by Tanith Lee
The search was, at first, entirely of the mind. He had no different means to seek her or the thing in her which guided him. Through the medium of the embryo, he traveled dull continents, wide plateaus of darkness, and came eventually upon the flickering beacon, unmistakable in the featureless night.
The translation was made after, the nonphysical landscape processed into roads and mountains and forests. The magnetism lay in Thaddra, as he had once believed.
The rebirth of a race, the symbol of the shattered city, became distant. He left them without recognition or regret. At the finish of the fight, after all, his godhead had not consumed him, for something had come indeed to turn him back into a human man.
• • •
Across the wild garden of the Guardian’s palace, the evening shadows drew close, like long cool fingers praying. In the jungle forest beyond the wall, birds squawked malevolently, and the orange Thaddrian moon was rising.
A man leaned on the wall, near the old gate.
Presently, a short, swarthy woman came slipping through the trees toward him.
“Well, Panyuma,” he said and snatched her breast. She thrust him off.
“You’re a fool, Slath. If Hmar heard of this, he’d kill us both. He understands the use of many slow and hideous poisons—”
“Be still, you slut. You know you come because you want. He’s not man enough to use you, and I am, and never tell me you don’t enjoy it. Besides, he thinks you protect him from this snake woman he says haunts him, and I—I protect him from his mortal enemies. In that last war we had up river, who brought him the heads of two lords?”
“You,” she said sneeringly.
He thrust her back against the wall and pulled up her skirts, and the moon stared with its fierce eye at the choreography and conclusion of their labors.
“I must go back now,” she whispered harshly. “He’ll call for me. He’s very fearful these past months—since the stories came over the mountains.”
“What? The Dortharian war? Why should that bother him?”
“I think he’s of their blood. And the snake woman—isn’t there a goddess with a snake’s tail, sacred to the yellow people? The traders said the yellow people took Alisaar and Zakoris and shook down the Dragon City, while their goddess sat on the mountains, watching,” Panyuma muttered in the hushed singsong voice she used for her forest spells.
Slath laced himself and spat scornfully at shadows of night or soul.
“Stories for brats.”
Panyuma said: “There are old things still, and strange things. Do you remember the slave you sold to Hmar?”
Slath nodded. A year since, Panyuma, irresistibly anxious to display her secret power, had shown him the hidden mausoleum, and, despite his casual brutality, his intestines had crawled at the row of undead dolls in their finery.
“I remember. A great waste. She was an ornamental bitch, my Seluchis.”
“He goes there to gloat,” Panyuma hissed. “He takes me sometimes. Their hair still grows, and their nails, and I must clip them, like a handmaiden. When the lamp fell on your slave, her hair had grown out red.”
Slath swore.
“By Zarduk!” He struggled with his memory and said: “The Storm Lord’s bride—didn’t she have a red mane?”
“So I’ve heard the traders say. Do you know what Hmar did then? He sweated and muttered and pulled me out. Then, when it was the black of night, he left our bed and went there with an iron bar—I followed, though he didn’t see. The thing in the floor which opens the stone—he took the bar to it and smashed it.”
“Perhaps he thinks she’ll come and strangle him with her red hair, like his snake lady.”
“Now he keeps to his rooms,” Panyuma said. “He has fever and screams all the time in his sleep.”
“That’s happened before.”
“Yes,” she said. Her black eyes glittered. “You were only a cutthroat mercenary when you came,” she said, “now you captain Hmar’s men. Since the war up river, they’d answer to you.”
“What’re you plotting, you bitch?”
“I have said nothing. Only woman’s talk. Men think for themselves when they’re men.”
The gold bits sparkled a cold yellow in her plaits as she slunk aside and hurried back toward the three-towered mass of the palace.
• • •
After almost a month, the man called Raldnor crossed the mountains into Thaddra under an expressionless sky of weary blue. It was a dead yet living land, choked up with black jungles and arid fields where nothing grew.
He rode through Tumesh, where, in a gaudy marketplace, slaves were sold, and, passing northward, he came to one of the nameless rivers and gave his mount in exchange for a raft. He used no company on the river, but poled himself upstream.
On the sixth day there was a challenge.
He had no password; he simply stood looking at the three men, seeing them with more than his eyes, gauging them with his senses, which were finer and more numerous than theirs—and on them he found, like a faint scent, an intimation of what he sought.
They breathed out oaths at the color of his hair. Something in his demeanor and face made them loath to apply their knives to his back and prod him up the track, like any other trespasser. They told him they would take him to Hmar, guardian of the eight kingdoms, and he thanked them.
And then, somehow, on the overgrown jungle road, they lost him. As night came on, they searched and shouted in the forests. They came to believe a leopard had seized him just too quickly for their eyes to see and, swift with hunger, had dragged him into the undergrowth and devoured him whole.
By that time Raldnor had reached the bursting Thaddrian town and was walking the refuse-scattered streets toward Hmar’s mansion of stone.
• • •
Amnorh, King’s Councilor, Warden of the High Council of Koramvis, opened his eyes on a chamber of guttering torch smoke. Amnorh, conceived of a Dortharian prince in an Iscaian wine girl’s reluctant womb. Amnorh, who had ridden Val Mala, the Storm Lord’s Queen, but never known he sired her child; Amnorh, who had murdered Rehdon, High King of Vis.
“Hmar,” he said, “I am Hmar.”
He thought of the secret room, and the woman standing waiting with her bloody hair. Ashne’e’s doing. Anackire rejected his gift.
“Oh, Mother mine,” he crooned. “I regret most bitterly I have offended you,” and he laughed crazily and in terror.
They had seen Her in Dorthar, too, in the sky like the sun, which had gone black. The city had been shaken down—it pleased him. Yet it was her revenge—Ashne’e’s, Anackire’s—the shadow of her vengeance had expunged Koramvis. Now it came reaching for his life—
“Who’s there?” Amnorh cried out. He had heard a cold footstep in the premature dark of the room. Was the assassin here already? Shivering and sweating, Amnorh stared and glimpsed Panyuma in the torch glare. She had carried a quartz phial in one hand, filched from a great chest against the far wall as he lay sleeping in his insane dozes. But she had slipped the phial between her dark round breasts before he noticed it.
“Only Panyuma, lord. Will you rise?”
“Yes. Tonight I’ll eat below. In my hall. You shall serve me.”
“I’m your slave, lord.”
He washed immaculately in the stone ewer, and she brought him his robe and the gold for his fingers.
When she went to fling the dirty water out from the window, she pulled free the phial from between her breasts and threw that down also a few moments later. It did not strike on the ground. Somewhere below a pair of hands had caught it.
Panyuma followed behind Hmar, descending the stairway into the hall. When he sat, she stood behind his chair and served him his meat.
Slath, Hmar’s captain and bodyguard, was laughing lower down the table. He had learned the good manners Hma
r expected and learned them well. He had even learned the mode and forms of table talk once prevalent in Dorthar.
“This wine’s particularly good, Lord Hmar. I’ve had it in store for a year—Zakorian liquor. Can I offer you a cup?”
Hmar’s darting eyes, moving as ever here and there across the length and breadth of the hall, skittered over the flask. He nodded peremptorily. Panyuma emptied his goblet and swilled it with water. She went to Slath, who handed her the flask. She filled Hmar’s cup, let a swift trickle merely line the bottom of the captain’s flagon and bore the brimming vessel back to the Guardian.
Hmar drank and nodded again.
“A bitter fluid, but personable.”
He drained the liquor, his long fingers wrapped about the stem, his eyes once more in motion. Panyuma’s face was blank. Slath noisily gulped nothing and was jovial with alarm. They had poisoned their lord, but he did not seem to be aware of it. And it was a slow agent. With luck, he would die in his sleep.
Beyond the high and narrow windows the last color left the sky.
At the far end of the hall one of the small doors opened. A man came through—a faceless, hooded man in a thick cloak. Hmar’s soldiers made a good deal of noise at their dinner, the newcomer was not discernible by sound, nor by anything else tangible. Nevertheless, Slath felt an odd, additional unease. He glanced at Hmar and was troubled, thinking the drink was working too quickly after all. For Hmar’s frenzied eyes had suddenly ceased their eternal search and were fixed on the stranger. Hmar’s face was sickly. He gave a sudden hoarse crow of laughter. A peculiar horrified sense of fulfillment seemed to have taken him, like that of a man condemned for months to die and confronted at last by the gallows.
Amnorh remembered. There had been a water-singing cave. The woman had tricked him in that cave, and he had grasped her arm.
“Perhaps I should abort my child from you, and leave you to the gentle mercies of the Lord Orhn.”
Incredibly, a smile rose like dawn over her white face. He had never seen her smile, nor any woman smile in this fashion: it seemed to freeze his blood. His hand fell away from her.
“Do so, Amnorh. Otherwise he will be my curse on you.”
Amnorh stared down the length of the hall, hearing only the blue tinkling of the water in his head. The man was not seated, but standing by one of the lower tables. Amnorh could see no face within the hood, no gaze answering his own.
A curious sensation gripped him, so that he seemed to look at her, not with his open eyes but with a third eye set in the center of his forehead. And it was not her he saw. Standing where she stood was a young man, indistinct, spectral, yet Amnorh could make out that he had the bronze skin of the Vis and, at the same time, eyes and hair as pale as the Lowland wine with which he had poisoned Rehdon during the first nights of the Red Moon. . . .
“He is here,” Amnorh thought. “She has sent him. Anackire’s messenger—my son—”
He chuckled grimly. No, not his son. Rehdon’s son, after all. Rehdon, whom he had poisoned with Lowland wine.
To Amnorh there came a vision. He saw Val Mala standing with her hand on his shoulder, staring with avid eyes at the liquor he had distilled to be Rehdon’s death—a bright cameo of the lord’s woman and the lord’s man conspiring to kill him. And suddenly, it was no longer Val Mala he saw, or himself. It was Panyuma, the Thaddrian, and Slath the mercenary, and the wine they had mixed was for him.
Amnorh let out a hoarse cry. He picked up his empty cup and slung it across the floor. He thrust from his chair.
“I am poisoned!”
Men left off eating and stared up at him.
“Poisoned!” Amnorh shouted, his eyes starting. He flung about, and struck Panyuma in the face. She fell down and cowered. “These two have murdered me. This bitch, and Slath, there, my captain—”
At every table men leapt to their feet. Treachery, they knew, was not greatly discriminating. They drew their knives or snatched blades off the board. Slath’s paid men began to roar for him; others began to strike about them in fear and anger. At once there was fighting. Blood and wine ran; a torch was knocked from its socket and inspired a blaze in the tapestry along the wall. Women shrilled.
Slath, growling with fury, pulled out a dagger, but Amnorh had spun round and fled—through the arch behind the dais, into the maze of corridors and stairs.
The stranger in the dark cloak, barely noticed now, began to make his way up the hall toward the arch, walking between the brawls and struggles as if unseeing. Near the dais a man jumped on his back with a crazy whoop of rage. The stranger gave a curious half turn, a sort of stumble and, as the man slid from him, cut his throat with a pitiless and accurate gesture. No others ran at him. Only the woman Panyuma saw him pass. His shadow fell over her as she crouched by the table. She made a magic sign against him, her eyes flashing dread, but then he was gone, silently, following dying Hmar into the dark of the mansion.
• • •
It was easy to find the place.
An unseen light, an unheard sound, an unfelt thread between his fingers—all guided him there. The way was half-lit by irregular banks of torches and the dim star-shine in windows.
Raldnor came eventually to a blank wall of stone and a broken machinery in the floor. It was here.
On the ground lay a narrow-eyed man, with gold on his hands, whimpering. He left off whimpering and said prosaically: “You’ve come, then.”
Raldnor looked at him. The man smiled.
“You kept me waiting a long time, son of Rehdon. Is it her you want—the red-haired woman?”
“Yes.”
“Retribution,” mused the man on the floor. “You note, confronted by the inescapable, I’ve become quite lucid. You’ll find the door inaccessible. The mechanism is damaged. I myself did this, in a fit of terror. But then, I’ve heard you brought an earthquake to Koramvis. Perhaps you can open the stone yourself.”
Raldnor kneeled by the broken levers, examining them intently. The hood slipped from his head. Amnorh stared at him. He began a dialogue concerning Ashne’e, but this was interrupted suddenly when the man struck sideways at the machinery with his fist, and then again, and, with a rusty protest, the stone began to pull reluctantly apart.
“Well, well. And clever also with his hands.”
Raldnor walked by Amnorh into the lightless gallery of the tomb.
A place of death, heavy with old embalming musk. Dead warriors and stone boxes of bones, and heaps of little treasure. At the far end of the gallery, ten women paralyzed in attitudes of marble. Their skin had turned to the texture of wood, their hair to wire. Soon real death would begin to eat their flesh.
His hands touched them and abandoned them. He came to an eleventh figure and found her suddenly, and her skin was as he remembered it, and her hair, with the frozen gems in it now, the Serpent’s Eye of Anackire.
A deeper shade of silence fell inside the opened tomb.
Amnorh babbled his elegant delirium at the door.
Below, a dull explosion rocked the palace. The wild impromptu battle had run out into the ragged town, fire had spread and smoke obscured the rising moon.
• • •
In her brain there was only darkness, a deserted hollow void, the shell of a citadel stripped bare by the motionless winds of time. Yet the essence of her being was somehow present—one last ghost in the ruin, and the far-off whisper of life which was the child.
Astaris.
He moved in her mind, calling her, and received no answer.
Then the image came.
It formed and hardened, a familiar configuration, now altered to undertake new horror.
Astaris stood waiting before him; the wind was washing through her scarlet hair. A red moon, the Zastis moon, shone behind her. She raised her arms, and long cracks appeared in her body—ink lines on amber. Then she crumble
d all at once in blazing ashes, and the ashes blew away across the moon.
He blotted out the image, but it formed again and again on the dark.
He put other images in its place. Images of love, images of passion, the sexual images of the body, the yearning images within the skull.
Initially, he alone peopled her brain with creatures. Then, like wraiths, the first memories that were truly hers came drifting up from the cobwebs to greet his.
Her mind filled itself, slowly, like a cup. Then came the deep dreams, the conclusions, the solitudes, all in great surges as if the doors had finally been broken down. She herself came last of all, behind a train of shapes and fantasies. The inner she, like a distant jewel, or rising sun in the core of the brain, opening its single eye and regarding him.
Raldnor?
In the dark of the tomb he felt her physical life return to her. She stirred in his arms.
“Are you here?” she said aloud.
“I am here.”
Somewhere, a dawn rose over a forest and filtered between the drifting smokes. It struck a half note of color in the black gallery, through the open doorway, across which a man was lying.
Raldnor took Astaris’s hand. They crossed the stone room, stepped over the dead man, went along the empty corridor.
Much of the palace had burned in the night. Many rooms were gutted. A few dogs ran yelping about the streets outside. The sun stained everything with nebulous gold and wine-red panes.
Only a child saw the wagon pass. He was to remember later, twenty years later, when, as the result of various promptings and by various means, he had crossed the mountains and assumed the yellow robe of the Dortharian Anackire.
A white-haired man and a scarlet-haired woman. He had thought they must be blind, for they seemed to see nothing at all, and yet, when they had glanced simultaneously aside at each other he had been aware, despite his lack of years and the terrors of the night, that they did indeed each see one thing, which was the other.
When grown, the child—then a man—discovered so many legends concerning Raldnor and the manner in which he had vanished from the world. The Lady of Snakes had taken him, or he had gone below into the earth, for gods cannot remain as gods; they can only transcend themselves, or in some inferno of mythology forget their power and die.
