R. Bakker - The Judging eye

No one speaks.

She sees Sarl, gazing with his pond-scum eyes, his manic face rutted and pale. But when she looks at the other old man, Achamian, she finds that her Judging Eye has opened… She has read her stepfather's writing on sorcery, his Novum Arcanum. She knows that the God peers through all eyes, and that the Few-sorcerer or witch, it did not matter-were simply those whose sight recollected something of His all-seeing gaze and so could speak with the dread timbre of His all-creating voice.

She sees Achamian as others do, stooped in his mad hermit robes, his beard stiff against his breast, his complexion the dark of long-used skins. She sees the Mark, soiling his colours, blasting his edges.

And though her eyes blink and roll against it, she sees the Judgment…

He is carrion. He is horror. His skin is burned to paste.

Drusas Achamian is damned.

Her breath catches. Almost without thinking, she clutches Somandutta's free hand-the slick cool of iron rings and the grease of leather shocks her skin. She squeezes hard, as though her fingers need confirmation of their warm-blooded counterparts. The Chorae and their inscrutable bearers move beneath her feet, each a point of absolute chill.

Part of her, she realizes, will not survive this underworld labyrinth.

She prays that it is the lesser part.

"Fucking mules! How can you run with fucking mules!" the Zeьmi Sword-Dancer cries after Sarl has once again screamed at them to make haste. The haunches of the beasts are already shagged with blood from the prick and slap of the scalpers' weapons. The clopping of their hooves makes a curious clatter across the dust and stone, like wood without the hollow, an avalanche of axes chopping. Their packs wobble drunkenly-one has already lost its entire burden. Stepping about the debris, tents and cooking utensils, adds material to Mimara's sense of panic.

Achamian has said nothing since leaving the airy blackness of the Repositorium. He labours beside her; the slight tick in his leg has swollen into a hobble. His breath comes hard and greedy, as though he needs to feed all the years baled within him. When he coughs, his chest sounds damp and torn, more rotted wool than flesh.

The vaulted hallways scroll above and about them, the basalt seemingly shocked by the sudden onset of their lights. The images rise and arch and fall away, as quick as life. There is no time to ponder the dead eyes that had once dreamed them. The company runs to survive.

Hope and urgency have become a single jarring note.

She can no longer feel the Chorae beneath them-their pursuers have outrun them using deeper halls, and now no one knows where and when they will strike. The Skin Eaters wrap their horror about their trust in their Captain, say nothing save to joke or to gripe. Questions have become perverse, an indulgence fit only for the obese.

Cleric leads them through a gallery of branching corridors, some so narrow the company is stretched into a single file longer than their sorcerous illumination. Those scalpers trapped in the rear cry out against the rising darkness. When Mimara glances back, it's as though she looks down a throat or a well-walls narrowing until blackness smothers them. She can scarce see the sheen roll across the laggards' helms.

A pain climbs into her chest, and she imagines an eye squinting from her heart.

There is no doubt they move through the deeps now. Only when the walls are tight and the ceilings low can you feel their constricting aura-or so it seems. Only the threat of closure makes the boggling enormity plain. They are sealed from all things, not simply sun and sky. The very world walls them in.

She looks up and around in an effort to throw off the oppressive sense of cringing. The stone reliefs seem to burn, so near are they to the encased light, so stark and immediate. Hunters wrestling lions, shepherds balancing lambs upon shields, on and on, all struck speechless in the stone of ages. The illumination crosses a lip; the ancient vignettes fall away, as though over inverted cliffs. They have come to another great chamber, not as vast as the Repositorium, but great enough. The air seems cold and graceful.

They rope from the narrow hall, gather in milling clots, gawking at this latest wonder. Their mules bray and tremble for exhaustion. One collapses amid echoing curses.

The columns are square, panelled in more animal manifolds, and even though she can see only the lower and outer limits of them, she knows they form great aisles across the darkness, that the company stands in some underworld forum or agora. Achamian is leaning against his knees next to her, staring into his shadow, mustering the spit to swallow. His teeth bared in exhaustion, he bends his head back, looks to the looming gallery.

"The High Halls," he gasps. "The High Halls of Mы-"

Haroo oooooooooooom!

Men twist and whirl about. The dust shivers. The sound seems to filter, to rise, as though they can only hear what mounts the surface of their ears. Sranc horns.

They feel it in their teeth-not so much an ache as a taste.

Never before has she heard them, and now she understands their antique power, the madness that saw mothers strangle their own children in besieged cities of yore. Their depth is tidal in its compass, yet riddled with thin and piercing notes, like a shriek unbraided into wincing threads, each towed wide across the unnameable. A portent hangs within them, a promise of what is other and impenetrable, of things that would glory in her lament. They remind her of her humanity the way burnt edges speak of fire.

Temple silence rises in their wake. There is a distant sound-like leaves skidding over marble flagstones. It seems to tighten her skin to the prick of moments passing.

Cleric calls, and they follow. They leave the fallen mule where it lays grunting.

They run, but the slow succession of pillars seems to diminish their pace. Their arcane lights throw shadows that swing and sweep out with monumental elegance. The greater blackness hangs from them, shrouding the hollows beyond the adjacent aisles.

The horns have a swelling nearness to them now, a cracking blare. Only the stone forest of columns divides them from their pursuers-she knows this with a herd animal's certainty. For the first time a part of her dares believe that she's about to die. Her bowels loosen to the jolt of her steps. Her stomach tightens to a burn. She throws her gaze wildly about, desperate to find something that she doesn't recognize. For it seems to her that she has known this place all along, that her soul, like an old knot undone, bears the kink and imprint of her future… The pillars braced against cataclysmic burdens. The bestial totems, their many limbs flattened into the dark. The stink of her exertions. The sense of loss and mortal misdirection. The gnashing of teeth and iron in the arching maze of black behind her…

They are coming. Out of the pit they are coming. The flutter of reverberations in her chest seems to confirm it. This is where she dies.

The outer reaches of their lights flatten against a wall, roll back the vertical murk with twin rings of illumination, the one wider and brighter because of Cleric's position out in front of Achamian. Mimara stumps to a stop with the others. The dust rolls forward, makes skirts about their waists. She cranes her neck, absently rubbing a stitch in her side-despite her terror she is relieved to simply breathe. Narrative reliefs band the wall, stacking high into the darkness, but the graven figures are not carved nearly so deep or so realistically as so the others. A heartbeat passes before she sees the hair and beards and chains that mark the forms as Men.

All at once, her earlier sense of recognition drains away. Only the premonition remains.

She has read enough to know these are not just any Men. They are the original Men of Eдrwa, the Emwama, the slaves exterminated by her ancestors in the earliest days of the Tusk. She can even see a woman bound to a train of naked captives-a woman that could be her. And for some reason, this point of connection strikes a nauseating note through the whole of Cil-Aujas, renders it alien to the point of revulsion, as though all of it had been smeared with reek and contagion…