The Judging Eye (14 page)

She heard rather than saw the release
of the curtains that concealed the scaffold behind her. Shouts like a
thunderclap. The mobs surged, not so much forward as
outward
. Hands were
raised in air-pummelling exultation. Lips curled. Teeth flashed with sunlit
spittle.

Somehow, through the roar, she
could hear Samarmas bawling to her right. When she looked, she saw him
huddling, shoulders in and chin down, as though trying to squeeze through some
hidden passage within himself. A kind of maternal hatred clamped her jaw tight,
a wild urge to order the Guardsmen into the masses, to cut and beat them from
her sight. How dare they frighten her child!

But to be a 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 distress. Even Samarmas—who she was certain would become
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 continued howling, not
at her or her sons, but at the sight of the Consult skin-spy, which she knew
would be strung like a spitted pig through the centre of the scaffold above and
behind her. According to tradition, her eyes were too holy for such a horrific
sight, so a lottery was held among the caste-nobility to see who would be
granted the honour of bringing her the hand mirror she would use to actually
witness the creature's purification. With some surprise she saw Lord Sankas
approach, his elbows pressed together before his cuirass, so that the mirror
could lay flat across his inner forearms.

Samarmas flew from his seat and
hugged him about the waist. For a moment the old caste-noble teetered. Gales of
laughter passed through the crowds. Esmenet hastened to detach him, wiped his
cheeks and kissed his forehead, then directed him back to his little throne.

Grinning in embarrassment, Biaxi
Sankas knelt so that he might offer up the mirror. Nodding to show Imperial
favour, she took it from his arms, raised it so that she saw flashing sky, then
her own face. Her beauty surprised her—large dark eyes on an oval face. She
could not remember when it happened, when she starting feeling older and uglier
than she in fact was. She had always been popular as a whore, even in a city
renowned for its white-skinned tastes. She had always been beautiful—and in
that down-to-the-bones way that somehow followed certain women even into their
decrepitude.

She had never been a match for
her face.

A pang made her avert the
mirror, and she glimpsed the uppermost timbers of the scaffold hanging in a
pool of bald sky. Tilting the handle, she followed beams to where the chains
were anchored, then followed the chains until the skin-spy occupied the
mirror's centre. With pinched breaths, she gazed at what she had already seen
in the multitude of faces before her: coin for the toll their Aspect-Emperor
had exacted from them.

The thing bucked and thrashed,
bouncing like a stone tied to a bowstring. Perched on separate boarded
platforms, two of Phinersa's understudies ministered to the thing, the one
already making the incisions required to peel back the skin, the other flicking
the Neuropuncture needles that controlled the abomination's reaction—the thing
would simply cackle and climax otherwise. Like a chorus of burning bulls it
screamed, its spine arched, the radial limbs of its face yanked back like the
petals of a dying flower.

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.

The brand was drawn from an
iron-bowl of coals that had been raised into the scaffold. The thing's eyes
were put out.

With a kind of rapt horror she
found herself wondering at her circumstances. What kind of whore was Fate, to
throw her into this place, this time, to make her the vessel of cruel godlings
and the bar of world-breaking events? She believed in her husband. She believed
in the Great Ordeal. She believed in the Second Apocalypse. She believed in all
of it.

She just couldn't believe that
any of it happened.

She whispered to herself in that
paradoxical voice we all bear within us, the one that speaks the most wretched
truths and the most beguiling lies, the one that is most us, and so not quite
us at all. She whispered,
"This is a dream."

Sarmarmas wept and Kelmomas, who
otherwise seemed so strong for a child his age, trembled like an old man's
dying words. At last she relented. Setting down the mirror, she reached over
the arms of her throne to squeeze both their hands. The feel of small fingers
closing tight about her own brought tears to her eyes. It was a sensation so
primeval, so
right
, that it almost always daubed the turmoil from her
soul.

But this time it felt more like
an... admission.

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.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hûnoreal

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

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

There is no other place. It is
as simple as that.

She cannot go back, not to the
brothel that is her mother's palace, nor to the brothel that is a brothel. She
was sold so very long ago, and nothing—no one—can buy her back.

She pilfers wood from the shed—little
more than a wall cobbled from the debris fallen from the upper tower—and
watches his slave curse and scratch his woolly head, then strike out to replace
it. She makes fires, even though she has nothing to cook or to burn, and she
sits before them, poking them like an anthill or staring at them, as though it
were a little baby kicking and clawing at an impossible sky. She lets her mule,
whom she calls Foolhardy, wander free, thinking or maybe even hoping that it
would run away. Each night, she hugs herself in shame and guilt, certain that
Foolhardy will be taken down by the wolves or at least spooked into running by
their endless howls. But each morning, the brute is still there, standing close
enough to be hit by a stone, flicking its ears at flies, staring off in any
direction but hers.

She cries.

She continues to watch her fire,
gazes at it with a new mother's fascination, gazes at it until her eyes are
pinched dry. There is something
proper
about flames, she thinks. They
possess a singularity of purpose that can only be called divine...

Flare. Wax. Consume.

Like a human. Only with grace.

One of the children, the
youngest of the girls, creeps down to her to explain they have been forbidden
to speak or play with her because she is a witch. Was it true she's a witch?

As a joke Mimara grimaces and
croaks,
"Yeeaasss!"

After the little girl flees, she
sees them from time to time, hiding behind a fence of weeds or the ridged edge
of some immense tree trunk, crawling and peering and running with faux-screams
whenever they realize that she sees them watching.

She can see the Wards set about
the tower, though she can only guess at their purposes. And she notes the
scattered signs of more violent, more ephemeral sorceries—a gash in a monstrous
elm, scorching across plates of stone, earth cooked to glass—proof that the
Wizard has resorted to his prodigious skills. Always and everywhere she sees
the ontic
plenitude
of things—the treeness of trees, the essence of
water and stone and mountains—mostly pristine, but sometimes wrecked thanks to
Schoolmen and their savage croon. 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. Masters 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.

It's a kind of madness, she
knows. She has seen too many succumb in the brothels to think she is immune.
Their handlers were loath to mark the skin, so they punished the soul. She was
no exception.

It
has
to be madness.
Even still, she cannot but wonder how Achamian will appear in the light of this
more discerning eye.

The morning sun rears from the
bulk of the hill and lances across the trees with their limbs like frozen
ropes, spilling pools of bright through the thatched gloom. And she watches and
watches, until the colours pale into coral evening.

And she thinks the tower was not
so tall. It only seems such because it occupies higher ground.

***

The world hates you...

The thought comes upon her, not
with stealth or clamour, but with the presumption of a slave owner, of one who
sees no boundaries save their own.

The suffering follows quick upon
the heels of her vigil—she had exhausted the last of her provisions before reaching
the tower—and something within her rejoices. The world
does
hate her—she
does not need a small brother's tearful confession to know that.
"It
hurts Momma to even look at you! She wishes she would have drowned you instead
of sold you..."
Here she sits, starving and shivering, staring and
croaking at the inscrutable window beneath the tower's demolished crown. This
one thing she wants—to become a witch, to exact what she has paid...

So of course she must be 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 weeps twice, though she
feels nothing of the sorrow that moves her: once glimpsing one of the little
girls crouched peeing beneath sun-shot bowers, and again seeing the Wizard's
silhouette pacing back and forth across his open window—back and forth. She
literally cannot remember the last time she has been at one with her weeping.
In her childhood, she supposes. Before the slavers.

At the very end of the heart's
exhaustion lies a kind of resignation, a point where resolve and surrender
become indistinguishable. Wavering requires alternatives, and she has none. The
world is in rout. To leave would be to embark on a flight without refuge, to lead
an itinerant existence, aimless, with nothing to credit one far-flung road over
another, since despair has become all directions. She has no choice because all
her choices have become the same.

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

Two days become 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.

***

And then one night he simply
comes out. He looks haggard, not just like an old man who never sleeps, but one
who never forgives—himself or others, it does not matter. He bears rank wine
and steaming food, which she falls upon like a thankless animal. Then he sits
opposite her fire and begins talking. "The
Dreams
," he says
with the intensity of someone who has waged long war against certain words.

She stares at him, unable to
stop fingering food into her mouth, which she swallows against the sob in the
back of her throat. The firelight seems to have grown shining porcupine quills.
For a moment, she fears she might swoon for relief.

He speaks of the Dreams of the
First Apocalypse, the nightmares that all Mandate Schoolmen share thanks to the
derelict memories of their ancient founder, Seswatha, and the long dark horror
of his war against the Consult. "Over and over," he mutters, "as
if a life can be writ like a poem, torments fashioned into verses..."