The Judging Eye (65 page)

They lie in a chamber of some
kind, the dimensions of which escape the feeble light, gathered in a corner
where the cycling gusts are broken by the confluence of walls. The air is too
fleet and too cold to possess smell. She first notices the graffiti while
watching Soma. Strings of white-scratched characters score the wall all about
him, the lines so dense where the hardened flow meets the wall as to almost
seem like decoration, but thinning out into lone scribbles about his shoulders
and neck—according, she realizes, to the original floor and the limited reach
of its ancient authors.

The wind flutes in the dark,
eerie and disharmonious.

She ponders the scratches with
the clarity of concentration that comes only with absolute exhaustion. Her
soul, which so often seemed to be petalled like a flower, a thing of frail
confusion, has become as simple as a stone, a lamp that can shine upon one
thing and one thing only. The signs themselves mean nothing to her, nor, she imagines,
to anyone living. But the character of their scratching almost shouts too loud.
These are human signs, she realizes, scraped in the throes of human anguish.
Names. Curses. Pleas.

And somehow she just knows: This
was once a place of great suffering.

A shadow blots the entrance
glow, and alarm beats hot blood into the clay of her body. She sits up, as do
several others. She sees a silhouette crawl through the slender orange maw,
then stand.

Cleric steps into their midst,
the gore on his face and nimil armour blown into crazed patterns by the wind.
She sees the same white chapping across his forehead and scalp as Achamian,
though not nearly so severe: Skin salted from Choric near misses, she realizes.
Unwinded, he stares with spent curiosity at the spent Men, trades a long look
with the Captain before turning to scan the shrouded spaces. There is a clarity
and a command in his dark eyes that she has never seen before—one that both
heartens and frightens her. He seems to ponder something only his eyes can
descry.

"We're safe," he
eventually says to Lord Kosoter. "For a time."

Finally able to move, she crawls
across the uneven stone—tongues laid across tongues—to Achamian. The panic
receding, she at last has room to worry, perhaps even to mourn.

"The wind," Xonghis
croaks. "It's
cold
. High mountain cold..."

The Nonman lowers his chin in
assent. "The Great Medial Screw runs near here... An immense stair that
runs the entire height of the Aenaratiol."

"Can we use it to
escape?" Galian blurts. He hugs his knees, slowly rocking. She glimpses a
tremor fluttering through one of his hanging thumbs.

"I think so... If it is
still as I... remember."

The relief is soundless and
palpable. This entire time, the scalpers have had breath enough—heart
enough—only for what was essential. Safety. Escape. The possibility of these
secured, their souls once more slacken, their thoughts fork down paths less
urgent. They look about them and wonder.

"What is this place?"
Xonghis asks.

Cleric's black eyes hold Mimara
for an appraising instant. "A kind of barracks... I think. For ancient
captives."

"A slave pit," Mimara
croaks, so softly that several of the others turn to her frowning. But she
knows the Nonman has heard.

A serpentine blink. His grin
reveals the arc of his fused teeth—the same as the Sranc, only not fanged and
serrated. He speaks, and for a heartbeat, his face becomes a mask before the
sun...

A Surillic Point sparks to life
in the air above him; white light blows out and across the darkness.

The chamber is massive. Terraces
climb about their lonely corner. How high or how far none can tell, since the
height and breadth quickly outrun the light. But they can clearly see the
chap-bronze cages that pack each of the terrace walls—cruel confinements no
larger than a single man—enough for hundreds, even thousands, standing hollow
save for shadows, their wretched prisoners having rotted free long, long ago.

Even though Mimara can imagine
how the room once looked, the tiers of piteous faces and clutching hands, it is
the graffiti, scratched out along the lowermost wall as far as the light can
reach, that most afflicts her heart. The Emwama, and their proof of misery, she
realizes. She can almost see their shades, massed in hopeless clots, looks
averted from the horrors hanging above, ears aching...

A shudder passes through her, so
deep her eyes and limbs seem to rattle in their sockets.

And she thinks,
Cil-Aujas
...

Some moments pass before she
realizes that no one, not even Soma, shares any inkling of her dread. Instead,
they are all staring into the gloom toward the corner opposite. Even Lord
Kosoter.

"Sweet Sejenus!"
Galian hisses, slowly coming to his feet. The wind bats his leather skirts,
toggles the loose ends of the tourniquet bound about his left calf. Xonghis is
already walking toward the point of their converging gazes. Gusts paw him from
his stride.

"Could it be?" Xonghis
calls out, his voice warbling in the wind's howl.

Several heartbeats pass before
her eyes discern it, jutting from the surface of the laval ground. There, a
cage of a different kind, large enough to shell a seafaring galley. Great ribs
rise from the stone like a portcullis grill, curve up to meet their
counterparts in a kiss of bowed spears. She sees a jawed carapace yards away,
as though carried on a different current, submerged and tilted, yet standing as
tall as a man, an empty eye socket just clearing the petrified stone.

"I pity you," Cleric
says. "To carry such sights for so short a span."

Sarl trips to his knees, his
hair drawn into a crazed rag halo. "I called him a fool!" he cries to
his fellows, grinning out of some maniacal reflex. "A
fool
!"

The Skin Eaters gather, beaten
by gust and fate alike, gazing in awe at the iron bones of a dragon.

Wracu.

The source of the wind's cold
hymn.

***

With light comes reason.

The Skin Eaters waste few words
on the dragon, though all idle gazes seem inevitably drawn toward the
rust-pitted bones. They do not speak of their fallen friends. They are
scalpers, after all, violent men leading the most violent of all lives. They
are long accustomed to the gaps between them—Kiampas, Oxwora, and many others.
The pyre is their only constant friend.

Instead they prepare and make
plans.

Somehow Galian and Xonghis have
become the guiding personalities. Bleak necessity has rewritten the ranks
between them, as is so often the case in the aftermath of catastrophe. Sitting
on a hump of stone, the Captain simply watches and listens, grants assent with
curt nods. Sarl mopes against a graffiti-etched wall, says nothing, and does
little save probe the cut on his cheek with his fingers.

The mark of a sobber.

Mimara tends to Achamian while
Cleric ministers to Pokwas and the others with his haphazard healing lore. The
Nonman gives them all a tiny pinch of black powder, medicinal spores, which he
produces from his leather satchel. "Qirri," he calls it. He claims
that it will rejuvenate them, as well as help them cope with the lack of food
or water. He even tells them to sprinkle some in the mouths of the two
unconscious men.

It tastes of dirt and honey.

A peculiar shyness leans against
her eyes whenever she looks at the Nonman. His recent exercise of power clings
to him like an aura, an intimation of some dread disproportion. He seems
heavier, harder by far than the Men surrounding him. It reminds her of watching
Kellhus on the Andiamine Heights: the sense of gazing at a presence that
somehow eclipses sight, that reaches out, arching beyond the limits of your
vision, to link hands behind you...

Beneath you.

She finds herself rehearsing
Achamian's earlier worries. What would he make of what she had seen? There can
be no doubt, she decides. Like the Aspect-Emperor, this Incariol, or whatever
his name, is one of the world's powers. An Ishroi of old.

She can still see him, leaping
alone into howling masses of Sranc, hanging bright above smouldering lakes of
fire. These memories, combined with the glories of the Upper Halls and the
atrocities soaked into the stone of this room, seem to confirm her suspicion
that Men are little more than animals to Nonmen, a variety of Sranc, a
corruption of their own angelic form.

Using what spit she can muster,
she begins carefully cleaning around the scabs of salt along the side of the
Wizard's face. The white swatches do not coat the skin, they
are
the
skin, down to individual moles and pores, only raised and puckered by the
inflamed flesh beneath. The damage is literally skin deep and certainly not
life-threatening. After the incident on the stair, his wits are what concern
her the most, even though Cleric assures her he will quickly recover,
especially once the qirri soaks into his veins.

"But you should not lean so
close," he says, nodding to the Chorae still stuffed beneath her jerkin.

Assured that Achamian is as
comfortable as possible, she sits some distance from him, and at last draws the
Chorae from the sweaty pocket it has pressed into her breast. Though she has
grown accustomed to its inverted presence, there is a surreality to the act of
taking it into her hand, a sense that it is not the Trinket that moves so much
as it is the whole of creation about it. She has no clue why it should compel
her. Everything about it shrieks anathema. It is the bane of her heart's sole
desire, the thing she must fear above all once she begins uttering sorcery.
What almost killed Achamian.

The light of the Surillic Point
does not touch it, so that even its worldly aspect seems an insult to her eyes.
It is a ball of shadow in her palm, its iron curve, its skein of ancient
writing, illuminated only by the low crimson glow that leaks through the
entrance. It seems to brood and to seethe. The abyssal dimensions of its Mark
are a greater insult still. She can scarce focus when she looks with the eyes
of the Few. It is as if it rolls from her sight and thought each time she
centres her attention upon it.

And yet she stares and stares,
like a boy gazing at some remarkable bug. Low voices flutter through the
portals of the wind. She can hear some of the scalpers hammering at the
dragon's teeth—even in disaster, their mercenary instincts have not abandoned
them. The Wizard lies prone in her periphery.

Shivers scuttle like spiders
from her palm to her heart and throat, pimpling her entire skin. She glares at
it, concentrates her breath and being upon its weightless horror, as if using
it to mortify her soul the way shakers use whips and nails to mortify their
flesh. She floats in the prickle of her own sweat.

The suffering begins. The
pain...

It's like thumbing a deep bruise
at first, and she almost revels its odd, almost honey sweetness. But the
sensation unravels, opens into an ache that swells about wincing serrations, as
if teeth were chewing their own mouth through sealed muscle and skin. The
violence spreads. The clubs begin falling, and her body rebels down to its
rooted bowel, gagging at memories of salt.
Emptiness itself...
Lying
cupped in her palm, a sheering void, throwing hooks about her, a million
lacerating stings.

She grunts spit between clenched
teeth, grins like a dying ape. Anguish wracks her, as deep as deep, but the
smallest nub of her remains, an untouched sip, still conscious of the Wizard
lying in her periphery, and it sees that he is the same yet transfigured, an
old ailing man, and a corpse boiled in the fires of damnation...

The Judging Eye has opened.

She feels it leaning through her
worldly eyes, pressing forward, throwing off the agony like rotted clothes,
snuffing fact from sight, drawing out the sanctity and the sin. With terrible
fixation it stares into the oblivion spilling from her palm...

And somehow, impossibly,
passes
through
.

She blinks on the far side of
contradiction, her face and shoulders pulled back in a warm wind, a breath, a
premonition of summer rain. And she sees it, a point of luminous white, a
certainty
,
shining out from the pit that blackens her grasp. A voice rises, a voice
without word or tone, drowsy with compassion, and the light grows and grows,
shrinking the abyss to a rind, to the false foil that it is, burning to dust,
and the glory, the magnificence, shines forth, radiant, blinding...

And she holds
all
... In
her hand she holds it!

A Tear of God.

***

Through the cold of the wind's
preternatural singing, she hears,
"Mimara?"

She sits hunched over her prize,
utterly bewildered.

"Are you okay?"

She holds a light in her hand, a
different light, one that shines but does not illumine, a star that glitters as
bright as the Nail of Heaven.

"Where did you get
that?" Soma asks. He is crouching before her, nodding to the Chorae in her
palm—or to what used to be a Chorae...