The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  Gravitas, the ancient Cenieans would have called it.

  No one dared hate her, for that would have carried too much admission. And all respected her, for that was the only ingress she allowed, the only way to avoid suffocating in her implacable gaze. So she rose through the layered hierarchies of the Cult of Yatwer the way a stone dropped through flotsam. In twenty short years, she became the Matriarch, the Cult's titular leader, answering only to the Shriah in Sumna. Fourteen years after that, she was declared Mother-Supreme, a station outlawed when the Thousand Temples brought the Cults to heel long ago but maintained in secret for almost sixteen centuries.

  A broad trench yawned before the priestesses. Forced to descend the earthen ramp in single file, they momentarily crowded the edge, flummoxed by the delicate question of precedence. Nannaferi ignored them, reached the bottom before the first of them had dared follow. A band of armed men, local caste-menials chosen for their fanatical zeal, fell to their knees as she strolled into their midst. She glanced across their sun-shining backs, nodded in approval as each murmured the ritual invocation, "Hek'neropontah…"

  Gift-giver.

  Gift-giver, indeed, she silently mused. A Gift they could scarce comprehend, let alone believe.

  She paused before the entrance, knelt to one knee so that she might taste Goddess-earth.

  Aside from excavating the ancient gate, the Cult had done nothing to undo the sacrilege wrought by the heathen. Looters had stripped the black-marble panels with the friezes depicting the Goddess in her various guises, Sowing, Tilling, and Harvesting, and they had pried off the bronze snakes that had wound about the flanking columns. They had taken little else otherwise. According to local lore, the Fanim had been loath to enter the Catacombs, especially after the Grandee charged with mapping its depths had failed to return. Apparently the Padirajah himself had ordered the place sealed, calling it in his accursed tongue Gecca'lam, or Pit of the She-Demon.

  They were as wretched as madmen, the heathen, and as deserving of pity, their delusions ran so deep. But one thing, at least, they saw with admirable clarity.

  The Goddess was to be feared.

  Even the Elder Scriptures, the Higarata and The Chronicle of the Tusk, gave the Goddess short shrift, so drunk were the poets on masculine virtues. The reason was obvious enough: Yatwer, more than any of the Hundred, celebrated the poor and the weak, for they were the growers and the makers, the toiling multitudes who carried the caste-nobility like a foul slime upon their backs. She alone celebrated them. She alone held up her hands to grant them a second, more shadowy life. Celebrated and avenged.

  Even her brother War, it was said, feared her. Even Gilgaцl shrank from Yatwer's bloody gaze.

  And well he should.

  Planting her cane before her, Psatma Nannaferi strode into the shadow of the ancient sandstone lintels. She entered the worldly womb of the Ur-Mother, descended into the company of her long-dead sisters.

  The subterranean cemetery wound deep beneath the ruined foundations of its namesake temple, level wheeling beneath level, making a vast drum of the earth. The lantern-light revealed an endless series of brick-vaulted recesses, each packed with urns, some so ancient the script they bore could not be read. For thousands of years, since the days of the Old Dynasty, the ashes of Yatwer's priestesses had been brought here to slumber in holy community.

  The Womb-of-the-Dead.

  Psatma Nannaferi could sense the awe in her sister high-priestesses. They shuffled after her in small, solemn clots, the young assisting the old, the awestruck walking in a kind of stupor, as though only now delivered to the truth of their calling-and so seeing their sham piety for the vanity that it was. Only the bitch that posed as the Chalfantic Oracle, Vethenestra, dared affect boredom. Heavens forfend an oracle who has not seen it all.

  Take-take-take. It was a wickedness, a pollution, that knew no bounds.

  It was the very essence of the Demon.

  Nannaferi held on to this passion as she guided them into the void that was the Charnal Hall. Her middle anger, she sometimes called it, where her judgment smouldered just enough to singe the hearts of the weak. Everything was sinful, everything was accountable; this was simply the truth of an unruly and disordered world. The Goddess was surfeit, the Goddess was wilderness, only beaten with hoe and plow into the feeding of the world. Nannaferi was the hoe. Nannaferi was the plow. And before these entombed proceedings were completed, her sisters would find themselves weeded and tilled… fertile soil for the White-Luck Warrior.

  There was no vanity in her task. The Goddess had made her into the rule with which the world would be measured-no more, no less. Who was Nannaferi to take heart or pride in this, let alone question the why and wherefore? The knife, as the Galeoth saying went, was no greater for the skinning.

  Only more doused in blood.

  She told them to space their lanterns throughout the vaulted hollow, then directed them to take seats about the immense stone table in the chamber's heart: the legendary Struck Table, where the Ur-Mother herself had once chastised her wayward daughters. Nannaferi took the place of the Goddess, so that the cracks that sundered its ancient planes radiated from her withered breast. A fissure seemed to fork and vein its way to each of her sisters, which was good, she thought, for she would be the light that revealed the fractures in them all.

  She sat perfectly immobile, waited patiently for the last of their conversations to fade. Several present had only recently arrived from across the Three Seas; there were more than a few old enmities and friendships here, interrupted by appointments abroad. Since friendship was one of the Goddess's most blessed gifts, she tolerated their banter. It was a rare thing, she knew, to find oneself in the company of peers when you reached the highest echelons of the Cult. Loneliness was ever the cold price of authority, and it showed in these women. Eleva, in particular, seemed desperate to speak.

  But the pall of enormity was quick to silence even her. Soon all twelve sat with the same rigid austerity as their Mother-Supreme: the Oracle and the eleven High Priestesses of the Cult. Everyone save the Matriach, Sharacinth-a fact that none could have missed.

  "Only once since the time of the heathen," Nannaferi said, her voice throat-smoky with age, "has the Struck Table been convened. Many of you were here that day. It was a joyous time, a time of celebration, for at last the Cult had regained this place, our Great Goddess's earthly womb, where the long line of our sisters dwell, awaiting their Second Birth in the Outside. At that time we celebrated the Shriah and his Holy War, thinking only of what we might regain. We did not see the Demon that slumbered in its belly, that would possess it, transform it into an instrument of oppression and blasphemous tyranny."

  She allowed her outrage to twist this final word.

  "We did not see the Aspect-Emperor."

  She slapped her cane of sacred acacia flat on the table. Her sisters jumped at the crack. Then she reached into her gown, whose silken folds seemed almost moist where they bunched against the bent joints of her body, and withdrew a small sphere of iron, no larger than a dove's egg, ringed with indecipherable script. She raised it high between thumb and forefinger, gingerly set it on the table before her…

  A Chorae. A Holy Tear of God.

  As though following some irresistible logic, the women's gazes moved in perfect tandem from the Chorae to her face. To be addressed in such a bald manner was shock enough: The Inaugurals, the ceremonial rites and prayers of initiation, were mandatory on such occasions. Now they stared at her in outright astonishment. They were beginning to understand, Nannaferi noted with grim satisfaction.

  Their Goddess girded for war.

  "But first," she said, resting her right hand on the shaft of her cane, "we must deal with the matter of the witch."

  With the Chorae before her, the implication was plain: She meant one of them.

  Several gasped. Maharta, the youngest of their number (and a political concession to Nilnamesh), actually cried out. Sharhild, with her piggish ey
es and radish cheeks, watched with the expression of bland stupidity she always used to conceal her cleverness. Vethenestra, of course, nodded as though she'd known all along. What kind of Oracle would she be otherwise?

  A hush fell upon them, so complete it seemed they could hear the dead ashes breathe.

  "B-but Holy Mother," Maharta fairly whispered. "How could you know?"

  Psatma Nannaferi closed her eyes, knowing they would be globes of crimson when they snapped opened.

  "Because the Goddess," she murmured, "lets me see."

  Shouting clamour. The clinking thump of a stone stool falling. Eleva leapt to her feet, her arms outstretched, her eyes and mouth shining sun-white, her hair and robes boiling in some intangible tempest. An uncanny mutter fell from the arches, the walls, from the circumference of all things seen-a voice that crumpled thought like paper. Sharhild flew at her, knife out and stabbing, only to be tossed back, thrown like soiled clothes into the corner. Spectral walls parsed the Charnal Hall, the ghosts of cyclopean bricks. Screams rang through the closeted deep. The priestesses scrambled, scattered. Shadows twisted about the hinges of things.

  The thwack of iron on wood. A blinding incandescence. A sucking roar.

  Moans and small cries of disbelief rose through the sulphurous reek. Maharta sobbed, crouched beneath the eaves of the Struck Table. "Eleva!" someone cried. "Eleva!"

  "Has been dead for days," Nannaferi spat. She alone had not moved. "Maybe longer."

  The cane tingled in her hands, as if still shivering from the impact. Using it, she walked up to the fallen witch, stared down at the cracked statue of salt across the floor. An anonymous girl, forever frozen in anxious, arrogant white. Buxom. Improbably young.

  With an involuntary groan Nannaferi knelt to retrieve her Chorae from the powdered floor. Her blessed Tear of God.

  "They hunt us with witches," she said, her hatred warbling through her voice. "What greater proof could we have of their depravity?"

  Witches… The School of Swayal. Yet another of the Aspect-Emperor's many blasphemies.

  Several stunned heartbeats passed before her sisters collected themselves. Two helped Sharhild back to her seat, full of praise for the old Thunyeri shield-maiden's ferocity and courage. Others crept forward to look at the dead witch who but moments earlier had been Eleva-one of their favourites, no less! Maharta continued crying, though she had been shamed into snuffles. Vethenestra resumed her seat, cast blank looks of apprehension about the Table.

  Then, as though once again answering to some collective logic, they erupted in questions and observations. The low-lintelled ceiling of the Charnal Hall rang with matronly exclamations. Apparently Vethenestra had dreamt this would happen a fortnight ago. Did this mean the Shriah and the Thousand Temples scrutinized them? Or was this the work of the Empress? Phoracia claimed to see Eleva touch a Chorae not more than three months previous in Carythusal, during the solstice observances. That meant the witch had replaced her recently, did it not? Sometime close to the secret summons they all received…

  But how could that be? Unless…

  "Yes," Nannaferi said, her tone filled with a recognition of menace that cleared the room of competing voices. "The Shriah knows of me. He has known of me for quite some time."

  The Shriah. The Holy Father of the Thousand Temples.

  The Demon's brother, Maithanet.

  "They have tolerated me because they believe secret knowledge a valuable thing. They accumulate conspiracies the way caste-merchants do ledgers, thinking they can control what they can number."

  A hard-faced moment.

  "Then we're doomed!" Aethiola abruptly cried. "Think of what happened to the Anagkians…"

  Five assassins, convinced they were enacting Fate, had attempted to murder the Empress on the day of her youngest son's Whelming. It had been a failure and, more importantly, a blunder, one that had threatened all the Orthodox, no matter what their Cult. The rumours of the Empress's revenge were predictably inconsistent: The Anagkian Matriarch had either been flayed alive, or sewn into a sack with starving dogs, or stretched into human rope on the rack. The only certain thing was that she and all her immediate subordinates had been arrested by the Shrial Knights, never to be seen again.

  Nannaferi shook her head. "We are a different Cult."

  This was no vain conceit. With the possible exception of Gilgaцl, none of the Hundred Gods commanded the mass sympathy enjoyed by Yatwer. Where other Cults were not so different than their temples, surface structures that could be pulled down, the Yatwerians were like these very halls, the Womb-of-the-Dead, something that could not be pulled down because it was the earth. And just as the Catacombs had tunnels, abandoned Old Dynasty sewers, reaching as far out as the ruins of the Sareotic Library, so did they possess far-reaching means, innumerable points of entry, hidden and strategic.

  Wherever there were caste-menials or slaves.

  "But Mother-Supreme," Phoracia said. "We speak of the Aspect-Emperor."

  The name alone was the argument.

  Nannaferi nodded. "The Demon is not so strong as you might think, Phori. He and his most ardent, most fanatical followers march in the Great Ordeal, half a world away. Meanwhile, all the old grievances smoulder across the Three Seas, waiting for the wind that will fan them to flame." She paused to touch each of her sisters with the iron of her gaze. "The Orthodox are everywhere, Sisters, not just this room."

  "Even the heathens grow more bold," Maharta said in support. "Fanayal continues to elude them in the south. Scarcely a week passes without riots in Nenciph-"

  "But still," Phoracia persisted, "you haven't seen him as I have. You have no inkling of his power. None of you do! No one kno-" The old priestess caught herself with a kind of seated lurch. Phoracia was the only one of their number older than Nannaferi, at that point where the infirmities of the body could not but leach into the soul. More and more she was forgetting her place, overspeaking. The intermittent impertinence of the addled and exhausted.

  "Forgive me," she murmured. "Holy Mother. I–I did not mean to imply…"

  "But you are correct," Nannaferi said mildly. "We indeed have no inkling of his power. This is why I summoned you here, where the souls of our sisters might shroud us from his far-scyring eyes. We have no inkling, but then we are not alone. Not as he is alone."

  She let these words hang in the sulphur-stained air.

  "The Goddess!" sturdy old Sharhild hissed. A bead of blood dropped from her scalp to her brow, tapped onto the pitted stone of the table. "We all know that She has touched you, Mother. But She has come to you as well, hasn't she?" The dread in her accented voice outlasted the wonder, seemed to hone the sense of mountainous weight emanating from the ceiling.

  "Yes."

  Once again the Charnal Hall erupted in competing voices. Was it possible? Blessed event! How? When? Blessed, blessed event! What did she say?

  "But what of the Demon?" Phoracia called above the others. The sisters fell silent, deferring as much to their embarrassment as to her rank. "The Aspect-Emperor," the prunish woman pressed. "What does she say of him?"

  And there it was, the fact of their blasphemy, exposed in the honesty of an old woman's muddled soul. Their fear of the Aspect-Emperor had come to eclipse all other terrors, even those reserved for the Goddess.

  One could only worship at angles without fear.

  "The Gods…" Nannaferi began, struggling to render what was impossible in words. "They are not as we are. They do not happen… all at once…"

  Her eyes narrowed in fatuous concentration, Aethiola said, "Vethenestra claims-"

  "Vethenestra knows nothing," Nannaferi snapped. "The Goddess has no truck with fools or fakers."

  The Struck Table fell very still. All eyes followed the wandering crack that led to the Chalfantic Oracle, Vethenestra, who sat in the tight pose of someone at war with their own trembling. For the Mother-Supreme to refer to any of them by name was disaster enough…

  The woman paled. "H-Holy Mother�
�� If I–I had cause to dis-displease you…

  Nannaferi regarded her as if she were a broken urn. "It is the Goddess who is displeased," she said. "I simply find you ridiculous."

  "But what have I-?"

  "You are no longer the Oracle of Chalfantas," she said, her voice parched with regret and resignation. "Which means you have no place at this table. Leave, Vethenestra. Your dead sisters await."

  An image of her own sister came to Nannaferi, her childhood twin, the one who did not survive the pox. In a heartbeat it all seemed to pass through her, the whooping laughter, the giggling into shoulders, the teary-eyed shushing. And it ached, somehow, to know that her soul had once sounded such notes of joy. It reminded her of what had been given…

  And those few things that remained.

  "Awa-await?" Vethenestra stammered.

  "Leave," Nannaferi repeated. There was something about the way she held her hand, an unnerving gestural inflection that implied destination rather than direction.

  Vethenestra stood, her hands clutching knots of fabric against her thighs. Her first steps were backward, as if expecting to be called back, or to wake, for she looked at them with a stung and stupefied glee, a face that had forgotten what was real. She turned to the black maw of the entrance. Each of them felt it, an ethereal squeezing, a wringing of empty air. They blinked in disbelief, gazed in horror at the issue. Ribs of menstrual crimson wound like smoke through the dark. Glistening curlicues, twining into nothingness.

  Oblivious, Vethenestra crossed the threshold. But she didn't so much step into the shadows as step out, as though she were no more than her image, twisting away in directions indescribable to the eye, like a pool soaked out of existence. One heartbeat she was, and the next she was not.

  Something like speech seemed to rattle in the corners beyond their hearing-or perhaps it was a shriek.

  Silence. The very air seemed animate. The excavated hollows that surrounded them, hall after honeycombed hall, hummed with emptiness, the deadness of space. Watching her sisters, Nannaferi could see it slacken the last of their eyes, the comprehending, the standing underneath what they had lived the entirety of their shallow lives. The Goddess, not the name they used to sugar their lips, not the vague presence that tickled their vanity or itched the underbelly of their sins, but the Goddess, the Blood of Fertility, the monstrous, ageless Mother of Birth.