The Judging Eye (61 page)

Out-out-
out
!

But the old Wizard is holding
her by the shoulders, telling her not to fear, not to fret, but to trust in his
heart and his power. "You want me to teach?" he cries. "I will
give you such a lesson!" His laugh is almost genuine.

No sobbers,
his eyes warn
her.
Remember!

Her breathing becomes both
easier and more difficult after that, and she finds herself wary of the
Captain. The mere thought of him has scared the panic from her—this, she
realizes, is his warlike Gift. All about her the Skin Eaters assemble, shield
to shield, shoulder to shoulder, forming a single rank around her and the
mules. They look motley with their different heights and scavenged armour...
Motley and fierce.

"Toe to the line!"
Sarl cries across the horn's thundering back. "Come now, boys,
toe to
the line!
"

Suddenly all the reasons she
feared these barbaric men become reasons to prize them. Those hoary trophies.
Those deep-chested bodies, girt with chain, leather, stink, and soiled cloth.
That bullying saunter. Those wide-swinging arms, with hands that could break
her wrists. And for some strange reason, their fingernails, each as broad as two
of her own, rimmed in black crescents. Everything she had scoffed at or
despised she now sees with thin-lipped understanding. The glib cruelty. The
vulgar posturing. Even the glares that nicked her when she was careless with
the cast of her eyes.

These are Skin Eaters, and their
slogs are the stuff of legend. They would eat her if they could—but only
because they walk so near the world's teeth.

She hears Achamian arguing with
Kiampas on the far side of two stamping mules. "We should have stayed in
the Repositorium..."

"But here we can choke them
in the aisles."

"And those with the
Chorae?"

The Nansur's grin is haphazard,
as though hooked by a hard-to-see scar. His jaw, normally clean-shaven, is
spackled grey. "Trifles, Wizard. Believe you me, we know how to stack
skinnies..."

The man trails, cocks his head
to the sudden quiet.

The horns have stopped.

The silence, she knows, is the
silence they have marched through since entering the Obsidian Gate, the silence
of their shutting in, the silence of corpses in their tombs. The ageless roar
of Cil-Aujas.

Her limbs seem buoyant for the
thickness of it.

All this time she has simply
stood witless amid the mules. Now Kiampas is before her, issuing instructions—stay
with the animals, keep the torches, staunch wounds by pressing like
this
—and
asking questions—Do you know how to bind a tourniquet? Can you use that pretty
sword? He peers into her eyes with calming seriousness, speaks only to the
point. He is a handsome father. She answers him as honestly as she can. In her
periphery she sees Achamian conferring with Cleric and the Captain. Sarl
continues barking at his line, his gravelly voice recalling slogs gone by.
"Oh, yes, boys, this is going to be a
chopper
. A classic
chopper!"

She unpacks the torches and
wedges five of them at intervals along the wall using chiselled hollows in the
friezes. She strikes a sixth and it flares with curious transparency—violet
wrapping into yellow—in the arcane light, but burns and smokes all the same.
She lights all five, and the engraved Emwama seem to glow with the colours of
their long-lost life. She walks among the restless mules, running her hands
across the bristle of their necks, scratching their jaws and ears, and it seems
that she mourns them.

Their small army falls
motionless. The twin Surillic Points lean white against the engraved planes of
the nearest columns, dwindle in grey stages the farther they reach down the
lanes. Though soundless, the light seems to hiss with suspense.

The Skin Eaters have formed a
bristling shell some thirty men strong, reaching from the wall, about their
beasts of burden, back to the wall. Lord Kosoter stands just behind the apex,
rigid with solitary concentration. With his plaited beard and tattered finery
he almost looks as ancient as Cil-Aujas. His round shield, which she has seen
many times hanging from a mule pack, is dented and scored. Barely legible
across its centre are the enamel remains of an Ainoni pictogram: the word
"umra," which in Ainoni means both duty and discipline. He holds his
sword pointed down to his side. She sees he has drawn a quarter arc through the
dust across the stone. Because he wears his Chorae over his heart, she cannot
shake the sense that he's not quite alive.

Achamian stands with Kiampas at
his side several paces to the Captain's left. Cleric stands likewise with Sarl
to his right. Their Marks remind her of their power, and their company's hope.

Still holding the torch, she
draws her sword: a Gift from her mother, forged of the finest Seleukaran steel.
The disparate lights slip like liquid across its sheen. Squirrel, she calls it,
because of the way it always seemed to tremble in her hand. It trembles now.
She tries to remember all the years she spent training with her half-brothers,
but the glow of the Andiamine Heights cannot penetrate this deep place...
Nothing can.

"They come,"
the
Nonman says, his black eyes as inscrutable as the darkness they plumb.

Mimara expects to feel the
Chorae weaving out in the black. Instead she hears something, a
nail-against-stone scratching that spreads like flood-water across the unseen
spaces, reaching wider and higher until it seems the company stands in the
piped centre of a gnawed bone...

Louder. Louder. A reek steams into
the air, like the rot of inhuman mouths.

Her hand burns for squeezing her
sword's pommel.

"Just as the Captain
said," Sarl rasps.
"Skinnies."
He shoots a pointed look
at Kiampas, every wrinkle grinning with his greasy lips.

"Remind me how much I hate
this," Galian says to no one in particular.

"Like a knife up the
bung?" Xonghis asks.

"No. Worse."

"I thought it was the knife
too," Soma says.

"No," Pokwas replies.
"It was beating your scrotum with, ah...
thistles
, right?"

"Exactly," Galian
says, nodding sagely. "Like beating my pouch with thistles. My poor pretty
pouch."

"Yes-yes," Xonghis
snorts. He bangs his helm with the flat of his sword.

"Just think of all the
gold," Somandutta replies—always the lackwit. Poor Soma.

"Pfah!" Pokwas cries,
scowling. "Hard to spend it when the whores are busy laughing at his
flayed hard-boileds, now isn't it?"

She feels a tick of sweat every
time they utter that word.
Whore.

Galian nods once again, this
time as if at some tragic human truth. "The sluts laugh enough as it
is."

They speak more to their terror
than to one another, she realizes. Ever do men play the mummer, strutting on
the stage of themselves to avoid the parts the world has assigned them. Women
would speak of their fear.

"My ass itches," the
giant Oxwora suddenly announces. "Does anyone have an itchy ass?"

"Just aim it the other
way," Galian calls back. "I'm sure the skinnies will oblige
you."

A wave of snorts and guffaws
passes through the line.

"Aye. But then my ass would
stink
!"

An almost crazed outburst of
laughter, one that catches fear as fuel, blotting the sounds of the scabrous
onrush...

"Soma!" the giant
cries. "You pare your nails! Lend me your pretty finger, would you?"

And the laughter is doubled.

Old Sarl calls through it in a
gravelly voice. "May I remind you boys that our lives are in mortal
danger!" His grin, however, belies his approval.

Lord Kosoter stands motionless.

Distracted, Mimara doesn't see
Achamian stepping to the fore of the line. When she glimpses him, her heart
opens into something that clutches, that claws. She opens her mouth to call him
back, but her breath has fallen through the bottom of her. She fears she might
swoon, so frail he looks beneath the towering blackness, so exposed!

But he's already speaking, and
in a voice that slaps the remaining laughter from the scalpers' mouths. Even
the nearing roar seems to falter. A Ward cups the spaces immediately before
him, a lens of bluish light. A cerulean glare limns his white hair and
wolf-skin cloak; he suddenly looks the Gnostic Wizard he is.

One of the Surillic Points goes
dark, and an increment of grimness shadows everything. Kiampas cries for a
torch. Numb to the fingertips, she wades through the mules, hands him the one
she carries, then returns to fetch another, which she lights by touching to the
centre-most torch on the wall. She turns in time to see the sergeant heave the
torch down the aisle in front of the Wizard. It pockets the dark with a ring of
stark gold...

She glimpses something crouch in
and out of the blackness, something white and snarling and shiny-thin. She
wraps her sword arm around the nearest mule's neck, hugs the beast tight.
"Bastion," she calls him, without knowing the why or the where of the
name. "Bastion..." She cares not who thinks her a fool!

The darkness itself seems to
rasp and chip and clank and wheeze. Inhuman barks ring across the unseen
ceilings.

She sees Cleric stride through
the line to Achamian's right. His cloak cast away, he stands planked in silvery
armour, plates skirted in impossibly fine chain, his greatsword swinging from
his left hip.
Ishroi
, she thinks, recalling Achamian's word from
earlier. The Nonman joins the smaller Wizard in his arcane chanting. Deep words
well up out of the root of things, so indecipherable they seem to yank at her
eyes.

Above her, the remaining Point
fades like an errant thought, and the company is reduced to the roiling glitter
of torchlight. The eternal dark of Cil-Aujas closes about them.

The glow of sorcery paints all
their faces.

Mimara is already running to
Kiampas when he calls her, the remaining torches hugged tight to her breast.
One by one she lights them, tries to purse the tremor from her lips while he
heaves them with athletic violence into the dark. They arc high enough to brush
the vaults with fluttering visibility. Some fall and spark across vacant floor.
Two roll to the brink of the shrouded horde, providing the merest of glimpses:
swords of notched iron held dowsing low, wet eyes glittering, white limbs
folding into the black. The last chips a graven visage, then twirls blue down
into the hunched midst of them. She glimpses a clutch of white faces, Nonmen
faces, only pinched into grotesque parodies of expression.

Canine shadows stamp the torch
into oblivion.

She stumbles back to Bastion,
pulls his head to her breast. The dull immovability of the beast heartens her
for some reason, soothes the quaking from her limbs. She whispers in his ear,
congratulates him for his idiot bravery. Before her stands Lord Kosoter,
unmoved, unmoving, the knots of his caste-noble braid gleaming down the cleft
of his splint-armoured back. The line of his Skin Eaters reaches out to either
side, and over their shields, she glimpses fragments of Cleric and Achamian,
little more than silhouettes against the curved planes of their Wards.

She feels the Chorae...
pinpricks of nothingness fanning across the far dark.

The horns caw through the black.
The underworld horde surges forward, overruns the torches and their pools of
fallow light. She glimpses a tide of howling faces and septic swords and
dog-ribbed torsos—

Living light glitters out to
meet them.

The two magi shout into the
gibbering thunder, the one high and human, the other low and booming. Blinding
lines spoke the air, their precision too beautiful to be true. The aisles
beneath the columns are writ with theorems and axioms, Quyan and Gnostic, and
the frenzied onslaught breaks beneath them, collapses into slops and severings.
Basalt planes burst. Blood gouts. Flame dazzles.

The two magi shout into the
shrieking thunder... The nearest column crumbles at the ankle, at once implodes
and topples, and the scalpers cry out in terror. Gravel and debris rain smoke
across the Wards. The sorcerous lines hiss through rolling plumes of dust. They
parse and measure the open expanses, dissect the heaving mass, Sranc packed as
tight as worms, their Nonman faces screeching back, waving like festival palms,
thrashing like dogs in the jaws of lions.

Another column collapses, and
Mimara thinks she hears Achamian screaming,
"Nooooo!"
through
the mountainous clacking. Cleric's maniacal laugh rides the clamour.

A stench rains across them.
Sranc blood, she realizes. Burning.

She sees only fractions through
and over the scalpers, lightning glimpses. Baying mobs. Brilliant geometries
sawing. Heaped tangles of dead. She feels the first Chorae bearer before she
sees it, the forward plummet of absence and anathema... Several in the line cry
out.

"Not one knee cracks!"
Sarl screams in blood-raw tones. "Do you hear me?
Not one knee!
"