Hunting the White Witch

by Tanith Lee

  “No,” she said. “You must leave. But I remain.”

  “You will come with me,” I said. “You know you won’t let me travel alone.”

  “I will let you.”

  “I will ask the old lady for you,” I said, attempting to lighten this shade across her face like the first shadow of night. “I will kneel to your Karrakaz—”

  “No,” she broke in, and her strong, slender fingers dug into my arms. “Never go to her now.”

  She is afraid, I thought. She reckons she has betrayed the sorceress by lying with me, and will be punished. So much for our loving mother.

  “She shan’t harm you when I am near,” I said.

  Ressaven’s eyes flamed up. And I saw it was anger.

  “You are not a fool,” she said. “Do not act one. This I give you is a prophecy, a warning. Abandon the island and make your life elsewhere. Forget this coupling, and forget your search for Karrakaz.” Her anger faded, and she said gently, “Now, let me go.”

  “I am not done with you,” I said.

  “But I am done with you, Zervarn. Yes, it is half my blame that we are here. And yes, you are my conqueror and I yield to you. But now it is over. Do not make me battle. You are not accustomed to the women of this mountain.”

  The argument had made me lust for her again. She did not struggle after all, and when I stirred within her, she moaned. The curve where her shoulder met her throat held a scent of strange flowers, clearer than the orange blossom. It was the last perfume I breathed for some while. My head was full of light one second, then full of black, a painless blow struck from within that ended our couching as surely as a knife in my heart.

  * * *

  I had the last dream of my father that night.

  I did not properly grasp its import then; it was only another jagged blade picked up in the cold dawn that woke me alone in that place.

  How well do I remember it, as if it were reality, a memory, which maybe it might have been; or in some other life where circumstances are other than in this, perhaps it has been, is.

  I was a child once more, in the dream, possibly five years of age. He had taken me to a high window to look down upon a marching of troops in the streets. It was winter there also, snow white on the ground, the men and the horses clattering black against it. He was black, too: black clothing, black prince’s hair, the dark skin and the black jewels on it. Gazing up at him more often than at his troops below, I saw, with the alarming foreshortened image that the child generally has, a leaning pillar of dark with the blank face above it. But when he said, “Look below,” I obeyed him at once. I was five years, yet I knew, I had learned: he was to be obeyed. “You must remind yourself at all times,” he said, “that you accede to this, strive for this, train your body and your brain for this. I will not have you mewling in the hall with a puppy like any peasant’s brat in some steading. You were born my son so that you shall become as I am. Do you understand me?” I said that I did. He turned eyes on me that were like dead coals. He moved me about and away from him with his impersonal fingers. I was aware that I hated and feared him, that this was the bond between us, fright and a child’s loathing that one day would be a man’s. Then I should kill him as efficiently as he had killed my dog. Or he would kill me.

  When I glimpsed my mother in the doorway, I walked to her—he had persuaded me not to run many months ago. Her face was masked in gold and green gems; I had never seen it unmasked. Yet, despite herself, she was my safe harbor, and I hers, for such a thing one may know at five years of age, for all one could not voice it, nor set it down.

  The lights of the mansion window roused me, and the caress of her hands in the dream, which had seemed like the touch of Ressaven.

  Part III: The Sorceress

  1

  ONE MORNING HOUR saw me across the wooded valley and at the roots of the mountain, the villa hidden far behind in trees. It was a tranquil day, to be sure, the sky clear as glass. A long-necked bird rose from a glow of water as I passed, its wings beating their own winds. It had been drinking there at the brink of the broken ice, not a care in the world, no feuds or aspirations to plague it.

  She had left me no footsteps in the snow to follow, no stamp of those agile and beautiful bare feet. She had levitated in order to deceive me, as she had deceived me in the warm candlelight with that little sound of hers that made me forget she was witch before woman. I had not been ready for the onslaught of her Power with which she had stunned me. It was her dread that made her betray me, yet it set my teeth on edge that she had not trusted me, put my strength at least beside the strength of Karrakaz.

  Still, she would come to learn. I did not have to depend on footsteps for my guide. I had recollected the marble town on the mountain slope, which she had told me of so incidentally. The moment I pictured it, I knew with the force of divination that the town was the sanctum of the sorceress.

  I kept to the ground, to the cloak of the trees. I did nothing to stir up alarms. Only the bird’s flight could have marked me, and then, not for sure. I was still woodsman enough to make, otherwise, a quiet road to the mountain. I had a conviction she might be watching for me.

  I had left my pack in the villa, opened, with the mask staring up for any to discover—my signature, perhaps, upon what had happened there.

  By now the dream had returned to my mind, that picture of my father I had never before constructed. Yet, not so strange. Not one man or woman I had encountered who knew his name had had a good word to spare for him. They held him in awe, and they hated him; I had had evidence in Eshkorek of that awe and hate they would have eased on me only because I was his seed. This much poison cannot pour in one’s ears without it will leave some trace. I would have been strange indeed if somewhere in me I had not begun to wonder. Would he have been to me the princely father I had imagined, or as I had finally seen him in the dream? The impetus of his despair had left me. I had almost imperceptibly ceased to reckon him the pivot of my life. I had vowed murder to him, yet it was no longer a passion in me to achieve it, and I felt no driving force rebuke my flagging vengeance. Had these issues perished with my youth in Bar-Ibithni, destroyed by plague and terror and resurrection? Or merely because I had begun to reason him less than I had at first supposed?

  Then again, I pondered if the dream were some witchcraft worked on me.

  I myself had conjured false images of him—the shadow that rose from the fire, the unreal guide in the Eshkirian fortress, and the force that pushed me to the slaughter of Ettook—all overflowings simply of my own thought, not a momentous ghost but spillage from a cup. And in Bit-Hessee, in the circle of beasts, others had conjured him inadvertently from my brain with their rampant spell.

  Traversing that valley, I began to go over the rest, seeking for Vazkor of Ezlann inside myself. And he was not there, not anymore. Certain of his mental fires had remained in me to deceive me once, and now they also were dead. I recalled the cave that night I tracked the Eshkiri raiders, and that death-vision of water and the teeth of knives, and waking to say, “I will kill her.” It was the last thought he had had, futile, floundering, impotent. That had been his legacy to me, a sword he could not take up, and which I had no right to draw for him. Whomever I slew or spared in my days on the earth, it must be my quarrel, not another’s. It is unlucky to weep at sea for, they would tell you, the ocean is salt enough. For sure, we have enough griefs of our own that we should not assume the burden of others.

  Sending or otherwise, the dream of my iron father had brought me to the truth.

  I met no one on my journey. Once I noted the tracks of a she-fox in the snow. Where the trees gave way to the bald white upsurge of the mountain, I found a girl’s silver bangle hanging on a bush, like a signal of derision, but maybe it was innocent.

  There was a path up this side of the mountain; I was inclined to follow it, for it seemed worn naturally by the passage of many feet,
and would no doubt lead straight to the witch’s sanctuary.

  A few trees grew about the path, stands of holly and bold briars. I climbed doggedly for near on an hour up this smooth slope and along another, between the trees, over the worn path. At last I realized I had been clambering there too long, and the landscape had not radically altered.

  There was sorcery even here. I halted and cleared my mind of its inner thoughts and gazed around me keenly. I was still at the mountain’s foot. I had gone about twenty yards and stridden in a circle, or up and down, I know not which, for it was all one. Like any peasant or yokel they had wanted to mislead, they had confounded me because I had been too sure and too unthinking. No more. I would be careful now.

  I did not take the path after that, but trod the rocky way. In a few minutes I was clear of the woods and on the upland. Looking back, I glimpsed valley, cliff-line, the shining pallor of the sea, and the silver clouds boiling up from it like curled steam from a caldron.

  I kept my senses outward, my instincts ready. Once I noted a symbol carved in the snow by a stick, some wizardry item meant to confuse the brain. I kicked it into a slush before I went on.

  Finally there was a wall of slaty stone, and a tall door in it of iron inlaid with semiprecious gems. It looked incongruous enough so that I took it for a spell, but it was not. Just another fancy of the Old Race for spectacle. Above, the far peak gored the ether, its whiteness changed to blue steel on the white sky. The door of iron had no bolt, no bar, no ring or knob to grasp.

  Had Ressaven come this way, escaping me?

  I saw in my mind’s eye that white hand of hers with its jade bracelet—that hand, one of a pair which had clung to me—laid on a panel of quartz in the iron door. When I guided my own fingers there, the door slid aside into the wall of rock.

  A black pine stood beyond the door. Beyond the pine, the mountain town of the goddess.

  For a moment, I was shown a waste, fallen pillar drums, smashed tiles, the empty courts of a ruin. But I grimly put the illusion aside from me, and the mirage drifted off like dust, leaving reality behind.

  There was one central street forty feet broad, straight as a rule, that ran for half a mile right up the slant of the mountain. It had a bizarre aspect, this road, being laid with alternate square paving stones of green and black, from which the snow had been scoured or on which the snow had never been permitted to alight. It pointed into the distance, a perfect toy of mathematical perspective, and at its peak rested a building of steps and columns and many roofs piled one above the other. In a Masrian play, a drumbeat would have thudded as I set eyes on it: Here was the citadel of Karrakaz.

  On either side the street of jade and black paving, the royal mansions mounted or declined at pleasing angles on the slopes. Every vista was aesthetic, everything arranged in relation to its neighbor, like the model of a city made for a king’s child to play with.

  It was silent as a model, too. Another would have thought it dead as Kainium, but I felt their presence there, the Lectorra, I felt their stealth, their curiosity, and a hint of something more, a nebulous and unadmitted fright.

  A dry fountain stood a couple of feet along the road, a roaring dragon with open jaws. As I stepped on the paving, the dragon’s muzzle of ice cracked off with a loud noise, and green water gushed out. Next second, the water changed color to the appearance of blood. It seemed they had not given over their games. I went by and up the street without another glance, for it had the spoor of Lectorra all over it, that oldest trick of liquid into blood.

  There were serpents crawling about on the stones farther on, a pool of fire, and an impassable broken area with the guts of the mountain yawning under it miles below. All these elegant illusions I trampled over, without even a bow to them for their ingenuity and the accuracy of the portrayal. Though, when an eagle shot down from a tower straight for my eyes, I own I ducked. Then I remarked, as I dissolved the beating pinions and the rending beak in midair, “A single hit for you, my children.”

  Midway along the road, a lion padded from one of the palace porches, a snow lion with a gray mossy body and black mane and eyes like summer heat stored up in him against the cold. He was real, a genuine inhabitant of this locus, though probably some whimsical import of the Lost Race rather than native to the western lands. After a century or two of roaming in a changeable climate he had developed a winter coat, like any fox or weasel.

  It was odd for me to confront him. I had no need of his flesh to feed me or his pelt to clothe me, and no need to beware his moods. Any attack of his would slide harmless from my invisible armor and he go toppling all the valiant, lean length of him. In my krarl youth I would have counted him a prize, hunted him with skill and hot excitement, to prove myself his better, driving my spear or knife into his brain, wearing his hide on mine. Now, needs, defenses, contests no longer meaningful, I took the time to run my eye over him, liking him for what he was in himself, rather than what he could be to me.

  His tail went this way and that, his nostrils and his glands telling him I was neither enemy nor easy prey. But as I drew level, he put his forefoot out in my path, as if to stay me. I turned and met his gaze and he moved the foot aside. It looked weighty enough to have staved in a man’s skull, but the claws were scarcely visible. He lay down like a huge cat. Somewhere there would be a lioness, and his sons and daughters, the pride.

  He reclined by the road and stared after me a minute, then I glanced over my shoulder and he was gone. There were no further illusions or beasts. The last palace loomed on my horizon. The pillars were circled with brazen bands and as I got closer I saw a rose tree growing in a bowl of earth before the steps, and it was in bloom, crimson flowers and dark green thorn daggers out of time, like the orange fruits and blossom in that room where I had lain with Ressaven.

  Ressaven, who fled me in terror of the sorceress, who thought me so feeble in Power I could not protect her from one bitch’s wrath.

  Well, we would find out, the three of us. There were three others first. I had not seen them for a moment on the steps. That white on white, marble, flesh, hair, and white velvet garments. But I caught the sudden glint of swords.

  Mazlek was the nearest, my guide to Kainium, who had crossed over the wide river with his hand on my shoulder.

  Two others behind, a young man about eighteen and a girl in male tunic, trousers, and boots, and with a man’s sword ready, competent as a man. A white kitten had climbed into the bowl of earth and began to nibble at the roses, waking my memory. This girl was she I had met in the old city, the kitten on her shoulder. She seemed as calm now, and she called to me, “Go back, Zervarn. Was the lion in your way not presage enough for you?”

  Mazlek moved down the steps onto the paving. He held the sword negligently, and said, “The blade is only a symbol. But we will use whatever we must to drive you off, Denarl, Sollor, and I.”

  “Of course,” I said. “You are the goddess’ guard.”

  “Oh,” he said, “self-elected, I confess. She has no actual requirement for us, but it was a fashion among us since we were very young—as we adopted the fashion of the jade in the forehead from her, which in turn the younger chicks of the brood copy from us. How else could we show we honored a goddess who refused to be honored? To mimic her guard seemed good to us, to offer ourselves as a weapon, however flimsy. And we have named ourselves from three captains of Ezlann who once served her, the older versions of their names, as her own people would have used them.”

  “Was one of that guard also a woman?”

  “No, to be sure. But Sollor, trust my word, is our equal. Don’t underrate her.”

  I said, “I could kill the three of you in three seconds.”

  He raised his brows. “It would take you so long?”

  “You have a nice humor,” I said. “Live to enjoy it. Get from my path.”

  But the girl Sollor called again, “Kill us, then.
Do it now.”

  She was beautiful. Not as Ressaven was beautiful, but enough. I recollected how, staring at this face in the ruined city, I had not supposed I should see one lovelier.

  I did not want to slay or harm them. They knew it.

  Mazlek said, “We are only symbols, like these swords of ours, like the lion. Suffice it to say, Karrakaz begs you to return from here. To leave her in peace. And yourself.”

  “Begs me? That’s a new song, I have not heard it before. Karrakaz begs, the sorceress, the goddess—Javhetrix. On her knees, perhaps. Let her come out and kneel to me, then, where I can watch her do it, and be sure.”

  A blue cloud had lifted itself over the mountain, raising an awning of shadow above the street.

  I went toward Mazlek, and abruptly his sword swung up and a lightning burst from its tip. There was a ripping of the air about me as the white vein struck on that psychic shield of mine, which now I did not even have to bother with but which answered for me instantly.

  Mazlek leaped back, his sword slashing bright arcs of metal and energy. He did not aim another cut at me, nor look afraid, nor even amazed. He had known he could not match me, which made this foolhardy barricade an idiotic puzzle.

  I understood I should not get by him, however, while he was upright, nor by the other two. Even the maid had devilry ready; I could see it in the flex of her wrist and her intent mouth. I was not obliged to butcher them, merely quell.

  I sent a shaft at Mazlek that spun him about and dropped him on his back. Dual bars of light sprang from the other two, but I set them aside, and laid the protagonists down. The kitten looked up from its feast of rose petals to spit at me, but the girl Sollor had suffered no great hurt. All three appeared sleeping rather than fallen warriors. Then I imagined I had her reasoning, the reasoning of the witch. She had sent them to test me, how vast my grievance should be. That I had incapacitated but not slain would reassure her. Wrongly.