivor let slip his hand, turned to resume his scrutiny of the couple.
“But I don’t understand,” the small voice pressed from his periphery.
Always so open, the boy—so trusting.
“Cause measures the distance between things …” one fraction said, while another continued scrutinizing the couple. “This is why the strength of the Dûnyain has always lain in grasping the Shortest Path …”
“But for her to know about the stones …” the boy said. “What possible path could deliver that knowledge?”
The fraction that listened nodded.
“None,” whispered the fraction that spoke.
The fraction that watched presided over the labour of yet others, whisking scenarios of act and consequence, all of them involving the death of the pregnant woman. By simply announcing his intent she had disastrously complicated its execution …
“But what does that mean?” the boy asked.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
“That the World …” a voice began, “is one in every respect.”
Fractions mewled and screamed in the dark.
“What are you saying?”
Something, the desperation hidden in the fluting striations of the boy’s voice perhaps, suspended the numberless labours dividing his soul. Why? a fraction asked. Why begin plotting her death before comprehending the ground of what had transpired?
The Survivor pinned the boy with his regard.
“That all of this has somehow already happened.”
The old man moaned in his sleep—cried out.
The pregnant woman stirred from his side, yanked herself upright in bleary alarm. She made no move to rouse him, electing to hang at his side instead, her face drawn with exhaustion. She had grown accustomed to these momentary, nocturnal vigils, thoughts freighted with the sloth of unconsciousness.
She laid a hand upon the old Wizard’s breast, a reflex borne of thoughtless intimacy. A palm like an ear held against his heart.
The old man grew still.
The fire had wheezed into oblivion. The encircling night howled with wind, altitude, and gaping emptiness. The Heavens illumined all …
Nothing sensible cued the sudden look she shot in the Dûnyain’s direction. She was blind again—a fact made clear by the swarming indications of fear and indecision. Fully human.
She locked eyes with the fraction watching.
The World is One, a fraction recalled a fraction saying …
The boy?
She turned away from its scrutiny, resumed her position at the Wizard’s side. The fraction watched her eyes sort through the infinity yawing above. Seventeen heartbeats passed, then, with a kind of grim fury, she clutched her blanket to her chin and rolled to her side.
This too, one fraction whispered to the others, has already happened.
The wind thrummed and roiled, rushed in invisible cataracts about the hanging heights.
The Survivor rolled onto his back. She says, a fraction whispered in the old man’s voice, that you gathered one hundred stones. How could such a thing be known? Sorcery, another fraction realized. Sorcery was the least among the Dûnyain’s many oversights. Long had he pondered the Singers and their cataclysmic song: none of the Brethren had risked so much as he in the futile attempt to capture one for interrogation. An errant fraction glimpsed lightning and thunder in the labyrinthine black. Why? Why would the worldborn founders of the Dûnyain deny their children knowledge of something so significant as sorcery? What could motivate dooming their progeny to millennial ignorance?
Perhaps some paths were too short. Perhaps they had feared their descendants would forswear the more arduous harvest of Cause, when the fruits of sorcery hung so low.
As profound as it was, sorcery did naught but complicate the metaphysics of Cause. But this … The knowledge that had apprehended him through the eyes of the pregnant woman.
Even now, as he gazed without sight into the oceanic cavity of night, a fraction retrieved her image, and he relived the impossibility of her gaze, of a scrutiny utterly unconstrained by the incestuous caprice of the here and now. A look unbound by time and place. A look from everywhere …
And nowhere.
And he knew: there existed a place without paths of any kind, without differences …
An absolute place.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
The four of them ascended ways slung across the face of the heavens. Falls, some sloped and tumbling, others abyssal, framed every glance they shared. Summits dizzied the sky about them, great cleavages of rocks thrust towering into the high blue. Thin air taxed their lungs and limbs.
“It hunts us,” a fraction said to the old Wizard.
An apprehensive squint.
“The darkness that comes before thought and soul,” another fraction explained.
The man’s face seemed of a piece with the mountains, a dark miniature.
“I did plot her murder,” a fraction resumed.
These words took the old man aback—according to their design. By beginning with a cryptic utterance, he had engaged the Wizard’s curiosity and attention, as well as provided a foil of obscurity for the clarity of his subsequent confession.
“And now? Do you still wish her dead?”
He needed Drusas Achamian to listen.
“No matter what I answer, you will not believe me.”
Trust was a habit for these people. If he spoke enough truth, his voice would become true.
“Sounds like a dilemma,” the old Singer said.
A luminous look. Smiles only called attention to the Survivor’s grotesquerie.
“It need not be.”
Achamian cast a worried glance at the pregnant woman several paces above. They toiled up the shoulder of a mountain, following a ravine of larger stones and boulders set into what were otherwise gravel slopes. Dislodged stones clacked down in their wake, gaining speed and kicking out onto the surrounding ramps, where they triggered small cascades of gravel, skirts woven of incalculable threads.
The old man had just resolved to ignore him, the Survivor knew.
“As much as you distrust me, you trust her sight more.”
The shadow of some bird plummeted across the slopes.
“So?”
Truth.
“Tell her,” the mutilated son of Anasûrimbor Kellhus said, “to gaze upon me while I speak.”
Honesty was the way in.
“And why would I do that?”
The Shortest Path.
“Because my father stole your wife.”
Cause …
Cause was but the skin.
The skein.
A scab on the knuckle of the boy’s left index finger, already ancient for three days healing.
The small mole to the left of the pregnant woman’s chin, the one that vanished those rare times she smiled.
The swelling joints in the old Wizard’s hands, and the ache that he tested without awareness, again and again, flexing and relaxing his fingers …
Flexing and relaxing.
Each of these things had origins and destinations. Each of these things caused and had been caused. They were points that knotted the shag of the past and fanned into a hollow future. But he knew them only insofar as they were his origin, his past. He knew not the scrape that had wounded the boy’s finger, the defect that marred the woman’s skin, or the malady that afflicted the old Wizard’s hands.
He was bound to the skin of these things—the skein.
All else was Darkness.
After generations of training and breeding for Logos, the Dûnyain could do no more than pierce this skin, cut and cut and cut. They could only lick the blood of knowledge. They could never hope to drink so deep as the woman had the evening previous. They could not so much as raise the cup, let alone drain it.
The Dûnyain, seeing only the skin of Cause, the pulsing webs, had assumed that Cause was everything, that it occupied the whole of darkness. But they had been fools, thinking that Darkness, even in this meagre respect, could be seen. For all their penetration they were every bit as abject before their ignorances as beasts, let alone worldborn Men.
A different blood throbbed through the infinite black, one that bled from all points equally.
He need only look at the pregnant woman to see it now, scarcely perceptible, like the stain of dawn on the longest watch of the night, or the first flutter of sickness.
They descended a broad pasture, their heads bobbing as the headlong fall pulled their steps downward. She walked below, wild for the pelts draped about her shoulders, boyish for the shortness of her hair. Unlike the old Wizard or even the boy, whose paths wandered like bumblebees, she walked with the assurance of one who followed a track both ancient and habitual …
Her every step trod Conditioned Ground.
She did not know this knowing, of course, which was what made it so much more remarkable … even miraculous. She bore an assurance that was not her own—and how could it be? How could anything bottomless be owned, let alone fathomed, by a soul so finite, so frail?
She says, a fraction whispered from the dark, that you intend to murder her.
Tell her, another answered, to gaze upon me while I speak.
The boy drew his crabbed hand across a throng of goldenrod … and the Survivor felt the tickle of embroidered petals across his own palm …
As did something greater. Incomprehensibly greater.
Absolute.
Pick any point in space—it does not matter which.
The only way to make that point the measure of the surrounding space, the Dûnyain had realized, was to call it zero, the absence of quantity that anchored the enumeration of all quantities. Zero … Zero was the source and centre of every infinity.
And it was everywhere.
Because zero was everywhere, measure was everywhere—as was arithmetic. Submit to the rule of another and you will measure as he measures. Zero was not simply nothing; it was also identity, for nothing is nothing but the absence of difference, and the absence of difference is nothing but the same.
Thus the Survivor had begun calling this new principle Zero, for he distrusted the name the old Wizard had given it …
God.
The great error of the Dûnyain, he could see now, was to conceive the Absolute as something passive, to think it a vacancy, dumb and insensate, awaiting their generational arrival. The great error of the worldborn, he could see, was to conceive it as something active, to think it just another soul, a flattering caricature of their own souls. Thus the utility of Zero, something that was not, something that pinched all existence, every origin and destination, into a singular point, into One. Something that commanded all measure, not through arbitrary dispensations of force, but by virtue of structure … system …
Logos.
The God that was Nature. The God that every soul could be, if only for the span of a single insight …
The Zero-God. The absence that was the cubit of all creation. The Principle that watched through Mimara’s eyes …
And had found his own measure wanting.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
A mountain lay between them and the setting sun, brute ground lunging into the sky. White water blasted through a gorge below, a snaking of ravines and crevasses that made a hoof of the mountain’s roots. The boy sat tending to their fire, his eyes reflecting twin miniatures of the flame, his face flushing orange as night wicked the colour from the distances beyond his shoulders. The old Wizard and the pregnant woman stood bickering above, perched on a flange of granite that curled like a great, slumbering cat about their camp.
“Pit-pit arama s’arumnat!” her voice fluted shrill across the stone.
“Why do they argue now?” the boy asked, raising his pupils from the reflected fires.
The Survivor had made no pretense of discretion or disinterest. He stood opposite the boy, his back to the coniferous gloom of the valley below, gazing up with cold fixity.
“I offered to submit to her gaze,” a fraction replied to the boy. “And its judgment.”
Another fraction tracked the serpentine interplay of outrage and incredulity flexing across her expression, warbling through her voice, twitching through her stance and gesture. Her Gaze, she was explaining to the old Wizard, had already passed judgment, had already found them wanting …
“And she balks?” the boy asked.
“They have suffered too much to trust anything we offer them. Even our capitulation.”
“Mrama kapu!” the woman cried, sweeping wide the blade of her right hand. Once again stumped by the violence of her ingenuity, the old Wizard stammered in reply.
He was losing this contest …
“I can hear them!” the Survivor cried, his tone modulated to provoke communal alarm.
The worldborn couple stared down at him, rimmed in the violet of incipient night. The burning scrub popped, to his right, coughed points of light, constellations drawn out on the wind.
“I can hear them in your womb,” the Survivor repeated—this time in the woman’s tongue. Though he was far from mastering the language, he knew enough to say at least this much.
She gawked at him, too shocked to be dismayed—to be anything other than disarmed.
“Taw mirqui pal—”
What do you mean … them?
One fraction registered the success of his stratagem. Others reaped the signs blaring from her form and face. And still others enacted the remaining articulations of this ploy …
The Survivor smiled the old Wizard’s most endearing smile.
“You bear twins … Sister.”
You are right to be terrified.
The Dûnyain exceed any rule that you possess … We outrun your measure.
You are the neck of a bottle. The World but drips into your soul.
We dwell in the deluge.
You come to us as a cataract. You assume you are unitary and alone, when in sooth you are a mob of blind men, crying out words you cannot comprehend in voices you cannot hear. For the truth is that you are many—this is the secret of your innumerable contradictions.
This … This is where the Dûnyain labour, in the darkness that comes before your souls. To converse with us is to submit to us—there is no other way for you to dwell in our presence. Given our respective natures, we are your slavers.
You were right to want to kill us …
Especially me, one who was broken in the deepest Deep.
Even this confession, this speaking of plain truth, is woven from knowledge that would terrify you, such is its penetration. My very voice has been fashioned into a key, using manner and intonation as teeth to unlock the tumblers of your soul. You are rapt because you have been so instructed.
Despite the brief span of our acquaintance, despite your will to conceal, I know so very much about you. I can name the Mission you call your mission, and I can name the Mission you know not at all. I know the twists of circumstance that shape and bind you; that for much of your life abuse was the only sincere rule; that you hide the tender beneath the bitter; that you carry your mother’s children …
But I need not enumerate what I know, for I see also that you know.
I see that you wonder what is to be done, for in speaking the truth, I also make the case for my destruction.
And so are my own limits made plain. Though the night ranges infinite above us, a fraction of me still wanders the Thousand Thousand Halls, a dark fragment, as obscure as it is elusive, one that argues death … death as the Shortest Path to the Absolute.
And I wonder, Is this what you call sorrow?
Thus are the limits of the Dûnyain made visible … also. For the desire that burns so bright within you has been stamped into the merest embers within us, bred into insignificance with the passing of generations, leaving but one hunger, one flame, one mover to yoke the Legion-within …
A single Mission.
This, Sister … This is why I bare my throat to the blade of your judgment. This is why I would make myself your slave. For short of death, you, Anasûrimbor Mimara, wife-daughter of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, who is also my father … you, Sister, are the Shortest Path.
The Absolute dwells within your Gaze. You … a frail, worldborn slip, heavy with child, chased across the throw of kings and nations, you are the Nail of the World, the hook from which all things hang.
Thus do I kneel before it, awaiting, accepting, death or illumination—it does not matter which …
So long as I am at last known.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
A fraction kneels before her, Anasûrimbor Mimara. And a fraction, one of a hundred stones, could see it … as if it were rising up, like lead pouring into the husk and tatter of a mortal frame, an immobility as profound as oblivion.
Zero.
Sranc squealing in the black, the air rancid with sweat and exhalation, cleavers whooshing, felling brothers for lunatic fear. Feet slapping stone.
Zero … Opening as an Eye.
The blackness, savage and greased. A point passes through it, plunging down lines and sweeping across curves. The shrieks are contagion, like fire upon the back of an arid hill.
Beauty … not of flowers or animal form, but of stillness, of vast mechanisms, the threshing, pounding, scraping, dwindling into the patter of mice.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
Beauty … the effortlessness of freefall, the reduction of all riddles to a single, far-falling line.
The point is sentient. It speaks, spinning tales of hewn ribs and deflected cleavers, punctured bowels and broken teeth, extremities sent spinning into the void of irrelevance.
The Survivor gazes into the Gaze, sees the lie that is sight.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
Judge us, a fraction whispers.
Raise us up.
Strike us down.
Anasûrimbor Mimara stands above him, little more than a halo, a smear of meat and hair about the Judging Eye. An excuse. An occasion …
Holding, a fraction notices, a sorcerous knife.
Thronging, mewling blackness. A path picked—pursued. A calligraphy too murderous to be real. Threats isolated, plucked from the deluge, pinched like candle wicks—snuffed.
So many cuts.
Zero, trembling with feminine mortality.
Too many.
“You are broken,” she sobs. “The same as me …”
A fraction reaches out, makes a pommel of the slender hand about the pommel of the knife. Judge, a fraction murmurs. End our ingrown war …
But she is weeping—openly now. Why does she weep?
The Gaze knows no sorrow.
“But I do,” she whispers.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
The knife clatters against stone. And somehow she is kneeling with him, embracing him, so that he can feel the sphere of her belly enter the cavity of his own. A fraction counts four heartbeats: one ponderous and masculine, another fleet and feminine, and two prenatal. She exhales into his neck, and a fraction tracks the creeping bloom of heat and humidity. She shudders.
I am lost, a fraction whispers …
Though her face is buried in his shoulder below his jaw, the Gaze has not moved. It watches as before, infinite scrutiny hanging from the memory of where her eyes had been.
“Yes …” she says. “As are we.”
Zero, glaring from nowhere, showing him his measure … and how disastrously far the Dûnyain had wandered.
The rank folly of the Shortest Path.
I am damned.
Her small fists twist knots into his tunic, make rope of a portion. The boy watches, for once immaculate and inscrutable. “I forgive you,” she cries into his shoulder.
I forgive.
Awareness has no skin.
No fists or fingers.
No arms.
So much must be ignored.
The boy watches him stare into the bowl of night—watches him float. “So you have succeeded?” he whispers.
A fraction hears. A fraction responds.
“Everything I have taught you is a lie.”
All that you know … another murmurs without voice. All that you are.
And another …
And another …
They deferred to the old Wizard’s reckoning, following the northward wend of a great valley rather than pass out of the mountains.
“Beyond lies Kûniüri,” he explained, “and Sranc without number.”
The meaning was plain …
And invisible.
Crime, a fraction postulated. Crime divides the innocent from the ignorant.
The four of them sat cross-legged, knees touching knees, upon a promontory overlooking the black velvet folds of yet another valley. Jackpine clung to the outcrop’s lip, leaning out like ravaged antlers. The chill made fog of their mingling breath. The old Wizard, who had not yet grasped let alone accepted what had happened, hefted the pouch he guarded so jealously in his left palm. A fraction sorted through the varieties of alarm that muttered through his look and gesture, plucked the one belonging, almost in its entirety, to the substance in the pouch. A puling spark, a greed almost infant in extent, poised to set the horizon aflame …
But there was veneration as well, the wince of hard memories … unwanted lessons.
The great project of the Dûnyain was conceived by Men, worldborn souls bent on pursuing an inkling of their own finitude. Their impulse was imperial. They had seen the encroaching darkness, the oblivion from which their every thought and passion had sprung; they had reckoned the servile fact of their dependency, and they would undo it if they could.
Thus had they transformed the Absolute into a prize.
“Qirri,” the pregnant woman said, her voice a bolt of silk, a banner for her mongrel fortitude. “Pa thero, Qirri …”
She touched the tip of her index finger to the bulb of her tongue, then reached into the interior of the pouch.
The boy watched witless—and trusting.
Ignorance, a fraction resolved. Ignorance was the foundation. The First Principle.
Proof of this lay in the very meat of the Dûnyain, for they had been bred in pursuit of deception. No intellect is orphaned, despite all the foundling hearts. All sons are born stranded because all fathers are sons. Every child is told, even those suckled on the teats of wolves. Even Dûnyain children. To be born is to be born upon a path. To be born upon a path is to follow that path—for what man could step over mountains? And to follow a path is to follow a rule …
To find all other paths wanting.
She pulled her fingertip from the pouch’s throat, held it in the light of the Nail. A woolen smudge of powder—ash, so fine as to dissolve in the least wind …
But the sky had forgotten how to breathe.
Not even an entire World of madmen could chart the infinite vagaries of belief and action. Thoughts, like legs, were joined at the hip. No matter how innumerable the tracks, no matter how crazed or inventive the soul, only what could be conceived could be seen. Logos, they had called it, the principle that bound step to step, that yoked what would be aimless to the scruple of some determinate destination. And this had been the greatest of the Dûnyain’s follies, the slavish compliance to reason, for this was what had shackled them to the abject ignorance of their forefathers …
Logos.
“What is it?” the boy asked.
“Not for you,” the old Wizard snapped—with more vehemence than he intended, a fraction noted.
Reason was a skulking beggar, too timid to wander, to leap, and so doomed to scavenge the midden-heap of what had come before. Logos … They had called it light, only to find themselves blinded. They had made it their ancient, generational toil, confusing its infirmities for their own …
Thinking the human was the obscuring shroud.
She reached toward him, her palm down and her finger out so that he might take the tip of her finger between his lips. A fraction surprised her by clasping her wrist and guiding the powder to his nostril …
The inhalation was quick, sharp enough to make the old Wizard flinch. Anasûrimbor Mimara pulled her finger back, frowned in marvelling surprise.
“Ingestion delays onset,” a fraction explained. “This way …”
A lesser fraction blinked.
The Legion-within groaned, reeled, fumbled the World they bore as burdens upon their backs.
“This … This way …”
This way, boy … Follow me!
Cuts and cuts and cuts. Teeth cracking in the black, gnashing, chewing. A demonic chorus bubbles down through the corridors, filters through the descending levels, viscous with lust and fury—savage with desperation. What the darkness obscures, the darkness welds together as one. So they seemed a singular thing, the Shriekers, more insect than human.
Don’t leave me.
The child was defective, as the Assessor had predicted. A fraction gloated for the fact of Ishuäl’s undoing, knowing that the child had been saved … for … for …
For what?
Bestial and inhuman, grunting as they loped through the black, lost and starving, endless thousands of them, snorting the air, shrieking for the scent of vulnerability. In the early days, the surviving Brethren had set out pots of their own blood and excrement as lures, and the creatures swarmed to their own destruction—though the toll proved too high: one Dûnyain for a thousand Shriekers. Scent hooked one, perhaps two, and the caterwauling seized the rest, the legions scattered through the chambered deep …
So it was always easy at first, fending them off, raising barricades of carcasses. Easy at first, impossible after. The Brethren abandoned the strategy, elected to flee, following the parse of fork and junction, using their intellect as their eyes, dividing their pursuers again and again—until the beasts were fractured into meagre bands. The boy had been suckled on such sounds, hearing his kind hunted to extinction beneath the very roots of the earth.
They would have cracked open his skull, had Ishuäl not fallen. The boy would have been pinned as all other Defectives were pinned to the subtlety of some forbidden affect, strapped for the scrutiny of others, nailed as if a drying hide to the outer expression of some inner frailty.
It was always easy at first.
I cannot breathe …
He danced through pitch blindness, climbed through the threshing of cleavers, climbed until he could climb no more.
Is this fear?
Sometimes he would pause and make a place, raise twitching ramparts. And sometimes he would run … not so much from as with the creatures, for he had learned to mimic them, the cadence of their galloping stride, the labial quaver of their snorts, their peeling screeches—everything save their stench. And it would drive them to the very pitch of frenzy, the scent of something almost human in their roiling midst, set them hacking the vacant black, killing one another …
Yes. Tell me what you feel.
Even then he had understood.
I shake. I cannot breathe.
Even then he had known that Cause had never been the Dûnyain’s First Principle.
And what else?
And Logos even less.
My eyes weep … weep for want of light!
They had settled upon these things simply because they could be seen. Even then he had understood this.
Yes … This is fear.
Darkness was their ground, their foe and foundation.
What is it?
The shrieking black.
The most simple rule.
Cuts …
And cuts …
There was a place high on the shoulder of a mountain where a boy, an old man, and a pregnant woman knelt and observed as another man, a scarred grotesquerie, convulsed and voided his bowel.
Perhaps it was real—a real place—but the fractions, who were legion, who rutted and rampaged through the black, did not care, could not.
Too many cuts. Too many divisions of skin.
Run was a rule.
Hide was a rule.
Know was a rule.
Desire was a following.
Existence was a heap.
One hundred stones, too round to lock one into the other. Rounded like thumbs. Those on top warm for sunlight, like lobes or lozenges of living meat between the fingers. Those below chill, like the lips of the dead. Eyes scanning the coniferous gloom, isolating the ink of avian shadows. One hundred throws, arm snapping, sleeve popping, hand flicking … A buzzing line, comprehended more in after-image than seen, spearing through the seams between branches.
Ninety-nine birds struck dead. Numerous sparrows, doves, and more crows than anything else. Two falcons, a stork, and three vultures.
“Killing,” a fraction explains to the wondering boy. “Killing connects me to what I am.”
And what are you?
“The Survivor,” another fraction replies, and yet another registers the network of scar tissue across his face, the tug and tension of unnatural compromises.
“The Heaper of the Dead.”
There was more horror than concern in their faces when his eyes fluttered open. The boy especially.
The Survivor drew a sleeve across his hideousness, looked to him, his son. The Legion-within howled and clamoured, stamped and spit. Only now did he understand …
Ignorance. Only ignorance had sealed the interval between them. Only blindness, the wilful idiocy that was worldborn love. A fraction relives the flight of the Brethren before the thunderous onslaught of the Singers. Dûnyain leaping before billowing geometries of light, fleeing into the mazed gut of the World, hunted by stone-cracking words, utterances, the violation of everything they held to be true. Dûnyain do not panic. Dûnyain do not reel, broken and bewildered. And he yet he had found himself in the nursery without thought, scooping up this very babe without thought, the one that smelled of him, of Anasûrimbor, the most promising of the Twelve Germs. He clutched this wailing burden to his breast, this impediment, without thought, as if it were no less a fraction of his own soul, a part that had wandered …
Zero. The difference that is not a difference. Zero made One.
He had survived. He, the one burdened, the one tasked, the one who refused to illuminate the interval between him and his son. The fractions of the Dûnyain had been sorted, and he, the least able, the most encumbered, had been the one Selected … the Survivor.
He who had refused to know … who had embraced the darkness that comes before.
The boy clutches his tunic with both hands, hale and halved. He cannot help himself. He is defective.
And so it was with the Absolute. Surrender. Forfeiture. Loss … At last he understood what made these things holy. Loss was advantage. Blindness was insight, revelation. At last he could see it—the sideways step that gave lie to Logos.
Zero. Zero made One.
The Eye watches. Approves.
He gestures to the boy, who obediently comes to him.
He does not speak for a time, electing instead to gaze across the crumpled condensations of earth, dark beneath the silvering arch of the sky. They have finally come to the end of the mountainous throw and steep, the terminus of tyrannical ground. The trackless forests below were just that, trackless, demanding judgment, decision, for being so permissive. Only one scarp remains, one last perilous descent.
The wind is warm with the dank rot that promises life, with the taste of surging green.
It will be better there.
“What is it?”
“Things …” he murmurs to the panorama, “are simple.”
“The madness worsens?”
He looks back to the boy. “Yes.”
He draws the hundredth stone from the waist of his tunic.
“This is yours now.”
The boy, the most blessed fraction, looks to him in alarm. He would deny the interval between them, if he could.
He cannot.
The Survivors stands, begins sprinting. He marvels at the magic that joins will to flexing limbs.
A cry, spoken in a tongue that even animals know.
The Survivor does not so much move as the ground runs out. But the leap … Yes. That is his.
That is his …
As is the yawning plummet, the drop …
Into the most empty arms.
So quickly …
The events that transform us slip …
So quickly.
The face, cut into all expressions, all faces.
Eyes gazing wet from mutilation.
Fixed upon something that runs as he runs, a place he can only pursue, never reach …
Unless he leaps.
The Eye understood, even if the woman did not.
Achamian could see the Dûnyain’s body about thirty cubits below, a motionless swatch of skin and fabric draining crimson across fractured stone. He struggled to breathe. It seemed impossible … that a being so formidable … so unnerving … could break so easily.
“Sweet Seju!” he cried, retreating from the dizzy edge. “I told you! I told you not to give any to him!”
Mimara knelt beside the crab-clawed boy, held his blank face against her breast, a hand splayed across his scalp. “Told who?” she snapped, glaring. It belonged to her infuriating genius, the ability to condemn one instant then console the next.
The old Wizard grabbed his beard in frustration and fury. What was happening? When had this damaged girl, this waif, become a Prophet of the Tusk?
She began rocking the boy, who continued gazing at nothing from nowhere—witless.
Achamian cursed under his breath, turned from her glare, understanding, in a turbulent, horrified way, that the futility of arguing with her had become the futility of arguing with the God. He wanted nothing more than to call her on the rank contradiction of mourning a death she had clamoured for mere days previous. But all he could do was fume instead …
And shake.
The wisdom, as always, came after. And with it the wonder.
The Eye had always been a source of worry, ever since learning of it. But now …
Now it had become a terror.
There was her knowledge, for one. He could scarcely look at her without seeing the fact of his damnation in her look, the sluggish blank of someone wracked with guilt and pity for another. Between a woman’s scorn and her truth, the look of the latter was by far the most unmanning.
There was the monolithic immobility of her judgment, for another, the bottomless certitude that he had once attributed to impending motherhood. It was pondering this that he gained some purchase on his newfound fear. Before coming to Ishuäl, he had lacked any measure external to his exasperation, and so had the luxury of attributing her rigidity to obstinance or some other defect of character. But what he had witnessed these past few days … The madness of making—once again—a travelling companion of a Dûnyain, only to watch him shatter like pottery against the iron of the Judging Eye … A Dûnyain! A son of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, no less!
“The eye,” he had told her in the chill aftermath of Cil-Aujas, “that watches from the God’s own vantage.” But he had spoken without understanding.
Now he had no choice. He could no longer feign ignorance of the fact that in some mad, unfathomable manner, he walked—quite literally—with the God … with the very Judgment that would see him damned. Henceforth, he realized, his every step would be haunted by the shadow of his sacrifice.
“Do you know why?” he asked Mimara when they resumed their descent, the mute boy in stumbling tow.
“Why he killed himself?” she asked, either preoccupied with her downward footing or pretending to be. She was genuinely great with child now, and even with the Qirri, she seemed to find steep descents labourious in particular.
The old Wizard grunted his affirmation.
“Because the God demanded it,” she offered after several huffing moments.
“No,” he said. “What were his reasons?”
Mimara graced him with a fleeting glance, shrugged. “Do they matter?”
“Where do we go?” the boy interrupted from above and behind them, his Sheyic inflected with Mimara’s Ainoni burr.
“That way,” the startled sorcerer replied, nodding to the north. What did a Dûnyain child feel, he wondered, in the watches following his father’s death?
“The world ends that way, boy …”
He hung upon that final word, gawking …
Mimara followed his scowl to the horizon—the cerulean haze.
The three of them stood transfixed, gazed with numb incomprehension. The forests of Kûniüri swept out from the crumpled gum-line of the Demua mountains, green daubed across ancient and trackless black. Several heartbeats passed before Achamian, cursing his failing eyes, conjured a sorcerous Lens. And so they saw it, an impossibility painted across an impossibility, a vast plume, spewing its fell innards outward and upward, far above the reach of mountain or even cloud …
Like the noxious shadow of a toadstool, bulging to the arch of Heaven, drawn across the curve of the very World.