The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

  Nannaferi shook her head. “We are a different Cult.”

  This was no vain conceit. With the possible exception of Gilgaöl, none of the Hundred Gods commanded the mass sympathy enjoyed by Yatwer. Where other Cults were not so different than their temples, surface structures that could be pulled down, the Yatwerians were like these very halls, the Womb-of-the-Dead, something that could not be pulled down because it was the earth. And just as the Catacombs had tunnels, abandoned Old Dynasty sewers, reaching as far out as the ruins of the Sareotic Library, so did they possess far-reaching means, innumerable points of entry, hidden and strategic.

  Wherever there were caste-menials or slaves.

  “But Mother-Supreme,” Phoracia said. “We speak of the Aspect-Emperor .”

  The name alone was the argument.

  Nannaferi nodded. “The Demon is not so strong as you might think, Phori. He and his most ardent, most fanatical followers march in the Great Ordeal, half a world away. Meanwhile, all the old grievances smoulder across the Three Seas, waiting for the wind that will fan them to flame.” She paused to touch each of her sisters with the iron of her gaze. “The Orthodox are everywhere, Sisters, not just this room.”

  “Even the heathens grow more bold,” Maharta said in support. “Fanayal continues to elude them in the south. Scarcely a week passes without riots in Nenciph—”

  “But still,” Phoracia persisted, “you haven’t seen him as I have. You have no inkling of his power. None of you do! No one kno—” The old priestess caught herself with a kind of seated lurch. Phoracia was the only one of their number older than Nannaferi, at that point where the infirmities of the body could not but leach into the soul. More and more she was forgetting her place, overspeaking. The intermittent impertinence of the addled and exhausted.

  “Forgive me,” she murmured. “Holy Mother. I-I did not mean to imply …”

  “But you are correct,” Nannaferi said mildly. “We indeed have no inkling of his power. This is why I summoned you here, where the souls of our sisters might shroud us from his far-scyring eyes. We have no inkling, but then we are not alone. Not as he is alone.”

  She let these words hang in the sulphur-stained air.

  “The Goddess!” sturdy old Sharhild hissed. A bead of blood dropped from her scalp to her brow, tapped onto the pitted stone of the table. “We all know that She has touched you, Mother. But She has come to you as well, hasn’t she?” The dread in her accented voice outlasted the wonder, seemed to hone the sense of mountainous weight emanating from the ceiling.

  “Yes.”

  Once again the Charnal Hall erupted in competing voices. Was it possible? Blessed event! How? When? Blessed, blessed event! What did she say?

  “But what of the Demon?” Phoracia called above the others. The sisters fell silent, deferring as much to their embarrassment as to her rank. “The Aspect-Emperor,” the prunish woman pressed. “What does she say of him?”

  And there it was, the fact of their blasphemy, exposed in the honesty of an old woman’s muddled soul. Their fear of the Aspect-Emperor had come to eclipse all other terrors, even those reserved for the Goddess.

  One could only worship at angles without fear.

  “The Gods …” Nannaferi began, struggling to render what was impossible in words. “They are not as we are. They do not happen … all at once …”

  Her eyes narrowed in fatuous concentration, Aethiola said, “Vethenestra claims—”

  “Vethenestra knows nothing,” Nannaferi snapped. “The Goddess has no truck with fools or fakers.”

  The Struck Table fell very still. All eyes followed the wandering crack that led to the Chalfantic Oracle, Vethenestra, who sat in the tight pose of someone at war with their own trembling. For the Mother-Supreme to refer to any of them by name was disaster enough …

  The woman paled. “H-Holy Mother … If I-I had cause to dis-displease you …”

  Nannaferi regarded her as if she were a broken urn. “It is the Goddess who is displeased,” she said. “I simply find you ridiculous.”

  “But what have I—?”

  “You are no longer the Oracle of Chalfantas,” she said, her voice parched with regret and resignation. “Which means you have no place at this table. Leave, Vethenestra. Your dead sisters await.”

  An image of her own sister came to Nannaferi, her childhood twin, the one who did not survive the pox. In a heartbeat it all seemed to pass through her, the whooping laughter, the giggling into shoulders, the teary-eyed shushing. And it ached, somehow, to know that her soul had once sounded such notes of joy. It reminded her of what had been given …

  And those few things that remained.

  “Awa-await?” Vethenestra stammered.

  “Leave,” Nannaferi repeated. There was something about the way she held her hand, an unnerving gestural inflection that implied destination rather than direction.

  Vethenestra stood, her hands clutching knots of fabric against her thighs. Her first steps were backward, as if expecting to be called back, or to wake, for she looked at them with a stung and stupefied glee, a face that had forgotten what was real. She turned to the black maw of the entrance. Each of them felt it, an ethereal squeezing, a wringing of empty air. They blinked in disbelief, gazed in horror at the issue. Ribs of menstrual crimson wound like smoke through the dark. Glistening curlicues, twining into nothingness.

  Oblivious, Vethenestra crossed the threshold. But she didn’t so much step into the shadows as step out, as though she were no more than her image, twisting away in directions indescribable to the eye, like a pool soaked out of existence. One heartbeat she was, and the next she was not.

  Something like speech seemed to rattle in the corners beyond their hearing—or perhaps it was a shriek.

  Silence. The very air seemed animate. The excavated hollows that surrounded them, hall after honeycombed hall, hummed with emptiness, the deadness of space. Watching her sisters, Nannaferi could see it slacken the last of their eyes, the comprehending, the standing underneath what they had lived the entirety of their shallow lives. The Goddess, not the name they used to sugar their lips, not the vague presence that tickled their vanity or itched the underbelly of their sins, but the Goddess, the Blood of Fertility, the monstrous, ageless Mother of Birth.

  Here, lending her fury to the blood dark.

  Without warning, Maharta fell to her knees, pressed tear-streaked cheeks to the soiled floor. Then they were all kneeling, all hissing or murmuring prayers.

  And Nannaferi spoke to the ceiling, crooked hands held out. “Your daughters are clean, Mother …

  “Your daughters are clean.”

  They were abject now, staring at her with mewling eyes, adoring and horrified eyes, for they saw now that their Goddess was real, and that Psatma Nannaferi was her chosen daughter. Maharta hugged her about the thighs, bent to kiss her knees. The others crowded near, trembling with wonder and zeal, and the Mother-Supreme pressed closed her unpainted lids, savoured the rain of their gentle touches, felt corporeal and incorporeal, like someone invisible finally seen.

  “Tell them,” she said to her sisters, her voice hoarse with the passion to dominate. “In whispers, let your congregations know. Tell them the White-Luck turns against their glorious Aspect-Emperor.”

  They had to take such gifts that were given. Even those beyond their comprehension …

  “Tell them the Mother sends her Son.”

  Or that would see them dead.

  Momemn …

  Kelmomas liked to pretend that the Sacral Enclosure, the octagonal garden situated in the heart of the Imperial Apartments, was nothing less than the roof of the world. It was easy enough, given the way the surrounding structures obscured the expanse of Momemn to the west or the great plate of the Meneanor to the east. From almost any position along the colonnades or verandas overlooking the Enclosure, all you could see was the long blue tumble of the sky. It lent a sense of altitude and isolation.

  He stared at the greening syca
mores, their crowns nodding in a chill wind that could scarce reach him where he sat on the balcony. The grand old trees fascinated him. The wending lines of trunks parsed into great hanging limbs. The leaves twittering like minnows in the sun. The arrhythmic back and forth against iron-bellied clouds. There was a power to them, a power and a stillness, that seemed to dwarf the staid background of marble columns and walls and shadowy interior spaces stacked three storeys high.

  He would very much like to be a tree, Kelmomas decided.

  The secret voice murmured, as though proposing lame solutions to an all-conquering boredom. But Kelmomas ignored it, concentrated instead on the sound of his mother’s fluting dialogue. By lying on his belly and pressing his face against the cold polish of the balustrades, he could almost see her sitting at the edge of the East Pool, the only place where the Enclosure opened onto the expanse of the Sea.

  “So what should I do?” she was saying. “Move against the whole Cult?”

  “I fear Yatwer is too popular,” his uncle, the Holy Shriah replied. “Too beloved.”

  “The Yatwerians, yes-yes,” his sister, Theliopa, said in her spittle-laden, words-askew way. “Father’s census figures indicate that some six out of ten caste-menials regularly attend some kind of Yatwerian rite. Six-out-of-ten. Far and away the most popular of the Hundred. Far-far. Far-far.”

  The pause in Mother’s reply said it all. It wasn’t so much that she reviled her own daughter—Mother could never hate her own—only that she could find no reflection of herself, nothing obviously human. There was no warmth whatsoever in Theliopa, only facts piled upon facts and an intense aversion to all the intricacies that seal the intervals between people. The sixteen-year-old could scarce look at another’s face, so deep was her horror of chancing upon a gaze.

  “Thank you, Thel.”

  His older sister was like a dead limb, Kelmomas decided, an extension into insensate space. Mother leaned on her intellect only because Father had commanded it.

  “I remember what it was like,” Mother continued. “I shudder to think how many coppers I tossed to beggars, thinking they might have been disguised priestesses. The Goddess of the Gift …” A laugh, at once pained and rueful. “You have no idea, Maitha, what a salve to the heart Yatwer can be …”

  Piqued by the undertones of anxiousness and melancholy in her voice, Kelmomas craned his head, pressed against the marble posts until his cheeks ached. He saw her, reclining in her favourite divan, little more than a teary-eyed silhouette against the glassy expanse of the pool. She seemed so small, so blow-away frail, that he found it difficult to breathe …

  She needs us, the voice said.

  Just then his nursemaid, Porsi, arrived with his twin brother, Samarmas. Popping to his feet with little-boy effortlessness, Kelmomas skipped from the veranda into the redolent gloom of the playroom. Samarmas’s grin ate up his angelic face the way it always did, turning him into a leering childhood version of an Ajoklian idol. Porsi, her acne scars like dappled wine stains, her fingers resting possessively on his brother’s golden maul, immediately began speaking in her now-the-twins-aretogether voice. “Would you like to play parasta? Would you like to do that? Or, something different? Oh, yes, how could I forget? Such strong boys—growing too old for parasta, aren’t we? Something warlike, then. Would that be better? I know! Kel, you could be sword while Sammi plays shield …”

  On and on she would go, while Kelmomas would smile or sulk or shrug and stare into her face and ponder all the small terrors that he saw there. Usually, he would play along, making games of the games she organized for the two of them. While playing parasta, he would modulate his tantrums over the course of successive days, gauging the variables that informed her response. He found that the very same words could make her laugh or grit her teeth in frustration, depending on his tone and expression. He discovered that if he abruptly walked up to her and placed his head on her lap, he could summon mist, even tears to her eyes. Sometimes, while Samarmas drooled and mumbled over some ivory toy, he would turn his cheek from her thigh and stare in a lazy, all-is-safe way into her face, smelling the folds of her crotch through her gown. She would always smile in nervous adoration, thinking—and he knew this because he somehow could see it—that a little god stared up from her lap. And he would say curious, childlike things that filled her heart with awe and wonder.

  “You are just like him,” she would reply every so often. And Kelmomas would exult, knowing that she meant Father.

  Even slaves can see it, the voice would say. It was true. He was able to hold so much more in the light of his soul’s eye than the people around him. Names. Nuances. The rate at which various birds beat their wings.

  So he knew, for instance, everything about the sickness the physician-priests called Moklot, or the Shudders. He knew how to simulate the symptoms, to the point where he could fool even old Hagitatas, his mother’s court physician. All he need do was think about becoming feverish, and he became feverish. The trembly-shake-shake, well, even his halfwit brother could do that. He knew that when he told their Porsi that his calves were cramping she would rush off to fetch his medicine, an obscure and noxious leaf from faraway Cingulat. And he knew that she would not find it in the infirmary, because how could she, when it was hidden beneath her own bed? So he knew she would begin searching …

  Leaving him alone with his twin brother, Samarmas.

  “But why, Maitha?” Mother was saying. “Are they mad? Can’t they see that we’re their salvation?”

  “But you know the answer to this, Esmi. The Cultists themselves are no more or no less foolish than other Men. They see only what they know, and they argue only to defend what they cherish. Think of the changes my brother has wrought …”

  Porsi would be gone for a long time. She would never think to look under her pallet because she had never placed it there. She would search and search, growing ever more bah-bah-teary-eyed, knowing that she would be called to account.

  Smiling, Kelmomas sat cross-legged and contemplated his brother, who had his head to the maroon carpets, staring up at a dragon from some miniature perspective. Though his hands dwarfed the dragon’s palm-worn head, he seemed diminutive, like a soapstone figurine playing with elaborately carved grains of sand. A toy Prince-Imperial poking toys that were smaller still.

  Only the lazy battle of boredom and awe in his expression made him seemed real.

  “So this business of the White-Luck?” his mother’s distant voice asked.

  “White-Luck-White-Luck,” Theliopa said. Kelmomas could almost see her rocking on her stool, her joints twitching, her hands climbing from her elbows to her shoulders then back again. “A folk belief with ancient Cultic origins—ancient-old-ancient. According to Pirmees, the White-Luck is an extreme form of providence, a Gift of the Gods against worldly tuh-tuh-tyranny.”

  “White-Luck-White-Luck,” Samarmas chimed in unison, then gurgled in his chin-to-windpipe way. Kelmomas glared him into silence, knowing that their uncle, at least, was entirely capable of hearing him.

  As was anyone who shared their father’s incendiary blood.

  “You think it’s nothing more than a self-serving fraud?” his mother asked his uncle.

  “The White-Luck? Perhaps.”

  “What do you mean, ‘perhaps’?”

  Samarmas had ambled to and from the toy trunk, bearing several more figures, some silver, others mahogany. “Mommy,” he murmured in a worlddoes-not-exist voice, extracting the figurine of a woman cast in aquiline silver. He held her to the hoary dragon so they could kiss. “Kisses!” he exclaimed, eyes lit with gurgling wonder.

  Kelmomas had been born staring into the deluge that was his twin’s face. For a time, he knew, his mother’s physicians had feared for him because it seemed he could do little more than gaze at his brother. All he remembered were the squalls of blowing hurt and wheezing gratification, and a hunger so elemental that it swallowed the space between them, soldered their faces into a single soul. The world was s
houldered to the periphery. The tutors and the physicians had droned from the edges, not so much ignored as overlooked by a two-bodied creature who stared endlessly into its own inscrutable eyes.

  Only in his third summer, when Hagitatas, with doddering yet implacable patience, made a litany of the difference between beast, man, and god, was Kelmomas able to overcome the tumult that was his brother. “Beasts move,” the old physician would rasp. “Men reflect. Gods make real.” Over and over. “Beasts move. Men reflect. Gods make real. Beasts move …” Perhaps it was simply the repetition. Perhaps it was the palsied tone, the way his breath undid the substance of his words, allowing them to soak into the between places, the gem-cutting lines. “Beasts move …” Over and over, until finally Kelmomas simply turned to him and said, “Men reflect.”

  A blink, and what was one had become two.

  He just … understood. One moment he was nothing, and another he was staring, not at himself, but at a beast. Samarmas, Kelmomas would later realize, was wholly what he would later see lurking in all faces: an animal, howling, panting, lapping …

  An animal that, because of his unschooled sensitivities and its sheer immediacy, had devoured him, made a lair of his skull.

  A blink, and what had absorbed suddenly repelled. Afterwards, Kelmomas could scarcely bear looking into the carnival of Samarmas’s face. Something about it wrenched him with disgust, not the grimaceand-look-away variety, but the kind that pinched stomach walls together and launched limbs in wild warding. It was as though his brother wore his bowels on the outside. For a time, Kelmomas wanted to cry out in warning whenever Mother showered Samarmas with coos and kisses. How could she not see it, the unsheathing of wet and shiny things? Only some instinct to secrecy had kept him silent, a will, brute and spontaneous, to show only what needed to be shown.