The Judging Eye (21 page)

"How about balance?"
Kelmomas said. "You know how to
balance
, don't you?"

Moments later, Samarmas was
perched tottering on the balcony's broad stone rail, deep spaces yawing out
beyond and beneath him. Kelmomas watched from the playroom, standing just
behind the line of sunlight across the floor, grinning as though astonished by
his skill and daring. The distance-filtered voices of his uncle and mother
seemed to fall from the sky.

"The White-Luck
Warrior,"
his uncle was saying,
"need not be real. The rumours
alone constitute a dire threat."

"Yes, I agree. But how
do you battle rumours?"

Kelmomas could almost see his
uncle's simulated frown.

"How else? With more
rumours."

Samarmas whooped in whispering
triumph. Cotton-white arms out and waving. Toes flexed across a marmoreal line.
The sycamores rearing behind, dark beneath sunlit caps, reaching up as though
to catch some higher fall.

"And the
Yatwerians?"
Mother asked.

"Call a council. Invite
the Matriarch herself here to the Andiamine Heights."

The sudden dip and lean. The
stabilizing twitches. The small looks of bodily panic.

"Yes, but you and I both
know she isn't the real leader of the Cult."

"Which might work to our
advantage. Sharacinth is a proud and ambitious woman, one who chafes at being a
figurehead."

Quick recovery steps. Feet
swishing over polished stone. A gurgling laugh caught in an anxious, reflexive
swallow.

"What? Are you
suggesting we bribe her? Offer to make her Mother-Supreme?"

"That's one
possibility."

The slender body bent about an
invisible point, one which seemed to roll from side to side.

The surrounding air deep with
the promise of gravity.

"As Shriah you hold the
power of life and death over her."

"Which is why I suspect
she knows little or nothing of these rumours, or what her sisters plan."

Eyes avid and exultant. Hands
cycling air. A breathless grinning.

"That's something we can
use."

"Indeed, Esmi. As I
said, she is a proud woman. If we could induce a schism in the Cult..."

Samarmas tottering. A bare foot,
ivory bright in the glare, swinging out from behind the heel of the other,
around and forward, sole descending, pressing like a damp cloth across the
stone. A sound like a sip.

"A schism..."

The shadow of a boy
foreshortened by the high angle of the sun. Outstretched hands yanked into
empty-air clutches. Feet and legs flickering out. A silhouette, loose and
tight-bundled, falling through the barred shadow of the balustrade. A gasp
flecked with spittle.

Then nothing.

Kelmomas stood blinking at the
empty balcony, oblivious to the uproar rising from below.

Just like his father, he was
able to hold so much more in the light of his soul's eye than the people around
him. It had been this way ever since Hagitatas had taught him the difference
between beast, man, and god—ever since he first had looked
away
from his
brother's face. Beasts move, the old man had said.

Men reflect.

So he knew the love and worship
Samarmas bore him, knew that he would do anything to close the abyss of insight
and ability between them. And he knew precisely where the Pillarian Guards
fixed their sandalled feet, where they planted the butt of their long spears...

Alarms rang through the
Enclosure, clawed up to the sky. Soldiers, their martial voices hoarse with
grief and terror. The guarded babble of slaves.

As though stunned, Kelmomas
walked to the marble railing, leaned over the point where his brother had
fallen. He looked down, saw his brother in an armoured circle of guardsmen, his
eyes rolled back, his right arm coiled like rope, his torso twitching about the
spear-shaft that pierced his flank.

The young Prince-Imperial was
careful to wipe the olive oil from the rail. Then he howled the way a little
boy should.

Why?
the voice asked. The
secret voice.

Why didn't you kill me
sooner?

He saw his mother beat her way
through the Pillarian Guards, heard her inconsolable scream. He watched his
uncle, the Holy Shriah, grasp her shoulders as she fell upon her beloved son.
He saw his sister Theliopa, absurd in her black gowns, approach in fey
curiosity. He glimpsed one of his own tears falling, a liquid bead, falling,
breaking upon his twin's slack cheek.

A thing so tragic. So much love
would be required to heal.

"Mommy!" he cried.
"Mommeeeeeeee!"

Gods make real.

***

There was such love in the touch
of a son.

The funerary room was narrow and
tall, plated with lines of blue-patterned Ainoni tile, but otherwise unadorned.
Light showered through air like steam. Idols glared from small niches, almost,
but never quite forgotten. Gold-gleaming censers wheezed in the corners,
puffing faint ribbons of smoke. The Empress leaned against the marble pedestal
in the room's centre, looking down, staring at the inert lines of her littlest.

She began with his fingers,
humming an old song that made her slaves weep for recognition. Sometimes they
forgot she shared their humble origins. Smiling, she looked at them as though
to say,
Yes, I've been you all along...

Just another slave.

She raised a forearm, cleansed
it with long gentle strokes, elbow to wrist, elbow to wrist.

He was cold like clay. He was
grey like clay. Yet, no matter how hard she pressed, she could not rob him of
his form. He insisted on remaining her son.

She paused to cry. After a time
she swallowed away the ache, cleared her throat with a gentle cough. She
resumed her work and her humming. It almost seemed that she carved him more
than she cleansed, that with every stroke he somehow became more real. The
flawless lines and moist divets. The porcelain gleam of skin. The little mole
beneath his left nipple. The constellation of freckles that reached like a
shawl from shoulder to slender shoulder.

She absorbed all of it, traced
and daubed and rinsed it, with movements that seemed indistinguishable from
devotion.

There was such love in the touch
of a son.

His chest. The low curve of his
abdomen. And of course his face. Sometimes something urged her to prod and to
shake, to punish him for this cruel little game. But her strokes remained
unperturbed, slow and sure, as if the fact of ritual were some kind of proof
against disordered souls.

She wrung the sponge, listened
to the rattle of water. She smiled at her little boy, wondered at his beauty.

His hair was golden.

He smelled, she thought, as
though he had been drowned in wine.

***

Kelmomas pretended to weep.

She bundled him tight against
her breast, and he squirmed clear of the blankets crowded between them. He
pressed himself against her shuddering length. Her every sob welled through him
like waves of lazy heat, washed him with bliss and vindication.

"Don't let go!"
she
gasped, pressing her cheek back from his damp hair.
"Never-never-please!"

Her face was his scripture,
written with looms of skin, muscle, and tendon. And the truths he read there
were holy.

He knew it so intimately he
could tell whenever a mole had darkened or a lash had fallen from her eyelids.
He had heard the priests prattle about their Heavens, but the truth was that
paradise lay so much nearer—and tasted of salt.

Her face eclipsed him, the
ligaments of anguish, the trembling lips, the diamonds streaming from her eyes.

"Kel," she sobbed.
"Poor baby..."

He keened, squashed the urge to
kick his feet in laughter.
Yes!
he cried silent glee, the limb-wagging
exultation of a child redeemed.
Yes!

And it had been so easy.

You are,
the secret voice
said,
her only love remaining.

CHAPTER
SIX

Marrow

Ask the dead and they will
tell you.

All roads are not equal.

Verily, even maps can sin.

—
Ekyannus I,
44 EPISTLES

What the world merely kills,
Men murder.

—
Scylvendi Proverb

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132
Year-of-the-Tusk), The River Rohil

The Wizard picked his way
through the cool forest deeps, his bones as old as his thoughts were young. He
huffed and grimaced, but there was a knowing cadence to his hobble, proof of
prior years spent travelling. Four days he had trudged, wending between the
pillar trees, squinting at the sun's glare through the spring-thin canopy,
using the slow crawl of distant landmarks to guide him to his destination...

Marrow.

All Achamian knew of this place
was what his Galeoth slave, Geraus, had told him. It was a Scalpoi entrepôt
located at the westward end of the long navigable stretch of the River Rohil, a
place where the companies of scalpers who worked the hinterland could collect
their bounties and purchase supplies. As the nearest centre of any description
to the tower, this was where Geraus would come, three or four times a year, to
sell his pelts and, with the gold Achamian gave him, secure those goods they
could not improvise for themselves. An even-tempered, slow-speaking man, Geraus
had always taken wary delight in telling them the stories of his visits.
Perhaps because the journey was both arduous and perilous—Tisthanna rarely
forgave Achamian the weeks of Geraus's absence—or perhaps because they simply
marked a deviation from the routine of his life, Geraus was given to
foot-stomping airs for the days immediately following his return. Only when his
tales were completed would he retreat to the borders of his gentle and
dependable self. They had always been his time to shine, for the slave of the
great Wizard to be "world-shouldered," as the Galeoth say.

For the most part, the visits
seemed to be skulking, secretive affairs, transactions made between trusted men
and trusted men only. A bag of beans, to hear Geraus speak of it, was as
valuable and fraught with complication as a purse of gold or a bale of scalps.
He made no secret of his discretion—in fact, he seemed to take great pride in
it. Even when his children were infants, Geraus seemed bent on impressing them
with the inestimable survival value of humility. The greatest virtue of any
slave, he always seemed to be saying, was the ability to pass unnoticed.

No different than a spy,
Achamian could not help reflecting.

To think he had believed those
days dead and gone, wandering the Three Seas, passing from court to court,
holding his head high before sneering kings and potentates—a Schoolman still.
Even though he had shed the fat, even though he wore wool and animal skins
instead of muslin and myrrh, the simple fact of striking for unseen horizons
had brought his past back to prickling life. Sometimes, when he glanced up
through greening limbs, he would see the turquoise skies of Kian, or when he
knelt to refill his waterskin, the heaving black of the northern Meneanor.
Blinks had become glimpses, each with its own history, its own peculiar sense
and beauty. Caste-noble courtiers laughing, their faces painted white. Steaming
delicacies served by oiled slaves. Fortifications sheathed in enamelled tiles,
gleaming beneath arid suns. A black-skinned prostitute drawing high her knees.

Twenty years had slipped away,
and not a day had passed.

He already found himself
mourning Geraus and his family, far more than he would have imagined. Slaves
were funny that way. It was as though the fact of ownership shrouded certain
obvious and essential human connections. You assumed it would be the
conveniences
you would miss, not the slaves who provided them. Now, Achamian could care
less about the comforts—they seemed contemptible. And something inner shook
whenever he thought of their faces—laughing or crying, it did not
matter—something jarred loose by the knowledge he would never sit with them
again.

It made him feel like a weepy
grandfather.

Perhaps it was good, this
suicidal turn his life had taken.

He paused, savoured the gilded
granduer of the evening wilderness seen from afar. The escarpment scrawled
along the horizon, a long-wandering band of vertical stone mellowing in the
dusk, buttressed by scree-and-boulder-choked ramps that descended into the
forests below. He could see the Long-Braid Falls, so named because of the way
the River Rohil divided about a great head of stone on the scarp's edge,
twisting down in two thundering cataracts.

Marrow lay immediately below,
soaked in the waterfall's rose-powder haze. The original town, according to
Geraus, had been built downriver but had crept like a caterpillar to the
escarpment's base as scalp broker after scalp broker vied to be the first to
greet the westward-bound Scalpoi. Now, hacked out of the surrounding forest, it
looked like a sore scabbed in pitch and wood, huts piled upon shanties, all
clapped together using logs and orphaned materials, packed along the riverbank,
encrusting the lower terraces of the cliff.