The Judging Eye (54 page)

Lord Kosoter stepped forward,
stood so that his shadow blotted the Pick entirely. He pressed Xonghis to the
side with his left hand.

"I held on!"
the
Pick shrieked.

As though breaking hard ground
with a spade, the Captain plunged his sword down through the man's corselet,
snapping one of the Sranc-teeth necklaces. He drove the point deep, from the
man's clavicle to his belly. The Pick jerked and spasmed, shook like sodden
cloth on a slave's drying-stick. The Captain wrenched his sword clear; the body
fell backward, arms unrolling, its feet pinned beneath it. The severed hand
rolled soundlessly through the dust. Of its own volition, the man's hand seemed
to twitch and grope. Senseless fingertip touched senseless fingertip.

Lord Kosoter spat. In a hiss
that was almost a whisper, he said,
"Sobber."

Sarl's face crunched into a
wheezing laugh. "No sobbers!" he cried, bending his voice to the
others. "That's the Rule. No sobbers on the slog!"

Achamian glanced from Xonghis to
Kiampas, saw the same expressionless mask he hoped to fake. The Nonman, Cleric,
stood with his mouth open, as though trying to catch some taste of what they
all smelled. Achamian blinked, let go a shuddering breath. Everything had
happened so quickly, too quickly for his heart to feel, let alone for his soul
to comprehend. All he knew was that something was wrong... Something in the
man's gibberish had carried the deep bruise of truth.

It looks and looks and it
can't see!

"Cut him open," he
heard himself say to Xonghis, who by now was standing at his side.

"What?"

"Cut him open... I need to
see his heart."

Our skin is too thick...

The Imperial Tracker glanced
from his Captain to Sarl, who said, "Do as he says," pinched through
a scarcely restrained cackle. For all the world, the bandy-legged sergeant
seemed like a man who had gambled everything on the mad turns of this
encounter—nothing could spoil his run. Xonghis knelt in their midst, pulling a
Jekki saw-knife from his boot as he did so. The dead Pick lay in his own inert
shadow, his blood making black wool of the surrounding dust. His chest thudded
like a broken drum when Xonghis cracked his ribcage. The Tracker worked with
the thoughtless concentration of a long-time hunter: deer, wolf, or man, it was
all the same to him, it seemed.

He pulled the heart from the
overflowing cup that was the Pick's breast, held the gory mass up for Achamian
to inspect. The shadow of his arm fell long across the floor beyond.

"Rinse it."

With a kind of bemused scowl,
the Imperial Tracker shrugged and reached back with his free hand. He raised
his waterskin to his teeth to unstop, grinning as though it were whisky. His
fingernails shone fresh and pink as he gingerly rinsed the blood from the
lobes. The water drained rose from the back of his knuckles. He kneaded the
heart, turning the clear meat to his palm. The tubular cluster at the top was
soaked white.

Suddenly he stopped. Everyone
leaned forward, breathless, struck by the sight of a scar or suture along one
of the heart's fat-sheathed chambers. With his thumb Xonghis pressed open the
upper lid...

A human eye stared at them.

"Sweet Seju!"
Sarl
hissed, stumbling back bandy-limbed.

The Imperial Tracker laid the
heart on the Pick's gore-soaked stomach, but carefully, as though fearful of
waking something asleep.

"What does it mean?"
Kiampas cried.

But Achamian was staring
directly at Cleric. "Do you know the way forward?" he asked. "Do
you
remember
?"

The ageless face regarded him
for an inscrutable moment. "Yes."

"What does it mean?"
Kiampas fairly shouted, demanding the Wizard's attention. "How did you
know?"

Achamian looked to him.
"This place is cursed."

"It's not time to follow
the donkey shit home yet," the Captain growled.

"Cursed?" Kiampas
pressed. "What do you mean? Haunted?"

Achamian matched the sergeant's
gaze, silently thanked the Hundred for his sober eyes. The two of them had much
to discuss.

"What happened here—"

"Means
nothing
,"
Lord Kosoter grated, his voice and manner as menacing as the dead eye watching.
"There's nothing here
but skinnies
. And they're coming to shim our
skulls."

***

The Captain's word signalled the
end of the matter. Nothing was said to the others, but they all knew that
something had happened. On the long walk back, Sarl harangued them with the
Captain's story. The skinnies had got the best of the Bloody Picks, true, but
then they were the
Picks
, and not the Skin Eaters. They didn't have
their Captain, nor did they have
two
"light-spitters," as
scalpers were wont to call sorcerers.

"This is the slog of all
slogs, boys!" he cried with a peculiar, red-faced savagery that was all
his own. "We run for the Coffers, and nothing—
nothing!
—will stop
us!"

Certainly not skinnies.

Those who had seen the eye in
the Pick's heart could only trade worried glances. The grandeur of the
underworld Mansion had become hoary with threat. The long ache of emptiness and
uncertainty had been replaced with the pang of teeming things. Mimara even
clutched Achamian's hand, but every time he glanced at her, she was staring at
the cavernous hollows opening above them, peering through the chains, as though
following the stages of brightening light. She seemed younger, somehow, more
fragile with beauty. The curve of her cheeks, like the outer edge of an opened
oyster shell. Her compact lips. Her wide eyes, lashed with quill strokes. For
the first time, it seemed, he noticed how much lighter her skin was than his or
her mother's. For the first time he wondered about her real father, about the
twist of caprice that had seen her born, rather than aborted by Esmenet's
whore-shell.

They would survive this, he told
himself. They had to survive this.

The great sheaf of debris that
had originally halted them rose white in the light of the blinding Bar, so that
it resembled the decayed outskirts of a glacier. Those left behind to guard the
mules and supplies came running toward them like farm dogs: Obviously they had
spent the entire time stewing in their terror. Sarl and Kiampas immediately
began shouting, instructing everyone to stow their gear and ready the
mules—despite the obvious exhaustion of all.

There would be no more sleep in
the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas.

The Outside was leaking in.
Hell.

The Bar of Heaven had burned for
quite some time; Achamian could feel the picking toll of maintaining its
meaning in the nethers of his soul—like holding a sum in thought for a span of
hours. Even still, he hesitated before dispelling it, struck by the image of
the Skin Eaters bending and bustling in its soaring glare. Sarl watching, more
priest than slaver, with a scrutiny that could only be called ravenous. Kiampas
wandering among the company's more recent recruits, or the Herd as the
originals called them, slapping shoulders and tightening straps, offering what
small wisdoms and assurances he could. Galian working closer to Xonghis than
was necessary, shooting pressing looks at the almond-eyed Tracker whenever
opportunity afforded. The former Columnary was too savvy not to know something
was amiss. Achamian imagined it was only a matter of time before they all knew
that Sarl was "coughing up their cracks"—as they liked to put it.
Pokwas berating a harried Somandutta, who because of his refusal to relinquish
his Nilnameshi garb was perpetually delaying the others. Every so often the
tall black man glanced at the others, flashed them the broad smile hidden
behind his outraged expression. Glum Sutadra, the Kianene everyone insisted was
a Fanim heretic, packing his kit with the slow-handed intensity of a mortal
ritual. Monstrous Oxwora towering head and shoulders above the rest, laughing
at something thought or heard, pinch-faced Sranc heads swinging in his wild Thunyeri
mane. One of the younger Galeoth boys, Rainon, scratching the veined cheek of
his favourite mule, whispering encouragements he obviously didn't believe...

And Cleric standing over the
Captain as he tightened the lacing on his Ainoni boots, staring with bland
fixity at Achamian, his eyes so much older than the ceramic face that held
them—like holes.

"What is it?" Mimara
asked from his periphery.

"Nothing," Achamian
said, looking away from the Nonman, letting go the cramped meaning that was the
Bar of Heaven. The line dimmed, as if it were a seam in a slowly closing door,
then was clipped into nothingness. There was a moment of jeering cries and
blackness, so utter it seemed to possess its own sound, followed by a sorcerous
murmur and the reappearance of the twin points of light, like the eyes of two
different races opening in the same invisible face.

The Skin Eaters resumed their
work, though now many cast anxious looks into the darkness that leaned heavy
about them.

The plan, Sarl announced after conferring
with Lord Kosoter, was simply to continue with all possible haste. Odds were,
he told them, they would encounter nothing at all, given the vast extent of
Cil-Aujas. Odds were, whatever destroyed the Bloody Picks had withdrawn to the
depths to lick their wounds and to count their spoils. Nevertheless, they were
to march "on the sharp," as he put it, which meant without undue
noise and with eyes and hearts and weapons held ready. "From here on
in," he ground out, "we'll be the only ghosts in these halls."

These words, Achamian was quite
certain, had been directed at him.

They resumed their march,
skirting the flanks of the enormous collapse, walking for the most part beyond
the tailings thrown by the catastrophe. The twin lights soundlessly mapped the
tangle of debris, painting this or that clutch of monolithic stone, throwing
double shadows that here and there resembled wings. The ancient slaughter, or
whatever it was that had scattered so many dead across these reaches, continued
to choke the floor, but the bones were so reed-brittle that the scalpers kicked
through them the way they might humps of grass. With every step, Achamian saw
knobs and shards of mouldered bone thrown free of the dust. He found himself
wondering if this was the place...

The place where grief had burned
through the rind of worldly things.

"How?" Mimara
whispered in Ainoni from below his shoulder, her tone such that he immediately
knew she referred to the dead scalper. "I saw no sorcery, and neither did
you—I could see it in your face. So how could a heart
have an eye in it
?"

He found himself glancing to
either side, counting those who might overhear. "Has anyone told you what
happened when the First Holy War camped on the Plains of Mengedda?"

"Of course. The
Battleplain. The earth began vomiting the dead within it. Mother told me that
bones choked the grasses."

He swallowed rather than
immediately reply. There was much he had intended to say, but a chorus of
unwanted memories knelled through him, of how he and her mother had fled the
Plains of Mengedda for the mountains, of how they had loved between sunlit
trees...

And declared themselves man and
wife.

"This is like that."

He could almost taste the
sourness of her pause. "I feel enlightened already."

She had a Gift for smacking the
generosity from him, he would grant her that much.

"Look," he said.
"The boundaries between the World and Outside are like those between
waking and sleep, reason and madness. Wherever the World slumbers or goes mad,
the boundaries break down, and the Outside leaks
through
..." He
glanced about to make sure no one was listening. "This place is a topos,
like I already said. We literally walk the verge of Hell."

When she failed to immediately
reply, Achamian congratulated himself on having silenced her.

"You mean the
Dialectic," she said after several thoughtful steps. "The Dialectic
of Substance and Desire..."

Though Achamian knew the
phrase—knew it very well—it struck him as incomprehensible.

"You've read Ajencis,"
he said with more sarcasm than he intended. The Dialectic of Substance and
Desire was the cornerstone of the great Kyranean philosopher's metaphysics, the
notion that the differences between the World and the Outside were more a
matter of degree than kind. Where substance in the World denied desire—save
where the latter took the form of sorcery—it became ever more pliant as one
passed through the spheres of the Outside, where the dead-hoarding realities
conformed to the wills of the Gods and Demons.

Mimara was staring at her booted
feet plowing through the dust. "Kellhus," she said. "You know,
the man you hope to kill? He encouraged me to explore his library..." She
stared at him, her expression mussed with conflicting passions. "I once
thought I could be like my father."

The accusation in her voice
called for pity, and yet he found himself with nothing but bitter words to
answer. "Father? And who might that be?"