The Judging Eye (2 page)

Sweet God of Gods

Who walk among us

Innumerable are your holy
names...

"Show me," Kelmomas
whispered to the beetle. "Lead..."

Together they wandered into the
deeper recesses of the Allosium, to where only the floating pinpricks of the
godhouse votives illuminated the gloom. The beetle clambered about a column's
graven base, left tracks that resembled sutures across a swatch of dust—tracks
that Kelmomas obliterated with his small sandalled foot. Soon they reached the
Forum's outermost aisle, where the idols of the Hundred Gods resided in their
adorned recesses.

"Where are you going?"
he murmured, smiling. He glimpsed the gauze of his exhalation on the chill air,
puffed two breaths just to consider his breathing—spectral proof of material
life. He laid his cheek to the cool tile and stared out across the vast plain
of the aisle. The glazing soothed his skin. Quite oblivious to his scrutiny,
the beetle continued its trek, tipping in and out of the joints between the
cerulean tiles. Kelmomas watched it toil toward the leering mountain that was
the idol of Ajokli, the Four-Horned Brother.

"The
Thief
?"

Compared to that of his brothers
and sisters, the godhouse of Ajokli was as poor as a crippled fuller. The floor
tiles stopped at the threshold. The stonework rimming the recess was bare, save
for a series of notches scratched into the right post. The idol—a horned little
fat man crouching as though over a chamberpot—was not much more than a play of
shadow and gleam emerging from the velvet darkness. It was carved of black
diorite, but without the jewelled eyes or silver fingernails that even Yatwer
boasted. Rigid with the sensibilities of some long-dead artisan, its expression
struck Kelmomas as improbable, if not outright inhuman. Grinning like a monkey.
Snarling like a dog. Staring like a dew-eyed virgin.

It also watched the beetle as it
scurried into its gloomy bower.

The young Prince-Imperial
skipped into the cramped recess, ducking even though the decorative vaults
reached far above his head. The air smelled of tallow, dusty stone and
something coppery. He smiled at the graven God, nodded more than bowed, then
assumed much the same posture, crouching over his witless subject. Moved by
some unaccountable whim, he pinned the beetle to the gritty floor with his
index finger. It writhed like a little automaton beneath his fingertip. He held
it for a moment, savouring its impotence, the knowledge that he could, at any
moment, crush it like a rotted seed. Then, with his other hand, he pinched off
two of its legs.

"Watch," he whispered
to the laughing idol. Its eyes gazed down, blank and bulbous.

He raised his hand, fingers
outstretched in a dramatic flourish. The beetle scrambled in shining panic, but
the arrow of its course had been bent, so that it chipped around and around,
sketching little ovals at the idol's stump-toed feet. Around and around.

"See?"
he
exclaimed to Ajokli. They laughed together, child and idol, loud enough to blot
out the chorus of chanting voices.

"They're
all
like
that," he explained. "All you have to do is
pinch
."

"Pinch what,
Kelmomas?" a rich, feminine voice asked from behind him. Mother.

Another boy would have been
startled, even ashamed, to be surprised by his mother after doing such a thing,
but not Kelmomas. Despite the obscuring pillars and voices, he had known where
she was all along, following her prim footsteps (though he knew not how) in a
corner of his soul.

"Are you
done
?"
he exclaimed, whirling. Her body-slaves had painted her white, so that she
looked like statuary beneath the folds of her crimson gown. A girdle etched
with Kyranean motifs cinched her waist. A headdress of jade serpents framed her
cheeks and pressed order on her luxurious black hair. But even disguised like
this she seemed the world's most beautiful thing.

"Quite done," the
Empress replied. She smiled and secretly rolled her eyes, letting him know that
she would much rather dote on her precocious son than languish in the company
of priests and ministers. So much of what she did, Kelmomas knew, she did for
the sake of appearances.

Just like him—only not nearly so
well.

"You prefer
my company
,
don't you, Mommy?"

He spoke this as a question even
though he knew the answer; it troubled her when he read aloud the movements of
her soul.

Smiling, she bent and held out
her arms. He fell into her myrrh-scented embrace, breathed deep her
encompassing warmth. Her fingers combed through his unkempt hair, and he looked
up into her smiling gaze. Even so far from the candle-wheels she seemed to shine.
He pressed his cheek against the golden-plates of her girdle, held her so tight
that tears were squeezed from his eyes. Never was there such a beacon, it
seemed. Never was there such a sanctuary.

Mommy...

"Come," she said,
drawing him by the hand back through the pillared gallery. He followed, more
out of devotion than obedience. He glanced back for one last look at Ajokli,
saw with satisfaction that he still laughed at the little beetle scuttling in
circles at his feet.

Hand in hand, they walked toward
the slots of white light. The singing had trailed into a gaggle of hushed
voices, and a deeper, more forbidding resonance had risen to take its place—one
that shivered through the very floor. Kelmomas paused, suddenly loath to leave
the Allosium's dust-and-stone quiet. His mother's arm was drawn out like a rope
behind her; their interlocked fingers broke apart.

She turned. "Kel? What's
wrong, sweetling?"

From where he stood a bar of
white sky framed her, reaching as high as any tree. She seemed little more than
smoke beneath it, something any draft could dissolve and carry away.
"Nothing," he lied.

Mommy! Mommy!

Kneeling before him, she licked
the pads of her fingers, which were palm-pink against the white painted across
the backs of her hands, and began fussing with his hair. Light twittered across
the filigree of her rings, flashing like some kind of code.
Such a mess!
her
grin said.

"It's proper that you be
anxious," she said, distracted by her ministrations. She looked him square
in the eye, and he stared into the pith of her, past the paint and skin, past
the sheath of interlocking muscles, down to the radiant truth of her love.

She would die for you,
the
secret voice—the voice that had been within him always—whispered.

"Your father," she
continued, "says that we need fear only when we lose our fear." She
ran her hand from his temple to his chin. "When we become too accustomed
to power and luxury."

Father was forever saying
things.

He smiled, looked down in
embarrassment, in the way that never failed to slow her pulse and quicken her
eyes. An adorable little son on the surface, even as he sneered beneath.

Father.

Hate him,
the secret
voice said,
but fear him more.

Yes, the Strength. He must never
forget that the Strength burned brightest in Father.

"Was ever a mother so
blessed?" The Empress beamed, clutching his shoulders. She hugged him once
more, then stood with his hands cupped in her own. He allowed her, reluctantly,
to tow him out to the towering eaves of the Allosium, then beyond, into the
sunless brilliance.

Flanked by scarlet formations of
Eöthic Guardsmen, they stood blinking upon the crest of the monumental steps
that fanned down to the expanse of the Scuari Campus. The long-weathered
temples and tenements of Momemn crowded the horizon, growing indistinct the
deeper they plumbed the humid distance. The great domes of the Temple Xothei
rose chill and dark, a hazy, hulking presence in the heart of mud-brick
warrens. The adjacent Kamposea Agora was little more than a gap in the rotted
teeth of interposing streetscapes.

On and on it went, the vast and
mottled vista of the Home City, the great capital of all the Three Seas. For
his entire life it had encircled him, hedged him with its teeming intricacies.
And for his entire life it had frightened him, so much so that he often refused
to look when Samarmas, his idiot twin, pointed to something unnoticed in its
nebulous weave.

But today it seemed the only
safe thing.

"Look!" his mother
cried through the roar. "Look, Kel!"

There were thousands of them
packed throughout the Imperial Precincts: women, children, slaves, the healthy
and the infirm, Momemnites and pilgrims from afar—uncounted thousands of them.
Churning like floodwaters about the base of the Xatantian Arch. Crushed against
the lower compounds of the Andiamine Heights. Perched like crows along the low
walls of the Garrison. All of them crying out, two fingers raised to touch his
image.

"Think of how far they have
come!" his mother cried through the tumult. "From across all the New
Empire, Kelmomas, come to witness your divinity!"

Though he nodded with the
bewildered gratitude he knew she expected from him, the young Prince-Imperial
felt nothing save brittle revulsion. Only fools, he decided, travelled in
circles. Part of him wished he could drag the Grinning God out of his shrine to
show him...

People were bugs.

They weathered the adulation for
what seemed ages, standing side by side in their proscribed places, Esmenet,
Empress of the Three Seas, and the youngest of her exalted children. Kelmomas
looked up as he was taught, idly followed the course of pinprick pigeons
against the smoke rising from the city. He watched sunlight gather distant
rooftops in the wake of a retreating cloud. He decided he would ask for a model
of the city when his mother was weak and eager to indulge. Something made of
wood.

Something that would burn.

Thopsis, their Shigeki Master of
Protocol, raised his massive eunuch arms, and the Imperial Apparati arrayed on
the steps below turned as one toward them. The gold-ribbed Prayer Horns
sounded, resonating through the roaring chorus. They had been fixed at
intervals in the shadow of the Allosium's facade, fashioned of jet and ivory
and so long they nearly reached to the second landing.

Kelmomas looked down across his
father's Exalt-Ministers, saw everything from lust and tenderness to hatred and
avarice in their blank faces. There was lumbering Ngarau, the Grand Seneschal
from the Ikurei days. Phinersa, the Holy Master of Spies, a plain yet devious
man of Kianene stock. The blue-tattooed Imhailas, the statuesque Exalt-Captain
of the Eöthic Guard, whose beauty sometimes turned his mother's eye. The
ever-cantankerous Werjau, the Prime Nascenti and ruler of the powerful
Ministrate, whose far-flung agents ensured none went astray. The emaciated
Vem-Mithriti, Grandmaster of Imperial Saik and Vizier-in-Proxy, which made him
the temporary master of all things arcane in the Three Seas...

On and on, all sixty-seven of
them, arranged in order of precedence along the monumental stair, gathered to
witness the Whelming of Anasûrimbor Kelmomas, the youngest son of their Most
Holy Aspect-Emperor. Only the face of his Uncle Maithanet, the Shriah of the
Thousand Temples, defeated his momentary scrutiny. For an instant, his uncle's
shining look caught his own, and though Kelmomas smiled with a daft candour
appropriate to his age, he did not at all like the flat consistency of the
Shriah's gaze.

He suspects,
the secret
voice whispered.

Suspects what?

That you are make-believe.

The last of the cacophony faded,
until only the oceanic call of the Horns remained, thrumming so deep that
Kelmomas's tunic seemed to tingle against his skin. Then they too trailed into
nothing.

Ear-ringing silence. With a cry
from Thopsis, the whole world seemed to kneel, including the Exalt-Ministers.
The peoples of the New Empire fell to the ground, fields of them, then slowly
lowered their foreheads to the hot marble—every soul crowded into the Imperial
Precincts. Only the Shriah, who knelt before no man save the Aspect-Emperor,
remained standing. Only Uncle Maithanet. When the sun broke across the stair,
his vestments flared with light: A hundred tiny Tusks kindled like fingers of
flame. Kelmomas blinked at their brilliance, averted his eyes.

His mother led him down the
steps by the hand. He clapped after her with his sandalled feet, giggled at her
frown. They passed down the aisle opened between the Exalt-Ministers, and he
laughed some more, struck by the absurdity of them, all shapes and ages and
sizes, grovelling in the costumes of kings.

"They honour you,
Kel," his mother said. "Why would you laugh at them?"

Had he meant to laugh? Sometimes
it was hard to keep count.

"Sorry," he said with
a glum sigh.
Sorry.
It was one of many words that confused him, but it
never failed to spark compassion in his mother's look.

At the base of the monumental
stair, a company of green-and-gold-dressed soldiers awaited them: some twenty
men of his father's hallowed bodyguard, the Hundred Pillars. They fell into
formation about the Empress and her child, then, their shields bright and their
looks fierce with concentration, they began leading them through the masses and
across the Scuari Campus toward the Andiamine Heights.