The Judging Eye (35 page)

An old woman's paper blink.

Bent knees. The ground rising
tidal. Strong hands reaching out for her wrist, drawing it up. Unseen lips
against the heat of her palm. The smell of copper and skin.

An ancient look suddenly
infantile with wonder.

"My name," she
whispered, "is Psatma Nannaferi."

The pulse and fork of blood. A
voice so close the speaker could not be seen. The pulse and fork of blood
behind this place...

"I am the White-Luck... I
walk. I breathe."

"Yes," she gasped,
shaking her wizened head in affirmation. A soul, wrought of iron and cruelty,
quivering like a maiden in the flower of her first bleeding. "W-we are
siblings, you and I."

Praise be our Mother.

"Siblings..."

A trembling hand held out to an
unseen cheek. The pads of calloused fingers, touching nothing, spanning out as
though across grease or paint. Tears cleansing an old woman's eyes.

Tears for a life forgotten.

"So beautiful."

Tears for what stood in its
place.

***

Momemn...

Esmenet was standing before her
great silvered mirror when she first glimpsed Kelmomas mooning in the shadowy
corners of her dressing room, almost small enough to go unnoticed.

Morning light showered through
the unshuttered balcony, so bright it seemed to render her apartments blinking
dim beyond the glare it cast across the floor. She appraised her image with the
negligent attention of those who spend too much time before mirrors, her
thoughts far too occupied with points of strategy to care about her appearance.
Maithanet and Phinersa had withdrawn but moments earlier, leaving her with
innumerable "suggestions" on how to best disarm, overawe, or even
intimidate Hanamem Sharacinth. She was due to meet with the Yatwerian Matriarch
within the watch.

She saw his reflection peeking
through the silken folds of her hanging gowns, one crimson, the other cerulean
blue. He was a shy, furtive shadow, scarcely more substantial than the fabric
hanging about him. She knew instantly that all was not well, but
something—habit, or perhaps exhaustion—prevented her from acknowledging him. A
pang gripped her throat. Not so long ago it had been a game that both Samarmas
and he had played, hiding and seeking through her wardrobe while she was
dressed. And now...

"Sweetling?" she
called. She glimpsed her smile in the mirror: It was so grim that she flushed
in shock. Was this how she looked every time she smiled, as though she merely
bent her lips?

Kelmomas stared at his toes
instead of replying.

She dismissed her body-slaves
with a vague flutter of her fingers, turned to look at him directly. Birdsong
floated on the cool morning drafts.

"Sweetling... Where's
Porsi?"

She winced at the question,
which she had asked out of habit. Porsi had been scourged and turned out for
her negligence. When Kelmomas failed to respond, Esmenet found herself looking
back into the mirror, pretending to be preoccupied with the twists of muslin
about her waist. Her hands automatically hitched and smoothed, hitched and
smoothed.

"I c-can be Sammy..."

She heard these words more with
her breast it seemed than her ears. A flush of cold about the heart. Even
still, she continued to face the mirror.

"What do you mean? Kel, what
are saying?"

Our children are so familiar to
us that we often forget them, which is why the details of their existence
sometimes strike us with discomfiting force. Either because she watched him
through the mirror or in spite of it, Esmenet suddenly saw her son as a little
stranger, the child of some unknown womb. For a moment, he seemed too beautiful
to be...

Believed.

"If you don't..."
Kelmomas began in a pinched voice. He was twisting the fabric of his tunic
against his right hip, causing the hem to ride up his thighs.

At last she turned, sighing as
if irritated and feeling instantly ashamed for it. "Sweetling. If I don't
what
?"

His little shoulders jerked in a
soundless gasp. He stared down with the fierce concentration that only injured
boys seemed able to summon—as though seeing could choke what was seen.

"If you don't w-want me...
If you don't want... Kelmomas, I can be Sam-Sammi."

Heartbreak crashed over her,
numbed her to the extremities. In a rush she saw the full compass of her
selfishness. Had she even truly mourned for Samarmas, an anguished part of her
wondered, or had she simply made him evidence of her own hardship? For whom had
she grieved?

She tried to speak, but there
was no voice in the sound she made.

Kelmomas warred with his
trembling lips. "I l-look... look j-just like..." He fell to his
rump, then slumped into a silken bundle onto the floor. He did not sob, nor did
he wail; he keened, a noise every bit as small as his frame and yet animal in
its intensity, its honesty.

Abandoning her reflection,
Esmenet pressed through cool fabric to kneel over him. Now that she could see
her crime, it seemed she had known all along. Trapped in circles of self-pity,
pinned by the weight of endless duty and obligation, she had never paused to
consider what Kelmomas suffered. As devastated and desolate as she had been the
past days, she possessed the same vein of flint that tempered the heart of all
mothers, the same hereditary knowledge. Children died. They died all the time,
such was the cruelty of the world.

But for Kelmomas. He had lost so
much more than a sibling or a playmate. He had lost his days. He had lost
himself
.
And he could not comprehend.

I'm all he has left,
she
thought, stroking his fine, golden hair.

Even still, something dark in
her recoiled.

Children. They wept so much.

***

Save for the long gold-and-white
banners depicting the Circumfix, the Imperial Audience Hall on the Andiamine
Heights looked much the same as it had during the Ikurei Dynasty. Everything
was designed to overawe petitioners and to concentrate the glory and the
dignity of those sitting upon the Mantle. The old Nansur Emperors had always
aspired to an architectural and decorative opulence at odds with their actual
power, perhaps thinking that the illusion, if pursued with enough patience and
zeal, could be made manifest.

It was as Kellhus said:
Monuments were as much prayers as they were tools, overreaching arrested in
dwarfing stone. That the world was littered with their ruins illustrated more
than a few uneasy facts regarding the human soul. Men were always inclined to
bargain from a position of strength, especially where the Gods were concerned.

Today, Esmenet could not help
but reflect, would almost certainly be a case in point.

She had grown quite accustomed
to her seat just below the Mantle on the dais, fond of it even. Several paces
from her slippered feet, steps descended in broad hemispheric arcs to the
Auditory, the main floor where the penitents and courtiers assembled. An arcade
of immense pillars soared to either side, diminishing both in perspective and
illumination. Ornate tapestries hung motionless between the marble trunks, each
a Gift from some province of the New Empire, each featuring the Circumfix as
its central motif. Animal totems from Thunyerus. Tigers and twining lotus from
Nilnamesh...

Everything, it seemed, had been
pinned to her position, as though stone and space had faces that could turn,
that could lower in obeisance. She was the windless centre, the intangible
point of balance.

But it was the missing rear wall
that pleased her most, the sense of natural light showering over her shoulders,
the knowledge that everyone gathered across the Auditory saw her against the
sky-bright firmament. It rendered what could be the most vulnerable position,
the place of the effigy, into something too elusive to serve as a convincing
target of curses. She loved nothing more than evening audiences, where
petitioners often held their hands against the sun to see. It let her act and
speak with the impunity of silhouettes.

She even liked the fact that
birds continually became fouled in the nearly invisible netting that had been
draped over the opening to prevent them from nesting in the vaults. There was
something at once sinister and reassuring to the sense of flutter and battle
hanging over her periphery. They relieved her, it seemed, of the need to make
threats. On any given day, there would only be one or two trapped, their
felt-limbed struggles too small and their cries too shrill to bring about any
real compassion.

Today there were four.

Sometimes after sunset, she had
allowed Samarmas help the slaves set them tree. Eyes miracle wide. Hands
trembling. His smile was like tear, it was so intense.

The gentle swell of orisons from
the upper galleries announced the Matriarch's imminent entrance—one of
innumerable hymns to the Aspect-Emperor.

Our souls rise from darkness,

at once near and far.

Our souls fall into darkness,

through gates left ajar.

He comes before,

A candle carried into forever
after.

He comes before...

Thinking of the twins, Esmenet
set her teeth, warred against the pang that threatened to crack her painted
face. Kelmomas had been inconsolable, and she had been forced to leave him
bawling, begging for her to hold him, promising to become his dead brother for
her sake.

"We l-love you,
Mom-mommy... So-so m-much..."

We
, he had said, his
voice small and forlorn. She could scarce think of the episode without blinking
the heat from her eyes. She exhaled slow and deep, doing her best to appear
motionless. The great bronze doors swung soundlessly open, and she watched
Hanamem Sharacinth, the nominal ruler of the Cult of Yatwer, stride into the
abandoned Auditory. The Matriarch was supposed to dress in gunny to signify her
poverty, but vertical bands gleamed across her earth-coloured gown with her
every step. Maithanet accompanied her, resplendent as always in commodious
white and gold.

He comes before,

A candle carried into forever
after.

He comes before...

The end of the chorus faded into
the pitch of ringing stone. The Yatwerian Matriarch stiffly dipped to one knee,
then the other. "Your Glory," she said, before pressing her face to
her reflection across the marble floor.

Esmenet nodded to demonstrate
Imperial Favour. "Rise, Sharacinth. We are all children of the
Ur-Mother."

The older woman lifted herself,
though not without some effort. "Indeed, your Glory." She looked to
Maithanet, as though expecting some kind of assistance, then remembered
herself. She was not accustomed, Esmenet realized, to the company of her
betters. Esmenet had received many petitioners over the years, long enough to
reliably guess the tenor of an audience from the first exchange of words.
Sharacinth, she could tell, had made hard habit out of authority, to the point
where she could not be trusted to show either grace or deference. Defensiveness
hung about the old woman like an odour.

Esmenet cut directly to the
point. "What do you know of the White-Luck Warrior?"

"I thought as much,"
the Matriarch huffed, her eyes narrow with arrogance. Her face was angular and
curiously bent, as though it were a thing of clay left too long on one side.

"And why would that be?"
Esmenet asked with mock graciousness.

"Who hasn't heard the
rumours?"

"The
treason
, you
mean."

"The treason, then."

For a moment the outrageousness
of her tone quite escaped Esmenet. So often, it seemed, she forgot her exalted
station and discoursed with others as though they were her equals. She found
herself blinking in indignation.
She hasn't even condoled me for the loss of
my son!

"And what have you
heard?"

A calculated pause. Sharacinth's
eyes seemed bred to bovine insolence, her lips to a sour line. "That the
White-Luck has turned against the Aspect-Emperor... Against you."

Esmenet struggled to draw breath
around her outrage. Arrogant ingrate! Treacherous old bitch!

Was this what she had imagined
all those years ago, sitting on her sill in Sumna, enticing passers-by with a
glimpse of the shadows riding up and down her inner thighs? Knowing nothing of
power, Esmenet had confused it with its trappings. Ignorance—few things were so
invisible. She could remember staring at the coins she had so coveted, those
coins that could ward starvation or clothe bruised skin, and wondering at the
profile of the man upon them, the Emperor who seemed to stand astride her every
bounty and privation. Not hated. Not feared. Not loved. These were passions
better spent on his agents. The Emperor himself had always seemed... far too
far.

In the endless reveries between
beddings, she would sort through everything she could remember, all the lore,
inchoate and humbling, that a citizen affixes to the subject of their
sovereign. And in her soul's eye she would see him, Ikurei Xerius III, sitting
in
this very place
.