The Judging Eye (33 page)

"Teach me, then... Teach
me, or I'll tell them everything!"

"Extortion, is it?"

"Murder is more wicked by
far."

"What makes you certain I
wouldn't kill you, if I'm a murderer as you say?"

"Because I look too much
like my mother."

"There's a thought. Maybe I
should just tell the Captain who you are. A Princess-Imperial. Think of the
ransom you would fetch!"

"Yes... But then why bleed
all the way to Sauglish looking for the Coffers?"

***

Impudent. An almost lunatic
selfishness! Was she born this way? No. She wore her scars the way hermits wore
their stench: as a mark of all the innumerable sins she had overcome.

"This is not a contest you
can win, Wizard."

"How so?"

"I'm no fool. I know you've
sworn by whatever it is you hold sacred to never teach anoth—"

"
I am cursed!
Disaster
follows my teaching. Death and betra—"

"But you're mistaken to
think that you can use threats or pleas or even
reason
with me. This
Gift I have, this ability to see the world the way
you
see it, it's
the
only Gift
I have ever received, the only hope I have ever known. I will be
a witch, or I will be dead."

"Didn't you hear me? My
teaching is cursed!"

"We're a fine match
then."

Impudent! Impudent! Was there
ever such a despicable slit?

***

That night they cast their camp
a short distance from the cluster of others. Neither of them spoke a word. In
fact, a quiet had fallen across all the Skin Eaters, enough to make the crackle
of their fires the dominant discourse. Only Sarl's hashed voice continued to
saw on as before.

"Kiampas! Kiampas! That
was no pretty night, I tell you!"

Achamian need only look up to
see several orange faces lifted in their direction—even among the Bitten. Never
in his life, it seemed, had he felt so absurdly conspicuous. He heard nothing,
but he listened to them mutter about her all the same: assessing her breasts
and thighs, spinning expressions of longing into violent boasts, catalogues of
what they would do, the vigour of their penetrations, and how she would scream
and whimper; speculating on the whys and wherefores of her presence, how she
had to be a whore to dare the likes of them, or how she soon would be...

He need only glance at Mimara to
know that she listened too. Another woman, a free-wife, or a Princess-Imperial
raised in cozened isolation, might be oblivious, simply assume that the
white-water souls of men sluiced through the same innocent tributaries as their
own, that they shared a common turbulence. But not Mimara. Her ears were
pricked—Achamian could tell. But where he felt apprehension, the shrill
possessiveness of an overmatched father, she seemed entirely at her ease.

She had been raised in the
covetous gaze of men, and though she had suffered beneath brutal hands, she had
grown strong. She carried herself, Achamian realized, with a kind of coy
arrogance, as though she were the sole human in the presence of resentful apes.
Let them grunt. Let them abuse themselves. She cared nothing for all the
versions of her that danced or moaned or choked behind their primitive
eyes—save that they made her, and all the possibilities that her breath and
body offered, invaluable.

She was the thing wanted. So be
it. She would find ways to make them pay.

But for Achamian it was too
much. Her resemblance to Esmenet was simply too uncanny. And though he had
little or no affection for the daughter—the girl was too damaged—he felt
himself falling in love with the mother all over again. Esmenet. Esmenet.
Sometimes, when his flame-gazing reveries dipped too deep, he found himself
startled by the image of her in his periphery, and the very world would reel as
he struggled to sort memories of the First Holy War from the chill dark of the
now.
To go back,
he found himself thinking.
I would do anything to go
back...

So, with the hollow chest of
speaking for the sake of forgetting, Achamian began explaining the metaphysics
of sorcery to her—if only to kill the prurient silence with the sound of his
own voice. She watched him, wide-eyed, the perfect oval of her face perched on her
knees—illuminated and beautiful.

Quite against his intentions, he
began teaching her the Gnosis.

***

The hike into the mountains
proved arduous. The trail heaved and plummeted as it strayed farther and
farther from the river gorges. The mules clicked across tracts of sheeted
gravel and bare stone. The mighty broadleaves of the plateau became ever more
spindly. "It's like we're climbing back into winter," Mimara
breathlessly noted after picking a purple bud from the twigs hanging above her
head.

Perhaps because of the
accusatorial aura hanging between them, or perhaps just to steer his thoughts
away from the burning in his thighs or the stitches in his flank, Achamian
began teaching her Gilcûnya, the ancient tongue of all Gnostic Magi. As a
student at Atyersus, he had been dismayed to discover that he would have to
learn an entire language—not to mention one whose grammar and intonation were
scarcely human—before he would be able to sing his first primitive Cant.
Mimara, however, took to the task with out-and-out zealotry.

He hadn't the heart to tell her
the truth: that the reason the sorcerous Schools were loath to take adults as
students had to do with the way age seemed to diminish the ability to learn
languages. What had taken him a single year as a child could very well take her
several. It could be the case that she would
never
learn to manipulate
the meanings with the precision and purity required...

Why this should seem a crime was
beyond him.

The Skin Eaters watched them
whenever opportunity afforded, some more boldly than others. Where the width of
the trail allowed, a dozen or so always seemed to gather in loose and
fortuitous packs about them. Achamian found himself bristling each time, and not
simply because of the endless succession of gazes sliding across her form. They
were friendly, courteous to a fault, but there was no mistaking their bullying
nearness, or the predatory lag whenever their look crossed his own, that moment
too long, pregnant with threat and prowess. He understood the game well enough,
the false gallantry of helping her across the more treacherous twists in the
trail, the implicit significance of offering him the exact same assistance.
Leave
her to us, old man...

Mimara, of course, affected not
to notice.

That afternoon a stop was called
at the base of an incline. No one at their end of the line knew the cause of
the delay, and everyone was worn out enough to remain incurious. Achamian was
doing vocabulary drills with Mimara when Sarl surprised them. "The Captain
wants you," the man said, smiling as usual, though more than a little
chagrin seemed written into the wrinkles netting his eyes. He grimaced at
Mimara as he paused to catch his breath, then looked to the other Skin Eaters
milling in the gloom. He lowered his voice to a mutter. "Troubling
news."

Achamian did his best to pace
the old cutthroat up the incline. By the time he gained the crest of the ridge
line, he was breathing hard, pressing his knees with his hands at every step. A
cold breeze greeted him, soaking through his beard and clothing. The Osthwai
Mountains piled across the horizon in all their glory, titanic flanges of earth
and stone rearing into cloud-smothered peaks. The woollen ceiling seemed close enough
to touch, and so black that his hackles raised in the expectation of thunder.
But the distances remained crisp with silence.

He saw Lord Kosoter standing
with Cleric looming at his side. Both were watching Kiampas haggle with a
Thunyeri almost as tall as Oxwora, though far older and nowhere as
thick-limbed. The two seemed to be speaking some mongrel tongue that combined
elements of Sheyic and Thunyeri. At least several dozen of the man's wild
countrymen stood watching in the near distance.

The tall one, Sarl explained in
a low murmur, was called Feather, though Achamian could see nothing avian about
his ornament. Several shrunken Sranc heads adorned his crazed red-and-grey
hair. His war girdle used knuckle-bones in the place of beads. Aside from his hauberk,
the gold-wire Circumfix hanging about his neck seemed his only concession to
civilization. Even paces back, Achamian could smell his furs, the carnivore
reek of blood and piss. He was, Sarl continued in a low mutter, the chieftain
of one of the so-called tribal companies, most of which were made up of
Thunyeri, a people who had warred so long and so hard against the Sranc it had
become a missionary calling.

When Kiampas and Feather
concluded their business, the tall chieftain reached out to clasp forearms with
Lord Kosoter. It struck Achamian as a formidable moment, two storied Scalpoi,
each with their own aura of assassination, each garbed in tattered parodies of
their nation's battledress. It was the first time he had witnessed the Captain
extend anything so precious as respect. With an enigmatic gesture, the
chieftain returned to the trail, followed by the long line of his men. His
manic blue eyes scraped across Achamian as he passed.

"They plan on camping on
the low slopes," Kiampas was saying to Lord Kosoter, "hunting,
foraging..."

"What's the problem?"
Achamian asked.

Kiampas turned to him, his eyes
smiling in an otherwise guarded expression, the triumphant look of a man who
kept fastidious count of wins and losses. "A spring blizzard in the mountains,"
he said. "We're stuck here for at least two weeks, probably more."

"What are you saying?"
Achamian looked to the glaring Captain.

Kiampas was only too happy to
respond. "That your glorious expedition has come to an end, Wizard. We can
wait or we can hump round the Osthwai's southern spur. Either way we've no hope
of reaching Sauglish by summer's end." There was no mistaking the relief
in his eyes.

"The Black Halls,"
someone said in the tone of contradiction.

It was the Nonman, Cleric. He
had his broad back turned to them, his cowl facing east, toward the nearest of
the mountains to their right. His voice pimpled the skin, as much for its
import as for its inhuman resonances. "There
is
another way through
the mountains," he continued, twisting his unseen face toward them.
"A way that I remember."

Achamian held his breath,
understanding instantly what the Nonman was suggesting but too dismayed to
truly consider the implications. Sarl snorted, as if hearing a joke beneath
even his vulgar contempt.

Lord Kosoter studied his Nonman
lieutenant, stared into the black oval with cryptic intensity.

"Are you sure?"

A drawn silence, filled by the
guttural banter of the Thunyeri trudging behind them.

"I lived there," Cleric
said, "on the sufferance of my cousins, long ago... Before the Age of
Men."

"Are you sure
you
remember
?"

The cowl bent earthward.

"They were... difficult
days."

The Ainoni nodded in grim
deliberation.

"Captain?" Kiampas
exclaimed. "You
know
the stories... Every year some fool leads his
compa—"

Lord Kosoter had not looked at
the sergeant until he mentioned the word
fool
. His eyes were
interruption enough.

"The Black Halls it is,
then!" Sarl exclaimed in a smoky cackle, the one he always used to blunt
his Captain's more murderous inclinations. He seemed to wheeze and laugh at
each man in turn. "Kiampas! Can't you see, Kiampas? We're Skin Eaters,
man—
Skin Eaters!
How many times have we talked about the Black
Halls?"

"And what about the
rumours?" the Nansur officer snapped, though with the wariness of a struck
dog.

"Rumours?" Achamian
asked.

"Bah!" Sarl cackled.
"Men just can't countenance mystery. If companies get eaten, they have to
invent a Great Eater, no matter what." He turned to Achamian, his face
wrinkling in incredulity. "He thinks a
dragon
hides in the Black
Halls. A Dragon!" He jerked his gaze back to Kiampas, red face thrust
forward, knobby fists balled at his side. "Dragon, my eye! It's the
skinnies that get them. It's the skinnies that get us all in the end."

"Sranc?" Achamian
asked, even though fire-spitting monstrosities heaved in his soul's eye. How
many Wracu had roared through his ancient dreams? "How can you be
sure?"

"Because their clans make
it through the mountains somehow," Sarl replied, "especially in the
winter. Why do you think so many scalpers risk the Black Halls in the first
place?"

"I told you," Kiampas
persisted. "I met those two from Attrempus, survivors of the High Shields.
I'm no fool when it comes—"

"Poofs!" Sarl spat.
"Moppers! Trying to soak you for a drink! The High Shields were massacred
on the long side of the mountains. Kiampas.
Kiampas!
Everyone knows
that! The
Long Side
!"