The Judging Eye (32 page)

The Sranc, he was saying. The
Sranc were the only rule.

Achamian studied their faces
across the firelight. "No liabilities, is that it? Nothing that could
afford your opponent any advantage." He raised a finger to scratch the
side of his nose. "That sounds like something our glorious Aspect-Emperor
would say."

Aside from the vague intuition
that discussing the Aspect-Emperor was generally unwise, the old Wizard really
didn't know what to expect.

"I would help," Soma
blurted. "If
Galian
was dying, that is. I really would..."

The eating paused. The ring of
faces turned to the young Nilnameshi, some screwed in mock outrage, others
sporting skeptical grins.

With a guileless smile, Soma
said, "His boots fit as fine as my own!"

There was a moment of silence.
Soma's jokes, Achamian had learned, generally occasioned a kind of communal
trial and conviction, especially when he was
trying
to be funny. Heads
were shaken. Eyes were rolled to heaven. Oxwora, the enormous Thunyeri with
shrunken Sranc heads tangled in his shaggy mane, looked up from the glistening
rib he had been gnawing, scowling as though his appetite had been ruined.
Without a word he tossed the bone at the Nilnameshi. Either by fluke or by dint
of grease, the thing slid rather than bounced from his head.

"Ox!" Somandutta cried
with real anger, but in the harmless way of the long heckled. The giant
grinned, his beard and moustache spackled with flecks of meat.

Suddenly the others were
reaching to their feet, and a haphazard wave of bones peppered the hapless
Nilnameshi, who held his arms out, cursing. He made as though to throw several
back at this or that figure, but ended up joining the general laughter instead.

"Loot thy brother,"
the Zeümi said to Achamian in a
there-you-have-it
tone. The Sword-Dancer
slapped his back. "Welcome to the slog, Wizard!"

Achamian laughed and nodded,
glanced out beyond the circle of illumined faces to the night-hooded world. It
was no simple or mean thing, the companionship of killers.

***

Two days following his
introduction to the Bitten, Achamian glimpsed Xonghis jogging along the outside
of the trudging line from the rear. The others paid him no attention: He
continually roamed while the others marched. Out of boredom more than anything,
Achamian asked the man what was wrong, expecting something wry and cutting in
reply. Instead, the Jekki slowed his pace to stride beside him. His short-sleeved
tunic revealed a grappler's veined arms, brown beneath the reddish hint of
sunburn. He was a lean, broad-shouldered man, with the aura of coiled reserve
that seemed proper to a former Imperial Tracker.

"We're being
followed," he said in his odd accent.

"Followed?"

"Yes..." He seemed to
weigh his own cryptic options. "By a woman."

Achamian nearly coughed, such
was his alarm. "Who else knows?"

The Tracker's almond-shaped eyes
narrowed. His Xiuhianni blood was always more pronounced in open daylight.
"Moraubon and several of the Herd."

"Moraubon?"

Suddenly Achamian was huffing
and gasping, running back along the tangled verge of the trail. The parade of
walking scalpers watched him pass with frowning curiosity. Then he was all
alone on the trail, running down a boulder-stumped incline, away from the river
and into the mute confines of the forest. Several moments passed before he
heard the first hoot, a raw laughing call, filled with malice and the
open-mouthed eagerness of men bent on rutting. He heard Moraubon shouting a few
moments afterwards: instructions to the others racing across the forest floor.
He heard a feminine shriek—no, not a shriek, a shrill cry of defiance and
frustration.

The sorcerous words were already
rumbling from his lips, through the essence of the encircling world, and he was
climbing, not air, but the echoes of ground across the sky, up into the
interweaving limbs. Branches lashed him as he broke through the canopy, then
walked over the forest crown, each step swallowing a dozen cubits, tipping for
the vertigo of looking down through the towering trees. He could see the pitch
of the surrounding wilderness to the horizon, ridges like wandering fins,
tributaries threading dark clefts with silver, mountains looming in white
judgment. He saw men running, Skin Eaters, like the shadows of mice beneath
meadow thatch. Then he saw her—Mimara—kicking and thrashing in the clutches of
three men.

He stepped into their midst.

They had her pulled like living
rope across the forest floor. Moraubon was kneeling between her legs, undoing
his girdle and breeches. He seemed to be cooing and growling. He whirled to the
sound of Achamian's sorcerous muttering...

Only to be blown tumbling,
kicking up tailings of leaves. An Odaini Concussion Cant.

The other Skin Eaters cried out,
scrambled back while tugging at their weapons. Through his rage, Achamian could
feel something exult at this first violent exercise.
Let them see!
an
inner voice cried.
Let them know!
His voice cracked out, soaked into the
surrounding matter and steamed skyward, sourceless, all-encompassing. The Skin
Eaters, including Moraubon, retreated in the safety of the great trunks.

The Compass of Noshainrau, an
existential glitter, a line of sun-concentrated white, sweeping out like a
flail from the axis of his upraised arm, sketching a perfect circle of
destruction. Wood charred and exploded. Flame spilled like water across the
ancient oaks, elms, and maples. Mountainous groans and creaks—a chorus—then the
roar of mighty trees falling, a ring of them crashing into their stone-heavy
cousins, chasing the Skin Eaters into the deeper shadows of the forest.

Achamian stood over her, bright
in the sudden sunlight, showered by the twirling green of innumerable
spring-early leaves. A Wizard draped in wolf skins. The bulk of once great
trees lay heaped about them. Forked trunks and limbs gouged the ground beneath
shags of greenery.

Mimara spat blood from her lips,
tried to pull her torn leggings to her hips. She made a noise that might have
been a sob or a laugh or both. She fell to her knees before him, her left thigh
as bare and pale as a barked sapling. A laughing grimace. A glimpse of teeth
soaked in blood.

"Teach me," she said.

***

No words were spoken as they
hastened back, Achamian fuming in the lead, Mimara shambling in her clutched
clothing to keep up. They found the Skin Eaters standing in clots across slopes
of earth between wain-sized molars of stone. The river arced and sprayed white
beyond them, endlessly pounding the hillside. All eyes turned to them as they
approached, lingered for a moment on Mimara's slight figure. Instinctively,
Achamian held out his arm and drew her close to his chest. Together they
pressed to the fore of the crowd.

They saw Moraubon, obviously
winded, climb to Lord Kosoter where he stood, thumbs hooked in his war girdle,
on the mottled back of a boulder. A confusion of vertical stone faces rose
behind the Captain, crested with bracken and the odd suicidal tree. A great
rooster tail of water spouted through the heart of the enclosure, kicked into
foam by some powerful twist in the current. The cowled Nonman, Cleric, was
nowhere to be seen.

The two men shared inaudible
words, with Moraubon glancing at Mimara, as though to say,
Look at her...
The
Captain remained absolutely motionless. Sarl glared at the Skin Eaters from
immediately below.

"The one with the
Chorae," Mimara whispered, referring to Lord Kosoter. "Who is
he?"

Achamian found himself glancing
down the line of warlike faces. "Shush," was all he said.

At first it seemed the Captain
had simply reached out and seized Moraubon's chin—so casual was his movement.
Achamian squinted, trying to understand the wrongness of the image: Lord
Kosoter holding the man mere inches from his face, not so much looking into his
eyes as
watching...
Achamian only glimpsed the knife jammed beneath the
scalper's mandible when Lord Kosoter withdrew his hand.

Moraubon crumpled as if the Captain
had ripped out his bones. Blood sheeted the boulder.

"Can
anybody
,"
Sarl cried out over the river's white thunder, "tell me what the rule is
for peaches on the slog?"

"The Captain always gets
the first bite," Galian called solemnly.

"And what is it that has
made us legends of the Wilds? What allows us to
eat so much skin
?"

"The Rules of the
Slog!" a number of them shouted against the roar.

Not in reluctance, Achamian
realized, but with dark affirmation. Even the Bitten, even those who had broken
bread with the dead man on the boulder.

They're all mad.

Sarl reddened about his mock
smile. His eyes became two more wrinkles creasing his face.

Without a glance at his
sergeant, the Captain crouched in his ragged Ainoni finery, wiped his blade
clean on Moraubon's sleeve. Then he fixed his gaze on Achamian and Mimara. He
leapt from the boulder, his balance and bearing shockingly limber. Until that
moment, he had seemed carved of living granite.

He strode up to the two of them.

"Who is she?"

"My daughter,"
Achamian heard himself say.

There was no chance the
murderous brown eyes could stare him down—not this time. She felt too much like
her mother pressed in the brace of his arm, too much like Esmenet. The Captain
glanced to the ground for a meditative moment, seemed to nod, though it could
have been a trick of the breeze through his squared beard. After a hooded
glance, he turned to make his way back to the head of the trail.

"Either she carries her
weight like a man," he shouted as he walked away. "Or she carries
our
weight like a woman!"

Catcalls and whistles from the
Skin Eaters. Each of them, it seemed, glanced at Achamian and Mimara as they
drifted back to resume the march. Their expressions ran the gamut from
accusation to jeering lechery. But it was the blank faces that troubled
Achamian the most, the eyes that seemed to commit Mimara's torn leggings to
memory.

No one bothered with Moraubon's
body, which continued to drain against a backdrop of booming water and towering
debris. A white corpse on a red-painted stone.

"Who is he?" Mimara
whispered. While Achamian had eyed the others, she had continued gazing at the
Captain's receding back.

"A Veteran," he
murmured. "The same as me."

***

They lagged behind the others,
passing from broken sunlight to green shadow, arguing over the rush and hiss of
the river.

"You cannot stay! This is
impossible!"

"Where would you have me
go?"

"Go? Go? Where do you
think? Back to your mother! Back to the Andiamine Heights where you
belong!"

"Never."

"I know your mother. I know
she loves you!"

"Not so much as she hates
what she did to me."

"To save your life!"

"Life... Is that what you
call it? Should I tell you the story of my life?"

"No."

"All these men. Trust me,
I've borne them before. I can bear them again."

"Not
these
men."

"Then I suppose I'm lucky
to have
you
."

She was nothing like Esmenet, he
had come to realize. She tilted her head the same way, as though literally
trying to look around your nonsense, and her voice stiffened into the same
reedy bundle of disgust, but aside from these echoes...

"Look. You simply
cannot
stay
. This is a journey..." He paused, his breath yanked short by the
sheer factuality of what he was about to say. "This is a journey without
any return."

She sneered and laughed.
"So is every life."

***

There was something snide and
infuriating about her, he decided, something that begged to be struck—or
dared
...
He could not tell which.

No. She was nothing like Esmenet.
Even the vicious dismissiveness of her snorts—all her own.

"Is that what you've told
these scalpers?"

"What do you mean,
'told'?"

"That this journey will see
them all killed."

"No."

"What did you tell
them?"

"That I can show them the
Coffers."

"The Coffers?"

"The legendary treasury of
the School of Sohonc, lost when the Library of Sauglish was destroyed in the
First Apocalypse."

"So they know nothing of
Ishuäl? They have no idea that you hunt the origins of their Holy
Aspect-Emperor? The man who pays the bounty on their scalps!"

"No."

"Murderer. That makes you a
murderer
."

"Yes."