The Judging Eye (26 page)

Achamian thought of the
innkeep's warning.
"Stand aside for the Skin Eaters,"
he had
said.

They strike you down but good.

***

"I have built a
place," the High-King said.

It was strange, the way Achamian
knew he dreamed, and the way he knew it not at all, so that he lived this
moment as a true now, as something unthought, unguessed, unbreathed, as
Seswatha
,
speaking with another man's selfsame spontaneity, every heartbeat counting out
a unique existence, veined and clothed and clotted with urgent and indolent
passion. It was strange, the way he paused at the forks of the moment and made
ancient
decisions...

How could it be? How could he
feel all the ferment of a free soul? How could he live a life
for the first
time
over and over?

Seswatha leaned over a small
table set between glowering tripods. Snake-entwined wolves danced in a bronze
rim around the lip of each, so that the light cast by their flames was fretted
by struggling shadows. It made staring at the
benjuka
plate and its occult
patterns of stone pieces difficult. Achamian suspected his old friend had done
this deliberately. Benjuka, after all, with its infinite relationships and
rule-changing rules, was a game of prolonged concentration.

And no man loathed losing more
than Anasûrimbor Celmomas.

"A place," Achamian
repeated.

"A refuge."

Seswatha frowned, bent his gaze
up from the plate.

"What do you mean?"

"In case the war... goes
wrong."

This was uncharacteristic. Not
the worry, for indecision riddled Celmomas to the core, but the worry's
expression. Back then, no one save the Nonmen of Ishterebinth understood the
stakes of the war that embroiled them. Back then, "apocalypse" was a
word with a different meaning.

Achamian nodded in Seswatha's
slow and deliberate way. "You mean the No-God," he said with a small
laugh—a laugh! Even for Seswatha, that name had been naught but a misgiving,
more abstraction than catastrophe.

How did one
relive
such
ancient ignorance?

Celmomas's long and leonine face
lay blank, indifferent to the geography of pieces arranged between them. The
totem braided into his beard—a palm-sized countenance of a wolf cast in
gold—seemed to pant and loll in the uncertain light.

"What if this... this
thing
...
is as mighty as the Quya say? What if we are too late?"

"We are not too late."

Silence fell upon them as in a
tomb. There was something subterranean about all the ancillary chambers of the
Annexes, but none more so, it seemed, than the Royal Suites. No matter how thick
the decorative plaster, no matter how bright the paint or gorgeous the
tapestries, the lintelled ceilings hung just as low, humming with the weight of
oppressive stone.

"You, Seswatha," the
High-King said, returning his gaze to the plate. "You are the only one.
The only one I
trust
."

Achamian thought of his Queen,
her buttocks against his hips, her calves hooked hot and hungry about his
waist.

The High-King moved a stone, a
move that Seswatha had not foreseen, and the rules changed in the most
disastrous way possible. What had been opportunity found itself twisted inside
out, stamped into something as closed and as occluded as the future.

Achamian was almost relieved...

"I have built a place... a
refuge..." Anasûrimbor Celmomas said. "A place where my line can
outlive me."

Ishuäl...

Sucking musty air, Achamian shot
upright in bed. He grabbed his white maul, pressed his head to his knees. The Long-Braid
Falls thundered beyond the timbered walls, a white background roar that seemed
to give the blackness mass and momentum. "Ishuäl," he murmured.
"A place..." He looked up to the heavens, as though peering through
the obscurity of his room's low ceiling. "But where is it?"

Whining ears, sorting through
the fibres of sound: laughter from the floor, breaking like a bubble in boiling
pitch; shouts calling out the streets, daring and proclaiming.

"Where?"

The truth of men lay in their
origins. He knew this as only a Mandate Schoolman could. Anasûrimbor Kellhus
had not come to the Three Seas by accident. He had not found his half-brother
waiting for him as Shriah of the Thousand Temples by accident. He had not
conquered the known world by accident!

Achamian swung his feet from his
blankets, sat on the edge of his straw-mattressed bed. The words from some
ribald song floated up through the joists in the floor.

Her skin was rough as brick,

Her legs were made of rope.

Her gut was plenty thick,

And her teeth were soft as
soap.

But her peach was cast in
gold.

Aye! No! Aye!

T'were her peach that had me
sold!

Waves of gagging laughter. A
muffled voice raised to the Coffers. A ragged, ululating cheer, soaking through
wood.

The Skin Eaters, singing before
they shed blood.

For the longest time, Achamian
sat motionless save for the slow saw of his breathing. It seemed he could see
the spaces beneath, that he hung upon glass over close limb-jostled air. The
Captain was absent, of course, as remote as his godlike authority required. But
he could see Sarl, his ink-line eyes, age-scorched skin, and gum-glistening
smile, see him using his rank to enforce the pretence that he was one of them.
That was his problem, Sarl, his refusal to acknowledge his old man crooks, the
flabby reservoirs of regret and bitterness that chambered every elderly heart.

And then there were the men, the
Skin Eaters proper as opposed to their mad handlers, spared the convolutions of
long life, lost in the thoughtless fellowship of lust and brute desire that
made the young young, flaunting the willingness to fuck or to kill under the
guise of whim, when in truth it all came down to the paring eyes of the others.
Recognition.

He could see all of it through
night and floors.

And the Wizard realized, with
the curious fate-affirming euphoria of those who discover themselves guiltless.
He would burn a hundred. He would burn a thousand.

However many fools it took to
find Ishuäl.

***

The company stomped to the foot
of the escarpments, in the chill of the following morning, a long bleary-eyed
train bent beneath packs and leading mules, and began climbing out of the
squalid precincts of Marrow. The switchback trail was nothing short of
treacherous, smeared as it was in donkey shit. But it seemed appropriate,
somehow, that spit and toil were required to leave the wretched town. It made
palpable the limits they were scaling, the fact that they had turned their
backs on the New Empire's outermost station, the very fringe of civilization,
both wicked and illumined.

To leave Marrow was to pass out
of history, out of memory... to enter a world as disordered as Incariol's soul.
Yes, Achamian thought, willing his old and bandy limbs step by puffing step. It
was proper that he should climb.

All passages into dread should
exact some chastising toll.

***

Mimara has learned much about
the nature of patience and watching.

And even more about the nature
of Men.

She realizes quite quickly that
Marrow is no place for the likes of her. She understands her fine-boned beauty,
knows in intimate detail the way it hooks, burrlike, the woollen gaze of men.
She would, she knows, be endlessly accosted, until some clever pimp realized
she had no protection. She would be drugged, or set upon by numbers greater
than she could handle. She would be raped and beaten. Someone would comment on
her uncanny resemblance to the Holy Empress on an uncut silver kellic, and she
would be trussed in cheap-dyed linens, foil, and candy jewels. For miles
around, every scalper with a copper would walk away with some piece of her.

She knows this would happen...
In her marrow, you might say.

Her slavery moves through her,
not so much a crowd of flinching years as an overlapping of inner shadows. It
is always there—always
here
. The whips and fists and violation, a
clamour shot through with memories of love for her sisters, some weaker, some
stronger, pity for the torment in the eyes of some, those who would weep,
"Just
a child..."
They used her, all of them used her, but somehow the
bottom of the jar never dried. Somehow a last sip remained, enough to moisten
her lips, to dry her eyes.

This was how her mother's agents
found her years ago, dressed like their Holy Empress, emptied save for a single
sip. Apparently thousands had died, such was Anasûrimbor Esmenet's outrage. A
whole swath of the Worm in Carythusal had been razed, the male population
indiscriminately slaughtered.

But it was never clear just whom
Mother was avenging.

Mimara knows what will happen.
So rather than follow Achamian into the town, she circles around and climbs the
escarpments instead. This time, she really does leave her mule, Foolhardy, to
the wolves. She takes up a position well away from the eastward tracks—not a
day passes, it seems, without some company trudging in from the horizon—and she
watches the town the way an idle boy might study a termite-infested stump. It
looks like a toy woven of rotted grass. The trees and bracken opening about a
great lesion of open mud. The rows of swollen-wood structures ribbing the
interior. The great white veils floating like some ghostly afterimage from the
falls, encompassing the strings of fuzzing smoke...

From high above she watches the
town and waits. Sometimes, when the wind blows just so, she can even smell the
place's fetid halo. She watches the coming and going, the ebb and flow of
miniature men and their miniature affairs, and she understands that the
infinite variety of Men and their transactions is simply a trick of an
earthbound vantage, that from afar, they simply
are
the mites they
appear to be, doing the same things over and over. Same pains, same grievances,
same joys, made novel by crippled memory and stunted perspective.

Finitude and forgetfulness,
these are what grace Men with the illusion of the new. It seems something she
has always known, but could never see; a truth obscured by the succession of
close leaning faces.

She dares no fire. She hugs
herself warm. From lips of high-hanging stone, she watches and waits for
him
.
She has no other place to go. She is, she decides, every bit as rootless as he.
Every bit as mad.

Every bit as driven.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sakarpus

...conquered peoples live and
die with the

knowledge that survival does
not suffer honour.

They have chosen shame over
the pyre,

the slow flame for the quick.

—
Triamis I,
Journals and Dialogues

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

It was a thing of wonder.

While the citadels and strong
places of Sakarpus still smoked, innumerable storks began clotting the southern
horizon, not the field-sized flocks that the Men of the Ordeal were accustomed
to, but high-flying mountains of them, darkening the sky, settling like salt in
water across the surrounding hills. Even for men familiar with momentous
sights, it was remarkable to behold: the whooshing descent, the starved
elegance, the twitch and turn of avian scrutiny, multiplied over and over
across every sky. Since storks meant many different things to the many
different nations of the Great Ordeal, few could agree what the bird's arrival
augured. The Aspect-Emperor said nothing, save issuing an edict to protect the
birds from becoming either food or ornament. Apparently the Sakarpi held them
holy: The men guarded them against foxes and wolves, while the womenfolk
gathered their guano for a concoction called char soot, a long-burning fuel
they used in lieu of wood.

The Judges were kept busy.
Several hangings were required, and one Ainoni sergeant, who had been killing
birds to make and sell pillows, was even publicly flayed. But eventually the
Men of the Ordeal became accustomed to the squawking, white-backed hills, and
ceased heckling the conquered men and women who tended to them. In the parlance
of the camp, "eating stork" became synonymous with any reckless and
self-indulgent act. Soon it seemed obvious—even to those, like the Kianene, who
thought storks were vermin—that these birds with their thin-necked conceit were
in fact holy, and that the hills were a kind of natural temple.

Meanwhile, preparations for the
ensuing march continued. In the Council of Names, the kings and generals of the
Great Ordeal debated points of supply and strategy beneath the all-seeing eyes
of their Aspect-Emperor. Even though flushed with pious excitement—a great
number of them had spent years waiting for this very day—they harboured few
illusions about the trials and perils that awaited them. Sakarpus stood at the
very edge of the mannish world, the point where, as King Saubon of Enathpaneah
would say, "Men are more lamb than lion." Sranc ruled the land beyond
the northern horizon, scratching a vicious existence from the ruined cities of
the long-dead High Norsirai. And that land, the Lords of the Ordeal knew,
stretched for more than two thousand miles. Not since the wars of Far Antiquity
had so many attempted such an arduous journey. "Between this march and the
Consult," their Aspect-Emperor told them, "the march will prove far
deadlier."