The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  "The treason, you mean."

  "The treason, then."

  For a moment the outrageousness of her tone quite escaped Esmenet. So often, it seemed, she forgot her exalted station and discoursed with others as though they were her equals. She found herself blinking in indignation. She hasn't even condoled me for the loss of my son!

  "And what have you heard?"

  A calculated pause. Sharacinth's eyes seemed bred to bovine insolence, her lips to a sour line. "That the White-Luck has turned against the Aspect-Emperor… Against you."

  Esmenet struggled to draw breath around her outrage. Arrogant ingrate! Treacherous old bitch!

  Was this what she had imagined all those years ago, sitting on her sill in Sumna, enticing passers-by with a glimpse of the shadows riding up and down her inner thighs? Knowing nothing of power, Esmenet had confused it with its trappings. Ignorance-few things were so invisible. She could remember staring at the coins she had so coveted, those coins that could ward starvation or clothe bruised skin, and wondering at the profile of the man upon them, the Emperor who seemed to stand astride her every bounty and privation. Not hated. Not feared. Not loved. These were passions better spent on his agents. The Emperor himself had always seemed… far too far.

  In the endless reveries between beddings, she would sort through everything she could remember, all the lore, inchoate and humbling, that a citizen affixes to the subject of their sovereign. And in her soul's eye she would see him, Ikurei Xerius III, sitting in this very place.

  How could it be possible?

  Once, quite on a whim, she had shown Samarmas a silver kellic. "Do you know," she had asked, pointing to the apparition of her own profile across its face, "who that is?" He had a way of opening his mouth when astounded, as though trying to shape his lips about a nail. It was at once comical-and heartbreaking in that it so clearly betrayed his idiocy.

  My son! she silently cried. Picking wounds had become her path of least resistance, the one effortless thing. But there was no escaping the clamour of her responsibilities, the motions she had to force against the grain of what should be overwhelming grief. She had no choice but to have faith in her painted face.

  "But you've heard more," she asked in a hard and steady voice-a voice proper to the Empress of the Three Seas. "Haven't you?"

  "More. More," Sharacinth muttered. "Of course, I've heard more. When does one not always hear more? Rumours are like locusts or slaves or rats. They breed indiscriminately."

  They had known she was a prideful woman. It was the whole reason for summoning the bitch here: Maithanet had hoped the dimensions and reputation of her surroundings would be enough to mellow her hubris into something more malleable, something they could shape to their own purposes.

  Apparently not.

  "Matriarch, you would do well to recollect the stakes of our conversation."

  A sneer-an open sneer! And for the first time, Esmenet glimpsed it, the look that is the terror of all those who command positions of power: the look that says, You are temporary, no more a passing affliction. Suddenly she understood the staged calculation behind her throne and its position above the auditory floor. With one look, it seemed, the old woman had thrown it all into stark relief: the truth behind the hierarchy of disparate souls. Recognition, Esmenet realized. Power came down to recognition.

  It was all naked force otherwise.

  "Matriarch!" Maithanet boomed, drawing into his voice and aspect all the magisterial authority of the Thousand Temples.

  Sharacinth opened her mouth in retort-not even the Shriah could cow her, it seemed. But whatever breath she possessed was sucked from her lungs…

  Instead she wheezed and stumbled back, raised a hand against the sudden, immolating light that had sparked into existence above the floor before her. It danced and spiked outward, so brilliant it rendered everything dim. Crazed shadows swung from her ankles across the far corners of the Auditory. The point grew and sparkled, chattered with incandescences that possessed intensities beyond the gaze's conception…

  Esmenet lowered her forearm, blinked at scalded eyes.

  There he stood, tall, magnificent and otherworldly, exactly as she remembered him. A white silk tunic fell loose over his armour, embroidered in countless crimson tusks, each the length of a thorn. His beard was braided gold, his mane was long and free-flowing. The two demon heads hung bound to his right hip, mouthing curses without breath… There was a mad density to his aspect, a hoarding of reality that denied the world the sharpness of its edges and the substance of its weight.

  It seemed the earth should groan beneath his feet. Her husband…

  The Aspect-Emperor.

  Sharacinth stood like a shipwreck survivor leaning to the memory of tossed seas. Two paces behind her and to the right, Maithanet lay supine across the shining floor. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples kneeling.

  Esmenet knew enough not to watch Kellhus assume the Mantle to her right. Confidence, which in all complicated situations is nothing more than the pretence of premeditation, is ever the outward marker of power. There could be no appearance of improvisation.

  "Hanamem Sharacinth," he said, his voice at once mild and permeated with the tones of imminent murder, "do you think you merit standing in my presence?"

  The Matriach nearly fell over trying to throw herself to the floor. "N-no!" she sobbed in old woman terror. "M-Most Glorious… Pluh-please-"

  "Will you," he interrupted, "take steps to assure that this sedition against me, this blasphemy, comes to an end?"

  "Y-yesssh!" she wailed to the floor. She even hooked her fingers behind her head.

  "For, make no mistake, I shall war against you and yours." The grinding savagery of his voice swallowed the entirety of the hall, battered the ear like fists. "Your deeds I shall strike from the stones. Your temples I shall turn into funeral pyres. And those that still dare take up breath or arms against me, I shall hunt, unto death and beyond! And my Sister, whom you worship, shall lament in the dark, her memory no more than a dream of destruction. Men shall spit to cleanse their mouths of her name!"

  The old woman shook, arched her back as if gagging in terror.

  "Do you understand what I say, Sharacinth?"

  "Yessssh!"

  "Then this is what you shall do. You shall heed your Empress and your Shriah. You shall put an end to the ignoble sham that is your office. You shall make claim to the truth of your station. You shall make war upon the wickedness within your own temple-you shall cleanse the filth from your own altar!"

  Somewhere beyond the vaulted ceiling, a cloud engulfed the sun, and everything dimmed save the old woman writhing upon her reflection. Kellhus leaned forward, and it seemed all the world leaned with him, that the pillars themselves tilted, hanging above the Matriach, shivering in catastrophic outrage.

  "And you shall hunt this witch you call your mistress, Psatma Nannaferi! You shall put an end to the sacrilege that is your Mother-Supreme!"

  Her face averted, her elbows to the floor, she shook two white-palmed hands out in warding.

  "No-noooo! Pluh-pluh-pleeeeese-"

  "Sharacinth!" The name crashed through the Hall, boomed through its arched recesses. "Would you offend me in my own house?"

  The Matriarch shrieked something inarticulate. A puddle of urine spread about her knees.

  Then, as though exhaling a pent breath, the world resumed its natural lines and proportions. The unseen cloud passed from the unseen sun, and indirect light once again showered blue upon the dais.

  "Taste your breath," Kellhus said as he stood. He stepped out to loom patient and fatherly over the woman blinking up at him from the base of the steps. "Taste it, Sharacinth, for it is the mark of my mercy. Fight the inclination of your heart, conquer your weakness for pride, for spite. Do not make humiliation of truth. I know you can feel it, the promise of release, the bone-shuddering release. Turn from the shrill poison of your conceit, from the hooked fists and knuckled teeth, from the rod of cold iron that ho
lds you rigid when you should sleep. Turn from these things and embrace the truth of the life-the life! — that I offer you."

  Esmenet had heard these words so many times they should have seemed more a recitation than something meant, an incantation that never failed to undo the knots of pride that so bound men. And yet each time, she found herself sinking through the surface, floating utterly submerged. Each time, she heard them for the first time, and she was frightened and renewed.

  Over the years, her husband had ceased being many things to Esmenet. But he was a miracle still.

  The Matriarch of the Cult of Yatwer wept as a child might, snuffling and mumbling, "F-f-forgive… F-f-forgive meeeee…" Over and over.

  "Comfort her," Kellhus said to his half-brother. Nodding in obeisance, Maithanet stood and crouched at the wailing woman's side.

  Smiling, the Aspect-Emperor turned to Esmenet and reached out his hand. He spoke the sun-fiery words. She clutched two of his outstretched fingers, fell into his pulsing embrace. She felt the open spaces about them collapsing, dropping in sheets of ethereal fabric, falling away.

  His light consumed her…

  …and they were alone together, in the cool gloom of their private apartments. His legs crumpled, and he leaned and lurched against her. Grunting, Esmenet helped him stagger to their bed.

  "Wife…" was all he said, rolling onto his back even though he still wore his sword, Certainty, sheathed across his shoulder blades. He raised a heavy hand to his forehead.

  More air than light filtered in from the seaward balconies. The rooms were broad and surprisingly low-ceilinged, articulated by a series of steps that divided the bedroom proper from the lower regions. The furnishings were elegant and, with the exception of the crimson-cushioned bed, spare. She often wondered if her antipathy to ornament was more a result of the maddening complexities of her new life or a pining for the simple squalour of her old.

  "How many?" she asked, knowing that he could only translocate the space of a horizon, and only then to places he had long studied from a distance or to places he had actually been. He had literally travelled all the way from the Istyuli Plains horizon by horizon.

  "Many."

  She found herself looking away, blinking. The profile of various cities frescoed the walls, creating the pale illusion that the room occupied some impossible space over Invishi, Nenciphon, Carythusal, Aцknyssus, and Oswenta. Esmenet had commissioned them several years previous-as a physical reminder of her position in political space. It was a decision she had long since regretted.

  Simple, her soul whispered. I must make things simple.

  "You came…" she began, shocked to find she was already crying. "You came as s-soon as you heard?" She knew this could not be true. Each and every night Mandate Far-Callers spoke with him in his dreams, apprised him of all that happened on the Andiamine Heights and elsewhere. He had come because of the situation with the Yatwerians, because of Sharacinth. Not because of his idiot son.

  There were no accidents with Anasыrimbor Kellhus.

  He sat up on the edge of the bed, and somehow she found herself in his arms, immersed in his wide-world husband smell, wracked with sobs.

  "We've been cursed!" she gasped. "Cursed!"

  Kellhus gently pressed her back into his gaze and somehow above the surface of her immediate grief. She found herself drawing cool and soothing air.

  "Misfortune," he said. "Nothing more, Esmi."

  When had his voice become a drug?

  "But isn't that what the White-Luck means? Mimara has fled, and no one can find her, Kellhus! I have this-this terrible feeling-such a terrible feeling! And now Samarmas! Sweet-sweet Samarmas! Do you know what they're saying in the streets? Do you know that some of them actually celebrate! That-"

  "You must take no action against them," he said with stern compassion-the perfect tone. He always spoke in the perfect tone, words like cool plaster trowelled across the cracks of desire and confusion. "Not the Yatwerians. They are not a people that we can massacre or uproot like the Mongilean Kianene. They are too widespread, too diffuse. The Great Ordeal is all that matters, Esmi. It has taken us too long as it stands. Golgotterath must be overcome before the No-God is resurrected. The immediate ever clouds the far, and desire ever twists reason to its own ends. I know these concerns seem to blot out all other considerations-"

  "Seem? Seem? Kellhus! Kellhus! Our son is dead!"

  Her voice pealed raw across the polished stone hollows.

  Silence. Where for others the lack of response augured wounds scored or truths too burdensome to ignore or dismiss, for her husband it meant something altogether different. His silence was always one with the world about it, monolithic in the way of framing things. Without exception it said, Hear the words you have spoken. You. It was never, ever, the mark of error or incapacity.

  Which was why, perhaps, she found him so easy to worship and so difficult to love.

  Then he uttered her name, "Esmi…"

  "Esmi," spoken in a voice so warm, so laced with compassion, that she found herself once again crying freely. He kissed her scalp and hair, a divine monster. "Shhhh… I'm not asking you to take comfort in abstractions, for there is none. Even still, the Great Ordeal remains the end that maps all others. We cannot allow anything, anyone, to take precedence over it. Not riots. Not the collapse of the New Empire…" It was as if she stared into her own eyes, his look was so canny-save that he knew her so much better than she knew herself.

  "Not even the death of our son."

  She had understood this all along. His tone had told her so.

  A breeze bellied the dust-violet sheers, drawing them over the hard line of the Meneanor Sea. A finger of light flickered across the mural of Carythusal.

  "How much misfortune must there be?" she heard herself crying.

  The White-Luck hunt us… Hunts us…

  "All of the woe the world has to offer, if need be. So long as we overcome the only one that is fatal."

  The Second Apocalypse.

  She was beating his chest softly, pressing her forehead into the jasmine-scented silk. She could feel the reptilian imprint of the nimil-mail beneath. Looking up through tears, he seemed a towering glow and shadow both. "But it's you they hunt! What? Do the Gods want a Second Apocalypse? Do they want the world shut against them?"

  She had chosen Kellhus over Achamian. Kellhus! She had chosen her womb. She had chosen power and sumptuous ease. She had chosen to lay her hand upon the arm of a living god… Not this! Not this!

  "Come, Esmi. I know Maithanet has explained this to you."

  "B-but it seems… it s-s-seems…"

  "Most live on the edge of heartbeats, trusting their betters and the blind eyes of habit to see them further. A rare few can apprehend the span of entire lives. But you and I do not possess either luxury, Esmi. We must act according to the dictates of the ages, or there will be no ages for anyone to live. And this makes us appear cold, merciless, even monstrous, not only to others and ourselves, but to the Hundred as well. We walk the Shortest Path, the labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden that the Gods begrudge."

  She found herself on the surface of his voice, for once hearing it with a musician's cold ear: the tunnelling harmonics, the resonance that forced it into unheard immediacy, the papery rasp that raised it outside the circle of the world.

  The voice that had conquered the First Holy War, then all the Three Seas. The voice of the King of Kings, the mortal echo of the God of Gods… The voice that had conquered first her thighs and then her heart.

  She thought of that final afternoon with Achamian, the day that Holy Shimeh fell.

  "I haven't the strength! I ca-can't b-bear losing any-any-m-more…"

  "You have the strength."

  "Let Maithanet rule! He's your brother. He shares your gifts. He should rule…"

  "He is Shriah. He cannot be more."

  "But why? Why?"

  "Esmi, you h
ave my love, my trust. I know that you have the strength to do this."

  A gust from over the dark sea. The violet sheers roiled and billowed, parted like gossamer lips.

  "The White-Luck," he whispered in a voice that was the sky, the curve of all horizons, "shall break against you."

  She gazed up at his face through sting and tears, and it seemed that in it she could see every face, the mien of all those who had bent upon her in Sumna, when she had kept a whore's bed.

  "How? How can you know?"

  "Because the anguish that makes mud of all your thoughts, because the fear that stains your days, because all your regret and anger and loneliness…" A haloed hand cupped her cheek. Blue eyes sounded her to the bottommost fathoms.

  "All this makes you pure."

  Iothiah…

  "Cursed!" Nannaferi cried. "Cursed be he who misleads the blind man on the road!"

  All old voices failed in some manner; they cracked or they quavered, or they dwindled with the loss of the wind that once empowered them. But for Psatma Nannaferi, the breaking of her voice, which had once made her family weep for its melodic purity, seemed to reveal more than it marred, as though it were but paint, hoary and moulted, covering something furious and elemental. It struck over the surrounding clamour, reached deep into the packed recesses of the Catacombs.

  Hundreds had gathered, filling the Charnal Hall with sweat and exertion, crowding the adjacent tunnels, stamping the detritus across the floors. Torches bobbed like buoys at sea, casting ovals of illumination across the bowed ceilings, revealing pockets of expression in the shadowy masses: smiles and howls, mouths fixed about wonder-disbelieving wonder. Smoke pooled in the dark gaps between the lintels. Fingers of light probed the niche-pocked walls and the innumerable urns packed within, cracked and leaning, limned in ages of dust.

  "Cursed be the thief!" Nannaferi shrieked. "For he who dines on the fortune of others is a bringer of famine!"

  She stood naked before them, wearing her skin like a beggar's rags. White-painted sigils sheathed her arms to the pit and her legs to the crotch, but her torso and genitals gleamed, adorned only in sweat. She stood withered and diminutive before them, and yet she towered, so that it seemed that her blood-soaked hair should brush the low ceilings.