The Judging Eye (36 page)

How could it be possible?

Once, quite on a whim, she had
shown Samarmas a silver kellic. "Do you know," she had asked,
pointing to the apparition of her own profile across its face, "who that
is?" He had a way of opening his mouth when astounded, as though trying to
shape his lips about a nail. It was at once comical—and heartbreaking in that
it so clearly betrayed his idiocy.

My son!
she silently
cried. Picking wounds had become her path of least resistance, the one
effortless thing. But there was no escaping the clamour of her
responsibilities, the motions she had to force against the grain of what should
be overwhelming grief. She had no choice but to have faith in her painted face.

"But you've heard
more
,"
she asked in a hard and steady voice—a voice proper to the Empress of the Three
Seas. "Haven't you?"

"More. More,"
Sharacinth muttered. "Of course, I've heard more. When does one not always
hear more? Rumours are like locusts or slaves or rats. They breed
indiscriminately."

They had known she was a
prideful woman. It was the whole reason for summoning the bitch here: Maithanet
had hoped the dimensions and reputation of her surroundings would be enough to
mellow her hubris into something more malleable, something they could shape to
their own purposes.

Apparently not.

"Matriarch, you would do
well to recollect the stakes of our conversation."

A sneer—an open sneer! And for
the first time, Esmenet glimpsed it, the look that is the terror of all those
who command positions of power: the look that says,
You are temporary, no
more a passing affliction.
Suddenly she understood the staged calculation
behind her throne and its position above the auditory floor. With one look, it
seemed, the old woman had thrown it all into stark relief: the truth behind the
hierarchy of disparate souls.
Recognition
, Esmenet realized. Power came
down to recognition.

It was all naked force
otherwise.

"Matriarch!"
Maithanet
boomed, drawing into his voice and aspect all the magisterial authority of the
Thousand Temples.

Sharacinth opened her mouth in
retort—not even the Shriah could cow her, it seemed. But whatever breath she
possessed was sucked from her lungs...

Instead she wheezed and stumbled
back, raised a hand against the sudden, immolating light that had sparked into
existence above the floor before her. It danced and spiked outward, so
brilliant it rendered everything dim. Crazed shadows swung from her ankles
across the far corners of the Auditory. The point grew and sparkled, chattered
with incandescences that possessed intensities beyond the gaze's conception...

Esmenet lowered her forearm,
blinked at scalded eyes.

There he stood, tall,
magnificent and otherworldly, exactly as she remembered him. A white silk tunic
fell loose over his armour, embroidered in countless crimson tusks, each the
length of a thorn. His beard was braided gold, his mane was long and
free-flowing. The two demon heads hung bound to his right hip, mouthing curses
without breath... There was a mad density to his aspect, a hoarding of reality
that denied the world the sharpness of its edges and the substance of its
weight.

It seemed the earth should groan
beneath his feet. Her husband...

The Aspect-Emperor.

Sharacinth stood like a
shipwreck survivor leaning to the memory of tossed seas. Two paces behind her
and to the right, Maithanet lay supine across the shining floor. The Shriah of
the Thousand Temples
kneeling
.

Esmenet knew enough not to watch
Kellhus assume the Mantle to her right. Confidence, which in all complicated
situations is nothing more than the pretence of premeditation, is ever the
outward marker of power. There could be no appearance of improvisation.

"Hanamem Sharacinth,"
he said, his voice at once mild and permeated with the tones of imminent
murder, "do you think you merit standing in my presence?"

The Matriach nearly fell over
trying to throw herself to the floor. "N-no!" she sobbed in old woman
terror. "M-Most Glorious... Pluh-please—"

"Will you," he
interrupted, "take steps to assure that this sedition against me, this
blasphemy
,
comes to an end?"

"Y-yesssh!" she wailed
to the floor. She even hooked her fingers behind her head.

"For, make no mistake,
I
shall war
against you and yours." The grinding savagery of his voice
swallowed the entirety of the hall, battered the ear like fists. "Your
deeds I shall strike from the stones. Your temples I shall turn into funeral
pyres. And those that still dare take up breath or arms against me, I shall
hunt, unto death and beyond! And my Sister, whom you worship, shall lament in
the dark, her memory no more than a dream of destruction. Men shall spit to
cleanse their mouths of her name!"

The old woman shook, arched her
back as if gagging in terror.

"Do you understand what I
say, Sharacinth?"

"Yessssh!"

"Then this is what you
shall do. You shall heed your Empress and your Shriah. You shall put an end to
the ignoble sham that is your office. You shall make claim to the
truth
of
your station. You shall make war upon the wickedness within your own temple—you
shall cleanse the filth from your own altar!"

Somewhere beyond the vaulted
ceiling, a cloud engulfed the sun, and everything dimmed save the old woman
writhing upon her reflection. Kellhus leaned forward, and it seemed all the
world leaned with him, that the pillars themselves tilted, hanging above the
Matriach, shivering in catastrophic outrage.

"And you shall hunt this
witch you call your mistress, Psatma Nannaferi! You shall put an end to the
sacrilege that is your Mother-Supreme!"

Her face averted, her elbows to
the floor, she shook two white-palmed hands out in warding.

"No-noooo!
Pluh-pluh-pleeeeese—"

"SHARACINTH!" The name
crashed through the Hall, boomed through its arched recesses. "WOULD YOU
OFFEND ME IN MY OWN HOUSE?"

The Matriarch shrieked something
inarticulate. A puddle of urine spread about her knees.

Then, as though exhaling a pent
breath, the world resumed its natural lines and proportions. The unseen cloud
passed from the unseen sun, and indirect light once again showered blue upon the
dais.

"Taste your breath,"
Kellhus said as he stood. He stepped out to loom patient and fatherly over the
woman blinking up at him from the base of the steps. "
Taste it
,
Sharacinth, for it is the mark of my mercy. Fight the inclination of your
heart, conquer your weakness for pride, for spite. Do not make humiliation of
truth. I know you can feel it, the promise of release, the bone-shuddering
release. Turn from the shrill poison of your conceit, from the hooked fists and
knuckled teeth, from the rod of cold iron that holds you rigid when you should
sleep. Turn from these things and embrace the truth of the life—the
life!
—that
I offer you."

Esmenet had heard these words so
many times they should have seemed more a recitation than something
meant
,
an incantation that never failed to undo the knots of pride that so bound men.
And yet each time, she found herself sinking through the surface, floating
utterly submerged. Each time, she heard them
for the first time
, and she
was frightened and renewed.

Over the years, her husband had
ceased being many things to Esmenet. But he was a miracle still.

The Matriarch of the Cult of
Yatwer wept as a child might, snuffling and mumbling,
"F-f-forgive...
F-f-forgive meeeee..."
Over and over.

"Comfort her," Kellhus
said to his half-brother. Nodding in obeisance, Maithanet stood and crouched at
the wailing woman's side.

Smiling, the Aspect-Emperor
turned to Esmenet and reached out his hand. He spoke the sun-fiery words. She
clutched two of his outstretched fingers, fell into his pulsing embrace. She
felt the open spaces about them collapsing, dropping in sheets of ethereal
fabric, falling away.

His light consumed her...

***

...and they were alone together,
in the cool gloom of their private apartments. His legs crumpled, and he leaned
and lurched against her. Grunting, Esmenet helped him stagger to their bed.

"Wife..." was all he
said, rolling onto his back even though he still wore his sword, Certainty,
sheathed across his shoulder blades. He raised a heavy hand to his forehead.

More air than light filtered in
from the seaward balconies. The rooms were broad and surprisingly
low-ceilinged, articulated by a series of steps that divided the bedroom proper
from the lower regions. The furnishings were elegant and, with the exception of
the crimson-cushioned bed, spare. She often wondered if her antipathy to
ornament was more a result of the maddening complexities of her new life or a
pining for the simple squalour of her old.

"How many?" she asked,
knowing that he could only translocate the space of a horizon, and only then to
places he had long studied from a distance or to places he had actually been.
He had literally travelled all the way from the Istyuli Plains horizon by
horizon.

"Many."

She found herself looking away,
blinking. The profile of various cities frescoed the walls, creating the pale
illusion that the room occupied some impossible space over Invishi, Nenciphon,
Carythusal, Aöknyssus, and Oswenta. Esmenet had commissioned them several years
previous—as a physical reminder of her position in political space. It was a
decision she had long since regretted.

Simple,
her soul
whispered.
I must make things simple.

"You came..." she
began, shocked to find she was already crying. "You came as s-soon as you
heard?" She knew this could not be true. Each and every night Mandate
Far-Callers spoke with him in his dreams, apprised him of all that happened on
the Andiamine Heights and elsewhere. He had come because of the situation with the
Yatwerians, because of Sharacinth. Not because of his idiot son.

There were no accidents with
Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

He sat up on the edge of the
bed, and somehow she found herself in his arms, immersed in his wide-world
husband smell, wracked with sobs.

"We've been cursed!"
she gasped. "Cursed!"

Kellhus gently pressed her back
into his gaze and somehow above the surface of her immediate grief. She found
herself drawing cool and soothing air.

"Misfortune," he said.
"Nothing more, Esmi."

When had his voice become a
drug?

"But isn't that what the
White-Luck means? Mimara has fled, and no one can find her, Kellhus! I have
this-this terrible feeling—such a terrible feeling! And now Samarmas!
Sweet-sweet Samarmas! Do you know what they're saying in the streets? Do you
know that some of them actually celebrate! That—"

"You must take no action
against them," he said with stern compassion—the perfect tone. He always
spoke in the perfect tone, words like cool plaster trowelled across the cracks
of desire and confusion. "Not the Yatwerians. They are not a people that
we can massacre or uproot like the Mongilean Kianene. They are too widespread,
too diffuse. The Great Ordeal is all that matters, Esmi. It has taken us too
long as it stands. Golgotterath must be overcome before the No-God is
resurrected. The immediate ever clouds the far, and desire ever twists reason
to its own ends. I know these concerns seem to blot out all other
considerations—"

"Seem?
Seem?
Kellhus!
Kellhus! Our
son is dead!
"

Her voice pealed raw across the
polished stone hollows.

Silence. Where for others the
lack of response augured wounds scored or truths too burdensome to ignore or
dismiss, for her husband it meant something altogether different. His silence
was always one with the world about it, monolithic in the way of framing
things. Without exception it said,
Hear the words you have spoken.
You.
It was never, ever, the mark of error or incapacity.

Which was why, perhaps, she
found him so easy to worship and so difficult to love.

Then he uttered her name,
"Esmi..."

"Esmi," spoken in a
voice so warm, so laced with compassion, that she found herself once again
crying freely. He kissed her scalp and hair, a divine monster. "Shhhh...
I'm not asking you to take comfort in abstractions, for there is none. Even
still, the Great Ordeal remains the end that maps all others. We cannot allow
anything,
anyone
, to take precedence over it. Not riots. Not the
collapse of the New Empire..." It was as if she stared into her own eyes,
his look was so canny—save that he knew her so much better than she knew
herself.

"Not even the death of our
son."

She had understood this all
along. His tone had told her so.

A breeze bellied the dust-violet
sheers, drawing them over the hard line of the Meneanor Sea. A finger of light
flickered across the mural of Carythusal.