The Judging Eye (39 page)

He watched his enigmatic slave
scowl over his uniform, swallowed against a sudden, almost maniacal urge to
scream. Never. Never in his life had he suffered such consistent uncertainty.
It plagued him, like some bone-deep fever of the soul. Everywhere he turned he
found himself faced with the unfamiliar, whether it be wondrous, blasphemous,
or merely novel. He knew not what was expected of him, by others, by honour, by
his Gods...

And perhaps even more
debilitating, he knew not what to expect of himself.

Certainly something better than
this. How could he have been born with such a despicable heart, hesitating like
an old man whose life had outrun his trust in his heart and frame? How could
Harweel, strong Harweel,
wise
Harweel, have given birth to such a craven
fool as he? To a boy who would weep in the arms of his murderer!

"I am no
conqueror."

Worry piled upon recrimination.
And then, miraculously, he found himself stepping through the canvas flaps into
the bustle of the camp. He stood blinking at the streaming files of passers-by.

Obotegwa turned to him with a
look of faint surprise. After leaning back to appraise the cut of his padded
Sakarpic tunic, he beamed reassurance. "Sometimes it is not so easy,"
he said in his remarkable accent, "to be a son."

***

So many sights. So many kinds of
Men.

The encampment was in a state of
uproar as its countless denizens hastened to take advantage of the remaining
daylight. The sun leaned low on Sorweel's left, spoked the sky with arid
brilliance. The Great Ordeal thronged beneath it, a veritable ocean of tents,
pavilions, and packed thoroughfares, sweeping out across the bowl of the
valley. The smoke of countless cooking fires steamed the air. Zaudunyani prayer
calls keened over the roar, high feminine voices, filled with sorrow and
exaltation. The Standard of the Scions—a horse rearing through a tipped crown
on Kidruhil red—lay dead in the motionless air, yet somehow the ubiquitous
Circumfix banners seemed to wave as if in some higher breeze.

"Indeed," Obotegwa
said from his side, "it is a thing of wonder, your Glory."

"But is it
real
?"

The old man laughed, a brief
husky wheeze. "My master will like you, I am sure."

Sorweel continued stealing gazes
across the encampment as he followed the Zeümi Obligate's lead. He even stared
at the southern horizon for several heartbeats, across miles of trampled earth,
even though he knew Sakarpus had receded out of all vision. They had passed
beyond the Pale into the Wilds where only Sranc roamed.

"My folk never dared ride
this far from our city," he said to Obotegwa's back.

The old man paused to look
apologetically into his face. "You must forgive my impertinence, your
Glory, but it is forbidden for me to speak to you in any voice save my
Master's."

"And yet you spoke
earlier."

A gentle smile. "Because I
know what it means to be thrown over the edge of the world."

Sorweel brooded over these words
as they resumed walking, realizing they inadvertently explained what had pained
his eyes when he looked southward. The Lonely City
had become an edge
.
It had been more than conquered, its solitude had been consumed. Once an island
in wicked seas, it was now a mere outpost, the terminus of something far
greater, a civilization—just like the times of the Long Dead.

More than his father had been
killed, he realized. His father's
world
had died with him.

He blinked at the heat in his
eyes, saw the Aspect-Emperor leaning over him, blond and luminous, a sunlit man
in the heart of night.
"I am no conqueror..."

These proved long thoughts for
the short walk to Prince Zsoronga's pavilion. He found himself within the small
Zeümi enclave before he was even aware of approaching it. The Prince's pavilion
was an elaborate, high-poled affair, roofed and sided in weathered
black-and-crimson leather, and chased with frayed tassels that may have once
been golden but were now as pale as urine. A dozen or so smaller tents reached
out to either side, completing the enclosure. Several Zeümi milled about the
three firepits, staring with a directness that was neither rude nor welcoming.
Anxious, Sorweel found himself considering the tall wooden post raised in the
enclosure's heart. Satyothi faces, stylized with broad noses and sensual lips,
had been carved one atop another along its entire length, stacks of them
staring off in various directions. This was their Pillar of Sires, he would
later learn, the relic to which the Zeümi prayed the same as Sakarpi prayed to
idols.

Obotegwa led him directly into
an antechamber at the fore of the pavilion, where he bid Sorweel to remove his
boots. This proved to be the only ceremony.

They found Prince Zsoronga
reclined across a settee in the airy depths of the central chamber. Light
filtered down through a number of open slots in the ceiling, blue shafts that
sharpened the contrast between the illumined centre of the chamber and the
murky spaces beyond. Obotegwa bowed as he had earlier, uttering what Sorweel
imagined was some kind of announcement. The handsome young man sat up smiling,
set down a codex bound in gold wire. He gestured to a neighbouring settee with
a long arm.

"Yus ghom,"
he
began,
"hurmbana thut omom..."

Obotegwa's voice rasped into the
thread of his with practised ease, so much so it almost seemed Sorweel could
understand the Prince directly.

"Appreciate these luxuries.
The ancestors know how hard I had to fight for them! Our glorious host does not
believe the rewards of rank have any place on the march."

Stammering his thanks,
self-conscious of his pale white feet, Sorweel sat erect on the settee's edge.

The Successor-Prince frowned at
his rigid posture, made a waving gesture with the back of his hand.
"Uwal
mebal! Uwal!"
he urged, throwing himself back and wriggling into the
soft cushions.

"Lean back," Obotegwa
translated.

"Aaaaaaaah!"
the
Prince gasped in mock joy.

Smiling, Sorweel did as he was
told, felt the cool fabric yield about his shoulders and neck.

"Aaaaaaaah!"
Zsoronga
repeated, his bright eyes laughing.

"Aaaaaaaah!"
Sorweel
gasped in turn, surprised at the relief that soaked through his body simply for
saying it.

"Aaaaaaaah!"

"Aaaaaaaah!"

Wriggling, they both roared with
laughter.

***

After serving them wine,
Obotegwa hovered with the thoughtless discretion of a grandparent, effortlessly
interpreting back and forth. Zsoronga wore a silk banyan, simple in cut yet
lavish with black stencilled motifs: silhouetted birds whose plumage became
branches for identical birds. He also wore a gold-fretted wig that made him
positively leonine with silk-black hair—as Sorweel would discover, the kinds of
wigs Zeümi caste-nobles wore in leisure were strictly governed by rules of rank
and accomplishment, to the point of almost forming a language.

Even though their shared
laughter had set Sorweel at his ease, they knew so little about each other—and
Sorweel knew so little, period—that they quickly ran short of idle
pleasantries. The Successor-Prince spoke briefly about their horses, which he
thought brutish to the extreme. He tried to gossip about some of their fellow
Scions, but gossip required common acquaintances, and whenever he mentioned
anyone, Sorweel could only shrug. So they came quickly to the one thing they
did share in common: the reason two young men from such disparate worlds could
share bowls of wine in the first place—the Aspect-Emperor.

"I was
there
,"
Zsoronga said, "when his first emissaries arrived in my father's
court." He had the habit of making faces while he spoke, as though telling
stories to a child. "I was only eight or nine at the time, I think, and
I'm sure my eyes were as wide as oysters!" His eyes bulged as he said
this, as if to demonstrate. "For years rumours had circulated... Rumours
of
him
."

"It was much the same in
our court," Sorweel replied.

"So you
know
,
then." Pulling his knees up, the Prince nestled back into his cushions,
balanced his wine between long fingers. "I grew up hearing tales of the
First Holy War. For the longest time I thought the Unification Wars simply
were
the Three Seas! Then Invishi fell to the Zaudunyani and with it all
Nilnamesh. That caused everyone to cluck and scratch like chickens, believe you
me. Nilnamesh had always been our window on the Three Seas. And then, when news
arrived that Auvangshei was being rebuilt—"

"Auvangshei?" Sorweel
blurted, resisting the urge to look at the old Obligate, whom he had actually
interrupted. He had witnessed enough interpreted exchanges in his father's
court to know that the success of informal conversations of this kind required
more than a little pretence on the interlocutors' part. A certain artificiality
was inescapable.

"Sau. Rwassa muf molo
kumbereti..."

"Yes. A fortress, a
legendary fortress that guarded the frontier between Old Zeüm and the Ceniean
Empire, centuries and centuries ago..."

All Sorweel knew about the
Ceniean Empire was that it ruled all the Three Seas for a thousand years and
that the Anasûrimbor's New Empire had been raised about its skeleton. As little
as that was, it seemed knowledge enough. Just as his earlier laughter had been
his first in weeks, he now felt the first true gleam of comprehension. The
dimensions of what had upended his life had escaped him—he had floundered in
his ignorance. The Great Ordeal. The New Empire. The Second Apocalypse. These
were little more than empty signs to him, sounds that had somehow wrought the
death of his father and the fall of his city. But here at last, in the talk of
other places and other times, was a glimmer—as though understanding were naught
but the piling on of empty names.

"Aside from skirmishing
with Sranc," the Successor-Prince was saying, "Zeüm has had no
external enemies since Near Antiquity... the days of the
old
Aspect-Emperors.
In our land, we worship events more than gods. I know that must sound strange
to you, but it's true. We do not, like you sausages, forget our fathers. At
least the Ketyai keep lists! But you Norsirai..."

He shook his head and cast his
eyes heavenward, a mock gesture meant to tell Sorweel that he simply teased.
Expressions, it seemed, all spoke in the same language.

"In Zeüm," the Prince
continued, "each of us has a book that is about us alone, a book that is
never completed so long as our sons are strong, our
samwassa
, which
details the deeds of our ancestors, and what they earned in the afterlife.
Mighty events, such as battles, or even campaigns such as this, are what knot
the strings of our descent together, what makes us
one people
. Since
everything that is present hangs from these great decisions, we revere them
more than you can know..."

There was wonder here, Sorweel
realized, and room for strength. Different lands. Different customs. Different
skins. And yet it was all somehow the same.

He was not alone. How could he
be so foolish as to think he was alone?

"But then I'm forgetting,
aren't I?" Zsoronga said. "They say your city has stood unconquered
for almost three thousand years. The same is the case with Zeüm. The only real
threats we have ever faced hearken back to the days of the Ceniean
Aspect-Emperors and the armies they sent against us. The Three Axes we call
them, Binyangwa, Amarah, and Hutamassa, the battles we regard as our most
glorious moments, whose dead we implore to catch us when we at last fall from
this life. So as you can imagine, that name, 'Aspect-Emperor,' is engraved in
our souls. Engraved!"

The same, of course, had been
true in Sakarpus. It seemed beyond belief that
one man
could incite such
fear on opposite ends of the world, that he could pluck distant kings and
princes like weeds, then replant them together...

That one man could be so powerful.
One man!

And in a rush, Sorweel realized
what it was he had to do—at last! He fairly shouted aloud, it struck with such
sudden obviousness. He needed to
understand
the Aspect-Emperor. It
wasn't his father's weakness or pride or foolishness that had seen the Lonely
City fall...

It was his
ignorance
.

The Successor-Prince's eyes had
drifted inward with his retelling, his face brightening with each turn and
digression as though at some minor yet critical discovery. "So, when news
arrived that Auvangshei had been rebuilt... Well, you can imagine. Sometimes it
seemed the Three Seas and the New Empire was
all
anyone could speak
about. Some were eager, tired of living in the shadow of greater fathers, while
others were afraid, thinking that doom comes to all things, so why not High
Holy Zeüm? I had always counted my father among the former, among the strong.
The Aspect-Emperor's emissaries would change all that."