Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  She was waiting for a chance to aid me, I thought at first, like a child. At length this puerile deception would not do. I began to see how her pride hung on her disdain. Thus: Let me come close to her and I should win her once more. But this would not do either. As the last red-brown autumn days sloughed from the land and my life, I realized she had turned cold bitch on me, and no lover’s stroke remained to break her ice.

  I was still sick enough that it made me sicker. But we were in the mountains eventually, and I began to have other events to dwell on. For one, my future as scapegoat in the city.

  The city, I saw it in its cage of mountains, black on the yellow sky of sunset. And two hours after, having entered its walls, I saw it by the light of torches, yellow on the black sky of night.

  I had never encountered a city before. The occasional great tribal gatherings, when there were pitched a thousand black and indigo tents, had seemed huge to me. The eastern towns had impressed me as complex. But this thing unnerved me, not only because of its enormity, its grandeur, its leaning weight of centuries, but because of its ruin and wreck. For Eshkorek, pitted with cannon blasts, scorched by fires, decaying, was an ancient yellow skull.

  Yet there were lights ablaze in the skull, and sounds of the living.

  From the high road that plunged down to it—a road marked by shattered columns, and the surface all broken paving that would have made any horse but an Eshkir stumble—it seemed a phantom city. Whole areas dark, and rising from those dark wounds tiers of starry windows. I remembered how the ruined fortress had stirred the fancy of Death’s Court. The city also was like that.

  Within the walls there were several broad thoroughfares, torchlit but unoccupied. The flares rebounded from shattered crystal panes and hollow entrances. Rats, perhaps, haunted behind the crumbling facades, but made no noise. Instead, borne on the night wind, a ghostly faint music came in snatches, pure as a bell in the silence. The thoroughfare shortly branched and the Eshkiri turned along the left-hand way. At the end of it, half a mile off along the straight street, a colossal palace tower reared up, its oval windows alive with lamps, the only animate in a whole avenue of dead mansions.

  My escort had moved quietly, almost stealthily, ever since coming in the unguarded gates. I wondered what they were nervous of, here, in their own place. Suddenly, about two thirds of the distance down the avenue, a group of men stepped out of the shadows onto the road. They wore the same shabby patchwork black as my captors, but the bronze masks were shaped like the heads of birds. More important, they were armed for a fight.

  “Halt, sirs,” one said. “Who is your lord?”

  “We serve Kortis, Phoenix, Javhovor.”

  At this the bronze-masks put up their swords, and murmured. The spokesman asked, “Is it you, Captain Zrenn?”

  “It is I. And my brother Orek. All the hunting band, save a few who lost heart before the game was done, and are already home.”

  Further soldiery was moving out on the street. I could see they had been fair set for an ambush if our party had not proved to their liking.

  A quota of these bronze-masks formed in around us, and the horses were trotted up the road and in through the tall gateway before the lighted palace.

  It was a giant tower, some seven or eight stories high. In some of its windows colored glass remained, amber, turquoise, ruby, and flares smoked in the lion-yellow walls of it. The music had its source here, too, far up in some hidden chamber.

  We crossed the outer court, and rode up shallow steps and in at a portico whose vast doors of iron-work stood wide but presently roared shut behind us.

  Here the Eshkiri dismounted, and the bronze soldiery dragged me from the saddle at a word from Zrenn. The horses were led away. We climbed the marble stairway to the floors above. Orek gave his arm to Demizdor on the stair. I noted it as I was absently noting everything, the sumptuous necrosis of the palace, and the city speech, my understanding of which had continued unabated since I woke to hear it on the journey. I was yet enough not myself to let this miracle go unanalyzed. In the same uncanny mood I had experienced before, I felt it as a mark of Power lingering in me, the Power of my father Vazkor in this, his enemies’ stronghold.

  We arrived in a room as massive as any room would have to be to accommodate five hundred men ranked shoulder to shoulder. Not that five hundred men were currently in it. It was deserted prior to our entry and not much crowded thereafter.

  There were pillars down the room, slim as swords they seemed, made of silver, and constructed to resemble trees. The silver branches of these trees fashioned the decoration of the ceiling, and set in them were flowers of faceted glass, wine-red and blue. The floor had a mosaic at its center of wide-winged swans in cobalt, scarlet, and gold. There had been precious stones in the walls but they had mostly been prised out, probably during some past sack of Eshkorek. Tapestries drooped there now, but their goldwork was turning green, and mice had tasted the tassels.

  A copper lamp hung from the roof, big as a man, on a chain of bronze. The candles in it burned under jade-green crystal, flecking the gargantuan hall with the lights of a summer forest. There was no hearth, yet an airy warmth rose from the walls and the floor.

  While I gazed, a man had come in at a narrow doorway. He wore a long womanish garment of dull yellow, and a golden face.

  At once every bronze and silver mask was whipped off. Every person in the hall bowed low, saving myself, but my discourtesy did not abide. A moment later my legs were kicked from under me and I crashed at the gold-mask’s feet.

  This winded me, and for a while I lost track of the words they were exchanging. Then I heard Zrenn speaking of a black-haired savage who might well be the bastard of Vazkor.

  The gold-mask said in a cold impatient voice, “Vazkor was not a man of passions. He desired only to rule, not the bodies of women. His witch-wife was enough for him, and her he took only in order to make sons. I can’t believe a story that has Vazkor rutting for lust among the tribal scum.”

  “But observe, Javhovor,” Zrenn said. “He has a look of him, does he not? We should have shaved his beard; you would have seen the likeness better.”

  And Zrenn got my hair and pulled my head back to let the gold-mask observe me.

  This man was their prince, and they called him Javhovor—High-Lord, a king’s title. His mask of gold was something like the bronze masks of the lower soldiers in that it represented a similar curious bird, a phoenix, for so they also titled him: Kortis, Phoenix, Javhovor. His eyes were shielded behind amber glass, but his neck and ringed fingers were knotty and aging. He, too, like the men in the fort, was old enough to recall the features of Vazkor.

  And it seemed he did. His hand went up to his masked face, an involuntary gesture, as if he would doff his visor for me, as his captains had done for him. But he checked himself, and under his breath, too low for them and thinking me ignorant of his language, he muttered, “I never dreamed to meet you in this room again, Black Wolf, Black Jackal of Ezlann.”

  Then I guessed why I had regained their tongue, or imagined I guessed. I looked in his glass eyepieces.

  “Did you not?” I said. He cried out aloud at that. I said, “And did you call my father ‘jackal’ to his face? Or did you rather gnaw the bones from the jackal’s table, and run at the jackal’s heels like his hound?”

  Even Zrenn had taken a step back from me. I got to my feet. Standing, I was a measure taller than Kortis Phoenix Javhovor.

  He glared past me and shouted at them, “Did you know he had our speech?”

  Zrenn stammered, controlled his shock, and said, “My lord, he never before spoke a word of it. He must have learned from my kinswoman, or the Moi perhaps, who have a smattering of it—”

  “I learned from none,” I said, watching Kortis. “It is my father in me. It is Vazkor.”

  For all my bonds and my uncertainties, such a scalding wave
of pride swelled me that I feared none of them. It would have been more prudent to fear, to fear and keep silent, but I might have been breathing drug incense. And all the while I felt him there, dark fiery shadow at my side, the emanation of my father. I could remember only my inherited gift of magic power, which must come from him, how I had killed a man with it. I had merely to reach for strength and I should find it. All men, perhaps, must have a deity. Godless so far my entire life, Vazkor became my one true god.

  Kortis drew himself up to confront me. His throat rasped like an old man’s in a harsh winter.

  “Very well. You are the seed of Vazkor. Somehow you have got our speech, which is cunning of you. And your mother, some heifer of the krarls?”

  I said negligently, partly to test him and thereby learn more of my heritage, “No tribal woman. A woman from the cities. A woman with white hair and white eyes. The wife of Vazkor.”

  The music that had been playing all this while somewhere in the palace, some hidden orchestra, just now ceased as if at a signal.

  “Then you are Uastis’ son,” Kortis said. “It is true, she was albino, and her womb was filled by him. Did she escape the fall of the Tower? Was it she taught you our language? Is she living, then, or dead?”

  A woman spoke beyond my shoulder. It was like the voice of the one he had named, and the hair rose on my neck. But it was not my lynx-mother, spirited out of the air, it was Demizdor.

  “Javhovor, don’t listen to this liar. I never lessoned him in our speech, but sometimes I have used it, and he is sly and quick, this man, he has learned from me. The stories too, I told him, of Vazkor and of Uastis. I do not reckon him Vazkor’s sowing, despite his looks. He has kept me as his doxy in the stinking tents of the shlevakin, he has defiled me, and I must follow the ways of his degenerate race in order to preserve my life. From this hell my kinsmen rescued me.”

  I kept my ground, but my bowels twisted at her crying. She was a pace or so behind me, but I could not look about at her unmasked face, her pale fever and her eyes and her hate.

  “Javhovor,” she said, more softly, breathing fast, “your own kin slew themselves because of this lying dung and his playacting. My lord was one of them. I beg for vengeance.” Her quick breathing faltered, and she began to weep.

  “There is no need to beg for vengeance,” Kortis said slowly; he had mastered himself now. “Whoever and whatever he is, he shall suffer.” His eyes returned to me. “Do you comprehend?”

  “I comprehend that in Eshkorek the women are vipers, and the men dogs walking on their hind limbs.”

  He struck me with the back of his hand, as if it were an idle blow, simply correction to a stupid slave who knew no better, and his bronze guard took me. Zrenn had them throw me flat a second time and drag me by my ropes to amuse his master and himself.

  Outside I was permitted to walk, traveling down the length of the palace now, and below it into dank underground chambers. In one of these, small as the great room above had been large, my bindings were exchanged for fetters, the fetters mated with rings of black metal in the sweating stone.

  When my guard had gone and taken the light with them, the rats commenced adventuring in and out, but none came too close, as yet. I did not relish the cell, however, if I should begin to bleed.

  The scene in the hall reenacted itself in my skull, the gold-mask’s horror, my pride, the demands of Demizdor. It began to seem an hallucination. No shade was any longer at my shoulder to guide me. I had had the power to kill Ettook, but not enough to burst my bonds, it appeared.

  I fell into a brief sleep and woke with the rats about my feet like a tide come in. I slashed a length of my chain among the red stars of their eyes and they fled chittering, till I should be quiescent once more.

  I thought of Tathra weeping as she struggled to birth Ettook’s child, of Demizdor weeping when she believed she had slain me.

  I wondered if the sow who bore me had ever shed tears.

  3

  Three bronze guards came through the passage beyond the cell and opened the metal door. It was their torches and the sound of their boots that had woken me this time; a change from the rats.

  In the doorway, Kortis. Somehow I had been expecting a visit from him, and was not enormously amazed. He moved into the cell, and set one of the torches in a rusty bracket, and the guard closed the door, and walked a good way off. It was to be a private audience, it seemed.

  The torch splashed sallowly on Kortis’ golden face and the gold of his great seal-rings. He said, “After the luxurious night you have no doubt spent here, perhaps your family history has altered somewhat.”

  “The truth can’t be altered,” I said, “but I expected nothing more of your hospitality. There are rats in all the rooms. Some squeak, and some wear gold on their faces.”

  On this occasion he did not strike me.

  “Your father,” he said, “would have answered with more care.”

  “My father would have seen you dead.”

  “Yes. That is true enough,” he remarked quietly. He turned a little, looking off into his past. “In the days of the glory at White Desert, when the Alliance held, I was the nephew of Eshkorek’s Javhovor, and I was not content. One sundown when I had gone hawking in the waste, my party met a company from Ezlann, and with it, Vazkor. They had come for the spring horse-catching, for the finest mounts were the mad ones of Eshkorek. He was only a young man, not much older than you, my savage; but he had a tongue like the adder’s bite, and his eyes made you believe him wise. I have heard it said he had slave blood, something of the Dark People in him, which may well be so. I have heard also he was a sorcerer, and that I have never doubted. That night’s camp we shared on the desert’s fringe, and he made a plan with me, piece by piece, like the fitting of a puzzle. Though it was some years later that the goddess opportunely struck down my uncle, and Vazkor set me in the royal chair of Eshkorek.” He glanced back at me. He seemed bound to tell me those things, and weary of them and weary of telling them, for I could see he had spoken of them many times inside his own head. “When Vazkor’s power was on the wane, when he had overreached himself, I threw in my lot with the five cities of the Alliance. I don’t think he felt a particular hate for me; he was incapable of hate as he was incapable of pleasure. No man mattered enough to him that he should hate him, and no woman either. Apart from one, maybe. Uastis. I never set eyes on her, the risen goddess of Ezlann, but I believe her power matched his, and if she lived after him, then no doubt she, too, betrayed him, as I did.”

  He went to the torch and took it again, then came close to me, staring up into my face, seeming to nerve himself to do it, and his eyes behind the amber glass were fixed and wide.

  “Son of Vazkor,” he said, “if you have his sorcery in you, you had better use it. Eshkorek is split in factions, and I am no longer the only man bowed to as Javhovor. Yet we are united in one thing. To kill you by inches will be a rare dish for those of us who have known only the grim aftermath of Vazkor’s battles.”

  His voice, dead calm and empty as a dry well, made me fear the prospect suddenly as I had avoided fearing it before. Where there was this blankness, there seemed no hope of a weakening, and none of any sort of clemency. I would rather have Demizdor’s lashing, that even then I think I knew was only love wrung in another shape. I swallowed, for there was a hemlock taste in my throat.

  I said, “Suppose, then, they do not believe I am Vazkor’s?”

  “You shall be tested,” a new voice answered me.

  I turned my head and saw Zrenn. Softer than a cat he had come creeping in. He no longer wore the black garments and silver skull, but ocher picked out with silver ornaments, delicate as a girl’s, and a silver fox-mask.

  Kortis turned also.

  “Well, what news?”

  Zrenn bowed. There was a yellow topaz in the fox’s brow, catching the torchlight.

 
“The messenger went out, my Javhovor, and returned. Nemarl, also Erran, agree to meet us, as you stipulated, but first they have sent a man to view our prisoner. Their caution does them credit, my lord, don’t you agree?”

  Kortis said, “Is the man here? Then let him come in. Why wait on ceremony?”

  Zrenn gestured into the corridor. One of the guards called to another, and there came again the tramp of feet and pitch of torches. Soon the emissary entered. His clothes were more ragged even than the scabby splendor of the Phoenix and his captains, and his mask was of a gray cloth. Some lower citizen, an unfortunate appropriated for this work by the rival princes, he was expendable and entirely aware of the fact.

  He immediately fell on his knees before Kortis, fumbling off his mask. His teeth were grayer than the cloth, his face nearly as gray.

  “I entreat the immunity of a messenger, great lord, Kortis Javhovor. Don’t harm me, only an old man who is nothing, nothing—”

  Zrenn slapped him lightly across the head.

  “Shut your foul gob, decrepit. Identify the warrior, as you were told to by your gentle masters. My lord Kortis is sick already of your noise.”

  At this, the emissary looked up at me.

  His red-rimmed eyes bulged as if they would burst the sockets. From being on his knees to Kortis, he now plunged face downward before me, whimpering.

  Zrenn kicked him.

  “Vazkor, it is Vazkor,” the old man shrilled. He edged crawling along the floor, over the rat droppings, and clasped my manacled feet. “Mercy, Overlord,” he whined to me, peering up as if into a strong irresistible glare.

  Zrenn broke into his soft and sinuous laughter.

  “Proof indeed,” he said, and laughed again.

  “How does the old man know him?” Kortis inquired. You could tell nothing from his tone.