The Judging Eye (52 page)

Achamian bolted from his blanket
with a gasp...

...only to find Incariol
kneeling over him in the deep shadow. A line of light rimmed his scalp and the
curve of his cheek and temple; his face was impenetrable otherwise.

The Wizard made to scramble
backward, but the Nonman clasped his shoulder with a powerful hand. The bald
head lowered in apology, but the face remained utterly obscured in shadow.
"You were laughing," he whispered before turning away.

Achamian could only squint,
slack-mouthed.

As dark as it was, he was
certain that Cleric had sobbed as he drew away.

****

Achamian awoke far older, it
seemed, than when he'd fallen asleep. His ears and teeth ached, as did every
joint he had words to describe. While the Skin Eaters busied themselves
preparing to depart, he sat cross-legged on his crude mat, forearms heavy
against his knees, glaring more than watching. The twin lights hung above them
as before, the differences in their cast as subtle and as profound as the
differences in their casters. His eyes traced the verge of their illumination,
from the hanging bronze of the fallen lantern wheel, along the slot-windowed
walls, to the great fragments of face leaning in the debris of the ruined head.
Part of him was horrified, even affronted, to discover that the previous day
had not been a dream—that Cil-Aujas
was real
. He breathed deep the
indescribable must hanging in the air, fought the urge to spit. It seemed he
could feel the black miles hanging above them.

When Mimara asked for a third
time what was the matter, he decided that he hated the young. Smooth faces and
lithe strong limbs. Not to mention the certainty of ignorance. In his soul's
eye he saw them doing jigs down blasted halls, while all he could do was hobble
after them. Pompous wretches, he thought, with their dark hair and hundred-word
vocabularies. Pissants.

"Huppa!"
Somandutta
called to him at one point, shouting the word they used to goad their mules.
"Huppa-huppa! No bones are so heavy!"

"And no fools are quite so
dense!" he snapped in return. He didn't so much regret the words as the
general laughter that greeted them. He stared down Mimara's look of reproach,
felt the petty satisfaction of winning petty contests of the will. A stab of
fear accompanied the thought that he might be taking ill.

With the others watching, he had
no choice but to quickly gather his things. He reminded himself that foul
humours were the most slothful humours of all, and that, just as the old
Ceneian slave-scholars insisted, one need only walk to escape them. He cursed
himself for groaning aloud as he hoisted his pack.

Sure enough, his mood mellowed
as his limbs warmed to the company's motivated pace. For a time, he did his
best to recollect what Seswatha had known of Cil-Aujas, to build a map of sorts
in his soul's eye. But the best he could conjure was a hazy sense of myriad
levels, with the nimil mines tangling the mountain's roots and the commons and
habitations reaching Aenaratiol's gouged peak. It seemed he could feel the
Mansion's hollows reach like roots through the buried distances: all the
enclosed spaces you might find in a great mannish city, from granaries to
barracks to temples to lowly hearths, stacked one upon another, hanging in the
compressed heart of a mountain. But he could pull nothing definite from these
imaginings, certainly nothing that would be of any use to their journey. Even
in Seswatha's day Cil-Aujas had been largely abandoned, and few were the Nonmen
who could find their way through the Mansion's outer reaches. The most the old
Wizard could say was that Cleric
seemed
to lead them true. So long as
they continued following the thoroughfares that traversed these great fissures,
he knew they drew nearer the Mansion's northern gates. There was comfort enough
in that...

For now.

Not a watch passed, however,
when the last fissure came to an end, closing above them like clutched palms.
After passing through yet another hallway with historical friezes set like
grillwork over deeper friezes, they came to a chamber so vast that the walls
opened above and beyond the reach of either his or Cleric's light, so that it
seemed they crossed a ground suspended in the void. Shrinking from the abyssal
dark, the scalpers pressed close, to the point where they continually ran afoul
of one another. Even Mimara walked with her cheek pressed against Achamian's
arm. Not a moment passed without someone softly cursing this mule or that man.
Few words were traded otherwise. Those who did call out were silenced by the
sound of their own echoes, which returned so transformed as to seem another
voice.

Though unnerved by the
blackness, Achamian actually felt more relieved than otherwise. For the first
time since passing the Wolf Gate, he thought he knew where they stood in
Aenaratiol's mazed bowels. This, he was certain, was the Repositorium, where
the Nonmen had shelved their dead like scrolls. And it meant not only that they
had travelled almost half the way, but more importantly, that Cleric actually
did remember the path through the ruined Mansion.

For the longest time nothing
loomed out of the encircling darkness. With the dust chalking the air about
their ankles and knees, it almost seemed they crossed a desert on some sunless
world. Once Cleric called them to a clanking halt, and the entire company spent
several dozen heartbeats simply standing, ears pricked, listening to the
iron-hard silence... The sound of their entombment.

The appearance of bones at their
feet caused more curiosity than alarm—at first. The skulls were so ancient they
crumpled like beehives beneath their soles, and the bones flattened like paper.
Clots of them emerged here and there, like flotsam dropped by eddies in
long-dried waters, but after a while the floor became thick with them. The dull
sound of the Skin Eaters' trudging became the whisk and thump of men kicking
through sandy leaves. A battle had been fought here long, long ago, and the
toll had been high. Soon the murmur of prayers could be heard among the men,
and wide eyes sought confirmation of their fear. Sarl laughed as he always did
when he sensed apprehension getting the best of his "boys," but the
echoes that fell back out of the blackness sounded so sinister that he went as
rigid and as pale as any of them.

Then, out of nowhere, a great
slope of debris reared before them, forcing a general halt. The company milled
in blank-faced confusion while Lord Kosoter and Cleric consulted. Because of
the dark, it was impossible to determine the scale of the obstruction. One of
the young Galeoth, Asward, began babbling in a panicked voice, something about
fingers reaching up from the dust. Both Galian and Xonghis tried to talk some
sense into the young man, casting wary glances at their Captain while doing so.
Sarl watched with an expression of repellant satisfaction, as though eager to
exercise some bloodthirsty Rule of the Slog.

Tired and annoyed, Achamian
simply walked into the blackness, leaving his sorcerous light hanging behind
him. When Mimara called out, he simply waved a vague hand. The residue of death
stirred no horror in him—it was the living he feared. The blackness enveloped
him, and when he turned, he was struck by an almost gleeful sense of impunity.
The Skin Eaters clung to their little shoal of light, peered like orphans into
the oceans of dark. Where they had seemed so cocksure and dangerous on the
trail, now they looked forlorn and defenceless, a clutch of refugees desperate
to escape the calamities that pursued them.

This
, Achamian thought to
himself,
is how Kellhus sees us...

He knew the sound of his arcane
voice would startle them, that they would point and cry out at the sight of his
mouth and eyes burning in the blackness. But they needed to be reminded—all of
them—of who he was...

He spoke the Bar of Heaven.

A line appeared between his
outstretched arms, shimmering white, bright enough for the blood to glow
through his hands. Then it sundered the shrouded heights, brilliant and
instantaneous as lightning. In a blink, the Repositorium lay revealed unto its
farthest corners...

The ruined cemetery of Cil-Aujas.

Great ribs and sockets of living
stone ravined the ceiling. Hanging from its contours, hundreds of ancient
chains cluttered the open reaches, some broken midway to the floor, others
still bearing the bronze lantern wheels that had once served as illumination.
The floors beneath stretched for what seemed a mile, white with illumination
and dust, puckered and furrowed by the long wandering lines of ancient dead. In
the distances behind and to either side of the company, walls had been hewn
from the scarped confusion, gaining heights easily as great as any of
Carythusal's famed towers. Tombs pocked them, row upon row of black holes
framed with graven script and images, lending them a wasp-nest malignancy.
Immediately before the company, however, the enormous sheaves of debris
continued climbing and climbing, sloping up to the very ceiling... Some kind of
catastrophic collapse.

The implication was as obvious
as it was immediate: The way was barred.

Everyone—save Lord Kosoter and
Cleric—gawked and blinked at the spectacle. Achamian could feel the Captain's
bone-hollowing gaze as he walked toward the others. The Bar faded like a
furnace coal, allowing the darkness to reclaim its dominion. Within heartbeats,
the company was every bit as stranded as before.

Kiampas, answering to some
unseen signal, suddenly declared the day's march over, though no one had any
way of knowing whether a day had in fact passed. As awed as they were dismayed,
the Skin Eaters began stumbling about, preparing camp. Mimara clutched Achamian's
arm, her eyes alight with a kind of enthralled greed...

"Can you teach me
that!" she cried under her breath.

He knew her well enough to see
she was bursting with questions, that she would likely plague him for hours if
she could. And to his surprise, he found himself disarmed by her interest,
which for the first time seemed
honest
instead of fraught with anger and
calculation as before. To be a student required a peculiar kind of
capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one was told, but to surrender
the movements of one's soul to the unknown complexities of another's. A
willingness, not simply to be moved, but to be
remade
.

How could he not respond?
Despite all his violent resolutions to the contrary, his was a teacher's soul.

But the time wasn't right.
"Yes-yes," he said, speaking with gentle impatience. He grasped her
shoulder to forestall her protest, sought Cleric through the commotion. He
needed to know just how much the Nonman remembered. Their passage through the
Repositorium was blocked, thanks to the ancient calamity heaped before them. If
Cleric knew of no other way through the peril that was Cil-Aujas, they would be
forced to backtrack, to begin the long trek back to the Obsidian Gate. If he
pretended or remembered falsely, they could very well be dead.

He was about to explain as much
to Mimara when Lord Kosoter suddenly appeared next to them, reeking in his
hoary old Ainoni armour and dress. Steel grey hairs manged his plaited beard.
Beneath his mailed breast, his Chorae hummed with unseen menace.

"No more," he said,
his voice as flat as frozen water. "No more"—his tongue tested the
edge of his teeth—"antics."

It was impossible not to be
affected by the man's dead gaze, but Achamian found himself returning his stare
with enough self-possession to wonder at the man's anger. Was it simple
jealously? Or did the famed Captain fear that awe of another might undermine
his authority?

"What?" Mimara said
angrily. "We should have stumbled on through the dark?"

Achamian watched the eyes slouch
toward her, glimpsed the mayhem behind their frigid calm. For all her ferocious
pride, his gaze bled her white.

"As you wish,"
Achamian said quickly, like a man trying to call the attention of wolves.
"Captain.
As you wish.
"

Lord Kosoter continued staring
at Mimara for several heartbeats. When he looked back at Achamian, his eyes
seemed to carry some mortal piece of her. He nodded, not so much at Achamian's
concession, it seemed, as at the fear that stuttered through the Wizard's
heart.

Your sins,
the dead eyes
whispered.
Her damnation.

***

They sat about a fire of bones.
Without the merest wind, the smoke spewed directly upward, a column of black
floating into black. The reek of it was strange, like something sodden and
already burned.

The Skin Eaters had congregated
at the edges of the rubble, where streams of ruin had created a bowl with
boulders large enough for men to sit and lean forward. Lord Kosoter sat between
his two sergeants, Sarl and Kiampas, absorbed in the shining length of his
Ainoni sword. Again and again, he drew his whetstone along its length, then
raised it, as if to study the way the edge cut the play of reflected flames.
Everything about his manner spoke of indifference, utter and absolute, as
though he sat with a relative's hated children. Achamian had taken a seat
nearly opposite him, with Mimara at his side. Galian, Oxwora, and the other
Bitten formed the first tier, those close enough to actually feel the fire's
acrid heat. The others sat scattered through the shadows. Cleric squatted apart
from them all, high on the back of a monolithic stone. The shadow of his perch
rode high on his chest, so that only his right arm and head fell in the
firelight. Whenever Achamian looked away from him, he seemed to lose substance,
to become a kind of dismembered reality... A headless face and a palmless hand,
come to speak and to seize.