Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  About three minutes later, we reached our destination.

  The warren came up against a Hessek cemetery, once exclusive to the city above. A gate of ornate and rusty metal introduced a stone corridor, intermittently lighted by uncovered torches burning in low sallow spurts.

  The end of the corridor was blocked by double doors of copper, gone to a bluish talcum with age, which gave onto a rectangular burial chamber hung with draperies of ancient cobwebby silk. Against the farther wall of this cozy nest were three couches of scrolled stonework, decorated with green human bones, as casual as you please.

  It is not generally delightful to arrive so in the odorous house of death.

  “Ki,” I said, “this isn’t the safe place I should want lodging in.”

  “I beg your patience, my lord,” Ki said. He lifted aside the fragile drapes. A second room lay behind them, similarly torchlit but empty.

  I went through into this room and the drapes subsided, leaving me alone. Ki was gone, and the rest of the Hessek party.

  Simultaneously a trick door appeared at the far end of the chamber. Eshkorian stratagem. But through that entrance something approached that stopped me thinking of Eshkorek.

  A figure in black came first, a man’s figure, yet crawling on all fours, his head down like a beast, and a leash about his neck. Behind him, holding the leash, was another, also black-garbed but upright, his bare face patterned over with designs of what looked to be brilliant emerald beads. Last, came a woman.

  Her smoky hair was woven with a colony of vipers. Jewel-work they were, of polished bronze, yet they looked real enough, and for a moment too real, catching the shifty light and seeming to twist and shiver. She wore a robe of flax-linen, very thin; the torches soaked through it like water to her silver limbs beneath. At her waist was a girdle that bled with green and scarlet gems.

  She halted, covered her face with her hands, and bowed before me. She wore no veils and no paint. When she raised her eyes I knew her. I had reason to.

  Lellih.

  8

  The man-creature on the floor growled. He lifted his face. It was smeared with black markings like those of a tiger, and his teeth were filed to points. His eyes wandered, savage and unhuman. He was in the grip of some possession, induced or haphazard, that made him suppose himself a beast. The beast’s keeper, the man with the mask of green beads, spoke to me.

  “Welcome, lord. We rejoice you are here, that you came willingly.”

  “And did she come willingly, too?” I said.

  Lellih smiled, and cold fingers walked on my shoulders. She was indeed beautiful, this girl I had re-created out of senile flesh. Too beautiful, remembering what had gone before, that pristine primal alabaster countenance, unmarked as a newborn child’s.

  “She is to be our priestess,” the man said, “our symbol.”

  “Symbol of what?” I said.

  “She was old; you have made her young, strong, and blessed. Hessek is also old.”

  “And I’m to make Hessek young and strong, am I? Because I am this devil-god you worship.”

  I perceived now that the emerald dots on the man’s cheeks and forehead were not beads after all, but small, shiny mummified beetles, glinting in the torchlight. He seemed to be a priest of sorts, the gem-insects and the man on the twitching leash sigils of his authority. My priest, then, presumably. And Lellih my priestess.

  “Even you, lord,” he said, “may not grasp your destiny, the will of the One that is in you. If you permit, we will take you to the Inner Chamber, and discover.”

  “And if I don’t permit? You know I can kill you where you stand, and any others who might come for me.”

  “Yes, lord,” he said. It was difficult to be sure of his expression through those insects stuck there. I had heard Masrians say with contempt that every Hessek was alike, and in the filtered gloom of the burial place, this seemed to be so. This man was a composite of his race rather than an individual. Stare at him as I might, I felt that, stripped of his devices, I would not know him after.

  But it was Lellih who had an answer for me.

  “The omnipotent are curious concerning men,” she said. “Go with us and satisfy your curiosity.”

  I had not heard her maiden’s voice before. There was nothing of the old Lellih left in her. Her words were elegant. Even the brain that formed the words was changed. I wondered if she actually recalled who she had been, her dismal life as hunchbacked whore and crippled seller of sweets. As to what she said, I could not deny a clammy, reluctant desire to see what was brewing, the very sensation that had brought me here.

  For all my cleverness, I half believed then that they had bewitched me.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “we had better be going.”

  The man bowed to me, my priest, then to Lellih, and when he spoke to her I became aware he added the Hessek honorific “yess.”

  “You are wise, Lellih-yess.”

  She smiled, a smile I did not take to.

  The priest went out, she after him. I followed her along another corridor, hot and fetid as only a grave shift could be; and under the growling of the leashed tiger-man, I said softly to her slender back, “Continue to be wise, granny-girl. Don’t try tricks.”

  “You wrong me,” she said. “Besides, what should you fear, who are brave and terrible? They tell me you saved the life of a Hragon prince tonight. Is Sorem your lover that you hold him so dear? I thought Vazkor was a man for women.”

  Her gauze gown was showing me all it might, but here was one girl I did not want and never would. A sort of loathing came over me at the notion of lying with her. This she did not realize, as I noticed from her mode of walking.

  “You made me a virgin, too, just as I asked. And the seal’s intact. Not a man for women, Vazkor?”

  “Whatever else,” I said, “not a man for you, lady.”

  There is no swifter way to make an enemy of a woman. You may tell her she is a clod or a bitch; as long as you lust for her, it will be forgiven. But say she is the wonder of the world and show her cold loins, and she will hate you till the sun goes out. This I understood well enough, but reckoned Lellih not much, if her people were a little more. It was, in any case, plain honesty, and put to the test would not alter.

  She said nothing further, and I, too, kept quiet

  * * *

  There had been a prophecy for ninety-odd years in Bit-Hessee; the priest spoke of it later. Like many a conquered people made slaves, beggars, and outcasts in their own land, they were dreaming of a savior who would redeem them from the oppressor, and reinstate the ancient Empire of Hessek over a million graveyards of dead Masrians. Their former gods, who had failed them, they cast down, even Hessu the sea demon, mythological founder of Bit-Hessee itself. Though Hessek sailors and salves still offered lip service and perfunctory offerings to deities of ocean, field, and weather, no scrap of this natural religion lingered over the marsh in the old city. As the metropolis went to ground in darkness, so did its mysteries.

  Hessek was aged, used up, decaying. It began to be said that when the barren tree put on green the savior of Hessek would come—a cynical enough maxim under the circumstances, which grew more naive and auspicious as the years of thralldom marched by. Yet Lellih, the barren tree, had put on again her green girlhood. Inadvertently, I had fulfilled their dream with that game of mine, which had used her as its pawn. I had thought, when she came whispering to me of her youth in the Grove, that her gods had put her in my hand. Maybe they had.

  The Inner Chamber seemed to lie at the core of the cemetery, accessible via a labyrinth of passages that passed among various boneyards and tomb closets, where piled skulls leered in the half-light and the air was putrid.

  I expected some menacing of freakish greeting at the end of the journey, and was not disappointed. An arch revealed to me a large space packed about the walls with bla
ck priests and ragged Bit-Hessians, and deserted at its center, where burned a tall bronze tripod lamp of the open Hessek sort. Lellih passed in before me, and the priest with his unpleasant pet. As I entered, a screaming shout emanated from the throng and split the hollow roof in echoes. It had in it the pent-up hysteria I had heard women break into in a death chant among the tribes. I did not like the noise of it much, and missed the words of the cry till they came again. What they were yelling over and over was: Ei ullo y’ ei S’ ullo-Kem! (“The invisible god is made visible in his son!”)

  I had named myself a god more than once; I had had my reasons. But to confront this fanatic horde and hear that shouting chilled me through. It was like standing in one of the powder cellars of Eshkorek’s cannon and striking flints.

  I thought, I am on trial here. If I fail them, they will go mad, and if I am what they want, this same madness explodes in my face. I did not know what test they meant to set me. It might be anything, judging by their demented fervor.

  The priest brought silence by raising his arms, and the jewels in Lellih’s girdle splashed green and red fires up onto her breast and neck as she bent above the tripod lamp.

  The floor at the center of the chamber was figured in a white circle of running beasts and muddied over with brown stains; blood, no doubt. In the strange agitation of the light Lellih was conjuring the beasts seemed to run, each snapping at the animal in front. It put me in mind of a herd running headlong to escape the stinging of a swarm of gadflies . . . . Something in the circle drew me. I felt the pull of it, and I said to myself, I can match any power of theirs. And of my own will (I imagined), I chose to enter the circle of running beasts, and wait there for what might come to me.

  Tell yourself, as you will, that you are god and demon. Come in the presence of either, and you see your error. To this day, I do not know if he was really there with me, their devil-deity, master of the dark. Perhaps the conjuration was so ancient, so much a part of Hessek, that it had become convincing, or maybe the insistence of their frantic belief had truly caused the thing to be, as pearl forms about grit in the oyster’s shell.

  The white beasts ran, real now, three-dimensional and upright. I could smell their odor, feel their warmth, and see the spit fleck from their jaws.

  Then the floor dropped from under me, not suddenly, more as if it melted. And I was alone in a place without light or sound, and he was there with me.

  I did not see him, or hear him, this being they called Shaythun, Shepherd of Swarms, but I was aware of him, instantaneously, like a breathing next to my ear. I remember I gathered my Powers against him, like a hedge of thorn dragged around the krarl to keep the wolves out. But this was a wolf I could not keep away. There is no man so holy that you cannot find one black thought or one black deed in him, however small. And that deed or that thought is the gate through which devils, like the devil of Hessek, come and go. I began to see, without light, and hear, without sound. Out of smoke, another smoke poured. It was composed of a million tiny atoms that I saw to be his creatures. Winged beetles, flies, black moths, locusts, and below these, the grounded messengers of his kingdom, the maggots and the worms, the spider-folk hanged on their wires of steel. They fell and crawled across the inside of my shuttered eyes like rain across a paper window-blind. I seemed to have no choice but to admit the illusion; my Power was chained or numbed by the pressure of Hessek’s worship, and because I had no positive fear with which to fight.

  After a moment the insect vision passed and the featureless half-dark with it.

  I was in the Inner Chamber, which was now empty save for the ring of white beasts. No longer mobile, they had turned their great heads to look at me. Running, they had resembled lions somewhat in the body, but those heads were more like the heads of horses, though far heavier and scrolled with flesh about the neck, and the short legs, muscular pillars beneath the low-slung bellies, ended in five-toed pads. Their smell was of the swamp’s beginning, some hot initiating ooze now centuries cold.

  They stared, lolling their thick brown tongues like dogs after the hunt.

  Then a darkness came between me and the beasts—a shadow growing up on the air. I knew it was not the Hessek’s ungod, for he was not to be visualized, despite their shrieking. Real or phantom, he had no actual masculine shape, which this presence did. I realized suddenly that my own mental energy, held in check by the religious passion of Bit-Hessee, had turned in upon itself, and produced some archetype of my own brain, as if to counter theirs.

  I believed him, for an instant, to be the mirror image of myself.

  A tall man, large boned, hard and lean, tanned very dark, his blue-black hair long as mine had been when I was a brave among the krarls, if more kempt than mine. He wore black, and black rings on his hands. His face was mine, yet not mine, some difference in the eyes and mouth; most would never note it. My blood clamored in my head and my sinews loosened.

  I forgot Hessek. There was a salt tingle in my mouth, terror that was not terror churning in my guts, and I faltered out the words as a child would falter them.

  “Vazkor. My father.”

  He did not answer me. But, ghost or hallucination, he gazed at me as if he saw me. Nothing in the past, no dream or reverie, had prepared me for this, not even the promise and the fiery shadow on the island. He seemed live enough to touch. But I went no nearer to him.

  “My king, I have not forgotten. I swore a vow. I will keep it.” My legs trembled and the sweat rushed down me. “What do you want of me, other than I am sworn to?”

  From being solid before me, he began to disintegrate, which was now unnerving and horrible.

  I cried out, “Wait—tell me what it is you wish. Javhovor— king—Father—”

  But he was gone, and through the place where he had stood, so finely noble and so evident, a great barred cat leaped toward my throat.

  I rolled across the ground, wrestling a tiger, in my hand the knife they had not taken from me. I slashed the neck of the tiger, and its scalding blood ran on my breast, all this in a daze with my mind crying out in me still.

  The cry burst upward but was not mine.

  I was on my feet, within the circle of painted white animals at the center of the Hessek cemetery. The flame of the tripod lamp blazed up, showing me a crowd on their knees all about, immemorial groveling of men before their gods. Lellih also was outstretched, and the beetle-decorated priest, and one more figure lying near me. I had not killed a tiger after all, but the lunatic on the leash who thought himself one. This was their true form of sacrifice, to lower a human into a beast and then cut his neck veins, and I had officiated for them—the bloody knife was back in my belt.

  It was the priest who crept to me on his knees. He grasped my foot and mouthed it, and I kicked him away and broke a tooth for him. He looked up at me, not appearing to register his hurt.

  “It is proved,” he said. “The Power of the circle revealed it, as it must. Your guiding principle, the burning shadow.” He whispered, “You are Shaythun made manifest, Shaythun made flesh. Command us.”

  “Be thankful I don’t kill you,” I said, low as he.

  “Kill me. I am ready. I offer myself to the death you will give me, Shaythun-Kem.”

  Lellih had raised her white face also. She tore open the gauzy linen and scored her breasts with her nails, her lips parted and the vipers glinting in her hair. She offered me other things, choosing to forget what I had said to her.

  “Command me,” the priest repeated.

  “Then take me to this lodging your men brought me over the marsh to find.” I got this out in as prosaic a voice as I could muster. The blood, the magic, the corpse-smell, and the shifting light were sending me faint as any silly girl. I had had enough, and meant to have no more.

  The priest rose and bowed and obeyed me.

  * * *

  I came into the room and found it unoccupied, clean and wh
olesome-smelling after the other. A couch with rugs stood by the wall. I fell on it, and into the gray country of sleep.

  A dream woke me, the dream of a white cat, drinking my blood.

  I started up into a confusing twilight, and saw, crouched at my feet, the selfsame monster from the dream. There is a terror unlike any other; it eats the mind. But it was the dawn in the room, broadening, and in a second I saw the thing for what it was, and kept my sanity. In a white robe, a white veil over her hair if not her face, Lellih the priestess ceased to be my private haunting come to devour me.

  This room was near the top of the Bit-Hessee warren, presumably, and sunup was finding a high thin window under the beams and filling it with a sugar-pink confectionery of rays. Lellih stretched in the fountain of the pink morning, letting the veil fall, and the loose robe after it.

  “See how pretty you made me. But, oh, Vazkor, I should not like to have such dreams.”

  I comprehended immediately that she knew the dream, in all its detail. No doubt I had cried out aloud in my sleep, but the conviction came on me that she had read my thoughts, unperturbed, as yesterday I had read Ki’s with such uneasiness. In that upper room I experienced again the draining energy of something ancient and perverse. For all my avowals of strength, my healing had failed me here, and I had entered that circle of theirs as the cattle go to the butcher’s shed, and more willingly. If I let go my caution their Power would creep in on me to sap my own, to make me part of them and their belief.

  Lellih laughed, showing me her nakedness.

  “They gave me the treasures of Ancient Hessek to wear the Serpent Crown and the Girdle of Fires, but I have more fabulous treasures, do I not? Don’t hesitate,” she said. “He is to visit you with his green face, but I have instructed him to be slow. You have time to lie with me before he arrives.” She came crawling up the length of me as I lay there, like the embodiment of that other thing I felt steal in on my mind.