The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  The columns are square, panelled in more animal manifolds, and even though she can see only the lower and outer limits of them, she knows they form great aisles across the darkness, that the company stands in some underworld forum or agora. Achamian is leaning against his knees next to her, staring into his shadow, mustering the spit to swallow. His teeth bared in exhaustion, he bends his head back, looks to the looming gallery.

  "The High Halls," he gasps. "The High Halls of Mы-"

  Haroo oooooooooooom!

  Men twist and whirl about. The dust shivers. The sound seems to filter, to rise, as though they can only hear what mounts the surface of their ears. Sranc horns.

  They feel it in their teeth-not so much an ache as a taste.

  Never before has she heard them, and now she understands their antique power, the madness that saw mothers strangle their own children in besieged cities of yore. Their depth is tidal in its compass, yet riddled with thin and piercing notes, like a shriek unbraided into wincing threads, each towed wide across the unnameable. A portent hangs within them, a promise of what is other and impenetrable, of things that would glory in her lament. They remind her of her humanity the way burnt edges speak of fire.

  Temple silence rises in their wake. There is a distant sound-like leaves skidding over marble flagstones. It seems to tighten her skin to the prick of moments passing.

  Cleric calls, and they follow. They leave the fallen mule where it lays grunting.

  They run, but the slow succession of pillars seems to diminish their pace. Their arcane lights throw shadows that swing and sweep out with monumental elegance. The greater blackness hangs from them, shrouding the hollows beyond the adjacent aisles.

  The horns have a swelling nearness to them now, a cracking blare. Only the stone forest of columns divides them from their pursuers-she knows this with a herd animal's certainty. For the first time a part of her dares believe that she's about to die. Her bowels loosen to the jolt of her steps. Her stomach tightens to a burn. She throws her gaze wildly about, desperate to find something that she doesn't recognize. For it seems to her that she has known this place all along, that her soul, like an old knot undone, bears the kink and imprint of her future… The pillars braced against cataclysmic burdens. The bestial totems, their many limbs flattened into the dark. The stink of her exertions. The sense of loss and mortal misdirection. The gnashing of teeth and iron in the arching maze of black behind her…

  They are coming. Out of the pit they are coming. The flutter of reverberations in her chest seems to confirm it. This is where she dies.

  The outer reaches of their lights flatten against a wall, roll back the vertical murk with twin rings of illumination, the one wider and brighter because of Cleric's position out in front of Achamian. Mimara stumps to a stop with the others. The dust rolls forward, makes skirts about their waists. She cranes her neck, absently rubbing a stitch in her side-despite her terror she is relieved to simply breathe. Narrative reliefs band the wall, stacking high into the darkness, but the graven figures are not carved nearly so deep or so realistically as so the others. A heartbeat passes before she sees the hair and beards and chains that mark the forms as Men.

  All at once, her earlier sense of recognition drains away. Only the premonition remains.

  She has read enough to know these are not just any Men. They are the original Men of Eдrwa, the Emwama, the slaves exterminated by her ancestors in the earliest days of the Tusk. She can even see a woman bound to a train of naked captives-a woman that could be her. And for some reason, this point of connection strikes a nauseating note through the whole of Cil-Aujas, renders it alien to the point of revulsion, as though all of it had been smeared with reek and contagion…

  They are coming. And she is just a child-a child! Everything everywhere chatters with dread and threat. Angles become knives. Inaction becomes blood. A mad part of her kicks and bucks and screams. Her shriek bunches like a fist at the base of her throat. She must get out. She has to…

  Out-out-out!

  But the old Wizard is holding her by the shoulders, telling her not to fear, not to fret, but to trust in his heart and his power. "You want me to teach?" he cries. "I will give you such a lesson!" His laugh is almost genuine.

  No sobbers, his eyes warn her. Remember!

  Her breathing becomes both easier and more difficult after that, and she finds herself wary of the Captain. The mere thought of him has scared the panic from her-this, she realizes, is his warlike Gift. All about her the Skin Eaters assemble, shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder, forming a single rank around her and the mules. They look motley with their different heights and scavenged armour… Motley and fierce.

  "Toe to the line!" Sarl cries across the horn's thundering back. "Come now, boys, toe to the line!"

  Suddenly all the reasons she feared these barbaric men become reasons to prize them. Those hoary trophies. Those deep-chested bodies, girt with chain, leather, stink, and soiled cloth. That bullying saunter. Those wide-swinging arms, with hands that could break her wrists. And for some strange reason, their fingernails, each as broad as two of her own, rimmed in black crescents. Everything she had scoffed at or despised she now sees with thin-lipped understanding. The glib cruelty. The vulgar posturing. Even the glares that nicked her when she was careless with the cast of her eyes.

  These are Skin Eaters, and their slogs are the stuff of legend. They would eat her if they could-but only because they walk so near the world's teeth.

  She hears Achamian arguing with Kiampas on the far side of two stamping mules. "We should have stayed in the Repositorium…"

  "But here we can choke them in the aisles."

  "And those with the Chorae?"

  The Nansur's grin is haphazard, as though hooked by a hard-to-see scar. His jaw, normally clean-shaven, is spackled grey. "Trifles, Wizard. Believe you me, we know how to stack skinnies…"

  The man trails, cocks his head to the sudden quiet.

  The horns have stopped.

  The silence, she knows, is the silence they have marched through since entering the Obsidian Gate, the silence of their shutting in, the silence of corpses in their tombs. The ageless roar of Cil-Aujas.

  Her limbs seem buoyant for the thickness of it.

  All this time she has simply stood witless amid the mules. Now Kiampas is before her, issuing instructions-stay with the animals, keep the torches, staunch wounds by pressing like this-and asking questions-Do you know how to bind a tourniquet? Can you use that pretty sword? He peers into her eyes with calming seriousness, speaks only to the point. He is a handsome father. She answers him as honestly as she can. In her periphery she sees Achamian conferring with Cleric and the Captain. Sarl continues barking at his line, his gravelly voice recalling slogs gone by. "Oh, yes, boys, this is going to be a chopper. A classic chopper!"

  She unpacks the torches and wedges five of them at intervals along the wall using chiselled hollows in the friezes. She strikes a sixth and it flares with curious transparency-violet wrapping into yellow-in the arcane light, but burns and smokes all the same. She lights all five, and the engraved Emwama seem to glow with the colours of their long-lost life. She walks among the restless mules, running her hands across the bristle of their necks, scratching their jaws and ears, and it seems that she mourns them.

  Their small army falls motionless. The twin Surillic Points lean white against the engraved planes of the nearest columns, dwindle in grey stages the farther they reach down the lanes. Though soundless, the light seems to hiss with suspense.

  The Skin Eaters have formed a bristling shell some thirty men strong, reaching from the wall, about their beasts of burden, back to the wall. Lord Kosoter stands just behind the apex, rigid with solitary concentration. With his plaited beard and tattered finery he almost looks as ancient as Cil-Aujas. His round shield, which she has seen many times hanging from a mule pack, is dented and scored. Barely legible across its centre are the enamel remains of an Ainoni pictogram: the word "u
mra," which in Ainoni means both duty and discipline. He holds his sword pointed down to his side. She sees he has drawn a quarter arc through the dust across the stone. Because he wears his Chorae over his heart, she cannot shake the sense that he's not quite alive.

  Achamian stands with Kiampas at his side several paces to the Captain's left. Cleric stands likewise with Sarl to his right. Their Marks remind her of their power, and their company's hope.

  Still holding the torch, she draws her sword: a Gift from her mother, forged of the finest Seleukaran steel. The disparate lights slip like liquid across its sheen. Squirrel, she calls it, because of the way it always seemed to tremble in her hand. It trembles now. She tries to remember all the years she spent training with her half-brothers, but the glow of the Andiamine Heights cannot penetrate this deep place… Nothing can.

  "They come," the Nonman says, his black eyes as inscrutable as the darkness they plumb.

  Mimara expects to feel the Chorae weaving out in the black. Instead she hears something, a nail-against-stone scratching that spreads like flood-water across the unseen spaces, reaching wider and higher until it seems the company stands in the piped centre of a gnawed bone…

  Louder. Louder. A reek steams into the air, like the rot of inhuman mouths.

  Her hand burns for squeezing her sword's pommel.

  "Just as the Captain said," Sarl rasps. "Skinnies." He shoots a pointed look at Kiampas, every wrinkle grinning with his greasy lips.

  "Remind me how much I hate this," Galian says to no one in particular.

  "Like a knife up the bung?" Xonghis asks.

  "No. Worse."

  "I thought it was the knife too," Soma says.

  "No," Pokwas replies. "It was beating your scrotum with, ah… thistles, right?"

  "Exactly," Galian says, nodding sagely. "Like beating my pouch with thistles. My poor pretty pouch."

  "Yes-yes," Xonghis snorts. He bangs his helm with the flat of his sword.

  "Just think of all the gold," Somandutta replies-always the lackwit. Poor Soma.

  "Pfah!" Pokwas cries, scowling. "Hard to spend it when the whores are busy laughing at his flayed hard-boileds, now isn't it?"

  She feels a tick of sweat every time they utter that word. Whore.

  Galian nods once again, this time as if at some tragic human truth. "The sluts laugh enough as it is."

  They speak more to their terror than to one another, she realizes. Ever do men play the mummer, strutting on the stage of themselves to avoid the parts the world has assigned them. Women would speak of their fear.

  "My ass itches," the giant Oxwora suddenly announces. "Does anyone have an itchy ass?"

  "Just aim it the other way," Galian calls back. "I'm sure the skinnies will oblige you."

  A wave of snorts and guffaws passes through the line.

  "Aye. But then my ass would stink!"

  An almost crazed outburst of laughter, one that catches fear as fuel, blotting the sounds of the scabrous onrush…

  "Soma!" the giant cries. "You pare your nails! Lend me your pretty finger, would you?"

  And the laughter is doubled.

  Old Sarl calls through it in a gravelly voice. "May I remind you boys that our lives are in mortal danger!" His grin, however, belies his approval.

  Lord Kosoter stands motionless.

  Distracted, Mimara doesn't see Achamian stepping to the fore of the line. When she glimpses him, her heart opens into something that clutches, that claws. She opens her mouth to call him back, but her breath has fallen through the bottom of her. She fears she might swoon, so frail he looks beneath the towering blackness, so exposed!

  But he's already speaking, and in a voice that slaps the remaining laughter from the scalpers' mouths. Even the nearing roar seems to falter. A Ward cups the spaces immediately before him, a lens of bluish light. A cerulean glare limns his white hair and wolf-skin cloak; he suddenly looks the Gnostic Wizard he is.

  One of the Surillic Points goes dark, and an increment of grimness shadows everything. Kiampas cries for a torch. Numb to the fingertips, she wades through the mules, hands him the one she carries, then returns to fetch another, which she lights by touching to the centre-most torch on the wall. She turns in time to see the sergeant heave the torch down the aisle in front of the Wizard. It pockets the dark with a ring of stark gold…

  She glimpses something crouch in and out of the blackness, something white and snarling and shiny-thin. She wraps her sword arm around the nearest mule's neck, hugs the beast tight. "Bastion," she calls him, without knowing the why or the where of the name. "Bastion…" She cares not who thinks her a fool!

  The darkness itself seems to rasp and chip and clank and wheeze. Inhuman barks ring across the unseen ceilings.

  She sees Cleric stride through the line to Achamian's right. His cloak cast away, he stands planked in silvery armour, plates skirted in impossibly fine chain, his greatsword swinging from his left hip. Ishroi, she thinks, recalling Achamian's word from earlier. The Nonman joins the smaller Wizard in his arcane chanting. Deep words well up out of the root of things, so indecipherable they seem to yank at her eyes.

  Above her, the remaining Point fades like an errant thought, and the company is reduced to the roiling glitter of torchlight. The eternal dark of Cil-Aujas closes about them.

  The glow of sorcery paints all their faces.

  Mimara is already running to Kiampas when he calls her, the remaining torches hugged tight to her breast. One by one she lights them, tries to purse the tremor from her lips while he heaves them with athletic violence into the dark. They arc high enough to brush the vaults with fluttering visibility. Some fall and spark across vacant floor. Two roll to the brink of the shrouded horde, providing the merest of glimpses: swords of notched iron held dowsing low, wet eyes glittering, white limbs folding into the black. The last chips a graven visage, then twirls blue down into the hunched midst of them. She glimpses a clutch of white faces, Nonmen faces, only pinched into grotesque parodies of expression.

  Canine shadows stamp the torch into oblivion.

  She stumbles back to Bastion, pulls his head to her breast. The dull immovability of the beast heartens her for some reason, soothes the quaking from her limbs. She whispers in his ear, congratulates him for his idiot bravery. Before her stands Lord Kosoter, unmoved, unmoving, the knots of his caste-noble braid gleaming down the cleft of his splint-armoured back. The line of his Skin Eaters reaches out to either side, and over their shields, she glimpses fragments of Cleric and Achamian, little more than silhouettes against the curved planes of their Wards.

  She feels the Chorae… pinpricks of nothingness fanning across the far dark.

  The horns caw through the black. The underworld horde surges forward, overruns the torches and their pools of fallow light. She glimpses a tide of howling faces and septic swords and dog-ribbed torsos-

  Living light glitters out to meet them.

  The two magi shout into the gibbering thunder, the one high and human, the other low and booming. Blinding lines spoke the air, their precision too beautiful to be true. The aisles beneath the columns are writ with theorems and axioms, Quyan and Gnostic, and the frenzied onslaught breaks beneath them, collapses into slops and severings. Basalt planes burst. Blood gouts. Flame dazzles.

  The two magi shout into the shrieking thunder… The nearest column crumbles at the ankle, at once implodes and topples, and the scalpers cry out in terror. Gravel and debris rain smoke across the Wards. The sorcerous lines hiss through rolling plumes of dust. They parse and measure the open expanses, dissect the heaving mass, Sranc packed as tight as worms, their Nonman faces screeching back, waving like festival palms, thrashing like dogs in the jaws of lions.

  Another column collapses, and Mimara thinks she hears Achamian screaming, "Nooooo!" through the mountainous clacking. Cleric's maniacal laugh rides the clamour.

  A stench rains across them. Sranc blood, she realizes. Burning.

  She sees only fractions through a
nd over the scalpers, lightning glimpses. Baying mobs. Brilliant geometries sawing. Heaped tangles of dead. She feels the first Chorae bearer before she sees it, the forward plummet of absence and anathema… Several in the line cry out.

  "Not one knee cracks!" Sarl screams in blood-raw tones. "Do you hear me? Not one knee!"

  The old Wizard scrambles back through the line, blunders into Kiampas. He's crying new Cants and Wards before he's even recovered his balance… " yioh mihiljoi cuhewa aijiru… "

  "Bashrag!" a scalper cries. "Seju! Sweet Seju!"

  Even as the word registers, she sees it, a shadow stamping through the smoking dead, towering over the seething rush, as high at the waist as men are at the shoulder.

  "Not! One! Knee!"

  The eyes have rules. They are bred to the order of things and mutiny when exposed to violations. At first she can only blink. Even though she has read innumerable descriptions of the obscenity, the meat of it overwhelms her faculties. Elephantine proportions. Cabbage skin. Amalgam limbs, three arms welded into one arm, three legs into one leg. Moles like cancers, ulcerous with hair. A back bent in a fetal hunch. Hands that flower with fingers.

  The Bashrag charges the scalpers, its swiftness contradicting the trampling shamble that is its gait. The Men raise shouts and arms. A spear snaps against the hauberk of crude iron scales draping its midsection. Its axe falls with the force of siege-engines, cleaving shield and arm and chest before the momentum of the iron becomes the momentum of the man and the two slap into the floor. It bats aside the scalper to the right. It throws the dead man high in raising its axe, like soaked cloth from a hammer, leaps roaring toward the old Wizard. Achamian shrinks behind his useless Wards.

  Mimara is already charging. Squirrel is out, a glittering arc that catches the abomination below the elbow. The steel cuts true. Bone cracks. Severed muscle snaps into knots beneath the hide. But only one of the limb's three spokes is undone.

  The Bashrag wags its great head in a mucus-plucking roar. The vestigal faces across its cheeks grimace with their own musculature. The skulls bound to its hair make a wooden clatter. It turns to her, the lower lids of each eye drawn to the pink by the weeping sockets below. It bares its misbegotten teeth. There is a moment of animal recognition. The truth of predator and prey hangs like possibility in the air between them. It raises its axe to the popping of ill-joined bones, and it seems that here, in the moment of her death, all justice stands revealed…