The Judging Eye (34 page)

The two sergeants glared at each
other, Sarl in entreaty, like the son who always placates his father for his
brother's sake, and Kiampas in incredulous resentment, like the sole sane
officer in a host of madmen—which was, Achamian reflected, not all that far
from the case.

"We take the Low
Road," Lord Kosoter grated. "We enter the Black Halls."

His tone seemed to condemn all
humanity, let alone the petty dispute before him. The Nonman continued to stare
off into the east, tall and broad beneath his mottled cowl. The mountain
climbed the climbing ground beyond him, a white sentinel whispering with
altitude and distance.

"Cleric says he
remembers."

***

Achamian returned to find Mimara
fairly surrounded by Skin Eaters, most of them Bitten. She stood childlike in
the looming presence of Oxwora and Pokwas, her look one of guarded good humour.
She was careful to keep her face and posture directed toward the trail, as
though she expected to leave their company at any moment, as well as to not
look at any one of them for more than a heartbeat. He could tell she was
frightened, but not in any debilitating way.

"So you're Ainoni,
then?"

"Small wonder the Captain's
smitten..."

"Maybe he'll stop
undressing
us
with his cursed eyes!"

The laughter was genuine enough
to make Mimara smile, but utterly unlike the raucous mirth that was their norm.
Soldiers, Achamian had observed, often wore thin skins in the presence of women
they could neither buy nor brutalize. A light and careless manner, a gentle
concern for the small things, stretched across a sorrow and an anger that no
woman could fathom. And these men were more than soldiers, more than scalpers,
even. They were Skin Eaters. They were men who led lives of uncompromising
viciousness and savagery. Men who could effortlessly forget the dead rapist
that had been their bosom friend.

And they would try to woo what
they could not take.

"It's as I thought,"
Soma said as Achamian joined them. His look was amiable enough but with an edge
that advised no contradictions. "She's one of the Bitten as well!"

The smell of contrivance hung
about all their looks. They had planned this, Achamian realized, as a way of
luring the prize to
their
fire. The question was one of how far the
covenant went.

"The Ochain Passes are
closed," he said. "Blizzard."

He watched their faces struggle
to find the appropriate expressions.

There was comedy in all sudden
reversals, a kind of immaterial nudity, to find your designs hanging, stripped
of the logic that had been their fundament. Their carnal plots depended on the
expedition, and the expedition depended on the Passes.

"The decision has been
made," he said, trying hard not to sound satisfied.

"We brave the Black Halls
of Cil-Aujas."

CHAPTER NINE

Momemn

A beggar's mistake harms no
one but the beggar.

A king's mistake, however,
harms everyone but the king.

Too often, the measure of
power lies not in the number

who obey your will, but in
the number who suffer your stupidity.

—
Triamis I,
Journals and Dialogues

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

Her face seemed numb for
tingling.

"Does he hear us, Mommy?
Does he know?"

Esmenet clutched Kelmomas's
little hand so tight she feared she might hurt him. "Yes," she heard
herself say. The stone of the Ashery snared her words, held them close and
warm, as though she spoke into a lover's neck. "Yes. He's the son of an
earthly god."

According to Nansur custom, the
mother of a dead male child had to mark her face with her son's ashes each full
moon after the cremation: two lines, one down each cheek.
Thraxami
, they
were called, tears-of-the-pyre. Only when her tears no longer darkened them
could the rite cease. Only when the weeping ended.

Even now, she could feel his
residue across her cheeks, burning, accusing, as though transmuted, Samarmas
had become antithetical to his mother, a kind of poison that her skin could not
abide.

As though he had become wholly
his father's.

The tradition was too old, too
venerated, to be contradicted. Esmenet had seen engravings of women marked with
thraxami dating back to the early days of ancient Cenei, trains of them
marching like captives. And in the ritual dramas the temples put on during
Cultic festivals, mummers used black lines down a white-painted face to
represent desolate women the way they used red horizontal lines,
wurrami
,
to depict rage-maddened men. For the Nansur, thraxami were synonymous with
mourning.

But where others kept their
child's remains in their household shrine, little Samarmas, as a
Prince-Imperial, had been interred in the High Royal Ashery of the Temple
Xothei. So once again, what was tender and private for others became rank
spectacle for her. Thousands had mobbed the gates of the Imperial Precincts,
and thousands more the foundations of mighty Xothei, a seething carnival of
mourning and anticipation, mothers casting dust skyward and rending their hair,
slaves loafing and gawking, boys jumping to snatch glimpses over grown
shoulders, and many more. Even here, deep in the temple's mazed bowel, she
thought she could hear their anxious hum.

What would they say when they
saw that her cheeks were dry? What would they make of an Empress who could not
weep for the loss of her dearest child?

Illuminated only by the rare
lamp, the walls of the Ashery seemed to hang in a greater black. Each of the
niches spoke to the sensibilities of different ages and families. Some were
garish with gilding and ornament, while others, like the adjacent niches of
Ikurei Xerius and his nephew Ikurei Conphas, were simply chiselled into the raw
stone, bereft of the marble facing that graced so many of the others. She tried
not to ponder the irony of her son resting so close to Conphas, who had been
the Nansurium's last Emperor before the ascension of Kellhus. She likewise
ignored the guttered votives and small bowl of grain that had been left on the
sill of his niche.

Someday, she thought,
all
her
children would rest in this immobile gloom. Static. Speechless. Someday,
she
would reside here, cool dust encased in silver, gold, or perhaps Zeümi
jade—something cold, for all the substances that Men coveted were cold. Someday
the heat of her would leach into the world, and she would be as dirt to the
warm fingers of the living.

Someday she would be dead.

The relief that accompanied the
thought was so sudden, so violent, that she almost audibly gasped. A confusion
descended upon her, robbing her of memory and volition. She swayed, raised a
hand to her blinking eyes. Then she found herself on the floor, sitting in a
way that would have horrified her vestiaries it was so common, so
undignified—no better than a whore hanging her legs from a window. She saw
Kelmomas watching her, tried to smile reassurance. She leaned her head against
the unyielding marble, the image of him lingering in her soul's eye. Small.
Defenceless. The very image of his dead twin.

She heard his voice.

"Mommy? Does he hear
us?"

She simply could not stop seeing
him, Samarmas, his blood clotting the grass, his body as small as a dog, slowly
relaxing about the spear that pierced it, slowly drifting asleep. Every time
she blinked.

Every time she looked upon this
other son.

"I told you..."

"No... I mean when we
think
."
He was crying now, a desperate kind of hitching that made him bare his teeth.
"D-does Sammy hear us
when we think
?"

She opened her knees and he fell
into her arms, burned her neck with a muffled wail. And she saw—with grievous
clarity, it seemed—that Samarmas's death had sundered her soul in two, the one
part numb and wondering, the other clinging to this child, this replica, as
though trying to absorb his shudders.

How could she protect him? And
if she could not, how could she love?

She laid her head across his
scalp, blew at the hairs that stuck to the seal of her lips. Her cheeks were
wet, but whether the tears were her own she could not tell. No matter. The mob
would be appeased. Her Exalt-Ministers would be relieved, for the Yatwerian
matter had become far more than a Cultic nuisance. Who would raise voice or
hand against a bereaved mother? And Kellhus...

She was so tired. So weary.

"The dead hear everything,
Kel."

***

Iothiah...

A life lived, now forgotten.

And in its place...

A breeze as dry as hot ash. An
airy room, clean with tile and paint, the floor canted to drain storm-waters. A
woman in a simple linen shift, wedding young, her hair raven-dark, suckling an
infant, smiling, asking something sweet and curious. Her head tipped, almond
eyes flashing, poised to laugh at something soon to be said, a warm and gentle
wit.

Peach-coloured walls trimmed in
vining green.

A life forgotten...

Concern clouding her dark eyes.
A quick glance at the infant against her breast, then again the question.

"Love? Are you okay?"

You look like you're
dreaming...

A doorway, open onto a vista of
tan and blue—pale and soft and oceanic. A blue that does not hang close behind
the nodding palms, but opens and opens to the white ribs of heaven. A blue like
billowing cotton.

The threshold crossed. Then a
courtyard where gnarled old slaves chase chickens. A young scullery girl
staring, immovable save for her tracking gaze, her skin as brown as her broom
handle.

The gate. The street.

The infant wailing now, swung
from a frantic hip, the woman scolding, weeping, crying out: "What are you
doing? What has happened?"

Wake up, please! You're
scaring me!

A slender clutch knocked aside
by a strong, wide-waving arm. Steps taken. Distances rolled up into oblivion. A
tugging from spaces unseen. The woman shrieking, "My love! My love,
please!"

What have I done?

Two hundred and fifty-seven
years before, a Shigeki builder had saved twenty-eight silver talents by
purchasing burnt brick from farther up the River Sempis, where the clay was
riddled with sand. Aside from the tan hue, the tenement he raised was indistinguishable
from the others. Over the course of the following centuries, the flood-waters
had twice risen high enough to lave the southernmost pylons. Though the damage
appeared minimal, sheets of material had fallen from the base of the outermost
support, lending it a gnawed look, which for some reason, seemed to attract
urinating dogs.

It toppled exactly when it
should, drawing with it an entire quadrant, collapsing four floors of
apartments and crushing all the unfortunates within. There was a roar, a collective
peal of screams punched into silence. Afterwards, dust sweeping out and up. The
earthen clap and tinkle of raining bricks. Then streets packed with shouting
passers-by.

The woman and the infant were
gone.

A life forgotten...

The streets. Miraculous numbers.
Miraculous movement, like threads of sand falling into and through one another
without collision or redirection.

The alleyways. The rainbow
awnings, cooling the dust, shielding the walking files, dimming the sun to a
threaded glare.

The great agora.

A peacock walking holy and
unmolested through a parting crowd, iridescent eyes shimmering from its
plumage, blessing all those who took care not to match them. A man barking, his
face bent low and dangerous, then slapping the boy who walked with him. The
click of teeth in paste. Two old men scratching their heads and laughing, lips
drawn across gums, over teeth like pieces of broken pottery. A distempered dog
limping up the temple steps, crooning low through half-open jaws.

A life...

She sat in the dust with the
other wretches, a listless row of them in the shade of a temple wall, palms
raised to catch rain, infirmities folded beneath tattered cloth or festering in
the haze of dust. Indecent with age, threshed of all compassion, she sat
begging. She did not look at the passing to and fro of miserly shadows.

One thousand four hundred and
twenty-two years before, a Scylvendi marauder had raped a Ceneian woman who had
not the courage to take her life as was the tradition. She fled her family,
fearing they would kill her to preserve their honour, and bore her child, a
son, on the banks of the Great River Sempis. Now a descendant of that son
tossed a halved coin exactly when he should, but carelessly, so that the bitten
point spun from the outer edge of her thumb, causing her to look out and up...