The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  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 sycamores, 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-are-together 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 world-does-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 shouldered 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 grimace-and-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.

  Now he was accustomed to it, of course. The beast that was his brother.

  The dog.

  "Hey, Sammi," he said, wearing his mother's mouth-watering smile. "Watch…"

  Bending over, he placed a single palm on the floor and raised his feet in the air. Grinning upside down, he bounced one-handed toward him, from indifferent carpet to cold marble.

  Samarmas gurgled with delight, covered his mouth and pointed. "Bum-bum!" he cried. "I see your bum-bum!"

  "Can't you do this, Sammi?"

  Samarmas pressed his cheek to his shoulder, smiled bashfully down. "Nothing," he conceded.

  "The Gods did not see the First Apocalypse," Uncle Maithanet was saying, "so why would they see the Second? They are blind to the No-God. They are blind to any intelligence without soul."

  Again the imperceptible pause before Mother's reply. "But Kellhus is a Prophet… How-?"

  "How could he be hunted by the Gods?"

  Kelmomas lingered upside-down next to his brother, his heels swaying above.

  "Isn't there anything you can do, Sammi?"

  Samarmas shook his head, still doing his gurgle-laugh-gurgle at his brother's ridiculous pose.

  "Lord Sejenus," Maithanet was saying, "taught us to see the Gods not as entities unto themselves, but as fragments of the God. This is what my brother hears, the Voice-Absolute. This is what has renewed the Covenant of Gods and Men. You know this, Esmi."

  "So you're saying the Hundred could very well be at war with the God's designs-with their very own sum?"

  "Yes-yes," Theliopa interjected. "There are one hundred and eighty-nine references referring to the disparate ends of the Gods and the God of Gods, two from the Holy Tractate itself. For they are like Men, hemmed in by darkness, making war on the shadows of they know not what.' Schol-Scholars, thirty-four, twenty. 'For I am the God, the rule of all things…' "

  Kelmomas swung his feet down to sit cross-legged before Samarmas, shimmied close enough to touch knees. "I know," he whispered. "I know something you can do…"

  Samarmas flinched and jerked his head, as though hearing something too remarkable to be believed.

  "What? What? What?"

  "Think of your own soul," Uncle Maithanet was saying. "Think of the war within, the way the parts continually betray the whole. We are not so different from the world we live in, Esmi…"

  "I know-I know all this!"

  "How about balance?" Kelmomas said. "You know how to balance, don't you?"

  Moments later, Samarmas was perched tottering on the balcony's broad stone rail, deep spaces yawing out beyond and beneath him. Kelmomas watched from the playroom, standing just behind the line of sunlight across the floor, grinning as though astonished by his skill and daring. The distance-filtered voices of his uncle and mother seemed to fall from the sky.

  "The White-Luck Warrior," his uncle was saying, "need not be real. The rumours alone constitute a dire threat."

  "Yes, I agree. But how do you battle rumours?"

  Kelmomas could almost see his uncle's simulated frown.

  "How else? With more rumours."

  Samarmas whooped in whispering triumph. Cotton-white arms out and waving. Toes flexed across a marmoreal line. The sycamores rearing behind, dark beneath sunlit caps, reaching up as though to catch some higher fall.

  "And the Yatwerians?" Mother asked.

  "Call a council. Invite the Matriarch herself here to the Andiamine Heights."

  The sudden dip and lean. The stabilizing twitches. The small looks of bodily panic.

  "Yes, but you and I both know she isn't the real leader of the Cult."

  "Which might work to our advantage. Sharacinth is a proud and ambitious woman, one who chafes at being a figurehead."

  Quick recovery steps. Feet swishing over polished stone. A gurgling laugh caught in an anxious, reflexive swallow.

  "What? Are you suggesting we bribe her? Offer to make her Mother-Supreme?"

  "That's one possibility."

  The slender body bent about an invisible point, one which seemed to roll from side to side.

  The surrounding air deep with the promise of gravity.

  "As Shriah you hold the power of life and death over her."

  "Which is why I suspect she knows little or nothing of these rumours, or what her sisters plan."

  Eyes avid and exultant. Hands cycling air. A breathless grinning.

  "That's something we can use."

  "Indeed, Esmi. As I said, she is a proud woman. If we could induce a schism in the Cult…"

  Samarmas tottering. A bare foot, ivory bright in the glare, swingin
g out from behind the heel of the other, around and forward, sole descending, pressing like a damp cloth across the stone. A sound like a sip.

  "A schism…"

  The shadow of a boy foreshortened by the high angle of the sun. Outstretched hands yanked into empty-air clutches. Feet and legs flickering out. A silhouette, loose and tight-bundled, falling through the barred shadow of the balustrade. A gasp flecked with spittle.

  Then nothing.

  Kelmomas stood blinking at the empty balcony, oblivious to the uproar rising from below.

  Just like his father, he was able to hold so much more in the light of his soul's eye than the people around him. It had been this way ever since Hagitatas had taught him the difference between beast, man, and god-ever since he first had looked away from his brother's face. Beasts move, the old man had said.

  Men reflect.

  So he knew the love and worship Samarmas bore him, knew that he would do anything to close the abyss of insight and ability between them. And he knew precisely where the Pillarian Guards fixed their sandalled feet, where they planted the butt of their long spears…

  Alarms rang through the Enclosure, clawed up to the sky. Soldiers, their martial voices hoarse with grief and terror. The guarded babble of slaves.

  As though stunned, Kelmomas walked to the marble railing, leaned over the point where his brother had fallen. He looked down, saw his brother in an armoured circle of guardsmen, his eyes rolled back, his right arm coiled like rope, his torso twitching about the spear-shaft that pierced his flank.

  The young Prince-Imperial was careful to wipe the olive oil from the rail. Then he howled the way a little boy should.

  Why? the voice asked. The secret voice.

  Why didn't you kill me sooner?