by Tanith Lee
Orhn stiffened, his mouth set. He bowed as rigidly as an automaton and strode out. The great cibba-wood door crashed behind him.
Val Mala glanced at Amnorh standing in the shadows.
“So much for the upstart.”
“Indeed, my goddess. So much.”
“I’m not certain what you mean, Amnorh. Possibly you should be thankful,” but she laughed and pulled the wig from her head. Her hair flowed black over her shoulders. “And has a physician examined the girl?”
“As soon as she reaches the Palace of Peace.”
“And Rehdon,” she said— “and Rehdon. When did he die?”
“A little before sunrise, I would judge. The girl was with him.”
“Foolish Rehdon, to need women so greatly and have such fear of them. Always fear. Even in lust, fear. An inadequate, hollow King.”
“He no longer troubles you.”
“No.” She bent close and her astonishingly white hand gripped his shoulder. “How?”
“I gave it to him in the bitter wine they brew in the Lowlands,” he said evenly. “The Red Moon was in his body. He didn’t realize what he was drinking.”
“I wanted him to know. I wish I could have seen him drink it and die.”
“Impracticable, my Queen.”
“And is Koramvis payment enough for you?” she hissed.
“In excess of what I ask,” he murmured, and reached out to caress her body already moving against his in awakening desire.
• • •
A man in a black robe hurried out from under the wide portico of the Palace of Peace. Behind him, high up in one of the bowl-topped towers, the room from which he had just come burned with a yellow light. Dusk was well advanced over the silent gardens.
He passed two sentries, whose eyes squinted after him when he had gone by.
In the shadow of the broad gate a strong hand came from the dark to seize his arm.
“What do you want with me?”
“News of the Lowland temple girl.”
“On whose authority do you ask me that?”
“The Lord Amnorh’s.”
The physician hesitated. At last he said: “It’s too early to judge her condition with certainty.”
The voice in the dark was insistent.
“Come now, physician. You think your own thoughts.”
“Then . . . I think she has conceived.”
The hand let go of his arm and someone moved soundlessly away. The physician shook himself as if to be rid of a shiver, and turned toward the sweep of the city, where lamps were lighting like stars.
• • •
Night flooded Koramvis, her bright palaces and narrow murderous ways, night and the star throbbed and faded and sank before the scarlet eruption that was dawn. Thereafter other nights and other dawns followed.
Somewhere a stringed bell began to rasp and toll.
Similar bells echoed it.
As the disc of this new sun steered above the horizon, gouts of smoke burst from the black temple of the Storm gods and drifted in gauzes over the river Okris. This red, scalding day would see a king finally carried to his tomb.
The sky cooled to darkest indigo.
From the Storm Palace, the temples, the Academy of Arms, moved black and glittering worm trails, converging and uniting on a white road flanked by gigantic crested dragons of obsidian—the Avenue of Rarnammon.
The High King is dead, the sun is eclipsed, the moon falls, the earth quakes.
A hundred priestesses were the prologue, wailing the mourning chant; a cry from hell it seemed, it was so full of emptiness, despair, pain. Their robes the storm-red of dragon’s blood, their eyes streaming tears from the citrus juice they had splashed into them, their bodies punctured and streaked with self-inflicted wounds. After them the priests, purple robes and a humming disquiet of gongs and mask faces caught in a congested rigor.
Rehdon’s Dragon Guard carried in their midst the embalmed death. Among their black, clashing assemblage, framed by the dipped rust banners and the trailing tassels, rolled a gilt cage with a man sitting up in it. He wore full armor. The great spiked crest flamed on his head, the eyes stared straight in front of him. He might have lived, yet death breathed out from every pore of him, an odorless stink of corruption, and the black eyes refracted and flashed and blazed, being constructed now not of tissue but onyx and crystal. Behind him walked princes like serfs, a king or two and after these their women and their wives. And Rehdon’s Queen in her black velvet and fantastic jewels, her skirt also trailing in the smoking dust. Her eyes were blank as the gem eyes of her dead and hated husband. Her wish had killed him, yet she must mourn him through the city like a slave. She recalled the greetings of the Zakorian princes—“Honor to the heir in your womb”—and fury burned bitter as the dust on her tongue.
At the tail of the worm marched the endless ranks of soldiery. Drums thundered across the streets and thunder answered dully from the panting sky.
The crowds trembled, hearing this sullen roar of gods in anger. Women fell to their knees weeping as Rehdon’s death cage passed them. Soon a shout rose, a shout to kill the witch, the banalik of the Lowland-Accursed, the murderess of the Storm Lord: Ashne’e.
• • •
The Hall of Kings stood on a terraced bank of the Okris, and its entrance was a marble dragon’s mouth.
Between those upstrained jaws the shimmering worm ran, flaring now with torchlight. The sky had turned black, and spears of pallid light flickered beyond the river; rain began to fall in huge molten drops, and the river boiled. Thunder cracked in fragments.
The priestesses raised their rain-and-tear-dashed faces, quivering terror and exaltation.
In the shell of the sepulcher the torches quavered and dug blue and red light from the rubies and sapphires of rearing mausoleums, from the eyes of carved monsters and hiddrax, and ran in silver pools between the limbs of metal guardians.
A line of priests marked the way to the newest tomb. In the breath of sweet-smoke and incense the body of Rehdon was lifted from its cage and carried into its heart. Prayers moaned among the sarcophagi and were lost.
Val Mala followed the kings and princes into the silent place. Long ago she would have been walled in beside her lord, his thing till eternity or decay, and a dry raw fear rose in her throat as she thought of it.
He lay before her on his couch, on his back. Fear was replaced by contempt and scorn as she recalled that never again would he lie thus in life before her. She reached to take his hand, to press her lips to it in a mockery of the traditional kiss of sorrow. And was turned to scarcely breathing stone.
There was a snake.
It stood straight upright on her husband’s breast, wickedly thin, yellow gold, splattered with a coiling black design. Its tongue flickered like a black flame in and out of its mouth.
She could not draw back her hand. She could not call out.
She held out her hand for the snake to strike her with its needle teeth, and for the poison to fill her veins. Its head recoiled and she knew her last instant of life was on her.
Lightning. It seemed lightning had struck through the roof into the tomb. But it was the glare of torchlight on a sword, the sword, in fact, of Prince Orhn, which had moved a fraction more swiftly than the snake and struck off its head.
Val Mala pulled her hand back as if from a sucking, reluctant clay, and fainted.
The silence in the tomb broke into shouts and imprecations, communicated rapidly to the throng outside.
Orhn wiped the blood slime from his sword and re-sheathed it methodically.
“Find the master mason of this tomb. He has some questions to answer.” As guards moved to oblige him, he motioned to Val Mala’s women, then stepped over her body without attention and went out.
It was no comfort to Val Mala th
at she was not required to walk back across the storm-choked streets. She lay like the brief vision she had experienced of her own death, and after oblivion came pain and sickness and alarm: physicians scurried to her, there were a hundred remedies and prayers. But the feared miscarriage did not occur; she held to her child with a furious, frightened vigor, and after the panic was done more than one surgeon howled under the whips of her personal guard.
She lay in her darkened bedchamber beneath the glittering coverlet embroidered with marigold suns and ivory-silver moons, and her eyes scorched her own shallow brain with their hate. Never had she known such terror, few times would she know such terror again.
“Bring me Lomandra,” she said.
Lomandra the Xarabian, her chief woman, came like an elegant and slender ghost into the shadowy room.
“I am here, lady,” she said. “I rejoice at your safety.”
“My safety. I almost lost the child, the King within me, Rehdon’s seed. My only hope of honor—she wants to take it from me—she sent the snake to kill my son.”
“Who, lady?”
“The whore Orhn brought here to spite me. The Lowlands worship the serpent, the anckira. That witch, that she-devil—I prayed she wouldn’t live. I swear she shan’t.”
“Madam—”
“Quiet. This is all you must do. You must go to the Palace of Peace.”
“Madam, I—”
“No. You’ll do as I say. Remember, I trust you completely. You’ll wait on the bitch, and then we shall see. Take this.”
Lomandra stared at the Queen’s extended hand and saw what Val Mala offered her—a ring of many precious stones, a beautiful and valuable ring.
Lomandra seemed to hesitate, and then, softly, she drew it off and placed it on her own finger.
“It becomes you,” Val Mala murmured, and Lomandra was wedded to her scheming.
Outside the casements, thunders crashed and galloped across the city, the black animals of the storm which was to last three days.
• • •
After the long rain, morning heat fell more sweetly into the gardens of the Palace of Peace.
The eyes of the guard turned sideways. A woman was coming up between the tall trees and the topiary, a woman with golden ornaments and wearing palace black. They knew her by sight: she was the Queen’s chief lady, Lomandra the Xarabian. She walked past them, up the pale steps, under the portico.
Inside, a coolness in the corridors, and mosaic floors. In a room sat a girl with lank hanging hair that was the exact hue of the rarest amber. Her belly was already enlarged with child, but her body did not seem to have grown with it; rather, it appeared shrunken away, as if all her flesh, all her being had concentrated itself in this one area of new life, the rest of her merely a shell, a housing.
Lomandra halted. She stood quite still, she stood with all Val Mala’s pride and contempt apparent in the lines of her, for she was at this time a total emulation of Val Mala.
“I am sent to you by my mistress, the Queen of the Am Dorthar and of all Vis, the Lord Rehdon’s widow,” she said coldly, stringing the titles like rare gems.
“For what purpose?”
Lomandra was startled by this directness, but only for an instant.
“To serve you. The Queen honors her husband’s child.”
Ashne’e turned and looked at her. She was a pathetic creature, Lomandra thought, with merciless distaste. Except, that was, for her eyes. They too were amber, and quite extraordinary. Lomandra found herself staring into them and looked quickly away, disproportionately unnerved.
“How long have you to wait for your labor?”
“It will not be long.”
“Precisely how long? We understand the Lowland women carry their children for a shorter time than the Vis.”
Ashne’e did not answer. Lomandra’s hauteur crystalized into anger. She went forward and stood over the girl.
“I’ll ask you again. How long before your child is born?”
Yes, the eyes were perfectly— Lomandra searched her mind for a suitable word and could not find one. Perhaps it was merely this alien racial coloring that made them seem so—preternatural. Small veins stretched across the white like paths into the golden circlet of the iris, the vortex of the pupils. The pupils expanded even as she gazed at them. They seemed to pull her down into a whirling lightless void. In the midst of the void Lomandra was assailed by a foreign emotion which was pure horror, pure dread and a misery beyond endurance.
She fell back gasping and caught at the chair to steady herself.
When next she looked down, the Lowland girl was sitting with her head bowed and her hair falling over her face.
Lomandra stared about her, confused. “I am ill,” she thought.
“In five months I shall bear the child.”
Lomandra recalled putting a question to the girl; this then must be the answer. She had asked about the birth. Her reason steadied suddenly about her; she was reassuringly calm, almost amused, at her brief hysterical disorientation. “I must be more careful of myself.” It was the heat, or possibly . . . Lomandra smiled, remembering that tonight she would lie with Kren, Fourth Dragon Lord, Warden of the River Garrison, whose lovemaking always pleased her.
The girl Ashne’e had already dwindled, guttered like the flame of a candle.
Lomandra forgot at the Garrison high table, and later, when the night dripped redly black through the open windows and she lived through the world of a man’s body under the auspices of the star. But when she slept, she lay with the great swelling of her own imminent labor before her, and felt the terrifying movement of foetal life within. Then there was a crowd screaming, and she stretched naked in an open place, pegged out under the cruel sky, and a blade was thrust through her, through her sex into her womb—the most ancient, unspeakable punishment of the Vis. She screamed, she heard the embryo scream. She saw her own corpse, and found it was not hers. It was the corpse of Ashne’e.
Kren woke her. She turned her face into his chest and wept. Lomandra had not wept since, long ago, little more than a child, she had left her own land for the crags of Dorthar. Now, rivers ran from her eyes, and afterward she trembled, fearing herself possessed.
• • •
At first she considered revealing to the Queen her fear, asking that some other woman be sent in her place to watch the Lowland witch, but when she attended Val Mala, bringing her the answer to her question, all hope of it left her. Since the serpent, Val Mala’s beauty had been gradually demolished by the tyranny of her womb; her whims were peevish, and she was at her most temperamental and dangerous.
So Lomandra returned to the Palace of Peace and found only a thin and wasted girl chained to the parasite of creation.
A month passed. Lomandra dressed the girl in rare fabrics that hung like sacks on her body, and combed out her lifeless, fulvid hair, and observed her closely, never once looking into her eyes, which now, correspondingly, never turned to hers.
And Lomandra marveled. She came to know the fragile body intimately, yet, knowing this much, Lomandra felt she knew nothing; the soul within the body was dumb and locked away.
The physician, the black gown flapping round his thinness like rags on a skeleton, came and went. At the end of the month, Lomandra approached him in the twilit colonnade.
“How are things progressing, lord physician?”
“Well enough, though she doesn’t, I think, seem well made to bear a child. Her hips are very narrow and the pelvis like a bird’s.”
Lomandra said then, as Val Mala had told her to: “It will happen soon?”
“Not for some months yet, lady.”
“I would have expected sooner,” Lomandra lied, the Queen’s words. “Milk pap comes out of her breasts on occasion. She’s complained of sharp pains in her lower back. Are these not signs?”
The physician appeared startled.
“I haven’t noticed that. She’s said nothing.”
“Well, I’m a woman. She’s peasant stock, unsophisticated, afraid perhaps to speak to a man of such things.”
“It may be sooner, then.”
He seemed troubled as he turned away and vanished between the pillars like a tattered shadow.
Lomandra, her hand already on the curtain, paused. She had guessed long since the Queen’s intent; but it came to her now, for the first time, to recoil from what she had made herself accomplice to.
In the room, the girl sat before the oval mirror drawing a comb slowly through her listless hair. An inexplicable pity choked the Xarabian. She went forward, gently took the comb and continued its movement.
“Lomandra.”
Lomandra was startled. This voice had never before spoken her name. It had a curious effect; for a moment the pale drained face in the mirror became the face of a queen who had bound her in service. Her eyes met Ashne’e’s in the glass.
“Lomandra, I have no hate for you. Fear nothing.”
The words fitted so perfectly with the overlaid image of royalty that Lomandra’s jeweled hands shook and she let go of the comb.
“Xarabiss lies beside the Shadowless Plains, Lomandra. Though you are Vis, the blood of our peoples has mingled. Know me and yourself, Lomandra. You will be a friend to me.”
The soul of the Xarabian screamed suddenly within her. Only fear of Val Mala kept her from crying aloud what she knew must happen.
The girl seemed to hear her thoughts, without surprise.
“Obey the Queen, Lomandra. You have no choice. When her work is done, then you will do mine.”
• • •
The moon hung, a red fruit in the garden trees, as Amnorh passed the uncrossed spears of the guard with a noncommittal: “I am on the Queen’s business.” Inside he climbed the darkness of a tower and pulled back the curtain of Ashne’e’s chamber. Only moonlight defined the room.
“I see you always as I see you now. Lying on a bed, Ashne’e.”
