The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker

Author:R. Scott Bakker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2011-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

… and they were alone together, in the cool gloom of their private apartments. His legs crumpled, and he leaned and lurched against her. Grunting, Esmenet helped him stagger to their bed.

“Wife …” was all he said, rolling onto his back even though he still wore his sword, Certainty, sheathed across his shoulder blades. He raised a heavy hand to his forehead.

More air than light filtered in from the seaward balconies. The rooms were broad and surprisingly low-ceilinged, articulated by a series of steps that divided the bedroom proper from the lower regions. The furnishings were elegant and, with the exception of the crimson-cushioned bed, spare. She often wondered if her antipathy to ornament was more a result of the maddening complexities of her new life or a pining for the simple squalour of her old.

“How many?” she asked, knowing that he could only translocate the space of a horizon, and only then to places he had long studied from a distance or to places he had actually been. He had literally travelled all the way from the Istyuli Plains horizon by horizon.

“Many.”

She found herself looking away, blinking. The profile of various cities frescoed the walls, creating the pale illusion that the room occupied some impossible space over Invishi, Nenciphon, Carythusal, Aöknyssus, and Oswenta. Esmenet had commissioned them several years previous—as a physical reminder of her position in political space. It was a decision she had long since regretted.

Simple, her soul whispered. I must make things simple.

“You came …” she began, shocked to find she was already crying. “You came as s-soon as you heard?” She knew this could not be true. Each and every night Mandate Far-Callers spoke with him in his dreams, apprised him of all that happened on the Andiamine Heights and elsewhere. He had come because of the situation with the Yatwerians, because of Sharacinth. Not because of his idiot son.

There were no accidents with Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

He sat up on the edge of the bed, and somehow she found herself in his arms, immersed in his wide-world husband smell, wracked with sobs.

“We’ve been cursed!” she gasped. “Cursed!”

Kellhus gently pressed her back into his gaze and somehow above the surface of her immediate grief. She found herself drawing cool and soothing air.

“Misfortune,” he said. “Nothing more, Esmi.”

When had his voice become a drug?

“But isn’t that what the White-Luck means? Mimara has fled, and no one can find her, Kellhus! I have this-this terrible feeling—such a terrible feeling! And now Samarmas! Sweet-sweet Samarmas! Do you know what they’re saying in the streets? Do you know that some of them actually celebrate! That—”

“You must take no action against them,” he said with stern compassion—the perfect tone. He always spoke in the perfect tone, words like cool plaster trowelled across the cracks of desire and confusion. “Not the Yatwerians. They are not a people that we can massacre or uproot like the Mongilean Kianene. They are too widespread, too diffuse. The Great Ordeal is all that matters, Esmi. It has taken us too long as it stands.

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