The Judging Eye (18 page)

She grabbed her cane and with
shaking elbows out began to hoist herself to her feet...

Only to be struck to her knees.

It began as it always did, with
a curious buzzing in the ears, as though dragonflies swarmed about her head.
Then the ground bucked and flopped like cloth thrown over fish, and watercolour
haloes swung about every living form. And she saw
her
, though she could
not turn to look, a shadow woman, spoked in sun-silver, walking where
everything and everyone exploded like clay urns, a silhouette so sharp it cut
eyes sideways. A hand reached out and pressed the side of her hooded head,
irresistibly gentle, forcing her cheek down to the pungent earth.

"Mother,"
she
gasped.

The shadow held her, as though
pinning her below unseen waters.
"Be still, child,"
it said in
a voice that crawled like beetles up out of the heart of things. It seemed that
she would crack open, that her marrow would climb out and wrap her in a newer
skin.

"Your brother has
finally arrived. The White-Luck Warrior has come."

The hand leaned down upon her, a
sun-swallowing mountain.

"So soon?"

"No, my love. On the
anointed day."

Her body was but a string tied
about an infinite iron nail, woollen tailings that trembled in an otherworldly
wind.

"And the
D-D-Demon?"

"Will be driven to his
doom."

Then the roar vanished, sucked
up like smoke from the opium bowl. The blasted streets became a wall of
onlookers, peopled by vendors, teamsters, harlots, and soldiers. And the shadow
became a man, a Nansur caste-noble by the look of him, with concerned yet
gentle eyes. And the hand was his hand, rubbing her poxed cheek the way you
might massage a sleeping limb.

He does not fear to touch—

"It's okay," he was
saying. "You were seized, but it's passing. How long have you suffered the
Falling Disease?"

But she ignored him—and all the
others. She clawed aside his hovering hands. She fairly beat herself a path
with her cane when she clambered to her feet.

What did they know of
giving
?

***

The city of Iothiah was ancient.
Not so old as Sumna perhaps, but certainly older than the Thousand Temples—far
older. As was the Cult of Yatwer.

The recently built Chatafet
Temple in the northeast of the city was where most of Iothiah's faithful
congregated to worship, mourn, and celebrate. By all accounts, it was one of
the most successful Yatwerian temples in the Three Seas, bolstered by the ever-growing
number of converts among what had been, until the First Holy War, a largely
heathen population. But for those initiated in the greater mysteries of the
Cult, it was little more than a point of administrative pride. The true
importance of Iothiah lay in the funerary maze of the Ilchara Catacombs, the
great Womb-of-the-Dead.

The once famed Temple of Ilchara
had been destroyed by the heathen Fanim, its marble and sandstone looted over
the centuries of their tenure. Now it was little more than a gap in the
rambling network of tenements surrounding it. All that remained were gravel
heaps hazed by desert scree. Here and there ragged blocks rose pale as ice from
the shag of grasses. Sandy tracks marked the paths taken by generations of
playing children. Were it not for the black banners stitched with Yatwer's
sacred sign—a harvest sickle that was at once a pregnant belly—nothing
immediate would have identified it as hallowed ground.

Psatma Nannaferi led her sisters
across a flower-covered mound toward the Catacomb entrance. Their sandalled
feet swished through the grasses, adding a strange melancholy to their sporadic
conversation. Nannaferi said nothing, concentrated on holding her head high
despite her bent back. It seemed she wore her revelation rather than the
black-silk gowns of her holy station, so palpable it had become. She could feel
it billow about her in winds that only souls could sail. Immortal attire. She
was certain the others glimpsed it, even if their eyes remained ignorant. They
glanced more than they should, more quickly than they should, the sidelong
appraisals of the envious and overawed.

Even scarred and diminutive,
Nannaferi was and always had been imposing, a will of oak among hearts of
balsa. In her youth, the senior priestesses never failed to overlook her when
doling out the reprimands they used to confirm their superior station. Others
they scolded and whipped, but they always passed by the "Shigeki
pox-girl," as they called her, in silence. Small as she was, she seemed a
weight too great for their flimsy nets. Something about her eyes, perhaps,
which always seemed fixed on their tipping point. Or her voice, whose flawless
edge called attention to the cracks and twists in their own.

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 Gilgaöl 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."