The Judging Eye (56 page)

But as he watched her eyes probe
inward, he was struck by the practicality of her wonder, the way her expression
made this novelty look more like a recollection. It was almost as if women
possessed a kind of sanity that men could only find on the far side of
tribulation. Witches, he found himself thinking, were not only a good thing,
they could very well be a necessity. Especially the witch-to-be before him.

"Yes," she said. "I
can
feel it. It's like... It's..." She trailed in smiling
indecision.

"It's a small Cant,"
he said, grateful that Sarl, for whatever reason, had granted them this moment
together. With a finger, he redirected the light so that it rested several feet
above her head. "Something called the Surillic Point..."

"Surillic Point," she
repeated, her voice hot with breath.

"So," he continued,
"picture yourself in your soul's eye." He paused a heartbeat.
"Now picture the light, not as you see it, but as you
see its Mark
."

She nodded, staring at him with
forked concentration. The light stretched the outline of her face across her
breast and shoulder.

"Now picture you and the
Point
walking together
. Hold fast that image. It'll be trying at first,
but with practice it'll become thoughtless, like any other reflex."

Her gaze fell blank to his
wool-covered chest. Without prompting, she took two steps, her eyes climbing in
upward astonishment to watch the glaring light track her move for move. She
looked back about to laugh, only to stub her toe against some dust-furred
detritus. She grinned as she snatched back her balance. Her shadow bloomed and
compressed beneath her.

"Hurry," he said.
"Catch the others."

She made no secret of her
disgust as she strode past the sergeant, walking like a slave with an amphora
poised atop her head. Then she began trotting down the path the others had
sloughed through the dust.

And she glowed, the old Wizard
thought, not only against the stalking black, but against so many memories of
harm.

***

Achamian followed her as far as
Sarl. The man stood slightly humped beneath the weight of his pack, the straps
of which had bunched folds of mail across the front of his hauberk. Standing so
close to him reminded Achamian of the dead Pick, the heart, and the knowledge
that they were not alone in these black-bowel deeps. Mimara's light was fast
receding, and he saw Sarl's eyes flit toward the encroaching darkness. Without
a word, they both began following the woman.

"What do you want,
Sergeant?" The company's passage had left an aura of dust in the air, and
Achamian could feel it fur the insides of his mouth. His chest wanted to cough
the words.

"The Captain asked me to
speak to you." Sarl looked even more wrinkled in the gloom. His face was
grey and grimace-marked, like a corpse exhumed from black peat. The Wizard
breathed against the bristle of bodily alarm, fought the urge to ball his hands
into fists. He almost always felt this whenever Sarl strayed too near, ever
since the man had smashed his wine-bowl in the Cocked Leg.

"Did he now."

"Yes," Sarl said in a
breathy rasp, smiling like an uncle fishing for a nephew's love. That was the
thing about the man's ceaseless posturing: Even when the passions were
appropriate, the underlying intensities were all wrong. "You see, he
thinks you're... too
honest
, let us say."

"Honest."

"And arrogant."

"Arrogant," Achamian
repeated. There was something deadening about the discourse of fools. It was as
if his patience were a pool that was only so deep, and Sarl's every word were a
rock...

"Look," Sarl said.
"We are learned men, you and I—"

"I assure you, Sergeant,
there's
very
little that you and I share."

"Oho! The grief old Sarl
gets for his diplomacy!"

"Diplomacy."

"Yes,
diplomacy
!"
he cried in sudden savagery. "Fine fucking words spoken to fine fucking
fools!"

Mimara had drawn far ahead of
them by now, so that they walked in the least glimmer of light, more the rims
of men than possessing human substance, stepping by memory of grounds glimpsed
ahead. Sarl was a threat, both to him and his quest—if Achamian had suspected
as much before, he knew now. All he need do was speak to the madman in his
true
voice
, right here, right now, and that threat would vanish, become more ash
to powder this dead Mansion's floor.

"What?" the fool
continued. "Did you not think the Captain
knew
we walked through a
vast tomb? Did you not think he would have commanded Cleric to illuminate it?
And what do you do? You decide to show the bones to all! To let simple men know
they walked beneath inhuman tombs. Darkness shields as much as it threatens,
Schoolman! And you must remember the first rule!"

There was reason in what he was
saying. But then that was the problem with reason: It was as much a whore as
Fate. Like rope, you could use it to truss or snare any atrocity...

Another lesson learned at
Kellhus's knee.

"Another Rule of the Slog,
is it?"

"Oh yes... The rules that
have made this company a legend in the Wilds. Do you hear me? A
legend
!"

"So what is the first rule,
Sergeant?"

"The Captain
always
knows
. Do you hear me? The Captain always knows!"

All at once, the hand-waving,
wire-grinning complexity of the sergeant seemed to focus into one simple truth:
Sarl did not just revere his Captain,
he worshipped him
. Achamian nearly
spit, so sour was the disgust that welled through him. To think that after all
these years, he marched in the company of fanatics once again!

"You think you can cow
me?" he heard himself shout. "A Holy Veteran, like your Captain? What
my eyes have seen, Sergeant. I have spat at the feet of the Aspect-Emperor
himself! I possess a strength, a might, that can scar mountains, rout entire
hosts, turn your bones into boiling oil! And you presume—presume!—
to
threaten me
?"

Sarl laughed, but with a breath
clipped by wariness. "You've stepped outside the circle of your skill,
Schoolman. This is the
slog
, not the Holy War, and certainly not some
infernal School. Here, our lives depend upon the resolve of our brothers. The
knee that cracks pulls ten men down. Recall that.
There will be no second
warning.
"

Achamian knew he should be
politic, conciliatory, but he was too weary, and too much had happened. Wrath
had flooded all the blind chambers of his heart.

"I am not one of you! I am
not a Schoolman, and I am certainly not a Skin Eater! And this, my friend, is
not your—"

His anger sputtered, blew away
and outward like smoke. Horror plunged in.

Sarl actually continued several
more steps before realizing he was alone. "What?" he called uneasily
from the almost total dark. The lights ahead of them seemed to hang in absolute
blackness, a vision of little men toiling into the void.

Over the course of his long
life, Achamian had been asked many times what it was like to see the world with
the arcane senses of the Few. He would usually answer that it was just as manifold
and multifarious as the world revealed by mundane senses—and every bit as
difficult to describe. Sometimes he would say it was like a different kind of
hearing.

Sarl forgotten, he found himself
looking down, even though he could see neither the ground nor his feet. It
seemed he could hear calling: the Skin Eaters shouting out their names.

There were galleries immediately
below them, stretching many miles into the entombed fundament. Before, he had
known this as an abstraction, as something drawn from the uncertain palette of
memory. But now he could
feel
those wending spaces, not directly, but
through the constellation of absences, the pits in the stitch of existence,
that moved through them.

Chorae...

Tears of God, at least a dozen
of them, borne by something that prowled the halls beneath their feet.

The riot of thought and passion
that so often heralded disaster. The apprehension of meaning to be had where no
sense could be found, not because he was too simple, but because he was too
small and the conspiracies were too great.

Sarl was little more than a
direction in the viscous black. "Run!" the Wizard cried.
"Run!"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Condia

If the immutable appears
recast,

then you yourself have been
transformed.

—
Memgowa,
Celestial Aphorisms

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk),
Condia

The Interval tolled long and low
over the landscape of tents.

Blowing into his hands against
the morning chill, Sorweel sat outside the entrance to his tent blearily watching
Porsparian prepare their morning fire. The old man crouched like a beggar
before a small, smoking pyramid of bound scrub and grasses, his feet bare
despite the cold. He seemed more ancient somehow, more wise and penetrating for
his leathery brown skin.

The Shigeki slave had been an
embarrassment at first. But the man quickly had become an enigma, every bit as
deep and as frightening as the Anasûrimbor. Something froze within Sorweel
whenever the pink-and-yellow eyes fixed him. And though he smiled at his
friendly frowns, his quizzical grins, the young King recoiled as well, as if
expecting a blow from unseen quarters. Porsparian was neither meek nor innocent
nor powerless. Shadows hung from him—terrifying shadows.

The old slave clucked in
satisfaction as the first flames soaked his grasses. Sorweel pretended to grin.
An involuntary hand drifted to his cheek, touched the memory of the soil the
man had smeared across his face days earlier.

Somehow, simply thinking her
name,
Yatwer
, had become a kind of premonition. And it shamed him. She
was the Goddess of the weak, the enslaved, and now she was his.

Eskeles was the first to arrive,
of course. The rotund Schoolman groaned and huffed as he lowered his bulk next
to Sorweel on the mat. "The Library of Sauglish," he muttered as he
tried to wrestle comfort from his posture. "Yet
again
." The
sorcerer was forever complaining about his Dreams, enough for Sorweel to start
losing interest in them.

Zsoronga arrived shortly
afterwards, stiff in his
basahlet
, the traditional dress of the Zeümi
caste-nobility. His battle-sash seemed all the more crisp and white now that
the Kidruhil tents surrounding them had become grey and mottled for travel.

With Obotegwa absent, Eskeles
was forced to translate their conversation, something Sorweel found more and
more irksome. Over the previous weeks, Obotegwa's mellow and throaty tones had
simply
become
his friend's voice. Hearing the Successor-Prince speak
through Eskeles only reminded Sorweel of the chasm of tongues between them. For
his part, Zsoronga quite obviously distrusted the Mandate Schoolman, and so
kept his remarks to a formal minimum. And Eskeles, of course, simply could not
refrain from adding his own commentary, so that Sorweel was never quite certain
where Zsoronga began and the sorcerer ended. It reminded him of when he had
first joined the Great Ordeal, the dark days when all he could understand were
the recriminations of his own voice.

After drinking the tea prepared
by Porsparian, the three of them strolled down the avenues and the byways of
the encampment, making their way to the Umbilicus, the palatial pavilion
belonging to the Aspect-Emperor. The air of carnival permeated the Great Ordeal
even during the most sober times. But today, when Sorweel had expected all to
be riot and celebration, they found only camp after subdued camp. Some Men of
the Circumfix clustered here and there sharing muted talk around smoking
breakfast fires, while others simply laid in the sunlight snoozing.

"They have nothing to
do," Zsoronga remarked.

Sorweel found himself staring at
a young Galeoth warrior laying between guy-ropes with his eyes closed, his head
propped on the tear-shaped shield he had lain against his pack. He was stripped
to his waist, and his skin shone as white as a child's teeth. A pang of envy
struck the young King as deep as a stabbing. After weeks of fear and
indecision, he now knew that he, Varalt Sorweel III, was simply an ordinary
fool, no wiser, no stronger, than the next man. He had been born with the gifts
of the mediocre, and yet here he was, stranded in the role of a captive king.
He was cursed, cursed with the toil of pretending, endlessly pretending to be
more.

Cursed to war, not across plains
as heroes do, but within the wells of his soul—to war as cowards do.

Today was but one more example.

For reasons unknown, the
Aspect-Emperor had declared a day of rest and consultation. Sorweel and
Zsoronga, alone out of the Company of Scions, had been summoned to the Council
of Potentates, a gathering of the Great Ordeal's senior planners and most powerful
participants. Since Sorweel had yet to master the rudiments of Sheyic, Eskeles
had been assigned his interpreter.