The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  So he came in kindness, with the food she so obviously needed, and with an openness that itched because of its premeditation. He certainly hadn't anticipated losing himself in story and conversation. It had been so long since he had truly spoken. For nigh twenty years, his words had always skipped without sinking.

  "I'm not even sure when it began happening, let alone why," he said, pausing to draw a palsied breath. "The Dreams began to change… in strange, little ways at first. Mandate Schoolmen claim to relive Seswatha's life, but this is only partially true. In fact, we dream only portions, the long trauma of the First Apocalypse. All we dream is the spectacle. 'Seswatha,' the old Mandate joke goes, 'does not shit.' The banalities-the substance of his life-is missing… The truth of his life is missing."

  All the things that were forgotten, he realized.

  "In the beginning, I noticed a change in the character, perhaps, but nothing more. A slight difference in emphasis. When the dreamer is remade, won't the dreams change also? Besides, the dread spectacle was simply too overwhelming to care all that much. When thousands are screaming, who pauses to count bruises on an apple?

  "Then it happened: I dreamed of him-Seswatha-stubbing his toe… I fell asleep, this world folded in on itself the way it always does, and his world rose into its place. I was he, crossing a gloomy room racked with what seemed to be thousands of scrolls, mumbling, lost in thought, and I stubbed my toe on the bronze foot of a brazier… It was like a fever dream, the ones that travel like a cart in a circle, happening over and over. Seswatha stubbing his toe!"

  Without thinking, he had leaned forward and clutched the tip of his felt-slippered foot. The leather was fire hot. Mimara simply stared at him, her eyes placid above fine-boned cheeks, looking for all the world like the past, like her staring out over the smoke of a harsher fire. Another abject listener. Either she remained silent out of irritation-perhaps he had spoken too long or too hard-or she kept her counsel, understanding that his story was a living thing, and as such could only be judged as a whole.

  "When I awoke in the morning," he continued, "I had no idea what to make of it. It didn't strike me as a revelation of any kind, only a curiosity. There are always anomalies, you see. If this were Atyersus, I could show you whole tomes cataloguing the various ways in which the Dreams misfire: the inversions, substitutions, alterations, corruptions, and on and on. More than a few Mandate scholars have spent their lives trying to interpret their significance. Numerological codes. Prophetic communications. Ethereal interferences. It's an easy obsession, considering the suffering involved. They convince nobody save themselves in the end. As bad as philosophers.

  "So I decided the toe-stubbing dream was my own. Seswatha never stubbed his toe, I told myself. I stubbed my dream toe while dreaming that I was Seswatha. After all, it was my toe that ached all morning! It never happened, I told myself. Not really…

  "And of course the next night it was back to the Dreams as I knew them. Back to the blood and the fire and the horror. A year passed, maybe more, before I dreamed another banality: Seswatha scolding a student on a veranda overlooking the Library of Sauglish. I dismissed this one the same as the first.

  "Then two months after that, I dreamed yet another trivial thing: Seswatha huddled in a scriptorium, reading a scroll by the light of coals…"

  He trailed, though whether to let the significance settle in or to savour the memory, he did not know. Sometimes words interrupted themselves. He pinched the hem of his cloak, rolled the rough-sewn seam between thumb and forefinger.

  Mimara ran the blade of her hand across the bowl's interior curve to scoop out the last of her gruel-like any slave or caste-menial. It was strange, Achamian noted, the way she alternately remembered and forgot her jnanic manners. "What was the scroll?" she asked, swallowing.

  "A lost work," he replied, absent with memories. He blinked. "Gotagga's Parapolis… The title means nothing to you, I know, but for a scholar it's nothing short of… well, a miracle. The Parapolis is a lost work, famous, the first great treatise on politics, referenced by almost all the writers of Far Antiquity. It was one of the greater treasures lost in the First Apocalypse and I dreamed of reading it, as Seswatha, sitting in the cellars of the Library…"

  Mimara paused for one last pass of her tongue along the bowl's rim. "And you don't think you invented this?"

  Irritation marbled his laugh. "I suppose my tongue is sharp enough to count me clever, but I'm no Gotagga, I assure you. No. No. There was no question. I awoke in a mad haste, searching for quill, hide, and horn so I could scratch down as much as I could remember…"

  Her meal forgotten, Mimara watched him with same shrewd canniness that had so honed her mother's beauty. "So the dreams were real…"

  He nodded, squinting at the memory of the miracle that had been that morning. What a wondrous, breathless scramble! It was as though the answer was already there, wholly formed, as clear as the steam rolling off his morning tea: He had started dreaming outside the narrow circle of his former Mandate brothers. He had begun dreaming Seswatha's mundane life.

  "And no one," she asked, "no Mandate Schoolman, has ever dreamed these things before?"

  "Bits maybe, fragments, but nothing like this."

  How strange it had been, to find his life's revelation in the small things; he who had wrestled with dying worlds. But then the great ever turned upon the small. He often thought of the men he'd known-the warlike ones, or just the plain obstinate-of their enviable ability to overlook and to ignore. It was like a kind of wilful illiteracy, as if all the moments of unmanly passion and doubt, all the frail details that gave substance to their lives, were simply written in a tongue they couldn't understand and so needed to condemn and belittle. It never occurred to them that to despise the small things was to despise themselves-not to mention the truth.

  But then that was the tragedy of all posturing.

  "But why the change?" she asked, her face a delicate oval hanging warm and motionless against the black forest deeps. "Why you? Why now?"

  He had inked these questions across parchment many times.

  "I have no idea. Perhaps it's the Whore-fucking Fate. Perhaps it's a happy consequence of my madness-for one cannot endure what I've endured day and night without going a little mad, I assure you." He made her laugh by blinking his eyes and jerking his head in caricature. "Perhaps, by ceasing to live my own life, I'd began living his. Perhaps some dim memory, some spark of Seswatha's soul, is reaching out to me… Perhaps…"

  Achamian blinked at the crack in his voice, cleared his throat. Words could soar, dip, and dazzle, and sometimes even cross paths with the sun. Blind and illuminate. But the voice was different. It remained bound to the earth of expression. Not matter how it danced, the graves always lay beneath its feet.

  On the back of a heavy breath, he said, "But there is a far greater question."

  She hugged her knees before the pop and swirl of the fire, blinking slowly, her expression more careful than impassive. He knew how he must look, the challenge in his glare, the defensiveness, the threat of punishing surrogates. He looked like a venomous old man, balling up his reasons in uncertain fists-he knew as much.

  But if there were judgment in her eyes, he could detect nothing of it.

  "My stepfather," she said. "Kellhus is the question."

  He imagined he must be gaping at her, gawking like a stump-headed fool.

  He had spoken to her as if she were a stranger, an innocent, when in point of fact she was joined to him at the very root. Esmenet was her mother, which meant that Kellhus was her stepfather. Even though he had known this, the significance of that knowing had completely escaped him. Of course she knew of his hatred. Of course she knew the particulars of his shame!

  How could he be so oblivious? The Dыnyain was her father! The Dыnyain.

  Did this not instantly make her an instrument of some kind? A witting or unwitting spy? Achamian had watched an entire army-a holy war-succumb to his dread influence. Slaves, princ
es, sorcerers, fanatics-it did not matter. Achamian himself had surrendered his love-his wife! What chance could this mere girl have?

  How much of her soul was hers, and how much had been replaced?

  He gazed at her, tried to scowl away the slack from his expression.

  "He sent you, didn't he?"

  She looked genuinely confused, dismayed even. "What? Kellhus?" She stared at him, her mouth open and wordless. "If his people find me, they would drag me home in chains! Throw me at the feet of my fucking mother-you have to believe that!"

  "He sent you."

  Something, some mad note in his voice perhaps, rocked her backward. "I'm not ly-lying…" Tears clotted her eyes. A strange half-crook bent her face to the side, as though angling it away from unseen blows. "I'm not lying," she repeated with a snarling intensity. A twitch marred her features. "No. Look. Everything was going so well… Everything was going so well!"

  "This is the way it works," Achamian heard himself rasp in an utterly ruthless voice. "This is the way he sends you. This is the way he rules-from the darkness in our own souls! If you were to feel it, know it, that would simply mean there was some deeper deception."

  "I don't know what you're talking about! He-he's always been kind-"

  "Did he ever tell you to forgive your mother?"

  "What? What do you mean?"

  "Did he ever tell you the shape of your own heart? Did he ever speak salving words, healing words, words that helped you see yourself more clearly than you had ever seen yourself before?"

  "Yes-I mean, no! And yes… Please… Things were going so-!"

  There was a grinding to his aspect, an anger that had become reptilian with age. "Did you ever find yourself in awe of him? Did something whisper to you, This man is more than a man? And did you feel gratified, gratified beyond measure, at his merest tenderness, at the bare fact of his attention?"

  He was shaking as he spoke now, shaking at the memories, shaking at the nakedness of twenty years stripped away. It seemed to hang about the edges of his vision, the lies and the hopes and the betrayals, the succession of glaring suns and uproarious battles.

  "Akka…" she was saying. So like her whore-mother. "What are you talki-?"

  "When you stood before him!" he roared. "When you knelt in his presence, did you feel it? Hollow and immovable, as if you were at once smoke and yet possessed the bones of the world? Truth? Did you feel Truth?"

  "Yes!" she cried. "Everyone does! Everyone! He's the Aspect-Emperor! He's the Saviour. He's come to save us! Come to save the Sons of Men!"

  Achamian stared at her aghast, his own vehemence ringing in his ears. Of course she was a believer.

  "He sent you."

  ***

  It was too late, he realized, staring at the image of Mimara across the fire. It had already happened. Despite all the intervening years, despite the waning violence of the Dreams, she had returned him to the teeth of yesterday. To simply gaze upon her was to taste the dust and blood and smoke of the First Holy War.

  He understood her look-how could he not when he so readily recognized it as his own? Too many losses. Too many small hopes denied. Too many betrayals of sell. The look of someone who understands that the World is a peevish judge, forgiving only to render its punishments all the more severe. She had suffered a moment of weakness when she had seen him clambering down the slopes with food; he could see that now. She had let herself hope. Her soul had taken her body's gratitude and made it its own.

  He believed her. She was not a willing slave. If anything she reminded him of the Scylvendi, of a soul at once strong and yet battered beyond recognition. And she looked so much like her mother…

  She was precisely the kind of slave Kellhus would send to him. Part cipher. Part opiate.

  Someone Drusas Achamian could come to love.

  "Did you know I was there when he first arrived in the Three Seas," he said, broaching the silence of dark forests and rustling flames. "He was no more than a beggar claiming princely blood-and with a Scylvendi as his companion no less! I was there from the very first. It was my back he broke climbing to absolute power."

  He rubbed his nose, breathed deep as though preparing for the plunge. It never ceased to strike him as strange, the fits and starts of the body and its anxieties.

  "Kellhus," he said, speaking the name in the old way, with the intonations of familiarity and wry trust. "My student… My friend… My prophet… It was my wife he stole…

  "My morning."

  He glared, challenging her to speak again. She simply blinked, wriggled as though to adjust her position. He could see her swallow behind the line of her lips.

  "The only thing," he continued, his voice wrung ragged with conflicting passions. "The only thing I took with me from my previous life was a simple question: Who is Anasыrimbor Kellhus? Who?"

  Achamian stared at the bed of coals pulsing beneath the blackened wood, paused to allow Mimara fair opportunity to respond, or so he told himself. The truth was that the thought of her voice made him wince. The truth was that his story had turned into a confession.

  "Everyone knows the answer to that question," she ventured, speaking with a delicacy that confirmed his fears. "He's the Aspect-Emperor."

  Of course she would say this. Even if she hadn't been Kellhus's adoptive daughter, she would have said precisely the same thing. They so wanted it to be simple, believers. "It is what is!" they cried, sneering at the possibility of other eyes, other truths, overlooking their own outrageous presumption. "It says what it says," spoken with a conviction that was itself insincerity. They ridiculed questions, for fear it would make their ignorance plain. Then they dared call themselves "open."

  This was the iron habit of Men. This was what shackled them to the Aspect-Emperor.

  He shook his head in slow deliberation. "The most important question you can ask any man, child, is the question of his origin. Only by knowing what a man has been can you hope to say what he will be." He paused, brought up short by an old habit of hesitation. How easy it was to hide in his old pedantic ruts, to recite rather than talk. But no matter how woolly, his abstractions always became snarled in the very needling particularities he so unwittingly tried to avoid. He had always been a man who wanted to digress, only to find himself bleeding on the nub.

  "But everyone knows the answer to that question," she said with same care as before, "Kellhus is the Son of Heaven." What else could he be? her over-bright eyes asked.

  "Yet he is flesh and blood, born of a father's seed and a mother's womb. He was reared. He was taught. He was sent out into the world…" He raised his eyebrows as though speaking something crucial but universally overlooked. "So tell me, where did all this happen? Where?"

  For the first time, it seemed, he glimpsed real doubt gnawing her gaze. "They say he was a prince," she began, "that he comes from Atrith-"

  "He does not come from Atrithau," Achamian snapped. "I know this on a dead man's authority."

  The Scylvendi. Cnaiьr urs Skiцtha. As always, the man's words came back to him: "With every heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and whimper when they raise their hand… They make us love!"

  They. The Dыnyain. The Tribe of the Aspect-Emperor.

  "But what about his bloodline?" Mimara asked. "Are you saying his name is false as well?"

  "No… He is an Anasыrimbor, I grant you that-the coincidences would be stacked too high were it otherwise. That is our only clue."

  "How so?"

  "Because it means the question of his birthplace is the question of where the Line of Anasыrimbor could have survived."

  She seemed to consider this. "But if not Atrithau, then where? The North is more than ruined, more than wilderness-or so my tutors always say. How could anyone survive with… them?"

  Them. The Sranc. Achamian thought of the multitudes, clawing the earth in frustration, throwing up gouts of
dirt in the absence of warding limbs, stamping and howling, stamping and howling across the endless tracts.

  "Exactly," he said. "If the Line were to survive, it had to be within a refuge of some kind. Something secret, hidden. Something raised by the Kыniьric High Kings, ere the First Apocalypse…"

  "Then listen!" the Scylvendi cried. "For thousands of years they have hidden in the mountains, isolated from the world. For thousands of years they have bred, allowing only the quickest of their children to live. They say you know the passing of ages better than any, sorcerer, so think on it! Thousands of years… Until we, the natural sons of true fathers, have become little more than children to them."

  "A sanctuary."

  Achamian knew he was speaking too desperately now, even though he measured his words the way hungry mothers dolloped out butter. Such words could not come slow enough. The Aspect-Emperor a liar? Her face was blank in the way of those grievously offended, whose retort remained bottled by the fear of unstopping too many passions. His soul's eye and ear cried out for her: Jealous old fool! He stole her, Esmenet! That is the sum of your pathetic case against him. He stole the only woman you've loved! And now you lust only for his destruction, to see him burn, though all the world is tinder…

  He breathed deeply, leaned back from the fire, which suddenly seemed to nip him with its heat. He resolved to refill his pipe, but could only clench his fists against the tremors.

  My hands shake.

  His voice grows more shrill. His gesticulations become wilder. His discourse develops a pinned-in-place savagery that makes him difficult to watch and impossible to contradict.

  Her heart rejoices at first, certain that he has relented. But the tone of his voice quickly tells her otherwise. The excitement. The wry delivery of his observations, as though to say, How many times? The way people speak is a bound thing, as far from free as a slave or a horse. Place binds it. Occasion binds it. But other people rule it most of all; the shadow of names lies hidden in every word spoken. And the longer he talks, the more Mimara realizes that he is speaking to someone other than her…