R. Bakker - The Judging eye

"At last," he said, closing eyes that smiled. "She listens."

He felt her fingers press his shoulder, as though to poke in friendly rebuke but really just to confirm. Something swelled through him then, something that demanded he keep his eyes shut in the pretence of sleep.

He had been lonely, he realized. Lonely.

These past twenty years…

"A place where my line can outlive me," the High-King said.

Seswatha frowned in good-natured dismissal. "You have no need to fear…" Achamian leaned back in his chair, forced his thoughts from the conundrum facing him on the benjuka plate between them. Most of the private rooms in the King-Temple Annexes were little more than slots between walls of cyclopean brick, and Celmomas's study was no exception. The towering scroll-racks only added to the cloistered air. "Our foe has no hope against the Ordeal you have assembled. Think. Nimeric… Even Nil'giccas marches."

The names seemed to relax his old friend.

"Ishuдl," Celmomas said, smiling at his own wit-or lack of it. He reached for his chalice of apple mead. "That's what I call it."

Seswatha shook his head. "Is it stocked with beer or with concubines?"

"Seeds," Celmomas replied, his eyes smiling over the rim of his cup. The golden wolf's head braided into the centre of his beard seemed to glower from beneath his wrist.

"Seeds?"

The High-King's demeanour faltered. There was always such an aura of care about him, at least when it came to the little things, like making sure he replaced his cup on the same ring of condensation.

He could be so reckless otherwise.

"For the longest time," he said, "I refused to believe you. And now that I believe…"

"Yes?"

Celmomas had a long face, one that suited the dynastic glory of his name. Solemn. Nimble yet strong-jawed. But it was too given to expressions of melancholy, especially in rooms where the gloom lay heavy. He laughed as much as the next man, Seswatha supposed, but the looks that inevitably followed-eyes slack with quiet sorrow, lips drawn into a pent line-always seemed more primitive somehow, closer to the native tenor of his heart.

"Nothing…" the High-King said with a release of old and weary air. "Just premonitions."

Seswatha studied him with new concern. "The premonitions of kings are never to be taken lightly. You know that much, old friend."

"Which is why I have built a ref-"

The creak of bronze hinges. They both yanked their gazes to the shadows that concealed the entrance. The fires pulled and twirled in the tripods set to either side of the game-table. Achamian heard the scuff of little feet, then suddenly Nau-Cayыti hurtled into his father's arms and lap.

"Whoopa!" Celmomas cried. "What warrior leaps blindly into the arms of his foe?"

The boy chortled in the grinding way of children fending fingers that tickle. "You're not my foe, Da!"

"Wait till you get older!"

Nau-Cayыti grinned with clenched teeth, struggled against his father's ringed hand, growling as much as laughing. The boy surprised him by jerking and twisting like a summer pike, clutched his white-woollen robe in an effort to brace his feet on his father's thighs. Celmomas pulled back, nearly toppled in his chair.

Achamian roared with laughter. "A wolf, my King! The boy's a wolf! You better hope he's never your enemy!"

"Cayы-Cayы!" the High-King cried, holding his hands out in surrender.

"What's this?" the young Prince asked, fumbling in the interior pockets of his father's robe. With a little grunt, he pulled a golden tube into the wobbling light. A scroll-case, cast in the likeness of twining vines.

"For me?" he gasped at his grinning father.

"Nay," Celmomas replied with mock gravity. "It's a great and powerful secret." The High-King's look found Seswatha past the boy's flaxen curls. Nau-Cayыti turned as well, so that both faces-the one innocent, the other careworn-hung motionless in the pale light.

"It's for your uncle Seswa," the High-King said.

Nau-Cayыti clutched the golden tube to his breast, more in a delighted than a covetous way. "Can I give it to him, Da?" he cried. "Please?"

Celmomas nodded in chuckling assent, but a gleam of seriousness lingered in his gaze. The Prince bounced from his father's lap, made both men start in alarm when he almost bowled into one of the tripods, then he was leaning against Seswatha's knee, beaming with pride. He held out the scroll-case in hands too small not to be clumsy, saying, "Tell me, Uncle Seswa. Tell-me-tell-me! Who's Mimara?"

Achamian bolted from his blanket with a gasp…

…only to find Incariol kneeling over him in the deep shadow. A line of light rimmed his scalp and the curve of his cheek and temple; his face was impenetrable otherwise.

The Wizard made to scramble backward, but the Nonman clasped his shoulder with a powerful hand. The bald head lowered in apology, but the face remained utterly obscured in shadow. "You were laughing," he whispered before turning away.

Achamian could only squint, slack-mouthed.

As dark as it was, he was certain that Cleric had sobbed as he drew away.

Achamian awoke far older, it seemed, than when he'd fallen asleep. His ears and teeth ached, as did every joint he had words to describe. While the Skin Eaters busied themselves preparing to depart, he sat cross-legged on his crude mat, forearms heavy against his knees, glaring more than watching. The twin lights hung above them as before, the differences in their cast as subtle and as profound as the differences in their casters. His eyes traced the verge of their illumination, from the hanging bronze of the fallen lantern wheel, along the slot-windowed walls, to the great fragments of face leaning in the debris of the ruined head. Part of him was horrified, even affronted, to discover that the previous day had not been a dream-that Cil-Aujas was real. He breathed deep the indescribable must hanging in the air, fought the urge to spit. It seemed he could feel the black miles hanging above them.

When Mimara asked for a third time what was the matter, he decided that he hated the young. Smooth faces and lithe strong limbs. Not to mention the certainty of ignorance. In his soul's eye he saw them doing jigs down blasted halls, while all he could do was hobble after them. Pompous wretches, he thought, with their dark hair and hundred-word vocabularies. Pissants.

"Huppa!" Somandutta called to him at one point, shouting the word they used to goad their mules. "Huppa-huppa! No bones are so heavy!"

"And no fools are quite so dense!" he snapped in return. He didn't so much regret the words as the general laughter that greeted them. He stared down Mimara's look of reproach, felt the petty satisfaction of winning petty contests of the will. A stab of fear accompanied the thought that he might be taking ill.

With the others watching, he had no choice but to quickly gather his things. He reminded himself that foul humours were the most slothful humours of all, and that, just as the old Ceneian slave-scholars insisted, one need only walk to escape them. He cursed himself for groaning aloud as he hoisted his pack.

Sure enough, his mood mellowed as his limbs warmed to the company's motivated pace. For a time, he did his best to recollect what Seswatha had known of Cil-Aujas, to build a map of sorts in his soul's eye. But the best he could conjure was a hazy sense of myriad levels, with the nimil mines tangling the mountain's roots and the commons and habitations reaching Aenaratiol's gouged peak. It seemed he could feel the Mansion's hollows reach like roots through the buried distances: all the enclosed spaces you might find in a great mannish city, from granaries to barracks to temples to lowly hearths, stacked one upon another, hanging in the compressed heart of a mountain. But he could pull nothing definite from these imaginings, certainly nothing that would be of any use to their journey. Even in Seswatha's day Cil-Aujas had been largely abandoned, and few were the Nonmen who could find their way through the Mansion's outer reaches. The most the old Wizard could say was that Cleric seemed to lead them true. So long as they continued following the thoroughfares that traversed these great fissures, he knew they drew nearer the Mansion's northern gates. There was comfort enough in that…