Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  “I was in the Commercial City,” I said. “One of Bailgar’s Shields found me and told me how it was with you.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing now,” he said. “It’s almost done.” He yawned, as a man does who has lost too much blood, and murmured, “Even the healing of Vazkor could not defeat this thing. But you will live, my sorcerer.” He seemed to have forgotten his accusations, what he had said to me in the tower, and before her. His hand was moving on the covers, dry and yellow. “I regret we never went hunting,” he said. “The white puma and the lion. It’s strange,” he said, “I never thought of death before. Even that night of Basnurmon’s assassins, not even then. I held a leopard on my spear, in the hills once. Any mistake, and he would have killed me, yet I was too busy fighting him to think of it. But this leopard is different.”

  There was no one close. The court functionaries, what portion was left of them, and the priests, had been and gone. Only the physician was at his table across the room, and a sentry at the door. Sorem set his hand over mine. In the gray parchment flesh of his lids, his eyes had grown more blue, younger by contrast.

  “You will not always think poorly of me, will you, Vazkor? It is hard to find yourself, as I did, like some stranger in a dark grove. Harder to find yourself alone there.”

  I took his hand. I could do nothing else. His grip was feeble. He shut his eyes, and said, “Malmiranet lives. They told her you were in the Palace, and she went away so we might talk privately. I believe she knew me before ever I knew myself. Leave me, and seek her. I’ll do well enough for a while.”

  But I could see he had not far to go. I kept where I was, and said, “Presently, Sorem.”

  He lifted up his lids, and said quite strongly, “My thanks. It won’t be for long. Don’t call anyone. I would rather my mother didn’t see me die. She has seen plenty already.”

  So I sat there by him, his hand in mine. A minute passed. The heat was fading, the room growing dank and chill, yet the walls were drowned in the last hot copper-yellow rays of the afternoon, which altered even the motionless dog to a beast of brass, as if the air itself had caught our sickness. Sorem looked toward the windows and his eyes widened, as though he could make out his death rising on the metallic sky.

  “The sun is almost down. I shall go with Masrimas then.”

  I said, for I could summon nothing else, “I envy you your god.”

  But he shut his eyes again, and his mouth twisted and his hand clenched strengthlessly in mine.

  “I spoke merely for custom. There is only the dark before me, and it is too easy to reach it. I have often wondered—”

  He did not finish, and stupidly I leaned to hear the rest. But he was dead.

  I got to my feet slowly. The physician, employed in mixing some balm Sorem would no longer require, did not turn. Malmiranet stood just within the door. I could not properly see her face in the darkening of the light, but she seemed all pity rather than grief. I suppose she had dreamed him dead a thousand times through the years of intrigue they had weathered here. The reality could not appall her. Only its wickedness.

  I was shivering, but, having looked too long for it, could no longer distinguish the demon. As Malmiranet moved across the chamber, the darkness appeared to billow and fold about her. Then I saw that the grieving pity in her face also included me. I tried to say her name and could not say it and sank to my knees without properly knowing how I came there.

  Her fingers touched my neck and forehead like wands of ice, and then there was no more.

  * * *

  I was nine years of age and a snake had bitten me. It was in Eshkorek Arnor that this had happened, and the doctors had laid me in a bath of ice to cool my fever. Yet I shouted to them that I was cold, the cold was killing me, and they paid no heed. Eventually my father came.

  He was lean and dark, his crow’s wing of hair framing his shoulders and his face as he bent to me.

  “You must lie quiet,” he said. “She has ordered it. I can do nothing. She will punish you till she grows bored with the punishment. Then it will stop.”

  He showed me, pointing with his long jeweled finger, where my mother stood. Her robes were white and her breasts were bare, the breasts of a maiden, firm and high. Her face was hidden in a cat-mask of gold, and golden spiders spun in her long pale hair. It was from the deck of a ship she watched me, a ship with great blue sails, and from the yard depended a hanged man, and the gulls snapped and clapped their hunger in his vitals.

  That was the first dream.

  There were only two. In the second, Uastis had shut me in a burning tower, and I roasted there, screaming, for several centuries.

  I became aware gradually that the ice had melted in the fire and put it out.

  A wonderful stillness filled my body and my mind.

  Something shone and gleamed. I puzzled what it could be, but a changing position of her head showed me it was lamplight on the fair hair of a girl. I did not remember for a second. Then everything was with me.

  “Isep,” I whispered. At that the bronze hair swung about like tufted grasses, and a face appeared between. “Isep, how well or ill am I?”

  She looked me over with a boy’s disparaging candor, and said, “Very ill, lord. But better. They predict you shall be well.”

  It was a small chamber, and our talk had roused the physician. He came puttering up, felt my head and peered in my eyes and laid his hand on my heart.

  “Yes, it is remarkable,” he said, “a night and a day of the ague, but no purging of blood, and now the fever’s broken. Your constitution is unusually strong, my lord, and the god has smiled upon you. You will recover, I swear to that, but you must be patient. They call you a magician, do they not? Ah, yes. Now I acknowledge it.”

  I felt I could spring from the couch and fly. Why not? I was the sorcerer again. I had survived the curse of death. No god had smiled on me but the gods of my ancestry. I could have laughed aloud, then fear sank through me, and I grasped his arm.

  “Where is the Empress?”

  It was Isep who answered haughtily, “She has kept by you the entire night, and this whole day, till she was dead herself. Be content, man.”

  “But is she sick?”

  “Sick of you, no doubt, and of your maniac shouting. Otherwise she is herself. They say Yellow Mantle is taking his leave.”

  “Yes, it’s true, my lord,” the physician said, bringing a sticky ointment and wanting to plaster my body with it like a joint for basting. “The plague is less. Countless thousands lost, of course, and Sorem, our lord, borne away with them. But fewer deaths this day at least, and no fresh outbreaks, not even among the slums of the commercial area.”

  I pushed him off me, and told him to spare me his medicinal muck, but he brought another thing in a shallow dish and put it in my mouth. This swallowed, I slipped back into a shadowy sleep where I seemed to swim along the bright shoals of Isep’s hair.

  When I woke again, it was about an hour past midnight, and my purpose lay intact and absolute before me, as if I had planned it in my sleep.

  Isep was nodding at her post, and started alert when I called her, angry as some young soldier caught sleeping on watch.

  “What is it, lord?”

  “This: Find me some water and some clothing, my own or another’s.”

  “Clothing? By my right hand, you shan’t stir.”

  “Leave off your warrior’s oaths, girl. In this room the man says what is to be done.”

  She turned to run for the physician, and for all I knew, for meatier help, and I was not certain yet if I had my Power again or not. I got her wrist and held her and said, “If you had an enemy who worked against you, and slew those near to you, and would have your life, too, if he could, what would you do?”

  “Kill him,” she said, and truly I believed her.

  “Thus,” I said. “That is what I go t
o do. And since I may have some extra trouble if I am naked, I prefer to travel with my breeches on.”

  “No,” she said, but she was wavering. Finally she asked, “Your enemy is from Hessek?”

  “Older than that, but Hessek is in it, too.”

  She frowned. I knew by her frowning she would do what I asked.

  * * *

  One moment I had reckoned that Uastis ruled them from the swamp itself. I had reckoned her, another time, far off. My indecision, I thought, was perhaps some part of the web in which she trapped me. Not till Gyest warned me had I understood for sure. But then I had been tranced, the net too tight around me for my struggles to break it. But now...now I had fathomed her abode; my dream had showed me. Now, better than any portent, I had outlived her sending. This would be the last meeting. If my Power had deserted me, or was not yet strong enough, I would use my hands as any copper-cash murderer knew how. That was all it took.

  I was feverish still, but no disaster in that. It only buoyed me up.

  I had crept about in her shade, in a terror, paralyzed. But I lived; the ordeal was past. She had committed her worst, and it was ashes.

  There were different foul things to be seen about the streets by night, glimpsed in blackness or smoky red glare. What lights burned did so surreptitiously behind blinds, everything muffled, masked. Four fifths of the Palm Quarter, where formerly it had been day by night, had fled to the hills taking their lamps with them. But the plague fires blazed on, and the carts went stealthily up and down to them, loaded with their speechless multitudes. A watchman, drunk on a tower roof, drew back in fear at my galloping horse. Its hooves rang on the paving and the echoes struck ten streets away, as if twenty beasts went racing.

  There was a new pyre near the dock, just beyond the Fish Market. The storehouses had been leveled here on the night of the rising and had not been repaired: now human flesh fried and the blue smoke rose in the starless sky to guide me.

  The sick were yet piled about the gates of the temples. If there were less of them, as the physician said, I did not ascertain.

  But I had a rare wine in my blood. Expiation was over, guilt washed out, terror canceled.

  That wild ride, between darkness and red shadow, was indeed what the watchman had retreated from, the passing of Lord Death.

  4

  It was simple to appropriate a fishing boat, to row out on the black water under the formless sky. No lookout patrolled the quay. The spars of ships were a tangled water forest without birds. Somewhere, raucous music and tipsy voices slashed and mauled the silence, men praying to a flask of koois to save them.

  The Hyacinth Vineyard stood far out from the dock, where the Hesseks had pulled the vessel with their little craft, to keep him from the fire. My southern ship with its soft southern name and its southern male gender. I had foreseen it would lead me to my witch-mother, all those months and days ago on Peyuan’s island.

  My strength had returned to me in double measure. The oars were light as reeds, and the somber shore, with its burning fire dots, retracted swiftly. I looked over my shoulder and saw the tall outline of the galley. There was a hard pallid light dancing on the upper deck, showing me three or four black figures, who regarded my coming, showing no alarm, unmoving. Even they had let down the ladder for me. They made no remonstration when I tied the boat alongside and began to climb aboard.

  It was not exactly like the dream. The masts had no sails, there was no splendor. The harsh uncovered flame tongues leaped and crackled, painting the deck in fitful bleachings. Six Hesseks about the rail, ten squatting aft, escapees of the jerds, for, as I remembered, not all Bit-Hessians had been slain that night of the rising. Perhaps others prowled below. No danger to me, for I could kill them when I had to. The witch had failed with me. She dared not use my own Power against me anymore.

  I said to them, in their own tongue, “Where is she?”

  None of them answered me. It was another voice that called, “Here, oh beloved.”

  My hair rose. I spun around, and there she sat, on one of Charpon’s couches. She seemed to have arrived by magic; I had not seen her, though I had glanced that way before.

  Her whiteness was the whiteness of the torches congealed to flesh, so white it made me queasy to look at her, as if at something bloodless, unhuman; which, maybe, she was. She had masked her face, as ever, this time in a veil of yellow silk that hung from a diadem of silver in her white hair. Beneath the veiling, what? A cat’s head, or a spider’s? Behind her, almost as I had visualized it in the fever, a man’s body depended from among the shrouds, hanging by its feet, and torn by the gulls. The mutilated remnant of a face was Lyo’s, my messenger.

  “Behold your messiah,” the woman said to her Hesseks. “Behold the Shaythun-Kem. Y’ei S’ullo, y’ei S’ullo. God-Made-Visible has betrayed you. Shaythun sent the swarm of his vengeance, and Bar-Ibithni the Beautiful bleeds on its deathbed. But this one thinks he has cheated Shaythun; this one thinks he will live.”

  Isep had got me a knife, along with the sentry’s clothes. I set my hand to it involuntarily.

  “See,” the woman said. “Barbarian still, calling himself the sorcerer, yet preferring to use the metal blade of a Masrian cur.”

  The taunt was familiar. It checked me.

  “I am the sorcerer,” I said. “Then name yourself.”

  “You name me.”

  A wave of dizziness and heat went over me.

  “Uastis,” I said, “the bitch-goddess of Ezlann. My mother, but not for much longer.”

  She got to her feet, and with delicate mincing steps, she came along the deck to me. She was so little, small, and slender, and yet a force came with her like a huge dark shadow thrown upon the air.

  I could not seem to stand back from her or advance to meet her. She halted about three paces from me, and then I noticed how she held her head, somewhat aslant, as if she could see me only from the left side. And, as before, I reached out my hand and snatched off the veil.

  A woman’s face, not raddled now, but a girl’s. Beautiful as a statue, flawless, all but the right eye, which was gone, the scars hidden by a green jewel.

  It had taken me till that instant to realize. Whoever she was, she was not my mother, not Uastis Reincarnate, for Uastis had the blood of the Old Magician Race; she would have healed. Smoke went over my eyes, like a myriad insects running on a crystal pane. Then I saw differently.

  I had chased a phantom, fished for a reflection in a pool.

  No, not Uastis. The illusion slid from her as sand runs from an hourglass. The robes were dirty, torn, and of a grayish flax, and her hair was the dull black fleece of Hessek hair, and her one eye a black Hessek eye, the other bound in a rag, and her skin the sallow white of Hessek. But I had dug this pit that swallowed me down. I had been so intent upon the hunt that when a quarry offered itself I never mused it might be other than the one I sought.

  “Vazkor is yet Vazkor,” she whispered. “He has learned his mistake at last. Not the old witch, but the young. For you made me young, my master and my lord, my stallion, my beloved, and I shall be your death.” Lellih smiled at me and slid her arms about me and pressed her body to mine. I felt all its youngness through the fabric of her clothes and mine, all the youth with which I had reenameled it. “In life you turned from me, but in death you will obey me. In your burial place I will work my magic, and lie in your dead arms. Oh, I can’t heal my flesh, it’s true, but there are more wondrous things. It is you who taught me, my sorcerer. Listen how I talk. Do I sound like an old hag of a sweet-seller, my dove? No. The Power you poured into my brain to recreate my girlhood created me also your equal. A sorceress. A goddess.”

  A fire came and went across my eyes, obscuring the deck, the shadowy motionless figures of the Hesseks, the pendant corpse. Lellih wound me about like a snake and her mouth on my skin was like the fall of burning rain.

  I
remembered the Hall of Physicians, her tiny bird skull between my hands, the surge of Power that passed from me to her, illuminating her mind like the sun. I remembered my pride.

  Small miracle she had been able to tap my Power ever after, to turn on me those abilities I had inadvertently installed in her. I had been her powerhouse from the first.

  “Yes,” she murmured, reading my thoughts, as previously she had read my whole brain, my history, my vow, my compulsion. “Yes, you have become my joke, beloved, with your quest for Uastis, who was really Lellih. I took her form to mislead you. You took my poor eye, my lovely eye, in exchange for that jest, beloved. Even that I should have forgiven you, if you had valued me. Then Bit-Hessee might have sunk in the mud for all I cared, and Shaythun, Shepherd of Swarms, sunk with it. There is no Uastis here, and no devil-god either, Vazkor. Only a wellspring of belief I used as my instrument. It is I who sent the plague. It is my betrayal I punish you for, not the betrayal of my people—Lellih’s anger, not the anger of a god. Know this, Vazkor . . . . What?” she asked me then, for I had tried to speak to her. I mumbled something through my frozen lips. She said to me, gently, “No, you’ll die, Vazkor, I promise you. Do you suppose of all the numbers who have perished that you alone, who I have cursed twice for every curse I laid on Bar-Ibithni, that you alone, my darling boy, will escape? Believe in the vitality of your own magic which you gave me. You are dying in my arms this very minute.”

  I knew it to be as she said. She had reseated the plague on me. My viscera scalded, but my flesh was like a layer of wool. I could barely see or hear, only the lower mast between my shoulders kept me on my feet, that and her twining. She had crawled up me to my mouth, and fastened there as if she herself would drain me of my life.

  Somehow then, I felt the knife. My hand had not strayed from it. My muscles were lead and my fingers water, yet this hand and this arm I could move, if I willed it. It seemed to take me hours. She was too busy with her grave-cold kissing to heed my hand and the knife. Not till the blade went through her back into her heart did she heed it.