The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Yus ghom,” he began, “hurmbana thut omom …”

  Obotegwa’s voice rasped into the thread of his with practised ease, so much so it almost seemed Sorweel could understand the Prince directly.

  “Appreciate these luxuries. The ancestors know how hard I had to fight for them! Our glorious host does not believe the rewards of rank have any place on the march.”

  Stammering his thanks, self-conscious of his pale white feet, Sorweel sat erect on the settee’s edge.

  The Successor-Prince frowned at his rigid posture, made a waving gesture with the back of his hand. “Uwal mebal! Uwal!” he urged, throwing himself back and wriggling into the soft cushions.

  “Lean back,” Obotegwa translated.

  “Aaaaaaaah!” the Prince gasped in mock joy.

  Smiling, Sorweel did as he was told, felt the cool fabric yield about his shoulders and neck.

  “Aaaaaaaah!” Zsoronga repeated, his bright eyes laughing.

  “Aaaaaaaah!” Sorweel gasped in turn, surprised at the relief that soaked through his body simply for saying it.

  “Aaaaaaaah!”

  “Aaaaaaaah!”

  Wriggling, they both roared with laughter.

  After serving them wine, Obotegwa hovered with the thoughtless discretion of a grandparent, effortlessly interpreting back and forth. Zsoronga wore a silk banyan, simple in cut yet lavish with black stencilled motifs: silhouetted birds whose plumage became branches for identical birds. He also wore a gold-fretted wig that made him positively leonine with silk-black hair—as Sorweel would discover, the kinds of wigs Zeümi caste-nobles wore in leisure were strictly governed by rules of rank and accomplishment, to the point of almost forming a language.

  Even though their shared laughter had set Sorweel at his ease, they knew so little about each other—and Sorweel knew so little, period—that they quickly ran short of idle pleasantries. The Successor-Prince spoke briefly about their horses, which he thought brutish to the extreme. He tried to gossip about some of their fellow Scions, but gossip required common acquaintances, and whenever he mentioned anyone, Sorweel could only shrug. So they came quickly to the one thing they did share in common: the reason two young men from such disparate worlds could share bowls of wine in the first place—the Aspect-Emperor.

  “I was there,” Zsoronga said, “when his first emissaries arrived in my father’s court.” He had the habit of making faces while he spoke, as though telling stories to a child. “I was only eight or nine at the time, I think, and I’m sure my eyes were as wide as oysters!” His eyes bulged as he said this, as if to demonstrate. “For years rumours had circulated … Rumours of him.”

  “It was much the same in our court,” Sorweel replied.

  “So you know, then.” Pulling his knees up, the Prince nestled back into his cushions, balanced his wine between long fingers. “I grew up hearing tales of the First Holy War. For the longest time I thought the Unification Wars simply were the Three Seas! Then Invishi fell to the Zaudunyani and with it all Nilnamesh. That caused everyone to cluck and scratch like chickens, believe you me. Nilnamesh had always been our window on the Three Seas. And then, when news arrived that Auvangshei was being rebuilt—”

  “Auvangshei?” Sorweel blurted, resisting the urge to look at the old Obligate, whom he had actually interrupted. He had witnessed enough interpreted exchanges in his father’s court to know that the success of informal conversations of this kind required more than a little pretence on the interlocutors’ part. A certain artificiality was inescapable.

  “Sau. Rwassa muf molo kumbereti …”

  “Yes. A fortress, a legendary fortress that guarded the frontier between Old Zeüm and the Ceniean Empire, centuries and centuries ago …”

  All Sorweel knew about the Ceniean Empire was that it ruled all the Three Seas for a thousand years and that the Anasûrimbor’s New Empire had been raised about its skeleton. As little as that was, it seemed knowledge enough. Just as his earlier laughter had been his first in weeks, he now felt the first true gleam of comprehension. The dimensions of what had upended his life had escaped him—he had floundered in his ignorance. The Great Ordeal. The New Empire. The Second Apocalypse. These were little more than empty signs to him, sounds that had somehow wrought the death of his father and the fall of his city. But here at last, in the talk of other places and other times, was a glimmer—as though understanding were naught but the piling on of empty names.

  “Aside from skirmishing with Sranc,” the Successor-Prince was saying, “Zeüm has had no external enemies since Near Antiquity … the days of the old Aspect-Emperors. In our land, we worship events more than gods. I know that must sound strange to you, but it’s true. We do not, like you sausages, forget our fathers. At least the Ketyai keep lists! But you Norsirai …”

  He shook his head and cast his eyes heavenward, a mock gesture meant to tell Sorweel that he simply teased. Expressions, it seemed, all spoke in the same language.

  “In Zeüm,” the Prince continued, “each of us has a book that is about us alone, a book that is never completed so long as our sons are strong, our samwassa, which details the deeds of our ancestors, and what they earned in the afterlife. Mighty events, such as battles, or even campaigns such as this, are what knot the strings of our descent together, what makes us one people. Since everything that is present hangs from these great decisions, we revere them more than you can know …”

  There was wonder here, Sorweel realized, and room for strength. Different lands. Different customs. Different skins. And yet it was all somehow the same.

  He was not alone. How could he be so foolish as to think he was alone?

  “But then I’m forgetting, aren’t I?” Zsoronga said. “They say your city has stood unconquered for almost three thousand years. The same is the case with Zeüm. The only real threats we have ever faced hearken back to the days of the Ceniean Aspect-Emperors and the armies they sent against us. The Three Axes we call them, Binyangwa, Amarah, and Hutamassa, the battles we regard as our most glorious moments, whose dead we implore to catch us when we at last fall from this life. So as you can imagine, that name, ‘Aspect-Emperor,’ is engraved in our souls. Engraved!”

  The same, of course, had been true in Sakarpus. It seemed beyond belief that one man could incite such fear on opposite ends of the world, that he could pluck distant kings and princes like weeds, then replant them together …

  That one man could be so powerful. One man!

  And in a rush, Sorweel realized what it was he had to do—at last! He fairly shouted aloud, it struck with such sudden obviousness. He needed to understand the Aspect-Emperor. It wasn’t his father’s weakness or pride or foolishness that had seen the Lonely City fall …

  It was his ignorance.

  The Successor-Prince’s eyes had drifted inward with his retelling, his face brightening with each turn and digression as though at some minor yet critical discovery. “So, when news arrived that Auvangshei had been rebuilt … Well, you can imagine. Sometimes it seemed the Three Seas and the New Empire was all anyone could speak about. Some were eager, tired of living in the shadow of greater fathers, while others were afraid, thinking that doom comes to all things, so why not High Holy Zeüm? I had always counted my father among the former, among the strong. The Aspect-Emperor’s emissaries would change all that.”

  “What happened?” Sorweel asked, feeling an old timbre returning to his voice. Zsoronga was no different than him, he decided. Stronger perhaps, certainly more worldly, but every bit as baffled by the circumstances that had carried him here, to this conversation in this wild and desolate land.

  “There were three of them in the embassy, two Ketyai and one sausage like you. One of them looked terrified, and we assumed he had simply been overwhelmed by the dread splendour of our Court. They strode beneath my father, who glared down at them from his throne—he was very good at glaring, my father.

  “They said, ‘The Aspect-Emperor bears you greetings, Great Satakhan, and as
ks that you send three emissaries to the Andiamine Heights to respond in kind.’”

  Zsoronga had leaned forward in the course of reciting this, hooked his arms about his knees. “‘In kind?’ my father asked …”

  The Prince held the moment with his breath, the way a bard might. In his soul’s eye, Sorweel could see it, the feathered pomp and glory of the Great Satakhan’s court, the sun sweating between great pillars, the galleries rapt with black faces.

  “With that, the three men produced razors from their tongues and opened their own throats!” He made a tight, feline swiping motion with his left hand. “They killed themselves … right there before us! My father’s surgeons tried to save them, to staunch the blood, but there was nothing to be done. The men died right there”—he looked and gestured to a spot several feet away, as though watching their ghosts—“moaning some kind of crazed hymn, to their last breath, singing …”

  He hummed a strange singsong tune for several heartbeats, his eyes lost in memory, then he turned to the young King of Sakarpus with a kind of pained incredulity. “The Aspect-Emperor had sent us three suicides! That was his message to my father. ‘Look! Look what I can do! Now tell me, Can you do the same?’”

  “Could he?” Sorweel asked numbly.

  Zoronga pulled a long hand across his face. “Ke amabo hetweru go …”

  “I’m too hard on my father. I know I am. Only now can I appreciate the deranged bind that gesture put him in. No matter how my father responded, he would lose … Perhaps he could find three fanatics willing to return the message, but what kind of barbarity would that be? What unrest would that cause the kjineta? And what if they lost heart at the penultimate moment? Who would the people call to account for their shame? And if he refused to respond in kind, would that not be an admission of weakness? Tantamount to saying, ‘I cannot rule as you rule …’”

  Sorweel shrugged. “He could have marched to war.”

  “I think that’s what the devil wanted! I think that was his trap. The provocation of rebuilding Auvangshei, followed by this mad diplomatic overture. Think of what would have happened, what a disaster it would have been, had we taken the field against his Zaudunyani hosts. Look at your city. Your ancient fathers weathered Mog-Pharau, turned aside the No-God! And the Aspect-Emperor broke you in the space of a morning.”

  These words hung between them like lead pellets on sodden cloth. There was no accusation in them, no implication of fault or weakness, just a statement of what should have been an impossible fact. And Sorweel realized that his question—his discovery—was the same question everyone was asking, and had been asking for years. Everyone who was not a believer.

  Who was the Aspect-Emperor?

  “So what did your father do?”

  Zsoronga snorted in derision. “What he always does. Talk, talk, and bargain. My father believes in words, Horse-King. He lacks the courage your father showed.”

  Horse-King. This was the name they used for him, Sorweel realized. Zsoronga would not have spoken with such ease otherwise.

  “And so what happened?”

  “Deals were struck. Treaties were signed by flatulent old men. Whispers of weakness began circulating through the streets and halls of High Domyot. And here I am, a Successor-Prince, hostage to an outland devil, pretending that I ride to war, when all I really do is moan to sausages like you.”

  Sorweel nodded in understanding, smiled ruefully. “You would prefer the fate of my people?”

  The question seemed to catch the Successor-Prince by surprise. “Sakarpus? No … Though sometimes, when my ardour overmatches my wisdom, I do … envy … the dead among you.”

  For some reason, the hooks of this reference to his overthrown world caught Sorweel where all the others had skipped past. The raw heart, the thick eyes, the leaden thought—all the staples of his plundered existence—came rushing back and with such violence he could not speak.

  Prince Zsoronga watched him with an uncharacteristic absence of expression. “Ke nulam zo …”

  “I suspect you feel the same.”

  The young King of Sakarpus looked to the red disc of wine in his bowl, realized that he had yet to take a single sip. Not one sip—all his pain seemed condensed in this idiotic fact. Mere weeks ago, simply holding wine would be cause for celebration, another pathetic token of the manhood he had so desperately craved. How he had yearned for his first Elking! But now …

  It was madness, to move from a world so laughably small to one so tragically bloated … Madness.

  “More than you could know,” he said.

  Sorweel found many things in Zsoronga’s company, much more than he was willing to admit to himself, let alone anyone else. The friendship he could acknowledge, as this was a Gift prized by men and gods alike, particularly with someone as resolute and honouable as the Zeümi Prince. His relief was something he had to admit, though it shamed him. For some perverse reason, all men found heart in learning that others shared not only their purpose, but their grief as well.

  What he could not acknowledge was the relief he found in simply speaking. A true Horselord, a hero such as Niehirren Halfhand or Orsuleese the Faster, viewed speech with the high-handed distaste they reserved for bodily functions, as something men did only out of necessity. Sakarpus found its strength in its solitude, in its lack of intercourse with other babbling nations—it was not called the Lonely City for nothing—so its great men affected to do the same.

  But Sorweel had found only desolation. Ever since joining the Scions, his voice had been stopped in the jar of his skull. His soul had turned inward, becoming ever more tangled in the hair of unruly thought. He had wandered about in a stupor, as if suffering the circling disease that sometimes afflicted horses, forcing them to walk around and around in senseless spirals until they collapsed. He too had been on the verge of collapse, pressed to the brink of madness by remorse and shame and selfpity—self-pity most of all.

  Words had saved him, even if he could only speak around the fact of his pain. His single greatest fear leaving Zsoronga’s pavilion that first night was that the Zeümi Prince, despite all his displays and declarations to the contrary, found him as crude and as disagreeable as his name for Norsirai, “sausages,” implied.

  That he would be returned to the prison of his backward tongue.

  As it turned out, Zsoronga invited him to ride with his retinue the following day, where thanks to Obotegwa’s tireless voice, Sorweel found himself a part of the sometimes strange and often uproarious banter of Zsoronga’s Brace, as the Zeümi called their boonsmen. The day might have been his first good day in weeks, were it not for the sudden appearance of the Scion’s commander—a campaign-grizzled Captain named Harnilias, or Old Harni as they called him. The silver-haired man simply rode into their midst, heavy with armour and airs of authority, searching and dismissing faces with a single sweeping glance. He addressed himself to Obotegwa without so much as a glance in Sorweel’s direction. Even still, the young King was not at all surprised when the old Obligate turned to him and said, “The General wants to see you … Kayûtas himself.”

  Sorweel had seen the Prince-Imperial many times since his last summons, but only in glimpses through thickets of cavalrymen, his head bare and bright in the prairie sun, his blue cloak shimmering about its kinks and folds. Each time he caught himself craning his neck and peering like some Sagland churl, when he should have done no more than sneer and look away. Sorweel was always skirmishing over small points of dignity, always losing, but this was different. The sight of the General’s battle-standard, which was well-nigh perpetual for some legs of the day-long march, drew his gaze like a lodestone. It was like some unnatural compulsion. He would ride and look, ride and look, and when the intervening masses parted …

  There. A man who should be a man like any other.

  Only that he wasn’t. Anasûrimbor Kayûtas was more than powerful—more even than the son of the man who had killed King Harweel. It was as if Sorweel saw him against a greater fr
ame, a background deeper than the endless emerald sweep of the Istyuli Plains.

  As if Kayûtas were more an expression than an individual. A particle of fate.

  Walking the short distance to the white-tented complex that formed the General’s command, Sorweel struggled with a skin-tingling sense of exposure. A kind of anxious reluctance balled like a fist in his chest. He could hear the Prince-Imperial’s declaration from their last meeting: “I need only look at your face to see your soul, not so clearly as Father, certainly, but enough to sound the measure of you or anyone else before me. I can see the depth of your pain, Sorweel …”

  This was no mean claim, the kind men make when “measuring tongues,” as the Sakarpi said, attempting to cow others with boasts and breast-beating. It was—and Sorweel knew this without reservation—a fact. Anasûrimbor Kayûtas could see through his arrogant posture, his feeble mask of pride—through him.

  How? How did one war against such men?

  A kind of panic welled through his thoughts as he approached the General’s Horse-and-Circumfix standard. He did not want to be known …

  Least of all now, and least of all by him.

  A mixed cohort of soldiers crowded about the austere tent, some wearing the armour and crimson uniform of the General’s Kidruhil guard and standing at attention, others garbed in silk-green beneath corselets of the finest chain and milling at ease—Pillarians, Sorweel would later learn, the personal bodyguard of the Imperial Family. A fair-haired Kidruhil officer barked senseless words at him as he approached, then nodded at his obvious incomprehension, as if there could be only one such fool.

  Within heartbeats he found himself inside the command tent. As before, the interior was spare, almost devoid of ornament, and the furnishings severe. The setting sun flared across the westward panels, illuminating everything in white-filtered light. The contrast to Prince Zsoronga’s pavilion with its gloomy corners and elaborate trappings could not be more complete. “Our glorious host,” Sorweel remembered the Zeümi Prince saying, “does not believe the rewards of rank have any place on the march.”