Free The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker Page B

to the way
he turns his back this time, one that tells her that no words can retrieve him.
The sun pulls his shadow long and profound. He walks with a stoop that says he
has long outlived the age of bargaining. But she hears it all the same, the
peculiar pause of legend becoming actuality, the sound of the crazed and disjoint
seams of the world falling flush.
     
    He is the Great Teacher,
the one who raised the Aspect-Emperor to the heights of godhead. Despite his
words to the contrary.
     
    He is Drusas Achamian.
     
    ***
     
    That night she builds a bonfire
not because she means to, but because she cannot overcome the urge to burn down
the Wizard's tower. Since this is impossible, she begins—quite without
thinking—to burn it in effigy. After throwing each hewn branch, she stands so
that the walls appear to rise miniature from the crackling incandescence,
crouching just enough for the flames to garland the little window where she
thinks he sleeps.
     
    When she's finished, she stands
in its blazing presence, takes comfort in the stink of her exertions, and tells
herself the fire is in fact a living thing. She does this quite often: pretends
that worldly things are magic, even though she knows otherwise. It reminds her
that sorcery is something she can see.
     
    That she is a witch.
     
    She scarcely notices the first
drops of rain. The fire seems to beat them into steam, to lap them from her
clothing and skin with invisible tongues. Lightning flashes, so bright the
flames become momentarily invisible. Then the black heavens open up. The
surrounding forest lets loose a vast white roar.
     
    For a time she crouches against
the downpour, her leather hood hitched over her head, the fire spitting and
steaming immediately before her. The water sends long tendrils through the
crease and seam of her cloak, cold roots that gradually sink to the depth of fabric
and skin. The dimmer the bonfire becomes, the more the misery of her
circumstance oppresses her. To suffer so much, travel so far...
     
    She never recalls standing, and
certainly not drawing back her cloak. It seems that one moment she's sitting
before her fire, her teeth clenched to prevent their chatter, then she's
standing several paces away, soaked to drowning, fairly floating in her
clothes, staring up at the crippled contours of the Wizard's tower.
     
    "Teach me!" she
hollers. "Teach meee!"
     
    Like all involuntary cries, it
seems to encompass her, to gather her like leaves and cast her into the
sheering wind.
     
    "Teach me!"
     
    He simply has to hear,
doesn't he? Her voice cracking the way all voices crack about the soul's
turbulent essentials. He needs only to look down to see her leaning against the
slope, wet and pathetic and defiant, the image of the woman he once loved,
framed by steam and fire. Pleading. Pleading.
     
    "Teeeeach!"
     
    "Meeee!"
     
    But only the unseen wolves
answer from somewhere on the higher hills, scoring the wash with cries of their
own. Mocking her. Owoooooo! Poor little slit! Owoooooooo! Their
laughter stings, but she is used to it, the hilarity of those who celebrate her
pain. She has long ago learned how to break it into kindling, to cast it upon
the bonfires behind her eyes.
     
    "Teach me!"
     
    Thunder cracks—the God's hammer
striking the shield of the world. It echoes through the hiss of rain across the
granite slopes. Hiss-hiss-hiss, like a thousand serpents warning. Mists rise
like smoke.
     
    "Curse you!" she
shrieks. "You will teach me !"
     
    She pauses in the marauding
manner of those well practised at provocation, searching for any sign of
reaction. Then, through the veils, she sees it. The great door opens, rimmed by
an upside-down L of interior light. A shadow watches her for several
heartbeats, as though weighing her lunacy against the chill. Then it slips out
into the rain.
     
    She knows that it is him
immediately, from his hobbling gait, from his bent shape, from the burning in
the pit of her throat. From the