History. History had come in the form of inhuman legions, creatures as bound to their crazed passions as the Brethren were free. History had come as death and destruction.
Ishu?l had fallen long before her walls had been pulled down, the Survivor knew. The D?nyain had been destroyed long before they had sheltered in the deepest deeps of the Thousand Thousand Halls. The World had learned of them, somehow, and had counted them a mortal threat.
The time had come to discover why.
“Then what?”
“We must accompany them. We must leave Ishu?l.”
The boy lacked all but the most rudimentary instruction, such had been their straits over the years. He could track the passions of the woman and the old man easily enough, but the thoughts and significances utterly eluded him. He could scarcely attain the Divestiture, the first stage of the Probability Trance. He was D?nyain by virtue of his blood, not his training.
It would have to be enough.
“Why?” the child asked.
“We must seek my Father.”
“But why?”
The Survivor resumed his implacable scrutiny of the old man and his pregnant woman.
“The Absolute has fled this place.”
The Thousand Thousand Halls plumbed the earth to the bowel, rising high into the encircling mountains, innumerable miles of passage hewn from the living rock. For two thousand years the D?nyain had toiled, reaching forever deeper, etching mathematical conundrums into the earth’s very fundament. They used the labour to condition the body, to teach the soul how to ponder independent of menial tasks. They used the labyrinth to sort those who would live from those who would die, and those who would work from those who would train and father. It refashioned the strong, and it buried the weak. The Thousand Thousand Halls had been their first and most cruel judge, the great sieve through which the generations spilled, collected and discarded.
How could they know it would be their salvation?
The Shriekers had come without the least warning. There had been anomalies the previous years, members of the Brethren sent out never to be seen, others found dead in their cells—suicides. An absence had moved among them, the shadow of contaminants not quite disposed. Their isolation had been compromised—they knew this much and nothing more. They did not trouble themselves with the implications, understanding the dead had taken their lives for purity’s sake. To interrogate the circumstances of their deaths would simply undo their sacrifice—and perhaps necessitate another. To embrace ignorance, even one so hallow as their own, was to embrace risk. A garden was not a garden absent the possibility of things going to seed.
The Shriekers descended upon Ishu?l in violence and fury. The valley was evacuated, the gates barred, and for the first time confusion and discord ruled the D?nyain. To dwell as they dwelt in a world groomed to its barest essentials, where the course of leaves could provoke scandal, had weakened them in ways they could never imagine. They could feel it, watching the savage cohorts stream down the mountains, their vulnerability to things wild and disordered. To live lives within the circuit of expectation, without any real comprehension of surprise, the way it breaches, throws the soul back in wincing disarray. They realized they had become something delicate in their millennial pursuit of the Unconditioned.
Some, a few, simply walked into the swords of their enemy, such was their soul’s disorder. But the others rallied—discovered that the assaulting world was, in its way, more delicate still.
The sun bright. The air gusting between the gaping heights. The battlements choked with motion and fury. The catwalks slicked in blood. The slopes matted with the miscreant fallen …
The Survivor had stepped between arrows and javelins, running down the miraculous course between flying points and edges, and he had struck the life out of hundreds. Tendons severed. Throats cut. Limbs lopped. Horns cawed low and sonorous over the screaming yammer, while he and his brothers battled in exquisite silence, striking and leaping and dipping across the heights, almost tireless, almost invulnerable, almost …
Almost.
The World was wild with Cause, true, but it could be overcome. How could so few exact such a toll otherwise? The ferocity of the inexplicable attack waned, then faded. The Shriekers relented, slunk howling back into the forests. And despite everything, the Survivor had thought the D?nyain confirmed: in their discipline, in their training and their doctrine—even in their fanatical solitude …
Then the Singers had come, shouting in voices of light and fire, and the extent of their delusion had been made clear.
That which comes before determines that which comes after … This had been the sacred rule of rules, the all-embracing dictum, the foundation upon which the whole of their society—their flesh as much as their doctrine—had been raised.