The Judging Eye (10 page)

The dead and their harvest.

She stood breathless,
motionless, her limbs glassed with horror. And she could only think,
Mimara...
Mimara...
A mumbling thought, nebulous with the confusion that hums through
all dreams.
Mimara...

Then she was blinking at the
grey of night's slow retreat. The tree was gone, as were the arms reaching from
earthen pits. But the terrible thought remained, no more clear for the fact of
waking.

Mimara.

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

***

The following afternoon sunlight
streamed through the fretted walls behind her, embossing the table and its
sheets of parchment with brilliant white squares. The secretaries, deputations
from a number of different offices, uniformly squinted as they approached with
the documents that required her seal. Brocaded tusks and circumfixes shimmered
from their sleeves. Grids of light rolled across their backs as they bent to
kiss the polished wood of the kneeling floor.

As bored as she was, Esmenet
listened attentively to their petitions, typically this or that minor
legislative declaration: a clarification of the Slaver Protocols, a revised
order of precedence for the Chamber of Excises, and on and on. 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 law. The inevitable maintenance required ever more language, all of
it underwritten by the authority of her voice.

As always, she relied heavily on
Ngarau, who had been Grand Seneschal since the days of the extinct Ikurei
Dynasty, to interpret the import of the requests. They had developed a
comfortable rapport over the years, eunuch and Empress. She would ask brief
questions, and he would respond either by answering to the best of his ability
or by interrogating the petitioning functionary in his turn. If the request was
granted—and the vetting process required to reach her penultimate level assured
that most of them were—he would dip his ladle in the bowl of molten lead that
continually warmed her left side and pour the flashing metal for her to stamp
with her Seal. If, as was sometimes the case, some kind of influence peddling
or bureaucratic infighting was suspected, the petitioners would be directed to
the Judges down the hall. The New Empire tolerated no corruption, no matter how
petty.

Mankind was at war.

Several emergency funding
requests from Shigek, "tokens of the Empress's generosity," proved
tricky to parse. For whatever reason, the rumours that Fanayal ab Kascamandri
and his renegade Coyauri prowled the deserts about the River Sempis refused to
die. Aside from this, the session had proved uneventful—thankfully. The chill
air carried the promise of renewal, and the repetitive nature of the suits made
her decisions seem trivial. Though she knew full well that lives turned on her
every breath, she welcomed the opportunity to pretend otherwise.

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

Sometimes the unmapped immensity
of it all would come crashing through the tedium. The mundane circuit would
peel open, the matter of course would evaporate into the hollow of a million mortal
obligations. Women. Children. Wilful men. A crazed anxiousness would seize her.
If she were walking, she would reel like a drunk, clutch at her vertigo with
outstretched hands. If she were talking, she would trail into silence, avert
her face and simply breathe, as though that were the endangered thread.
I am
Empress
, she would think,
Empress
, and the title would speak not to
the glory, but to the horror and the horror alone.

But typically the combination of
routine and abstractions kept her afloat. To condense all the administrative
details into the "Ministrate" or all the ecclesiastical confusion
into the "Thousand Temples" was a powerful and a comforting thing.
She would consult the appropriate officials and that was that.
Yes, I
understand. Do your best.
Sometimes it even felt
simple
, like a
library with all the books inventoried and titled—all she need do was make the
proper entries. Of course, some crisis would quickly remind her otherwise, that
she was simply confusing the handle for the pot, as the caste-menials would
say. The details would always come leaking through—in their multitudes.

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 from
the gutters of living truth, how could she not be a tyrant? Not 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.

Without warning, a small voice
piped through the officious murmur. "Thelli! Thelli! Theliopa found
another one!" Esmenet saw her youngest, Kelmomas, barrelling through the
secretaries, then around the grand table. He ran across his reflection to throw
his arms around her waist. She hugged him, laughing.

"Sweetling... What do you
mean?"

At times his beauty struck her
breathless, his features avid beneath a mop of lavish blond curls. But when he
surprised her like this, the bouncing perfection of him fairly hummed through
her, made her throat thicken for pride. With Kelmomas she could almost believe
the Gods had relented.

"A
skin-spy
, Momma.
Among the new slaves for the stables—Theliopa found another one!"

Esmenet involuntarily stiffened.
Captain Imhailas appeared on the heel of these words, fairly swinging through
the entrance to fall onto his knees. "Your Glory!"

"Leave us," Esmenet
commanded Ngarau. The old Imperial Seneschal clapped his hands in dismissal,
and a retreating commotion descended on the chambers.

"How is it my
son
bears
this news to me?" she asked, gesturing for the Exalt-Captain to take his
feet.

"I beg mercy, your
Glory." Imhailas was extraordinarily attractive in a way that only
Norsirai men could be. It seemed to render his embarrassment all the more
ludicrous. "I set out to inform you immediately! I have no idea
how—!"

"Can I
seeee
, Momma?
Please!"

"No, Kel. You certainly may
not!"

"But I
need
to see
these things, Momma. I need to know. Someday I'll need to know!"

Scowling, she looked from the
boy to the Captain, who stood armour agleam in the broken light. Through the
propped doors, she could see the last of the functionaries fleeing into the
palace's polished depths. One of the laggards stumbled on the hem of his robes,
and for an instant, she glimpsed the tar-black bottoms of his silk slippers.

She blinked, focused on the
Exalt-Captain. "What do you think?"

Imhailas hesitated for a moment,
then with an air of quotation said, "Calloused hands suffer no tender
eyes, your Glory."

Esmenet frowned at the hackneyed
quote.
Only an idiot
, she found herself thinking,
asks an idiot for
advice
. But her dismissal caught in her throat when she looked at Kelmomas.
Squares of light graphed his clothes and skin, bright and oblong where not undone
entirely by the compact curves of his body. For an instant, he seemed so very
soft
,
the world's most vulnerable thing, and her heart heaved with the dwarfing
confusion that mothers call love. Mere months had passed since his
Whelming—since the assassination attempt on the Scuari Campus. All she wanted
was to protect him. She would will herself into a cocoon if she could, an
impervious and eternal shield...

But she knew that she could not.
And she was wise enough not to confuse her want for her world.

"Please, Momma," he
said, his blue eyes glittering with teary eagerness. The sun seemed to shine
through his flaxen curls.
"Please."

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 world its
inroads.

***

With Kelmomas in tow—he had
become much more reluctant at the mention of his brother—Esmenet set off in
search of her other darling, Samarmas. The galleries at the summit of the
Andiamine Heights were not so very large, but they had the habit of becoming
labyrinthine whenever she needed to find someone or something. Of course she
could have dispatched slaves to search for him—even now her train of attendants
followed at a discrete distance—but she was wary of delegating too much in the
way of trivial tasks: It seemed madness enough to be dressed by strange hands
in the morning, let alone never having to hunt for her own children. 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 mementoes of a
more human past. Her only organs remaining, it sometimes seemed, were those
belonging to statecraft: a tongue attached to a devious soul.

She paused at the juncture of
every corridor, the instinctive way parents do not so much look for their
children as make themselves visible. Each time figures fell to their faces down
the length of the marble shafts, the slaves like hairless dogs, the
functionaries like piles of lavish fabric. Gilded corbels gleamed. Decorative
columns shone with lines curved to the positioning of lanterns or ceiling
apertures.

Not much had changed since the
days when the Ikurei Dynasty had presided over the Andiamine Heights.
Certainly, the palace had grown in measure with the Empire—or her hips, as it
sometimes seemed. Momemn had been one of the few Three Seas cities with wisdom
enough to throw itself upon the mercy of her husband. There had been no smoke
on the wind, no blood on the flagstones, when she had first walked these halls.
And what a wonder it had seemed then, that people could encase themselves in
such glorious luxury. Marbles looted from Shigeki ruins. Gold beaten into foils,
cast into figures both human and divine. The famed frescoes, such as the
Blue
Hubris
by the suicide, Anchilas, or the anonymous
Chorus of the Seas
in
the Mirullian Foyer. The white-jade censers. The Zeümi tapestries. The carpets
so long, so ornate, that lifetimes had been spent weaving them...

All it had lacked was power.

A kind of mute inattention
dogged her as she walked. She found herself turning down the hall almost
without realizing, though she had been able to hear the screams for some time.
His
screams, Inrilatas. One of her middle children, youngest save for the twins.

She paused before the great
bronze door to his room, stared with distaste at the Kyranean Lions stamped
into its panels. Even though she passed it several times every day, it always
seemed larger than she remembered. She ran her fingertips along the greening
rims. She could feel nothing of his cries in the cool metal. No warmth. No hum.
The frantic sound seemed to rise more from the cold floor at her feet.

Kelmomas leaned against her
thigh, mooning for her attention. "Uncle Maithanet thinks you should have
him sent away," he said.

"Your uncle said
that?" An itch always accompanied references to Maithanet, a premonition
too indistinct to be called a worry. Because he was so much like Kellhus, she
supposed.

"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.

"You've heard... them...
talking?"

"Is that what happened to
Inrilatas?"

"It's the God, Kel. The God
burns strongly in all of you. With Inrilatas he burns strongest of all."

"Is that why he's
mad?"

"Yes."

"Is that why you keep him
here?"

"He is my child, Kel, as
much as you. I will never abandon my children."

"Like Mimara?"

An unearthly sound burrowed from
the polished stone, a shriek meant to pass sharp, cutting things. Esmenet
flinched, certain he was there, Inrilatas, just on the other side of the door,
his lips mashed against the portal's marmoreal frame. She thought she could
hear teeth gnawing at the stone. She looked from the door to the slender cherub
that was her other son. Kelmomas. Godlike Kelmomas. Healthy, loving, devoted to
the point of comedy...