The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

  Fear, he told himself. Fear and lust and fury … Trust in these, old man. It seemed the only commandment a place such as Marrow could countenance.

  He trudged onward, more wary than ever. He smelled whisky, vomit, and shallow latrines. He heard songs and laughter and weeping, the ghostly notes of a lute plucked from the bowl of the night. He glimpsed smiles—the glint of gold from yellow-rotted teeth. He saw lantern-limned interiors, raucous, illuminated worlds, filled with hard words and mad, murderous looks. He saw the glimmer of naked steel. He watched a roaring Galeoth man hammer another, over and over, until the man was little more than a blood-soaked worm flexing and squirming in the muck. A drunk harlot, her flabby arms bruised and bare, accosted him. “Fancy a peach?” she drawled, groping between his thighs.

  He felt the flare of dwindled memory, the twitch of old, life-preserving habits, no less prudent for becoming vestigial. He gripped the pommel of his knife beneath his cloak.

  He passed the lightless Custom House with its threadbare Circumfix hanging slack in the windless gloom. Marrow was an outpost of the New Empire—it wouldn’t do to forget that. He passed a lazaret with its aura of astringent, feces, and infection. He passed a low-raftered opium den, as well as several booming taverns and two half-tented brothels, oozing moans and mercantile giggles into the general night. He even happened upon a wooden post-and-lintel temple to Yatwer, filled with chimes and chants—some evening ceremony, Achamian supposed. All the while the cataract whooshed and rumbled, the motionless blast of water against stone. Clear beads dripped from the rim of his cowl.

  He tried not to think of the girl. Mimara.

  By the time he found the inn Geraus had mentioned, the Cocked Leg, he was almost accustomed to the uproar. Marrow, he decided while leading his mule into the rear courtyard, was not so different from the great polyglot cities of his youth. More vicious, roughed in timber instead of monumental stone, and lacking the size that allowed indifference and mass anonymity to congeal into urban tolerance—there was no unspoken agreement to overlook one another’s perversions here. Anyone could be judged at any moment. But even still, it possessed the same sense of possibility, accidental and collective, humming across every public threshold, as though the congregation of strangers was all it took to generate alternatives …

  Freedom.

  A night in such a place could have a million endings, Achamian realized. That was its wonder and horror both.

  A night in Marrow.

  The room was small. The woollen bedding reeked of mould and must. The innkeeper had not liked the looks of him, that much was certain. Show the pauper to the pauper’s room—that was the ancient rule. Nevertheless, Achamian found himself smiling as he doffed his dripping cloak and squared his supplies and belongings. It seemed he had set out for Marrow a sleeping hermit and had arrived an awakening spy.

  This was good, he told himself as he followed the stairs and halls toward the thunder of the Cocked Leg’s common room. Most auspicious. Now all he required was some luck.

  He grinned in anticipation, did his best to ignore the bloody handprints decorating the wall.

  Achamian’s adventurous mood evaporated as soon as he pressed his way into the smoky, low-timbered room. The shock nearly struck him breathless, so long had it been since he had last observed other men with his arcane eyes. There was another sorcerer here—an old and accomplished one given the black and blasted depth of his Mark—sitting in the far corner. And there was someone carrying a Chorae as well. A cursed Tear of God, so-called because its merest touch destroyed sorcerers and their desecrations.

  Of course, he could see the Mark whenever he looked to his own hands or glimpsed his reflection in sitting water, but it was like his skin, something too near to be truly visible. Seeing its eye-twisting stain on another—especially after so many years immersed in the clarity of the Uncreated, the World as untouched by sorcerers and their blasphemous voices—made him feel ... young.

  Young with fear.

  Turning his back on the presence, Achamian made his way to the barkeep, whom he easily recognized from his slave’s description. According to Geraus, his name was Haubrezer, one of the three Tydonni brothers who owned the Cocked Leg. Achamian bowed his head, even though he had yet to see anyone observing jnan since arriving here. “My name is Akka,” he said.

  “Ya,” the tall, stork-skinny man replied. His voice wasn’t so much deep as it was dark. “You the old pick. This no land for the slow and crooked, ya know.”

  Achamian feigned an old man’s baffled good humour. It seemed absurd that the venerable Norsirai slur for Ketyai, “pick,” could still sting after so many years.

  “My slave, Geraus, said you could assist me.”

  Coming to Marrow had always been the plan—as had hiring a company of Scalpoi. Mimara had simply forced him to abbreviate his timetable, to begin his journey before knowing his destination. Her coming had rattled him in more ways than he cared to admit—the suspicions, the resemblance to her mother, the pointed questions, their sad coupling—but the consequences of her never coming would have been disastrous.

  At least now he knew why Fate had sent her to him—as a boot in the rump.

  “Yaa,” Haubrezer brayed. “Good man, Geraus.” A searching look, rendered severe by the angularity of his face. He struck Achamian as one of those men whose souls had adapted to the peculiarities of their body. Stooped and long-fingered, mantislike both in patience and predatoriness. He did not hunt, Achamian decided, so much as he waited.

  “Indeed.”

  Haubrezer stared with an almost bovine relentlessness—bored to tears, yet prepared to die chewing his cud. The man seemed to have compensated for his awkwardness by slowing everything down, including his intellect. Slowness had a way of laying out the grace that dwelt in all things, even the most ungainly. It was the reason why proud drunks took care to walk as though under water.

  At last, the large eyes blinked in conclusion. “Ya. The ones you look for ...” He lowered his veined forehead toward the back corner, on the far side of the smoking central hearth.

  Toward the sorcerer and the Chorae that Achamian had sensed upon entering the common room.

  But of course ...

  “Are you sure?”

  Haubrezer kept his head inclined, though it seemed that he stared at his eyebrows rather than the grim-talking shadows beyond the smoke.

  “Ho. No mean Scalpoi, those. They the Veteran’s Men. The Skin Eaters.”

  “The Skin Eaters?”

  A sour grin, as though the man had been starved of the facial musculature needed to pull his lips from his teeth. “Geraus was right. You hermit, to be sure. Ask anyone here around”—he gestured wide with a scapular hand—“they will tell you, ya, step aside for the Skin Eaters. Famed. The whole River know. They bring down more bales than rutta—anyone. Ho. Step aside for the Skin Eaters, or they strike you down. Hauza kup. Down but good.”

  Achamian leaned back to appraise what suddenly seemed more a hostile tribe than another alehouse trestle. Though all the other long-tables were packed, the three men Haubrezer referred to sat alone, neither rigid nor at their ease, yet with a posture that suggested an intense inward focus, a violent disregard for matters not their own. The image of them wavered in the sparked air above the hearth: the first—the bearer of the Chorae—with the squared-and-plaited beard of an Ainoni or a Conriyan; the second with long white hair, a goatee, and a weather-pruned face; and the broad-shouldered third—the sorcerer—cowled in black-beaten leather.

  Achamian glanced back up at Haubrezer. “Do I require an introduction?”

  “Not from the likes of me.”

  An acute sensitivity to his surroundings beset Achamian while crossing the common room, which for him amounted to a kind of bodily awareness of some imminent undertaking—some reckless leap. He winced at the odour of sweat festering in leather. The outer thunder of the Long-Braid Falls shivered through air and timber alike, so that the room seemed a motionless bu
bble in a torrent. And the guttural patois everyone spoke—a kind of mongrel marriage of Gallish and Sheyic—struck him with an ancient and impossible taste: the First Holy War, twenty long years gone by.

  He thought of Kellhus and found his resolution rekindled.

  The pulse of a fool ...

  Achamian had no illusions about the men he was about to meet. The New Empire had signalled the end of the once lucrative mercenary trade, but it did not signal the end of those willing to kill for compensation. He had spent the greater part of his life in the proximity of such men—in the company of those who would think him weak. He had long ago learned how to mime the proper postures, how to redress the defects of the heart with the advantages of intellect. He knew how to treat with such men—or so he thought.

  His first heartbeat in their presence told him otherwise.

  The cowled man, the sorcerer, turned to him, but only far enough to reveal a temple and jawline as white and as smooth as boiled bone. Obdurate black shrouded his eyes. The small, silver-haired man graced him with a nimble, shining look and a smile that seemed to welcome the derision to come. But the square-bearded one, the man Haubrezer had identified as the Captain, continued staring into his wine-bowl as before. Achamian understood instantly he was the kind of man who begrudged others everything.

  “Are you the Ainoni they call Kosoter?” he asked. “Ironsoul. The Captain of the Skin Eaters?”

  A moment of silence, far too thick to connote shock or surprise.

  The Captain took a deliberate drink, then fixed him with his narrow brown eyes. It was a look Achamian recognized from the massacres and privations of the First Holy War. A look that saw only dead things.

  “I know you,” was all he said in a voice with a hint of a papyrus rasp.

  “You will address the Captain as ‘Veteran,’” the silver-haired man exclaimed. He was diminutive but with wrists thick enough to promise an iron grip. And he was old, at least as old as Achamian, but it seemed the years had stripped only the fat of weakness from him, leaving spry fire in the leather that remained. He was a man who had been shrivelled strong. “After all,” he continued with a slit-eyed laugh, “it’s the Law.”

  Achamian ignored him.

  “You know me?” he said to the Captain, who had resumed his study of his inscrutable drink. “From the First Hol—”

  “Sir,” the small man interrupted. “Please. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Sarl—”

  “I need to contract your company,” Achamian continued, staring intently at the Captain. Definitely Ainoni. He looked archaic, like something risen from a burial mound.

  “Sir,” Sarl pressed, this time with a cut-throat gleam in his eye. “Please ...”

  Achamian turned to him, frowning but attentive.

  His grin hooked the ruts of his face into innumerable lines. “I have, shall we say, a certain facility for sums and figures, as well as the finer details of argument. My illustrious Captain, well, let us just say, he has little patience for the perversities of speech.”

  “So you make the decisions?”

  The man burst into a beet-faced cackle, revealing the arc of his gums. “No,” he gasped, as though astounded that anyone could ask a question so uproariously thick. “No-no-no! I do the singing. But I assure you, it is the Captain who inks the verse.” Sarl bowed to the Ainoni in embellished deference—who now watched Achamian with something poised between curiosity and malice. When Sarl turned back to Achamian, his lips were pursed into a see-I-told-you-so line.

  Achamian snorted dismissively. This was one thing he didn’t miss about the civilized world: the addiction to all things indirect.

  “I need to contract your Captain’s company.”

  “Such a strange request!” Sarl exclaimed, as though waiting to say as much all along. “And daring, very daring. There are no more wars, my friend, save the two that are holy. The one that our Aspect-Emperor wages against wicked Golgotterath, and the more tawdry one we wage against the Sranc. There are no more mercenaries, friend.”

  Achamian found himself glancing back and forth between the two men. The effect was unnerving, as though the division of attention amounted to a kind of partial blindness.

  For all he knew, this was the whole point of this ludicrous exercise.

  “It isn’t mercenaries I need, it’s scalpers. And it isn’t war that I intend, it’s a journey.”

  “Ahhh, very interesting,” Sarl drawled. His eyes collapsed into fluttering slits every time he smiled, as if blinking at some kind of comical grit. “A journey requiring scalpers is a journey into the wastes, no?”

  Achamian paused, disconcerted by the ease of the man’s penetration. This Sarl was every bit as nimble as he looked.

  “Yes.”

  “As I thought! Very, very interesting! So tell me, just where in the North do you need to go?”

  Achamian had feared this question, as inevitable as it was. Who was he fooling?

  “Far ...” He swallowed. “To the ruins of Sauglish.”

  Another spittle-flecked spasm of laughter, this one carving every vein, every web of wrinkles in succinct shades of purple and red. He even yanked his wrists together as though bound, shook up and down, fingers flicking. He looked to the cowled man as though seeking confirmation. “Sauglish!” he howled, rolling his face back. “Oh ho, my friend, my poor, poor lunatic friend!” He reclined back in his chair, sucking air. “May the Gods”—he shook his head in a kind of astonished dismissal—“keep your bowls warm and full and whatever.”

  Something in his look and tone said, Leave while you still can …

  Achamian’s fists balled of their own volition. It was all he could do to keep from burning the pissant to cinders. Arrogant monkey-of-a-man! Only the Captain’s Chorae and the indigo Mark of his cowled companion stayed his tongue.

  A hard moment of fading smiles.

  Sarl scratched the pad of his thumb with the nail of his index finger.

  Then the Captain said, “What lies in Sauglish?”

  The words fairly knocked the blood out of Sarl’s ruddy face. Perhaps there were consequences for misreading the Captain’s interest. Perhaps the man had simply wandered too far out on a drunken limb. For some reason, Achamian had the impression that Lord Kosoter’s voice always had this effect.

  “What do you know of it?” Achamian asked. He immediately realized this was a grievous mistake, answering a question with a question when discoursing with the Captain. Nevertheless, he felt the need to match, flint for flint, the man’s unearthly look, to communicate his own ability to see the atrocity at the heart of all things.

  He stared into Lord Kosoter’s shining eyes. He could hear Sarl breath, a shallow-chested sound, like a dog dreaming. He found himself wondering if the cowled man had moved. A ringing sidled into the room, highpitched and hazy, and with it came a premonition of lethality, a wheedling apprehension. The stakes of this contest, part of him realized, involved far more than dominance or respect or even identity, but the very possibility of being ...

  I am the end of you, the eyes in his eyes whispered. And they seemed a thousand years old.

  Achamian could feel himself wilt. Wild-limbed imaginings flickered through his soul, hot with screams and blood. He could feel tremors knock through his knees.

  “Go easy now, friend,” Sarl murmured in what seemed genuine conciliation. “The Captain here can piss halfway cross the world, if need be. Just answer his question.”

  Achamian swallowed, blinked. “The Coffers,” some traitor with his voice said. Glancing at Sarl seemed like breaking the surface of a drowning.

  “Coffers,” Sarl repeated strangely. “Perhaps”—a quick glance at Lord Kosoter—“you should tell the Captain what you meant by the Coffers.”

  Achamian could see the man’s implacable eyes, like Scrutiny incarnate, leaning against his periphery. He found himself glancing at the cowled figure, then looking away, down to the accursed floor.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like th
is!

  “No,” he said, breathing deep, then glaring at all three in turn. The way to deal with the Captain, he realized, was to make him one of a number. “I shall try my luck elsewhere.” He made to leave, feeling faint and sweaty and more than a little nauseous.

  “You’re the Wizard,” Lord Kosoter called out in a growl.

  The word hooked Achamian like a wire garrote.

  “I remember you,” the grave face continued as he turned. “I remember you from the Holy War.” He slid his wine-bowl to one side, leaned forward over the table. “You taught him. The Aspect-Emperor.”

  “What does it matter?” Achamian said, not caring whether he sounded bitter.

  The almost black-on-black eyes blinked for what seemed the first time.

  “It matters because it means you were a Mandate Schoolman ... once.” His Sheyic was impeccable, bent more to some inner dialect of anger than to the lilting cadences of his native Ainoni tongue. “Which means you really do know where to find the Coffers.”

  “So much the worse for you,” Achamian said. But all he could think was how ... How could a scalper, any scalper, know about the Sohonc Coffers? He found himself glancing at the leather-cowled man to the Captain’s left … The sorcerer. What was his School?

  “I think not,” Lord Kosoter said, leaning back. “There’s scalpers aplenty in Marrow, sure. Any number of companies.” He hooked his wine-bowl with two calloused fingers. “But none who know who you are …” His grin was curious, frightening. “Which means none who will even entertain your request.”