Free The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker Page A

complexion blanch, despite
the sun's morning glare. And she knows that what her mother once told her is in
fact true: Drusas Achamian possesses the soul of a teacher.
     
    So the old whore didn't lie.
     
    Almost three months have passed
since her flight from the Andiamine Heights. Three months of searching. Three
months of hard winter travel. Three months of fending against Men. She
travelled inland as much as possible, knowing that the Judges would be watching
the ports, that their agents would be ranging the coastal roads, hungry to
please her mother, their Holy Empress. It seems a miracle whenever she recalls
it. That time in the high Cepalor when the wolves paced her step for weary
step, little more than feral ghosts through the soundless snowfall. The mad
ferryman at the Wutmouth crossing. And the brigands, who tracked her only to
turn away when they saw the caste-noble cut of her clothes. There was fear in
the land, fear everywhere she turned, and it suited her and her needs well.
     
    She spent innumerable watches
lost in revery during this time, her soul's eye conjuring visions of the man
she secretly named her father. When she arrived, it seemed that everything was
the way she imagined it. Exactly. A lonely hillside spilling skyward, trees
scarred with sorcery's dread murmur. An even lonelier stone tower, a makeshift
roof raised across its collapsed floors, grasses growing from rotten-mortar
seams. Stacked-stone outbuildings, with their heaped wood, drying fish, and
stretched pelts. Slaves who smiled and talked like caste-menials. Even children
skipping beneath great-boughed maples.
     
    Only the sorcerer surprises her,
probably because she has expectations aplenty of him. Drusas Achamian, the
Apostate, the man who turned his back on history, who dared curse the
Aspect-Emperor for love of her mother. True, he seemed entirely different in
each of the lays sung about him, even in the various tales told by her mother,
by turns stalwart and doubt-ridden, learned and hapless, passionate and
cold-handed. But it was this contradictory nature that had so forcefully
stamped his image in her soul. In the cycle of historical and scriptural
characters that populated her education, he alone seemed real .
     
    Only he isn't. The man before
her seems to mock her soft-bellied imaginings: a wild-haired hermit with limbs
like barked branches and eyes that perpetually sort grievances. Bitter. Severe.
He bears the Mark, as deep as any of the sorcerers she has seen glide through
the halls of the Andiamine Heights, but where they drape silks and perfume
about their stain, he wears wool patched with rancid fur.
     
    How could anyone sing songs
about such a man?
     
    His eyes dull at the mention of
the Gnosis—the inward look of concealed pity, or so it seems. But when he
speaks, his tone is almost collegial, except that it's hollow.
     
    "Is it true, what they say,
that witches are no longer burned?"
     
    "Yes. There's even a new
School."
     
    He does not like the way she
says that word, "School." She can see it in his eyes.
     
    "A School? A School of witches ?"
     
    "They're calling themselves
the Swayal Compact."
     
    "Then what need do you have
of me?"
     
    "My mother will not allow
it. And the Swayali will not risk her Imperial displeasure. Sorcery, she says,
leaves only scars."
     
    "She's right."
     
    "But what if scars are all
you have?"
     
    This, at least, gives him pause.
She expects him to ask the obvious question, but his curiosity seems bent in a
different direction.
     
    "Power," he says,
glaring at her with an intensity she does not like. "Is that it? You want
to feel the world crumble beneath the weight of your voice."
     
    She knows this game. "Was
that how it was for you in the beginning?"
     
    His glare seems to falter over some
inner fact. But it means less than nothing, winning arguments. The same as with
her mother.
     
    "Go home," he says.
"I would sooner be your father than your teacher."
     
    There is set manner