Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  Then this one – this.

  He stood there in the chamber staring at Jemhara, who slowly also opened her eyes and gazed at him guilelessly.

  Without a word, she held out her hand.

  Her naked body, her breasts, her hair – these sent through him one further surge of desire. He slammed desire from him and felt it fall away down the cliff of his fury.

  ‘You’ve been cunning,’ he said, ‘Jema.’ Of course he knew her steader name.

  To the insult of its use she paid no heed. ‘Have I? To be in love – is that so clever, my lord?’

  ‘Don’t use court phrases to me. They stink of where you come from – of Vuldir.’

  Fear, after all, started up in her face, like the hare she had been starting across blue snow.

  ‘You have some other place to go to?’ he said.

  ‘None—’

  ‘Then find one. Be gone from this house inside one hour, or I’ll put you out. You will prefer to travel, I believe, by your own volition.’

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘To earn my anger? What do you think? What you were told to do and did. Go back to Ru Karismi and boast that you fucked with a Magikoy. That you’ve merited. From me, you will keep away.’

  The room was intolerably hot. Thryfe turned, staring now at it: the walls running with wet, the pools of water on the floor. A pane of ice dropped from the ceiling and smashed in front of him.

  Jemhara screamed.

  ‘In the name of nothingness,’ said Thryfe, ‘what’s this?’

  ‘I don’t know—’ Jemhara whispered. But Thryfe the magician had left the chamber.

  Through the house Thryfe strode, then ran. He broke the web of the ice with his hands and feet, and with his psychic power. Besides it was giving way, this entity time had formed by stopping. He did not know what had occurred. Then in the towery, finding the wreckage of the oculum, he hesitated in a deathly apprehension.

  Only a blind and arrogant man would question himself at such a moment – how have I, even I who am impervious, been beguiled and ruined? Thryfe did not question himself, nor would he question her.

  Whether she left the house or stayed in it, now he had no care. Gargolems came to him, sluggish as if, like himself, just roused from a drugged sleep.

  When the sleekar and team of lashdeer were ready in the yard outside, Thryfe stepped into the chariot. With a sorcerous command that would set them racing, he turned their heads towards Ru Karismi, City of the Kings.

  Just before he wakened, Arok thought he was lying by Chillel. She no longer smelled of coolness, but like an ordinary healthy shorewoman. Arok thought he had converted her; then he came to and saw the fishwife stretched beside him. She lay on her back and faintly snored.

  For a moment he was aggrieved. Then a sort of kindness for her overcame him.

  She had been willing and eager, enjoyable. Moreover, she still treated him with the correct courtesy, and called him sir when they were not in bed. Her name was Nirri.

  Nevertheless Arok sat up with a curse. This was no sleep nocturnal – and he had been asleep.

  Oh, this life, then, it was no use. It was making him sloppy, a sot. All those days and nights crossing the snow waste, he had never slept, with stamina better than a Fazion’s—

  Arok walked out of the hut. The sun was up, about a hand-span above the ocean.

  Great fissures had opened in the ice less than thirty strides from the village. They ran back towards the slender bright line of liquid sea.

  Arok knew he must go out and check these channels, to see if they might threaten the stability of the ice here, or if anything edible were swimming about in them.

  Before he could take a step, the whole horizon opened.

  Up out of the sea, out of the ice – out of the sky itself – came thrusting, like a sword, a tower of ivory.

  Thunders roared – a compendium of waters and breaking ice – which growled and croaked with the sound of giant bones snapping.

  But a building was flying up from the sea.

  The tower was contained in a palisade of lesser towers, spur-spikes in a ring large as a palace of the Rukarians. This architecture ascended, mile on mile of it, or so it seemed. Behind it came its reason.

  The wife, Nirri, had hurried out and was standing behind Arok in the hut door. To her credit, she did not shriek, but he heard the breath go out of her as if she had been punched in the belly.

  What rose from the ocean was an ice-whale.

  Arok had heard of monsters among them, larger than a Faz Mother Ship, but to this animal they were what a child would be to a full-grown man—

  Only landmasses, seas and skies, Arok numbly thought, were as vast as this one whale.

  Its black uneven body rose on and on. Already it had cancelled out all light from the sun. Night fell back on to the shore.

  From the blowhole, which must be huge itself as the Holas House – a whole garth even – it ejected a gross ray of water. When this crashed down, the sea plunged, and a dense rain of brine thrashed over the village.

  The little forearms of the ice-whale were each the size of a small whale. But they hung loosely from its body – it did not need their help.

  How much more of it could rise? How much more could even the ocean hold?

  In the thick darkness of the shore. Arok turned round to Nirri. She was hypnotized by the whale. He shook her.

  ‘Run!’ She gaped at him. ‘No, wait – I’ll get the hnowa. We’ll go faster—’

  Still she gaped. He pushed by her, back into the hut. From the fire he picked up a burning brand, then got the hnowa and pulled it from the hut. At the old mad Rukar woman Arok did not even glance, for in her state she was better dead, and now soon would be.

  Nirri did not protest as he bundled her on to the hnowa. Nervous, it trampled and defecated on the snow, afraid of the dark mass still going up – still rising from the sea – but too brainless fully to react. The air stank of rotten fish and ocean depths.

  Arok vaulted astride. He grabbed Nirri before him and, around her, the guiding reins. Then he touched the hnowa with the burning brand. It squealed in pain and galloped snorting over the ice – inland.

  Behind them, the whale still rose—

  Great God—

  From slightly higher ground, Arok looked back once. They had been just in time. The whale stood at last on its tail – impossible. The titanic mass of it, even from this distance, was unreal. Yet there, in the night it had created, it gleamed with a sorcerous luminescence.

  In that split second, Arok saw the prodigious body begin to bend over. Its breaching done, it was commencing its dive back to the bottom of the sea—

  He rammed the fire-brand into the hide of the hnowa and held it there.

  As they tore away in smoke and screaming, Arok thought this would make quite a tale for the long nights – if they lived, or if any Jafn Holas were left to hear it.

  On the rags, the Rukarian woman they called Saffi had also woken up. She reached out to feel if the beasts were there, her cat and her dog. They were not.

  Nor was anyone in the hut.

  The hut was warm, the fire crackled. There had been a noise, and this had roused her. But it was more than a noise.

  She could smell a stench of burnt hair, and an overpowering reek of fish. A primeval odour overhung everything else, and a rumbling sound – and it was night.

  Very seldom did she get up, and merely to answer the now only occasional purposes of nature.

  Something, though, drew Saffi to the hut door which stood wide.

  She had no brain either, not exactly. Her brain had died under the ice, or else – remnant or revenant that she was of the true Saffi, called Saphay – this Saffi had never had one.

  She ambled to the door and looked out, and in that moment the night sky, which was the gargantuan whale, plummeted back under the sea.

  Water, which had swirled inward and down, as if into some sink-hole, was now displaced by the returning
bulk of the whale.

  As its black brilliance speared home, a tidal wave rose up and up in turn, approximate to the whale’s stupendous girth. The water formed a spangled wall against a sun which now was almost visible. The wall was high as the roof of heaven.

  Saffi screamed. It was merely a response; she had no other. She simply stood there, and the tidal wave curled, in imitation of the plunging whale, and flung itself over to cover the frozen land.

  The shores of ice broke now like thinnest glass. Immense blocks of ice went whirling through the grey wind of the water.

  The wave smashed forward, rushing screeching across the coast.

  Everything gave before it. The village was lost in one minute, the tough black huts crushed like things of paper. All that was there was swept up by the wind-that-was-sea: wood, stones, nets, beached boats, artefacts that had been pots and pans, now abstract bits.

  In this water-hurricane Saffi too was carried, her eyes wide, her hair streaming, constantly turning over, doubtless also broken.

  The wave ran in for two miles, three miles, four. It met its match against a very high snow-cliff ballasted by rock, but nevertheless left its impression there: the shape of its final defeat and withdrawal.

  It had missed too the man and woman on the hnowa – missed by the margin of a quarter mile.

  On the land, the stranded fish slapped and died. The debris of the ocean floor lay in slabs of oily weed, shells the wave had granulated, other items unrecognizable to man.

  The wave crawled, tired now, back into its parent ocean. With it, it took very much of its spoils from the ice, including the woman called Saffi.

  Down through the sea the dregs of the wave bore her, with the rest of its booty.

  Midnight beyond all nights shut Saffi’s eyes, cold beyond all Winters covered her.

  Again.

  The pyramids of ice were in poor repair. Gusts of air moaned through chinks in their sides. It had started to remind Saphay of her princess apartment in Ru Karismi. She mooned about from area to area, looking at the rotting black grain fields and orchards. She never found anything to eat but this, like the cold, did not seem to affect her now, except in principle. The cat too was indifferent to temperature and lack of food, though it hunted savagely among the mess.

  The cat had delivered itself of kittens some time ago. Saphay had not seen them – and been glad of that – only the cat reappearing, slim again and quite self-satisfied. What could they have been, these offspring – result of cat mated with god-as-dog?

  What should Saphay do? There was, as so often, little option.

  Her thoughts moved, despite her will, to the other one, to Zeth Zezeth. She had had other dreams of him since their last dream-meeting. Although these dreams were about the god Zeth, he was not, surely, actually in them. She dreamed of seeing him a long way off. In the dream she would run away, or sometimes ride in a runaway slee. But along with terror was the wish that he would pursue and catch her. Also she had dreamed she was on an icy shore with him, and out at sea a black whale extruded its back. The dreams were memories from her life, mingled with desires and fears. Despite her comparative youngness, Saphay seemed to herself to have lived many decades, to be old, withered and perhaps becoming senile. How would she know? She had no company, no mirror. Her hands though, when she looked at them, were young.

  The cat played sturdily and nastily with an imaginary mouse among the putrid wheat.

  A strange noise filled the air. It was a type of screaming, but there was a rumbling too, like thunder in the sea.

  Saphay felt a tug at her body. Abruptly her head spun. She went down limply on the ground and, when the world steadied, found the cat planted on her breast, gazing in her face.

  What had occurred now? Slowly, testing herself, she sat up again.

  Had something happened to her son, her faithless son, who had abandoned her without a word for so long – the son that she adored and loved only because he was in the image of his evil fiend of a father? Why then this pain of distress in her heart at the idea of harm coming to her son?

  They sat there on the ice, Saphay and her cat.

  ‘Where’s Yyrot, your lover?’

  The cat sprang suddenly away.

  ‘Where is everything?’ Saphay asked the collapsing pyramids of ice.

  She saw the cat then passing out through a kind of doorway in the air.

  Alarmed, offended despite all that had gone on, Saphay stood up. She walked over to the aperture and looked into and through it. Nothing was there. It was like a pane of thickest ice.

  Saphay put out her hand and one finger met the ice-pane. It parted.

  She beheld a scorchingly golden landscape, like a picture seen in the core of a fire. Within it, trees that seemed in a foliage of flame surrounded a mountain of ripe orichalc, from whose head drifted plumes like roses.

  ‘Not yet,’ said a voice.

  Saphay threw herself about to see—

  No one was there.

  When again she looked for the aperture into the fire, it had vanished.

  Guri, sitting on an ice floe, watched uneasily as his mera suckled her new-hatched egg. It was female, and had already bitten Guri with its snaggle teeth.

  The ’tween-place was dismal today, swept by long claws of winds. He could not get it to be anything else for him. And the mera, though she had allowed him to father his child on her, had not been friendly.

  He had come away from the plains of death below the Rukar city, soon after making his offering to the Ranjal goddess. She in turn had flown off anyway across the sky, like a hawkish broomstick, and left him there.

  A concussion went dimly through the sea below the ice. Guri glanced down. He wondered what had caused the shock, for in the ’tween-place normally such things did not penetrate, let alone factually go on.

  Then he felt, worse than the vague blow beneath, a sucking drag on him. Guri resisted vigorously.

  The mera, apparently noting his agitation, jumped back into the waves and was off, the merchild clutched to her breast.

  The tugging stopped.

  Shaken, Guri stamped about the floe. What had taken hold of him? Was it that one again? Almost, Guri could smell Zeth Zezeth about – or nearly about. He seemed to have evaded some supernatural detention, and to be at large once more.

  If so, where could Guri hide? The world, and other worlds, were open to him – yet that would not be enough. No, he would need to get behind the very stars to avoid that one. And he had earned this god’s hate by loyalty to the boy, the man because of whom—

  Guri burst from the ’tween-world like a shooting star. Slinging his feet down on the snow of the earth, he began to race the wind, running like hell to get away from the vision of Ru Karismi.

  Ru Karismi, however, showed itself now to others.

  The salt-dusts were growing inert, and sinking. It was feasible to see the city walls, the sculptured metropolis behind, although the parasols of crystal on the heights no longer winked at a westering sun.

  Thryfe drove across the endless plain.

  Nowhere did anything remain outside the city, to a distance of three or four miles. The steadings, the fields, were all gone, leaving no trace. The ice of the plains had grown brown. It was a disgusting colour, like something decayed, or evacuated. Here the dust had become more like sand.

  As the sleekar carried him nearer to the city, he saw, against the hard, unnatural shine of the sky, narrow streams of smoke going up from every quarter.

  At Southgate, hollow-eyed guards let him through grudgingly. The gate had been damaged too. He left the chariot just inside.

  He soon found the explanation of the smoke. The citizens were burning their dead, having too many corpses by now to bury.

  People on the sloping streets paid Thryfe no attention. Their faces were hopeless, or clenched with an angry fear.

  He saw a dead man, of about twenty years, carried out of a house. Those with him did not even exclaim. They put him down on the ro
adway for the crematory wagon to collect, like a dead flower from the hothouse.

  Another man, one of the Magikoy, met Thryfe as he was walking up the Stair of a thousand steps. The man was coming down.

  ‘Who paid the atonement price for this?’ Thryfe asked him.

  ‘Wundest and two others. And Vuldir was burned, but alive.’

  ‘I too must pay the price. I should have prevented it. But had the Magikoy forgotten the old writings that suggest to us that once – this was done before – weapons like these were used in the furthest north. I too must pay.’

  ‘That’s your affair. Burn yourself if you want. You’d do better to work in the city.’

  ‘To save them? They’re already lost.’

  The other Magikoy walked on down the Stair.

  They had, these two magicians, no time for each other. It was the same among all the Order, what was left of it. Their individual shame and regret poisoned them, as the residue of the weapons had done their colleagues.

  Going on up the Stair, Thryfe did not hesitate to draw breath. But at the top he found he must lean on the wall.

  The Gargolem did not emerge. None had seen it since that day.

  In the palace gardens there was no one at all. Thryfe regarded the pavilions and palaces and statues.

  Although – or because – the sky was so over-clear, the setting sun gave off almost no red.

  He would have wept, Thryfe, but he could not be so impertinent as to weep for this catastrophe he might have turned aside, or for these people he might have shielded, or for himself who deserved not one single tear. A tall man, he felt now the tallest thing in that garden, and the slightest thing, too, and neither of these conditions was of any use.

  TWO

  Under an ice-cedar like moonstone lay the house of the white dancers.

  In its sprawl it had four pillared doors, facing north, south, east and west, and windows which were covered by wavered glass that made everything outside resemble running water. About a hundred people lived there. They had what they called a Mother and a Father. Other than these two elected rulers, there was no authority over them.