Tag Archives: R. Scott Bakker

Reread of The Judging Eye: Chapter Four

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Four

Hûnoreal

Welcome to Chapter Four of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Three!

For He sees gold in the wretched and excrement in the exalted. Nay, the world is not equal in the eyes of the God

—SCHOLARS, 7:16, THE TRACTATE

My Thoughts

This is about the subject view on who is and isn’t saved. It echoes the sentiment from Christianity that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven. To Christians, this is a statement that material possessions are a path into sin because you focus on them and not putting God first. Bakker’s scripture is saying that it is better to suffer than to be praised. That pain in this life brings reward in the next while those who take glory in this world are in for a surprise. It echoes another Christian teaching about salvation in that doing good deeds to earn salvation is offensive to God like soiled menstrual rags, I believe, is how the translations often go.

In Bakker’s universe, damnation is something seen and judged. This is our first allusion to the title of the book and Mimara’s ability. Fittingly, it is her POV that starts off the chapter and her first unveiling of this power.

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), southwestern Galeoth

Mimara has no choice but to camp by Achamian’s tower. Where will she go? The brothel? Her mother’s palace (which is like a brothel)? She doesn’t tether her mule, Foolhardy, hoping he will wander free and escape then fearing that he’ll be eaten by wolves at night because of her carelessness. So far, he’s still there when she wakes up. As the days past, she tends her fire, thinking its “singularity of purpose” is divine.

Flare. Wax. Consume.

Like a human. Only with grace.

The children, learning she’s a witch, spy on her and gives fake screams of fright when she spots them. She is a witch because she can see the Wards that Achamian has put around his tower as well as the bruises to the world his violent defense of the valley against the Sranc had left. “The eyes of the Few were with her always, prodding her onto this path she has chosen, fortifying her resolve.”

But more and more the different eye seems to open, one that has perplexed her for many years—that frightens her like an unwanted yen for perversion. Its lid is drowsy, and indeed it slumbers so deep she often forgets its presence. But when it stirs, the very world is transformed.

For moments at a time, she can see them… Good and evil.

Not buried, not hidden, but writ like another colour or texture across the hide of everything. The way good men shine brighter than good women. Or how serpents glow holy, while pigs seem to wallow in polluting shadow. The world is unequal in the eyes of the God—she understands this with intimate profundity. Master over slaves, men over women, lions over crows: At every turn, the scriptures enumerate the rank of things. But for terrifying moments, the merest of heartbeats, it is unequal in her eyes as well.

She believes this “judging eye” is a madness brought on by what happened to her. “It has to be madness.” She wonders what Achamian will look like. She stares at his tower in the morning sun and thinks it’s not so tall. It’s height an illusion.

The world hates you…

This thought afflicts her when she least expects it. She knows this truth and didn’t need her little brother to remind her: “It hurts Momma to even look at you! She wishes she would have drowned you instead of sold you…” As she starves outside Achamian’s tower, she believes this more and more. She traveled all this way to be a witch and is denied.

There is no other place. So why not cast her life across the Whore’s table? Why not press Fate to the very brink? At least she will die knowing.”

She cries though she feels empty. She sees “the Wizard” pacing in his window. She can’t remember when she had cried and felt the emotion. She thinks maybe as a child. She stays because she has nowhere to go. All her choices are the same. Despair lies in all directions.

A broken tree, as her brothel-master once told her, can never yield.

Two days became three. Three become four. Hunger makes her dizzy, while the rain makes her clay-cold. The world hates you, she thinks, staring at the broken tower. Even here.

The last place.

One night, he appears, haggard like he hadn’t slept because of guilt. He has food and wine. She devours it like a “thankless animal.” He watches her and mentions Dreams like they are an old enemy he’s long fought. As she eats and stares at him, he speaks of his Dreams and what it’s like. She finds herself asking the lame question if they’re bad. In the firelight, she can see that though he’s suffered much, he still remembers how “to be tender and honest.” He answers her with a wink then fills a pipe and lights it. He tells her the dreams used to be. That confuses her. He then asks her why Mandate Schoolmen have the dreams.

She knows the answer. Her mother always resorted to talk of Achamian to salve the abrasions between her and her embittered daughter. Because he was her real father, Mimara had always thought. “To assure the School of Mandate never forgets, to never lose sight of its mission.”

“That’s what they say,” Achamian replies, savoring the smoke. “That the Dreams are the goad to action, a call to arms. That by suffering the First Apocalypse over and over, we had no choice but to war against the possibility of the Second.”

Achamian disagrees and says that her adopted father, Kellhus, is right that every life is a riddle that can be solved. He knows this to be a truth before telling her about the First Holy War and his “forbidden love” for Esmenet. He’d been willing to risk the World to have her. He is open and vulnerable with her, making it compelling. She’s heard this story before, but listens with “childish attentiveness,” letting herself feel his emotions. During it, she realizes that he doesn’t know that his love for Esmenet is a story told around the empire.

The only secret is that he still lives.

With these thoughts her wonder quickly evaporates into embarrassment. He seems over-matched, tragically so, wrestling with words so much larger than himself. It becomes cruel to listen as she does, pretending not to know what she knows so well.

“She was your morning,” she ventures.

This interrupts him, and he gets angry, glaring at her. He asks her to repeat it. And she does, explaining how Esmenet told her about what she meant to him. He then says he no longer fears the night because he doesn’t have the same Dreams as other Mandate Schoolman.

“I no longer pray for the morning.”

She leans back to pluck another log for the fire. It lands with rasping thump, sends a train of sparks twirling up through the smoke. Watching their winking ascent to avoid his gaze, she hugs her shoulders against the chill. Somewhere neither near nor far, wolves howl into the bowl of the night. As though alarmed, he glanced away into the wood, into the wells of blackness between the variant trunks and limbs. He stares with an intensity that makes her think that he listens as much as he hears, to the wolves and to whatever else—that he knows the myriad languages of the deep night.

It is then that he tells his tale in earnest…

As though he has secured permission.

Achamian thinks about how Esmenet, after his capture by the Scarlet Spire, had waited for him like Mimara had. He hadn’t come to see the girl out of anger, not wanting to reward her. He did it out of ear not wanting to be caught with missing Princess-Imperial. That he was doing her a favor because she was too old to learn the Nonman tongue to use magic. He used every excuse to hid from his pain.

Her mother, Esmenet, had waited for him on the banks of the River Semis over twenty years previous. Not even word of his death could turn her from her vigil, so obstinate, so mulish was her love. Not even sense could sway her.

Only Kellhus and the appearance of honesty.

Achamian recognizes Esmenet’s stubbornness in Mimara. How else could the girl have traveled so far alone? He finally realized he had to tell her the truth because she would die and he’d be destroyed by guilt. So he came with compassion and food and told her everything, including how his dreams had started changing. It had been twenty years since he spoke without issue. He explains how while the Mandate dream about Seswatha, they don’t witness the normal, day to day stuff. “‘Seswatha’ the old Mandate joke goes, ‘does not shit,’”

All the things that were forgotten, he realized.

The dreams took on new a character, subtle at first. Achamian merely thought it was his change in perspective. Achamian dreamed of Seswatha stubbing his toe to fetch a scroll. Mimara, as he speaks, stars at him the way Esmenet had. “Another abject listener.” He can’t read her, but she’s letting him speak. He explains how he was flabbergasted upon awakening. It wasn’t anything profound. He brings up how the Mandate have cataloged the variation of all the dreams. They could misfire, playing things out of order or corrupted. More than a few Mandate had become obsessed with them, thinking they found some greater truth. But they never could convince anyone else. So Achamian writes off the dream as his own. For two months, he dreamed the usual things, then he has one of Seswatha reading a scroll.

He trailed, though whether to let the significance settle in or to savour the memory, he did not know. Sometimes words interrupted themselves. He pinched the hem of his cloak, rolled the rough-sewn seam between thumb and forefinger.

Achamian notices how Mimara finishes off her gruel like a slave would before she asks what the scroll was. He says it’s a lost scroll by Gotagga. Parapolis. It’s famous. Mimara asks if Achamian invented it. He doesn’t think so. He wrote down what he remembered and it was far better than he could write. It proved they were real. He remembers that morning and the heady feel or realizing “he had begun dreaming Seswatha’s mundane life.” No other Mandate Schoolman had.

How strange it had been, to find his life’s revelation in the small things; he who had wrestled with dying worlds. But then the greater turned upon the small. He often thought of the men he’d known—the warlike ones, or just the plain obstinate—of their enviable ability to overlook and to ignore. It was like a kind of willful illiteracy, as if all the moments of unmanly passion and doubt, all the frail details that gave substance to their lives, were simply written in a tongue they couldn’t understand and so needed to condemn and belittle. It never occurred to them that to despise the small things was to despise themselves—not to mention the truth.

But then that was the tragedy of all posturing.

She asks why this happened. Why him. He has no idea, maybe Fate is fucking with him or maybe he’s gone mad, “for one cannot endure what I’ve [Achamian has] day and night without going mad.” Maybe since he’s abandoned his life, a new one filled it or Seswatha is reaching out to him. He comports himself and says there is a bigger question. He stares at her, watching her even while knowing he must appear as a bitter, old man.

But if there were judgment in her eyes, he could detect nothing of it.

“My stepfather,” she said. “Kellhus is the question.”

This makes him realize that she’s not ignorant of much of what he’s been talking to. She knew Kellhus personally. She’s his stepdaughter. It hadn’t clicked in his mind and he feels like an idiot for how obvious it was. Then he wonders why she came here. Did Kellhus send her even if she doesn’t know it? Is she a spy? Kellhus had seduced the Holy war. Mimara stood no chance.

How much of her soul was hers, and how much had been replaced?

Achamian asks if Kellhus sent her. She looks confused and bewildered. She says he’d drag her home in chains and return her to her mother. Achamian persists. She’s crying as she protests she’s not lying.

“This is the way it works,” Achamian heard himself rasp in an utterly ruthless voice. “This is the way he rules—from the darkness in our own souls! If you were to feel it, know it, that would simply mean there was some deeper deception.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! He-he’s always been kind—”

“Did he ever tell you to forgive your mother?”

She’s confused by that. He asks if he ever knew her heart better than she did. She says he had, not sure why it matters. He asks her if she felt awe in him. Saw him as more than a man. Did his attention make her feel gratified? Achamian is manic, shaking, frightening her. She calls him Akka, sounding to him like her “whore-mother.”

“When you stood before him!” he roared. “When you knelt in his presence, did you feel it? Hollow and immovable, as if you were at once smoke and yet possessed the bones of the world? Truth. Did you feel Truth?”

“Yes!” she cried. “Everyone does! Everyone! He’s the Aspect-Emperor! He’s the Saviour. He’s come to save us! Come to save the Sons of Men!”

Achamian stared at her aghast, his own vehemence ringing in his ears. Of course she was a believer.

“He sent you.”

Her presence returns him to the mindset of being in the First Holy War. In her eyes, he sees hope dying, like it had to him. When he approached her, she’d weakened, dared to believe finally something good would happen to her, and he’d snatched it from her. He believes she’s not a willing slave now and is reminded of Cnaiür who had “a soul at once strong and yet battered beyond recognition.” He sees Esmenet in her.

She was precisely the kind of slave Kellhus would send him [Achamian]. Part cipher. Part opiate.

Someone Drusas Achamian could come to love.

Achamian talks about the day Kellhus arrived at the Holy War. How Achamian was there. Kellhus had been a beggar claiming to be a prince with a Scylvendi. “It was my back he broke climbing to absolute power,” Achamian tells her. He goes on how Kellhus was his friend, his student, and how Kellhus stole his wife anyways. His morning. He dares her to speak now and she stays silent.

“The only thing,” he continued, his voice wrung ragged with conflicting passions. “The only thing I took with me from my previous life was a simple question: Who is Anasûrimbor Kellhus? Who?”

Achamian stared at the bed of coals pulsing beneath the blackened wood, paused to allow Mimara fair opportunity to respond, or so he told himself. The truth was that the thought of her voice made him wince. The truth was that his story had turned into a confession.

Mimara gives the obvious answer to his question: Kellhus is the Aspect-Emperor. Achamian isn’t surprised. Anyone, let alone Kellhus’s adopted daughter, would give this answer. People wanted things to be simple. They would mock questions “for fear it would make their ignorance plain.” Then they would claim to be open.

This was the iron habit of Men. This was what shackled them to the Aspect-Emperor.

He shook his head in slow deliberation. “The most important question you can ask any man, child, is the question of his origin. Only by knowing what a man has been can you hope to say what he will be.” He paused, brought up short by an old habit of hesitation. How easy it was to hid in his old pedantic ruts, to recite rather than talk. But no matter how woolly his abstractions always became snarled in the very needling particularities he so unwittingly tried to avoid. He had always been a man who wanted to digress, only to find himself bleeding on the nub

She gives the official answer, that Kellhus is “the Son of Heaven” as if it were the only one that could be. Achamian points out he’s a real person with parents born like anyone else. Where did that happen? She brings up Atrithau, but he cuts her off and says that Cnaiür, a dead man, told him. A memory of Cnaiür’s conversation, his warning on how Dûnyain “war against circumstances” and see men as dogs to be tamed. How they use love to control. The Dûnyain are Kellhus’s people.

She asks about his bloodline, and Achamian says he is an Anasûrimbor, the only clue to where he’s from. Where had that kingly family survived? She asks where else besides Atrithau since the North is ruined. The Sranc rule it. He says the Kûniüric High Kings must have created a refugee, something Cnaiür had mentioned in their conversation. Hidden in the mountains. Isolated for a thousand years so they could breed themselves into something better than world-born humans.

As he talks about the sanctuary, Achamian knows he sounds desperate to be believed even as he struggled to control how fast he gives Mimara the information. However, when calling the Aspect-Emperor a liar, their words never could come out slow enough. Mimara has gone blank, hiding her offended beliefs. Achamian thinks she sees him as a bitter cuckold railing against the better man who’d taken his wife and now paints a story with himself as the hero.

He breathed deeply, leaned back from the fire, which suddenly seemed to nip him with its heat. He resolved to refill his pipe, but he could only clench his fists against the tremors.

My hands shake.

Mimara watches Achamian as his voice grows shriller, his gestures wilder. At first, she was excited, but then she realizes he’s not free at all, but bound by the past. He’s not speaking to her, either, but to her mother. The irony that he mistakes her for her mother after she mistook him for her father hurts her. She realizes he’s more her brother, another person hurt and betrayed by Esmenet.

Mimara realizes she’s been wrong about him. Her imagination the opposite of reality. He lives only for vengeance against Kellhus. He’s ranting about how keeping Cnaiür alive was Kellhus’s mistake. The Scylvendi knew too much about Kellhus’s past. So now Achamian is using his mutated Dreams to get his vengeance. He’s spent twenty years sifting through Seswatha’s life to find what he needed.

It’s more than a fool’s errand; it is a madman’s obsession, on par with those ascetics who beat themselves with strings and flint, or who eat nothing but ox-hides covered in religious writings. Twenty years! Anything that could consume so much life simply has to be deranged. The hubris alone…

His hatred of Kellhus she finds understandable, though she herself bears no grudge against her stepfather. She barely knows the Aspect-Emperor, and those fare times she found herself alone with him on the Andiamine Heights—twice—he seemed at once radiant and tragic, perhaps the most immediate and obvious soul she had ever encountered.

You think you hate her,” he once said—referencing her mother, of course.

I know I do.”

There is no knowledge,” he had replied, “in the shadow of hate.”

She ponders those words and sees how Achamian has focused everything in his life towards unmasking Kellhus. His Dreams and his Hatred. If you can’t get your revenge, it devours you which only feeds your outrage at the source. She sees Achamian as the same as her.

She asks if he’s found what he’s been searching for in the dreams. He’s found a name, sounding embarrassed because it sounds so paltry compared to his boasts about his work. She nearly laughs, earning a bitter glare.

She reminds herself to take care. Her instinct, given all that she has endured, is to be impatient with the conceits of others. But she needs this man.

He says the name: Ishuäl. It’s almost a whisper. He explains it means ‘Exalted Grotto’ or ‘High Hidden Place’ in a Nonman dialect. She asks if that’s where Kellhus is from and sees it disturbs him when she speaks Kellhus name with familiarity. He is certain, however. She asks how he can find it. He says he’ll know soon. More and more of Seswatha’s life is opening to him. He’s getting the secrets.

A life spent mining the life of another, pondering glimpses of tedium through the lenses of holy and apocalyptic portent. Twenty years! How can he hope to balance the proportions? Grub through dirt long enough and you will prize stones.

“Like he’s yielded,” she forces herself to say.

Achamian says that’s just what it likes. He speaks as if Seswatha knows it and is helping him. She can’t imagine what sort of drive it would take to spend twenty years researching this. She doesn’t think any sane person could have such conviction and perseverance.

Faces. All conduct is a matter of wearing the appropriate faces. The brothel taught her that, and the Andiamine Heights simply confirmed the lesson. It’s as though expressions occupy various positions, a warning here, a greeting there, with the distance between measured by the difficulty of forcing one face from the other. At this moment nothing seems so difficult as squeezing pity into the semblance of avid interest.

She asks him again if no other Mandate’s had this happen. He says no and asks her what it means. She’s shocked and offended that he’s showing weakness. At that point, the Judging Eye opens, though she doesn’t know what this is. She sees more than the Mark on him. She sees the “hue of judgment, as though blessing and condemnation have become a wash visible only in certain kinds of light.” He bleeds evil. Damnation.

He is damned. Somehow she knows this with the certainty with which children know their hands. Thoughtless. Complete.

He is damned.

The Judging Eye closes and he’s just Achamian again. She feels great sorrow for this once strong man who is now a wreck. She knows, thanks to the brothel, that a madman needs to be believed. She tells him he’s a prophet from the past and leans in to kiss. “Her whole life she has punished herself with men.”

The memory of his power is like perfume.

After they have sex, they both regret it. She feels lonely as he sleeps beside her, wondering why that should be. She crawls to the fires, wrapped up in blankets, and tries to forget what they did. When he touches her shoulder, giving her kindness, she starts to cry.

“We have made our first mistake together,” he says, as though it were something significant. “We will not make it again.”

The forest is silent and suddenly she can’t stand it and sobs out, asking if she’s broken. If that’s why she runs. He says everyone carries silent burdens that bend them. She throws that back in his face, even as she hates herself for calling him broken. His hands stay on her in a comforting manner, though. He tells her he needs to find the truth more than for his hatred. She asks what difference does it make, and he’s shocked to learn the Great Ordeal has marched for Golgotterath. In a year, the Consult will be destroyed. Already, Sakarpus has already fallen.

Silence. Remorse comes crashing in.

Can’t you see? Something shrikes in her. Can’t you see the poison I bring? Strike me! Strangle me! Pare me to the core with your questions!

But she laughs instead. “You have shut yourself away for too long. You have found your revelation too late.”

My Thoughts

Why is the palace like a brothel? It’s a place where people are seen as objects. As things to be used and manipulated. As the Empress’s daughter, she would be seen as a valuable piece to be claimed as a wife. As an ear to her mother. As a wedge against a political rival. The brothel is, at least, honest.

Flare. Wax. Consume. Be energetic, get tired, and then eat food before you do it all over again. Life reduced to its most basic and honest form.

Unlike the Judging Eye, seeing sorcery’s mark on the world never goes away.

We get our first description of the Judging Eye and what our opening epigram is about: in this world, things are not equal. Men are seen as better than women. Why? I think it’s belief. The Outside exists so long as enough souls on this planet believe in it. That’s why the Inchoroi and the Consult want to depopulate it. To destroy this extra-dimensional realm that is being fed upon by the psyche of intelligent beings. Nonmen are evil because the majority species on this planet believe it. Whatever effect the Nonmen had on the Outside is gone. They’ve been depopulated. It’s all human now. Men think they’re better than women, which is a common thing we’re shown as a great evil in this series.

Bakker is accused of misogyny, but the whale room is his greatest condemnation of women being used as objects. The Dûnyain, who prized intellect above all others, who wanted to breed themselves into perfect beings, realized that the sex differences between women and men made it necessary to turn their women into better breeders. They destroyed their women because they had no emotions.

They did it through logic.

Then you have the other end. The Inchoroi. They are all about sex but don’t care about its biological purpose. Just the pleasure. They are all just men looking to rut with whatever holes they can find. They have a thousand words for ejaculate. Tells you a lot of their priorities.

Esmenet is the perfect person to show the flaws of these beliefs. An intelligent woman denied any chance to use it, forced to sell her body, even her own child, to survive. Achamian came close to treating her as an equal. Considering their culture, he went far beyond what’s normal. Kellhus used this to seduce her by respecting her and feeding her knowledge. However, his logic still led to the same position: she became a breeder for him.

How can Mimara ever heal and find resolution with her relationship with Esmenet when she has Kelmomas poisoning the well, polluting her thoughts with lies? We’ve seen Esmenet’s POV. We know the greatest mistake she’s ever made was selling her daughter.

A broken tree can never yield. A tree yields to the wind that blows past it, bending and swaying. To the forces of nature until those forces are too much and it breaks. The trunk collapses. Then it just lies there, unable to do anything. Unable to yield because it has collapsed. Is this what Bakker means? Maybe.

Reading this section of Mimara is something I can relate to. That feeling of helplessness. That nothing matters so why do anything. Just like you’re in a pit and will die because no one cares about you to come look for you. No one will miss you. Why even bother trying to escape? It takes too much effort. Just lie there and let it end.

Poisonous thoughts. The loss of hope is crippling.

Achamian says he no longer prays for the morning, and yet he just spent all this time talking about what Esmenet meant to him. What he was willing to give up for her. He would have condemned the world if it meant having the woman he loved. He isn’t over her at all. He is, after all, still trying to prove that Kellhus is not what he says. To find proof that he’s lying about salvation for sorcerers and even for Esmenet. That the Great Ordeal isn’t what he claims.

I don’t know about you, but I have dreamed of invented books before. I once heard you can’t read in dreams, but that’s not true. I have. Usually, it’s on the eve of a book I’m looking forward to reading coming out. The Wheel of Time books caused me to have them a few times. I’d be so excited to read them, but I could never find the same place in the books and sometimes would frantically be flipping through pages to find it.

The small things of life are where your true self comes out. Not the mask you wear around others, the various roles we all shift through like chameleons. The good employee. The patient friend. The polite cashier. Spouse. Confidant. Adviser. We never fully act our real selves around anyone but modify our behavior because it’s expected or to avoid friction.

And a brutal critic on those who pretend it doesn’t happen. Who project themselves as something more than the truth: they’re no better than any other human being.

Dûnyain influence on people is almost like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Only it’s still the person you love who betrays you because of Kellhus. Like what happened with Conphas and Martemus in the last series. Martemus was loyal until Kellhus began whispering. Then he nearly killed Conphas. And Conphas never betrayed Martemus. Conphas never did anything to Martemus that would have prompted a sense of betrayal. It was all Kellhus rewriting his soul.

Making Martemus into a new person.

It’s insidious if you’re trying to war against Kellhus. There’s no test like with the skin-spy. No mark left on the person physically. Not even the Mark.

Mimara, of course, was sent by a Dûnyain. Just not Kellhus. So Achamian is right, but, lucky for him, Kelmomas cares nothing about Achamian. He just needed Mimara to go away. She’s lucky not to be dead.

My theory is that Kellhus expected Achamian to try and find Ishuäl and use the Holy War as cover. I believe that’s why he arranged for the nonman king to be with the Ironsoul and his men. He cut a deal with the nonman erratic to let him relive his past through Seswatha (aka Achamian) in exchange for knowledge. He used that knowledge to send Serwa on an attack on Ishterebinth and secure his flank for the march on Golgotterath. Was Achamian supposed to be killed by the erratic? Was he supposed to find the truth about Kellhus?

I don’t know.

Once Kellhus had achieved his goal of defeating the No-God, he didn’t need to rule everything. Perhaps he was readying for some form of enlightened atheism. To have Achamian began to destroy his own myth after Kellhus achieved his plan. I think Kellhus wanted to close the Outside but not the way the Consult wanted to. Not through genocide. I could be just talking out of my ass here because Kellhus died without giving us any closure on Achamian’s storyline. In the end, Achamian’s journey didn’t change what happened at Golgotterath one bit. It was anticlimactic. Perhaps the point, but it seems like a waste of literary potential.

We’ll have to see how the next series handles it.

Achamian is unburdening himself now. He felt guilty for snatching away Mimara’s hope with his accusation. So even though he fears she is exactly what he dreads, a leash from Kellhus, he can’t help but explain himself. To fall into the Dûnyain trap.

People do not like their beliefs challenged. It causes turmoil. Why go through all that mental effort when you can just get on with your life? Like confronting contradictory information to what is in your core identity. Is it any wonder people hate philosophers. No one likes the status quo being challenged when you’re benefiting from it.

Beyond that, our minds take a lot of energy to operate. Humans burn a lot of calories to have our brains process so much, so our minds focus on important things and don’t like us to waste energy on things that cause it to have to burn more resources.

To understand something, you need to know how it came about. Whether it’s an astronomer studying a new cosmic phenomenon or a farmer trying to eradicate a new weed in his crops. The truth of origin can allow you to both understand something better and then categorize it. Handle it.

To war against it.

“There is no knowledge in the shadow of hate.” Mimara doesn’t hate her mother, she loves her. That is why she’s so hurt. Why she wants to punish her back. She doesn’t want to destroy her mother. Doesn’t despise her. She wants to make her mother bleed so she can find closure on the pain she received from Esmenet. You hate what you don’t know. One of the most successful men in defusing racial hatred is a black man named Daryl Davis. He sat down with members of the KKK, became their friends, and more than two hundred of them gave up their robes. He let them get to know what they hated and find understanding.

Achamian hates Kellhus. Mimara resents her mother.

One of those secrets of Seswatha, like how he’d cuckolded the king and is probably the father of Nau-Cayûti.

“Grub through dirt long enough and you will prize stone.” Value is subjective, after all. What looks like something as common as stone to one person is the material to build something great and vast to another.

Despite her upbringing, Mimara is having trouble hiding her pity for Achamian let alone feeling it. He’s touched her. Reached through her hard, bitter, cynical exterior that she drew around herself to protect her heart from the suffering she received as a child-slave in a brothel.

Interesting that the Judging Eye triggered as she’s judging him for being weak. I’m going to pay attention to its other appearance and see if there’s anything that triggers it, or if it happens at “random.” I put that in quotes because no book has random things in it. An intelligent mind creates a book and while their reasoning may not make sense, an author chooses when to put information in and for a reason.

Mimara has really only learned one way to deal with men. She hates it, but she doesn’t know other ways to get them to give her things. So she once again goes down that path, sensing Achamian’s vulnerability. This is her moment. She could have continued doing this with him, but he does the one thing she can’t take.

He’s kind to her.

Sex is a punishment for her. To willingly do what she’d been forced to do. What she hates. To be the thing she can never escape. He shouldn’t be kind to her, and yet he is.

She feels lonely beside him because she didn’t have sex out of love, out of a desire to truly be with him. She just wanted to get something from him. They had the veneer of intimacy but in fact, it’s not there. So she can’t take any satisfaction from his presence.

Ultimately, Mimara’s problem is that she hates herself. For how she has grown to become exactly what the brothel masters intended: a woman who uses sex to get things from men. And because of that, she wants the world to hate her, too. Her mother. Achamian. She lashes out at them even as she wants to stop. Even as she wants to receive their love. Until she can stop hating herself, she’ll never be able to accept the love of others.

And what Achamian offers her as he holds her face is love. Not sexual love, but that paternal love she came here seeking. He will become her father in truth over their journey, and since we’re in the world of grimdark fantasy, it comes after they had sex and she becomes pregnant with his child.

And with her pronouncement on the Holy War’s march, Achamian is launched into action. He has his quest. His chance to make it to his goal and find the truth. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. They arrive at the Great Ordeal not caring about the results. They don’t confront Kellhus. He’s never even seen with the Judging Eye. Because we, the readers, don’t need to see Kellhus in that eye. In those final moments, we see what Kellhus’s goals are. Whether or not he’s damned, he’s trying to change things his way. A way that doesn’t see humans suffer more than necessary.

Because, ultimately, he fell in love in his stunted way. He forged an emotional bond to Serwë and Esmenet. He let one of them die for his mission. He couldn’t let the other one. The irony is that this led to his fall. If he never went back to save Esmenet, if he hadn’t spared Kelmomas for her sake, what happened at Golgotterath would have played out very differently.

So what is the point of Achamian and Mimara’s journey? I haven’t read this series since the Unholy Consult came out and know how it ends. It sees these two broken figures reunited with Esmenet both transformed by their journey.

Let’s figure this out together and see if we can piece together what Bakker was intending. Is this another fantasy storyline that ends in failure like all the rest? Probably.

Ultimately, all are protagonists fail. Achamian and Mimara never reveal the truth of Kellhus.

Kellhus never defeats the Consult.

Sorweel never stops the evil emperor and live happily ever after with his princess.

Esmenet fails to protect her children.

But scattered through it is lives and passions, events that have meaning. That resonates. Let’s explore those as we march forward through The Aspect-Emperor.

If you enjoyed this, click here for Chapter Five!

And if you want to help support this blurb, check out my fantasy books on Amazon!

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To save the skies, Ary must die!

If you love the works of Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, R. Scott Bakker, and Steven Erikson, then check out my first ever Fantasy novel!

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Reread of The Judging Eye: Chapter Three

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Three

Momemn

Welcome to Chapter Three of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Two!

On my knees, I offer you that which flies in me. My face to earth, I shout your glory to the heavens. In so surrendering do I conquer. In so yielding do I seize.

NEL-SARIPAL, DEDICATION TO MONIUS

My Thoughts

So, as we’re about to see in the first paragraph of the chapter, that this is the dedication to a seditious poem just written. It is a bold statement that is saying that though Nel-Saripal has surrendered to the tyranny of the Anasûrimbor dynasty and their rule over the New Empire, he has found the opposite. He is saying that they have no power over him in truth because he understands just what power is.

It’s not something that can be taken but only given.

No tyrant can rule a nation without being given power. Now, I’m not talking about the subjected people who are held in bondage by physical force. No, it is the instrument of that force that has surrendered to the tyrant. The various functionaries and generals and bureaucrats who have, for one reason or another, given to the tyrant the ability to rule the state.

And what is given, can be taken away.

If one day, all of Hitler’s chief advisers, his Himmlers and Goerings and the like, stopped giving him power, he would have been impotent. This is the dirty secrets of hierarchy. You don’t climb to the top but are lifted there by your peers for a myriad of personal reasons. To believe that you rule by some sort of divine right, as promulgated by the new religion, or because you believe you deserve it, that you’re somehow better than those around you, is a trap.

An easy one to fall in to.

The poet is showing the illusion of it. The contradiction of power and rule. And that’s what we see from Esmenet throughout this chapter.

That she’s a fraud.

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), southwestern Galeoth

Nel-Saripal had his body slave deliver his newest poem to Empress Anasûrimbor Esmenet the moment it was penned. Within an hour it was on a ship. Seventy-three days later, it’s in her hand. She’s eager to read it as she grasped the scroll “the way a barren woman might grasp a foundling babe.” However, the opening lines strike her “as surely as a husband’s slap.” Already whispers start echoing through the hall at the utterance of first sentence: “Momemn is the first in our breasts, the beating heart.”

She gets mad while the reader, a famed orator named Sarpella, falters at the text. Everyone can tell this is seditious. That it implies Momemn beats its people to maintain power. Her poet was calling the government a thug. As the poem continues, she thinks all “great artists” punish their patrons in some way. She decides Nel-Saripal wasn’t subtle about it. That Nel-Saripal wasn’t as good a poet as Protathis who would have insulted her and gotten away with it. The rest of the poem is moving, so she first decides to forgive him.

But as the days past, that first line stuck with her. Slowly, Momemn became Esmenet. Every day, the poem becomes more and more personal for her. With Kellhus in the field, she was now the government. She was no Momemn. “A tyrant.”

You…” That was how Monius truly began.

You are the fist that beats us.”

Esmenet dreams of Mimara calling to her. She can’t seem to find her but instead finds an apple tree. The apples fall and become shrunken heads that glare at her. She screams as fingers break free of the ground. The dead spill out with their harvest. She’s thinking only of Mimara. She wakes up.

Esmenet wept as though she were her only child. Found, then lost.

The next afternoon finds her sitting bored as she listens to petitions. “The New Empire, she had long since learned, was a kind of enormous mechanism, one that used men as gears, thousands upon thousands of them, their functions determined by the language of the law.” It required upkeep, though she has Ngrau, formerly Ikurei Xerius’s seneschal, who now served hers. She has a comfortable relationship with him, and he knew to only send her the most important decisions. If she suspected any influence peddling or other corruption, she’d send them to the judges. It couldn’t be tolerated.

Mankind was at war.

She has a request for money form Shigek to help deal with Fanayal ab Kascamandri and his renegade army out in the desert. The last Kiani emperor refuses to die and admit defeat. Though her word could destroy any life, she liked to pretend her decisions were trivial.

For twenty years she had been Empress. For almost as long as she could read.

Other times, she’s almost overwhelmed by the sheer amount of power she has as the Empress. The horror of what she could do with it. But usually, it’s routine. Even simple, as she just approves the actions of others, leaving them to carry it out. However, crisis would come along that could overwhelm her with confusing details.

Part of her would even laugh, convinced that it was simply too absurd to be real. She, Esmenet, a battered peach from the slums of Sumna, wielding an authority that only Triamis, the greatest of the Ceneian Emperors, had known. Souls in the millions traded coins with her profile. Oh what was that, you say? Thousands are starving in Eumarna. Yes-yes, but I have an insurrection to deal with. Armies, you see, simply must be fed. People? Well, they tend to suffer in silence, sell their children and whatnot. So long as the lies are told well.

At such a remove, so far fro the gutters of living truth, how could she not be a tyrant? Not [No] matter how balanced, thoughtful, or sincerely considered her judgments, how could they not crack like clubs or pierce like spears.

Exactly as Nel-Saripal had implied, the wretch.

Kelmomas bursts in on her latest meeting to shout that her daughter Theliopa had found a skin-spy. As he talks, she feels motherly pride in him. He’s beautiful and perfect. She believes the Gods have spared one of her children the curse of her husband’s blood. Then she stiffens as she realizes what her son had said.

A moment later, Captain Imhailas appears and kneels. She orders the court cleared while demanding how her son could bring her this news. Imhailas has no idea how Kelmomas while Kelmomas begs to see the skin-spy. She says no. He responds that he kneads to know for when he’s older. She asks Imhailas his opinion and he quotes, “Calloused hands suffer no tender eyes, your Glory.” That annoys her because it’s so hackneyed statement. Never ask an idiot for advice. She stares at her son’s innocence. She just wants to protect him, especially after the assassination attempt at his Whelming a few months ago. He keeps begging.

She composed her face and looked back to Imhailas. “I think…” she said with a heavy sigh. “I think you’re quite right, Captain. The time has come. Both my sweet cherries should see Thelli’s latest discovery.”

Another skin-spy in the court. Why now, after so many years?

Both boys, your Glory?”

She ignored this, the way she ignored all the tonal differences that seemed to colour references to Kelmomas’s twin, Samarmas. In this one thing, she would refuse the worlds its inroads.

Kelmomas doesn’t appear nearly as excited since Esmenet mentioned his brother. She drags him along as she searches for Samarmas. Though the galleries weren’t large, they could become labyrinthine. She doesn’t have to look for him herself, but she doesn’t want to delegate too much of her life to others. “Power, she had come to realize, had the insidious habit of inserting others between you and your tasks, rendering your limbs little more than decorative mementos of a more human past.” Sometimes, it was like she was reduced to a devious tongue.

Servants bow as she sweeps through the columns. The palace hasn’t changed much since the Ikurei Dynasty ruled it. Momemn had been smart and surrendered to her husband. It hadn’t needed to be conquered. She remembers the first time she had walked through these walls, seeing the rich.

All it had lacked was power.

She doesn’t immediately pay attention to the screams of her third-youngest child Inrilatas. When she does, she pauses by the door to his room. She touches it, feeling only cold metal. Kelmomas suddenly says that Uncle Maithanet thinks Inrilatas should be sent away. Hearing Maithanet always itched her. It’s almost a worry because he’s so much like Kellhus.

They’re frightened of us, aren’t they, Mommy?”

Them?”

Everybody. They’re all afraid of our family…”

Why would that be?”

Because they think we’re mad. They think father’s seed is too strong.”

Too strong for the vessel. Too strong for me.

She tells Kelmomas the God burns the strongest in Inrilatas which is why he’s mad. She keeps him here because she wouldn’t abandon her children. “Like Mimara?” asks Kelmomas. She’s torn for one moment between listening to Inrilatas madness as he gnawed on the other door to the cherubic face of Kelmomas. She prays he’s not like her other children before admitting she had abandoned Mimara. She hopes Akka will keep her safe.

Inrilatas’s screams turn masturbatory. The animal sounds make her hold tight to Kelmomas, knowing an impressionable child shouldn’t hear these sounds. The jerking noises sound personal, meant only for her. Samarmas crying out “Momma!” frees her from listening to Inrilatas. Samarmas looks like Kelmomas but his face has a slackness to it. His eyes bulge. She scoops him up and realizes he’s getting big while beaming “mother-love into his idiot gaze.”

My broken boy.

The nursemaid, Porsi, had followed in his stomping wake, eyes to the ground. The young Nansur slave knelt, face to floor. Esmenet should have thanked the girl, she knew, but she had wanted to find Sammi herself, perhaps even to spy for a bit, in the way of simpler parents watching through simpler windows.

Inrilatas continued screaming through polished stone—forgotten.

Esmenet heads down endless stairs to reach dungeons, leading her two sons. Samarmas pauses to hug everyone who prostates themselves. “He always was indiscriminate with his loving gestures, particularly when it came to slaves.” Kelmomas keeps reminding Samarmas thy have to be warriors and be strong, like a big brother should. Fears for their futures in this world grows in her.

As they head down the last stairs, Kelmomas starts describing how skin-spies have soft bones like sharks and calls them monsters. This scares Samarmas even though he knows all this. “But it was part of his innocence to respond to everything as though encountering it for the very first time.” He has to be told over and over about things. Esmenet admonishes Kelmomas for scaring him as he protests his brother has to know.

She had to remind herself that his [Kelmomas’s] cleverness was that of a normal child, and not like that of his siblings. Inrilatas, in particular, had possessed his father’s… gifts.

She wished she could these worries to rest. For all her love, she could never lose herself in Kelmomas the way she could Samarmas, whose idiocy had become a kind of perverse sanctuary for her. For all her love, she could not bring herself to trust the way a mother should.

Not after so many… experiences.

There is a large crowd before the Truth Room. Everyone seems to have found an excuse, even her cook while Biaxi Sankas, a powerful member of the Congregate, shouts at the rabble to move. It disturbs her and reminds her that, while Kellhus is gone, she was the ultimate authority of the Empire. And yet even here, she feels like she doesn’t rule with such completeness. When Kellhus was around they would all line up “moist-eyed with awe and devotion.” But for her, it’s all back-fighting and whispers of plot and innuendo. “The long dance of tongues as knives.” She ignores most of it because it would mean the palace were about to revolt on her every week. Of course, if true foment brewed she would miss it. A monarch’s greatest threat came from those closest.

She cries out her Exalt-Captain’s name, demanding of Imhailas why everyone is here. She orders him to clear them out, and they scurry, hearing her anger before the soldiers can obey her.

They’re more of afraid of Father,” young Kelmomas whispered at her side.

Yes,” Esmenet replied, at a loss as to how to respond otherwise. The insights of children were too immediate, too unfiltered not to be unwelcomed. “Yes, they are.”

Even a child can see it.

As the various people file out, giving her fawning bows, she feels sickened. She wonders how she can rule when these people carry out her orders. “But she had been too political for too long not to recognize an opportunity when she saw one.” So she asks for Lord Sankas to watch over her boys. He towers over her, reminding her that her short stature marks her caste-menial, to her shame. He agrees, like most, he’s eager to feel important. She finds that unseemly in a man as hold as Sankas. However, when he gives her sons advice on behind men, she smiles knowing it will endear her boys to him. Kellhus often told her to seek advice from men who can benefit her. “Men, he was always saying, liked to see their words proved right.”

Samarmas asks if they are going to see the monster. She’s happy to dote on him. She’d rather be a mother than deal with the politics and finds herself retreating from rule into caring for her twins. She tells him not to fear, “Lord Sankas will protect you.”

The Truth Room, as the torture chamber had been known during the Ikurei Dynasty, had been expanded by Kellhus from a small chamber “every bit as dark and closeted as their peevish souls.” Now it is a sprawling organ of the state. It has cells, places to interrogate prisoners, and a galley for observers to watch. It’s like an upside-down step pyramid. At the highest tier, she meets with Phinersa (Master-of-Spies), Vem-Mithriti (Vizier), Maithanet, and Theliopa. The first two prostrate while the latter two merely bow.

Theliopa, her eldest daughter by Kellhus, bowed in stiff curtsy as they approached. Perhaps she was the strangest of her children, even morose than Inrilatas, but curiously all the more safe for it. Theliopa was a woman with an unearthly hollow where human sentiment should be. Even as an infant she had never cried, never gurgled with laughter, never reached out to finger the image of her mother’s face. Esmenet had once overheard her nursemaids whispering that she would happily starve rather than call out for food, and even now she was thin in the extreme, tall and angular like the God-her-father, but emaciated, to the point where her skin seemed tented over the woodwork of her bones. The clothes she wore were ridiculously elaborate—despite her godlike intellect, the subtleties of style and fashion utterly eluded her—a gold-brocaded gown fairly armoured in black pearls.”

Mother, the sallow blonde girl said in a tone that Esmenet could now recognize for attachment, or the guttering approximation of it. As always the girl flinched at her touch, like a skittish cat or steed, but as always Esmenet refused to draw back, and held Theliopa’s cheeks until she felt the tremors calm.

You’ve done well,” she said, gazing into her pale eyes. “Very well.” It was strange, loving children who could see the movement of her soul through her face. It forced a kind of bitter honesty of her, the resignation of those who know they cannot hide—not ever—from the people they needed to hied from the most.

Theliopa says she lives to please. Esmenet reflects that her children all have bits of Kellhus’s “truth” in him. Except Samarmas. That was obvious to her. Only he could be trusted. She instantly recoils from that thought as Kelmomas squeezes her hand. She greats the others with the customary, “Reap the morrow.” Phinersa stands up with spry ease while Esmenet helps aged Vem-Mithriti, whose not just her vizier but the Grandmaster of the Imperial Saik, to his feet. Phinersa is someone that rarely makes eye contact, but when he does, the Master-of-Spies will have such intensity you feel stripped naked. Vem-Mithriti is more shy, like a scared adolescent. Kellhus chose the man for his weakness. “She often wondered whether old Vem was his [Kellhus’s] Gift to her since Kellhus had no difficulty handling the willful and ambitious.”

Maithanet, her brother-in-law and the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, towered next to the two Exalt-Ministers, dressed in a plain white tunic. The oiled plaits of his beard gleamed like jet in the lantern light. His height and force of presence never failed to remind Esmenet of her husband—the same light, only burning through the sackcloth of a human mother.

Maithanet explains the new skin-spy was found by “Thelli” in a surprise inspection of new slaves. He motions to the skin-spy hung spread eagle on an iron device. It is covered in sweat and has black skin. Its held at all its joints to keep it from flexing. It still is testing out the device by twisting its body. A single pin driven through its skull has forced its face to open. This is Dûnyain Neuropuncture. Its face fingers twitch like crab limbs. It still raises revulsion in Esmenet despite how many times she’d been around them. They violated the natural order of the world. She even keeps a skull of one complete with its face fingers, to remind herself about them. She forced herself to look at it.

It had long since become an argument for suffering her husband.

She asks if this is the first time they’ve made a black-skinned Satyothi before? Maithanet says it’s the first, and Theliopa speculates it’s a test to see if the difference in skin tone and bone structure would make it different enough to slip by. She suspects that making this one is why it’s been 733 days since the last infiltration. Her daughter’s gaze unnerves Esmenet and she doesn’t consider these implications. Instead, she checks on her sons. Kelmomas seems to be judging if the skin-spy lives up to his imagination while Samarmas watches it through his fingers, curious and scared at the same time. When Kelmomas looks at her, it reminds Esmenet that he’s still Kellhus’s son and “it worried her.”

She asks him what he thinks. He says scary. She agrees. Samarmas then throws himself at her and cries into her stomach. She storks him and notices Phinersa and Imhailas watching her. She knows with Theliopa around, she doesn’t have to be afraid of their intent because she sees malice or lust (which are the same) in their eyes. Phinersa asks what she wants to be done with the skin-spy. Only Kellhus can successfully interrogate one. Not even Cants of Compulsion worked on them, they had no souls. Pain just turns them on. She orders a public execution so the people can be reminded. Maithanet calls it wise. Everyone stares at it like they were memorizing it, keeping the threat fresh. Imhailas asks if she’ll be in attendance.

Yes,” she replied absently. “Of course.” The People needed to e reminded of more than what threatened them, they needed to be reminded of the discipline that kept them safe as well. They needed to recall the disciplinarian.

The tyrant.

While holding Samarmas still, she watches Kelmomas staring with fascination at the skin-spy. The mother in her rebels as she does what Kellhus would do. For her sons’ sake, they have to become as ruthless as she’d failed to become because being his children put them in danger. She wants her sons there, too.

After handing over her sons to their nurse, she escorts her brother-in-law Maithanet out of the palace. It had become their custom since Kellhus left for her to do this. It was both political, showing them as equals, and she found him a comfort. He’s more human than Kellhus.

And, of course, his blood made him her closest ally.

He brings up she’s thinking about Nel-Saripal’s poem recited the day before. She asks him what he thinks of the opening line. He says it’s significant, but only a signal “the way birds tell sailors of unseen land.” Maithanet says with Kellhus and his most loyal supporters gone, lingering resentments from the Unification shall flare-up. Nel-Saripal is just the first. She asks if they should prioritize stability over the Consult. Maithanet says they need to increase their efforts. The best way the Consult can demoralize the Great Ordeal is to throw the New Empire into turmoil. “When the hands are strong, attack the feet,” as the Ainoni say. Esmenet asks who would be so foolish to do that after everything Kellhus has done.

The well of fools has no bottom, Esmi. You know that. You can assume for every Fanayal who poses us openly, there are ten who skulk in the shadows.”

She just hopes they aren’t as cunning as Fanayal who has been a thorn in the Empire’s side since the First Holy War. He’d escaped Kian’s fall into Kellhus’s hand and fled into the desert. Folk songs spread his fame no matter how many minstrels are burned. The Bandit Padirajah had made things difficult in Fanim lands.

They walk in silence for a while through the apartments where the functionaries lived. The sounds of normal living affect her, especially a young boy crying. She asks Maithanet what he sees her in her face. He tells her not as much as his brother would see.

Dûnyain. It all came back to this iron ingot of meaning. Maithanet, her children, everyone near to her possessed some measure of Dûnyain blood. Everyone watched with a portion of her husband’s all-seeing eyes. For a heartbeat, she glimpsed Achamian as he stood twenty years earlier, a thousand smoke plumes scoring sky beyond him. “But you’re not thinking! You see only your love for him. You’re not thinking of what he sees when he gazes upon you…”

And with a blink both he and his heretical words were gone

She says that wasn’t her question. And he sees sorrow, confusion, and worry for Mimara. She fears her other children more than she worries about them. She’s afraid she’s not capable of governing in Kellhus’s stead. She asks if the others can see this in her. He says some perhaps will catch glimpses, but he reminds her that Kellhus set things up so their redemption goes through her. He has put people around her to help her. He assures her not to worry. She asks why. Because Kellhus chose her answers Maithanet. It’s why he has no fear.

A Dûnyain. A Dûnyain has chosen you.

She asks why he hesitated, and he says if he saw this fear, then so did Kellhus. So it must be a strength. She blinks back tears and asks if she was chosen for being weak. Maithanet answers, “Is the man who flees to fight anew weak?” He says fear isn’t a good or bad thing but how it’s reacted to.

Then why wouldn’t he tell me as much.[?]”

Because, Esmi[,]” he said, drawing her back down the hall, “sometimes ignorance is the greatest strength of all.”

The next day, Esmenet wakes up thinking of her children as babies and not “instruments of power.” It feels miraculous. She didn’t like thinking about her early years. There was a time when Kellhus was relentless to have children. She’d conceived seven times and six had survived. Plus Mimara and Moënghus, Serwë’s son.

Eight!

The thought never ceased to surprise and to dizzy her, so certain she had been that she would live and die barren.

Kayûtas was born a few months after Moënghus, the pair raised as fraternal twins. Kayûtas had been perfect and it made the Lords of the Holy War weep to see him. “It had been Kayûtas who taught her that love was a kind of imperfection.” Despite his perfection, he felt no love. It broke her heart to hold him. Then she had Theliopa. She’d hoped for this child after Kayûtas, but even before the afterbirth was washed off, knew she had born another child lacking love. Kellhus was gone a lot at war and she grew depressed, even suicidal. Only Moënghus kept her alive. “He at least needed her, even if he was not her own.” That was why she really started looking for Mimara in earnest. She even thought of killing Theliopa and herself if Kellhus didn’t find Mimara.

Fate truly was a whore, to deliver her to such thoughts.

She quickly becomes pregnant with Serwa born in Carythusal right after the conquest. Another perfect child like Kayûtas, but Serwa seemed capable of love. A joy. However, at three, it was discovered she had the Gift and was sent to the Sawayal witches.

There had been a bitterness in that decision, and no few thoughts of heresy and sedition. In lowing Serwa, Esmenet learned that worship could not only survive the loss of love, it possessed room for hatred as well

Her next child was born with “eight arms and no eyes.” It almost killed her. Next was Inrilatas, another son incapable of love. However, she’d know there was something even more wrong, an instinct gained from being a mother so many time. By the time he was two, his nurses were scared, and at three he began “speaking the little treacheries that dwelt in the hearts of those about him.” At five, he unnerved hardened warriors. Once after Esmenet had sung him a lullaby, he said, “Don’t hate yourself for hating me, Mommy. Hate yourself for who you are.” Only Kellhus could manage him after that. And he didn’t have the time. Not long after, Inrilatas descended into madness.

Esmenet yearned for menopause or “the dry season.” But she kept having periods. She started to find surrogates for Kellhus to breed. “Of the seventeen concubines he impregnated, ten died in childbirth, and the others gave birth to more… nameless ones.”

Esmenet sometimes wondered how many hapless souls had been assassinated to keep this secret. A hundred? A thousand?

They found Mimara after Inrilatas’s madness. It took ten years for the Eothic Guard to find her in a brothel dressed up like the Empress. “They had found her daughter, her only child sired by a man instead of a god.” Mimara hated Esmenet. That sweet child was gone, mad in different ways from her “divine daughters and sons.” She also was the Few, but Kellhus allowed Esmenet to keep Mimara. She had refused, willing to destroy her relationship with Kellhus for her daughter. “She would not sell Mimara a second time—no matter how vicious the young woman’s rantings.” Though Mimara was even too old to go, it didn’t stop her from demanding it. Esmenet assumed this was her final punishment for her sin.

The twins arrived during this time, and with them one final spear throw at Fate

The twins had their own problems. Though they looked perfect, like Kayûtas, if you separated them, they both would not stop crying. Instead, for months they lay side by side staring into each other’s eyes. The physician-priest had warned her of “complications” for having children at her age. The two seemed to share a single sou, which she found poetic. Kellhus had found a famed slave named Hagitatas who specialized in “troubled souls.” He managed to separate the two children and give them their own identity. “Such was her relief that even the subsequent discovery of Samarmas’s idiocy seemed a cause for celebration.”

These sons loved—there could be no question that they loved!

At last the Whore of Fate, treacherous Anagke, who had lifted Esmenet form ignorance and brutality of the Sumni slums to the pitch of more profound torments, had relented. At last Esmenet had found her heart. She was an old mother now, and old mothers knew well the tightfisted ways of the world. They knew how to find largess in its meager capitulations.

How to be greedy with small things.

She feels hope despite her nervousness as she’s dressed. Porsi brings her sons looking like little generals, which delights Esmenet. Then she brings the protesting sons along a passage that ran beneath the Scuäri Campus. The Plate is heard above, summoning the city to witness the skin-spy’s execution. They emerge in the Allosium Forum and are almost deafened by the crowds. They step out atop the height overlooking the campus which is covered in people crying out in adoration to her.

Esmenet was always conscious of her unreality at moments such as this. Everything, even the cosmetics smeared across her skin, possessed the weight of fraud. She was not Esmenet, and nor were her children Kelmomas and Samarmas. They were images, semblances drawn to answer the mob and their anxious fantasies. They were Power. They were Justice. They were mortal flesh draped about the dread intent of God.

Authority in all its myriad incarnations

She pretends to bask in the adoration before being shocked by the sudden silence. She feels hesitant, frozen. Someone coughs. She heads down the stairs, flanked by the Eothic Guard. The lower she gets, she can smell the unwashed masses. As she stares out at the, she wonders how many want to kill her and her children. All eight of them. Theliopa isn’t here, unable to handle so many people, while Moënghus, Kayûtas, and Serwa march in the Great Ordeal. Mimara is with Achamian and Inrilatas in his prison.

Eight. And only these two boys loved.

She leads her sons to their seats, only letting go of their hands to rest them on the golden claws of her throne. She wears various gems and garb to signify different titles and claims to importance. She is facing away from the execution. She can hear the curtains being drawn as the skin-spy is unveiled. The crowd roars, frightening Samarmas. He huddled on his seat. The mother in her wants to order the guards to kill those who scared her child.

But to be sovereign is to be forever, irrevocably, cut into many. To be a matron, simple and uncompromising. To be a spy, probing and hiding. And to be a general, always calculating weakness and advantage.

She fought the mother-clamouring within, ignored his [Samarmas’s] distress. Even Samarmas—who she was certain would be nothing more than a dear fool—even he had to learn the madness that was his Imperial inheritance.

For him, she told herself. I do this for his sake!

The mobs scream at the Consult skin-spy strung up behind her. By tradition, her “eyes were too holy for such a horrific sight.” Lord Sankas, who must have one the lottery among the important nobles, has the honor of bringing her the hand mirror by which she’ll watch the execution behind her. Samarmas leaves his seat to hug her while those in the crowd laughed. She works to get him back to his seat while Sankas looks embarrassed. He holds up the mirror and she’s surprised by how beautiful she looks. She often thinks she’s older and uglier than she looks. Even growing old, it would stay with her.

It also hurts her, so she shifts the mirror to see the skin-spy. Her breath tightens. She watches it thrash against its chains as two of Phinersa’s men are preparing to flay it while another manipulates the Neuropuncture needles controlling it.

Both the twins had climbed into their seats to gaze over the back, Kelmomas pale and expressionless, Samarmas with his shining cheeks pressed to the cushion. She wanted to shout at them to turn away, to look back to the shrieking mob, but her voice failed her. Even though the mirror was meant to protect her, holding it the way she did seemed to make it all the more real, into something that rubbed against the soft-skin of her terror.

Brands burn out its eyes. She watches the torture with a sick, horrific fascination. She wonders how she could have ended up here. She believed in her husband and his mission, she just couldn’t believe it had happened to her. She thinks this is all a dream. Samarmas cries while Kelmomas trembled, not as strong as he usually was. She grabs her sons’ hands to comfort them, unable to stop being a mother. As she does, she feels the comfort it brings. An admission of her weakness.

The masses roared in exultation, becoming in some curious way, the iron that burned, the blade that peeled. And Esmenet sat painted and rigid, gazing out across their furious regions.

Thug. Tyrant. Empress of the Three Seas.

A miracle not quite believed.

My Thoughts

This opening does many things with Esmenet. It instantly reminds us of the thing that had initially seduced her to Kellhus: learning to read. She loves it. I don’t think there is a character in Bakker’s books that loves to read more than she does. It shows how self-conscious she is of her image. She wants to be seen as a loving ruler, but her critic clearly sees her as a thug. Her ego doesn’t like this one bit. It gnaws at her until it becomes more and more personal.

So once a government has power, and has the consent of the majority, it can only impose its will through violence. Every government, even your own, is a thug. Remember this when you lobby a politician to make a law: that law will be enforced by men with guns. At some point in the process, if someone defies it long enough, even in the most civilized country, a law enforcement officer will show up to either force you to comply or arrest you if you don’t. And if you resist, they will use an escalation of force on you.

A government will use force to maintain its order for so long as it can suppress the minority who object. It’s the very nature of government.

It must be terrible to be estranged from your child. I haven’t spoken to my father since June 2003 when my brother graduated from high school. Sometimes I wonder what he thinks about that? Sometimes I think about finding him after waking up from my own surreal dreams.

War. The eternal justification for the expenditure of resources, for marshaling a nation’s engine of economics in a single direction. Sometimes, it’s a necessary exercise to persevere against an aggressor, other times it’s the petty greed of men who want that greener pasture on the other side of the border.

A good discussion on how even someone who can care can be swept up in despotism. She’s reflecting on it thanks to the powers. That’s why his words are gnawing at her. He just stripped away her self-deception about her banality. She oppresses the people because she’s focused on “the big picture” forgetting that it’s made up of individual brush strokes. Or, in modern parlance, all those little dots made by a printer that forms a mosaic so fine it blends into an illusion of a seamless whole to our eyes.

But all those little dots matter when they’re human lives.

I think Theliopa is my favorite of Kellhus’s children. She has this innocence about her and a frailness even as she’s overwhelmed by her intellect and her inability to feel anything.

We get our first clue that Kelmomas knows the palace better than anyone as he beats Imhailas to Esmenet.

Esmenet is in denial that Samarmas isn’t mentally handicapped like he clearly is. She wants both of her youngest children to be perfect. One is faking it. Just like she won’t be able to see what he truly is for a long time.

Why a new skin-spy? We’re seeing an upgrade here. The first hints that the Consult has had another breakthrough and are now probing to see if they infiltrate while Kellhus is gone.

A mark of wealth in ancient times was being able to pay someone to spend their life weaving a carpet. That’s a human being that needs to pay for all of their life needs and are not contributing to the survival of the species. That’s the power that civilization and the diversification of skills gave our species.

Kelmomas is starting to turn her against Maithanet. He senses her worry and he’s going to feed on it through this book. He wants to isolate her. Doesn’t want her to rely on anyone else but him. Notice him then lumping himself and his mother together as one tribe against the rest of the world.

We see Esmenet, despite her intelligence, has a hard time breeding with Kellhus. The first two children came out Dûnyain enough. They’re stable. Able to fake emotions, but the rest of her children, including the stillborn, are not. Theliopa can’t understand fashion and actions. She’s very autistic, but she has a good rationale mind. Inrilatas sees it all for what it is, a joke. He sees the strongest of all of the children, but he doesn’t have the discipline to give a shit. Then we have the twins, one a sociopath and the other mentally handicapped.

We do see that Serwë is probably the most human of them. She does find emotions in the end.

Mimara thinks she’s run, that she escaped, but her mother knows just where she is. Esmenet probably realizes she can’t save her relationship with Mimara by holding tight. Maybe distance, time spent with Achamian, will help her. She has no idea Achamian is about to plan a dangerous journey and her daughter is not going to be safe.

But he does protect her.

It sounds like Samarmas has down syndrome. She had the twins late in life, which increases the risk factor of having a child with down syndrome. I think past the late thirties is when that starts happening. A woman’s eggs form in her in the womb. They’re rather old cells considering the life span for most is only seven years so by time a woman reaches procreation, they’re double if not triple the age of other cells in her body. And over the years, things break down.

Poor Inrilatas. There are limits to every human. He found his mother’s.

I used to work four years driving a paratransit shuttle for Pierce Transit, the local bus agency. A paratransit shuttle picks up those too disabled to ride the regular bus. It’s a requirement of the ADA act. A lot of my passengers were adults with mental handicaps. Down syndrome, extreme autism, other conditions. A lot of them were like Samarmas. Hugging and happy.

I really hate Kelmomas for killing him.

“For all her love, she could never lose herself in Kelmomas the way she could Samarmas, whose idiocy had become a kind of perverse sanctuary for her. For all her love, she could not bring herself to trust the way a mother should.” And here we have why Samarmas had to die. Kelmomas is a jealous god. He only wants one worshiper, and she needs to bend her full attention to him.

It’s only natural that she’s paranoid. She wants to believe Kelmomas is normal, which probably is why his deception is so successful on her. He has just enough sense to fake emotions, unlike his other siblings. So now she’s convincing herself that he must be, suppressing any doubts she might have because she’s desperate to have a child who loves her.

After all, she ruined things so badly with Mimara and the rest of her children are Dûnyain. All save Samarmas.

Biaxi Sankas, I hope your grateful Conphas is dead. Or else you would be. The last Biaxi in the story was the general Conphas sent after Cnaiür. If he didn’t come back with the barbarian’s head, Conphas vowed to exterminate the Biaxi family.

“The insights of children were too immediate, too unfiltered not to be unwelcomed.” This sentence is a double negative. Not unwelcomed? Should be not welcomed. It hurt my brain reading that.

Esmenet’s worried about betrayal. Maybe Ikurei had a point to be paranoid. It probably started out as reasonable concern, knowing about history including how his own father was betrayed by his mother so he could take the throne. But if you’re not careful, it becomes pathological. Kelmomas noticed this, and he starts working on her immediately.

The new rich are always embarrassed that they used to be poor around the old rich. They often try to overcompensate. Rarely does it work. Of course, Esmenet has the power of the Empire behind her so the old rich have to suck up to her.

Sometimes, it’s best to tell a white lie to spare hurt feelings especially trivial. I’m a writer, and when my mom tells me she likes my writing, I’m always like, ‘Are you just saying that because you’re my mom?’ At least Esmenet’s children would know if they’re bad or not.

The moment she thinks only Samarmas can be trusted, Kelmomas reminds her of his presence. She is actually on to him more than I realized and deceiving herself. He is doing everything to feed that delusion. “The lies that flatter us are the ones we most readily believe,” is something similar to a Bakker quote. I probably got it wrong, but that’s the essence of it.

“Reap the morrow.” What a curious greeting. Harvest the future. I have a feeling that Kellhus set this up, a reminder to think about what tomorrow is going to bring. You want a good harvest to reap on the morrow. To build towards it.

Esmenet clearly doesn’t love Kellhus at all. She all but hates him, but tolerates him because the world needs to be saving. She believes in his mission. That’s one of the reasons she’s here. It’s one argument, but also her children and seeing them cared for is another. Of course, if she’d know the sort of children she would be having…

733 days. Nearly two years. Who wants to bet that this is when the Mutilated took over the Consult. It can’t have been too many years before that because of the age of the boy. The Mutilated were clearly tortured for a period of time before they used their Dûnyain skills to win over the Consult and then dominate it. They would understand exactly how the skin-spies were detected. Now that Kellhus is gone, perhaps they thought a new type would work or were testing how good the half-Dûnyain are. It might also be a feint to keep Kellhus from suspecting of their existence.

It’s hard to speculate with Dûnyain in the mix.

There is little to no evidence that the Consult is behind any of the happenings that take down the New Empire. Maybe they were doing stuff, but it’s all Kelmomas, Fanayal and his Cishaurim, Zeüm, and Yatwer that cause the problems and draw Kellhus back to the New Empire. Even in the end, it’s Kelmomas becoming the No God not whom the Consult wanted. No one predicted he would be the No God. The Mutilated wanted Kellhus to reach them. They just couldn’t make it easy. They had to try their hardest to destroy him. Now, maybe they were behind Zeüm giving support to Fanayal, but it’s hard to say. Maybe the next book will elucidate it. after all, Zeüm is about to have a bad time.

The Bandit Padirajah. The perfect, romantic symbol of rebellion to inflame the common folk. If the world survives, he’ll be a legendary figure like Robin Hood in our world. Everyone loves to root for an underdog because, unless you’re one of the .0001% at the top of the social hierarchy, you’re an underdog yourself. And you would hope to win if you had the balls to do what Fanayal does.

A sad thing for a mother to fear her children. Normally, the mother or parents would bring that on themselves, but given her children and her inability to relate to them, to even understand them, it makes sense. They are almost aliens to her save for Mimara and poor Samarmas.

Did I mention I hate Kelmomas?

Fear is an important part of humans. As Maithanet says, it’s necessary. Look at Conphas, the man was so narcissistic that he ignored his fear. He pushed doubt aside. Doubt is merely a type of fear, after all. One that makes us question what we’re doing. Be self-reflective. Since most of us aren’t in a life or death struggle like our fear response was designed for, we can use it to help us with more modern issues. It’s healthy, but too much fear is just as bad. Like with everything in life, it’s balance.

Of course, there is the possibility that it doesn’t matter who was in charge. The New Empire was never intended to survive. Kellhus has his mission. Defeat the Consult and stop the No-God from being activated. The New Empire serves no purpose after that. He might even see the eradication of the Dûnyain like himself can only be a positive given where Dûnyain philosophy leads in a world where Damnation is a true thing and morality matters.

Esmenet felt that emptiness inside of her created when she sold Mimara. She’s desperate to replace it with anything. But Kellhus’s children are like him. They just couldn’t fake it yet. How horrifying to have children who might as well be rocks. Mothers need that emotional connection to bond with them, else you get what she descends into postpartum depression. The thoughts of harming herself and the baby are all symptoms of that.

Serwa seems capable of love. She is definitely the most emotional of Kellhus’s children we see (baring Samarmas). Once Sorweel breaks through her barriers. She even saves her mother life when her mission to destroy the Consult should have been all that mattered.

I hope Serwa survives into the next series. She was badly wounded at the end, though.

“Don’t hate yourself for hating me, Mommy. Hate yourself for who you are.” Inrilatas called his mother a whore to her face. Also, it’s pretty clear that Kellhus pushed the kid into harmless insanity so he would have to be locked up because he did not have time to care for him.

More proof that the Dûnyain are not fully human, they have trouble reproducing. They have strengthened the nonman gene in their bloodlines to a point where they’re verging on a different species from humans. Or so I believe.

Kelmomas certainly loves. He has the jealous love of a child who wants his mother all to himself and the intellect to make it happen combined with not a bit of morality to restrain his actions. We also get another version of this story from Kelmomas about what was going on with him and his brother.

The Plate sounds like a giant symbol used to sound the alarm.

Oh, Esmenet, Mimara loves you. It’s in there. The pain of her hatred wouldn’t be so great otherwise. It might be impossible for them to ever get past that. Mimara was greatly wronged by her mother. If she chooses never to forgive Esmenet, it’s understandable.

She didn’t count Moënghus in her tally of normal children. Yet he’s not Dûnyain, so what happened to him? We’ll see in book 2 and 3.

Notice how many traditions there are around her. Her eyes are too holy to watch an execution. She wears a garnet on her shoulder to signify Kellhus’s blood had passed through her. These are not natural traditions. Not established so fast. They were implemented by Kellhus for he knows the importance of traditions. Most start out as a convenience done by someone who keeps doing it, then others follow until you get a separation between the reason it was done and those who just mimic it because that is how it has always been done.

Esmenet has “impostor syndrome” which is the belief that you don’t deserve where you are. It’s that doubt that can make you question your own skill, your own purpose. It can be a healthy thing, keeping you sharp, or it can destroy you if it becomes a neurosis. She’s not as strong as she thinks she needs to be. Her children are a crutch, an escape, that give her comfort. Hence, why I think she felt it to be an admission that holding their hands soothed her soul.

Our introduction to Esmenet is done. We get her backstory, how she is more a partner to Kellhus than a wife. She believes in him, but she’s long stopped loving him. She hates him now, but she also still trusts him. Worships him.

Click here for Chapter Four of the Reread!

And if you want to help support this blurb, check out my fantasy books on Amazon!

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To save the skies, Ary must die!

If you love the works of Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, R. Scott Bakker, and Steven Erikson, then check out my first ever Fantasy novel!

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Reread of The Judging Eye: Chapter Two

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Two

Hûnoreal

Welcome to Chapter Two of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter One!

We burn like over-fat candles, our centres gouged, our edges curling in, our wick forever outrunning our wax. We resemble what we are: Men who never sleep.

—ANONYMOUS MANDATE SCHOOLMAN, THE HEIROMANTIC PRIMER

My Thoughts

It’s a nice reintroduction to the Mandate Schoolman. They used to be men at the edge of their resources. They are working themselves too hard. They are driven to push themselves to their utter limits. Why?

Because of Seswatha’s dreams.

And since this chapter starts out with Achamian, it’s a fitting introduction.

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), southwestern Galeoth

There would have been nightmares aplenty had Drusas Achamian been able to dream a life that was his own. Nightmares of a long, hard war across deserts and great river deltas. Nightmares of sublimity and savagery held in perfect equipoise, though the cacophony of the latter would make all seem like misery. Nightmares of dead men, feeding like cannibals on their once strong souls, raising the impossible on the back of atrocity.

Nightmares of a city so holy it had become wicked.

And of a man who could peer into souls.

Achamian can’t dream of these things because, even though he renounced being a Mandate Schoolman, he still dreams of Seswatha and the First Apocalypse. He relives the horrors of the past. Tonight, he’s dreaming of a feast that the High King Anasûrimbor Celmomas has thrown. He’s reclining on his Urthrone drunk and almost passed out. His Knight-Chieftains are partying. Toasts are cried out and mead is drunk. Achamian (as Seswatha) is at the end of a table only drinking water. He is watching “the High King—the man he still called his best friend—drink himself into unconsciousness.”

Seswatha slips out. No one notices. He moves through the palace and finds a door open as expected. Candles light the room, illuminating Suriala, a wanton beauty. “He knelt in accordance with the very Laws he was about to break.” He’s overcome with her beauty. He goes to the bed, mounts her.

Made love to his High-King’s wife—

A convulsive gasp.

Achamian bolted forward from his blankets. The darkness buzzed with exertion, moaned and panted with feminine lust—but only for a moment. Within heartbeats the chorus call of morning birdsong ruled his ears. Throwing aside his blankets, he leaned into his knees, rubbed at the ache across his jaw and cheek. He had taken to sleeping on wood as part of the discipline he had adopted since leaving the School of Mandate, and to quicken the transition between his nightmares and wakefulness. Mattress, he had found, made waking a form of suffocation.

It takes him some time to banish his arousal from the dream. If he was still a Mandate, this would have been momentous to dream. He wasn’t one, and he had many such revelations in his dreams to be overawed. He glances at the sun shining through curtains thinking exposing truth to the light is “never a bad thing.”

He can hear the children of his two slaves playing outside. He savors the sound because today it felt like a “profound miracle.” He wished to just stay in this moment, a good way to spend the rest of his life.

He looks at his room in a Galeoth military tower. It’s simple and barbaric compared to his life spent in the “fleshpots of the South.” But it had been his home for twenty years. The place where he studied.

He walked different roads. Deeper roads.

How long had he travelled?

All his life, it seemed, though he had been a Wizard for only twenty.

Breathing deep, drawing fingers from his balding scalp to his shaggy white beard, he walked to the main worktable, braced himself for the concentrated recital to come…

The meticulous labour of mapping Seswatha’s labyrinthine life.

Thanks to writing down Seswatha’s dreams for years, he’d learned the best way to do it. Before his memory could taint the recollection, he had to write it down fresh. The first thing he did upon awakening. However, he could only write: “NAU-CAYÛTI?” He stares at the name of Celmomas’s son who helped steal the Heron Spear. That weapon slew the No-God. Achamian has read dozens of books devoted to him. His military exploits. His heroic deeds. How he was slain by his wife, Iëva. Some have noted how many of Seswatha’s dreams had involved Nau-Cayûti. Achamian is realizing Seswatha had bedded his lover, which is in itself a significant revelation. As much as Achamian wants to jump to the conclusion that Seswatha is Nau-Cayûti’s father, he thinks to the dream, wanting to date it to see if was possible. He’s interrupted by one of the slave children asking a question only for a strange woman to reply.

He’s shocked by the accent of the newcomer. She spoke like a Nansur or Ainoni. Someone from the south, not someone from Hûnoreal, a province in northern Galeoth. He looks out the window across the grounds and doesn’t see where the voices are coming from. He scans past a few outbuildings and spots a mule while the voices “continued to chirp and gaggle somewhere to the left.” The boy cries out for their mother and Achamian spots him moving through the trees on the slope. His mother, Tisthana, comes out to meet the children. There are children talking to the stranger, a woman, asking about her sword and the name of her mule. She’s wearing a fine cloak marking her noble caste, but he can’t see her face. He wonders how long it had been since a visitor had come. Maybe five or six years ago.

He remembers how it had been just him and Geraus in the beginning. He often had to use the Gnosis to kill packs of Sranc, leaving marks of the battle all over the place. Geraus still has nightmares about it. Later, Scalpoi came to win the bounty on Sranc scalps. They often brought their own problems, but his Gnosis took care of that.

No matter, the rule had been simple over the years: Visitors meant grief, the Gods and their laws of hospitality be damned.

The woman appears friendly as she greets Tisthana, and Achamian thinks the woman acts like caste-menial despite her fine clothing. He relaxes when he hears Tisthana laugh, knowing she’s a trustworthy judge of character. The two women now walking side by side to the tower, chatting in the friendly way of women. Tisthana points out Achamian. He tries to put on a dignified pose but the mortar of the windowsill crumbles and he almost falls out the window. The children laugh in delight as he rights himself.

The stranger looked up, her delicate face bemused and open and curious…

And something in Achamian suffered a greater fall.

No matter how surprising an event is, there is a reason for it. Cause and effect rule the world. The newcomer calls him the Great Wizard in a tone “balanced between many things, hope and sarcasm among them.” She reminds him of a child with poor manners. He demands to know what she’s doing here after sending Tisthana and the children away. Despite how short she is, she’s standing on the highest fold of the ground to loom over him out of instinctive. He recognizes her. She’s beautiful, her face that of his wife. This is Mimara, Esmenet’s daughter who she’d sold into slavery during a famine. Achamian wonders if finding Mimara is why Esmenet stayed with Kellhus, choosing the Dûnyain emperor over “a broken-hearted fool.”

Not because of the child she carried, but because of the child she had lost?

The questions were as inevitable as the pain, the questions that had pursued him beyond civilization’s perfumed rim. He could have continued asking them, he could have yielded to madness and made them his life’s refrain. Instead he had packed a new life about them, like clay around a wax figurine, then he had burned them out, growing ever more decrepit, even more old, about their absence—more mould than man. He had lived like some mad trapper, accumulating skins that were furred in ink instead of hair, the lines of every snare anchored to this silent hollow within him, to these questions he dared not ask.

And now here she stood… Mimara.

The answer?

Mimara is glad he recognized her. Memories of Esmenet ripple through Achamian at the sight of her, and he says she looks a lot like her. She doesn’t seem pleased about that. He repeats his question, asking why she is here. She gives a flippant, obvious answer that forces him to ask a third time. Anger glazes through her, startling Achamian. The world that had slowly faded away from his valley now has returned. He’d found peace here and realizes he’s about to lose it as he shouts at her to know why she’s here.

She flinched, looked down to the childish scribble at her feet: a gaping mouth scrawled in black across mineral white, with eyes, nose, and ears spaced across its lipless perimeter.

“B-because I wanted…” Something caught her throat. Her eyes shot up, as though requiring an antagonist to remain focused. “Because I wanted to know if…” Her tongue traced the seam of her lips.

“If you were my father.”

His laughter felt cruel, but if was such, she showed no sign of injury—no outward sign.

He explains he met Esmenet after Mimara was sold into slavery. He should have realized Esmenet would have used all her new power to find the “girl whose name she would never speak.” He tries to explain how Esmenet sold Mimara to save her from starving to death and how it broke her. As he says them, he realizes this is just the “same hollow justifications” she’s heard again and again. It’s clear that though Esmenet found her years ago, it was too late to fix her. She then starts pressing that she remembers that he bought her apples. He claims it wasn’t him and he’s not her father because the daughter of whores “have no fathers.” He tried to say it gently, but it comes out too hard. It hurts her. “You said that I was clever,” she accuses.

He ran a slow hand across his face, exhaled, suddenly feeling ancient with guilt and frustration. Why must everything be too big to wrestle, too muddy to grasp

“I feel sorry for you, child—I truly do. I have some notion of what you must have endured…” A deep breath, warm against the bright cool. “GO home, Mimara. Go back t your mother. We have no connection.”

He turned back towards the tower. The Sun instantly warmed his shoulders.

“But we do,” her voice chimed from behind him—so like her mother’s that chills skittered across his skin.

He reiterates that he’s not her father, but she says it’s something else that brought her. Her tone makes him turn back to face her. She says she’s one of the few. A witch. She continues that she isn’t looking for her father, but for a teacher. She wants to learn the Gnosis.

There is a progression to all things. Lives, encounters, histories, each trailing their own nameless residue, each burrowing into a black, black future, groping for the facts that conjure purpose out of the cruelties of mere coincidence.

And Achamian had his fill of it.

Mimara realizes that her mother “the old whore” is right: Achamian likes to teach. It’s been three months since she’s run away from the Andiamine Heights in search of Achamian. She had to dodge the Judges and survive the hard winter. She can’t believe she made it. She’s dreamed of this place, imagined it so much, it actually fits her fantasy. Everything but Achamian.

He’s the Apostate. The man who cursed the Aspect-Emperor out of love for Esmenet. She’s heard many versions of him. Even her mother talks about him in different ways. It’s the contradictions about this man that left the impression. “In the cycle of historical and scriptural characters that populated her education, he alone seemed real.

Only he isn’t. The man before her seems to mock her soft-bellied imaginings: a wild-haired hermit with limbs like barked branches and eyes that perpetually sort grievances. Bitter. Severe. He bears the Mark, as deep as any sorcerers she has seen glimpse through the halls of the Andiamine Heights, but where they drape silks and perfume about their stain, he wears wool patched with rancid fur.

How could anyone sing songs about such a man?

He asks if it’s true that witches aren’t burned. She says there’s even a School, the Sawayal Compact. That shocks Achamian who then asks why she needs him. Her mother won’t let her and the Sawayali won’t anger Esmenet by taking her. “Socerery, she [Esmenet] says, leaves only scars.” Achamian agrees with that.

“But what if scars are all you have?”

Achamian is taken back by Mimara’s statement then asks if she wants power to “feel the world crumble beneath the weight of your voice.” She sees this as a game and asks isn’t that why he did it and strikes a nerve, but she finds no satisfaction in winning. He tells her he’d rather be her father than teacher.

There is a set manner to the way he turns his back this time, one that tells her that no words can retrieve him. The sun pulls his shadow long and profound. He walks with a stoop that says he has long outlived the age of bargaining. But she hears it all the same, the peculiar pause of legend becoming actuality, the sound of the crazed and disjoint seams of the world falling flush.

He is the Great Teacher, the one who raised the Aspect-Emperor to the heights of godhead.

He is Drusas Achamian.

She builds a bonfire that night wanting to burn down his tower. She pretends the fire is living, a fantasy she often indulges in to put magic into the world. “That she is a witch.” It starts to rain. Lightning flashes. She crouches in the downpour, soaked. It slowly smothers her fire. Her misery grows. She finds herself before the tower hollering for him to teach her.

He simply has to hear, doesn’t he? Her voice cracking the way all voices crack about the soul’s turbulent essentials. He needs only to look down to see her leaning against the slope, wet and pathetic and defiant, the image of the woman he once loved, framed by steam and fire. Pleading. Pleading.

Teeeeeach!”

Meeee!”

Only wolves answer, howling with her. It mocks her, but she’s used to people “who celebrate her pain.” She throws her hurt back at the world, declaring he will teach her. Then she sees him watching her from a doorway. He steps out into the rain, hobbling towards her. She can see the unseen sorcery shielding him from the rain. She trembles when he looks down at her from the stairs while the storm rages around them. She feels embarrassed under his scrutiny and demands he teach her.

Without a word, which she could now see is made not of wood, but of bone. Quite unprepared, she watches him swing it like a mace—

An explosion against the side of her skull. Then sliding palms, knuckles scraped and skinned, arms and legs tangled rolling. She slams to a stop against a molar-shaped rock. Gasps for air.

Stunned, she watches him pick his way back up the shining slope. She tastes blood, bends her face back to let the endless rain rinse her clean. The drops seem to fall out of nowhere.

She begins laughing.

Teeeach meeee!”

My Thoughts

A great way to introduced Achamian and remind us of the Holy War and what happened. We cut right to the most important part of his motivation in this series: finding out the truth of Kellhus. He has to know the truth of who he is, and those keys lie in his dream of Seswatha. A dream about a sorcerer cuckolding a king.

So is Seswatha the father of Nau-Cayûti? This certainly seems to imply it. Why else would Achamian dream this moment.? Or more specifically, why else would Bakker write this passage? My theory on why both Nau-Cayûti and Kelmomas are both able to activate the No-God when no one else can is their bloodline. The Anasûrimbor bloodline. It is implied that the only successful mating between human and Nonman happened when an Anasûrimbor daughter was raped by a Nonman. However, if Nau-Cayûti isn’t Celmomas’s bloodline, how does my theory survive?

Well, as we can see from the appendix of Thousandfold Thought, the Anasûrimbor dynasty was large. It ruled several different kingdoms. The Anasûrimbor that Kellhus is a descendant of is a cousin to Kelmomas. If you know anything about royalty, they like to marry important people. There is often quite a number of close kin marrying amid royal families. It is possible that Suriala is also an Anasûrimbor by blood even if her maiden name was another.

In fact, estimates of human history show that most marriages in the history of our race (hardly dented by the small fraction of the modern era) have been between first and second cousins. So the Anasûrimbor bloodline was spread out wide, it was preserved in the Dûnyain as one of their various lines of descent because of its innate gifts. I also think this is why Kellhus has trouble with children. The Dûnyain have bred the Nonman part of the Anasûrimbor genetics to its limits through their program. The reason for their greater intelligence and reflex might be, partly, accounted by this strengthening of the Nonman genes. I think the Mutilated figured this out, but by then they were the last Dûnyain left alive and none of them wanted to do the activation.

They were trying to save their souls, not sacrifice them, so they needed a replacement. And one was coming. Their enemy. They were certain Kellhus would work. They had to have figured out the Anasûrimbor bloodline was the key. They could take out the greatest threat to their power and turn on the No-God in one step. Leave Kellhus alive, and he’d probably figure out how to destroy the No-God again even if one of them activated it.

There is precedent for it happening. Hope they find that missing Heron Spear.

The sound of children laughing and playing, a simple joy, is what Achamian yearns for. He wants to keep hearing it because it means the Second Apocalypse hasn’t come. That there is still innocence in the world.

We noticed near the end of the last book, that Achamian’s dreams with Seswatha were focused on Nau-Cayûti. Now, he’s dreaming things no other Mandate has. The things that the Seswatha-in-his-Soul didn’t think was relevant to their mission. What’s changed for Achamian. What makes him different.

Kellhus.

I believe when Kellhus hypnotized Achamian in the Thousandfold Thoughts, something changed. Perhaps Kellhus talking with the Seswatha caused him to react and start feeding Achamian more information, or whatever Kellhus did to free Achamian to teach the Gnosis loosened the other restraints on the Seswatha in him, and now he’s dreaming all sorts of things.

On another note, Mandate who get obsessed with dreams invariably fall into the conspiracy theory traps and get lost in them. Achamian, at least, is studying new things. But obsession can do a lot of damage if it consumes him.

Poor Achamian, having to dream about an adulterous wife while missing Esmenet. Twenty years, and it still hurts. He’s like Leweth from the first book. The man who went into the wilderness to preserve memories of his wife. Achamian is obsessed with his quest to unmask Kellhus and prove himself right. Esmenet went back to him without telling him why. She probably thought he was dead, she was pregnant, and she had a chance to find Mimara.

Achamian is always the teacher, even if his only pupils are slave children who’d normally never learn to write. The Turtle Shell rock is a nice and subtle reminder of one of Achamian’s core characteristics.

Why did Esmenet stay? I’ve always said it was for her children: Mimara and Kayûtas, the one she was pregnant with. She had to be a mother before a woman, choosing them over her heart.

I think I’ve mentioned this, but altruism is hard to maintain when you’re starving. The hungrier you get, the more you retreat into instinct. And instinct is selfish. We know from Esmenet’s point of view she sold Mimara to feed herself. In a fit of selfishness, she did it and only regretted it later. Once she’d eaten and could think properly, she wanted to take it back. Ironically, it did save Mimara’s life, but the girl suffered greatly anyways. A wound that being told her suffering was for her own good won’t work to heal.

I’m interested in the next series. Will becoming a mother herself bring Mimara and Esmenet together?

Achamian is lying about never meeting Mimara. He’s not her father, but he did know her as a child. He helped Esmenet to try and get her back after the famine but failed, and that was when Esmenet stopped talking about her. I imagined he’s denying he’s Mimara father out of guilt for that. She would have been sold off when he was away. When he couldn’t help Esmenet. Now he can’t be her father. He’s too old. He wants her to leave, not to bond with him.

Mimara being one of the Few is not a surprising plot twist if you were paying attention to the last series. Esmenet mentioned that her mother could do things that she refused to teach her daughter. She was a witch, but Esmenet didn’t have the ability. It’s a recessive gene or something and skipped her generation. So Mimara being one of the Few is not a clue she’s Achamian’s daughter.

She sees his face slacken, despite the matted wire of his beard. She sees his complexion blanch, despite the sun’s morning glare. And she knows that what her mother once told her is in fact true: Drusas Achamian possesses the soul of a teacher.

This is Mimara’s first POV paragraph. Notice the verbs. They are not in past tense like EVERYTHING else in the series. They’re present tense. It’s a subtle thing Bakker does with her POVs. Whenever we’re in her head, it’s not like the past is being retold to us, but that we’re living in the present with Mimara.

We’re seeing what her Judging Eye sees as the world unfolds before her.

I have to confess, I had read The Judging Eye maybe three or four times before I began seriously pursuing my own writing. The next time I read it after I did, in preparation for The Great Ordeal’s release, this leaped out at me at once and it made me ask, “Why did Bakker do this?”

Remember this lesson: if an author has even a modicum of talent, they write things for a reason. Now, don’t get lost in why they made so-and-so’s dress blue, or why such-and-such person has a wart on their nose. Most of the time, those are just there to paint the world, not for any special reason. But pay attention to which details an author shares and how they convey information. Bakker so far has used 3rd Person Omniscient Past Tense for the historical sections and 3rd Person Limited Past Tense for the character POVs. Now we have a shift to 3rd Person Limited Present Tense for Mimara and only Mimara. Why?

The Judging Eye.

When it opens, we see the world as she does. We experience it as she does. She’s the conduit for the God, the Oversoul, to peer out at the world and witness it the way IT sees the world. Damnation and Salvation. It makes her POVs have an immediacy that other sections can lack.

Like many abused as children, she has a great deal of anger inside of her. She’s lost. Looking for the family she should have had while rejecting the one who sold her into that horror. As we later see when she seduces Achamian, she’s been taught by her abuse that her body only holds value in pleasing a man.

Achamian sees too much of himself in her. He wants to hurt Kellhus and the world that has taken everything away. Mimara cuts too close. To protect himself, he has to drive her away. But she’s determined. She’s come too far to give up. Hitting her on the head won’t work. She thinks she has nothing else but this. She has a driving need to be here, manipulated to come here by her darling little brother Kelmomas.

He wants mommy all to himself.

If you want to read the next part, click here for Chapter 3!

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To save the skies, Ary must die!

If you love the works of Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, R. Scott Bakker, and Steven Erikson, then check out my first ever Fantasy novel!

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Reread of The Judging Eye: Chapter One

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter One

Sakarpus

Welcome to Chapter One of my reread. Click here if you missed the Prologue!

Upon the high wall the husbands slept, while ‘round the hearth their women wept, and fugitives murmured tales of woe, of greater cities lost to Mog-Pharau

—“THE REFUGEE’S SONG,” THE SAGAS

My Thoughts

Pretty straight forward, a reminder of the devastation caused by the First Apocalypse. The men are sleeping at their posts, unable to leave the defenses in case of attack while their women weep because all their children are stillborn. They hear the rumors. They know what is coming.

It is fitting to open Chapter One which also starts out with the Great Ordeal and its mission to stop the Second Apocalypse and the re-awakening of the No-God. Here are the stakes that are being gambled upon. Kellhus has to surpass the original Ordeal that Anasûrimbor Celmomas led two thousand years. He only had to cross the final leg of the Great Ordeal’s march. Kellhus’s army has to survive the ruins of the north just to reach Celmomas’s starting point.

Also, it’s good to know how to pronounce Mog-Pharau. It rhymes with woe. Though the selection is written out as prose, it’s lyrical poetry.

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The Kathol Passes

The tracks between whim and brutality are many and inscrutable in Men, and though they often seem to cut across the impassable terrain of reason, in truth, it is reason that paves their way. Ever do Men argue from want to need and from fortuitous warrant. Ever do they think their cause the just cause. Like cats chasing sunlight thrown from a mirror, they never tire of their own delusions.

Across the lands, priests of the Thousand Temples and Judges of the Ministrate preached the Truth and hunted for those who disputed it or ignored it for greed. Caste-slave and caste-noble alike are taught “the Great Chain of Missions.” This is how each person’s job helps other people’s job allowing the Empire and the Great Ordeal to succeed against “the apocalyptic designs of the Consult.” The Great Ordeal is the greatest host in the history of mankind. It took ten years to prepare. They have gathered for their march across the “Sranc-infested Wilds of the Ancient North” to reach Golgotterath.

“It was a mad endeavor.” It was no simple task. It required a massive movement of food and supplies. A knight, his mount, the pack mules that carried the supplies, and the slaves who prepare his supper all needed food. “This was why the most arduous battle waged by the Great Ordeal would not be against the Consult legions, but against Eärwa’s own wild heart.” They had to survive to make it to Golgotterath. So for years, the New Empire produced food and stored them in granaries while herds of livestock were driven north. The records to track this required their own warehouses to store them.

The call to arms did not come till the last.

The Zaudunyani come across the Three Seas to take up the Circumfix from Conryia to Kian. The Schools send their sorcerers including the new Saway Compact of Gnostic witches. Preeminent among them is the Mandate who are no longer seen as fools. They gather in Oswenta in Galeoth, swelling the city with foreign lords and soldiers. “The bowl of each nation had spilled, and now their distinct and heady flavors swirled together, continually surprising the palette with some unheard-of-combination.”

Summer and autumn passed. The lessons of the Holy War are remembered. The officer core is made of Zaudunyani veterans who won’t allow any trespasses. Punishments are swift and lethal because too much was at stake. This is the Shortest Path. “Mercy required a certain future, and for men, there was none.” Two skin-spies are uncovered by Kellhus and publicly executed. The Great Ordeal passes winter at the city of Harwash where the caravans that travel to Sakarpus and Atrithau depart from. Twenty thousand die to lungplague.

It was, the Aspect-Emperor explained, but the first of many tests.

As spring approached, preparations to march were underway. Men weep when the order to march is given. As they march, the men feel like the entire world is kneeling before them, approving their actions. King Saubon of Caraskand, who’s one of the two Exalt-Generals, leads the first host with the faster units. Kellhus’s eldest sun, Kayûtas, leads the Kidruhil with Conphas. They are the most famed heavy cavalry in the Three Seas. Sakarpus’s retreats before them, leaving only their skirmisher to harass the Great Ordeal. Behind them, King Proyas of Conryia leads the rest of the host, including the sorcerers. The column is so long, communication between the front and the back is too great for any rider to travel it quickly.

It snowed the fourth night, when the priests and judges led ceremonies commemorating the Battle of the Pass, where an ancient alliance of refugee Men and the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas had defeated the No-God in the First Apocalypse, so purchasing the World a year of precious respite. Nothing was said of the subsequent betrayal and the extermination of the Nonmen at the hands of those they had saved.

As they march, they sing to Kellhus, to their own might, to their wives and families, and about the world they would save. At evening, they shed armor to pray and listen to sermons. It took days for them all to file through the pass onto the “thawing fields of the Sagland.” The Sakarpi have left scorched earth behind, the King of Sakarpus hoping hunger would save his city.

Few Three Seas Men had ever seen grassland steppes, let alone the vast and broad-back Istyuli. Beneath grey skies, with tracts still scabbed with snow, it seemed a trackless and desolate place, a precursor to the Agongorea, about which they had heard so much in endless recitations of The Sagas. Those raised on the coasts were reminded of the sea, of horizons as flat as a rule with nothing but limits for the eye to fasten upon. Those bred along desert margins were reminded of home.

It was raining when the multitudes climbed into the broad scruffs of land that lifted the Lonely City above the plain. At last, the two Exalt-Generals clasped arms and set about planning the assault. They scowled and joked and shared reminiscences, from the legendary First Holy War to the final days of the Unification. So many cities. So many campaigns.

So many proud peoples broken.

Sorweel finds sleep eluding him so is already awaken when the emissary from the Great Ordeal comes to speak with his father, King Varalt Harweel II. Sorweel attends as the crown prince of Sakarpus, as he has attended all such important meetings. “But until recently, ‘important’ had meant something quite different.” Fights with Srancs, diplomatic issues with Atrithau, disgruntled nobles. He’s usually bored. Now he’s scared. He’s a year from his “first Elking,” on the cusp of full manhood, and is staring at King Nersei Proyas standing before his father. Through translators, Proyas broaches what King Harweel says about Kellhus. Harweel sneers about his “blasphemy,” showing his disdain for Kellhus’s godhood.

“Blasphemy…” the Exalt-General said. “He would not say that.”

“And what would he say?”

“That you fear, as all man fear, to lose your power and privilege.”

Sorweel’s father laughed in an offhand manner that made the boy proud. If only he could muster such careless courage.

Harweel, sounding merry, asks if Proyas actually sees him as using his people as pawns to protect them as opposed to standing up to Kellhus to protect his people. Proyas does see it that way by saying no man can “stand between a God and the people.” It unnerves Sorweel how Three Seas Men speak of Kellhus as a living god. Harweel says his priest call Kellhus a demon.

“They say what they need to keep their power safe,” the translator said with obvious discomfort. “They are, truly, the only ones who stand to lose from the quarrel between us.”

To Sorweel, the Aspect-Emperor had been an “uneasy rumour.” His earliest memories are sitting on his father’s knee as traders spoke about Kellhus. From them, Sorweel had heard about everything in the south. His father would always warn that one day, Kellhus would come for them.

“But how can you know, Da?”

“He is a Ciphrang, a Hunger from the Outside, come to this world in the guise of a man.”

“Then how can we hope to resist him?”

“With our swords and sour shields,” his father had boasted, using the mock voice he always used to make light of terrifying things. “And when those fail us, with spit and curses.”

But the spit and the curses, Sorweel would learn, always came first, accompanied by bold gestures and grand demonstrations. War was an extension of argument, and swords were simply words honed to bloodletting edge. Only the Sranc began with blood. For Men, it was always the conclusion.

Perhaps this explained the Emissary’s melancholy and his father’s frustration. Perhaps they already knew the outcome of this embassy. All doom requires certain poses, the mouthing of certain words—so said the priests.

Sorweel can feel Kellhus lurking outside the walls. “An itch, a name, a principle, a foreboding…” Sorweel knows they have come to kill the man, rape the women, and enslave the children. His father is boasting how Sakarpus survived the No-God and will survive Kellhus.

The Exalt-General smiled, or at least tried to. “Ay, yes… Virtue does not burn.”

Harweel asks what that means and Proyas explains all that is left after death is the good things your children record about you. “All men flatter themselves through their forebears.” Harweel snorts and says Sakarpus is still around, proving his strength. But Proyas says Kellhus has been here when Sakarpus was merely the frontier of a great empire. Its lack of importance is why Sakarpus survived. Chance is ever as fickle as a whore. The silence from his father unnerves Sorweel. The stakes were crushing his father. He was pretending everything was fine, but Sorweel could see the lie.

Proyas continues that the entire Three Seas and all the schools are here. Proyas pleads with Harweel to see that he can’t win, appealing to him as a fellow warrior who has fought and seen the terrors of war.

Another ashen silence. Sorweel found himself leaning forward, trying to peer around the Horn-and-Amber Throne. What was his father doing?

“Come…” the Exalt-General said, his voice one of genuine entreaty. “Harweel, I beg of you, take my hand. Men can no longer afford to shed the blood of men.”

Sorweel can’t believe how aged his father appears. He’s not old, but looks it, his crown heavy. For a moment, Sorweel wants to speak to cover his father’s weakness, but Harweel finds his strength. He tells Proyas if he doesn’t want to fight, then leaves and march to die at Golgotterath or return to “hot-blooded wives.”

As though deferring to some unknown rule of discourse, Proyas lowered his face. He glanced at the bewildered Prince before returning his gaze to the King Sakarpus. “There is the surrender that leads to slavery,” he said. “And there is the surrender that sets one free. Soon, very soon, your people shall know the difference.”

“So says the slave!” Harweel cried.

The Emissary did not require the translator’s sputtering interpretation—the tone transcended languages. Something in his look dismayed Sorweel even more than the forced bluster of his father’s response. I am weary of blood, his eyes seemed to say. Too long have I haggled with the doomed.

He stood, nodding to his entourage to indicate that more than enough breath had been spent.

Sorweel was hoping his father would take him aside and explain why he appeared so fearful. To Sorweel, his father is the bravest man. He’d earned it through is room, revered by his Boonsmen and feared by the Horselords. “How could he of all Men be afraid?” Sorweel fears his father is holding back something important. Sorweel can only watch in the wake of Proyas’s departure as his father gives orders. At dawn, he is marched through the streets with his father’s High Boonsmen, seeing the refugees from the Saglands who’d entered the city, mothers looking dazed as herding their children. Sorweel wants to fight, but he hasn’t had his Elking, so he’s not allowed.

It begins raining as the hours past. It soaks through his armor. He feels useless and miserable. Finally, his father calls for him after a while. He’s brought to an empty barrack and warms his hands at a fire with Harweel. His father is troubled. Sorweel has no idea what to say.

“Moments of weakness come upon all Men,” Harweel said without looking at his son.

The young Prince stared harder into the glowing cracks.

“You must see this,” his father continued, “so that when your time comes you will not despair.”

Sorweel was speaking before he even realized he had opened his mouth. “But I do, Father! I do desp—!”

The tenderness in his father’s eyes was enough to make him choke. It knocked his gaze down as surely as a slap.

His father explains that men who see things in absolute terms can’t handle fear or despair. It breaks them because they have not struggled with doubt before then. His father asks Sorweel if he’s a fool like that. Sorweel is hurt because the question is genuine. He answers no. He has so much fear and doubt in him. He can’t speak it as he feels ashamed for doubting his father. He realized he’d been a burden to his father instead of supporting him on this day. Before he can explain his thoughts, three Horselords enter, calling for them.

Forgive me…

Standing on the walls of Sakarpus, he still feels warm after his talk with his father. He’s in the northern tower It’s raining. He stares at the thick walls and can’t imagine them being destroyed. It’s lined with soldiers in the “ancient armour of their fathers.” Archers wait to fire arrows. He’s proud of his people’s courage and determination. He knows that beyond the rain-choked gray, the Great Ordeal lurks.

He says the war prayers to Gilgaöl like he was trained and to Anagke, the Whore of Fate, to keep him from bad luck. The High Boonsmen pray around him for deliverance from “the Aspect-Emperor’s grasping hand.” Sorweel tries to convince himself that Kellhus is a demon and will lose.

A horn rings out. After a pause, more sound. “Suddenly the whole world seemed to shiver, its innards awakened by the cold cacophony.” More prayers and curses are muttered by unnerved men. The horns die while a father tells his son to “Take heart,” and speaks of an omen that means they’ll have good fortune, but the man’s confidence sounds forced.

Peering after the voices, Sorweel recognized the Ostaroots, a family whom he had always thought hangers-on in his father’s Royal Company. Sorweel had always shunned the son, Tasweer, not out of arrogance or spite, but in accordance with what seemed the general court attitude. He had never thought of it, not really, save to make gentle sport of the boy now and again with his friends. For some reason, it shamed Sorweel to hear him confessing his fears to his father. It seemed criminal that he, a prince born to the greatest of privileges, had so effortlessly judged Tasweer’s family, that with the ease of exhalation, he had assessed lives as deep and confusing as his own. And found them wanting.

His remorse is swallowed up by warning shouts. Out of the rainy mist, siege towers appear. Their size surprises him. They are massive and had to be carried across the wilderness in pieces to reach here. They crawl forward in a V formation, covered in tin armor. They have the Circumfix painted across their fronts. Sorweel had seen that symbol tattooed on missionaries his father had ordered burned. Everyone on the wall grows breathless as they approach. The battle has finally begun. The previous months of stress are over. Behind the towers marches the vast Great Ordeal.

Once again the horns unnerved the sky.

Sorweel sees ten times the number of the defenders (who themselves number ten thousand) approaching. So many strangers who came from lands he’d never heard of. These people didn’t care about Sakarpus. “The Southron Kings, come to save the world.” Sorweel had imagined those lands, wanting to run away as a child to a place where “Men yet warred against Men.” He’d learned, however, to hide his fascination. The South is viewed with contempt. “It was a place where subtlety had become a disease and where luxury had washed away the bourne between what was womanish and what was manly.”

But they were wrong—so heartbreakingly wrong. If the defeats of the previous weeks had not taught them such, then surely they understood now.

The South had come to teach them.

King Harweel appears at his son side and tells them not to fear the Schoolman. They won’t attack because of all the Chorae Sakarpus possesses. The king is inspiring his son and the others. Harweel gives a rousing speech about how they stood unbroken against the Sranc and—

His speech is cut off by a stork swooping down before him, startling everyone. Sorweel presses on his belly, feeling the Chorae tied against his bellybutton. The stork shouldn’t be flying in the rain. The stork stares at them without fear, unnerving the men. Harweel pushes himself forward to stand over the stork. A bright light in the sky, like a star, draws Sorweel’s attention. When he looks back, the stork is gone.

Activity explodes across the battlement, men shouting as the siege towers move forward as the star winked out. It reappeared closer over the front of the marching army. Sorweel realizes that there is a man or a god surrounded by blue light

Sorweel fond himself clutching the pitted stone of the battlements.

The Aspect-Emperor.

The rumor. The lifelong itch…

Sorweel cries a warning to his father as heavy winds blow rains over the walls. Ballistae fire Choraetipped bolts, but the sudden wind cuts their range. They miss him. At the same time, Sorweel hears words of sorcery. Silver lines race out from Kellhus, forming “incandescent geometries, a sun-bright filigree.” Sorweel realizes Kellhus is making mist to blind them. The Southron armies are singing hymns as they advanced.

Harweel grabs his son and tells him to go to the Citadel. That it was a mistake to bring him here. Sorweel is horrified, protesting that his father would treat him like a child. He cries out, “My bones are your bones!”

Harweel raised his hand to Sorweel’s cheek. “Which is why you must go. Please, Sorwa. Sakarpus stands at the ends of the world. We are the last outpost of Men! He needs this city! He needs our people! That means he needs you, Sorwa! You!”

Sorweel protest that he won’t leave, crying hot tears hidden by the cold rain. His father punches him and knocks him to the ground and orders Narsheidel to carry him to the Citadel. Narsheidel obeys and drags Sorweel away. He cries out in protest, seeing his father one last time before the fog hides him.

“Nooooooo!”

The clamour of arms descended upon the world.”

Sorweel continues his struggle against Narsheidel, but the man won’t relent. He sees his father’s eyes watching him, full of love and concern and even regret. He sees a father’s pride and hope that “he might live with greater grace through the fact of a son.” Soon, they’re in the city streets, soldiers rushing to the fight.

And a solitary figure in the midst of the confusion, crouched like a beggar, only clothed in too much shadow…

And with eyes that blinked light.

The Herder’s gate is destroyed with sorcerery. The enemy flood into the streets. Men die, killed by sorcery. A siege tower reaches the wall supported by Angogic sorceries. Harwell is dragged farther and farther from the battle while his father’s blue, beseeching eyes fill his mind. He reaches the Citadel where he once again sees Kellhus as “bright as the Nail of Heaven—only beneath the clouds.” Narsheidel is overcome with fear while retainers and guards ask where the king is. In his panic, Narsheidel is screaming that the Citadel must hold secrets that will save them because it is old. He’s dragged to an antechamber where he finally shouts at Narsheidel to stop. He asks where his father is and is told that Harweel is dead.

The words winded him. Even still, Sorweel heard his own voice say, “That means I am King. That I’m your master!”

The High Boonsman looked down to his palms, then out and upward, as though trying to divine the direction of the outer roar—for it had not stopped.

“Not so long as your father’s words still ring in my ears.”

Sorweel looked into the older man’s face, with its strong-jawed proportions and water-tangled frame of hair. Only then, it seemed, did he realize that Narsheidel too had loved ones, wives and children, sequestered somewhere in the city. That he was a true Boonsman, loyal unto death.

Sorweel starts to shout that his father is dead when the wall explodes. He is thrown to the ground while the commander of the Citadel, Lord Denthuel, has his head crushed by debris. Sorweel lies stunned as he stares at a gaping hole. He doesn’t remember if he spoke. Through the hole, he sees the Aspect-Emperor striding through the air. The rain doesn’t touch him.

The shining demon crossed the threshold, framed by gloom and deluge.

A nameless guard flees when Kellhus steps through the breach. Narsheidel charges. Kellhus smoothly doges and whips out his sword, beheading the Boonsman. “The demon” stares at Sorweel the entire time, but Kellhus’s eyes seem far too human.

“On his knees, Sorweel could do naught but stare.”

Kellhus feels unreal, like he’s both physically here and in a spiritual place. He stands taller than Sorweel’s father and wearing a mail of nimil (Nonman steel). He wears the severed heads of two demons on his belt, and he has scabs of salt on his skin. The “vision” announces his identity and Sorweel pisses himself and collapses onto his belly.

“Come,” the man [Kellhus] said, crouching to place a hand on his [Sorweel’s] shoulder. “Come. Get up. Remember yourself…”

Remember?

“You are a King, are you not?”

Sorweel could only stare in horror and wonder.

“I-I d-d-d-on’t understand…”

A friendly scowl, followed by a gentle laugh. “I’m rarely what my enemies expect, I know.” Somehow, he was already helping him to his feet.

Kellhus explains that this fight was a mistake, he’s not a conqueror, but here to save mankind. Sorweel calls him a liar. Kellhus tells him to grieve because it’s natural. “But take heart in the fact of your forgiveness.” Sorweel asks how Kellhus can forgive anything. Kellhus says Sorweel misunderstands what he meant.

“Misunderstand what?” Sorweel spat. “That you think yourse—!”

“Your father loved you!” the man interrupted, his voice thick with a nigh-irresistible paternal reprimand. “And that love, Sorwa, is forgiveness… His forgiveness, not mine.”

The young King of Sakarpus stood dumbstruck, staring with a face as slack as rainwater. Then perfumed sleeves enclosed him, and he wept in the burning arms of his enemy, for his city, for his father, for a world that could wring redemption out of betrayal.

Years. Months. Days. For so long the Aspect-Emperor had been an uneasy rumor to the South, a name heaped in atrocity as it was miracle…

No more.

My Thoughts

Bakker starts right off with a discussion on men and how they are controlled by Cause and Effect. Humans do not like being the villains so we always rationalize our actions and find excuses for them. Some are better than others, but most do it. We come up with why we lie, we cheat, we steal. Why we are selfish.

We spin out our delusions to justify our crimes.

“Men, all Men, warred all the time.” Pure Bakker there. Men are in competition, and war is the ultimate competition. Whether they are competing (warring) with the field they till or competing for the affection of their lover.

It’s clear Bakker thought a lot about how the host would survive the march. It’s great to see that level of detail.

Hello, skin-spies. Slipping them in early. Need to remember that they exist because there’s another one out there.

Men and their delusions are illustrated with: “The Men of the Ordeal could feel it: an approving world, a judging world.” Also, we see judging again. The Judging Eye does exactly what these men believe is happening as does the Inverse Fire.

We have our first reference to Cil-Aujas, the Nonman ruin which dominates the finale in this book. We get the first glimpse of its history, how the humans and Nonmen fought off the No-God and then how the humans later butchered them. It’s a whitewashing of history as well as planting the first seeds for a big story hook to come.

Bakker starts off the Great Ordeal by mirroring how it will end. The army crosses a plain that has been depleted of food, just like they’ll find when crossing the Agongorea, the Field Appalling. There, hunger will reduce them to cannibalism to survive. Like with Sakarpus, the Consult tries that same tactic of starvation to defeat the Great Ordeal. Only we see the armies here at the start, strong and proud and confident, eager to break another proud people.

They don’t realize they’re a proud people.

Bakker’s irony is on full display with the Great Ordeal fighting to save mankind by starting his campaign with conquering a city that has stood up against the Consult and the Sranc since the Second Apocalypse ended. In other fantasy, Sakarpus would welcome and aid the Great Ordeal.

Sorweel is our primary POV for the events of the Great Ordeal. He’s a young man who has to grow up and see the world for what it is. He still idealizes his father like any boy would. It’s easy to see someone as being brave when you don’t know the fear inside of them. It’s as Bakker described in an earlier book, that humans are a two-sided coin. There’s the face the world sees of us and the face we see of ourselves. You can never see how the world sees you, and the world can never see how you view yourself.

Proyas is trying diplomacy here. It is admirable. Harweel is as Proyas describes. He wants to keep his power. He seems like a good man, so he probably has his reasons like protecting his people and defying a demon. The rationalization to justify his desires. After all, Sakarpus survived the No-God. How could Kellhus threaten them?

Kellhus is a Ciphrang… An interesting comment to have in the prose given the deal he’s made Ajokli between the two series.

Bakker brings us some good insight on fighting and why it happens. Some say war is the failure of diplomacy, others say it’s the only way to accomplish it. Force is required to bring people to the peace tables. The threat of it or its actual unleashing. The outcome can often be seen ahead of time, which only makes the tragedy to come pointless. But people are stubborn. They have hope. They don’t want to see reality. They are consumed with pride or fear. A hundred reasons that can lead to men dying on the battlefield. They’re rarely good ones.

Well, Chapter One and fortune is compared to a whore!

Sakarpus says they are here because of the strength of their wall, the might of their ancestors, and the Chorae Horde (which why the Holy War is here). Kellhus says they were on the periphery of events and lucked out that the consult didn’t come. I imagine it’s more in the middle. They did weather attacks but they never felt the full brunt of the No-God.

Sakarpus reminds me of Game of Thrones. The North talked a good talk about how they were strong than their southern men, worth ten of them, and then Arya finds them slaughtered when Ned Stark is captured. She’s confused that their bravado didn’t match reality. Sorweel is starting to see through his father’s bravado before the face of the might before them.

The end is writ in stone. Everyone knows it, but Harweel cannot break free of the expectations that lie on him and the fear of losing all he has. He is grasping at straws to stay free and Proyas knows it. We see that after twenty years, Proyas has grown with more compassion. This isn’t the zealot we first met, but the man who witnessed Shimeh burn.

How many cities has he seen burned since?

I make no bones about how much I dislike Kellhus. What he does to Proyas in this series is brutal. The shortest path as no room for compassion or love.

Great father and son stuff between Sorweel and his father. His father is getting him ready for what’s to come. The fact that they’re going to lose. Harweel can’t bring himself from surrendering without a fight. He must feel trapped by duty and expectation. Sorweel can start clean as the subject ruler. He recognizes how Kellhus operates. He prefers to leave those in place who will be followed if they bend the knee. Sorweel is that person. Someone he can use as both a hostage and a ruler to keep Sakarpus in line after the defeat. Harweel needs his son to be strong enough to survive what is coming.

Sorweel is maturing fast now, feeling empathy to a boy he disliked out of habit. Humans fall into a social hierarchy, and you act in your place to maintain it or risk falling from your place and losing the ability to climb higher.

It’s interesting the relief that can come when the dreaded thing happens. You can finally deal with it and not worry about it, even if it goes bad. Stress is not good for humans in our current modern world. Its designed for life-and-death situations, not worrying for days or weeks on whether you’re going to lose your job. It’s not great having that building pressure with no release for too long.

Warrior cultures always think they are superior in military might to more civilized nations. They can often be surprised then to lose. Those countries might not have the culture on the surface, but that doesn’t mean they’re not humans who, when need to, can be just as aggressive to survive. Barbarians might win when they sweep unprepared against a “soft” enemy, but if the enemy can regroup, they can fight back. The Japanese saw the Americans as weak and easily swept aside. They were followers of Bushido. During the Battle of Midway, in one of the opening skirmishes, a US dive bomber almost crashed into the bridge of an aircraft carrier, nearly killing the admiral in command of the Japanese forces. This shook them badly seeing an American willing to go that far. On that day, they saw inexperience American forces, but not cowards. Not men who wouldn’t fight.

Sakarpus is seeing the same. The “weak” south has marched with the same martial fervor that any human can muster.

Harweel might be the best father in this series. He’s trying to keep his son alive, even if that means punching him in the face to get him to leave. Everything we’ve seen about him through Sorweel is positive. It’s a shame Harweel couldn’t bend his knee, but then giving up power is one of the hardest things to do. The darkness that comes before had its hand around Harweel. He couldn’t break free.

This shadowed beggar is something I’ve never noticed before. Eyes that blinked light. A follower of Yatwer? At some point, Sorweel drew the Goddess’s notice. She makes him her Narindar. I thought it was with the slave he later meets, but it might have been as early as right now.

Sorweel is trying to be an active main character here. His father is dead, and he knows he has to take charge, but Narsheidel is panicked. He’s obeying his last order no matter what. He’s placed Sorweel above protecting his own family because he finds comfort in following his oath. It’s something familiar.

Then Kellhus steps in and removes that agency from Sorweel that he almost had. Sorweel’s story is one of lacking agency. He wants it, but he’s continually forced into different roles, and in the end, becomes nothing more than a pawn for Yatwer.

“On his knees, Sorweel could do naught but stare.” Sorweel meets Kellhus as a kneeler king. Just as he thinks of all those others who serve in disdain, that’s how he meets our Dûnyain.

Kellhus’s Mark is probably at the point where even a near miss from a Chorae can cause him issues.

Come on, Bakker, you can’t use pronouns like this: “Somehow, he was already helping him to his feet.” That’s two different men being referenced by the pronouns. Kellhus is helping Sorweel stand but it sounds like one person is helping himself stand. And that one person would be Kellhus, who is standing! I love Bakker’s writing, but his pronouns sometimes drive me nuts.

If you hadn’t known anything about Kellhus, if this was your first introduction to him, you would buy his act. Hugging the enemy of his son after reluctantly fighting his people in the greater goal of saving the world is something you’d see in fantasy. The savior of mankind with his inhuman power.

We know every word he spoke to Sorweel is an act to win his support and through him the resources of Sakarpus.

Sorweel is fantasy trope of the captured enemy who is out to avenge his father and in the process seduces the daughter of his enemy to his side. He only manages to seduce the daughter, and that only happened because he became a pawn of a Goddess using him in an act of mad defiance to kill Kellhus. It ends in failure. In his death, having no agency. Never taking his own power. He is perpetually pulled from event to event (quite literally when he’s dragged into the bowels of Ishterebinth in The Great Ordeal). Like with Kellhus in the first series, he is a subversion of this trope. In some ways, he’s a mirror of Kellhus. They both start out as the young man stepping out into the world, each their own fantasy trope, and each radically different. One seizes agency, the other is seized. However, they both end up being possessed by the gods.

Sorweel is a pawn. A slave to the darkness that comes before. Only it’s the darkness of Yatwer who can’t see the No-God and his actions. She doesn’t understand the context of the future and can only seek to stop it the way a blind man can: by blundering. Sorweel is one of those who are in her path.

Let’s follow him on his journey and study his character. His part in The Unholy Consult is something I’m eager to dig in when we (eventually) get there.

Click here for Chapter Two!

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To save the skies, Ary must die!

If you love the works of Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, R. Scott Bakker, and Steven Erikson, then check out my first ever Fantasy novel!

You do not want to miss out on this awesome adventure!

You can buy or burrow Above the Storm today!

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Review: The Thousandfold Thoughts (The Prince of Nothing Book 3)

The Thousandfold Thoughts (The Prince of Nothing Book 3)

by R. Scott Bakker

Reviewed by JMD Reid

The Holy War has bent knee before Kellhus, proclaiming him the Warrior-Prophet. Thanks to their renewed fanaticism, the siege of Caraskand has been broken. Nothing stands between them and their final march on Shimeh.

Achamian has to adjust to the new reality. His wife, Esmenet, is now Kellhus’s. After thinking he died, she was seduced by the Dûnyain and is pregnant with his child. Believing Kellhus is the Harbinger, the only hope for humanity against the Consult and the threat of the return of the No-God, he swallows his hatred and tries to fight his desire to reclaim his wife.

Conphas is the only great name that still defies Kellhus. He is forced to surrender his legion’s weapons and be interred at Joktha under the brutal watch of Cnaiur. The Scylvendi barbarian knows the truth about Kellhus and realizes he has been put into a trap. If he doesn’t kill Conphas, the Nansur prince will plot and scheme, but if Cnaiur does kill the man, he’ll lose his own life in the backlash of Conphas’s loyal legions.

Around them all, the Consult studies, struggling to understand just who this Kellhus is and what to do about him. They see one tool that will be useful. One tool that can help them destroy the Warrior-Prophet once and for all.

Kellhus’s father awaits him near Shimeh. The Dûnyain’s original mission still needs to be completed. What will happen when father and son reunite? Will Kellhus discover he’s merely a pawn in a greater scheme himself, or will his trials prove too much for even one of his conditioning?

The Thousandfold Thought is the conclusion of the first series in Bakker’s ambitions Second Apocalypse Megaseries. The book does not hold your hand. Bakker philosophy abounds, unveiled on every page mixed in with the poetry of his pose. The entire series has been building towards the moment when Kellhus and Moenghus meets. The fate of the world pivots on the relationship between father and son.

Characters are tested. Some are broken while others finds strength in them they never knew they had. Passions clash. Betrayals and mistakes lead to devastation while chance and misfortune afflict others. No one comes out of the crucible of the Holy War and Kellhus’s manipulation unchanged. The story is gripping. The stakes are high. Bakker has shown himself not adverse to maiming, breaking, and killing characters.

None are safe. The tension has never been higher as the assault on Shimeh begins. Love, religion, vengeance, and more clash and swirl in the conclusion of The Prince of Nothing.

When you finish this book, you’ll want more. You’ll want to know what happen next. You’ll be eager to plunge into the Judging Eye. Bakker’s writing is engaging, enthralling, and enlightening in turns. It will leave you in awe, keep you at the edge of the seat, and have you weeping.

The human soul is laid bare in Bakker’s epic fantasy story!

You can buy Thousandfold Thoughts from Amazon.

Reread of The Judging Eye: Prologue

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Prologue

Welcome to the Prologue of my reread. Click here if you missed the Introduction!

When a man possesses the innocence of a child, we call him a fool. When a child possesses the cunning of a man, we call him an abomination. As with love, knowledge has its season.

—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

My Thoughts

Wow, a warning about Kelmomas? He is introduced in this prologue. He’s certainly an abomination.

It’s nice to have Ajencis start us off. After quotes of Achamian’s Compendium of the First Holy War, quotes from The Third Analytic of Men were among the most common. It’s like a welcome sight at the start of this new series. Yes, this is continuing. We’re going to be diving into dark and difficult subjects wrapped up in the guise of a fantasy story.

Knowledge is something you have to gain over time. Having it too early is atypical and not gaining it as you age is disappointing. We do not like things that differ from the norm. We like predictable things. Children may be smart but lack knowledge, and adults may be dumb but possess it. The familiarity is comforting.

The opposite provokes a reaction. So, Kelmomas is the child with too much intellect, so who is the fool?

Samarmas. He might not be an adult, but he’s Dûnyain. The only child of Kellhus that has a normal intellect. And to Kelmomas, that makes him a fool.

Autumn, 19 New Imperial Year (4131 Year-of-the-Tusk), the “Long Side”

A horn pealed long and lonely beneath the forest canopies. A human horn.

For a moment all was quiet. Limbs arched across the imperious heights, and great trunks bullied the hollows beneath. Shorn saplings thatched the intervening spaces. A squirrel screeched warning from the gloom of interlocking branches. Starlings burst into the squinting sky.

They came, flickering across bands of sunlight and shadow.

The Sranc come running wearing armor and shield decorated in human trophies: teeth, skin, fingernails, and more. They smell mannish blood and spill their black seed on the ground. Their scouts have reported what they can smell. “It had been so long since they had glutted their rapacious hunger.” They are eager to kill and rape.

They ran, weeping for joy.

They spot their prey. The Sranc charge across the ground. Just as they are about to fall on the men, the ground collapses beneath them. They fall into pit traps. Some manage to stop in time, shocked by what has happened. They stare “in lust and apprehension” at their prey.

Men.

A hard-bitten handful, running as though by magic across the forest floor. They lunged into the Sranc’s midst, their heavy swords high and pitching. Shields cracked. Mouldered iron was bent and broken. Limbs and heads were thrown on arcs of glittering blood.

The Men roared and bellowed, hammered them to earth, hacked them to twitching ruin.

Later, a lone traveler cries out, “Scalper.” They all turn to face him and the traveler thinks they’re like animals. He threads through the slaughtered Sranc, passing one “white as drowned fish, floating face down in a pool of translucent red.” The traveler notes the ambush was very successful with many Sranc killed. He approaches the scalpers taking their grisly trophies with efficiency. A Galeoth washes the scalps off in a stream, treating them with the same care like they were gold. Even with the lowering of the Hallow Bounty offered by Kellhus, they still were worth money.

All the scalpers watch him even as they pretend to indifference. It was unusual for an outsider to find them in the wilderness. “This work, the work of collecting and counting, was the least manly portion of their trade.” Their shameful secret.

It was also the point.

Nearly eleven years had passed since the Aspect-Emperor had declared his bounty on Sranc scalps, before the last of the Unification Wars had ended. He placed the bounty on Sranc because of their vast numbers. He placed the bounty on scalps because their hairlessness made them distinctive to Sranc. Men such as these, the traveller supposed, would be far happier poaching something less inclined to kill back—like women and children.

So began the Scalping Years. Over that time, countless thousands had trudged into the northern wilderness, expedition after expedition, come to make their fortune as Scalpoi. Most died in a matter of weeks. But those who learned, who were wily and every bit as ruthless as their foe, prospered.

And some—a few—became legendary.

The traveler has come looking for one such legend. He studies the man who is dressed in the “traditional costume of his caste and race” only his armor and clothing ripped and rusted, soiled. The man is an Ainoni known as Ironsoul. The man the traveler judged to be him says it and the traveler bows out of respect to a Veteran of the First Holy War. It’s a crime not to “venerate a survivor” of that conflict.

“How did you find us?” the man asked in his native tongue. From the cadence of his voice, it was obvious that he despised speaking, that he was as jealous of his voice as he was of his women or his blood.

The traveller did not care. Men prized what they would

“We find everyone.”

A barely perceptible nod. “What do you want?”

The Ainoni glanced back towards his cowled companion. No words were exchanged, only an inscrutable look.

Autumn, 19 New Imperial Year (4131 Year-of-the-Tusk), the “Long Side”

Ever do Men seek to hide what is base and mean in their natures. This is why they talked of wolves or lions or even dragons when they likened themselves to animals. But it was the lowly beetle, the young boy decided, who they must resembled. Belly to the ground. Back hunched against the world. Eyes blind to everything save the small circle before them.

The boy, Anasûrimbor Kelmomas, follows the beetle scurrying across the floor in the wake of his Whelming. Prayers drift through the temple’s columns as he is curious to where the beetle is going. The beetle leaves a trail in the dust and obliterates it as the beetle leads to the statue of Ajokli, the Four-Horned Brother.

“The Thief?”

Kelmomas is not impressed. Ajokli’s godhouse is a poor one compared to the other gods, his brothers and sisters. It’s a statue carved from black diorite to look like a fat man crouching over to chamber pot. He has no jewels or precious metals. Kelmomas finds the expression inhuman. “Grinning like a monkey. Snarling like a dog. Staring like a dew-eyed virgin.”

It [the statue] also watched the beetle as it scurried into its gloomy bower.

Kelmomas follows the beetle and mocks the statue by mimicking its posture by crouching over the beetle. Then he grabbed the insect. “It writhed like a little automaton beneath his fingertip.” He anticipates killing it, knowing he could do it easily and enjoying his power. He rips off two legs and tells the statue to watch. He sets the beetle back down. Missing two legs, it moves in a circle.

See?” he exclaimed to Ajokli. They laughed together, child and idol, loud enough to blot out the chorus of chanting voices.

“They’re all like that,” he explained. “All you have to do is pinch.”

“Pinch what, Kelmomas?” a rich, feminine voice asked from behind him. Mother.

Another boy would have been startled, even ashamed, to be surprised by his mother after doing such a thing, but not Kelmomas. Despite the obscuring pillars and voices, he had known where she was all along, following her prim footsteps (though he knew not how) in a corner of his soul.

He asks if they’re done as he whirls to see his mother, the Empress Esmenet. He finds her the “world’s most beautiful thing” despite her makeup and jewelry. She is finished and rolls her eyes, signaling she’d rather dote on him then do boring things. Kelmomas knows she does things to maintain appearances, just not nearly as good as he did. He asks her if she prefers his company even though he already knows the answer. He doesn’t let her know he knows because “it troubled her when he read aloud the movement of her soul.” She smiles and scoops him up in her arms, adjusting his hair while he savors her embrace. He thinks, “Never was there such a sanctuary.”

Mommy…

She leads him away and he is satisfied the beetle still stalks in circles. Then he hears the sounds of a crowd and he grows nervous, not wanting to leave. She asked him what is wrong, but he lies and says anything. She licks her fingers and attends to his messy hair like any mother would.

“It’s proper that you be anxious,” she said, distracted by her ministrations. She looked him square in the eye, and he stared into the pith of her, past the paint and skin, past the sheath of interlocking muscles, down to the radiant truth of her love.

She would die for you, the secret voice—the voice that had been within always—whispered.

“Your father,” she continued, “says that we need fear only when we lose our fear.” She ran her hand from his temple to his chin. “When we become too accustomed to power and luxury.”

Father was forever saying things.

He sneers inside while faking being an adorable kid. The secret voice tells him to both hate his father but fear him. Kelmomas “must never forget that the Strength burned brightest in Father.” Meanwhile, Esmenet is happy to have such a good son and hugs him. Holding her hand, he allows her to lead him out of the Allosium. They exit the temple onto the Scuäri Campus, the plaza before all the temples. Eothic Guardsmen protect them. He can see the whole vista of the Home City. It’s massive.

On and on it went, the vast and mottled vista of the Home City, the great capital of all the Three Seas. For his entire life it had been encircled him, hedged him its teeming intricacies. And for his entire life it had frightened him, so much so that he often refused to look when Samarmas, his idiot twin, pointed to something unnoticed in its nebulous weave.

But today it seemed the only safe thing.

“Look!” his mother cried through the roar. “Look, Kel!”

He stares at the thousands crowding the square, pilgrims and locals, “churning like floodwaters about the base of the Xatantian Arch.” They all reach for them while his mother tells him they are all here to witness his divinity. He fakes the “bewildered gratitude” she expects; he feels only disgust. “Only fools, he decided, travelled in circles.” He wants to show Ajokli this truth.

People were bugs.

It feels like a long time that Kelmomas and his mother stand in their “proscribed places.” He focus on flying birds and sunlight on rooftops. He wants to ask his mother for a model of the city so he can burn it. Soon Thopsis, Master of Protocol, arrives and all the Imperial Apparati on the steps turn to face Kelmomas and his mother. He studies their faces, seeing all their emotions despite blank spaces. Ngrau, Xerius’s old seneschal, still holds that position. Phinersa is the Holy Master of Spies, and Imhailas is the Exalt-Captain of the Eothic Guard and Esmenet’s sometimes lover. Werjau is the Prime Nascenti and leads the Ministrate while Vem-Mithriti is the Grandmaster of the Imperial Saik and Vizier-in-Proxy. There are sixty-seven in all in descending order of importance to witness Kelmomas’s Whelming. He’s the youngest son of Kellhus. Only his Uncle Maithanet, the Shriah, is unreadable. He doesn’t like Maithanet’s scrutiny.

He suspects, the secret voice whispered.

Suspects what?

That you are make-believe.

The cheers die as the horns sound. Then, at Thopsis’s shout, “the whole world seemed to kneel.” The citizens of the New Empire prostrate themselves save for Maithanet who only kneels to Kellhus. Kelmomas is dazzled by the sun reflecting off small tusks decorating his vestments and loos away. As they descended, he can’t help but laugh at how absurd the Exalt-Ministers look “grovelling in the costumes of kings.”

“They honour you, Kel,” his mother said. “Why would you laugh at them?”

Had he meant to laugh? Sometimes it was hard to keep count.

“Sorry,” he said with a glum sigh. Sorry. It was one of the many words that confused him, but it never failed to spark compassion in his mother’s look.

They walk through the square to the Andiamine Heights under the armed escort of the hallowed Hundred Pillars. The walk makes Kelmomas nervous despite the familiarity of being escorted by towering, armed men. He can smell the unwashed masses, a nauseating reek while they chanted “Bless-bless-bless,” over and over. He stars at the “landscape of kneelers.” A beggar weeps while a young girl watches when she shouldn’t. It stretches forever.

He walked across a living ground.

And then he was among them, in them, watching his own steps, little more than a jewelled shadow behind a screen of merciless, chainarmoured men. A name. A rumour and a hope. A god-child, suckled at the breast of Empire, anointed by the palm of Fate. A son of the Aspect-Emperor.

They did not know him, he realized. They saw, they worshipped, they trusted what they could not fathom.

No one knows you, the secret voice said.

No one knows anyone.

He glances at her mother and sees she’s worrying over Mimara. He asks if she is thinking about Esmenet’s first daughter, “the one she loved with the most desperation—and hated.” Kelmomas drove Mimara away at the secret voices urging while the voice. His mother lies and says she’s worrying for his father and Kellhus. Seeing she still worried for Mimara, Kelmomas isn’t happy that all his manipulations haven’t worked. The secret voice wonders if they should have killed Mimara. He then asks when Kellhus will return.

He knew the answer at least as well as she did, but at some level he understood that as much as mothers love their sons, they loved being mothers as well—and being a mother meant answering childish questions. They traveled several yards before she replied, passing through a fog of please and whispers. Kelmomas found himself comparing her to the countless cameos he had seen depicting her in her youth—back in the days of the First Holy War. Her hips were wider, perhaps, and her skin not so smooth beneath the veneer of white paint, but her beauty was legendary still. The seven-year-old could scarce imagine anyone more beautiful.

She says he won’t return until the Great Ordeal is over. That gives Kelmomas such joy. He wants his father to die and this brings his “first true smile of the day.” As they continue walking, someone yells out cursed. A madman with a knife rushes to attack Esmenet. He watches “battling shadows” and a word pops into his mind.

Assassins.

My Thoughts

A human horn sounds. The fact Bakker has to point this out should let us know, we are in a place humans shouldn’t be. We start with the Sranc. They dominate this series. They are the great concern of the Holy War, which only grows worse as they start marching and began fighting their way across the Sranc to the north. In this wake travels Achamian and his band. It’s fitting that we start with these bestial creatures, reminding the reader what they are. How they wear trophies of human flesh. How they get so excited by the scent of human blood that they ejaculate their black seed. They are pure hunger.

The “traveler” sees the scalpers as nothing more than animals. We see how fighting Sranc dehumanizes men. The Great Ordeal is marching out to fight these same creatures. Bakker is laying the groundwork of what being around Sranc does to humans. How it’s going to twist them into beasts like Ironsoul and his men.

Scalpers must be seen as the most dangerous and deadly men. The ones with the balls to go off into the wilderness and fight the monsters then come back with their trophies. It’s as masculine as you can get, and yet to earn their money, they have to do something almost domestic: washing and counting and organizing.

Trust Bakker to slip in that comment about scalpers needing to bring back something purely Sranc else they’d just be murderers. Most follow the path of least resistance, and those who do this will quickly have the innocence beat out of them. Even if they started off killing Sranc, soon they’d realize easier ways to make money after the dehumanizing work.

Well, Bakker’s really building up Ironsoul and his men. As we’ll see, they earn it. Especially Ironsoul.

Ironsoul is a man cast in the vein of Cnaiür. As brutal and deadly. He’s Ainoni, which in the first series was the most effete of all the races. The most urbane and decadent. Though they had their soldiers who fought in battle with skill, but they were always looked down as being lesser men by the others. Yet here we have Ironsoul, dressed like an Ainoni down to having tattoos mimicking makeup, purple lips, and eyeliner. Still, there’s no denying this man could rip you apart. It’s a nice subversion of expectations of Ainoni, showing that they’re not monoliths but a diverse people.

So who is this Traveler his “cowled companion.” The man is someone who revers the laws of Kellhus Empire by showing defense to a Veteran of the First Holy War. He is someone on a mission, searching these men out. He is delivering them this cowled companion. This is Cleric. We see no mention of Cleric in this passage. No nonman preaching. This is how he was delivered to them. We see the Cleric agree with a silent nod

We later learn Cleric is the last Nonman King Nil’giccas who is supposed to be in their last city of Ishterebinth. Kellhus sends his daughter, adopted son, and Sorweel there ostensibly to negotiate with Nil’giccas. But Kellhus already knew he wasn’t there. Clearly, he has met with Nil’giccas and made an agreement with him. He delivers him to the Scalpers to act as his elju, his book, because the nonman king is an Erratic.

Kellhus appears to have placed these scalpers and Nil’giccas into the path of Achamian. He is arranging protection and the skills for Achamian to make his journey, probably because Kellhus anticipates Mimara will join him. He is protecting those Esmenet loves. Mimara, Achamian, Kelmomas, and Samarmas (well, Kellhus would have if he knew about Kelmomas activities).

I do not think Kellhus cares if Achamian learns anything or not. Maybe he had different plans for Achamian and Mimara after the Consult’s defeat, but Kellhus’s plan failed in the final moments and so we’ll probably never know.

Well, we see Kelmomas’s opinion of people. It has the clinical detachment of a Dûnyain but possesses a spite to it. A delusion of grandeur a sane Dûnyain wouldn’t have. Right there in the opening paragraph about him. He destroys the beetle’s trail, obliterating its history, the evidence of its existence.

It’s fitting knowing where he ends up. Many thought he would be the Narindar (avatar/agent) of Ajokli because of this scene, but Kelmomas is acting as an equal, not a servant, to what he calls “the Thief.” The humans have scurried to the gods to save them. The ones who steal their souls.

“It writhed like a little automaton beneath his fingertip.” What’s an automaton but a slave to what comes before unable to deviate from the cause that set it in motion. He proves it by ripping off the beetles two legs then shares in the joke with the god. Kelmomas is Ajokli’s equal. Or will be.

Kelmomas tracking his mother is something we’ve seen from Kellhus. Of course, Kellhus has gone past that, but it’s showing us that Kelmomas going to have some Dûnyain level of skills and manipulation as we see his interactions with Esmenet. But he’s also untrained. He does this all instinctual.

However, while he’s Dûnyain, he clearly has an emotional attachment to Esmenet. A jealous and obsessive love, as we’ll see. It’s very childish, the only thing childish about him. She’s his favorite toy but also the only place he feels safe. Interesting that he feels fear. He gets scared by the sounds of the crowd though he refuses to admit it and lets himself be mothered by Esmenet.

Kelmomas is scared by the city because it’s too much for him. He can’t possibly take it all in and pay attention to it. Take that line “something unnoticed in its nebulous weave.” Kelmomas needs to control everything, especially his mother. In the palace, he can do it. When Kellhus is absent, he has free rein, or so he thinks. He can’t control a city.

But today, everyone in the city is cheering for him. All the beetles have come to worship him.

Werjau… I remember you. Did that slave plot in Thousandfold Thoughts go anywhere? I’m going to be paying attention to him in this book because I can’t for the life of me remember what he does in this book and the next. Is he still working against Esmenet?

So Kelmomas has a secret voice. This is another indication that he’s a broken Dûnyain like many of his siblings. We later see he’s not sure if he meant to laugh or not. He can’t maintain the facade as well as others.

We have a Dûnyain who is jealously in love with his mother and has the impulse control of a seven-year-old. We can see him struggling to maintain his facade at times. He does acts that could get him caught, like mutilating the insect. He has a god compact. As we see going forward, he’s not as smart as he thinks when dealing with other half-Dûnyain.

This chapter is full of so much foreshadowing. We have glimpses of the Holy War’s fate with the scalpers followed by the introduction of one of the biggest sources of chaos in this series. Kelmomas has the idea of assassins implanted in his head, and that is a big thing he does in this book. He causes so many problems for his mother trying to isolate her. We have the mystery of Cleric and what deal he made with Kellhus. And we learn that the inciting incident for Achamian’s storyline, Mimara’s arrival, was orchestrated by Kelmomas.

A great start to this series.

If you want to read on to Chapter One, click here!

Hi, if you like my Analysis, you can connect with me on Facebook and Twitter, and you can pre-order my first fantasy novel, Above the Storm, from Amazon or purchase my short story collection! Also,  please leave any comments or criticisms below! They help keep me motivated!

To save the world, Ary must die!

Ary, a young man scarred by his past, is thrust into the dangers of the military. But he carries a deadly secret: the dark goddess’s touch stains his soul.

Her taint threatens to destroy all he loves.

He must hide the truth from the other marines and the woman he loves. Can Ary survive the dangers of service and the zealous assassin plotting his death?

Are you ready for the action, danger, romance, and betrayal exploding across the skies Above the Storm!

Reread of The Judging Eye: Introduction

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Introduction

Welcome to the start of my reread of The Judging Eye. Click here if you the Prince of Nothing Reread!

After reading the Prince of Nothing Trilogy, I needed more. It couldn’t just end there with Achamian renouncing everything and walking away from power. Yes, Kellhus had defeated the Fanim and founded his theocracy, becoming the Aspect-Emperor and reviving the Kyranean Empire of old (the very empire who’s ruler King Anaxophus used the Heron Spear to slay the No-God) and had mastered all before him, but the story wasn’t over.

What was all that stuff with the Consult? The skin-spies couldn’t have just been a plot device. The Synthese was working towards its own goals. Goals that had not been realized. The greater danger wasn’t resolved at all. It felt like we’d reached the end of a book in a series and more was to come.

But it was the end of the Prince of Nothing series.

I took to the internet. I discovered the Three Seas forums. I spent hours pouring through posts, struggling to understand the story I had just read. What had occurred between Kellhus and his father, and, most importantly to me, where was the rest of the story? What about the Second Apocalypse. Kellhus becoming emperor didn’t solve that. It was still there.

And then I found out the truth: The Prince of Nothing series was supposed to be one book. The first in a trilogy. Only Bakker soon discovered it was too big to be a book. He has several options, but the one he chose was to split each book into its own series. The Prince of Nothing series was complete, so that left two more.

I was eager for it. Rumors abounded. There were different names for what the next series could be. Different titles for the first book. I came into the series not long after Book 3 was published. I experienced that wait for what it would be. Then the title for the series:

The Aspect-Emperor

Spoilers came out. A time jump. A great war. Things were getting interested. We were all awaiting it. We had a title for the first book. The Judging Eye?

What did that mean? What was this Judging Eye? Nothing in the first series gave a clue. Speculation was rampant. And then it arrived. The Judging Eye was published in February of 2009 in the US. Just in time for me to lose my job delivering pizzas. I had plenty of time to read it. To dive into it. I opened that book with trembling anticipation.

SPOILER WARNING: Please read the book before any of these posts. This is intended for those who have read ALL the books. I will discuss both the events of the chapter and even their ramification for future events up to and including the Unholy Consult.

Like with the Prince of Nothing Trilogy, Bakker opens The Judging Eye with a quote. But not any from his fictional setting. He quotes the bible to start out this series. Fitting given the increased presence of religion and the Gods (specifically Yatwer and Ajokli).

But who are you, man, to answer God thus? Will what is made say to him who made it—Why have you made me this way? Does the potter not have power over his clay, to make, from the same mass, on vessel for honour, and another for dishonour?

—ROMANS 9:20-21

My Thoughts

There are so many different ways to take this verse as it relates to The Aspect-Emperor. Who is the God of this world that Bakker is exposing? Is it the Hundred, the gods who split up the souls of mankind to feast upon in the afterlife. As we learn, human souls are the wheat with which the Gods make their bread.

Is it Kellhus as he takes on the persona of a Living God and remakes the world. He shapes the nations and builds them for a purpose. He took Proyas and turned him into a cannibal only to blame him for what happened, to be a scapegoat to assuage the guilt of the survivors of the final march of the Great Ordeal upon Golgotterath. Kellhus created his empire for one purpose then allowed it to collapse once the army march. He was finished with it.

Is it the Consult and the Inchoroi who shape flesh like men shape clay? They make different beings for different purposes. Sranc, Bashrags, Wracu, Skin-Spies, and other monstrosities. They toy with lives for their own perverse amusements.

Obviously, he chose this verse a critique on religion and the remote coldness of a creator Deity. The entire series is about the pitfalls of blind faith and the irony that the only way to unite people is to give them all the same belief to embrace and in which to find comfort. Humans crave that because it gives us the illusion of safety. We project our simplified view of things upon the world. A veneer of order slathered across the chaos of nature.

Bakker is condemning the level of power such a being would have. To so casually use its creations in such a fashion. The Hundred who vie for worship so they can claim souls to feast upon, Kellhus who fashions everything for one singular purpose to realize the Thousandfold Thought, and the Consult as they bend and twist flesh itself for their own selfish needs. Even Achamian uses the Scalpers knowing they’ll die.

If the Dune series is the critique of the myth of the Great Man and the folly in following one vision, then The Second Apocalypse is that on steroids. The only way to find freedom is to have knowledge else we will all be slaves to the Darkness that Comes Before.

It’s time to begin the second chapter of this story.

It’s time to delve into The Judging Eye.

The Letter

Before the prologue, we have a letter written from an unknown bureaucrat to an unnamed Exalt-Minister.

Exalt-Minister, most glorious, many be your days.

For the sing of apostasy, they were buried up to their necks in the ancient way, and stones were cast into their faces until their breathing was stopped. Three men and two women. The child recanted, even cursed his parents in the name of our glorious Aspect-Emperor. The world has lost five souls, but the Heavens have gained one, praise be the God of Gods.

The writer explains that the source of the heresy comes from them reading Drusas Achamian’s Compendium of the First Holy War. The writer goes on to say that the Heresy it contains is like a disease and must be studied to destroy. Because of that, he has and gives the three bullet points of what he considers the worst offenders that “contradict Doctrine and Scripture.”

I) Achamian had sex with Esmenet before the battle of Shimeh.

II) Achamian claiming that the “Holy Aspect-Emperor” is not an incarnation of “the God of Gods” but is a Dûnyain, a group who use their intellect to enslave mankind. “That his [Kellhus’s] Zaudunyani interpretation of Inrithism is nothing more than a tool, a means of manipulation of nations.” In short, everyone is his slave. The writer is greatly troubled by these words. He finds himself doubting his faith because Achamian wrote: “if all men lay claim to righteousness, and they do, who is to say which man claims true?”

III) The third claim is that Kellhus is not preparing war to stop the No-God. That he is not the savior of mankind but a fraud.

This is all the writer can remember. He understands the reader’s concern. Not only does Achamian’s book undermine their belief, but the man once walked at Kellhus’s side and taught him. The writer says he had his body-slave, who read the book to him, put to death and now the writer awaits his own summary judgment, writing: “It is our doom to suffer the consequences of our acts, regardless of the piety of our intentions.”

Some pollution begs not the cloth, but the knife; this I accept and understand.

Sin is sin.

My Thoughts

The child condemning his parents reminds me of the Hitler Youth and how they were encouraged to inform even on their own parents. They were convinced that an ideology was more important than familial bonds, just like Kellhus wants. He needs to unite mankind.

A body-slave reading for a person was not uncommon. There is a history of slaves being educated and reading for illiterate masters or for those whose age has weakened their eyesight. The Ottoman empire employed slaves to run their government, serving as their bureaucracy.

We see the fanaticism of the Zaudunyani interpretation of Inrithism through the author, how blasphemers have to be put to death to keep this disease from spreading and how even the author expects to die. Kellhus and his ministry understand that ideas are as virulent as a pestilence. They can take root in a population and cause downfall. It has to be rooted out.

Finally, this letter serves as a quick reminder of what Achamian’s motivations and beliefs are. He lost his wife to Kellhus, that Kellhus isn’t a god but a Dûnyain, and that we can’t trust Kellhus’s motivations in his war against the Consult. It’s a great way to set the stage for the series we’re about to read.

Right from the start, Bakker puts the ultimate narrative question before us: Can we trust Kellhus not to betray mankind like a proper Dûnyain would? It’s been twenty years. Has his assessment changed? Is he leading the Great Ordeal to their slaughter?

Other books try to make the readers question if one of the main characters has become a threat. It can be hard to pull off for a character you feel like you know and wouldn’t do that. Bakker pulled it off in this series.

Onward to the Prologue!

If you enjoyed this, continue on to the Prologue!

Hi, if you like my Analysis, you can connect with me on Facebook and Twitter, and you can pre-order my first fantasy novel, Above the Storm, from Amazon or purchase my short story collection! Also,  please leave any comments or criticisms below! They help keep me motivated!

To save the world, Ary must die!

Ary, a young man scarred by his past, is thrust into the dangers of the military. But he carries a deadly secret: the dark goddess’s touch stains his soul.

Her taint threatens to destroy all he loves.

He must hide the truth from the other marines and the woman he loves. Can Ary survive the dangers of service and the zealous assassin plotting his death?

Are you ready for the action, danger, romance, and betrayal exploding across the skies Above the Storm!

Reread Update and my Books!

Enjoy my reread of R. Scott Bakker’s amazing Second Apocalypse series and waiting for the next post? Well, check out my own fantasy novels. I’m not Bakker (what author is?), but I’ve tried to take what he’s taught me about human nature and put it into my own characters.

I should have the Prologue of The Judging Eye up late next week by the latest. That prologue is dense and full of so much foreshadowing for what’s to come. This is my first time reading The Aspect-Emperor since I’ve read The Unholy Consult!

In the meantime, check out my first fantasy novel Above the Storm (Book One of the Storm Below)! I think you’ll like it!

Death rides in the Cyclones!

The demonic Stormriders are the greatest threat…

…to the people whose lives they’ve ruined. Do the riders have a weakness?

Ary knows their danger first-hand. As a child, they broke his family. Now he has a choice to make. Can he find a way to defeat them when so many before him have failed?

When the storm clouds come, what will Ary do?

You’ll be enthralled by this epic fantasy story set in the skies above the Storm because the characters will keep you hooked.

Get it now at Amazon!

Reread of The Thousandfold Thought: Chapter Seventeen

Reread of Prince of Nothing Trilogy

Book 3: The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

The Final March
Chapter 17
Shimeh

Welcome to Chapter Seventeen of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Sixteen!

Faith, they say, is simply hope confused for knowledge. Why believe when hope alone is enough?

—CRATIANAS, NILNAMESHI LORE

Ajencis, in the end, argued that ignorance was the only absolute. According to Parcis, he would tell his students that he knew only that he knew more than when he was an infant. This comparative assertion was the only nail, he would say, to which one could tie the carpenter-string of knowledge. This has come down to use as the famed “Ajencian Nail,” and it is the only thing that prevented the Great Kyranean from falling into the tail-chasing skepticism of Nirsolfa, or the embarrassing dogmatism of well-nigh every philosopher and theologian who ever dared scratch ink across parchment.

But even this metaphor, “nail,” is faulty, a result of what happens when we confuse our notation with what is noted. Like the numeral “zero” used by the Nilnameshi mathematicians to work such wonders, ignorance is the occluded frame of all discourse, the unseen circumference of every contention. Men are forever looking for the one point, the singular fulcrum they can use to dislodge all competing claims. Ignorance does not give us this. What it provides, rather, is the possibility of comparison, the assurance that not all claims are equal. And this Ajencis would argue, is all that we need. For so long as we admit our ignorance, we can help to improve our claims, and so long as we can improve our claims, we can aspire to the Truth, even if only in rank approximation.

And this is why I mourn my love of the Great Kyranean. For despite the pull of his wisdom, there are many things of which I am absolutely certain, things that feed the hate which derives this very quill.

—DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, THE COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

My Thoughts

Achamian, ever the doubter, goes on to talk about how ignorance is the state of man. That despite the belief systems of both philosophers and theologians, they simply things too much. The world is too complicated to be reduced to a “singular fulcrum they can use to dislodge all competing claims.” We’re forever battling with ideas that threaten our own cherished ideals, and that can lead to real fights. The ability to look at everything and compare different ideas is how we fight against our biases. It is what we should strive for and usually fail at doing. And even saying that, Achamian admits he can’t do it. He hates Kellhus. He’s writing his compendium to reveal that Kellhus is a fraud.

The Compendium of the First Holy War is his singular fulcrum against the mythos Kellhus has crafted around himself.

This leads to our first quote. It’s saying faith is ignorance, but if it were that simple, why would you need it if you could just hope your right. Faith is more than believing in some higher power. It’s the faith that when you step on the ground, it will be firm. It’s the faith that when you press on your brakes, they’ll work. Faith comes out of knowledge. Blind faith is a danger. Faith without scrutinizing it, without testing it, is a weak faith.

Achamian has had his faith in Kellhus tested. He has scrutinized it. He has found it wanting.

Spring 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh

Achamian is remembering soaring in the grasp of the Ciphrang. It flies unsteadily, crying out in pain. It’s bleeding and descending in a spiral. When Achamian awakens, he’s lying by the sea amid reeds. He wonders where his brothers are. He thinks he’s a child and expects his fisherman father to shout at him.

Then something was dragging him, drawing him across the sand; he could see the clots where his blood blackened it. Dragging him, a shadow leaning against the sun, drawing him down into the darkness of ancient wars, into Golgotterath…

Into a golden labyrinth of horrors more vast than any Nonmen Mansion, where a student, who was more a son, gazed at him with horror and incredulity. A Kûniüric Prince, just beginning to fathom his surrogate father’s betrayal.

He dreams he is Seswatha is telling Nau-Cayûti that his lover is dead or ruined beyond saving. Nau-Cayûti, betrayed, is horrified to learn that Seswatha lied to him. He’s utterly betrayed because “Sessa” was the only one who believed.

“Because I couldn’t succeed,” Achamian said. “Not alone. Because what we do here is more important than truth or love.”

Nau-Cayûti asks why they are here. To find the Heron spear. As he does, he turns and sees a little girl’s face that looks like Esmenet’s. The girl speaks, but it is a mature woman’s voice that comes out from it. He hears the sound of the sea and thinks he’s dying.

He doesn’t die. He comes awake after spending days feeling like he “rolled, as though he had been bound to a great spinning wheel, only a small portion of which breached the surface of hot, amniotic waters.” A woman and her daughter tends him. He has nightmares of the last Apocalypse as he suffers through fevers. When they break, he is able to take in the fisher hut he’s recovering in and he feels like he’s in his childhood home. He falls into a dream of riding in the chariot with the Kyranean High King.

For years now, an inexplicable sense of doom had hung upon the horizon, a horror that had no form, only direction… All Men could feel it. And all Men knew that it bore responsibility for their stillborn sons, that it had broken the great cycle of souls.

Now at last they could see it—the bone that would gag Creation.

An army of Sranc and Bashrag swarm before the No-God, the mighty whirlwind. “A great winding rope sucking the dun earth into black heavens, elemental and indifferent, roaring ever nearer, come to snuff out the last light of Men.” Twilight descends as the Sranc fall to their knees, not caring that they are getting slaughtered. Through all their throats, the No-God speaks.

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

“What,” Anaxophus said, “do you see?”

Seswatha gaped at the High King. Though the man’s tone and expression were entirely his own, he had spoken the selfsame words as the No-God.

“My Lord High King…” Achamian knew not what else to say.

The surrounding plains writhed and warred. As tall as the horizon, the dread whirlwind approached, the No-God walked, so vast it made gravel of Mengedda’s ruin, motes of men.

I MUST KNOW WHAT YOU SEE

“I must know what you see…”

The painted eyes fixed him, honest and intent, as though demanding a boon whose significance had yet to be determined.

“Anaxophus!” Seswatha cried through the clamour. “The Spear! You must take up the Spear!”

This isn’t what happens…

The No_God comes closer with Achamian screaming at Anaxophus to use the Spear. Entire legions of Sranc are caught up in the whirlwind, hurtling around it. Anaxophus keeps repeating the No-God’s questions. “WHAT AM I?” The No-God is closer. It’s ripping into the human army. Achamian realizes it’s too late, feeling the wind ripping at his skin.

Strange… the way passion flickered out before life.

Horses shrieking. Chariot tipping.

TELL ME, ACHAMIA—

He bolted awake, crying out.

The woman rushes to him. He grabs her too hard and keeps her from pulling away. He uses her to stand while she cries out in pain. He’s holding her too tight but can’t let go. A man rushes in and punches Achamian. Stunned and lying on the ground, Achamian doesn’t remember the actual blow, just the man yelling while the wife pleads. Naked, Achamian stands up. He wraps himself up in a rough blanket and leaves the couple. Their daughter watches him from where she cringes behind a wall.

He turned and, as fast as he could manage, fled across the shore.

Please don’t kill me! he wanted to cry out, though he knew he could burn them all.

He began walking east, to Shimeh. It seemed the only direction he knew.

Achamian trudges down the beach as the morning sun rises. The warm waves lap at his feet. He only takes a few breaks, including to make a staff from driftwood, tie a rope about his blanket, and to check his leg. It’s cut. The demon had injured Achamian before he cast his Skin Wards, keeping the demon from killing him. The fourth time he stopped, he notices his reflection in a tidal pool and sees the symbol of Fane drawn on it. He finds himself loathe to wash away the charm so only rinses out his beard.

He heads from the beach on his walk to the city. The heat grows away from the ocean. He finds signs of the battle then the camp of the Holy War. He walks through the battlefield and entered the Massus Gate. He pauses at the sight of a Scarlet Schoolman turned to salt. He then climbs up to the Juterum and sees no one until he reaches the Heterine Wall. Two Conryians who know Achamian kneel and cry, “Truth shines!” They want his blessing.

He spat on them instead.

He approaches the First Temple. Nearby, the Ctesarat, the home of the Cishaurim, is smoking ruins. He finds thousands of Inrithi crowding around it. He leans on his staff as the Men of the Tusk part for him, recognizing him. “He stood at the centre of the world—teacher to their Warrior-Prophet.” He ignores their cries and, before entering the temple, glares and laughs at them.

Inside the gloomy temple, everyone is kneeling amid the outer pillars. “The marble soothed his bleeding feet.” He feels hollow inside and only feels alive because he breathed and still has lice. He feels he’s about to die. He hears someone speaking “stern proclamations” and recognizes Maithanet’s voice. He glimpses him introducing Kellhus as the High King of Kûniüri and the Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas.

The words winded Achamian as surely as a father’s blow. While the Men of the Tusk leapt to their feet, crying out in rapture and adulation, he staggered against one of the white pillars, feeling the cool of engraved figures pressed against his cheek.

What was this hollow that had so consumed him? What was this yearning that felt so like mourning?

They make us love! They make us love!

Achamian is lost in his thoughts and doesn’t realize for a bit that Kellhus is speaking. He’s drawn forward “irresistibly, inevitably.” He passes the lords dressed in looted Fanim clothing. Kellhus is declaring that he is rewriting everything “Your books, your parables, and your prayers, all that was your costume are now nothing more than childhood curiosities.” He is hear to bring them Truth, a new beginning.

Year One.

Achamian keeps limping forward and as he reaches the end he cries out that Kellhus is declaring the “old world dead!” People gasp. The last figures part revealing the splendor of the “Holy Court of the Aspect-Emperor.” Maithanet is dressed in his golden robes. Proyas, Saubon, and the other surviving Great Names appear radiant. Nautzera stands to represent the Mandate. The growing Ministrate look glorious in the “fraudulent station.” Iyokus even stands “as pale as glass” dressed as in Eleäzaras’s garb.

He saw Esmenet, her mouth open, her painted eyes shining with tears that spilled… a Nilnameshi Empress once again.

He could not see Serwë. He could not see Cnaiür or Conphas.

Neither was Xinemus anywhere to be found.

But he saw Kellhus, sitting leonine before a great hanging Circumfix of white and gold, his hair flashing about his shoulders, his flaxen beard plaited. He saw him drawing the nets of the future, just as Scylvendi had said, measuring, theorizing, categorizing, penetrating…

He saw the Dûnyain.

Kellhus agrees with “Akka.” Achamian leans on his staff and says Kellhus speaks of apocalypse. Kellhus says it is not that simple and adopts a pose of good humor, inviting Achamian to sit at his side. Then Esmenet burst from the dais and false weeping before Achamian. She stares up at him, begging with her anguish.

“No,” Achamian said to Kellhus. “I’ve returned for my wife. Nothing more.”

A moment of crushing, monolithic silence.

Nautzera is the first to object, ordering Achamian to obey. Achamian ignores him and stares at his wife, holding out his hand and calling her by his pet name. He notices that her pregnancy is showing for the first time.

Kellhus simply… watched.

Nautzera shows menace as he admonishes Achamian. Ignoring Nautzera, Achamian continues to beg, holding out his hand to Esmi.

This was the only thing that could mean anymore.

“Akka,” she sobbed. She glanced about, seemed to wilt beneath the rapt gazes that encircled them. “I’m the mother of… of…”

So the hollow could not be shut. Achamian nodded, wiped the last tear he knew he would ever shed. He would be heartless now. A perfect man.

She begs with him, reminding him about the world. He remembers his joke. “What will it be the next time I die?” He seizes her wrist and exposes her whore tattoo. People shout, but no one moves to grab him. Esmenet even shouts for everyone to leave him alone. Achamian renounces his position as the Holy Tutor and Vizier to Kellhus. Then he renounces being a Mandate Schoolman calling them “an assembly of hypocrites and murderers.” Nautzera shouts that Achamian will be killed. No one can practice sorcery outside of the schools. Achamian cuts him off.

I renounce my Prophet!”

Everyone is in an uproar. Achamian waits for it to calm as he stares at Kellhus. “Nothing passed between them.” Then Achamian glances at Proyas who looks older. Achamian sees in Proyas’s eyes they could have a reconciliation. But it’s late.

“And I renounce…” He trailed, warred with errant passions. “I renounced my wife.”

His eyes fell upon Esmenet, stricken upon the floor. My wife!”

Nooo,” she wept and whispered. “Pleeaaase, Akka…”

“As an adulteress,” he continued, his voice cracking, “and a… a…”

His face hardening, he marches away. Everyone is dumbstruck and angry. He can hear Esmenet weeping as the crowd parts for him. Finally, Kellhus shouts Achamian’s name.

Kellhus. Achamian did not condescend to turn, but he did pause. It seemed the future itself leaned inscrutable against him, a yoke about his neck, a spear point against his spine…

“The next time you come before me,” the Aspect-Emperor said, his voice cavernous, ringing with inhuman resonance, “you will kneel, Drusas Achamian.”

Retracing his bloody footprints, the Wizard limped on.

My Thoughts

I wonder if Bakker has ever read Tad Williams amazing Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy (or tetralogy if you read in paperback). In the third book, the main character is attached to a water wheel and spun around for days and days, dunked into water, brought back up. The imagery with Achamian describing his recovery reminded me of it. Maybe not. I know GRR Martin attributes the trilogy as a big influence of his ASOIF series. If you like Bakker, I’d check out Tad Williams. It doesn’t have the grimdark feel, but it has some powerful moments in it and is a partial deconstruction of normal fantasy tropes.

We’re seeing Achamian’s first dream that’s different. Where things aren’t happening the way they should. There have always been variations in the dream, minor differences that probably come from the fact that memories are never quite precise. That Seswatha dreaming in them doesn’t remember everything correctly, but we’re seeing a major deviation. It’s right after Achamian was unconscious and the Synthese promising to tell the boy a secret. It is possible that Achamian’s shifting dreams are not caused by Kellhus’s hypnotism, but something Aurang did to the unconscious Schoolman. Some glamour or spell.

Not wiping off the sign of Fane is the first hint at what Achamian is up to. Spitting on the Conryians is another. He is done with Kellhus and his religion. He has learned the truth and he’s here to satiate his ego.

Serwë, Cnaiür, Conphas, and Xinemus. Why those four names? Serwë and Xinemus, sure, they are Achamian’s friends. Cnaiür was once an ally, but Conphas? What do they have in common? They are all Kellhus’s failures. The proof he’s not a true prophet. He couldn’t save his wife, he couldn’t win the loyalty of the man who knew him longest, he couldn’t win the trust of his bitterest enemy, and he couldn’t heal a man blinded by the cruelties of the world.

Heartless. Perfect man. Achamian thinks Kellhus is a perfect man because Esmi is choosing him in the end, so he’s trying to become him. To flee the emotions that Kellhus can’t ever really feel. It’s a natural reaction. He has to grieve losing Esmenet all over again. If the demon hadn’t come, maybe, but she had days of Kellhus working on her, making her understand that she has her child to think about. A mother has to choose what’s best. I can understand it. It sucks.

And what an end to the series, Achamian, our protagonist, leaving behind everything in angry defiance. He has learned the truth and he won’t comprise any longer. He gave up Esmenet for the greater good, but know he’s learned that Kellhus is a fraud. That He’d seduced Esmenet away. I don’t know what passed between Esmenet and Kellhus, but I almost think the way she was pleading with Achamian that they could have still had their relationship, in private. However, he would be cuckolded over and over. He would have to watch as she still went to his bed to bear his children. She would be his Empress.

As we see in the next series, Esmenet’s feelings for Kellhus are not passionate. They have a comfort with each other grown by the two decades that pass, but she regularly cheats on him with younger men. She embraces the power and privileged that he’s given her. She ensures that Achamian isn’t punished for both his defiance and the book he’ll write. Kellhus loves her, but he couldn’t ever get true love from her, only worship.

Esmenet made the choice that was in her best interest. Achamian did the same. He’s done sacrificing for the world. It left him with nothing. He had Esmenet twice and both times he “died.” If the demon hadn’t carried him off, I still doubt she would have left Kellhus, but maybe things would have turned out differently. Though Iyokus accidentally saved his life, the blind Scarlet Schoolman once again robbed Achamian of happiness.

I remembered being shocked that the story ended here. Not only had the Consult//Second Apocalypse plot didn’t any resolution, but there was also still a good hundred pages of the book. I was expecting more. And while the Holy War resolution was great, I wanted to get to the true story.

Like with Game of Thrones, the Consult and No-God is the true threat. All of this has been necessary for Kellhus to gain the power to deal with it, but he still needed it. So I was glad that there more out there. That he was writing two more series. I was eager for the Judging Eye (which didn’t even have a title) to come out. I couldn’t wait for the Aspect-Emperor Series to come.

Luckily, I had that glossary. It helps explain a lot (like who Anasûrimbor Ganrelka was and how did he relate to Anasûrimbor Celmomas and Nau-Cayûti). It explains a lot about the Nonmen and the Inchoroi. Gives a great deal of background information.

I still have no clue what the Nail of Heaven is. That really bugs me. It might be a satellite in a geosynchronous polar orbit (which sounds impossible, but fantasy). There is a cryptic line in the second series that I need to keep an eye out which makes it sound like the Nail of Heaven preceded the Inchoroi by a few years. It’s bright as moonlight though.

Well, The Thousandfold Thought has come to an end. We’ve learned a lot that we need to remember going forward:

  1. The Dûnyain are not infallible. They can make mistakes. Their predictions can be flawed.

  2. The Outside is real. There are demons. Events can precede their cause. The Darkness that Comes Before is not an absolute in this world.

  3. True Dûnyain, when shown incontrovertible truth that Damnation is real and they are going to suffer, will see the logic in the Consult’s plan and side with them, preferring oblivion upon death to eternal torment.

  4. The Consult is searching for the Dûnyain through the north.

The Prince of Nothing has come to its end. Let the Aspect-Emperor commence.

“Retracing his bloody footprints, the Wizard limped on.”

Hi, if you like my Analysis, you can connect with me on Facebook and Twitter, and you can pre-order my first fantasy novel, Above the Storm, from Amazon or purchase my short story collection! Also,  please leave any comments or criticisms below! They help keep me motivated!

To save the world, Ary must die!

Ary, a young man scarred by his past, is thrust into the dangers of the military. But he carries a deadly secret: the dark goddess’s touch stains his soul.

Her taint threatens to destroy all he loves.

He must hide the truth from the other marines and the woman he loves. Can Ary survive the dangers of service and the zealous assassin plotting his death?

Are you ready for the action, danger, romance, and betrayal exploding across the skies Above the Storm!

Reread of The Thousandfold Thought: Chapter Sixteen

Reread of Prince of Nothing Trilogy

Book 3: The Thousandfold Thought

by R. Scott Bakker

The Final March
Chapter 16
Shimeh

Welcome to Chapter Sixteen of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Fifteen!

Hi, JMD Reid here. Sorry for how long this took to get out. Not only was this one of the longest chapters in the series, but this is also one of the longest writeups. On top of that, I went on vacation for two weeks in March and then I got sick this week. Between that and getting my novels published, I haven’t had the time to put to it. But I’ll be diving into the final chapter of Thousandfold Thought this Weekend and hopefully, it’s not as long!

Please leave comments because it is a great motivator to continue this. And please, check out my fiction. I’ve learned a lot from Bakker on characters that I’ve applied to my writing. I’m not promising his style of fiction, but I’ve learned many lessons from the greats in the genre to make my own!

Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion.

Verily, it is conviction that kills.

—PAARCIS, THE NEW ANALYTICS

My Thoughts

A very astute observation. It’s one of the themes of Bakker’s series. Doubt is something the wise do. They use their brains and question things. Seek to understand things. When you can step outside your own world view you understand others. Empathy forms.

The best way to counter things you don’t like, bigotry or hatred, isn’t to demonize but to socialize. To engage. To get to know your opponent. Speak to them. Host dialogues and share your ideas. You can open up both your minds and discover maybe you were a little close-minded, too. That common ground can be forged.

The zealot always believes they are right. And that always leads to violence when the “blasphemer” disagrees.

This leads directly to the goal of the Thousandfold Thought. The Dûnyain see the easiest way to unite humans is to make them all zealots for the same thing.

Spring 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shimeh

Bowmen huddle in the sewers of Shimeh with a Cishaurim. Above, the buildings burn. The sounds of the Scarlet Spires sorcery has gone quiet. The bald Cishaurim commands the bowmen to douse their torches and cover their eyes. They do. The world goes black.

Then impossibly bright. A thunderous crack.

“Move!” the Waterbearer cried. “Climb! Climb!”

Suddenly all was blue, illuminated by a coin of incandescence that flared on the Waterbearer’s brow. They jostled forward, spitting at the dust. One by one they shouldered their way past the blind man, struggled up a slope of broken and blistering stone, then found themselves dashing through fiery ruins.

Moënghus concludes that the voices Kellhus hear are not from the Thousandfold Thought. Kellhus responds by demanding to see the captives. Moënghus asks what Kellhus will do if he refuses. Kellhus asks why Moënghus would.

“Because I need to revise my assumptions, to explore these unforeseen permutations. I had discounted this possibility.”

“What possibility?”

That the Wilderness would break rather than enlighten. That you would come to me a madman.”

Water, endlessly dropping, pounded air and stone. The thunder of inevitability.

“Refuse me anything, and I will kill you, Father.”

The Kianene boil out of the ruins of the collapsed city wall and race out to attack the Ainoni flank. The Tydonni who spotted the attack keep sounding the alarm, but the dust and smoke have hidden this attack from the rest of the Holy war. The Kianene cross the Jeshimal River, including war mastodons dragging rafts to make improvised bridges. They Tydonni charge into hopeless numbers.

Moënghus leads Kellhus through “absolute darkness,” leaving behind the waterfall. Kellhus explains all he had inferred about his father that he’d gleaned from Cnaiür then speculates what Moënghus did after leaving the Utemot. Unlike Kellhus, his father had carved the swazond into his arms meaning he would find no safety in the Nansur Empire forcing him south to the Fanim. This was before the Battle of Zirkirta, so while they didn’t love the Scylvendi they also didn’t hate them. Moënghus was first a slave, but after his “conversion” to Fane and with his intellect, he was freed by his master. Moënghus made his master love him. Soon, Moënghus’s knowledge of scripture outstripped the Fanic Priests. “Those who would whip you now implored you to travel to Shimeh… to the Cishaurim, and the possibility of power beyond anything the Dûnyain had conceived.”

Five steps. Kellhus could smell the water drying across his father’s bare skin.

Moënghus responds that he had good reason to believe this. Kellhus agrees, pointing out that the worldborn are “less than children to us.” They see deeper in all their philosophies and sciences. Moënghus assumed becoming a Cishaurim and “taking up the Water” would be just as easy. He didn’t know that Psûkhe was all about emotions.

“So you let them blind you, only to find your powers proportionate to your vestigial passions. What you thought to be the Shortest Path was in fact a dead end.”

The Scarlet Schoolmen who are holding back from the main fray as Watchers feel the Chorae moving in the ground before the Thesji Bowmen appear. They cried warning but were confused by what to do. “Not since the Scholastic Wars had the Scarlet Spires waged such a battle.” Rimon is the first salted and killed. They scatter.

Their shouts catch Eleäzaras’s attention. He sees their fear but doesn’t feel any. Instead, he feels relief because the Cishaurim was finally fighting back. He sees the demolition of the city around him, creating a ring where they could fight the Cishaurim.

They come!” he boomed in a laughing, sorcerous voice. “At long last, they come!”

Arrayed across the pitched ruin, so small beneath the fires they had kindled, the Schoolmen of the Scarlet Spires cried out in exultant acclaim. Their Grandmaster had come back to them.

Then threads of incandescence, blinding blue and white, lashed through the encircling walls of flame.

Kellhus continues explaining that though Moënghus, going by Mallahet, was respected by Seökti and the other Cishaurim openly, they all secretly think he’s cursed for having so little Water. Worse, losing his eyes reduced his ability to “discern what comes before.” He could only see pinholes through them. He did what he could with his intellect and rose high, but whenever he left the powerful, the whispers about his weak powers would undermine his work.

Kellhus determines he first found the skin-spies twelve years ago. It shocks the Cishaurim and they blame the Scarlet Spire. What other school would dare to do this? But Moënghus understood that these weren’t made by sorcerers but “were engines of the flesh.” Though Moënghus couldn’t stop the Cishaurim from sending their assassins to kill the previous Scarlet Spire Grandmaster, starting the Holy War. Kellhus’s words are cut off.

Just then, Kellhus inadvertently kicked something lying upon the graven floor. Something hollow and fibrous. A skull?

Kellhus continues without giving the skull another thought, explaining how Moënghus had tortured the skin-spies and learned the truth about them, discovering about the last two Inchoroi, Aurang and Aurax, the Consult, and how they corrupted Meketerig and perverted Shaeönanra.

“These words you speak,” Moënghus said from the black, “‘wicked,’ ‘corrupted,’ ‘perverted’… why would you use them when you know they are nothing more than mechanisms of control?”

Kellhus ignores his father and explains how Moënghus would have thought of the Consult as long dead or Mandate delusion, but discovers the skin-spies story is too consistent. Moënghus became troubled learning that what he had dismissed as nonsense might be true. He had rejected the Sagas. After all who would be mad enough to destroy the world. What could you gain?

“But the skin-spies explained it all. Speaking in shrieks and howls, they taught you the way and wherefore of the Apocalypse. You learned that the boundaries between the World and the Outside were not fixed, that if the World could be cleansed of enough souls, it could be sealed shut. Against the Gods. Against the heavens and the hells of the Afterlife. Against redemption. And, most importantly, against the possibility of damnation.

“The Consult, you realized, were laboring to save their souls. And what was more, if your captives could be believed, they were drawing near the end of their millennial task.”

In the absence of light, Kellhus studied his father through the lens of different senses: the scent of naked skin, the displacement of drafts, the sound of bare feet scuffing through the dark.

“The Second Apocalypse,” Moënghus said simply.

Moënghus says the Consult has to be stopped. He spent years in the Probability Trance and is the only person who knew what the Consult was up to. Who could detect their spies? Kellhus thinks that this labyrinth is a place prepared for him by his father. He then says Moënghus began “contemplating what would become the Thousandfold Thought.” Moënghus agrees. Things change suddenly. They are in a larger room where a few things live but more have died.

“We have arrived,” his father said.

Gothyelk leads the Tydonni in a charge against the Fanim as they cross the river. The Inrithi cry out to Gilgaöl while the Fanim charge at them. The Men of the Tusk cry out to Shimeh as they set lances. The two groups crash together in a maelstrom of hacking death. The Tydonni drive through the horde and reach the riverbank, scattering those who crossed. They regroup like “angry bees” and attack the flanks.

Inrithi lords cajole their men to hold the river crossing. The Fanim began breaking apart their makeshift bridges as archers on the far bank pelt the Inrithi. Despite reaching the river, Gothyelk realizes he can’t hold it and sounds the retreat.

Kellhus lights the room with sorcery. For a nonman room, it’s austere (which means it still is pretty ornate just not excessive). Kellhus realizes it is access to the sewage system and hence why it is not as decorated. There are workbenches and a cistern. In between are four skin-spies spread eagle. Two more hang above pits, all shackled with iron. Kellhus notes a funnel above one’s head that is a force-feeding mechanism. He wonders how long they’ve been here. He then studies them, their facial limbs held back by a system of ropes and pulleys allowing them to be manipulated.

Kellhus asks when Moënghus realized he didn’t have the strength to face the No-God. Moënghus thought it was probably from the beginning. Thinking about it lead him to come upon the Thought. Kellhus continua his examination and notes that the skin-spies are lobotomized and have needles inserted into their brain. He brushes one, causing the skin-spy to defecate.

Kellhus has deduced that his father has some power, hence sending the dream. Moënghus nods while Kellhus ponders the secrets his father had learned from the skin-spies. Moënghus explains he is better at Psûkhe that requires subtly such as Scrying and Calling. The dreams were almost beyond him.

“I was the Shortest Path.” [asked Kellhus.]

“No. You were the only path.”

Kellhus notes a dead child and woman nailed to doors hung before the skin-spies. They are recently dead. Kellhus wanders if it was an interrogation technique or feeding them. As he does, he asks about his half-brother. Kellhus can almost visualize his half-brother from the way he had heard him described. At the same time, he feels his father’s scrutiny.

He uses every heartbeat to reassess. His son has returned to him insane.

Moënghus nodded and said, “You mean Maithanet.”

Esmenet, cuddling beside Achamian, stares up at the tree above them. She’s recently cried. She is astounded by how the tree keeps branching to thinner and thinner limbs, “all reaching for a thousand different heavens.”

She sighed and said, “I feel so young.”

His chest bounced in silent laughter beneath her cheek.

“You are… Only the world is old.”

“Oh, Akka, what are we going to do?”

“What we must.”

“No… that’s not what I mean.” She cast an urgent look to his profile. “He’ll see, Akka. The instant he glimpses our faces, he’ll see us here… He’ll know.”

He turned to her. The scowling hurt of old fears unearthed.

“Esmi—”

He’s interrupted by a horse. Alarmed, Achamian creeps out to view. She follows and is shocked to see Conphas’s Kidruhil riding in formation. She thought he was dead and then realizes Achamian isn’t. She realizes Cnaiür told him about it and to sound the alarm. Achamian was just so shocked by it that he didn’t think about it. He tells her to stay hiding. His tone causes her to shrink back. She asks what he plans to do. He says he can’t let Conphas succeed. She doesn’t want him to go, but he is afraid for her since she’s Kellhus’s wife.

Just like Serwë was.

In her soul’s eye she glimpsed the girl trying to palm blood back into the gash about her throat. “Akka!” she sobbed.

“I love you, Esmenet. The love of a fool…” He paused, blinked two tears. “That’s all I’ve ever had to offer.”

Then suddenly he stood tall. Before she could speak, he had stepped over the broken foundation. There was something nightmarish to his movements, an urgency that couldn’t be contained by his limbs. She would have laughed had she not known him so well.

He walked out and among the cavalrymen, calling…

His eyes shining. His voice a thunderclap.

Conphas is in a good mood as he witnesses Shimeh burning. He’s with Cememketri and asks the guy what it says about men that they find destruction beautiful. “That we are bred to war, God-of-Men,” answers the Schoolman. Conphas disagrees, saying that they’re bred to violence. “War is intellect, and men are stupid.”

Conphas feels everything is going perfectly. He had a smooth landing of his troops this morning and is arriving at just the right time to seize the day. He is delighted to see the Scarlet Spires fighting in the city and that the Holy War split, one half pouring into the city as the Tydonni are trying to stop Fanayal from outflanking them. He has achieved tactical surprise.

Whom do the Gods favour now, hmm, Prophet?

A defect carried from the womb… Please.

He laughed aloud, utterly unperturbed by the ashen looks of his officers. Suddenly it seemed he could see the future to its very limit. It wouldn’t end here, oh my, no! It would continue, first to the south, to Seleukara, then onward to Nenciphon, west to Invishi—all the way to Auvangshei and the legendary gates of Zeüm! He, Ikurei Conphas I, would be the new Triamis, the next Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas!

He scowls, realizing those around him couldn’t see anything but “their precious Holy City” burning. His thoughts are interrupted by General Areamanteras who is startled by Achamian walking towards them. Conphas realizes he’s casting sorcery and grabs his Chorae moments before fire engulfs him. Someone cries out to him and he realizes he’s no longer on his horse but on burned grass, Cememketri floating above protected with “ethereal ramparts.” Meanwhile, Achamian is destroying his troops with lines of light “more perfect than any rule.” His men are being butchered.

A blinding light rewrote all the shadows, and through upraised fingers Conphas saw a sun falling from black-bellied clouds, plummeting onto the figure of the Mandate Schoolman. Bursting fire, ribbons of it, arching off in all directions. Conphas heard himself cry out in relief elation…

But as his eyes adjusted, he saw the flames twining away into nothingness about an invisible sphere, and he glimpsed him, as clear as night beneath the Andiamine Heights, or in the Sapatishah’s Palace in Caraskand: Drusas Achamian, unharmed, untouched, laughing about incandescence as he sang.

From nowhere, a massive concussion. The air just cracked.

Cememketri is buckling, Achamian’s “parabolas of light” are tearing down the Saik Schoolmaster’s wards. Cememketri panics and stumbles on his words. He cries out for Conphas to run. Conphas does as Cememketri is ripped into bloody pieces.

The lone guardsman left to defend the Umbilica curses as he hears something. He’s terrified of what he sees. A figure that doesn’t look right “like a moth’s pupa or a bundle of collapsing cloth.” He wants to run, but he’s a Hundred Pillar. He feels enough shame at being left behind. He draws his weapon and demands it halt.

And miraculously, the thing ceased moving.

Forward, anyway, because it somehow clawed outward, as though soft inner surfaces were being peeled back, exposed to the needling sky.

A face like summer sunlight. Limbs barked in fire.

Reaching out, the thing grasped his head, skinned it like a grape.

Where, bolted a voice through his smoking skull, is Drusas Achamian?

The Scarlet Spire battled beneath the First Temple, led by “the thunder of their Grandmaster’s voice.” They are outnumbered by the Cishaurim. Everywhere, sorcery is unleashed. Cants are sung. Wards are strengthened. The Javreh shield-bearers struggle to block incoming Chorae arrows, but some get through. One kills Hem-Arkidu who, somehow, was perfectly balanced to remain standing as a “pillar of salt amid sizzling ruins.”

The Scarlet Schoolman retreat to each other, uniting their wards to create directed defenses. Protected, they counterattacked with Dragonheads belching fire, Memkotic Furies attack, and Meppa Cataract devours air. Cishaurim die while others are dragged away wounded. The Scarlet Spires own Chorae crossbowman reach the battle and, though they are buried beneath the rubble, killing dozens. The Cishaurim do not falter because “unlike their wicked foeman, they cared not for their lives.”

In the midst of their enemy, they spilled their Water.

The slaughter was great.

The Tydonni knights are in retreat now, pelted by Fanim arrows as they rout. Kianene cavalry overruns some. However, the infantry has formed lines and grow stronger with every moment as more and more men join the ranks. Standing amid a crumbling aqueduct, the ready to face the enemy. Some of the Ainoni are joining them now. The surviving knits reach their lines and ready to fight again. The heathens advance.

Missiles rained among them, like hail across tin.

“Here!” Earl Gothyelk roared. “Here we stand!”

But the Fanim parted before them, content to release storms of whirring arrows. The knights of Kishyat, their faces painted dread white above their square-plaited beards, had exacted a terrible toll on their flank. But even more, Cinganjehoi recalled well the obstinacy of the idolaters once their heels touched ground. As yet only a fraction of the Fanim army had crossed the Jeshimal.

Fanayal ab Kascamandri was coming. Lord of the Cleansed lands. Padirajah of Holy Kian.

Proyas’s men are losing their discipline More and more are raping and plundering the city. He’s given up, his heart grieving as the battle madness consumed them. He “understood what it meant to wager one’s life, and the bestial license that men took as their prize.” He’s realizing Shimeh isn’t any different. He finds himself separated from his soldiers and wandering through a market. Above, the First Temple is wreathed in smoke.

He enters a house and finds several dead men. Cringing in the corner is a woman and a young girl staring at him in fear. He is wearing his war-mark, hiding who he is. He realizes he’s splattered in blood. Memories of the fighting feel him mixing with his memories of kneeling before Maithanet. He approaches the mother. She’s crying out in her tongue and draws something on the floor. The tusk.

She keeps drawing the tusk and begging for mercy. He knows this is wrong, but the girl looks so young and inventing. He feels this urge for the “daughter of his enemy.” He wants to enjoy her, to take her.

An enormous crack shivered the air, thrummed through the building’s bones.

“Run,” he murmured, though he knew she wouldn’t understand. He pulled her back, held a soiled hand out to raise the mother. “You must find a better place to hide.”

This was Shimeh.

Moënghus explains that Dûnyain blood is the most precious commodity, but children born to worldborn women lack their full range of abilities. Maithanet isn’t Dûnyain. “He could do no more than preparing the way.” Kellhus feels a pang as he thinks of Esmenet’s name.

“Only a true son of Ishuäl could succeed,” his father continued. “For all the Thousandfold Thought’s innumerable deductions, for all its elegance, there remained countless variables that could not be foreseen. Each of its folds possess a haze of catastrophic possibilities, most of them remote, others nearly certain. I would have abandoned it long ago, were not the consequences of inaction so absolute.

“Only one of the Conditioned could follow its path. Only you, my son.”

Could it be? A tincture of sorrow in his father’s voice? Kellhus turned from the hanging skin-spies, once again enclosed his father within the circle of his scrutiny.

“You speak as though the Thought were a living thing.”

He could see nothing in the eyeless face.

Moënghus says thought is alive. He uses the Nilnamesh game viramsata (“many-breaths”) as an example. It is a game of truth. They have taken jnan so far, that they spread lies about each other and the person will act out those lies, “especially when they are elegant.” It blurs the line between what is fiction and lies. The best tale is declared Pivirsut (“this breath is ground”). It is a lie that has become truth, the foundation everyone walks on. Kellhus sees the connection to Inrithism and Fanimry.

“Precisely. Lies that have conquered and reproduced over the centuries. Delusional world views that have divided the world between them. They are twin viramsata that even now war through shouts and limbs of men. Two great thoughtless beasts that take the souls of Men as their ground.”

“And the Thousandfold Thought?”

Moënghus sees the Thousandfold Thought as a way to change history and transform the two religion into something new. Moënghus realizes to survive what is to come, then everyone must “all act of one accord.” Religious division cannot be allowed but must surrender to a “new delusion.” Kellhus asks where is Truth in this.

“There is no Truth for the worldborn. They feed and they couple, cozening their hearts with false flatteries, easing their intellects with pathetic simplifications. The Logos, for them, is a tool of their lust, nothing more… They excuse themselves and heap blame upon others. They glorify their people over other peoples, their nations over other nations. They focus their fears on the innocent. And when they hear words such as these, they recognize them—but as defects belonging to others. They are children who have learned to disguise their tantrums from their wives and their fellows, and from themselves most of all…

No man says, ‘They are chosen and we are damned.’ No worldborn man. They have not the heart for Truth.”

Stepping from between his faceless captives, Moënghus approached, his expression a mask of blind stone. He reached out as though to clasp Kellhus’s wrist or hand, but halted the instant Kellhus shrank back.

But why, my son? Why ask me what you already know?”

Esmenet watches Achamian battling the Nansur. He no longer seems like Achamian, but different. Something “godlike and all-conquering.” She’s witnessing “the War-Cants of the Ancient North.” Despite the supernatural cadence of his voice, it’s still Achamian she’s hearing. For the first time, she’s seeing the presence that has always shadowed their love: the Mandate Schoolman. The Nansur are reeling in confusion and panic. They are breaking, but she knows that soon they’ll bring up Chorae bowmen.

She was about to watch him die, she realized. The only man who truly loved her.

He’s attacked by new sorcery, the barrage causing her to stumble backward. Four Imperial Saik Schoolmen are approaching. He kills them one by one with “blistering precision.”

The Cishaurim’s surprise attack kills dozens of Scarlet Schoolman. “Entire cadres were swept away in deluge after glittering deluge.” Chorae bowmen on both sides kill Schoolmen and Cishaurim. The Scarlet Spires coordination is disrupted and a sorcerous melee erupts. Schoolmen are fighting on their own for their own survival. Lesser Cishaurim are killed, but the Scarlet Spires had no idea the true strength of the Nine Incandati, the Cishaurim “whose backs could bear the most Water.” Their power is driving back the Schoolmen.

Eleäzaras is in a battle with two Cishaurim, including Seökti, the High Heresiarch. All Eleäzaras can do is sing his Wards. He uses all his knowledge to protect himself. He couldn’t afford despair. Then he is saved by Prince Hulwarga and his Thunyeri are rushing into the battle under the blare of horns.

Men of the tusk, come to save them.

On the field, the Holy War’s troops watch the Kianene horsemen maneuver to attack them. “All that remained of a proud and fierce nation, come for a final reckoning.” The Men of the Tusk began singing. The Kianene rode faster, howling in rage and anger.

So many wrongs suffered. So many deaths unavenged.

The Kianene charge fast and crash into the ranks of the Inrithi. A wild melee erupts.

“Even the Dûnyain,” Moënghus said, “possess vestigial versions of these weaknesses. Even me. Even you, my son.”

The implication was clear. Your trial has broken you.

Kellhus wonders if he had broken while bound to Serwë’s corpse. The memory of walking away alive when he should have died and all the Inrithi staring at him in awe fills him. He reminds his father that there is more than this world.

He [Kellhus] could remember the voice.

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

Even without his eyes, his father’s face still seemed to scrutinize. “You refer to your visions, the voice from nowhere. But tell me, where is your proof? What assures your claim over those who are simply mad?”

TELL ME.

Assurance? What assurance did he have? When the real punished, the soul denied. He had seen it so many times in so many eyes… So how could he be so certain?

Kellhus starts to feign that he’s wavering in as he brings up his “prophecy” of the Shrial Knights coming to pass. Moënghus calls it a “Correspondence of Cause.” It was just happenstance. He repeats that a cause always proceeds an effect, not the other way around. Kellhus knows this is true because if it wasn’t, if what came after could affect what came before, he wouldn’t have risen to power. “The Principal of Before and After simply had to be true.”

His father had to be right.

So what was this certainty, this immovable conviction, that he was wrong?

Am I mad?

Moënghus continues that while the Dûnyain are wrong about the world, and there is something Outside. He calls it “fractured and distorted reflection” of the material world. Moënghus hasn’t found any contradiction to Before and After. He explains that men, thanks to their limitations, can’t see this. They only pay attention to what confirms their basis and dismiss anything that contradicts them. “They are bent upon affirmation.” Moënghus has studied the world and realizes nothing from the outside acts on it.

“The God sleeps… It has ever been thus. Only by striving for the Absolute may we awaken Him. Meaning. Purpose. These words name not something given… no, they name our task.”

Kellhus stood motionless.

“Set aside your conviction,” Moënghus said, “for the feeling of certainty is no more than a marker of truth than the feeling of will is a marker of freedom. Deceived men always think themselves certain, just as they always think themselves free. This is simply what it means to be deceived.”

Kellhus looked to the halos about his hands, wondered that they could be light and yet cast no light, throw no shadow… The light of delusion.

Moënghus continues that they can’t fall into this trap because of the Inchoroi who have twice tried to destroy the world and will do so again. Kellhus nods and says the No-God “speaks to me as well.” Moënghus seems as shocked as a Dûnyain can be before he proclaims Kellhus insane.

Conphas is dazed from Achamian’s sorcerery. His men are shouting, thinking he’s dead. Some are not happy to be fighting for “Fanim pigs” and risking damnation. Then they notice he’s moving. He’s gripping his Chorae in a bloody hand and thinks he’s dead before he gathers himself and orders his mean to kill Achamian. He realizes the blood is Cememketri and thinks he’s useless.

He continues to order for Achamian death, but no one will look at him. He then glances at the battle and sees his Saik Schoolmen dying. Conphas has split his Schoolmen up among his columns. They don’t have the massed numbers to take on Achamian and his Gnosis. He didn’t expect to have a sorcerous battle. Not with the Scarlet Spire and the Cishaurim fighting.

This isn’t happening… not to me!

“My Chorae,” he said numbly. “Where are my crossbowmen?”

No one could answer—of course. All was in disarray. The Mandate filth had obliterated his entire command. The Emperor’s own standard had vanished in an eruption of fire. The sacred standard destroyed! He turned from the spectacle, scanned the surrounding fields and pastures. Kidruhil fled to the south—fled! Three of his Columns had halted, while the phalanxes of the farthest, the Nasueret, actually seemed to be withdrawing.

They thought he was dead.

Laughing, he pressed his way through the clutch of soldiers, opened his bloodied arms to the far-flung ranks of the Imperial Army. He hesitated at the sight of white-garbed horsemen cresting the far rise, but only for a heartbeat.

Your Emperor has survived!” he roared. “The Lion of Kiyuth lives!”

The Cishaurim shift their attacks from the surviving Scarlet Spires to engage the Thunyeri rushing at them. Eleäzaras watches stunned as “one barbarian, his beard and hair aflame, stumble across the pitch of fallen walls, still holding a Circumfix banner high.” Then he realizes he’s not being attacked. He strengthens his wards while realizing the Cishaurim are stronger than they are. He spots Yalgrota Sranchammer strangling a Cishaurim, protected by his Chorae. Seökti retreats to the Sacred Heights while the surviving Scarlet Spires renew their attack. Eleäzaras orders his Schoolman to fight while he realizes only one shield-bearer remains and he cowers on the ground.

Cursing the fool, the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires stepped into the smoke-rent sky.

The Fanim led by Fanayal and the Inrithi battle outside the city. It’s a brutal fight, but then the Fanim retreat. The Inrithi cheer, shouting, “Wait! You forgot your blood!” The Men of the Tusk, seasoned by two years of fighting, regroup with ease as they see the Fanim massing. The sight shocks them.

Horns signaled. Someone, somewhere, resumed their song.

We shall raise glory to the morrow,

we shall bring fury to the now.

As the Fanim form up, they are charged by the outnumbered Shrial Knights lead by Gotian. The Men of the Tusk cheer at the disorder this causes the enemy. The Fanim faced the Inrithi as “the sons of Fane and Sejenus regarded one another.”

Sunlight showered across the fields, gleamed from clammy metal. Blinking, men looked to the heavens, saw vultures circling the glare.

Mastodons screamed among the Girgashi. An anxious rustling passed through the lines, both heathen and idolater. Spotters along the aqueduct’s crown shouted out warnings: heathen horsemen seemed to be re-positioning themselves behind their motionless brethren. But all eyes were drawn to the Coyauri, where the banner of the Padirajah himself pressed forward through the ranks—the Maned Desert Tiger, embroidered in silver on a triangular bolt of black silk. The rows parted and, draped in golden mail, Fanayal himself spurred his black onto the intervening ground.

Who?” he cried to the astonished onlookers—and in Sheyic no less. “Who is the true voice of God?”

The Fanim charge. The Inrithi brace for the attack. Fanayal’s words have shaken up the Inrithi and they are breaking through the Holy War’s lines. The Tydonni knights, lead by Gothyelk, charge into Fanayal’s horseman. Gothyelk and Fanayal find themselves face to face. Fanayal “swift blade” kills Gothyelk.

Death cam swirling down.

Kellhus asks his father what the No-God is. Moënghus states Kellhus was broken by the trial. Kellhus persists, saying if the No-God was destroyed, how can it send him dreams. Moënghus just says he mistakes his inner voice for something without, like any madman. Kellhus then asks what the skin-spy say.

Though walled in by the flesh of his face, Moënghus seemed to scrutinize him. “They do not know. But then, none in this world know what they worship.”

Kellhus asks what his father has considered about the No-God, but his father presses on the madness then starts to say something about Kellhus’s training when the sounds of others approach. Moënghus thinks Kellhus brought them while Kellhus recognizes Cnaiür by his heartbeat. Kellhus presses on and says that he’s been chosen to be the Harbinger.

“These voices,” Moënghus said with slow deliberation, “what do they say of me?”

His father, Kellhus realized, had finally grasped the principles of this encounter, Moënghus had assumed that his son would be the one requiring instruction. He had not foreseen it as possible, let alone inevitable, that the Thousandfold Thought would outgrow the soul of its incubation—and discard it.

“They warn me,” Kellhus said, “that you are Dûnyain still.”

Moënghus asks if this is why he has to die. Kellhus, glancing down at his hallowed hands, then says when the Inchoroi prove to Moënghus that damnation is real and the Dûnyain are all condemned to eternal punishment, his training as a will lead him to side with the Consult. Moënghus will “come to see tyranny in what is holy.” Kellhus assesses his father’s physical capabilities and knows he must strike fast.

“To shut the World against the Outside,” the pale lips said. “To seal it through the extermination of mankind…”

“As Ishuäl is shut against the Wilderness,” Kellhus replied.

For the Dûnyain, it was axiomatic: what was compliant had to be isolated from what was unruly and intractable. Kellhus had seen it many times, wandering the labyrinth of possibilities that was the Thousandfold Thought: The Warrior-Prophet’s assassination. The Rise of Anasûrimbor Moënghus to take his place. The Apocalyptic conspires. The counterfeit war against Golgotterath. The accumulation of premeditated disasters. The sacrifice of whole nations to the gluttony of the Sranc. The Three Seas crashing into char and ruin.

The Gods baying like wolves at a silent gate.

Kellhus isn’t sure if his father has seen this probability, where his plan would lead. Or maybe he had and merely accused Kellhus of being mad to throw off Kellhus. He then declares that His father is Dûnyain. Moënghus starts to say so is Kellhus, but he stabs his father in the chest before he can finish his words.

“I am more,” the Warrior-Prophet said.

Achamian realizes that he’s routed the Kidruhil and that the rest of the imperial army will soon march over the hill. He expects there to be Chorae bowmen and realize he’ll be killed as his Mandate Training kicks in. He then remembers Esmenet and is fearful for her when he sees how close the ruins are. She was alive, watching him. She had witnessed him fighting.

It shamed him for some reason.

She bursts out of cover to race for him as he yells at her to stop. Then the Ciphrang attacks from above. A powerful wind knocks Esmenet to the ground. As the demon descends, Achamian knows it is Iyokus’s doing.

Proyas finds a still-standing building and gazes out across the burning city of Shimeh. He watches the Scarlet Spire and Cishaurim fighting while everything below was destroyed. The First Temple stands untouched overall.

A loud crack almost knocks Proyas to the ground. He sees a pair of Scarlet Schoolman. They are sending sorcery at a floating Cishaurim. They unleash devastation that is answered by water-like energy from the Cishaurim that slams into their wards. The glare is bright. The Cishaurim rises until he’s level with Proyas. The sorcerery battle clashes before Proyas. The Cishaurim wins, killing the two Scarlet Schoolman.

“Sweet God of Gods!” he cried to the acrid wind. With bare hands he tore the Chorae from the chain about his neck.

“Who walk among us…” He drew back his sword-weary arm, secured his footing.

“Innumerable are your holy names…” And he cast his Tear of God, a gift from his mother on his seventh birthday.

It seemed to vanish against the iron horizon…

Then a flash, a black ringed circle of light, from which the saffron figure plummeted like a sodden flag.

Proyas fell to his knees on the brink, leaned out over the fall. His holy city gaped before him. And he wept, though he knew not why.

Despite the Tydonni knights’ charges, it’s not enough to rout the Kianene forces. Despite some victories, Fanayal’s forces are too much. The Inrithi forces are doomed to lose. Despite their loses, the Holy War holds their position.

The Fanim wept with fury, with outrage, as they cut down the Inrithi invaders. They cried out glory to Fane and the Solitary God, even as they wondered that the Men of the Tusk did not flee.

Achamian faces the demon and realizes it is a powerful demon. He struggles to think how to deal with it. He used an Odaini Concussion Cant to throw her clear before it landed on her. The demon advances on him speaking that it must take an eye for an eye. He is horrified by what Iyokus has unleashed and begs Esmenet to flee.

The thing leapt towards him.

Achamian began singing—the deepest of the Cirroi Looms. Glorious Abstractions knitted the air about and before him, a thresher of light. The demon laughed and screamed.

In the nonman ruins, Moënghus staggers back from his wound, his snakes coming out of recessed holes in the wall to curl about his neck. He realizes something in this moment about how Moënghus can see through the serpents, many becoming one. “What was soul became place.”

With three voices he sang, one utteral pitched to the world and two inutterals directed to the ground. What had been an ancient Cant of Calling became something far, far more… A Cant of Transposing.

Kellhus is wrapped up in the spell, illuminating the room in blue light. He sees his father looking so pale. Then he sees Serwë leaping at Moënghus out of the darkness. A moment later, Kellhus teleports away.

Achamian battles the demon while Esmenet is unable to look away. She’s transfixed by Achamian “surrounded by withered, burning grasses, he stood behind his sheets of light, at once glorious with power and dreadful with frailty.” The demon reaches his wards and breaks through them. Achamian’s sorcerer falters for one moment. The demon grabs him and carries him into the air.

She could not scream.

Conphas cries out that he’s alive, but no one cheers or looks relieved. They’ve mistaken him for a common soldier. He glances at a captain and orders him to find General Baxatas. The man hesitates but sees the “cold fire” in Conphas and obeys at a run. He is giving commands, telling a soldier to sound the advance. He hears shouting, thinking it’s his own soldiers only to see an army of horseman racing at him roaring, “There are no more nations!” They fly beneath the Red Lion and the Circumfix.

“Kill them!” Conphas howled. “Attack! Attack! Attack!”

For an instant it seemed nothing would happen, that nobody had heard. His army continued to mill in imbecile crowds; the interlopers continued to ride unmolested among them.

There are no more nations!”

Then the white-clad knights abruptly changed direction, began riding towards him.

As they charge, he remembers his grandmother when she was younger and beautiful. She was teaching him that an emperor needed to stay grounded and to measure “the purses of those who serve you, my little godling.” An emperor needs to know how much loyalty they have to spend. Today, Conphas’s found out the limits. His men don’t rally. They surrender. They flee. They break under the stress.

“I defeated the Scylvendi,” he said to the remainder. “You were there…”

Hooves pounding the turf. The ground shivered through his sandals.

“No man could do such a thing,” he said.

“No man!” one of the kneelers cried. The soldier clutched his hand, kissed his Imperial Ring.

Such a deep sound, the charge of the Inrithi. Thunder about horses snorting, gear clanking. So this was what the heathen heard.

The Emperor of Nansur turned, not really believing…

He saw King Saubon leaning from his saddle, his face ruddy with murderous intent. More than sun glinted in the man’s blue eyes.

He saw the broadsword that took his head.

Eleäzaras closes in on Seökti, the Heresiarch of the Cishaurim. He plans on avenging his “beloved teacher” and his school. He screams his mentor’s name between Cants. Eleäzaras smote Seökti with magma and fire, with suns and fury. Eleäzaras is laughing as he sang because “vengeance had made hatred a thing of rapture and glory.” However, he’s attacked by blue plasma, the Holy Water of Indara-Kishauri. Eleäzaras’s wards crack. Eleäzaras strengthen his defenses and then realizes he’s alone in the skies.

All about him the world had become a tidal surge of brilliant white and blue, tearing, pounding. Markless, as virginal as the Godspun world.

Tearing. Pounding.

The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires grunted, cursed. Jets of incandescence exploded through his Wards, immolating his left arm even as he screamed deeper defenses. A fissure opened before him. Light blew across his scalp and brow. Like a doll, he was thrown backward.

His corpse toppled into burning tracts below.

Outside the city, Fanayal’s forces are encircling the Inrithi. Things are looking bleak for the Men of the Tusk. Gotian, in a desperate charge, is slain along with most of his Shrial Knights. Then they hear a horn sound. They spot the Imperial Army marching towards the battle. But mixed in among the banners of the Nansur Columns were the Circumfix and the Red lion.

This wasn’t the treachery of an Emperor—an Ikurei—come to seal a pact with their Padirajah. The hated standard of the Exalt-General, with its distinctive Kyranaean disc, was nowhere to be seen.

No. This wasn’t Ikurei Conphas. It was the Blond Beast…

King Saubon.

Cnaiür is struggling to breathe as he sees Moënghus slumped against the walls. The Scylvendi had moved for hours through the halls following Serwë and the other skin-spies. They tracked Kellhus’s scent. He knows he is farther from the Steppe than ever. Serwë attacks Moënghus first, but Moënghus uses a mix of hand-to-hand fighting and Psûkhe to kill her. The other skin-spies attack. One is seized by the throat and consumed from within by flue fire.

Cnaiür advances at a numb shamble. He feels that same dread on the day he approached Kellhus on his father’s barrow. Today is different. Kellhus had been where he departed. “This was his destination.” Moënghus, through his snakes, notices Cnaiür and calls him, “Nayu.” He sounds just like Kellhus. He says that Nayu has returned just as he knew. Moënghus beseeches Cnaiür and he feels a tug of joy and remorse.

Cnaiür stopped at the threshold, mere paces from the man who had butchered his heart. He glanced uneasily about the room, saw Serwë splayed motionless to his right, her long blonde hair swept across a bloodied floor, and captive skin-spies hanging abject within a curtain of pulley sand chains. The walls warred with inhuman images. He squinted at the light that hung impossibly beneath the graven vaults.

“Nayu… put down your sword. Please.”

Blinking, he saw the notched blade in the air before him, though he had no recollection of drawing it. The light rolled like liquid across it.

“I am Cnaiür urs Skiötha,” he said. “The most violent of men.”

Moënghus calls that a lie to hide his weakness. Cnaiür calls him the lie. Moënghus says he sees love in Cnaiür. He screams, “I hate!” Moënghus is full of pity and starts talking about how he showed Cnaiür he was different from the others. Cnaiür calls this deceit. Moënghus asks if they’re lies, why do they torment him. “It is truth that burns, Nayu—as you know… for you have burned in it for uncounted seasons.” Cnaiür feels the weight of the earth and knows he has strayed too far from his people. He drops the sword. He cries.

And Moënghus was holding him, enclosing him, healing his innumerable scars.

Nayu…”

He loved him… this man who had shown him, who had led onto the trackless steppe.

I am dying, Nayu.” Hot whispers in his ear. “I need your strength…”

Abandoned him. Forsook.

He had loved only him. In all the world…

Weeping faggot!

They kiss and Cnaiür feels shame. The snakes curl around his head as he finds this so different from kissing Serwë or Anissi. He can surrender here. He doesn’t have to be strong. He pulls his Chorae out of his breeches.

His eyes leaden with ardour, he murmured, “I wander trackless ground.”

Moënghus gasped, jerked, and spasmed as Cnaiür rolled the Chorae across his [Moënghus’s] cheek. White light flared from his gouged sockets. For an instant, Cnaiür thought, it seemed the God watched him through a man’s skull.

What do you see?

Moënghus spills dead on the ground as Cnaiür cries out in grief, asking how Moënghus could leave him again. He laughs, mad, realizing he has a final swazond to make. It was all too much. “He cackled with grief.” He loses track of time as he cries over Moënghus. Only the fading of the sorcerous light pulls him out. He looks over to Serwë, her face cracked for a moment before it’s smooth. “Seamless and perfect.”

Yes. Serwë… The first wife of his heart.

His proof and prize.

Absolute darkness engulfed him.

Proyas witnesses the destruction of the Scarlet Spires, the five surviving Cishaurim standing over the scorched landscape. Proyas was lucky to have survived without his Chorae. He’s confused, stunned as he witnesses the ruins of Shimeh. He stars up at the sky, the smoke choking out all but a glimmer of the sun. Then he notices something sparkle. The point became a geodesic dome. A burst of air drives back the smoke from the spell.

And Proyas saw a figure standing where the light had been, so distant he could scarce make out his features, save that his hair was gold and his gown billowed white.

Kellhus!

The Warrior-Prophet

Proyas blinked. Shivers splashed across his skin.

Kellhus begins chanting as marches at the Cishaurim. The five turn and face the Warrior-Prophet walking towards them on solid air. Debris begins to circle him, pulled up in various orbits. He uses the orbiting debris to deflect Chorae missiles shot up at him. When they hit, they disrupted the spell, sending the debris flying. At the same time, light flashes from Kellhus, attacking the bowmen.

The five Cishaurim advance on Kellhus. They send their water-like spells to crash against his spherical Wards. “Somehow, perfect lines flicked from the maelstrom, coiled into knifing geometries about the nearest of the Cishaurim.” He’s ripped to pieces. But the attacks from the others are weakening his wards. He has to strengthen them. Proyas fears he can’t win if he has to stay on the defensive.

Suddenly, the Cishaurim stop their attack. Kellhus has vanished. He reappears behind one Cishaurim and rams his sword through the Cishaurim’s back. Kellhus teleports as the three remaining Cishaurim are stunned. “Had they eyes, Proyas was certain they would have blinked.” Kellhus teleports behind another and beheads him. Kellhus catches a Chorae crossbow bolt and throws it at the fourth Cishaurim, turning him into a pillar of salt.

Proyas whooped. Never had he felt so renewed, so young!

And Anasûrimbor Kellhus was singing the Abstractions once again. White robes boiled in the clearing sun. Planes and parabolas crackled about him. The Very ground, to the pith of its ruin, hummed. The surviving Cishaurim floated in a broad and wary circle. He knew he had to keep moving, Proyas realized, to avoid the fate of his brothers. But it was already far too late…

There was no escaping the Warrior-Prophet’s holy light.

On the shores of the Meneanor, a peasant is picking along the beach as the sun sets. He finds a “dead sorcerer” lying on the beach next to a giant figure of salt. The battle is over. He’s chipping away at the salt figure, fearful he’ll get caught. He fills the purse with salt. When he finishes, a voice asks if he’d like to know a secret. He gasps to find the syntheses staring at him. Terrified, the boy nods.

The voice tells him to come closer.

My Thoughts

Looks like Eleäzaras was wrong about those Chorae being beneath the rubble as belonging to dead men. He’s walked right into a trap.

Things have shifted now. You can feel the tension in the conversation between Moënghus and Kellhus. He thinks Kellhus is mad. Is he? We know he saw visions during the Circumfix. He probably saw visions even earlier in book two. He had a ‘revelation” in an early probability trance. The balance of power is shifting in ways Moënghus didn’t expect. It’s interesting that he’s honest. Why would Moënghus refuse?

I have to stall for time and come up with Plan B.

Dûnyain are interesting. They do not lie to each other. They follow logic. They want facts. Truth. Then they will debate and one side will convince the other. Now Kellhus has to convince his father he’s not insane.

Moënghus made a big mistake. Nice of Bakker to have a type of metaphysics that wasn’t tied to intellect. And, interestingly, that’s the one that can’t be seen. It’s the one that matches creation far more closely than Gnosis, even then produced by the Quya.

Mallahet was mentioned as being one of the most influential Cishaurim back in book one. It was said then that the only reason he wasn’t the High Heresiarch was his foreign blood.

There are lots of theories about the skull Kellhus trips over. However, it’s just showing Kellhus is blind so he couldn’t see it, that Dûnyain does have weaknesses, and to break up the conversation with something interesting. I wouldn’t read anything into it.

Moënghus brings up an interesting point. Kellhus is painting the Consult as evil, a subjective description from the point of view of the Dûnyain. Kellhus doesn’t even engage this. Kellhus is preparing to go to war with the Consult.

The woman and the child… Shows you the Dûnyain priorities there. He needs to do something for the skin-spies. I imagine they require some level of violence innate in them. It’s also a preview to what we’ll find in Ishuäl in the next series.

Maithanet being half-Dûnyain explains a lot. We had the clues right from the beginning. He had blue eyes showing he was half-Ketyai and half-Norsirai. Further, he came out of nowhere from the south. The real question is, where did his mother go? Because Kellhus was having a hard time getting kids. He tried a lot of other women besides Esmenet. Smart women. Only she produced any viable offspring, and even most of hers had problems.

Achamian and Esmenet’s brief moment of happiness is ruined. Esmenet is his greatest motivation. It’s behind his actions in the next series. He wants to prove his theories right about Kellhus for her. To get her back. Now, he’s going to fight an army to protect her.

Conphas’s take is interesting about human nature. Bred to violence. It’s in us all. There is something in us that delights in destruction. In seeing something torn down. Not anything that we worked on. Destruction of objects acts as a proxy for darker emotions. Ones we know we can’t act on. Push us hard enough, some harder than others, and we all embrace violence.

Poor Conphas. He’s facing the Gnosis. One man ruins all the fun. And we get to see just why the Mandate are truly to be feared.

Bakker’s demons are truly alien and terrifying. Poor guardsman. Tension is mounting now.

Proyas is a real believer. Shimeh is his Jerusalem, and he’s helping to destroy it. His men are killing, raping, and stealing. He’s reeling, the poor guy. He’s feeling that wild exhilaration of risking his life conflicting with his faith. His illusions are being shattered. The horrors of war are filling him. They’re twisting him, turning him into something like the Inchoroi, losing his humanity, just caring about his own desires.

Remember what Proyas does in The Unholy Consult once his illusions of Kellhus are shattered even worse. We get a preview for the darkness of the human soul while seeing how it can be controlled now. He fights it here. This is what war and violence do to humans. It destroys us.

It will destroy Proyas eventually. Just not in Shimeh.

Kellhus just got confirmation that Esmenet can’t give him full Dûnyain children. This hurt Kellhus because he has that bit of love for her. As much as he can love.

As it has been apparent, Moënghus conditioned the path for Kellhus to walk on. It has been a massive program to see if Kellhus would solve the equation. It’s like a mathematician writing software to calculate something beyond his ability to solve and then letting it run. If he did it right, the solution would be derived.

The Dûnyain philosophy is a bleak one. There is a reason humans have a yearning for belief. Something about religion is important to our survival. Even those who think they’re not religious usually adopt a secular belief and put it in that same position. They can become just as zealous as any fanatic. The Dûnyain see these beliefs as the problem, but it’s really just humans twisting ideas for their own self-interest. That’s what has to be battled against. Not religion, but selfishness. The Dûnyain see the only way forward to unite everyone in the same selfish belief instead of freeing their minds. The Dûnyain want to be self-moving souls but care little for doing the same for others.

Interesting that Kellhus pulls back from his father’s gesture. It’s a clear rejection of Moënghus, almost revulsion. And yet, they’re Dûnyain. Moënghus couldn’t be reaching out like a father to find comfort in his son, and Kellhus shouldn’t be acting in revulsion, but we know Kellhus has emotions. Perhaps this was a test on Moënghus’s part, to see how he would act. To see how “mad” Kellhus is.

In the midst of her fear and seeing Achamian for who he truly is, Esmenet is finally honest with herself. Achamian loves her. Kellhus has some feelings for her. He loves her in the stunted way, but he can’t ever give her what Achamian can. What Kellhus can give her is other things and, being pregnant, she has to think of more than herself.

There is something ironic about Eleäzaras being saved by Men of the Tusk. He’s a sorcerer condemned by the Tusk to Hell, and yet he is being saved by them.

“So many wrongs suffered. So many deaths unavenged.” The cycle of violence. So hard to break.

Kellhus seems to think his survival at the Circumfix was a miracle. And definitely something weird happened. He plucked Serwë’s heart out of his own chest. A topoi had formed there. The outside bled in while he was on the Circumfix. He spoke with the No-God, or, I should say, interfaced with its connection. It’s an indication that Anasûrimbor blood can activate it. I think because they have nonman blood in their veins. The only time, it seems, that a nonman bred a human woman was the ancestor of the Anasûrimbor dynasty.

Kellhus believes he’s special. I think this is what lead him into venturing into the Outside between books. He had to find proof. Assurances of what he thinks. Bakker has an interesting world. He’s a materialist and yet created a world with the spiritual being a real thing. Is Kellhus actually special? Or is it all a delusion on his part? What if it’s a mix of all of it? He’s a fulcrum for the outside. For Ajokli and for the No-God.

Kellhus is an interesting character. A man raised to logic who know has embraced some modicum of faith. He’s seen beyond this world and seen the Outside touch it. Maybe the prophecy to the Shrial Knights was just good luck, but he had a “revelation” of the Circumfix. Bakker chose that word with care. Not a guess, not a probable outcome, but a revelation. He’s realizing it now, and he has to decide if he’s crazy or to trust that he’s not. He has to go against being Dûnyain, which is what keeps him from falling into the logical decision of siding with the Consult like the Mutilated do.

Force of personality is all that has held his army together. With him dead, they are lost. It’s not a good thing for an army. They should be able to survive the loss of any officer. It gave him this loyal force, but now it’s biting him in the ass as they think he’s dead.

I recently read a series with a character that is similar to Conphas. Someone who thought himself better. Someone who believed he was a God because of his abilities. He had the arrogance to think he could reshape the world in his own image, so certain in his vision of what right and wrong meant that he could impose it on the world. I won’t name the character so as not to spoil it, but in the end, when he realizes he lost, he starts to panic. He breaks down in disbelief and becomes a bitch.

Eleäzaras knows they can’t win, but he orders his survivors to fight. He can’t let this go. Not after all he’s done to his school. They have to win. He’s desperate for it.

No one can know what they worship because God stands outside our world. If there is something beyond the physical world, we can never reach it. We can never escape our universe. We’re limited. The more we learn, the more we realize we’ll never reach outside our universe.

He recognized Cnaiür by his HEARTBEAT! Jesus, that’s precise.

Kellhus pronouncement on his father is correct. We see that at the end of the Unholy Consult. I wondered all through the second series if Kellhus would still be Dûnyain. If he was leading the Great Ordeal to their destruction as a bargaining chip to assume command of the Consult and continue their work. Bakker was smart to deny us POV’s of Kellhus in the second series until near the end.

Such a strange heroes journey Kellhus has been upon. Now that we’ve seen the whole of the series and know his true intentions, this is a powerful moment in his story when he says he’s more than Dûnyain. It’s when he rejected his path and accepted the Call. Death and rebirth is also part of the Hero’s Journey. Will that play a role in the final series?

I suspect Achamian is shamed by Esmenet witnessing him killing. Seeing the true him, as she noted: the Mandate Schoolman not her husband.

So the Ciphrang tries to kill Achamian and inadvertently saves him from the Imperial Army’s Chorae bowmen. Iyokus accidentally saves Achamian’s life. I’ve never noticed that.

I think Proyas weeps because he is losing all his innocence. This was supposed to be a special place, and they are destroying it. Not the Fanim, but the Inrithi. To save it, they are defiling it. To protect it, they are breaking it. They came here thinking they were doing good, but only committed evil upon evil.

Kellhus realized that souls are things mapped on the outside. That they can be plotted. They can be a place. So he needs coordinates. He has previously speculated on using a second inutteral, something Achamian claimed impossible. Now he used it and took a two-dimensional spell and made it into three dimensions, inspired by the Cishaurim peering through the souls of their snakes.

Nice touch with the “rumbling climbing into the sky” as the demon carries off Achamian in the background of Conphas’s scene.

So long Conphas. Your men followed you so long as you were winning. Conphas had never run. When he faced the Warrior-Prophet after the Circumfix, he stayed proud, in charge. He was defiant and so they were, too. But today, he ran from Achamian. He broke and spent the last of their loyalty and faith in him.

Eleäzaras, obsessed with vengeance, is slain. His obsession with defeating his enemy has led his school to ruin. Arrogance let him think he was better than the Cishaurim. They’ve learned the hard way.

Oh, Saubon. That guilt got to you. Now you’re sweeping in to save the day. If Achamian hadn’t broken Conphas with his attack and delayed the Nansur advance, who knows how this battle would have resulted. Now the tied has turned.

I wondered why Kellhus didn’t just kill Moënghus but stab him. Cnaiür was here. Kellhus wounded Moënghus enough to give Cnaiür the ability to kill him. Kellhus upheld his bargain with Cnaiür in the end. He didn’t have to. Ensuring Moënghus died would be the more practical thing. The Dûnyain thing.

Kellhus is more than Dûnyain now.

What do you see?” This whispers in Cnaiür’s mind as he thinks he sees God through Moënghus’s dying eyes. The God is asking the question. The same question that the No-God sees. We go back to Kellhus’s theory that every soul is merely a point of the Oversoul, the unity trying to understand itself. The No-God is an artificial soul. It absorbs the pieces of the Oversoul, sucking them up and thus preventing the cycle of rebirth. Diminishing the Oversoul, the God, until it can’t keep the outside manifesting. So it can’t keep claiming the souls of the survivors. The No-God is it’s opposite, it’s inverse, and it asks the same questions. It wants to know the same thing.

What do you see? What am I?

Cnaiür admitted at long last he loved Moënghus. That was why his hate was so great. He loved this man and was abandoned by him. He found him, kissed him, and he knew that Moënghus would just abandon him again. Cnaiür knew that as he felt Moënghus manipulating him. “I need your strength.” That was the only reason Moënghus was so warm. He knew he would be abandoned again.

So he killed him to protect himself. Then he retreats back to his people. He’s come far, but he has Serwë again. It’s the surviving skin-spy brother, hence her face momentarily cracked as it changed appearances. By embracing Serwë, he’s rejecting the freedom of the Dûnyain and the trackless step. He’s choosing to return to the “absolute darkness.”

He’s embraced by the darkness that comes before. The lie is easier than the truth.

When we next see Cnaiür, he’s Scylvendi again.

So, the Psûkhe is different from other sorceries. It’s all about passion. There very best, the five Kellhus just annihilated, are probably on par with an average Mandate with the Gnosis through sheer passion and strength of will. It’s hard to say since we’ve never seen Cishaurim fight the Gnosis save this one instant, and, well, Kellhus.

If you didn’t know it, salt was a valuable commodity in ancient times. It was either found in natural salt flats or gathered along seashores and traded inland. To the boy, finding a demon turned into salt is like finding a huge stack of gold.

So, what is going on with this scene? Somehow, Achamian defeated the demon after it grasped him. A demon’s body seems to turn into salt when it is defeated. Then Achamian landed on the beach. He survives, but the boy thinks him dead.

What is the Synthese’s secret? I have no idea. What does this boy matter? Don’t know. Did the Synthese kill him, tell him some profound secret. Who knows. All we can say is the Synthese was over Achamian while he slept, probably with skin wards around him protecting him. The Synthese doesn’t have the strength to do any physical sorcerers, only glamours. It’s Bakker being cryptic.

Maybe Bakker had plans for this boy in the sequel series and it never manifested. Maybe it’s hinting that something was done to Achamian by the Synthese. After all, something changes with his dreams of Seswatha in the next series. I’ve always attributed it to being hypnotized by Kellhus in this book, but there is no conclusive proof.

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To save the world, Ary must die!

Ary, a young man scarred by his past, is thrust into the dangers of the military. But he carries a deadly secret: the dark goddess’s touch stains his soul.

Her taint threatens to destroy all he loves.

He must hide the truth from the other marines and the woman he loves. Can Ary survive the dangers of service and the zealous assassin plotting his death?

Are you ready for the action, danger, romance, and betrayal exploding across the skies Above the Storm!

Click here for Chapter Seventeen, the final part of The Prince of Nothing trilogy!