The Judging Eye (55 page)

They walked without speaking for
what seemed a long while. It was odd the way anger could shrink the great frame
of silence into a thing, nasty and small, shared between two people. Achamian
could feel it, palpable, binding them pursed lip to pursed lip, the need to
punish the infidelities of the tongue.

Why did he let her get the best
of him?

The Skin Eaters laboured in the
circumscribed lights, leaning beneath the bulk of their packs like
caste-menials beneath firewood. The younger ones led the mules in short trains
of two or three, while the others walked the wary margins of the group, swords
or spears drawn against the blackness. Though the memory of the Repositorium
burned bright in his soul's eye, Achamian could not shake the sense that they
marched into the void. If Cil-Aujas indeed plumbed the World to its very limit,
as he had told Mimara, might they not simply wander into the precincts of Hell?

He occupied himself with this
thought for a time, pondering his various readings of those who had allegedly
passed alive into the Afterlife. The legend of Mimomitta from ancient Kyranean
lore. The parable of Juraleal from
The Chronicle of the Tusk
. And of
course the rumours his slave, Geraus, had told him about Kellhus...

Mimara walked beside him as
before, but her damp presence had hardened into something prickling sharp.
Is
it true,
he wanted to ask,
that Kellhus wears the severed heads of
demons about his girdle?
These words, he was certain, would heal their
momentary feud. As loath to encourage her as he had been, he had made a habit
of avoiding her opinions.

The simple act of asking would
say much.

Instead, he rubbed his face,
muttering curses. What kind of rank foolishness was this? Pining over harsh
words to a cracked and warped woman!

"I watched you,"
Mimara abruptly said, staring at the procession of chains through the upper
reaches of his light. For a moment he assumed this was just more hounding, then
she said, "You don't trust the Nonman. I could see it in your eyes."

Achamian scanned the distance to
be sure Cleric was far enough away not to hear, then looked at her with the
mixture of annoyance and mystification that was fast becoming his
"Mimara-face," even as part of him recognized that this was
her
peace
offering.

"Now is not the time, girl,"
he said brusquely. That she could worry about such a thing given what they had
just heard—not to mention what they might find—was beyond Achamian. If anything
made her seem crazed, he told himself, it wasn't so much her intellect as the
disorder of her cares.

"Is it his Mark?" she
persisted, again speaking in Ainoni. "Is that why you fear him?"

As though to match her absurdity
with his own, Achamian began mumbling the song his slave's children had sung
and sung until he had cried aloud for them to stop. It seemed he could even
hear them, piping about the edges of his husky baritone, voices that had
floated with innocence and chanting delight. Voices he dearly missed.

"Stinky feet, hide my
sweet, walk the river cool..."

"Sometimes," Mimara
persisted, "when I glimpse him in the corner of my eye..."

"Stinky bum, sniff your
thumb, swim the water pool..."

"...he seems like something
monstrous, a shambling wreck, black and rotted and... and..."

Suddenly the song and the
peevishness that had provoked it were forgotten. Achamian found himself
listening with arched attentiveness—a horror-spurred concentration.

She worked her mouth for a
moment, lips pert about some lozenge of inexplicability, then looked to him
helplessly.

"And it's like you can
taste
his evil," he heard himself say. "Not so much on your tongue as in
your gums. Your teeth ache for it."

A peculiar vulnerability
afflicted her look, as though she had admitted something beyond her courage.
"Not always," she said.

"And it's more than just
the Nonman, isn't it?" Something peculiar fizzed through his voice,
something like a pang, but too fraught with fear. "Sometimes... Sometimes
I
look this way
as well, don't I?"

"So you see the same?"
she blurted.

He shook his head in a way he
hoped seemed lackadaisical. "No. What I see is what you see typically, the
shadow of ruin and decay, the ugliness of the deficient and incomplete. You're
describing something different. Something
moral
as opposed to merely
aesthetic..." He paused to catch his breath. What new madness was this?
"What antique Mandate scholars called the Judging Eye."

He had watched her carefully as
he spoke, hoping to see the glint of thrill in her eyes. But there was naught
but concern. This had been gnawing at her for quite some time, he realized.

"The Judging Eye," she
repeated in flawless Ainoni. "And what is that?"

His heart crawled into his
throat. He coughed it loose, then swallowed it back into his chest. "It
means that you don't simply apprehend the Mark of sorcery,
you see the sin
as well
..." He trailed, then laughed, despite the horror that flexed
through him.

"And that's
funny
?"
she asked, her voice warbling with indignation.

"No, girl... It's just
that..."

"That
what
?"

"Your stepfather...
Kellhus."

He had improvised this, not
willing to stray too far into the truth. But once spoken it seemed every bit as
true and far more terrible with significance. Such was the perversity of things
that Men often recognized their own arguments only after they had spoken them.
"Kellhus..." he repeated numbly.

"What about him?"

"He says the Old Law has
been revoked, that Men are at long last ready for the New..." The words of
the Mandate Catechism came back to him unbidden, and with the heat of truths
drawn intact from the crucible of deception.
Though you lose your soul, you
shall gain the world...

"Think," he continued.
"If sorcery is no longer abomination, then..." Let her think it was
this, he told himself. Perhaps it would even serve to discourage her.
"Then why would you see it as such?"

He was surprised to discover he
had stopped walking, that he stood riven, staring at the woman whose parentage
had stirred so many echoes of heartbreak and whose unscrupulous obstinacy
threatened everything. The last of the Skin Eaters had passed them, casting
dubious backward glances as they marched with the mule-train beyond the limits
of his light. Within heartbeats it was just the two of them, flanked by knolls
of heaped basalt, plains of dust, and bones bleached as light as charcoal by
the ages. Cleric's light had tapered to a point, and the company had dwindled
to a floating procession of shining helms and trudging shadows.

Silence sealed them as utterly
as the blackness.

"I always knew something
was... wrong," she said softly. "I mean, I read and I read, everything
I could find about sorcery and the Mark. And nowhere, not once, was there any
mention of what I see. I thought it was because it was so... unpredictable, you
know, just when I would see the... the good of the evil. But when I see it, it
burns so... so... I mean, it strikes me so much deeper than at any other time.
It was too profound to go without saying, to be left out of the records... I
just knew that something had to be different. That something had to be
wrong!"

First her arrival, and now this.
She had the Judging Eye—she could see not just sorcery, but the
damnation
it
betokened... To think he had convinced himself the Whore of Fate would leave
him be!

"And now you're
saying," she began hesitantly, "that I'm a kind of... proof?"
She blinked in the stammering manner of people finding their way through
unsought revelations. "Proof of my stepfather's...
falsity
?"

She was right... and yet what
more proof did he, Drusas Achamian, need? That night twenty years ago, on the
eve of the First Holy War's final triumph, the Scylvendi Chieftain had told him
everything, given him all the proof he would ever need, enough to fuel decades
of bitter hate—enough to deliver these scalpers to their doom. Anasûrimbor
Kellhus was Dûnyain, and the Dûnyain cared for naught but domination. Of course
he was false.

It was for
her
sake that
the Wizard trembled. She possessed the Judging Eye!

He thought of their coupling,
and the sordid passions that had driven it. A cold sweat compressed the skin
and wool beneath his pack. He could feel the pity hanging like wet string in
his expression, the way his look saw past what she was now—the pale image of
her mother standing small in white light—into the torment that awaited her.

"We have more immediate
concerns at the moment," he said in a rallying voice.

"You mean Cleric," she
replied, her little hands balled into slack fists. She was looking at him with
the kind of wilful focus that spoke of contravening interests. Soon, he knew,
she would come at him with questions, relentless questions, and he needed to
consider carefully the kinds of answers he could and could not give.

"Yes," he said,
drawing her by the elbow after the others. "Incariol." He thought of
how men always did this, managed the thoughts of others, and wondered why it
should exact such a toll from him. "His Mark means he's old... older than
you could imagine. And that means he's not only a Quya Mage, but Ishroi, a
Nonman noble..."

He could feel the note of
falsity, like a cold coin in the slick palm of his voice. He cursed himself for
a fool, even as he sought her gaze, hoping that a sincere look might carry what
his words could not. The Erratic and his ability to lead them through this
deserted warren was their immediate concern. The fact that Achamian used them
to another purpose... Weren't all words simply tools in the end?

"So he's Ishroi,
then..." Mimara said. The lilt in her tone told him that she knew
something was amiss. When had he ever urged her into the murk of his
ruminations?

"Such figures don't easily
slip through the cracks of history, Mimara. And what history I haven't lived
through Seswatha, I've
read
many times. Moithural, Hosûtil, Shimbor—all
the mannish translators and chroniclers of the Nonmen. I assure you, there's no
mention of any Incariol, nowhere, not even in their own
Pit of Years
..."
Despite himself, his voice was striking more, not fewer, tin notes of
insincerity.

Her gaze was bolt-forward now,
apparently following Cleric's light and the small mob of men and pack animals
labouring beneath it. From their vantage, the Skin Eaters seemed to pick their
way across the vast back of nothingness. Here and there small clearings of
floor opened between them, bloomed colourless and flat in the illumination,
only to be obscured by kicked dust and the drift of shadowy legs.

They had travelled past the
point of sturdy grounds.

"This Judging Eye,"
she said with cool resignation. "It's a
curse
, isn't it? An
affliction..."

Many years had passed since last
he had suffered this feeling, not simply of too much happening too quickly, but
of some dread intent in motion, as though all these things, the Nonman, the
Captain, the dead scalper out there, and now Mimara, were like the suckered
arms of the octopuses he and his father had sometimes pulled from the Meneanor
Sea—limbs webbed in the sinew of a singular Fate.

Circumstances always
encompassed, but sometimes they encircled as well, as many-chambered as this
mountain and every bit as dark. His heart seemed to beat against sagging
bandages.

"Just legends," he
said. "Nothing more."

"But you've read them
all," she said in a high, scathing voice.

He raised a knobbed hand to
silence her, nodded to the interval of darkness separating them from the
company. A figure had surfaced from the advancing perimeter of their light,
became what looked like, for a mad moment, a wizened ape armoured in human
rags...

It was Sarl. He waited for them,
alone in the darkness, smiling, his lips stretched longer than the arc of his
gums and teeth. "Well-well-well," he called in the tones of a cracked
flute. Even in the dark the man squinted.

"We'll speak of this
later," Achamian said to Mimara, halting her with a gentle hand on her
elbow. She frowned and in a careless moment looked to the sergeant with naked
fury. Though the man remained some several paces distant, there was no way he
could have failed to see her anger.

"You take the light,"
Achamian said quickly.

"Me?"

"You have the Gift of the
Few. You can grasp it with your soul, even without any real sorcerous
training... If you think on it, you should actually be able to
feel
the
possibility."

For the bulk of his life,
Achamian had shared his calling's contempt of witches. There was no reason for
this hatred, he knew, outside the capricious customs of the Three Seas. Kellhus
had taught him as much, one of many truths he had used to better deceive. Men
condemned others to better celebrate themselves. And what could be easier to
condemn than women?