The Judging Eye (45 page)

"The Imperial
Precincts," Phinersa said apologetically, "are simply too large, your
Glory."

"Then we must go on the
offensive!" Imhailas exclaimed. Until this moment, the handsome
Exalt-Captain had done his best to slip between the cracks of her Imperial notice,
his eyes wired open by the certainty that he would be held accountable. The
security of the Imperial Precincts was his sole responsibility.

"That is true in any
event," Maithanet said gravely. "But we have another possibility to
consider..."

Esmenet found herself studying
Sharacinth's ash-grey bodyguard, quite numb to what she was seeing. The smell
of corruption was already wafting through the hall, like sediment kicked up in
water. How absurd was it for them to have this discussion—this council of
war—here in the presence of the very circumstantial debris they hoped to bury?
People were dead, whole lives had been extinguished, and yet here they stood,
plotting...

But then, she realized, the
living had to forever look past the dead—on the pain of joining them.

"We must ensure this crime
is decried for what it is," she said. "Few will believe us, but
still, it's imperative that an Inquiry be called, and that someone renowned for
his integrity be made Exalt-Inquisitor."

"One of the Patriarchs of
the other Cults," Maithanet said, studying the carpets meditatively.
"Perhaps Yagthrûta..." He raised his eyes to her own. "The man
is every bit as rabid as his Patron God when it comes to matters of ritual
legality."

Esmenet found herself nodding in
approval. Yagthrûta was the Momian Patriarch, famed not only because he was the
first Thunyeri to reach such an exalted rank, but because of his reputed piety
and candour. Apparently, he had journeyed across the Meneanor from Tenryer to
Sumna in naught but a skiff—a supreme gesture of faith if there ever was one.
Best of all, his barbaric origins insulated him against the taint of the Shrial
or Imperial Apparati.

"Excellent," she said.
"In the meantime, it is absolutely crucial we find this Psatma
Nannaferi..."

"Indeed, your Glory,"
Imhailas said, nodding with almost comic grandiloquence. "As the Khirgwi
say, the headless snake has no fangs."

Esmenet scowled. The Captain had
a habit of spouting inane adages—from some popular scroll of aphorisms, no
doubt. Usually she found it charming—she was not above forgiving handsome men
their quirks, particularly when
she
was their motive—but not on a matter
as grievous as this, and certainly not in the presence of rank carnage.

"I'm afraid I've nothing
new to add, your Glory," Phinersa said, his gaze ranging across the scenes
of war and triumph along the walls. "We still think she's somewhere in
Shigek. Think. But with the Fanim raiding the length of the River
Sempis..." His eyes circled back only to flinch the instant they met her
own.

Esmenet acknowledged the dilemma
with a grimace. After spending years simply running, Fanayal ab Kascamandri had
suddenly become aggressive, extraordinarily aggressive, effectively cutting the
overland routes to Eumarna and Nilnamesh and, according to the latest reports,
storming fortified towns on the river itself—using
Cishaurim
no less!
All Shigek was in an uproar—precisely the kind of confusion the Mother-Supreme
needed.

Weakness, she realized. They
smelled weakness, all the enemies of the New Empire, be they heathen or
Orthodox.

"Unless you issue warrants
for the
arrest
of the High-Priestesses," Phinersa continued,
"we simply will not find this Nannaferi."

Of course by "arrest" he
meant torture. Esmenet found herself looking to Maithanet. "I need to
consider that... Perhaps if our Exalt-Inquisitor is disposed to blame
Sharacinth's murder on some kind of feud
within
the Cult, it might
provide the pretext we need."

The Shriah of the Thousand
Temples pursed his lips. "We need to proceed cautiously. Perhaps, Empress,
we should consult the Aspect-Emperor."

Esmenet felt her look harden
into a glare.

Why?
she found herself
thinking.
Why doesn't Kellhus trust you?

"Our immediate priority,"
she declared, pretending he had not spoken, "is to prepare for the
eventuality of riots. Phinersa, you must recruit infiltrators. Imhailas, you
must
assure
that the Precincts are secured—I will not have this happen a
second time! Tell Ngarau that we are to be provisioned for the possibility of a
siege. And contact General Anthirul. Have him recall one of the Arcong
Columns."

For a moment all of them stood
as motionless as the dead.

"Go! Both of you!
Now!"

Startled into action, the two
men hastened back the way they had come, the one tall and flashing in his
ceremonial armour, the other dark and fluid in his black-silk robes. Esmenet
found herself nagged by the certainty that Phinersa had momentarily glanced at
Maithanet for confirmation...

So many looks. So many qualms.
It was always the complexities that overwhelmed us. It was always the maze of
others that robbed us of our way.

My little boy is dead.

But she squelched her
misgivings, stared at the Shriah of the Thousand Temples squarely. "Skin-spies,"
she said. She suddenly found herself dizzy with exhaustion, like a water-bearer
balancing one bowl too many. "You think skin-spies did this."

Anasûrimbor Maithanet replied
with uncharacteristic reluctance. "I find this turn... incalculable."

A memory struck her then, not so
much of an event as of a feeling, the murky sense of being harassed and hemmed
in, the tightness of breath that belonged to the besieged. A memory of the
First Holy War.

For an instant, she thought she
could smell the septic reaches of Caraskand.

"Kellhus told me they would
come," Esmenet said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Condia

Damnation follows not from
the bare utterance

of sorcery, for nothing is
bare in this world.

No act is so wicked, no
abomination is so obscene,

as to lie beyond the
salvation of my Name.

—
Anasûrimbor Kellhus,
Novum Arcanum

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk),
Condia

In Sakarpus,
leuneraal
,
or hunched ones (so-called for their habit of stooping over their scrolls),
were so despised that it was customary for Horselords and their Boonsmen to
bathe after their dealings with them. The Men of Sakarpus considered weakness a
kind of disease, something to be fended with various rules of interaction and
ritual cleansings. And no men were so weak as the leuneraal.

But Sorweel's new tutor,
Thanteus Eskeles, was more than a hunched man. Far more. Were he merely a
scholar, then Sorweel would have had the luxury of these rules. But he was also
a
sorcerer
—a Three Seas Schoolman!—and this made things... complicated.

Sorweel had never doubted the
Tusk, never doubted that sorcerers were the walking damned. But try as he
might, he could never square this belief with his fascination. Through all his
innumerable daydreams of the Three Seas, nothing had captivated him quite so
much as the Schools. What would it be like, he often wondered, to possess a
voice that could shout down the World's Holy Song? What kind of man would
exchange his soul for that kind of diabolical power?

As a result, Eskeles was both an
insult and a kind of illicit opportunity—a contradiction, like all things Three
Seas.

The Mandate Schoolman would join
him each morning, usually within a watch of the march getting underway, and
they would while away the time with drill after laborious language drill.
Though Eskeles encouraged him to believe otherwise, Sorweel's tongue balked at
the sound and structure of Sheyic. He often went cross-eyed listening to
Eskeles drone. At times, he feared he might slump unconscious from his saddle,
the lessons were so boring.

Once he enlisted Zsoronga to
hide him in the middle of his retinue, he came to dread the sorceror's
appearance so. The Successor-Prince promptly betrayed him, but not before
having his fill of laughing at the sight of the Schoolman riding on his burrow
craning his neck this way and that. Old Obotegwa, he explained, was growing
weary speaking for two men.

"Besides," he said,
"how can we be sure we're talking to each other at all? Perhaps the old
devil makes it all up so he can laugh himself to sleep."

Obotegwa simply winked and
grinned mischievously.

Eskeles was a strange man, obese
by Sakarpi standards, but not so fat as many Sorweel had seen in the Ordeal. He
never seemed to get cold, despite wearing only a red-silk tunic with his
leggings, one cut to expose the black fur that crawled from his belly to his
beard, which even oiled and plaited never quite seemed under control. He had an
affable, even merry face, high cheeks beneath pig-friendly eyes. This, combined
with a lively, even careless manner, made him exceedingly difficult to dislike,
despite his sorcerous calling and the brownish tinge of his Ketyai skin.

At first Sorweel could scarcely
understand a word he said, his accent was so thick. But he quickly learned how
to listen through the often bizarre pronunciations. He discovered that the man
had spent several years in Sakarpus as part of a secret Mandate mission posing
as Three Seas traders.

"Dreadful, dreadful time
for the likes of me," he said.

"I suppose you missed your
Southron luxuries," Sorweel jeered.

The fat man laughed.
"No-no.
Heavens
, no. If you knew what me and my kind dreamed each
night, your Glory, you would understand our profound ability to appreciate the
simplest of things. No. It was your
Chorae Hoard
... Quite extraordinary
really, dwelling in the vicinity of so many Trinkets..."

"Trinkets?"

"Yes. That's what we
Schoolmen like to call them—Chorae, that is. For much the same reason you
Sakarpi call Sranc—what is it? Oh, yes,
grass-rats
."

Sorweel frowned. "Because
that's what they are?"

Despite his good humour, Eskeles
had this sly way of appraising him sometimes, as if he were a map fetched from
the fire. Something that had to be read around burns.

"No-no. Because that's what
you
need them to be
."

Sorweel understood full well
what the fat man meant—men often used glib words to shrink great and terrible
things—but the
true lesson
, he realized, was quite different. He
resolved never to forget
that Eskeles was a spy
. That he was an agent of
the Aspect-Emperor.

Learning a language, Sorweel
quickly realized, was unlike learning anything else. At first, he thought it
would be a matter of simple substitution, of replacing one set of sounds with
another. He knew nothing of what Eskeles called
grammar
, the notion that
a kind of invisible mechanism bound everything he said into patterns. He
scoffed at the sorcerer's insistence that he first
learn his own tongue
before
venturing to learn another. But the patterns were undeniable, and no matter how
much he wanted to dispute the fat man and his glib
I-told-you-so
smile,
he had to admit that he could not speak without using things such as subjects
and predicates, nouns and verbs.

Though he affected an attitude
of aloof contempt—he was in the presence of a leuneraal, after all—Sorweel
found himself more than a little troubled by this. How could he know these
things
without knowing them
? And if something as profound as grammar
could escape his awareness—to the point where it had simply not existed—what
else was lurking in the nethers of his soul?

So he came to realize that
learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not
only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your
soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what
he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied
these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.

None of which made the lessons
any less boring. But thankfully even Eskeles's passion for Sheyic would begin
to wane by midafternoon, and his disciplined insistence on the drills would
lapse. For a few watches, at least, he would let the young King indulge his
curiosity about more sundry things. Sorweel spent much of this time avoiding
the topics that really interested him—sorcery because he feared it sinful, and
the Aspect-Emperor for reasons he could not fathom—and asking questions about
the Three Seas and the Great Ordeal.

So he learned more details about
the Middle-North and its peoples: the Galeoth, the Tydonni, and the Thunyeri.
The Eastern Ketyai: the Cengemi, the Conriyans, and the Ainoni. And the Western
Ketyai: primarily the Nansur, the Shigeki, the Kianene, and the Nilnameshi.
Eskeles, who, Sorweel was beginning to realize, was one of those vain men who
never seemed arrogant, discussed all these peoples with the confidence and
wicked cynicism of someone who had spent his life travelling. Each nation had
its strengths and weaknesses: the Ainoni, for instance, were devious plotters
but too womanish in their affect and attire; the Thunyeri were savage in battle
but about as sharp as rotten fruit—as Eskeles put it. Sorweel found all of it
fascinating, even though the sorcerer was one of those men whose animate
enthusiasm actually seemed to deaden rather than liven the subject matter.