The Judging Eye (50 page)

"You seem to manage well
enough!"

A cackling swell. The crew
always enjoyed a good joke at Soma's expense.

"In Zeüm—" Pokwas
began.

"The beggars give
you
money,"
Galian interrupted. "We know."

"Not at all." The
Sword-Dancer laughed. "They trek into the Wilds to skin skinnies..."

A general cry of outrage and
laughter.

"Which explains all the
silver you owe me," Oxwora exclaimed.

And on it went.

Judging by her expressions,
Mimara found the banter terribly amusing, a fact not lost on the
scalpers—Somandutta in particular. Achamian, however, found it difficult to
concede more than a smile here and there, usually at turns that escaped the others.
He could not stop pondering the blackness about them, about how garish and
exposed they must sound to those listening in the deeps. A gaggle of children.

Someone listened. Of that much
he was certain.

Someone or something.

***

With Lord Kosoter at his side,
Cleric led them through a veritable labyrinth. Corridors. Halls. Galleries.
Some struck as straight as a rule, others wound in the random pose of worms
suspended in water, or like the writing of weevils beneath the bark of dead
trees. All of them hummed with the enormity of the mountain they plumbed: the
walls seemed to bow, the floors buckle, the ceilings tingled with crushing
weight. At some point, their entombment had become palpable. Cil-Aujas became a
world of wedged things, of great collapses, immense torsions, all held in check
by stone and ancient cunning. More than once, Achamian found himself gasping,
as though breathing against some irresistible grip. The air tasted of
tombs—stone joists and age-long motionlessness—but it was plentiful enough.
Even still, something animal within him cried suffocation.

It was the lack of sky, he
decided. He tried not to think of his earlier premonitions.

The banter dwindled into
silence, leaving the arrhythmic percussion of footfalls and the sonorous
complaints of this or that mule in its wake.

The sound of water rose so
gradually out of the silence that it seemed sudden when they finally noticed
it. The walls and ceiling of the passage they followed flared outward, like the
mouth of an intricately carved horn, becoming ever more dim in the twin points
of sorcerous light. After several steps, the walls fell away altogether, and
they stepped into booming space. Through membranes of mist, the lights reached
out, paling, revealing hanging scarps and cavernous spaces—a great chasm of
some kind. The floor became a kind of stone catwalk, slicked with rust-coloured
moulds. Water tumbled beneath, a rush of diamonds, broken only by the shadow of
the catwalk, leaping and wheeling into void. Achamian found himself looking
away, dizzied by how its sheeting plunge made his footing drift. He heard the
mules kick and scream in the train immediately behind him. Near the head of
their long file, he could see Cleric's light gather against the cavern's far
heights, then fold into the tubular hollows of another corridor.

Except that it wasn't another
corridor, but the entrance to some kind of shrine. The room was neither large
nor small—about the size of a temple prayer floor—with a low circular ceiling
spoked like a wheel. Friezes panelled the walls—were-animals with multiple
heads and limbs—but not to the convoluted depths found elsewhere. The scalpers,
Achamian could tell, thought them representations of devils: More than a few
whispered homespun charms. But he knew better, recognizing in the figures a
sensibility kindred to that of the Wolf Gate. It wasn't monsters that glared
from the walls, he knew, but rather the many poses of natural beasts compressed
into one image. Before they began forgetting, the Nonmen had been obsessed with
the mysteries of time, particularly with the way the present seemed to bear the
past and the future within it.

Long-lived, they had worshipped
Becoming... the bane of Men.

While the company milled beneath
the low ceilings, Sarl and Kiampas organized the replenishment of their water
supply. The leather buckets they normally used to scoop water from gorges were
unpacked. A relay was set up, and soon armed men were squatting all across the
chamber filling skins. Achamian paced the walls in the meantime, studying the
graven images with Mimara in tow. He showed her where innumerable ancient
penitents had worn indentations into the walls—with their foreheads, he
explained.

When she asked him whom they
prayed to, he cast about looking for Cleric, once again loath to say anything
the Erratic might overhear. He found him standing at the far end of the
chamber, his bald head bowed and gleaming. A great statue loomed before him, a
magisterial Nonman hewn from the walls, at once hanging with arms and legs
outstretched—a pose curiously reminiscent of the Circumfix—and sitting rigid
upon a throne, his knees pressed together beneath flattened hands. Mould had
stained the stone black and crimson, but otherwise the figure seemed untouched,
blank eyes staring out. Rather than answer Mimara's query, Achamian simply
motioned for her to follow, pressing past the crowded scalpers toward Cleric.

"Tir hoila
ishrahoi,"
the Erratic was saying, his eyes and forehead covered by a
long-fingered hand—the Nonman gesture of homage. There could be no doubt he
spoke to the statue, rather than prayed to something beyond.

"Coi ri pirith
mutoi'on..."

Achamian paused and, for reasons
he did not understand, started translating, speaking in a low murmur. Compared
to the harmonic resonances of Cleric, his voice sounded as coarse as yarn.

"You, soul of splendour,
whose arm hath slain thousands..."

"Tir miyil oitossi, kun
ri mursal arilil hi... Tir..."

"You, eye of wrath, whose
words hath cracked mountains... You..."

"Tirsa hir'gingall
vo'is?"

"Where is your judgment
now?"

The Nonman began laughing in his
mad, chin-to-breast way. He looked to Achamian, smiled his inscrutable
white-lipped smile. He leaned his head as though against some swinging weight.
"Where is it, eh, Wizard?" he said in the mocking way he often
replied to Sarl's jokes. His features gleamed like hand-worn soapstone.

"Where does all the
judgment go?"

Then without warning, Cleric
turned to forge alone into the black, drawing his spectral light like a
wall-brushing gown. Achamian gazed after him, more astounded than mystified.
For the first time, it seemed, he had seen Cleric for what he was... Not simply
a survivor of this ruin, but of a piece with it.

A second labyrinth.

Mimara stepped into the Nonman's
place, apparently to better peer at the statue. Their water-skins filled, the
scalpers had begun filing past them, their looks unreadable. Mimara seemed so
small and beautiful in the shadow of their warlike statue that Achamian found
himself standing as though to shield her.

"Who is it?" she
asked.

The underworld cataract
thundered up through the surrounding stone.

"The greatest of the Nonman
Kings," Achamian replied, reaching out two fingers to touch the cold stone
face. It was strange, the heedless way that statues stared and stared, their
eyes bound to the panoply of dead ages. "Cu'jara Cinmoi... the Lord of
Siöl, who led the Nine Mansions against the Inchoroi."

"How can you tell?"
she asked, cocking her head the same as her mother. "They all look the
same...
Exactly
the same."

"Not to each other..."
He sketched a line through the mould across the Nonman King's polished cheek.

"But how can
you
tell?"

"Because it's written,
carved into the rim of the throne..."

He drew back his fingers,
pinched the silken residue between them.

"Come," the Wizard
said, deliberately cutting off her next question. When she persisted, he
snapped, "Leave an old man to think!"

They had palmed their lives, as
the Conriyans were fond of saying. They had palmed them and given them to a
Nonman—to an
Erratic
... To someone who was not only insane, but
literally addicted to trauma and suffering. Incariol... Who was he? And more
importantly,
what would he do
to remember?

Kuss voti lura gaial
, the
High Norsirai would say of their Nonmen allies during the First Apocalypse.
"Trust only the thieves among them." The more honourable the Nonman,
the more likely he was to betray—such was the perversity of their curse.
Achamian had read accounts of Nonmen murdering their brothers, their sons, not
out of spite, but because their love was so great. In a world of smoke, where
the years tumbled into oblivion, acts of betrayal were like anchors; only
anguish could return their life to them.

The present, the now that Men
understood, the one firmly fixed at the fore of what was remembered, no longer
existed for the Nonmen. They could find its semblance only in the blood and
screams of loved ones.

***

Beyond the Cujaran Shrine they
descended into a maze of desolate habitations. The darkness became liquid, it
seemed so deep, and their light became the only air. Walls reared into
visibility as though squeezed of ink. Doorway after doorway gaped to either
side of them, revealing lanes of interior floor, featureless for the dust,
swinging in counterpoise to their sorcerous lights. Stairwells climbed into
rubble. Stone faces watched with callous immobility.

Eventually they came to a
subterranean thoroughfare, one of several that wound along natural occlusions
in Aenaratiol's heart. Seswatha had walked these, two thousand years previous,
and Achamian found himself mourning the wrack and ruin. This was where the
Ishroi had stacked their palaces, street upon street, climbing the sides of
each fissure. Enormous pitch lanterns had burned in the open spaces, suspended
in webs of chain. Gold and silver foils had skinned the fluted walls. Fountains
had flowed, their waters like ropes of refracted fire.

Now all was dust and dark. For
the first time, it seemed to Achamian, the company grasped the dread scale of
their undertaking. It was one thing to crowd halls hunched against the mountain
above them, it was quite another to file through hollows as vast as this, a
thread of light and furtive movement. Where before the dark had enclosed them,
now it exposed... Anything, it seemed, might descend upon them.

They made camp next to the
wreckage of a collapsed lantern wheel. Bronze bars curved like ribs, reaching
as high as small trees. A massive three-faced head had crashed from some unseen
perch above, forming a barricade of sorts not so far away. The more daring
scalpers explored the doorways and passages along the short section of street
between, but only as far as the white light would take them. The rest broke
into tired clots, making seats of the debris or simply sitting upon the
powdered floor. Some could do no more than ponder their shadows.

Achamian found himself with
Galian and Pokwas. All the Skin Eaters were sleeping in their armour by this
point. Galian wore a hauberk of crude-ringed Galeoth mail, like many others,
only belted and cinched in the Imperial fashion. Pokwas wore a shirt of fine
Zeümi steel, which had been patched on his right arm and left abdomen with
sections of cruder Galeoth links. Over this, across his collar and shoulders,
he wore the traditional Sword-Dancer halter, but the plates were too waxy to
reflect much more than lines of white and dark. The silvering had been scrubbed
away long ago.

From the rehearsed character of
their questions, Achamian could tell they had decided to corner him sometime
earlier. They wanted to know about dragons, particularly the possibility that
one might reside in the vast galleries beneath their feet. The old Wizard
wasn't surprised: Ever since Kiampas's outburst at the Obsidian Gate, he had
overheard the word "dragon" or its Galeoth cognate,
"huörka," at least a dozen times.

"Men have little to fear
from dragons," he explained. "Without the will of the No-God, they
are lazy, selfish creatures. We Men are too much trouble for them. Kill one of
us today, and tomorrow you have a thousand hounding you."

"So there
are
dragons
out there?" Galian asked. The former Imperial Columnary was the nimble
sort, like Sarl, perhaps, only tempered with Nansur sensibility. Where the
sergeant perpetually squinted, Galian's eyes were clear, even if they promised
to frost at the slightest provocation. Pokwas, on the other hand, possessed
that warm-hearted confidence that seemed to belong exclusively to men with
quick wits and big hands. Unlike Galian, he was someone you only had to
befriend once.

"Certainly," Achamian
replied. "Many Wracu survived the First Apocalypse, and they're as
immortal as the Nonmen... But like I said, they avoid Men."

"And if," Galian
pressed, "we were to wander into one's lair..."

The Wizard shrugged. "It
would simply wait for us to leave, if it sensed any strength in us at
all."

"Even if—?"

"He's saying they're not
like wild animals," Pokwas interrupted. "Bears or wolves would attack
because they don't know better. But dragons
know
... Isn't that
right?"