The Judging Eye (25 page)

"So just when did you hope
to reach these ruins?" His speech had a well-practised insistence—a
first-things-first air—that spoke of many long campaigns.

"The Wards protecting the
Coffers are peculiar," Achamian lied, "geared to the heavenly
spheres. We must reach Sauglish
before
the autumn solstice."

All eyes raked him, searching,
it seemed, for the telltale glow of deceit in the blank coals of his face.

"Sweet Sejenus!"
Kiampas cried in disbelief. "The end of summer?"

"It's imperative."

"Impossible. It can't be
done!"

"Yes," the Captain
grated, "it
can
."

Kiampas paled, seemed to glance
down in unconscious apology. Though he was cut of different cloth entirely,
Achamian wasn't surprised to see him sharing Sarl's reaction to the
chest-tightening rarity of their Captain's voice.

"Well then," the
Nansur continued, apparently searching for his equilibrium in the matter at
hand. "The choice of routes is straightforward then. We should travel
through Galeoth, up through—"

"That cannot be done,"
Achamian interrupted.

The studied lack of expression
on Kiampas's face would be Achamian's first glimpse of the man's escalating
disdain.

"And what route do you
suggest?"

"Along the back of the
Osthwai."

"The back of the..."
The man possessed a sneering side, but then, so did most ironic souls.
"Are you fucking mad? Do you realize—"

"I cannot travel anywhere
in the New Empire," Achamian said, genuinely penitent. Of all the Skin
Eaters he had met thus far, Kiampas was the only one he was prepared to trust,
if only at a procedural level. "Ask Lord Kosoter. He knows who I am."

Apparently the lack of
contradiction in the Captain's glare was confirmation enough.

"So you wish to avoid the
Aspect-Emperor," Kiampas continued. Achamian did not like the way his eyes
drifted to the Captain as he said this.

"What of it?"

His impertinent smile was rendered
all the more injurious by the dignity of his features. "Rumour has it
Sakarpus has fallen, that the Great Ordeal even now marches northward."

He was saying they would have to
cross the New Empire no matter what. Achamian bowed his face to the jnanic degree
that acknowledged a point taken. He knew how absurd he must look, an old,
wild-haired hermit dressed in a beggar's tunic, aping the etiquette of a
faraway caste-nobility. Even still, this was a courtesy he had yet to extend to
any of the others; he wanted Kiampas to know that he respected both him and his
misgivings.

Something told him he would need
allies in the weeks and months to come.

"Look," Achamian
replied. "Were it not for the Great Ordeal, an expedition such as this
would be madness. This is perhaps the one time, the
only
time, that
something like this can be attempted! But just because the Aspect-Emperor
clears our way, doesn't mean we must cross his path. He shall be far ahead of
us, mark me."

Kiampas was having none of it.
"The Captain tells me you're a fellow Veteran, that you belonged to the
First Holy War. That means you know full well the sluggish and capricious ways
of great hosts on the march."

"Sauglish lies out of their
way," Achamian said evenly. "The chances of encountering any Men of
the Circumfix are exceedingly slim."

Kiampas nodded with slow
skepticism, then leaned back, as if retreating from some disagreeable scent.

The smell of futility, perhaps.

After that second meeting, the
watches of the day and the days of the week passed quickly. Lord Kosoter
commanded a muster of the full company the following morning. The Skin Eaters
assembled among the posts of old Marrow, far enough from the mists for their
jerkins to harden in the sun. They were a motley group, some sixty or so
strong, sporting all manner of armour and weaponry. Some were fastidious,
obviously intent on reclaiming as much civilization as they could during their
brief tenure in Marrow. One was even decked in the crisp white gowns of a
Nilnameshi caste-noble and seemed almost comically concerned with the mud
staining his crimson-threaded hems. Others were savage-slovenly, bearing the
stamp of their inhuman quarry, to the point of almost resembling Sranc in the
case of some. A great many seemed to have adopted the Thunyeri custom of
wearing shrunken heads as adornment, either about their girdles or sewn into
the lacquered faces of their shields. Otherwise, the only thing they seemed to
share in common was a kind of deep spiritual fatigue and, of course, an
abiding, almost reverential fear of their Captain.

When they had settled into
ranks, Sarl described, in terms grandiloquent enough to flirt with mockery, the
nature of the expedition their Captain was in the course of planning. Lord
Kosoter stood off to the side, his eyes scavenging the horizon. Cleric
accompanied him, somewhat taller and just as broad, his face hidden in his
cowl. The cataracts boomed in the distance, a great murky hiss that reminded
Achamian of the way the Inrithi hosts had roared in response to Kellhus some
twenty years previous. Birdsong braided the nearby forest verge.

Sarl explained the extraordinary
perils that would face them, how they would be travelling ten times the
distance of a standard "slog," as he called it, and how they could
expect to live in the "pit" for more than a year. He paused after
mentioning this last as though to let its significance resonate. Achamian
reminded himself that the wilderness was not so much a
place
to these
men, as an art with its own well of customs and lore. He imagined that scalpers
traded stories of companies gone missing returning after so many months in the
"pit." Those words, "more than a year," he realized, likely
carried dismaying implications.

But again and again, the old,
wire-limbed man came back to the Coffers. "Coffers," spoken like the
title of some great king. "Coffers," murmured like the name of some
collective aspiration. "Coffers," spat as though to say, "How long
shall we be denied our due?" "Coffers," hollered over and over
like the name of some lost child. "Coffers," invoked as though it
were something lost and holy, another Shimeh crying out for reconquest...

But more real than any of these
things in that it could be divided into equal shares.

A lie carved at the joints.

Sarl explained all, his face
reddening, then reddening again, his head bobbing to the more strident turns of
speech, his body given to illustrative antics, standing at attention, trotting
in place, pacing while the voice pondered. And all was disciplined silence
throughout, something which, given the crazed composition of the Skin Eaters,
Achamian would have thought a miracle had he not shared bowls with their
Captain.

"You have until tomorrow
morning to decide," Sarl announced in wide-armed conclusion.
"Tomorrow to decide whether to risk all
to become a prince!
or
cradle your pulse and die a slave. Afterwards, departures will be considered
desertion—
desertion!
—and Cleric, here, will be set to the hunt. You know
the rule of the slog, boys. The knee that buckles pulls ten men down. The knee
that buckles pulls ten men down!"

Watching them break ranks and
fall to talking among themselves, Achamian found himself comparing them to the
hard-bitten men of the First Holy War, the warriors whose zeal and cruelty had
allowed Kellhus to conquer all the Three Seas. The Skin Eaters, he decided,
were a far different breed than the Men of the Tusk. They were not ruthless so
much as they were vicious. They were not hard so much as they were numb. And
they were not driven so much as they were hungry.

They were, in the end,
mercenaries
...
albeit ones touched by the gibbering ferocity of the Sranc.

Lord Kosoter seemed to
acknowledge as much over the course of the rate glances Achamian exchanged with
him. It was a bond between them, Achamian realized, their shared experiences of
the First Holy War. They alone possessed the measuring stick, they alone knew
the rule. And it had made them kinsmen of a sort a thought that at once awed
and troubled Achamian.

During that night's obligatory
revels, Sarl approached him. "The Captain has asked me," he said,
"to remind you these men are Scalpoi. Nothing more. Nothing less. The
legend of the Skin Eaters resides
in him
."

Achamian thought it strange, a
man who despised speaking confiding in a man who could do nothing else.
"And you? You believe this?"

The same eye-pinching grin.
"I've been with the Captain since the beginning," he cackled.
"From before the Imperial Bounty, in the wars against the Orthodox. I've
seen him stand untouched in a hail of arrows, while I cringed behind my shield.
I was at his side on the walls of Meigeiri, when the fucking Longbeards fell
over themselves trying to flee from his blood-maddened gaze. I was
there
,
after the battle of Em'famir. With these two ears I heard the
Aspect-Emperor
—the
Aspect-Emperor!—name him Ironsoul!" Sarl laughed with purpling mania.
"Oh, yes, he's mortal, to be sure. He's a man like other men, as many an
unfortunate peach has discovered, believe you me. But something watches him,
and more important,
something watches through him
..."

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 Eärwa. 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.