R. Bakker - The Judging eye

So he learned more details about the Middle-North and its peoples: the Galeoth, the Tydonni, and the Thunyeri. The Eastern Ketyai: the Cengemi, the Conriyans, and the Ainoni. And the Western Ketyai: primarily the Nansur, the Shigeki, the Kianene, and the Nilnameshi. Eskeles, who, Sorweel was beginning to realize, was one of those vain men who never seemed arrogant, discussed all these peoples with the confidence and wicked cynicism of someone who had spent his life travelling. Each nation had its strengths and weaknesses: the Ainoni, for instance, were devious plotters but too womanish in their affect and attire; the Thunyeri were savage in battle but about as sharp as rotten fruit-as Eskeles put it. Sorweel found all of it fascinating, even though the sorcerer was one of those men whose animate enthusiasm actually seemed to deaden rather than liven the subject matter.

Then, one afternoon several days into his instruction, Sorweel summoned enough courage to mention the Aspect-Emperor. He related-in a form abbreviated by embarrassment-the story Zsoronga had told him about the emissaries cutting their own throats before the Zeьmi Satakhan. "I know he's your master…" he ended awkwardly.

"What about him?" Eskeles replied after a thoughtful pause.

"Well… What is he?"

The sorcerer nodded in the manner of those confirmed in their worries. "Come," he said cryptically, spurring his mule to a trot.

The Kidruhil typically rode near the forward heart of the Great Ordeal, where they could be sent in any direction given the unlikely event of an attack. But word of Sranc activity to the west had led to their redeployment on the extreme left flank. This meant the sorcerer and his ward need press neither hard nor far to ride clear of the slow roping columns. Looking absurd on his mule-his legs straight rather than bent, his girth almost equal to his mount's-Eskeles pressed along the shoulders of a long low knoll. Sorweel followed, alternately smiling at the sight of the man and frowning at his intentions. Beyond the crest of the knoll, the farther plains sloped up into the horizon, bone-coloured for the most part but shot with whorls of grey and ash black. The green of the more lush lands to the south had become little more than a haze.

Staring off into the distance, the sorcerer reined to a halt at the summit, where Sorweel joined him. The air was crisp and chill.

"So dry," Eskeles said without looking at him.

"It often is. Some years the grasses all die and blow away… Or so they say."

"And that," Eskeles continued, pointing toward the northwest. "What is that?"

There was a Kidruhil patrol in the distance, a line of tiny horses, but Sorweel knew that Eskeles pointed beyond them. The sky was a bowl of endless turquoise. Beneath it the land ascended a series of rumps, then spread bluing into a series of flats and folds, like a tent after its poles had been dropped. Reaching in and out of the horizon, an immense band cut across the plain, mottled black and grey near its centre and fading into the natural grain of the surrounding grasslands along its edges.

"The great herds," Sorweel said, having seen such tracks many times. "Elk. Endless numbers of them."

The sorcerer turned in his saddle, nodding back the way they had come. The breeze pulled a comb of hairs from his beard.

"And what would you say that is?"

Perplexed, Sorweel wheeled his horse about, followed Eskeles's bemused gaze. Not since Sakarpus had he seen the Great Ordeal from its edge, and he found himself shocked at the difference of watching something that had encompassed him from afar. Where before the world had seemed to roll into the immobile masses, now the masses rolled over an immovable world. Thousands upon thousands of figures, scattered like grain, thrown like threads, knitted into slow heaving carpets, gradually creeping across the back of the earth. Arms twinkled to the horizon.

"The Great Ordeal," he heard himself say.

"No."

Sorweel searched his tutor's smiling eyes.

"This," Eskeles explained, "this… is the Aspect Emperor."

Mystified, Sorweel could only turn back to the spectacle. Though he couldn't be sure, he thought he saw the Aspect-Emperor's own banner rising from faraway mobs: a white-silk standard the size of a sail, emblazoned with a simple blood-red Circumfix. Struck by unseen priests, the Interval hummed out across the arch of the sky, deep and resonant, fading as always in increments too fine to detect, so that he was never quite sure when it stopped sounding.

"I don't understand…"

"There are many, many ways to carve the world, your Glory. Think of the way we identify different men with their bodies, with the position they occupy in place and time. Since we inherit this way of thinking, we assume that it is natural, that it is the only way. But what if we identify a man with his thoughts-what then? How would we draw his boundaries? Where would he begin, and where would he end?"

Sorweel simply gazed at the man. Damned leuneraal.

"I still don't understand."

The sorcerer frowned in silence for a time, then with a decisive grunt leaned back in his saddle to root through one of his packs. He huffed and cursed in some exotic tongue as he pawed through his belongings-the effort of twisting back and sideways obviously strained him. Without warning, he dismounted with a heavy "Oooof!" then began rifling the opposite pack in the same way. It wasn't until he searched the rump pack-made of weather-beaten leather like the others-that he found what he was looking for: a small vase no bigger than a child's forearm and just as white. With a triumphant expression, he held it shining to the sun: porcelain, another luxury of the Three Seas.

"Come-come," he called to Sorweel, stamping his left boot in the grass to wipe mule shit from his heel.

Securing his pony's reins to the pommel of the mule's saddle, Sorweel hastened after the sorcerer, who walked kicking through winter-flattened grasses-to clean off more dung, the young King supposed, until, that is, Eskeles cried, "Aha!" at the sight of rounded stone rising from the turf.

"This is called a philauta," the sorcerer said, raising the slight vase and shaking it. A clipped rattle issued from within. The sunlight revealed dozens of little tusks raised along its length. "It's used for sacramental libations…"

He smashed it across the back of the stone. To his chagrin, Sorweel flinched.

"Now look," Eskeles said, squatting over the wreckage so that his belly hung between his knees. A small replica of the vase-what had made the rattling sound, Sorweel realized-lay beneath the sorcerer's bulk, no longer than a thumb. Otherwise, fragments lay scattered across the stone and between the twisted threads of last year's grass, some as small as cat's claws, others the size of teeth, and still others as big as coins. The sorcerer shooed away a spider with stubby fingers, then lifted one of the tinier pieces, little more than a splinter, to the glinting light.

"Souls have shapes, Sorweel. Think of how I differ from you"-he raised another splinter to illustrate the contrast-"or how you differ from Zsoronga," he said, raising yet another. "Or"-he plucked a far larger fragment-"think of all the Hundred Gods, and how they differ from one another, Yatwer and Gilgaцl. Or Momas and Ajokli." With each name he raised yet another coin-sized fragment.

"Our God… the God, is broken into innumerable pieces. And this is what gives us life, what makes you, me, even the lowliest slave, sacred." He cupped several pieces in a meaty palm. "We're not equal, most assuredly not, but we remain fragments of God nonetheless."

He gingerly set each of the pieces across the top of the stone, then stared intently at Sorweel. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Sorweel did understand, so much that his skin had pimpled listening to the sorcerer speak. He understood more than he wanted. The Kiьnnatic Priests had only rules and stories-nothing like this. They had no answers that made… sense of things.