The Judging Eye (5 page)

"Moments of weakness come
upon all Men," Harweel said without looking at his son.

The young Prince stared harder
into the glowing cracks.

"You must see this,"
his father continued, "so that when your time comes you will not
despair."

Sorweel was speaking before he
even realized he had opened his mouth. "But I
do
, Father! I do
desp—!"

The tenderness in his father's
eyes was enough to make him choke. It knocked his gaze down as surely as a
slap.

"There are many fools,
Sorwa, men who conceive hearts in simple terms, absolute terms. They are
insensible to the war within, so they scoff at it, they puff out their chests
and they pretend. When fear and despair overcome them, as they must overcome us
all, they have not the wind to
think
... and so they break."

The heat enclosed the young
Prince, thinning the moisture that slicked his skin. Already his palms and
knuckles were dry. He dared look up at his father, whose bravery, he realized,
burned not like a bonfire, but like a hearth, warming all who stood near its
wisdom.

"Are you such a fool,
Sorwa?"

The fact that the question was
searching, genuine, and not meant as a reprimand cut Sorweel to the quick.

"No, Father."

There was so much he wanted to
say, to confess. So much fear, so much doubt, and remorse above all. How could
he have doubted his father? Instead of lending his shoulder, he had become one
more burden—and on this day of days! He had recoiled, stricken by thoughts of
bitter condemnation, when he should have reached out—when he should have said,
"The
Aspect-Emperor. He comes. Hold tight my hand, Father."

"Please..." he said,
staring into that beloved face, but before he could utter another word the door
flew open, and three of the greater Horselords called out.

Forgive me...

***

Even upon the walls, the famed
and hallowed walls of Sakarpus, the heat of the barracks stayed with him, as
though he had somehow carried away a coal in his heart.

Standing with his father's High
Boonsmen upon the northern tower of the Herder's Gate, Sorweel stared out
across the miserable distances. The rain continued to spiral down, falling from
fog skies. Though the plains ringed the horizon with lines as flat as any sea,
the land about the city was pitched and folded, like a cloak cast upon a vast
floor, forming a great stone pedestal for Sakarpus and her wandering walls.
Several times, Sorweel leaned forward to peer between the embrasures, only to
push himself back, dizzied by the sheer drop: a plane of pocked brick that
dropped to sloping foundations that hung over grass-and-thistle-choked cliffs.
It seemed impossible that any might assail them. Who could overcome such
towers? Such walls?

When he stared down their length,
with the iron-horned crenelations and lines of bovine skulls set into the
masonry, a mixture of pride and awe swelled through him. The Lords of the
Plains, draped in the ancient armour of their fathers, crowded by the
longshields of their clans. The batteries of archers hunched over their bows,
struggling to keep the strings dry. Everywhere he looked, he saw his father's
people—his people—manning the heights, their faces grim with determination and
expectant fury.

And out there, across the grass
slopes, only void, the grey of distances lost through sheet after sheet of
gossamer rain. The Aspect-Emperor and his Great Ordeal.

Sorweel rehearsed the prayers
his father had taught to him, the Demanding, meant to loosen the sword of
Gilgaöl's favour, the Plea to Fate, meant to soften the hard look of the Whore.
It seemed he could hear others among the High Boonsmen whispering prayers of
their own, summoning the favour they would need to wrest their doom from the
Aspect-Emperor's grasping hand.

He's a demon,
Sorweel
thought, drawing strength from the remembered tenor of his father's voice.
A
Hunger from the Outside. He will not prevail...

He cannot.

Just then, a single horn pealed
from the rain-shrouded horizon, long drawn and low, of a tone with the call of
bull mastodons. For several heartbeats, it seemed to hang suspended over the
city, solitary, foreboding. It trailed into silence, one heartbeat, two, until
it seemed its signification had ended. Then it was joined by a chorus of
others, some shrill and piercing, some as deep as the previous night's thunder.
Suddenly the whole world seemed to shiver, its innards awakened by the cold
cacophony. Sorweel could see men trade apprehensive looks. Mumbled curses and
prayers formed a kind of counterpoint, like bracken about a monument. Blare and
rumble, a sound that made a ceiling of the sky—that made water sharp. Then the
horns were gone, leaving only the hoarse cries of the lords and officers along
the wall, shouting out encouragement to their men.

"Take heart," Sorweel
heard an old voice mutter to someone unseen.

"Are you sure?" a
panicked boy-voice whispered in reply. "How can you be sure?"

A laugh, so obviously forced
that Sorweel could not but wince. "A fortnight ago, the Hunter's priests
found a nest of warblers in the temple eaves.
Crimson
warblers—do you
understand? The Gods are with us, my son. They watch over us!"

Peering after the voices,
Sorweel recognized the Ostaroots, a family whom he had always thought
hangers-on in his father's Royal Company. Sorweel had always shunned the son,
Tasweer, not out of arrogance or spite, but in accordance with what seemed the
general court attitude. He had never thought of it, not really, save to make
gentle sport of the boy now and again with his friends. For some reason, it
shamed Sorweel to hear him confessing his fears to his father. It seemed
criminal that he, a prince born to the greatest of privileges, had so
effortlessly judged Tasweer's family, that with the ease of an exhalation, he
had assessed lives as deep and confusing as his own. And found them wanting.

But his remorse was short-lived.
Shouts of warning drew his eyes back in the direction of the pelting rain,
toward the first shadows of movement across the plain. The siege towers
appeared first, each within toppling distance of the others, little more than
blue columns at the misty limits of his vision, like the ghosts of ancient
monoliths. There was no surprise at the number of them—fourteen—since Sorweel
and countless others had watched their faraway assembly over the preceding
days. The surprise, rather, was reserved for their scale, and for the fact that
the Southerners had borne them disassembled across so many trackless leagues.

They moved in echelon, crawling
as though perched on tortoises. Slowly, the finer details of their appearance
resolved from the mist, as did the rhythmic shouts of the thousands that
pressed them forward. They were sheathed in what appeared to be scales of tin,
and almost absurdly tall, to the point of tottering, rising to a slender peak
from bases as broad as any Sakarpic bastion—unlike any of the engines Sorweel
had seen sketched in the
Tomes of War
. Each bore the Circumfix, the mark
of the Aspect-Emperor and his sham divinity, painted in white and red across
their middens: a circle containing the outstretched figure of an upside-down
man—Anasûrimbor Kellhus himself, the rumours said. The sign tattooed into the
flesh of the missionaries Sorweel's father had ordered burned.

There was a breathlessness to
their approach, which Sorweel attributed to the fact that it was at last
beginning
,
that all the worrying and bickering and preparing and skirmishing of the
previous months was finally coming to a head. In the towers' wake, the
immaculate ranks of the Great Ordeal resolved into gleaming solidity, row after
marching row of them, reaching out across field and pasture, their far flanks
lost in the rainy haze.

Once again the horns unnerved
the sky.

Sorweel stood numb, one of ten
thousand faces, concentrated with rancour, dread, disbelief, even ardour,
watching as ten times that number—more!—marched through the dreary downpour,
bearing the exotic arms of distant peoples, following the devices of a dozen
different nations. Strangers come from sweaty shores, from lands unheard of,
who knew not their language, cared nothing for their ways or their riches...

The Southron Kings, come to save
the world.

How many times had Sorweel
dreamed of them? How many times had he imagined them reclining half-nude in
their grand marble galleries, listening bored to polyglot petitioners? Or
riding divans through spice-dusted streets, heavy-lidded eyes scanning the
mercantile bustle, searching for girls to add to their dark-skinned harems? How
many times, his heart balled in child anger, had he told his father he was
running away to the Three Seas?

To the land where Men yet warred
against Men.

He had learned quickly to
conceal his fascination, however. Among the officials of his father's court,
the South was the object of contempt and derision—typically. It was a fallen
place, where vigour had succumbed to complexity, to the turmoil of a thousand
thousand vyings. It was a place where subtlety had become a disease and where
luxury had washed away the bourne between what was womanish and what was manly.

But they were wrong—so
heartbreakingly wrong. If the defeats of the previous weeks had not taught them
such, then surely they understood now.

The South had come to teach them.

Sorweel cast about looking for
his father. But like a miracle, King Harweel was already beside him, standing
tall in his long skirts of mail. He gripped his son's shoulder, leaned
reassuringly. When he grinned, jewels of water fell from his moustaches.

The tapping drone of rain. The
peal of outland horns.

"Fear not," he said.
"Neither he nor his Schoolmen will dare our Chorae. We will fight as Men
fight." He looked to his High Boonsmen, who had all turned to watch their
King give heart to his son.

"Do you hear me?" he
cried out to them. "For two thousand years, our walls have stood unbroken.
For two thousand years, the line of our fathers has reached unbroken! We are
their culmination. We are the Men of Sakarpus, the Lonely City. We are survivors
of the Worldfall, Keepers of the Chorae Hoard, a solitary light against the
pitch of Sranc and endl—!"

The sound of swooping wings
interrupted him. Eyes darted heavenward. Several men even cried out. Sorweel
instinctively raised a hand to his mail-armoured stomach, pressed the
sorcery-killing Chorae about his waist so that it pinched cold into his navel.

It was a stork, as white and as
long as a tusk, flying when it should have sheltered from the rain. Men shrank
in horror from the battlement it landed upon, crowded back into one another. It
turned the knife of its head toward them, its long bill pressed low to its
neck.

The King's hand fell from his
son's shoulder.

The stork regarded them with
porcelain patience. Its black eyes were sentient and unfathomable.

Raindrops tinkled across iron,
pattered against leather.

"What does it want?"
some voice cried.

King Harweel pushed himself to
the fore of his men. Sorweel stood transfixed, blinked at the rain blowing into
his eyes, tasted the cold spill across his lips. His father stood alone, his
woollen mantle soaked, his hands slack below the shining lines of his
vambraces. The stork stood nearly on top of him, legs like sticks, wings folded
into the polished vase of its body, its sage face bent down to regard the King
at its feet...

Then, hanging in the
cloud-swollen distance to the right of the bird, a star appeared, a
scintillating point of light. Sorweel could not but glance in its direction, as
did all those crowded about him. When he looked back to his father, the stork
was gone—gone!

Suddenly he found himself
jostled forward by the High Boonsmen, pressed hard against the embrasures.
Everybody seemed to be shouting, to his father, to one another, to the
horn-filled sky. The siege towers had continued their inexorable approach, as
had the Southron men, whose formations now made a dread tapestry of the
surrounding plains. The point of light, which flared from deeper distances,
suddenly flickered out...

Only to reappear above the
Ordeal's forward ranks, hanging half again the height of the ponderous towers.
Sorweel gasped, tried to step back. It seemed a fearful thing to look up when
he already stood so high. The point was no longer a point, but a figure of the
purest white striding through a nimbus of blue incandescence. A man or a god.

Sorweel found himself clutching
the pitted stone of the battlements.

The Aspect-Emperor.

The rumour. The lifelong itch...

"Father!" Sorweel
cried, unable to see past the shoulders and shields about him. Gusts tumbled
down from the west, blowing the rain into veils of mist, which floated like
mountainous apparitions over the walls and their sodden defenders. The cold was
like knives. "Father!"

He heard the crack of firing
ballistae, but with the wet, the Chorae-tipped bolts sank far short of the
hanging spectre. Shouts and curses erupted all along the wall. Then he heard
the
words
, words remembered but not understood, making haze of pools and
puddles, stinging skin and making teeth ache.