The Judging Eye (62 page)

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...

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.