The Judging Eye (60 page)

The darkness that dwells inside
stones.

She bears the light of
presence—a Surillic Point, he had called it—and she runs across floors older
than the most ancient nations of Men. She stands beneath all empire and
ambition, and she
illuminates
. So simple, she knows—so paltry as to be
pathetic. But this is how all greatness begins.

She carries a sphere of sight
about her, bloated and invisible save where its touch frosts the floor and ruin
white. She
is a witch
... at last! How can she not clamp tooth to tooth
in dark glee? How many times had she dreamed, her limbs pinned to pillows, of
speaking light and fire?

The company has ceased marching,
receives her with wonder and consternation. She tells them that Sarl and
Achamian follow close behind. She sees the tilt in their looks, the way they
take a step back in their eyes, as though to regain some lost perspective. The
light tingles. A strut haunts her limbs, and she thinks of her slave-sisters
back in Carythusal, the way they posed like rare and precious things when
wearing something new. She too had cried over dresses.

The Skin Eaters turn to the dark
behind them, searching the flat blackness. When their eyes fail them, they turn
their scrutiny to her. They seem a wall, even though they stand scattered among
their mules. Her light gilds the texture of their armour. It shines along the
rims of their shields, bares the dents of metal hammered over wooden edges. It
warms old leather, forks and branches along gut-stitched seams. It bares their
anxious faces, bobs silver up and down the hone of their restless swords. It
paints white circles in their beasts' black gaze.

Fierce men, with the wild pride
of the dispossessed. They would eat her skin, were it not for the Wizard. They
would glory in the stink of her. They would wear her the way they wear
shrivelled bits of Sranc, as a charm, a trophy, and a totem. As a seal and a
sign.

It seems she has always known
that men were more animal than women were animal. She was sold before her
mother could tell her this, but still she knew. The animal continually leans
forward in the souls of men, forever gnaws the leash. Even here, in the Black
Halls of Cil-Aujas, this truth is no less ancient.

Even here, so tragically out of
their depth, they lean to the promise of her vulnerability.

"Where's the Wizard?"
someone asks.

She retreats a step, and her
shadow falls behind her. She has lost her light to the space between her and
the Skin Eaters—a space she has never owned. She can sense the Captain standing
to the right of her, turns to risk his dominating gaze but finds herself
staring at the pocked dust instead. She has been tricked, it seems, into a
posture of submission.

"Mimara," a voice
calls. "What's the matter, girl?" It's Somandutta, the one man here
that she trusts, and only then because he is no man.

"You have no call to fear
us..."

A chorus of shouts greets the
abrupt arrival of Sarl and Achamian. In a heartbeat she is forgotten by all
save Somandutta, who comes to her side, saying, "The
light
... How
did you do that?"

She bites her lower lip, curses
down the urge to lean her head against the armour scaling his chest. Of
Achamian she can see nothing but the congregated backs of the scalpers with
their packs and their slung shields. But she hears his voice between the
figures, speaking to the Captain with quarrelsome urgency, something about
Chorae moving through the halls immediately below them. Someone, Kiampas,
immediately suggests the Bloody Picks, but the Wizard is dubious, asking why
anyone wealthy enough to own a Chorae would be fool enough to hunt Sranc for
money. Mimara wonders if their Chorae-bearing Captain will take offence.

Then Cleric says, "He's
right." The inhuman voice doesn't so much reach farther as it reaches
deeper
,
carried through the stone of the floor into her bones. "I sense them
too."

The Skin Eaters open, back away,
each staring at the company of prone shadows splayed across the dust scuffed
about their feet. She knows they think they can feel the Chorae too...

Then suddenly
she feels them
.
Her limbs jolt, and she sways, for her body had thought the ground solid, and
now she senses open space, breaths and plummets between leagues of stone.
Chorae, bottomless punctures in being, traverse them, a necklace of little
voids carried by something that runs in a lumbering file... something.

"They travel in the
direction I lead us," Cleric says, "toward the Fifth Anterograde
Gate..."

"You think they mean to cut
us off?" Kiampas asks.

No one speaks.

She sees Sarl, gazing with his
pond-scum eyes, his manic face rutted and pale. But when she looks at the other
old man, Achamian, she finds that her
Judging Eye has opened
... She has
read her stepfather's writing on sorcery, his
Novum Arcanum
. She knows
that the God peers through all eyes, and that the Few—sorcerer or witch, it did
not matter—were simply those whose sight recollected something of His
all-seeing gaze and so could speak with the dread timbre of His all-creating
voice.

She sees Achamian as others do,
stooped in his mad hermit robes, his beard stiff against his breast, his complexion
the dark of long-used skins. She sees the Mark, soiling his colours, blasting
his edges.

And though her eyes blink and
roll against it, she sees the Judgment...

He is carrion. He is horror. His
skin is burned to paste.

Drusas Achamian is damned.

Her breath catches. Almost
without thinking, she clutches Somandutta's free hand—the slick cool of iron
rings and the grease of leather shocks her skin. She squeezes hard, as though
her fingers need confirmation of their warm-blooded counterparts. The Chorae
and their inscrutable bearers move beneath her feet, each a point of absolute
chill.

Part of her, she realizes, will
not survive this underworld labyrinth.

She prays that it is the lesser
part.

***

"Fucking mules! How can you
run with fucking mules!" the Zeümi Sword-Dancer cries after Sarl has once
again screamed at them to make haste. The haunches of the beasts are already
shagged with blood from the prick and slap of the scalpers' weapons. The clopping
of their hooves makes a curious clatter across the dust and stone, like wood
without the hollow, an avalanche of axes chopping. Their packs wobble
drunkenly—one has already lost its entire burden. Stepping about the debris,
tents and cooking utensils, adds material to Mimara's sense of panic.

Achamian has said nothing since
leaving the airy blackness of the Repositorium. He labours beside her; the
slight tick in his leg has swollen into a hobble. His breath comes hard and
greedy, as though he needs to feed all the years baled within him. When he
coughs, his chest sounds damp and torn, more rotted wool than flesh.

The vaulted hallways scroll
above and about them, the basalt seemingly shocked by the sudden onset of their
lights. The images rise and arch and fall away, as quick as life. There is no
time to ponder the dead eyes that had once dreamed them. The company runs to
survive.

Hope and urgency have become a
single jarring note.

She can no longer feel the
Chorae beneath them—their pursuers have outrun them using deeper halls, and now
no one knows where and when they will strike. The Skin Eaters wrap their horror
about their trust in their Captain, say nothing save to joke or to gripe.
Questions have become perverse, an indulgence fit only for the obese.

Cleric leads them through a
gallery of branching corridors, some so narrow the company is stretched into a
single file longer than their sorcerous illumination. Those scalpers trapped in
the rear cry out against the rising darkness. When Mimara glances back, it's as
though she looks down a throat or a well—walls narrowing until blackness
smothers them. She can scarce see the sheen roll across the laggards' helms.

A pain climbs into her chest,
and she imagines an eye squinting from her heart.

There is no doubt they move
through the deeps now. Only when the walls are tight and the ceilings low can
you feel their constricting aura—or so it seems. Only the threat of closure
makes the boggling enormity plain. They are sealed from
all things
, not
simply sun and sky. The very world walls them in.

She looks up and around in an
effort to throw off the oppressive sense of cringing. The stone reliefs seem to
burn, so near are they to the encased light, so stark and immediate. Hunters
wrestling lions, shepherds balancing lambs upon shields, on and on, all struck
speechless in the stone of ages. The illumination crosses a lip; the ancient
vignettes fall away, as though over inverted cliffs. They have come to another
great chamber, not as vast as the Repositorium, but great enough. The air seems
cold and graceful.

They rope from the narrow hall,
gather in milling clots, gawking at this latest wonder. Their mules bray and
tremble for exhaustion. One collapses amid echoing curses.

The columns are square, panelled
in more animal manifolds, and even though she can see only the lower and outer
limits of them, she knows they form great aisles across the darkness, that the
company stands in some underworld forum or agora. Achamian is leaning against
his knees next to her, staring into his shadow, mustering the spit to swallow.
His teeth bared in exhaustion, he bends his head back, looks to the looming
gallery.

"The High Halls," he
gasps. "The High Halls of Mû—"

Haroo
oooooooooooom
!

Men twist and whirl about. The
dust shivers. The sound seems to filter, to rise, as though they can only hear
what mounts the surface of their ears. Sranc horns.

They feel it in their teeth—not
so much an ache as a taste.

Never before has she heard them,
and now she understands their antique power, the madness that saw mothers
strangle their own children in besieged cities of yore. Their depth is tidal in
its compass, yet riddled with thin and piercing notes, like a shriek unbraided
into wincing threads, each towed wide across the unnameable. A portent hangs
within them, a promise of what is other and impenetrable, of things that would
glory in her lament. They remind her of her humanity the way burnt edges speak
of fire.

Temple silence rises in their
wake. There is a distant sound—like leaves skidding over marble flagstones. It
seems to tighten her skin to the prick of moments passing.

Cleric calls, and they follow.
They leave the fallen mule where it lays grunting.

They run, but the slow
succession of pillars seems to diminish their pace. Their arcane lights throw
shadows that swing and sweep out with monumental elegance. The greater
blackness hangs from them, shrouding the hollows beyond the adjacent aisles.

The horns have a swelling
nearness to them now, a cracking blare. Only the stone forest of columns
divides them from their pursuers—she knows this with a herd animal's certainty.
For the first time a part of her dares believe that she's about to die. Her
bowels loosen to the jolt of her steps. Her stomach tightens to a burn. She
throws her gaze wildly about, desperate to find something that she
doesn't
recognize
. For it seems to her that she has known this place all along,
that her soul, like an old knot undone, bears the kink and imprint of her future...
The pillars braced against cataclysmic burdens. The bestial totems, their many
limbs flattened into the dark. The stink of her exertions. The sense of loss
and mortal misdirection. The gnashing of teeth and iron in the arching maze of
black behind her...

They are coming. Out of the pit
they are coming. The flutter of reverberations in her chest seems to confirm
it. This is where she dies.

The outer reaches of their
lights flatten against a wall, roll back the vertical murk with twin rings of
illumination, the one wider and brighter because of Cleric's position out in
front of Achamian. Mimara stumps to a stop with the others. The dust rolls
forward, makes skirts about their waists. She cranes her neck, absently rubbing
a stitch in her side—despite her terror she is relieved to simply breathe.
Narrative reliefs band the wall, stacking high into the darkness, but the
graven figures are not carved nearly so deep or so realistically as so the
others. A heartbeat passes before she sees the hair and beards and chains that
mark the forms as Men.

All at once, her earlier sense
of recognition drains away. Only the premonition remains.

She has read enough to know
these are not just any Men. They are the original Men of Eärwa, the Emwama, the
slaves exterminated by her ancestors in the earliest days of the Tusk. She can
even see a woman bound to a train of naked captives—a woman that could be her.
And for some reason, this point of
connection
strikes a nauseating note
through the whole of Cil-Aujas, renders it alien to the point of revulsion, as
though all of it had been smeared with reek and contagion...

They are coming. And she is just
a child—a child! Everything everywhere chatters with dread and threat. Angles
become knives. Inaction becomes blood. A mad part of her kicks and bucks and
screams. Her shriek bunches like a fist at the base of her throat. She must get
out. She
has to
...