The Judging Eye (6 page)

Sorcery.

Silver lines appeared about the
figure's outstretched hands, began scrolling into emptiness...

Incandescent geometries, a
sun-bright filigree, scaling the rain to the dark-bellied clouds. And a hiss
like no other, like the millennial pounding of the surf condensed into the span
of heartbeats. Out and out the lines reached, making glory of the sky, a
glittering canopy that reached over the walls and across the city. Ghoulish
reflections rolled and glimmered across every sword and shield.

"He makes mist,"
Sorweel murmured to no one. "He blinds us!"

Southron voices, roaring
thousands of them, unitary and ecstatic. Hymns—they were singing hymns! The
towers continued their relentless approach, driven by trains of bent-back
thousands. Someone had to do something! Why was no one doing anything?

Then his father was before him,
grasping him by the arms. "Go to the Citadel," he said, his
expression strange. The light of the Aspect-Emperor glittered in his eyes,
rimmed the lines of his nose and cheek in blue. "It was a mistake bringing
you to the walls."

"What do you mean? Father,
how cou—"

"Go!"

Sorweel could feel the corners
of his face waver and crumple.

"Father—
Father
! My
bones are your bones!"

Harweel raised his hand to
Sorweel's cheek. "Which is why you must go.
Please
, Sorwa. Sakarpus
stands at the ends of the world. We are the last outpost of Men! He needs this
city! He needs
our people
! That means he needs you, Sorwa! You!"

The Prince looked down, cowed by
his father's fury and desperation. "No, Father," he mumbled, suddenly
feeling twig-thin—far younger than his sixteen years. "I won't leave you..."
When he looked up, cool rain flooded the hot of his tears. "I won't leave
you!"

His voice hung raw and shrill,
defiance yanked to the sinew. Then the song of the invaders swelled, the
throats of the joyous thousands come to burn, to kill.

His father's blow took him in
the jaw, sent him skidding into the men behind him, then to his hands and knees
onto the wet stone. "Don't shame me with your impertinence, boy!" He
turned to one of his High Boonsmen. "Narsheidel! Take him to the Citadel!
See that no harm comes to him! He will be our final swordstroke! Our
vengeance!"

Without a word Narsheidel
hoisted him to his feet by the scruff of his mail harness, began dragging him
through the assembled warriors. Pulled backward, Sorweel watched them close
ranks in his wake, saw their looks of pity. "Nooo!" he howled,
tasting clean cold water on his tongue. Across sodden shoulders and glistening
shield-rims, he glimpsed his father staring back at him, his eyes as blue and
crisp as the summer sky. For one inscrutable heartbeat, his father's look
pierced him. Sorweel saw him turn just as the wall of fog encompassed the
parapets.

"Nooooooo!"

The clamour of arms descended
upon the world.

***

He tried to struggle, but
Narsheidel was indomitable, an iron shadow that scarcely bent to his thrashing.
Through the dark spiral of the tower stair, it seemed all he could see were his
father's eyes, loving eyes, judging eyes, regretting a heavy hand, celebrating
a tickling laugh, and watching, always watching, to be sure his second heart
beat warm and safe. And if he looked close, if he dared peer at those eyes the
way he might gems, he knew he would see
himself
, not as he was, but
mirrored across the shining curve of a father's pride, a father's hope that he
might live with greater grace through the fact of a son.

Thunder shivered about them,
cracking ancient mortar, loosing showers of grit from the low-vaulted ceilings.
Narsheidel was shouting, something, something taut with more than fear. A
warrior already mourning.

Then they were past the iron
door, skidding on stones in the Gate's monumental shadow. Rearing horses.
Warriors running through fog, their white shields across their backs. The
foundations of buildings that vanished into grey. The void of ancient streets
opening between them.

And a solitary figure in the
midst of the confusion, crouched like a beggar, only clothed in too much
shadow...

And with eyes that blinked
light.

Crying out, Narsheidel hauled
him down to the hard wet stone.

Diagrams of burning white,
making smoke of the rain. The great bronze plates of the Herder's Gate flashed
with sun-brilliance, then fell away, bent like woodchips, twirling like flotsam
in a stream.

Shouting, always shouting,
Narsheidel pulled him to his feet, yanked him to a run.

He saw the beggar become someone
priestly and luminescent, then vanish in a twinkle. He saw his countrymen rally
to stem the breach. He saw tall Droettal and his company of Gilgallic Priests
roaring as the tide of dark-faced outlanders engulfed them. He saw the Eithmen,
whipping their caparisoned chargers through panick-packed streets. He saw
gutters rushing with pink and crimson waters. He saw one of the siege towers
lurching above the crest of the walls, the ghosts of dragonheads rising from
slots in its metallic hide. He saw ropes of men, Longshields and Horselords
alike, vanish screaming in roiling light.

Again and again, he threw
himself against Narsheidel's strength, sobbing, raving, but the High Boonsman
was unconquerable, driving him ever forward, bellowing at the madness to make
way. And through it all, he saw his father's summer-blue eyes, beseeching...

Please, Sorwa...

They ran down labyrinthine
alleyways, through endless curtains of rain. Behind them, the shouts and
screams multiplied into a senseless white roar, punctuated only by braying
horns and the inside-out mutter of sorcery.

The winding streets were so deep
they couldn't see the black-walled Citadel until they were almost upon it,
hunched against the sky above them, its rounded towers no taller than the
soaring walls. Weeds hung from the joints of its sloped and fluted base. Its
northern quarters, where the ancient Sakarpi Kings had once resided, hung in
ruin, windows like eye sockets revealing the gutted hollows within. They reeled
toward it. The ramparts climbed to encompass a greater part of the sky. Sorweel
glimpsed a star flaring high above the black-stone rim, as bright as the Nail
of Heaven—only
beneath
the clouds. The light made diamonds of the
falling rain.

Even Narsheidel stumbled in
terror, face held up, pressing Sorweel before him. "Quick, boy,
quick
!"
Then they were through the vault doors, sheltered in deep sockets of black
stone. Guards and ashen-faced attendants flocked to them. Sorweel found himself
staggering in circles, fending away their fussing hands. "The King?"
an old retainer cried. "What has become of the King?"

"There must be a way!"
Narsheidel was shouting at some mail-armoured steward. "This place must
have secrets! Everything
old
has secrets!"

Then Sorweel was being hustled
up tight-winding stairs, through hot, wood-panelled corridors, across
low-ceilinged rooms, some too bright, others too dim.
Turning-crossing-climbing. Everything, tapestries, batteries of candles,
chapped walls, seemed to swim in his periphery.

What was
happening
?

"No!" Sorweel cried,
shaking away ushering hands like a lunatic dog. "Stop this!
Stop
!"

They stood in some kind of
antechamber, with a hemispherical wall that found its apex in a bricked-in
passageway. Narsheidel and two others—an aging Longshield and Baron Denthuel,
the one-legged Horselord assigned to command the Citadel—stood back, their
hands out, their faces wary or placating or worried or pleading or...

"Where's my father?"
he cried.

Only Narsheidel, his soaked
armour shining silver and black in the uncertain light, dared speak.

"King Harweel is dead,
boy."

The words winded him. Even
still, Sorweel heard his own voice say, "That means
I am King
. That
I'm your master!"

The High Boonsman looked down to
his palms, then out and upward, as though trying to divine the direction of the
outer roar—for it had not stopped.

"Not so long as your
father's words still ring in my ears."

Sorweel looked into the older
man's face, with its strong-jawed proportions and water-tangled frame of hair.
Only then, it seemed, did he realize that Narshiedel too had loved ones, wives
and children, sequestered somewhere in the city. That he was a true Boonsman,
loyal unto death.

"King Harweel is—"

Explosion. Only afterwards,
sputtering, scrambling across the floor, would the young Prince understand what
happened. Bricks exploding outward, as though a tree-sized hammer had struck
the round wall's far side, taking Lord Denthuel in the head and neck, swatting
him broken to the ground.

Dust carried on the back of
shiver-cold air. Pale out-of-doors light. Ears ringing, Sorweel turned to the
gaping hole...

He might have called out, but he
wouldn't remember.

He looked through the breach
into the husk of the Citadel's ruined galleries. Something golden hung in the
floorless hollows, something that boiled with impossible light. Against a
backdrop of empty windows and long-gutted walls, it walked across open air.
Walked. Rain plummeted in lines about it, as though down a well.

But no dampness touched him.

The Aspect-Emperor.

The shining demon crossed the
threshold, framed by gloom and deluge.

The nameless Longshield simply
turned and ran, disappearing into the halls. Raising his greatsword high,
Narsheidel cried out, charged the luminescent figure...

Who simply stepped to the side,
impossibly, like a dancer avoiding a drunk. Whipping his arms like rope, the
figure brought his curved blade up over his scalp, then snapped it back in a
perfect arc. Narsheidel's body and head continued careering forward, joined
only by a flying thread of blood.

The demon's eyes had remained
fixed on Sorweel the entire time. Only... they did not seem a demon's eyes.

Too human.

On his knees, Sorweel could do
naught but stare.

The man seemed cut from a
different place, one with a brighter sun, as though he stood both here amid the
ruin that was Sakarpus and upon a mountain summit at the edge of dawn. He was
tall, a full hand over Sorweel's father, draped in a priest's gold-panelled
vestments, armoured in mail so fine it seemed silk—nimil, some absent part of
Sorweel realized, Nonman steel. His hair fell in sodden ringlets about his
long, full-lipped face. His flaxen beard was plaited and squared in the manner
of the Southron Kings pictured on the most ancient of the Long Hall's reliefs.
The severed heads of two demons, their skin blotched and aglow, hung from his
girdle, making fishmouths about black-nail teeth.

Scabs of salt crusted his bare
sword-hand.

"I am," the vision said,
"Anasûrimbor Kellhus."

It started with the shaking, the
hot flush of urine. Then his bones became serpents, and Sorweel collapsed to
the floor. On his belly... On his belly! He spat at the blood greasing his
chin.

Fuh-Fuh-Father!

"Come," the man said,
crouching to place a hand on his shoulder. "Come. Get up. Remember
yourself..."

Remember?

"You are a
King
, are
you not?"

Sorweel could only stare in
horror and wonder.

"I-I d-d-don't
understand..."

A friendly scowl, followed by a
gentle laugh. "I'm rarely what my enemies expect, I know." Somehow,
he was already helping him to his feet.

"Buh-buh-but..."

"All this, Sorweel, is a
tragic mistake. You must believe that."

"Mistake?"

"I'm no conqueror." He
paused as though to frown at the very notion. "As mad as it sounds, I
really
have
come to save Mankind."

"Lies," the Prince
murmured through his confusion.
"Liar!"

The Aspect-Emperor nodded,
closed his eyes in the manner of a long-suffering parent. His sigh was both
honest and plain. "Mourn," he said. "Grieve as all Men must. But
take heart in the fact of your forgiveness."

Sorweel gazed into the
summer-blue eyes.
What was happening?

"Forgiven? Who are
you
to
forgive?"

The scowl of an innocent twice
wronged.

"You misunderstand."

"Misunderstand what?"
Sorweel spat. "That you think yourse—!"

"Your father loved
you!" the man interrupted, his voice thick with a nigh irresistible
paternal reprimand. "And that
love
, Sorwa, is forgiveness...
His
forgiveness, not mine."

The young King of Sakarpus stood
dumbstruck, staring with a face as slack as rainwater. Then perfumed sleeves
enclosed him, and he wept in the burning arms of his enemy, for his city, for
his father, for a world that could wring redemption out of betrayal.