The Judging Eye (59 page)

For it flexed about invisible
faults, then opened, drawn apart like interlocking fingers. Articulations were
pried back and out, revealing eyes that neither laughed nor hated, that simply
looked
,
above shining slopes of boneless meat.

"Rishra mei..."
the Aspect-Emperor said in a voice that sounded like silk wrapped about a
thunderclap. "I see..." Eskele's murmured in reedy tones, "I see
mothers raise stillborn infants to blinded Gods. The
death of birth
—I
see this! with eyes both ancient and foretold. I see the high towers burn, the
innocents broken, the Sranc descend innumerable—innumerable! I see a world
shut
against Heaven!
"

The assembly cried out, a cacophony
of voices and hand-wringing gestures, piteous for the terror, frightening for
the fury. With wild glances Sorweel saw them, the Men of the Ordeal, standing
or clutching their knees, their faces cramped as though they listened to news
of recent catastrophe. Wives dead. Clans scattered.
No!
their
expressions shouted.
No!

"Rishra mei—"

"I see kings with one eye
gouged, naked save for the collars from which their severed hands swing. I see
the holy Tusk sundered, fragments cast to the flames! Momemn, Meigeiri,
Carythusal and Invishi, I see their streets gravelled in bones, their gutters
black with old blood. I see the temples overgrown, the broken walls rot over
empty, savage ages.

"I see the Whirlwind
walk—Mog-Pharau! Tsurumah! I see the
No-God
..."

Spoken like a groan, like air
struck from dead lungs.

"Behold!"
the Aspect-Emperor bellowed in tones that ripped nerves from skin, yanked them
to the farthest tingling corners.
"See!"

The thing—the faceless
thing—hung skinned in arcane light. One rotation passed in breathless witness.
Another. Then, like smoke inhaled, the brilliant lattice imploded, against the
beast,
into
the beast. The sound of scissions, multiple and immediate,
whisked through the air. The sorcerous light winked out. What remained simply
dropped, a curtain of slop raining to the ground.

Breathless silence. A return to
the holy gloom. It had happened, and it had not happened.

"Rishra mei,"
the
impossible visage said, sweeping his gaze across the astonished tiers. And the
silence roared about him. Sorweel could only stare at the severed Ciphrang
heads hanging like sacks from his hip, their white mouths laughing or howling.

His haloed palms spread wide,
the Aspect-Emperor continued following the same unseen geometric curve. He was
so close that Sorweel could see the winding Tusks embroidered white upon white
into the hem of his cassock, the three pink lines wrinkling the outside corners
of his eyes, the scuff of soil that marked the toe of his left white-felt
slipper. He was so close that the image of him burned the surrounding spaces to
black, so that the curving tier of forms and faces sunk into void.

The Anasûrimbor.

A scent preceded him, a draft
that seemed to brush away the cloying perfumes worn by the more effete
attendants. The smell of damp earth and cool rain. Weary truth.

The demons' puckered sockets
seemed to watch him—recognize him.

Please!
Sorweel found
himself thinking, begging.
Please let it be Zsoronga!

But the luminous form came to a
stop directly before him, too vivid to possess depth, to be framed—to be truly
seen. Sorweel's heart stomped against his breast. It seemed that animals
thronged within him, that each of his fears had become gibbering terrors,
creatures with their own limbs and volitions. What would he see?

How would he punish?

"Sorweel," a voice
more melodious than music said in the tongue of his fathers. "Sad child.
Proud King. There is nothing more deserving of compassion than an apologetic
heart."

"Yes." A noise more
kicked out of his lungs than spoken.

Never!

Though he had not moved, though
he sat mild and meditative, the Aspect-Emperor somehow towered over every
region of sight and sound. Summer-blue eyes, not seeing so much as sacking.
Plaited golden beard. Lips shaped about a pit without bottom. The intensity of
his presence boiled against the limits of the senses, seeped into the faults,
steamed into the unseen recesses...

"Do you repent your
father's folly?"

"Yes!" Sorweel lied,
his voice cracking for fury.

Demon! Ciphrang! The Goddess
names you! Names you!

An old friend's wry smile, as
plain and as guileless as a joke about a girl, as sudden as a mother's slap.

"Welcome, young Sorweel.
Welcome to the glory that is the God's Salvation. Welcome to the company of
Believer-Kings."

Then the godlike figure was
gone, floating to his left, searching for the face of another penitent, another
troubled soul. Blinking, Sorweel saw the Lords of the Ordeal watching and
smiling. The pavilion's embroidered interior seemed to become sky wide with
sweet, breathable air.

"Gulls," he heard
Eskeles murmur with sarcastic good-nature beside him. "Fools..."

The day wore on with speech,
prayer, and debate. Afterwards, the fat Schoolman would cough back tears and
hold him, hug him as a mother or a father might hug their son.

Against a desolate backdrop,
Zsoronga simply watched, speaking not a word.

***

Sorweel insisted on walking back
to his tent alone.

For a time he made his way in
numb peace, simply enjoyed the sense of free calm that often follows tumultuous
events. Sometimes the bare fact of time passing is enough to seal us from
painful experience. Stripped of worry, warmed by the crimson sun and the wind
that had raised so much consternation in the Council of Potentates, he found
himself staring at the endless succession of makeshift camps with earnest
curiosity. A bowl of tea steaming unaccompanied on the trampled grass. A lone
Tydonni repairing a braid in his hair. A forgotten game of benjuka. Shields
bracing shields in pairs and trios. Two Nansur muttering and smiling as they
oiled the straps of their cuirass.

The awe was not long in coming.
There were simply too many warriors from too many nations not to be astonished
in some small way. And the field of wind-lashed banners was simply too great.
Some of the Inrithi returned his gaze with hostility, some with indifference,
others with open cheer, and it struck Sorweel that they were
simply
Men.
They grunted upon their wives, fretted for their children, prayed against
rumours of a hungry season. It was what they
shared
that made them seem
remarkable, even inhuman: the omnipresent stamp of the Circumfix, be it in gold
or black or crimson. A single purpose.

The Aspect-Emperor.

It was at once glorious and an
abomination. That so many could be folded into the intent of a
single
man.

The calm slipped from his heart
and limbs, and the mad rondo of questions began batting through his soul. What
had happened at the Council? Did he see? Did he not see? Did he see and merely
pretend not to see?

How could he, Sorweel, the
broken son of a broken people, shout hate beneath the all-seeing eyes of the
Aspect-Emperor, and not be... not be...

Corrected.

He quickened his pace, and the
details of his surroundings retreated into half-glimpsed generalities. His left
hand strayed to his cheek, to the warm memory of the muck Porsparian had
smeared there. To the earthen spit of the Goddess...

Yatwer.

He found Porsparian busy
preparing his evening repast. Their small camp bore all the signs of a
laborious day. The sum of Sorweel's meagre wardrobe hung across the tent's
guy-ropes. The contents of his saddle packs lay across a mat to the left of the
tent entrance. The tent, which stood emptied of all its contents, had been
washed, its sun-orange panels drying in the failing light. The old Shigeki had
even set his small camp stool next to the swirling of their humble fire.

Sorweel paused at the invisible
perimeter.

The High Court of the
Sakarpic King.

Seeing him, Porsparian scurried
to kneel at his feet, a bundle of old brown limbs.

"What did you do?"
Sorweel heard himself bark.

The slave glanced up at him, his
wrinkled look as resentful as alarmed. Sorweel had never addressed him as a
servant, let alone as a slave.

He grabbed the old man's arm,
yanked him to his feet with an ease that he found shocking. "What?"
he cried. He paused, screwed his face in an expression of frustration and
regret, tried to remember the Sheyic words Eskeles had taught him. Surely he
could ask this—something as simple as this!

"What you do?" he
cried.

A wild look of incomprehension.

Sorweel thrust him back, then
maintaining his glare, made a pantomime of taking soil and rubbing it across
his cheeks. "What? What you do?"

Like a flutter of wings,
Porsparian's confusion flickered into a kind or perverse glee. He grinned,
began nodding like a madman confirmed in his delusions.
"Yemarte...
Yemarte'sus!"

And Sorweel understood. For the
first time, it seemed, he actually
heard
his slave's voice.

"Blessed... Blessed
you."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Cil-Aujas

A soul too far wandered from
the sun,

walking deeper ways,

into regions beneath map and
nation,

breathing air drawn for the
dead,

talking of lamentation.

—
Protathis,
The Goat's Heart

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

She is terrified and alive.

Mimara runs over mouldered
bones, a pinch of sun-brilliance carried high in the air above her. In her soul
she thinks circles, while with her eyes she sees the light swing and seesaw,
and she ponders the impossibility of it, how the light shed is the same light
as any other, baring the surfaces of things, and yet at the same time
not
quite whole
, as though strained through a filter—robbed of some essential
sediment.

Sorcerous light, stretched over
the ruin like moulted skin.
Her
light!

Fear crowds the moment, to be
sure. She knows why the Wizard has given her this Gift, perhaps better than he.
Part of her, she realizes, will not survive this underworld labyrinth...

Great Cil-Aujas.

She is inclined to see history
as degeneration. Years ago, not long after her mother had brought her to the
Andiamine Heights, an earthquake struck Momemn, not severe, but violent enough
to crack walls and to set arms and ornaments toppling. There had been one mural
in particular, the
Osto-Didian
, the eunuchs called it, depicting the
First Holy War battling about Shimeh, with all the combatants cramped shield to
shield, sword to sword, like dolls bound into sheaves. Where the other murals
had been webbed with fractures, this one seemed to have been pounded by
hammers. Whole sections had sloughed away, exposing darker, deeper images:
naked men across the backs of bulls. In shallow sockets here and there even
this layer had given out, especially near the centre, where her stepfather had
once hung out of proportion in the sky. There, after dabbing away the white
powder with her fingertips, she saw a young man's mosaic face, black hair high
in the wind, child-wide eyes fixed upon some obscured foe.

That, she understood, was
history: the piling on of ages like plaster and paint, each image a shroud
across the others, the light of presence retreating, from the Nonmen to the
Five Tribes to the New Empire, coming at last to a little girl in the embrace
of hard-handed men...

To the daughter who dined with
her Empress mother, listening to the tick of enamel tapping gold, watching the
older woman's eyes wander lines of sorrow, remorse thick enough to spit.

To the woman who raged beneath a
wizard's tower.

To now.

She is inclined to see history
as degeneration, and what greater proof did she need, now that they walked
beneath the mural of mannish strife, now that they touched the glass of first
things?

Cil-Aujas. Great and dead, a
mosaic exposed. What was human paint compared to this?

Everything everywhere has the
smell of age, of air so leached of odour and event that the dust they scoop
into the air with their boots actually makes it seem young, ushers it into a
more human scale. Ageless air, she thinks. Dead air, the kind that lingers in
the chests of corpses.

And everything everywhere has
the look of weight and suffocation. It makes her think of her furies, those
times when she wants to pull all roofs down, so that her perishing could be her
vengeance. What would it be like, she wonders, to be slapped between mountain
palms? Every ceiling plummeting, so that it seems the floor bucks up. The light
snuffed. The thunder of sound crushed to nothing. Everything captured, even the
dust. Limbs little more than blades of grass. Life seeping through fault and
fracture.