R. Bakker - The Judging eye

For several heartbeats Sorweel simply stared, dumbfounded. Where? Where had the water come from?

What kind of Three Seas trickery…

"You hide," the old slave gasped. "Hide in gaze!"

But a kernel of understanding anchored his panic, and something within him wept, shouted in anguish and relief. The Old Gods had not forgotten! Sorweel closed his eyes, knowing that this was all the permission required. He felt the fingers smear his cheek, press in the firm manner of old men who do all things at the limit of their strength, not for anger, but to overmatch the thoughtless vitality of the young. He felt her spit at once soil and cleanse.

A mother wiping the face of her beloved son.

Look at you…

Somewhere on the plain, the priests sounded the Interval: a single note tolling pure and deep over landscapes of tented confusion. The sun was rising.

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), South of Mount Aenaratiol

Age. Age and darkness.

For the peoples of the Three Seas, The Chronicle of the Tusk was the ultimate measure of the ages. Nothing was more ancient. Nothing could be. Yet the Skin Eaters found themselves walking halls older than even the language of the Tusk, let alone the ivory into which it had been cut. No one had to tell them this, though they sometimes glanced at Achamian as if pleading to be told otherwise. They could see it scrawling through the light about them. They could smell it hanging in the dust. They could feel it creeping through meek bones and chastened hearts.

Here was a glory that no human, tribe or nation, could hope to match, and their hearts balked at the admission. Achamian saw it floating in their faces: lips drawn into lines, teeth set in slack jaws, eyes roaming without focus, the vacant look of blowhards confronting their tolly. Even these men, so quick to celebrate sin and debauchery, had thought the blood of Gods coursed through their veins.

Cil-Aujas, for all its silence, boomed otherwise.

What Achamian had thought a vast entrance gallery turned out to be a subterranean road. The line of walkers quickly coalesced into two bands, one following Cleric and his hanging point of sorcerous light in the lead, the other crowding Achamian and his Surrillic Cant of Illumination. For a time they seemed to shuffle more than stride, a gawking band staring up and around, painfully aware of their trespass. Everyone cringed at the sound of voices. Fragments of what might have been bone gravelled their steps. Dust fogged their ankles.

Images. Images planked every surface, virginal as exhumed graves, soaked in the gloom of unwitnessed ages. The style mirrored that of the Obsidian Gate: the walls banded with layered pictorial reliefs, the outer set like impossibly elaborate grillwork over the inner, vaulting some forty feet. The sedimentary grain, whorls of charcoal black veined with grey, made it obvious that it had been hewn from living rock. Whole sections shone like brown and black glass. Pinned between their passing points of light, the walls literally seethed with counterfeit motion.

It was the absence of weathering that distinguished the hall from the Gate. The detail baffled the eye, from the mail of the Nonmen warriors to the hair of the human slaves. Scars striping knuckles. Tears lining supplicants' cheeks. Everything had been rendered with maniacal intricacy. The effect was too lifelike, Achamian decided, the concentration too obsessive. The scenes did not so much celebrate or portray, it seemed, as reveal, to the point where it hurt to watch the passing sweep of images, parade stacked upon parade, entire hosts carved man for man, victim for victim, warring without breath or clamour.

Pir-Pahal, Achamian realized. The entire hall was dedicated to it, a great and ancient battle fought between the Nonmen and the Inchoroi. He could even recognize the principals: the traitor, Nin'janjin, and his sovereign, Cu'jara Cinmoi, the Nonman Emperor. The mighty hero, Gin'gыrima, with arms like a man's thighs. And the Inchoroi King, Sil, armoured in corpses, flanked by his inhuman kinsmen, winged monstrosities with wicked limbs, pendulous phalli, and skulls grafted into skulls.

Achamian nearly stumbled when he saw the Heron Spear raised high in Sil's articulated arms.

"Those things…" Mimara whispered from his side.

"Inchoroi," Achamian muttered. With a kind of wonder, he thought of Kellhus and his Great Ordeal, of their mad march across the wasted North to Golgotterath. The war depicted on these walls, he realized, had never ended, not truly.

Ten thousand years of woe.

"These are their memories," Achamian found himself saying aloud. "The Nonmen cut their past into the walls… as a way to make it as immortal as their bodies."

The faces of several scalpers turned toward him, some in expectation, others in annoyance. Speaking seemed a kind of sacrilege, like ill-willed gossip in the light of a funeral pyre.

On and on they walked, deeper into the bowels of the mountain. Miles passed without a terminus or a fork, just warring walls, stamped as deep as outstretched arms. The way before them resolved out of obscurity. Behind, the light of the entrance dwindled into a star, solitary in a field of absolute black.

Then with horrifying suddenness, a second gate welled out of the darkness. Several gasps echoed through the stale air. The company stumbled to a halt.

Two wolves towered before them, standing like men to either side of an unbarred portal, eyes bulging, tongues lolling. The contrast was dramatic. Gone was the intricacy of the underworld road, replaced by a more ancient, more totemic sensibility. Each wolf was three wolves, or the same wolf at three different times, the graven heads warped into three distinct postures, their stylized expressions ranging from sorrow to savagery, as if the ancient artisans had rendered an entire animal existence in a single moment of stone. Writing ringed the casings of each, densely packed in vertical columns, pictograms like numeric slashes, at once elegant and primitive. Auja-Gilcыnni, Achamian realized, the so-called First Tongue, so old that even the Nonmen had forgotten how to read or speak it-which meant this gate had to be as ancient to Nonmen as the Tusk was to Men. Everything about it spoke of rude souls awakening to the subtleties of artistic wonder…

But the fascination wilted as quickly as it had sparked. Achamian found himself swaying on his feet, light-headed, as if he had leapt too quickly from a slumber. Mimara also stumbled, brought both hands to her forehead, held them like a tent over her brows. Several mules spooked, stamped and jerked against their ropes. There was more than the ache of ages in the air. There was… something else, a lack of some kind, running perpendicular to the geometry of the real, bowing its lines with its cavernous suck. Something that whispered from the blackness between the graven beasts.

Something abyssal.

The gate swam in the Wizard's eyes, not so much a portal as a hole.

Without warning, Cleric's light waxed, bleached the heights of stone. Shadows crawled from the great wolf snouts hanging above. The Nonman turned before the entrance, blasted by illumination. Several raised their hands against the glare.

His voice seemed to boom into the surrounding darkness.

"Kneel…"

The Skin Eaters stared at him dumbstruck, watched as he slumped to his knees. For a heartbeat his eyes glared without focus, then he looked to the Men standing about him, his expression slowly tightening. Pained lines climbed his scalp.