The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

  The air remained chill enough to fog deep exhalations.

  Achamian sat next to Mimara with his back against one of the columns. For the longest time she seemed transfixed by the light, staring endlessly at its silver flare.

  “The script,” she said, her voice thick from disuse. “Can you read it?”

  “No.”

  An inaudible snort. “The all-knowing Wizard …”

  “No one can read it.”

  “Ah … I was worried I had misjudged you.”

  He looked at her prepared to scowl, but the mischief in her eyes demanded he chuckle. A great weight seemed to fall through him.

  “Remember this, Mimara.”

  “Remember what?”

  “This place.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s old. Older than old.”

  “Older than him?” she asked, nodding toward the figure of Cleric sitting in the pillared gloom.

  His momentary sense of generosity drained away. “Far older.”

  A moment passed, suffused by the low tingle of repose in perilous circumstances—a dripping sense of doom. Mimara continued her furtive examination of Cleric.

  “What’s wrong with him?” she eventually whispered.

  He did not want to think of the Nonman, Achamian realized, let alone speak of him. Travelling with an Erratic was every bit as perilous as traveling these halls, if not more so. A fact that begged the forbidden question: How much would Achamian risk to see his obsession through? How many souls would he doom?

  His mood blackened.

  “Hush,” he said, frowning in habitual irritation. What was she doing here? Why did she plague him? Everything! Twenty years of toil! Perhaps even the world! She risked it all for a hunger she could never sate. “They can hear far better than we can.”

  “Tell me in a tongue he can’t understand then,” she replied, speaking flawless Ainoni.

  A long look, too sour to be surprised. “Ainon,” he said. “Is that where they took you?”

  The curiosity faded from her eyes. She slouched onto her mat and turned without a word—as he knew she would. Silence spread deep and mountainous through the graven hollows. He sat rigid.

  When he glanced up he was certain he saw Cleric’s face turn away from them …

  Back to the impenetrable black of Cil-Aujas.

  The Library of Sauglish burned beneath him in his Dream, its towers squat and monumental within garlands of flame. Dragons banked about mighty plumes of smoke. The glitter of sorcery sparked across the heights—the blinding calligraphy of the Gnosis.

  Its wings threshing the air, Skafra bared corroded teeth, shrieked out to the horizon, to the whirlwind roping black across the distant plains. A rumble deeper than a final heartbeat.

  And Achamian hung unseen, an insubstantial witness … Alone.

  Where? Where was Seswatha?

  They found the mummified corpse of a boy no more than a hundred paces down the passageway Cleric had chosen for them. He was curled as though about a kitten, his back to the wall. He had been at most thirteen or fourteen summers old, Xonghis estimated. The Imperial Tracker had no idea how long he had lain there, but he pointed to the propitiatory coins that had been set on his hip and thigh: three full coppers, two grey with dust, one still bright. gifts for the Ur-Mother—not the coins, but the acts of surrendering them. Apparently others had passed this way as well. With the rest of the company clustered about him, Soma fell to one knee and added a fourth, whispering a prayer in his native tongue. His eyes sought out Mimara afterwards, as though seeking confirmation of his gallantry.

  “You need to watch that one,” Achamian murmured to her as they continued down the corridor. They had not spoken since waking, and he found himself regretting the way he had cut short their conversation the previous night. It seemed absurd, offering words like coins in the bowels of a mountain, but the small things never went away, no matter how tremendous the circumstance. Not for him, anyway.

  “Not really,” she said with a weariness Achamian found vaguely alarming. Their was peril in feminine exhaustion—men understood this instinctively. “It’s usually the quiet ones you need to watch. The ones waiting for the door to clap behind them …”

  The sound of other voices welled into her silence. A debate had broken out regarding the fate and provenance of the dead child. Strangely enough, the boy and the mystery of his end had inspired a return to normalcy of sorts.

  “Ainon taught me that,” she added with reassuring bitterness. “You know … where they took me.”

  The expedition marched on, a collection of pale faces in the long murk. The conversation, quite inexplicably, turned to which trades were the hardest on the hands. Galian insisted that fishermen had the worst of it, what with all the knots and nets. Xonghis described the cane fields of High Ainon, endless miles of them along the upper Secharib Plains, and how the field slaves always had bleeding fingers. Everyone agreed that if you included feet, fullers were the sorriest lot.

  “Imagine marching in piss day in and day out—and without moving a cubit!”

  Then they started on beggars, trading tales of this or that wretch. Soma’s claim to have seen a beggar without arms or legs was met with general derision. Soma was always claiming things. “So how did he pick up his coins?” one of the younger wits asked. “With his pecker?” In the spirit of mockery, Galian went one better, saying he saw a headless beggar when he was in the Imperial Army. “For the longest time we thought he was a sack of ripe turnips, until he began begging, that is …”

  “And what did he beg for?” Oxwora asked. The giant’s voice always seemed to boom, no matter how low he pitched it.

  “To be turned right side up, what else?”

  Laughter crashed through the abandoned halls. Only Soma remained unimpressed.

  “How could he speak without a head?”

  “You seem to manage well enough!”

  A cackling swell. The crew always enjoyed a good joke at Soma’s expense.

  “In Zeüm—” Pokwas began.

  “The beggars give you money,” Galian interrupted. “We know.”

  “Not at all.” The Sword-Dancer laughed. “They trek into the Wilds to skin skinnies …”

  A general cry of outrage and laughter.

  “Which explains all the silver you owe me,” Oxwora exclaimed.

  And on it went.

  Judging by her expressions, Mimara found the banter terribly amusing, a fact not lost on the scalpers—Somandutta in particular. Achamian, however, found it difficult to concede more than a smile here and there, usually at turns that escaped the others. He could not stop pondering the blackness about them, about how garish and exposed they must sound to those listening in the deeps. A gaggle of children.

  Someone listened. Of that much he was certain.

  Someone or something.

  With Lord Kosoter at his side, Cleric led them through a veritable labyrinth. Corridors. Halls. Galleries. Some struck as straight as a rule, others wound in the random pose of worms suspended in water, or like the writing of weevils beneath the bark of dead trees. All of them hummed with the enormity of the mountain they plumbed: the walls seemed to bow, the floors buckle, the ceilings tingled with crushing weight. At some point, their entombment had become palpable. Cil-Aujas became a world of wedged things, of great collapses, immense torsions, all held in check by stone and ancient cunning. More than once, Achamian found himself gasping, as though breathing against some irresistible grip. The air tasted of tombs—stone joists and age-long motionlessness—but it was plentiful enough. Even still, something animal within him cried suffocation.

  It was the lack of sky, he decided. He tried not to think of his earlier premonitions.

  The banter dwindled into silence, leaving the arrhythmic percussion of footfalls and the sonorous complaints of this or that mule in its wake.

  The sound of water rose so gradually out of the silence that it seemed sudden when they finally noticed it.
The walls and ceiling of the passage they followed flared outward, like the mouth of an intricately carved horn, becoming ever more dim in the twin points of sorcerous light. After several steps, the walls fell away altogether, and they stepped into booming space. Through membranes of mist, the lights reached out, paling, revealing hanging scarps and cavernous spaces—a great chasm of some kind. The floor became a kind of stone catwalk, slicked with rust-coloured moulds. Water tumbled beneath, a rush of diamonds, broken only by the shadow of the catwalk, leaping and wheeling into void. Achamian found himself looking away, dizzied by how its sheeting plunge made his footing drift. He heard the mules kick and scream in the train immediately behind him. Near the head of their long file, he could see Cleric’s light gather against the cavern’s far heights, then fold into the tubular hollows of another corridor.

  Except that it wasn’t another corridor, but the entrance to some kind of shrine. The room was neither large nor small—about the size of a temple prayer floor—with a low circular ceiling spoked like a wheel. Friezes panelled the walls—were-animals with multiple heads and limbs—but not to the convoluted depths found elsewhere. The scalpers, Achamian could tell, thought them representations of devils: More than a few whispered homespun charms. But he knew better, recognizing in the figures a sensibility kindred to that of the Wolf Gate. It wasn’t monsters that glared from the walls, he knew, but rather the many poses of natural beasts compressed into one image. Before they began forgetting, the Nonmen had been obsessed with the mysteries of time, particularly with the way the present seemed to bear the past and the future within it.

  Long-lived, they had worshipped Becoming … the bane of Men.

  While the company milled beneath the low ceilings, Sarl and Kiampas organized the replenishment of their water supply. The leather buckets they normally used to scoop water from gorges were unpacked. A relay was set up, and soon armed men were squatting all across the chamber filling skins. Achamian paced the walls in the meantime, studying the graven images with Mimara in tow. He showed her where innumerable ancient penitents had worn indentations into the walls—with their foreheads, he explained.

  When she asked him whom they prayed to, he cast about looking for Cleric, once again loath to say anything the Erratic might overhear. He found him standing at the far end of the chamber, his bald head bowed and gleaming. A great statue loomed before him, a magisterial Nonman hewn from the walls, at once hanging with arms and legs outstretched—a pose curiously reminiscent of the Circumfix—and sitting rigid upon a throne, his knees pressed together beneath flattened hands. Mould had stained the stone black and crimson, but otherwise the figure seemed untouched, blank eyes staring out. Rather than answer Mimara’s query, Achamian simply motioned for her to follow, pressing past the crowded scalpers toward Cleric.

  “Tir hoila ishrahoi,” the Erratic was saying, his eyes and forehead covered by a long-fingered hand—the Nonman gesture of homage. There could be no doubt he spoke to the statue, rather than prayed to something beyond.

  “Coi ri pirith mutoi’on …”

  Achamian paused and, for reasons he did not understand, started translating, speaking in a low murmur. Compared to the harmonic resonances of Cleric, his voice sounded as coarse as yarn.

  “‘You, soul of splendour, whose arm hath slain thousands …”

  “Tir miyil oitossi, kun ri mursal arilil hi … Tir …”

  “You, eye of wrath, whose words hath cracked mountains … You …”

  “Tirsa hir’gingall vo’is?”

  “Where is your judgment now?”

  The Nonman began laughing in his mad, chin-to-breast way. He looked to Achamian, smiled his inscrutable white-lipped smile. He leaned his head as though against some swinging weight. “Where is it, eh, Wizard?” he said in the mocking way he often replied to Sarl’s jokes. His features gleamed like hand-worn soapstone.

  “Where does all the judgment go?”

  Then without warning, Cleric turned to forge alone into the black, drawing his spectral light like a wall-brushing gown. Achamian gazed after him, more astounded than mystified. For the first time, it seemed, he had seen Cleric for what he was … Not simply a survivor of this ruin, but of a piece with it.

  A second labyrinth.

  Mimara stepped into the Nonman’s place, apparently to better peer at the statue. Their water-skins filled, the scalpers had begun filing past them, their looks unreadable. Mimara seemed so small and beautiful in the shadow of their warlike statue that Achamian found himself standing as though to shield her.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  The underworld cataract thundered up through the surrounding stone.

  “The greatest of the Nonman Kings,” Achamian replied, reaching out two fingers to touch the cold stone face. It was strange, the heedless way that statues stared and stared, their eyes bound to the panoply of dead ages. “Cu’jara Cinmoi … the Lord of Siöl, who led the Nine Mansions against the Inchoroi.”

  “How can you tell?” she asked, cocking her head the same as her mother. “They all look the same … Exactly the same.”

  “Not to each other …” He sketched a line through the mould across the Nonman King’s polished cheek.

  “But how can you tell?”

  “Because it’s written, carved into the rim of the throne …”

  He drew back his fingers, pinched the silken residue between them.

  “Come,” the Wizard said, deliberately cutting off her next question. When she persisted, he snapped, “Leave an old man to think!”

  They had palmed their lives, as the Conriyans were fond of saying. They had palmed them and given them to a Nonman—to an Erratic … To someone who was not only insane, but literally addicted to trauma and suffering. Incariol … Who was he? And more importantly, what would he do to remember?

  Kuss voti lura gaial, the High Norsirai would say of their Nonmen allies during the First Apocalypse. “Trust only the thieves among them.” The more honourable the Nonman, the more likely he was to betray—such was the perversity of their curse. Achamian had read accounts of Nonmen murdering their brothers, their sons, not out of spite, but because their love was so great. In a world of smoke, where the years tumbled into oblivion, acts of betrayal were like anchors; only anguish could return their life to them.

  The present, the now that Men understood, the one firmly fixed at the fore of what was remembered, no longer existed for the Nonmen. They could find its semblance only in the blood and screams of loved ones.

  Beyond the Cujaran Shrine they descended into a maze of desolate habitations. The darkness became liquid, it seemed so deep, and their light became the only air. Walls reared into visibility as though squeezed of ink. Doorway after doorway gaped to either side of them, revealing lanes of interior floor, featureless for the dust, swinging in counterpoise to their sorcerous lights. Stairwells climbed into rubble. Stone faces watched with callous immobility.

  Eventually they came to a subterranean thoroughfare, one of several that wound along natural occlusions in Aenaratiol’s heart. Seswatha had walked these, two thousand years previous, and Achamian found himself mourning the wrack and ruin. This was where the Ishroi had stacked their palaces, street upon street, climbing the sides of each fissure. Enormous pitch lanterns had burned in the open spaces, suspended in webs of chain. Gold and silver foils had skinned the fluted walls. Fountains had flowed, their waters like ropes of refracted fire.

  Now all was dust and dark. For the first time, it seemed to Achamian, the company grasped the dread scale of their undertaking. It was one thing to crowd halls hunched against the mountain above them, it was quite another to file through hollows as vast as this, a thread of light and furtive movement. Where before the dark had enclosed them, now it exposed … Anything, it seemed, might descend upon them.

  They made camp next to the wreckage of a collapsed lantern wheel. Bronze bars curved like ribs, reaching as high as small trees. A massive three-faced head had crashed from some unseen per
ch above, forming a barricade of sorts not so far away. The more daring scalpers explored the doorways and passages along the short section of street between, but only as far as the white light would take them. The rest broke into tired clots, making seats of the debris or simply sitting upon the powdered floor. Some could do no more than ponder their shadows.

  Achamian found himself with Galian and Pokwas. All the Skin Eaters were sleeping in their armour by this point. Galian wore a hauberk of crude-ringed Galeoth mail, like many others, only belted and cinched in the Imperial fashion. Pokwas wore a shirt of fine Zeümi steel, which had been patched on his right arm and left abdomen with sections of cruder Galeoth links. Over this, across his collar and shoulders, he wore the traditional Sword-Dancer halter, but the plates were too waxy to reflect much more than lines of white and dark. The silvering had been scrubbed away long ago.

  From the rehearsed character of their questions, Achamian could tell they had decided to corner him sometime earlier. They wanted to know about dragons, particularly the possibility that one might reside in the vast galleries beneath their feet. The old Wizard wasn’t surprised: Ever since Kiampas’s outburst at the Obsidian Gate, he had overheard the word “dragon” or its Galeoth cognate, “huörka,” at least a dozen times.

  “Men have little to fear from dragons,” he explained. “Without the will of the No-God, they are lazy, selfish creatures. We Men are too much trouble for them. Kill one of us today, and tomorrow you have a thousand hounding you.”

  “So there are dragons out there?” Galian asked. The former Imperial Columnary was the nimble sort, like Sarl, perhaps, only tempered with Nansur sensibility. Where the sergeant perpetually squinted, Galian’s eyes were clear, even if they promised to frost at the slightest provocation. Pokwas, on the other hand, possessed that warm-hearted confidence that seemed to belong exclusively to men with quick wits and big hands. Unlike Galian, he was someone you only had to befriend once.