The Judging Eye (7 page)

Years. Months. Days. For so long
the Aspect-Emperor had been an uneasy rumour to the South, a name as heaped in
atrocity as it was miracle...

No more.

CHAPTER TWO

Hûnoreal

We burn like over-fat
candles, our centres gouged,

our edges curling in, our
wick forever outrunning our wax.

We resemble what we are: Men
who never sleep.

—
Anonymous Mandate Schoolman,
The Heiromantic Primer

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk),
Southwestern Galeoth

There would have been nightmares
aplenty had Drusas Achamian been able to dream a life that was his own.
Nightmares of a long, hard war across deserts and great river deltas.
Nightmares of sublimity and savagery held in perfect equipoise, though the
cacophony of the latter would make all seem like misery. Nightmares of dead
men, feeding like cannibals on their once strong souls, raising the impossible
on the back of atrocity.

Nightmares of a city so holy it
had become wicked.

And of a man who could peer into
souls.

But he could not dream of these
things. No. Though he had renounced his School, cursed his own brothers, he
still wore the great yoke that broke the backs of them all. He still bore
within him a second, more ancient soul, Seswatha, the hero and survivor of the
First Apocalypse. He still dreamed, as they dreamed, of the World's crashing
end. And he still awoke gasping another man's breath...

The feast was a greasy, raucous
affair—another celebration of the Hunt-Glorious. The High-King, Anasûrimbor
Celmomas, reclined the way he always did when too far into his cups: legs
askew, shoulders slumped into the left corner of the Urthrone, forehead planted
against a slack fist. His Knight-Chieftains bickered and cavorted across the
long trestle-table set before him, raising gobs of seared meat in shining
fingers, drinking deep from golden cups stamped in the likeness of animal
totems. Light danced from the bronze tripods set across the floor about them,
making the table a place of shadows and silhouettes, and illuminating the
curtain of freshly killed deer that rose behind the revellers to either side.
Beyond, the mighty pillars of the Yodain, the King-Temple raised by Trysë's
ancient rulers, rose higher still, into the obdurate blackness.

More toasts rang out. To Clan
Anasûrimbor, to the Great Kin Lines represented at the table, to the Bardic
Priest and his uproarious account of the day's escapade. Honey mead was poured
and spilled into cups and smacking lips alike. But Achamian, alone at the very
end of the booming table, lifted his vessel only to the water-bearer. He nodded
at the warlike exclamations, laughed at the ribald jokes, grinned the sly grin
of the learned in the company of fools, but he did not participate. Instead,
with eyes that seemed more bored than cunning, he watched the High-King—the man
he still called his best friend—drink himself into unconsciousness.

Then he slipped away, without
care or notice. Who could fathom the ways of a sorcerer?

Seswatha passed through the
shadowy, industrious network of servants that kept the feast in belching good
humour, then left the King-Temple for the closeted maze of palace apartments.

The door was ajar—as promised.

Squat candles had been set on
the floor along the passageway, spreading fans of illumination across the
decorative mosaics above. Figures roped in and out of the gloom, the shadows of
men warring against animals. Breathing deep, Achamian chipped shut the door,
listened for the rasp of iron. The heavy stone of the Annexes had swallowed all
sound save the spit of candle flames twirling in the wake of his passage.
Resinous perfumes steeped the air.

When he found her—Suriala,
glorious and wanton Suriala—he knelt in accordance with the very Laws he was
about to break. He knelt before her beauty, before her hunger and her passion.
She raised him to her embrace, and he glimpsed their entwined reflection in the
contours of a decorative shield. They looked as bent and desperate as they
should, he thought. Then he pressed her to the bed...

Made love to his High-King's
wife—

A convulsive gasp.

Achamian bolted forward from his
blankets. The darkness buzzed with exertion, moaned and panted with feminine
lust—but only for a moment. Within heartbeats the chorus call of morning
birdsong ruled his ears. Throwing aside his blankets, he leaned into his knees,
rubbed at the ache across his jaw and cheek. He had taken to sleeping on wood
as part of the discipline he had adopted since leaving the School of Mandate,
and to quicken the transition between his nightmares and wakefulness.
Mattresses, he had found, made waking a form of suffocation.

He sat for a while, trying to
will his arousal away, to banish the memory of her nakedness sheering against
his own. Had he still been a Mandate Schoolman, he would have run shouting to
his brothers. But he was not, and he had dwelt with too many revelations for
too long. Insights that would have once wired his body with horror or
exultation now merely throbbed. Discovery, it seemed, had become but another
ache.

Snuffling and coughing, he
walked across the plank floor to the square corona of white outlining the
shutters. "Shed some sun on this," he muttered to himself.
"Yes-yes... Light is never a bad thing."

He closed his eyes against the
explosive brilliance, breathed deep the many layers of morning: the bitter of
budding leaves, the damp of forest loam. The cries of children rang up from
below, claiming, daring—the singsong of careless souls.
"I don't-don't
believe you!"
Banished from the lower floors by their
parents—Achamian's slaves—they always ran rampant about the tower's shadow in
the morning, racing and twittering like combative starlings. For some reason,
hearing them today seemed a profound miracle, so much so he almost wished he
could stand such—here, now, eyes closed and all else open—for the remainder of
his life.

It would be a good end, he
thought.

Squinting against the
brightness, he turned to his room, to its racks and rough-hewn tables, to the
endless sheaves of scribbling stacked in precarious piles across random
surfaces high and low. The broad curve of the stone walls embraced the morning
gloom, its mortices lending the appearance of a Galeoth millery. A broad
fireplace stood fallow opposite his plank bed. Immense ceiling timbers ran
overhead, black with pitch, the spaces between insulated with layers of animal
pelts—wolf, deer, even hare and marten.

He smiled a sad upside-down
smile. Some small memory winced at the barbarity of the place, for he had spent
a good portion of his life travelling the fleshpots of the South. But it had
been home for far too long to seem anything other than safe. For nearly twenty
years he had slept, studied, and supped in this room.

He walked different roads now.
Deeper roads.

How long had he travelled?

All his life, it seemed, though
he had been a Wizard for only twenty.

Breathing deep, drawing fingers
from his balding scalp to his shaggy white beard, he walked to his main
worktable, braced himself for the concentrated recital to come...

The meticulous labour of mapping
Seswatha's labyrinthine life.

***

He had hoped to write a detailed
account of everything he could remember. He had developed a talent, over the
years, for recollecting what he dreamed. He had literally accumulated thousands
of recitals, each the focus of innumerable critiques and speculations. Writing
from memory was treacherous enough: Sometimes it seemed as though only the
bones of things were actually remembered and that the flesh had to be invented
anew with each resurrection. But when it came to the Dreams, everything carried
the taint of contrivance, even when they tossed him whole into the heart and
bowel of Seswatha's life. The key, he had learned, was to start writing
immediately, before the afterimage found itself shouldered into obscurity by
the brute insistence of the waking world.

But instead, all he could write
was,

NAU-CAYÛTI?

He found himself staring at this
ink scribble throughout the morning, the name of Celmomas's famed son, whose
theft of the Heron Spear would lead to the No-God's ultimate destruction. In
the libraries of the Mandate, dozens if not hundreds of tomes were dedicated to
his exploits, the predictable stuff mostly: the Slaying of Tanhafut the Red,
his string of victories after the disaster at Shiarau, his death at the hands
of his wife, Iëva, and of course the endless interpretations of the Theft. But
a few scholars—at least two that Achamian could remember—had focused their
attention on the sheer frequency of the Dreams involving Nau-Cayûti, which
seemed far out of proportion to his short-lived role in the Apocalypse.

But if Seswatha had bedded his
mother...

The revelation of adultery was
significant in its own right—and it stung the old Wizard for reasons he dare
not ponder. But the possibility that Seswatha might be Nau-Cayûti's father? Not
all facts are equal. Some hang like leaves from the branching of more
substantial truths. Others stand like trunks, shouldering the beliefs of entire
nations. And a few—a desperate few—are seeds.

He was running through all the
details that might allow him to date the dream—which Knight-Chieftains still
had favour at the High-King's table, which rings Seswatha wore, the fertility
tattoos on the Queen's inner thighs—when one of the children's voices piped
through the drone of his failing concentration.
"Yeah, but from how faaaaaar?"
A girl's warbling, squeezed into a reed by the distance. Little Silhanna, he
realized.

A woman replied, something
tender and inaudible.

It was the accent more than the
voice that sent him stumbling to the open window. He found himself blinking,
gripping the cracked and pitted sill against the sudden vertigo. It was Sheyic,
the common tongue of the New Empire, but lilting with southern nuances. Nansur?
Ainoni?

He glanced out to the horizon,
across what had once been the Galeoth province of Hûnoreal. The skies were iron
grey with the chill-spring promise of summer blue. Climbing and falling
canopies jostled across the near distance, a patchwork of tender greens so new
that swales of ground could be seen through them. The morning sunlight was still
barred from the ravines, so the landscape possessed an oceanic quality; the
sunbathed summits and ridge lines resembled yellow islands in a shadowy sea.
Even though he couldn't make out the white-backed tributaries of the Rohil, he
could see their winding stamp on the disposition of the distant hills, like
cables laid across love-tossed sheets.

Strange, the way distances grew
in the chill.

The ground immediately below
fell away in a series of stubbed terraces, so that looking directly down made
it feel as though he were being tugged out the window. There were the
outbuildings, little more than lean-tos actually, staking out their humble
circle of habitation, and the nearer trees, elms and oaks, winding to heights
that would have been eye level had the ground been even. And there were the
bare stretches, whose bald stone carried premonitions of smashing melons and
broken skulls. He could see nothing of the children, though he did spy a mule
staring with daft concentration at nothing in particular.

The voices continued to chirp
and gaggle somewhere to the left, on a blade of level earth that formed the
foundation for several hoary old maples.

"Momma! Momma!"
he
heard young Yorsi cry. Then he spied him through the weave of branches,
barrelling up the slope. His mother, Tisthanna, strolled down toward him,
wiping her hands on her apron and quite—Achamian was relieved to
note—unconcerned.
"Look!"
Yorsi cried, waving something small
and golden.

Then he saw a petite woman
climbing in Yorsi's wake, laughing at the four blond children who danced around
her, their questions rising in chiming counterpoint.
"What's your mule
called?" "Can I chop your sword?" "Can I? Can I? Can
I?"
Her hair was Ketyai black and half-cropped, and she wore a leather
cloak whose many-panelled manufacture shouted caste-noble even from such a
distance. But given his high vantage and the way she looked down at her little
interlocutors, Achamian could see nothing of her face.

He felt a tickle in his throat.
How long had it been since their last visitor?

In the beginning, when it had
just been him and Geraus, only the Sranc had come. He had lost count of how
many times he had lit up the hillside with the Gnosis, sending the vile
creatures howling back into the forest deeps. Every tree within bowshot carried
some scar of those mad battles: A sorcerer poised on the edge of a half-ruined
tower, raining brilliant destruction down on fields of what looked like raving,
white-skinned apes. Geraus still suffered nightmares. Afterwards, with the end
of the Unification Wars, it had been the Scalpoi, the innumerable Men—Galeoth,
Conriyans, Tydonni, Ainoni, even Kianene—who had come to collect the
Aspect-Emperor's bounty on Sranc scalps. For years it seemed some blood-mad
camp of theirs lay within a day's distance of them. And on more than a few
occasions, Achamian had to resort to the Gnosis to cut short their drunken
depredations. But even they moved on after time, hunting their vicious prizes
into the wilderness's truly primeval deeps. Periodically a troop of them would
happen upon the tower, and if they were hungry or otherwise broken by the
horrors of their trade, some kind of woe was certain to follow. But then even
they ceased coming.