R. Bakker: The Judging eye

"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, "Anasыrimbor 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.

Years. Months. Days. For so long the Aspect-Emperor had been an uneasy rumour to the South, a name as heaped in atrocity as it was miracle…

No more.

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Southwestern Galeoth

There would have been nightmares aplenty had Drusas Achamian been able to dream a life that was his own. Nightmares of a long, hard war across deserts and great river deltas. Nightmares of sublimity and savagery held in perfect equipoise, though the cacophony of the latter would make all seem like misery. Nightmares of dead men, feeding like cannibals on their once strong souls, raising the impossible on the back of atrocity.

Nightmares of a city so holy it had become wicked.

And of a man who could peer into souls.

But he could not dream of these things. No. Though he had renounced his School, cursed his own brothers, he still wore the great yoke that broke the backs of them all. He still bore within him a second, more ancient soul, Seswatha, the hero and survivor of the First Apocalypse. He still dreamed, as they dreamed, of the World's crashing end. And he still awoke gasping another man's breath…

The feast was a greasy, raucous affair-another celebration of the Hunt-Glorious. The High-King, Anasыrimbor Celmomas, reclined the way he always did when too far into his cups: legs askew, shoulders slumped into the left corner of the Urthrone, forehead planted against a slack fist. His Knight-Chieftains bickered and cavorted across the long trestle-table set before him, raising gobs of seared meat in shining fingers, drinking deep from golden cups stamped in the likeness of animal totems. Light danced from the bronze tripods set across the floor about them, making the table a place of shadows and silhouettes, and illuminating the curtain of freshly killed deer that rose behind the revellers to either side. Beyond, the mighty pillars of the Yodain, the King-Temple raised by Trysл's ancient rulers, rose higher still, into the obdurate blackness.

More toasts rang out. To Clan Anasыrimbor, to the Great Kin Lines represented at the table, to the Bardic Priest and his uproarious account of the day's escapade. Honey mead was poured and spilled into cups and smacking lips alike. But Achamian, alone at the very end of the booming table, lifted his vessel only to the water-bearer. He nodded at the warlike exclamations, laughed at the ribald jokes, grinned the sly grin of the learned in the company of fools, but he did not participate. Instead, with eyes that seemed more bored than cunning, he watched the High-King-the man he still called his best friend-drink himself into unconsciousness.

Then he slipped away, without care or notice. Who could fathom the ways of a sorcerer?