R. Bakker: The Judging eye

"Take heart," Sorweel heard an old voice mutter to someone unseen.

"Are you sure?" a panicked boy-voice whispered in reply. "How can you be sure?"

A laugh, so obviously forced that Sorweel could not but wince. "A fortnight ago, the Hunter's priests found a nest of warblers in the temple eaves. Crimson warblers-do you understand? The Gods are with us, my son. They watch over us!"

Peering after the voices, Sorweel recognized the Ostaroots, a family whom he had always thought hangers-on in his father's Royal Company. Sorweel had always shunned the son, Tasweer, not out of arrogance or spite, but in accordance with what seemed the general court attitude. He had never thought of it, not really, save to make gentle sport of the boy now and again with his friends. For some reason, it shamed Sorweel to hear him confessing his fears to his father. It seemed criminal that he, a prince born to the greatest of privileges, had so effortlessly judged Tasweer's family, that with the ease of an exhalation, he had assessed lives as deep and confusing as his own. And found them wanting.

But his remorse was short-lived. Shouts of warning drew his eyes back in the direction of the pelting rain, toward the first shadows of movement across the plain. The siege towers appeared first, each within toppling distance of the others, little more than blue columns at the misty limits of his vision, like the ghosts of ancient monoliths. There was no surprise at the number of them-fourteen-since Sorweel and countless others had watched their faraway assembly over the preceding days. The surprise, rather, was reserved for their scale, and for the fact that the Southerners had borne them disassembled across so many trackless leagues.

They moved in echelon, crawling as though perched on tortoises. Slowly, the finer details of their appearance resolved from the mist, as did the rhythmic shouts of the thousands that pressed them forward. They were sheathed in what appeared to be scales of tin, and almost absurdly tall, to the point of tottering, rising to a slender peak from bases as broad as any Sakarpic bastion-unlike any of the engines Sorweel had seen sketched in the Tomes of War. Each bore the Circumfix, the mark of the Aspect-Emperor and his sham divinity, painted in white and red across their middens: a circle containing the outstretched figure of an upside-down man-Anasыrimbor Kellhus himself, the rumours said. The sign tattooed into the flesh of the missionaries Sorweel's father had ordered burned.

There was a breathlessness to their approach, which Sorweel attributed to the fact that it was at last beginning, that all the worrying and bickering and preparing and skirmishing of the previous months was finally coming to a head. In the towers' wake, the immaculate ranks of the Great Ordeal resolved into gleaming solidity, row after marching row of them, reaching out across field and pasture, their far flanks lost in the rainy haze.

Once again the horns unnerved the sky.

Sorweel stood numb, one of ten thousand faces, concentrated with rancour, dread, disbelief, even ardour, watching as ten times that number-more! — marched through the dreary downpour, bearing the exotic arms of distant peoples, following the devices of a dozen different nations. Strangers come from sweaty shores, from lands unheard of, who knew not their language, cared nothing for their ways or their riches…

The Southron Kings, come to save the world.

How many times had Sorweel dreamed of them? How many times had he imagined them reclining half-nude in their grand marble galleries, listening bored to polyglot petitioners? Or riding divans through spice-dusted streets, heavy-lidded eyes scanning the mercantile bustle, searching for girls to add to their dark-skinned harems? How many times, his heart balled in child anger, had he told his father he was running away to the Three Seas?

To the land where Men yet warred against Men.

He had learned quickly to conceal his fascination, however. Among the officials of his father's court, the South was the object of contempt and derision-typically. It was a fallen place, where vigour had succumbed to complexity, to the turmoil of a thousand thousand vyings. It was a place where subtlety had become a disease and where luxury had washed away the bourne between what was womanish and what was manly.

But they were wrong-so heartbreakingly wrong. If the defeats of the previous weeks had not taught them such, then surely they understood now.

The South had come to teach them.

Sorweel cast about looking for his father. But like a miracle, King Harweel was already beside him, standing tall in his long skirts of mail. He gripped his son's shoulder, leaned reassuringly. When he grinned, jewels of water fell from his moustaches.

The tapping drone of rain. The peal of outland horns.

"Fear not," he said. "Neither he nor his Schoolmen will dare our Chorae. We will fight as Men fight." He looked to his High Boonsmen, who had all turned to watch their King give heart to his son.

"Do you hear me?" he cried out to them. "For two thousand years, our walls have stood unbroken. For two thousand years, the line of our fathers has reached unbroken! We are their culmination. We are the Men of Sakarpus, the Lonely City. We are survivors of the Worldfall, Keepers of the Chorae Hoard, a solitary light against the pitch of Sranc and endl-!"

The sound of swooping wings interrupted him. Eyes darted heavenward. Several men even cried out. Sorweel instinctively raised a hand to his mail-armoured stomach, pressed the sorcery-killing Chorae about his waist so that it pinched cold into his navel.

It was a stork, as white and as long as a tusk, flying when it should have sheltered from the rain. Men shrank in horror from the battlement it landed upon, crowded back into one another. It turned the knife of its head toward them, its long bill pressed low to its neck.

The King's hand fell from his son's shoulder.

The stork regarded them with porcelain patience. Its black eyes were sentient and unfathomable.

Raindrops tinkled across iron, pattered against leather.

"What does it want?" some voice cried.

King Harweel pushed himself to the fore of his men. Sorweel stood transfixed, blinked at the rain blowing into his eyes, tasted the cold spill across his lips. His father stood alone, his woollen mantle soaked, his hands slack below the shining lines of his vambraces. The stork stood nearly on top of him, legs like sticks, wings folded into the polished vase of its body, its sage face bent down to regard the King at its feet…

Then, hanging in the cloud-swollen distance to the right of the bird, a star appeared, a scintillating point of light. Sorweel could not but glance in its direction, as did all those crowded about him. When he looked back to his father, the stork was gone-gone!

Suddenly he found himself jostled forward by the High Boonsmen, pressed hard against the embrasures. Everybody seemed to be shouting, to his father, to one another, to the horn-filled sky. The siege towers had continued their inexorable approach, as had the Southron men, whose formations now made a dread tapestry of the surrounding plains. The point of light, which flared from deeper distances, suddenly flickered out…

Only to reappear above the Ordeal's forward ranks, hanging half again the height of the ponderous towers. Sorweel gasped, tried to step back. It seemed a fearful thing to look up when he already stood so high. The point was no longer a point, but a figure of the purest white striding through a nimbus of blue incandescence. A man or a god.

Sorweel found himself clutching the pitted stone of the battlements.

The Aspect-Emperor.

The rumour. The lifelong itch…

"Father!" Sorweel cried, unable to see past the shoulders and shields about him. Gusts tumbled down from the west, blowing the rain into veils of mist, which floated like mountainous apparitions over the walls and their sodden defenders. The cold was like knives. "Father!"