by Beverley, Jo
None were serious, except mayhap for Melisande Shahrizai. Beautiful, calculating Melisande, with a hunger for life’s sharper pleasures, the only person clever enough to guess what I was about with my intrigues. In a moment of weakness, when the black grief was upon me, I told her of the Unseen Guild and how I regretted betraying Rolande’s trust to this day.
She understood. We were ill suited in many ways, but Melisande understood me.
TOO WELL, MAYHAP.
Even now, I cannot believe Melisande would have wished me dead … but I have been wrong before.
The Skaldi have found a leader who thinks.
And Melisande knew his name.
THE WHOREMASTER OF Spies.
Even as I wove my net among the pleasure-houses of the Night Court, I never set out to become such a thing; and yet it happened. It began with the best of intentions.
There were six years of peace along the Skaldic border after the Battle of Three Princes. When reports of renewed raiding came, I did not volunteer. Instead, mindful of a promise Rolande had made, I journeyed to the Camaeline village of Trefail, where I found the widow’s son Rolande had promised to care for. His mother was dead, and his half-Skaldi nurse was preparing to desert him.
I took him home, the Skaldi sacking his village in our wake. In the City of Elua, I adopted him into my household and gave him my name—or at least my mother’s name, if not the one I was born with.
Alcuin; Alcuin nó Delaunay.
When I began training him in the arts of covertcy, I’d not thought to employ him to serve my ends. It was merely a set of skills to teach him. But ah, gods! He was so bright, so eager to learn, so grateful to have been rescued. From the beginning, Alcuin simply assumed he would aid me in my work in whatever manner possible when he was grown.
Somewhere along the path, I began to assume it, too. I hardened my heart against any remorse.
Phèdre was another matter. From the beginning, I knew what she was and why I chose her.
WHERE ARE YOU, my anguissette? Kushiel’s Chosen, marked by the scarlet mote in your eye, bound by fate to experience pain as pleasure. No wonder Melisande delighted in you so.
I am grateful you were not here today.
Anafiel Delaunay’s last pupil.
I pray I taught you well; and that I was meant to do so.
MAYHAP I SEALED my fate when I paid the price of Phèdre’s marque and took her into my household. It can be unwise for mortals to meddle in the affairs of the gods; but I was the only one who recognized her for what she was.
What else was I to have done?
Alcuin and Phèdre, my beautiful boy and my god-touched girl. I did not mean to use them; and yet I did.
I should not have used them so, especially Alcuin. I should have seen that the work did not suit him, that he merely wished to please me. When all is said and done, Naamah’s Service is a sacred calling. But the goddess absolved him of any transgression, and still, and still, Alcuin found it in his heart to love me in a manner I never expected nor deserved; one desperate mouthful of sweetness at the bottom of a bitter cup. I owed him a better life than I gave him.
So many strands, so many threads unraveling!
It is all falling apart. A sharp sword can cut through the most intricately woven of webs. I will die without knowing who plotted my death, without knowing what it means that the Skaldi have found a leader who thinks, without knowing if Ysandre found a way to cross the deadly Straits and wed the Alban prince to whom she was betrothed.
But I kept her safe, Rolande. Your daughter, Ysandre. She is a grown woman now. I kept my oath. When she came to me for aid, I gave it to her; and yet there is something I missed. But I can do no more. Now it is in the hands of the gods, and their chosen.
Did I cross the will of the gods? Here at the end, I pray I have not offended mighty Kushiel, punisher of the damned, in taking his chosen as my pupil; I pray he will use Phèdre to administer his cruel mercy and bring justice to those who have murdered me; to continue the task of keeping Ysandre safe.
I obeyed Blessed Elua’s precept, of that I am sure. I loved you, Rolande. While you lived, I loved you with all my heart; you, and you alone.
Even dying, it is true.
All I can do is pray into the falling darkness, hoping to find you on the other side …
And die.
Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee is one of the best-known and most prolific of modern fantasists, with more than a hundred books to her credit, including (among many others) The Birthgrave, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Don’t Bite the Sun, Night’s Master, The Storm Lord, Sung in Shadow, Volkhavaar, Anackire, Night’s Sorceries, Black Unicorn, Days of Grass, The Blood of Roses, Vivia, Reigning Cats and Dogs, When the Lights Go Out, Elephantasm, The Gods Are Thirsty, Cast a Bright Shadow, Here in Cold Hell, Faces Under Water, White as Snow, Mortal Suns, Death of the Day, Metallic Love, No Flame but Mine, Piratica: Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl’s Adventure Upon the High Seas, and a sequel to Piratica, called Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island. Her numerous short stories have been collected in Red as Blood, Tamastara, The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales, Dreams of Dark and Light, Nightshades, and Forests of the Night. Her short story “The Gorgon” won her a World Fantasy Award in 1983, and her short story “Elle Est Trois (La Mort)” won her another World Fantasy Award in 1984. Her most recent books are the collected reprint of The Secret Books of Paradys and two new collections, Tempting the Gods and Hunting the Shadows. She lives with her husband in the south of England.
It’s said that each of us has one special person in the world that we are destined to love, and that to miss meeting that special person, to go through life without them, is perhaps the worst tragedy that can befall you. In the intricate, opulent, and lyrical story that follows, Lee shows us that if you miss your destined lover in one lifetime, it may just be possible to find them in another …
Under/Above the Water
PART ONE—TIME AND TIDE
1
GOING TO THE lake. Either in her head, or in the soft, hovering drone of the flybus, she heard this refrain, repeating over and over. Going to the lake—was someone singing it?
Zaeli refused to look around. All these people smiling at or talking to each other, or reading guide books, or gazing earnestly, hungrily, from the windows at the exquisite ghosts of ruins littered all over the tawny folds and featherings of landscape.
But all I can see—
All she can see behind her eyes, whether closed or open, is Angelo. All she can hear, apart from the tinnitus of the Going to the lake refrain, is his voice, dark and beautiful; what it said that evening four years ago, when they were, both of them, twenty-three years old. There in that far distant, ultramodern city that lay along the shores of that other lake. And then, of course, in sequence, she will see the other lake too, the first lake, glimmering in the darkness, and all the spiteful lights of the people hurriedly gathered there. How can it still stab into her like this? She must have reseen it, reheard it all so many times now, hundreds, thousands. Sometimes she also dreams it. The pain never eases. It never can.
No one can help her. She is a fool to have listened to the relentlessly caring advice which, eventually, has brought her here, into such a different environment, across so many miles and through so much time. And tomorrow it will bring her to shores of the second lake, that lies waiting in those palace-scattered, ancient hills the colors of tobacco, sand, and turquoise.
THERE WAS A halt around midday at a picturesque roadhouse, a copy of palatial architecture done small, and perched on a high terrace. The view was spectacular.
Below lay forests now. The vastly tall and slender trees, with their smoky foliage, were alight with the fiery flickerings of indigenous parrots and fonds-oiseaux. At the horizon, the mountains had appeared, melting out of the blue-green sky.
Everyone kept saying how sensational it all was. And it was. There was a lot of discussion of legends, and questioning of the guides. That far-
off peak, shaped rather like an uprisen serpent, was that Mt. Sirrimir, where the mythic Prince Naran had shot his arrows up into the third moon, killed it, and brought it crashing down—dead—onto the land?
And how long before they reached the lake to which they were going? Would they be there by sunset?
Naturally. Of course.
The Lake of Loss, that was its name.
Zaeli felt a sudden hot rage, perhaps fresh camouflage for the never-ending pain.
But she gave no outward sign. She leaned on the railing and gazed miles away over the trees. An intermittent upland wind lifted strands of her hair and blew it across her green eyes. The hair was coppery red. She brushed it away with her hand and the hair seemed alien to her, and then the hand did too, and when she rested it again on the rail it lay there, her hand, pale and slim, like a separate object she had set down, which could now scurry off on its own.
Going to the lake. It would not matter. It, like her hair and her hand, and herself, and everything, could mean nothing. She would simply have visited and seen a bit of water, and listened obediently to the local legends. And then she could catch the returning flybus and go back. Back to the place called home. Home, where the heart was not.
You see, I did what you suggested. Another lake. I tried my best.
“It will have done you good.”
Yes, thank you, she would answer, politely.
Someone really was speaking to her now, and Zaeli glanced at them distractedly. It was time to move on. To the Lake of Loss.
THE BUS GLIDED smoothly out between the hills just as a crimson solar disc dropped among the mountains. The upper air turned purple, and beneath it, as if held in an enormous bowl, a purple mirror copied every shade and aspect of the sky. It showed how darkness came, too, with the rising on it of a pair of lavender moons, and the tidal star Sunev, pinned in the east like a boiling diamond.
Every person on the bus stared downward now into the mirror of the lake, as they crossed above it, and saw the spangle of their own lighted passing.
But that was all. Reflections, and night: surface. The depths were not revealed.
Staring also, Zaeli told herself that the lake was made only of solid glass. Nothing was below the surface. Nothing was in it. Neither living, nor dead.
WHEN THE GOLDEN bug cruised by above, heading toward the farther shore, the fisherman looked up at it a moment. Such vehicles made very little noise, and sometimes their lights enticed the fish to rise.
He doubted, this fisherman, that the passengers would notice him, or his little wooden insect of a boat, tucked in as they still were against the eastern beach. But soon the sail was up. Propelled by a night wind, the boat ghosted off through the water, breaking the mirrored star and moons with her silver net.
2
FROM THE HOTELS by the lakeshore came a loud and mingled noise. Many diverse musics played and many unmatched voices, human and mechanical, were raised. The multitude of windows and entrances glowed, sending twisted corkscrews of brightness down into the water, trailing away like glowworms into the hills. The largest remaining area of the ruined city stood up there. But it had left its markers too all down the shore, and all about the groups of elegant contemporary hotels, thousand-year-old columns rose, as well as broken stairs or walls or lattices. No hotel garden did not possess at least one fragment of the ruins. Adjacently, ancient trees lifted. Lit lanterns delicately swayed in the low wind from the lake.
Zaeli had walked down to and then about a mile along the pebble-cluttered beach. At this time of year, the lake was tidal. Its ripples had lapped up as far as they would climb tonight. In an hour, perhaps, it would begin a melodious retreat.
Though lights still glinted at the water’s edge, the hotel complex seemed a long way off. The omnipresence of the ruins had grown dominant.
Inevitably so. For once the greater part of the city had been here—there, down there, beneath the lake itself.
She had stayed in the hotel for dinner, and then a lecture on the legends of the city. The guides gave this, with the assistance of a recreationist docudrama shown on two wide screens.
Then the rest of the party, and the guides, went smugly off to the bar. I don’t belong with these others, she had thought, I never have or will—Zaeli had found a door and stepped out into the night.
For a while, she stood at the water’s brink. Overhead, all the stars had burst their shells. Blazing Sunev was now halfway over to the west, pulling at the lake as it went. One moon had hidden behind the other.
Something was moving, out on the water.
Zaeli looked to see what it was. A fishing boat, its sail now furled, a man rowing strongly in to shore. He was a local, obviously, and would not be like the efficient, and probably falsely friendly, staff who worked in the hotels. An indigenous man, oldish, yet toughened, wound in a tight-belted robe, his lower face swathed in the masking scarf that men affected here more often than women.
Zaeli decided that she had better leave the beach, go back to the hotel—her proper place, a sort of zoo built to contain the foreigners, where the local people could be amused by them but not have to put up with them too much.
Abruptly, she felt sullen. She had begun to feel a little better. Not happy, not secure, but less stifled out here, alone, listening to the pulse of the water. But now her mood had darkened again. She should go back—
But just then the boat, surprising her slightly with its abrupt fleetness, nosed in on the shingle. The man stood up and raised one hand in a traditionally courteous greeting. “Good evening,” he said. He spoke Ameren, but almost everybody did, and it would be a facet of his courtesy to extend the foreign woman’s language to her.
“Hello,” she said. “Did you catch many fish?”
“None,” he answered gravely. He had a deep and musical voice, well-pitched and calm.
“I’m sorry.”
“Ah no,” he said. And oddly, from the creasing movement of the scarf, she saw that he smiled. “I never even try now.”
Zaeli said nothing. He was an eccentric, or he did not speak Ameren as well as he thought. Or she had misheard him.
But then, he drew up one end of the net his boat had trailed. It was empty. He told her, “I fish for other things. What the lake may give up from the world beneath.”
He must mean the drowned city.
“Is it really there?” she asked. “The city?” How childish I sound. Presumably it was, or something was. And did everyone here believe the legend? How, when Prince Naran had cloven and brought down the third moon, waters under the earth had erupted to meet it, and, falling back, covered the metropolis, leaving only its outer suburbs along the hills above the water.
But the fisherman simply looked at her. He had dark eyes, blacker than the sky, they seemed. And she thought of Angelo. His face, his body, his life were entirely there before her, standing between her and the fisherman, and between her and all things. It was always worse when it came like this, the memory, the despair, after some brief and so very hard-won interval of respite.
The fisherman was watching her. He would not be blind to the alteration of her face. He might think she was ill, consigned to die in a few months, or that she had recently lost a child, or a parent, or a lover. That something loved beyond reason had, without reason, been wrenched away from her.
She said, “Well, I must go—”
And he spoke over her immediately. “Let me take you across the lake in my boat. There is a special spot where you can see down into the water, all the way to the city. I have seen it very often, and in the past I have sometimes shown others, visitors like yourself.”
“No, thank you,” she said. “I must—”
“That is up to you.” And he made again a most respectful, almost a courtly, gesture, one now that indicated his departure, and turned to leave.
She thought. He might take me out on the lake and drown me. Is that what I’m scared of? Or rape and drown me? What do I care? What does anything ma
tter? Angelo won’t come back out of the water, not this water, not the way he came back then. Not like that—
“Wait!” she called.
The fisherman paused.
“How much should I pay you?” she said.
Then he turned again and the scarf creased again for his smile.
“No payment. I am rich. Please, the boat is ready. Let us go.”
“BECAUSE OF THE star, do you see,” he said, as they drifted over the water. “Sunev-la, who draws the tide. The star is only present for a month twice a year, but at those seasons the tide may flow strangely, near the center of the lake. Have they told you of this?”
“They told me the legend,” she answered. She did not watch him, but gazed down into the black glass of the lake. She resisted the urge to trail her hand in the water. He did not row now, nor had he reset the sail. Somehow the water itself—or the tide, or the star—drew the boat forward. And therefore helped to retain for Zaeli the illusion that the fluid of the lake was solid glass—or polished obsidian—the ripples a fake. Impenetrable. She could swim, of course. But she had not done so since that evening long ago and far away.
He said, “One region of the city rises from the lake, that is the legend. Not all of the city, by no means. It is the palace of the king, they say, that rises. Did they tell you his name? He was called Zehrendir, and Naran was his brother. But there was no longer a bond between them, for they had quarreled over a woman. She was betrothed to Zehrendir but, or so the legend says, Naran stole her.”
“Oh, yes,” said Zaeli, absently.
She could see nothing in the water but darkness. And a faint reflection of her own paleness, and the pallor of the fisherman’s clothing: two ghosts.
“When the moon fell, the waters covered the city, and Amba—this was her name, the woman both Naran and Zehrendir had wanted—knowing her deserted betrothed had drowned, concealed herself in a high cave of the mountains. There she stayed, and although a streamlet ran through the cave, she would drink none of it. She died of thirst, because the king had died of too much water. So they say.”
