The Judging Eye (41 page)

At least there had been no more
episodes like that first night.

"Good," Kayûtas said
nodding, though for the merest sliver of a heartbeat, a shadow crossed his
face. "My father has at last chosen your tutor," he continued in a
you-must-be-wondering
tone, "a Mandate Schoolman named Thanteus Eskeles. A good man, I am
told. He will accompany you throughout the remainder of the march, teach you
Sheyic while you ride... I trust you will defer to his wisdom."

"Of course," Sorweel
said, quite at a loss as to what to think. Moënghus and the nameless woman
continued staring at him, each with their own variety of contempt. Sorweel
found himself looking to his feet, fuming. "Is there anything else?"
he asked with more heat than he intended.

He was a king! A
king
!
What would his father say, seeing him like this?

General Kayûtas laughed aloud,
said something in the same language spoken by the woman moments earlier.
"I'm afraid so," he continued in effortless Sakarpic. He spared a
droll glance at his sister—whose name Sorweel suddenly recalled: Serwa.
Anasûrimbor Serwa.

"As you might
imagine," the fair-haired General continued, "the line between
insolence and sacrilege is a rather hazy one in an endeavour such as this. But
there are those who... watch such things. Those who keep count."

Something in his tone pried
Sorweel's gaze upward. Kayûtas was leaning forward now, his elbows on his
knees, so that the white silk of his robe hung in a series of luminous arcs
below his throat. Behind him, his brother had turned away in apparent boredom,
gnawed at what looked like a section of dried meat. But the woman continued
watching as intently as before.

"You
are a king
,
Sorweel, and when you return to Sakarpus you will rule as your father had
ruled, with all of your privileges intact. But
here
, you are a soldier
and a vassal. You will salute others in accordance to rank. In the presence of
myself or my brother and sister, you will kneel and lower your face, so that
when you look straight ahead, your eyes are focused on a spot one length before
you. You may then look at us directly: This is your privilege as a king. When
you encounter
my father
, no matter what the circumstance, you are to
place your forehead to the ground. And never look at him unless invited. All
men are slaves before my father. Do you understand?"

The tone was gentle, the words
were nothing if not politic, and yet there could be no mistaking the cutting
edge of reprimand. "Yes," Sorweel heard himself say.

"Then show me."

A breeze bellied the eastward
canvas panels; ropes creaked and poles groaned. There was a burning tightness
to the air, like the tinkle of old coals in an old fire, making breathing not
only uncomfortable, but dangerous. It happened without him even willing it to
happen: His knees simply bent, folded like stiff leather, then fell to the
crude-woven mat that had been rolled across the floor. His chin dropped on the
swivel of his neck, as though obeying an irresistible accumulation of weight.
He found himself looking at the Prince-Imperial's sandalled feet, at white skin
and pearl nails, at the yellow-orange calluses climbing the pads of his toes.

Forgive me...

"Excellent." A
breathless pause. "I know that was difficult."

His every sinew, it seemed,
tensed about his frame, cramped about his father's bones. Never had he been so
utterly immobile—so utterly silent. And somehow, this became his accusation.

"Come, Sorweel. Please
stand."

He did as he was instructed,
though he continued staring at the General's feet. He looked up only when the
silence became unbearable. Even in this, they were unconquerable.

"You've made a
friend," Kayûtas said, gazing at him with the amiable air of an uncle
fishing for some reluctant truth. "Who is it? Zsoronga? Yes. It only stands
to reason. That interpreter of his... Obotegwa."

The young King's shock was such
that he paid no heed to his expression. Spies! Of course they were watching
him... Porsparian?

"I have no need of spies,
Sorweel," the Prince-Imperial said, snatching the thought from his face.
He leaned back and with a gentle laugh added, "My father is a god."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Osthwai Mountains

Since all men count
themselves righteous, and since

no righteous man raises his
hand against the innocent,

a man need only strike
another to make him evil.

—
Nulla Vogneas,
The Cynicata

Where two reasons may deliver
truth,

a thousand lead to certain
delusion.

The more steps you take,

the more likely you will
wander astray.

—
Ajencis,
Theophysics

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132
Year-of-the-Tusk), The Osthwai Mountains

The Scalpoi called the mountain
the Ziggurat, apparently because of its flat summit. None among the Skin Eaters
knew its true name—perhaps even Cleric had forgotten. But Achamian had dreamt
of it many, many times.

Aenaratiol.

When the Nonman had first
mentioned the Black Halls, Achamian had thought only of the expedition, of
reaching Sauglish by midsummer. By the time they made camp that evening, the
relief had all but evaporated and the implications of what they were about to
attempt—for want of a better word—stabbed at him. The world was old, strewn
with ancient and forgotten hazards, and short of Golgotterath, few could match
the peril that was Cil-Aujas.

The Skin Eaters had their own
lore. Given that it flanked the southern approaches of the Ochain Passes, the
Ziggurat and the derelict Nonman Mansion that plumbed its foundations had been
the subject of countless fireside speculations. What shreds of fact they might
have possessed had been burned long ago as fuel for brighter wonderings, and
what remained was out-and-out fantastical. Pestilence. Exodus. Invasion. It
seemed they had concocted every tale to explain the fate of the Black Halls
save the actual one.

Refuge.

When Achamian began telling the
true story, he found himself the focus of all attention, to the point where it
almost seemed comedic: hard and warlike men hanging on his words like children,
asking the same guileless questions, watching with the same timid impatience.
Xonghis, in particular, would begin calling out what he thought would happen
next, only to catch himself and trail mumbling. Achamian would have laughed,
had he not understood what it meant to be stranded as these men were stranded,
had he not known the power of words to parent the orphaned present.

The true name of the mountain,
he told them, was Aenaratiol.

Smokehorn.

More and more Skin Eaters
gathered about their fire as he spoke, including Sarl and Kiampas. Mimara sat
with her head resting against Achamian's shoulder, her eyes lifted high and
searching each time he glanced at her. The flames tossed and twined in the
mountain wind, and he basked in its heated glow. Sinking from the clouds, the
sun leaned hot and crimson against the mountains, before slipping behind the
uneven teeth of the mountains, trailing a shrinking patina of gold, violet, and
blue. The land was tossed to the horizon, slopes and sheer drops, growing ever
more black.

He told them about the Nonmen,
the Cûnuroi, and the glory of their civilization in the First Age, when Men
lived as savages and the Tusk had yet to be written. He told them about Cu'jara
Cinmoi, the greatest of the Nonmen Kings, and the wars he fought against the
Inchoroi, who had fallen in fire from the void, and how those wars left the
survivors mateless and immortal, with no will to resist the Five Tribes of Men.
And then he told them of the First Apocalypse.

"If you want to look at the
true ruin," he said, nodding to the barren knoll where the Captain sat
alone with his inhuman lieutenant, "look no farther than your Cleric.
Reduced. Dwindled. They were once to us as we are to Sranc. Indeed, for many
among the Nonmen, we were little more."

He described the Meöri Empire,
the great White Norsirai nation that once had ruled all the lands on the Long
Side of the mountains, as the Scalpoi called it, the wilderness that was their
hunting grounds. He described its destruction at the hands of the No-God, and
how the great hero, Nostol, fled south with the remnants of his people, and
found refuge in the lands of Gin'yursis, the Nonman King of Cil-Aujas. He
described how the two of them, hero and king, defeated the No-God and his
Consult at Kathol Pass, and so purchased a year's respite for the entire world.

"But what does it
mean," he asked the faces about the fire, "when angels walk the very
ground we trod? What does it mean to be
mortally
overshadowed, to toil
in the dazzle of another race's glory? Do you admire? Do you bend knee and
acknowledge? Or do you envy and hate?

"Nostol and his Meöri
kinsmen
hated
. Dispossessed, they coveted, and coveting, they maligned
those they sought to rob. They did what all men do, you, me, throughout the
entirety of our lives. They confounded need for justice, want for writ. They
turned to the tangled strings of their scriptures and pulled out the threads
that spoke to their fell ends."

"Betrayal," Mimara
murmured from his side.

"Refuge," Achamian
said. He then narrated the three versions of the tale as he knew them. In the
first, Nostol instructed his chieftains and thanes to woo the Emwama
concubines, the slaves the Nonmen used as substitutes for their long-dead
wives. Nostol, he explained, hoped to incite the Nonmen to some act of
violence, something he could use as a pretext to rally his people behind his
planned atrocities. Apparently the Meöri were zealous in the prosecution of his
orders, impregnating no less than sixty-three different concubines.

"Talk about farting in the
queen's bedchamber!" Pokwas exclaimed.

"Indeed," Achamian
said, adding to the chorus of laughter with the mock gravity of his tone.
"And there are no windows in the deeps of Cil-Aujas..."

In the second, Nostol himself
seduced Weyukat, whom the Nonman King prized above all his other concubines,
since she had twice carried his seed to pregnancy, if not to term—among few
human women ever to do so. In this version, the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas had
rejoiced, thinking that the resulting child, if female, could herald the
resurrection of their dying race—only to discover that the infant boy was
wholly human. The child, named Swanostol in the legends, was subsequently put
to the sword, providing the outrage Nostol required to incite his Meöri kin.

In the third, Nostol commanded
his chieftains and thanes to seduce not the Emwama, but the highest among the
Nonmen nobility, the Ishroi, knowing that the resulting passions would be
certain to create the friction he required. This, Achamian had always thought,
was far and away the most likely tale, since most contemporary chroniclers
placed the Fall of Cil-Aujas within a year of the Battle of Kathol
Pass—scarcely enough time for plots involving seduction, pregnancy, and birth
to unfold. And it seemed to accord with the scraps he could remember from
Seswatha's Dreams.

Nevertheless, each of the
versions had its own poetic virtues, and they all came to the same: war between
Men and Nonmen.

He described the glare of riot
lighting the deeps. He told them about fury hunting grief, about bared blades
raised to low ceilings and naked skin falling to chiseled floors. He spoke of
corridors blocked by spears, of underworld houses soaked in flame. He described
wild and desperate Men, Chorae bound against their throats, howling through the
trackless deeps. He explained the blind stands of the Ishroi, their sorceries
cracking through labyrinthine halls. He told them how Nostol, his beard all
filth, his hair blood-matted, struck down the Nonman King as he wept and
laughed upon his throne. How he murdered Gin'yursis, ancient and renowned.

"With courage and fell
cunning," Achamian said, his face hot in the firelight, "Men made
themselves masters of Cil-Aujas. Some Nonmen hid, only to be found in the
course of time, by hunger or iron, it mattered not. Others escaped through chutes
no mortal man has ever known. Perhaps even now they wander like Cleric,
derelict, cursed with the only memories that will not fade, doomed to relive
the Fall of Cil-Aujas until the end of days."

The mountain shadows had
ascended to the arch of heaven, revealing a sky so deep with stars it tugged at
the heart simply to glance at them. A chill crept through the old Wizard.

"I've heard this
story," Galian ventured as the windy silence grew leaden, his palms held
out to the flames. "This is why the Galeoth are cursed with fractiousness,
is it not? The fugitives you describe were their forefathers."

Several of the Galeoth scalpers
howled in complaint.

Achamian pursed his lips, shook
his head in a way that made him feel campfire wise and mountain sad. "The
King of Cil-Aujas was not so discriminate in his dying," he said, staring
into the pulsing coals. "According to the legends, all Men bears this
curse.