Caludium

 He looked at the great hall, looking at it through the eyes of a child.

The child in question was long since dead.  They had been taken from a political dissident and put into school to re-educate them.  After four months it had become apparent that the child was either too stubborn or too stupid to learn what they were being taught so the Overseer had had them brought to the offices of the Surgeon and they had removed the child's eyes.  They apparently had a special spoon for the job -- Caludium didn't doubt it, as he'd seen the Surgeon's operating theatre a couple of times and always walked out hoping he'd never, ever need to go there for anything serious -- and it hadn't taken very long at all.  The Overseer pronounced himself happy and the child had died of 'complications' a couple of days later.  Caludium, who was still debating with himself whether or not he should shut the school down and have the administrators shot, had ordered that the child be buried in the Martyr's grave.  No name could be found, according to the Overseer.  Caludium believed that the Overseer was a congenital liar and a sadist to boot but short of having him tortured could see no way of extracting the name from him.  And if he tortured the man just to find a name out, wasn't he stooping to his level?  The eyes of the child, set into a strange, silvery frame made from rare-earth metals and ingraved with sigils from the Second Kingdom, were presented to him a day later.

Through the eyes of a child the hall looked... curious. The walls were all closer in that Caludium knew they were.  When the hall was empty he'd put the Eyes on and walked around, his hands outstretched.  The Eyes definitely lied about where the walls where.  But where there were empty spaces in the hall, the Eyes found things to look at: here there was a swirl of colour that looked warm and inviting, and there there was an old man sitting crouched on the floor, hunched over on himself, vomiting.  Next to the group of honorable Elders, three women with no good word to say about anyone, a sprite of some kind cavorted, pulling faces and running its hand lasciviously over its body and Caludium felt that it was an appropriate expression of the general attitude of the honorable Elders.  All around the hall there were more of the same: a general appearance that all was not well at all with the Kingdom.

And the Eyes... didn't lie about these strange things.  Caludium had pushed him hands into a vortex of colour and felt the warmth, the slick ooziness; when he'd pulled his hands out they had dripped.  He had stepped in the vomit of the hunched over man and heard the squelch as he walked around the hall.  He had refused to touch the capering sprite, but he had petted, for a moment, a two-headed bird with eyes like flame, and felt hot feathers tickle his fingers.

He took the eyes off and sat down on the only chair in the room: the throne of the Seventh Kingdom.  Almost immediately a hush fell over the room and he realised that he'd inadvertently moved the proceedings on.  Now it was time for the requests to begin, and he would have to choose which ones to grant and which to ignore.

"Sire," said a gelatinous voice off to his side, and he struggled not to cringe as he turned his head to look at the Overseer.