by Tanith Lee
However, he seemed light as air while Ryhgon was a lumbering elemental force all about him, the dragon sword in the giant’s grasp lusting after him. Raldnor dropped down to the side and the massive blade swung by him, resounding on one of the stone pillars of the hall. Ryhgon used no guard. He wheeled the sword like an ax; the vast sweeping blows were hypnotic and paralyzing. He fought contemptuously, a machine that knows it is invincible and does not have to think. “But the master should be careful of his pupil,” Raldnor thought quite clearly, and in his sparkling rage he saw only a reputation behind the sword, something that expected to be feared and was not essentially fearful.
“Look at me, Ryhgon,” he thought, “how I freeze with terror,” and he fell back before the giant as if afraid, and the storm came on, its teeth a glimpse of lightning. The great arm lifted the sword, and on the end of that soaring hung Raldnor’s death dangling like a doll.
Raldnor thrust beneath and up to meet the descending arm. It was a swift almost casual stroke that severed the Guard Lord’s wrist. Thick blood spurted, the ox muscles spasmed and the sword dropped from Ryhgon’s impotent fingers.
Ryhgon fell to his knees, clutching the shorn-off hand against him, shouting and drooling in agony. No one moved to help him. They sensed perfectly that his rule was over, yet more than this, they were appalled by the sight of the monster on its knees, reduced so simply and so totally to its basic animal parts, emptied like a broken jar of all its power.
But in Raldnor the silver rage did not abate. He saw they would be on him in a moment and there would be more of Kathaos’s justice. So he leaped across the room, over benches, toward the outer doors. No one stopped him; he seemed to be moving in a different time, and outside the corridors were empty.
He ran in smoky lamplight over mosaic floors, looking for an exit point. But there was no cool reasoning left to him—only instinct. At last it was a window, not a door, he found—a window with dry creeper, half dead from the snow, coiling away from it. He took its withered brown claws in his hands and climbed downward into a court of shadows and a forest of columns of poppy-colored glass.
“What now?” he asked himself, and then came a black absorbing dreariness: “Nothing now.”
But there was something. A light. It sprang up ahead of him, and where it shone through the pillar stems it was a pale carnelian fire. He pressed backward, but the flame found his face.
There was a girl, carrying a lamp. She was the sort of girl he had grown accustomed to seeing about the walks of the major palace in the past three months—gliding always in the distance, accompanied by servants, hair intricately dressed, jewels on her fingers. Yet this one was alone. She tilted her head a little to one side and gave him an inquisitive, dangerous smile.
“And what’s your business here, Am Kathaos? An illicit love affair with some Dragon Lord’s wife? And you so breathless to get to it.”
The abrupt transition from anger, blood and flight to this could only stun him. The madman’s plan came out of his mouth before it was fully formed in his brain.
“I seek an audience with the Storm Lord.”
Her eyes widened, but she gave a little false, elegant laugh.
“Indeed? You’re very ambitious.”
“Where do I find him?”
“Oh, you don’t,” she said haughtily. “Your request must go through the proper channels and will take several days. After that you will probably be granted a moment with some underling, if you’re excessively favored. And I doubt, soldier, if you will be.”
Raldnor felt his head spin from fatigue. He considered thrusting by this doll creature into the courts of the palace, but where could he go? Besides, he could see that expression behind her eyes that he had grown used to seeing in Vis women when they looked at him. He chanced his luck with her, having no other choice.
“I’ve killed a man. If Kathaos’s guards find me, I’ll be finished.”
“If you’re a criminal, no doubt you deserve to be punished,” she said, but she was neither afraid nor anxious to see him taken away to a gallows.
“Self-defense,” he said.
“Oh, so they all say. What do you expect I should do with you?”
“Hide me.”
“Oh, indeed? And why should I? I am the chief lady of the Princess Astaris Am Karmiss, and what are you, I wonder? Some riffraff off the streets of Xarabiss under the Lord Councilor’s badge.”
Behind him, from the tiers of the guest mansion, came a sudden sound of shouting and red torchlight moving on the colonnades.
“Decide now, princess’s lady,” he said. “Your mercy or their justice. If they take me, I’ll be fit only for worms by morning.”
Her eyes flickered and her cheeks paled with excitement. She had made her decision.
“Follow me,” she said.
And turning, she and her lamplight drifted between the pillars and into the dark garden walks of Thann Rashek’s palace.
Overhead the moon was a smudge of ivory, and near at hand fountains arced among the vegetable statuary. The scene, so incongruous to him now, affected his draining insanity and anger so that he had a crazy urge to laugh. He slipped an arm about the woman’s small waist, and she pushed it away, though slowly.
“Don’t be insolent with me, soldier.”
“Your beauty precludes all restraint,” he said.
She heard the laughter in his voice and glanced at him curiously.
“Banter, and you in fear of death? Stop here now. This is the place.”
“The place for what? Am I to be so honored—”
This time she did not thrust him off, but said tightly: “You see that avenue? He’ll pass along it when he comes from Astaris’s rooms and then go by you here.”
“Who?”
“The one you say you seek; Amrek the Storm Lord. It’s a route known only to a few. I risk my life telling you.”
“I’m humbled by your supreme bravery,” he said and kissed her. When he let her go, she trembled but said in a measured, cool little voice: “Time enough for that if you survive the night. And remember, you never met me.”
And, taking the lamp, she slipped away, leaving him alone in the black velvet garden, the scent of her costly perfume lingering on his hands.
• • •
Amrek sat staring at the woman who was to become his wife. “I am mesmerized,” he suddenly thought, “gawping at her like a fish on a cold slab.” But oddly, neither this realization nor the analogy he had produced made him uneasy. “Well, she was meant to be looked at, devoured with the eyes. The eternal feast.” He could imagine her losing none of this, even with age. She would die at thirty, or else she was immortal, some sort of goddess mistakenly at large. These fancies spread across his mind in many colored fans, evoking no particular emotion. It was on the whole very strange; he had been the subject of violent tearing rages since childhood—the present of his mother, he bitterly supposed. They came on him in white hot waves, like a recurrent illness. More than once he had cowered, suspecting himself mad, before the great and overweening pride of his position swept fear into the underlayers of his consciousness. And yet, with this woman, a stillness had come into his life. Simply to be able to sit like this, quite motionless, as she had been in her carved chair for so long, was a kind of surprising peace. What kept him so still? This banquet of loveliness? Or did she extend some part of her own immobility to the things about her? Certainly it was no gift she brought him on purpose. She was curiously impersonal in all she did, almost unaware of her surroundings. The sudden twinge of nervous jealousy tore him; she might be so easily unaware of him along with all the rest.
“Astaris,” he said. Her amber eyes lifted their inner lids like a cat’s—yet not entirely. She looked at him, but did she see him? “What are you thinking?”
“Thoughts are very abstract, my lord. How should I express them to y
ou?”
“You’re devious, Astaris. When I ask a woman what she’s thought or done and she answers in this way, I invariably conclude that she’s hiding something.”
“We are all born with armor,” she said.
“Riddles.”
She turned her head again and presented to him the profile of an image. He seemed always to see her in these terms—something unreal, an artifice.
“Well, I won’t tax you with it. I’ll tell you instead what I thought as I looked at you. You see, I’m altogether more explicit. Every day, I thought, free men and women make slaves of themselves to please me. And you, merely by your presence which denies me its thoughts, please me more than anything in the world.”
She looked at him again, and said: “When you speak like this, I wonder what you want from me.”
Her words unnerved him. He had never grown accustomed to her directness and her forms of logic.
“I want a queen, Astaris, a woman to give me sons.”
“Perhaps I’ll fulfill neither of these requirements.”
Her calmness stung him. He rose and stood over her, then reached and half lifted her to her feet and moved her body against his.
“Then it must be you I want, must it not? This Karmian flesh.”
Yet he had never lain with her, despite the bed rights given him by their betrothal. He had never analyzed his reserve—it was not, certainly, any kind of fear, yet somehow her serene unreality had held him off. Now, quickened by her nearness and the faint pure scent of her unperfumed skin, he nevertheless felt not the slightest desire to satisfy himself with her. Perhaps she would be disappointing, yet somehow he did not think so. Perhaps rather she was like that treasured gift, guessed at but avoided until the last moment.
Now he kissed her, and his need increasing, only drew back from her and looked in her face. She smiled, a peculiarly sweet smile.
“You inspire tenderness in me,” she said, as if it surprised her as much as it surprised him to be so told. Surprised, and oddly hurt him, too. Desire was transmuted into a sort of disorganized spite. Wildly and blindly, with a sensation of helplessness, he cast himself into the pit.
He let her go and held up before her the gloved left hand.
“And this? Does this inspire tenderness?”
“The hand of legend,” she said.
“Yes. Didn’t you believe me when I told you I wore the glove to mask a knife wound?”
“No,” she said simply.
He turned his back, his face working in sudden pain. He had been moving toward this moment all along, this moment of shame and terror, for he had known she would see his lies in his face when he told them, this damnable seeress.
“Scars, too,” he muttered, “scars, too. I was eight years old when I prayed to the gods to relieve the curse, and I hacked my own flesh to ribbons in the early morning of a feast day in Koramvis. Then Orhn came. I remember Orhn very well. He picked me up and slung me down in her rooms on a couch. ‘Your mewling cub bleeds,’ he said to her. She hated me for that. I was screaming, but I remember how she sent for a girl to clean the blood off the velvet before she called for the physician.”
Amrek turned and looked at the woman who was to be his wife.
“She seduced my father in Kuma: it’s common knowledge. She was thirteen but advanced for her years.”
“Val Mala,” Astaris said softly, but now she was only a golden shape imprinted on the lamp glow.
Shaking with his anger and his pain, he turned again, this time toward the doorway.
“I’ll leave you, Astaris,” he said stiffly. “You’ll forget what I’ve said to you. It’s dangerous to slander the King.”
For her, such an empty injunction.
Yet he caught a glimpse of her eyes before he left her— those bottomless eyes—and saw the briefest flickering in them, as if he had stirred their depths with his anguish.
So he went out into the night garden, with his own insanity dogging him—a monster, a shadow shape from his own childhood nightmares, for he had terrorized himself in his dreams.
And she remained behind, the faintest despair on her, for she had seen the tortured animal in his eyes, burning there, and had been unable to communicate with it.
• • •
The garden was black as death, the moon put out in cloud. Two Dragon Guard fell into step behind, but he scarcely noted them, and they kept their usual respectful distance from him.
At the end of the avenue a figure moved out onto the path in front of him. He was barely aware of it at first, but one Guard ran by him, sword drawn.
“Keep still, whoever you are.”
A light was struck, and Amrek saw then the yellow blazon of Kathaos’s house guard, and after this, the face of a Dortharian prince. The incongruous apparition acted on him like an icy blow. His first thought was: “One of my father’s bastards.”
Then the man spoke.
“I ask clemency of the Storm Lord.”
“Then ask it on your knees,” the Guard rapped out.
The man did not move. He looked in Amrek’s face and said: “King Amrek knows I honor him. He needs no proof.”
Amrek felt himself reacting, not with anger, but with a peculiar excitement to this unforeseen thing. It cleared his head of shadows, and made him back into a human man, and a King.
“So you honor me. And you ask for clemency. Why? What have you done that you need protection?”
“I’ve offended your Lord Councilor.”
“How?”
The man on the path grinned a savage and exultant grin. He might have been drunk, but not on any kind of wine.
“Ryhgon of Zakoris goes one-handed from this night on.”
The nearer escort sucked breath sharply between his teeth; the second muttered an exclamation. Ryhgon had a certain reputation among the Dragon Guard.
“What made you come to me?” Amrek demanded sharply.
“Frankly because your lordship has more authority than Kathaos Am Alisaar.”
The moon slid out overhead and sketched dim gray ghosts between the trees. The man on the path blinked and shook his head as if the light troubled him, and Amrek noted lines of intense weariness on the extraordinary face. At this Amrek experienced an unexpected awareness of this man. As when he had seen Astaris for the first time, he felt himself confronted by a personality, a live thing—instead of the silken cutouts of people who generally moved around him, bowing and flinching, or else steeped in their own concealments and ironies as was Kathaos. And he sensed, too, a strange rearrangement of planes either inside himself or without. He felt that he was facing a part of his destiny. The insight was astounding. He looked hard at the stranger, this mere underling of Am Alisaar’s soldiers, yet he could not shake the absurd conviction from him.
He waved the Guard back a few paces and indicated to the man a stone bench. They sat together, and it bewildered Amrek that this did not disturb him. “Well, and if he’s one of my father’s spawn, I suppose he has a half right to be at my side. Is this what I feel then? An obscure brotherhood?”
“Well, soldier,” he said aloud, “what are you called?”
“Raldnor, my lord, Raldnor of Sar.”
“Indeed. Then I know you better than I thought.”
“The matter of your Guard, my lord. I humbly apologize for proving superior to the Chosen.”
“You’re playing a dangerous game, Sarite.”
“What other game is left me, my lord? Either your Councilor hangs me, or you do. I would only draw your attention to one thing—something Kathaos of Alisaar has failed to see.”
“Which is?”
“I’ve proved my excellence as a fighting machine. I could substitute for Ryhgon very well, and better, either in Kathaos’s guard, which is unlikely—or in your lordship’s.”
“This is
the proposal of a drunkard or a fool.”
“And to ignore it would be the act of one. My lord.”
“Be careful what you say to me, Sarite.”
“One day, my lord, long after you’ve seen me dangle on a gallows, a man may slip a knife in your back or a powder in your cup, which I, had I been there, would have prevented.”
“You offer yourself as a bodyguard, then?”
Raldnor said nothing. The scents of the garden drifted about them.
“How did you find this place?” Amrek asked.
“I followed one of the Lady Astaris’s women. She was returning from a tryst, I think, and didn’t see me.”
“You’re too cunning, soldier. And you’ve too many enemies.”
“I can deal with my enemies, my lord, if I live. And yours, too.”
“I think,” Amrek said slowly, “that you, Sarite, had the same father as I.”
The face of the young man beside him seemed to harden almost imperceptibly, then relax.
“You don’t have an answer to that, I see.”
“My line is all Xarabian, my lord.”
“Not in your eyes. You have the mark of Rarnammon there.”
“Perhaps, my lord, we were honored, unknown, in some past generation.”
Amrek rose; Raldnor followed him.
“From this moment your trial has begun. No, not the gallows. I’ll give you what you claim a right to; then I’ll watch you earn it, and I promise you, you’ll be fighting for your life every inch of the way.”
• • •
“Good morning, Kathaos.”
Kathaos turned and bowed, and nothing about his attitude or his person betrayed his rancor or his unease.
“I called you to inform you of the whereabouts of a certain man—a Sarite. I think you know who I mean.”
“Indeed, my lord.”
“Indeed, Kathaos. He’s here. Of course, you’d assumed as much. Your hunter, who can defeat both your men and mine. Can you imagine what his fate will be?”
“I’ve a poor imagination, my lord,” Kathaos said, without inflection.
