R. Bakker - The Judging eye

"See that one there, with the little one bending with the water urn before the row of tall ones? See it? Now, look away. Now look back. See? See! That big one popped his prick in the little one's arse, I swear it!"

Laughter, honest, yet rationed all the same. Dread encircled them, and Sarl kept careful watch, making sure it did not take hold in his Captain's men.

"Dirty Nonmen buggers, eh, Cleric? Cleric?"

The Nonman merely smiled, as pale as a ghoul in the firelight.

Time and again, Achamian found himself stealing glances in his direction. It was almost impossible not to ponder the connection of the two, the ruined Mansion, harrowed in the First Apocalypse, and the ruined Nonman, as old as languages and peoples. Cil-Aujas and Incariol.

Mimara leaned against him, and in some distracted corner of his soul he noted the difference, the way she leaned rather than clutched at his hand as her mother had. She was talking to Soma, who sat cross-legged next to her, staring at his palms like a shy poet. More out of the absence of alternatives than out of concern, Achamian listened, his gaze drifting from scene to engraved scene.

"You have the look and the manner of a Lady," the Nilnameshi said.

"My mother was a whore."

"Ah, but what is parentage, really? Me? I burned my ancestor lists long ago."

A mock disapproving pause. "Doesn't that frighten you?"

"Frighten?"

"Look around you. I would hazard that all these men, even the most vicious, bear some record of their forebears."

"And why should that frighten me?"

"Because," Mimara said, "it means they're bound to the unbroken line of their fathers, back into the mists of yore. It means when they die, entire hosts will cast nets for their souls." Achamian felt her shoulders hitch in a pity-for-the-doomed shrug. "But you… you merely wander between oblivions, from the nothingness of your birth to the nothingness of your death."

"Between oblivions?"

"Like flotsam."

"Like flotsam?"

"Yes. Doesn't that frighten you?"

Achamian found himself scowling at the shadowy pageants chiselled above. An improbable number of faces stared out and down from the graven dramas, their eyes gouged into blank pits, their noses worn to points over mouthless chins. The priest to the right of the butchered stag. The child at the knee of the nursing mother. The warrior with the broken shield. Among the thousands of figures that vaulted the blackness above their fire, hundreds watched those who would watch them, as though the moments that framed them could not isolate their attention.

Proof of souls.

Skin prickling, Achamian glanced back toward Cleric, who stared as before into the pit of the entrance. Several heartbeats passed before the immaculate face turned-inevitably, it seemed-to answer his scrutiny. A kind of blank intensity leapt between them, born more of exhaustion than affinity, flattening the dozen or so Skin Eaters who leaned in and out of their line of sight.

They watched each other, Wizard and Nonman, for one heartbeat, two, three… Then, without rancour or acknowledgment, they looked away.

"I suppose it does," Achamian heard Soma admit after a long silence. The man invariably erred, Achamian had noticed, when it came to honesty. He was always revealing too much.

"Frighten you?" Mimara replied. "Of course it does."

Soon the talk sputtered out altogether, and the scalpers unrolled their mats and bedding across the pitted stone of the platform. Men kicked stones clicking into the night. The moon hung over the fissure for a time, disclosing the scarps and ravines in a curious light, one that argued stillness, uncompromising, absolute, like mice in the panning eyes of owls.

Few slept well. The black mouth of the Obsidian Gate seemed to inhale endlessly.

The ruins revealed in the morning light were more melancholy than malevolent. Hands eroded into paws. Heads worn into eggs. The layered panels appeared more riddled with fractures, more pocked with gaps. For the first time, it seemed, they noticed the little appendages scattered like gravel across the platform. Nocturnal fears had become sunlit fragments.

Even still, the company ate in comparative silence, punctuated by the low comments and laughs typically reserved for recollections of hard drinking. Forced normalcy as a remedy for uncertain nerves. Their small fire burned through what little fuel remained before Achamian had a chance to boil water for his tea, forcing him to mutter a furtive Cant. This filled him with dread for some reason.

They paused to watch Xonghis confer in low tones with Lord Kosoter. Then they entered the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas with nary a commemorating word, let alone the fanfare Men typically attach to fatal endeavours. They simply assembled, leading their mules, then followed Cleric and their Captain in a file some thirty-five souls long. With Mimara at his side, Achamian glanced skyward one final time before joining the string of vanishing figures. In the slot of a hanging ravine, the Nail of Heaven twinkled alone in the endless blue, a beacon of all things high and open…

A final call to those who would dare the nethers of the earth.

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-ofthe-Tusk), Momemn

Kelmomas had known his father had returned almost immediately. He saw it in a host of subtle cues that he didn't even know he could read: an imperceptible contraction in the Guards' posture, an alertness of pose and look in the Apparati, and a long-jog breathlessness in the slaves. Even the air assumed a careful taste, as though the drafts themselves had grown wary. Nevertheless, Kelmomas didn't realize he knew until he overheard one of the choir slaves gossiping about the Yatwerian Matriarch pissing herself beneath the Holy Mantle.

He's come to console Mother, the secret voice said.

Alone in the playroom, Kelmomas continued working on his model of Momemn, carving meticulous little obelisks out of balsa, long after darkness draped the Enclosure. A kind of childish indecision had overcome him, a listless need to continue poking at whatever he happened to be doing, to simply exist for a petulant time, thinking and acting stubbornly counter to fact.

It had always been like this with his father. Not fear, just a kind of canny reluctance, rootless and long-winded.

Eventually he had to relent-that too was part of the game-so he made his way to his mother's private apartments. He could hear his older brother, Inrilatas, ranting about the Gods in his locked room. His brother had broken his voice bludgeoning the walls years ago, yet still he croaked, on and on and on, as though flooding his room in some lunatic search for leaks. He never stopped raving, which was why he was always kept locked in his room. Kelmomas had not seen him for more than three years.

His mother's apartments were located down the hallway. He padded across the rug-strewn floor as silently as he could, his ears keen to the sound of his parents' voices filtering through innumerable wheezing cracks and surfaces. He paused outside the iron door, his breath as thin as a cat's.

"I know it pains you," Father was saying, "but you must have Theliopa with you in all your dealings."

"You fear skin-spies?" his mother replied.

Their voices possessed the weary burnish of a long and impassioned conversation. But the roots of his father's exhaustion stopped short of the deeper intonations that warbled in and out of his discourse. A heart-easing hum, and a kind of ursine growl, far too low to be consciously heard by Mother. These spoke from something as unwinded as it was inscrutable, an occluded soul, entirely hidden from lesser ears.