R. Bakker - The Judging eye

She is terrified and alive.

Mimara runs over mouldered bones, a pinch of sun-brilliance carried high in the air above her. In her soul she thinks circles, while with her eyes she sees the light swing and seesaw, and she ponders the impossibility of it, how the light shed is the same light as any other, baring the surfaces of things, and yet at the same time not quite whole, as though strained through a filter-robbed of some essential sediment.

Sorcerous light, stretched over the ruin like moulted skin. Her light!

Fear crowds the moment, to be sure. She knows why the Wizard has given her this Gift, perhaps better than he. Part of her, she realizes, will not survive this underworld labyrinth…

Great Cil-Aujas.

She is inclined to see history as degeneration. Years ago, not long after her mother had brought her to the Andiamine Heights, an earthquake struck Momemn, not severe, but violent enough to crack walls and to set arms and ornaments toppling. There had been one mural in particular, the Osto-Didian, the eunuchs called it, depicting the First Holy War battling about Shimeh, with all the combatants cramped shield to shield, sword to sword, like dolls bound into sheaves. Where the other murals had been webbed with fractures, this one seemed to have been pounded by hammers. Whole sections had sloughed away, exposing darker, deeper images: naked men across the backs of bulls. In shallow sockets here and there even this layer had given out, especially near the centre, where her stepfather had once hung out of proportion in the sky. There, after dabbing away the white powder with her fingertips, she saw a young man's mosaic face, black hair high in the wind, child-wide eyes fixed upon some obscured foe.

That, she understood, was history: the piling on of ages like plaster and paint, each image a shroud across the others, the light of presence retreating, from the Nonmen to the Five Tribes to the New Empire, coming at last to a little girl in the embrace of hard-handed men…

To the daughter who dined with her Empress mother, listening to the tick of enamel tapping gold, watching the older woman's eyes wander lines of sorrow, remorse thick enough to spit.

To the woman who raged beneath a wizard's tower.

To now.

She is inclined to see history as degeneration, and what greater proof did she need, now that they walked beneath the mural of mannish strife, now that they touched the glass of first things?

Cil-Aujas. Great and dead, a mosaic exposed. What was human paint compared to this?

Everything everywhere has the smell of age, of air so leached of odour and event that the dust they scoop into the air with their boots actually makes it seem young, ushers it into a more human scale. Ageless air, she thinks. Dead air, the kind that lingers in the chests of corpses.

And everything everywhere has the look of weight and suffocation. It makes her think of her furies, those times when she wants to pull all roofs down, so that her perishing could be her vengeance. What would it be like, she wonders, to be slapped between mountain palms? Every ceiling plummeting, so that it seems the floor bucks up. The light snuffed. The thunder of sound crushed to nothing. Everything captured, even the dust. Limbs little more than blades of grass. Life seeping through fault and fracture.

The darkness that dwells inside stones.

She bears the light of presence-a Surillic Point, he had called it-and she runs across floors older than the most ancient nations of Men. She stands beneath all empire and ambition, and she illuminates. So simple, she knows-so paltry as to be pathetic. But this is how all greatness begins.

She carries a sphere of sight about her, bloated and invisible save where its touch frosts the floor and ruin white. She is a witch… at last! How can she not clamp tooth to tooth in dark glee? How many times had she dreamed, her limbs pinned to pillows, of speaking light and fire?

The company has ceased marching, receives her with wonder and consternation. She tells them that Sarl and Achamian follow close behind. She sees the tilt in their looks, the way they take a step back in their eyes, as though to regain some lost perspective. The light tingles. A strut haunts her limbs, and she thinks of her slave-sisters back in Carythusal, the way they posed like rare and precious things when wearing something new. She too had cried over dresses.

The Skin Eaters turn to the dark behind them, searching the flat blackness. When their eyes fail them, they turn their scrutiny to her. They seem a wall, even though they stand scattered among their mules. Her light gilds the texture of their armour. It shines along the rims of their shields, bares the dents of metal hammered over wooden edges. It warms old leather, forks and branches along gut-stitched seams. It bares their anxious faces, bobs silver up and down the hone of their restless swords. It paints white circles in their beasts' black gaze.

Fierce men, with the wild pride of the dispossessed. They would eat her skin, were it not for the Wizard. They would glory in the stink of her. They would wear her the way they wear shrivelled bits of Sranc, as a charm, a trophy, and a totem. As a seal and a sign.

It seems she has always known that men were more animal than women were animal. She was sold before her mother could tell her this, but still she knew. The animal continually leans forward in the souls of men, forever gnaws the leash. Even here, in the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas, this truth is no less ancient.

Even here, so tragically out of their depth, they lean to the promise of her vulnerability.

"Where's the Wizard?" someone asks.

She retreats a step, and her shadow falls behind her. She has lost her light to the space between her and the Skin Eaters-a space she has never owned. She can sense the Captain standing to the right of her, turns to risk his dominating gaze but finds herself staring at the pocked dust instead. She has been tricked, it seems, into a posture of submission.

"Mimara," a voice calls. "What's the matter, girl?" It's Somandutta, the one man here that she trusts, and only then because he is no man.

"You have no call to fear us…"

A chorus of shouts greets the abrupt arrival of Sarl and Achamian. In a heartbeat she is forgotten by all save Somandutta, who comes to her side, saying, "The light… How did you do that?"

She bites her lower lip, curses down the urge to lean her head against the armour scaling his chest. Of Achamian she can see nothing but the congregated backs of the scalpers with their packs and their slung shields. But she hears his voice between the figures, speaking to the Captain with quarrelsome urgency, something about Chorae moving through the halls immediately below them. Someone, Kiampas, immediately suggests the Bloody Picks, but the Wizard is dubious, asking why anyone wealthy enough to own a Chorae would be fool enough to hunt Sranc for money. Mimara wonders if their Chorae-bearing Captain will take offence.

Then Cleric says, "He's right." The inhuman voice doesn't so much reach farther as it reaches deeper, carried through the stone of the floor into her bones. "I sense them too."

The Skin Eaters open, back away, each staring at the company of prone shadows splayed across the dust scuffed about their feet. She knows they think they can feel the Chorae too…

Then suddenly she feels them. Her limbs jolt, and she sways, for her body had thought the ground solid, and now she senses open space, breaths and plummets between leagues of stone. Chorae, bottomless punctures in being, traverse them, a necklace of little voids carried by something that runs in a lumbering file… something.

"They travel in the direction I lead us," Cleric says, "toward the Fifth Anterograde Gate…"

"You think they mean to cut us off?" Kiampas asks.