Anackire

by Tanith Lee

  5.

  AGAINST A BLUE DUSK no longer tinged by Zastis, the magician’s hands flickered and a rain of light fell from them. In the shallow bowl beneath, the bones of a recently dead animal, clean and white, glimmered. There was a prolonged hiatus. Beyond the window, stars hung in streams above the bay. A star smoked also on the highest palace roof, a morbid beacon to all Istris: the funeral watch-fire of a King’s dead, custom of Shansar, burning now for more than a month.

  “Well?” Suthamun eventually rasped.

  “What do you see?” Suthamun’s magician raised his head, and the mysterious light among the bones went out.

  “You were wise, King, to call him back from Xai.”

  “Was I? That was the advice of my council. Black men and yellow. He’s made himself popular, a little hero. My Vis didn’t care for his exile. This tale I tried to kill him—twice—at Tjis, now here in the capital, my assassins falling on my own heir in error—By Ashara! It was the rabble here did that—black and brown scum—drunken—killing my boy, knowing him even in those damnable filched clothes. Or else Free Zakoris. Infiltrators revenging themselves on Kesarh—mistaken—” Suthamun broke off. His grief was real but oblique. His eyes were dry, yet he had wept in rage when they brought him the corpse. Jornil had been, if nothing else, a symbol of the continuance of Shansarian rule in Karmiss, that dynasty of reavers. Now Suthamun’s oldest legal heir was seven years old. The rest were mixed-blood bastards, or daughters. Useless.

  “King,” said Suthamun’s magician, “even the High Lord must sometimes listen to the desire of his people. You could have done no other thing than return the Prince Am Xai to your court.”

  “And now I must pet him, make love to him, to please them, keep them quiet. When he was the cause of my son’s death. And I never raised my hand against the dog. Never. The story about Tjis—it’s a lie.”

  “You believe Prince Kesarh might also be implicated in the Heir’s murder?”

  “I don’t know. Free Zakorians, the mob, Kesarh—yes, why not? In Shansar I’d have put him to the test, the Three Ordeals, fire, water, steel. But I daren’t, not here in this liars’ land.”

  “You do well to humor him, King. The constellations that companion his birth are arresting. And the goddess has spoken here, a low soft voice, indecipherable, but evident.”

  Suthamun, impatient and afraid, reined his pacing.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Aura of the goddess has passed across the fate of the Prince Kesarh. It would, King, be pointless now to oppose him.”

  Suthamun grunted. He longed for wine and noise; the ten-night-long Shansarian death-feast, loud lament and toasts to the shades, that had eased him. But they were done. And tonight Kesarh would also sit at the table. He had been welcomed back discreetly, at noon today, having passed through the city incognito as a thief. As one of his own assassins, perhaps?

  There had been nothing to link Kesarh with the death of Jornil—save the clothes in which Jornil had died. But despite the Aura of the goddess, diplomacy, magic, what-have-you, one would be slow not to, yet he saw the event from an oddly angled perspective, from the dramatic epic view of what he had been, a tribal lord in a land of omens and sagas. For Kesarh to think Suthamun strove to murder him, and so to have Suthamun’s son dispatched while playing Kesarh—Suthamun to carry the blame—these were Shansarian vengeance-moves of the highest order. The King, if he credited them as such, gave them also that much respect.

  He did not prophesy from them a particular threat to himself. It would have been absurd to do so. Kesarh was nothing, save transiently to the Vis rabble. And even with the foremost heir missing, Suthamun and his five brothers yet stood between all men and the Karmian throne.

  • • •

  The fire on the palace roof was doused. It smoldered out as Zastis had done, conflagrations of love, life, death, showing no great difference from each other.

  The summer too began to flame and die. The flames of leaves rotted on the trees. The reeds beside the pools turned sallow, then black, and the sunsets thickened.

  Rem, having found himself intimately involved with his master’s schemes at Tjis and Ankabek, thereafter waited, at a loose end. That afternoon before he left for Xai, Kesarh had spoken to Rem. It was the first time Rem had been inside the modest royal apartment, as opposed to on guard outside it. His former trade was apparently to be put to some use. Talents Rem had been glad not to use for more than a year were again called on. With the correct blend of implicit coercion and silken payment, he had seen to it the required persons were suborned to Kesarh’s will. As a result, Jornil was now ashes, and Kesarh back at Istris, installed in new, more lavish rooms, a party to most of the King’s social calendar.

  The situation astounded Rem. To live off a man’s enforced bounty, the cold blade of his hate, though sheathed, always waiting at your back—Kesarh seemed quite unmoved. Only the intense stillness of his eyes sometimes belied it. He was aware, he was vigilant. His brain worked on, even as he drank Suthamun’s wine, or as the girls ran to kiss him on the streets. Before too long, appeased by Suthamun’s ironic punishment and the victim’s glory, Visian Istris would forget Kesarh’s wit and bravura. It was only a matter of time. And then, if only then, some accident might be arranged. Kesarh would know all this. Know it more competently than did the King.

  But Rem himself was weighed down, uneasy. He considered again and again quitting the Prince’s service. It would mean a fat fee gone. While, knowing what he now did, Rem might find his own life in danger. In flight without wages was a state that did not appeal. There was, too, some abstraction that kept him loyal. To carry out such tasks for a man bound you to him, more than fear or prudence.

  Another thing troubled him besides.

  What had happened at Ankabek, the sudden second subjection of his reason to those mind-pictures, too close upon the first—so he had awaited other such subjections in constant nervousness for days and nights after. Even now. And the night of the temple, the statue of the serpent woman, so irrationally familiar.

  Weeping storms visited the city. The nights grew cool, then chill. Kesarh had awarded presents to the council, and the Warden, but he must conjure some other insurance before the cold months came, for already the mood of the city was changing. Part of the roof of the Ashara Temple had been found to be unseated. During this stormy weather tiles had crashed in the street. Shansar and Vis alike were dismayed at the augury, which could be adapted to almost anything bad.

  Kesarh went modestly but openly in his black, with only two guards, to offer to Ashara for the joy of Jornil’s soul. Istris, suitably alerted to the happening, watched in somber approval.

  A doleful letter from Lyki somehow found Rem at the lodgings he was then frequenting. The rope merchant was sick and crotchety. Lyki herself was unwell. It seemed she needed a physician and her protector, miserly after his losses, would not send for one. The thinly disguised cry for alms was adorned by veiled references to her own former generosity to an unloving son. Hating her, but unable to do otherwise, Rem sent her money.

  An hour after this charitable deed, he was summoned to the under-palace.

  The rain fell like arrows on the streets, and in the open court. Kesarh came striding at him out of the downpour, and began to speak to him while they drowned, and lightning curled in a wedge of purple light over their heads.

  “He’s done something almost clever,” Kesarh said, and Rem knew he meant the King. “He’s thinking of recalling my sister to court. I value her. She could therefore be used against me.”

  Rem nodded. Kesarh handed him a sealed packet.

  “Take her this letter. Only to her, do you understand? Breakneck speed. Your mount’s over there, with cash to buy a new one if it drops dead under you.”

  “Ankabek,” said Rem.

  He did not want to return to Ankabek.

  Kesarh loo
ked at him, and Rem knew there was no choice. Again, it was not exactly fear. He had been trusted, trusted by something that could, with just as much facility, kill him minus a second thought.

  • • •

  The ride was wet all the way. The tall skies of the hill country roared, and the Ioli road was slick as sweetmeat.

  On the coast the sea collided with the shore in quake. At first they would not put out for him. When he had bribed them enough, they rowed him cursing, but the waves had looked worse than they were.

  After the usual preliminaries of landing, he was conducted on the long uphill walk to the temple, through a rain now red from sacred leaves.

  He waited three hours in a stony building, trying to coax the fire to dry him, trying intermittently to find someone to whom to reiterate his urgent duty as messenger to the Princess Val Nardia.

  Finally he gave up on both and fell asleep, and then they came and he had to follow them out again into the rain.

  They led him to the temple, and in one of the two curving corridors performed their door-opening sorcery. His reluctance, when he thought he would have to re-enter the body of the temple, startled him. But in fact the way went down, this time, under the temple’s core, presumably. He ended up in an insignificant room, which was suddenly lit by the coming in of an apparition. He guessed at once he was for some reason meant to be affected, impressed. That did not diminish anything.

  She was a priestess, a white-skinned Lowland priestess, with the Serpent’s Eye on her forehead. All the rest was gold, gold hair, gold robes of scales—like the curtain he recollected—gold eyes. Her eyelids and lips were golden, too, and her sails. She entered unannounced and merely stood before him, looking at him, and he felt something of his self-will give way at once.

  “You were sent by the Prince Kesarh?”

  “I was,” she said tightly. Her voice did not sound human. There was a resonance somewhere, not striking against him, but somehow . . . inside him.

  “You have brought a letter for the Princess.”

  All at once, he knew.

  “What’s happened?” he said, “what is it?”

  “Rarnammon,” she said. Just that, no other thing.

  It appalled him, for there was no sense on earth for why she should know his given name. He was afraid, and would not question her. He said, “I’ll ask you again. What’s happened?”

  “You will follow me,” she said, “and you shall see what has happened. Then you’ll return to her brother, and tell him what you have seen, and all you have been told.”

  They walked through a long corridor, barely lit by slotted windows high above. Then through an iron door, as if to a dungeon. Steps went down, and below another door was opened for them by two of the hooded priests.

  As before, Rem knew himself led, helpless and unwilling, toward some profundity. His head began to ring, he felt again something of the weird disorientation he had experienced in the boat, the world shifting; chaos.

  There was smoke now, incense, unlike the incense of Ashara, more subtle, darker, permeating everything. (He had heard they did not use incense here.) A gauze curtain drifted aside. Another. The smoke, the curtains, sight, all misted together. The center of his body seemed empty, as if he were hollow. Chanting came from somewhere, all around it seemed, one word over and over, or did he imagine it—

  Astaris. Astaris. Astaris.

  Then the sound stopped. The mists cleared. They were going into quite an ordinary chamber, though lamplit and without windows. In the midst of the room was a bed or couch, with draperies drawn close.

  The golden priestess, glittering from the lamps, clasped a tasseled cord, and the curtains slid away.

  There on the bed lay the young woman Rem had sometimes glimpsed at Istris, even more frequently here, the Princess Val Nardia. She was asleep, her hair spilling around, saturating the pillows with its color. He noticed something else. Her belly lifted high under the black gown, the firm rounded lift of early pregnancy.

  “Yes,” the priestess said, as if he had remarked on this. “Now go closer, touching nothing.”

  Not wanting to, he did. So he beheld the terrible marks on the neck. Somehow, these people had remolded the face, disguising the bulge of the eyes, resettling the tongue within the mouth.

  “Who did this?” Rem said. But he had no image of the King’s men somehow here and at the work.

  “Val Nardia took her own life. She despaired. She had learned nothing.”

  Rem started round on the woman, a gutter expression nearly on his lips. But he saw it was not lack of pity, but pity itself which had prompted the callous-sounding phrase.

  Instead he asked, “When did she do this to herself—yesterday? today?”

  “Some months past,” said the priestess quietly.

  He began automatically to say that was not possible, and fell silent. At last he only said, “How have you preserved her like this?”

  “Certain medicines, certain drugs. And yes, also methods the Vis would term magic. Things known to the ancient temples. But we don’t abuse her, Rarmon. Her body is empty, the spirit free. We retain her bodily life only that the child shall also live. When the child is ready, it will be brought forth. All of her will have death’s freedom then.”

  He had flinched at her use of his abbreviated name almost more than at her use of the longer, older name. Sweat had broken out on him, though the room was cold.

  “The child’s important. Important to you.”

  “Important, certainly.”

  “Why? How do you know?”

  She smiled. He was surprised, for they did not often smile, the pure-bred of her race. They had suffered so in the past, for centuries, maybe that was why. This smile said gently, scornfully: You know our means. But she said to him, spreading her hands in a gracious mimicry of Vis theater: “Anackire.”

  He glanced at the dead girl again, then away. Something was whispering in his brain, a memory he did not want, the brain-vision of three women, white-haired, dark-haired, scarlet, and of their wombs, which he had seen were filled.

  “And the father,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Return to him and tell him,” she said, “what you’ve been shown, what I’ve spoken of.”

  “You know the father’s her brother, then.”

  “As you, also, Rarmon, know it.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “It is your name.”

  He felt sick. He needed to be away from the room and went to the doorway.

  “Not anymore.”

  There were women in the outer chamber, he had not noted them before. Though nauseous, he was steadied now, as if by a blow, or icy water.

  When they reached the upper passage, he said to her, for want of something else whereby to behave as if all this were normal, “I’ll take his letter back to him then.”

  “As,” she said, “the other message was also taken back.”

  Rem checked.

  “From Suthamun?”

  “From the King.”

  “Before me?”

  “And left yesterday. A secret well-kept. But then, ours also. The King’s messenger does not know all I have told you. Nevertheless, the King will have news of her death before the Prince hears of it.”

  Though he walked the rest of the distance through the under-temple, Rem was already running. He ran physically across the island and between the stripes of the rain. On the beach he fought a man, throwing him over and mashing his lips against his teeth, to get the boat back in the water.

  Regaining land, he almost killed the first zeeba, and the second that he stole when purchase was refused him.

  He had thought often, as he rode to Ankabek, of using this opportunity to be gone from Kesarh’s service. There were other ports around the coast. He might have risked some leaky merchantman to Dortha
r over the straits. But not now. Rem, between the attacking madness of visions, and the strangeness of the temple, had still seen them together, in the cell, on the hill, Kesarh and his sister. An exile from the landscape of heterosexual love, Rem had found himself now and then fascinated by the ethics of it, as by some rite he could comprehend yet never know, and never wish to know. It had the bizarre glamour of most alien things. The close relationship did not enter his calculations at all, save as a permissible theory for Val Nardia’s suicide.

  And Kesarh had looked at her, in his illness and in health, as Rem never saw him look at any other thing.

  And the King would have news of her death before Kesarh.

  Rem glimpsed now Suthamun might use it.

  • • •

  The mason was a muddy color, almost the shade of his light hair, which he wore so proudly and fashionably long. Two soldiers had come on him at home, and brought him here, surreptitiously, by back ways, jollying him to dumbness, promising rewards while the edges of swords gleamed in the torchlight. The man in the chair was Kesarh Am Xai. The mason had never seen him, but had heard him described often enough. It seemed Kesarh had found out something about him, too. A couple of things, neither of which would be beneficial to the mason should others also learn of them.

  “Am I to—to—believe I’ve been spied on, my lord?”

  “If I were you, I’d believe it.”

  “But why—what possible interest could your lordship have—”

  “The Ashara Temple,” said Kesarh Am Xai. The mason gaped. “You’re in charge of the restoration around the Eastern Cupola.”

  The mason nodded. He had been pleased to get this portion of the job, which carried kudos, and excellent fees if well done. The roof was being tended in several places since the storms had laid bare its weakness. But the Eastern Cupola was the trickiest spot; so much weight, so much ornament to be preserved.

  “Someone,” said Kesarh, “suggested that, if unattended, this area of the roof might have given way entirely. During snow, perhaps.”