The Judging Eye (46 page)

Then, one afternoon several days
into his instruction, Sorweel summoned enough courage to mention the
Aspect-Emperor. He related—in a form abbreviated by embarrassment—the story
Zsoronga had told him about the emissaries cutting their own throats before the
Zeümi Satakhan. "I know he's your master..." he ended awkwardly.

"What about him?"
Eskeles replied after a thoughtful pause.

"Well...
What is he?
"

The sorcerer nodded in the
manner of those confirmed in their worries. "Come," he said
cryptically, spurring his mule to a trot.

The Kidruhil typically rode near
the forward heart of the Great Ordeal, where they could be sent in any
direction given the unlikely event of an attack. But word of Sranc activity to
the west had led to their redeployment on the extreme left flank. This meant
the sorcerer and his ward need press neither hard nor far to ride clear of the
slow roping columns. Looking absurd on his mule—his legs straight rather than
bent, his girth almost equal to his mount's—Eskeles pressed along the shoulders
of a long low knoll. Sorweel followed, alternately smiling at the sight of the
man and frowning at his intentions. Beyond the crest of the knoll, the farther
plains sloped up into the horizon, bone-coloured for the most part but shot
with whorls of grey and ash black. The green of the more lush lands to the
south had become little more than a haze.

Staring off into the distance,
the sorcerer reined to a halt at the summit, where Sorweel joined him. The air
was crisp and chill.

"So dry," Eskeles said
without looking at him.

"It often is. Some years
the grasses all die and blow away... Or so they say."

"And that," Eskeles
continued, pointing toward the northwest. "What is that?"

There was a Kidruhil patrol in
the distance, a line of tiny horses, but Sorweel knew that Eskeles pointed
beyond them. The sky was a bowl of endless turquoise. Beneath it the land
ascended a series of rumps, then spread bluing into a series of flats and folds,
like a tent after its poles had been dropped. Reaching in and out of the
horizon, an immense band cut across the plain, mottled black and grey near its
centre and fading into the natural grain of the surrounding grasslands along
its edges.

"The great herds,"
Sorweel said, having seen such tracks many times. "Elk. Endless numbers of
them."

The sorcerer turned in his
saddle, nodding back the way they had come. The breeze pulled a comb of hairs
from his beard.

"And what would you say
that
is?"

Perplexed, Sorweel wheeled his
horse about, followed Eskeles's bemused gaze. Not since Sakarpus had he seen
the Great Ordeal from its edge, and he found himself shocked at the difference
of watching something that had encompassed him from afar. Where before the world
had seemed to roll into the immobile masses, now the masses rolled over an
immovable world. Thousands upon thousands of figures, scattered like grain,
thrown like threads, knitted into slow heaving carpets, gradually creeping
across the back of the earth. Arms twinkled to the horizon.

"The Great Ordeal," he
heard himself say.

"No."

Sorweel searched his tutor's
smiling eyes.

"This," Eskeles
explained, "
this
... is the Aspect Emperor."

Mystified, Sorweel could only
turn back to the spectacle. Though he couldn't be sure, he thought he saw the
Aspect-Emperor's own banner rising from faraway mobs: a white-silk standard the
size of a sail, emblazoned with a simple blood-red Circumfix. Struck by unseen
priests, the Interval hummed out across the arch of the sky, deep and resonant,
fading as always in increments too fine to detect, so that he was never quite
sure when it stopped sounding.

"I don't
understand..."

"There are many, many ways
to carve the world, your Glory. Think of the way we identify different men with
their bodies, with the position they occupy in place and time. Since we inherit
this way of thinking, we assume that it is
natural
, that it is the only
way. But what if we identify a man
with his thoughts
—what then? How
would we draw his boundaries? Where would he begin, and where would he
end?"

Sorweel simply gazed at the man.
Damned leuneraal.

"I still don't
understand."

The sorcerer frowned in silence
for a time, then with a decisive grunt leaned back in his saddle to root
through one of his packs. He huffed and cursed in some exotic tongue as he
pawed through his belongings—the effort of twisting back and sideways obviously
strained him. Without warning, he dismounted with a heavy
"Oooof!"
then began rifling the opposite pack in the same way. It wasn't until he
searched the rump pack—made of weather-beaten leather like the others—that he
found what he was looking for: a small vase no bigger than a child's forearm
and just as white. With a triumphant expression, he held it shining to the sun:
porcelain, another luxury of the Three Seas.

"Come-come," he called
to Sorweel, stamping his left boot in the grass to wipe mule shit from his
heel.

Securing his pony's reins to the
pommel of the mule's saddle, Sorweel hastened after the sorcerer, who walked
kicking through winter-flattened grasses—to clean off more dung, the young King
supposed, until, that is, Eskeles cried, "Aha!" at the sight of
rounded stone rising from the turf.

"This is called a
philauta
,"
the sorcerer said, raising the slight vase and shaking it. A clipped rattle
issued from within. The sunlight revealed dozens of little tusks raised along
its length. "It's used for sacramental libations..."

He smashed it across the back of
the stone. To his chagrin, Sorweel flinched.

"Now look," Eskeles
said, squatting over the wreckage so that his belly hung between his knees. A
small replica of the vase—what had made the rattling sound, Sorweel
realized—lay beneath the sorcerer's bulk, no longer than a thumb. Otherwise,
fragments lay scattered across the stone and between the twisted threads of
last year's grass, some as small as cat's claws, others the size of teeth, and
still others as big as coins. The sorcerer shooed away a spider with stubby
fingers, then lifted one of the tinier pieces, little more than a splinter, to
the glinting light.

"Souls have
shapes
,
Sorweel. Think of how I differ from you"—he raised another splinter to
illustrate the contrast—"or how you differ from Zsoronga," he said,
raising yet another. "Or"—he plucked a far larger
fragment—"think of all the Hundred Gods, and how they differ from one
another, Yatwer and Gilgaöl. Or Momas and Ajokli." With each name he
raised yet another coin-sized fragment.

"Our God...
the
God,
is broken into innumerable pieces. And this is what gives us life, what makes
you, me, even the lowliest slave, sacred." He cupped several pieces in a
meaty palm. "We're not equal, most assuredly not, but we remain
fragments
of God
nonetheless."

He gingerly set each of the
pieces across the top of the stone, then stared intently at Sorweel. "Do
you understand what I'm saying?"

Sorweel did understand, so much
that his skin had pimpled listening to the sorcerer speak. He understood more than
he
wanted
. The Kiünnatic Priests had only rules and stories—nothing like
this. They had no answers that made... sense of things.

"But..."

The young King trailed, defeated
by the weakness of his own voice.

Eskeles nodded and smiled, so
openly pleased with himself that he seemed anything but arrogant or haughty.
"But what is the Aspect-Emperor?" he asked, completing Sorweel's
question.

Using his fingers, he combed the
chipped replica of the vase from the grass below his left knee. He held it
between thumb and forefinger, where it shone as smooth as glass, identical to
the original philauta in every respect save for its size.

"Huh?" The Schoolman
laughed. "Eh? Do you see? The soul of the Aspect-Emperor is not only
greater than the souls of Men, it possesses the
very shape
of the
Ur-Soul."

"You mean... your God of
Gods."

"
Our
God of
Gods?" the sorcerer repeated, shaking his head. "I keep forgetting
that you're a heathen! I suppose you think
Inri Sejenus
is some kind of
demon as well!"

"I'm trying," Sorweel
replied, his face suddenly hot. "I'm trying to understand!"

"I-know-I-know," the
Schoolman said, this time smirking at his own stupidity. "We'll discuss
the Latter Prophet, er... later..." He closed his eyes and shook his head.
"In the meantime, ponder this... If the Aspect-Emperor's soul is cast in
the very form of the God, then..." He trailed nodding. "Huh? Eh?
If...
"

"Then... He is the God in
small..." A kind of supernatural terror accompanied these words.

The sorcerer beamed, his teeth
surprisingly white and straight compared to the dark frazzle of his beard.
"You wonder how it is so many would march to the ends of the earth for him?
You wonder what could move men
to cut their own throats
in his name.
Well then, there you have your answer..." He leaned forward, his pose
rigid in the manner of men who think they possess world-judging truths.
"Anasûrimbor Kellhus
is the God of Gods
, Sorweel, come to walk
among us."

Somehow Sorweel had fallen from
a crouch to his knees. He remained breathless still, staring at Eskeles. To
move his hands or even to blink his eyes, it seemed, would be to quake and to
spill, to reveal himself a thing of sand.

"Before his coming, me and
my kind were damned," the sorcerer continued, though he seemed to be
speaking more for his own benefit than Sorweel's. "We Schoolmen traded a
lifetime of power for an eternity of torment... But now?"

Damnation.
Sorweel felt
the cold of dead earth soak through his leggings. An ache climbed into bis
knees. His father had died in sorcerous fire—how many times had Sorweel
tormented himself with that thought, imagining the shriek and scream, the
thousand blistering knives? But what Eskeles was saying...

Did it mean
he burned still
?

The Mandate Schoolman gazed at
him, his eyes wide and bright with a kind of uncompromising joy, like a man in
the flush of infatuation, or a gambler delivered from slavery by an impossible
throw of the number-sticks. When he spoke, more than admiration—or even
worship—trilled through his voice.

"Now I am
saved
."

Love. He spoke with love.

***

Rather than go to Zsoronga's
pavilion that evening, Sorweel shared a quiet repast with Porsparian in the
white-washed air of his own tent. He sat on the end of his cot, his head bent
to his steaming gruel, knowing yet not caring that the Shigeki slave stared at
him wordlessly. A kind of incipient confusion filled him, one that had slipped
the cup of his soul and spilled through his body, a leaden tingle. The sounds
of the Great Ordeal fell through the fabric effortlessly, thrumming and booming
from every direction.

Save the sky. The sky was
silent.

And the earth.

"Anasûrimbor Kellhus is
the God of Gods incarnate, Sorweel, come to walk among us..."

Men often make decisions in the
wake of significant events, if only to pretend they had some control over their
own transformations. Sorweel's first decision was to ignore what had happened,
to turn his back on what Eskeles had said, as though rudeness could drive his
words away. His second decision was to laugh—laughter was ever the great ward
against all things foolish. But he could not harness the breath to see it
through.

Then he finally decided to think
Eskeles's thoughts, if only to pretend they had not already possessed him. What
was the harm of thinking?

As a young boy he spent most of
his solitary play in the ruined sections of his father's palace, particularly
in what was called the Overgrown Garden. Once, while searching for a lost
arrow, he noticed a young poplar springing from some far-flung seed beneath a
thicket of witch-mulberry. Wondering whether it would live or die, he checked
on it from time to time, watched it slowly labour in the shadow. Several times
he even crawled into the mossy interior of the thicket, wriggling in on his
back, and bringing his cheek close to the newborn's stem so that he could see
it leaning, extending up and out to the promise of light shining through the
fretting of witch-mulberry leaves. Over days and weeks it reached, thin with
inanimate effort, straining for a band of golden warmth that descended like a
hand from the sky. And then finally, it touched...

The last time he had looked,
mere weeks before the city's fall, the tree stood proud save for the memory of
that first crook in its trunk, and the mulberry bush was long dead.

There
was
harm in
thinking. He not only knew this—he could
feel
it.

What Eskeles had shown him had
the power of... of
sense
. What Eskeles had shown him had explained, not
only the Aspect-Emperor... but himself as well.