The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  At the end of his sixth day, as he stood so that Porsparian could remove his gear, a black-skinned man with an ashen pallor pressed his face through the flap and begged permission to enter.

  "Your Glory… I am Obotegwa, Senior Obligate of Zsoronga ut Nganka'kull, Successor-Prince of High Holy Zeьm." He fell to his knees as he said this, making three waving flourishes with each of his hands and lowering his chin to his chest. He was dressed in the finest silks, a padded yellow jacket stencilled with thin black floral motifs. His ebony skin, which was a shock to Sorweel-until the coming of the Great Ordeal, he had never seen any Satyothi-shone in the day's failing light. His receding white hair and high-climbing beard had been trimmed close to the apple-round contours of his skull. There seemed to be a sturdy honesty both to his bearing and his voice, which possessed a raspy earthiness despite its high tone.

  As the son of an isolate nation, Sorweel had little grasp of etiquette between nations. Even his own father had seemed at a loss as to how to deal with the Aspect-Emperor's first fateful emissaries. Sorweel found himself flustered by the man's elaborate display, as well as bewildered by his command of the Sakarpic tongue. So he did what all young men did in such circumstances: he blurted.

  "What do you want?"

  The Obligate raised his face, displayed a grandfather's wise smile. "My Lord Master requests the pleasure of your company at his fire, your Glory."

  The young King accepted the invitation, his cheeks burning.

  All Sorweel knew of black men was that they hailed from Zeьm, an ancient and great nation in the distant west. And all he knew of Zeьm was that its people were black. He had noted Zsoronga earlier, both during assembly and exercises. The man was difficult to miss, even among the large retinue of black-skinned companions and servants that rode with him. Men born to authority, Sorweel had noticed, often stood apart from others, not merely in appearance, but in demeanour and comportment as well. Some positively swaggered with prominence-or self-importance as the case might be. Though Zsoronga communicated his station with a similar intensity, he did so without any overt gestures whatsoever. You simply looked at his party and knew that he was the first among them, as though consciousness of rank possessed a kind of visual odour.

  Obotegwa waited outside while Porsparian finished ministering to the young King. The old Shigeki slave muttered under his breath the whole time, periodically fixed him with a yellow-eyed glare. Words or no words, Sorweel would have asked him what was amiss, but too many worries plagued his thoughts. What could this Zsoronga want? Amusement for his cohort? A lesson for his fellows, a living example of how base the blood of nobles could be?

  He watched his enigmatic slave scowl over his uniform, swallowed against a sudden, almost maniacal urge to scream. Never. Never in his life had he suffered such consistent uncertainty. It plagued him, like some bone-deep fever of the soul. Everywhere he turned he found himself faced with the unfamiliar, whether it be wondrous, blasphemous, or merely novel. He knew not what was expected of him, by others, by honour, by his Gods…

  And perhaps even more debilitating, he knew not what to expect of himself.

  Certainly something better than this. How could he have been born with such a despicable heart, hesitating like an old man whose life had outrun his trust in his heart and frame? How could Harweel, strong Harweel, wise Harweel, have given birth to such a craven fool as he? To a boy who would weep in the arms of his murderer!

  "I am no conqueror."

  Worry piled upon recrimination. And then, miraculously, he found himself stepping through the canvas flaps into the bustle of the camp. He stood blinking at the streaming files of passers-by.

  Obotegwa turned to him with a look of faint surprise. After leaning back to appraise the cut of his padded Sakarpic tunic, he beamed reassurance. "Sometimes it is not so easy," he said in his remarkable accent, "to be a son."

  So many sights. So many kinds of Men.

  The encampment was in a state of uproar as its countless denizens hastened to take advantage of the remaining daylight. The sun leaned low on Sorweel's left, spoked the sky with arid brilliance. The Great Ordeal thronged beneath it, a veritable ocean of tents, pavilions, and packed thoroughfares, sweeping out across the bowl of the valley. The smoke of countless cooking fires steamed the air. Zaudunyani prayer calls keened over the roar, high feminine voices, filled with sorrow and exaltation. The Standard of the Scions-a horse rearing through a tipped crown on Kidruhil red-lay dead in the motionless air, yet somehow the ubiquitous Circumfix banners seemed to wave as if in some higher breeze.

  "Indeed," Obotegwa said from his side, "it is a thing of wonder, your Glory."

  "But is it real?"

  The old man laughed, a brief husky wheeze. "My master will like you, I am sure."

  Sorweel continued stealing gazes across the encampment as he followed the Zeьmi Obligate's lead. He even stared at the southern horizon for several heartbeats, across miles of trampled earth, even though he knew Sakarpus had receded out of all vision. They had passed beyond the Pale into the Wilds where only Sranc roamed.

  "My folk never dared ride this far from our city," he said to Obotegwa's back.

  The old man paused to look apologetically into his face. "You must forgive my impertinence, your Glory, but it is forbidden for me to speak to you in any voice save my Master's."

  "And yet you spoke earlier."

  A gentle smile. "Because I know what it means to be thrown over the edge of the world."

  Sorweel brooded over these words as they resumed walking, realizing they inadvertently explained what had pained his eyes when he looked southward. The Lonely City had become an edge. It had been more than conquered, its solitude had been consumed. Once an island in wicked seas, it was now a mere outpost, the terminus of something far greater, a civilization-just like the times of the Long Dead.

  More than his father had been killed, he realized. His father's world had died with him.

  He blinked at the heat in his eyes, saw the Aspect-Emperor leaning over him, blond and luminous, a sunlit man in the heart of night. "I am no conqueror…"

  These proved long thoughts for the short walk to Prince Zsoronga's pavilion. He found himself within the small Zeьmi enclave before he was even aware of approaching it. The Prince's pavilion was an elaborate, high-poled affair, roofed and sided in weathered black-and-crimson leather, and chased with frayed tassels that may have once been golden but were now as pale as urine. A dozen or so smaller tents reached out to either side, completing the enclosure. Several Zeьmi milled about the three firepits, staring with a directness that was neither rude nor welcoming. Anxious, Sorweel found himself considering the tall wooden post raised in the enclosure's heart. Satyothi faces, stylized with broad noses and sensual lips, had been carved one atop another along its entire length, stacks of them staring off in various directions. This was their Pillar of Sires, he would later learn, the relic to which the Zeьmi prayed the same as Sakarpi prayed to idols.

  Obotegwa led him directly into an antechamber at the fore of the pavilion, where he bid Sorweel to remove his boots. This proved to be the only ceremony.

  They found Prince Zsoronga reclined across a settee in the airy depths of the central chamber. Light filtered down through a number of open slots in the ceiling, blue shafts that sharpened the contrast between the illumined centre of the chamber and the murky spaces beyond. Obotegwa bowed as he had earlier, uttering what Sorweel imagined was some kind of announcement. The handsome young man sat up smiling, set down a codex bound in gold wire. He gestured to a neighbouring settee with a long arm.

  "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 thank
s, 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 Zeьmi 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 Zeьm 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 Anasыrimbor'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, "Zeьm 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 Zeьm," 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 Zeьm. 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 Zeьm? 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 asks 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 swipin
g 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.