The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  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 face. 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 Eдrwa. 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 Anasыrimbor 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…" Anasыrimbor Celmomas said. "A place where my line can outlive me."

  Ishuдl…

  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. "Ishuдl," 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. Anasыrimbor 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!
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  Achamian swung his feet 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 Ishuдl.

  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.

  To leave Marrow was to pass out of history, out of memory… to enter a world as disordered as Incariol's soul. Yes, Achamian thought, willing his old and bandy limbs step by puffing step. It was proper that he should climb.

  All passages into dread should exact some chastising toll.

  Mimara has learned much about the nature of patience and watching.

  And even more about the nature of Men.

  She realizes quite quickly that Marrow is no place for the likes of her. She understands her fine-boned beauty, knows in intimate detail the way it hooks, burrlike, the woollen gaze of men. She would, she knows, be endlessly accosted, until some clever pimp realized she had no protection. She would be drugged, or set upon by numbers greater than she could handle. She would be raped and beaten. Someone would comment on her uncanny resemblance to the Holy Empress on an uncut silver kellic, and she would be trussed in cheap-dyed linens, foil, and candy jewels. For miles around, every scalper with a copper would walk away with some piece of her.

  She knows this would happen… In her marrow, you might say.

  Her slavery moves through her, not so much a crowd of flinching years as an overlapping of inner shadows. It is always there-always here. The whips and fists and violation, a clamour shot through with memories of love for her sisters, some weaker, some stronger, pity for the torment in the eyes of some, those who would weep, "Just a child…" They used her, all of them used her, but somehow the bottom of the jar never dried. Somehow a last sip remained, enough to moisten her lips, to dry her eyes.

  This was how her mother's agents found her years ago, dressed like their Holy Empress, emptied save for a single sip. Apparently thousands had died, such was Anasыrimbor Esmenet's outrage. A whole swath of the Worm in Carythusal had been razed, the male population indiscriminately slaughtered.

  But it was never clear just whom Mother was avenging.

  Mimara knows what will happen. So rather than follow Achamian into the town, she circles around and climbs the escarpments instead. This time, she really does leave her mule, Foolhardy, to the wolves. She takes up a position well away from the eastward tracks-not a day passes, it seems, without some company trudging in from the horizon-and she watches the town the way an idle boy might study a termite-infested stump. It looks like a toy woven of rotted grass. The trees and bracken opening about a great lesion of open mud. The rows of swollen-wood structures ribbing the interior. The great white veils floating like some ghostly afterimage from the falls, encompassing the strings of fuzzing smoke…

  From high above she watches the town and waits. Sometimes, when the wind blows just so, she can even smell the place's fetid halo. She watches the coming and going, the ebb and flow of miniature men and their miniature affairs, and she understands that the infinite variety of Men and their transactions is simply a trick of an earthbound vantage, that from afar, they simply are the mites they appear to be, doing the same things over and over. Same pains, same grievances, same joys, made novel by crippled memory and stunted perspective.

  Finitude and forgetfulness, these are what grace Men with the illusion of the new. It seems something she has always known, but could never see; a truth obscured by the succession of close leaning faces.

  She dares no fire. She hugs herself warm. From lips of high-hanging stone, she watches and waits for him. She has no other place to go. She is, she decides, every bit as rootless as he. Every bit as mad.

  Every bit as driven.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sakarpus

  …conquered peoples live and die with the knowledge that survival does not suffer honour.

  They have chosen shame over the pyre, the slow flame for the quick.

  — Triamis I, Journals and Dialogues

  Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Sakarpus

  It was a thing of wonder.

  While the citadels and strong places of Sakarpus still smoked, innumerable storks began clotting the southern horizon, not the field-sized flocks that the Men of the Ordeal were accustomed to, but high-flying mountains of them, darkening the sky, settling like salt in water across the surrounding hills. Even for men familiar with momentous sights, it was remarkable to behold: the whooshing descent, the starved elegance, the twitch and turn of avian scrutiny, multiplied over and over across every sky. Since storks meant many different things to the many different nations of the Great Ordeal, few could agree what the bird's arrival augured. The Aspect-Emperor said nothing, save issuing an edict to protect the birds from becoming either food or ornament. Apparently the Sakarpi held them holy: The men guarded them against foxes and wolves, while the womenfolk gathered their guano for a concoction called char soot, a long-burning fuel they used in lieu of wood.

  The Judges were kept busy. Several hangings were required, and one Ainoni sergeant, who had been killing birds to make and sell pillows, was even publicly flayed. But eventually the Men of the Ordeal became accustomed to the squawking, white-backed hills, and ceased heckling the conquered men and women who tended to them. In the parlance of the camp, "eating stork" became synonymous with any reckless and self-indulgent act. Soon it seemed obvious-even to those, like the Kianene, who thought storks were vermin-that these birds with their thin-necked conceit were in fact holy, and that the hills were a kind of natural temple.

  Meanwhile, preparations for the ensuing march continued. In the Council of Names, the kings and generals of the Great Ordeal debated points of supply and strategy beneath the all-seeing eyes of their Aspect-Emperor. Even though flushed with pious excitement-a great number of them had spent years waiting for this very day-they harboured few illusions about the trials and perils that await
ed them. Sakarpus stood at the very edge of the mannish world, the point where, as King Saubon of Enathpaneah would say, "Men are more lamb than lion." Sranc ruled the land beyond the northern horizon, scratching a vicious existence from the ruined cities of the long-dead High Norsirai. And that land, the Lords of the Ordeal knew, stretched for more than two thousand miles. Not since the wars of Far Antiquity had so many attempted such an arduous journey. "Between this march and the Consult," their Aspect-Emperor told them, "the march will prove far deadlier."

  For more than a decade, a greater part of the New Empire's resources had been bent toward the arduous trek to Golgotterath. Even before Sakarpus had fallen, the Imperial Engineers had begun building a second city below the ancient first: barracks, smithies, lazarets, and dozens of sod-walled storehouses. Still others staked the course of the broad stone road that would, in a matter of weeks, connect the ancient city to faraway Oswenta. Even now, an endless train of supplies wound in from the southern horizon, bearing arms, wares, rations, and more rations. Infantrymen, no matter their rank, were limited to strict portions of amicut, the campaign fare of the wild Scylvendi peoples to the southwest. The caste-nobility could count on somewhat heartier provisions but were reduced to riding shaggy-maned ponies that required no grain to preserve their strength. Vast herds of sheep and cattle, bred solely to accompany the march, were also beaten across the horizon, so many that some Men of the Ordeal began calling themselves ka Koumiroi, or the Herdsmen-a name that would later become holy.

  But even with all these preparations, there was simply no way the Great Ordeal could bear the food required to reach Golgotterath. The ponderous herds, the great packs borne by the infantrymen, and the mile-long mule trains would only take them so far. At some point, the columns would have to fan out and fend for themselves. The Lords of the Ordeal knew they could depend on game for their men and wild fodder for their horses: thousands of the now legendary Imperial Trackers had given their lives mapping the lands ahead. But foraging armies moved far more slowly than supplied ones, and if winter struck before the Ordeal could overcome Golgotterath, the result would be catastrophic. A second problem, and the point that was endlessly argued in the Councils, was that no one knew how many of the countless Sranc clans the Enemy would be able to rally. Despite the Imperial Bounty, despite collecting enough scalps to clothe entire nations, the number of Sranc remained beyond reckoning. But without the dread will of the No-God, the creatures were governed only by their terror, hatred, and hunger. Not even the Aspect-Emperor could say how many the Consult might recruit or enslave to oppose them. If the answer was many, then the day the Ordeal divided to begin foraging could very well be the day of its doom.