The Judging Eye Read Free Page B

stair, gathered to
witness the Whelming of Anasûrimbor Kelmomas, the youngest son of their Most
Holy Aspect-Emperor. Only the face of his Uncle Maithanet, the Shriah of the
Thousand Temples, defeated his momentary scrutiny. For an instant, his uncle's
shining look caught his own, and though Kelmomas smiled with a daft candour
appropriate to his age, he did not at all like the flat consistency of the
Shriah's gaze.
     
    He suspects, the secret
voice whispered.
     
    Suspects what?
     
    That you are make-believe.
     
    The last of the cacophony faded,
until only the oceanic call of the Horns remained, thrumming so deep that
Kelmomas's tunic seemed to tingle against his skin. Then they too trailed into
nothing.
     
    Ear-ringing silence. With a cry
from Thopsis, the whole world seemed to kneel, including the Exalt-Ministers.
The peoples of the New Empire fell to the ground, fields of them, then slowly
lowered their foreheads to the hot marble—every soul crowded into the Imperial
Precincts. Only the Shriah, who knelt before no man save the Aspect-Emperor,
remained standing. Only Uncle Maithanet. When the sun broke across the stair,
his vestments flared with light: A hundred tiny Tusks kindled like fingers of
flame. Kelmomas blinked at their brilliance, averted his eyes.
     
    His mother led him down the
steps by the hand. He clapped after her with his sandalled feet, giggled at her
frown. They passed down the aisle opened between the Exalt-Ministers, and he
laughed some more, struck by the absurdity of them, all shapes and ages and
sizes, grovelling in the costumes of kings.
     
    "They honour you,
Kel," his mother said. "Why would you laugh at them?"
     
    Had he meant to laugh? Sometimes
it was hard to keep count.
     
    "Sorry," he said with
a glum sigh. Sorry. It was one of many words that confused him, but it
never failed to spark compassion in his mother's look.
     
    At the base of the monumental
stair, a company of green-and-gold-dressed soldiers awaited them: some twenty
men of his father's hallowed bodyguard, the Hundred Pillars. They fell into
formation about the Empress and her child, then, their shields bright and their
looks fierce with concentration, they began leading them through the masses and
across the Scuari Campus toward the Andiamine Heights.
     
    As a Prince-Imperial, Kelmomas
often found himself overshadowed by armed men, but the walk unnerved him for
some reason. The smell was comforting at first: the perfumed muslin of their
surcoats, the oils they used to quicken their blades and soften the leather
straps of their harness. But with every step, the bitter-sweet bitumen of
unwashed bodies came more and more to the fore, punctuated by the reek of the
truly wretched. Murmurs rose like a haze about them. "Bless-bless-bless," over and over, in a tone poised between asking and giving. Kelmomas found
himself staring past the towering guards, out across the landscape of kneelers.
He saw an old beggar, more husked than clothed, weeping, grinding his face
against the cobbles as though trying to blot himself out. He saw a girl only
slightly younger than himself, her head turned in sacrilege, so that she could
stare up at their monstrous passage. On and on the prostrate figures went, out
to distant foundations.
     
    He walked across a living
ground.
     
    And then he was among them, in
them , watching his own steps, little more than a jewelled shadow behind a
screen of merciless, chain-armoured men. A name. A rumour and a hope. A
god-child, suckled at the breast of Empire, anointed by the palm of Fate. A son
of the Aspect-Emperor.
     
    They did not know him, he
realized. They saw, they worshipped, they trusted what they could not
fathom.
     
    No one knows you, the
secret voice said.
     
    No one knows anyone.
     
    He glanced at his mother, saw
the blank stare that always accompanied her more painful reveries.
     
    "Are you thinking of her,
Mommy?" he asked. Between the two of them, "her" always meant
Mimara, her first