The Judging eye ta-1

by R. Scott Bakker

  Smoke blown from the bonfires of domination.

  She cries out… Something more plea than prayer.

  But Oxwora has barrelled out of nowhere, crashing shoulder against shield into the creature's gut, bearing it back and down. The Thunyeri grunts in human savagery, sets to with his axe, hacking and hewing. But a Sranc leaps upon his back, drives its blade into his neck. The giant scalper cries out and arches, lets slip the haft of his axe. He catches the thing in his free hand, lifts it squealing and choking-

  Only to drop it, speared in the gut by another Sranc. He staggers to his knees, then miraculously heaves back to his feet. Blood spills from his lips like wine from a bowl, mats his flaxen beard. His eyes cloud, but his face still snarls in rage. He seizes the spear holder in a back-breaking embrace, topples upon it as though hugging a child.

  The choked one has turned to Mimara. It grimaces at her trembling blade, its face bunched into a crazed sneer, as though its skin were merely wrapped about, not anchored to, the slick bone beneath. Its loincloth has twisted into a rope, and its phallus arches against its corselet, quivering. Rape floats through its glittering black eyes.

  Her body becomes thick with the blood it aches to spill.

  Then it's gone, swatted into the gloom as if struck by some immense and invisible club. Over the Bashrag's humped corpse, she glimpses Achamian on his knees, his mouth and eyes incandescent.

  She looks wildly about, sensing the onrush of more Chorae. All is screaming panic among the mules and shouting disorder among the scalpers. She sees Pokwas dancing with his great tulwar, cutting against a cat-shrieking tide of Sranc: Lord Kosoter braced, stabbing around his shield, puncturing necks and faces and armpits. She glimpses Cleric riding the shoulders of another Bashrag down, his greatsword buried in the monstrosity's eye.

  And she thinks, Ishroi…

  "Hold to!" Kiampas cries. "Hold to!" The javelin that takes him in the mouth doesn't seem to move so much as appear, a black skewer through his head. He falls backward, nailed to the other wet shadows in the periphery of her panicked attention.

  One of the mules has caught fire… Gold light washes across what was wicked and dark.

  "Mimara!"

  Achamian has her by the arm. He jerks her back, unguessed iron in his old man grip. She sees one of the young Galeoth crouched, teeth gritted as he tries to wrench a javelin from his thigh. She sees another Bashrag stomping into the scalpers, hammering them aside like effigies of straw. It begins hacking into the mules, whips of blood arcing. The beasts fly apart in scrambling disorder, as though scattering from the plunge of something on high. She sees Bastion, his haunches rent, hoof-skidding beneath the lurching monstrosity. The axe catches the hump of his neck. She sees his head fold back on a glistening flank, vanish beneath the body as he crumples forward.

  "We've lost this battle!" the old Wizard is crying. Blood flecks his beard, little rubies caught between coarse strands. Only now does she notice the Ward about them, an unearthly curvature.

  "Toe to the line!" Sarl is screaming. Does any line remain?

  Sranc throw themselves against the spectral screens, thrashing, shields smoking, skin blistering, blades scraping sparks. She clutches the old Wizard, stares in something too numb to be fear or terror. Starved and hairless. Draped in flayed skins laced with iron rings. They are hunger. They are horror. They are the quick that renders hatred vicious in Men.

  She hears the Wizard's sorcerous call through his chest-the birth of his words. Incandescent lines flare from his palms, strike along the Emwama Wall, begin scissoring to his gesticulations.

  White light carves the darkness deep. The Sranc jerk and scream and burn.

  Then one of them simply steps through the Ward, swinging a sword of rotted iron. For mere heartbeats the Chorae have floated out there, little abyssal holes, long enough for her to have forgotten. She raises Squirrel in time, though her arm numbs at the concussion. The rabid creature howls, punches Achamian with its free hand, the one cramped about the Trinket…

  The Wizard falls backward, rolling along her slack arm. The Sranc swings its blade up and about…

  Her sword and her lunge are a single being. The point catches the obscenity in the windpipe. It gags, throws clawed fingers to its throat. The Chorae drops to the floor.

  She does not see the Sranc fall kicking through the fading Ward.

  Chorae. Tear of God. Trinket…

  It wrenches the eyes even to glance at it, to see both the plain iron ball tacked in Sranc blood and the pit that scries into oblivion. She clutches it, she who is not yet cursed, presses it against her breast and bodice. Nausea wrings her like a wineskin. The vomit surprises her mouth, her teeth.

  Something strikes her and she blinks, suddenly on her hands and knees, coughing, retching. Darkness swirls, as though it were a liquid chasing cracks in the light. And she understands with graven finality… No one recognizes their own death. It comes inevitable and absolute.

  It comes as a stranger.

  Achamian grimaced, blinked at the sting that was the only thing he could feel. Tears or blood or sweat, it did not matter. He knew he was sprawled across the floor, the back of his head caught in a crook in the engravings across the Emwama Wall. He knew his life was over. He knew these things, but in the manner of whims or idle reveries. What was hard had become detached, ghostly. The world had lost its needling grit, and all substance had fled to abstractions.

  He could see the regions about him greased in dingy torchlight: his legs as immovable as the mountain, the slump of the girl, the verges of the inhuman killing floor. But beyond…

  His eyes climbed into blackness.

  "Seju! Kellah! Fuck!"

  Eyes wincing at blood. Head rolling. Her heart fluttering against the bourne of oblivion. Glances of a nightmare existence.

  "Did you see Cleric? Did you see him?"

  "Sweet Kellah, would you just fucking grab her?"

  "Come, boys. Quickly. Quickly."

  "What's wrong with his face?"

  "Just salt. From the Tears of Go-"

  "Enough with the fucking questions! Move-move!"

  Shadows consult. Pain presses the first of its many pins into her skull. Arms hoist her like a basket against a scale-armoured chest. Tears and torchlight make gold and water of her bearer's face. But she recognizes the smell: myrrh through the reek of entrails…

  Soma.

  He is a landmark, and the lay of her circumstances comes crashing back to her. "Akka!" she croaks. They are running with wounded haste, a meagre party of nine or ten or maybe more. Soma tells her to clutch his neck, raises her chin to his shoulder. Between ragged breaths, he tells her the Wizard lives but that they know no more. She can feel the Chorae between their two hearts. He explains how she's lucky to be alive, how a Sranc javelin had capped her. He begins naming the fallen.

  But she's no longer listening. A lick of hair has dropped past her brow, threading the blood from her eyes to her cheek and lips. They are running along the Emwama Wall, and she can see their lost position in the light of a single remaining torch, the wreckage of Men and Sranc and mules. She sees one of their number limp-running, becoming slower and more precarious with every step. She sees him wobble, skid to his knees. She sees the Captain farther back, sprinting alone, a shimmering silhouette against the torchlight. She sees him raise his sword to strike the laggard down.

  And beyond, in the distance, as though peering into a well without walls, she sees Cleric shining, afire in sorcerous light. Javelins explode like birds against the curve of his Wards. Sranc throng and heave before him, cut and rent by the glittering fury of his song. Three Bashrag close with him, stump-haired obscenities that lurch untouched through weaving geometries of incandescence, each bearing echoes of the absence that pockets her left breast. The Nonman leaps out of their monstrous reach, sails into the midst of more Sranc, his sword falling in an oblique arc. Sorcerous lines mirror his every stroke, and smoke spits from everything they trace. The very air seems
to shriek. White light etches the pillared hollows of the gallery, the graven vaults, the panelled surfaces, revealing a floor clotted with hosts of Sranc, aisle after aisle, packed as thick as wind-tossed wheat…

  And Cleric laughs and sings and exacts his dread toll, the last heir to Cil-Aujas.

  The Emwama Wall comes to an end. Soma turns with the fugitive party into the dark. Stonework draws across the mad scene, blotting the horror and the glory with the desperate practicalities of flight.

  And she thinks, Incariol…

  Flee.

  She has heard and read the word many times; she has even pretended to have lived it. Did she not flee her mother? Did she not flee the ingrown strife of the Andiamine Heights?

  No.

  Fleeing is when terror digs across you like a million ticks. Fleeing is when you run so hard the very air begins to strangle. Fleeing is when the howls of your pursuers cut the nerves from your skin. Fleeing is when you listen to the others balk at carrying the Wizard, and a slow heartbeat of doubt passes where you wonder whether the old man might stall your hunters, like silver kelics thrown to a mob of beggars.

  Fleeing is when all the world's directions crash into one…

  Away.

  The mazed depths of Cil-Aujas humour them. No gates bar their way. No collapses pinch their path into a fatal cul-de-sac. Like a miracle, every black threshold opens onto yet another hallway.

  Away! Away!

  They have two torches between them. One quickly sputters into black. When the corridors tighten, she is so short that all she sees of their light is its stark tumble across the ceilings. All else is glint and innuendo. Blood-slicked shoulders. Notched blades. Soaked tourniquets. Now and again she glimpses profiles: Sarl chewing his lips, a kind of shock-senility blearing his eyes. Achamian lolling unconscious, his cheek and temple caked in a tree-cancer white. Pokwas swatting tears, his looks pinned to his periphery…

  Only Lord Kosoter has carried his inscrutability away intact. He and Soma, who has not let go her hand since she began running on her own. Time and again her glances find him: She had not thought him the equal of this enormity. There is a wrath in his look, grim and unconquerable. His eyes have become beacons of his caste-nobility.

  They run so fast with so little light that they see only the kick of the dust and nothing of the hanging haze. But they know the trail they leave is mortally obvious. They see nothing of their pursuers-they can scarce see themselves-but they can hear them baying through the halls: an infernal chorus of shrieks and shrill yapping, frothing up behind them, outrunning their panicked gait, filtering through the dark halls about and before them, so that every other moment echoes trick them into turning or spiralling down ancient stairs.

  Once again the horns swell through the deeps, a yawing menace. The rumble fills them, thins them with terror, until they become rags blown on a dread wind. The halls and the vaults and the graven panels flash into sight and fall into oblivion. Men moan and cry.

  They are all sobbers now. Doom creeps like lead into their limbs, so that they lurch against their own bulk. Doom ignites the air, so that they hack with furnace lungs. Doom shreds their thoughts, so that they become flying fragments, souls that break and crumble with every jerk and turn.

  They don't even pause when the bronze door leaps into the torchlight, but throw themselves against it, wailing and cursing. It slaps them back. Pokwas drives a spear into the aperture, begins prying. Mimara stares without breath or thought at the shackled nudes stamped across it-more Emwama slaves. Galian, Xonghis, and the others turn to the curtains of blackness behind them, to the concentrating clamour. Lord Kosoter seizes her by the back of the neck, throws her at the unconscious Wizard. She needs no explanation. She clutches Achamian's cheeks, sobs at the rasp of salt against her right palm. "Akka!" she cries. "Akka! Akka! We need you!"

  His eyes flutter.

  The haft of the spear snaps. Pokwas shouts something in his native tongue, begins punching blood from his fists. The dust of their exertions clouds the torchlight, chalks their mouths.

  "Akka! Akka, please!"

  The roar is palpable, a pang shivering out from the graven walls. The Chorae leans like an ache against her heart.

  "Here they come!" Galian cries.

  "Akka! Akka! Wake up! Seju damn you! Wake up!"

  Then, like a vision, a figure trots out of the blackness…

  Cleric.

  The scalpers stumble back, bewildered and horrified. Awash in Sranc blood, his skin and armour are filmed in soaked dust. Basalt dark, he looks like an apparition. Cil-Aujas made animate.

  He laughs at the astounded Men, waves Pokwas from the door. His sorcerous murmur makes a deep-water pop in Mimara's ears. His eyes and mouth flare white, and something, a flickering wave of force, shimmers through the air. There is a deafening crack; the bronze doors fly ajar.

  "Time to run," the Nonman says, his voice miraculously audible through the screeching roar.

  With awe too brittle to be hope, the survivors scramble into the blackness beyond the bronze rim.

  Down. Down. Down to more guttural stone.

  Gone are the image-pitted walls, level floors, and barrelled ceilings. They race through rough-hewn tunnels, so deep, so near the mountain's root, even the air seems compressed. The chapped rock becomes hot to the touch, like stone just drawn from a fire's perimeter. And the air moves, always hot, always against them, as though they chase the source of some endless exhalation. A sulphurous tincture bitters their tongues.

  They have entered the mines, she realizes, the toil of a thousand human generations, slaves begetting slaves, dredging holy nimil for their Nonman masters. And the Sranc host pours after them, lunging down straights, bursting from bottlenecks, somehow seeing by bark and scream. They are closing, so much the scalpers can hear the whisk of their claws, the clap and scrape of their weapons, the sputum boiling through their cries. The company is a skiff twirling and slipping on the edge of a breaking wave. And yet the sheer fury and numbers of their pursuers seem to slow them, to draw them out in wild ropes. Several times Cleric stops to face them, leaving the scalpers with the rush-ragged gloom of their only torch. They hear his laughter booming behind them, the whisper of his sorcery whirring through their bones, the clack and rumble of unimaginable weights. But the fear is that the Sranc will range out ahead through the worming of parallel tunnels. So the Captain veers left and down at every fork, hoping to scatter them in the mazed deeps.

  And the world piles higher and higher above them.

  Her throat leathers for gasping. The heat drugs her exhaustion, makes her fall as much as run, chasing stride after drunken stride with her boots. She has fallen behind herself. A sensation soaks through her, so warm, so consoling it seems sacred, a kind of revelatory horror, bodiless and floating and so heartbreakingly clear. She has thrown herself to the ends of terror and will, and nothing remains but to pirouette and plummet…

  She has run to the very edge of Away.

  Forgive me…

  The hard things have become water; only the ground can break her. She falls, more sack than human. She even lacks the strength to raise her hands. Grit pummels her face. Dust burns her gums.

  The Sranc will have her, and she will die, speared by their brutalities.

  Forgive me, Mother.

  She hears shouts, rage wrung into weeping. She smells myrrh…

  She is thrown across a broad chest, hung like dripping cloth from arms.

  "You will not perish for me!" She hears his voice rasp. "I'll carry you across the doors of hell! Do you hear me? Mimara! Do you hear me?"

  She reaches for his cheek, but her hand is a stone swinging from a string.

  She lets her head carry her eyes where it will. It jolts and rolls to the rhythm of his exertions-only the mailed crook of his arm, it seems, prevents it from spinning free. The fissures across the walls and ceiling scrawl and arc and cross and explode into pits and crags. The scalpers sprint and toil, their figures bent by tear
s and angles, paced by a gliding palm of light. The Wizard slumps between two of them, his toes scratching furrows through the sand, kicking up against butts of stone.

  The passage dips and twists in a dog-tail bend, ending, miraculously, in a maw of pumpkin orange, waxing as bright as a horizon-scorching sun. The sight of it stiffens her neck, and for a time she simply stares, watching the shadows of the company wander across its luminous expanse.

  "Light," she murmurs. "Wh-what?"

  "Light," Soma croaks in affirmation. "We don't know."

  "Cleric?"

  "Lost. Behind us."

  Suddenly she feels the heat felting the air, making ash out of emptiness. It seems she has always sensed it, only as a shadow through the slick-skin chill of unconsciousness.

  The world sets its hooks deep, ever drawing souls tight across its infinite contours. Circumstances are reborn, and hearts are renewed. A spark throbs through her gutted muscles, returns slack extremities to her will. She glances at the man bearing her-Soma, stripped of his earnest foolery-and it seems she is a child in a swing.

  She knows that he loves her.

  Light, luxuriant and smoking. The tunnel opens like the mouth of a battered horn. A hiss that had escaped their hearing crashes into a gasping roar. An all-burning stench lies in the air like a sting in the skin. They stumble down slopes of fiery gravel-the bowl of a ruined amphitheatre, she realizes-staring agog at the ravines that hang in the distances above them, cliffs piled upon cliffs, their bellies braised in smouldering crimson. Below them, at the base of the amphitheatre's ruined tiers, a hemisphere of pillars, roofless cripples, enclose a terrace covered in wrack. Light rims the brink, blackens heaped foundations. Sulphur crabs the backs of their throats. The air undulates with heat.