The Judging Eye (9 page)

Only the sorcerer surprises her,
probably because she has expectations aplenty of him. Drusas Achamian, the
Apostate, the man who turned his back on history, who dared curse the
Aspect-Emperor for love of her mother. True, he seemed entirely different in
each of the lays sung about him, even in the various tales told by her mother,
by turns stalwart and doubt-ridden, learned and hapless, passionate and
cold-handed. But it was this contradictory nature that had so forcefully
stamped his image in her soul. In the cycle of historical and scriptural
characters that populated her education, he alone seemed
real
.

Only he isn't. The man before
her seems to mock her soft-bellied imaginings: a wild-haired hermit with limbs
like barked branches and eyes that perpetually sort grievances. Bitter. Severe.
He bears the Mark, as deep as any of the sorcerers she has seen glide through
the halls of the Andiamine Heights, but where they drape silks and perfume
about their stain, he wears wool patched with rancid fur.

How could anyone sing songs
about such a man?

His eyes dull at the mention of
the Gnosis—the inward look of concealed pity, or so it seems. But when he
speaks, his tone is almost collegial, except that it's hollow.

"Is it true, what they say,
that witches are no longer burned?"

"Yes. There's even a new
School."

He does not like the way she
says that word, "School." She can see it in his eyes.

"A School? A School of
witches
?"

"They're calling themselves
the Swayal Compact."

"Then what need do you have
of me?"

"My mother will not allow
it. And the Swayali will not risk her Imperial displeasure. Sorcery, she says,
leaves only scars."

"She's right."

"But what if scars are all
you have?"

This, at least, gives him pause.
She expects him to ask the obvious question, but his curiosity seems bent in a
different direction.

"Power," he says,
glaring at her with an intensity she does not like. "Is that it? You want
to feel the world crumble beneath the weight of your voice."

She knows this game. "Was
that how it was for you in the beginning?"

His glare seems to falter over some
inner fact. But it means less than nothing, winning arguments. The same as with
her mother.

"Go home," he says.
"I would sooner be your father than your teacher."

There is set manner to the way
he turns his back this time, one that tells her that no words can retrieve him.
The sun pulls his shadow long and profound. He walks with a stoop that says he
has long outlived the age of bargaining. But she hears it all the same, the
peculiar pause of legend becoming actuality, the sound of the crazed and disjoint
seams of the world falling flush.

He
is
the Great Teacher,
the one who raised the Aspect-Emperor to the heights of godhead. Despite his
words to the contrary.

He is Drusas Achamian.

***

That night she builds a bonfire
not because she means to, but because she cannot overcome the urge to burn down
the Wizard's tower. Since this is impossible, she begins—quite without
thinking—to burn it in effigy. After throwing each hewn branch, she stands so
that the walls appear to rise miniature from the crackling incandescence,
crouching just enough for the flames to garland the little window where she
thinks he sleeps.

When she's finished, she stands
in its blazing presence, takes comfort in the stink of her exertions, and tells
herself the fire is in fact a living thing. She does this quite often: pretends
that worldly things are magic, even though she knows otherwise. It reminds her
that sorcery is something she can see.

That she is a witch.

She scarcely notices the first
drops of rain. The fire seems to beat them into steam, to lap them from her
clothing and skin with invisible tongues. Lightning flashes, so bright the
flames become momentarily invisible. Then the black heavens open up. The
surrounding forest lets loose a vast white roar.

For a time she crouches against
the downpour, her leather hood hitched over her head, the fire spitting and
steaming immediately before her. The water sends long tendrils through the
crease and seam of her cloak, cold roots that gradually sink to the depth of fabric
and skin. The dimmer the bonfire becomes, the more the misery of her
circumstance oppresses her. To suffer so much, travel so far...

She never recalls standing, and
certainly not drawing back her cloak. It seems that one moment she's sitting
before her fire, her teeth clenched to prevent their chatter, then she's
standing several paces away, soaked to drowning, fairly floating in her
clothes, staring up at the crippled contours of the Wizard's tower.

"Teach me!" she
hollers.
"Teach meee!"

Like all involuntary cries, it
seems to encompass her, to gather her like leaves and cast her into the
sheering wind.

"Teach me!"

He simply
has
to hear,
doesn't he? Her voice cracking the way all voices crack about the soul's
turbulent essentials. He needs only to look down to see her leaning against the
slope, wet and pathetic and defiant, the image of the woman he once loved,
framed by steam and fire. Pleading. Pleading.

"Teeeeach!"

"Meeee!"

But only the unseen wolves
answer from somewhere on the higher hills, scoring the wash with cries of their
own. Mocking her.
Owoooooo!
Poor little slit!
Owoooooooo!
Their
laughter stings, but she is used to it, the hilarity of those who celebrate her
pain. She has long ago learned how to break it into kindling, to cast it upon
the bonfires behind her eyes.

"Teach me!"

Thunder cracks—the God's hammer
striking the shield of the world. It echoes through the hiss of rain across the
granite slopes. Hiss-hiss-hiss, like a thousand serpents warning. Mists rise
like smoke.

"Curse you!" she
shrieks. "You
will teach me
!"

She pauses in the marauding
manner of those well practised at provocation, searching for any sign of
reaction. Then, through the veils, she sees it. The great door opens, rimmed by
an upside-down L of interior light. A shadow watches her for several
heartbeats, as though weighing her lunacy against the chill. Then it slips out
into the rain.

She knows that it is him
immediately, from his hobbling gait, from his bent shape, from the burning in
the pit of her throat. From the deep, sorcerous bruise, like a darkness untied
to any worldly light. He leans on a staff, setting it in the crooks between
boulders to keep from slipping. The rain parts about him like string, and she
can see it, the sense of eyes angling, of something not quite complete, that
mars all sorcery from the epic to the petty.

He descends the slope like a
stair, halting only when he stands immediately before and above her. They stare
at each other for a moment, the young woman, standing as though risen from the
sea, and the old Wizard, waiting between the lines of falling water. She
swallows at the impossibility of him, his beard frayed and feathery, his cloak
dust dry in light of her fire. The forests roar about them, a never-ending
rain-world.

His eyes are hard and incurious.
For a moment, she struggles with a strange embarrassment, like someone caught
cursing an animal in tones reserved for people. She spits water from her lips.

"Teach me," she says.

Without a word, he hefts his
staff, which she could now see is made not of wood, but of bone. Quite
unprepared, she watches him swing it like a mace—

An explosion against the side of
her skull. Then sliding palms, knuckles scraped and skinned, arms and legs
tangled rolling. She slams to a stop against a molar-shaped rock. Gasps for
air.

Stunned, she watches him pick
his way back up the shining slope. She tastes blood, bends her face hack to let
the endless rain rinse her clean. The drops seem to fall out of nowhere.

She begins laughing.

"Teeeach meeeee!"

CHAPTER THREE

Momemn

On my knees, I offer you that
which flies in me.

My face to earth, I shout
your glory to the heavens.

In so surrendering do I
conquer. In so yielding do I seize.

—
Nel-Saripal,
Dedication to Monius

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

When Nel-Saripal, the famed
Ainoni poet, finished copying the final revised verses of his epic retelling of
the Unification Wars,
Monius
, he had his body-slave run the manuscript
to a specially commissioned galley waiting in the harbour. Seventy-three days
later it was delivered to his divine patroness, Anasûrimbor Esmenet, the
Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, who grasped it the way a barren woman might
grasp a foundling babe.

Nel-Saripal's epic cycle would
be read aloud the following morning with the entire Imperial Court in
attendance. "'Momemn,'" the orator began, "'is the fist in our
breast, the beating heart.'"

These words struck Esmenet as
surely as a husband's slap. Even the reader, the celebrated mummer Sarpella,
faltered at their utterance, they seemed so obviously seditious. Whispers and
serpentine glances were traded among those in attendance, and the Blessed
Empress fumed behind her painted smile. To say that Momemn was the heart was to
say that Momemn was the centre, the capital, something at once factual and laudable.
But the word "fist," did that not intimate violence? And to
subsequently say that Momemn was the "beating" heart, did that not
divide the meaning in troubling ways? Esmenet was no scholar, but after twenty
years of rabid reading, she thought she knew something of words and their
supernatural logic. Nel-Saripal was saying that Momemn maintained its power
through brutality.

That it was a thug.

The poet was playing some kind
of game—that much was obvious. Nevertheless, the elegance and imagistic splendour
of the ensuing story quickly swept her away, and she decided to overlook what
was at most a gesture to impertinence. What great artist failed to punish their
patron? Afterwards she would decide that the insult was rather clumsy, no more
subtle than the slit gowns worn by the Priestess-Whores of Gierra. Had
Nel-Saripal been a greater poet, a rival to Protathis, say, the attack would
have been more devious, more cutting—and well nigh impossible to punish.
Monius
would have been one of those deliciously barbed works, cutting those with
the fingers to touch, and baffling the palms of all the others.

But her misgivings continued to
plague her. Again and again, during whatever thoughtful lull her schedule
permitted, she found herself reciting the line:
Momemn is the fist in our
breast, the beating heart... Momemn... Momemn...
At first she took his
reference to Momemn at face value—perhaps because of the way the city and its
convolutions encircled her apartments on the Andiamine Heights. Nel-Saripal,
she assumed, had restricted his symbolic mischief to the latter half of the
formula: The literal Momemn was the metaphoric heart. But the substitutions,
she realized, went deeper, the way they always did when it came to poets and
their obscure machinations. Momemn wasn't the heart, it was the
heart's
location
. It too was a cipher...

Momemn was
her
, she
finally decided. Now that her divine husband had taken the field against the
Consult,
she
was the fist in her people's breast. She was the heart that
beat them. Nel-Saripal, the thankless ingrate, was calling her a thug. A
tyrant.

"You..." That was how
Monius
truly began.

"You are the fist that
beats us."

***

That night, tossing alone on the
muslin planes of her bed, she found herself running in the manner of dreams,
where distance, the jolt of earth, and rushing movement were little more than
an inconsistent jumble. She could hear Mimara calling to her on the wind.
Closer and closer, until the cries seemed to fall from the stars. But instead
of her daughter, she found an apple tree, its branches bowed into skirts by the
weight of crimson-shining fruit.