Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  “As you wish,” I said.

  I hazarded I should have the advantage of him; whatever trick he intended to detect, he would not look for me.

  I loosened the cloak first, getting my knife ready to hand as I did so. As he took in my black hair, I heard him catch his breath in his throat. Then I had pulled off the mask.

  I had been ready for all manner of things, but not for what he did. He fell back, and his arm went up, weaponless, instinctive, in a gesture of deference and denial. He blurted out two syllables I guessed to be an oath. Yet aware of his speech and still unable to fathom the word, I realized in a moment it was not an oath but a name.

  “Vazkor.”

  Unreasonably, receiving this unknown title terrified me.

  A chasm gulped for my feet: I had lost my identity. I had intended a smooth killing, like the other on the track, but I went at him in a blank panic, and drove in the blade vilely, missing the vital organ so he yelped with agony and fear before he fell. So much done amiss, I did not even have the sense left to lean and be certain he was dispatched. I waited only long enough to hear if an answering hubbub would respond to his cry. When the night stayed peaceful, I ran and jumped down into the northern gully, without another caution.

  As I had trusted, there was a low door in the side of the dungeon where the slope abutted on the gully. It was solid iron, but secured only by bolts fastened on the outside. These bolts I ripped from their sockets with my dagger, and stepped into the pit.

  It was freezing, already fetid, the dark relieved inadequately through the oval grating by cheerless pale brown flakes of light.

  A man lay moaning against my feet. His legs were bound with chains to the legs of two neighbors. I had reckoned on their being bound, but not on chains. However, the metal was brittle and green as the grating, and they were tangled in it rather than fettered. I tried to roll him free, chopping meanwhile at the chain with my knife. He muttered and struggled.

  “Are you a man?” I asked him in the tribal tongue. I had observed that his captors had not even bothered to take his knife away from him. He flinched and groveled on the soiled floor of the dungeon, and all about the warrior-heap was flailing and tossing like a fever-house. I felt contempt, black and deep as the hole in which they lay. Pride in myself had brought me here; now my pride urged me away. I was not one with this mortal wreckage, crawling like insects in their own filth.

  But I had come a distance and would not retreat. If they had no brain or strength of their own, I must goad them with mine.

  The rusty chain cracked under my blade. The three men, loosed from it, curled together like disturbed puppies. Their vacant eyes were enlarged and stupid, and it occurred to me they had been fed some medicine on their journey here. The last of the three was a Dagkta from Ettook’s krarl. I saw he knew me and was trying to collect himself. I gave him the bronze-mask’s knife, and put him to work on chains.

  The slave-pit grew stealthily alive with staggering, bemused freedom. Some, less affected, were reviving in violent starts, snarling, searching out weapons, which in most cases had been left with them. Their eyes and knives glittered in the faint light. The tincture that had kept them docile was turning them vicious now that they had an avenue to escape and vengeance. Many were striped on the face or shoulders with the raw decoration of a whipping. Each had a score to settle.

  None of this took very long, once we were started on it. Soon there were about twenty standing in the pit, and eight lying down permanently from the treatment they had got, poisoned with the drug or beaten out of the world.

  In the ruin aloft, it seemed too steadily quiet; the fabric of peace was woven differently.

  There was no need to speak to the red warriors. Most of them had recognized me, at last, and recognized themselves, and their blood was up. We stole out softly, two by two, into the gully, and scaled the slope.

  The city men were on the dungeon roof, not five yards away, politely waiting for us. Near seventy of them.

  The body of the silver-mask who had renamed me was missing—he must have lived long enough to crawl into their camp and warn them. Informed of everything, they had negligently formed their cordon and let us leap into it, like moths into the candle.

  The warriors behind me faltered. They had never fought any but their tribal kin. What confronted them had an appearance of sorcery.

  I was first onto level ground. The fires were burning behind the city men, making of them black dream figures, with bronze and silver beast-heads, white slanting swords, and green and purple rays spitting from their jewels as if their bodies had been pierced with eyes.

  Suddenly one of them shouted. I tried to grasp the meaning, but, like a dream itself, my knowledge of their tongue was leaving me—then I caught once more the name the other had spoken: Vazkor.

  And speech came in my mouth. I did not know what I said.

  “So Vazkor enorr. Beheth Vazkor. Vazkor karnatis.”

  It was like a portent, some god’s jest.

  They retreated wordlessly, some slowly drawing off their masks, making men of themselves again. The faces they revealed were disbelieving, transfixed, white. Three knelt on the roof as if to worship, and ten more knelt after them, and another ten. These were all older men, forty or fifty years old. Among the rest there was an altercation, cries of anger and doubt. In the midst of this, understanding nothing but hungry for any chance, we sprang on them and cut them down.

  In their obscure confusion, they scattered before us. I hacked the kneeling men away to get at the standing angry men behind. I felt no battle lust; it was a grim task that must be done. Presently, I had a city sword, red to its hilt, and I was bathed with blood. It was like a killing of pigs. Though more than twice our number, they scarcely resisted us, as if some destiny had found them out and we were its instrument.

  In the end they were silent, and no others came to challenge us.

  During the fight, such as the fight was, the guiding principle left me. I was glad to lose it, once it was gone. I wiped off my new sword on the furs of a corpse, and grinned with no laughter, telling myself, Well, now, Tuvek, you have been possessed by a demon, in which kind you do not believe. I congratulate you. I spit on the ground, as if I could spit out the ancient language I had mastered and forgotten, both so quickly.

  The warriors were stripping jewelry from the dead. A few had ventured to the tents and were inventing doors in them with their blades, and pulling out threadbare cushions of velvet sewn with pearl and similar mildewed wonders. Now and again they would happen on a rack of swords or a metal dainty worth keeping, and a ferocious yell of acquisition echoed through the broken fort.

  I, too, went searching shortly, destructive and covetous as any of them, with a sense of I knew not what gnawing at my spirits.

  I walked right through the empty tent homes, and reached the last pavilion, and realized I had selected well.

  This pavilion was the largest, set a little back, half hidden, around an angle of the eastern wall, and ten black horses were penned there. By the pen one of the dark-haired slave men was squatting. He was like those I had seen earlier, though this one was wide awake. I had met with none in the fight, and supposed they had run off, so I glared at him, and shook the sword, anticipating a prompt view of his heels.

  His face remained blank and wooden as a slat, and sluggish as muddy water, he stepped aside to let me by. I did not trust his docility and that made me reconsider.

  We had dealt with around sixty men in this camp, but the force that had come on the valley had been stronger—seventy or eighty. Likely some had ridden ahead to another destination, but here were ten horses by a large tent. Might there be ten men inside, prepared for me?

  I spun about on the dark slave, and caught him by his gray-fleshed neck. I asked him questions, but I had lost the magic speech, and either he did not understand the tribal tongue or had no wish to.
Finally I fisted him asleep, having had enough killing and foreseeing more, and went to the pavilion timidly as a bride.

  Before it a golden banner, real gold beaten thin as a wafer and painted with a crested bird in white enamel, whistled softly in the wind on its pole. The pavilion was crimson velvet, almost black with age. Tassels of green-tarnished gold cascaded across the drapery of a hidden entrance, artfully showing where the opening might be discovered. I went to another side and stuck the sharp city sword straight in the velvet and tore it up like rotten flax. Then I dashed into the tent, alert to deal instant death on either hand.

  No need. He had been there before me, the skull-headed gentleman.

  A lamp of amber glass depended from the roof frame, showing the scene in perfect detail.

  There were but three of them, after all. They had pulled aside the elegant rugs with which the floor of the tent was strewn, and fixed their own blades in the craggy floor of the ruin beneath, point uppermost, then neatly fallen on them.

  I had often heard the tale of men who preferred suicide to this or that shame or deprivation or terror. However, hearing the tale and seeing the evidence are not the same. It shook me, though. It made me think at once, rationally and with an abject, instinctive loathing, what would be my test, my ultimate unbearable burden, that I would choose my own iron in my belly rather than endure?

  Each man was golden masked, one in the manner of a hawk, and his saffron hair spilled in his spilled blood—the rider in the thorn wood.

  Why this? Lost honor, humiliation that we had come from the slave-pit and beaten them? But these had not even ventured out to fight.

  I raised my head. The pavilion was hung with soft dazzling silks, embroideries, and fraying gauzes, which made an effervescence of the amber lamp. Then a gauze stirred and drifted aside like powder. And something stood across from me, silver gleaming, a great dart of fire through a jewel—I leaped back, the sword ready. And lowered the sword like lead in my leaden hand.

  It was not a city warrior standing there. I had not considered women might be with them, there had been no others we had seen; besides, at first she did not seem a woman but a sorceress, unheralded, materialized so bright and sudden, and the three dead between us.

  She wore some kind of silver dress of snake scales, and a bodice of milky emeralds that left bare her breasts. Her waist was narrow but her breasts were full, a soft tactile whiteness flushing to warm darkness at their tips, and round as little moons. Her breasts might have reassured me she was human, too distracting to be celestial flesh. But her face was masked, the shape of a silver deer with eyes of apple-green quartz, and behind it her hair was like another sort of fire, a fire of glacial gold, burning with coldness.

  She spoke to me in the city speech I could no longer interpret. I did not comprehend the words, but her meaning was exactly conveyed: the contempt of the king for his slave—no, worse, of the goddess for a piece of human offal spoiling the pasturage of paradise.

  I had never got such a tone from a woman, nor ever considered I should. I was too amazed not to bear it a moment, like the mule his load, and no doubt my mouth was ajar to tempt night-flying insects.

  Then I saw how her right hand, half hidden in the folds of her skirt, was clenched on a small shiny star, and I flung myself sideways in the second she threw her dagger at me. It flashed over my shoulder, and sliced among the draperies of the tent wall.

  At that, seeing her failure, she cried out. It was a mortal voice, a young voice, rough with grief and fury and fright. It gave me back my sight and I looked again. Now I saw only a girl, trembling with her fear, a masked girl with naked breasts that made my mouth go dry.

  “Well,” I said, abandoning the sword, “your luck isn’t with you tonight, deer-headed maiden.”

  I knew she could no more understand the tribal speech than I hers. The lack of verbal communion reduced our intercourse to one eternal symbolic channel. I was glad it was so mundane, glad I had now the excuse to forget how she had seemed to me a dagger-cast before.

  I crossed over the dead men, and, as I came at her, she turned and tried to run. All her pale topaz hair gushed like a fall of water over her back. It was easy to grab her by the hair, to bring her to face me and to thrust off her mask.

  She was beautiful. I had never seen beauty before, not like her beauty. Her skin was white, her hair white as silver at the roots where it entered her white flesh, her mouth was smooth and shaped, and red as a summer fruit, and her eyes were green as the gems of her bodice. Everything of this I glimpsed like a flame burning up at me.

  She did not struggle any longer. Her fight was done. I had her easily.

  Her breasts filled my hands and she smelled of youth and womanhood. I did not hurt her, there was no need for she never tried to evade me; nor was she a virgin. I had not expected it, coming as she did out of that camp of men. She was their whore, or someone’s, and now she would be mine. The gate between her thighs was golden as her hair, and the road beyond the gate was made for kings. Her green jewel eyes reflected back the lamp in the roof. She never shut them; neither did she look. Despite her heart and mind, her body was good to me.

  The lamp glowed less vigorously overhead, and she lay there under me, her eyes open and her body open. I was still pleased with my victory, the shallow victory outside, the shallow victory of her.

  I said, at random as she did not speak the tribal tongue, “That was a fine treasure to take in your lord’s tent, and his dead eyes watching.”

  And she answered in a whisper. “Be happy then, you filth, you diseased and verminous rubbish. Be happy and die of it.”

  I started up. She turned me cold with her surprises.

  “Where did you learn krarl talk?”

  “From the Moi. Who but, when we barter with them? Are you stupid as well as disgusting, oh shlevakin accursed?”

  I was confounded. I had raped women on countless raids and tribal wars. They had bitten me, screamed, cried tears, or whined with pleasure. They had not coolly insulted me. Nor had they such eyes.

  “Since you follow what I say,” I said, “tell me why the men here took their own lives.”

  She smiled at that.

  “The three princes of Eshkorek slew themselves on learning that Vazkor had risen from his tomb.”

  “Vazkor,” I said. My belly turned about in me. “Who or what is Vazkor?”

  “You,” she said. “Tribal savage, dog, offal. Ask the dead.”

  “You will tell me tomorrow if you tell me nothing now.”

  “Am I to be with you then tomorrow, oh my master?” She was shivering, not so much from fear as from denying it.

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said. “I am a chief’s son, and will protect you in the krarl.”

  “Oh rejoice, Demizdor,” she said. “The savage will protect you in the stinking den of his idiot people.”

  “Be civil or the savage shall change his mind. Was it your name you spoke?”

  She shuddered all over, and said, “Demizdor is my name.”

  I could not say it quite. I was eager to forget the city tongue I had used.

  “Demmis-tahr,” I said. She laughed, more like choking than laughter. I could not make her out, though I meant to keep her.

  “Even my name is to be defiled,” she said. “But I will call you Vazkor.”

  “Call me that, you bitch, and I will kill you.”

  At dawn, I and twenty-three red warriors rode out of the fortress. Our tribal dead we had burned with their ornaments and weapons; the city men we left for the carrion birds of the mountain valleys. We took all their riches and all their horses, either riding or leading them. They did not like us much after their former lords, but they should come to it, since they must. I had half dreamed of bringing away one of the tubular cannon on its wheeled cart, but the braves would not touch it. It had been only a whim—I had no idea o
f their workings, nor much hope of learning—so I let it go.

  I had kept an eye out for the dark slave-men but saw none, and we did not seek them. We had one prisoner only and she was mine.

  I had clad her in her furs over the finery of emeralds so the warriors should not see them or any other of her treasure, gem or flesh, and grow envious. By day I made her tie her hair in a piece of velvet. Only the deer-mask stared out. She was calmer.

  I said to her, “Obey me and you are safe. You found me rough, but try tricks and you will be at the mercy of others who are less courteous even than I.”

  “That is a winsome thought indeed,” she said. Then, as we were going out, she called to me mockingly, “Vazkor, Vazkor.”

  I could not bring myself to hit her. I was intoxicated with her body and would not damage it, and this she knew, sensing her power already, and she my slave. I took her shoulders and lifted her off the ground.

  “I have been thinking, bitch-lady. Maybe you are right. Maybe your king Vazkor—he was a king, was he not, a golden-mask?—maybe he is in me, as the old men said when they kneeled. So. Call me by that name. I shall beat you if you use another. I am Vazkor. One day I shall steal a golden mask and wear it when I stopper you.”

  After that she kept quiet, for she was no less contrary than other women.

  Still, the thought took root in me. If I resembled their dead prince, his must be the spirit which had guided me, my possession. This made it harder to reason myself from the notion, as I had been attempting to do since the fight. The incidents upon the rock had not declined like the dream that began them, but I told myself I would not dwell on them. And I had other things to consider.

  The krarl men bellowed for me that dawn, as they would bellow for the chief after a battle raid. When they observed I had got myself a doxy from the city tents, they shouted the louder. I might have what I liked, they would not grudge it, for this hour at least, for I was the hero who rescued them. Later, of course, they would hate me the more for the favor owed.

  I set Demizdor on a horse. Though few women rode among the krarls, my woman should ride. Slave she might be, but she had been valuable in the fortress.