The Judging Eye (28 page)

The old slave led without
hesitation. He pressed through this or that commotion—a brawl, a wain buried to
the axles in muck, two stalled mule-trains—with the calm assertiveness of a
caste-noble, turning down lesser mud tracks only when marching companies
blocked their passage entirely. Without a word, he led Sorweel deeper and
deeper into the encampment. The grim stares of Thunyerus became the exotic canopies
of Nilnamesh became the haggling bustle of Cironj. Every turn, it seemed,
delivered them to another of the world's far-flung corners.

Before meeting the
Aspect-Emperor, Sorweel would have thought it impossible that one man could
make an instrument of so many disparate souls. The Sakarpi were a sparse
people. But even with their meagre numbers, not to mention common language and
traditions, King Harweel had found it difficult to overcome their feuds and
grudges. The more Sorweel pondered it, the more miraculous it seemed that all
the Men of the Three Seas, with their contradictory tongues and ancient
animosities, could find common purpose.

Everywhere he looked, he could
see it, hanging slack in the windless morning: the Circumfix.

Wasn't there proof in miracles?
Isn't that what the priests said?

Swaying to the canter of his
horse, Sorweel found himself glancing at face after face, a stranger for every
heartbeat, and finding bleak comfort in the careless way their looks skipped
past him. There was a kind of safety, he realized, in the Great Ordeal's
clamour. In the press of so many, how could he not be forgotten? And it seemed
that this was the only true desire that remained to him: to be forgotten.

Then, in the uncanny way that
familiar faces rise out of the anonymity of strangers, he saw Tasweer, the son
of Lord Ostaroot, one of his father's High Boonsmen. Two Conriyan knights led
him staggering, each holding chains welded to a collar about his skinned neck.
His wrists were cruelly bound. His elbows had been wrenched back about a wooden
rod. His hair was as wild as his eyes, and his
parm
, the traditional
padded tunic of Sakarpi noblemen, hung stained, ragged, and beltless above bare
knees.

The mere sight of him clutched
the breath from Sorweel's throat, returned him to the rain-swept battlements,
where he had last seen Tasweer—and his father. He could almost hear the crowing
horns...

The young man did not recognize
him, but rather stared with the unfixed intensity of those beaten back into the
depths of themselves. To his shame, Sorweel looked away—to judge the weather
across the horizon, he told himself. Yes, the weather. His horse felt
reed-legged beneath him, like something wavering in the summer heat. The world
smelled of mud cooking in the morning sun.

"Y-you?" a voice
croaked from below.

The young King could not bear to
look.

"Sorweel?"

Compelled to look down, he saw
Tasweer gazing up at him, his once open face almost bewildered, almost
horrified, even almost glad of heart, but in truth none of these things. The
captive reeled to a halt, blinking.

"Sorweel," he
repeated.

His Conriyan escorts cursed,
flicked his chains in warning.

"No!" the prisoner
cried, leaning against the links. A stubborn and helpless noise.
"Nooo!" as they yanked him to his knees in the muck. "Sorweel!
S-s-sorweel! Fight them! Y-you have to! Cut their throats while they sleep!
Sorweel! Sor—!"

One of the square-bearded
knights struck him full in the mouth, knocked him into rolling
half-consciousness.

As had happened so many times
since the city's fall, Sorweel found himself divided, struck into two separate
souls, one real, the other ethereal. In his soul's eye he slipped from his
saddle, his boots slapping into wheezing mud, and shouldered his way past the
Conriyans. He pulled Tasweer to his knees, held his head behind the ear. Blood
pulsed from the captive's nostrils, clotted the coarse growth rising from his
jaw. "Did you see?" Sorweel cried to the broken face. "Tasweer!
Did you see what happened to my father?"

But the bodily Sorweel simply
continued after his guide, his skin porcelain with chill.

"Noooo!" pealed hoarse
into air behind him, followed by raucous laughter.

The young King of Sakarpus
resumed his study of the nonexistent weather. The true horror of defeat, a
kernel of him realized, lay not in the fact of capitulation, but in the way it
kennelled in the heart, the way it loitered and bred and bred and bred.

The way it made fate out of
falling.

***

Eventually they came to the
northern perimeter of the encampment, to a broad field whose greening expanse
was marred by broad swaths of hoof-mudded turf and ornamented by stretches of
blooming yellow-cress. Small groups of horsemen rode patterns at various
intervals, answering to the booming cries of their commanders. They were doing
squad drills, Sorweel realized, riding a hearty breed not so different from
those used by Sakarpi Horselords.

The slave led him along a row of
white-canvas tents, most of them stocked with various kinds of stores. Where
the two of them had passed largely unnoticed before, now they drew stares,
largely from clots of loitering cavalrymen. Several even called out to them,
but Sorweel affected not to notice. Even well-wishes became insults when
shouted in an unfamiliar tongue.

Finally the slave reined to a
halt and dismounted before an expansive white pavilion. A crimson standard had
been hammered into the ground beside the entrance. It bore a black Circumfix
over a golden horse: the sign of the Kidruhil, the heavy cavalry that had
caused Harweel and his High Boonsmen so much grief in the skirmishes preceding
the Great Ordeal's arrival. A guard armoured in a gold-stamped cuirass stood
motionless beside it; he merely nodded at the slave as he led Sorweel across
the threshold.

A strange aroma permeated the
interior air, pleasant despite the bitter overtones. Like orange peels burning.
He stood rigid, his eyes adjusting to the enclosed light. The recesses of the
pavilion were largely unfurnished and unadorned: simple reed mats for flooring,
various accouterments hanging from posts, a wicker-and-wood cot covered with
empty scroll cases. The Circumfixes embroidered into the ceiling canvas cast vague
shadows across the ground.

Anasûrimbor Kayûtas sat at the
corner of a camp-table set against the centre post, alone save for a bald
secretary who mechanically inked lines of script, apparently adding to the
stacks of papyrus spread about him. The Prince-Imperial leaned back in his
chair, his sandalled feet kicked out and crossed on the mats before him. Rather
than acknowledge Sorweel, he gazed from one papyrus sheet to another, as though
following the thread of some logistical concern.

Sorweel's wizened guide knelt,
pressing his forehead to the stained mats, then withdrew the way he had come.
Sorweel stood alone and breathless.

"You're wondering,"
Kayûtas said, his eyes fixed on the vertical bars of script, "whether it
was a deliberate insult..." He set a final sheet down, following it with
still-reading eyes as he did so. He looked to Sorweel, paused in appraisal.
"Having a slave bring you here like this."

"An insult," Sorweel
heard himself reply, "is an insult."

A handsome smirk. "I fear
no court is so simple."

The Prince-Imperial leaned back,
raised a wooden bowl to his lips-water, Sorweel noted after he set it down.

It was no small thing, to stand
before the son of a living god. Even with his hair trimmed so close and so
curiously to the contours of his skull, Kayûtas closely resembled his father.
He had the same long strong face, the same pearl-shining eyes. He even
possessed the same unnerving manner. His every movement, it seemed, followed
preordained lines, as though his soul had mapped all the shortest distances
beforehand. And when he was still, he was utterly still. But for all that,
Anasûrimbor Kayûtas still possessed a
mortal
aura. There could be no
doubt that he faltered as other men faltered, that his skin, if pressed, would
be thin and warm...

That he could bleed.

"Tell me," the
Prince-Imperial continued, "what do your countrymen call it when men trade
useless words?"

Sorweel tried to breath away his
hackles. "Measuring tongues."

The Prince-Imperial laughed at
the cleverness of this. "Excellent. A name for jnan if there ever was one!
Let us dispense with 'tongue measuring' then. Agreed?"

The secretary continued
scratching characters across papyrus.

"Agreed," Sorweel
replied warily.

Kayûtas smiled with what seemed genuine
relief. "Let me speak to the matter then: My father needs more than your
city, he needs the obedience of her people as well. I suppose you know full
well what this means..."

Sorweel knew, though it had
become more and more difficult to contemplate. "He needs me."

"Precisely. This is why
you're here, to give your people a stake in our glorious undertaking. To make
Sakarpus part of the Great Ordeal."

Sorweel said nothing.

"But of course," the
Prince-Imperial continued, "we remain the enemy, don't we? Which I suppose
makes all this little more than a cunning ploy to win your loyalty... a way to
dupe you into betraying your people."

It was too late for that,
Sorweel could not help but think. "Perhaps."

"Perhaps," Kayûtas
repeated with a snort. "So much for not measuring tongues!"

A dull and resentful glare.

"Well, no matter," the
Prince-Imperial continued. "I'll keep
my
end of our bargain at
least." He winked as though at a joke. "I may not have the Gift of
the Few, but I am my father's son, and I possess many of his strengths. I find
languages effortless, as I suppose this conversation demonstrates. And I need
only look at your face to see your soul, not so clearly as Father, certainly,
but enough to sound the measure of you or anyone else before me. I can see the
depth of your pain, Sorweel, and though I think your people have simply reaped
the consequences of their own foolishness, I
do understand
. If I fail to
commiserate, it's because I hold you to the same standards of manly conduct as
would
your
father. Men weep to wives and pillows...

"Do you understand
me?"

Sorweel blinked in sudden shame.
Did they have spies watching him sleep as well?

"Excellent," Kayûtas
said, like a field captain pleased by the vigour of his company's response.
"I should also tell you that I
resent
this charge of my father's. I
even resent this interview, not simply because I lack the time, but because I
think it beneath me. I detest politics, and this relationship my father has
forced upon us is nothing if not political. Even still, I recognize that these
passions are a product of my own weakness. I will not, as other men might, hold
you accountable for them. My father wants me to be as a brother to you... And
since my father is more God than Man, I will do exactly as he wishes."

He paused as though to leave
room for Sorweel to reply, but the young King could scarce order his thoughts,
let alone speak. Kayûtas had been every bit as direct as he had promised, and
yet at the same time his discourse seemed bent to the point of deformity,
charged with a too-penetrating intelligence, pleated with an almost obscene
self-awareness...

Who were these people?

"I can see the embers of
sedition in your eyes," Kayûtas resumed, "a wild hunger to destroy
yourself in the act of avenging your father." His voice had somehow scaled
the surrounding canvas panels, so that it seemed to fall from all directions.
"At every turn you struggle, because you know not whether my father is a
demon, as your priests claim, or the Saviour the Men of Three Seas
know
him
to be. I do not begrudge you this, Sorweel. All I ask is that you inquire with
an open heart. I fear proof of my father's Holy Mission will come soon
enough..."

He paused as though distracted
by some unexpected thought. "Perhaps," he continued, "if we're
fortunate enough to survive that proof, you and I can have a different
conversation."

Sorweel stood rigid, braced
against the sense of futility that whelmed through him.
How?
was all he
could think.
How does one war against foes such as this?

"In the interim," the
Prince-Imperial said with an air of turning to more practical matters,
"you need to learn Sheyic, of course. I will have an instructor arranged
for you. And you need to show my Horse-masters that you're a true son of
Sakarpus. You are now a captain of the Imperial Kidruhil, Sorweel, a member of
the illustrious Company of Scions..." He lowered his chin in a curious
smile. "And I am your general."

Another long, appraising pause.
The old secretary had paused to cut a new tip on his quill, which he held in
fingers soaked black with ink. Sorweel caught him stealing a quick glance in
his direction.

"Is this agreeable to
you?" Kayûtas asked.

"What choice do I
have?"