The Judging Eye (17 page)

The truth of Anasûrimbor
Kellhus, he insists, was to be found in the secret of his origins—in the secret
of something called the Dûnyain. "The Scylvendi was his mistake!"
Achamian cries, his eyes wild with unkempt passions. "The Scylvendi knew
what he was.
Dûnyain!
" And the secret of the Dûnyain, he claims,
though Mimara understands instantly that this is little more than a hope, was
to be found in the detail of Seswatha's life.

His Dreams. His Dreams had
become the vehicle for his vengeance. Here, on the very edge of the wilderness,
he has bent all his efforts to decoding their smoky afterimages. Twenty years
he has laboured, mapping, drawing up meticulous inventories, sifting through
the debris, the detritus of a dead sorcerer's ancient life, searching for the
silver needle that would see his wrongs avenged.

It's more than a fool's errand;
it is a madman's obsession, on a par with those ascetics who beat themselves
with strings and flint, or who eat nothing but ox-hides covered in religious
writings. Twenty years! Anything that could consume so much life simply has to
be deranged. The hubris alone...

His hatred of Kellhus she finds
understandable, though she herself bears no grudge against her stepfather. She
barely knows the Aspect-Emperor, and those rare times she found herself alone
with him on the Andiamine Heights—twice—he seemed at once radiant and tragic,
perhaps the most immediate and obvious soul she had ever encountered.

"You think you hate
her,"
he once said—referring to her mother, of course.

"I know I do."

"There's no
knowledge,"
he had replied,
"in the shadow of hate."

Now, watching and listening to
this old man, she thinks she understands those words. Cooped in his desolate
tower, trapped between the banks of his soul, how could Achamian not bring the
two great currents of his life together? His Dreams and his Hatred. Contained
too long in too little space, how could they not become entangled in a single
turbulent stream? To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life
acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred
hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you cannot strike out,
you strike nonetheless. Inward, if not outward, as if such things have
direction. To hate, especially without recourse to vengeance, is to besiege
yourself, to starve yourself to the point of eating your own, then to lay
wreaths of blame at the feet of the accused.

Yes, she decides. Drusas
Achamian is her brother.

"So all this time,"
she says, daring to speak into one of the few silences he affords her,
"you've been dreaming his life, cataloguing it, searching for clues as to
my stepfather's origin..."

"Yes."

"What have you found?"

The question shocks him; that
much is plain. He draws clawed fingers through his great and grizzled beard.
"A name," he finally says with the sullen resentment of those forced
to admit the disproportion between their boasts and their purse.

"A name?" She nearly
laughs.

A long sour glare.

She reminds herself to take
care. Her instinct, given all that she has endured, is to be impatient with the
conceits of others. But she needs this man.

An inward look of concentration,
then he says, "Ishuäl."

He almost whispers it, as though
it were a jar containing furies, something that could be cracked open by a
careless tongue.

"Ishuäl," she repeats,
simply because his tone seems to demand it.

"It's derived from a Nonman
dialect," he continues. "It means 'Exalted Grotto,' or 'High Hidden
Place,' depending on how literal the translation."

"Ishuäl? Kellhus is from
Ishuäl?"

It troubles him, she can tell,
to hear her refer to her stepfather as such—as someone familiar.

"I'm certain of it."

"But if it's a hidden place..."

Another sour glare. "It
won't be long," he mutters with old man dismissiveness. "Not now. Not
any more. Seswatha... His life is opening... Not just the small things, but
the
secrets as well
."

A life spent mining the life of
another, pondering glimpses of tedium through the lense of holy and apocalyptic
portent. Twenty years! How can he hope to balance the proportions? Grub through
dirt long enough and you
will
prize stones.

"Like he's yielding,"
she forces herself to say.

"Exactly! I know I sound
mad for saying it, but it's almost as if
he knows
."

She finds nodding difficult, as
though pity has seized the hinge of her neck and skull. What reservoirs of
determination would it take? To spend so long immersed in a task not only
bereft of any tangible profit, but without any appreciable measure of
progress—how much would it require? Year after year, wrestling with the
imperceptible, wringing hope out of smoke and half-memory. What depths of
conviction? What kind of perseverance?

Certainly not any the sane
possess.

Faces. All conduct is a matter
of wearing the appropriate faces. The brothel taught her that, and the
Andiamine Heights simply confirmed the lesson. It's as though expressions
occupy various positions, a warning here, a greeting there, with the distance
between measured by the difficulty of forcing one face from the other. At this
moment nothing seems so difficult as squeezing pity into the semblance of avid
interest.

"No other Mandate Schoolman
has ever experienced anything like this?" She has asked this already, but
it bears repeating.

"Nothing," he replies,
his face and posture true to his frailty. He has shrunk into the husk of hides
that clothe him. He seems as lonely as he is, and even more isolate. "What
can it mean?"

She blinks, strangely offended
by this open display of weakness. Then it happens.

The Mark already blasts him,
renders him ugly in the manner of things rent and abraded, as though his inner
edges have been pinched and twisted, pinched and twisted, his very substance
worried from the fabric of mundane things. But suddenly she sees more, the hue
of judgment, as though blessing and condemnation have become a wash visible
only in certain kinds of light. It hangs about him,
bleeds
from him,
something palpable... evil.

No. Not evil. Damnation.

He is damned. Somehow she knows
this with the certainty with which children know their hands. Thoughtless.
Complete.

He is damned.

Another blink, the different eye
closes, and he is an old Wizard once again. The illuminated surfaces are as
impervious as before.

Sorrow wells through her, at once
abstract and tidal, the resignation one feels when losses outrun numbers.
Clutching her blanket, she presses herself to her feet, scuttles to sit on the
cold ground beside him. She looks at him with the eyes she knows so well, the
gaze that promises to roam wherever. She knows that he is hopeless, the wreck
of what was once a mighty man.

But she also knows what she
needs to do—to give. Another lesson from the brothel. It's so simple, for it's
what all madmen yearn for, what they crave above all things...

To be believed.

"You have become a
prophet," she says, leaning in for the kiss. Her whole life she has
punished herself with men. "A prophet of the past."

The memory of his power is like
perfume.

***

The recriminations come later,
in the darkness. Why is there no place so lonely as the sweaty slot beside a
sleeping man?

And at the same time, no place
so safe?

Bundling a blanket about her
nakedness, she crawls to the dim bed of coals, where she sits, rocking herself
between clutched arms and rough folds, trying to squeeze away the memory of
skidding skin, the wheezing of old man exertions. The dark is complete, so much
so the forest and the stoved-in tower seem painted in pitch. The warmth of the
gutted fire only sharpens the chill.

The tears do not come until he
touches her—a gentle hand across her back, falling like a leaf. Kindness. This
is the one thing she cannot bear. Kindness.

"We have made our first
mistake together," he says, as though it were something significant.
"We will not make it again."

No forest slumbers in silence,
even in the dead of a windless night. The touch of twigs and leaves, the press
of forking branches, the sweep of limbs endlessly interlocking, incorporating
more and more skirted trunks, creating a labyrinth of hollows, with only sudden
scarps to interrupt them. Somehow it all conspired to create a whispering dark.

The coals tinkle like faraway
glass.

"Am I broken?" she
sobs. "Is that why I run?"

"We all bear unseen
burdens," he replies, sitting more behind her than beside. "We are
all bent somehow."

"You mean you," she
says, hating herself for the accusation. "The way you are bent!"

But the hand does not retreat
from her back.

"The way I must be... I
must discover the truth, Mimara. More than my spite turns upon what I do."

Her snort is convulsive,
phlegmatic. "What difference will it make? Golgotterath will be destroyed
within the year. Your Second Apocalypse will be over before it even begins!"

His fingertips draw away.

"What do you mean?" he
says, his tone both light and brittle.

"I mean that Sakarpus will
have already fallen." Why does she suddenly hate him? Was it because she
seduced him, or because he failed to resist? Or was it because laying with him
made no difference? She gazes at him, unable or unwilling to hide the triumph
her eyes. "The plans were afoot before I fled the cursed Heights. The
Great Ordeal marches, old man."

Silence. Remorse comes crashing
in.

Can't you see?
something
shrieks within her.
Can't you see the poison I bring? Strike me! Strangle
me! Pare me to the core with your questions!

But she laughs instead.
"You have shut yourself away for too long. You have found your revelation
too late."

CHAPTER FIVE

Momemn

Where luck is the twist of
events relative to mortal hope,

White-Luck is the twist of
events relative to divine desire.

To worship it is to simply
will what happens as it happens

—
Ars Sibbul,
Six Ontonomies

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

Psatma Nannaferi sat in the
dust, rocking to whispered prayers, her crooked hand held out to the train of
passers-by. Though she counted their shadows, she took care not to probe their
eyes, knowing that whatever moved them to give, be it pity, the bite of guilt,
or simply the fear of an unlucky coin, it must be their own. The blessed words
of the Sinyatwa were clear on that account: "From seed to womb, from seed
to furrow. The right hand cannot give to the left..."

To give was to lose. It was an
arithmetic with only one direction.

This was the miracle of the
Ur-Mother, Yatwer, the Goddess of Fertility and Servitude, who moved through
the world in the form of more and more and more. Unasked for bounty. Undeserved
plenitude. She was the pure Gift, the breaking of tit for tat, the very
principle of the birthing world. It was She who made time flesh.

Which was why Nannaferi realized
she had to move. More and more the copper talents came to her palm, rather than
to those other beggars raised beside her. More and more they landed with a
knowing clink, a momentary hesitation. One young girl, a Galeoth slave, even
gave her an onion, whispering, "Priestess-Mother."

It always happened this way, even
in cities as great as Iothiah. The human heart was ever bent on exchange. Even
though people knew the purpose of the Beggar's Sermon, they were still drawn to
her once the rumours of her presence spread. They felt the pinch of their
offering, and assumed that this made it Gift enough. If you asked them whether
they were trying to purchase the Goddess's favour, they would insist they only
wanted to give. But their eyes and expressions always shouted otherwise.

Such a strange thing, giving, as
if the arms of beggars could be the balance of the world.

So Nannaferi would be forced to
move, to find someplace where anonymity could assure the purity of the
offerings she received. To take from those angling for dispensations was a kind
of pollution. And more importantly, it saved no souls. For adherents to the
Cult of Yatwer, ignorance was the royal road to redemption.

She undid the veil from her old
and cratered face, pocketed the coins in her sack-cloth robe. As though to
verify her conclusion, three more coins plopped into the dust before her, one
of them silver. Excess generosity was ever the sign of greed. She left them in
their small oblong craters. Other Yatwerian priestesses, she knew, would have
taken them, saying waste not want not or some other trite blasphemy. But she
was not one of the others—she was Psatma Nannaferi.