The Judging Eye (48 page)

"That is what you are to
the Aspect-Emperor. That is what we
all
are."

"Children?"

Zsoronga dropped his reins,
waved his arms out in grand gesture of indication. "All of this. This
divinity. This apocalypse. This...
religion
he has created. They are the
kinds of lies we tell children to assure they act in accord with our wishes. To
make us love, to incite us to sacrifice... This is what Drusas Achamian
seems
to be saying."

These words, spoken through the
lense of wise and weary confidence that was Obotegwa, chilled Sorweel to the
pith. Demons were so much easier! This... this...

How does a child war against a
father? How does a child not... love?

Sorweel could feel the dismay on
his face, the bewilderment, but his shame was muted by the realization that
Zsoronga felt no different. "So what
are
his wishes, then? The
Aspect-Emperor. If all this is... is a fraud, then what are his true
ends?"

They had climbed out of the
shallow marsh and now crested a low knoll. Zsoronga nodded past Sorweel's
shoulder, to where, in the congestion of the near distance, the young King
could see Eskeles's absurd form fairly bowing the back of his huffing donkey. More
lessons...

"The Wizard does not
say," the Successor-Prince continued when he glanced back. "But I
fear that you and I shall know before this madness is done with."

***

That night he dreamed of Kings
arguing across an ancient floor.

"There is the surrender
that leads to slavery,"
the Exalt-General said.
"And there is
the surrender that sets one free. Soon, very soon, your people shall know that
difference."

"So says the
slave!"
Harweel cried, standing in a flower of outward-hooking flames.

How bright his father burned.
Lines of fire skittering up the veins wrapping his arms. His hair and beard a
smoking blaze. His skin blistering like pitch, shining raw, trailing lines of
fiery grease...

How beautiful was his damnation.

***

At first he battled the slave,
crying out. Porsparian was little more than hands in the darkness, fending,
pressing, and then as Sorweel eventually calmed, soothing.

"Ek birim
sefnarati,"
the old slave murmured, though it sounded more like a
mutter in his broken wood-pipe voice.
"Ek birim sefnarati... Shhh...
Shhh..."
Over and over, little more than a shadow kneeling at the side
of Sorweel's cot.

Illumination slowly tinted the
greater dark beyond the canvas planes of his tent, a slow inhalation of light.

"I saw my father burn,"
he croaked to the uncomprehending slave.

For some reason, he did not
begrudge the gnarled hand that rested on his shoulder. And it seemed a miracle
the way the slave's cracked-leather features gained reality in the fading
gloom. Sorweel's own grandfather had died on the Pale when he was very young,
so he had never known the indulgent warmth of a father's father's adoration. He
had never learned the way the years opened the hearts of the old to the
miraculousness of the young. But he thought he could see it in Porsparian's
strange yellow-smiling eyes, in the rattle of his voice, and he found himself
trusting it completely.

"Does that mean he's
damned
?"
he asked thickly. A grandfather, it seemed, would know. "Dreams of
burning?"

The shadow of a stern memory
crossed the old Shigeki's face, and he pressed himself to his feet. Sorweel sat
up in his cot, absently scratched his scalp while watching his slave's shadowy
labour. Porsparian stooped to pull the mat from the turf floor, then knelt in
the manner of an old woman worshiping. As Sorweel had seen him do so many
times, he plucked away the turf, then pressed the form of a face into the
soil—a face that seemed unmistakably feminine despite the gloom.

Yatwer.

The slave brought dirt to his
eyes, then began slowly rocking to a muttered prayer. Back and forth, without
any discernible rhythm, like a man struggling against the ropes that bound him.
On and on he muttered, while the dawning light pulled more and more details
from obscurity: the crude black stitching of his tunic's hem, the tufts of wiry
white hair that climbed his forearms, the cross-hatching of kicked and pressed
grasses. A kind of violence crept into his movements, enough to draw Sorweel
anxiously forward. The Shigeki jerked from side to side, as though yanked by
some interior chain. The intervals between the spasms shrank, until it seemed
he flinched from a cloud of bee stings. A series of convulsions...

Sorweel leapt to his feet,
stepped forward, hands held out. "Porsparian!" he cried.

But something, some rule of
religious witness perhaps, held him back. He remembered the incident with the
tear, when Porsparian had burned his palm, and a hollowing anxiousness seized
him. He felt like a thing of paper, creased and rolled and folded into the
shape of a man. Any gust, it seemed, could make a kite of him, toss him to the
arches of heaven. What new madness was this?

His soiled fingers still to his
eyes, the old man writhed and bucked as though kicked and beaten from within. Breath
whistled from flaring nostrils. His voice had sputtered into a ragged gurgle...

Then, like grass springing back
to form in the wake of boots, he was upright and still. Porsparian drew aside
his hands, looked to the earth with eyes like red gelatin...

Gazed at the earthen face.

Sorweel caught his breath,
blinked as though to squint away the madness. Not only had the slave's eyes
gone red (a trick, some kind of trick!), somehow the mouth pressed into the
soil face had
opened
.

Opened?

Forming a plate with his palms,
Porsparian lowered his fingers to the lower lip, received the waters pooling
there. Old and bent and smiling, he then turned to his master and stood. His
eyes had returned to normal, though the knowingness they possessed seemed
anything but. He stepped forward, reached out. Muck trailed like blood from the
pads of his fingers. Sorweel shrank backward, nearly toppled over his cot.

Standing across the
morning-glowing canvas, Porsparian actually seemed a creature made of shadowy
earth, like something moulded from the mud of an ancient river watching with
the forever look of yellow eyes. "Spit," the old slave said, stunning
him with the clarity of his Sakarpic pronunciation. "To keep... face...
clean."

For several heartbeats Sorweel
simply stared, dumbfounded. Where? Where had the water come from?

What kind of Three Seas
trickery...

"You
hide
," the
old slave gasped. "Hide in gaze!"

But a kernel of understanding
anchored his panic, and something within him wept, shouted in anguish and
relief. The Old Gods had not forgotten! Sorweel closed his eyes, knowing that
this was all the permission required. He felt the fingers smear his cheek,
press in the firm manner of old men who do all things at the limit of their
strength, not for anger, but to overmatch the thoughtless vitality of the
young. He felt
her
spit at once soil and cleanse.

A mother wiping the face of her
beloved son.

Look at you...

Somewhere on the plain, the
priests sounded the Interval: a single note tolling pure and deep over
landscapes of tented confusion. The sun was rising.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cil-Aujas

The world is only as deep as
we can see.

This is why fools think
themselves profound.

This is why terror is the
passion of revelation.

—
Ajencis,
The Third Analytic of Men

Spring,
20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), South of Mount Aenaratiol

Age. Age and darkness.

For the peoples of the Three
Seas,
The Chronicle of the Tusk
was the ultimate measure of the ages.
Nothing was more ancient. Nothing
could be
. Yet the Skin Eaters found
themselves walking halls older than even the
language
of the Tusk, let
alone the ivory into which it had been cut. No one had to tell them this,
though they sometimes glanced at Achamian as if pleading to be told otherwise.
They could see it scrawling through the light about them. They could smell it
hanging in the dust. They could feel it creeping through meek bones and
chastened hearts.

Here was a glory that no human,
tribe or nation, could hope to match, and their hearts balked at the admission.
Achamian saw it floating in their faces: lips drawn into lines, teeth set in
slack jaws, eyes roaming without focus, the vacant look of blowhards
confronting their tolly. Even these men, so quick to celebrate sin and debauchery,
had thought the blood of Gods coursed through their veins.

Cil-Aujas, for all its silence,
boomed otherwise.

What Achamian had thought a vast
entrance gallery turned out to be a subterranean road. The line of walkers
quickly coalesced into two bands, one following Cleric and his hanging point of
sorcerous light in the lead, the other crowding Achamian and his Surrillic Cant
of Illumination. For a time they seemed to shuffle more than stride, a gawking
band staring up and around, painfully aware of their trespass. Everyone cringed
at the sound of voices. Fragments of what might have been bone gravelled their
steps. Dust fogged their ankles.

Images. Images planked every
surface, virginal as exhumed graves, soaked in the gloom of unwitnessed ages.
The style mirrored that of the Obsidian Gate: the walls banded with layered
pictorial reliefs, the outer set like impossibly elaborate grillwork over the
inner, vaulting some forty feet. The sedimentary grain, whorls of charcoal
black veined with grey, made it obvious that it had been hewn from living rock.
Whole sections shone like brown and black glass. Pinned between their passing
points of light, the walls literally seethed with counterfeit motion.

It was the absence of weathering
that distinguished the hall from the Gate. The detail baffled the eye, from the
mail of the Nonmen warriors to the hair of the human slaves. Scars striping
knuckles. Tears lining supplicants' cheeks. Everything had been rendered with
maniacal intricacy. The effect was too lifelike, Achamian decided, the
concentration too obsessive. The scenes did not so much celebrate or portray,
it seemed, as
reveal
, to the point where it hurt to watch the passing
sweep of images, parade stacked upon parade, entire hosts carved man for man,
victim for victim, warring without breath or clamour.

Pir-Pahal, Achamian realized.
The entire hall was dedicated to it, a great and ancient battle fought between
the Nonmen and the Inchoroi. He could even recognize the principals: the
traitor, Nin'janjin, and his sovereign, Cu'jara Cinmoi, the Nonman Emperor. The
mighty hero, Gin'gûrima, with arms like a man's thighs. And the Inchoroi King,
Sil, armoured in corpses, flanked by his inhuman kinsmen, winged monstrosities
with wicked limbs, pendulous phalli, and skulls grafted into skulls.

Achamian nearly stumbled when he
saw the Heron Spear raised high in Sil's articulated arms.

"Those things..."
Mimara whispered from his side.

"Inchoroi," Achamian
muttered. With a kind of wonder, he thought of Kellhus and his Great Ordeal, of
their mad march across the wasted North to Golgotterath. The war depicted on
these walls, he realized, had never ended, not truly.

Ten thousand years of woe.

"These are their
memories," Achamian found himself saying aloud. "The Nonmen cut their
past into the walls... as a way to make it as immortal as their bodies."

The faces of several scalpers
turned toward him, some in expectation, others in annoyance. Speaking seemed a
kind of sacrilege, like ill-willed gossip in the light of a funeral pyre.

On and on they walked, deeper
into the bowels of the mountain. Miles passed without a terminus or a fork, just
warring walls, stamped as deep as outstretched arms. The way before them
resolved out of obscurity. Behind, the light of the entrance dwindled into a
star, solitary in a field of absolute black.

Then with horrifying suddenness,
a second gate welled out of the darkness. Several gasps echoed through the
stale air. The company stumbled to a halt.

Two wolves towered before them,
standing like men to either side of an unbarred portal, eyes bulging, tongues
lolling. The contrast was dramatic. Gone was the intricacy of the underworld
road, replaced by a more ancient, more totemic sensibility. Each wolf was three
wolves, or the same wolf at three different times, the graven heads warped into
three distinct postures, their stylized expressions ranging from sorrow to
savagery, as if the ancient artisans had rendered an entire animal existence in
a single moment of stone. Writing ringed the casings of each, densely packed in
vertical columns, pictograms like numeric slashes, at once elegant and
primitive. Auja-Gilcûnni, Achamian realized, the so-called First Tongue, so old
that even the Nonmen had forgotten how to read or speak it—which meant this
gate had to be as ancient to Nonmen as the Tusk was to Men. Everything about it
spoke of rude souls awakening to the subtleties of artistic wonder...