The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

  “That cannot be done,” Achamian interrupted.

  The studied lack of expression on Kiampas’s face would be Achamian’s first glimpse of the man’s escalating disdain.

  “And what route do you suggest?”

  “Along the back of the Osthwai.”

  “The back of the …” The man possessed a sneering side, but then, so did most ironic souls. “Are you fucking mad? Do you realize—”

  “I cannot travel anywhere in the New Empire,” Achamian said, genuinely penitent. Of all the Skin Eaters he had met thus far, Kiampas was the only one he was prepared to trust, if only at a procedural level. “Ask Lord Kosoter. He knows who I am.”

  Apparently the lack of contradiction in the Captain’s glare was confirmation enough.

  “So you wish to avoid the Aspect-Emperor,” Kiampas continued. Achamian did not like the way his eyes drifted to the Captain as he said this.

  “What of it?”

  His impertinent smile was rendered all the more injurious by the dignity of his features. “Rumour has it Sakarpus has fallen, that the Great Ordeal even now marches northward.”

  He was saying they would have to cross the New Empire no matter what. Achamian bowed his face to the jnanic degree that acknowledged a point taken. He knew how absurd he must look, an old, wild-haired hermit dressed in a beggar’s tunic, aping the etiquette of a faraway caste-nobility. Even still, this was a courtesy he had yet to extend to any of the others; he wanted Kiampas to know that he respected both him and his misgivings.

  Something told him he would need allies in the weeks and months to come.

  “Look,” Achamian replied. “Were it not for the Great Ordeal, an expedition such as this would be madness. This is perhaps the one time, the only time, that something like this can be attempted! But just because the Aspect-Emperor clears our way, doesn’t mean we must cross his path. He shall be far ahead of us, mark me.”

  Kiampas was having none of it. “The Captain tells me you’re a fellow Veteran, that you belonged to the First Holy War. That means you know full well the sluggish and capricious ways of great hosts on the march.”

  “Sauglish lies out of their way,” Achamian said evenly. “The chances of encountering any Men of the Circumfix are exceedingly slim.”

  Kiampas nodded with slow skepticism, then leaned back, as if retreating from some disagreeable scent.

  The smell of futility, perhaps.

  After that second meeting, the watches of the day and the days of the week passed quickly. Lord Kosoter commanded a muster of the full company the following morning. The Skin Eaters assembled among the posts of old Marrow, far enough from the mists for their jerkins to harden in the sun. They were a motley group, some sixty or so strong, sporting all manner of armour and weaponry. Some were fastidious, obviously intent on reclaiming as much civilization as they could during their brief tenure in Marrow. One was even decked in the crisp white gowns of a Nilnameshi caste-noble and seemed almost comically concerned with the mud staining his crimson-threaded hems. Others were savage-slovenly, bearing the stamp of their inhuman quarry, to the point of almost resembling Sranc in the case of some. A great many seemed to have adopted the Thunyeri custom of wearing shrunken heads as adornment, either about their girdles or sewn into the lacquered faces of their shields. Otherwise, the only thing they seemed to share in common was a kind of deep spiritual fatigue and, of course, an abiding, almost reverential fear of their Captain.

  When they had settled into ranks, Sarl described, in terms grandiloquent enough to flirt with mockery, the nature of the expedition their Captain was in the course of planning. Lord Kosoter stood off to the side, his eyes scavenging the horizon. Cleric accompanied him, somewhat taller and just as broad, his face hidden in his cowl. The cataracts boomed in the distance, a great murky hiss that reminded Achamian of the way the Inrithi hosts had roared in response to Kellhus some twenty years previous. Birdsong braided the nearby forest verge.

  Sarl explained the extraordinary perils that would face them, how they would be travelling ten times the distance of a standard “slog,” as he called it, and how they could expect to live in the “pit” for more than a year. He paused after mentioning this last as though to let its significance resonate. Achamian reminded himself that the wilderness was not so much a place to these men, as an art with its own well of customs and lore. He imagined that scalpers traded stories of companies gone missing returning after so many months in the “pit.” Those words, “more than a year,” he realized, likely carried dismaying implications.

  But again and again, the old, wire-limbed man came back to the Coffers. “Coffers,” spoken like the title of some great king. “Coffers,” murmured like the name of some collective aspiration. “Coffers,” spat as though to say, “How long shall we be denied our due?” “Coffers,” hollered over and over like the name of some lost child. “Coffers,” invoked as though it were something lost and holy, another Shimeh crying out for reconquest …

  But more real than any of these things in that it could be divided into equal shares.

  A lie carved at the joints.

  Sarl explained all, his face reddening, then reddening again, his head bobbing to the more strident turns of speech, his body given to illustrative antics, standing at attention, trotting in place, pacing while the voice pondered. And all was disciplined silence throughout, something which, given the crazed composition of the Skin Eaters, Achamian would have thought a miracle had he not shared bowls with their Captain.

  “You have until tomorrow morning to decide,” Sarl announced in wide-armed conclusion. “Tomorrow to decide whether to risk all to become a prince! or cradle your pulse and die a slave. Afterwards, departures will be considered desertion—desertion!—and Cleric, here, will be set to the hunt. You know the rule of the slog, boys. The knee that buckles pulls ten men down. The knee that buckles pulls ten men down!”

  Watching them break ranks and fall to talking among themselves, Achamian found himself comparing them to the hard-bitten men of the First Holy War, the warriors whose zeal and cruelty had allowed Kellhus to conquer all the Three Seas. The Skin Eaters, he decided, were a far different breed than the Men of the Tusk. They were not ruthless so much as they were vicious. They were not hard so much as they were numb. And they were not driven so much as they were hungry.

  They were, in the end, mercenaries … albeit ones touched by the gibbering ferocity of the Sranc.

  Lord Kosoter seemed to acknowledge as much over the course of the rare glances Achamian exchanged with him. It was a bond between them, Achamian realized, their shared experiences of the First Holy War. They alone possessed the measuring stick, they alone knew the rule. And it had made them kinsmen of a sort—a thought that at once awed and troubled Achamian.

  During that night’s obligatory revels, Sarl approached him. “The Captain has asked me,” he said, “to remind you these men are Scalpoi. Nothing more. Nothing less. The legend of the Skin Eaters resides in him.”

  Achamian thought it strange, a man who despised speaking confiding in a man who could do nothing else. “And you? You believe this?”

  The same eye-pinching grin. “I’ve been with the Captain since the beginning,” he cackled. “From before the Imperial Bounty, in the wars against the Orthodox. I’ve seen him stand untouched in a hail of arrows, while I cringed behind my shield. I was at his side on the walls of Meigeiri, when the fucking Longbeards fell over themselves trying to flee from his blood-maddened gaze. I was there, after the battle of Em’famir. With these two ears I heard the Aspect-Emperor—the Aspect-Emperor!—name him Ironsoul!” Sarl laughed with purpling mania. “Oh, yes, he’s mortal, to be sure. He’s a man like other men, as many an unfortunate peach has discovered, believe you me. But something watches him, and more important, something watches through him …”

  Sarl seized Achamian’s elbow, smashed his wine-bowl into Achamian’s hard enough to shatter both. “You would do well …” he said, a mad blankness on his f
ace. He eased backward step by unreal step, nodding as though to a tune or a truth that only rats could hear, “to respect the Captain.”

  Achamian looked down to his soaked hand. The wine had run from his fingers as thick as blood.

  To think he had worried about the Nonman’s madness.

  The presence of the Erratic concerned Achamian, to be sure, but on so many levels that the resulting anxieties seemed to cancel one another out. And he had to admit, aside from the bardic romance of a Nonman companion, there was a tremendous practical advantage to his presence. Achamian had few illusions about the odyssey that confronted them. It was a long and bitter war they were about to undertake as much as it was an expedition, a protracted battle across the breadth of Eärwa. He had much to learn regarding this Incariol, true, but there were few powers in the world that could rank a Nonman Magi.

  Lord Kosoter kept him close for good reason.

  At the ensuing muster the following morning, only some thirty or so Skin Eaters reported—half the number of those assembled the previous day. Lord Kosoter remained as inscrutable as ever, but Sarl seemed overjoyed, though it was unclear whether it was because so many or so few had “cleaved to the slog,” as he put it. The defections may have halved his chances of survival, but they also had doubled the value of his shares.

  With the composition of the company decided, the following days were dedicated to outfitting and supplying the expedition. Achamian quite willingly surrendered what remained of his gold, a gesture that seemed to impress the Skin Eaters mightily. The fortune spent seemed to speak of the far greater fortune to be made—even Sarl joined in the general enthusiasm. It was ever the same: Convince a man to take a single step—after all, what earthly difference could one step make?—and he would walk the next mile to prove himself right.

  How could they know Achamian had no expectation of return? In a sense, leaving the Three Seas was the real return. He might no longer be a Mandate Schoolman, but his heart belonged to the Ancient North all the same. To the coiling insinuations of the Dreams …

  To Seswatha.

  “It is always like this,” Kiampas told him one evening at the Cocked Leg. The two of them had been sitting side by side wordlessly eating while the trestle before them boomed and cackled with revelling Skin Eaters—Sarl in the celebratory thick of them.

  “Before going on a slog?” Achamian asked.

  Kiampas paused to suck at the tip of a rabbit bone. He shrugged.

  “Before anything,” he said, glancing up from the carcass scattered across his plate. There seemed to be genuine sorrow in his look, the regret of kings forced to condemn innocents in the name of appeasing the masses. “Anything involving blood.”

  Weariness broke across the Wizard, as if a consciousness of years were an integral part of understanding the man’s meaning. He turned to the illuminated tableau of scalpers before them: nodding, leaning, shaking with laughter, and, with the exception of Sarl and a few others, brash with rude youth. For the first time, Achamian felt the cumulative weight of all the lies he had told, as though the prick of each had been tallied in lead. How many would die? How many would he use up in his quest to learn the truth of the man-god whose profile graced all the coins they so coveted?

  How many pulses had he sacrificed?

  Are you doing this for the sake of vengeance? Is that it?

  Guilt palmed his gaze toward the incidental background, toward those untouched by his machinations. Across the haze of the room’s central hearth, he saw Haubrezer watching the Skin Eaters as well. When he realized that Achamian had seen him, the thin man jerked to his feet, then lurched through the door, his wrists paddling the air with every loping step.

  Achamian thought of the innkeep’s warning. “Stand aside for the Skin Eaters,” he had said.

  They strike you down but good.

  “I have built a place,” the High-King said.

  It was strange, the way Achamian knew he dreamed, and the way he knew it not at all, so that he lived this moment as a true now, as something unthought, unguessed, unbreathed, as Seswatha, speaking with another man’s selfsame spontaneity, every heartbeat counting out a unique existence, veined and clothed and clotted with urgent and indolent passion. It was strange, the way he paused at the forks of the moment and made ancient decisions …

  How could it be? How could he feel all the ferment of a free soul? How could he live a life for the first time over and over?

  Seswatha leaned over a small table set between glowering tripods. Snake-entwined wolves danced in a bronze rim around the lip of each, so that the light cast by their flames was fretted by struggling shadows. It made staring at the benjuka plate and its occult patterns of stone pieces difficult. Achamian suspected his old friend had done this deliberately. Benjuka, after all, with its infinite relationships and rule-changing rules, was a game of prolonged concentration.

  And no man loathed losing more than Anasûrimbor Celmomas.

  “A place,” Achamian repeated.

  “A refuge.”

  Seswatha frowned, bent his gaze up from the plate.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In case the war … goes wrong.”

  This was uncharacteristic. Not the worry, for indecision riddled Celmomas to the core, but the worry’s expression. Back then, no one save the Nonmen of Ishterebinth understood the stakes of the war that embroiled them. Back then, “apocalypse” was a word with a different meaning.

  Achamian nodded in Seswatha’s slow and deliberate way. “You mean the No-God,” he said with a small laugh—a laugh! Even for Seswatha, that name had been naught but a misgiving, more abstraction than catastrophe.

  How did one relive such ancient ignorance?

  Celmomas’s long and leonine face lay blank, indifferent to the geography of pieces arranged between them. The totem braided into his beard—a palm-sized countenance of a wolf cast in gold—seemed to pant and loll in the uncertain light.

  “What if this … this thing … is as mighty as the Quya say? What if we are too late?”

  “We are not too late.”

  Silence fell upon them as in a tomb. There was something subterranean about all the ancillary chambers of the Annexes, but none more so, it seemed, than the Royal Suites. No matter how thick the decorative plaster, no matter how bright the paint or gorgeous the tapestries, the lintelled ceilings hung just as low, humming with the weight of oppressive stone.

  “You, Seswatha,” the High-King said, returning his gaze to the plate. “You are the only one. The only one I trust.”

  Achamian thought of his Queen, her buttocks against his hips, her calves hooked hot and hungry about his waist.

  The High-King moved a stone, a move that Seswatha had not foreseen, and the rules changed in the most disastrous way possible. What had been opportunity found itself twisted inside out, stamped into something as closed and as occluded as the future.

  Achamian was almost relieved …

  “I have built a place … a refuge …” Anasûrimbor Celmomas said. “A place where my line can outlive me.”

  Ishuäl …

  Sucking musty air, Achamian shot upright in bed. He grabbed his white maul, pressed his head to his knees. The Long-Braid Falls thundered beyond the timbered walls, a white background roar that seemed to give the blackness mass and momentum. “Ishuäl,” he murmured. “A place …” He looked up to the heavens, as though peering through the obscurity of his room’s low ceiling. “But where is it?”

  Whining ears, sorting through the fibres of sound: laughter from the floor, breaking like a bubble in boiling pitch; shouts calling out the streets, daring and proclaiming.

  “Where?”

  The truth of men lay in their origins. He knew this as only a Mandate Schoolman could. Anasûrimbor Kellhus had not come to the Three Seas by accident. He had not found his half-brother waiting for him as Shriah of the Thousand Temples by accident. He had not conquered the known world by accident!

  Achamian swung his fe
et from his blankets, sat on the edge of his straw-mattressed bed. The words from some ribald song floated up through the joists in the floor.

  Her skin was rough as brick,

  Her legs were made of rope.

  Her gut was plenty thick,

  And her teeth were soft as soap.

  But her peach was cast in gold.

  Aye! No! Aye!

  T’were her peach that had me sold!

  Waves of gagging laughter. A muffled voice raised to the Coffers. A ragged, ululating cheer, soaking through wood.

  The Skin Eaters, singing before they shed blood.

  For the longest time, Achamian sat motionless save for the slow saw of his breathing. It seemed he could see the spaces beneath, that he hung upon glass over close limb-jostled air. The Captain was absent, of course, as remote as his godlike authority required. But he could see Sarl, his ink-line eyes, age-scorched skin, and gum-glistening smile, see him using his rank to enforce the pretence that he was one of them. That was his problem, Sarl, his refusal to acknowledge his old man crooks, the flabby reservoirs of regret and bitterness that chambered every elderly heart.

  And then there were the men, the Skin Eaters proper as opposed to their mad handlers, spared the convolutions of long life, lost in the thoughtless fellowship of lust and brute desire that made the young young, flaunting the willingness to fuck or to kill under the guise of whim, when in truth it all came down to the paring eyes of the others. Recognition.

  He could see all of it through night and floors.

  And the Wizard realized, with the curious fate-affirming euphoria of those who discover themselves guiltless. He would burn a hundred. He would burn a thousand.

  However many fools it took to find Ishuäl.

  The company stomped to the foot of the escarpments, in the chill of the following morning, a long bleary-eyed train bent beneath packs and leading mules, and began climbing out of the squalid precincts of Marrow. The switchback trail was nothing short of treacherous, smeared as it was in donkey shit. But it seemed appropriate, somehow, that spit and toil were required to leave the wretched town. It made palpable the limits they were scaling, the fact that they had turned their backs on the New Empire’s outermost station, the very fringe of civilization, both wicked and illumined.