R. Bakker - The Judging eye

Achamian found himself speaking against a queer reluctance, one that he confused with shyness at first. Some time passed before he realized that it was in fact shame. He didn't want to be like these unruly men, much less respect them. Even more, he didn't want their trust or their admiration, things that both men had obviously granted him days ago, given the way they had risked their lives for his lie.

"Tell me," Pokwas said, staring with an interest that seemed almost threatening for its intensity. "What happened to the Nonmen?" Whether it was the way he steered his voice or the wariness in his eyes, Achamian knew that the Sword-Dancer was every bit as worried about Cleric as he.

"I thought I already told that story."

"He means what happened to their race," Galian said. "Why have they dwindled so?"

A momentary flash of cruelty passed through the old Wizard, not for them as men, but for their beliefs. "You can look to your Tusk for that account," he said, taking peevish relish in the word "your." "They're the False Men, remember? Cursed of the Gods. Our ancient fathers destroyed many a Mansion as great as this." In his soul's eye he could see them, the Prophets of the Tusk, as stern and as spare as the words they would carve into ivory, leading hide-clad savages through deep halls of glory, calling out in guttural tongues, murdering those who had been their slavers.

"But I thought their back had already been broken," Pokwas said. "That the Five Tribes came upon them in their twilight."

"True."

"So what happened?"

"The Inchoroi came…"

"You mean the Consult?" Galian asked.

Achamian stared at the man, not quite stunned, but speechless all the same. That a mere scalper could mention the Consult with the same familiarity as he might mention any great and obvious nation seemed beyond belief. It was a sign, he realized, of just how profoundly the world had changed during his exile. Before, when he still wore the robes of a Mandate Schoolman, all the Three Seas had laughed at him and his dire warnings of the Second Apocalypse. Golgotterath. The Consult. The Inchoroi. These had been the names of his disgrace, utterances that assured the mockery and condescension of any who might listen. But now…

Now they were religion… The holy gospel of the Aspect-Emperor.

Kellhus.

"No," he said, feeling that peculiar wariness when one crossed uncertain lines of knowing. "This was before the Consult…"

And so he told them of the millennial wars between the Nonmen and the Inchoroi. The two scalpers listened with honest fascination, their eyes lost in the middle ground between the telling and the glorious riot of the told. The first Wracu descending. The first naked hordes of Sranc. The Nonmen Ishroi whipping their chariots into screaming horizons…

Even Achamian found himself curiously overawed. To speak of distant grounds and faraway peoples was one thing, but to sit here, in the derelict halls of Cil-Aujas, speaking of the ancient Nonmen…

Voices could stir more than the living from slumber.

So instead of lingering in his explanations as he might have otherwise, Achamian struck through the heart of the matter, relating only what was essential: the treachery of Nin'janjin, the Womb-Plague and the death of Hanalinqы, the doom slumbering in the bones of the survivors' immortality. The two scalpers, it turned out, already knew many of the details: Apparently Galian had studied for the Ministrate before, as he put it, drink, hash, and whores had saved his soul.

Achamian laughed hard at that.

Every so often he glanced at Mimara to make sure all was well. She sat like a cross-legged vase with Somandutta, indulging the young caste-noble's vanity with questions about Nilnamesh. He liked the man well enough, Achamian supposed. Somandutta seemed to be one of those peculiar caste-nobles who managed to carry their sheltered upbringing into adulthood: sociable to a fault, almost absurdly confident that others meant him well. Were this Momemn, Invishi, or any other great city, Achamian had no doubt he would be one of those dog-eager courtiers, one everyone would dismiss with smiles rather than sneers.

"Do you know," the caste-noble was saying, "what my people say about women like you?"

Even still, the old Wizard remained wary. He knew enough about scalpers to know they weren't easily known. Their lives demanded too much from them.

"Tell me," Achamian asked Galian directly. "Why do you do this? Hunting Sranc. It can't be for the bounty, can it? I mean, as far as I can tell you all leave places like Marrow as poor as you arrive rich…"

The former Columnary paused in reflection. "For some, it is the money. Xonghis, for instance, leaves most of his share with the Custom House-"

"He'll never spend it," Pokwas interrupted.

"Why would you sa-?" Achamian pressed.

But Galian was shaking his head. "Your question, sorcerer, is not so wise. Scalpers scalp. Whores whore. We never ask one another why. Never."

"We even have a saying," Pokwas added in his resonant, accented voice. "'Leave it to the slog.'"

Achamian smiled. "It all comes back to the slog, does it?"

"Even kings," Galian replied with a wink, "shod their feet."

The conversation turned to more mundane fare after this. For a time, Achamian listened to the scalpers argue over who was the true inheritor of the Ancient North's greatness, the Three Seas or Zeьm. It was an old game, men taking pride over meaningless things, passing time in good-natured rivalry. He thought of how strange it must be for long-dead Cil-Aujas to hear the glory of small and petty words after so many entombed ages, let alone to feel the polishing touch of light. Perhaps that was why the entire company seemed to fall mute sooner than their weariness merited. There was a greater effort in speaking overheard words, an effort that, though infinitesimal, quickly accumulated. And this dark place, whether from the drowsing edge of dreams or with ears pricked in malice, did listen.

The disappointment on Somandutta's face was almost maudlin when Mimara abandoned him to rejoin her "father."

They had slept side by side since she had joined the company, but somehow, this night, they ended up laying face to face as well-a position that Achamian thought uncomfortably intimate but didn't seem to trouble Mimara at all. It reminded him of her mother, Esmenet, how the habits of prostitution had coloured so much of what she said and did. Wearing her nakedness the thoughtless way a smith might wear a leather apron. Talking cocks and congress the way masons might discuss trowels and arches.

So many calluses where he had only tender skin.

"Everything…" she said in a wistful tone. Her eyes seemed to track the passage of ghosts.

"Everything what?"

"The walls… The ceilings. Everywhere, limbs and people cut out of stone-images atop images… Think of the toil!"

"It wasn't always such. The Wolf Gate is an example of how they once adorned their cities. It was only when they began forgetting that they turned to this… this… excess. These are their annals, the accounting of their deeds-great and small."

"Then why not simply paint murals the way we do?"

Achamian found himself approving of this question-another long-dead habit, tingling back to life. "Nonmen can't see paintings," he said with an old man's shrug.

A frowning smile. Despite the anger that always seemed to roll about the nethers of her expression, her skeptical looks always managed to promise a fair accounting.

"It's true," Achamian said. "Paintings are naught but gibberish to their eyes. The Nonmen may resemble us, Mimara, but they are far more different than you can imagine."

"You make them sound frightening."

An old warmth touched him then, one that he had almost forgotten: the feeling of carrying another, not with arms or love or even hope, but with knowledge. Knowledge that made wise and kept safe.