The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  She had a Gift for smacking the generosity from him, he would grant her that much.

  "Look," he said. "The boundaries between the World and Outside are like those between waking and sleep, reason and madness. Wherever the World slumbers or goes mad, the boundaries break down, and the Outside leaks through…" He glanced about to make sure no one was listening. "This place is a topos, like I already said. We literally walk the verge of Hell."

  When she failed to immediately reply, Achamian congratulated himself on having silenced her.

  "You mean the Dialectic," she said after several thoughtful steps. "The Dialectic of Substance and Desire…"

  Though Achamian knew the phrase-knew it very well-it struck him as incomprehensible.

  "You've read Ajencis," he said with more sarcasm than he intended. The Dialectic of Substance and Desire was the cornerstone of the great Kyranean philosopher's metaphysics, the notion that the differences between the World and the Outside were more a matter of degree than kind. Where substance in the World denied desire-save where the latter took the form of sorcery-it became ever more pliant as one passed through the spheres of the Outside, where the dead-hoarding realities conformed to the wills of the Gods and Demons.

  Mimara was staring at her booted feet plowing through the dust. "Kellhus," she said. "You know, the man you hope to kill? He encouraged me to explore his library…" She stared at him, her expression mussed with conflicting passions. "I once thought I could be like my father."

  The accusation in her voice called for pity, and yet he found himself with nothing but bitter words to answer. "Father? And who might that be?"

  They walked without speaking for what seemed a long while. It was odd the way anger could shrink the great frame of silence into a thing, nasty and small, shared between two people. Achamian could feel it, palpable, binding them pursed lip to pursed lip, the need to punish the infidelities of the tongue.

  Why did he let her get the best of him?

  The Skin Eaters laboured in the circumscribed lights, leaning beneath the bulk of their packs like caste-menials beneath firewood. The younger ones led the mules in short trains of two or three, while the others walked the wary margins of the group, swords or spears drawn against the blackness. Though the memory of the Repositorium burned bright in his soul's eye, Achamian could not shake the sense that they marched into the void. If Cil-Aujas indeed plumbed the World to its very limit, as he had told Mimara, might they not simply wander into the precincts of Hell?

  He occupied himself with this thought for a time, pondering his various readings of those who had allegedly passed alive into the Afterlife. The legend of Mimomitta from ancient Kyranean lore. The parable of Juraleal from The Chronicle of the Tusk. And of course the rumours his slave, Geraus, had told him about Kellhus…

  Mimara walked beside him as before, but her damp presence had hardened into something prickling sharp. Is it true, he wanted to ask, that Kellhus wears the severed heads of demons about his girdle? These words, he was certain, would heal their momentary feud. As loath to encourage her as he had been, he had made a habit of avoiding her opinions.

  The simple act of asking would say much.

  Instead, he rubbed his face, muttering curses. What kind of rank foolishness was this? Pining over harsh words to a cracked and warped woman!

  "I watched you," Mimara abruptly said, staring at the procession of chains through the upper reaches of his light. For a moment he assumed this was just more hounding, then she said, "You don't trust the Nonman. I could see it in your eyes."

  Achamian scanned the distance to be sure Cleric was far enough away not to hear, then looked at her with the mixture of annoyance and mystification that was fast becoming his "Mimara-face," even as part of him recognized that this was her peace offering.

  "Now is not the time, girl," he said brusquely. That she could worry about such a thing given what they had just heard-not to mention what they might find-was beyond Achamian. If anything made her seem crazed, he told himself, it wasn't so much her intellect as the disorder of her cares.

  "Is it his Mark?" she persisted, again speaking in Ainoni. "Is that why you fear him?"

  As though to match her absurdity with his own, Achamian began mumbling the song his slave's children had sung and sung until he had cried aloud for them to stop. It seemed he could even hear them, piping about the edges of his husky baritone, voices that had floated with innocence and chanting delight. Voices he dearly missed.

  "Stinky feet, hide my sweet, walk the river cool…"

  "Sometimes," Mimara persisted, "when I glimpse him in the corner of my eye…"

  "Stinky bum, sniff your thumb, swim the water pool…"

  "…he seems like something monstrous, a shambling wreck, black and rotted and… and…"

  Suddenly the song and the peevishness that had provoked it were forgotten. Achamian found himself listening with arched attentiveness-a horror-spurred concentration.

  She worked her mouth for a moment, lips pert about some lozenge of inexplicability, then looked to him helplessly.

  "And it's like you can taste his evil," he heard himself say. "Not so much on your tongue as in your gums. Your teeth ache for it."

  A peculiar vulnerability afflicted her look, as though she had admitted something beyond her courage. "Not always," she said.

  "And it's more than just the Nonman, isn't it?" Something peculiar fizzed through his voice, something like a pang, but too fraught with fear. "Sometimes… Sometimes I look this way as well, don't I?"

  "So you see the same?" she blurted.

  He shook his head in a way he hoped seemed lackadaisical. "No. What I see is what you see typically, the shadow of ruin and decay, the ugliness of the deficient and incomplete. You're describing something different. Something moral as opposed to merely aesthetic…" He paused to catch his breath. What new madness was this? "What antique Mandate scholars called the Judging Eye."

  He had watched her carefully as he spoke, hoping to see the glint of thrill in her eyes. But there was naught but concern. This had been gnawing at her for quite some time, he realized.

  "The Judging Eye," she repeated in flawless Ainoni. "And what is that?"

  His heart crawled into his throat. He coughed it loose, then swallowed it back into his chest. "It means that you don't simply apprehend the Mark of sorcery, you see the sin as well…" He trailed, then laughed, despite the horror that flexed through him.

  "And that's funny?" she asked, her voice warbling with indignation.

  "No, girl… It's just that…"

  "That what?"

  "Your stepfather… Kellhus."

  He had improvised this, not willing to stray too far into the truth. But once spoken it seemed every bit as true and far more terrible with significance. Such was the perversity of things that Men often recognized their own arguments only after they had spoken them. "Kellhus…" he repeated numbly.

  "What about him?"

  "He says the Old Law has been revoked, that Men are at long last ready for the New…" The words of the Mandate Catechism came back to him unbidden, and with the heat of truths drawn intact from the crucible of deception. Though you lose your soul, you shall gain the world…

  "Think," he continued. "If sorcery is no longer abomination, then…" Let her think it was this, he told himself. Perhaps it would even serve to discourage her. "Then why would you see it as such?"

  He was surprised to discover he had stopped walking, that he stood riven, staring at the woman whose parentage had stirred so many echoes of heartbreak and whose unscrupulous obstinacy threatened everything. The last of the Skin Eaters had passed them, casting dubious backward glances as they marched with the mule-train beyond the limits of his light. Within heartbeats it was just the two of them, flanked by knolls of heaped basalt, plains of dust, and bones bleached as light as charcoal by the ages. Cleric's light had tapered to a point, and the company had dwindled to a floating procession of shining helms and trudging shadows. />
  Silence sealed them as utterly as the blackness.

  "I always knew something was… wrong," she said softly. "I mean, I read and I read, everything I could find about sorcery and the Mark. And nowhere, not once, was there any mention of what I see. I thought it was because it was so… unpredictable, you know, just when I would see the… the good of the evil. But when I see it, it burns so… so… I mean, it strikes me so much deeper than at any other time. It was too profound to go without saying, to be left out of the records… I just knew that something had to be different. That something had to be wrong!"

  First her arrival, and now this. She had the Judging Eye-she could see not just sorcery, but the damnation it betokened… To think he had convinced himself the Whore of Fate would leave him be!

  "And now you're saying," she began hesitantly, "that I'm a kind of… proof?" She blinked in the stammering manner of people finding their way through unsought revelations. "Proof of my stepfather's… falsity?"

  She was right… and yet what more proof did he, Drusas Achamian, need? That night twenty years ago, on the eve of the First Holy War's final triumph, the Scylvendi Chieftain had told him everything, given him all the proof he would ever need, enough to fuel decades of bitter hate-enough to deliver these scalpers to their doom. Anasыrimbor Kellhus was Dыnyain, and the Dыnyain cared for naught but domination. Of course he was false.

  It was for her sake that the Wizard trembled. She possessed the Judging Eye!

  He thought of their coupling, and the sordid passions that had driven it. A cold sweat compressed the skin and wool beneath his pack. He could feel the pity hanging like wet string in his expression, the way his look saw past what she was now-the pale image of her mother standing small in white light-into the torment that awaited her.

  "We have more immediate concerns at the moment," he said in a rallying voice.

  "You mean Cleric," she replied, her little hands balled into slack fists. She was looking at him with the kind of wilful focus that spoke of contravening interests. Soon, he knew, she would come at him with questions, relentless questions, and he needed to consider carefully the kinds of answers he could and could not give.

  "Yes," he said, drawing her by the elbow after the others. "Incariol." He thought of how men always did this, managed the thoughts of others, and wondered why it should exact such a toll from him. "His Mark means he's old… older than you could imagine. And that means he's not only a Quya Mage, but Ishroi, a Nonman noble…"

  He could feel the note of falsity, like a cold coin in the slick palm of his voice. He cursed himself for a fool, even as he sought her gaze, hoping that a sincere look might carry what his words could not. The Erratic and his ability to lead them through this deserted warren was their immediate concern. The fact that Achamian used them to another purpose… Weren't all words simply tools in the end?

  "So he's Ishroi, then…" Mimara said. The lilt in her tone told him that she knew something was amiss. When had he ever urged her into the murk of his ruminations?

  "Such figures don't easily slip through the cracks of history, Mimara. And what history I haven't lived through Seswatha, I've read many times. Moithural, Hosыtil, Shimbor-all the mannish translators and chroniclers of the Nonmen. I assure you, there's no mention of any Incariol, nowhere, not even in their own Pit of Years…" Despite himself, his voice was striking more, not fewer, tin notes of insincerity.

  Her gaze was bolt-forward now, apparently following Cleric's light and the small mob of men and pack animals labouring beneath it. From their vantage, the Skin Eaters seemed to pick their way across the vast back of nothingness. Here and there small clearings of floor opened between them, bloomed colourless and flat in the illumination, only to be obscured by kicked dust and the drift of shadowy legs.

  They had travelled past the point of sturdy grounds.

  "This Judging Eye," she said with cool resignation. "It's a curse, isn't it? An affliction…"

  Many years had passed since last he had suffered this feeling, not simply of too much happening too quickly, but of some dread intent in motion, as though all these things, the Nonman, the Captain, the dead scalper out there, and now Mimara, were like the suckered arms of the octopuses he and his father had sometimes pulled from the Meneanor Sea-limbs webbed in the sinew of a singular Fate.

  Circumstances always encompassed, but sometimes they encircled as well, as many-chambered as this mountain and every bit as dark. His heart seemed to beat against sagging bandages.

  "Just legends," he said. "Nothing more."

  "But you've read them all," she said in a high, scathing voice.

  He raised a knobbed hand to silence her, nodded to the interval of darkness separating them from the company. A figure had surfaced from the advancing perimeter of their light, became what looked like, for a mad moment, a wizened ape armoured in human rags…

  It was Sarl. He waited for them, alone in the darkness, smiling, his lips stretched longer than the arc of his gums and teeth. "Well-well-well," he called in the tones of a cracked flute. Even in the dark the man squinted.

  "We'll speak of this later," Achamian said to Mimara, halting her with a gentle hand on her elbow. She frowned and in a careless moment looked to the sergeant with naked fury. Though the man remained some several paces distant, there was no way he could have failed to see her anger.

  "You take the light," Achamian said quickly.

  "Me?"

  "You have the Gift of the Few. You can grasp it with your soul, even without any real sorcerous training… If you think on it, you should actually be able to feel the possibility."

  For the bulk of his life, Achamian had shared his calling's contempt of witches. There was no reason for this hatred, he knew, outside the capricious customs of the Three Seas. Kellhus had taught him as much, one of many truths he had used to better deceive. Men condemned others to better celebrate themselves. And what could be easier to condemn than women?

  But as he watched her eyes probe inward, he was struck by the practicality of her wonder, the way her expression made this novelty look more like a recollection. It was almost as if women possessed a kind of sanity that men could only find on the far side of tribulation. Witches, he found himself thinking, were not only a good thing, they could very well be a necessity. Especially the witch-to-be before him.

  "Yes," she said. "I can feel it. It's like… It's…" She trailed in smiling indecision.

  "It's a small Cant," he said, grateful that Sarl, for whatever reason, had granted them this moment together. With a finger, he redirected the light so that it rested several feet above her head. "Something called the Surillic Point…"

  "Surillic Point," she repeated, her voice hot with breath.

  "So," he continued, "picture yourself in your soul's eye." He paused a heartbeat. "Now picture the light, not as you see it, but as you see its Mark."

  She nodded, staring at him with forked concentration. The light stretched the outline of her face across her breast and shoulder.

  "Now picture you and the Point walking together. Hold fast that image. It'll be trying at first, but with practice it'll become thoughtless, like any other reflex."

  Her gaze fell blank to his wool-covered chest. Without prompting, she took two steps, her eyes climbing in upward astonishment to watch the glaring light track her move for move. She looked back about to laugh, only to stub her toe against some dust-furred detritus. She grinned as she snatched back her balance. Her shadow bloomed and compressed beneath her.

  "Hurry," he said. "Catch the others."

  She made no secret of her disgust as she strode past the sergeant, walking like a slave with an amphora poised atop her head. Then she began trotting down the path the others had sloughed through the dust.

  And she glowed, the old Wizard thought, not only against the stalking black, but against so many memories of harm.

  Achamian followed her as far as Sarl. The man stood slightly humped beneath the weight of his pack, the straps of
which had bunched folds of mail across the front of his hauberk. Standing so close to him reminded Achamian of the dead Pick, the heart, and the knowledge that they were not alone in these black-bowel deeps. Mimara's light was fast receding, and he saw Sarl's eyes flit toward the encroaching darkness. Without a word, they both began following the woman.

  "What do you want, Sergeant?" The company's passage had left an aura of dust in the air, and Achamian could feel it fur the insides of his mouth. His chest wanted to cough the words.

  "The Captain asked me to speak to you." Sarl looked even more wrinkled in the gloom. His face was grey and grimace-marked, like a corpse exhumed from black peat. The Wizard breathed against the bristle of bodily alarm, fought the urge to ball his hands into fists. He almost always felt this whenever Sarl strayed too near, ever since the man had smashed his wine-bowl in the Cocked Leg.

  "Did he now."

  "Yes," Sarl said in a breathy rasp, smiling like an uncle fishing for a nephew's love. That was the thing about the man's ceaseless posturing: Even when the passions were appropriate, the underlying intensities were all wrong. "You see, he thinks you're… too honest, let us say."

  "Honest."

  "And arrogant."

  "Arrogant," Achamian repeated. There was something deadening about the discourse of fools. It was as if his patience were a pool that was only so deep, and Sarl's every word were a rock…

  "Look," Sarl said. "We are learned men, you and I-"

  "I assure you, Sergeant, there's very little that you and I share."

  "Oho! The grief old Sarl gets for his diplomacy!"

  "Diplomacy."

  "Yes, diplomacy!" he cried in sudden savagery. "Fine fucking words spoken to fine fucking fools!"

  Mimara had drawn far ahead of them by now, so that they walked in the least glimmer of light, more the rims of men than possessing human substance, stepping by memory of grounds glimpsed ahead. Sarl was a threat, both to him and his quest-if Achamian had suspected as much before, he knew now. All he need do was speak to the madman in his true voice, right here, right now, and that threat would vanish, become more ash to powder this dead Mansion's floor.