R. Bakker - The Judging eye

"But…"

The young King trailed, defeated by the weakness of his own voice.

Eskeles nodded and smiled, so openly pleased with himself that he seemed anything but arrogant or haughty. "But what is the Aspect-Emperor?" he asked, completing Sorweel's question.

Using his fingers, he combed the chipped replica of the vase from the grass below his left knee. He held it between thumb and forefinger, where it shone as smooth as glass, identical to the original philauta in every respect save for its size.

"Huh?" The Schoolman laughed. "Eh? Do you see? The soul of the Aspect-Emperor is not only greater than the souls of Men, it possesses the very shape of the Ur-Soul."

"You mean… your God of Gods."

"Our God of Gods?" the sorcerer repeated, shaking his head. "I keep forgetting that you're a heathen! I suppose you think Inri Sejenus is some kind of demon as well!"

"I'm trying," Sorweel replied, his face suddenly hot. "I'm trying to understand!"

"I-know-I-know," the Schoolman said, this time smirking at his own stupidity. "We'll discuss the Latter Prophet, er… later…" He closed his eyes and shook his head. "In the meantime, ponder this… If the Aspect-Emperor's soul is cast in the very form of the God, then…" He trailed nodding. "Huh? Eh? If…"

"Then… He is the God in small…" A kind of supernatural terror accompanied these words.

The sorcerer beamed, his teeth surprisingly white and straight compared to the dark frazzle of his beard. "You wonder how it is so many would march to the ends of the earth for him? You wonder what could move men to cut their own throats in his name. Well then, there you have your answer…" He leaned forward, his pose rigid in the manner of men who think they possess world-judging truths. "Anasыrimbor Kellhus is the God of Gods, Sorweel, come to walk among us."

Somehow Sorweel had fallen from a crouch to his knees. He remained breathless still, staring at Eskeles. To move his hands or even to blink his eyes, it seemed, would be to quake and to spill, to reveal himself a thing of sand.

"Before his coming, me and my kind were damned," the sorcerer continued, though he seemed to be speaking more for his own benefit than Sorweel's. "We Schoolmen traded a lifetime of power for an eternity of torment… But now?"

Damnation. Sorweel felt the cold of dead earth soak through his leggings. An ache climbed into bis knees. His father had died in sorcerous fire-how many times had Sorweel tormented himself with that thought, imagining the shriek and scream, the thousand blistering knives? But what Eskeles was saying…

Did it mean he burned still?

The Mandate Schoolman gazed at him, his eyes wide and bright with a kind of uncompromising joy, like a man in the flush of infatuation, or a gambler delivered from slavery by an impossible throw of the number-sticks. When he spoke, more than admiration-or even worship-trilled through his voice.

"Now I am saved."

Love. He spoke with love.

Rather than go to Zsoronga's pavilion that evening, Sorweel shared a quiet repast with Porsparian in the white-washed air of his own tent. He sat on the end of his cot, his head bent to his steaming gruel, knowing yet not caring that the Shigeki slave stared at him wordlessly. A kind of incipient confusion filled him, one that had slipped the cup of his soul and spilled through his body, a leaden tingle. The sounds of the Great Ordeal fell through the fabric effortlessly, thrumming and booming from every direction.

Save the sky. The sky was silent.

And the earth.

"Anasыrimbor Kellhus is the God of Gods incarnate, Sorweel, come to walk among us…"

Men often make decisions in the wake of significant events, if only to pretend they had some control over their own transformations. Sorweel's first decision was to ignore what had happened, to turn his back on what Eskeles had said, as though rudeness could drive his words away. His second decision was to laugh-laughter was ever the great ward against all things foolish. But he could not harness the breath to see it through.

Then he finally decided to think Eskeles's thoughts, if only to pretend they had not already possessed him. What was the harm of thinking?

As a young boy he spent most of his solitary play in the ruined sections of his father's palace, particularly in what was called the Overgrown Garden. Once, while searching for a lost arrow, he noticed a young poplar springing from some far-flung seed beneath a thicket of witch-mulberry. Wondering whether it would live or die, he checked on it from time to time, watched it slowly labour in the shadow. Several times he even crawled into the mossy interior of the thicket, wriggling in on his back, and bringing his cheek close to the newborn's stem so that he could see it leaning, extending up and out to the promise of light shining through the fretting of witch-mulberry leaves. Over days and weeks it reached, thin with inanimate effort, straining for a band of golden warmth that descended like a hand from the sky. And then finally, it touched…

The last time he had looked, mere weeks before the city's fall, the tree stood proud save for the memory of that first crook in its trunk, and the mulberry bush was long dead.

There was harm in thinking. He not only knew this-he could feel it.

What Eskeles had shown him had the power of… of sense. What Eskeles had shown him had explained, not only the Aspect-Emperor… but himself as well.

"…we remain fragments of the God, nonetheless."

Was this why the Kiьnnatic Priests had demanded that all Three Seas missionaries be burned? Was this why spittle had flecked their lips when they came to his father with their demands?

Had they been a bush, fearful of the tree in their midst?

"I keep forgetting that you're a heathen!"

After darkness fell and Porsparian's breathing dipped into a rasping snore, Sorweel lay awake, riven by thought after cascading thought-there was no thwarting them. When he curled beneath his blankets, it seemed he could see him as he was on that day of war and rain and thunder, the Aspect-Emperor, ringlets dripping about a long face, beard cut and plaited in the way of Southron Kings, eyes so blue they seemed a glimpse of another world. A glaring, golden figure, walking in the light of a different time, a brighter sun.

A friendly scowl, followed by a gentle laugh. "I'm rarely what my enemies expect, I know."

And Sorweel told himself, commanded himself, mouthed about clamped teeth, I am my father's son! A true son of Sakarpus!

But what if…

Hands lifting him from his knees. "You are a King, are you not?"

What if he came to believe?

"I'm no conqueror…"

He awoke, as had become his habit, several moments before the sounding of the Interval. For some reason, he felt a kind of long-drawn relief instead of the usual clutch of fear. The plains air, the breath of his people, sighed through his tent, made the bindings creak where Porsparian had tied them down. The silence was so complete he could almost believe that he was alone, that all the rolling pasture about his tent was empty to the horizon-abandoned to the Horse-King.

Then the Interval tolled. The first calls to prayer climbed into the skies.

He joined the Company of Scions where their Standard had been planted the previous evening, numbly followed Captain Harnilias's barked instructions. Apparently his pony, which Sorweel called Stubborn, had done some soul searching the previous night as well, because for the first time he responded wonderfully to Sorweel's demands. He'd known the beast was intelligent, perhaps uncommonly so, and only refused to learn his Sakarpic knee-and-spur combinations out of spite. Stubborn had become so agreeable, in fact, that Sorweel breezed through the early on-the-march drills. He even heard several of the Scions call out, "Ramt-anqual!" — the word Obotegwa always translated as "Horse-King."