R. Bakker - The Judging eye

He had found peace-real peace-waging his strange nocturnal war. Now this woman threatened to overthrow it all.

He fairly shouted when she failed to answer. "Why?"

She flinched, looked down to the childish scribble at her feet: a gaping mouth scrawled in black across mineral white, with eyes, nose, and ears spaced across its lipless perimeter.

"B-because I wanted…" Something caught her throat. Her eyes shot up, as though requiring an antagonist to remain focused. "Because I wanted to know if…" Her tongue traced the seam of her lips.

"If you were my father."

His laughter felt cruel, but if was such, she showed no sign of injury-no outward sign.

"Are you sure?" she asked, blank in voice and expression.

"I met your mother sometime after…"

In a blink Achamian had seen it all, written in a language not so different from the charcoal scrawlings beneath their feet. It was inevitable that Esmenet would do this, that she would use all her power as Empress to recover the child she had forbidden him to mention all those years ago… To find the girl whose name she would never speak.

"You mean after she sold me," the girl said.

"There was a famine," he heard himself reply. "She did what she did to save your life, and forever wrecked herself as a result."

He knew these were the wrong words before he finished speaking. Her eyes suddenly became old with exhaustion, with the paralysis that comes from hearing the same hollow justifications over and over again.

The fact that she refused to reply to them said it all.

Esmenet had recovered her some time ago-that much was obvious. Her manner and inflection were too studied, too graceful, not to have been honed over years in the court. But it was just as obvious that Esmenet had found her too late. The damaged look. The rim of desperation.

Hope was ever the great foe of slavers. They beat it from your lips, then they pursued it past your skin. Mimara, Achamian knew, had been hunted to the ground-many, many times.

"But why do I remember you?"

"Look-"

"I remember you buying me apples-"

"Child. It wasn't-"

"The street was busy, loud. You were laughing because I kept smelling mine instead of biting. You said that little girls shouldn't eat through their nose, that it wasn't-"

"It wasn't me!" he exclaimed. "Look. The daughters of whores…"

She flinched once again, like a child startled by a snapping dog. How old would she be? Thirty summers? More? Nonetheless, she looked like the little girl she said she remembered, joking about apples on a crowded street.

"The daughters of whores…" she repeated.

Achamian gazed at her, filled to his fingertips, suffused by an anxious prickle.

"Have no fathers."

He had tried to say this as gently as he could, but in his ears his voice had grown too harsh with age. The sun limned her in gold, and for a moment she seemed a native of the morning. She lowered her face, studied the lines scraped about them, etched in burnt black. "You said that I was clever."

He ran a slow hand across his face, exhaled, suddenly feeling ancient with guilt and frustration. Why must everything be too big to wrestle, too muddy to grasp?

"I feel sorry for you, child-I truly do. I have some notion of what you must have endured…" A deep breath, warm against the bright cool. "Go home, Mimara. Go back to your mother. We have no connection."

He turned back toward the tower. The sun instantly warmed his shoulders.

"But we do," her voice chimed from behind him-so like her mother's that chills skittered across his skin.

He paused, lowered his head to curse his slippered feet. Without turning, he said, "It's not me you remember. What you believe is your affair."

"But that's not what I mean."

Something in her tone, the windy suggestion of a snicker or a laugh, forced him to look back. Now the sun drew a line down her centre, violated only by the creases of her clothing, whose contours smuggled light and dark this way and that. The wilderness rose behind her, far more pale but likewise divided.

"I can distinguish between the created and uncreated," she said with something between embarrassment and pride. "I am one of the Few."

Achamian whirled, scowling both at her and the brightness.

"What? You're a witch?"

A deliberate nod, made narrow by a smile.

"I didn't come here to find my father," she said, as though everything until now had been nothing but cruel theatre. "Well… I thought you might be my father, but I really didn't… care… that much, I think." Her eyes widened, as though turning from the inner to the outer on some invisible swivel.

"I came to find my teacher. I came to learn the Gnosis."

There it was, her reason.

There is a progression to all things. Lives, encounters, histories, each trailing their own nameless residue, each burrowing into a black, black future, groping for the facts that conjure purpose out of the cruelties of mere coincidence.

And Achamian had had his fill of it.

She sees his face slacken, despite the matted wire of his beard. She sees his complexion blanch, despite the sun's morning glare. And she knows that what her mother once told her is in fact true: Drusas Achamian possesses the soul of a teacher.

So the old whore didn't lie.

Almost three months have passed since her flight from the Andiamine Heights. Three months of searching. Three months of hard winter travel. Three months of fending against Men. She travelled inland as much as possible, knowing that the Judges would be watching the ports, that their agents would be ranging the coastal roads, hungry to please her mother, their Holy Empress. It seems a miracle whenever she recalls it. That time in the high Cepalor when the wolves paced her step for weary step, little more than feral ghosts through the soundless snowfall. The mad ferryman at the Wutmouth crossing. And the brigands, who tracked her only to turn away when they saw the caste-noble cut of her clothes. There was fear in the land, fear everywhere she turned, and it suited her and her needs well.

She spent innumerable watches lost in revery during this time, her soul's eye conjuring visions of the man she secretly named her father. When she arrived, it seemed that everything was the way she imagined it. Exactly. A lonely hillside spilling skyward, trees scarred with sorcery's dread murmur. An even lonelier stone tower, a makeshift roof raised across its collapsed floors, grasses growing from rotten-mortar seams. Stacked-stone outbuildings, with their heaped wood, drying fish, and stretched pelts. Slaves who smiled and talked like caste-menials. Even children skipping beneath great-boughed maples.

Only the sorcerer surprises her, probably because she has expectations aplenty of him. Drusas Achamian, the Apostate, the man who turned his back on history, who dared curse the Aspect-Emperor for love of her mother. True, he seemed entirely different in each of the lays sung about him, even in the various tales told by her mother, by turns stalwart and doubt-ridden, learned and hapless, passionate and cold-handed. But it was this contradictory nature that had so forcefully stamped his image in her soul. In the cycle of historical and scriptural characters that populated her education, he alone seemed real.

Only he isn't. The man before her seems to mock her soft-bellied imaginings: a wild-haired hermit with limbs like barked branches and eyes that perpetually sort grievances. Bitter. Severe. He bears the Mark, as deep as any of the sorcerers she has seen glide through the halls of the Andiamine Heights, but where they drape silks and perfume about their stain, he wears wool patched with rancid fur.

How could anyone sing songs about such a man?

His eyes dull at the mention of the Gnosis-the inward look of concealed pity, or so it seems. But when he speaks, his tone is almost collegial, except that it's hollow.