The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  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 honourable as the Zeьmi 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 self-pity-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 Zeьmi 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 Zeьmi 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… Kayыtas 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. Anasыrimbor Kayыtas 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 frame, a background deeper than the endless emerald sweep of the Istyuli Plains.

  As if Kayыtas 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. Anasыrimbor Kayыtas 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 Zeьmi Prince saying, "does not believe the rewards of rank have any place on the march."

  Only what was needed. Only what was necessary.

  Kayыtas sat as before at the same sheaf-covered table, only this time he stared at Sorweel with mild expectation instead of reading. A beautiful woman, her flaxen hair braided and bound about her head, sat to his immediate right, dressed in a gold-and-charcoal gown: Kayыtas's sister, Sorweel realized, glimpsing the familial resemblance in her face. Kayыtas's dark-maned brother, Moлnghus, hulked several paces away, fairly bristling with weaponry. There was a taut humidity in the air, the kind found in the wake of heated arguments.

  The woman stared at him with the amused boldness of an aunt finally laying eyes on a sister's vaunted child. "Muirs kil ti
erana jen hыl," she said. Though her gaze never wavered, the way she tilted her head told Sorweel she had directed her words at Moлnghus behind her.

  The dark Prince-Imperial said nothing, simply glared with eyes like chips of sky. His brother Kayыtas snorted in laughter.

  Sorweel felt the blood rise to his face. They were scarcely older than him, he realized, and yet he was the boy here-unquestionably so. Was it the same with Zsoronga? Did they have this impact on everyone who came before them?

  "How is Porsparian treating you?" the General asked in Sakarpic.

  "As well as can be expected," Sorweel replied, though the words felt false on his lips. The Shigeki slave had tended to his modest needs with diligence-this much was true. But the old man's religious zealotry unsettled him: Porsparian was forever praying over the small mouths he moulded in the earth, continually feeding warm food to cold dirt, and forever… blessing the young King.

  At least there had been no more episodes like that first night.

  "Good," Kayыtas said nodding, though for the merest sliver of a heartbeat, a shadow crossed his face. "My father has at last chosen your tutor," he continued in a you-must-be-wondering tone, "a Mandate Schoolman named Thanteus Eskeles. A good man, I am told. He will accompany you throughout the remainder of the march, teach you Sheyic while you ride… I trust you will defer to his wisdom."

  "Of course," Sorweel said, quite at a loss as to what to think. Moлnghus and the nameless woman continued staring at him, each with their own variety of contempt. Sorweel found himself looking to his feet, fuming. "Is there anything else?" he asked with more heat than he intended.

  He was a king! A king! What would his father say, seeing him like this?

  General Kayыtas laughed aloud, said something in the same language spoken by the woman moments earlier. "I'm afraid so," he continued in effortless Sakarpic. He spared a droll glance at his sister-whose name Sorweel suddenly recalled: Serwa. Anasыrimbor Serwa.

  "As you might imagine," the fair-haired General continued, "the line between insolence and sacrilege is a rather hazy one in an endeavour such as this. But there are those who… watch such things. Those who keep count."

  Something in his tone pried Sorweel's gaze upward. Kayыtas was leaning forward now, his elbows on his knees, so that the white silk of his robe hung in a series of luminous arcs below his throat. Behind him, his brother had turned away in apparent boredom, gnawed at what looked like a section of dried meat. But the woman continued watching as intently as before.

  "You are a king, Sorweel, and when you return to Sakarpus you will rule as your father had ruled, with all of your privileges intact. But here, you are a soldier and a vassal. You will salute others in accordance to rank. In the presence of myself or my brother and sister, you will kneel and lower your face, so that when you look straight ahead, your eyes are focused on a spot one length before you. You may then look at us directly: This is your privilege as a king. When you encounter my father, no matter what the circumstance, you are to place your forehead to the ground. And never look at him unless invited. All men are slaves before my father. Do you understand?"

  The tone was gentle, the words were nothing if not politic, and yet there could be no mistaking the cutting edge of reprimand. "Yes," Sorweel heard himself say.

  "Then show me."

  A breeze bellied the eastward canvas panels; ropes creaked and poles groaned. There was a burning tightness to the air, like the tinkle of old coals in an old fire, making breathing not only uncomfortable, but dangerous. It happened without him even willing it to happen: His knees simply bent, folded like stiff leather, then fell to the crude-woven mat that had been rolled across the floor. His chin dropped on the swivel of his neck, as though obeying an irresistible accumulation of weight. He found himself looking at the Prince-Imperial's sandalled feet, at white skin and pearl nails, at the yellow-orange calluses climbing the pads of his toes.

  Forgive me…

  "Excellent." A breathless pause. "I know that was difficult."

  His every sinew, it seemed, tensed about his frame, cramped about his father's bones. Never had he been so utterly immobile-so utterly silent. And somehow, this became his accusation.

  "Come, Sorweel. Please stand."

  He did as he was instructed, though he continued staring at the General's feet. He looked up only when the silence became unbearable. Even in this, they were unconquerable.

  "You've made a friend," Kayыtas said, gazing at him with the amiable air of an uncle fishing for some reluctant truth. "Who is it? Zsoronga? Yes. It only stands to reason. That interpreter of his… Obotegwa."

  The young King's shock was such that he paid no heed to his expression. Spies! Of course they were watching him… Porsparian?

  "I have no need of spies, Sorweel," the Prince-Imperial said, snatching the thought from his face. He leaned back and with a gentle laugh added, "My father is a god."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Osthwai Mountains

  Since all men count themselves righteous, and since no righteous man raises his hand against the innocent, a man need only strike another to make him evil.

  — Nulla Vogneas, The Cynicata

  Where two reasons may deliver truth, a thousand lead to certain delusion.

  The more steps you take, the more likely you will wander astray.

  — Ajencis, Theophysics

  Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The Osthwai Mountains

  The Scalpoi called the mountain the Ziggurat, apparently because of its flat summit. None among the Skin Eaters knew its true name-perhaps even Cleric had forgotten. But Achamian had dreamt of it many, many times.

  Aenaratiol.

  When the Nonman had first mentioned the Black Halls, Achamian had thought only of the expedition, of reaching Sauglish by midsummer. By the time they made camp that evening, the relief had all but evaporated and the implications of what they were about to attempt-for want of a better word-stabbed at him. The world was old, strewn with ancient and forgotten hazards, and short of Golgotterath, few could match the peril that was Cil-Aujas.

  The Skin Eaters had their own lore. Given that it flanked the southern approaches of the Ochain Passes, the Ziggurat and the derelict Nonman Mansion that plumbed its foundations had been the subject of countless fireside speculations. What shreds of fact they might have possessed had been burned long ago as fuel for brighter wonderings, and what remained was out-and-out fantastical. Pestilence. Exodus. Invasion. It seemed they had concocted every tale to explain the fate of the Black Halls save the actual one.

  Refuge.

  When Achamian began telling the true story, he found himself the focus of all attention, to the point where it almost seemed comedic: hard and warlike men hanging on his words like children, asking the same guileless questions, watching with the same timid impatience. Xonghis, in particular, would begin calling out what he thought would happen next, only to catch himself and trail mumbling. Achamian would have laughed, had he not understood what it meant to be stranded as these men were stranded, had he not known the power of words to parent the orphaned present.

  The true name of the mountain, he told them, was Aenaratiol.

  Smokehorn.

  More and more Skin Eaters gathered about their fire as he spoke, including Sarl and Kiampas. Mimara sat with her head resting against Achamian's shoulder, her eyes lifted high and searching each time he glanced at her. The flames tossed and twined in the mountain wind, and he basked in its heated glow. Sinking from the clouds, the sun leaned hot and crimson against the mountains, before slipping behind the uneven teeth of the mountains, trailing a shrinking patina of gold, violet, and blue. The land was tossed to the horizon, slopes and sheer drops, growing ever more black.

  He told them about the Nonmen, the Cыnuroi, and the glory of their civilization in the First Age, when Men lived as savages and the Tusk had yet to be written. He told them about Cu'jara Cinmoi, the greatest of the Nonmen Kings, and the wars h
e fought against the Inchoroi, who had fallen in fire from the void, and how those wars left the survivors mateless and immortal, with no will to resist the Five Tribes of Men. And then he told them of the First Apocalypse.

  "If you want to look at the true ruin," he said, nodding to the barren knoll where the Captain sat alone with his inhuman lieutenant, "look no farther than your Cleric. Reduced. Dwindled. They were once to us as we are to Sranc. Indeed, for many among the Nonmen, we were little more."

  He described the Meцri Empire, the great White Norsirai nation that once had ruled all the lands on the Long Side of the mountains, as the Scalpoi called it, the wilderness that was their hunting grounds. He described its destruction at the hands of the No-God, and how the great hero, Nostol, fled south with the remnants of his people, and found refuge in the lands of Gin'yursis, the Nonman King of Cil-Aujas. He described how the two of them, hero and king, defeated the No-God and his Consult at Kathol Pass, and so purchased a year's respite for the entire world.

  "But what does it mean," he asked the faces about the fire, "when angels walk the very ground we trod? What does it mean to be mortally overshadowed, to toil in the dazzle of another race's glory? Do you admire? Do you bend knee and acknowledge? Or do you envy and hate?

  "Nostol and his Meцri kinsmen hated. Dispossessed, they coveted, and coveting, they maligned those they sought to rob. They did what all men do, you, me, throughout the entirety of our lives. They confounded need for justice, want for writ. They turned to the tangled strings of their scriptures and pulled out the threads that spoke to their fell ends."

  "Betrayal," Mimara murmured from his side.

  "Refuge," Achamian said. He then narrated the three versions of the tale as he knew them. In the first, Nostol instructed his chieftains and thanes to woo the Emwama concubines, the slaves the Nonmen used as substitutes for their long-dead wives. Nostol, he explained, hoped to incite the Nonmen to some act of violence, something he could use as a pretext to rally his people behind his planned atrocities. Apparently the Meцri were zealous in the prosecution of his orders, impregnating no less than sixty-three different concubines.