The Judging Eye (58 page)

But another glimpse of the
madness that had seized these men.

The Interval tolled, its
resonant sound eerie because of the way it passed through the pavilion. The
last of the stragglers filed in, three long-haired Galeoth, a lone Conriyan,
and a contingent of goateed Khirgwi or Kianene—Sorweel still had difficulty
telling them apart. Dozens of men still shuffled along the various tiers
searching for gaps or friends, including two Nansur who shimmed past their
knees with fierce yet apologetic smiles. The pavilion took on the open roar of
men attempting to press in final comments and observations, a stacking of
voices that was progressively doused into murmurs.

It would have reminded Sorweel
of Temple—were it not for the skidding sense of doom.

"Tell me, your Glory,"
Eskeles muttered close in his ear. His breath smelled of sour milk. "When
you look into these faces, what do you see?"

Sorweel thought the question so
strange that he glared at the sorcerer, suspecting some kind of joke at his
expense. But the fat man's friendly expression shouted otherwise. He was
genuinely curious. The young King found this alarming in a vague way, like a
spontaneous and inexplicable pain. "Gulls," he heard himself blurt.
"Gulls and fools!"

The Mandate Schoolman chuckled,
shook his head like someone too familiar with the ways of conceit not to be
amused.

The Interval's second sounding
hung prickling in the avid air, soaking all other noise. Sorweel saw faces turn
in curiosity across the tiers, at first to one another, then, as though bent to
some singular will, to the pavilion floor...

He failed to see the prick of
light at first, perhaps because his gaze shied from the eye-twisting planes of
the arras. Some twenty Shrial Knights, resplendent in white and silver and
gold, had taken up positions across the front of the dais, accompanied by three
of the surviving Nascenti, the first of the Aspect-Emperor's disciples, clad
entirely in silken black. It was the shadows thrown from the shoulders of these
newcomers that drew his eyes to the glittering point behind them.

It twinkled at first, like a
star watched with tired eyes. But it
resolved
, became more dense with
blank incandescence. The Interval tolled again, deeper this time, like the boom
of faraway thunder drawn into a string. The braziers wheezed into strings of
smoke. Skirts of gloom fell from the tented heights.

A sloped landscape of
faces—bearded, painted, clean-shaven—watched.

Seven heartbeats of soundless
thunder.

Blinking brilliance... and
there
he was
.

He sat cross-legged, but not
upon any surface Sorweel could see, his forehead bowed to the spear-point of
his hands, which had been pressed, elbows out, together in prayer. A halo shone
about his crownless head, like a golden, ethereal plate, laying at an angle
behind his scalp. The image of him seemed to scald unblinking eyes.

A murmuring wave passed through
the Lords of the Ordeal: furtive exclamations of joy and wonder. Sorweel cursed
himself for clasping his chest, for quick breaths drawn through a throat like a
burning reed.

Demon!
he cried to
himself, trying to summon his father's face in his soul's eye.
Ciphrang!

But the Aspect-Emperor was
speaking, his voice so broad, so simple and obvious, that
gratitude
welled
through the young King of Sakarpas. It was a beloved voice, almost but not
quite forgotten, here at last to soothe the anxious watches, to heal the
sundered heart. Sorweel understood none of the words, and Eskeles sat slack and
dumbstruck, apparently too overawed to translate. But the voice—the
voice
!
Somehow spoken to many, and yet intended only for one, for him, for Sorweel
alone, out of all the hundreds, the thousands!
You
, it whispered.
Only
you...
A mother's scolding cracked into laughter by love. A father's
coaxing crimped into tears by pride.

And then, just when this music
had wholly captured him, the assembled Lords of the Ordeal crashed into it with
a booming chorus. And Sorweel found himself
understanding
the words, for
they belonged to the first thing Eskeles had taught him in Sheyic, the Temple
Prayer...

Sweet God of Gods,

Who walk among us,

Hallowed are your many
names...

And somehow, through the
entirety of the recitation, the Anasûrimbor's voice remained distinct, like a
thread of milk in slow-curling waters. Sorweel pinched his lips into a line,
steeled himself against the pitch of collective voices—against the tidal urge
to
pray with
. At that moment, he understood what it meant to look out
while others bowed their faces in worship. The groping of unanswered
expectations, clammy and intangible. The fouled sense of defiance, like the sin
of creeping awake through a house of sleepers. He exchanged a look with
Zsoronga and saw in his eyes a more caustic version of his own bewildered
dissent.

They
were the fools here,
not because they dared stand in the company of kneelers, but because being a
fool consisted of no more than being thought so by others.

The chorus trailed into ringing
silence.

His head bowed beneath a nimbus
of gold, the Aspect-Emperor hung in a honey glow.

"Ishma tha serara!"
one of the Nascenti, little more than a black silhouette before the image
of his master, hollered to the darkest pockets of canvas.
"Ishma
tha—"

"Raise your faces,"
Eskeles hissed almost inaudibly, apparently recalling his interpretive duties.
"Raise your faces to the gaze of our Holy Aspect-Emperor."

"What does he me—?"
Sorweel began asking the sorcerer, but the flash of warning in the man's eyes
silenced him. Scowling, Eskeles nodded toward the Aspect-Emperor.
There
...
his expression said.

Look only there.

A breathless intensity slipped
about the neck of the proceedings, a mingling of hope and anxiousness that
Sorweel felt only as fear. Without exception, the assembly turned to the
Anasûrimbor, so that all eyes reflected the white points of his otherworldly
light. Only the twin demon heads, bound by their hair to the Anasûrimbor's
girdle, stared off in contrary directions.

The Aspect-Emperor floated out
over the Table of Potentates, his legs still crossed, his simple white cassock
the one thing gleaming to a fixed light. He moved so slowly that at first
Sorweel blinked at the unreality of it. The Lords of the Ordeal followed his
passage, angling their faces with near perfection, so that no shadows marred
their features. Soft light combed through their beards and moustaches,
shimmered across their finery. Something, a sub-audible rumbling, accompanied
his movement, a noise like slow-sailing thunderheads.

Sorweel almost coughed with
relief when the impossible figure veered to the opposite side of the pavilion.
Soon the Anasûrimbor hung luminous before the shadowy Men, no more than two
lengths away, scrutinizing them as he followed the tier's line at a beetle's
crawl. Sorweel saw faces squint as though expecting a sudden blow. But most
stared back with lunatic poise—some rejoicing, others proclaiming, and still
others
confessing
—confessing above all.

Tear-scored cheeks shimmered in
the passing light. Grown men, warlike men, wept in the wake of their
sovereign's divine passage...

The Aspect-Emperor paused.

The man beneath his gaze was an
Ainoni, or so Sorweel guessed from the styling of his square-cut beard,
ringlets about flattened braids. He sat on one of the lower tiers, and rather
than descend, the Aspect-Emperor simply tilted in his floating posture to study
him. The rings of light about his head and hands gilded the man's face and
shoulders with a patina of gold. The caste-noble's dark eyes glittered with
tears.

"Ezsiru,"
the
Aspect-Emperor began in a voice that seemed to coil about Sorweel's ears,
"ghusari
histum mar—"

Leaning until his beard brushed
Sorweel's shoulder, Eskeles whispered, "Ezsiru, since your father,
Chinjosa, kissed my knee during the First Holy War, ever has House Musammu been
a bastion of the Zaudunyani. But the feud between you and your father has
festered too long. You are too harsh. You do not understand the difference
between the infirmities of youth and the infirmities of age. So you play father
to your father, punish his weaknesses the way he once punished yours..."

One of the demon heads began
opening and closing its white mouth like a fish. Horrified, Sorweel saw the
glimmer of needle-teeth.

"Ezsiru, tell me, is it
right that the father take the rod to the child?"

A throaty answer.
"Yes."

"Is it right that the child
take the rod to the father?"

A pause that tugged a pang from
the back of Sorweel's throat. "No," Ezsiru said, his voice pitched
high through phlegm and sobbing.

"Love him, Ezsiru. Honour
him. And always remember that old age is rod enough."

Onward the Aspect-Emperor moved,
floating no more than a length before pausing before another Lord of the
Ordeal, this one Nilnameshi.
"Avarartu... hetu kah turum pah—"

On and on it continued, each
exchange at once momentary and interminable, as though the timelessness of the
consequences had somehow soaked backward into the act. And in each case,
nothing more than some human
truth
was summoned forth, as though the
Anasûrimbor need only look into the face of one who stumbled to set every man
in attendance upon sure footing. How the loss of a wife exempted you from the
laws of manliness. How shame at being thought a fool made fools of us all in
the end. How cruel natures corrupted piety into excuses to indulge their evil.

Truth. Nothing more than truth.

And the sheer clarity of it
bewildered Sorweel, shook him as deeply as anything since the death of his
father and the humiliation of his people. Truth! The Anasûrimbor spoke only
truth. How? How could a
demon
do such a thing? What demon would?

And how? How could such a thing
be...

Be miraculous?

Sorweel's heart began pacing the
Aspect-Emperor's arcane transit once he reached the apex of the horseshoe and
began moving toward them. Dread cinching his chest, he watched the expressions
of those who believed, upturned and rapt, brightening as he soundlessly passed,
then falling into shadow. The floating figure drew closer and closer, as
inexorable as an equation, as bright as a prison window, until Sorweel's heart
seemed to be beating
against
him. Finally, the Aspect-Emperor slowed,
came to a hissing stop no more than two lengths away. He tilted back on an
invisible axis to regard someone on the highest tier.

"Impalpotas,
habaru—"

"Impalpotas," Eskeles
said with a quaver, "tell me, how long has it been since you were
dead?"

A collective intake of breath.
The man called Impalpotas sat four people abreast of Sorweel—three of
Eskeles—and two rows higher. The young King of Sakarpus found himself peering
against the shining proximity of the Anasûrimbor: The Inrithi had the
clean-shaven look of a Nansur but seemed different in dress and hair. A
Shigeki, Sorweel guessed. Like Porsparian.

"Impalpotas..."
the Aspect-Emperor repeated.

The man smiled like a rake
caught wooing a friend's daughter—an expression so at odds with the
circumstances that Sorweel's stomach reeled as if pitched from a cliff.

Impalpotas leapt—no,
exploded
—from
the tiers, sword out and flashing in divine light. A crack of voice greeted him
in the interval, a word shouted beneath the skins of all present. Bald and
searing light flooded the pavilion to the seams. Sorweel blinked against the
glare, saw the Shigeki hanging before the Anasûrimbor, pinned to nothing,
encased in a calligraphy of blinding lines. Impalpotas's sword had dropped from
nerveless fingers and now lay upright between the feet of a Conriyan on the
bottom tier, its point buried into carpet and turf the depth of a palm.

The assembly broke out in
roaring commotion. Like fire across desert scree, outrage leapt from face to
face, a wrath too feral to be called manly. Beards opened about howls. Swords
were brandished across the rows, like shaking teeth.

The Anasûrimbor's voice did not
so much cut through the din as
harvest
it—the uproar collapsed like
wheat about the scythe of his declaration.
"Irishi hum makar,"
he
said, continuing to scrutinize those seated before him. Save for his tongue and
lips, he had not moved.

Eskele's stunned and stammering
voice was several heartbeats in translating. "Be-behold our foe."

The Shigeki assassin had sailed
out around the Aspect-Emperor and now floated behind his haloed head, a
brighter beacon. The light that tattooed his skin and clothes flared, and his
limbs were drawn out and away from his body. He hung, a different kind of
proof, revolving like a coin in open space. He panted like an animal wrapped in
wire, but his eyes betrayed no panic, nothing save glaring hate and laughter.
Sorweel glimpsed the curve of his erect phallus through his silk breeches,
looked away to his sigil-wrapped face, only to be more appalled...