The Judging Eye (16 page)

Achamian blinked at the crack in
his voice, cleared his throat. Words could soar, dip, and dazzle, and sometimes
even cross paths with the sun. Blind and illuminate. But the voice was
different. It remained bound to the earth of expression. Not matter how it
danced, the graves always lay beneath its feet.

On the back of a heavy breath,
he said, "But there is a far greater question."

She hugged her knees before the
pop and swirl of the fire, blinking slowly, her expression more careful than
impassive. He knew how he must look, the challenge in his glare, the
defensiveness, the threat of punishing surrogates. He looked like a venomous
old man, balling up his reasons in uncertain fists—he knew as much.

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

"My stepfather," she
said. "Kellhus is the question."

***

He imagined he must be gaping at
her, gawking like a stump-headed fool.

He had spoken to her as if she
were a stranger, an innocent, when in point of fact she was joined to him at
the very root. Esmenet was her mother, which meant that Kellhus was her
stepfather. Even though he had known this, the significance of that knowing had
completely escaped him. Of course she knew of his hatred. Of course she knew
the particulars of his shame!

How could he be so oblivious?
The Dûnyain was her father! The
Dûnyain
.

Did this not instantly make her
an instrument of some kind? A witting or unwitting spy? Achamian had watched an
entire army—a
holy
war—succumb to his dread influence. Slaves, princes,
sorcerers, fanatics—it did not matter. Achamian himself had surrendered his
love—his wife! What chance could this mere girl have?

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

He gazed at her, tried to scowl
away the slack from his expression.

"He sent you, didn't
he?"

She looked genuinely confused,
dismayed even. "What? Kellhus?" She stared at him, her mouth open and
wordless. "If his people find me, they would drag me home in chains! Throw
me at the feet of my fucking mother—you
have
to believe that!"

"He
sent
you."

Something, some mad note in his
voice perhaps, rocked her backward. "I'm not ly-lying..." Tears
clotted her eyes. A strange half-crook bent her face to the side, as though
angling it away from unseen blows. "I'm not
lying
," she repeated
with a snarling intensity. A twitch marred her features. "No. Look.
Everything was going so well... Everything was going so well!"

"This is the way it
works," Achamian heard himself rasp in an utterly ruthless voice.
"This is the way he sends you. 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?"

"What? What do you
mean?"

"Did he ever tell you the
shape of your own heart? Did he ever speak salving words, healing words, words
that helped you see yourself more clearly than you had ever seen yourself
before?"

"Yes—I mean, no! And yes...
Please... Things were going so—!"

There was a grinding to his
aspect, an anger that had become reptilian with age. "Did you ever find
yourself in awe of him? Did something whisper to you, This man is more than a
man? And did you feel gratified, gratified beyond measure, at his merest
tenderness, at the bare fact of his attention?"

He was shaking as he spoke now,
shaking at the memories, shaking at the nakedness of twenty years stripped
away. It seemed to hang about the edges of his vision, the lies and the hopes
and the betrayals, the succession of glaring suns and uproarious battles.

"Akka..." she was
saying. So like her whore-mother. "What are you talki—?"

"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."

***

It was too late, he realized,
staring at the image of Mimara across the fire. It had already happened.
Despite all the intervening years, despite the waning violence of the Dreams,
she had returned him to the teeth of yesterday. To simply gaze upon her was to
taste the dust and blood and smoke of the First Holy War.

He understood her look—how could
he not when he so readily recognized it as his own? Too many losses. Too many
small hopes denied. Too many betrayals of sell. The look of someone who
understands that the World is a peevish judge, forgiving only to render its
punishments all the more severe. She had suffered a moment of weakness when she
had seen him clambering down the slopes with food; he could see that now. She
had let herself hope. Her soul had taken her body's gratitude and made it its
own.

He believed her. She was not a
willing slave. If anything she reminded him of the Scylvendi, of a soul at once
strong and yet battered beyond recognition. And she looked so much like her
mother...

She was precisely the kind of
slave Kellhus would send to him. Part cipher. Part opiate.

Someone Drusas Achamian could
come to love.

"Did you know I was there
when he first arrived in the Three Seas," he said, broaching the silence
of dark forests and rustling flames. "He was no more than a beggar
claiming princely blood—and with a Scylvendi as his companion no less! I was
there from the very first. It was
my back
he broke climbing to absolute
power."

He rubbed his nose, breathed
deep as though preparing for the plunge. It never ceased to strike him as
strange, the fits and starts of the body and its anxieties.

"Kellhus," he said,
speaking the name in the old way, with the intonations of familiarity and wry
trust. "My student... My friend... My prophet... It was my wife he
stole...

"My morning."

He glared, challenging her to
speak again. She simply blinked, wriggled as though to adjust her position. He
could see her swallow behind the line of her lips.

"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.

"Everyone knows the answer
to that question," she ventured, speaking with a delicacy that confirmed
his fears. "He's the Aspect-Emperor."

Of course she would say this.
Even if she hadn't been Kellhus's adoptive daughter, she would have said
precisely the same thing. They so wanted it to be simple, believers.
"It
is what is!"
they cried, sneering at the possibility of other eyes,
other truths, overlooking their own outrageous presumption.
"It says
what it says,"
spoken with a conviction that was itself insincerity.
They ridiculed questions, for fear it would make their ignorance plain. Then
they dared call themselves "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 hide 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.

"But everyone knows the
answer to that question," she said with same care as before, "Kellhus
is the Son of Heaven."
What else could he be?
her over-bright eyes
asked.

"Yet he is flesh and blood,
born of a father's seed and a mother's womb. He was reared. He was taught. He
was sent out into the world..." He raised his eyebrows as though speaking
something crucial but universally overlooked. "So tell me, where did all
this happen?
Where?
"

For the first time, it seemed,
he glimpsed real doubt gnawing her gaze. "They say he was a prince,"
she began, "that he comes from Atrith—"

"He does not come from
Atrithau," Achamian snapped. "I know this on a dead man's
authority."

The Scylvendi. Cnaiür urs
Skiötha. As always, the man's words came back to him:
"With every
heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They
walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we
whine and whimper when they raise their hand... They make us love!"

They. The Dûnyain. The Tribe of
the Aspect-Emperor.

"But what about his
bloodline?" Mimara asked. "Are you saying his name is false as
well?"

"No... He
is
an
Anasûrimbor, I grant you that—the coincidences would be stacked too high were
it otherwise. That is our only clue."

"How so?"

"Because it means the
question of his birthplace is the question of where the Line of Anasûrimbor
could have survived."

She seemed to consider this.
"But if not Atrithau, then where? The North is more than ruined, more than
wilderness—or so my tutors always say. How could anyone survive with...
them
?"

Them. The Sranc. Achamian
thought of the multitudes, clawing the earth in frustration, throwing up gouts
of dirt in the absence of warding limbs, stamping and howling, stamping and
howling across the endless tracts.

"Exactly," he said.
"If the Line were to survive, it had to be within a refuge of some kind.
Something secret, hidden. Something raised by the Kûniüric High Kings, ere the
First Apocalypse..."

"Then listen!"
the
Scylvendi cried.
"For thousands of years they have hidden in the
mountains, isolated from the world. For thousands of years they have bred,
allowing only the quickest of their children to live. They say you know the
passing of ages better than any, sorcerer, so think on it!
Thousands
of
years... Until we, the natural sons of true fathers, have become little more
than children to them."

"A sanctuary."

Achamian knew he was speaking
too desperately now, even though he measured his words the way hungry mothers
dolloped out butter. Such words could not come slow enough.
The
Aspect-Emperor a liar?
Her face was blank in the way of those grievously
offended, whose retort remained bottled by the fear of unstopping too many
passions. His soul's eye and ear cried out for her:
Jealous old fool! He
stole her,
Esmenet!
That is the sum of your pathetic case against him.
He stole the only woman you've loved! And now you lust only for his
destruction, to see him burn, though all the world is tinder...

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

My hands shake.

***

His voice grows more shrill. His
gesticulations become wilder. His discourse develops a pinned-in-place savagery
that makes him difficult to watch and impossible to contradict.

Her heart rejoices at first,
certain that he has relented. But the
tone
of his voice quickly tells
her otherwise. The excitement. The wry delivery of his observations, as though
to say,
How many times?
The way people speak is a bound thing, as far
from free as a slave or a horse. Place binds it. Occasion binds it. But other
people rule it most of all; the shadow of names lies hidden in every word
spoken. And the longer he talks, the more Mimara realizes that he is speaking
to someone other than her...

To Esmenet.

The irony stings for some
reason. She had taken him to be her father, and now he takes her to be her
mother.
He's mad... Mad the same as me.

The Wizard is not so much her
father, she realizes, as her
brother
. Another child of Esmenet, almost
as broken, and every bit as betrayed.

She has been wrong about him in
every way, not simply with regard to demeanour and appearance. Her mother
styled him a scholar and a mystic, someone who spent his exile lost in arcane
researches. Mimara has read enough about sorcery to know the importance of
meanings, that semantic purity is a Schoolman's perennial obsession. And yet
nothing could be further from the case. As he explains to her, he cares
nothing
for the Gnosis, not even as a tool. He has retired from the Three Seas for
heartbreak—this much is true. But the
reason
, the rule that makes his
life rational in his own eyes, is simple vengeance.