Lords of Rainbow

by Vera Nazarian

  A woman, like a bountiful forest, stood before Andelas. She drew forth her supple hand, touching his palm, and where their palms had come together, a branch sprouted, and upon it a green jewel of a flower, a blossom of pure emerald hue.

  The woman took the blossom, and brought it to her lips, and the emerald petals came apart, wafting on the wind like an autumnal fall, while at the same time she paled, shimmering, and began to melt into the fabric of the world.

  The sun’s spectrum expanded, pulsing red, orange, yellow, and green. And the distant gardens remained verdant like Fiadolmle.

  Andelas smiled, and called forth, “Koerdis!”

  A flash of electricity, and blue rain came down upon their heads, a downpour of light. It washed the scene of battle, droplets of sky water, pieces of sky, tumbling down in an endless paradox of origin, mingling with the red blood spilled on the ground, diluting it into azure softness. . . .

  A man formed of that very intangible rain, great and translucent, with hair like sea foam. He moved his liquid fingers and reached to touch the hand of Andelas, leaving in his wake a sprinkling of dew.

  I come in the fullness of truth, in the living breath. Thus spoke Koerdis, his voice cleansing like a downpour.

  At the same time, the sun, at last, was washed of its veil of twilight. And now, it was spilling over, like an overfilled cup, with a liquid light that traversed the sky, and imbued it with a permanent hue of cerulean.

  Koerdis dissolved like salt into the intangible fabric of heaven, and his essence remained, as they stared overhead, and watched the airy expanse. And yet, there it was, the blue, also hidden in the dark shadows below, lurking in the crevices, sliding along the earth. . . .

  The sun now pulsed red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. And the wind was blue also—seemingly colorless, and yet permeated with its hidden soul.

  Andelas looked around him, with the eyes of Elasand, and saw their receptive expressions, each one and all. And then, because they were ready, he whispered, “Laelith!”

  The sun opened, bright as a rose, into violet. Gentle lavender poured upon the universe in even languor, smooth like cream mists over a hidden forest swamp. Sweet light came to blanket the sky, and before Andelas bloomed a woman, more beautiful than hope.

  I come to you in silence . . . whispered she, and took the outstretched hand of Andelas with both her own, drawing small lilac fingers softly over his white palm.

  With her touch, silence indeed came over the battlefield.

  Soldiers who had fought for this City, Qurthe soldiers who had come to wreak destruction here, upon someone else’s orders—each was alone suddenly, aware of the beating of his own heart, the sweat pouring softly over tired flesh, the aching of torn skin, slashed muscle, the flowing of moist life juices, potent and red.

  Each was aware of his own flesh, and the state of the enemy’s flesh, as if there were no boundaries of identity, and the other’s flesh, pain, and life, was his own. Here, a dark-skinned Qurth drew in breath sharply, because his long heavy sword of iron bit into his own arm—no, the arm of the City soldier opposite him, the one with the pale skin and watery blue eyes. Here, a Bilhaar wiped his own neck, rubbed it unconsciously, in an attempt to remove the choking, the stifling sense of drowning that had come to him suddenly—no, it had come to the dark-haired alien invader, the soldier whose neck he held in a tight noose with cruel rope and leather.

  Here, among a pile of war rubble, discarded weapons and broken carts, an old soldier with worn City armor lay dying, breathing deeply and raspingly while he still could, sweat glittering at his pale temples, while the contents of his gaping stomach twisted like the innards of a torn overripe fruit, spilling forth like discarded remains of harvest. And standing over the soldier, a young Qurthe giant paused, a grimace of sudden sensation drawn on his bared face, his helmet discarded. He stood, feeling cramps of agony within his own abdomen, cramps within his laboring lungs, and he too drew the slow rasping hypnotic breaths. . . .

  Ranhé watched enthralled, the form of hyacinth pallor, the woman holding between her own two palms the pale elegant ones of Andelas, or maybe Elasand. . . .

  For there was a shadow, a familiar instant of clarity in his eyes, mortal and for a moment very human, as the white god looked through mortal eyes upon her who was love.

  This, their only time.

  This would be the only time that Elasand’s hands would hold and feel the hands of his violet dream. And seeing him alien and yet so achingly the same, Ranhé felt a knot forming in her own throat, and she wanted to weep and howl, the remainder of the small child in a dark room, the last of her that could remember the old emptiness, the unfulfilled hole deep within. . . .

  But she was silent, Ranhéas Ylir, as silent in her true sympathy as the one called Laelith, for in that instant she too fathomed the nature of violet.

  I have come and will be with you for as long as you know and can feel . . . silence . . . whispered the voice, and then dissipated on the wind, while she also began to melt, dissolve, become the soft veil of mist upon the world.

  In the end, the world was only slightly different, softer and yet more pronounced, acute in places.

  Sensitivity was heightened.

  And the sun pounded a heartbeat of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.

  Andelas looked around at them all, his outlines brilliant and painful to observe.

  “It is done now . . .” he whispered, and yet even the farthest soldier heard him. “We are here. Look around you and remember us as we are, so that never again will you forget!”

  And in an instant, the eyes of the god met those of Ranhé, and looked within her with utmost understanding.

  You . . . his thought said. You are different in your fullness of self, and you will never forget. They will forget, however. Eventually, as it always is, each millennium. There will be a time of darkness, a swing of the pendulum. And throughout, only your kind will remain steadfast to the truth, the knowledge buried deep inside you, the knowledge to call me back again. Remember that, you who are Lady of Black, and thus alone can recognize the light. . . .

  Ranhé heard him, and yet, maybe it had been nothing, an echo?

  But she was never to know, because then Andelas smiled at them all, and cried out his own name.

  What came next, few remembered with true clarity. Only that there was much light, brilliant, universal, never before seen. And the sun, they said, swelled suddenly, and filled the whole dome of heaven, then collapsed upon itself in an outpouring of liquid rhapsodic brilliance—while they could only stand, shielding their eyes, shutting their eyelids, and yet seeing all as though there was nothing over their eyes, while their retinas burned. . . .

  Then, in the tumult of the burning white sky, the aura had left the outlines of the corpse that had been Elasand, and for a moment the corpse was still and upright.

  And then, he moved.

  Human, astounded, healed of his mortal wounds, the man called Elasand Vaeste stood in a clearing of battle, in a place somewhere in the Markets Square of the great City of Dreams. He was alive and well, and before him loomed in the saddle an equally astounded ancient young King.

  “Your Sovereign Grace!” said Elasand, finding these strange words issuing from his lips, as though another still spoke through him.

  And then, Lord Vaeste came down on his knees, bowing before the last and first Monteyn. And with him bowed the multitudes.

  Overhead, the white blinding sun began a dance of hues, pulsing with each color of the Rainbow.

  Sunset. Strange, remote, filled with a burst of orange and yellow, flowing smoothly into an indigo opposite horizon. It was all gaudy, alien to the eyes.

  They walked through the silence of the Markets Square of Tronaelend-Lis, after the battle.

  Ahead walked Lord Elasand Vaeste, the tall man with raven hair, shadowed with blue, and a serious different expression. A few steps behind came his half-brother, the Guildmaster of a Guild that no longer held
any relevance in this world of garish sunset.

  They were looking for the living and the dead.

  Somewhere in the distance was the silhouette of another man, walking apart from all. He was the one whose face everyone could still hardly look upon without superstitious awe, and who was now their King. It was upon his orders that they and many others—both of this City, and the Qurthe, no longer an enemy—were here now, witnessing this place of death, searching for any that still breathed, that might need help.

  There were so many fallen here. . . .

  So many familiar faces of death. Faces of fallen Bilhaar they knew. Faces of others they would now never come to know.

  At one point, Elasand Vaeste paused. Even now, his initial look was vague, somewhat dazed, almost drunken with overwhelming experience. He would retain that look always now, for none could be the same afterward. He stood, locked in odd stillness at the sight of a dead man, recognizing a Master of the Light Guild.

  “This one . . . was a great poet of this City . . .” he whispered. “One of the few true ones, if not the only one. He was a child and a warrior of words, often mad ones. And now, he will be—silent. What utter senseless evil has been wrought.”

  Elasirr looked where his half-brother paused, and saw the wild-maned Baelinte Khirmoel, a man with a silver-sharp tongue, wry, quirky, manic. His broken body lay over another, protecting in his last moment the slender body of a woman, also wearing war mail, a woman who should never have been in this battle, who should never have died.

  In death, Tegra Daqua’s pale flax hair, yellow and fine like Dersenne’s own locks, mingled with the darkness of the Khirmoel who had so hated to love her. Their eyes, both blue like the air above. Open, stilled skyward. In a common peace, at last.

  With difficulty, Elasand turned away from the sight, and continued walking.

  “Elas . . .” said one brother to the other softly, the one whose mane of hair burned lilac and gold like the sunset.

  Elasand turned, expressionless and alien.

  “What are you thinking now? Do you think of the one who was within you? Do you remember?” Elasirr said.

  “I don’t know,” replied Elasand after a pause. “He is like the blending of colors now. I can’t remember how it was before.”

  And then Vaeste continued walking in silence until he came upon a corpse of a giant in dull black armor lying on his back.

  The face of the dead man was illuminated by the sunset, contrasting red and orange highlights smoothing his large features into a stillness and beauty. His skin was deep brown, the color of the earth, crimson stained his neck, pooled around him on the ground, and his opened eyes were fathomless black-brown, oddly soft and innocent. It was not death that was the source of the innocence, rather that a burden of illusion was gone.

  “He almost killed me,” Elasand said, in the same tired voice devoid of feeling. He was examining the dead man’s face. “A worthy adversary. I regret not knowing him as he really was. Because we never knew this man who was Lord Araht Vorn—only that which possessed him.”

  “I wonder how he died,” whispered Elasirr.

  And then the blond man gave a bitter laugh, and wiped his brow, and squinted his eyes against the wind of sunset. “Sometimes it is best not to know. When our father was dying, and I stood at his side arguing the Bilhaar cause, I did not take the time to listen to his dying breath and his last croaked words. He slipped away before I was done talking, and in my idiot passion I hated him for leaving me forever without an answer. But now I know that in doing this, in leaving me without direction, he forced me to make the decision I alone could.”

  Elasand slowly looked away from the dead man and stared at his brother. “So you persisted with doing things your own way, and that is why the Bilhaar became the bringers of merciless retribution instead of being guardians of the Guilds?”

  Again Elasirr laughed. “As always you choose to interpret it this way. If the Bilhaar had not been merciless, there would have been no mercy left to defend in all of Tronaelend-Lis.”

  “And yet if our father had lived, the Bilhaar would not have been your kind of Bilhaar.”

  “I know,” Elasirr said. “The Guild would have wallowed in its own juices like the others, caring only for its own internal affairs while it grew in impotence. Fortunately it happened that Bilhaar honed their blades and did what had to be done, and forged bonds of influence all throughout. We ruled the city, Elas. We cleansed it and buried it and took the final blame.”

  “We’ll never agree on this, you know,” said Vaeste. “Even now if our father heard this—”

  “Rendvahl Vaeste always knew he had one reasonable son, and one fool,” said Elasirr ruefully. “It is a good thing that the fool’s will came to shape the Guild. It would have destroyed him to know it, so yes, I killed him too with my acts and my consequent decisions. And I would do it again with no regrets. I promised him to support and follow you as the eldest brother, the lord of the Family, to watch over you, and in that one thing I have not failed. But I have killed him in all other ways.”

  Elasand had grown very still, and his eyes were liquid with emotion. “What really came to pass all those years ago, brother?” he whispered. “Will you ever tell me? Please. . . .”

  Elasirr took a big breath and let it out. He threw his head back, letting the evening wind wash over him. And then he looked at Vaeste.

  His half-brother returned his look in silence, with suddenly receptive eyes.

  “Well, then. Although, I never once imagined such a day would come, a day when I could speak of it.” Elasirr took a step closer, so that he could face the other, their eyes inches away. Elasand’s eyes were odd, pale sky-blue, he noticed even now, incidentally. . . .

  “I had promised to my mother, the courtesan whom you despise, who is dead and thus beyond reproach,” he continued, “I had promised never to speak of it ‘unless the Rainbow comes.’”

  “I never despised your mother,” said Elasand softly, his face stained with golden sunset.

  “Nevertheless. Rainbow is here, is come upon us. And my promise to her is nullified. I am free to scream the truth out at last, to vent it to the skies, if I wanted to. The truth about him.”

  “Your word had always been perfect and true.”

  “My word, may it be damned! It is what you know that matters to me now.”

  Elasand was silent, watching him.

  “Truth has been eating at me, and my pride also,” Elasirr said. “For years, I’ve wallowed in their odd sweet combination, oddly satisfied to know that deep inside I was not at fault, not guilty and yet condemned, as I had been in eyes of those select few who truly knew me all these years—you, the Chancellor, a couple of the guildsmen. It also served my purposes well, to be thought a patricide and thus capable of anything—the damned younger bastard brother.”

  Elasand observed him with an expression that was impossible to describe.

  And then Elasirr said, “I didn’t kill our father. Contrary to what I’ve been saying to you all these years. I was not even the incidental cause of his death. When I had come upon my mother, weeping in her boudoir, wallowing upon the silken bed, Rendvahl Vaeste was already dying. It was her knife in his chest, her hand that had stabbed him in jealous madness. Because although he continued to visit her, she was sure now that it was your mother, Elasand, his legal wife, that he truly loved—as if reciprocal love should be the concern of an erotene. Poor deluded madwoman, my mother.

  “I held our father. I watched him fade and listened as he begged me to forget what has been done and to care for her, and for you and for the Guild. He gave the Guild to me in those moments, Elas, entrusted it into my keeping. I started to tell him of my plans, and would have told him all, but when I looked next, he was gone.

  “Seeing how distraught my mother was, her suddenly clear madness—being still an idiot boy myself and still capable of feeling, I took pity upon her. I took her blame upon myself. She cried as she held me, in such
wonderful gratitude. It had meant more to me then, for she had never cried and held me thus before. It made me proud. Besides, I had hardly known my father, hardly knew how to pity or miss his passing. Even when the House of Erotene disowned me, had me excluded for murder—even then I was triumphant and proud. I became unique, strong, harboring this secret within me; I became the epitome of Bilhaar. My whole life was formed from that point onward when I took the blame, expecting to take this secret to my grave. But now—now the Rainbow burns all around us, and it hardly matters at all that my father had died, or how he died, or who was to blame. And—that is all of it. Now—you know.”

  Elasirr grew silent.

  But Elasand put his hand forward, and touched his shoulder in an odd gentle gesture.

  “I suspected, and I am glad to hear the truth from you,” he said to the blond man.

  “And I am glad to finally speak it. It all matters so little now,” said Elasirr. “But back then—the servants of the House of Erotene witnessed the murderous insane act of my mother. Not all had known, but enough. And the House of Erotene feared, above all else, scandal. My mother, a commoner, would have been put to death, by law. But I, having Vaeste’s own blood, was only to be ostracized. Thus, my admission of guilt was oh so opportune to everyone’s plans. And it saved that unfortunate woman. It saved my mother’s life.”

  They looked at each other, while the sunset blazed around them, in new truth.

  “There is another thing,” whispered Elasirr. “I never sent Bilhaar to murder you. That, I know you still doubt. But now you must believe me.”

  Elasand looked at him earnestly. “I believe you, at last. That incident will remain a mystery.”

  “Maybe Deileala? She might’ve sent the clumsy assassins. I know in her possessiveness she is not above resorting to murder of those she wants most.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then, until you do know, remain on your guard,” said Elasirr. “But never again from me.”