Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  “And when he learns he’s not rid of you, what?”

  “That intrigues me, Vazkor. He’s never been so open. He’s risked much on this throw and won’t like to have lost. For the Emperor, he’ll turn his usual blind eye.”

  There came a sudden dull clatter of harness and mail from the wood at our backs, and riders with closed Masrian lanterns showed between the trees. Sorem smiled.

  “Yashlom and some of my jerd, from the sound of it, a minute or so too late, if it had not been for you. Still, we’ll have a safe conduct to the Citadel.”

  The party of soldiers reined up, and the leader called out to Sorem. Even spies had been spied on, apparently, and these fifty jerdiers had been dispatched to intercept Basnurmon’s men, rather too late, as Sorem had observed. Now they inspected the dead, and gathered up their own. Presently the captain, Yashlom, brought up Sorem’s white horse, and he, courteous and graceful as the lord’s son at a feast, offered the animal to me.

  I thanked him, and told him I did not mean to break Masrian law by riding white, and added that I could make my own way back into the city, being well able, as he might have noted, to protect myself. I had in fact no wish to cause a military stir on my return home; I was too far in the plots and snares of the Heavenly City already for my entire liking.

  Sorem nodded, probably aware of my reasons. He took me aside and said, “I have my life because of you. We met as enemies, but that’s done. I won’t forget this night’s work.” He offered his hand, which I gripped Masrian fashion. Then he mounted up and rode off with his men toward the Citadel and his precarious safety. Tomorrow she would hear, that blue-eyed lady, that he lived through me.

  * * *

  I had no fears of the dark disgorging further enemies, and went up the hill to the shrine of the unknown goddess, and sat down there in order to think. Yet my thoughts were aimless enough. This city of the south seemed intent to trap me and keep me from my purpose. Its women, its scheming. With some uncharitable bitterness, I reflected on the loyalty of Sorem’s men, the four who died for him in the Lion’s Field, the others who had burst on us with strained, angry faces, anxious for his defense. I was remembering the warriors of the tribes, even those I fought with in the Eshkir ruin, who forgot my leadership so swiftly. I had very often been aware I had no man I could trust my back to, and had none yet. Charpon the shark, and Long-Eye, dead. Even Lyo, my slave, had run away.

  Then, looking down the northward slope to where the faint line of the ocean was penciled in above the seawall, I put reflection aside. A green light had opened there, and against its color shapes were moving. I was to have company.

  My psychic armament was recharged in me, though I had retained one of the black cloak’s short blades besides, which I now drew and kept in readiness. Soon I could make out the foremost of the several men who climbed toward me—Lyo.

  He raised his arm and shouted to me in Seemase, “Lord! Wait, Lord Vazkor.” He ran the last yards and flung himself down before me. “Your Power,” he said. “I feared your Power, and ran away.”

  “I thought it was fourteen men and their knives you feared.”

  “No, lord.” He lifted his head and stared at me. “I saw you kill them.”

  “Who have you brought with you?”

  “Hesseks,” he said. “Lord Vazkor, they were in the groves, watching what you did. They kept back till the jerdiers were gone.”

  “Yet more spies,” I said.

  “No, lord,” Lyo said. It seemed to me he looked frightened, not of me or the watchers who had returned here with him, but of something less tangible, less avoidable than men.

  The others were coming up now. There appeared to be five of them, but their own lamp was shining behind them, which I did not care for.

  There were withered flowers lying on the altar stone, black opium poppies filched from some merchant’s field. I loosed the energy from my fingers to set this offering burning and give me light to see by.

  The Hesseks halted at once. A brief whispering went over them, like dry leaves blown down an alley. They were not speaking Masrian or Seemase, or the Bar-Ibithni argot so many got by on, but Old Hessek. I hardly needed the light after all to show these were not slaves or free scavengers from the docks, but the semi-outcast denizens of Bit-Hessee-over-the-marsh.

  Ragged dirty garments, which had initially been greenish tunics not of Masrian style, were open at the arms and sides and laced with rope lacings, rusty belts of green copper links without knives in them—the law—yet strange morbid toys dangled there, catapults and little knotted strings and pipes and pouches of flints. Otherwise they wore no ornament, not even the Hessek prayer necklaces of red beads common to the dockland. Their hair was long, matted, and wild enough to break a wooden comb, if they had ever tried one on it, which I doubted. Their skins were the swarthy white of all true Hessek flesh; even their marsh-hunting had not tanned it.

  I had never come on their like before in the city, at least, not dressed for their part openly. One of them I had certainly met previously, camouflaged in sailor’s gear, later in my own livery. I recognized him now straight off: Ki, the man who saw me walk the sea, who vanished with Lellih out of my courts, who had left a dead and bloody crow at my door.

  He moved near to me, kneeled, and touched the earth with his forehead. From that position he said, “You remember Ki, my master? I was your first witness and I was not believed.” It was ridiculous, this speech delivered by a man on his face with his rump in the air. I told him to get up, and asked him what he wanted.

  “To serve you,” he said. “Let us serve you. There may be danger from the Masrian lords. If you wish a safe hiding place, we know of one.”

  He did not need to tell me where.

  They smelled of danger, of lawlessness, those men, and of suspense and religion, too. It was not hard to find the pattern. Ki had spread legends of me, and taken Lellih to his people as a proof of my magic. His was a race like Long-Eye’s, accustomed to gods, perhaps awaiting them.

  I did the thing then that had been on my mind to try to do some while, the thing from which I shrank. I looked deliberately into his thoughts to be sure of him.

  I had glimpsed the brain of Lellih briefly, but then I had been armored with hubris, the contact accidental and vague. Now I only brushed the surface of Ki’s inner world, yet the alien country turned me cold to my groin. To enter another’s head was no trip to be undertaken lightly or often. Still, having done it, I learned something.

  For an instant I was Ki, saw through the eyes of Ki. What he was seeing in me was a god, a god darker than shadows.

  Events, my own meditation, had unsettled me. There stole up on me a feeling of dread that must be explored.

  I nodded to the Hesseks.

  “Bit-Hessee then,” I said, “Let’s visit this outlaw city of yours.”

  7

  Their green lantern burned on the seawall, where crumbling steps led down into the water. The remains of a watchtower stood there, its beacon long unlighted, and at the half-rotten pier were moored two ghostly boats, sailless Hessek craft constructed of the bound tough stems of the great marsh reeds. Poles rested on the thole pins, of some notched black wood, their blades muffled with swathes of cloth.

  Three of the five Hesseks got into the nearer boat, Ki and another man took the oars of the second vessel and offered the passenger’s place to me. As this went on, Lyo broke away and fled up the slope. I told them to let him go, which they did. He had been at best an unnecessary companion, whose nervousness put me out of patience.

  The papyrus boat was rowed from shore a few moments later onto the black breadth of the ocean.

  The Hesseks steered their course about three quarters of a mile out to clear the shipping and the docks of Bar-Ibithni. There was no moon, the liquid dark almost absolute except on the left hand, where the coast glimmered with the silver fog of lamps that m
arked the city and the port. Nothing lay in our path save two tall galleys anchored outside the bar, which presumably had been unable to make dock before sunset closed the toll-gate. They had the deathly stillness of all benighted ships, only the red signal lights popping on their rails and spangling in the sea. The Hessek boats drifted between them, unchallenged, on the muffled oars. Unwelcome in its own country, Old Hessek had learned caution to the last letter.

  Farther west, the coastline was pleated into the obscurity of night, and the lights scattered there grew few and indeterminate. At length nothing showed but the glimmering, barely audible sea, companioned on one side and gradually swallowed away into a featureless shore.

  Presently the salt-fish odor of ocean faded into something saltier and less pleasing, the reek of the marsh.

  The boats began to turn inland at once. The water became turgid and scythed off from the oars in a soup of vegetable flotsam. Soon reed-beds opened out before us, glowing unnaturally, not from the lamps of men but the phosphorous illumination of the landscape itself. The current swerved, guiding the sea and the Hessek craft together through a sinuous delta that slowly narrowed into the blackest of black channels. On either side reared up the marsh of Bit-Hessee, which was in essence the child of some older thing, a remnant left aground from the morning of the world.

  Swamp rather than marsh, a swamp uniquely deficient in the noises of night birds or small water-life, yet perpetually susurrating. This insidious papery rustling reminded me, against my logic, of the movement of vast reptilian wings aloft and similar reptilian scratchings below—doubtless no more than the stirring of the giant reeds and spiny leaf blades. There were insects, however, making an endless chatter. And occasionally a mouthing of bubbles uttered glutinously from the mud-banks where the trees rose.

  I thought them palms at first, these trees, but they seemed rather the pylons of primeval ferns. In the faint dungeon glare of the phosphorus, their fibrous stalks, diagonally scaled, soared into a massive invisible umbrella of foliage.

  “Ki,” I said.

  He looked up over the oars at me.

  “Lord?”

  “No birds, Ki. Yet I heard Bit-Hessee hunted these marshes for the pot.”

  “Birds farther east, lord. Nearer the New City. Hessek hunts there when it must.”

  Something flopped in the water ahead of us, and then passed alongside with a treacly wavering of the channel. Just beneath the surface, itself dully luminous, shone a saurian beast, part alligator and part bad dream.

  “This swamp is old,” I said.

  Ki smiled, an ingratiating smile, but due to the circumstances, tacitly menacing.

  “Old as Hessek,” he said.

  “And how old is that?”

  “Old as darkness,” he said.

  The other man, alerted to our speaking, watched me with bright hollow eyes.

  “Ki,” I said.

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Give me my true name.”

  He started slightly, then said, “We are cautious with names.”

  “Still,” I said, “you imagine I am he, your black Ungod of the Ancient Faith.” I did not want to delve in Ki’s skull, nor any man’s, but my mind was still sensitive from the previous contact, and the images cast up on the skim of his brain were abnormally distinct. “You call him the Shepherd of Swarms. Don’t you?” Ki lowered his eyes, the other man stared; both continued to row as if their arms moved independently. “He’s the god of flies, of crawling things and winged creeping things, of tomb-darkness and worms. That’s what you worship here in your swamp-sink.”

  “There has always been the dark,” Ki mumbled, some ritual phrase.

  “Shaythun,” I said experimentally, and the faces froze above the rigidly grinding arms. “Shaythun, Shepherd of Swarms.”

  No one spoke. The enormous trees went gliding by and the insects sparked and ticked. The reeds, each thick or thicker than a man’s wrist, came down into the channel and the boats pushed through them, causing the tassels of green-bronze, which passed for rush-flowers, to rattle like corrupt metal.

  “If I am Shaythun,” I said, “surely I am permitted to say my own name. But why should I be Shaythun? If I am a god, then why not Masri?” I said to Ki, remembering those cries he reportedly gave when first he saw me in the sea, that I was clothed in flakes of light, that I was Masri—Masrimas—the conqueror’s god.

  “You make fire and leave it to burn free.”

  I thought, That’s true. No Masrian would light an unshielded lamp or even a camp fire without some covering and an invocation, let alone burn an offering on the altar of a cheap floral deity. And, perhaps ineptly, one supposes their Masrimas would not either.

  “Why not Hessu, then,” I said to Ki, “your sea god?”

  “Hessu is no more. The Masrians drove him out.”

  “You have an answer for everything,” I said. “I am Shaythun, then?”

  “It is to be proved.”

  The reeds parted suddenly. The channel lay open ahead, broadening immediately into an irregular lagoon bounded by swamp growth in three directions, while to the west, about a quarter of a mile away, a fungoid whitish promontory stood clear of the salty pool—remains of the wharf and dock of the old city.

  As we neared the dock, the skeleton of a ship appeared around the winding bank: a vessel of Old Hessek, unlike the galleys of the Conquerors, narrow and serpentine, green now, and sinking in the ooze. Beyond the dead ship, an avenue of wreckage, the ribs and timbers and rotting prows of countless other hulks, with weeping trees clinging among them. There had been good trade here, it seemed, before the harbor silted up. From this marine graveyard, broad steps clotted with slimy algoid gardens showed the way aboard the land.

  The green lantern, extinguished all this while, was rekindled. The boats sidled to the steps and were dragged around among concealing undergrowth. Ki led me up the stair, carrying the lamp.

  Black walls shot forward on the lamplight, rubble, slender blind windows. Bats flickered in crenellated gutters, under pointed broken eaves.

  In the midst of the ruins, the path snaked downward, and abruptly the charcoal smell of smoke was mingled with the stench of the marsh. The winding street, whose upper stories embraced each other, presently became a tunnel, and into this pitch-black foulness we went.

  Unexpectedly the lamp caught a white rat transfixed in its glare, and I called to mind the nickname Bar-Ibithni gave this area: the Rat-Hole.

  It was a warren, such as rabbits make for themselves, but noisome in parts as the mansions of foxes. Here and there the tunnels were open to the sky, against which the deserted upper city ruinously crowded or the encroaching stems of the giant trees; mostly the road plunged beneath brick overhang or through the guts of the earth itself, where the hard mudbanks were hollowed out and shored up with stones. Stagnant salt canals roped away in the gloom of it, and the roots of growing things intruded. In this incredible vileness, men lived.

  Shadows, crowding against mud walls that gaped with little entrance holes; the mouths of caves, subterranean house cellars, and rooms excavated from the swamp. Not rabbits, not foxes. Termites, rather. Termites who could make fire, and let it burn naked (Masrian blasphemy) in earthen pots by the “doors” of their macabre hovels.

  I had never seen quite such degradation or such sinister eccentricity. Hessek had truly gone to earth as the hunted animal will.

  Pale fire caught pale faces. There was not a man there I saw to whom I would have turned my back of choice, and for the women, I would rather lie beside a she-wolf.

  I noticed a child on a ledge, who had a plainly gangrenous foot, but who did not cry or fret, only stared down at me with a hatred he must have learned early. Maybe captive Masrians had been brought here before—the children at least would think me captive probably, and in some degree no doubt I was. I reached for the child, an impul
se to heal him taking hold of me in my disgust at this hell-pit. For a second I thought he inappropriately smiled before a set of yellow teeth were clamped in my forearm.

  Ki shouted, and the four other Hesseks yelled also.

  The child gnawed on me like a ferret, and I had a fancy he drank my blood. I struck him thrice on the head before he let go and fell down with a red mouth and rolling eyes. Then I put my hand on his leg above the festering wound. And no healing came from me.

  Evidently my nauseous revulsion drove out the benign aspect of my sorcery—not in regard to myself, for I healed instantly of the filthy wound the child’s fangs had given me, but in regard to others. I could have killed the poor little brute with Power, but nothing else.

  The Hesseks relapsed into soundlessness. I motioned to Ki to go on, but asked him where he was conducting me.

  “Not far,” he said. “A place holy to us. Shall the child die, lord?”

  “He’s almost dead now. Be more specific about your holy place.”

  “A tomb,” he said, as naturally as another would say, “My neighbor’s house.”

  I no longer glimpsed his brain; its turmoil had faded into obscurity, and though I had felt no trepidation before, invincible as I seemed to have become, the dark and stink and misery began with no warning to eat away at me to the point of allergy.