The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

  “Stinky feet, hide my sweet, walk the river cool …”

  “Sometimes,” Mimara persisted, “when I glimpse him in the corner of my eye …”

  “Stinky bum, sniff your thumb, swim the water pool …”

  “… he seems like something monstrous, a shambling wreck, black and rotted and … and …”

  Suddenly the song and the peevishness that had provoked it were forgotten. Achamian found himself listening with arched attentiveness—a horror-spurred concentration.

  She worked her mouth for a moment, lips pert about some lozenge of inexplicability, then looked to him helplessly.

  “And it’s like you can taste his evil,” he heard himself say. “Not so much on your tongue as in your gums. Your teeth ache for it.”

  A peculiar vulnerability afflicted her look, as though she had admitted something beyond her courage. “Not always,” she said.

  “And it’s more than just the Nonman, isn’t it?” Something peculiar fizzed through his voice, something like a pang, but too fraught with fear. “Sometimes … Sometimes I look this way as well, don’t I?”

  “So you see the same?” she blurted.

  He shook his head in a way he hoped seemed lackadaisical. “No. What I see is what you see typically, the shadow of ruin and decay, the ugliness of the deficient and incomplete. You’re describing something different. Something moral as opposed to merely aesthetic …” He paused to catch his breath. What new madness was this? “What antique Mandate scholars called the Judging Eye.”

  He had watched her carefully as he spoke, hoping to see the glint of thrill in her eyes. But there was naught but concern. This had been gnawing at her for quite some time, he realized.

  “The Judging Eye,” she repeated in flawless Ainoni. “And what is that?”

  His heart crawled into his throat. He coughed it loose, then swallowed it back into his chest. “It means that you don’t simply apprehend the Mark of sorcery, you see the sin as well …” He trailed, then laughed, despite the horror that flexed through him.

  “And that’s funny?” she asked, her voice warbling with indignation.

  “No, girl … It’s just that …”

  “That what?”

  “Your stepfather … Kellhus.”

  He had improvised this, not willing to stray too far into the truth. But once spoken it seemed every bit as true and far more terrible with significance. Such was the perversity of things that Men often recognized their own arguments only after they had spoken them. “Kellhus …” he repeated numbly.

  “What about him?”

  “He says the Old Law has been revoked, that Men are at long last ready for the New …” The words the Mandate Catechism came back to him unbidden, and with the heat of truths drawn intact from the crucible of deception. Though you lose your soul, you shall gain the world …

  “Think,” he continued. “If sorcery is no longer abomination, then …” Let her think it was this, he told himself. Perhaps it would even serve to … discourage her. “Then why would you see it as such?”

  He was surprised to discover he had stopped walking, that he stood riven, staring at the woman whose parentage had stirred so many echoes of heartbreak and whose unscrupulous obstinacy threatened everything. The last of the Skin Eaters had passed them, casting dubious backward glances as they marched with the mule-train beyond the limits of his light. Within heartbeats it was just the two of them, flanked by knolls of heaped basalt, plains of dust, and bones bleached as light as charcoal by the ages. Cleric’s light had tapered to a point, and the company had dwindled to a floating procession of shining helms and trudging shadows.

  Silence sealed them as utterly as the blackness.

  “I always knew something was … wrong,” she said softly. “I mean, I read and I read, everything I could find about sorcery and the Mark. And nowhere, not once, was there any mention of what I see. I thought it was because it was so … unpredictable, you know, just when I would see the … the good of the evil. But when I see it, it burns so … so … I mean, it strikes me so much deeper than at any other time. It was too profound to go without saying, to be left out of the records … I just knew that something had to be different. That something had to be wrong!”

  First her arrival, and now this. She had the Judging Eye—she could see not just sorcery, but the damnation it betokened … To think he had convinced himself the Whore of Fate would leave him be!

  “And now you’re saying,” she began hesitantly, “that I’m a kind of … proof?” She blinked in the stammering manner of people finding their way through unsought revelations. “Proof of my stepfather’s … falsity?”

  She was right … and yet what more proof did he, Drusas Achamian, need? That night twenty years ago, on the eve of the First Holy War’s final triumph, the Scylvendi Chieftain had told him everything, given him all the proof he would ever need, enough to fuel decades of bitter hate—enough to deliver these scalpers to their doom. Anasûrimbor Kellhus was Dûnyain, and the Dûnyain cared for naught but domination. Of course he was false.

  It was for her sake that the Wizard trembled. She possessed the Judging Eye!

  He thought of their coupling, and the sordid passions that had driven it. A cold sweat compressed the skin and wool beneath his pack. He could feel the pity hanging like wet string in his expression, the way his look saw past what she was now—the pale image of her mother standing small in white light—into the torment that awaited her.

  “We have more immediate concerns at the moment,” he said in a rallying voice.

  “You mean Cleric,” she replied, her little hands balled into slack fists. She was looking at him with the kind of wilful focus that spoke of contravening interests. Soon, he knew, she would come at him with questions, relentless questions, and he needed to consider carefully the kinds of answers he could and could not give.

  “Yes,” he said, drawing her by the elbow after the others. “Incariol.” He thought of how men always did this, managed the thoughts of others, and wondered why it should exact such a toll from him. “His Mark means he’s old … older than you could imagine. And that means he’s not only a Quya Mage, but Ishroi, a Nonman noble …”

  He could feel the note of falsity, like a cold coin in the slick palm of his voice. He cursed himself for a fool, even as he sought her gaze, hoping that a sincere look might carry what his words could not. The Erratic and his ability to lead them through this deserted warren was their immediate concern. The fact that Achamian used them to another purpose … Weren’t all words simply tools in the end?

  “So he’s Ishroi, then …” Mimara said. The lilt in her tone told him that she knew something was amiss. When had he ever urged her into the murk of his ruminations?

  “Such figures don’t easily slip through the cracks of history, Mimara. And what history I haven’t lived through Seswatha, I’ve read many times. Moithural, Hosûtil, Shimbor—all the mannish translators and chroniclers of the Nonmen. I assure you, there’s no mention of any Incariol, nowhere, not even in their own Pit of Years …” Despite himself, his voice was striking more, not fewer, tin notes of insincerity.

  Her gaze was bolt-forward now, apparently following Cleric’s light and the small mob of men and pack animals labouring beneath it. From their vantage, the Skin Eaters seemed to pick their way across the vast back of nothingness. Here and there small clearings of floor opened between them, bloomed colourless and flat in the illumination, only to be obscured by kicked dust and the drift of shadowy legs.

  They had travelled past the point of sturdy grounds.

  “This Judging Eye,” she said with cool resignation. “It’s a curse, isn’t it? An affliction …”

  Many years had passed since last he had suffered this feeling, not simply of too much happening too quickly, but of some dread intent in motion, as though all these things, the Nonman, the Captain, the dead scalper out there, and now Mimara, were like the suckered arms of the octopuses he and his father had sometimes
pulled from the Meneanor Sea—limbs webbed in the sinew of a singular Fate.

  Circumstances always encompassed, but sometimes they encircled as well, as many-chambered as this mountain and every bit as dark. His heart seemed to beat against sagging bandages.

  “Just legends,” he said. “Nothing more.”

  “But you’ve read them all,” she said in a high, scathing voice.

  He raised a knobbed hand to silence her, nodded to the interval of darkness separating them from the company. A figure had surfaced from the advancing perimeter of their light, became what looked like, for a mad moment, a wizened ape armoured in human rags …

  It was Sarl. He waited for them, alone in the darkness, smiling, his lips stretched longer than the arc of his gums and teeth. “Well-well-well,” he called in the tones of a cracked flute. Even in the dark the man squinted.

  “We’ll speak of this later,” Achamian said to Mimara, halting her with a gentle hand on her elbow. She frowned and in a careless moment looked to the sergeant with naked fury. Though the man remained some several paces distant, there was no way he could have failed to see her anger.

  “You take the light,” Achamian said quickly.

  “Me?”

  “You have the Gift of the Few. You can grasp it with your soul, even without any real sorcerous training … If you think on it, you should actually be able to feel the possibility.”

  For the bulk of his life, Achamian had shared his calling’s contempt of witches. There was no reason for this hatred, he knew, outside the capricious customs of the Three Seas. Kellhus had taught him as much, one of many truths he had used to better deceive. Men condemned others to better celebrate themselves. And what could be easier to condemn than women?

  But as he watched her eyes probe inward, he was struck by the practicality of her wonder, the way her expression made this novelty look more like a recollection. It was almost as if women possessed a kind of sanity that men could only find on the far side of tribulation. Witches, he found himself thinking, were not only a good thing, they could very well be a necessity. Especially the witch-to-be before him.

  “Yes,” she said. “I can feel it. It’s like … It’s …” She trailed in smiling indecision.

  “It’s a small Cant,” he said, grateful that Sarl, for whatever reason, had granted them this moment together. With a finger, he redirected the light so that it rested several feet above her head. “Something called the Surillic Point …”

  “Surillic Point,” she repeated, her voice hot with breath.

  “So,” he continued, “picture yourself in your soul’s eye.” He paused a heartbeat. “Now picture the light, not as you see it, but as you see its Mark.”

  She nodded, staring at him with forked concentration. The light stretched the outline of her face across her breast and shoulder.

  “Now picture you and the Point walking together. Hold fast that image. It’ll be trying at first, but with practice it’ll become thoughtless, like any other reflex.”

  Her gaze fell blank to his wool-covered chest. Without prompting, she took two steps, her eyes climbing in upward astonishment to watch the glaring light track her move for move. She looked back about to laugh, only to stub her toe against some dust-furred detritus. She grinned as she snatched back her balance. Her shadow bloomed and compressed beneath her.

  “Hurry,” he said. “Catch the others.”

  She made no secret of her disgust as she strode past the sergeant, walking like a slave with an amphora poised atop her head. Then she began trotting down the path the others had sloughed through the dust.

  And she glowed, the old Wizard thought, not only against the stalking black, but against so many memories of harm.

  Achamian followed her as far as Sarl. The man stood slightly humped beneath the weight of his pack, the straps of which had bunched folds of mail across the front of his hauberk. Standing so close to him reminded Achamian of the dead Pick, the heart, and the knowledge that they were not alone in these black-bowel deeps. Mimara’s light was fast receding, and he saw Sarl’s eyes flit toward the encroaching darkness. Without a word, they both began following the woman.

  “What do you want, Sergeant?” The company’s passage had left an aura of dust in the air, and Achamian could feel it fur the insides of his mouth. His chest wanted to cough the words.

  “The Captain asked me to speak to you.” Sarl looked even more wrinkled in the gloom. His face was grey and grimace-marked, like a corpse exhumed from black peat. The Wizard breathed against the bristle of bodily alarm, fought the urge to ball his hands into fists. He almost always felt this whenever Sarl strayed too near, ever since the man had smashed his wine-bowl in the Cocked Leg.

  “Did he now.”

  “Yes,” Sarl said in a breathy rasp, smiling like an uncle fishing for a nephew’s love. That was the thing about the man’s ceaseless posturing: Even when the passions were appropriate, the underlying intensities were all wrong. “You see, he thinks you’re … too honest, let us say.”

  “Honest.”

  “And arrogant.”

  “Arrogant,” Achamian repeated. There was something deadening about the discourse of fools. It was as if his patience were a pool that was only so deep, and Sarl’s every word were a rock …

  “Look,” Sarl said. “We are learned men, you and I—”

  “I assure you, Sergeant, there’s very little that you and I share.”

  “Oho! The grief old Sarl gets for his diplomacy!”

  “Diplomacy.”

  “Yes, diplomacy!” he cried in sudden savagery. “Fine fucking words spoken to fine fucking fools!”

  Mimara had drawn far ahead of them by now, so that they walked in the least glimmer of light, more the rims of men than possessing human substance, stepping by memory of grounds glimpsed ahead. Sarl was a threat, both to him and his quest—if Achamian had suspected as much before, he knew now. All he need do was speak to the madman in his true voice, right here, right now, and that threat would vanish, become more ash to powder this dead Mansion’s floor.

  “What?” the fool continued. “Did you not think the Captain knew we walked through a vast tomb? Did you not think he would have commanded Cleric to illuminate it? And what do you do? You decide to show the bones to all! To let simple men know they walked beneath inhuman tombs. Darkness shields as much as it threatens, Schoolman! And you must remember the first rule!”

  There was reason in what he was saying. But then that was the problem with reason: It was as much a whore as Fate. Like rope, you could use it to truss or snare any atrocity …

  Another lesson learned at Kellhus’s knee.

  “Another Rule of the Slog, is it?”

  “Oh yes … The rules that have made this company a legend in the Wilds. Do you hear me? A legend!”

  “So what is the first rule, Sergeant?”

  “The Captain always knows. Do you hear me? The Captain always knows!”

  All at once, the hand-waving, wire-grinning complexity of the sergeant seemed to focus into one simple truth: Sarl did not just revere his Captain, he worshipped him. Achamian nearly spit, so sour was the disgust that welled through him. To think that after all these years, he marched in the company of fanatics once again!

  “You think you can cow me?” he heard himself shout. “A Holy Veteran, like your Captain? What my eyes have seen, Sergeant. I have spat at the feet of the Aspect-Emperor himself! I possess a strength, a might, that can scar mountains, rout entire hosts, turn your bones into boiling oil! And you presume—presume!—to threaten me?”

  Sarl laughed, but with a breath clipped by wariness. “You’ve stepped outside the circle of your skill, Schoolman. This is the slog, not the Holy War, and certainly not some infernal School. Here, our lives depend upon the resolve of our brothers. The knee that cracks pulls ten men down. Recall that. There will be no second warning.”

  Achamian knew he should be politic, conciliatory, but he was too weary, and too much had happened. Wr
ath had flooded all the blind chambers of his heart.

  “I am not one of you! I am not a Schoolman, and I am certainly not a Skin Eater! And this, my friend, is not your—”

  His anger sputtered, blew away and outward like smoke. Horror plunged in.

  Sarl actually continued several more steps before realizing he was alone. “What?” he called uneasily from the almost total dark. The lights ahead of them seemed to hang in absolute blackness, a vision of little men toiling into the void.

  Over the course of his long life, Achamian had been asked many times what it was like to see the world with the arcane senses of the Few. He would usually answer that it was just as manifold and multifarious as the world revealed by mundane senses—and every bit as difficult to describe. Sometimes he would say it was like a different kind of hearing.

  Sarl forgotten, he found himself looking down, even though he could see neither the ground nor his feet. It seemed he could hear calling: the Skin Eaters shouting out their names.

  There were galleries immediately below them, stretching many miles into the entombed fundament. Before, he had known this as an abstraction, as something drawn from the uncertain palette of memory. But now he could feel those wending spaces, not directly, but through the constellation of absences, the pits in the stitch of existence, that moved through them.

  Chorae …

  Tears of God, at least a dozen of them, borne by something that prowled the halls beneath their feet.

  The riot of thought and passion that so often heralded disaster. The apprehension of meaning to be had where no sense could be found, not because he was too simple, but because he was too small and the conspiracies were too great.

  Sarl was little more than a direction in the viscous black. “Run!” the Wizard cried. “Run!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN