by Tanith Lee
Disconcerted a moment, he had warned himself from his own dismay. These things happened. But when he stepped off the ladder-stair into the bedroom, Athluan changed to stone.
Without telling her, he had asked the Mage to put up protections for Saphay, from the Olchibe phantom. And since that was done, so far as Athluan knew they were free of it.
Now, despite that precaution, something else was there in the room.
Athluan stared.
Saphay, sleeping as so frequently she did, lay in the carved chair. Her belly, even this early, had begun to round, sticking up like a small knoll from the slenderness of her frame. Something … spilled from her there. It was not anything coherent, but a kind of line formed of red light, thin as a scavenger snake. It emerged from her belly and her gown, and dropped and coiled along the floor. At its end lay a heap of the blood jewels, bright as fire, which had spangled all about her in the ice-hill.
When he and his men had struck the splintering ice with axes, to get her free, these jewels had hailed out in all directions. Where they fell in the bay, they sizzled and, sinking, shone for maybe a minute. Those that hit the snow and ice stayed longer in it. The Jafn were puzzled. They had prudently made protective gestures against the gems, but not against the woken girl. Later, by the time they let her out, all the jewels had faded into the shore or into the water.
Now here they were again, a cache of thousands, like the hoard of a dragon. At first Athluan did not see what sat on them – because at first it was unclear. But the instant he started to notice it, it hardened, gained colour, and began to move. It was a naked child.
The child did not look at him, but only sat there, holding its face in its hands, hiding its eyes, obviously frightened by the physical world in which it found itself.
A boy, Athluan could see presently – a boy-child of about three years, long-limbed, wind-tanned, his hair a burning shade like new copper.
Is this my son, come out in spirit from her womb? The soul grows quicker then than the flesh.
Something surged under Athluan’s ribs. His unlegal pairings with women in the garth had seldom produced progeny – and those that appeared were girls.
Just then he thought the boy was turning to look at him, but the eyes – they were blue – stared right past Athluan, behind him. Athluan felt a second presence, at his left shoulder.
Then something moved through him. He recognized it: it had done this two months before, but going in the opposite direction.
The sensation made him ill a moment. A sick blurring of vision, a ringing in his skull, bowed him over. As the faintness went off and he was able to straighten, he beheld plainly the ghost, Guri, standing there peering down at the seated child.
Athluan tensed, meaning to move forward and, as he did so, bellow for the mage down in the hall. But he discovered he could neither utilize his limbs nor release his voice. He was unable even to croak out magical words to offset the spell. Powerless, reduced to an onlooker, he could only gaze and wait. And listen, too, for they spoke now and he heard them.
‘Whose kiddling are you?’ asked Guri, and continued, ‘The women ought to keep you by.’
The child turned and pointed back at Saphay, still asleep. To Athluan the gesture was evident enough: The woman there has kept me by her. But the ghost seemed unaware of any others in the room. Perhaps, being still partly etheric, like the ghost itself, the soul of the child cancelled out more physical things for discorporeal Guri. Either that, or the protections hid them from him.
Guri sat down before the child and began to unbraid and rebraid his hair. The child watched him.
‘I have seen some things,’ said Guri. ‘I’ve been to the bottom of the sea.’ The child shuddered – this was very clear to the other watcher – and Guri reacted to the shudder. ‘What?’
The child spoke. ‘He is there.’
‘He? Who?’
‘He – he is.’
Guri shrugged.
The child said, ‘He’s fire, sun under the sea, and now he rages.’
Guri paused. ‘A demon?’
‘He has two faces.’
‘Ah?’ Guri braided conscientiously. Then: ‘A god of the Rukar.’
‘I ran away,’ said the child. ‘I ran here.’
‘Out of her womb. I see it – but it’s not yet your time to do that.’
‘I never yet live in her body. What I shall be – that lives there. It binds me close, but not there inside.’
Athluan thought how the child seemed growing progressively coherent, in a disproportionately adult way. He tried again to move. What they said, the ghost and the out-womb soul, troubled him, but still he could not shift the spell that held him like stone.
‘Yes,’ said Guri, ‘I never liked the gods of the Rukar. Let me tell you of the whale. He had a snow-white horn far longer than my body, but he was black as night – as the sea-depths where he took me. There was a woman too—’ Guri checked. He gazed over at Saphay and now saw her, but imperfectly it seemed. He ground his teeth slowly, then looked back at the soul-child. ‘Come here,’ he said, kindly. ‘Get the knot out of this braid for me.’
Athluan writhed in stasis. He watched the child – his child – get up and go over to the vengeful ghost.
In the back of his brain, Athluan began to pray to God for help. Either God sent it, or more likely it was unneeded. Guri leant over so the child could pluck at his tangles. Carefully the boy unpicked the matted hair, then Guri grinned in his face. ‘Not feared of me, are you?’
‘You?’ asked the child wonderingly. ‘No, not of you.’
‘You needn’t fear Guri, your old Olchibe uncle. I’ve fifty, sixty kiddles among the sluhtins. I like them all finely, and they me. I bring them gifts from my wars. I’ll bring you something, too.’ Then he reached out and ruffled the boy’s hair in turn. ‘Listen to me, any time that he comes after you, that Rukar god in her insides, you call out for me. Call by my name, which is—’
‘Guri.’
‘Guri, yes. Olchibe Uncle Guri. I can’t fight a god, but I know a trick or two. I’ve been under the sea. There are ways to hide.’
‘Guri,’ said the child again. He lowered his coppery head against the chest of the ghost, and Athluan felt a stab of most inappropriate and extraordinary jealousy.
It was at this second that a step sounded on the ladder-stair, coming up from the joyhall.
The Chaiord recognized the step. It was his brother Rothger’s.
Guri also heard it. He got up, and lifted the boy in his arms. Athluan knew the Olchibe were a rancid, murderous people, less mild even than ravening beasts. But where they would rape, torture and kill, laughing, they had a good-heartedness towards the very young of any race. Too new to spoil, was their saying for a baby – or a child up to the age of twelve. Their punishments for any of their own who transgressed against this law were very dire. Athluan’s alarm had been misplaced. Now the ghost stood there, holding the child well, as only a man can who has held children often and become willingly used to it.
‘Let’s be going,’ said Guri. ‘The cold is coming in.’
Where they went Athluan did not see. In the moment they vanished, Rothger was there, striking him hard between the shoulders, shouting, in his light metallic tones, an uncharm common to any educated Jafn who could use his voice.
‘Face of God,’ said Rothger, ‘this room stinks of summonings, of witchery. I could smell it on the stair.’
Dizzy and sickened, Athluan leaned on the wall. The spell in the room had drained his energy. He saw Rothger stride about, in perfect command of himself and everything, clapping his hands, flinging open window shutters to let in cleansing air.
‘Did you see?’ Athluan asked. His voice came out unsoundly.
‘See? Yes, a flick of something red. It’s gone. What was it?’
‘A vrix,’ Athluan lied. ‘It’s been haunting this area of the House.’
‘A vrix with such power? You couldn’t move, brother, I could see t
hat from the steps.’
‘What made you come up here?’ Athluan asked.
‘Luck, maybe. And you were a long while gone.’
Athluan thought woodenly, You sensed something awry – but did not necessarily come up to assist me. To spy, that was the reason you came up here. In the past, especially in their youth, when Conas had been Chaiord, Rothger had spied on Athluan a great deal, particularly when he went with women. Perhaps it was that again. Rothger himself, though he had lain with occasional females among the Klow, did not often indulge. They said his heart was cold.
How cold Rothger’s heart was, only Rothger could truly be aware.
He went to the table and poured wine for Athluan, bringing it to him in the black jade cup. As he did so he glanced at Saphay. ‘Still asleep. Always asleep. And slept even through that.’ He gave the cup to Athluan, who drank it down. Rothger said, ‘That was no vrix, my brother. It came from her, didn’t it? Some thing from the night-behind-the-day. Don’t shield her. Does she know about it? Is she some filthy conjuror of elementals this woman they sent you from the Ruk?’
‘Quiet.’ Athluan was himself again and glared into Rothger’s face. ‘Do you think I’d protect her if she was that? I told you, it was a vrix. Sometimes they gain in power. I must talk to the House Mage.’
‘Talk to me first.’
‘Who are you? Merely the Chaiord’s brother. It is I who tell you how I proceed, not the other way about.’
‘Pardon me, then,’ said Rothger. His tone was offhand, neither rebuked nor sorry.
‘We will go down. After you, Roth, on the stair.’
A minute after they were gone, Saphay woke. As can happen, she knew the area had recently been full of activity, of people, but no one was there now. Only the jade cup stood on the floor, its lip wet from drunk wine.
There had been another bad dream, but she could not recall it. Something had thrown her down, or she had fallen … It had lasted on and on, happening over and over. A feeling hollowed her heart, echoing with distress and darkness like a dungeon, but its contents were unseen.
Just then, one of the women attendants came up the stair and into her room. It was old Rowah, the eldest of the older women, her hair white as any Jafn maiden’s.
‘You’re to shift quarters, lady,’ said Rowah pragmatically. ‘The Chaiord says I’m to help you gather your things, and the girl is coming to help too.’
‘Why?’
‘A fault with the shutters. Look, they’ve flown open again while you rested. The ice-wind has left its footprints all over the floor.’
FOUR
He climbed now only a hundred stairs.
For a towery of the Ruk, this was not high, but the western quintul house ran also below ground; he had negotiated several previous flights from the subtor. Here, in a room at the centre of the towers, the oculum blazed, exactly as he had felt it doing from the depths of the house.
Thryfe crossed to the oculum.
Its black globe had become a vortex of spinning lights. Thryfe raised his left hand, only that. Like a panicky animal responding to a known and welcomed touch, the globe composed itself.
Now it grew opaque, and then its internal mirror began to appear. Within that might be glimpsed virtually anything a magician of Thryfe’s mental stature could demand. But also it was, like all the greatest of its type, autonomous. It had signalled to him. Next it would reveal its message.
The image came. It surprised, nearly startled him. An oval ruby burned in the mirror, throbbing with heat and radiance. All about lay walls and spires of ice. They were unaffected by the jewel, nor did they have on it any effect that was apparent. Thryfe waited.
Since the sending had come so vehemently from the Jafn, assuring the Ruk that Saphay had survived, Thryfe had anticipated further tidings. The kings in Ru Karismi, he was aware – they had told him – did not believe in the Jafn sending. The girl who one king at least had dispatched to her death, was meant to be dead and could not therefore be alive.
Thryfe, along with others of the Magikoy, had seen the sending. Though patchy in detail, it had carried Saphay’s individual and unmistakable physical print. Thryfe and his fellowship knew that rarely, if ever, could such pictures be faked to so absolute an extent. But additionally Thryfe held his own doubts. For he had at first failed to see the vile little plot Vuldir had made, sacrificing his own daughter in order to cheat the Jafn. Whether Sallusdon had had a part in the scheme Thryfe did not bother to investigate. Blameless or a villain, the King Paramount was a fool worse even than Bhorth.
Yet Thryfe had no excuse for his original lapse of vision and deduction. Why had he lapsed? Vuldir’s game should have been as clear to him from the first as presently it became – clear as a drop of blood running on the face of a moon. But he had missed it. Of all the Magikoy – sensing, as most now did, the impending obscure doom which threatened to push the world out of kilter – none had noted Vuldir’s hand in the pot. It seemed to Thryfe that they had been meant to miss it. Such was the psychic muscle of the doom which flaunted itself, yet simultaneously veiled its nature entirely. The thought was very terrible. If Fate chose to conceal its path – as, for ordinary men, usually it did – from those of the calibre of the Magikoy, what hope could there be?
Partly to brood on that, Thryfe had come far west to the quintul house.
The jewel in the oculum began to crack open. Thryfe stared, seeing now for sure that it was an egg. From the tissues of it poured shining streams, and then something burst out of its core.
It was a Firefex, the bird of fire, mythical yet possible, always credited.
The huge smooth body fully formed, the long neck and crested head all red as blood, the beak like hammered gold, and trailing feet like molten brass, were nothing to the outspread wings. They seemed wide as the sky, made of cinnabar and lightning. Upon them it rose instantly from the earth. The mirror tracked it, up through the temple of the ice, into a black heaven. Where, not like a drop but like a river of flame and blood, the Firefex passed over the masks of all the frightened moons.
The Fazion ships, low and lean, nosed from a night of wind and light-blowing snow.
There were, as they said in Fazion lands, a jalee of them: thirteen. Behind them, out on the deeper open water, wallowed the Mother Ship, fat and bottom-heavy, driven by witchcraft and her nine crowded sails.
Along the sides of the slighter vessels hung weird shields, and at the prows were the horns of sharks and land cattle, used for rams. But the Mother Ship was decorated with the skulls of men. They somewhat resembled habits of Olchibe in that.
Twenty further Endhlefons crossed the garth. Nothing altered very much, until the soft snow fell in a rain of dull stars.
The riders were mounted on hnowas, bulky beasts that could support the full weight of a man, caparisoned in rainbow fringes and colours. Having ridden far, they poured loudly into yard and House. They were messengers, necessary because no sending had been feasible.
‘Their shamans barred our witches with a wall of sorcery – as before.’
Saphay, balanced in the door of the room they had made for her, to the east of the joyhall, heard these words.
Life had stopped in the hall. Athluan, standing with the messenger’s leader, the other men, having also stood up, also immobile, and the women in the middle of various tasks at the hearth, the looms, were like statues. Light glinted on eyes bright with alert alarmed concentration. Well schooled, no child began to cry.
The raid had happened along the coast east and north, near the area of narrowed land that stuck out in the sea, and which the Jafn called The Spear. Raiders often began there. Last year it had been the Kelps who came and burned the steads and villages, as now the Fazions would be doing.
Life in the hall resumed. The men started to shout, to charge about. Dogs leapt and barked, and those lions which lived in the House growled. Two turned on each other, and their masters hauled them back, striking them with the flats of their hands. From the wa
lls the great swords and axes were being unslung, a rain now of steel not stars. Carapaces of metal and hardened leather were brought out. The women were running to unfold Klow lion banners from the chests at the hall’s back. And the House Mage was striding in, followed by all his lesser counterparts.
Beyond high shuttered windows, Saphay heard more noise in the streets, and out of the door the rumble of assembling chariots.
Hate or like it, they were used to war here. In Ru Karismi, Saphay had never seen any skirmish worse than that of a pair of nobles duelling in the terraced gardens, under sculptures of ice.
Weighed down by her physical occupant, she returned slowly into her room. It was not horror or fear that pushed her back there. She could not, herself so leaden and without energy as she was, comprehend or bear the activity. In fact the raiders did not seem to her at all real. For these last three months, nothing beyond herself had seemed so.
The room was simple enough, constructed of high wood screens and with a tent roof. It had another bed, rather smaller, but ample since Athluan did not often share it with her – and then never to join her in sexual love. The Jafn were abstemious during the last months of pregnancy, and she was by now too big. Saphay sat down in the chair brought from the upper bedchamber. She had never been told, or reasoned, why neither she nor Athluan had gone back to that upper room. Surely, in a space of seven months, they could have mended the shutters?
A fire splashed in its basket. Saphay warmed her hands.
An hour later, Athluan came into the room.
‘You’ll have heard.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Don’t be afraid. We’ve dealt with this outland dirt many times. They stain their faces blue and wear jewels fashioned with eyes, and fight like butchers. They ride monstrosities another man would scorn. And yet they are nothing. The Kree and Shaiy will come with us, too. We’ve sent to them. The Fazions can’t blot out our spells here; we’re too far off and our mages too vital.’
