The Judging Eye (42 page)

"We are all Sons of Nostol.
We all bear the stamp of his frailty."

***

The following morning revealed
cloudless skies, the clarity measured in the concave spine of the mountains
fading to purple as they reached into the horizon, the cold measured in the
white that capped their ragged heights. Sunlight glared nascent from hanging
fields of snow, flashed gold and silver. It sharpened the breath, simply
staring.

The company loaded their mules
with little or no conversation, then set out toward the Ziggurat. What Lord
Kosoter had called the Low Road seemed anything but. Not only was it little
more than a track, it climbed far more than otherwise, following the course of
various ridges, before dropping into some gullied interval to scale higher
courses. But always, however circuitous its route, it stalked the great fissure
that hoofed the Ziggurat's knuckled base. No matter what earth-and-rock
enormity the Low Road placed before them, the fissure inevitably climbed back
into view, larger, darker, more sinister for the concentration of detail.

The mighty oaks and elms of
previous days had yielded altogether, giving way to scrawny poplars and twisted
screw pine where trees could be found at all. Most of the time the company
scuffed and clopped across expanses of bare stone, surrounded by the
wind-combed remains of the previous year's bracken. Everything seemed to
shiver. Everything that had once lived.

It was long past noon before
they descended into the delta of gorges at the base of the great fissure. The
Ziggurat, by this time, occupied the whole of the sky before them, cowing them
into consensual silence. They tramped onward in a kind of stupor. The Coffers
were forgotten, as was the distraction of Mimara's hips. Perhaps it was the
humility of seeing fundamentals upended, the very ground wracked and beaten,
hauled into scarps and slopes, heaved to heights that could defeat sun and
clouds let alone the aspirations of mere men. Perhaps it was the weight of the
inexpressible, the hard bone of the world rearing into horns that hooked the
skirts of heaven. The titanic precipices, the pulverizing leaps, the distances
ramping into the clouds. The Skin Eaters, each in their own way, seemed to
understand that this was the prototype, what tyrants aped with their
God-mocking works, mountains into monument, migrations into pageant and parade.
This was the most primordial rule—the world itself—too vast, too elemental, to
be called sacred or holy.

And it weakened the knees, as
all true spectacle should.

The Ziggurat had become as much
argument as mountain, posed not in claims or premises, but in immensities, in
features that encompassed experience, saying, murmuring,
You are small...
So very small.

And they walked, willingly,
between the cracks of its hoary fingers.

The sky was pinched into a
shining slot. The air became dry and still, like the gap in a dead man's mouth.

The Kianene, Sutadra, was the
first to notice they walked the ruins of some ancient road. It almost seemed a
trick of the eyes, for once they noticed the telltale signs, it seemed
impossible they could have seen otherwise. Something, snowmelts perhaps, had
sawed a long winding gully across and over its course, gutting the broad planes
of what once must have been a grand processional avenue. There was little
enthusiasm in the discovery. It seemed to trouble the Skin Eaters somehow,
knowing they walked in the footsteps of gold-clad kings and shining armies,
rather than those of wayfarers such as themselves. There was comfort in a
simple track, Achamian supposed, an assurance that the world they walked did
not laugh at them.

Several hours passed before they
rounded the final bend and saw it before them. The fissured wall climbed high,
straining the neck with its gouged dimensions. It loomed as only natural works
could loom. The random line of fracture and millennial erosion, of rock
sculpted in mystery and accident. Black outcroppings with mossed bellies. Long
cracks dangling anemic weeds. And set in its heart, like some shrine to
intellect and intention, the enormous Obsidian Gate, looming over the ruins of
an ancient fortress.

The company gathered on the
platform beneath it, loose clots of men drifting to a halt, mouths open. The
Skin Eaters had expected many things, daydreams of a storied destination, but
they were quite unprepared for what they beheld. Achamian could see it in the
way they craned and peered, like emissaries of a backward yet imperious people
trying to see past their awe. The entrance was unbarred, an ovoid of
impenetrable black set in an immense arched recess, which was panelled with
reliefs that formed a skein over yet deeper narratives, so that the scenes
depicted possessed a startling depth. Nonmen figures twined across every
surface, weathered to the point where you could scarcely distinguish the
armoured from the naked, frozen in antique postures of triumph or ceremonial
tedium. Shepherds with lambs about their shoulders. Warriors fending lions and
jackals. Captives baring necks to the swords of princes. On and on, the lives
of the dead in miniature. Four pillars flanked the threshold, the outermost
pair soaring tall as netia pine, yet hollow, great cylinders of interlocking
figures and faces; the innermost solid, three snakes intercoiling, their heads
lost in the vaulted gloom, their rattled tails forming three-pronged bases.

Curses filled the silence, some
murmured, others spoken quite out loud. Such was the monumental delicacy, the
profusion of figure and detail, that the forms seemed more revealed than
rendered, as though the sheeted cliffs were naught but mud rinsed from the
stone of ossified souls. Even half-ruined, there was too much, too much beauty,
too much detail, and certainly too much toil, a grandeur made wicked by the
demands it exacted on simpler souls. It was a place that begged to be challenged,
overthrown.

For the first time, Achamian
thought he understood the crude bronze of Nostol's betrayal.

"What are we doing?"
Mimara whispered from his side.

"Recalling ourselves... I
think."

"Look," Xonghis said
in his deadpan accent. "The other companies..." He nodded to the left
serpentine pillar: Various symbols had been scratched into the lower coils,
childish white slashes across weathered scales. "Their signs."

The Skin Eaters gathered round,
careful to heed the invisible line that marked the entrance side of the pillar.
Xonghis knelt between two of the rattle tails, which rose like roots, each
thicker than a man. He ran his outstretched fingers and palm over each mark, as
though testing extinguished fires for heat. Different Skin Eaters called out
the names of the companies they recognized as he did so. He lingered over the
sign of a weeping eye. "This one," he said, looking back
significantly, "was marked the most recently."

"The Bloody Picks,"
Galian said, frowning. "They left, when?"

"More than a fortnight
ago," Pokwas replied.

The following silence persisted
longer than it should. There was heartbreak in these furtive marks, a
childishness that made the ancient works rising about them seem iron heavy,
nigh invincible. Scratches. Caricatures with buffoonish themes. They were so
obviously the residue of a lesser race, one whose triumph lay not in the
nobility of arms and intellect, but in treachery and the perversities of
fortune.

"See," Achamian heard
Kiampas mutter to Sarl. "There..." He followed the direction of the
man's finger, saw what looked like a Galeoth kite-shield chalked long and
skinny across the lower coils of the serpents.

"The High Shields, as I
said."

"It can't be their
sign," Sarl snapped, as though assertion alone could make things true.
"Their bones lie on the Long Side." Even as he said this he stooped
to fetch a stone from his feet. Everyone watched as he began scratching the mark
of the Skin Eaters across one of the serpent's backs: a mandible with gumless
teeth.

"What I would like to
know," Sarl said, the gravel of his tone rendered thin and abrasive by the
soaring works of glass and stone, "is how we could have gone so long
without coming here."

His meaning was plain. The Skin
Eaters were a legend, as was this place, and all legends were drawn together
sooner or later—such was the song that decided all things. Such was the logic.

His face pinched into a cackle.
"This
is
the slog of slogs, boys!"

Cleric, meanwhile, had wandered
forward, effortlessly crossing the incorporeal boundary that seemed to hold
everyone else back, turning in a slow circle as he did so.

"Where are you?" he
bellowed—so violently even the hardest of the Skin Eaters started. "The
Gate unguarded? And with the world grown so dark? This is an outrage!
Outrage!"

Despite his stature, he seemed a
mere sliver, frail and warm-blooded, before the great maw of black about him.
Only the depth of his sorcerous Mark bespoke his might.

"Cûncari!" he boomed,
growing frantic. "Jiss!
Cûncari!
"

The Captain strode to him,
clapped a hand on his shoulder.

"They're dead, you fool.
Ancient dead."

The cowled darkness that was his
face turned to the Captain, held him in eyeless scrutiny, then lifted skyward,
as though studying the lay of illumination across the hanging slopes. As the
gathered company watched, he raised two hands and drew back, for the first
time, his leather hood. The gesture seemed obscene, venal, a flouting of some
aboriginal modesty.

He turned to regard his fellow
scalpers, smiling as if taking heart in their astonishment. His fused teeth
gleamed with spit. His skin was white and utterly hairless, so much so that he
looked fungal, like something pulled from forest compost. His features were
youthful, drawn with the same fine lines and flawless proportions as all his
race.

The face of a Sranc.

"Yes," he said,
closing lashless eyelids. His pupils seemed as big as coins when he opened
them, black with hooks of reflected silver.
"Yes,"
he fairly
cried, laughing now.

"They
are
dead."

***

Night did not so much rise over
the great fissure as the day was snatched away.

They had difficulty scrounging
for fuel, so the entire company ended up crowding about a single fire,
oppressed by the works hanging above them. Small desultory conversations
marbled the silence, but no one took the stage and addressed the company as a whole,
aside from Sarl of course, who had the habit of pitching his declarations in
all directions. Most simply sat, knees hooked in the ring of their arms, and
stared up at the thousand lozenge faces and figures above them, black-limned in
flickering yellow-white. With the outer reliefs set like grillwork over the
inner, the firelight seemed to animate the panels, to imbue them with the
illusion of strain and motion. Several Skin Eaters swore that this or that
scene
had
changed. Sarl, however, was always quick to make fools of
them.

"See that one there, with
the little one bending with the water urn before the row of tall ones? See it?
Now, look away. Now
look back
. See? See! That big one popped his prick
in the little one's arse, I swear it!"

Laughter, honest, yet rationed
all the same. Dread encircled them, and Sarl kept careful watch, making sure it
did not take hold in his Captain's men.

"Dirty Nonmen buggers, eh,
Cleric? Cleric?"

The Nonman merely smiled, as
pale as a ghoul in the firelight.

Time and again, Achamian found
himself stealing glances in his direction. It was almost impossible not to
ponder the connection of the two, the ruined Mansion, harrowed in the First
Apocalypse, and the ruined Nonman, as old as languages and peoples. Cil-Aujas
and Incariol.

Mimara leaned against him, and
in some distracted corner of his soul he noted the difference, the way she
leaned rather than clutched at his hand as her mother had. She was talking to
Soma, who sat cross-legged next to her, staring at his palms like a shy poet.
More out of the absence of alternatives than out of concern, Achamian listened,
his gaze drifting from scene to engraved scene.

"You have the look and the
manner of a Lady," the Nilnameshi said.

"My mother was a
whore."

"Ah, but what is parentage,
really? Me? I burned my ancestor lists long ago."

A mock disapproving pause.
"Doesn't that frighten you?"

"Frighten?"

"Look around you. I would
hazard that all these men, even the most vicious, bear some record of their
forebears."

"And why should that
frighten me?"

"Because," Mimara
said, "it means they're bound to the unbroken line of their fathers, back
into the mists of yore. It means when they die, entire hosts will cast nets for
their souls." Achamian felt her shoulders hitch in a pity-for-the-doomed
shrug. "But
you
... you merely wander between oblivions, from the
nothingness of your birth to the nothingness of your death."

"Between oblivions?"

"Like flotsam."

"Like flotsam?"