The Judging Eye (68 page)

"I can't
seeeeee
!"
the crease-faced sergeant gibbers. "I-look-I-look-I-look..."

The Unholy Seal rears glistening
from the water, weeping strings of fire. It towers over them in leaning
accusation. It roars, the sound so near, so ingrown that it seems they stand in
the throat of a Demon-God. A voice claps through their souls, so loud it draws
blood through the pores of their skin.

The Gates are no longer
guarded.

Mimara is also on her knees,
also shrieking, yet her fingers somehow find her purse, begin fumbling,
pinching the Chorae that nearly killed the Wizard. She cringes beneath the
looming aspect, a child beneath a collapsing city wall. She hugs her limbs
against the piercing pleas of little mouths, the moaning masses of the
damned...

And somehow lifts her Tear of
God.

She knows not what she does. She
knows only what she glimpsed in the slave chamber, that single slow heartbeat
of light and revelation. She knows what she saw with the Judging Eye.

The Chorae burns as a sun in her
fingers, making red wine of her hand and forearm, revealing the shadow of her
bones, and yet drawing the eye instead of rebuking it, a light that does not
blind.

"I guard them!"
she
weeps, standing frail beneath the white-bleached Seal.
"I hold the
Gates!"

***

Of all their ordeals, none would
be so great as climbing the Great Medial Screw. Where the Sranc had taken their
toll in blood and lives, and the Wight-in-the-Mountain, or whatever it was they
had encountered in the closeted deeps, had taken its toll in terror and spirit,
the endless stairs of the Screw took everything that remained: courage,
strength, and endurance—endurance above all. Climbing. Climbing. Climbing.
Clinging to seams as they picked their way over collapsed sections. Hurrying
past the hundreds of gaping black portals. Bending back their faces to remind
themselves of the sky they sought, to wonder at the way it waxed and grew.

The first time the high blue
point they climbed toward began darkening they had despaired, fearing they had
been shut in, until they realized that it was simply night. They had been
buried so long they had forgotten the cycle of the days.

Sometimes, with the inscrutable
ideograms struck into the curvature of the endlessly rising walls, it seemed
they crawled through the curled inside of a scroll. Sometimes, given the way
the Screw crossed the course of some natural shaft, here bricked, here hewn,
Achamian was reminded of the canals of Momemn, where cut waterways linked
natural estuaries. But always he was struck by the
ambition
, the
marriage of patience and hubris that had made such a work possible. A stair as
tall as a mountain. There was a kind of madness in the fact of the Screw, one
that dwarfed even the famed Ziggurats of Shigek.

Mimara had said nothing in two
days. When he tried coaxing words from her, she would simply gaze at him. Her
lips would twitch, sometimes they would even part, but no words would come, and
a kind of helpless remorse would dim her eyes. He spent quite some time trying
to puzzle through what had happened, to make sense of the crazed image of her,
holding nothing but a Chorae, the same existential pit she carried beneath her
belt now, quailing beneath a horror that should have devoured her whole, from
the flesh of her fingertips to the final spark of her soul.

He knew something of demons,
Ciphrang, knew that when summoned, a Chorae could destroy their corporeal form.
But what faced them had risen on a tide of unreality. Hell had come with him,
the shade of Gin'yursis, the last Nonman King of Cil-Aujas, and he should have
taken them all, Chorae or no Chorae.

But something had happened.
She
had happened.

Anasûrimbor Mimara, cursed with
the Judging Eye.

Despite the pity that filled
him, there was a reprieve in her misfortune. It could be no coincidence that
she had come to him when she had. The wiles of the Whore were at work here, the
treachery of Fate. The more he pondered it, the more it seemed she had been
given. It was his doom to hunt down the origins of the Aspect-Emperor, to shed
light on the darkness that came before him. Cil-Aujas had resolved that
question.

There was a bad period when the
last of the qirri drained from them, where the most they could do was lay
gasping. Somehow they slept, and somehow they found themselves unharmed when
they awoke. After that, the climb was sheer misery. Dizziness and nausea.
Cramped limbs. Several fainted for the effort and were only saved by the wits
of their fellows. Achamian paused several times to vomit spittle.

The downward wind grew as they
climbed, so chill that Achamian added an air warming Huiritic Ring to the
Surillic Point—they needed to be sure of their footing—yet one more burden for
his overtaxed soul. What had been a vast well above them became an endless pit
below. Soon they could spy the source of the perpetual water that threaded the
open spaces beyond the brink: ice and snow. It clotted the final tracts of the
Screw, rising in shining humps against the cloudless plate of the sky.

After clambering across the
first ice-sheathed steps and staring up across the angular slopes heaped across
the stair, they realized their limbs could take them no farther. There was a
look of grim confirmation in the dismay that deadened their eyes, as if they
had known all along that Cil-Aujas would never relinquish them. Without
explanation, Achamian bid them withdraw behind him. From behind glimmering
Wards, he showed them what a Gnostic Wizard could do in the light of day. Ice
and snow cracked and crashed, sloughed away in mountainous sheets, thundered so
hard against his Wards that the stone of the stair even fractured beneath his
feet. But he continued singing Abstractions, pure dispensations of force and
light, and the geometries danced and twirled, striking and burning. And when he
was done, bars of sunlight could be seen lancing through the mist, warming the
bare black stone of Aenaratiol.

This was a kind of final knell
for the Skin Eaters, a tipping point of comprehension. At last they understood
the abyssal gap that had always existed between them, scalpers and Wizard.
Achamian could see it in their sidelong glances. With the exception of their
Captain, they began looking at him with an awe and reverence they had once
reserved for Cleric.

And he felt an itch, something
small and sharp against the buzz of His utter exhaustion... Some time passed
before he recognized it: the creeping return of his guilt. These men, these
strangers he would kill, now seemed his brothers.

It was no small thing to crawl
out of the abyss, to rise from Hell to the very roof of the World. Though their
eyes had long adjusted, they still stood blinking, scattered atop the
snow-encrusted debris that ringed the opening to the Great Screw. It made
Achamian, who stood arm in arm with Mimara, think of the first Men, savages of
the plains, rubbing their eyes at what they could only comprehend as a
blessing.

With light comes life. With sky
comes freedom.

The Halls of Cil-Aujas, the
dread Black Halls, had at last relinquished them.

Achamian looked to the remnants
of their company, knowing they had reached a moment of decision. Aside from
Lord Kosoter, only Soma, blessed with the luck of the daft, seemed unscathed.
Sarl appeared intact in body but continued to betray a disordered soul—even now
he grinned and rocked from heel to heel. Pokwas had gained strength on the
climb, despite continuously bleeding from his scalp. The other veteran Skin
Eaters, Xonghis, Sutadra, and Galian, wore septic bandages on their arms and
thighs but seemed able enough. Of those the Bitten had called the Herd, all
three survivors were Galeoth—Conger, Wonard, and Hameron—men Achamian had not
known until the arduous climb up the Screw. Wonard was already showing signs of
infection, and Conger seemed to hop more than walk. Hameron wept whenever Lord
Kosoter's distraction afforded.

Their hair whipping in the wind,
bereft of everything save their hauberks and their swords, the company stood,
blank before the vista extending about them. Their trials had stained and
stamped them: the purplish smear of Sranc blood, the rusty blots of their own,
innumerable little cuts across their shins and knuckles, the mottling of
sweat-and-dust-soaked skin. Though their stares were dead for fatigue, there
was a madness in the quick twitches with which they cast them across the
panorama.

They stood in the heart of
Aenaratiol's extinct crater, on an island heaped with broken columns and gutted
walls. A frozen lake surrounded them, gleaming black where not covered with
dunes of snow. More ruins climbed the crater walls, a veritable city of them,
walls stacked upon walls. Vacant windows gazed out from them, as black as the labyrinth
below, melancholy. Above, beyond the crater rim, taller peaks rose bright and
white against the blue, trailing chalk streamers of snow.

The sun gleamed cold and white.

Xonghis raised a blood-dirtied
hand against the glare. "That way..." he said without emotion. He
pointed over the bottomless plummet of the Screw to the crater wall behind
them, to where the line of the rim rose like a shark or Sranc tooth. "I
recognize that from when we first approached the mountain... That way is
home
."
He turned back to the direction they had faced when they first ascended.
"That is the Long Side."

Achamian caught his breath.

He had not forgotten his dream
in the bowel of the mountain, the dream he had sought in vain for so many
years. But he had not remembered it either. Circumstances can blot the
significance of our revelations as easily as otherwise. What did it matter, the
realization of ardent desires, when all was death and damnation?

"Keep it, old friend.
Make it your deepest secret..."

But circumstances had changed.
They had escaped Cil-Aujas, and the revelatory memories now glowed through the
fog of his privations. He had dreamed it! On the very threshold of hell he had
dreamed his long-sought answer. A map, two thousand years old, slumbering
beneath ruin and wilderness. A map to Ishuäl, and to the truth of the
Aspect-Emperor.

"Bury it,"
the
ancient High-King had said.
"Bury it in the Coffers..."

In Marrow, Achamian had
mentioned the Coffers the way a trapper baits his snare, as a crude goad meant
to drive crude men. But now...

His lie. Fate was making his lie
true.

The surviving Skin Eaters
glanced at Xonghis, then surveyed the competing distances. But this moment,
Achamian knew, had already been decided: There were no forks in the road before
them. The Whore was driving them like slaves beaten toward a captor's capital.

"Yes..." Sarl coughed
and laughed. "
Yesss!
The
Coffers
, boys! The Coffers-yes!"

And there it was. Somehow they
were content to let a madman sound and settle the issue. Gazing through shanks
of steel-grey hair, Lord Kosoter took the first downward step.

Mobbed beneath the heat
radiating from the crimson glow of the Huiritic Ring, the company followed him,
trundled down a slope of snowpacked ruin, onto the flat expanse of the frozen
lake. A thin carpet of snow covered its nearer reaches, so they didn't see the
ancient dead frozen beneath its surface until they had travelled a good portion
of its length. Some were little more than shadows, either because the ice was
clouded or they lay so deep. Others hung mere inches below the surface,
strangely chapped and withered, like dead wasps in cocoons. The eyes looked
like the pads of severed fingers. The mouths were all pried open, as though
still, after all these ages, trying to draw air from the sky. The limbs were
frozen in innumerable poses of falling. All of them were women and children.

No one spoke as they limped and
tramped across them. Whatever curiosity they possessed had been beaten from
them, and dread had become a constant companion.

They climbed what stairs they
could find, up through the remnants of ancient pleasure-palaces. They saw all
the same motifs and architectural flourishes, the same crazed density of image,
that had so awed them in the galleries below. But for some reason it seemed
tragic, pathetic even, exposed as it was by cracked walls and vanished
ceilings. The work of a race that had gone insane for staring inward.

When they reached the summit of
the crater rim, the inversion was so utter, the contrast to the buried depths
so severe, that several of them fell to clinging whatever the ice or stone
afforded. The dishevelled enormity of the Osthwai Mountains unfolded before
them, glaring in the crisp high-sky light, great snow-sheathed horns receding
across the horizon. The giddy sweep and plunge of endless open spaces encircled
them, fluttered in their bellies. For a time at least, it was too much for
newly born men.

But there was no question of
stopping long. No matter how hard they sucked they could not draw enough air.
Despite the heat shed by the Huiritic Ring, their skin purpled and their lips
turned blue.

And they were starving.

But as they were about to descend,
one of them called out, Soma, pointing back the way they came, at the ruins
heaped about the rim of the Great Medial Screw. Achamian crowded with the
others, peering to look, but his old eyes could make out nothing more than a
speck crossing the snow-swept iron of the frozen lake. A lone figure trudging
in their wake...