The Judging Eye (49 page)

But the fascination wilted as
quickly as it had sparked. Achamian found himself swaying on his feet,
light-headed, as if he had leapt too quickly from a slumber. Mimara also
stumbled, brought both hands to her forehead, held them like a tent over her
brows. Several mules spooked, stamped and jerked against their ropes. There was
more than the ache of ages in the air. There was... something else, a
lack
of
some kind, running perpendicular to the geometry of the real, bowing its lines
with its cavernous suck. Something that whispered from the blackness between
the graven beasts.

Something abyssal.

The gate swam in the Wizard's
eyes, not so much a portal as a
hole
.

Without warning, Cleric's light
waxed, bleached the heights of stone. Shadows crawled from the great wolf
snouts hanging above. The Nonman turned before the entrance, blasted by
illumination. Several raised their hands against the glare.

His voice seemed to boom into
the surrounding darkness.

"Kneel..."

The Skin Eaters stared at him
dumbstruck, watched as he slumped to his knees. For a heartbeat his eyes glared
without focus, then he looked to the Men standing about him, his expression
slowly tightening. Pained lines climbed his scalp.

"Kneel!"
he
shrieked.

Sarl cackled, though the smile
that broke his barbed goatee seemed far from amused. "Cleric. Come
now..."

"This was the war that
broke our back!" the Nonman thundered. "This...
This!
All the
Last Born, sires and sons, gathered beneath the copper banners of Siol and her
flint-hearted King. Silverteeth! Our Tyrant-Saviour..." He rolled his head
back and laughed. Two lines of white marked the tears that scored his cheeks.
"This is our..." The flash of fused teeth. "Our
triumph
."

He shrunk, seemed to huddle into
his cupped palms. Great silent sobs wracked him.

Looks were exchanged,
short-lived with embarrassment. There was something eerie about the light,
apart from the way it hung sourceless above them, something that rendered each
of them in a distinct cast of brilliance. Perhaps it was the black walls, or
the curls of white refracted across the polish of innumerable figures, but none
of the shadows seemed to match up. It was as if everyone stood in the unique
light of some different morning, noon, or twilight. Perhaps it was his race, or
maybe it was his pose, but only Cleric seemed to belong.

Lord Kosoter crouched at his
side, placed a hand on his broad back, began muttering something inaudible.
Kiampas stared at the floor. Sarl looked about, eyes darting, apparently more
unnerved by this act of intimacy than by the substance of Cleric's words.

"Yessss!"
the
Nonman hissed, as though grasping something essential and overlooked.

"This is just a fucking
place," Sarl growled. "Just another fucking place..."

All of them could feel it,
Achamian realized, looking from face to stricken face. Some kind of dolour,
like the smoke of some hidden, panicked fire, pinching them, drawing their
thoughts tight... But there was no glamour he could sense. Even the finest sorceries
carried some residue of their artifice, the stain of the Mark. But there was
nothing here, save the odour of ancient magicks, long dead.

Then, with a bolt of horror, he
understood: The tragedy that had ruined these halls stalked them still. Cil-Aujas
was a
topos
. A place where hell leaned heavy against the world.

He turned to Mimara, surprised
to find himself gripping her hand. "Haunted," he murmured in reply to
her wondering eyes. "This place—"

"Listen," Kiampas
called, apparently in the grip of some abrupt resolution. "Stow your
tongues—all of you! You saw the marks at the gate, all the companies that have
vanished into this place. Granted, they didn't have Cleric, they didn't have a
guide, but the fact remains
they vanished
. Maybe they lost their way, or
maybe the skinnies got them. Either way, this is a
slog
, boys, as deadly
as any other. From here on in, we march
at the ready
, you
understand?"

"He's right," Xonghis
called from the gloom to their rear. He was crouched near the wall, his Jekki pack
high on his shoulders, his mailed forearms pressed against his knees. He
reached to the ground before him, raised a long bone from the dust, something
that could have belonged to a dog. "Dead skinny," he said. He held it
to the light, then peered through it like a tube: The knobs at either end had
been snapped off. He turned to the rest of the company, shrugged.
"Something was hungry."

The scalpers looked around,
cursed at the sight of bones scattered everywhere, like the remains of some
forgotten flood, sticks beneath silt. Lord Kosoter continued to mutter in
Cleric's ear, a grinding discourse, full of hate. The words "miserable
wretch" climbed into clarity. Achamian found himself staring into the
black portal between the towering wolves, expecting, any moment now,
something...

When he blinked, he saw
yammering figures from his Dreams.

"Sranc?" one of the
Galeoth scalpers cried—Hoat. "What
eats
Sranc?" He had to be
the youngest of the Skin Eaters, his body still hooked by an adolescent
ranginess.

Every one of them, Achamian
realized, every company that had dared these halls. All of them had paused
before this broken gate and suffered the very same premonition. And still they
marched onward, carrying their war, whatever it was, deeper, deeper...

Never to be seen again.

"Where are the doors?"
Galian blurted. He looked around in the quarrelsome manner that some use to
conceal their fright. "What does it mean? Gates without doors?"

But questions always came too
late. Events had to be pushed passed the point of denial; only then could the
pain of asking begin.

***

They spent their first night in
the grand chamber beyond the Wolf Gate. Achamian hung his sorcerous light high
in the air, an abstract point of brilliance that illuminated the ceiling and
the finned capitals of the pillars ascending about them. The light seemed to
creep down, dim enough to be shut out by closed eyes, expansive enough to provide
the illusion of security. Alien images glared from on high, their recesses
inked in utter black.

True to his word, Kiampas
organized shifts and posted sentries along their perimeter of light. Cleric sat
alone on the dust and stone, gazing into the passageway they would take upon
waking. Lord Kosoter stretched across his mat and seemed to fall instantly
asleep, even though Sarl sat cross-legged at his side, muttering inanity after
inanity, pausing only to cackle at the turns of his own wit. The rest of the
company formed sullen clots across the floor, tossing on their mats or sitting
and talking in low tones. Their crowd of mules stood in the nearby shadows,
looking absurd against the surrounding grandeur.

The air remained chill enough to
fog deep exhalations.

Achamian sat next to Mimara with
his back against one of the columns. For the longest time she seemed transfixed
by the light, staring endlessly at its silver flare.

"The script," she
said, her voice thick from disuse. "Can you read it?"

"No."

An inaudible snort. "The
all-knowing Wizard..."

"No one can read it."

"Ah... I was worried I had
misjudged you."

He looked at her prepared to
scowl, but the mischief in her eyes demanded he chuckle. A great weight seemed
to fall through him.

"Remember this,
Mimara."

"Remember what?"

"This place."

"Why?"

"Because it's old. Older
than old."

"Older than him?" she
asked, nodding toward the figure of Cleric sitting in the pillared gloom.

His momentary sense of
generosity drained away. "Far older."

A moment passed, suffused by the
low tingle of repose in perilous circumstances—a dripping sense of doom. Mimara
continued her furtive examination of Cleric.

"What's wrong with
him?" she eventually whispered.

He did not want to think of the
Nonman, Achamian realized, let alone speak of him. Travelling with an Erratic
was every bit as perilous as traveling these halls, if not more so. A fact that
begged the forbidden question: How much would Achamian risk to see his
obsession through? How many souls would he doom?

His mood blackened.

"Hush," he said,
frowning in habitual irritation. What was she doing here? Why did she plague
him
?
Everything! Twenty years of toil! Perhaps even the world! She risked it all for
a hunger she could never sate. "They can hear far better than we
can."

"Tell me in a tongue he
can't understand then," she replied, speaking flawless Ainoni.

A long look, too sour to be
surprised. "Ainon," he said. "Is that where they took you?"

The curiosity faded from her
eyes. She slouched onto her mat and turned without a word—as he knew she would.
Silence spread deep and mountainous through the graven hollows. He sat rigid.

When he glanced up he was
certain he saw Cleric's face turn away from them...

Back to the impenetrable black
of Cil-Aujas.

***

The Library of Sauglish burned
beneath him in his Dream, its towers squat and monumental within garlands of
flame. Dragons banked about mighty plumes of smoke. The glitter of sorcery
sparked across the heights—the blinding calligraphy of the Gnosis.

Its wings threshing the air,
Skafra bared corroded teeth, shrieked out to the horizon, to the whirlwind
roping black across the distant plains. A rumble deeper than a final heartbeat.

And Achamian hung unseen, an insubstantial
witness... Alone.

Where? Where was Seswatha?

***

They found the mummified corpse
of a boy no more than a hundred paces down the passageway Cleric had chosen for
them. He was curled as though about a kitten, his back to the wall. He had been
at most thirteen or fourteen summers old, Xonghis estimated. The Imperial
Tracker had no idea how long he had lain there, but he pointed to the
propitiatory coins that had been set on his hip and thigh: three full coppers,
two grey with dust, one still bright—gifts for the Ur-Mother—not the coins, but
the acts of surrendering them. Apparently others had passed this way as well.
With the rest of the company clustered about him, Soma fell to one knee and
added a fourth, whispering a prayer in his native tongue. His eyes sought out
Mimara afterwards, as though seeking confirmation of his gallantry.

"You need to watch that
one," Achamian murmured to her as they continued down the corridor. They
had not spoken since waking, and he found himself regretting the way he had cut
short their conversation the previous night. It seemed absurd, offering words
like coins in the bowels of a mountain, but the small things never went away,
no matter how tremendous the circumstance. Not for him, anyway.

"Not really," she said
with a weariness Achamian found vaguely alarming. Their was peril in feminine
exhaustion—men understood this instinctively. "It's usually the quiet ones
you need to watch. The ones waiting for the door to clap behind them..."

The sound of other voices welled
into her silence. A debate had broken out regarding the fate and provenance of
the dead child. Strangely enough, the boy and the mystery of his end had
inspired a return to normalcy of sorts.

"Ainon taught me
that," she added with reassuring bitterness. "You know... where they
took me."

The expedition marched on, a
collection of pale faces in the long murk. The conversation, quite
inexplicably, turned to which trades were the hardest on the hands. Galian
insisted that fishermen had the worst of it, what with all the knots and nets.
Xonghis described the cane fields of High Ainon, endless miles of them along
the upper Secharib Plains, and how the field slaves always had bleeding
fingers. Everyone agreed that if you included feet, fullers were the sorriest
lot.

"Imagine marching in piss
day in and day out—and without moving a cubit!"

Then they started on beggars,
trading tales of this or that wretch. Soma's claim to have seen a beggar
without arms or legs was met with general derision. Soma was always claiming
things. "So how did he pick up his coins?" one of the younger wits
asked. "With his pecker?" In the spirit of mockery, Galian went one
better, saying he saw a
headless
beggar when he was in the Imperial
Army. "For the longest time we thought he was a sack of ripe turnips,
until he began begging, that is..."

"And what did he beg
for?" Oxwora asked. The giant's voice always seemed to boom, no matter how
low he pitched it.

"To be turned right side
up, what else?"

Laughter crashed through the
abandoned halls. Only Soma remained unimpressed.

"How could he speak without
a head?"