The Judging Eye (53 page)

For the longest time the chatter
was small, with words traded only between those seated side by side, or nearly
such. Many simply gnawed on their salted rations, staring into the firelight.
When men laughed they did so quietly, with the between-you-and-I circumspection
of temple services and funeral pyres. No one dared mention the precariousness
of their situation, at least no one that Achamian heard. Fear of fear was ever
the greatest censor.

Eventually the talk petered out,
and a gazing silence fell over the company. Ash glowed ruby and orange through
blackened eye sockets. Fused Nonmen teeth gleamed like wet jewels.

Then without warning, Cleric
addressed them from on high.

"I remember," he
began. "Yes..."

Achamian looked up in
exasperated relief, thinking the Nonman meant he remembered another way through
Cil-Aujas. But something in the regard of the others told the Wizard otherwise.
He glanced around at those nearest the fire, noticed Sarl staring at him, not
the Nonman, with manic intensity.
See!
his expression seemed to shout.
Now
you shall understand us!

"You ask yourselves,"
Cleric continued, his shoulders slumped, his great pupils boring into the
flames. "You ask, 'What is this that I do? Why have I followed unknown
men, merciless men, into the deeps?' You do not ask yourself
what it means
.
But you
feel
the question—ah, yes! Your breath grows short, your skin
clammy. Your eyes burn for peering into the black, for looking to the very
limit of your feeble vision..."

His voice was cavernous, greased
with inhuman resonances. He spoke like one grown weary of his own wisdom.

"
Fear.
This is how
you ask the question. For you are Men, and fear is ever the way your race
questions great things."

He lowered his face to the
shadows, continued speaking to his palms and their millennial calluses.

"I
remember
... I
remember asking a wise man, once... though whether it was last year or a
thousand years ago I cannot tell. I asked him, 'Why do Men fear the dark?' I
could tell he thought the question wise, though I felt no wisdom in asking it.
'Because darkness,' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.' 'And do Men
despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things—all
things!—but only so long as it remains invisible.'"

The words implied accusation,
but the Nonman's tone was reassuring, as though he ministered to the wretched
and the lost. He spoke true to his slog-name, Achamian realized, as the inhuman
priest of scar-hearted men.

Cleric.

"We Nonmen..." he
continued telling his hands, "we think the dark
holy
, or at least
we did before time and treachery leached all the ancient concerns from our
souls..."

"The dark?" Galian
said, and his voice warm and human—and as such, so very frail.
"Holy?"

The Nonman lifted his flawless
white face to the light, smiled at the Nansur scalper's questioning gaze.

"Of course... Think on it,
my mortal friend. The dark is oblivion made
manifest
. And oblivion
encircles us always. It is the ocean, and we are naught but silvery bubbles. It
leans all about us. You see it every time you glimpse the horizon—though you
know it not. In the light,
our eyes
are what blinds us. But in the
dark—in the
dark!
—the line of the horizon opens... opens like a mouth...
and oblivion gapes."

Though the Nonman's expression
seemed bemused and ironic, Achamian, with his second, more ancient soul,
recognized it as distinctively Cûnuroi—what they called
noi'ra
, bliss in
pain.

"You must understand,"
Cleric said. "For my kind, holiness begins where comprehension ends.
Ignorance stakes us out, marks our limits, draws the line between us and what
transcends
.
For us, the true God is the unknown God, the God that outruns our febrile
words, our flattering thoughts..."

These words trailed into the
wheezing murmur of their fire. Few of the scalpers, Achamian noted, dared look
the Nonman in the eye as he spoke, but rather watched the flames boil into
noxious smoke.

"Do you see now why this
trek is holy?" the deep voice resumed. "Do you see the prayer in our
descent?"

No one dared breath, let alone
reply. The hanging face turned to survey each of them.

"Have any of you ever
knelt
so deep
?"

Five heartbeats passed.

"This God of yours..."
Pokwas said unexpectedly. "How can you pray to something you cannot
comprehend? How can you worship?"

"Pray?" A snort of
breath that might have indicated amusement in a man. "There is no prayer,
Sword-Dancer. But there is
worship
. We worship that which transcends us
by making idols of our finitude, our frailty..." He rolled his face as if
working an ancient kink, then repeated, "We... we..."

He slumped into himself, his
head bowed like a galley slave chained about the neck. The fire of bones
gleamed across the white of his bare scalp.

Achamian battled the scowl from
his face. To embrace mystery was one thing, to render it divine was quite
another. What the Nonman said sounded too like
Kellhus
, and too little
like what Achamian knew of Nonmen mystery cults. Again he found himself
contemplating the blasted complexion of the Erratic's Mark: Whomever he was, he
was as powerful as he was old... With scarce thousands of Nonmen remaining, how
could have Achamian not heard of him?

Incariol.

"If the dark truly is the
God," Sarl muttered through gravel. He squinted out at the black spaces
with the leather of his face. "I'd say we're in
His
almighty belly
right about now..."

Throughout the entirety of Cleric's
sermon, Lord Kosoter had continued sharpening his sword, as though he were the
reaper who would harvest the Nonman's final meaning. At long last, he paused,
stood to sheath his fish-silver blade. The fire lent him an infernal aspect,
soaking his tattered battledress in crimson, gleaming across the plaits of his
square beard and filling his eyes as surely as it filled the skulls at his
feet.

A sparking air of expectancy—the
Captain spoke so rarely it always seemed you heard his voice for the first vicious
time.

But another sound spoke in his
stead. Thin, as if carried on a thread, exhausted by echoes...

The shell of a human sound. A
man wailing, where no man should be.

***

Blinking in the bright light of
another Bar of Heaven, the company fanned out over the vast expanse of the
Repositorium, their shadows stretched as long as walking trees across the ashen
floor before them.

The cry had trailed into
nothingness almost as soon as it had appeared, leaving the company scrambling
for their weapons and their feet. Everyone instinctively turned to Cleric
seated upon his high stone dolmen. The Nonman had simply pointed into the
blackness, perpendicular to the way they had originally come.

The seven youngest of the Skin
Eaters remained with the mules, while the twenty-odd others struck out in the
direction indicated by Cleric, swords drawn, shields raised. As unnerved as any
of them, Achamian and Mimara took their place in the wide-walking line, their
backs bathed in light, their faces in shadow. Galian and Pokwas moved to the
right of them, while Sarl and the Captain advanced to their left. No one
uttered a word, but walked, like Achamian, with ears so keen the silence seemed
to roar. Drawn like tendons before them, their shadows were so black that their
boots vanished into them with every step.

For almost an entire watch, they
traversed an either-or world of light and dark, with a crevassed landscape for
a ceiling and black-mouthed tombs for walls. The ancient lantern chains, though
evenly spaced and sparely positioned, flayed the open spaces, forming curtains
across the grim distances. And Achamian could not but think that here was an
image of the Apocalypse that threatened them all.

Despite the brilliance of the
light behind them, the darkness grew ever more bold. Soon they seemed a
peculiar line of half-men, backs without bodies, moving as thin as branches
waving in the wind. The dust that fogged their strides formed ethereal shadows
across the lanes of light between them, like steam in low morning sun. Still no
one spoke. Everyone held shield and sword at the ready.

And the mighty Repositorium
gaped on and on.

When they found the man, he was
kneeling in a desert plain of dust, his face raised to the glittering vision
that was the now distant Bar of Heaven. The Skin Eaters formed a thin and wary
circle about him, peering against the tricks of the gloom. Though his eyes were
clearly open, he did not seem to see any of them. He was another scalper—the
necklaces of teeth he wore atop his hauberk made that much plain. His skin was
Ketyai dark, and his beard had been crudely plaited in the Conriyan fashion,
though none of his gear seemed to hail from that nation. At first he seemed
greased in pitch, so pale was the distant light. None of the Skin Eaters saw
the crimson sheen until they were but several paces away.

"Blood." Xonghis was
the first to mutter. "This man has battled..."

"Perimeter positions!"
Sarl yelled to the astonished company. "Move-move!"

The Skin Eaters scattered, their
gear clanking as they raced to form a thin rank in the murk beyond the
stranger. Achamian approached with the Captain and the others, holding Mimara a
pace behind him with an outstretched arm. They gathered to either side of the
man, standing so as not to obscure the light. Answering to some look or gesture
from Lord Kosoter, Xonghis tossed his shield to the floor and knelt before the
unknown scalper. Achamian stepped over the shield, glimpsing the three shrunken
Sranc heads, joined at the chins, that adorned its centre. Where before he had
pressed Mimara back, now he could feel her tugging on the back of his hide
cloak, silently urging him to keep his distance. When he glanced back at her,
she nodded toward the stranger, directing his gaze to the man's lap.

The scalper held on to a hand,
its fingers cupped like dearly won gold between his palms...

A woman's severed hand.

"I've seen him
before," Kiampas said. "He's one of the Picks. The Bloody
Picks."

The smeared face flinched at
those words. For the first time, the dark eyes wandered from the Bar of Heaven,
which rose incandescent on the ingrown horizon. He seemed to search the gaps between
their leaning faces.

"Light..."
the
Pick whispered. He brought the severed hand to his cheek, closed his eyes, and
swayed like a child.
"Didn't I promise you light?"

He shrunk from the fingers
Xonghis placed on his shoulder. "What happened?" the Imperial Tracker
asked, the sternness of his tone somehow softened by the cadences of his Jekki
accent. "Where's your company?"

The man looked at him as though
he were some kind of tragic intrusion. "My company..." he repeated.

"Yes," the Tracker
said. "The Bloody Picks. What happened to them? What happened to..."

Xonghis looked up to Kiampas,
but it was Lord Kosoter who said, "Captain Mittades."

"Captain Mittades,"
the Tracker repeated. "What happened to
him
?"

The man began shaking.
"M-my-my-my..." he began, blinking his eyes with each stutter.
"M-m-m-my c-c-company?" The severed hand had sunk back to his lap.

"Yes. What happened?"

A look of incredulity stretched
about rigid terror.

"My c-company? It was too-too-too-too
dark—too dark to see the blood... You could only
hear
it!" His
expression clenched at this, his lips pulled inward, as though he were suddenly
toothless. "He-he-hear it sucking at their feet as they ran, slapping the
walls like little boy hands. Draining like piss...
It was too daaaark!
"

"Whose feet?" Sarl's
saw-toothed voice broke in. "Whose hands?"

"There's no light
inside," the man sobbed. "Our skin. Our skin is too
thick
. It
wraps—like a shroud—it keeps the blackness in. And my heart—
my heart!
—it
looks and looks and it can't see!" A shower of spittle.
"There's
nothing to see!"

Something wild and violent
jerked through the man, as if he were a sack filled with rabid vermin. And in
the light, it all seemed too stark, too obvious to the naked eye, the twitch
and fracture of a man's breaking. His eyes rolling beneath a stationary film of
reflected white. His face caped in black, the lines of his anguish bleeding ink
this way and that. Even Xonghis leaned backward.

The stranger began rocking side
to side. A kind of pained tooth-to-tooth grin broke his beard. "In the
dark there is always
touch
... you see?" He waved the severed hand
in a bawling, loose-wristed manner. A thread of blood pattered across Mimara's
tunic. "I held on. I-I didn't l-l-let go! I held on. I held on. I held on.
I h-he-held on!" His eyes ceased seeing anything illuminated, became so
crazed as to seem painted. "Gamarrah! Gamarrah! I got you! Don't let go.
No-no, don't!
Don't!
Don't let go!"