The Judging Eye (3 page)

As a Prince-Imperial, Kelmomas
often found himself overshadowed by armed men, but the walk unnerved him for
some reason. The smell was comforting at first: the perfumed muslin of their
surcoats, the oils they used to quicken their blades and soften the leather
straps of their harness. But with every step, the bitter-sweet bitumen of
unwashed bodies came more and more to the fore, punctuated by the reek of the
truly wretched. Murmurs rose like a haze about them.
"Bless-bless-bless,"
over and over, in a tone poised between asking and giving. Kelmomas found
himself staring past the towering guards, out across the landscape of kneelers.
He saw an old beggar, more husked than clothed, weeping, grinding his face
against the cobbles as though trying to blot himself out. He saw a girl only
slightly younger than himself, her head turned in sacrilege, so that she could
stare up at their monstrous passage. On and on the prostrate figures went, out
to distant foundations.

He walked across a living
ground.

And then he was among them,
in
them
, watching his own steps, little more than a jewelled shadow behind a
screen of merciless, chain-armoured men. A name. A rumour and a hope. A
god-child, suckled at the breast of Empire, anointed by the palm of Fate. A son
of the Aspect-Emperor.

They did not know him, he
realized. They saw, they worshipped, they
trusted
what they could not
fathom.

No one knows you,
the
secret voice said.

No one knows anyone.

He glanced at his mother, saw
the blank stare that always accompanied her more painful reveries.

"Are you thinking of her,
Mommy?" he asked. Between the two of them, "her" always meant
Mimara, her first daughter, the one she loved with the most desperation—and
hated.

The one the secret voice had
told him to drive away.

The Empress smiled with a kind
of sad relief. "I worry for your father and your brothers too."

This, Kelmomas could plainly
see, was a lie. She fretted for Mimara—even still, after all he had done.

Perhaps,
the voice said,
you
should have killed the bitch.

"When will Father return?"

He knew the answer at least as
well as she did, but at some level he understood that as much as mothers love
their sons, they loved
being mothers
as well—and being a mother meant
answering childish questions. They travelled several yards before she replied,
passing through a fog of pleas and whispers. Kelmomas found himself comparing
her to the countless cameos he had seen depicting her in her youth—back in the
days of the First Holy War. Her hips were wider, perhaps, and her skin not so
smooth beneath the veneer of white paint, but her beauty was legendary still.
The seven-year-old could scarce imagine anyone more beautiful.

"Not for some time,
Kel," she said. "Not until the Great Ordeal is completed."

He nearly clutched his breast,
such was the ache, the joy.

If he fails,
the secret
voice said,
he will die.

Anasûrimbor Kelmomas smiled what
seemed his first true smile of the day.

Kneelers all around, their backs
broken by awe. A plain of abject humanity.
"Bless-bless-bless,"
rising like whispers in a sick-house. Then a single, savage cry: "Curse!
Curse
!"

Somehow a madman managed to
plunge past the shields and blades, to reach out, punctured and failing, with a
knife that reflected shining sky. The Pillarian Guardsmen traded shouts. The
crowds heaved and screamed. The young boy glimpsed battling shadows.

Assassins.

CHAPTER ONE

Sakarpus

upon the high wall the
husbands slept,

while 'round the hearth their
women wept,

and fugitives murmured tales
of woe,

of greater cities lost to
Mog-Pharau...

—"The Refugee's Song,"
The Sagas

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132
Year-of-the-Tusk), The Kathol Passes

The tracks between whim and
brutality are many and inscrutable in Men, and though they often seem to cut
across the impassable terrain of reason, in truth, it is reason that paves
their way. Ever do Men argue from want to need and from need to fortuitous warrant.
Ever do they think their cause the just cause. Like cats chasing sunlight
thrown from a mirror, they never tire of their own delusions.

At the behest of their Holy
Aspect-Emperor, the priests of the Thousand Temples harangued their
congregations, and the Judges of the Ministrate scoured the land, seeking out
and destroying all those who would either dispute the Truth or choose avarice
over the mortal demands of the darkness to come. Everyone, whether caste-slave
or caste-noble, was taught the Great Chain of Missions, how the words and works
of each made possible the words and works of the other. They learned how Men,
all Men, warred all the time, whether tilling fields or loving their kin. All
lives, no matter how humble, were links that either fortified the Great Chain
or impaired it, leading to the First Ring, the link from which the world itself
hung: the Holy War against the apocalyptic designs of the Consult...

Or as it came to be called, the
Great Ordeal.

Never, not even in the days of
Far Antiquity, had the world seen the assembly of such a host.
Ten years
were
devoted to its preparation. To prevent the resurrection of the No-God, they had
to destroy his foul slaves, the Consult, and to destroy them, they had to march
the length of Eärwa, from the northern frontiers of the New Empire, across the
Sranc-infested Wilds of the Ancient North, all the way to their stronghold,
Golgotterath, which the Nonmen had called Min-Uroikas in days long dead, the
Pit of Obscenities.

It was a mad endeavour. Only
children and fools, who confused tales of war with war itself, could think the
task simple. For them, war was battle, and they always squinted in surprise
when veterans spoke of latrines and cannibalism and gangrenous feet and so on.
Even the most illustrious knights required food, as did the horses they rode,
as did the pack mules that carried the food, as did the slaves who served it.
Food was required to transport food—the problem was as simple as this. Without
some intensive system of supply—relays, depots, and the like—the amount
consumed would quickly exceed the amount carried. This was why the most arduous
battle waged by the Great Ordeal would not be against the Consult legions, but
against Eärwa's own wild heart. The host would have to survive the
distance
to
Golgotterath before it could be tested on the field.

For years, the New Empire
groaned beneath the demands of their holy sovereign's prophecy. Tithes of food
were exacted from all the provinces. Vast granaries were constructed above the
third cataract of the Vindauga River. Herds of sheep and cattle were driven
northward, along coastal trails that soon became favourite topics for court
minstrels. In the Home City, mathematicians scribbled indentures, summons,
requisitions, and Kings and Judges seized what was needed in faraway lands. The
records were stored in great mud-brick warehouses and cared for with the
fastidiousness of religious ritual. Everything was numbered.

The call to arms did not come
till the last.

Across the Three Seas the
Zaudunyani took up the Circumfix, the holy symbol of their Aspect-Emperor: the
knights of Conriya, masked and long-skirted, the disciplined columnaries of
Nansur, the axmen of Thunyerus, wild-haired and ferocious, the peerless
horsemen of Kian, and on and on. The sons of a dozen nations converged on
Oswenta, the hoary old capital of Galeoth, bearing rough-painted or finely
wrought representations of the Tusk and Circumfix. The sorcerous Schools sent
their contingents as well: the haughty magi of the Scarlet Spires, borne in
their silk-panelled litters, the dour witches of the Swayal Compact, the robed
processions of the Imperial Saik, and, of course, the Gnostic sorcerers of the
Mandate, who had been raised from fools to priests by the coming of the
Warrior-Prophet.

The children of Oswenta
marvelled. In streets choked with newcomers, they saw Nilnameshi princes in
their palanquins, Ainoni Count-Palatines with their white-painted retinues,
religious madmen of every description, and once, even a towering mastodon that
sent horses bolting like dogs. They saw all the ornament, all the pomp and
demonstration of ancient and faraway customs, thrown together and made a
carnival. The bowl of each nation had spilled, and now their distinct and heady
flavours swirled together, continually surprising the palette with some
unheard-of combination. Long-bearded Tydonni throwing the number-sticks with
wire-limbed Khirgwi. Kutnarmi monkeys climbing the gowns of Shigeki witches.

A summer and an autumn passed
organizing the host. Though a generation had come and gone, the Aspect-Emperor
and his advisers remembered well the lessons of the First Holy War. The
Unification Wars, with their setbacks and victories and butchered cities, had
produced a corps of shrewd and ruthless Zaudunyani officers, all of whom were
made Judges and granted the power of life and death over the faithful.
Trespasses were not forgiven—too much hung in the balance for the Shortest Path
not to be taken. Mercy required a certain future, and for Men, there was none.
Two Consult skin-spies were discovered, thanks to the divine insight of the
Aspect-Emperor and his children. They were flayed before booming, riotous
masses.

The Great Ordeal wintered at the
headwaters of the Vindauga River, in the city of Harwash, which had been an
entrepot for the Twelve-Pelt Road, the famed caravan route connecting Galeoth
to the ancient and isolate cities of Sakarpus and Atrithau, but was now little
more than a vast barracks and supply depot. The season was hard. Despite all
the precautions, dread Akkeägni, Disease, fondled the host with his Many Hands,
and some twenty thousand souls were lost to a version of lung-plague common to
the humid rice plains of Nilnamesh.

It was, the Aspect-Emperor explained,
but the first of many tests.

The days began to thaw what the
nights yet froze. Preparations intensified. The order to march was a fervent
occasion of tears and joyous shouts. There is a taste to these things. The
wills of men coalesce, become one, and the
air knows
. The God did not
only create the created, He created the
act
of creation as well, the
souls that dwell within men. Should it be any surprise that the world of things
answered the world of intents? The Great Ordeal marched, and the very earth,
rising from dreary winter slumber, bent knee and rejoiced. The Men of the
Ordeal could feel it: an approving world, a judging world.

The host advanced in two stages.
King Saubon of Caraskand, one of the Holy War's two Exalt-Generals, marched
first, taking the quicker elements of the host—the Kianene, the Girgashi, the
Khirgwi, and the Shrial Knights—and none of the slower, which included the
sorcerous Schools. The Aspect-Emperor's second eldest son, Anasûrimbor Kayûtas,
rode with him, leading the famed Kidruhil, the most celebrated heavy calvary
cohort in the Three Seas. The Sakarpic host melted away before them, leaving
only several companies of Long-Riders, their fleet and devious skirmishers, to
harass their advance. The decisive engagement the Exalt-General hoped for never
happened.

King Proyas of Conriya, the
Ordeal's other Exalt-General, followed with the bulk of the host. Jubilant, the
Men of the New Empire marched into the Kathol Passes, which formed the armature
of two great mountains ranges, the Hethantas to the west and the Osthwai to the
east. The column was too long for any real communication between its forward
and rear elements—no rider could press through the masses quickly enough. The
scarps climbed to either side, stacked to the timberline.

It snowed the fourth night, when
the priests and judges led ceremonies commemorating the Battle of the Pass,
where an ancient alliance of refugee Men and the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas had
defeated the No-God in the First Apocalypse, so purchasing the World a year of
precious respite. Nothing was said of the subsequent betrayal and the
extermination of the Nonmen at the hands of those they had saved.

They sang of their devotion, the
Men of the Ordeal, heartbreaking hymns composed by the Aspect-Emperor himself.
They sang of their own might, of the doom they would deliver to the faraway
gates of their enemy. They sang of their wives, their children, about the
smaller pockets of the wider world they marched to save. In the evenings, the
great bell they called the Interval tolled, and the Singers cried out the calls
to prayer, their sweet voices rising across the far-flung fields of tents and
pavillions. Hard men shed their gear and gathered beneath Circumfix banners.
Noble knelt with slave or menial. The Shrial Priests gave their sermons and
benedictions, and the Judges watched.

They spent several days filing
through the final stages of the Pass, then descended the sill of the mountains.
They crossed the thawing fields of Sagland, where the retreating Sakarpi had
burned anything that could be of use to them. Overmatched, the King of Sakarpus
had no recourse save the ancient and venerable weapon of hunger.