The Judging Eye (11 page)

So unlike the others.

Please let it be.

Her smile seemed proper to the
tears in her eyes. "Like Mimara," she said.

She couldn't even think the name
without a series of inner cringings, as though it were a weight that could be
drawn only with ill-used muscles. Even now she had her men scouring the Three
Seas, searching—searching everywhere except the one place where she knew Mimara
would be.

Keep her safe, Akka. Please
keep her safe.

Inrilatas's shriek trailed into
a series of masturbatory grunts. On and on they continued, each sucking on the
one prior, all possessing a hairless animality that made her clutch Kelmomas's
shoulder. She knew this was something no child should hear, especially one as
impressionable as Kelmomas, but her honor immobilized her. There was
something...
personal
in the jerking sounds—or so it seemed. Something
meant for her and her alone.

The cry of "Momma!"
snapped her from her trance.

It was Samarmas. He burst from
his nursemaid's grasp, identical to Kelmomas in every respect, save for the
slack pose of his face and the outward bulge of his eyes, so like those on
ancient Kyranean statuary.

"My boy!" Esmenet
cried, scooping the boy into her arms. With an
"Ooof!"
she
swung him onto her hip—he was getting too big!—beamed mother-love into his
idiot gaze.

My broken boy.

The nursemaid, Porsi, had
followed in his stomping wake, eyes to the ground. The young Nansur slave
knelt, face to the floor. Esmenet should have thanked the girl, she knew, but
she had wanted to find Sammi herself, perhaps even to spy for a bit, in the way
of simpler parents watching through simpler windows.

Inrilatas continued screaming
through polished stone—forgotten.

***

Stairs. Endless stairs and
corridors, from the reserved splendour of the summit, to the monumental
spectacle of the palace's lower, more public reaches, thence to the raw stone
of the dungeons, with troughs worn into the floor stones for the passage of
innumerable prisoners. In one courtyard they crossed, Samarmas hugged the backs
of everyone who fell to their faces. He was always indiscriminate with his
loving gestures, particularly when it came to slaves. He even kissed one old
woman on her nut-brown cheek—Esmenet's skin pimpled at the sound of her joyous
sobbing. Kelmomas babbled the entire way, reminding Samarmas in his stern big
brother way that they must be
warriors
, that they must be strong, that
only honour and courage would earn the love and praise of their father.
Listening, Esmenet found herself wondering at the Princes-Imperial they would
become. She found herself fearing for them—the way she always feared when her
thoughts were bent to the future.

As they descended the final
stair, Kelmomas began describing skin-spies. "Their bones are soft like a
shark's
,"
he said, his voice lilting in wonder. "And they have claws for faces,
claws they can squeeze into any face. They could be you. They could be me. At
any second they could strike you down!"

"
Monsters
,
Mommy?" Samarmas asked, his eyes aglow with tears. "Sharks?" Of
course he already knew what skin-spies were: She herself had regaled him with
innumerable stories about their sinister role in the First Holy War. But it was
part of his innocence to respond to everything as though encountering it for
the very first time. Repetition, as she had discovered on many cross-eyed
occasions, was a kind of drug for Samarmas.

"Kel, that's quite
enough."

"But he needs to know
too!"

She had to remind herself that
his cleverness was that of a
normal
child, and not like that of his
siblings. Inrilatas, in particular, had possessed his father's... gifts.

She wished she could put these
worries to rest. For all her love, she could never lose herself in Kelmomas the
way she could Samarmas, whose idiocy had become a kind of perverse sanctuary
for her. For all her love, she could not bring herself to trust the way a
mother should.

Not after so many...
experiences.

As she feared, a carnival of
personages great and small clotted the corridors leading to the Truth Room. The
whole palace, it seemed, had found some excuse to see their latest captive. She
even saw her
cook,
a diminutive old Nilnameshi named Bompothur, pressing
toward the door with the others. The voice of Biaxi Sankas, one of the more
powerful members of the Congregate, reverberated across the hooded stone
spaces.
"Let me pass, you caste-menial fool!"

The scene troubled her perhaps
more than it should. To be Empress of the Three Seas was one thing, to be the
wife of the
Aspect-Emperor
was quite another. In his absence, absolute
authority fell to her—but how could it not bruise and break when the fall was
so far? Even where one would expect her rule to be absolute—such as her own
palace—it was anything but. In Kellhus's absence, the Andiamine Heights seemed
nothing so much as a squabbling mountain of bowing, scraping, insinuating
thieves. The Exalt-Ministers. The caste-nobles of the High Congregate. The
Imperial Apparati. The visiting dignitaries. Even the slaves. It sickened her
the way they all lined up moist-eyed with awe and devotion whenever Kellhus
walked the halls, only to resume their cannibalistic rivalries the instant he
departed—when
she
walked the gilded halls.
Word has it, Blessed
Empress, that so-and-so is questioning the slave reforms, and in the most
troubling manner...
On and on, back and forth, the long dance of tongues as
knives. She had learned to ignore most of it, the palace would be on the brink
of revolt if even a fraction of what was said was true. But it meant that she
would never know if the palace were about to revolt, and she had read enough
history to know that this was every sovereign's most mortal concern.

She cried out,
"Imhailas!"

Whether it was her or some
perverse trick of the stone, the ringing of her voice had the character of a
screech. A herd of apprehensive faces turned to her and the twins. There was a
comical scuffle as they all struggled to kneel in the absence of floor space.
She could not but wonder at what Kellhus would say about this lack of
discipline. Who would be punished and how? There was always punishment where
the Aspect-Emperor was involved...

Or as he pretended to call it,
education.

"Imhailas!" she cried
again. She squeezed Samarmas's hand in reassurance, smiled at him. He had a
tendency to cry whenever she raised her voice.

"Yes, your Glory," the
Exalt-Captain called from the blockaded threshold.

"What are all these people
doing here?"

"It's been some time, your
Glory. Almost two years since the last—"

"This is foolish! Clear
everyone out save your guards and the pertinent ministers."

"At once, your Glory."

Of course Imhailas scarce needed
to utter a word: Everyone had heard her anger and her rebuke.

"They're more afraid of
Father," young Kelmomas whispered at her side.

"Yes," Esmenet
replied, at a loss as to how to respond otherwise. The insights of children
were too immediate, too unfiltered not to be unwelcome. "Yes, they
are."

Even a child can see it.

She drew the boys to the wall to
make way for the file of men—a parade of seditious souls draped in ingratiating
skins, or so it seemed. She acknowledged their anxious and perfunctory bows as
they scurried past, wondering how she could possibly rule when her instruments
so sickened her. But she had been too political for far too long not to
recognize an opportunity when she saw one. She stopped Lord Sankas as he made
to pass, asked him if he would assist her with the twins. "They've never
seen a skin-spy before," she explained. She wondered how she could have
forgotten how tall he was—even for a caste-noble. Her own height had always
been a source of shame for her, given the way it shouted her caste-menial
origins.

"Indeed," he said with
a gloating smile. Most men were only too eager to embrace evidence of their
importance, but when they were as old as Sankas, it seemed more unseemly for
some reason. He looked down, winked at her sons. "The horrors of the world
are what make us men."

Esmenet smiled up at the Lord,
knowing this little piece of advice to her sons would endear them to him.
Kellhus was forever reminding her to seek the counsel of those whose friendship
could be advantageous. Men, he was always saying, liked to see their words
proved right.

"Are we going to see the
monster now, Momma?" Samarmas asked in a voice as small as his eyes were
wide. She looked to the child, grateful for the excuse to ignore the mob. Over
the past year, ever since deciding the twins were not like the others, she had
found herself retreating from the mad polity around her into the realm of
maternal cares. It was more instinctive, and certainly more gratifying.

"There's no need for you to
fear," she said, smiling. "Come. Lord Sankas will protect you."

***

Though the name was the same,
the Truth Room was one of the palace chambers, subterranean or otherwise, that
had been drastically expanded in the years since Kellhus's uncontested march
into Momemn. The original Truth Room had been little more than the personal
torture chamber of the old Ikurei Emperors, and every bit as dark and closeted
as their peevish souls. The enormous chamber she now entered with her children
was nothing less than an organ of state, a pit with walls tiered by walkways,
some possessing cages for prisoners, others lined with various instruments of
interrogation, and one, the uppermost, adorned with columns and marble
veneers—a gallery for observers from the land of light. It was, the architect
had told her, an inverted replica of the Great Ziggurat of Xijoser, carved so
that the mighty monument on the Sempis Delta would fit if tipped into its
hollow. Esmenet could remember Proyas quipping something to the effect that
"sometimes Men must reach down" when seeking the Truth.

She led the children to the
ornate balustrade of the highest tier, where the others awaited her. Her
Master-of-Spies, Phinersa, and her Vizier, Vem-Mithriti, knelt with their faces
to the floor, while Maithanet and Theliopa stood with their faces lowered in
greeting. Imhailas was ushering out the last of the stragglers, his humour at
once officious and curiously apologetic, the air of someone executing the
irrational demands of another.

Theliopa, her eldest daughter by
Kellhus, bowed in a stiff curtsy as they approached. Perhaps she was the
strangest of her children, even moreso than Inrilatas, but curiously all the
more safe for it. Theliopa was a woman with an unearthly hollow where human
sentiment should be. Even as an infant she had never cried, never gurgled with
laughter, never reached out to finger the image of her mother's face. Esmenet
had once overheard her nursemaids whispering that she would happily starve
rather than call out for food, and even now she was thin in the extreme, tall and
angular like the God-her-father, but emaciated, to the point where her skin
seemed tented over the woodwork of her bones. The clothes she wore were
ridiculously elaborate—despite her godlike intellect, the subtleties of style
and fashion utterly eluded her—a gold-brocaded gown fairly armoured in black
pearls.

"Mother," the sallow
blonde girl said in a tone that Esmenet could now recognize for attachment, or
the guttering approximation of it. As always the girl flinched at her touch,
like a skittish cat or steed, but as always Esmenet refused to draw back, and
held Theliopa's cheek until she felt the tremors calm.

"You've done well,"
she said, gazing into her pale eyes. "Very well." It was strange,
loving children who could see the movements of her soul through her face. It
forced a kind of bitter honesty on her, the resignation of those who know they
cannot hide—not ever—from the people they needed to hide from the most.

"I live to please you,
Mother."

They were what they were, her
children. Bits and pieces of their father. The
truth
of him—perhaps.
Only Samarmas was the exception. She could see it in his every stitch, in the
ardent affection with which he clung to Lord Sankas's hand, in the round way
his eyes probed the shadows beyond the rail, in the anxiousness that warbled
through his limbs. Only Samarmas could be...

Trusted.

Recoiling from these thoughts,
she turned to the others and pronounced the customary greeting, "Reap the
morrow." She felt Kelmomas's small fingers squeeze her palm.

"Reap the morrow,"
they intoned in response. Phinersa jumped to his feet with bandy-legged
alacrity. He was a brilliant but nervous man, one who could bloom and wilt in
the course of speaking a single sentence. He was one of those men who were far
too conscious of their own eyes. They had the habit of darting around the point
of your own, but more ritually than randomly, as though they followed some
formal rule of avoidance, rather than any instinctive antipathy to the prick of
contact. Those rare times he did manage a level gaze, it was with a penetration
and intensity that boiled away to nothing in a matter of heartbeats and left
you feeling at once superior and strangely exposed.