Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  The paperweight fell with a crash and shattered, sending green splinters skittering across the floor. Bonifacio jumped. Tembujin glanced down, blandly surprised. Andrion cleared his throat. The acolyte stood stiff and silent.

  “Surely, my lord, this year you should go to Farsahn, the winter capital,” burbled Bonifacio. “Or perhaps, my lord, to Sardis itself. Surely our beloved emperor would be safer in the north, away from imperial plotting.”

  Tembujin’s refusal to use his title was really quite refreshing. “You know of a plot?” Andrion asked.

  The priest’s plump cheeks reddened with agitation. “No, no, my lord, but it is only to be expected of these devious imperials; it was an imperial chamberlain who betrayed your father, glorious Bellasteros, may he rest in peace, and we can only assume—”

  Andrion said briskly, “We can assume nothing. The Empire and Sardis were joined on the day of my birth, and few resented it. Perhaps the assassin was some disaffected follower of the khan’s, and the attack had nothing to do with me.”

  Bonifacio’s earnest gaze fell upon Tembujin. “If the khan would allow me to teach him the catechism of Harus of Sardis, I am sure the god would protect him.”

  “I bow to Harus,” said Tembujin, “and to Ashtar, the gods who guard the emperor.”

  “But, but …” Bonifacio squirmed. “Ashtar is a woman’s god, named by Bellasteros only out of courtesy to his vassal Danica.”

  Andrion’s jaw tightened. Vassal indeed; Harus rested on Ashtar’s arm, consort of the sacred mother. But very few Sardians had ever crossed the borders of Sabazel.

  His glance fell upon the acolyte. An odd face, with the pointed chin and large liquid eyes of a fox. The man, sensing the emperor’s gaze upon him, stepped back into shadow.

  Bonifacio gargled faintly and bounced up and down, trying to earn a response from the emperor. Andrion condescended to look down at him again, and cursed himself for his condescension. Unworthy of a king, to treat a man as a fool even when he was.

  “Journey,” insisted Bonifacio. “I shall begin to make the arrangements, my lord, if you would permit such a humble servant …”

  “Yes,” said Andrion. “Begin our move north.”

  “And if the emperor’s respected lady—” Bonifacio turned with a low fluttering bow to Sumitra “—may her virtue be rewarded, would be too wearied by such a journey, she would be well cared for here.”

  Pompous ass, Andrion thought. He spun about, found himself facing the table, unrolled a map. His hand crimped the papyrus. Only yesterday Bonifacio had urged him to abjure Sumitra as a barren wife. As soon as I am alone, Andrion thought, you will parade every pretty girl in Farsahn and Sardis before me, noblemen’s daughters offered like cattle at market. I will notice them, yes, how could I not be stirred by sparkling eyes and round breasts and smooth flanks? But if I have learned nothing else from the implacable beauty of Dana, of Ashtar herself, I have learned the demands and limits of love, and the compromises of the flesh.

  Andrion glanced in silent apology at Sumitra. She was unruffled, a serene surface over unplumbed depths of sorrow. Of guilt. By all the gods, Andrion thought, I shall not let Bonifacio or anyone make her feel guilty. The map rolled up with a snap.

  With a few tentative drops rain began to fall outside. A damp breeze stirred the draperies with a cool clean scent, and the odor of rot faded. Good. Bonifacio would have to walk back to the temple compound in the rain. Perhaps that would cool his rhetoric. “I shall send for you tomorrow,” Andrion told the priest, “and we shall discuss the matter then.”

  “Yes, my lord.” The priest bobbed up and down like a feeding duck. “Indeed, my lord, as I was telling Rowan here—”

  Andrion gently but firmly ushered Bonifacio and Rowan out, shut the door behind them and stood with his back against the panels.

  Tembujin grimaced as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. Valeria rolled her eyes. Sumitra exhaled between pursed lips. The older children, released from good manners, swirled out of their mother’s arms and scattered across the marble floor playing some spontaneous game with the shards of malachite. The youngest, a girl, toddled into her father’s arms, and when he lifted her, tangled her tiny hands in his long hair.

  “Could he be plotting against you?” asked the khan, patiently suffering the child’s attentions. “Against us?”

  “You saw his subtlety toward Sumitra,” Andrion replied. “The man could not plot his way out of a market basket. No, I fear …”

  For the first time Sumitra spoke. “What do you fear, my lord?”

  In her quiet, resonant voice the honorific was a caress. Andrion’s face softened in response. “It was not carelessness, my lady, that staged the attack on my doorstep. An attempt to sever me from my ally, perhaps; a signal to me, probably; a challenge, certainly. I think that, strange as it seems, Bonifacio is right. We must journey north for the winter.”

  “Run away?” asked Tembujin caustically.

  “Of course not.” The diadem sparked. “To see if the attacks follow us.”

  “Ah, I see. These last few days may be only the tip of the spear.”

  Sumitra turned to Valeria. “Would you care to come with us, instead of wintering in Khazyaristan this year?”

  How could anyone refuse a request made with those lush lips? Valeria, with a sideways glance at her husband, said, “I am a child of Sardis, not of the steppes, and I would prefer to bear this babe in my father Patros’s house.”

  “I daresay my nuryans can watch the flocks,” Tembujin said with a shrug of assent. His eye gleamed briefly in a private, somewhat reluctant, but perfectly honest message.

  So then, Andrion thought, needing to say nothing, you will not apologize for your doubts, but you will reaffirm your allegiance. Good. I would rather have allegiance than apology. When the khan and his family took their leave and went to their own quarters in the palace, his hand remained warm from Tembujin’s strong clasp.

  He shut the door and turned to his wife with a grimace; one of the hazards of ruling was a lack of privacy. Sumitra’s face was hidden as she picked up her sharp, shining needle and turned it in her hand like a warrior considering his—or her—blade.

  Again Andrion’s thought shivered; he saw other female hands, light, strong bones and taut flesh, raising sword and shield and bow. Danica his mother. Ilanit her daughter. Dana Ilanit’s daughter, his own … He bent and picked up a shard of the malachite paperweight. Dana’s eyes were as green, and often as brittle.

  The damp wind had something in it of asphodel, the lily of love and death, and the anemone, the wind flower. Suddenly, with a yearning so strong it dizzied him, Andrion wanted Sabazel. Sardis was forty day’s journey to the north and east; a detour of only a few more days would bring him to Sabazel’s embrace in time for the autumn equinox and the fall rites. The water in Ashtar’s bronze basin, the shining star-shield on his half-sister Ilanit’s arm—surely they held omens for him. He was the only living son of Sabazel, and yet he had not made offering for two mortal years. No wonder the gods tested him again, this time with uncertainty.

  Sumitra’s needle stabbed the fabric. Andrion started, collected himself, and went to her side. Her long, graceful fingers were wrapped with gold thread. Beneath them an image of Solifrax gleamed in Bellasteros’s hand and an image of the shield stone in Danica’s. The real sword hummed faintly against Andrion’s thigh. The sword of power, given by the gods to he who deserved it, the heroes Daimion, Bellasteros, Andrion.

  He touched his necklace, a gold crescent moon with a gold star at its tip, the symbol of sword and shield united in more than temporal power. Who am I, Andrion said to himself, to fear shadows?

  Sumitra said, “Surely your councilors would not dare to plot against you. Against Tembujin perhaps, against me, certainly …”

  Andrion set his fingertip on her lips, stopping her. Always she accepted the indignities of living. He never had to explain, never had to justify, never had to apologize for courting her love aft
er marriage, not before. For coming to her virgin bed when his body, his heart, his soul had already been taken—but never kept—by another.

  “Is it sorcery you sense?” she said against his flesh.

  “Yes.”

  She laid down the thread, stood, touched his necklace. Her eyes stirred with decision, doubt surpassed by hope. “Go to Sabazel, Andrion. Pray to the goddess who protects us for guidance. And for children.”

  “Sumi,” he sighed, almost shamed by the generosity of her perception. “Sumi, my lady wife.”

  Her head, with its sleek sable hair smoothed back in two wings, came only to his shoulder. Her skin was shining mahogany, gilded by the lamplight. The tiny ruby in the side of her nose glinted. Andrion’s nostrils filled with the elusive scent of jasmine. It charred the senses as surely as asphodel and anemone.

  In her eyes was the serenity of deep water, only the surface rippled by wind. He saw himself there as she saw him: a lean and well-proportioned body, stiffly guarding against any hint of weakness; a square jaw, clean-shaven, revealing a tenacity that might in the less tolerant be called stubbornness; an incised mouth which would be tender if it were not tight with the necessity of command. A mouth that had never known caprice.

  Sumitra smiled, accepting him, it seemed, as much for his contradictions as in spite of them. “Rest, my lord; let me play for you.”

  Andrion let her go, but his hands seemed empty without her between them. “Rest?”

  She picked up her zamtak and sat, testing the seventeen strings with one sweep of her fingertips. The answering trill repeated the murmuring swish of the rain.

  “Rest?” He shook his head. The table was loaded with papers, stacked by his scribes in tidy piles which only emphasized their quantity. Plans to rebuild lands that had lain devastated for centuries under the tyranny of the old Empire. Plans for the nomadic Khazyari to begin a semi-permanent settlement. Petitions, accounts, orders. Letters from councilors and village heads, from Proconsul Nikander in Farsahn and Governor-General Patros in Sardis; at those names he smiled.

  Then he saw the reports of bandits infesting the wilderness along the Royal Road to the north, of pirates harassing the sea lanes from Sardis’s port of Pirestia out to Rhodope and even to distant Minras. His smile curdled into a frown.

  And there was a letter from Minras itself, from his sister Chrysais, announcing the death of her husband King Gath. The news had taken almost three months to arrive. Anything could have happened in three months. He set the letter aside with a sigh. How could he respond, except with banal courtesies; he could not remember ever having met Chrysais, the child of his father’s youth. If Sabazel was at the rim of this world, Minras was surely another world entirely.

  The music stirred the shadows. Each note was a drop of water, rain upon parched Iksandarun after a summer’s drought; rain falling upon Cylandra, Sabazel’s guardian mountain, streaming into the bronze basin on its flank.

  Andrion drifted upon the music into Sumitra’s glistening eyes. She was too proud to offer what might be refused; she was too honest to conceal her consuming need. Her hand stilled the strings, but the music of the rain continued.

  Andrion removed the diadem, unbuckled Solifrax, laid the weight of both among the papers. If neither could quell the dread slithering through his mind, he could at least defer dread and power alike until the morrow.

  He took his wife’s hand, kissed her lips as soft and sweet and moist as apricots, and led her toward the bedchamber. The rainsong smoothed but did not quite mend the frayed edges of his soul.

  Chapter Two

  The water in the great bronze basin rippled with a luminescence like distant lightning, seething the darkness of the mountain hollow. Dana knelt at the basin’s rim and pondered the message within. Her fine, precise features were burnished by the light, filled by it; she was a jeweled icon, not fully mortal.

  The wind, bearing a faint odor of rotten fruit, stirred her long blond hair. The Sight stirred her mind, and her thoughts wavered with bright images and dark.

  She saw blinding sunlight and a sky washed of color. She saw the sea, the deep blue of Ashtar’s eyes, slapping upon a steep rocky shore. She saw a smoking mountain, an arena ringed with dark and watchful faces, a sprawling palace. Her throat clogged with acrid dust.

  A bull bellowed in her ear, and a voice—Andrion’s voice—shouted in rage and terror. She flinched.

  Solifrax, brighter than the sun, suddenly extinguished, and the star-shield … what? Sumitra, Andrion’s wife, lay across the shield as if broken upon it. A fiery chariot bore down upon her, upon Andrion, upon Dana herself… . The image was gone. The light in the basin flickered and went out. The wind streamed from the peak of ice-crowned Cylandra.

  For a moment Dana sat, blinking stupidly at the night, trying to fill her sudden emptiness with the senses of her own being. We are but shadows dancing for the gods, she told herself, and the gods are the shadows of our own hearts. So where, then, is certainty?

  The skein of her Sight was too tangled to interpret. She knew only that some evil befell god-touched Andrion, King of Sardis, Emperor, the only living acknowledged son of Sabazel. But then, sons were of little account here. She must believe that; Andrion was a wound never quite healed.

  Some evil befell Sabazel. With ice in her soul Dana stood, her shoulders coiled, aching with tension. The night was uncannily dark, the sky hidden under a pall of cloud, no moon, no stars for guidance. The soft night sounds of the city were muffled as if by a great hand. The wind—the wind grew in strength, moaning, rushing through the city. Dana’s hair whipped around her face and she clawed through it. What was wrong?

  She ran down the steps, through her mother Ilanit’s garden, through the city to the temple. A city of the dead, it seemed, the frightened faces of its inhabitants only powerless wraiths.

  Not powerless, never powerless, Dana insisted to herself.

  The pool in the atrium of Ashtar’s temple swirled slowly. A mist rose above it, forming indecipherable images. The wind purled through the opening in the roof, and doves cooed uneasily. The wind was tainted. Not for the first time that night the hair on Dana’s nape prickled.

  Andrion’s sister Sarasvati ran from a side room, gasping, “Sorcery! I have not sensed sorcery since the Khazyari witch died!” Her basket of healing herbs and bandages fell unheeded from her hands.

  The wind grew stronger. The doves broke into squawking, panicked flight and were tumbled away. The mosaic at the bottom of the pool shifted and jumbled itself into meaningless patterns. Or perhaps Dana simply could not read its message.

  Scowling with frustration, she followed Sarasvati from the temple into the street. There they collided with the thin, angular form of the queen’s weapons master. Lyris’s teeth were set in a snarl of anger and terror mixed. “Evil,” she cried, flourishing her javelin. “Evil, such as I have not felt since I was a girl!” She sprang forward, shouting, “Sabazel!”

  A howling gale screamed down the slopes of the mountain, ringing from some profound depth of ice and sky. The stone blocks of the city shivered. Flowering vines were shredded and their pitiful mangled petals whirled across the lidded sky.

  Lyris, Dana, and Sarasvati stumbled down the street, fighting through knots of women clutching their daughters. The darkness thickened, a black mist blotting the city.

  There. The Horn Gate loomed before them. The sentries clung desperately to their posts atop the walls. The wind shrilled. One guard wailed and fell and was dashed against the ground. With a tremendous clangor the gate flew open.

  A woman-sized shadow, black against blackness, sprinted down the avenue as if borne on the wings of the wind itself. It carried upon its back a large, shrouded disk. Lyris leaped forward, singing the victory paean; her voice cracked in the force of the gale, but still she sang.

  Dana, too, lunged toward the shadow creature. Some cold force, fear made tangible, emanated from it; stunned, she fell sprawling into the street. A whirlwind of fine ash over
took her, blinding her, choking her. She coughed rackingly but could not clear her throat.

  Lyris barred the creature’s path, her javelin flaring with a faint, watery light. Black fire shot from the shadow’s hand and encompassed the weapons master, masticated her, spit her out and left her gasping upon the scarred cobbles. The javelin clattered down and was still.

  The dark figure sped through the gates and disappeared into the depths of the night. Slowly, wearily, the gates drew themselves shut. The surviving sentry slid down the rock and crouched trembling against a stone pier. Dana managed a deep breath, steadying her wits and strength, and staggered up. Sarasvati crawled to Lyris’s side and lifted her head into her lap.

  The sky roiled. The light of a waning gibbous moon and a sparse handful of stars winked through shredding cloud and then hid again, as if fearful of what they might illuminate. In the fitful light Lyris’s face was stark white, a blade honed clean of any stain. Her flesh was cold and hard as ice. “Give me my weapon,” she wheezed. “I would defend … Sabazel… .”

  Ilanit, Queen of Sabazel, appeared from the murk. She knelt next to Lyris, her face as tight and sere as a bloom nipped by frost. She lifted the javelin, set it in Lyris’s hand, closed her fingers about its shaft. “You are Sabazel’s greatest defender,” she said hoarsely.

  Lyris was dead. The moon fought free of cloud, pouring its radiance upon her. Her blank, staring eyes filled with light. They seemed to see beyond the city, beyond the small, mountain-girt country beset by shadow, to a greater reality and a greater peace.

  Dana closed Lyris’s eyes, preserving that moment’s vision. The moon was eaten by driving cloud. The wind died, abandoning the sky.

  “In the name of the goddess!” choked Sarasvati. “What has happened?”

  Do not answer, Dana silently begged Ilanit. Please, do not answer.

  Her mother clambered as slowly to her feet as if she wore a full suit of armor. She stood, hands dangling empty at her sides. Her hair hung pale and lank about her face, and Dana could not see her eyes. But she could hear the quavering words, “The star-shield is gone.”