Free The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker

did what she did to save your life, and
forever wrecked herself as a result."
     
    He knew these were the wrong
words before he finished speaking. Her eyes suddenly became old with
exhaustion, with the paralysis that comes from hearing the same hollow
justifications over and over again.
     
    The fact that she refused to
reply to them said it all.
     
    Esmenet had recovered her some
time ago—that much was obvious. Her manner and inflection were too studied, too
graceful, not to have been honed over years in the court. But it was just as
obvious that Esmenet had found her too late. The damaged look. The rim of
desperation.
     
    Hope was ever the great foe of
slavers. They beat it from your lips, then they pursued it past your skin.
Mimara, Achamian knew, had been hunted to the ground—many, many times.
     
    "But why do I remember
you?"
     
    "Look—"
     
    "I remember you buying me
apples—"
     
    "Child. It wasn't—"
     
    "The street was busy, loud.
You were laughing because I kept smelling mine instead of biting. You said that
little girls shouldn't eat through their nose, that it wasn't—"
     
    "It wasn't me!" he
exclaimed. "Look. The daughters of whores..."
     
    She flinched once again, like a
child startled by a snapping dog. How old would she be? Thirty summers? More?
Nonetheless, she looked like the little girl she said she remembered, joking
about apples on a crowded street.
     
    "The daughters of
whores..." she repeated.
     
    Achamian gazed at her, filled to
his fingertips, suffused by an anxious prickle.
     
    "Have no fathers."
     
    He had tried to say this as
gently as he could, but in his ears his voice had grown too harsh with age. The
sun limned her in gold, and for a moment she seemed a native of the morning.
She lowered her face, studied the lines scraped about them, etched in burnt
black. "You said that I was clever."
     
    He ran a slow hand across his
face, exhaled, suddenly feeling ancient with guilt and frustration. Why must
everything be too big to wrestle, too muddy to grasp?
     
    "I feel sorry for you,
child—I truly do. I have some notion of what you must have endured..." A
deep breath, warm against the bright cool. "Go home, Mimara. Go back to
your mother. We have no connection."
     
    He turned back toward the tower.
The sun instantly warmed his shoulders.
     
    "But we do," her voice
chimed from behind him—so like her mother's that chills skittered across his
skin.
     
    He paused, lowered his head to
curse his slippered feet. Without turning, he said, "It's not me you
remember. What you believe is your affair."
     
    "But that's not what I
mean."
     
    Something in her tone, the windy
suggestion of a snicker or a laugh, forced him to look back. Now the sun drew a
line down her centre, violated only by the creases of her clothing, whose
contours smuggled light and dark this way and that. The wilderness rose behind
her, far more pale but likewise divided.
     
    "I can distinguish between
the created and uncreated," she said with something between embarrassment
and pride. "I am one of the Few."
     
    Achamian whirled, scowling both
at her and the brightness.
     
    "What? You're a witch ?"
     
    A deliberate nod, made narrow by
a smile.
     
    "I didn't come here to find
my father," she said, as though everything until now had been nothing but
cruel theatre. "Well... I thought you might be my father, but I really
didn't... care... that much, I think." Her eyes widened, as though turning
from the inner to the outer on some invisible swivel.
     
    "I came to find my teacher .
I came to learn the Gnosis."
     
    There it was, her reason.
     
    There is a progression to all
things. Lives, encounters, histories, each trailing their own nameless residue,
each burrowing into a black, black future, groping for the facts that conjure purpose
out of the cruelties of mere coincidence.
     
    And Achamian had had his fill of
it.
     
    ***
     
    She sees his face slacken,
despite the matted wire of his beard. She sees his