Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Andrion’s body rippled in a spasm of denial. “The gods shall answer for this,’’ he muttered.

  “The gods answer only to themselves, Andrion.” Bellasteros’s mouth curled in a black humor. His eye turned toward what remained of the painting of Daimion; it peeled off the wall before him and was whirled away. The flesh crawled on Andrion’s neck; Bellasteros blanched. Lamplight glanced, ruddy brilliance, along the outstretched blade of Solifrax. “And do the gods deem it time for me to relinquish Daimion’s sword?” the emperor murmured, half to himself, fading again.

  “No!” Andrion exclaimed. “This despair is sorcery, whether of man or god; do not surrender to it!” And yet, he told himself, if the conqueror speaks of surrender, surely all is lost . . . Andrion grasped the comfort of his mother’s name. “Danica. We shall go to Danica. She speaks with the goddess.”

  “No longer,” sighed Bellasteros. “Those days are gone forever.” His forefinger touched Andrion’s necklace, tracing the line of the crescent moon and the star at its tip. A wind stirred the air, and a beating of wings.

  With a desperate, stubborn, tenacity, Andrion called, “Father!”

  And again Bellasteros knitted together the raveling threads of his thoughts. His mouth set itself in a tight line of command; he thrust Solifrax into its serpent-skin sheath and jumped lightly down from the dais. “Let us see, Andrion, if any of my guard remain, so that with them we can sneak like thieves over the walls of our own city.”

  Andrion nodded, sheathed his sword, set his shoulder to his father’s. He turned his back on the glittering peacock throne of the Empire and stretched his legs to match Bellasteros’s stride.

  The length of the hallway was muted with eddies of smoke, echoing with murmurs of battle. Beside the door stood the other standard of Harus. The bronze falcon seemed to strain upward, wings thrusting frantically against its bonds. “Well then, Harus,” said Bellasteros. “I owe you and Sardis, though I am not even of Sardian blood.” He pulled the hollow bronze figure from its pole and tucked it behind his sash:

  “My lords,” said a reedy voice.

  Both men snapped around, their hands on their swords; Bellasteros, the famous campaigner, was a moment quicker. But it was a plump, beardless old man in the brown robe of a servant who stood behind them. “My lords,” he said again. “I have lived in this palace many years. I know a secret passage.”

  Andrion forced his heart down from his throat and croaked, “The stories you told me as a boy, Toth? You said they were only legend.”

  Toth smiled vaguely and flapped a pudgy hand in the air. His clear, pale eyes sparked. “Legends become reality at need.”

  “True enough,” growled Bellasteros. But a furtive amusement crimped the corners of his mouth. “Let the servant guide his master then, to this secret he has kept as his own.”

  The old man bobbed a perfunctory bow and scuttled down the passageway into misty smoke. Bellasteros and Andrion exchanged a quick glance and followed.

  Five of the emperor’s private guard, dirty and bloodied but as yet unscathed, waited with horses and supplies in a small dingy stable yard. “Toth!” exclaimed Bellasteros. “My thanks.”

  The old man smiled again. He produced a cloak, roughly woven of brown wool. “I could not find your crimson cloak, my lord,” he told the emperor, “but I think this would be better.”

  Andrion glanced cautiously around. The sky was a black vault, etched with roiling smoke. The battlements of the palace flickered with the quickest, briefest tint of crimson. Demons dancing on the pyre of the defeated, he thought. The smoke was bitter in his mouth.

  He turned abruptly and recognized one of the guards, a young man encountered in the hallways of the palace. They had joked together, had sparred at weapons-practice . . . Andrion could not remember the man’s name.

  Beyond the wall, from the heart of Iksandarun, rose a great cry. An eerie ululation offered by a thousand throats, rising and falling, that twined itself about the city and strangled it. The horses shifted restlessly, jangling their harnesses.

  “A victory paean, I wager,” said Bellasteros softly, detached.

  Andrion spat. “Barbarians.”

  Bellasteros half turned, as if drawn to the sound. “But I must bring my heir to safety,” he protested; he turned back again, tightened his body with an almost audible snap, and draped the clumsy cloak about himself.

  Do not think about it, Andrion ordered himself. Madness stalks the night, sorcery stirs the shadows, my world turns upside down and reveals its soft underbelly.

  Toth began to heave at the rough blocks of stone surrounding a well that lay against the wooden wall of the stable. Bellasteros waved and the guard ran forward. Andrion threw his young muscles against the rock. In a few moments the coping of the well lay uprooted on the dirty straw. The opening was a great blot of darkness, a cloud of darkness flowing tangibly upward. The emperor plucked up a torch and held it out. Stone-carved steps curved around the inside of the hole, their treads hollowed from much use, and dived into shadowed depths. From somewhere below echoed a faint trickle of water.

  Bellasteros’s eyes gleamed. “An ancient water tunnel?” he asked Toth.

  “Yes, my lord.” And, his hands fluttering, “Wait, wait, stack those stones here . . .”

  “To conceal our exit,” finished Andrion. “Very good, Toth.” Odd, he had never thought the old creature capable of such cunning.

  Bellasteros strode from man to man, offering a word of encouragement or a strong shoulder; he brought a length of rope from the stable and helped Andrion rip the supporting poles from the superstructure of the well. Levers took shape, the rope weaving through them like a spider’s web. Andrion let himself believe that all would be well; they would escape, and Bellasteros would lead the armies of Sardis to the relief of Iksandarun.

  The unearthly ululation began again, wavered and died. The stableyard filled suddenly with rosy light as flames leaped above the walls of the palace. The sky remained flat, unyielding.

  “Come,” ordered Bellasteros. He placed his foot on the top step, on the second step; his hand holding the torch shook suddenly, and his face in the scarlet light twisted. His other hand groped for the hilt of Solifrax.

  He remembers the quest for the sword, Andrion realized. It was my mother who led him down just such a stairway, her star-shield shining before them. At the end they found the garden of the gods.

  Bellasteros glanced up, searching; Andrion caught his eyes and held them. His eyes were horribly dull, terribly wrong. Perfidious gods, Andrion thought, and between his teeth he said, “If the gods mean to take the sword, better below than at the hands of the Khazyari.”

  Bellasteros steadied. The torch disappeared below the lip of the well. A glow fluttered within, a solitary firefly unable to illuminate the depths of the night.

  The horses snuffled at the gaping black hole and started back, refusing. The guards swore; Andrion cursed. A wind whirled down from the palace walls, bearing a drift of glowing cinders, and brushed the flanks of the beasts. Whinnying indignantly, the horses plunged forward and stumbled onto the steps.

  Andrion took the other torch and beckoned to Toth. “Come. We shall guard the rear.”

  The old man chuckled. “No, young lord; I think you will need a friend here, in the city.”

  “But Toth, the barbarians—”

  “Will not notice an old eunuch left from the old days, before Bellasteros spread his cloak like a blessing over us. No, I shall stay and make sure this courtyard is nothing but charred wood and stone and ashes circling in the wind.”

  The wind—the voice of Ashtar. He was, after all, a clever old creature. “My thanks,” said Andrion, and he and Toth solemnly touched hands. The old man’s eyes were oddly translucent, like windows into another world. Andrion turned away.

  He started down the rough, uneven stair. Slowly, he told himself. A fall could mean a broken neck. Toth would wait until the torchlight was gone before he released the levers. Ther
e was plenty of tinder to spread over the tumbled rock; the palace, its gardens and tapestries, his own room filled with rolled maps and manuscripts and clumsy odes to Dana’s beauty, the implacable beauty of the goddess. Gone, already gone. The Khazyari would find only a ruined and abandoned well. He stumbled and grasped at the wall; the slime on it burned his hand like acid. He saw only then that he had torn his palm on wood and rock.

  Bellasteros and the guard were waiting at the bottom, pressing themselves against a rough-hewn wall that surrounded a dark, dank pool of water. A great rock-carved chamber arched overhead, its crevices lost in guttering shadow. Perhaps there were words carved there, perhaps not; perhaps a smoke gathered on the surface of the pool. The emperor’s mouth was pinched shut in denial, but his sunken eyes were bleached into pale tinted mirrors reflecting nothing but despair. Andrion, struggling with exasperated horror, hurried once again to his side. “Father!”

  With a weary sigh Bellasteros awoke. “Yes, yes, Andrion.”

  A tunnel exited the far side of the chamber, following the course of a stream, a water tunnel carved in the dawn of time long before Iksandarun became the seat of the Empire. The small company and their reluctant mounts splashed into the passageway.

  Suddenly the earth heaved itself around them, and a wave of dust and ash boiled from behind to envelop them. Toth had done his work well. I shall reward him some day, if I ever see him again, Andrion thought. “About here,” he muttered, looking narrowly upward, “would be the city walls.”

  “Yes,” said Bellasteros. His torch threw wavering shadow on the rock. Rock shaped into leering demons? Andrion asked himself. No, it was his own imagination that saw the barbarian victory cry take form around him.

  And then a breath touched his cheek, a breeze purling through the old tunnel, freshening, beckoning. Not a wind bearing the blood-and-soot scent of the city, but a cold wind singing down from the fastness of Cylandra, the white-capped mountain of tiny, remote Sabazel. Andrion smiled and turned to Bellasteros, and Bellasteros echoed his quick grin.

  The exit was a tiny crevice between megaliths that might at one time have been hewn by the hand of man. Now they lay cozily together, overgrown with brambles and vines. Cursing the thorns and quelling the indignant snorts of the horses, the company forced their way through and emerged into a willow grove.

  Limber branches danced and sighed, and rustling leaves played with a sky suddenly filled with stars. Andrion started with recognition. He knew this place, a grove lining the banks of a stream well beyond the city walls. He had played here as a child, dreamed here as a youth.

  The wind summoned him. Beside him, his father straightened and inhaled deeply of the clean air. A full moon spun through the fingerlike leaves of the willows. Heartened, the company strode forward.

  At the edge of the grove the trees parted, seeming to lift their roots and move away from the armed company like fine ladies raising their skirts to avoid a mud puddle. The plateau of Iksandarun opened before Andrion’s eyes. A shroud of darkness shot with flame lay over the city. A pall of smoke engulfed the stars and reached upward, grasping at the full moon of midsummer. The moon, its great golden face tinted crimson—Ashtar’s eye stained by the ordeal of Iksandarun—seemed too heavy to be borne on a breeze that failed and died.

  The stench of smoke and death filled Andrion’s nostrils. Faraway screams filled his ears. He quelled an impulse to run back into the trees and hide there, denying his birth, denying the gods. The grove was protected by a corner of the goddess’s mantle; she loved him, yes, and whom she loved she tested. As she had tested his grandmother Viridis, who had perhaps walked here before she gave herself to Sabazel and died for her gift at the hand of Gerlac in Sardis.

  Viridis’s only son, his father, stood beside him. The cool shadow of the trees slipped away from him like a rent garment. His eyes dulled again, haunted by circling ghosts. “There,” he said, his voice thin and taut. “The moon was there, caught in the constellation of the Tree, the night you were born. It has not been there since.”

  “My life come due?” Andrion heard himself say. “Or yours?” The hair prickled on the back of his neck. Blood stained the ancient altar, and blood stained the moon. Viciously he shrugged away such thoughts.

  Bellasteros turned to him as if wanting to reassure him. But his words were not reassuring. “The rites of the goddess will be finished by the time we reach Sabazel, and men will have been turned away from its borders. Perhaps the queen will not let us in.”

  Andrion’s heart went leaden in his chest. To be turned away at the gates of Sabazel would be the final betrayal. But he raised his chin, touched his father’s arm, and said stoutly, “How can the Queen Ilanit, my half-sister, turn us away? We are the only acknowledged sons of Sabazel.”

  Bellasteros shook his head, not seeming to understand. Andrion ground his teeth in frustration at the spell that must be sucking at his father’s spirit. Gods, why do this to him? he demanded silently. There was no answer.

  It was only when they mounted that Andrion realized his pony Pergamo had been left behind; Toth had given him a tall cavalry horse. So easily, then, did his youth pass. So terribly.

  A fitful smoke hung heavy over the grassland, blurring the outlines of walls, the crumbled ashes of farmsteads. The bodies of their defenders bristled with clumps of arrows like some creeping weed. Bellasteros looked about him and moaned; a tear coursed slowly, painfully, down his hollow cheek, and disappeared into his beard. His eyes, sunken pale shadows, reflected no moonlight.

  Andrion leaned forward over the neck of his horse, trying to urge them on, faster, faster, feeling almond-shaped eyes on the back of his neck. But the moon faded; they had to pick their way through the ruined land as a sullen crimson light diffused along the underside of the great cloud of smoke. The city burned; Bellasteros’s challenge, to build and to grow, was forfeit. A distant wailing hung upon the heavy air; the hoof-beats of horses reverberated upon the earth.

  The hoof beats of more than the small imperial company—light steps, unshod steppe-ponies. Andrion inhaled sharply. Where? The sound could come from anywhere . . .

  Shouts tore the night, incomprehensible Khazyari passwords. As one Bellasteros and Andrion reined in their horses and spun about. The guard, uncertain, blocked their way. The horses entangled themselves, plunging and rearing.

  Khazyari shouts and black-tipped arrows together split the night. One guard went down with a cry, the arrow embedded in his throat, and his horse screamed and vanished into the murk.

  Bellasteros’s body snapped into wakefulness. “By all the gods!” he shouted. Solifrax flared from its scabbard. For a moment the blade glinted crystal clear, driving the darkness before it. Andrion’s breath caught in his throat, with exaltation perhaps, perhaps with terror. He drew his own sword.

  The dim shapes that were the Khazyari darted through the smoke, circling like jackals. Another flight of arrows hissed downward.

  And one barbed shaft struck deep into Bellasteros’s right arm. He cried out, in protest, it seemed, not in pain; the sword Solifrax flew from his hand and inscribed a gleaming arc through the darkness.

  “No!” Andrion shouted. “God’s beak, no!” He threw his short sword away and reached up, fingers open. Solifrax fell neatly into his hand. The hilt was too large; it seared his palm and he gasped. He was not the hero who had earned its power. The glow of its path still hung in the air, the glow of its curving blade hung behind his eyelids in the shape of a crescent moon.

  One quick glance, and Andrion saw his father bent over his horsed neck, grasping its mane; the diadem lay inert on his hair, his face was stark white, his teeth bared in a rictus grin of pain and of pride in his son. Then his face went blank, the last threads of his intelligence, of his courage, fraying into nothingness.

  “Gods!” screamed Andrion. The outrage, the agony, the fear filled him taut as a wineskin. And burst. He shouted. realizing as he did so that he sang the Sabazian paean. The sword moved in his hand,
jerking his arm out, and his thighs tightened on the horse’s sides. It leaped forward. He struck, slicing right and left, and voices cried in sudden terror. Hoofs thundered behind him.

  The Khazyari gave way, howling, before the wrath of the prince and the shining blade of Solifrax, and their shapes faded into the night.

  But Andrion did not dare stop. Even as the sword muted itself, growing unbearably heavy; even as his hand burned, he urged the company onward. His arm could fall from his body before he would give up that sword. His father’s sword, which now lay awkwardly in his own right hand.

  The gods will answer for this! he told himself, seizing the far edge of sanity. I shall defy them all. The company raced on, farther, farther, as a westering moon pulled the smoking shroud of Iskandarun with it across the sky.

  Chapter Two

  Dana perched on a boulder, settled her long bow over her shoulder, and surveyed the night with clear green eyes. Behind her rose the mountain Cylandra, its ice-crown sparkling in the moonlight; before her lay the narrow valley of Sabazel. The torches in the city flared, brazenly mortal, beneath the purity of a full midsummer moon.

  Or was the moon pure? Oddly, it seemed tinted with crimson, and the stars were smudged, seen through a fine pall. Dana frowned. For the tenth time she leaped from her seat and paced up and down. Perhaps if she had participated in the rites, she could have burned away that restlessness, purged the unease in the arms of some unwitting imperial soldier.

  If those men with whom she had celebrated the rites this last year had only known whose face she set upon their straining bodies. Such arrogance, to imagine the heir of the Empire in her arms. But he was, after all, her own . . . cousin? The bloodlines became tangled.

  Andrion had been coming with his father to the rites of Sabazel all her life. As children they were set in the care of some older woman while their elders sang and danced and feasted together. And they were friends. Then, last midsummer, they were themselves admitted to the rites, as was custom, with partners older and wiser than they. Then the emperor and his son came again at midwinter, and again Andrion was given to another.