R. Bakker - The Judging eye

An acute sensitivity to his surroundings beset Achamian while crossing the common room, which for him amounted to a kind of bodily awareness of some imminent undertaking-some reckless leap. He winced at the odour of sweat festering in leather. The outer thunder of the Long-Braid Falls shivered through air and timber alike, so that the room seemed a motionless bubble in a torrent. And the guttural patois everyone spoke-a kind of mongrel marriage of Gallish and Sheyic-struck him with an ancient and impossible taste: the First Holy War, twenty long years gone by.

He thought of Kellhus and found his resolution rekindled.

The pulse of a fool…

Achamian had no illusions about the men he was about to meet. The New Empire had signalled the end of the once lucrative mercenary trade, but it did not signal the end of those willing to kill for compensation. He had spent the greater part of his life in the proximity of such men-in the company of those who would think him weak. He had long ago learned how to mime the proper postures, how to redress the defects of the heart with the advantages of intellect. He knew how to treat with such men-or so he thought.

His first heartbeat in their presence told him otherwise.

The cowled man, the sorcerer, turned to him, but only far enough to reveal a temple and jawline as white and as smooth as boiled bone. Obdurate black shrouded his eyes. The small, silver-haired man graced him with a nimble, shining look and a smile that seemed to welcome the derision to come. But the square-bearded one, the man Haubrezer had identified as the Captain, continued staring into his wine-bowl as before. Achamian understood instantly he was the kind of man who begrudged others everything.

"Are you the Ainoni they call Kosoter?" he asked. "Ironsoul. The Captain of the Skin Eaters?"

A moment of silence, far too thick to connote shock or surprise.

The Captain took a deliberate drink, then fixed him with his narrow brown eyes. It was a look Achamian recognized from the massacres and privations of the First Holy War. A look that saw only dead things.

"I know you," was all he said in a voice with a hint of a papyrus rasp.

"You will address the Captain as 'Veteran,'" the silver-haired man exclaimed. He was diminutive but with wrists thick enough to promise an iron grip. And he was old, at least as old as Achamian, but it seemed the years had stripped only the fat of weakness from him, leaving spry fire in the leather that remained. He was a man who had been shrivelled strong. "After all," he continued with a slit-eyed laugh, "it's the Law."

Achamian ignored him.

"You know me?" he said to the Captain, who had resumed his study of his inscrutable drink. "From the First Hol-"

"Sir," the small man interrupted. "Please. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Sarl-"

"I need to contract your company," Achamian continued, staring intently at the Captain. Definitely Ainoni. He looked archaic, like something risen from a burial mound.

"Sir," Sarl pressed, this time with a cut-throat gleam in his eye. "Please…"

Achamian turned to him, frowning but attentive.

His grin hooked the ruts of his face into innumerable lines. "I have, shall we say, a certain facility for sums and figures, as well as the finer details of argument. My illustrious Captain, well, let us just say, he has little patience for the perversities of speech."

"So you make the decisions?"

The man burst into a beet-faced cackle, revealing the arc of his gums. "No," he gasped, as though astounded that anyone could ask a question so uproariously thick. "No-no-no! I do the singing. But I assure you, it is the Captain who inks the verse." Sarl bowed to the Ainoni in embellished deference-who now watched Achamian with something poised between curiosity and malice. When Sarl turned back to Achamian, his lips were pursed into a see-I-told-you-so line.

Achamian snorted dismissively. This was one thing he didn't miss about the civilized world: the addiction to all things indirect.

"I need to contract your Captain's company."

"Such a strange request!" Sarl exclaimed, as though waiting to say as much all along. "And daring, very daring. There are no more wars, my friend, save the two that are holy. The one that our Aspect-Emperor wages against wicked Golgotterath, and the more tawdry one we wage against the Sranc. There are no more mercenaries, friend."

Achamian found himself glancing back and forth between the two men. The effect was unnerving, as though the division of attention amounted to a kind of partial blindness.

For all he knew, this was the whole point of this ludicrous exercise.

"It isn't mercenaries I need, it's scalpers. And it isn't war that I intend, it's a journey."

"Ahhh, very interesting," Sarl drawled. His eyes collapsed into fluttering slits every time he smiled, as if blinking at some kind of comical grit. "A journey requiring scalpers is a journey into the wastes, no?"

Achamian paused, disconcerted by the ease of the man's penetration. This Sarl was every bit as nimble as he looked.

"Yes."

"As I thought! Very, very interesting! So tell me, just where in the North do you need to go?"

Achamian had feared this question, as inevitable as it was. Who was he fooling?

"Far…" He swallowed. "To the ruins of Sauglish."

Another spittle-flecked spasm of laughter, this one carving every vein, every web of wrinkles in succinct shades of purple and red. He even yanked his wrists together as though bound, shook up and down, fingers flicking. He looked to the cowled man as though seeking confirmation. "Sauglish!" he howled, rolling his face back. "Oh ho, my friend, my poor, poor lunatic friend!" He reclined back in his chair, sucking air. "May the Gods"-he shook his head in a kind of astonished dismissal-"keep your bowls warm and full and whatever."

Something in his look and tone said, Leave while you still can…

Achamian's fists balled of their own volition. It was all he could do to keep from burning the pissant to cinders. Arrogant monkey-of-a-man! Only the Captain's Chorae and the indigo Mark of his cowled companion stayed his tongue.

A hard moment of fading smiles.

Sarl scratched the pad of his thumb with the nail of his index finger.

Then the Captain said, "What lies in Sauglish?"

The words fairly knocked the blood out of Sarl's ruddy face. Perhaps there were consequences for misreading the Captain's interest. Perhaps the man had simply wandered too far out on a drunken limb. For some reason, Achamian had the impression that Lord Kosoter's voice always had this effect.

"What do you know of it?" Achamian asked. He immediately realized this was a grievous mistake, answering a question with a question when discoursing with the Captain. Nevertheless, he felt the need to match, flint for flint, the man's unearthly look, to communicate his own ability to see the atrocity at the heart of all things.

He stared into Lord Kosoter's shining eyes. He could hear Sarl breath, a shallow-chested sound, like a dog dreaming. He found himself wondering if the cowled man had moved. A ringing sidled into the room, high-pitched and hazy, and with it came a premonition of lethality, a wheedling apprehension. The stakes of this contest, part of him realized, involved far more than dominance or respect or even identity, but the very possibility of being…

I am the end of you, the eyes in his eyes whispered. And they seemed a thousand years old.

Achamian could feel himself wilt. Wild-limbed imaginings flickered through his soul, hot with screams and blood. He could feel tremors knock through his knees.

"Go easy now, friend," Sarl murmured in what seemed genuine conciliation. "The Captain here can piss halfway cross the world, if need be. Just answer his question."