Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  Till this incident there had been no noise from the Hesseks.

  Now, the Commercial City awash with them as they cascaded like black ink into the Market of the World, and appeared abrupt as death itself on the wide streets of the Palm Quarter, they began to call a single thing, over and over.

  “Shaythun-Kem! Shaythun-Kem!” And after it, that other howling, “Ei ullo y’ ei S’ ullo-Kem!”

  I heard it, borne to the Citadel, even above the din of the bells, and my skin crept on my bones. I needed every iota of my former resolve to keep me sane.

  Then, in the midst of their wailing, a more mundane racket made itself noticed, a hammering on the Fox Gate, and the hoarse blustering of rich men in fright.

  Sorem stood in the room that led from the colonnade of the Ax Court, rubbing the head of the gray bitch hound, his face the face of a man who, fettered, hears his woman tortured in an adjoining chamber.

  Bailgar and Dushum stood by him, relating how seventy-odd dignitaries had arrived to plead the garrison gate for the help of Sorem, which was, of all signals, the surest.

  Sorem straightened from his dog and gazed about at us.

  “So you permit me to go out now, you five kings of Bar-Ibithni? Now that the city is on its knees, I may put my lesson books away. School is over.”

  “My lord Sorem,” Bailgar protested. “This was agreed between us, for your own sake—”

  “I never agreed this,” he shouted. “Never, do you hear me?”

  “Then, Sorem, you should have countermanded their orders, and done what you thought fit,” I said from the door. “We are pledged your vassals. We offer our advice; if you take it or not is your choice.”

  He spun around to me, and I thought he would come to me and strike me in the face, as a girl would have done, but he collected himself in time.

  “Your advice,” he said, “your advice is excellent, but it takes no account of human life. The dead, they tell me, are piled in the streets.”

  “Then now is the moment to finish it.”

  “Why now? It could have been seen to two hours back.”

  “I will remind you of the itinerary. The purpose of the wait was to gauge the proportion of the Hessek rabble and the direction of their attack, to show the indifference and weakness of the Emperor, while at the same moment lessening what power he has. Last, to bring the city to your door, Sorem, to beg your help in spite of Hragon-Dat. These things achieved end the waiting.”

  He looked at me. He said, very quietly, “You began it, Vazkor. You end it.”

  I thought, Where did this start? Was it Basnurmon’s gift, the statuette from the brothel, fit only to laugh at? Or does he guess I lust for his mother, and has the eternal boy’s dislike of me for that? Or is it that he has never truly seen blood and fire all around him, those toy campaigns of the Empire too tender meat to wean him to this night?

  I had put on the full gear of a jerdier since my return to Pillar Hill; now I took up the helmet with its brass ringlets and set it on my head, and went up and back to the wall.

  The rich lords of the Palm Quarter were massing beneath, the track glittering with them and their lamps, their wealth piled about them, everything they could drag here, in bundles, in carriages, in the arms of menials. There were even a few Hessek slaves, looking as frightened as their masters. Perhaps they were mixes, or irreligious, but I would not risk them.

  “The Citadel will give shelter to Masrians,” I shouted down. “I speak for Prince Sorem Hragon-Dat when I say no Hessek will be admitted.”

  “And what of the city?” bawled the spokesman of the throng, a portly man with much gold on him, and some eloquent rubies besides.

  “The Emperor has charge of it. The jerds of the Crimson Palace are even now, so we hear, laboring in your defense.”

  “One jerd!” yelled the rich man. Others parroted the yell. “And that, sir Captain,” he screeched, “that one destroyed by slaves!”

  “Incredible,” I said.

  The multitude assured me it was not.

  The scene brought on an urge to humor. Though clearly they did not know me in my unfamiliar soldier’s garb, I had recognized, here and there, former patients of mine, men I had rescued from sure death of toothache and indigestion, and even, beneath the fringed parasol-roof of a lady’s traveling chariot, my overdressed lover of the white pavilion.

  A man of Denades’ jerd approached, and told me quickly that fire had been spotted southward among the suburbs, which pointed the whereabouts of a third portion of Hesseks like a sign post.

  The Fox Gate was being opened, and the jeweled escapees grumbling and thrusting their way inside.

  The man with the rubies got himself up the wall-stair and planted himself before me.

  “Where is Prince Sorem? Is the city to be burned to cinders? Surely the Emperor has instructed him to lead the jerds of the Citadel to our defense?”

  “My lord,” I said, slowly, so he should not miss any, “Prince Sorem does not enjoy his Imperial father’s confidence. You may have heard talk of a plot against the life of the prince, engineered by the heir Basnurmon, and winked at by the Emperor.” I certainly trusted he had heard it. We had taken some pains to spread this truth around the city the past two days, using the paid gossips of the metropolis, who will put any rumor to seed, honest or otherwise. “However, moved by the plight of Bar-Ibithni, and not at one with his royal father’s sloth, the prince is gathering his forces to quash the Hessek rabble.”

  Rubies swallowed my speech whole, and made fish-eyes at me. I bowed and went down the stair. The jerds were forming up through the gate yard and the adjacent courts, glad to be employed at last. I made out Bailgar, Dushum, and the rest riding up with their captains around them. I thought, If Sorem does not come now, he will lose everything. Then he came.

  He rode into the yard, fully dressed for battle, and on the white stallion with its trappings of white, that old Masrian illusion, a man-horse in the dark red torch glare. He looked a king if he was not yet an emperor. One would not entertain the notion that some minutes back he had raved like an angry baby, and as well one would not.

  It had been agreed from the beginning that I go with them, my own part an essential one, something I had determined to do, yet which made my mouth go dry, realizing I had reached it. A jerdier led over my horse, the white Arrow that Sorem had given me this very afternoon, which seemed years in my past. I swung up and found Sorem had set his mount in front of mine.

  “Vazkor,” he said, “will you forgive my foolishness? I spoke in haste to a man whose advice I value and whose judgment I have no quarrel with. You will understand, my grandfather built this city. I did not like to see it destroyed all about me while I hid in a bolt-hole.”

  It seemed to me he forever begged my pardon, or I his.

  “You said nothing to me that I will recall with rancor, Sorem Hragon-Dat.”

  The rich citizens were crowding up on the wall to watch us go forth, the saviors of their city, and their gold. The gates stood wide, and from the parapets above brass horns were sounding. A jerd is a fine sight, five jerds, by deductive reasoning, one supposes must be five times finer. I rode with Sorem at the head of his jerd and my pulse was slow as sleep.

  I felt I stared at it, this brazen passing of legions, this pealing of light on white swords and the red-blood splash of leather, as the mage-priest stares, in the old mural on the temple wall, at the world in a sphere of crystal. Even though my mouth was dry because I went toward Old Hessek, I seemed to have no part in my own fear.

  A woman stood on the parapet, a woman in man’s clothing, with a little gold snake wound about her wrist. Malmiranet also watched us from the Citadel, regarding the show as a lioness regards from a rock the dawn of fine hunting weather. But she, too, I beheld in the crystal. In a hundred years, or much less, she would be dust in a tomb, and I a dead god.


  Hessek slaves, left outside, whimpered and implored and slunk away.

  Then the city was before us, raw with its fires, and I was back in my body, a man again, and an enemy ahead of me I meant to kill.

  4

  Dushum’s thousand galloped east through the Palm Quarter; Denades’ jerd and Bailgar’s Shields took the highway south to stem the haphazard advance three thousand Hesseks had made upon the suburbs. Ustorth’s jerd went south, then west, crossing into the Commercial City where the line of Hragon’s inner wall came to an end, turning finally north to liberate the port and close in the Hessek four thousand from the rear, cutting them in the flank where possible and driving them forward to meet Sorem’s jerd along Hragon’s Wall itself and at Winged Horse Gate.

  The desperate crowd on Amber Road, getting no mercy from that closed gate, had already cascaded south before the Bit-Hessian thrust, leaving corpses thick on the ground, all slaughtered accidentally or in panic by their fellow citizens. The Market of the World and its neighboring alleys, markets, shops, and warehouses, were alive with the rats of Bit-Hessee, or blazing where they had flung their fires and run on.

  But something was slowing them now. Not the greed or curiosity of the invading army, pausing to loot and rape, or simply to gawk at the alien treasures on which it comes. Old Hessek appeared to have no interest in these ordinary diversions. It was the lack of a leader which turned them lethargic and aimless. They had risen at the will of Shaythun-Kem, they had sung their chant to him in the thoroughfares, but God-Made-Visible was nowhere to be seen.

  I never thought that I had betrayed them. I saw only filth to be wiped away, a nest of vipers to be crushed.

  The forty jerdiers who had held Winged Horse Gate against a frightened, innocuous crowd lay dead from Hessek missiles. Beyond the bastions of the wall the light jumped, now scarlet, now flaring black, and a second wall of smoke obscured the near distance, out of which rose the intermittent crashing of timbers, cries for help or of pure agony and terror. The Hessek mass milled before the Gate, at least a thousand of them packed up to it, with a makeshift ram—the doorposts of some nearby inn wrenched off for the purpose—thudding on the alcum barrier. Over this nightmarish scene, so like a disturbed colony of ants at work upon a carcass, had descended this strange pall of slackening blank-eyed silence. Their shouting was done and their inspiration quiescent.

  They noted the advent of armed men on the slope the other side of the wall, and left off battering, but the pale “Old Blood” faces were all the same it seemed to me, wells without a floor, imbecilic almost, with a dreadful unyielding imbecility.

  The jerd reined in and waited, glittering clean as new bronze in the coming and going of the light.

  As I had arranged it, I rode forward alone, up the ramp to the wall’s head, and onto the crown of Winged Horse Gate. I removed my helm as I went, and glad enough to do it for it was stifling me. My palms were clammy and my guts cold, but the iron was still there in me, my sanity, my pride. They had turned my Power against me, but I would master them. They must finish here. After them, one other must be finished.

  I dismounted, and stood alone on that high place, gazing down. Presently the voice of some hag shrieked out my name and the name they had allotted me.

  “Vazkor! Ei Shaythun-Kem!”

  Only she; no other perpetuated that calling, but their faces altered, raised themselves to me. I had seen women who thought they loved me look at me that way, and wolves which were hungry.

  The pressure built itself inside my skull.

  I lifted myself upward, levitating from the wall into the spark-ridden murk. There was no effort, as with the horse, the storm, the ocean-walk; it had the ease of the perfect thing, what is meant to be.

  They watched, their faces tilting like pale plates, after the rising of their star. I struck them, even as they worshiped me.

  The fire that sprang from me was no longer white, but red, blinding, a hurt, a sheet of scarlet hate that wrapped around them and me.

  I slew three hundred or more with that first blow, six hundred at the next. Death shot from me in vast waves of sightless brilliance, and they fell like dolls of melting wax, not attempting to evade me, motionless till they toppled, then motionless once again.

  I remember everything that followed with great clarity.

  The jerd was moving, had opened the Gate and raced through it, over the mounds of blasted human flesh. I, regaining the wall, caught the bridle of my horse, which shied from me, squealing, till I touched its brain with mine. I mounted and caught up to Sorem’s men, and went through them and beyond, unaccompanied, into the fire-fog that swirled before us.

  They had their own strong sorcery that night, the rats of Old Hessek, for somehow they became instantaneously aware, scattered as they were across the length and breadth of Bar-Ibithni, that in that second their messiah had rejected them, and that the bolts of his lightning were turned on them. I broke the spine of their rising with the first blow I dealt them at Winged Horse Gate, but did not guess it, and besides, had not done with the beating.

  To fight an enemy in a trap, in the dark, to feel his stranglehold on my windpipe, and then abruptly to discover a knife under my hand, that was how it was. I struck him again and again, my foe who could no longer cloud himself with shadow, shield himself with my own body. Long after the stranglehold was broken, I stuck that red knife in his side.

  In every direction, crackling fires, the voices and the shrieks, and before me a carpet of dead Hesseks. I left the jerd small need for swords or bows. But they had a city to rescue, fire to tame, honor to win. That was their portion, Sorem’s garland, not mine.

  There was eventually a different luminance in the sky. Dawn in the east, the color of decaying leaves from the smoke. A huge quiet descended with the darkness into the marsh.

  The streets were coming out of the night clad in soot, charcoal wrecks leaning on the air, and up and down them the damned were journeying, some with their garments burned from them, others with the skin similarly gone. I healed no one and no one came to me for healing. Probably, my face smeared with grime and my eyes red, like the faces and eyes of all those about me, they did not know Vazkor. I must have appeared, too, a man capable of murder, but not of compassion. For, to this hour, that act of death has left its sign on me. That act and the deeds that pursued it.

  Presently, some order emerged with the city from the darkness.

  The fires were dying, for it had begun to rain—a boon from Masrimas perhaps, his seal on the victory of the light.

  Though quite a few believed the sorcerer ordered the rain down from heaven.

  It was the first dawn I had seen in Bar-Ibithni and no morning hymn had risen from the prayer-towers in the Palm Quarter. Everywhere the priests were busy doctoring the injured (I even noticed the orange fire-eaters genuinely abroad, with baskets of salves and amulets), or else they had gathered their temple riches and hidden themselves.

  The rain splashed through the sullen dawn. Soldiers were collecting the unclaimed dead, Hessek and Masrian, and throwing the bodies into road-sweepers’ carts harnessed to mules. There was a great traffic of these carts. Despite the rain, such a quantity of unburied business could not be left long in the midsummer heat of the south.

  Some Hesseks still lived, those who had had no part in the rising, mostly of mixed blood, scared of the whole world now, of Masrian and Bit-Hessee alike. Generally, the only Hessek to be found that day was one the sorcerer had slain, or the jerds, if one traveled farther south or east.

  Denades and Bailgar had routed out the three thousand in the suburbs. The menace had gone suddenly from them, the soldiers would tell you; as if under a spell, they dropped their weapons and offered themselves to the shafts of crossbows and the blades of longswords. Like rats that had been poisoned. Denades returned with dawn to Pillar Hill to report his success, for the damage was not vast southward, only a
n inn or two burned, which he dismissed as nothing. In the Palm Quarter the tale was much the same. The slaves’ uprising had been contained in the Fountain Garden, due to the grisly exercises carried out there by the Hesseks on the bodies of the Emperor’s jerd. Aimless, and without any leadership, the slaves had abandoned themselves to the wild orgiastic dream of the slave, and gloried in the mutilation of this symbol of their slavery, nine hundred and sixty Imperial Guards. Dushum’s men had witnessed a feast of blood, of vampires and ghouls, and not one slave in the park was spared.

  Of other Hesseks wandering on the terraces, most were brought down on sight. A handful fled to their boats, surprising the jerdiers by their speed and will to survive, for the majority made no protest at retribution.

  Northward, Ustorth had mastered the docks and port swiftly, reorganized its police, and commenced cutting the escape path of the Hesseks and forcing them back upon the swords of Sorem’s men. He, too, found Bit-Hessee, however, apt to perish. By dawn he had started on the second task, to set chaos in order. Having argued for the sacrifice of certain portions of Bar-Ibithni to add weight to Sorem’s deeds, he had been well prepared. Ustorth had foreseen the wreck, and made plans for alleviating it before it even occurred.

  Only Bailgar’s Shields sent no word, till a savage streamer in the west spoke for them. Now it was the Rat-Hole’s season of fire, for Bailgar cauterized the wound of Bit-Hessee as he had proposed.

  The snarling glare thinned and swelled alternately till the rain and the swamp licked it from the sky.

  * * *

  Nor had Bailgar’s Shields been idle elsewhere. There was something he and I had settled on the day before, that clearly had been effected. A gold cash or two had insured that as we rode back through the Market of the World, with half a jerd behind us, voices began to extol Sorem, yelling his name and authorizing for him the favor of their god. Shortly the whole wretched mob of homeless, shocked, and sick gathered there began to echo these paid praises with weak hysteria. In the Palm Quarter itself, where small harm of any sort had come save to the hapless Imperial jerd, the praise was louder and more definite.