The Judging Eye (8 page)

So what had it been? Five, maybe
six years since the last visitor had climbed to the foot of their tower?

It had to be. That long at
least. There had been those two starving Scalpoi who had come shortly after
Geraus had taken Tisthanna for his wife, but after? Certainly not since the
last of the children had been born.

No matter, the rule had been
simple over the years: Visitors meant grief, the Gods and their laws of
hospitality be damned.

Holding hands with one of the
girls, the nameless woman came to a friendly stop before Tisthanna, bowed her
head in greeting—precisely how far Achamian couldn't tell because of an
obscuring tree limb, though it seemed the inclination proper to caste-menials.
He could see her boots through a brace of budding twigs, the toe of her left
absently scuffing the winter-flat leaves; they were every bit as fine as her
ermine-trimmed cloak.

Perhaps she was only equipped
like a caste-noble.

Craning his head, he leaned out
perilously far, to the point of breaking out in a cold sweat, but to no effect.
He heard Tisthanna's whinnying laugh, and it relieved him—somewhat. Tisthanna
was nothing if not sensible.

Then the two women were walking
side by side into the clearing that encircled the tower's foundation, talking
loudly enough to be overheard, but in that close, feminine tone that seemed to
baffle masculine ears. Nodding at something, Tisthanna, her blonde hair stacked
upon her apple-round face, looked up and gestured to him in the window.
Achamian, who leaned stooped out like yard and tackle, tried to pull himself
into a more dignified posture. His left foot slipped. The sill-stone beneath
his left palm cracked free the rotten mortar—

He nearly followed it clacking
down.

Tisthanna let loose an
involuntary
"Ooop!"
then chortled as Achamian, his long white
beard dragging along the stones, carefully palmed his way back to safety.

"Mast-Master Akka!"
the children called out in a broken chorus.

The stranger looked up, her
delicate face bemused and open and curious...

And something in Achamian
suffered a greater fall.

***

There is a progression to all
things. Madness, miracles, even dreams broken into their most feverish extremes
follow some thread of association. The unexpected, the astonishing, are always
the effect of ignorance, no matter how absolute they may seem. In this world,
everything has its reasons.

"So," she said, her
tone balanced between many things, hope and sarcasm among them, "the Great
Wizard."

There was a strangeness to her,
something like the stare of children with ill-mannered smiles.

"What are you doing
here?" Achamian snapped.

He had sent Tisthanna and the
children away and now stood with the woman in the sunlight to the lee of the
tower, on the broad white stone the children called the Turtle Shell. For years
they had been drawing on it with the tips of burnt sticks: grotesque faces,
oddly affecting pictures of trees and animals, and, lately, the letters
Achamian had taught them to write. There was an order to the drawings, with the
steadier lines of symbol and verisimilitude struck across the pale remnants of
fancy, like the record of the soul's long, self-erasing climb.

She had instinctively sought out
the highest point—something that inexplicably irritated him. She was short,
obviously lithe beneath her leather and woollens. Her face was dark, beautiful,
with the colour and contours of an acorn. Save for the green irises and a
slight elongation of the jaw, she was exactly as he remembered her...

Except that he had never seen
her in his life.

Was
she
the reason why
Esmenet had betrayed him? Was she why his wife—his wife!—had chosen Kellhus
over a sorcerer, a broken-hearted fool, all those years ago?

Not because of the child she
carried, but because of the child she had lost?

The questions were as inevitable
as the pain, the questions that had pursued him beyond civilization's perfumed
rim. He could have continued asking them, he could have yielded to madness and
made them his life's refrain. Instead he had packed a new life about them, like
clay around a wax figurine, then he had burned them out, growing ever more
decrepit, ever more
old
, about their absence—more mould than man. He had
lived like some mad trapper, accumulating skins that were furred in ink instead
of hair, the lines of his every snare anchored to this silent hollow within
him, to these questions he dared not ask.

And now here she stood...
Mimara.

The answer?

"I wondered if you would
recognize me," she said. "I
prayed
you would, in fact."

The morning breeze sifted
through the dark edges of her hair. After so much time spent in the company of
Norsirai women, Achamian found himself struck by memories of his mother and
sisters: the warmth of their olive cheeks, the tangle of their luxurious black
hair.

He rubbed his eyes, dragged
fingers through his unkempt beard. Shaking his head, he said, "You look
like your mother... Very much."

"So I'm told," she
said coolly.

He held out a hand as though to
interrupt her, then lowered it just as quickly, suddenly conscious of its
knob-knuckled age. "But you never answered me. What are you doing
here?"

"Searching for you."

"That much is obvious. The
question is
why
."

This time the anger shone
through, enough to make her blink. Achamian had never stopped expecting the
assassins, whether sent by the Consult or the Aspect-Emperor. But even still,
the world beyond the horizon's rim had grown less and less substantial over the
years. More abstract. Trying to forget, trying not to hear when your deepest
ears were continually pricked was almost as difficult as trying to hate away
love. At first nothing, not even holding his head and screaming could shut out
the murderous bacchanal. But somehow, eventually, the roar had faded into a
rumble, and the rumble had trailed into a murmur, and the Three Seas had taken
on the character of a father's legendary exploits: near enough to be believed,
distant enough to be dismissed.

He had found peace—real
peace—waging his strange nocturnal war. Now this woman threatened to overthrow
it all.

He fairly shouted when she
failed to answer.
"Why?"

She flinched, looked down to the
childish scribble at her feet: a gaping mouth scrawled in black across mineral
white, with eyes, nose, and ears spaced across its lipless perimeter.

"B-because I
wanted..." Something caught her throat. Her eyes shot up, as though
requiring an antagonist to remain focused. "Because I wanted to know
if..." Her tongue traced the seam of her lips.

"If you were my
father."

His laughter felt cruel, but if was
such, she showed no sign of injury—no outward sign.

"Are you sure?" she
asked, blank in voice and expression.

"I met your mother sometime
after..."

In a blink Achamian had seen it
all, written in a language not so different from the charcoal scrawlings
beneath their feet. It was inevitable that Esmenet would do this, that she
would use all her power as Empress to recover the child she had forbidden him
to mention all those years ago... To find the girl whose name she would never
speak.

"You mean after she sold
me," the girl said.

"There was a famine,"
he heard himself reply. "She did what she did to save your life, and
forever wrecked herself as a result."

He knew these were the wrong
words before he finished speaking. Her eyes suddenly became old with
exhaustion, with the paralysis that comes from hearing the same hollow
justifications over and over again.

The fact that she refused to
reply to them said it all.

Esmenet had recovered her some
time ago—that much was obvious. Her manner and inflection were too studied, too
graceful, not to have been honed over years in the court. But it was just as
obvious that Esmenet had found her too late. The damaged look. The rim of
desperation.

Hope was ever the great foe of
slavers. They beat it from your lips, then they pursued it past your skin.
Mimara, Achamian knew, had been hunted to the ground—many, many times.

"But why do I remember
you?"

"Look—"

"I remember you buying me
apples—"

"Child. It wasn't—"

"The street was busy, loud.
You were laughing because I kept smelling mine instead of biting. You said that
little girls shouldn't eat through their nose, that it wasn't—"

"It wasn't me!" he
exclaimed. "Look. The daughters of whores..."

She flinched once again, like a
child startled by a snapping dog. How old would she be? Thirty summers? More?
Nonetheless, she looked like the little girl she said she remembered, joking
about apples on a crowded street.

"The daughters of
whores..." she repeated.

Achamian gazed at her, filled to
his fingertips, suffused by an anxious prickle.

"Have no fathers."

He had tried to say this as
gently as he could, but in his ears his voice had grown too harsh with age. The
sun limned her in gold, and for a moment she seemed a native of the morning.
She lowered her face, studied the lines scraped about them, etched in burnt
black. "You said that I was clever."

He ran a slow hand across his
face, exhaled, suddenly feeling ancient with guilt and frustration. Why must
everything be too big to wrestle, too muddy to grasp?

"I feel sorry for you,
child—I truly do. I have some notion of what you must have endured..." A
deep breath, warm against the bright cool. "Go home, Mimara. Go back to
your mother. We have no connection."

He turned back toward the tower.
The sun instantly warmed his shoulders.

"But we do," her voice
chimed from behind him—so like her mother's that chills skittered across his
skin.

He paused, lowered his head to
curse his slippered feet. Without turning, he said, "It's not
me
you
remember. What you believe is your affair."

"But that's not what I
mean."

Something in her tone, the windy
suggestion of a snicker or a laugh, forced him to look back. Now the sun drew a
line down her centre, violated only by the creases of her clothing, whose
contours smuggled light and dark this way and that. The wilderness rose behind
her, far more pale but likewise divided.

"I can distinguish between
the created and uncreated," she said with something between embarrassment
and pride. "I am one of the Few."

Achamian whirled, scowling both
at her and the brightness.

"What? You're a
witch
?"

A deliberate nod, made narrow by
a smile.

"I didn't come here to find
my father," she said, as though everything until now had been nothing but
cruel theatre. "Well... I thought you might be my father, but I really
didn't... care... that much, I think." Her eyes widened, as though turning
from the inner to the outer on some invisible swivel.

"I came to find my
teacher
.
I came to learn the Gnosis."

There it was, her reason.

There is a progression to all
things. Lives, encounters, histories, each trailing their own nameless residue,
each burrowing into a black, black future, groping for the facts that conjure purpose
out of the cruelties of mere coincidence.

And Achamian had had his fill of
it.

***

She sees his face slacken,
despite the matted wire of his beard. She sees his complexion blanch, despite
the sun's morning glare. And she knows that what her mother once told her is in
fact true: Drusas Achamian possesses the soul of a teacher.

So the old whore didn't lie.

Almost three months have passed
since her flight from the Andiamine Heights. Three months of searching. Three
months of hard winter travel. Three months of fending against Men. She
travelled inland as much as possible, knowing that the Judges would be watching
the ports, that their agents would be ranging the coastal roads, hungry to
please her mother, their Holy Empress. It seems a miracle whenever she recalls
it. That time in the high Cepalor when the wolves paced her step for weary
step, little more than feral ghosts through the soundless snowfall. The mad
ferryman at the Wutmouth crossing. And the brigands, who tracked her only to
turn away when they saw the caste-noble cut of her clothes. There was fear in
the land, fear everywhere she turned, and it suited her and her needs well.

She spent innumerable watches
lost in revery during this time, her soul's eye conjuring visions of the man
she secretly named her father. When she arrived, it seemed that everything was
the way she imagined it. Exactly. A lonely hillside spilling skyward, trees
scarred with sorcery's dread murmur. An even lonelier stone tower, a makeshift
roof raised across its collapsed floors, grasses growing from rotten-mortar
seams. Stacked-stone outbuildings, with their heaped wood, drying fish, and
stretched pelts. Slaves who smiled and talked like caste-menials. Even children
skipping beneath great-boughed maples.