The Judging Eye (13 page)

"Then why wouldn't
he
tell
me as much."

"Because, Esmi" he
said, drawing her back down the hall, "sometimes ignorance is the greatest
strength of all."

***

For a thing to seem a miracle,
it cannot quite be believed.

The following morning Esmenet
awoke thinking of her children, not as the instruments of power they had
become, but as babies. She often found herself shying away from thoughts of the
early years of her motherhood, so relentless had Kellhus been in his pursuit of
progeny. Seven children she had conceived by her husband, of which six had
survived. Add to that Mimara, her daughter from her previous life, and
Moënghus, the son she had inherited from Kellhus's first wife, Serwë, and she
was the mother of eight...

Eight!

The thought never ceased to
surprise and to dizzy her, so certain she had been that she would live and die
barren.

Kayûtas had been the first, born
close enough to Moënghus that the two had been raised as fraternal twins. She
had delivered him in Shimeh upon the Holy Juterum, where the Latter Prophet,
Inri Sejenus, had ascended to the Heavens two thousand years previous. Kayûtas
had been so perfect, both in form and in temperament, that the Lords of the
Holy War had wept upon seeing him. So perfect, like a pearl, she sometimes
thought, taking in the world's shadowy jumble and reflecting only a generic,
silvery light. So smooth that no fingers could grasp him, not truly.

It had been Kayûtas who had
taught her that love was a kind of imperfection. How could it be otherwise,
when he was perfect and could feel no love? Simply holding him had been a
heartbreak.

Theliopa had come second, born
in Nenciphon while Kellhus waged the first of many wars against the drugged
princes of Nilnamesh. After Kayûtas, how could Esmenet not hope against hope?
How could she not clutch this new babe and pray to the Gods, please,
please
,
give me but one human-hearted child? But even then, her daughter's limbs still
slick with the waters of passage, she had known she had born another... Another
child who could not love. With Kellhus at war, she stumbled into a kind of
bottomless melancholy, one that made her envy suicides. If it had not been for
her adopted son, little Moënghus, it might have ended then, this queer fever dream
that had become her life. He at least had needed her, even if he was not her
own.

That was when she began
demanding resources, real resources, for her search for Mimara—whom she had
sold to slavers in the shadow of starvation so very long ago. She could
remember staring at Theliopa in her bassinet, a pale and wane approximation of
an infant, thinking that if Kellhus denied her, she would have no choice but
to...

Fate truly was a whore, to
deliver her to such thoughts.

Of course, she found herself almost
immediately pregnant, as though her womb had been a hidden concession in the
deal she had struck with her husband. Her third child by Kellhus, Serwa, was
born in Carythusal with the smell of the Zaudunyani conquest still on the
wind—soot and death. Like Kayûtas, she had seemed perfect, flawless, and yet
unlike him she had seemed capable of love. What a joy she had been! But when
she was scarce three years old, her tutors realized that she possessed the Gift
of the Few. Despite Esmenet's threats, despite her entreaties, Kellhus sent the
girl—still a babe!—to Iothiah to be raised among the Swayal witches.

There had been bitterness in
that decision, and no few thoughts of heresy and sedition. In losing Serwa,
Esmenet learned that worship could not only survive the loss of love, it
possessed room for hatred as well.

Then came the nameless one with
eight arms and no eyes, the first to be delivered on the Andiamine Heights. The
labour had been hard, life-threatening even. Afterwards would she learn that
the physician-priests had drowned it, according to Nansur custom, in unwatered
wine.

Then came another son,
Inrilatas—and there was no doubt that he could love. But Esmenet had developed
instincts for these things, as mothers who bear many children sometimes do.
From the very beginning, she had known something was wrong, though she could
never name the substance of her misapprehensions. But it became plain to his
nurses by his second year. Inrilatas was three when he first began speaking the
little treacheries that dwelt in the hearts of those about him. The entire
court walked in terror of him. By the age of five he could summon words so
honest and injurious that Esmenet had seen hard-hearted warriors blanch and
reach for their blades. She would never forget the time when, after singing to
him in his bed, he had looked up with his too-nimble face and said, "Don't
hate yourself for hating me, Mommy. Hate yourself for who you are."
Hate
yourself for who you are,
spoken in the dulcet tones of child adoration. By
the time he was six, only Kellhus could fathom, let alone manage, him, and he
had not the time for anything more than a cursory relationship. She still
shuddered whenever she recalled the rare conversations they shared, father and
son. Afterwards, it was as if Inrilatas, who had always walked the perimeter of
sanity, simply tripped and tumbled in the wrong direction. The veil of utter
madness was drawn down.

She had prayed for the passing
of her fertility during this time, for what the Nansur called
meseremta
,
the "dry season." But Yatwer's Water continued to flow, and she so
dreaded coupling with Kellhus that she actively sought out surrogates for him,
women of native intellect like herself. But if his divine seed was a burden she
could scarce bear, then it broke all the others. Of the seventeen concubines he
impregnated, ten died in childbirth, and the others gave birth to more...
nameless ones. Thirteen in sum, all drowned in wine.

Esmenet sometimes wondered how
many hapless souls had been assassinated to keep this secret. A hundred? A
thousand?

News of Mimara's discovery
arrived shortly after Inrilatas's final breakdown. For almost ten years
Esmenet's men, soldiers of the Eöthic Guard who had sworn to die before
returning to their mistress empty-handed, had scoured the Three Seas. In the
end they found Mimara in a brothel, dressed in paste and foil to resemble none
other than Esmenet herself, so that low men might couple with their dread
Empress. All Esmenet could remember of the news was the cruelty of the floor.

They had found her daughter, her
only child sired by a man instead of a god. And if the manner of her discovery
had not broken Esmenet's heart, then the hatred she saw in Mimara's eyes upon
their reunion most certainly had... Mimara, sweet Mimara, who as a child would
only hold her mother's thumb when they walked hand in hand, who would cry
inexplicably at the sight of solitary birds, or squeal at the glimpse of rats
flitting from crack to crevice. She had come back to her mother broken, another
bruised and battered peach, and quite as mad as any of Esmenet's other more
divine daughters and sons.

As it turned out, Mimara also
possessed the Gift of the Few. But where Kellhus had turned a deaf ear to
Esmenet with Serwa, this time he left the matter in her selfish hands. She
would not lose another daughter to the witches, even if it destroyed any chance
of mending the tattered history between them. She would not sell Mimara a
second time—no matter how vicious the young woman's rantings. Even the
Schoolmen Esmenet consulted had told her that Mimara was too old to master the
painstaking meanings sorcery required. But as so often happens in family
quarrels, the grounds were entirely incidental to the
conflict
. Mimara
simply needed to punish her, and she in turn had needed to be punished—or so
Esmenet had assumed.

The twins arrived during this
time, and with them one final spear-throw at Fate.

There had been much cause for despair
in the beginning. Though as perfect in form as their eldest brother, Kayûtas,
they could not be separated without lunatic squalls of anguish. And when they
were left together, all they ever did was stare into each other's eyes—watch
after watch, day after day, month after month. The physician-priests had warned
her of the risks of bearing children at her age, so she had prepared herself
for... oddities, she supposed, peculiarities over and above what she had
already experienced. But this was so strange as to be almost poetic: two
children with what seemed a single soul.

It was Kellhus who purchased the
slave who would save them—and her. His name was Hagitatas, famed among the
Conriyan caste-nobility as a healer of troubled souls. Somehow, through tenderness,
wisdom, and incalculable patience, he managed to pry her two little darlings
apart, to give them the interval they required to draw their own breath, and so
raise the frame of individual identities. Such was her relief that even the
subsequent discovery of Samarmas's idiocy seemed cause for celebration.

These sons
loved
—there
could be no question that they loved!

At last the Whore of Fate,
treacherous Anagkë, who had lifted Esmenet from ignorance and brutality of the
Sumni slums to the pitch of more profound torments, had relented. At last
Esmenet had found her heart. She was an old mother now, and old mothers knew
well the tight-fisted ways of the world. They knew how to find largesse in its
meagre capitulations.

How to be greedy with small things.

***

There was hope in her
apprehension as her body-slaves dressed and painted her. When Porsi brought
Kelmomas and Samarmas to her anteroom festooned like little generals, she
laughed with delight. With the two of them in mutinous tow, she descended the
stairs and landings to the lower palace, then hurried through the subterranean
corridor that ran beneath the Scuari Campus. Periodically she heard the deep
clap of the Plate thrumming across the city's quarters, calling all those who
would witness this latest abomination. And at turns she caught hints of a
deeper sound, more human in its register, legion in its tones.

By the time they surfaced in the
limestone gloom of the Allosium Forum, the roar had become a deafening wash
that hummed through the pillars and lintels. They stood motionless as the
vestiaries fussed with creases and other unsightly defects in their clothing.
Then, following an aisle between dark columns, Esmenet led her sons into light
and fury.

The crest of the monumental
stair seemed the summit of a mountain, a place so high that it made haze of the
world below. The sun was dry and cool. The broad expanse of the Scuari Campus
seethed beneath it, a dark sea scarped by the hazy contours of the city. As
one, untold thousands cried out in jubilation, with abandon, as though she were
the throw of the number-sticks that had saved all of their lives.

Esmenet was always conscious of
her unreality at moments such as this. Everything, even the cosmetics smeared
across her skin, possessed the weight of fraud. She was not Esmenet, and nor
were her children Kelmomas and Samarmas. They were images, semblances drawn to
answer the mob and their anxious fantasies. They were Power. They were Justice.
They were mortal flesh draped about the dread intent of God.

Authority in all its myriad
incarnations.

She stood with a twin to either
side, pretending to bask in the thunder of their adulation. Everywhere she
looked she saw open mouths, black holes no wider than a woman's fist, no deeper
than a boy's arm. And though the air quivered with sound, each of them seemed
as soundless as a gaping fish, sucking at air too thin not to suffocate.

The silence, when it finally
came, tickled her with its abruptness. She hesitated, heard the strange hum of
unvoiced expectations, of endless eyes watching. Finally a solitary cough broke
the hanging spell, and she started down the monumental stair, led the twins
past the mirrored shields of the assembled Eöthic Guardsmen, then around the
folds of the great crimson curtain that had been raised about the scaffold.

The swish of her gowns seemed to
blot out all other noise. She could smell them now, her people, raw and sour.
The uniformity of their faces seemed to dissolve into insulting details. The
painted hauteur of the caste-nobility assembled immediately below. The woollen leers
of the caste-menials crowding the innumerable distances beyond.

How many of them, she wondered,
harboured souls that would see her and her children dead?

She glanced at the twins, trying
to smile for their sakes. Kelmomas looked.... blank. Tears silvered Samarmas's
cheeks.

Eight of them
, she
thought.

Theliopa hid in her soulless
apartments, far too fragile for ceremonial carnivals such as this. Moënghus,
Kayûtas, and Serwa marched with their father in the Great Ordeal, at a distance
appropriate to children who were strangers. Inrilatas screamed from the prison
of his room. And Mimara... wandered.

Eight. And only these two boys
loved.

Whispering, "Come,"
she led them to their gilded and cushioned seats. A call rang out as they sat,
and all across the depths of the vista before them, the masses fell to their
knees. Unable to reach over the arms of her throne, she relinquished her sons'
hands. The golden claws of twin Kyranean Lions arched above her, signifying the
continuity of empires from the present back to the murk of Far Antiquity. Upon
her left shoulder, she bore a grand ruby brooch, symbolizing the divine blood
of her husband, which had passed through his seed into her, and thence into
their children. Across her right shoulder, she wore a sash of felt, blue chased
with gold, the sign of her command of the Eöthic Guard, the protectors of the
Imperial Precincts, and in the absence of the Aspect-Emperor, her own private
army, bound to her by oaths of life and death.