R. Bakker - The Judging eye

"Our immediate priority," she declared, pretending he had not spoken, "is to prepare for the eventuality of riots. Phinersa, you must recruit infiltrators. Imhailas, you must assure that the Precincts are secured-I will not have this happen a second time! Tell Ngarau that we are to be provisioned for the possibility of a siege. And contact General Anthirul. Have him recall one of the Arcong Columns."

For a moment all of them stood as motionless as the dead.

"Go! Both of you! Now!"

Startled into action, the two men hastened back the way they had come, the one tall and flashing in his ceremonial armour, the other dark and fluid in his black-silk robes. Esmenet found herself nagged by the certainty that Phinersa had momentarily glanced at Maithanet for confirmation…

So many looks. So many qualms. It was always the complexities that overwhelmed us. It was always the maze of others that robbed us of our way.

My little boy is dead.

But she squelched her misgivings, stared at the Shriah of the Thousand Temples squarely. "Skin-spies," she said. She suddenly found herself dizzy with exhaustion, like a water-bearer balancing one bowl too many. "You think skin-spies did this."

Anasыrimbor Maithanet replied with uncharacteristic reluctance. "I find this turn… incalculable."

A memory struck her then, not so much of an event as of a feeling, the murky sense of being harassed and hemmed in, the tightness of breath that belonged to the besieged. A memory of the First Holy War.

For an instant, she thought she could smell the septic reaches of Caraskand.

"Kellhus told me they would come," Esmenet said.

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Condia

In Sakarpus, leuneraal, or hunched ones (so-called for their habit of stooping over their scrolls), were so despised that it was customary for Horselords and their Boonsmen to bathe after their dealings with them. The Men of Sakarpus considered weakness a kind of disease, something to be fended with various rules of interaction and ritual cleansings. And no men were so weak as the leuneraal.

But Sorweel's new tutor, Thanteus Eskeles, was more than a hunched man. Far more. Were he merely a scholar, then Sorweel would have had the luxury of these rules. But he was also a sorcerer-a Three Seas Schoolman! — and this made things… complicated.

Sorweel had never doubted the Tusk, never doubted that sorcerers were the walking damned. But try as he might, he could never square this belief with his fascination. Through all his innumerable daydreams of the Three Seas, nothing had captivated him quite so much as the Schools. What would it be like, he often wondered, to possess a voice that could shout down the World's Holy Song? What kind of man would exchange his soul for that kind of diabolical power?

As a result, Eskeles was both an insult and a kind of illicit opportunity-a contradiction, like all things Three Seas.

The Mandate Schoolman would join him each morning, usually within a watch of the march getting underway, and they would while away the time with drill after laborious language drill. Though Eskeles encouraged him to believe otherwise, Sorweel's tongue balked at the sound and structure of Sheyic. He often went cross-eyed listening to Eskeles drone. At times, he feared he might slump unconscious from his saddle, the lessons were so boring.

Once he enlisted Zsoronga to hide him in the middle of his retinue, he came to dread the sorceror's appearance so. The Successor-Prince promptly betrayed him, but not before having his fill of laughing at the sight of the Schoolman riding on his burrow craning his neck this way and that. Old Obotegwa, he explained, was growing weary speaking for two men.

"Besides," he said, "how can we be sure we're talking to each other at all? Perhaps the old devil makes it all up so he can laugh himself to sleep."

Obotegwa simply winked and grinned mischievously.

Eskeles was a strange man, obese by Sakarpi standards, but not so fat as many Sorweel had seen in the Ordeal. He never seemed to get cold, despite wearing only a red-silk tunic with his leggings, one cut to expose the black fur that crawled from his belly to his beard, which even oiled and plaited never quite seemed under control. He had an affable, even merry face, high cheeks beneath pig-friendly eyes. This, combined with a lively, even careless manner, made him exceedingly difficult to dislike, despite his sorcerous calling and the brownish tinge of his Ketyai skin.

At first Sorweel could scarcely understand a word he said, his accent was so thick. But he quickly learned how to listen through the often bizarre pronunciations. He discovered that the man had spent several years in Sakarpus as part of a secret Mandate mission posing as Three Seas traders.

"Dreadful, dreadful time for the likes of me," he said.

"I suppose you missed your Southron luxuries," Sorweel jeered.

The fat man laughed. "No-no. Heavens, no. If you knew what me and my kind dreamed each night, your Glory, you would understand our profound ability to appreciate the simplest of things. No. It was your Chorae Hoard… Quite extraordinary really, dwelling in the vicinity of so many Trinkets…"

"Trinkets?"

"Yes. That's what we Schoolmen like to call them-Chorae, that is. For much the same reason you Sakarpi call Sranc-what is it? Oh, yes, grass-rats."

Sorweel frowned. "Because that's what they are?"

Despite his good humour, Eskeles had this sly way of appraising him sometimes, as if he were a map fetched from the fire. Something that had to be read around burns.

"No-no. Because that's what you need them to be."

Sorweel understood full well what the fat man meant-men often used glib words to shrink great and terrible things-but the true lesson, he realized, was quite different. He resolved never to forget that Eskeles was a spy. That he was an agent of the Aspect-Emperor.

Learning a language, Sorweel quickly realized, was unlike learning anything else. At first, he thought it would be a matter of simple substitution, of replacing one set of sounds with another. He knew nothing of what Eskeles called grammar, the notion that a kind of invisible mechanism bound everything he said into patterns. He scoffed at the sorcerer's insistence that he first learn his own tongue before venturing to learn another. But the patterns were undeniable, and no matter how much he wanted to dispute the fat man and his glib I-told-you-so smile, he had to admit that he could not speak without using things such as subjects and predicates, nouns and verbs.

Though he affected an attitude of aloof contempt-he was in the presence of a leuneraal, after all-Sorweel found himself more than a little troubled by this. How could he know these things without knowing them? And if something as profound as grammar could escape his awareness-to the point where it had simply not existed-what else was lurking in the nethers of his soul?

So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.

None of which made the lessons any less boring. But thankfully even Eskeles's passion for Sheyic would begin to wane by midafternoon, and his disciplined insistence on the drills would lapse. For a few watches, at least, he would let the young King indulge his curiosity about more sundry things. Sorweel spent much of this time avoiding the topics that really interested him-sorcery because he feared it sinful, and the Aspect-Emperor for reasons he could not fathom-and asking questions about the Three Seas and the Great Ordeal.