The Judging Eye (40 page)

"What happened?"
Sorweel asked, feeling an old timbre returning to his voice. Zsoronga was no different
than him, he decided. Stronger perhaps, certainly more worldly, but every bit
as baffled by the circumstances that had carried him here, to this conversation
in this wild and desolate land.

"There were three of them
in the embassy, two Ketyai and one sausage like you. One of them looked
terrified, and we assumed he had simply been overwhelmed by the dread splendour
of our Court. They strode beneath my father, who glared down at them from his
throne—he was very good at glaring, my father.

"They said, 'The
Aspect-Emperor bears you greetings, Great Satakhan, and asks that you send
three emissaries to the Andiamine Heights
to respond in kind
.'"

Zsoronga had leaned forward in
the course of reciting this, hooked his arms about his knees. "'In kind?'
my father asked..."

The Prince held the moment with
his breath, the way a bard might. In his soul's eye, Sorweel could see it, the
feathered pomp and glory of the Great Satakhan's court, the sun sweating
between great pillars, the galleries rapt with black faces.

"With that, the three men
produced razors from their tongues and opened their own throats!" He made
a tight, feline swiping motion with his left hand. "
They killed
themselves...
right there before us! My father's surgeons tried to save
them, to staunch the blood, but there was nothing to be done. The men died
right
there
"—he looked and gestured to a spot several feet away, as though
watching their ghosts—"moaning some kind of crazed hymn, to their last
breath,
singing
..."

He hummed a strange singsong
tune for several heartbeats, his eyes lost in memory, then he turned to the
young King of Sakarpus with a kind of pained incredulity. "The
Aspect-Emperor had sent us three
suicides
!
That
was his message
to my father. 'Look! Look what I can do! Now tell me,
Can you do the same
?'"

"Could he?" Sorweel
asked numbly.

Zoronga pulled a long hand
across his face.
"Ke amabo hetweru go..."

"I'm too hard on my father.
I know I am. Only now can I appreciate the deranged bind that gesture put him
in. No matter
how
my father responded, he would lose... Perhaps he could
find three fanatics willing to return the message, but what kind of barbarity
would that be? What unrest would that cause the
kjineta
? And what if
they lost heart at the penultimate moment? Who would the people call to account
for their shame? And if he refused to respond in kind, would that not be an
admission of weakness? Tantamount to saying, 'I cannot rule as you
rule...'"

Sorweel shrugged. "He could
have marched to war."

"I think that's what the
devil wanted! I think
that
was his trap. The provocation of rebuilding
Auvangshei, followed by this mad diplomatic overture. Think of what would have
happened, what a disaster it would have been, had we taken the field against
his Zaudunyani hosts.
Look at your city.
Your ancient fathers weathered
Mog-Pharau, turned aside the No-God! And the Aspect-Emperor broke you in the
space of a morning."

These words hung between them
like lead pellets on sodden cloth. There was no accusation in them, no
implication of fault or weakness, just a statement of what should have been an
impossible fact. And Sorweel realized that his question—his discovery—was the
same question
everyone
was asking, and had been asking for years.
Everyone who was not a believer.

Who was the Aspect-Emperor?

"So what did your father
do?"

Zsoronga snorted in derision.
"What he always does. Talk, talk, and bargain. My father believes
in
words
, Horse-King. He lacks the courage your father showed."

Horse-King. This was the name
they used for him, Sorweel realized. Zsoronga would not have spoken with such
ease otherwise.

"And so what
happened?"

"Deals were struck.
Treaties were signed by flatulent old men. Whispers of weakness began
circulating through the streets and halls of High Domyot. And here I am, a
Successor-Prince, hostage to an outland devil, pretending that I ride to war,
when all I really do is moan to sausages like you."

Sorweel nodded in understanding,
smiled ruefully. "You would prefer the fate of my people?"

The question seemed to catch the
Successor-Prince by surprise. "Sakarpus? No... Though sometimes, when my
ardour overmatches my wisdom, I do... envy... the dead among you."

For some reason, the hooks of
this reference to his overthrown world caught Sorweel where all the others had
skipped past. The raw heart, the thick eyes, the leaden thought—all the staples
of his plundered existence—came rushing back and with such violence he could
not speak.

Prince Zsoronga watched him with
an uncharacteristic absence of expression.
"Ke nulam zo..."

"I suspect you feel the
same."

The young King of Sakarpus
looked to the red disc of wine in his bowl, realized that he had yet to take a
single sip. Not one sip—all his pain seemed condensed in this idiotic fact.
Mere weeks ago, simply holding wine would be cause for celebration, another
pathetic token of the manhood he had so desperately craved. How he had yearned
for his first Elking! But now...

It was madness, to move from a
world so laughably small to one so tragically bloated... Madness.

"More than you could
know," he said.

***

Sorweel found many things in
Zsoronga's company, much more than he was willing to admit to himself, let
alone anyone else. The friendship he could acknowledge, as this was a Gift
prized by men and gods alike, particularly with someone as resolute and
honourable as the Zeümi Prince. His relief was something he
had
to
admit, though it shamed him. For some perverse reason, all men found heart in
learning that others shared not only their purpose, but their grief as well.

What he could not acknowledge
was the relief he found in
simply speaking
. A true Horselord, a hero
such as Niehirren Halfhand or Orsuleese the Faster, viewed speech with the
high-handed distaste they reserved for bodily functions, as something men did
only out of necessity. Sakarpus found its strength in its solitude, in its lack
of intercourse with other babbling nations—it was not called the Lonely City
for nothing—so its great men affected to do the same.

But Sorweel had found only
desolation. Ever since joining the Scions, his voice had been stopped in the
jar of his skull. His soul had turned inward, becoming ever more tangled in the
hair of unruly thought. He had wandered about in a stupor, as if suffering the
circling disease that sometimes afflicted horses, forcing them to walk around
and around in senseless spirals until they collapsed. He too had been on the
verge of collapse, pressed to the brink of madness by remorse and shame and
self-pity—self-pity most of all.

Words had saved him, even if he
could only speak around the fact of his pain. His single greatest fear leaving
Zsoronga's pavilion that first night was that the Zeümi Prince, despite all his
displays and declarations to the contrary, found him as crude and as
disagreeable as his name for Norsirai, "sausages," implied.

That he would be returned to the
prison of his backward tongue.

As it turned out, Zsoronga
invited him to ride with his retinue the following day, where thanks to
Obotegwa's tireless voice, Sorweel found himself a part of the sometimes
strange and often uproarious banter of Zsoronga's Brace, as the Zeümi called
their boonsmen. The day might have been his first good day in weeks, were it
not for the sudden appearance of the Scion's commander—a campaign-grizzled
Captain named Harnilias, or Old Harni as they called him. The silver-haired man
simply rode into their midst, heavy with armour and airs of authority,
searching and dismissing faces with a single sweeping glance. He addressed
himself to Obotegwa without so much as a glance in Sorweel's direction. Even
still, the young King was not at all surprised when the old Obligate turned to
him and said, "The General wants to see you... Kayûtas himself."

Sorweel had seen the
Prince-Imperial many times since his last summons, but only in glimpses through
thickets of cavalrymen, his head bare and bright in the prairie sun, his blue
cloak shimmering about its kinks and folds. Each time he caught himself craning
his neck and peering like some Sagland churl, when he should have done no more
than sneer and look away. Sorweel was always skirmishing over small points of
dignity, always losing, but this was different. The sight of the General's
battle-standard, which was well-nigh perpetual for some legs of the day-long
march, drew his gaze like a lodestone. It was like some unnatural compulsion.
He would ride and look, ride and look, and when the intervening masses
parted...

There. A man who should be a man
like any other.

Only that
he wasn't
.
Anasûrimbor Kayûtas was more than powerful—more even than the son of the man
who had killed King Harweel. It was as if Sorweel saw him against a greater
frame, a background deeper than the endless emerald sweep of the Istyuli
Plains.

As if Kayûtas were more an
expression
than an individual. A particle of fate.

Walking the short distance to
the white-tented complex that formed the General's command, Sorweel struggled
with a skin-tingling sense of
exposure
. A kind of anxious reluctance
balled like a fist in his chest. He could hear the Prince-Imperial's
declaration from their last meeting:
"I need only look at your face to
see your soul, not so clearly as Father, certainly, but enough to sound the
measure of you or anyone else before me. I can see the depth of your pain,
Sorweel..."

This was no mean claim, the kind
men make when "measuring tongues," as the Sakarpi said, attempting to
cow others with boasts and breast-beating. It was—and Sorweel knew this without
reservation—a
fact
. Anasûrimbor Kayûtas could see
through
his
arrogant posture, his feeble mask of pride—through
him
.

How? How did one war against
such men?

A kind of panic welled through his
thoughts as he approached the General's Horse-and-Circumfix standard. He did
not want to be known...

Least of all
now
, and
least of all by
him
.

A mixed cohort of soldiers
crowded about the austere tent, some wearing the armour and crimson uniform of
the General's Kidruhil guard and standing at attention, others garbed in
silk-green beneath corselets of the finest chain and milling at ease—Pillarians,
Sorweel would later learn, the personal bodyguard of the Imperial Family. A
fair-haired Kidruhil officer barked senseless words at him as he approached,
then nodded at his obvious incomprehension, as if there could be only one such
fool.

Within heartbeats he found
himself inside the command tent. As before, the interior was spare, almost
devoid of ornament, and the furnishings severe. The setting sun flared across
the westward panels, illuminating everything in white-filtered light. The
contrast to Prince Zsoronga's pavilion with its gloomy corners and elaborate
trappings could not be more complete.
"Our glorious host,"
Sorweel
remembered the Zeümi Prince saying,
"does not believe the rewards of
rank have any place on the march."

Only what was needed. Only what
was necessary.

Kayûtas sat as before at the
same sheaf-covered table, only this time he stared at Sorweel with mild
expectation instead of reading. A beautiful woman, her flaxen hair braided and
bound about her head, sat to his immediate right, dressed in a
gold-and-charcoal gown: Kayûtas's sister, Sorweel realized, glimpsing the
familial resemblance in her face. Kayûtas's dark-maned brother, Moënghus,
hulked several paces away, fairly bristling with weaponry. There was a taut
humidity in the air, the kind found in the wake of heated arguments.

The woman stared at him with the
amused boldness of an aunt finally laying eyes on a sister's vaunted child.
"Muirs
kil tierana jen hûl,"
she said. Though her gaze never wavered, the way
she tilted her head told Sorweel she had directed her words at Moënghus behind
her.

The dark Prince-Imperial said
nothing, simply glared with eyes like chips of sky. His brother Kayûtas snorted
in laughter.

Sorweel felt the blood rise to
his face. They were scarcely older than him, he realized, and yet he was the
boy here—unquestionably so. Was it the same with Zsoronga? Did they have this
impact on everyone who came before them?

"How is Porsparian treating
you?" the General asked in Sakarpic.

"As well as can be
expected," Sorweel replied, though the words felt false on his lips. The
Shigeki slave had tended to his modest needs with diligence—this much was true.
But the old man's religious zealotry unsettled him: Porsparian was forever
praying over the small mouths he moulded in the earth, continually feeding warm
food to cold dirt, and forever... blessing the young King.