The Judging Eye (70 page)

The Nonmen held sway in those
ancient days, a long-lived people that surpassed Men not only in beauty and
intellect, but in wrath and jealousy as well. With their Ishroi heroes and Quya
mages, they fought titanic battles and stood vigilant during epochal truces.
They endured the Inchoroi weapons of light. They survived the treachery of the
Aporetics, who provided their foe with thousands of sorcery-killing Chorae.
They overcame the horrors their enemy crafted to people his legions: the Sranc,
the Bashrag, and, most fearsome of all, the Wracu. But their avarice at last
betrayed them. After centuries of intermittent war, they made peace with the
invaders in return for the Gift of ageless immortality—a Gift that was in fact
a fell weapon, the Plague of Wombs.

In the end, the Nonmen hunted
the Inchoroi to the brink of annihilation. Exhausted, culled of their strength,
they retired to their underworld Mansions to mourn the loss of their wives and
daughters, and the inevitable extinction of their glorious race. Their
surviving mages sealed the Ark, which they had come to call Min-Uroikas, and
hid it from the world with devious glamours. And from the eastern mountains,
the first tribes of Men began claiming the lands they had abandoned—Men who had
never known the yoke of slavery. Of the surviving Ishroi Kings, some fought,
only to be dragged under by the tide of numbers, while others simply left their
great gates unguarded, bared their necks to the licentious fury of a lesser
race.

And so human history was born,
and perhaps the Nameless War would have ended with the fading of its
principals. But the golden Ark still existed, and the lust for knowledge has
ever been a cancer in the hearts of Men.

Centuries passed, and the mantle
of human civilization crept along the great river basins of Eärwa and outward,
bringing bronze where there had been flint, cloth where there had been skins,
and writing where there had been recital. Great cities rose to teeming life.
The wilds gave way to cultivated horizons.

Nowhere were Men more bold in
their works, or more overweening in their pride, than in the North, where
commerce with the Nonmen allowed them to outstrip their more swarthy cousins to
the South. In the legendary city of Sauglish, those who could discern the
joints of existence founded the first sorcerous Schools. As their learning and
power waxed, a reckless few turned to the rumours they had heard whispered by
their Nonman teachers—rumours of the great golden Ark. The wise were quick to
see the peril, and the Schoolmen of Mangaecca, who coveted secrets above all
others, were censured, and finally outlawed.

But it was too late. Min-Uroikas
was found—occupied.

The fools discovered and
awakened the last two surviving Inchoroi, Aurax and Aurang, who had concealed
themselves in the labyrinthine recesses of the Ark. And at their hoary knees
the outlaw Schoolmen learned that damnation, the burden all sorcerers bore,
need not be inevitable. They learned that the world could be shut against the
judgment of Heaven. So they forged a common purpose with the twin abominations,
a Consult, and bent their cunning to the aborted designs of the Inchoroi.

They relearned the principles of
the material, the Tekne. They mastered the manipulations of the flesh. And
after generations of study and searching, after filling the pits of Min-Uroikas
with innumerable corpses, they realized the most catastrophic of the Inchoroi's
untold depravities: Mog-Pharau, the No-God.

They made themselves slaves to
better destroy the world.

And so the Nameless War raged
anew. What has come to be called the First Apocalypse destroyed the great
Norsirai nations of the North, laying ruin to the greatest glories of Men. But
for Seswatha, the Grandmaster of the Gnostic School of Sohonc, the entire world
would have been lost. At his urging, Anasûrimbor Celmomas, the High-King of the
North's mightiest nation, Kûniüri, called on his tributaries and allies to join
him in a holy war against Min-Uroikas, which Men now called Golgotterath. But
his Ordeal foundered, and the might of the Norsirai perished. Seswatha fled
south to the Ketyai nations of the Three Seas, bearing the greatest of the
legendary Inchoroi weapons, the Heron Spear. With Anaxophus, the High-King of
Kyraneas, he met the No-God on the Plains of Mengedda, and by dint of valour
and providence, overcame the dread Whirlwind.

The No-God was dead, but his
slaves and his stronghold remained. Golgotterath had not fallen, and the
Consult, blasted by ages of unnatural life, continued to plot their salvation.

The years passed, and the Men of
the Three Seas forgot, as Men inevitably do, the horrors endured by their
fathers. Empires rose and empires fell. The Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus,
reinterpreted the Tusk, the First Scripture, and within a few centuries, the
faith of Inrithism, organized and administered by the Thousand Temples and its
spiritual leader, the Shriah, came to dominate the entire Three Seas. The great
Anagogic Schools arose in response to the Inrithi persecution of sorcery. Using
Chorae, the Inrithi warred against them, attempting to purify the Three Seas.

Then Fane, the self-proclaimed
Prophet of the so-called Solitary God, united the Kianene, the desert peoples
of the Great Carathay, and declared war against the Tusk and the Thousand Temples.
After centuries and several jihads, the Fanim and their eyeless
sorcerer-priests, the Cishaurim, conquered nearly all the western Three Seas,
including the holy city of Shimeh, the birthplace of Inri Sejenus. Only the
moribund remnants of the Nansur Empire continued to resist them.

War and strife ruled the South.
The two great faiths of Inrithism and Fanimry skirmished, though trade and
pilgrimage were tolerated when commercially convenient. The great families and
nations vied for military and mercantile dominance. The minor and major Schools
squabbled and plotted. And the Thousand Temples pursued earthly ambitions under
the leadership of corrupt and ineffectual Shriahs.

The First Apocalypse had become
little more than legend. The Consult and the No-God had dwindled into myth,
something old wives tell small children. After two thousand years, only the
Schoolmen of the Mandate, who relived the Apocalypse each night through the
eyes of Seswatha, could recall the horror of Mog-Pharau. Though the mighty and
the learned considered them fools, their possession of the Gnosis, the sorcery
of the Ancient North, commanded respect and mortal envy. Driven by nightmares,
they wandered the labyrinths of power, scouring the Three Seas for signs of
their ancient and implacable foe—for the Consult.

And as always, they found
nothing.

Some argued that the Consult,
which had survived the armed might of empires, had finally succumbed to the
toll of ages. Others that they had turned inward, seeking less arduous means to
forestall their damnation. But since the Sranc had multiplied across the
northern wilds, no expedition could be sent to Golgotterath to settle the
matter. The Mandate alone knew of the Nameless War. They alone stood guard, but
beneath a pall of ignorance.

The Thousand Temples elected a
new, enigmatic Shriah, a man called Maithanet, who demanded the Inrithi
recapture the holy city of the Latter Prophet, Shimeh, from the Fanim. Word of
his call spread across the Three Seas and beyond, and faithful from all the
great Inrithi nations—Galeoth, Thunyerus, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, High Ainon and
their tributaries—travelled to the city of Momemn, the capital of the
Nansurium, to swear their swords and their lives to Inri Sejenus. To become Men
of the Tusk.

And so was born the First Holy
War. Internal feuds plagued the campaign from the very beginning, for there was
no shortage of those who would bend the holy war to their selfish ends. Not
until the Second Seige of Caraskand and the Circumfixion of one of their own
would this fractiousness be overcome. Not until the Men of the Tusk found a
living
prophet to follow—a man who could see into the hearts of Men. A man like a
god.

Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

Far to the north, in the very
penumbra of Golgotterath, a group of ascetics called the Dûnyain had concealed
themselves in Ishuäl, the secret redoubt of the Kûniüric High-Kings. For two
thousand year they had pursued their sacred study, breeding for reflex and
intellect, training in the ways of limb, thought, and face—all for the sake of
reason, the Logos. In the effort to transform themselves into the perfect
expression of the Logos, the Dûnyain had dedicated their entire existence to
mastering the irrationalities of history, custom, and passion—all those things
that determine human thought. In this way, they believed, they would eventually
grasp what they called the Absolute, and so become true self-moving souls.

But their glorious isolation had
been interrupted. After thirty years of exile, one of their number, Anasûrimbor
Moënghus, reappeared in their dreams, demanding they send to him his son,
Kellhus. Knowing only that Moënghus dwelt in a distant city called Shimeh, the
Dûnyain dispatched Kellhus on an arduous journey through lands long abandoned
by Men—sent him to kill his father.

But Moënghus knew the world in
ways his cloistered brethren could not. He knew well the revelations that
awaited his son, for they had been his revelations thirty years previous. He
knew that Kellhus would discover sorcery, whose existence the forefathers of
the Dûnyain had suppressed. He knew that given his abilities, Men would be
little more than children to him, that Kellhus would see their thoughts in the
nuances of their expression, and that with mere words he would be able to exact
any devotion, any sacrifice. He knew, moreover, that Kellhus would encounter
the Consult, who hid behind faces that only Dûnyain eyes could see—that he
would come to see what Men with their blinkered souls could not: the Nameless
War.

For centuries the Consult had
evaded their old foe, the School of Mandate, by creating doppelgangers, spies
who could take on any face, any voice, without resorting to sorcery and its
telltale Mark. By capturing and torturing these abominations, Moënghus learned
that the Consult had not abandoned their ancient plot to shut the world against
Heaven, that within a score of years they would be able to resurrect the No-God
and bring about a second Apocalypse. For years he walked the innumerable paths
of the Probability Trance, plotting future after future, searching for the
thread of act and consequence that would save the world. For years he crafted
his Thousandfold Thought.

Moënghus knew, and so prepared
the way for Kellhus. He sent out his world-born son, Maithanet, to seize the
Thousand Temples from within, so that he might craft the First Holy War, the
weapon Kellhus would need to seize absolute power and so unite the Three Seas
against the doom that was their future. What he did not know, could not know,
was that Kellhus would see
further
than him, that he would think beyond
his Thousandfold Thought...

And go mad.

Little more than an impoverished
wayfarer when he first joined the Holy War, Kellhus used his bearing,
intellect, and insight to convince ever more Men of the Tusk that he was the
Warrior-Prophet, come to save mankind from the Second Apocalypse. He understood
that Men, who embrace baseless beliefs the way drunkards imbibe wine, would
render anything to him, so long as they believed he could save their souls. He also
befriended the Schoolman the Mandate had dispatched to watch the Holy War,
Drusas Achamian, knowing that the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North,
would provide him with inestimable power. And he seduced Achamian's lover,
Esmenet, knowing that her intellect made her the ideal vessel for his seed—for
sons strong enough to bear the onerous burden of Dûnyain blood.

By the time the battle-hardened
remnants of the campaign at last invested Holy Shimeh, he possessed the host
body and soul. The Men of the Tusk had become his Zaudunyani, his Tribe of
Truth. While the Holy War assailed the city's walls, he confronted his father,
Moënghus, mortally wounding him, explaining that only with his death could the
Thousandfold Thought be realized. Days later Anasûrimbor Kellhus was acclaimed
Aspect-Emperor, the first in a millennium, by none other than the Shriah of the
Thousand Temples, his half-brother, Maithanet. Even the School of Mandate, who
saw his coming as the fulfillment of their most hallowed prophecies, knelt and
kissed his knee.

But he had made one mistake. He
had allowed Cnaiür urs Skiötha, a Scylvendi chieftain who had accompanied him
on his trek to the Three Seas, to learn too much of his true nature. Before his
death, the barbarian revealed these truths to Drusas Achamian, who had
harboured heartbreaking suspicions of his own.

Before the eyes of the entire
Holy War, Achamian repudiated Kellhus, whom he had worshipped; Esmenet, whom he
had loved; and the Mandate masters he had served. Then he fled into the
wilderness, becoming the world's only sorcerer without a school. A Wizard.

Now, after twenty years of
conversion and bloodshed, Anasûrimbor Kellhus plots the conclusion of his
father's Thousandfold Thought. His New Empire spans the entirety of the Three
Seas, from the legendary fortress of Auvangshei on the frontiers of Zeüm to the
shrouded headwaters of the River Sayut, from the sweltering coasts of Kutnarmu
to the wild rim of the Osthwai Mountains—all the lands that had once been Fanim
or Inrithi. It was easily the equal of the old Ceneian Empire in terms of
geographical extent, and likely far greater when it came to population. A
hundred great cities, and almost as many languages. A dozen proud nations.
Thousand of years of mangled history.