by Janet Morris
He swung the sword blindly above his head, catching one ossasim’s wing and slicing it through. There was a scream, a rush of air as the ossasim lost control and crashed into the mountainside. Then the other ossasim hit him, feet first, in the chest. As its talons raked him and he went down beneath its onslaught, the blade flew spinning from his grasp. Lightning blew the sky apart once more, caught the spinning sword in its blue-white fingers, caressed it. Its length enflamed, it tumbled groundward.
Then the ossasin’s fangs snapped near his throat and the rock came up under him with concussive force and he wrapped his legs around the ossasim’s trunk and shoved back on that mighty jaw with both hands. Grimly, red lights crowding his vision, he dug his fingers into the spittly chin, thrusting forward with his arms while pulling inward with his legs. There was a loud snap, and the ossasim lay quiet on him.
It was some time before he pushed it off. It was even longer before his lungs ceased gulping air. Then he sat, shakily, to consider his wounds. Through the coarsely woven jerkin his chest and belly were scored in twelve diagonal lines. But for his clothing’s protection, the thing would have laid open his belly.
Something within his right hip twinged. His left arm was badly scratched where it had only been half-healed, and the sleeve of the tunic was torn away. He ripped off the rest of the flap in disgust, and used it to bind up the arm.
Then he assayed the climb down to where the sword lay in a narrow crevice ringed with ice.
He squatted down there, studying the blade that lay in a pool of slush. The metal shone dull, grayish, but otherwise seemed intact. The gemstone hilt was not even scratched. Even as he watched, the slush that had been melted by the hot metal began to crust. Satisfied that any heat the blade retained must by now be dissipated, he picked it up, dried it as well as he could in the continuing sleet, and thrust it in the makeshift scabbard.
He was just rising, cautiously, intent upon the throbbing twinge in his hip, when Quendros joined him, blowing loudly.
“You are by far the most charmed man I have ever met. That lightning was meant for you. I yelled. Did you hear me? No. Well, I did. Lightning loves nothing like the taste of metal. You are bewitched. Anyone else would have been fried.”
“Is that why you climbed all the way down here, to tell me that?” He kneaded his hip tenderly with his fingers, but found no spot where external pressure caused pain.
“No,” said Quendros brusquely. “How’d the blade fare?”
“Well enough,” he replied, looking curiously at Quendros’ drenched face, which bore an expression he could not name.
“Well, son. Let’s go get you installed in that carnelian throne of yours. Nothing is going to stop us now.”
“That is not wholly true. Kirelli says we must fear Wehrdom until we make that first ridge.” And he pointed upward, to where he thought that ridge might be, hiding behind the storm.
“Ignorant savage,” Quendros chided, offering Deilcrit a countenance pursed like a closed fist and kicking desultorily at the dead ossasim. “Se’keroth is like a weathervane. It does not create a climatic change, but it does indicate one.”
It took Deilcrit a moment to realize that Se’keroth was the name Quendros had given to the sword he bore. Then he gave Quendros a blank stare.
Quendros, upon receipt of this, grumbled that they had best be making for the ridge hidden behind the midday dark, if they would face the real dark safely.
Deilcrit craned his neck in vain for sight of Kirelli, then agreed that they had better start climbing. Hitching himself up between two rocks, he asked Quendros what he meant about the sword being a weathervane.
Quendros asked him if he could read. To which he answered no, and Quendros pronounced that in that case it was no use trying to explain.
But he knew that something in the morning’s occurrences had greatly heartened Quendros, and if it was the dunking of the sword in a slushy puddle that had caused the change in Quendros’ manner (and he strongly suspected that it was), the change was still to his benefit. And he respected Quendros’ knowledge. So he decided that if the sword would in some way aid him, he would let it though he did not believe in material things such as swords having desires or goals or significance of the like with which Quendros seemed to credit the strange blade.
When they had gained the ledge once more, Deilcrit asked Quendros if he did not believe in Mnemaat the Unseen. And Quendros replied quite solemnly: “Not only do I believe in him, I have seen him.”
At which Deilcrit made a sign to ward off blasphemy, and Quendros laughed and said, “It is true. Fifteen, no, sixteen years ago. I can’t tell you on what errand—gave my word, y’know—but he’s magnificent, a great golden thing with the face everyone’s father should have had.”
“In the flesh?” said Deilcrit as Kirelli’s wings beat around his head, and with a deep sigh he extended his arm to the whelt.
“In the flesh; clasped his hand.”
“But Mnemaat is the Unseen!”
“Now he is, and that’s a fact. Look, Deilcrit, when you’re in a position, you hire me and I’ll tutor you in history.”
“Do you know something about Imca-Sorr-Aat that I do not?” asked Deilcrit, bending his head away from Kirelli’s insistent attempts to give him a message.
“Nothing that will help you. If I were to think of something, you would be the very person I’d tell.” There was something icy and deliberating in his tone that Deilcrit had never before heard there.
His feelings hurt by he knew not what, he took the message from Kirelli, who urged all speed, and with a curt word to Quendros started up the boulder-strewn ridge.
The rock and dirt and weeds blurred by. He climbed mechanically, surely, though he had never before been on Mt. Imnetosh, did not know her. When he had climbed with great attention, in the beginning, he had been dizzied and fearful. So he rested his attention elsewhere, and Kirelli sometimes rode his shoulder and sometimes flew around his head, and he thought of Mahrlys-iis-Vahais and what had passed between them.
The swoop of her white throat, her soft curves along which the light rode as he stripped her of her veils, the surrender he had not expected, that which his lengthy exploration of her had precipitated, all proceeded before his inner sight as he climbed. The dreams of her that had tortured his youth had not prepared him for the reality. Nor for the questions she had asked, or the rare pleasures, of which he had been previously ignorant, she demanded from him. And she had bade him kneel down before her, saying “Do you not show respect before her to whom you are sworn?”
A cold had chilled him then, causing his passion to shrink and then blow away on the wind of her words. It was while she interrogated him that he determined that the day would come when their positions would reverse. She had cheated him of his dream, cheapened it. She had drained from him his strength. He grunted and pulled himself by the arms over a chasm between two boulders, and up onto the shelf above.
There he rested, swinging his legs, while he awaited Quendros, looking into the receding storm clouds pushed eastward by the ocean winds. It was because of Mahrlys, more than any other thing, that he had accepted Kirelli’s proposal. All his life, those above him had asked him to do nothing, to be quiet, to be passive and follow orders and live the life he had stolen from Mnemaat’s henchman without letting on that he truly should have died in Nehedra’s dirt. Within him burned proscribed fires, needs which his station in life could not fill. Kirelli had held out to him a purpose, a striving, something more than the spitting of an occasional guerm. Kirelli had something to gain that was not yet revealed, he was sure; but the whelt had proposed that they do something, that thing for which, said Kirelli, only Deilcrit was fit. He mattered to the whelt. He had never mattered to anyone but Parpis, and to Parpis he had been a child to be protected, even when he stood twice the old man’s height.
He did not matter to Mahrlys yet.
Then he thought of Mahrlys’ tears, and Heicrey’s, and reflected that his t
ouch always seemed to bring women tears. All but the spirit power Estri, who was not a woman.
And thinking of women brought him to Amnidia, and her pronouncement that he would feed Quendros to Wehrdom if she let him. The ancient crone’s face hovered before him. He shook it away and extended his hand to Quendros, just levering himself over the canted boulders.
He had thought Quendros might care for him. Now he was not so sure. But he resolved that the older man would not end in a wehr’s belly upon his account.
“Why so solemn, Deilcrit? Lose your whelt? Sun’s about due. We’ll both feel better with the ice melted off our bones.”
“Did you see Eviduey leading the wehrs who attacked us on the shale?”
“No,” grunted Quendros, shifting until his legs, too, dangled off the shelf’s overhung edge. “But I don’t doubt that he’s about.” Quendros peered upward, around his head. “Most wehr-masters who’ve become high as the Third Hand tend to stay pretty much in council. Eviduey has always been out in the field, himself. He likes it, I guess. The Byeks—the human ones, that is—all met in Bachryse the year before Nothrace was razed, and they put a price on his black head that would set a man and his children and their children free from drudgery.”
“Are the human rulers of the outer provinces those for whom you work?”
“On occasion. I try to stay self-employed, on the whole. There’s plenty for a man to do, if injustice concerns him.” Quendros gave Deilcrit a sidelong glance.
“It is revolution, then, that you are about.”
“Survival, more truly. There are not enough men left to launch a successful revolt.”
The way he said it made Deilcrit know that he had well studied the question, and also that he did not believe the answer.
He said slowly, “If I am successful ... I would do what I could for your folk.”
At that Quendros did not laugh, but only locked eyes with him and nodded gravely, telling Deilcrit more than he wanted to know about Quendros thereby.
Then the soft touch of Kirelli’s wehr-thought brushed him, and without another word he scrambled to his feet and began the difficult ascent to the ridge top.
The boulders were loose and the vegetation sparse and the rock iced slippery. When he could finally lie prone upon the ridge’s summit, he rested, eyes closed, until Quendros’ muttered exclamation made him lift his head and peer through his tangles at what lay enfolded in Imnetosh’s skirts.
Othdaliee gleamed sullenly in the thin air. She was hewn into the V where Imnetosh’s final sheer ascent met the ridge’s lee. Through her middle a river ran silver, and in the middle of the river was a gigantic amber bubble, dark-centered, like the eye of a dead fish. Around this bubble, on either side of the river, rose squat rectangular towers of shiny black, like the glassy stuff he had seen in Dey-Ceilneeth. Each of the twelve towers was connected by an elevated, enclosed span that arched over the river and the amber bubble set into it.
In the whole city of Othdaliee, nothing moved.
“By Laore’s eyeteeth,” said Quendros on an indrawn breath. “All men should see this before they die.” The reverence that choked his voice was incomprehensible to Deilcrit, for it was a reverence of man’s art.
They descended the ledge in a shower of tumbling rocks until they reached a staircase, invisible from above, cut into the stone. The stairs were very wide and fanned out from the mountain. The steps were worn round and slick with the years, and in their corners fat black spiders spun elegant webs.
The wind with its icy chill howled over the ridge, but its claws could not touch them in the sheltered ravine.
Where the green rock stopped and the black slick stuff began, Kirelli waited. He sat upon the head of a statue whose whelt’s visage rested upon a woman’s body. It was one of the first pair of many enshadowed by the overhanging staircase by way of which they had descended.
When they walked between them and Deilcrit extended his arm for Kirelli, a humming sound cut through the faraway whine of the wind over the ridge, and sent Deilcrit hastily retreating, until he was stopped by Quendros’ arm.
“What’s the matter, boy? Don’t like your palace?”
Deilcrit was struck speechless by what he saw between the two statues, and did not answer.
The apparition stood in a bath of light converging from the eyes of the whelt-headed statues.
Then Quendros’ arm was on his shoulders, and the older man’s reassuring voice whispered in his ear that the thing that approached them, through which the black paves could be dimly seen, whose head was like a whelt and whose body was like a woman’s, was a projection of light, a thing of man’s elder science, and told him not to be afraid. His mind heard, but his body did not. It shook like a leaf, until Kirelli straddled his shoulders and pressed cheek to his and gave him wehr-comfort.
So fortified by the confidence of both his allies, he neither fainted nor dropped to his knees before the glowing, flesh-toned apparition with its silver beak and cobalt crest.
This vision, which in Benegua’s mythology was that of Imca-Sorr-Aat’s female attribute, beckoned them, whelt-head cocked. Then it turned and floated down the middle of the black way along which sixteen identical statues stood guard.
Deilcrit’s teeth chattered loudly, and he clamped his jaws together until they ached. Quendros, beside him, gawked right and left, but when Deilcrit asked him how the light-thing could move away from the statues that Quendros said created it, the older man opened his mouth, closed it, and said: “Never mind.”
Before a gaping portal thrice his height and wide enough to hold the men standing abreast, the image flickered, faded, and from within another, seemingly identical, beckoned out of the dim.
Quendros strode across the threshold. Deilcrit’s legs were rooted to the back steps. Kirelli nudged him, cooed softly, then tugged at his hair.
Quendros, within, shouted: “Look, Deilcrit,” and thrust his hand through the substance of the wheltheaded deity and waved the hand around.
Deilcrit squinted above, at the sky, at the last pair of black whelt-headed statues with their beaks turned toward him, staring down reproachfully; at the huge obsidian tower within which Quendros already stood.
There was a soft kissing sound. Kirelli squawked, took leave of his shoulder, and darted through the mighty portal. Deilcrit hesitated another moment, realized that the portal was indeed closing, and bounded through in three leaps. To find himself pulled up short by the slamming together of the glassy slabs upon the tail of his ragged shirt.
He lunged against the thing that restrained him, unthinking, and the ill-used tunic ripped from his shoulders and he stumbled into Quendros’ arms.
“Easy there, Deilcrit, it’s only a door. You made it. We made it. We’re in Othdaliee.”
Embarrassed, Deilcrit pulled away and stared at the glassy black portal from whose mouth dangled his garment, and at the patiently waiting apparition. Then he craned his neck and followed the black walls up into the dark. At about eye level on one of the walls was a large oval in which bricks of colored light were stacked. As he watched, the bricks flickered, changed color, ceased to exist. Quendros was peering intently at the oval. So, apparently, was the apparition, which stood by Quendros with raised arm.
As he joined them and Kirelli alighted on his shoulder, he realized that the apparition would point to a brick and then Quendros would touch it and then the color would change and they would repeat the process.
When Quendros did not answer his query as to what he was doing, Deilcrit turned around and stared at the black doors, closed up for a thousand years.
Then Kirelli nudged him and he turned back to where a rainbow display now filled the oval and the wall was drawing back into itself to expose a corridor lit with a dancing red glow. The whelt shivered and made an agitated little noise.
So he thought calm thoughts to it, reminding the whelt that soon they would both have their freedom, one way or the other, while he hissed at Quendros: “What did you
do?” once again.
“Pressed what buttons were indicated. You want to go home, this is a little late.” And he bowed low and sweepingly to Deilcrit, and indicated the corridor wherein danced the red light.
Then Kirelli humped up his wings and shook off his fear and flew first into the corridor of reddish mist. He could do no other than to follow. He was just turning to reassure Quendros when the wall through which he had entered closed upon itself.
He pounded on the wall and yelled Quendros’ name until he realized the futility of what he did, then sat at its foot and closed his eyes and took stock of himself, searching out that purpose which he had thought he had here.
Even through his closed eyelids he was dizzied by the lights pulsing. He fingered the hilt of the sword he bore, and spoke harshly to himself and dredged up Mahrlys’ face. But it was a long while before his legs would hold him and he rose up in the narrow, low corridor to take Kirelli onto his shoulder and walk the length of it, looking betimes at his feet, which seemed to sink into webs of flame that splashed and clung to his ankles. The farther he proceeded down the corridor, the deeper the sticky webs became, until he slogged through them rather than raising his feet so that he could see them between steps. By the time the strangely liquid filaments had reached his thighs, both he and the whelt knew that this was what they had come so far to find, and their cheeks were pressed together and their minds embraced more tightly than ever. He had allowed himself to be enfolded by Wehrdom’s caress. So tightly that Kirelli heard his every fear and he himself was inundated with wheltly trepidation, and all of Kirelli’s conjecture as to what strength they might throw into that consuming red glitter that threatened to wipe from them all cognizance of individuality came clear to him.
Tightly held the whelt to his mind. Brightly burned its claws in his shoulder, and he was glad of the pain as the red stuff through which he walked congealed thicker and lapped about his chest. He felt little stingings, like insect bites, from the filaments the stuff threw up, but once his skin was immersed in it he felt nothing. It was not a physical danger, in truth, he faced there, but one of mind. When Kirelli’s claws and his chin were beneath the surface and the salty taste of it lapped against his lips, he felt terror that even their combined strengths would not be enough; that the inundation of knowledge to which their linked minds were being subjected would prove too great; that their conjectures were unfounded and they would lose remembrance of their purpose before the moment at which they must act to save themselves came. And then the sparkling red mist was in his mouth and his eyes and he felt Kirelli shiver against him and closed his lips and lids and tried to breathe the stuff in and his lungs exploded and he did indeed forget who he was.
